Profunda Linguae
by Monica Ong
My work investigates cultural silences that shape the medical-emotional landscape of family diaspora, extending from China to the Philippines to North America. These experimental image-poems juxtapose diagram and diary, bearing witness to underrepresented histories of the body.
“Profunda Linguae” addresses the silence of the father and the secret language of food. I found a recipe book that my mother made when she first arrived in America. To cope with her isolation, she typed her favorite Chinese-Filipino recipes on my father’s old prescription pads and pasted them into a red book. Using anatomical drawings as a prompt, I superimposed diagrams of the tongue onto her recipes and used these as satellites to draw out memories, which is often how my writing occurs. For me, storytelling is comprised of this alchemy of art and artifacts.
“The Attic” was written for my son. I used a diagram of the ear as an entry point to a short language lesson for the word “tiah,” which can have many meanings in Hokkien depending on the tone. It’s a reflection that recognizes the difficulty of passing down a dying language, one that is not taught anywhere or used at home, but resides only in fragmented memories. So what is it that I can leave behind? This poem is my attempt to answer that question. These works were created during my time at the inaugural Literary Hybrid/Book Arts Workshop at the 2013 Kenyon Review Writers Workshop.
Monica Ong is a visual artist and writer dwelling in experimental spaces. She completed her MFA in Digital Media at the Rhode Island School of Design, and is also a Kundiman poetry fellow. Her work can be found in Tidal Basin Review, Lantern Review, Drunken Boat, and Glassworks Magazine, to name a few. She has been exhibiting work for over a decade, with a forthcoming show at the Institute of Women and Art at Rutgers University. She designs to support these habits while happily fumbling around in motherhood.
Originally appeared in the online supplement to the Beyond Category issue 43.2-44.1