Reviewed by Magdalena Ball
Joss: A History
By Grace Yes
Giramondo
June 2025, 80 pages, Paperback, ISBN: 9781923106314
There has been something of a surge in verse memoirs and hybrid poetic histories over the past few years. It’s not difficult to understand why. Poetry is an appropriate medium for dealing with fragmented information, the vagaries of memory, marginalisation and trauma. The lyric intensity of poetry and its almost anti-narrative structure allows writers to get closer to the immediacy of experience without the usual difficulties of appropriation, false smoothing, or anachronisms. Poetry doesn’t generally claim to be an authoritative account. Instead it uses sound, rhythm, structure, multivocalism, and other non-linguistic tools to bypass the constraints of story and the colonial notion of time being linear. Grace Yee’s Joss: A History is a history that is perfectly suited to poetry, with its mix of research, artefacts, collage, cento and other found poems, erasures, and intertextuality.
A large number of the poems explore the experiences of the Chinese migrants who arrived in Bendigo during the 19th century gold rush. These migrants made up almost 35% of the male population and significantly impacted the town, establishing the local Ironbark Chinese Camp, market gardens, and the Bendigo Joss House Temple, one of the things that gives the book it’s title. Much of the material available to tell these stories has come from European sources, and Yee’s book counters this in similar ways to her first book, Chinese Fish. The poems are often composed out of archival material, found through research, family histories, ekphrasis, inquest records, artefacts and accounts, newspaper articles, other books, diaries, lists of names as in the six page list of names of Chinese Australians born in Victoria who enlisted in World War 2 even though they were exempt from the draft in “NON-EUROPEAN ANCESTRY”, and lists of cemeteries with segregated Chinese graves, or phrases adopted from science pieces like the prose poem“Iron Awe” which uses lines from a article published in Geoscience Australia about iron ore:
…Diplomacy can be economically extracted. It is
one of the most sought-after commodities in the world.
diplomacy varies in colour, it can be black, grey, silver, deep
purple, bright yellow, rusty desert red.
These are public documents, but combined in ways that create an intimacy, especially when followed by a visceral and personal piece like “white hills”. This poem follows the lists of names, taking the reader directly into the cemetery with its lonely unadorned graves. The sonic elements of anaphora and alliteration repeated throughout the poem create a sense of footfall, as if we too were walking around Bendigo’s White Hills Cemetary, looking at the mounds:
What dreams weather beneath these mounds
what fierce agitations turn the night
with neither lanterns nor goose-quill by their own hands
Yee notes that there is even less information from or about Chinese women in Bendigo during this period because men were incentivised to travel alone as temporary laborers rather than settle permanently with wives and children, and where there were women, archival tracking was often limited. A piece called “(heffernan lane)” includes a photograph from the State Library of Victoria of a procession of traditionally dressed women raising funds for famine relief in China. The poem includes phrases from a range of newspapers and interviews that conflate the past with the present, something Yee is particularly good at doing, while countering the marginalisation, mysogeny (“the right decision is always the one that leaves/you in full sight.”) and stereotypes of “self-effacement” from a “colonialist, anthropological government”: In this story, we are well-heeled, muscular, arched and unfettered, tripping and gadding in shoe our grandmothers (supposedly) could never have conjured.”
The poems splay across multiple pages, utilise typographical marks, different font sizes, employ irony, and weave together material that is sometimes cohesive in ways that have the look and feel of prose poems but are disjointed, presenting a counter narrative that re-contextualises history. A good example of this is the poem “when we elevated a section of the great wall” which brings in lines from the imperialist and paternalistic sinologist John Francis Davis’ The Chinese: A General Description of the Empire of China and Its Inhabitants with terms like “Celestials” and kite-flyers:
forget/about binding allowances, and think twice before drawing
the colour line because the editor is not white and mao was
not the last dancer. If you look up and admire the light fittings
and ceiling cornices, we could be asian-pacific sweethearts
for eight hundred years: we celestials excel at kite-flying.
Many of the poems focus on language, exploring what’s been stripped, lost, buried, or distorted. Some of the poems contain Chinese phrases and characters, with colloquial expressions. The erasure poems reminds us of how names were erased or altered, sometimes anglicised or replaced entirely with labels like “Chinaman”, their words misunderstood, the language phonetically mangled and woven with modern references:
Stroking the hair on his chin chin chin. He says, it’s council land,
technically, clickers clickers clickers click. (brick brick brick brick) (“chin chin chin”)
There is outright prejudice in the xenophobic “Anti-Chinaman Special Number” with its overt racism augmented by font changes and rhythmic irony “…keep this land fit and pleasant for white men” (“for the sake of social peace”).
In addition to the specific stories of the early Chinese settlers, Yee explores sinophobia in classic Australian literature like Miles Franklin’s My Brilliant Career which takes explores an incident in Chapter 27 where the protagonist Sybylla Melvyn moves seats to avoid sitting next to a “bloomin’ chow’. Similarly, though in a fair bit more detail, Yee interrogates the Quangos, a “quiet and industrious Chinese family” portrayed in ways that are “humourless and graceless and bleak” in Patrick White’s Happy Valley. Throughout the book this engagement with texts of all descriptions broadens the perspective of the book but also adds richness to ways in which the settlers were perceived and depicted. The book begins in the 21st century in the Heritage Collections Reading Room at the State Library Victoria where the murkiness of history “clears like cloud and wind and camphor.” The final poem, “This story”, ends with a wry Covid (and Trump) reference which once again brings us back to the present while also reminding us of the past, the historical inequities, and those moving burial mounds:
…Our heroes lie beneath logs moss
bark and rock, yield to the power walkers (round-toed, three-four
abreast), their festive dawdling shitting dogs. (“This story”)
Joss: A History is not an easy book – it asks for deep engagement from the reader, but it is worth a slow read and careful attention to the notes. Yee’s way of weaving social, cultural and historical artefacts into a story that feels very alive, present and relevant, is powerful.