Map of an Onion

by Kenji C. Liu

Birth certificates, passports, citizenship papers: these are the documents that define our official identities, that make us legible to the apparatus of the state. For Asian Americans, such documents are often central to our family narratives, marking a history of migration, departure and arrival, rejection or belonging. Yet we are also well aware of what such official documents erase, enforce, or repress. Kenji Liu's Map of an Onion begins with a reflection on the role of such documents in shaping identity but the mapping Liu offers us in this collection rejects the sharp boundaries of the official cartographer. Instead, Map of an Onion is a border-crossing, coalitional text that finds its political voice in interruption. In Liu's poetics, family history structures, and is structured by, histories of migration, colonialism, and violence, yet Liu finds in the interstices of those structures a space of profoundly personal exploration. "Tell me how to say your name," he asks us, "because / documents won't protect us."

— Timothy Yu, Author, 100 Chinese Silences and Race and the Avant-Garde: Experimental and Asian American Poetry Since 1965

One way to read Map of an Onion is as a quest myth for the contemporary self-discovering, revealing, asking deeper, inquiring layer by layer toward the onion's core, which is, ironically, unlocatable. Self as sensorium of perception, self as "animal, bird," as family member, as the inheritor of eight centuries of Liu heritage, self as man, as Japanese-Chinese-Taiwanese-American living on borrowed Lenape Native land in a suburb of New Jersey, self as unstable construct, as citizen, diplomat, flaneur, saboteur, artist, as tech-savvy, code-switching trans-lingual being. Kenji Liu's illuminated Map of an Onion is a koan of deconstructions which interrogates within the fissures of difference those spaces within us and between us, as charged spaces of potential and becoming. A booklength question in a hard, graceful calligraphy, asking deeper, asking better, what does it mean to be a self, this Self, to "translate this search / between my family's four languages,"-emergent, reassembled of ancient molecules and sculpted by all the forces of culture, history and bloodlight into a man? If "nations need a parable to reinvent themselves," Map of an Onion may be that parable.

— Chad Sweeney, Hillary Gravendyk Prize Judge

Genres: Poetry

146 pages, Paperback

Published March 1, 2016

About the author

Kenji C. Liu is author of Monsters I Have Been (2019, Alice James Books) and Map of an Onion, 2015 national winner of the Hillary Gravendyk Prize (also shortlisted as a finalist for the Hong Kong University International Poetry Prize). His writing appears in Anomaly, Apogee, The American Poetry Review, Asian American Literary Review, Barrow Street Journal, CURA, RHINO, Split This Rock's poem of the week series, several anthologies, and two chapbooks, including Craters: A Field Guide (2017, Goodmorning Menagerie). A recipient of fellowships from Kundiman, VONA/Voices, Djerassi Resident Artist Program, and the Community of Writers, he holds an MA in Cultural Anthropology and Social Transformation.

Reviews

[Neil Aitken · Rating 5 out of 5]

Just finished reading Map of an Onion last night and loved it for all its multiplicities and pluralities, for the myriad ways languages and histories weave together, and for its inventiveness and exploration of the physical, metaphysical, political,and historical spaces a body and a name might occupy. A terrific debut, one that continues the work of Cha's Dictee and opens new doors to thinking about the intersections of race, heritage, and the documents that construct our existence and passage through the world.

[Inverted · Rating 4 out of 5]

Exhaustive, exhausting, expansive work. A bit dumbstruck with how ambitious this collection is and how the multiplicities of one's identity are formally explored.

For instance, the poetry of interruption (as mentioned by Timothy Yu in his foreword) where poems such as in Deconstruction: Papers allow the personal voice to interrupt the legalese in immigration documents. Although it is an allusion to Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's Dictee, my reading immediately goes to Oliver de la Paz' Autism Screening Questionnaire. Not immigration, but it seems to come from the same impulse.

And, by the way, there are at least five languages used in this collection: English, Lenape, Chinese, Japanese and Spanish. If that doesn't drive home the point.

[Will McGrath · Rating 5 out of 5]

A nuanced meditation on the ways identity sustains and constrains. The language is rich and layered throughout.

[Paul Cannon · Rating 5 out of 5]

A wonderful, insightful, at times sad, mostly reflecting on life themes, well worth anyone's time over tea or coffee.