INFO
Name | How to be Dead in a Year of Snakes |
Year | 2014 |
Writer(s) | Chris Tse |
Publisher | Auckland University Press |
Type of Text | Poetry |
Artform | Literature |
ABOUT
How to Be Dead in a Year of Snakes is a collection of poems by Chris Tse based on the shooting of Joe Kum Yung on Haining Street, Wellington in 1905 by white supremacist, Lionel Terry. Tse’s writing, as though interviewing ghosts, gives Joe, who is often an afterthought to Lionel Terry’s story, a voice. It has been described as a “brave traversing of fiction and New Zealand history…a riddle but also a lesson, one where we ‘must reach back into madness’ to learn from events that preceded us.”
The collection is organised around the central narrative of the murder, drifting in and out of the perspectives of the characters and contemplations on death and remembrance. Eleanor Wright described it as a “poetic memorial” that “effectively challenges the reader to ponder over who owns the stories, what can we learn from the past and what should we take forward to the future.”
1905 was the year of the snake in the lunar calendar, which is where the name comes from. While the story is about death and murder, Tse told Renee Liang in an interview, “I didn't want to be trapped by or preoccupied with the heaviness that can come with that territory. I wanted to focus on Joe Kum Yung's search for light. It was important to me that the book carries a sense of hope, despite the life he had lived."
He also said that the fragmented nature of what’s known about Joe Kum Yung’s life seemed “tailor-made for poetry” and the perfect form to explore contrasting ideas like light and shadow, life and death, beauty and destruction. While incorporating factual details of this historical crime, it is not a realist account, writes Paula Green in her review: “Instead the poetic spareness, the drifting phantom voices give stronger presence to things that are much harder to put into words. How to be dead, for example.”
Commemorations around the 100th anniversary of Joe’s murder in 2005 catalysed Tse’s interest in the subject. He began writing about Joe Kum Yung towards the end of 2005 when completing his Master’s degree in Creative Writing and worked on the manuscript on and off for the next nine years. Near the completion of the manuscript, Tse’s por por (maternal grandmother) passed away. He said, “a lot of the grieving process including the rituals and customs made its way into the final poems written for the manuscript.”
The book is Tse’s first full-length collection. Shortlisted for the 2016 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards for poetry, it won the Jessie Mackay Award for Best First Book of Poetry and was named one of the best poetry books of 2014 by the New Zealand Listener.
LINKS
Key awards
2016 — New Zealand Book Awards: Jessie Mackay Award for Best First Book of Poetry