"The poet is of no party." Baudelaire
The Betweens, by Cynthia Arrieu-King (Noemi Press, 2021)
It shouldn’t feel surprising that a work called The Betweens would exist in a space amid genres—between poetry and prose, personal history and memoir—yet Cynthia Arrieu-King’s new book endlessly surprises in its negotiation between the lived and the remembered, between the recounting of direct event and the sense that an event has left along the way. Arrieu-King’s book gives us more than either the recollection of experience or the derivation of experience compressed into verse. Jumping from fragments of encounters to conversations and impressions, this autobiographical work moves beyond the urge to tell us everything that happened in the author’s life, but rather how the things that happened shaped the person and the writer she has become. In her acknowledgments, Arrieu-King notes how some of The Betweens came into being within the manuscript of her first book of poems, People Are Tiny in Paintings of China, and this gives us insight into another way this work exists between spaces—in this case, the gaps within the writer’s processing of her own memories. Those two books now feel like shadow texts to each other, in which a line from the former as crisp as “I was down in the hole collecting rain” becomes another lens through which to read the larger narrative threads now brought together. What sets The Betweens apart is how personal it is about both the nebulous space in which Arrieu-King has always lived, rooted in her identity and upbringing, and a broadly shared BIPOC space through which her life runs.
The Betweens presents the experience of so many of us in this New World of ours that it’s difficult not to turn this review into a litany of one’s own experiences. My brother and I grew up in suburban Atlanta, the kids with the funny names with the funny religion and the parents who had accents. What the book captures so well is the dual sense of not belonging: our original awareness that one does not quite belong here in America, but also our growing recognition as we get older that one does not belong anywhere else either, certainly not in the Old World, where one remains the American Cousin—we had “American” stamped on our foreheads, even among family, my dad would say. All that can be said about this acute feeling is: This is why we do what we do, this is why we not only gravitate to the exploration of language and culture and memory, but also to one another, other misfits in this broad cultural experiment. Arrieu-King gives us in pinpoint accuracy not a poetics statement but an operating system, a way of understanding how we have come to be who we are. The book opens in a place familiar to me:
“I noticed that Chinese people didn’t think of me as Chinese. I told my dad how they’d say I wasn’t “a real Chinese.” I felt stuck in a gray area between this reaction and the reaction—to my playing piano, to good grades, to being quiet—that I was very Asian. My mom and dad kept neutral faces as I told this story and said not to say anything about it, to be quiet.”
We learn to shut up about ourselves, to find that space to blend in so no one notices us. It’s an impossible task, ultimately, because we are betrayed by our skin and by our names, shown for who we are to a world that doesn’t understand what we are. This can be especially painful at a time when we don’t even really understand what we are ourselves. When we don’t fit a stereotype, it’s impossible to get along. When we do—I don’t know. We’re always trapped.
The lessons are direct: You don’t out yourself as other, as best as possible. You laugh along at a joke, you do as asked in the hopes of being just another person on a beach or in a school. Be one of the good ones and they won’t turn against you, the “perceived model minority,” she writes. But the journey in Arrieu-King’s work is not only her own, but also that of her family, which finds itself in between spaces too, within their individual struggles in an unfamiliar place, their collective struggles as a family and even their struggles with one another. Her brother becomes a sheriff, his own attempt at joining the existing power structure of the society we have adopted. Similarly, the silence of the parents in response to the racism their child faces, the urging to remain silent, is ingrained deeply, cultivated because silence is what allows us to survive our otherness: “not to say anything about it, to be quiet, let it ride, not to let my upset show.” It is necessary, the parents believe. For me, this might be the most interesting thread through the work, in attempting to understand my own parents and their experiences, as well as that of my older brother as a child taken to a new country, all of them leaving a home in an attempt to find a new one, to create a new space for themselves, but inevitably finding the empty spaces between spaces. I remember a particular day in which I was arguing with the boy down the street about religion and my parents later told me to just not say anything at all. We learn, in some ways, to shut up about ourselves as a reminder that we are nowhere at all.
Arrieu-King’s writing about her father makes me wonder too “if this is what my father ever felt for escaping to the United States.” There was not only guilt in our home over having left others behind, wavering between an act of necessity and an act of abandonment. Back “home,” their parents were aging, their siblings who hoped to get their own children across the ocean were slowly growing disappointed or even angry over the years. Sometimes what Arrieu-King refers to as an escape felt like more to me like a curse, a failed obligation to others. Throughout The Betweens, this too seems to weigh heavily on her father, a sense that one should always act in certain ways, to be working and thinking toward the future and not wasting time. It is a heavy burden for a child, but one that Arrieu-King, while struggling with, also comes to understand better. It is not hard to see why one’s parents loom large in a personal work such as this, a lost parent even more heavily. The lessons of the parents resonate profoundly, their realizations speaking not only to us as readers, but also as children.
Time throughout The Betweens seems jumbled, moving abruptly from one period to another, but the progression of vignettes, memories, and observations also feels incredibly linear, the mind wandering naturally through a personal and collective history in such a way that each new moment seems the result of all the ones that came before it. Arrieu-King avoids the traps of revelation, displaying a control in her writing that does not force any sort of surprise or grand epiphany by the end. She evokes the way that life is rarely punctuated by large epiphanies, but rather tiny ones throughout, built on the understandings of the past:
“Nothing will teach you to wear a poker face faster than having a very dark sense of humor or being surrounded by co-workers who are kind, good, generous, and correct you, and explain to you each time you make a dark joke, how that isn’t fair … Always looking for what will keep you from ruin.”
While each stanza (or paragraph) of the book gives us a brief glimpse of time, an isolated moment, there is also the recognition of how each of those moments is its own realization, its own microgesture in the grand experience. We are left with the insistent sense that Arrieu-King has not only given voice to the in-between spaces of her experience, but also filled those places of silence with her speech.