The titular poem of Franny Choi’s The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On traces the origins of the apocalypse. The opening line reads, “Before the apocalypse, there was the apocalypse of boats: / boats of prisoners, boats cracking under sky-iron, boats making corpses / bloom like algae on the shore” (1). But there is no beginning. Before that beginning to the apocalypse, there was another beginning: “Before the apocalypse, there was the apocalypse / of the bombed mosque” (1). There is always another beginning—I think of the Hot Water Music album title The New What’s Next (but in reverse—the new what’s first?). A later poem, “Science Fiction Poetry,” takes a similarly anaphoric quality, listing all sorts of contradictory dystopias: “Dystopia of congratulations you were right to be paranoid; / Dystopia of diversity trainings; / Dystopia of the banning of diversity trainings” (19) and so on.
The book evokes Maurice Blanchot’s notion of the disaster: there is no place where the disaster begins. In The Writing of the Disaster, Blanchot writes that “The disaster ruins everything, all the while leaving everything intact” (1). Hence, there is always a new beginning to the apocalypse. Put another way, “We are on the edge of disaster without being able to situate it in the future: it is rather always already past, and yet we are on the edge or under the threat, all formulations which would imply the future—that which is yet to come—if the disaster were not that which does not come, that which has put a stop to every arrival. To think the disaster [...] is to have no longer any future in which to think it” (1).
I can’t help but feel that Choi’s work is part of the “infinite conversation” to which Blanchot referred, as well. It is her own response, her own iteration of the endless trail of disaster, pain, trauma, oppression, exploitation, and historical injustice. Whereas most associate Blanchot with the writing of the Holocaust, Choi gives voice to a number of other historic travesties—the treatment of the Korean comfort women makes a number of appearances throughout the poems, for instance.
In fact, the poem “Process Note” knocked me right out in that regard. It’s a poem that begins with a central premise: “Depending on when and through which education system you learned about / so-called world history, you may understand the 1945 atomic bombings of / Hiroshima and Nagasaki to represent two things” (43). I hope not to take away the entire force of the poem by summarizing those two things as the end of WWII and the end of the world, the end of modernity, “the ringing in / of a half-century-plus of annihilation paranoia and very confusing novels” (amazing juxtaposition of those two ideas, incidentally), the end of narrative and God and so on. It seems like more than two things, but then again, Blanchot’s disaster is without limit, so why try to number them? Choi’s poem continues with a blazon of horrific images and implications. The poem offers a kind of drone of lengthy sentences. Then, a short one: “Now.” A snap of a short sentence at the core of a lengthy piece. The back half of the poem is an incredible and uncomfortable turn, given my own education, which I’ll quote at length here:
Now. Depending on whether or not you were
raised by the descendants of the survivors of a former colony of the Japanese
Empire, you might understand the 1945 atomic bombings of Hiroshima and
Nagasaki to, in fact, represent three things: one, the end of World War II; two,
the end of the world itself; and three, the prelude to liberation—the beginning
of the end, that is, of the control, carnage, forced labor, and cultural genocide
that raped, enslaved, and killed millions of Koreans, Indonesians, Taiwanese,
and others. Depending on when and in which geopolitical context you learned
“world history,” the moment in which you encounter this third association (at
the dinner table with your parents, home for some holiday) might sharpen
the room around you into sick bloom, as the terrible line appears—not drawn
by anything like righteousness, or grim duty, or God, or even causation,
really; just the flat time signature of sequence; terrible, indifferent sequence,
which leads from the detonations, to carnage, to freedom(?), to carnage, to
an airplane in the sky carrying a woman carrying a clumsy gathering of cells
that will one day look backwards and see, in that line, only endings, endings,
endings---
Sliced from bone, my life
hung like a jaw---faultless. And
unforgiveable. (43-44)
Choi exposes the uncomfortable position of the colonized in response to the atomic bomb, which seems so obviously wrong it’s hard to see those that might cheer without flinching—the politics of an eye for an eye, and all that. It’s a poem that lingers, potentially the most memorable and troubling in the collection. Also the recurrence of an “indifferent sequence” here again recalls the idea of an interminable disaster. I also like the touch that the prose poem collapses into more fragmentary lines for the final three, a formal reflection on the idea that the atomic bomb destroyed narrative.
The kind of repetition and interminable sequence of disasters is given another form, beautifully done in three poems that all share the same title: “Upon Learning That Some Korean War Refugees Used Partially Detonated Napalm Canisters As Cooking Fuel.” To be clear, this is not a poem in three parts. This is three poems with the same title—and what a striking title! That image is a haunting symbol of the disaster in general. I think my favourite version of the poem is the one that appears on page 62. Choi’s speaker recounts that “Somewhere in a prior world, a woman with [her] face / is scraping the seeds from an unborn hell” (62). The poem positions the global-scale violence alongside the daily work of this woman she has introduced: “All night, doom rang from the sky. And in the morning, / there are mouths to feed” (62). The juxtaposition of those two spheres of influence is interesting, as is the parallel at the level of the line: night at the start, “and in the morning” at the end — the implication being that doom rings across all time. The poem also juxtaposes the early frost and ruined crops with a neighbor’s daughter “strung up in the square” (62). A series of questions without answers follow; in fact, the questions are so unanswerable they are not even provided with interrogation marks: “What else to do / when the unspeakable comes. What to burn / when it doesn’t” (62). The characterization of the woman at the end of the poem is an incredible reflection on history, identity, and trauma. Just look at this:
Somewhere in a world that didn’t quite
end, a woman like me is foraging for that which failed to kill her.
She is cranking open modernity’s throat, wrenching
her arc from its scat. She is a woman who can hack
an impossible morning into water, bean paste, bitter leaves,
another chance to fumble toward the next chance, and the next-
Every day of my life has been something other than my last.
Every day, an extinction misfires, and I put it to work.
First of all: “she is cranking open modernity’s throat”? —Stunning. Second, I wonder if the Seamus Heaney reference is explicit or something of my own imagining, but I remember being knocked out by the premise of his poem “Digging” of a man not being able to do the farming his father could and he ends on the following: “Between my finger and my thumb / The squat pen rests. / I’ll dig with it.” Here I see a kind of inverse, a mirror-image between the women: farming a “misfired” extinction at something more meaningful than writing—what is writing in the face of genocide? To put it in Choi’s own words from “Poem with an End in Sight,” “If I write, there’s nothing / to be done, it’s a bird in the hand, i.e., // worth its weight in dead bird. It’s so corny / to call for the tyrant’s head again, and yet” (10). “Worth its weight in dead bird” is a gorgeous turn of phrase and I love the way the poem ends on the idea of “and yet.” Sure, it’s corny to “call for the tyrant’s head again” — how many times must we have a revolution? As many times as we have an apocalypse?
I’ve focused up until now on some of the more historical and political layers to The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On, but there are distinctly personal poems peppered throughout the work, often dealing with grief and trauma. In a longer poem, “Disaster Means ‘Without a Star’, Choi’s speaker reflects on disaster and then notes, “Meanwhile, I’m merely gorging / on the butterfly effects of ashes, ashes; reaching for the oat milk” (6) — I’m doing a little injustice to the sentence structure here, but I think it’s put beautifully there as is. The poem continues on in a mix of the personal and political and seemingly grappling with an individual’s role in human history. Once again, juxtaposition is a highlight of Choi’s craft: “Sixty-six million years after the last great extinction, six to eight business days before the next one, I whispered / Speak to a fucking agent into the hold music to trigger the system into connecting // me with a ‘real person’” (7). The whole idea of just trying to make a phone call and speak to an agent is very relatable and the course language evokes the sense of frustration and despair in making a phone call, which seems so much more important than the frustration and despair of the Covid pandemic, which is the key force of the poem. I’d quote this poem more at length, but you should likely simply read it. There are too many good lines to reference. Those of a certain generation (i.e. my own) will find a lot of small moments of the everyday elevated to the level of global calamity.
I think Choi touches on grief, both collective and personal, beautifully. For instance, Choi writes, “I sit on the train toward Chicago and mourn the avocado softening in my / kitchen. This, too, is practice, avocado being the smallest unit of grief. It’s rock / and ripe and gone; rock and ripe and gone. Which should be a lesson” (32). There’s a beautifully philosophical line that ends that same poem, “the fruit is another imagination that passes through me on / its way to unknowing” (“Grief Is a Thing with Tense Issues” 32). Choi’s recounting of the funeral in “Danez says they want to lose themselves in bops they can’t sing along to” is similarly mournful. “I Learned That I Was Beautiful” is a troubling kind of romance-turned-sinister poem that addresses grief as well. In that piece, there are two linguistic mysteries that linger to me. The first: what people say about Asian women. The second: what happened that rhymes with what was already inside her? The poem is somewhat of a puzzle—I have a guess, but the way the poem evades an answer is similar to, again, how disaster (however personal) evades conclusion.
Reading through Choi’s work, I found a lot that I liked and a few things that blew me away. A sign of a good book, I think, is that it becomes richer the more time you spend with it. That is the case with The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On. The more time I’ve spent thinking about it and responding to it in writing here, the more thoroughly I’ve appreciated it and found more to discuss. For dramatic effect, I’d like to end by quoting the final stanza of one of the final poems in the collection. I find it such a tragic tone, and it sometimes becomes so hard to go on, and yet. From “Waste” on page 122:
And in the swath between them, loneliness. Just that: loneliness. I thought that was all love could give me. I'm sorry. I thought I'd seen the future. I thought I knew the words to our one wild and unfathomable life. Forgive me; I see it now. I wasted so much time being wrong.
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