“The only teeth I have are human teeth”: On the Mouth in Franny Choi’s Soft Science
by Rochelle Hurt
Franny Choi’s Soft Science begins with a quote from Donna Haraway’s “Cyborg Manifesto”: “We are excruciatingly conscious of what it means to have a historically constituted body.” This is followed by Bhanu Kapil: “The rain is soft. The rain is hard. I don’t know anything.” I love the friction between these two epigraphs. While Haraway’s quote offers a certain point of view in its “we,” Kapil’s prompts questions about certainty itself. Somewhere between being “excruciatingly conscious” of one’s subject position and being bound by one’s own subjectivity, a space for the self opens on the page—a space rich with contradiction and ways of knowing through the body. It is here that Choi operates. I say “operates,” though the book is not a machine. A machine is human-made and reliant on patterns; it uses the force applied by an operator to accomplish a task. So maybe a book is a machine. (Maybe I don’t know anything.)
Drawing parallels between the experiences of humans and cyborgs, Choi’s book points to the ways in which racial and gender dynamics dictate the nature of one’s reality—not just by creating, for example, toxic social interactions in poems like “The Cyborg Wants to Make Sure She Heard You Right” (composed of re-translated racist Tweets directed at the author) or traumatic sexual encounters in poems like “Jaebal,” but also by limiting the means one has to question those dynamics. If our knowledge (of history, of the world, of ourselves) is situated within our “historically constituted” bodies, then we are in a sense human-made, reliant on acceptable patterns of conduct, both subjects and objects of force (“is there anything that works / that isn’t a machine for killing?”). These overlaps between human and machine are central to Haraway’s concept of a cyborg as a posthumanist “affinity” that can transcend the boundaries of social identity. As I read it, Choi’s book is less concerned with ultimate transcendence and more concerned with contradiction and machination--that is, how we operate and are operated by these bodies.
One of the most important sites of this operation is the mouth. I’m prone to writing about mouths (see this mandala-like chart I made tracking uses of the mouth in Aziza Barnes’s i be, but i ain’t), but in Soft Science, Choi directs us to the mouth on the very first page, in “Glossary of Terms,” a poem in the form of a chart not unlike a conjugation chart. Here a mouth is defined as “an entryway or an exit,” positioning the mouth as a boundary between self and other (not self) and as a kind of two-way valve through which the world enters and the self spills out. In this same chart, the mouth is listed as its own antonym, pointing to the contradiction inherent in this definition. What does it mean when something is its own opposite? It’s self-referential, self-destructive, self-creating, self-contained, an O, self-encompassing.
In “Chi,” a four-part poem about a character from the manga Chobits, the broken android “Chi” is named after the only sound she can still make. It is the language she was given that names her, makes her into a subject called Chi—self-referential, self-creating. But as Choi’s epigraph explains, this is only the name she was given by the character who found her, unable to ascertain any other name. In the first part of the poem, Choi asks: “what names did you call yourself / there in the alley / . . . who dimmed you / when you stopped // reflecting a man’s / sweetest name.” The rest of the poem works to restore Chi’s subjectivity by creating a language for her—and of her.
In Section II of the poem, Choi gives us a vocabulary chart in which the syllable “chi” is punctuated four different ways (“chi.” “chi?” “chi! chi?” and “chi!”) with different meanings attached to each, though the standard definitions are all variations on polite small-talk that a woman or child might be trained to use (“Thank you,” “May I please,” “Wow! Can you show me how to,” and “Excuse me, but I’m”). Beneath the small-talk is more complexity, but it’s bracketed, kept behind the valve. In the final entry, the pressure builds: “[dripping; drained; lost in the compost; in need of a shower; holding two dead cats in my arms; unsure of my name . . . flushed; a mess; a sopping mess]” into an anticlimax of more self-diminishing small-talk: “please plug me in!” In the next and third section is a conjugation chart that reveals both the limits and the possibilities of “chi” as a word. First “chi” is repeatedly conjugated into “chi,” but then it begins to transform. Stripped of context, “chi” becomes a syllable on the page like any other, like “chip” or “cheap” or “chop,” or “clot,” or “clit” or even the machinated “click.”
Choi uses punctuation as a tonal and conceptual device throughout this entire poem (and the book), but perhaps nowhere more stunningly than in the fourth and final section of “Chi.” Much of this section is enclosed in parentheses, including all the prepositions, articles, and pronouns, leaving only a few one-syllable words outside of parentheses—words that sound similar to those in the conjugation chart of section III. The first three lines, for example, read as follows without the parentheticals: “sheathed sleep, / chirped short tweet / treat shorn, dream shucked;” With the parentheticals: “(when i was un)sheathed from sleep, (i) / chirped (just one word, a) short tweet / (a) treat shorn (from) dream, shucked (&).” At first, the parentheticals seem almost unnecessary as conveyors of meaning, but beside the charts of the previous two sections, they seem to convey a layer of voice, partly through the subject “I.” By the end of the poem, the parentheticals convey more: “shit (if i won’t be heard / just because they) shirked (the only word / the world needs).” What’s missing from the main text is not just a sense of voice through a subject, but a sense of conviction, of will behind the speech. When I read this short section aloud, it sounded halting at first, the words emerging uncomfortably from my mouth, but as I grew better at navigating the swinging doors of the parentheses, the voice—the will—settled into me. “Chi” and all of Soft Science is a lesson in the linguistics of human and cyborg subjectivity.
It’s subjectivity I’m thinking about when I see this video of Sophia, the first humanoid robot to be granted citizenship in a country (Saudi Arabia). I watch her mouth move as she smiles “naturally” and maintains eye contact, something her creators have spent much time on getting right. I consider what it means to move or speak “naturally” as a human (and thus a subject), who makes those rules, and which humans those rules strip of their subjectivity. Sophia can say a few words in five languages, but speaks “mostly English” in her own words. I myself don’t know how to explain precisely what it “means” that as hundreds of thousands of people were being separated from their families and deported from the United States, Sophia, who looks white and primarily speaks English, was granted citizenship in Saudi Arabia—or that her citizenship in Saudi Arabia was granted the same year that the Trump administration initiated a series of travel bans for people coming and going between the United States and a host of Middle Eastern and African countries.
So far I’ve been talking about language more than mouths, but this focus on language as that which enters and exits the body is what makes the mouth (as one potential entry/exit for language, though not the only one) so compelling in a book about socially (de)constructed consciousness and reality. As Choi writes in “It’s All Fun and Games Until Someone Gains Consciousness,” “the only words I have are human words,” and these are what shape us, what allow us to ask or understand the question of me. Of course, the mouth is a site of many other things, depending on what goes in or out: nourishment, illness, violence, sex. In the spirit of Choi’s charts, I’ve created my own chart tracking some (though certainly not all) uses of the mouth in Soft Science.
| Mouth As | Quote | Poem |
|---|---|---|
| ABJECT | “The internet pointed to my mouth and said blood / blood in the stool” “The boy whose body / was the first to enter mine is breathing / from too many mouths now.” “fine-toothed cunt / sorry / my mouth’s not pottytrained” “like a girl / who’s come to rot, to retch. To cough it up.” |
"A Brief History of Cyborgs,” pg. 15 “Afterlife,” pg. 20 “Turing Test_Boundaries,” pg. 37 “Chatroulette,” pg. 64 |
| CONSUMPTION | “An audience of smiles invites me, / one mouthful at a time” “I drink and drink their looking, til I’m soaked. / I drink and drown in want. I drink, and choke.” (See also Hunger/Longing) |
“Acknowledgements,” pg. 9 “Chatroulette,” pg. 63 |
| FILTER / SHIELD | “I smile when the man comes in for a hug and a laugh / . . . my lips rust in place. (The brown dust falls / and I lick it up, embarrassed.)” “I walked into another day dressed in my finest tongues.” (See also Performance/Proof) “When I smack my gum it’s to signal / that I do perceive space and time, it’s just / I’m kind of over it.” |
“Acknowledgements,” pg. 9
“In the Morning I Scroll My Way Back to America,” pg. 57 “It’s All Fun and Games Until Someone Gains Consciousness,” pg. 59 |
| LEARNING / MIMICRY | “on a bright screen / i watched every mouth / duck duck roll / i learned to speak . . . i caught letters / as they fell from my mother’s lips” “Last night, I ate / both my hands. Each digit, // a salty word whose meaning / furred my teeth.” “I once made my mouth a technology of softness. . . . I made the tools fuck in mouth . . . What I mean is: I learned.” |
“Turing Test,” pg. 2 “Making Of,” pg. 4 “A Brief History of Cyborgs,” pg. 14 |
| PERFORMANCE / PROOF | “I made my mouth a jar . . . I scooped up the foam and called it language. The audience applauded.” “Her mouth is a stage sprouting cardboard trees.” “I reach up inside myself, move my mouth. / I make it do terrible things, terrible.” |
“A Brief History of Cyborgs,” pg. 15 “Everyone Knows That Line About Ogres and onions, But Nobody Asks the Beast Why Undressing Makes Her Cry,” pg. 21 “It’s All Fun and Games Until Someone Gains Consciousness,” pg. 60 |
| HUNGER / LONGING | “i have only ever wanted to bite / down hard on whatever was offered // to my hothouse mouth.” “Our mouths, tearing at what bones we found, grinning and hungry for something” “we put our mouths on the least lovable, the too-full, the easy-bruised . . . and canned that hunger, and spooned it into our mouths on the coldest days.” “Will you feed and feed, and lick the bowl clean when we’re both full?” |
“& O Bright Star of Disaster, I Have Been Lit,” pg. 33 “Perihelion: A History of Touch (Wolf Moon),” pg. 71 “Perihelion: A History of Touch (Strawberry Moon),” pg. 75 “Perihelion: A History of Touch (Harvest Moon),” pg. 77 |
| WEAPON / TRAP | “I said, Come in. Make yourselves at home. I opened my glittering jaw. My hunger, too, has both hard and soft parts” (See also Hunger/Longing) “The only teeth I have are human teeth, I remind him, gently / before opening his throat.” “for the ocean so loved / the quartz / feldspar / the tiny home of tiny creatures / that she ground them / into sand / to keep them close / to kiss them with / well / i suppose you would call it / a mouth” (See also Hunger/Longing) “Scraped every dead daughter from my silly maw. . . . Next time, I grew three extra rows of seeds. Hid them in my mouth. Sharpened them to my teeth.” |
“A Brief History of Cyborgs,” pg. 15 “It’s All Fun and Games Until Someone Gains Consciousness,” pg. 60 “Turing Test_Love,” pg. 69 “Perihelion: A History of Touch (Sturgeon Moon),” pg. 76 |
| WOUND | “a man barges through the screen / to hook his fingers in my mouth.” “suckling a knife” (see also Learning) |
“Beg,” pg. 7 “Program for the Morning After,” pg. 25 |
Rochelle Hurt is the founding editor of The Bind. She is the author of In Which I Play the Runaway (Barrow Street, 2016), which won the Barrow Street Book Prize, and The Rusted City (White Pine, 2014), a novella in prose poems. She is the recipient of awards and fellowships from Crab Orchard Review, Arts & Letters, Poetry International, Vermont Studio Center, Jentel, and Yaddo. She teaches in the MFA program at the University of Central Florida.