echolalia echolalia
Jane Shi
Brick Books, 2024
Review by Madelaine Caritas Longman
After reading the first poem in Jane Shi’s debut, echolalia echolalia, I put down the book and paced in circles. My heart knocked against my chest; my fingers transfigured into vibrating moth wings. I had forgotten language could be so embodied, so gut-hot and defiantly alive. I had forgotten, in other words, what drew me to poetry in the first place: how it can open a dimensional portal to a realm where one can speak differently, where clashing dictions and the breakdown of syntax are forms of possibility rather than pathology, where one can break open English like a geode and touch its seams, its jagged glitter. “This page pecks worms from my pocket eyes,” Shi’s speaker announced herself in “Reading Practice.” I flinched. I flapped. I was hooked.
Through a queer, diasporic, and disabled lens, echolalia echolalia upturns language both literally and figuratively. Words are printed upside down and crookedly, layered into dense voids and rearranged as cut-up collages. Internet memes abut Chinese character worksheets, teen WordPress diaries, and autotranslated messages from a family WeChat. A face “gr[ows] into a basket / of wind.” A Word Doc becomes a “word dock.” There are zaps and snaps and at least one capybara. But echolalia’s innovation goes far beyond its diction and layout. The heart of this book’s daring lies in its challenge to presumptions about what constitutes “poetic” – and about who can be a poet. echolalia echolalia is an assertion: do not wait for permission to exist.
This is not a collection aimed at canonical tastes, as one can probably infer from the opening poem, “Reading Practice,” taking a swipe at the “Norton Anthology / of English Shiterature.” But for those who want – or need – to leave well-trodden literary paths to follow other desire lines, Shi’s mash-up of avant-garde free association and disarming lyric earnestness is a vibrant and rewarding journey. Centering an autistic, Chinese Canadian speaker, echolalia echolalia is a much-needed antidote to a white and medical gaze that has long flattened racialized and neurodivergent people into tragedies, punchlines, and inspirational (read: exploitable) geniuses. Defying one-dimensional stereotypes, Shi’s speaker is funny, stubborn, empathetic, opinionated, and – perhaps most excitingly – isn’t focused on justifying herself to a white neurotypical readership. Poems honour friends, ancestors, and other writers and artists, returning to themes of identity and history, found and lost family, disability and mad kinship, and ruptures and recombinations of languages and selfhoods. While struck through with grief, the collection reads as an ode to community and an incantation for interdependent survival.
“Echolalia” refers to the repetition of words or sounds. Today, the term most often crops up in discussions of autism, appearing in medical papers, resources for parents, and online communities of autistic people ourselves. Put another way, the term “echolalia” is most familiar to two demographics: autists, and those who pathologize us. When used by the latter, the phrase “repetitive speech” is typically preceded by “meaningless.” Autistic people, in contrast, tend to characterize echolalia not as empty language but as a way of using language differently: to play, to self-sooth, to communicate where conventional speech fails. Here, Shi explores echolalia as a mode of poetic inquiry. Dedicated to “the mouths sewed shut / mumbling water what water,” echolalia echolalia considers who is permitted to speak, what forms of speech are accepted as meaningful, and how a more inclusive poetics might manifest. The result is a valuable contribution to disability literature, and a dynamic, layered, and ambitious collection fullstop.
These poems are often difficult, by which I mean that I frequently found myself Googling references or wondering how to approach an unconventional form. Unlike some experimental texts, however, echolalia never felt like it aimed to obfuscate. This is in part because the poems reward inquiry; through Shi, I discovered science fiction author Ted Chiang, learned about the sixteenth century novel Fengshen Yanyi, read up on the history of the Chinese Exclusion Act, and found funk band Tank and the Bangas. Rather than a barrier, these poems’ abundance of juxtapositions felt like a welcoming in of historically excluded voices. “how do u say help me in yr language” the speaker inquires in the poem “incense search engine #AskYrAncestorsAnything,” a question that rings with the possibilities of language but also with the echoes of erasure English has left in its wake. Yet, the speaker’s question does not feel rhetorical. These poems hum with deep pain: “Definition Hostile” considers a history of intergenerational trauma in which family is “a calculus of nation & resignation”; in “being your own family,” the diaspora is an “imagined / distance between the epicentre and nowhere.” But they are also poems where disabled people pledge to look after one another, where one can tell the ancestors about a love of donut peaches, where “you do not / need to win to live.” If I was startled by these poems’ experimentation, I was doubly so by their tenderness. By their declaration of an ethics and an art that insists we can – must – help each other.
I was especially grateful for Shi’s direct yet gentle discussion of suicidality, an issue that disproportionately impacts autistic people. My personal favourite poem, “Fiddling with My Chew Toy Strolling Across Matthew Wong’s River at Night (2018)” considers the intersections of art, capitalism, race, and disability, pushing back against mythologies of “genius” that value productivity over lives. Wong, an autistic Toronto-born painter who grew up in Hong Kong, died by suicide in 2019. As Shi puts it, “After his death, Matthew’s art sold / for tens of thousands of not getting to grow old.” Against an art world that chains marginalized artists to “the steel of old money, new money, whiteness,” Shi’s speaker imagines inviting Wong to lunch, imploring, “Let us be boring and unextraordinary.” It is a surprising statement from a speaker who seemingly cannot help but revolutionize language; a reminder that true revolution is not an individual act, but a duration of living that depends upon patience, on care, and on each other.
echolalia echolalia gives no false hope that such living will be easy. But it offers a portal into what poetry and community can become when difference is approached not as an error to correct or suppress but as a constellation of possibilities to navigate together. Angry, tender, funny, wise, polyphonic, and profoundly alive, this book will appeal to fans of both experimental and lyric poetry, particularly those seeking a new and energetic voice. Readers of such powerhouse poets as Chimwemwe Undi, D.M. Bradford, and Diana Khoi Nguyen will appreciate Shi’s formal boldness, sociopolitical engagement, and ear for surprising vocabulary, though Shi’s approach is very much her own. Dancing and crackling across tones and styles, echolalia echolalia is a kaleidoscopic explosion of language that leaves me excited for the future of poetry. More importantly, it leaves me determined to live.
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Madelaine Caritas Longman is the author of The Danger Model, which won the Quebec Writers’ Federation Concordia University First Book Prize and was longlisted for the Fred Cogswell Award for Excellence in Poetry. Her writing has appeared in Room, Vallum, Grain, The Ex-Puritan, CV2, and elsewhere, been shortlisted for the PRISM international Creative Nonfiction Prize, and featured in art installations at Never Apart Gallery and the EK Volland Art Gallery. She lives in Tio’Tià:ke (Montréal).