Hey, Girl, Are You in the Experimental Group? by Shareen K. Murayama
Harbor Editions, 2022
Shareen K Murayama’s chapbook Hey, Girl, Are You in the Experimental Group? expresses a deep interest in form as well as in Cathy Park Hong’s notion that “[Asians] are reputed to be so accomplished, and so law-abiding, we will disappear into this country’s amnesiac fog.” Hong’s assertion serves as epigraph to the poems, which are anything but invisible.
Often echoing the tone of research, theory, and journalistic investigation, the poems in Hey, Girl provide a living autopsy of policy and public behavior in the face of racial and gender violence. “Color Interference” begins with the phenomenon of light waves interacting in iridescence—“rainbows in soap bubbles”—and proceeds in successive couplets to identify “Its / exotic lustre” as that which “helps us recognize our species, choose mates, / and, sometimes, evade predators.”
Desire and denial chase each other through the word play and image-morphing of “a wolf poem,” in which dogs chase sticks and people chase “fancy appliances / that sit pliantly on an island with its own power source.” In this poem-scape, “wolf” is a typo for “wife” and “someone is going to get eaten.” The speaker asks, “is it bad to want / a thing just because it belongs to someone else?”
The poems of Hey, Girl shapeshift between lush and sparse, asking, always, what is it—and who is it— that counts? How is violence quantifiable when the measurements are suspect? Murayama lives in Hawai`i, on an island where colonialism is enacted and reenacted every time a planeload of tourists disembark, as well as through long-established populations. The chapbook takes measures of its own with multiple poems entitled, “Group Treatment.” Several are composed of quotes—first-person accounts of the experience of living in Hawai`i from the point of view of a “Japanese, Hawaiian, Chinese, female, 23,” a “Jewish female, 50,” and a “Caucasian, Samoan, male, 43.”
A longer “Group Treatment” takes the reader inside a public health nightmare, where, the speaker says, abandoned elders, “prone in bun-like baskets” are like hotdogs turning in their convenience-store tray: “We could read body language if we wanted to. / We didn’t want to.” The speaker, however, admits that “even the unwanted / want to be touched” before they die and can only be identified by the red envelope pinned to a pocket. In a creation myth, the poem says, there was a mountain for “granny dumping,” but here, “[t]he mountain would always be a remote one, almost too difficult for a son to climb while carrying his / aging parent on his back.”
In our current era of devastating and continued loss via illness and violence, Hey, Girl applies a focused—if fragmented—lens to the fractures and open wounds of its home territory with wit, lyricism, and a bold sense of experiment.
–
Irene Cooper wrote Committal (V.A. Press), poet-friendly spy-fy about family, & spare change (FLP), finalist for the Stafford/Hall Award. Her writings appear in Denver Quarterly, The Feminist Wire, The Rumpus, streetcake, Witness, & elsewhere. Irene supports AIC-directed writing at a regional prison and lives with her people and Maggie in Oregon.