‘Toward a Poetics of Phantom Limb Or, All the Shadows That Carry Us’
— Andrew Sargus Klein
I map the ghosts; the ghosts map me.
There aren’t a lot of available terms to describe the experience of Jennifer S. Cheng’s piece in the current issue of Territory. You click on the numbers that adorn an image of a body mapped out for acupuncture and up pop boxes of text that are in conversation with the image as well as with multiple of other narratives: the body, ancestry, home, memory.
We frequently look to the body as a vessel of evidence, but Cheng is interested in absence, in what isn’t there anymore and the memory left behind.
For I have written about the strange ambiguous homesickness I have known in the hollow cavity of my stomach every now and then since childhood.
Throughout, Cheng references texts from other authors as well as herself, emphasizing how the art we consume and the art we create are vital parts of our personal trajectories, “our hidden histories at hand.”
While this work is deeply personal, it offers a full and vital dimension of inquiry, a re-looking at the body and its place in time and space, of how the body holds on and lets go, of how memory is imprinted, how memory exists in both a presence and an absence, a sort of matter and anti-matter simultaneously.