Jessica Q. Stark’s Buffalo Girl
A Review Interview
In a language both haunting and revelatory, Buffalo Girl reads like an incantation where the speaker excavates the roots her mother’s memories and weaves stories with culture and ancestry. There are strong connections to fictional characters, all women, whose tragic fates have affected the ways in which the speaker looks at the world. For example, in the poem “Phylogenetics,”
When it began isn’t clear, but isn’t it obvious that we always had a knack
for stories about little girls in danger? (15)
Stark’s second collection delves into womanhood, lineage, language, and history through successive retellings of the story of “Little Red Riding Hood” (also called Red or Red Hat). The poems are accompanied by collages, depictions of fairy tale scenes, and photographs of the speaker’s mother. The author explains she “discovered the black-and-white photographs when I was snooping in my mother’s closet when I was very young (around age six or seven) in my childhood home. They were all taken around the same time prior to my mother’s immigration to the United States, prior to when she met my father, prior to when she became a mother of four daughters, prior to an entirely different life far away from Vietnam. I was enchanted by this little book of poems—as they are so deeply poetic—and it would frequently enter my mind over years and years. Why? I’m not so sure. I think my interest had to do with how powerful she looked, how independent, how free, how powerfully unknowable. It was this younger version of her that I could never fully understand.”
This relationship to the unknown and to the possibilities offered by the author’s finding are evident in the “Red” series, where each poem offers alternative beginnings, plots, and endings to the story, emphasizing that fate, especially as related to women in contemporary society, can be challenged and contested. Stark reflects on the theme of violence when writing this book, claiming, “I thought a lot about epigenetic remnants and DNA Methylation and how our bodies hold traces of ancestral experience. These details are a little poem in our bodies. And the body doesn’t lie. The body holds trauma and grief and maybe love and heartbreak that our ancestors’ experienced, even if they themselves pushed these pieces way deep down into a small, private pocketbook of photographs. I think the terms of survival often require at least some willful forgetfulness. I’d like to believe that that cultural amnesia can’t ever completely succeed in its own erasure. The site of return for me is the body.” Thus, In the first two lines of one of the Little Red Riding Hood’s poems, Half a league from the village/Little Red entered the wolf” (30). The word “entered” can be interpreted in a variety of ways, all of them implying violence to the body of another, and in this case reversing traditionally accepted roles between the girl and the wolf. The wolf is on the receiving end of the violence.
Violence is also connected to heritage, both in terms of race and ethnicity. In the poem “On Passing,” the speaker talks about this by saying, “The discomfort I have with my whiteness resembles betrayal to the sentence in/my body.” Her mixed heritage affects her relationship with others, “My whiteness makes some people comfortable” (43), and because of this she is at odds with her own body. Stark mentions this was the final poem she wrote for the collection, “It was the missing piece. I had to grapple with the fact of my frequent passing to fully tell the story of my own bits of erasure, to fully tell the story of my body as a physical site of connection and rupture from my mother and her story. I have been told many times throughout my life that I deeply resemble my mother by those that knew her. Counterintuitively, a lot of people are surprised to learn of my Vietnamese heritage (if they have never met her). This discordance produces a litany of questions about access, possession and dispossession, projected visual boundaries of race and subsequent (dis)comfort. These questions only enunciate further how the physical body embodies a kind of story. And occasionally, this story doesn’t fit easy archetypes or scripts we have inadvertently memorized.” Language has a significant role in the way we name ourselves. This is why, in the last line, the speaker states, after talking about the birth of her son and about intergenerational trauma, that “without language we might finally be vanished,/touchless, free” (45).
In many of the poems, the speaker challenges colonialism and surveillance, but particularly in the series of poems titled “Kleptomania.” The author explains how this poems represent the different ways in which people cope with survival, “So often survivors of war or trauma in conventional, glossed-over narratives are glamorized as perfect victims or ethically sanitized, saintly doll versions of reality. Look, monstrosities produce monsters—minor and major. The woods permeate the basket long after departure. We pretend as if monsters are not sometimes the most magnificent creatures, who understand how arbitrary our rules can be on how to live. I am not condoning theft, unequivocally. I am, however, embracing an ability to witness who has been taken from, continually, and what kind of reorientation to the world and its rules that that experience breeds.”
The poems in this series speak to the disconnect between self and society, and the speaker evades the eye––the gaze?–– of store cameras, just like Red evades the hungry gaze of the hungry wolf. In a way, the speaker is trying to choose her own fate, to be the one who consumes, even if the consequences are dire,
Once I shoved
a handmade placard down
the front of my pants at a
stripmall and felt nothing. (73)
Stark underlines that violence “ in many ways permeates a lot of certain people’s lives—particularly, the lives of survivors of war. You come to eat it, daily. You come to observe it, like the dailiness of a mail carrier or the weather. And subsequently, their children may be haunted by it—this unsettling feeling that violence is one’s bedfellow even if it’s never physically manifested. Or even if it takes smaller, microforms. I don’t want to glamorize or valorize this presence; it is mostly uncomfortable. But to deny this ever-presence of human violence would be to occlude the realized existence of refugees and their offspring.” In a way, the speaker attempts to make sense of a world where she feels like she does not belong and where there seems to be a consistent hunger/longing for what isn’t or what could be. This is also evident in how the story of Red seems to also be the story of the mother before she became a mother, when she was a young woman in her native Vietnam, “She locks eyes with a uniform that will give her away to the stars. She smiles, her heartbeat high in her red throat” (51). Each of the poems adds a layer to Red’s experiences with “the uniform” –the wolf– a complexity that challenges preconceived notions of what a refugee’s life is and how their experiences trickle into the next generations.
Buffalo Girl is an incredibly complex and compelling collection that challenges Westernized ways of thinking, seeing, and categorizing difference by using image, syntax, and space to understand the possibilities of imagining a different reality, leaving us as readers curious, awake, and alert.
Jessica Q. Stark is the author of Buffalo Girl (BOA Editions, 2023), a finalist for the 2023 Maya Angelou Book Award, Savage Pageant (Birds, LLC, 2020), and four poetry chapbooks, including INNANET (The Offending Adam, 2021). She is a Poetry Editor at AGNI and is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at the University of North Florida. She co-organizes the Dreamboat Reading Series in Jacksonville, Florida.