When I received Sawako Nakayasu’s Pink Waves, I was drawn to its cover. Green, black, and blue arranged in shapes suggest camouflage, or woods filtered by wetness and movement. The artwork, Borrowed Landscape VIII (2020) by Naomi Kawanishi Reis, could serve as a negative image of Pink Waves. A negative is an inversion of perceived material realities. Pink will appear green. Light, dark. A negative could be produced by photographic techniques or experienced by the human visual system. Gaze at one spot for a prolonged period and you may see a negative afterimage.
This process mirrors how I approached Pink Waves, a book-length poem that defies easy categorisation with its “structured improvisation,” hybridity, and intertextuality. It leaves me with a compelling sense of uncertainty. With Trump’s potential presidential resurgence, perhaps it is an opportune moment to revisit Pink Waves and its layered embodiment of historicity, where “women marched in 2017, in pink hats”.
Pink Waves is a “micro-translation” and a dialogue with an array of texts, including Waveform by Amber DiPietra and Denise Leto, and Adam Pendleton’s “Black Dada”. The result is an embrace of disruption, serving as an antidote to the normative violence born of a lack of imagination. Written during a three-day durational performance, Pink Waves adopts a “loose sonata form,” reminiscent of Kurt Schwitters’s Ur Sonata (1922). In musical terms, the sonata comprises three movements: “exposition,” “development,” and “recapitulation.” The “exposition” transitions from the original key to a new one; the “development” traverses various keys; and the “recapitulation” ultimately returns to the original key.
A single line triggers Nakayasu’s exposition titled “A”: “it was a wave all along.” This line repeats as the opening of the subsequent fragments, where lines expand, multiply, and shift. For instance, turning the page that contains “it was a wave all along,” readers encounter two lines: “it was a wave all along / a passing moment reveals itself to have cued the long apology.” On the following page: “it was a wave all along / sliding between the heat of now and surrender / a passing moment reveals itself to have cued the long apology / i sat with a friend and the loss of her child.” There is no way to predict what will come next, aside from the assurance of repetition with variation. The reader, therefore, “cedes control” and engages with the poem by being attuned to the (im)possibility of meaning-making:
the formal struggle of a vertical field of grass and then somebody holds you your wild you i need the drifting organisms of the space between i need the slightly eroded quicksand moat to protect us all from the impending waves i need a decidedly animal resolution cantilevered muscles when the goals bring the stillness, a new sound erupts as if out of nowhere […] i had a nice dick, the sky is blue […] how will i locate expansiveness in touch refuge snap we ate them
The “cantilever” is one of the many conceits that operates metaphorically and formally throughout Pink Waves. A cantilever is defined as “a long bar fixed at only one end to a vertical support, used to hold a structure such as an arch, bridge, or shelf in position.” Its open-endedness creates clear space, allowing the surroundings to remain visible. In Pink Waves, cultural detritus—such as phrases, syntax, names, and calendar years—re-emerges, interlocks, and evolves across frames. For instance, “i have a nice dick; the sky is blue” transforms into “did you know i have a nice kick, and the sky is blue,” which can be traced back to “I need a constant morning, a kick in my mouth and coffee.” These intricate networks of intuitions and questions “set the conceptual line on fire.” This is the space where feelings and thoughts coexist, where authorial voices are “alone and together” in a process of accrual.
In “B,” the Sonata form’s development, readers encounter a shift in typography. A single word, “snap,” occupies the top left corner, as if cresting the peak of an incoming wave. A blank page juxtaposes the word, offering a broader perspective. On the next page, two lines appear: “was that you / or the genre trouble.” Another blank page follows. Over the course of eleven spreads, lines gradually build and lengthen on the left-hand side of the book, while the right-hand side remains empty. Then, a shift occurs. Words begin to bleed from the left to the right. The margin is so narrow it feels as though a spiral is opening, pulling everything inward. Leaking words surge and crash until the lines resolve into “radioed / nothing nothing.” The right-hand pages return to their calm emptiness. I was not present at Nakayasu’s staged performance in 2019. However, the book, as an artefact of that performance, invites me to imagine a soundscape within silence—a synesthetic blend of the visual and the auditory. Recurrences, upon re-reading, are both humorous and grounding:
how will i locate expansiveness in touch the on-point rhythms of partial identities no two bodies occupy pink the same way […] i don’t need your fleabag scuttlebutt […] i let you fall here like an intimate leaf and i will share this room with you i don’t need to be at odds with myself […] Ursonata sung by a beetle the desk is a spatial deadline no music without friendship […] do you want more protection now i am at odds with myself
The final movement of the book is titled “A’,” aligning with the sonata form’s recapitulation. It marks a return to “A,” now transformed by the alterations introduced in “B”: “it was a wave, would I snap.” The “cantilevered”—previously described as “muscles,” “muscles of joy,” “muscles in the backyard of my body,” and “narratives”—propels itself into an imperative expressed in the active voice:
cantilever this your facts fill it up scrap deluge a quiet neck is often discomfiting, all that is indifferent to the noise of the world the assumption of her failure how will I locate expansiveness in touch the extent that we feed another creature do you think if i brought you more and more if time falls illegible my function is to recoup it
Punctuation serves as a signpost. Its removal invites the reader to wander between the lines in a “bed of fog” (DiPietra and Leto via Nakayasu). The last two lines cited above can be read either independently or dependently, as supplementary conditions to whether “you think.” The penultimate line is simultaneously incomplete and complete. “Incomplete” as in “more of what?”; “complete” as in “If I brought you more and more, do you think.” This interplay between apparent binaries and the manipulation of syntax recalls Black Dada, which Adam Pendleton describes as “a way to talk about the future while talking about the past.” Nakayasu’s act of “recoup[ing]” “illegible time” urges the reader to examine the connections—and fragmentations—between various historical reference points: “i cannot claim Black Dada but i know that certain uses of the word love is a trap […] the 1960s are hungry ghosts loitering around the hot bosom of the 2010s […] Black Dada is our present moment.”
In the essay “In Conversation with Adam Pendleton”, Awa Konaté observes that “the past is never past but an ongoing rupture in the present […] The dialogues of imagery allude to history as a constituted limitation between past and present beyond the reinforced linearity of time, which, when read at a micro-level, slowly detects the familiarity of narratives.” Pendleton further remarks that “[Black Dada] operates on notions of abstraction, but such abstraction is an active mode of representation, which is a liberation of its own.” Nakayasu’s Pink Waves, with its defamiliarising, non-linear narratives, complicates the relationship between abstraction and materiality:
extent to which i breathe your facts it’s haptic; it’s your membrane; it’s material clatter sliding between your stargazing hoax and flesh and then somebody steals your wild you and names it after a sharp thought
In a single line, abstractions (“the extent to which,” “your facts”) frame the material (“i breathe”). “The wild you” is taken and given an unfamiliar name. As Nakayasu explains: “Some forms of loss are legible, others are complicated by their own illegibility. Pink Waves wrote itself from and towards the unstable intersection of love, grief, loss, and joy. An illegible loss of a child. Cancellation of waves and other matter. Detritus thereby left in limbo […] It is my attempt to be true to the thickness as I move through time and space, in cross-sections of wave upon wave. Some forms of otherness are more specific to my own history, some arrive through the discourse of others. All these spreading differences.”
If history is a series of “cancellations,” poetry becomes the space where “forms of otherness,” “detritus thereby left in limbo,” and “differences” are allowed to flourish. Perhaps the hybrid form and “the loss of a child” share an affinity in their elusive, slippery potentials. To engage with Pink Waves, one must also trace back to its/their numerous prefigurations. In Amber DiPietra and Denise Leto’s Waveform (2011), the two disabled women poets explore a “poeisis of / > interdependence,” quoting Bhanu Kapil: “You can’t go wrong with a sloppy hybrid. Ever. Because they are hybrid that, pre-animal, hasn’t carved out a spectacular niche.” By blurring each other’s boundaries through collaborative writing, DiPietra and Leto delve into the fluid possibilities of inhabiting both language and limbs:
The splintering of the mind so as not to betray the grimace in the body. Leaning at once toward and away from language, too many subtexts in that instant, all else goes unwritten. […] But here are the specs on that construct/site.) Build me anew. I want to say that […] I am just using words to touch places in my body that have gone numb, quiet, crunched. […] The water wants me to be pain free. It laps up and grabs the outer edge of body, pulls it in so that the inner stun is an ungrounded triumph.
Could conclusions themselves be a form of palimpsest? Allow me to use Waveform’s phrases as backwash as I navigate Pink Waves. To address “all else [that] goes unwritten,” one must locate what has “gone numb, quiet, crunched” and treat “inner stun” as “an ungrounded triumph.” Summoning voices that “splinter” across communities and bodies, Nakayasu shows that the personal need not be confessional; the political can transcend specific events; and the elegy can become, in Nakayasu’s very own words,“a reaching towards sensory pleasure, peace, unboundedness—speaking through the residue of that which is lost.”
I, too, was lost, but now I am found.
How to cite: Cheng, Tim Tim. “She Was Elegylight: Sawako Nakayasu’s Pink Waves.” Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, 23 Dec. 2024, chajournal.blog/2024/12/23/pink-waves.
Tim Tim Cheng (she/they) is the author of The Tattoo Collector(Nine Arches Press, 2024), a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. Her pamphlet, Tapping at Glass (Verve, 2023), was shortlisted for The Kavya Prize and named one of The Poetry Society’s Books of the Year. She co-edited Where Else: An International Hong Kong Poetry Anthology (Verve, 2023). In addition to poetry, she translates, writes lyrics, and co-hosts 英詩乞衣 (IG: @yshy.podcast), a Cantonese podcast exploring Anglophone poetry. Born and raised in Hong Kong, she has spent the past three years living in Edinburgh, London, and Glasgow. Visit her online at timtimcheng.com.
