Last Friday, our Year 12 and 13 English Literature students were treated to a session with Mary Jean Chan, poet and Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at Oxford Brookes University.
In the session, Chan discussed her award-winning collection Flèche, which won the 2019 Costa Book Award for Poetry and was shortlisted in 2020 for the Dylan Thomas Prize, the John Pollard Foundation International Poetry Prize, the Jhalak Prize and the Seamus Heaney Centre First Collection Poetry Prize. Furthermore, in 2021, Flèche was a Lambda Literary Award Finalist. Students were enraptured as Chan read several of the poems aloud and, at the end of the session, they were able to have their own copies signed.
From Eleanor (Year 13):
“While it is amazing to be able to study a living poet for coursework, nothing surpasses this poet actually coming into school for a reading and a discussion of her poems. OHS Year 12 and 13 English A Level students were therefore delighted to welcome Mary Jean Chan, the Winner of the Costa 2019 Poetry Award, to read from and delve into her anthology Flèche, exploring themes of cultural history, multilingualism and queerness among others.
Chan spoke about her experiences, growing up speaking English at school in Hong Kong and Cantonese at home. She explained how she had chosen to use some Chinese characters in ‘Written in a Historically White Space’ without providing a translation to invite the monolingual reader to experience an unfamiliar language thus also asserting Chan’s own linguistic space. Dwelling a little on her own complex relationship with English, she expressed her love for the language but also the need to speak it well in order to succeed and progress. Learning English also allowed her to explore notions of queerness banned from her childhood life, expressed in poignant lines such as the following: ‘My desires dressed themselves in a hurry of English to avoid my mother’s gaze. How I typed ‘Shakespeare’ then ‘homoeroticism + Shakespeare’ into Google, over and over.’
The anthology also explores the tensions of the mother-daughter relationship, particularly in association with queerness while emphasising the deep links between the poet’s identity and her mother’s life and identity. Across the poems, the fencing motif, inspired by Chan’s own 10 years of fencing experience and apparent in the title, helped her to create a narrative arc within the anthology. The tone of the poems moves from defensive towards empowered, in the same way that the eponymous fencing move, the Flèche, signifies for Chan a daring to be oneself.
A crowning finale saw Chan reading an as yet unpublished poem from her next anthology. Students were also thrilled to have their copies of Flèche signed at the end. A huge thank you to the English Department for organising a really memorable visit and, of course, to Mary Jean Chan who has truly inspired us.”
