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Witness Back at Me is personal dissection that draws on the author's childhood episodes of disembodiment, when, through the death of his mother from cancer at age two, he lost his ability to speak for nearly two years, which is also the time when he was placed in a foster home at a dairy farm outside Calgary, from age two to four. During this time, the author recalls not inhabiting his own body, but often floating outside it and witnessing himself as "other."
About the author
Weyman Chan was born in Calgary in 1963, to immigrant parents from China. He has published poems and short stories in a wide variety of literary journals and anthologies. He won the 2002 National Magazine Awards silver prize for his poem "At Work," and the 2003 Alberta Book Award for his first book of poetry,
Before a Blue Sky Moon. His second book,
Noise from the Laundry, was a finalist for the 2008 Governor General's Award for Poetry and the 2009 Acorn-Plantos Award for People's Poetry.
Summary
In Witness Back at Me, Weyman Chan continues to explore themes of dislocation and belonging by drawing on biography, myth, science, and the everyday. Chan’s poetry is suffused with a collage-like immersion of stream-of-conscious voices, approximating the kaleidoscopic effect of interior thought.
Witness Back at Me draws on the childhood loss of Chan’s mother to breast cancer, as a survival mechanism towards an aesthetics of accepted disembodiment, always haunted by a search for nurturing and surrender to some greater being. The poems in this book intertwine polyvocally, building into a liminal biographical metanarrative: the whole point of existence, the author believes, is to luxuriate in the greater being of not-knowing. To accept the historical underpinnings, the brokenness of the world, inside and outside the self, but be in constant communication of both worlds, towards understanding and healing, is the one true meaningful quest.
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