the installation also reveals that distance separated Wong from her mother: the latter was never able to find the language to tell her daughter about her rape. It was only in adulthood that Wong learned of the story from her older sister. Mending Body/Mending Mind is less about naming sexual violence, and more about the secrets that exist between mothers and daughters. The poem is purely fictional, a form of wish fulfillment. It seems intentional that a viewer could easily walk through the installation attending only to its images, never picking up the audio player to listen to its words. In memorializing the dead, we often feel the need to idealize them. But Wong makes no such move. She freely admits that her mother was a complicated figure—while also recognizing that this complexity makes her more, not less, worthy of compassion. Sedgwick compels us to take an “empathetic view of the other as at once good, damaged, integral, and requiring and eliciting love of care.” 5 And this Wong surely does. Following Fisher, she refuses to give up on her mother’s ghost. Karpin´ska’s poem acknowledges the anxiety and shame Wong’s mother must have felt post-trauma. How do you tell your teenage daughter? The question is ultimately rhetorical—she knows she cannot. It is possible that she believed she was protecting her daughter through her chosen silence. Adolescence is a vulnerable period. In a poem deliberately spare, bereft of adjective and color, Karpin´ska’s inclusion of the word “teenage” feels significant. My mind returns to those video motifs. The cutting, the stitching. They are certainly metaphors for bodily harm, analogies for a violence of another sort—the “knife at my throat.” Though obvious, it still bears noting that Wong’s installation was made possible by sewing. Her mother taught her to sew, a biographical fact to which she attributes her turn, in the early 2000s, toward textile. The installation’s suspended panels echo the video’s scenes of disfiguration. Pieces of silk, cotton, and antique lace are sewn together, only to be cut by Wong’s hand. But they also presage a kind of repair. She gathers the scraps
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Sedgwick, 137.
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Elizabeth Wiet
Holly Wong’s Reparative Hauntology
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