Rachelle Lawka
Jane Shi, echolalia echolalia.
Kingston: Brick Books, 2024. $23.95
There is a pervasive sense of repetition, beginning with the title, in Jane Shi’s debut collection of poetry, echolalia echolalia. More specifically, the book opens a vast, liminal space where past, present, and future versions of ourselves collide, rendering an endless, conjoined echo that reverberates between the reading self and the looking-glass self of our perception. The word echolalia refers to the repetition of certain words or phrases; it is a developmental method of learning language, as well as a common trait emerging in certain neurodivergent speakers as they encounter and process the language of others in the world. It comes as no surprise then, that through unflinching and transformative poetics, Shi teaches the reader to communicate in the language of her own lived experiences, and to listen to the echoes those experiences create. Shi encourages readers to not only delve deeper into the imprint they leave behind for others, but to also consider the fracturing of their own constructed echo in relation to the ones they may have inherited through generations of passed-down violence and grief.
echolalia echolalia is a compelling debut collection with a voice that is distinct, versatile, and resilient on every page. Shi’s articulation and reworking of language guides the reader through a series of narratives that explore queerness, disability, and intergenerational trauma. In these pages Shi eclipses the idea of a rigid, structured form and instead offers poems shaped to the likeness of a cuttlefish: a creature continuously altering and transforming itself to survive in its surroundings. For Shi, survival can look a lot like, “starburst of mold spores / face morphing into an eyeball window,” a “goodbye to / earlier drafts / of / yourself each night,” or even a “foxglove-covered / drawer.” The patterns that Shi forms then, through the various shapes the poems take on, can be seen to mimic the very real and persistent obligation marginalized speakers often feel to either nimbly adapt to their environment or to become well-versed in the art of camouflage in order to avoid detection as “other” or “different.”
The speakers in Shi’s poems, while tender, electrifying, and at times deeply humorous, are also distinctly persuasive in their continuous reminder that the essence of each poem goes beyond what is explicitly in the lines themselves. Through skillful craft, Shi evokes echolalia in poems like “is it literature or deforestation” where the act of repetition is seen in not only the shape of the poem (the top and bottom half mirror one another), but also in the echoing of the words “national” and “foreign” throughout. In the elicitation of such reverberations, Shi’s speaker implores the reader to consider how, if the continuous repetition of a certain word or phrase makes it temporarily meaningless (as per the psychological phenomenon of semantic satiation), we decide what language holds what value in the first place. In this way, echolalia echolalia questions the rigid, patriarchal, and colonial structure of western language by altering the way we expect it to appear: linear, right-side-up, and abiding by the rules of syntax and grammar that we have been taught are “correct.” The result is an amalgamation of poetic speech that resembles SMS text or slang, as in “incense search engine #AskYrAncestorsAnything,” where the speaker breaks down words’ “proper” spelling and norms: “what do i let go of in yr language / n what about this pomegranate.” The poems throughout this collection suggest to the reader that no matter what form language may appear in — even if it is one that is different and unfamiliar to us — it still warrants our listening and understanding.
Shi’s poems require the reader to look inwards — to seek the internal, raw substance of not only their experienced life, but also the innate mechanisms allotted to them through generations of lived trauma by those that came before them. Often, the poems feature a sort of rumination on the idea of blood-relations and chosen family. In “Azure Road,” parents are relegated to “just people” — the very outline of them condensed to “your first lesson / in boundary-setting,” by “promising / you won’t speak / to them again.” There is a rhetorical pondering here of the question of who and what we consider family to be in the first place, and of who a person can be, and love (and in turn, be loved by) outside of the legacy of their own intergenerational trauma. It is a question posed for the reader to answer and figure out for themselves: What do we define as community, love, and kin?
echolalia echolalia is a masterclass in echoes, and in the phantom shadows we leave behind for others to inherit and repeat. In altering the shape of the poems — in contorting her own body to conform to a narrative that society, family, and strangers often impose on her — Shi depicts the visceral struggles that marginalized individuals all over the world often experience daily. Living, in these poems, is a continuous cycle of altering one’s shape, size, and pattern to adhere to a set of standards deeply rooted in colonialism, misogyny, and fear. echolalia echolalia offers a profound and intimate lesson in unlearning these passed-down beliefs and in understanding the notion that who we are as individuals goes beyond what everyone else expects our echoes to be.
The final poem of echolalia echolalia, “queerwork,” reminds us that the language we have been taught to speak “properly” can be deconstructed. It can be “brick walls / crumbling / into bits of / scrap,” waiting to be rebuilt and remade into something raw and new and loved by “so very sore / & eager / hands.” Shi challenges our expectations and presumptions that language must adhere to a rigid set of rules to be worthy of genuine compassion and comprehension. Like literary theorist Judith Butler, Shi approaches language as something we not only enact and participate in, but also as a signifying body that is not passive or fixed; it is an animate creature whose appearance can shift and adapt in the same way that our own often does. And thus, at its crux, echolalia echolalia is a living, breathing, linguistic entity that is unashamed of its differences, or breaks, from societal expectations and norms. It is a courageous and unapologetic collection of poems that does not need to ask if it is deserving of its own considerable agency because it already knows that it is.
Rachelle-Anne Lawka (she/her) is an emerging Canadian poet and painter whose writing has appeared in Arrival Magazine, PRISM International, and The Ampersand Review. When she is not writing or painting, she can be found reading her cat poetry, exploring new hiking trails, or chasing waterfalls across Ontario.