Hong Kong-born poet stunned into silence by detractors finds voice again with Foretokens
Sarah Howe’s new collection comes a decade after her TS Eliot Prize win as a young part-Chinese female was met with racism and misogyny
The Hong Kong-born poet Sarah Howe has a lovely voice. People have commented on it so often that she wrote a line about it in her new collection, Foretokens.
“From my teens, well-meaning adults would exclaim, ‘You have a lovely voice!’” she writes in her poem World Service. “Not picking up my flush of shame, they’d keep going. ‘When you grow up, you should be on the BBC!’”
Those modulated tones were drummed into her when she moved from Hong Kong to England aged seven, the daughter of a British father and a mother from China’s Guangdong province. She was sent to elocution classes, as she writes, “along with the other suburban offspring of Asian parents, driven by anxiety or aspiration that we shouldn’t sound like them”.
In the poem, her mother tells her about an interesting interview she has heard recently on the radio. It was Howe, unrecognisable to her mother’s ear.
“That was all true,” says Howe, wryly, on a recent morning in a London arts cafe. “And maybe it says something about our relationship. We have a dance of mutual awkwardness, not wanting to encroach on each other’s terrain. I feel that it’s like a comedy of errors. This book is partly about us missing and missing and missing each other.”
Foretokens is a follow-up to Howe’s first collection, Loop of Jade, published in 2015. Until then, she had been an academic who had studied at Harvard and Cambridge and wanted to explore her own uncertainties about family, place and identity.