Splitting the Difference: Double-Consciousness in                   深影 The Reflection

 

            Recently, I’ve found it more and more difficult to communicate with gender reactionaries. As I’ve seen growing scapegoating of the trans and non-binary community by individuals who have never even met anyone trans themselves, I often feel like the mere fact that I actually know and care about individuals who are not cisgender puts me on a different planet than them, speaking a different language. I often feel like the pointlessness of bigotry should be self-evident, assuming probably wrongly that these people never think about gender, much less struggle with it. Reading (or failing to read) 深影The Reflection helped me reorient towards that.

            The poem, as presented, seems to imply an order for those reading, and the first order reading is content without context. We are presented with a narrative without beginning and end; our speaker is confronted with their reflection, but we don’t know the when, where, or why. The central tension is the clearest thing here- the reflection carries a different gender than the original; the subject is male, the image is female, both are dissociated– we don’t know whose tears dot the wooden floor. Nevertheless, our speaker refuses to resolve the contradiction– by the end of the poem, their identity remains undefined. Man though they may be, the reflection remains a ‘she.’ Rejecting the common trans narrative of a soul at war with a ‘wrong’ body, the speaker affirms “I am the body” and also “I am the soul,” all while remaining “nameless as I was born” until the last line [1].

            Following this, we must be confronted with another truth– the body is not the only imperfect lens through which we might view the truth of a person; the poem is too. The Chinese we were initially exposed to in (and seemingly entrusted to ignore) now directly confronts us, named by the author as a Translation– from the original text in its multiplicities into just one facet. A second, unnamed translation of that Translation appears, from Chinese into English. This short paragraph gives us something else; a story behind the scenes of how the moment came to be, a prosaic glimpse into what day-to-day activities run us full freight into alienation of our own reflections. A friend’s abstract order was taken quite literally, a miscommunication carried through even at great personal pain, for the sake of art. What do I know of this as a cisgendered man? Everything and nothing– I’m quite used to examining myself critically for poetry, and I too avoid my reflection like the plague. This is of course, its own privilege: the ability to pretend I merely am a soul that lives in a body. This cowardice is not without consequences: I’ve had my crying jags in the changing room of a Target. Nevertheless, for me this is only a personal issue; for our speaker, it extends unto their position in the social world, has effects on how their peers discern them and how strangers do or don’t target them. My reflection may haunt me, but it can never clock me.

            Recognizing this first barrier, I can sense layers of meaning yet hidden in the interplay between languages. I don’t speak Chinese, but I have studied Japanese extensively, which borrows Chinese ideographs– the characters that represent ideas rather than sounds– for its own writing system, often incorporating identical meanings. Some of these homographs are apparent to me, and reveal new juxtapositions when reconsidering 深影 [Deep Shadow] The Reflection. Some add small nuances– the ideograph for neck (首) next to the line “clocking me,” suggesting our speaker focusing on a historical gender marker (perhaps the Adam’s apple, or perhaps the lack thereof). Others complicate and insinuate double and treble meanings. Consider the couplet stanza:

               心 I am the body

               神 vulnerable and warm

In both Chinese and Japanese,「心 」by itself means ‘heart’ in the literary sense– a person’s deep feelings– while「神」alone refers to ‘god,’ and in Japanese at least, encompasses both divinity and the animating spirit present throughout nature. Thus, perhaps our speaker feels like simply a body, yet their spirit, the divine element that imbues them with life, lies in vulnerability and warmth, in how their body is limited and fragile. But  hold on– combining the two ideographs creates a compound word「心神」, a term that translates to ‘mind’ or ‘psyche,’ and since both Chinese and Japanese can and do read these symbols vertically as well as horizontally, we now have a third layer of understanding emerging– the self emerges as the vulnerable body meets the deeper, untouchable self of emotions and creativity, and the contrast itself becomes the speaker’s mind as they know it.

            That said, not all Chinese characters are used in Japanese, and even among those that are used in both language, the meanings do not always match as in the above examples. There are parts of the poem that I don’t know, cannot know unless I had spent years studying a different language, or perhaps, living a different life. This is the trust the author has put in me, in any reader; not to understand completely, because that is impossible as swimming in the depths of a shadow, but to try to reckon. To look into the mirror of their art and reflect. How else can we begin to understand?

 

[1] Since PSS contributors are given each other’s poetry packets with the names removed, in this case the namelessness is quite literal.