Automaton Biographies

Automaton Biographies (2009) ISBN 978-1551522920 is the first full-length poetry book by Larissa Lai, although earlier in the same year, she published the chapbook Eggs in the Basement (Nomados), and Sybil Unrest (Line Books), a book-length long poem written in collaboration with Rita Wong.
Automaton Biographies is a book that grapples with the grammatical status of the pronoun “I” and its relation to the speaking, or writing, subject. In the wake of a post-structural linguistics that recognized the gap between the signifier and the signified, as well as an anti-racist politic that recognized the ways in which the apparently universal lyric “I” has traditionally circulated to recognize a fairly limited cultural experience, Lai redeploys the lower-case “i” in such a way as to shift the speaking voice of the poem and to allow language to have a kind of creative instability, in which sense, meaning and/or feeling arise between the reader and the writer in ways that are less determined and more creative than traditional lyric poetry allows.
There are four long poems in Automaton Biographies.
The first, “Rachel” is written in the voice of the cyborg woman Rachel in Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, and its source text, the Philip K. Dick novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Conscious of the ways in which Asian bodies and Asian geographies are overdetermined in the Western imagination, Lai intentionally conflates the geography of Scott’s orientalized Los Angeles with the body of the cyborg woman. The poem is search for a kind of agency from subject positions already racialized, technologized, collectivized and overwritten by the tropes of Western metaphysics. The agency of Lai’s Rachel appears in flashes and zaps, between the lines of the poem.
The second long poem, “nascent fashion” was written during the US invasion of Iraq. It’s many voices contemplate the white noise of CNN, Fox News and the BBC World Service, as they interrogate their own locations in a complicated matrix of power in which we are all complicit with the violence of war, whether we choose to be or not. This is a poem that seeks compassion from a site of knowledge rather than hatred from a the sites willful blindness perpretrated by corporate and pseudo-nationalist media. “nascent fashion” relies on the power of the pun to unsettle the reader’s faith in the language of television news. It is necessarily playful, and sometimes very funny, even as it wrenches the gut.
The third long poem concerns the chimpanzee sent up into space during the Mercury Redstone Mission launched by NASA in the late 60s, at the height of the American space race against the Soviet Union. He was nick-named “Chop Chop Chang” during his training period, and dubbed “Ham” upon his successful return from the mission, during which he performed a number of lever pulling tasks under conditions of acceleration, flight and weightlessness. Both names are thick with racialized connotation. “Chop Chop Chang” is not a “real” Chinese name, but resonates with the awful sounds of suburban North American children as they tug at the corners of their eyes. “Ham” brings to mind “the last tribe of Ham”—ie the last son of Noah, who was punished for gazing on his father’s nakedness, instead of covering it up, as his more “honorable” brothers did when he called them to the scene. The biblical story of Ham was widely used during slavery in the US to justify the enslavement of African peoples. NASA declares “HAM” an acronym for “Holloman Aero Med,” but the term is clearly loaded in many other ways.
If there is an aura of racialization that circulates around Chop Chop Chang/Ham, it is further complicated by the fact that he was used as a chimpanzee—ie as member the species most like human beings, but classified as an animal. He was used in other words, for all the qualities that made him human-like, and at the same time time, exploited precisely because he was not human. NASA was, after all, preparing to send the first man into space.
If the boundaries between the human and the non-human have shifted culturally depending on moment and location to include or exclude non-whites for the purposes of exploitation, then there is also a continuity between the exploitation of animals for experimentation and the exploitation of human beings for labour or experimentation—as in slavery or biomedical experimentation in the Third World, or the testing of the nuclear bomb. Ham and many of his compatriots were passed on to The Coulston Foundation for biomedical experimentation once NASA no longer had a use for them. The poem then, explores the distinction between human and non-human as it is constructed in language and pop culture. Human arrogance and Euro-centric arrogance are related, but engaging English differently might offer us more hopeful kinds of relation. Beneath the surface is an attempt to nudge at the possibilities of alliance building between people of Asian descent and people of African descent, who have been much pitted against one another in contemporary and historical Western contexts. The poem also opens the possibility for building a different kind of relation between the “human” and animal world. But “human” is a very fraught term here—it may be that in order to undo the horror of the human/animal split, we may need to figure ourselves differently.
The last long poem, “Auto Matter,” is the most “realistic” and lyric of the four poems. It is a poem “about” the author, but the author already destabilized by the recognition made in the previous three poems that the self is a suspect construct, always already called into culture and language. Lai is of Hong Kong Chinese descent, though she was born in the US. Her family thus lived through the British colonial presence on that island, the Japanese occupation during World War Two, as well as the American sanctions against China during the Korean War. “Auto Matter” is a meditation on that history, and the family’s experience of immigration, first to the US and then to Canada. As such, it is a personal poem, but embedded as it is with collective histories of war, economic pressure, immigration and diaspora, it is also deeply social.

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