Leanne Dunic, One and Half of You

 

First, there were them, and them, and them.
Then more. Faces mixed. A pocket here, a
clan there. landscapes shifted – people, too.
Communities disappeared.

And now there is me. I will draw you some maps.

West Coast writer and musician Leanne Dunic’s latest, following To Love the Coming End (Toronto ON: Book*hug/Chin Music Press, 2017) [see my review of such here] and The Gift (Book*hug, 2019), is the long poem lyric memoir One and Half of You (Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 2021). One and Half of You is a treatise on sibling love, and seeking a space of comfort and comprehension; an examination on identity and growing up. A book-length collection of lyrics that accumulate across a narrative around mixed-race identities, gender and sexual preference, Dunic writes a fragmented composed of short bursts, prose knots and breaths. Dunic writes on growing up into and against a set of expectations that don’t quite fit, experiencing homophobia and racist presumptions and attacks and dismissals. Dunic’s small sections focus on the intimate, seeking to articulate a mapping of how one gets to here. “Funny that the girl from my kindergarten / class remembers my Ghostbuster-crush / more than me kissing her nearly every day. / When I think of her, that’s what I remember.”

The lyrics that make up One and Half of You are set as a long thread, nearly an endurance; a book that attempts to navigate the complications of self against shortsighted social limitations. “At recess,” Dunic writes, early on in the collection, “the older kids taunted, <are you a / boy or a girl?> I was pretty sure I was a girl / but didn’t understand why I wanted to kiss / boys and girls when I knew I wasn’t / supposed to. Gender didn’t matter. Age / didn’t either; I recall not just kissing my / classmates, but the grey-haired school / principal too. I loved to love.”

Chinatown, four-by-ten room, the gap between
books. Paper and beeswax. Scent captive
like insects in resin. Selves we shelve for
future reference. Discover intimacy of sleep.
Difficult to catalogue, love is full of defiant
Compulsions. Inhale. Wear it like rubies.

Set in three sections, each with accompanying soundtrack to be found on the Talonbooks website, Dunic speaks of subtle and overt anti-Asian racisms, from those personally experienced to those further out in the community. She speaks of evolution, change and shifts. “Displacement is / a pattern, not a single occurrence.” Akin to Kenyatta A.C. Hinkle’s SIR (2019) [see my review of such here], Dunic seeks an orientation as much as an articulation through this lyric memoir, working a poetic framed as a sibling portrait that extends out to the family unit and the larger community, and returning to the author/narrator as a counterpoint. The portrait centres on the relationship and interactions between the two, and both the distances and connections that can’t help but keep them.

Leanne Dunic, To love the coming end

On top of sweaty sheets, I exist without basic order. Order of eating. Of hydration. Of relieving myself of concentrated urine. Buddha says: Existence is suffering. Desire is suffering. To be awake with one’s anxieties is suffering. If I can sleep, then I can survive, but there’s something I desire, something that, in my rest-deprived state, seems attainable. Reunion. Perhaps through dreams? But then there would have to be sleep. Without worry, without unnamed guilt.

Reality is unreality. I have no references to validate my existence. Mornings at nights I pray to other gods, talk to you, think of new superstitions.

5 am, I wake. Hello?

The first published book by Vancouver multidisciplinary artist Leanne Dunic is the poetry title To love the coming end (Toronto ON: BookThug, 2017), a book-length suite of lyric meditations composed as a series of self-contained fragments. While this appears to be a sketchbook composed during foreign travel, this is less a book about travel than one that, through the experience of travel, allows for the removal of the distractions of home, forcing the narrator into an examination of self after “the loss of a loved one.” As she writes: “Even while in Japan, my missing doesn’t thin. Maples and pines root my muscle, call me back to land.” Dunic writes the self-doubt, recriminations, observations and pessimisms that are often associated with loss, writing:

Within me, a gaping crevice. The more I change my environment the more I lose track of myself, yet I traverse. Maybe that’s the point. Nothing is anchored. Today is unstable, easy for people and land to split. Minerals grind a geological dance, the balance of the earth’s axis shifts. Chile, Indonesia, New Zealand, Haiti, Japan. Where next? The unsure crust hectors the Pacific Northwest, evidence of instability buried under substrate. A story, mounds.

Dunic writes of impending natural disasters and impending destruction, questioning how one can continue on such a precipice: “Singapore grows, a city of glass, as if there is no threat of plates and quakes.” To love the coming end is a book about isolation, vulnerability and perspective. She writes on Mishima and travel, Singapore and her “next project,” attempting to find ground even as she deems herself perpetually unsettled. She writes:

I hate November. Especially in Singapore. I’ve given up on aging, on anniversaries. I’ve given up on freshness. Showers are pointless when you step out of the bathroom and into fortified humidity. Despite the heat, I leave the flat to gorge on noodles oiled with meat fat and yeasty goods from BreadTalk. I’m readying for tropical hibernation.