I would absorb everything.
I would drown. Water makes song
of erratic forms, and I hear the living
push back branches, wander off trail.
—from "Geneaology"
Despite its conjuring of fairy tales and myth, The History of Anonymity is a ghost story. It is less concerned with storytelling than it is with the loss (and silencing) of that story—and of the love, identity, people, and physicality still entwined within its wreck. The speakers here are anonymous and mysterious figures, coming to readers without names or faces; their strange, disembodied voices move up and through landscapes—the sea, the forest, an isolated cliffside town—defined by both absence and the plaguing desire to fill it. Formally, the poems mimic their ghostliness in their airy fragmentation, how their lines float away from each other in a way that emphasizes the white space imposed between them; some lines lie severed, while others stagger precariously across the page, as if the poem itself might collapse.
Further contributing to its ghostliness of this book is its continual resistance to easy conclusions. Chang lets many poems live purgatorially, asking the reader to engage in their process and complete their meaning as participants. The History of Anonymity will thus capture readers who approach poems as navigation or exploration—as raw worlds built to learn and learn from—rather than epiphanic episodes or platforms for the poet's philosophical musings. This book has no place-markers. The universe in The History of Anonymity, like our own, offers more questions than answers. But sometimes the process of answering is more important than the answer itself.
The History of Anonymity builds the universe of childhood (though sometimes one on the cusp of awakening) through the lens of lore and mysticism, but ultimately creates a landscape unique to itself and not dependent on the tropes that inspired it. Chang's fairy-tale forest grows as dark and disturbing as those in the oldest versions of Grimm's tales, but, for the most part, she creates an independently emotive world. Her folkloric forest reinvents itself as a breathing entity that feels dire and newly strange in its cradling of its child speakers (with the exception of "Obedience, A Lying Tale," a lovely poem so aware of its meta-narrative that it rings slightly out of place in the endlessly-connected world created by the book). Likewise, her mythical sea of the dead is profoundly sad and palpably cold.
Chang's evocative images do not simply set lovely scenes for the landscapes of the book: they haunt this afterworld, and beautifully, as if symbolic manifestations of lives and emotions submerged there. The speakers here come in turmoil, are haunted as much as they themselves haunt; they see the world beneath the world as visionaries and confess that terrible sight to us. The book's imagery is undoubtedly as paranormal as its speakers:
I told her I could not walk,
the walls circled by steps. I told her
my flesh become stone and I did not
bleed blood, but sound.
What sound? I could not describe it;
it was voiceless
and low. But it was not.
Mostly I was not alone in my solitude.
The book's ambitious self-titled opening sequence immediately plunges readers into this ethereal landscape of anonymity, with its interweaving of phantom-voices and its fragmented presentation as recovered pages (as if from the bottom of the sea) from The History of Anonymity itself. The vaporous voice concludes the poem resolved in its frailty:
Mostly, I have forgotten that world.
I had a face then gave it up. The eyes
were gray. Or green, a color
like a growl. I have forgotten. In the afterworld, every I
is a we. Does knowing this soothe you?
Your longing
has a clean finish;
mine echoes its hollow chord, is too frail.
It is the confession offered here that best prepares us for the rest of this book: "I had a face, then gave it up." We are left to wonder: why does the speaker seemingly will her own anonymity? Is it the shame caused by abuse, as in "Innocence Essay"? Or the shame in abandoning another to save oneself, as in "A Move to Unction"?
Ultimately, a large portion of The History of Anonymity explores this ghosting of self, or self-estrangement: the distancing or displacement of voice from body, or even soul from body, to the extent that the shadow seems to speak instead. Whether these shadows come from the past or present (or both) remains unclear, but what we receive as readers are figural representations of a physical speaker. In fact, the speakers in this book seem to vanish into the landscapes they inhabit, and then speak through them:
Even you don't see
the black line of yourself,
the vanishing
you slowly come to, a shadow gift.
You're the kind
who walks into a forest
and becomes
indistinguishable from the trees.
Such instances of ghosting are numerous in the book. For example, in the deftly written "Conversation with Owl and Clouds," the nameless speaker asks clouds to teach her “the apparition life.” In "Slept," we see the body as “a darkness/ there is no memory of.” In "Apologia pro su Vita," the speaker says, “If I did not lose my body to the ocean/ I lost it to you.”
These speakers channel the sad speaker featured in the sprawling opening sequence, supporting her claim that “every I/ is a we.” And thus, as claimed, “My voice/ is always becoming another voice.” The transitory nature of the physical world repeatedly and forever distances us from ourselves; the body and voice we "owned" even one second ago no longer belong wholly to us but to that place and time (which also belongs to a prior place and time, and so on). Yet with distancing comes the attempt at bridging that distance, to re-inhabit or reconstruct what was lost, even if remembering causes pain, even if these moments conjured from "darkness" retain the power to destroy us all over again. And even if reentering those places requires distancing oneself even further from the present, to further "ghost" oneself in order to retrieve what was lost—to find truths there unchanged by the faults of memory. How does one fill the absence? How does one fill the space of the body left behind or lost, whether it is one's own or belonging to another?
"Unction," the "imaginary cliffside town of fog" identified on the back cover and the landscape conceived in the final section, is a place of seemingly ancient pain, but the retrieval and reconstruction of this lost story—a lost childhood in a lost house—represents one attempt to heal long-standing psychological wounds, to let those lost people and moments speak, much in the way unction as a rite or treatment both anoints and heals a body. Though the narrative of the poem arrives through visions and fragments—pieced together much like the fragmented book in "The History of Anonymity"—it gathers weight and (an albeit surreal) presence through the desperation inherent in its voice. Still, the poems land inconclusively because sifting through such experiences to "interpret" what is "left" is not the major purpose of the endeavor. The point is to revive, carefully, the lost things by breathing into their mouths. "A Move to Unction" dives deep into the wrecked past to retrieve, at the very least, one thing:
What else have I lost? If I write a list,
I will lose the thing, the desire
for retrieval. So I tell myself. Unction
is a town of glass, not an escape.
I am tired of the past.
I am so tired.
This one "lost thing" in the final section is a drowned sister, either literal or figurative: the speaker eventually laments, “I did not save her. I saved myself.” Here is one root of shame, of one's casting off of name and face: the failure to protect a loved one out of cowardice and fear for oneself. And here is also what destroys all over again: the failure of remembering and thus fully reviving the lost ones: "Shame's/ a puddle, Sister once said. But she never said that./ She had no gift/ for language and her voice is the one thing/ I cannot remember."
Because re-witnessing such traumatic loss can disturb so profoundly, the final section of the book is significantly darker than the previous two sections, successfully combining horror with lore (it seems vaguely similar to A Tale of Two Sisters, a Korean horror film inspired by fairy tales that similarly deals with childhood, family, fear, shame, isolation and loss). The section titled "I follow the day's inclination and find myself returned" feels almost cinematically horrific:
remembering how afraid I was then. And did Sister dissolve
seeing I had no hope? Mother, see,
must be a question or demand. Mother curled
in a bed of our torn hair, steam rising around her
or for her. Not a demon, not a witch, but broken too early
to ever grow, her private hurts winking
as if to say Haven't we met
before? Open the door and there she stood,
her mouth an endless ringing. A howl
or an outcry? A hoot, Sister said, pretending
not to care that Mother wanted us deaf, dumb,
and maybe a little dead.
"A little dead" seems one way to characterize the voices contained in The History of Anonymity—in their fear, their eerie way of seeing and recounting places and events, how seamlessly they belong to water and earth in their willed anonymity. But the book ends in physicality, in aliveness, as if at least one body was retrieved from beyond the veil, and revived:
I raise my arms
into the air. I would like to reach for something.
