AMBIENT PARKING LOT

Ambient Parking Lot by Pamela Lu | Kenning Editions 2011 | $14.95

Parked in a corner of Pamela Lu’s Ambient Parking Lot, I turned up the volume on my headphones and listened long past the comfort level of both my bladder and my thirst, testing the limits of the quickly fading sunlight. I chuckled and tick-marked at record speed, drunk with the spot-on parody and ridiculous brilliance of her lines. What I love about Lu’s work is her sharp wit, subtle delivery and deadpan hilarity, which you have to slow down and listen for in order to fully appreciate. Thus, parked, I listened.

Lu’s characters, all of them, are also listening. This book is a mock-documentary novel that tracks the mid-highs and mid-lows of a band of ambient noise musicians, the Ambient Parkers, who record in parking lots and garages and sample car trunk thuds, gridlock traffic honks, revving engines and the like. Aspiring to capture the nature in the machine, their material is capitalism and its doomed, sublime ambience.

Reading this book is like watching an indie webisode spin-off of “Behind the Music” (“Behind the Noise”) run by a group of nerdy, over-enthusiastic volunteers and bored unpaid interns with MFA degrees. Lu tracks the Ambient Parkers’ absolute mediocrity in awkwardly-awesome crescendos and geeky-fantastic loops. Parts of it read like an overly self-conscious, overly detailed fan blog with absolutely no web traffic, which is crafted with earnest, superb engineering and is as addictive as low-calorie reality TV. The band’s fits of self-induced melodrama and cheesy enlightenment register as mere blips and farts to The Alternative Mainstream—yet, anonymously, the band continues, and miraculously, they continue to be heard.

Our album was released in the spring to the deafening silence of the public. Urged on by our manager, we held anemic signings at record stores and granted interviews to lackluster radio personalities, who kept fidgeting in their seats and mispronouncing the titles of our songs. Bearing the cross of those who serve up reality over euphemistic fabrication, we braced ourselves for the onset of poverty that would surely follow our disappointing sales. Our one consolation was the darkness that descended upon our suite each night, relieving us from the sight of our manager combing the want ads and calling our attention to openings for local waitstaff. (125-6)

This book asks us to listen to the intonations between noise and silence, between constant movement and abrupt stillness, between entropy and paralysis, between the cars and the lot. The Ambient Parkers unknowingly stumble upon these spaces, accidentally bumping into other failures of capitalism, other awkward nerds and excessive outcasts. Together they sip weak tea and theorize in a co-op across the street, grappling with their ridiculous and “unspectacular existence[s].” Their refusals—their starts, deletions and restarts—fall like bulldozed trees in a future parking lot, which splinter and crack underneath the bureaucratic electric saw of free-market time. Their attempts beg the question: What does it mean to fail, as J. Halberstam asks in The Queer Art of Failure, if the hegemonic rubric of success is pre-designed?

* * *

Lu brings a boom mic up to the excessive amounts of noise that capitalism constructs and demands be meticulously maintained, from the white noise of gentrification to the mobile phone radiation of global communication systems to the pretentious hype of green trends and the academic elite. If we are often complacent and complicit in these structures, Lu plays back the thrilling complexity of their inaudible sounds and gestures so that we can no longer ignore them. The Ambient Parkers sample and record our sense of worthlessness, insignificance, loneliness and sheer absurdity as artists “superfluous to the discourse” and paralyzed by excess. The “always on” or “always on vibrate” cultural standard means that silence is not something we’re trained to hear.

To train our ears, Lu builds the Ambient Parkers’ profile from a variety of source materials—first in their own manifesto and then in the manifesto of a rival copycat band, the Ambient Barkers. This is followed by “The Salaryman Chronicles,” a hilariously detailed report compiled by a private investigator that documents the bored and empty minutes of a band member who has sold himself out to the corporate cubicle world. We stop to listen to extended tracks: a radio interview with a dancer on her previous collaboration with the band (complete with indications for [Pauses], [Shifts in her chair] and [Forty-five seconds of radio announcements]) and a 50-page email from the Station Master of a pirate radio station who they’ve been stalking (including the band’s ridiculous attempts to reply).

The Station Master, who refuses to play the band’s music on air, chronicles an epic saga from his youth, which includes his blind trek into the woods of “the Orient,” where he encounters a strange creature called Agatha and “hear[s] a new kind of music.” Much of the saga also centers on the rise and inevitable downfall of the Station Master’s lover, Annika, a Swedish opera singer. At a major turning point in her story, she says the following:

When I was singing, all I could hear between the measures was silence—that inhuman silence, the silence of eternity. I often think I must have married that silence before I was born, in some past life perhaps. It’s my one passion, the meaning of my existence. My singing is an attempt to move it and change it, make it turn around and speak to me. My fans mean the world to me and I’ve dedicated my career to them, but I’d give it all up for a single moment alone with that silence, a single moment of recognition. (86)

* * *

The Station Master’s email finally ends in a museum with “a towering animatronic model of a saber-toothed tiger and a giant sloth.” After narrating his journey of global insignificance, Lu focuses our attention here:

The action lasts all of twelve, maybe thirteen seconds. At the end of this time, the cat’s fangs are suspended in midair, less than an inch away from the sloth’s neck. No blood is drawn, no appetite is sated. The inevitability of nature is stalled through human mechanization. Then artifice takes over and the scene is duly reset. With motorized precision, the models slide back to their starting positions. This is perhaps the strangest and most heart-wrenching part of the program, and it is this industrious backsliding, complete with the creaking wheels of machinery concealed beneath the fur, that reminds me indelibly of your music. (119-120)

Caught up in the absurd mechanizations of their lives, the characters in Ambient Parking Lot strive for “a moment of recognition” with silence that is never quite attained or successfully replicated. In their extreme awkwardness, they share an “air of distraction…a restless shifting and quiet shuffling.” They stall; we idle. Our listening stretches out long past what’s comfortable; we listen to them systematically occupy all 116 parking spots in a corporate garage and busk in a park to pathetic results for 21 days.

This kind of prolonged, awkward endurance is embodied by the dancer, who performs an exhausting scene of “experimental torture” inside a wrecked car as part of a collaborative performance in response to events that can be inferred as the aftermath of 9/11. She stretches a 3.5-hour set choreography into a 12-hour improvisation and in effect stages her own death. In her interview with The Radio Host, we witness the traumatic and nearly debilitating effect the performance had on her body. At the end of her interview, she describes a moment of pain (while her friend works on a tattoo) in which she extends through the “miniature trauma site” of her shoulder:

And in that moment of freefall, I understood that I had never really left the car wreck at all. I was still wedged inside the twisted shell, my legs pinned together, a sharp splinter of metal digging into my shoulder. I was dancing, Jerrod’s needle was dancing; we were performing a duet. I was trying to communicate something through each one of my movements. I could feel the pressure of the audience gathered outside, the open-mouthed awe of the musicians as they pointed their microphones at the wreck. [...] The musicians are probably still congregated around the wreck, peering inside its jagged openings, documenting the freakish silence with their studious machines. They strain to hear what they can’t hear, to capture what they can’t possibly capture. (174-5)

Everyone in Ambient Parking Lot lingers anxiously in an awkward gear, shifts and shuffles, and conducts their own kind of endurance art. For the dancer to lift herself out of the wreckage, to break through the carapace, is an impossible yet simple act, filled with symphonies of micro-movements and the labor of stasis. In straining to hear what they can’t hear, to capture what they can’t capture, the band is hushed by their inability to replicate stillness’ echo. Lu asks us to open our ears to these auditoriums of absence. She gestures toward the potentiality buzzing in every pause, which waits to be given a voice, to make a move, to become transformed. These moments of emptiness, of realizing something is yet unfinished and missing, are the moments the Ambient Parkers begin to listen for.

The NY Times began the new year with a piece about the Hmong American Writers’ Circle and the cultural context in which it operates. And our most recent issue of the Lantern Review put a spotlight on HAWC in Community Voices. This is only the beginning of much-deserved attention for this unique generation of new writers.

How Do I Begin is an apt title for an anthology of writers whose ethnic identity is doubly marginalized: though the Hmong roots are in southwest China, most emigrated/fled to the US from places like Laos or Vietnam after the Vietnam-American War. Burlee Vang, in his introduction to the book, describes himself as “born into a people whose written language has long been substituted by an oral tradition.” The written language of the Hmong was lost after assimilation in Imperial China long ago; this is not to mention assimilation into Thai and Lao culture, where most Hmong are provided an education only in their host countries’ official languages. The Hmong language has remnants in traditional embroidery but they have become indecipherable. Writers identifying as Hmong American today, therefore, have the tremendous task not only of writing themselves into history and literature, but also of gathering their names and identities from the pieces available. English is their adopted language, and so these writers must weave a warp and woof through multiple traditions.

The writing of themselves is a doubly difficult task because of the relationship between art and identity politics. Almost worth the purchase of the book alone are the short statements beginning each author’s pieces: in them, the writers describe their relationship to the term “Hmong American writer.” Many of How Do I Begin’s contributors wonder whether the Hmong part or the writer part takes primacy, and many are skeptical of the “object of exoticism” and of ethnic identity as “artistic limitation.” They struggle with negotiating the universal (empathy) and the individual (alienation). These writings are like a hand opening and closing, pulsing, from palm to fist. The impulse to “transcend ethnic and geographic boundaries” is paired with the impulse to preserve those boundaries and distinctions. Vang writes, “We have overcome ourselves. Our writing attests to this. Legitimizes us.” That overcoming is a matter of ownership and self-creation; yet the question of legitimacy is raised, and one wonders, On whose terms? Mai Der Vang uses the word paradox in her statement: “Writing for me has become a roadmap to navigate the paradoxes of life.” Sandra McPherson writes in her advance praise that these writers “are new to themselves and yet they already have their elders.”

Because their chosen language is English, these writers’ elders must be equated across cultures. The two epigraphs of Vang’s introduction, for instance, are from Shakespeare and Hmong American poet Pos L. Moua. The Shakespeare quote comes from Hamlet V.ii, when Hamlet describes waking suddenly on his execution-bound ship: “Sir, in my heart there was a kind of fighting, / That would not let me sleep . . .” He finds the letter from Claudius commanding England to behead him, and he rewrites the letter, thus rewriting his fate. The scene’s metaphor echoes with two of the last lines of verse in this anthology, from a poem by Mai Der Vang: “When all along you think the only war / is the one inside you.” And the epigraph from Pos L. Moua is the voice of a different elder: “Then they rode in canoes secretly arranged for them . . . / straight toward the world where the torches are burning.”

All throughout the anthology are reconfigurations of cultural inheritance. Iconic images like picket fences are challenged in Soul Choj Vang’s poem “Here I Am,” while the Carveresque image of fishing in Americais written from a different perspective in V. Chachoua Xiong-Gnandt’s “Lake Red Rock, Iowa” and then in Ying Thao’s essay “The Art of Fishing.” Martha Vang’s poem “Still Life of a Fruit Bowl” paints for us not apples and oranges but

plaintains, lychees, longans, and mangoes.
Pomegranate seeds are sprinkled around the
spiky jack and durian.

Soul Choj Vang’s “Our Field” lines up a mythic history of place names and people’s names that begins in the East and ends in the West. The poem concludes with the exhortation: “Hold on to our new fields!” Bryan Thao Worra’s “The Spirit Catches You, and You Get Body Slammed” plays with exotic expectations by taking us to Missoula with thoughts of “an auspicious moon above ancient Qin” while a shaman speaks enthusiastically in Hmongabout “Randy Macho Man Savage!” The image of the wrestling ring is an apt one as we think about the way these writers grapple with themselves in the box of their spaces, and as we think of Anthony Cody’s words, a Mexican American writer contributing to this anthology in the “hope to connect to tangents of the universal human experience and tie us to one another.”

The experience of the alien is another theme. That now-indecipherable embroidery, the paj ntaub, graces the cover of this book in an artistic rendering. In Burlee Vang’s author statement, he claims as his goal “some universal experience or truth, despite how alien the world, situation, or characters . . .” Andre Yang’s poem “Cousins” gestures at a painful language of love and recognition even “amongst the chorus of insects / that must have been so familiar to you, that were so foreign to me.” Bryan Thao Worra’s poem “Modern Life” ends with the speaker

Waiting for the cops in their fancy cruisers
To blink
So our race can begin

That is a blink of longed-for recognition from authorities, and it is a blink that quickens the gap between the alien and the invisible.

There is a self-estrangement involved in all writing, in the creation of all memories, and it is useful to consider Ka Vang’s formulation: “Being Hmong makes me a better writer and being a writer makes me a better Hmong.” This awareness of a split identity is one of upward lift, like two waves rising in their collision.

I cannot stress enough the importance of this anthology, or how exciting it is to read these new voices and see the stirring of a people in words. I believe that the work of this anthology is not merely one of extending history or of grafting on labels. “Hmong American literature” is not a name; it is a conversation, an evolution. Bryan Thao Worra writes:

There is often the implication that ethnicity can be separated or masked in writing. This cannot be done any more than we can disguise the time in which we write. [. . .] my work remains, and that is my true body.

NOT MERELY BECAUSE OF THE UNKNOWN THAT WAS STALKING TOWARD THEM

“Sewing,” “pockets” and “stories” being things that don’t quite exist in the Neverland, Jenny Boully’s not merely because of the unknown that was stalking toward them sews pockets in and around the mythos of J.M. Barrie’s Peter and Wendy. Cutting snippets of Barrie’s source text, including Barrie’s Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens and events in Andrew Birkin’s J.M. Barrie & the Lost Boys, Boully centralizes Wendy’s experience and sews up bits of her story, stitching the make-believe into the made-quite-real. In her pockets, open ends and open endings fit and hover.

“places in the earth are breaking”

Every page of not merely because is footnoted with a section called “The Home Under Ground,” while the rest of the text wraps itself around. Boully is famous for having written an entire book in footnotes, The Body: An Essay (Slope Editions, 2002 and Essay Press, 2007); these footnotes referenced empty pages—a nonexistent text. In notes 1 and 2 of The Body she writes, “…everything that is said is said underneath… / It is not the story I know or the story you tell me that matters; it is what I already know, what I don’t want to hear you say. Let it exist this way, concealed…”

That she chooses to reference the concealed, underground home where Peter Pan, Wendy and the lost boys lived in her footnotes to not merely because made me think of Souvankham Thammavongsa’s Small Arguments (Pedlar Press, 2003). Thammavongsa studies a variety of fruit and insects and reveals, in the words of Bertrand Russell, “the strangeness and wonder lying just below the surface even in the commonest things in daily life.” Boully’s line “A mushroom head here, a celery stalk there, three new baby bird graves, a fiddlehead here; places in the earth are breaking” echoes Thammavongsa’s poem “The Ground”: “You will not leave / or keep from / this ground, a breaking.”

Boully’s footnotes also recall Padcha Tuntha-obas’ “a poem composed to call one’s self” in her book Trespasses (O Books, 2006), in which a gutter of text continues on its own track throughout the poem: “but even then silence speaks, quietly.” Boully, Thammavongsa and Tuntha-obas’ use of foot- and ground- noting causes breaks in the page and breaks in our encounter with the text. Like street ditches hauling off rain, language flows from page to page and spills out. Text run-off settles here at the bottom, “nicely crammed,” like a kind of sedimentation. *

“nicely crammed” / “a mere scrawling”

I could only approach not merely because in the hour before dusk; I wanted to get under wool blankets by a fire and eat pumpkin muffins fresh out of the oven in order to read this book. In Barrie’s text, the Neverland is a map that exists in all children’s minds, in all children’s dreams:

Of all the delectable islands the Neverland is the snugggest and most compact; not large and sprawly, you know, with tedious distances between one adventure and another, but nicely crammed. When you play at it by day with the chairs and table-cloth, it is not in the least alarming, but in the two minutes before you go to sleep it becomes very nearly real. That is why there are night-lights. (J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan and Wendy, Clarkson N. Potter, Inc., 1988, p. 13)

Boully’s book became “very nearly real” for me during these winter nights. The back cover blurb says, “…Boully reads between the lines of a text…and emerges with the darker underside, with those sinister or subversive places merely echoed or hinted at.” Having also read Barrie’s text, I find that the original story is already quite dark and awkwardly twisted. The Neverland is a world of recurring trauma and chronic amnesia, wrapped up in a child’s ignorance, which continues to circle itself. Sexuality is no stranger to Barrie’s story either, but Boully does unravel the hems a bit further, taking a peek at Tiger Lily’s pubes, Hook’s pubic-y beard, Wendy’s panties, poo, peepee and pooper holes.

The realness of make-believe washing, make-believe medicine, make-believe food and make-believe sex—stink, sickness, malnutrition and still-birth—peep through Boully’s stitches. Peter and Hook’s sexual interest in Tiger Lily, Tinker Bell and Wendy, and intimations of abuse, are written up from underneath.

“Wendy began to be scrawled all over with him. … Whether the he is the little Betwixt-and-Between or whether the Betwixt-and-Between is he: there is a male hand, and it is scrawling on a little girl. All over, that is. At what point is the girl no longer herself but a mere scrawling” (56).

Peter’s pubes all strung up with crustaceans and barnacles: what must be hiding deep within the lagoon, gathering itself in some fishy fallopian tube? … Such a little hole too; do you think the Peter bird will break through, break through? … The Tinker dental dam; the Tinker tampon. Old little tin cup you drank from: look! They’ve taken to using it as. And your little still-birth, all like a tadpole, all a-gasping in your little kettle of water.
__________________
The Home Under Ground
… For example, [Peter] can put a little something inside of you, and you will carry that for the rest of your life; thimble all empty underneath in the inside. The molar pregnancy: lasting, lasting; placenta all set to bursting, all full of nothing, nothing. (60-62)

Could Tinker Bell, Tiger Lily or Wendy have gotten pregnant in the Neverland? In a place where nothing is planted, where it is forbidden to speak about mothers, where it is forbidden to grow up, where there are no babies, where so many things die—is anything conceived? Born? Grown? “Why, I think I should like to be a farmer, says he, right when we were sending you out to sea.”

“the end has been hovering”

“Don’t write down what actually happened; instead, write down what you wanted to believe.” In not merely because Boully animates the tension between the make-believe and the made quite real, but even more so, she opens up the dream in-between the story and the hand of the storyteller. Wendy transforms from “a mere scrawling” to the one in control of the end—instead of re-telling Barrie’s/Peter’s/Hook’s story, she sews new ones and writes them true. Boully’s hypnotic use of rhyme, addictive phrase repetition and clever end-of-sentence clips create unexpected echoes and stops, and loose ends to sew up.

What I wanted to give you was this here little tiny piece. Of me. If it heals; if it heals properly, it won’t leave. Such a scar. Where it’s red, it’s only red for just a little. While. Return soon. To normal it will. … Some night, in dream, when I will have climbed the look-out, it won’t be you who I see, but rather another more distant star, another darker molting of sky. And so you will lie. And I will not be there too—not in a hovel, not in a bottle, not in a happy-ending novel, not in a kitchen serving eggs for two, and certainly not in a parallel grave from you. (18)

Playing dead = growing up, growing up = forgetting, forgetting = the end. What intrigues me about not merely because is the exploration of Peter’s role as a grave digger, as a kind of ghost or angel that buries (i.e. plants) children in the earth so that they pop out new. This is hinted at in Barrie’s text: “There were odd stories about him, as that when children died he went part of the way with them, so that they should not be frightened.” The Neverland is a make-believe dream and a real afterlife, and Peter Pan is made of earth and lives underground, both exceptionally old and exceptionally young.

What also strikes me about not merely because is Boully’s/Wendy’s insistence on planting things, on growing things, on bearing—not just in childbirth, but in what it means to “mother” and to sustain, outside the traditional gendered role, to sustain the effort it takes to remember. The final chapter of Barrie’s Peter and Wendy includes an additional scene written after his original play premiered, which suggests that just as Peter came for Mrs. Darling, Wendy’s mother, he will also come for Wendy’s daughter Jane, and her daughter Margaret, on and on and so forth. Boully writes, threading in Barrie’s words: “Two is the beginning of the end. As in, you and me, Peter; we make two and the story, and the story takes on an and then.” Remembering, beyond vague recognition, to break the cycle, is behind Boully’s writing.

And so, Wendy hides things that will later be found. Her endings are pockets, and nesting inside are buried secrets. “Oh, Peter, you’re turning every pocket, every pocket: inside out, inside out! But I have the acorn button. The acorn button is something that, up until now, I’ve kept. Silent about.” Boully fits footnotes into these pockets, like the note Wendy slips into the pocket of her granddaughter’s nightgown, to remind us.

_______________________________
“What is a pocket but a hole? A home.”
* Coincidentally, Boully, Thammavongsa, Tuntha-obas and myself are all Thai writers. Something about our obsession with what is concealed, with what lies just below the surface, with what is between the lines, feels culturally resonant for me—what is never unearthed and never spoken maintains its own economy. For an exceptional essay by Boully on pad Thai, being mixed and the small places we argue and withhold in language, visit “A Short Essay on Being” at TriQuarterly.

Bao Phi's SONG I SING

A Guest Post by Greg Choy

Sông I Sing by Bao Phi | Coffee House Press 2011 | $16

Greg Choy

After reading Bao Phi’s remarkable collection of poems, Sông I Sing, I was reminded of an incident that occurred about ten years ago when I was an assistant professor at the University of Minnesota. I was attending a panel discussion at UMinn entitled, simply, “Asian American Poetry,” sponsored in large part by Minnesota Poets Society, and was greatly looking forward to listening to two acclaimed Asian American poets speak on the topic. Disappointingly, the only thing the Society members, through their persistent questions about it, seemed interested in was the “poetic process”—and more particularly a process devoid of those nattering issues about race, identity, or politics. Toward the end of the discussion, an elderly white woman, clearly a senior member of the eminent Society, raised her hand and said, “Well, after listening to you both talk about your poetry, I’m wondering why we need to apply the name ‘Asian American’ to your poetry at all.” To my astonishment, at the time, both poets—both award-winning Asian American poets—agreed that the term “Asian American” as it’s applied to their poetry or to them as poets, felt limiting if not downright debilitating.

Such a response has its precedent. It’s reflective of the conundrum of the ethnic writer: how to keep from falling into the binary of either writing to a prescribed aesthetic steeped in a history of political ideology or writing as a fully realized individual shaped by an accumulation of discrete, personal experiences. It ‘s a false binary, of course, as a number of Asian American poetry anthologies have already shown, from The Open Boat: Poems From Asian America, edited by Garrett Hongo, to Premonition:The Kaya Anthology of New Asian North American Poetry, edited by Walter Lew, and Asian American Poetry: The Next Generation edited by Victoria Chang. All three anthologies rally around the diversity of themes and poets as opposed to a unifying call to some singular identity and community. Though anchored from a historical perspective to linear coordinates such as identity construction and political ideology, Asian American poetry is not bound to those coordinates. It is a fluid, changing body of work in time and space.

For me, what stung in the discussion panel with the two Asian American poets was not just the reluctance of either poet to engage the theme of the panel. It was more the shrugging of the shoulders, the all too quick surrender when confronted with the very raison d’être of the term “Asian American” in the little time they actually did spend in reluctant engagement with it. “It’s not for me to say,” seemed the consensus response. For that, too, there is a historical explanation, if not a rationale. Those two Asian American poets from the “Asian American Poetry” panel a decade ago were exemplary of Asian American poets who were moved toward more traditional and complex (i.e., Euro American) poetics reflective of what literary critic George Uba, in a seminal essay, describes as a “loss in faith in the efficacy of language as an agent of social reform or reliable tool of representation.” The cutting edge of contemporary Asian American poetry, according to Uba, had become “Post-activist.” As in the three Asian American poetry anthologies I mentioned earlier, Post-activist Asian American poetry is no longer so easily categorized or defined by theme or by audience. Today, the notion of “the Asian American community” out of which earlier Asian American poetry was generated, and to which it refers is considered antiquated, imaginable only from past exceptions like the haiku clubs of early Japanese America, the senryu poetry of issei internees, Chinese language poems published in early San Francisco Chinatown newspapers, even the poems written on the walls at Angel Island—that is, when geographic centers of Asian America were easily locatable, if not entirely legislated. With the growth and diversity of Asian American poetry have come varied centers, multiple margins, mixed race identities, and a nostalgia that focuses as much outside the US as anyplace within the nation state.

Conversely, Bao Phi’s poetry is unabashedly and unwaveringly all about being Asian American in the old activist sense of the term. In Sông I Sing, Bao Phi has something to say about being Asian American and an Asian American poet, and he says it in one astonishing poem after another. Phi was raised and educated in Minnesota, in the Twin Cities, and during the time of that Asian American Poetry panel was, for the most part, unknown in the world of Asian American Poetry even as he was rising strong and fast in national Slam competitions. In its manifesto-like tone and its uncompromising declarations of identity, Phi’s poetry is highly reminiscent of early Asian American movement writing—think Janice Mirikitani and Nellie Wong, Wing Tek Lum, the writings from Roots: An Asian American Reader, and the seminal Preface and Introduction to Aiiieeeee! An Anthology of Asian-American Writers, edited by Frank Chin, Jeffery Paul Chan, Lawson Fusao Inada, and Shawn Wong—that tradition of ethnic coalition writing from which, presumably, many contemporary Asian American poets have either grown away or cannot relate to. By the crude yardstick of “Asian American literary sensibility” employed by the Aiiieeeee! editors, Phi’s poetry measures up and then some. The very dedication of Sông I Sing, “for my Asian American people,” evokes nostalgia for that bygone era as much as it is an homage to his audience.

The sense of urgency and immediacy in Phi’s poetry, the fluid flux and street cadences of his measures, carry over from his years as a seasoned and acclaimed Slam poet and his innumerable spoken word performances. At his performances, Phi’s audience is always present, their reactions palpable. They are his “tribe,” to coin a term from Russell Leong in his reference to the reading audience for Asian American poetry from the movement era—in community and in sync with him as he speaks to their sensibilities in his own inimitable style. It’s the physical presence of an audience that sets a performance poet apart from a purely discursive poet, and it is against that backdrop that Phi spent his formative years practicing poetry. His tribe(s) (“my Asian American people”) are always there, must always be there, for the final draft. George Uba reads the tribalism, in discursive Asian American poetry, as an ethnographic signifier of resistance to an oppressive and dominant culture, as anti-assimilationist, as privileging the oral over the written, and as more embracing of the polemic than the poetic—all descriptors that resonate through Bao Phi’s poetry and from which many contemporary Asian American poets were in retreat by the time Uba’s essay appeared in the early nineties.

However, the very first poem in Sông I Sing makes you realize that this collection, as much as it evokes the fist-held-high militancy of the movement era, is not simply a throwback to the past, and that Phi will not cleave to formulaic expressions of ethnic pride. Sông I Sing focuses on Asian Americans who are for the most part absent from the movement years—Vietnamese, Laotian, Hmong, Himalayan, Tibetan, Korean, South Asian, Arab Americans—and whose stories unfold in what would have been unimaginable places to those movement writers (the hardscrabble multiethnic Phillips neighborhood in Minneapolis and other ethnic epicenters of the Twin Cities, which until recently was noted as one of the most racially segregated metropolitan regions in the nation). The opening poem, “For Us,” extends the book’s dedication into a paean for those characters who fill, or will turn, the pages that follow:

This is for you, Celestial, Oriental, Asian, Asian Pacific American, 
Woman, Man, Queer, broke, collegiate, young old gook, spitting chink,
 Dog-eating dothead, faggot bitch slope. . . (1)

My people, we are a song that we can never stop singing against the silence
. My people, we are a song that we can never stop singing against the silence (4)

Songs, indeed, but not à la Whitman’s celebrations of the Self or the Open Road. These are counter-narratives from the streets that arise long after Whitman’s Democratic Vista has been overtaken and commandeered by rapacious institutions bent on global capital and exploitation and racial hierarchies that have been naturalized into a national lexicon: “haunting mouths taunting gook, chink bitch, butch, dyke, communist,/ feminazi,/ how people can call you by so many names/ yet see so little of you” (“Cleats Crowned by Soil”). Phi gives voice to the disenfranchised and displaced in his “refugeography,” to those who battle quotidian racism and who fight to keep from internalizing it to the point at which they cannot see themselves beyond those words: “They called us gook, chink, blanket ass, spic, nigger, coon—/(and what was really sad is, we called each other that, too)” (“Called, An Open Letter to Myself”). These slurs recur throughout the collection and there is no inuring oneself to them the more one reads them. Their sting is always fresh and there is no intent to reclaim or to reaccommodate them.

Indeed, they are terms that mark and illuminate processes of disenfranchisement that continue on both micro and macro levels. His speaker in “Fusion,” one of a series of character poems from the section entitled “The Nguyens,” serves up, with trenchant wit, the hypocrisies of white hipsters at a chic multiculti Asian/Latino fusion restaurant in Minneapolis where customers and proprietors gainfully deny “any allegations/ that a white restaurant cooking fake Asian Latino food/ could be racist” (25), while in a poetic missive, re-worked from an earlier version, ["and"] entitled “Dear Senator McCain,” Phi’s speaker continues to call out the senator for his shameful plying of the slur “gook” to garner presidential votes: “Senator/ what’s the difference/ between an Asian/ and a gook/ to you.” A decade since the earlier version was written, the senator, like the restaurant schmoozers, still seems not to know or care if there is a difference.

A clipped, smiling, stoic façade describes the quaint and unthreatening nature of “Minnesota Nice,” a passive-aggressiveness stereotypical of a non-confrontational demeanor, and a quirk of pride among many Minnesota residents. It’s an image that was momentarily shattered by the racist and statewide broadcasts of KQRS morning show DJ Tom Barnard, who, in 1998, admonished the Hmong community to “assimilate or hit the goddamn road,” a warning he also issued by way of complaint about the growing Somali community, and for which amongst other casually racist, sexist, and homophobic banter—alternating with the beat of seventies rock—the radio station garnered the largest audience of listeners in the state. The “American dream” of the subjects who occupy Phi’s poems, cornered in urban pockets of middle America, quickly transmogrifies into the existential panic of constantly being seen before they are seen, of being marked as easy scapegoats who shoulder the blame for high crime rates, low performing schools, challenged economies, and a receding quality of life for White middle Americans who are seeing their job opportunities shipped overseas. These cultural and racial markers quickly harden to become the borders that Phi’s personae are expected not to transgress and to which they themselves are expected never to call attention: ”Minnesota Nice: this city hides its scars well” (95).

In his poem “8 (9),” Phi recounts and contemplates the questionable police shooting of a Hmong teenager named Fong Lee. Despite the valid objections raised by the marginal community of concerned voices outside the investigation, the authorities refused to see anything questionable about the incident; the verdict seemed firmly resolved in their eyes before the trial began:

4.

An all-white jury found Officer Anderson not guilty of using excessive
 force.

Put a blindfold on me

tell me who you fear

and I will tell you

your skin. (94)

For the speaker, it becomes all too predictable, an unpalatable cycle of history that unwinds painfully, a tragic and familiar story heard over and over:

8.

All our lives, men with guns.

Chased, in the womb, in the arms

Of our parents.

 

Our parents

Chased, all our lives,

By men with guns.

 

In the womb, in our parents’ arms

We’ve run

Chased by men with guns.

 

(9).

Michael Cho. Cau Thi Bich Tran. John T. Wiliams

Tycel Nelson. Oscar Grant. Fong Lee.

May your names be the hymn

wind that sways

police bullets to miss. (95)

The people in verse (9) are all victims of police shootings—a Korean American man in Orange County; a Vietnamese American woman in San Jose; a Native American man in Seattle; an African American man in Minneapolis; an African American man in Oakland; a Hmong man in Minneapolis—and Phi has made their names into chronotopes, correlatives of time and space, where each singularly and arguably wrongful death becomes yet another iteration of what it is to live with the ramifications of being chased by men with guns. Indeed, it is only a partial list.

Sông I Sing also rings with poems of love and unforgotten friendship, tributes to otherwise invisible immigrant parents, humanizing portraits of those who have lost or are losing but nonetheless growing up wiser in the face of existential despair. Phi gives voice to those who live beneath the radar of the American creed, but who have internalized that creed as much as the quotidian racism they endure. His people struggle and laugh, fight, dance, sing and, in the last poem, like a Springsteen finale, go “race-ing” in the street.

As Phi has commented, Sông has more than one interpretation. It is Vietnamese for “river.” These poems wind through the heart of two cities like the river that borders them. Like the fabled Mississippi River that originates in upstate Minnesota, these poems are also origin stories of souls grown deep like the river, lives cast against a backdrop of often implacable whiteness. Phi’s poems emanate a sense of place. The recurring racist and sexist slurs provide the backdrop of intolerance against which those identities take shape. Minnesota is an overwhelmingly white state, and though the Twin Cities offers a modicum of relative diversity, the fact that well over half the state’s population lives within the seven counties that comprise the Twin Cities dilutes that diversity to a staggeringly small, even if continually growing, demographic. Yet within the last decade Minnesota Asian American writers and artists have reached national audiences—poets Ed Bok Lee and Sun Yung Shin, memoirist Jane Jeong Trenka, playwright Rick Shiomi, Hmong writer and editor Mai Neng Moua, photographer Wing Young Huie to name but a few. Many of the writers from Seeds From A Silent Tree, a seminal anthology of writing by and about Korean adoptees, were raised and reside in Minnesota. The Twin Cities is (or in some cases was) not without its artistic venues of expression for Asian American artists—Paj Ntaub Voice, Korean Quarterly, Asian American Renaissance, Theater Mu. All of these artists write with unique vibes that resonate with Phi’s, with each other’s. They are artists whose humanity was forged in the same unique crucible of place.

So what would any of those artists have had to say at that Asian American Poetry panel a decade ago? Even David Mura, a national literary luminary and de facto poet laureate of Minnesota Asian American poetry (who was not in attendance at that poetry panel a decade ago), feels the pinch of the binary. “We need then,” Mura has written, “to recognize a real diversity in our reading practices, a reading which acknowledges our living within a multicultural and postmodern world, where the centers are illusory—though occasionally useful—fictions, and where margins exist everywhere we look.” Conditions, more so than evasive definitions, of “Asian American Poetry,” are as much constructed upon its reading as its writing. Perhaps the best we can do is to “dance an attitude,” to use Kenneth Burke’s phrase, of Asian Americanness before the work, instead of opting to sit out the dance altogether. Or perhaps Eleanor Telemaque Wong summed it up best back in 1978: “It’s Crazy to Stay Chinese in Minnesota.” But if you do, imagine the songs you’ll sing.

* * *

Since 2004, Greg Choy has been a faculty lecturer in the Department of Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley. From 1998-2002, he was an assistant professor of humanities at the University of Minnesota, General College, and from 2002-2004 he was an assistant professor of English at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul , MN.

LIGATURE STRAIN

YELLOW YELLOW

In typography, a ligature is the conjunction of two or more letters into a single glyph.

In typography, an index is a punctuation mark indicating an important part of the text with a pointing hand.

Margaret Rhee’s Yellow/ Yellow and Kim Koga’s Ligature Strain meet in a typographical terrain of conjugation and decomposition, where fists appear in the margins. These texts saturate their pages to such a degree that I wish these words could stain my fingers—pink, brown, yellow.

These works are first chapbooks for both Koga and Rhee, and are #5 and #6 in Tinfish Press‘ yearlong Retro Series. Since April 2011, one chapbook has been released per month, each designed by Eric Butler.

In Ligature Strain it’s winter; in Yellow / Yellow I want to believe it’s spring. In the way that Koga lays down planks of text and then proceeds to gnaw, Rhee threads Tila Tequila and her father’s ashes, nectarines and arithmetic with critical discourse on race and gender to index the margins.

fi typographic ligature (via Wikipedia)

In the title poem, Rhee’s ligatures of “yellow” and “yolk,” “yellow” and “net,” “yellow” and “butter,” “yellow” and “cunt,” “yellow” and “other” become single gestures, single imprints. Koga’s blocks of text appear as rudders, rungs and slats, creating structures of strangulation and suture that “file practice rant,” “pilot up a hill” and “loll and roll like glass misbehaving.”

Koga is talking about baby beaver fetuses; Rhee is talking about radical feminism and queer sex. Their textures and colors conjoin and birth poems of the body. I am reminded of Dodie Bellamy’s Cunt-Ups (Tender Buttons, 2001), a feminist re-figuring of the male form of the “cut-up” and the male realm of porn. The rodent on the cover of Bellamy’s book might live well in Koga’s structures, as it might be indexed by Rhee, somewhere between “Pussy” and “Public/Private spheres.”

Dodie Bellamy's Cunt-Ups

In an excerpt in Stretcher, Bellamy writes, “I show you the photographs and they’re wet. I’m huffing as I’m trying to pack a considerable punch, I’m just going to think about it throughout, expelling a cloudy medium, faintly this time like we’re teenagers. I’m kissing you, emerging like a baby in fluid…”

These are wet texts. In Koga’s, placental goo and mucus drip and leak. In Rhee’s, snot, discharge and poo ooze and stain like yolk. Koga’s damp decomposition, fetal mouths, teats and webbed feet echo Rhee’s hybrid mesh of fruit and file downloads that is a correspondence of fleshes—their proximities flush and flash in the plural. “I pull my fingers through / and through” slips into “I drown   gulp   salt ashes & mermaid hair   the waves…” in Rhee’s ocean, while “the pink fleshes / squirm in shapes of congealed / raspberries” in Koga’s caves, wombs searching for release.

In the poem “Nectarines,” also published in the Spring 2011 issue of Kartika Review, Rhee splices cross-sections of historical research with the pleasure of the fruit. She examines the Korean American “invention” of the nectarine, the peach with plum skin, and crosses it against her own Korean American identity. Her line, “The flesh is delicate, easily bruised in some cultivations,” performs a similar gesture as “The innards of lesbians are the same as yours” in “219% x (a+b+c) x A I R =,” what Rhee refers to as her coming out poem. Comings out are runts of the litter in Koga’s work: “brown oiled fur in / water to repel or release your pink child / into water or wood” and “…new pink fleshes float and wait / inert for birth.”

"Index Cuts" (via callumjames.blogspot)

In “Index: A Poem About Sex,” Rhee builds personal and socio-cultural points of reference into a den where Koga’s beaver babies might “echo locate” or “paw and gnaw.”

Foucault, Michel, 88, 98, 2002, 100,000,000
Family, 000
Fiona lightly touched my cheek, 27
Femme, 578; see also beautiful femmes of color …
[...]
Identity, 1-100,000,00
[...]
I saw her in West Hollywood playing with Glow Sticks, it was then I knew I was gay, 77
[...]
Lawrence versus Texas, 265-66
Loving Lydia was my biggest mistake and my greatest dream, 105
Loving versus Virginia, 45, 98, 100,000,999 …
[...]
Yellow, 6, 57; see also Yellow Fever, Yellow Cunt, [nu rang nu rang], and why does someone in my seminar / respond to my poem by drawing an Asian eye?

In this last entry, Rhee might also have listed “Yellow Apparel: When the Coolie Becomes Cool” (2000), a short film made by UC Berkeley students that “explores the commodification and appropriation of Asian cultural elements into mainstream America and examines the effects of this trend on Asian Americans.” Interwoven into the film is footage of Anida Yoeu Ali performing a piece that was recorded with the spoken word group “I Was Born With Two Tongues” on the album Broken Speak.

Excuse me, ameriKa
I’m confused
you tell me to lighten up
but what you really mean is whiten up
you wish to wash me out
melt me in your cauldron
Excuse me if I tip your melting pot
spill the shades onto your streets
I don’t want to lose my color [...]

(Anida Yoeu Ali/I Was Born With Two Tongues, “excuse me, ameriKa”)

Rhee ties a suture around the color yellow until it stains everything that comes into contact with it. Pink, brown and gray strain to surface behind the black and white of Koga’s scaffolds:

a scintillating beaver she was—she
sheds her skin her skin pink and
new streaked with blood and left
without its protective fur. a whole
molting process for winter and each
season the pink comes through.

the pink fleshes attach and drink mothers
milk from your pink teat bits of red
blood cells pass too. pink gums and gray
lidded eyes paw and gnaw.

pink squirming fleshes and new pink skin
streak your blood and appetite.

These books break the skin and streak the appetite. Spines spill. Outside, it’s raining. Inside, I’m surprised that my hands are still dry.

* * *

Koga and Rhee’s chapbooks can be purchased online at www.tinfishpress.com. Subscriptions to the entire Tinfish Retro Series are also available for $36.

AALR SPECIAL ISSUE: COMMEMORATING THE TENTH ANNIVERSARY OF SEPT. 11

In the selective memory of America’s pop tart psyche, 9/11 is a day—a montage of proud flag-waving, “God Bless!” and baseball. In this sense, 9/11 is a memorial that never meant anything to me. But a decade ago, before I had formulated my political consciousness as a queer person of color, I knew what it meant to live in fear, to be a “Transsexual Militant,” as Amir Rabiyah writes, in the anxiety-inducing nightmare of airport security, to move through public spaces as suspect. The exclusive “land of the free” 9/11 did not remember people like me.

AALR’s Special Issue attempts to rupture the dominant narrative of 9/11 by examining, as Rajini Srikanth states in the introduction, the not-so-innocent act of remembering. The voices and visual art in this book and the companion DVD—from youth, students, teachers, social workers, lawyers, DJs, community organizers, neuroscientists and poets in the South Asian, Asian, Arab and Muslim American communities—fight America’s obsession with 9/11 as a fixed tragedy, as a single event after which everything changed.

Their remembrances counteract the ways we are being told to frame 9/11 by contextualizing it as a continuation of historical patterns systemic of broader structures of US imperialism. In these crucial and courageous testimonies, essays, interviews and discussions, 9/11 is framed as a non-event, as a decade of war, [1] as an “American Century,” [2] as “homeland security” since 1492. Sunaina Maira writes, “9/11 was not a moment of exception but an ongoing state of emergency.”

While America has mastered the practices of exerting its influence, of spreading democracy, of occupation and colonialism, it has also mastered the culture of amnesia and denial that seeks to erase the effects of that influence. Mary Husain, Rakhshanda Saleem, Sunaina Maira and Veena Dubal discuss the silencing and censorship of critical discourse and critique of US policy and the criminalization of political dissent, even within university systems.
Despite the horrific experiences of detention, deportation and murder, the violence exacted on individuals “mistaken for Muslim” as Anida Yoeu Ali embodies in the 1700% Project—despite this overwhelming evidence, the US provides an equally overwhelming amount of distractions. With smart phones, Facebook, Google, caffeine addictions and headphones, people actually don’t have to look, don’t have time to look it up, don’t need to look up.

* * *

Absent/present in the skyline of US imperialism and state-sponsored denial are the tectonic shifts in South Asian experience in the US—apart, together, a part, to gather. The work in this issue highlights specific political barriers many faced in community organizing and coalition building before and since 9/11, including the conflation of different racial, ethnic and religious groups into the imagined and ambiguous race of “terrorist,” the reactive distancing of Hindus from Muslims and the internal distrust, prejudice, surveillance and paranoia that increased within these communities.

But this issue also looks at the opportunities for connection these forced proximities facilitated, including the formation of a specifically “South Asian” identity and its incorporation within an Asian American framework; the push to include Arab, Muslim and Palestinian experiences in the discourse of Asian American studies; and alliances forged with other folks in the anti-immigration struggle.

Crucial connections are made between post-WWII Japanese American internment and the Special Registration program, which, as Theresa Thanjan explains, “required men from 25 countries, 24 of them Arab and Muslim nations, to be fingerprinted, photographed, and interrogated by INS federal agents.” The program, instigated by John Ashcroft and finally terminated on April 27, 2011, focused mostly on undocumented immigrants, many of whom, “even though they had no ties to terrorism, were detained and deported due to visa violations.”

Apart, together. A part, to gather. These tectonic shifts have ruptured the landscape of South Asian, Muslim and Arab American communities, who often inhabit what Mazen Naous describes as a place of “hyper-in-visibility,” “a hyper awareness of presence both visible and invisible in a post-9/11 US.” Visible victims, visible others. Hyper-invisible, vacant.

* * *

This collection maps the state and states we are in as immigrants, as people of color, as brown folks. It is an empire state, a war on terror state, a state of emergency, a security state, a state of detention and deportation, a state of internment and imprisonment, an interrogation state, a police state, a state of surveillance, what Subhash Kateel describes as an “immigrant apartheid state.”

As the contributors to this issue realize, the American practice, language and grammar of war has ruptured our psyches, our modes of organizing and our chosen forms of artistic production. The psychological weight of fear, silence and denial affects both the targets and the perpetrators of violence. These “acts”—imperialistic acts, exclusion acts, removal acts, acts of slavery—have become common syntax for people on both sides of the power dynamic.

In Dangerous Border Crossers, performance artist Guillermo Gómez-Peña speaks to his collaborations with Roberto Sifuentes and the techniques they employ to embody America’s deepest fears and desires regarding the racialized “other.” In their performances, Gómez-Peña and Sifuentes often create living dioramas that can be manipulated by audience members, installing themselves as syncretic, cyborgian, savagely high-tech “Mexterminator” figures. In this way, the fears and sublimated desires of white middle-class America are made “hyper-in-visible” and projected back in indigenous technicolor.

In looking at the literatures of 9/11, Shailja Patel cites Styrofoam cups on which Guantánamo prisoners etched poems using pebbles, which the US Department of Defense confiscated and destroyed. These Styrofoam cup poems echo poems etched on walls by Chinese detainees at Angel Island, which were obscured by layers of paint.

When Hasan Elahi found himself on a terrorist watch list and subsequently investigated, he decided to collaborate with the FBI and meticulously track his own whereabouts in “The Orwell Project.” Through the site’s massive catalog of time-stamped images, Elahi incorporates, dis-identifies [3] with and re-figures surveillance as a technique.

Amitava Kumar cites the interrogation log of Guantánamo Detainee 063, Mohammed al-Qahtani, dated December 11, 2002:

“0100: Detainee began to cry during pride and ego down. Detainee was reminded that no one loved, cared or remembered him. He was reminded that he was less than human and that animals had more freedom and love than he does. He was taken outside to see a family of banana rats. The banana rats were moving around freely, playing, eating, showing concern for one another. Detainee was compared to the family of banana rats and reinforced that they had more love, freedom, and concern than he had. Detainee began to cry during this comparison.”

It is the deep sadness and utter absurdity of these images—Mohammed al-Qahtani crying before banana rats; Styrofoam cup poems destroyed; Elahi tracking his meals and ATM withdrawals; “mosquito,” “Spanish,” “bagels” and “towels” all “Mistaken for Muslim” in Anida Yoeu Ali’s powerful video on the companion DVD—that make “hyper-in-visible” the viciously surrealist poetic of war. As Poet/Prisoner Ali reiterates, “America mistaken for ‘white people’?”

The US government has cut into and carved out certain people from the protection of the law. We are left to suture and fathom, as Kazim Ali writes. Dancer/Angel Prumsodon Ok, in “Mistaken for Muslim,” moves, “hyper-in-visible,” within the gap.

* * *

Within these gaps, Naeem Mohaiemen, Tamiko Beyer and Prerana Reddy raise the need to create spaces for reflection, contemplation, “continuity and movement memory.” In the presence of the state of emergency and immediate action required by 9/11, folks from the coalition Visible Collective sought to facilitate long gestations and longevity in community building and worked to create more sustainable strategies and partnerships through art-making, museum exhibitions and events that engaged South Asian American communities within a longer time frame and broader context.

Such strategic interventions—Vivek Bald mixing samples from the McCarthy hearings in his DJ sets; Ash Hsie’s stunning animation of Bao Phi’s poem “No Question” on the companion DVD; the cadence of six syllables, chador au chadori and man to bau, man to bau, that helped Angie Chuang awake to the connections between Kabul, Afghanistan and Taoyuen, Taiwan—are sutures that attempt to build change and transformation in our collective cultural spaces over time.

Yet Parag Khandhar’s afterword leaves me somber. I realize the magnitude of voices left out, of those not yet able to process their own experiences, of the remembering and documentation still needed. Kelly Zen-Yie Tsai cites a songwriter and NGO worker who “said that art is what draws the emotion out of people to allow information to live and pass on.” I think this is why Khadijah’s Caravan youth member Unais Ibrahim’s photograph on the cover of this collection is so moving. The photograph asks us to look up—to encounter the vacancy, the disappeared, the ash, the echo—to look up to find. It wants us to ask, “What is my heart not seeing?”

Notes

[1] See the anthology Conversations at the Wartime Cafe: A Decade of War 2001 – 2011 edited by Sean Labrador y Manzano.

[2] Veena Dubal cites Henry R. Luce, the publisher of Life magazine, who coined the phrase “the American Century” in a February 17, 1941 article that advised the US “to exert upon the world the full impact of our influence, for such purposes as we see fit and by such means as we see fit.”

[3] For more information about disidentification as a strategy, see Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics by José Esteban Muñoz.

Two Works by Ronaldo V. Wilson

A Guest Post by Stephen Hong Sohn, Assistant Professor of English at Stanford University

Narrative of the Life of the Brown Boy and the White Manby Ronaldo V. Wilson | U of Pittsburgh Press 2008 | $14

Poems of the Black Objectby Ronaldo V. Wilson | FuturePoem Books 2009 | $15

Stephen Hong Sohn

In this review, I discuss Ronaldo V. Wilson’s Narrative of the Life of the Brown Boy and the White Man (University of Pittsburgh Press 2008) and Poems of the Black Object (FuturePoem Books 2009). Wilson’s first full-length poetry collection might be more specifically described as prose poetry, as implied by its title. There are really no formal line breaks throughout the collection, so one is forced to consider what makes such a work poetry as opposed to prose. This genre-defying work’s title also clearly derives inspiration from two canonical African American literary texts: Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl and Frederick Douglass’s Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave. In Wilson’s title, there isn’t any mention of the word “slave,” but the impulse to explore the conditions of subjection and domination are still very much there. Wilson’s work thus seems to enact a neo-slave “poetic” as derived through the queer racial minority’s subjectivity. The reference to the “brown boy” and the “white man” in the title also helps situate what actually occurs in the prose poetry blocks throughout the collection. “Brown boy” suggests that the lyric “I” is a mixed-race subject and likely an adult, but clearly one who does not have much access to economic resources. He is engaged in a homosexual relationship with “White Man,” someone likely older and with clearly far more money than the “Brown Boy.” Racial difference, class difference, and age difference, among other such distinctions, generate the rubrics of power and domination that mark the tension between “white man” and the “brown boy.”   Wilson’s work is raw, dense, and does not shy away from difficult topics, as demonstrated by the following excerpt, which is fairly indicative of the stylistic impulses of the collection:

“Go Shower. This command reveals [the brown boy’s] relationship to the white man. He follows his lover’s orders like a slave without anything but the promise of being fed and shown a movie” (64).

Poems of the Black Object continues the project that Wilson starts in Narrative of the Life of the Brown Boy and the White Man. Again, the central issue at stake is a kind of enslavement, mediated by the intersections of race, sexuality, and late capitalism. One stylistic approach that Wilson employs masterfully is the juxtaposition of “high” and “low” cultures: references to Shakespeare appear alongside references to Little House on the Prairie. Wilson also continues to use the “prose poetic” aesthetic that appears in his first collection, but also branches out and explores a variety of different styles, some more avant-garde in approach and others with a more traditional lyric quality. Yet the signature rawness of Wilson’s lyrics, which never shy away from the awkward or potentially vulnerable moments faced by the lyric speaker, remains constant throughout the text. In “Construction of a Black Poetic Self in Four Narratives,” for instance, the lyric speaker explores the complications of a mixed-race heritage through the bodies of his parents:

In a box, my father’s torso is
in a white thermal rib top
(my
own face leaning in to find
my face
in his black shiny skin)
between my mother,
a then fattish Filipino girl,
with a cinched waist is
the speed
at which she trained
to run off
excess flesh (58).

What I find especially interesting here is Wilson’s use of abrupt breaks. Does the shortness of these lines sonically and metrically augment the sense of rupture suggested here? Wilson’s focus on skin is particularly instructive in teasing out his exploration of race, but the racial identifications at work in this excerpt seem to operate asymmetrically. The lyric speaker finds the father’s body more tangible, something that can be explored, but the mother’s body is something in flight, running away.

A poetic of mixed-race seems to emerge here alongside the asymmetrics of parental lineage.

One of my favorite excerpts in this entire collection comes from “The Lesson”:

“Side B: aesthetic theory—Your skin is pink,
then opaque, caramelized then burned
if you are one of the drumsticks
stuffed in a bowl, as in a holocaust.

NY Times, East Timor. A blown-apart leg unskinned,
a shoe’s sole ripped back to bone, synonym
for torso in a soccer shirt.

This is ours. We are pickled,
you with me this strange leg.
Should I turn the chicken over?

See your life as screenic,
think collage,
ethnograph—He is your brown body.
Eve
the bone and scrape out the marrow
for marinade” (94).

As always, Wilson is able to engage provocative juxtapositions—in this case, generating a kind of poetics of the grotesque. The reference again to skin reminds us of the thread of race and racial formation that moves throughout the collection. What I appreciate most about this passage is the way in which global politics infests and infiltrates everyday activities such as cooking and consumption. The lyric speaker is aware of his unique privilege, one that does not let him prepare foods without thinking about how the act engages him in a type of metaphorically-inflected cannibalism.

I will definitely be teaching either or both of these collections in the future. I appreciate their inventive formal aesthetics and their dense, politically complex lyricism. And I always, always appreciate any collection that stretches the bounds of Asian American poetics.

* * *

Stephen Hong Sohn is an Assistant Professor of English at Stanford University.

bough breaks

bough breaks by Tamiko Beyer | Meritage Press 2011 | $12.50

The title of Tamiko Beyer’s first chapbook, bough breaks, evokes not just the creepy nursery rhyme, but also plant metaphors and motifs running through the poem-sequence. On the very first page there is “deep moss,” “bloomer,” and the “instinct” that “rises / late” from “whatever field”: whatever it is, this field has conceptual dimensions as well as spatiality. Shortly thereafter, the narrator tells us, “I construct syllabic fields,” suggesting with the simple present tense a habit, a pattern, perhaps something involuntary—and in this field, language itself, like foliage, must be attended to “like watering.”

These language-pastures seem to have once in the past(oral) contained the narrator until this instinct, to be a mother, escapes—pretty much like a protuberance—and causes a being-body to leak through. Queer desire is already a transgression, “chaotic.” By challenging the narrative that queer sexualities are non-reproductive, the maternal instinct turns the queer body excessive over and above its already-excess.

bough breaks seeks to interrogate this protuberance, this leaking, and its limits. It is fuelled by yearning: “will there be / between us a darling?” Yearning pushes through the body of the poem in the form of white space. Forms are invented to strike off authorized definitions of conception (biological as well as artistic), to prefigure the politics of a queer couple raising a child so as to question gender (“we would ….  open mother to repetitions”), to consider how options for child-getting are often embedded in contexts of violence and capitalistic greed (and is there really a choice), to destabilize both the “natural” and the “not natural” in “queer” and “motherhood” (and sneaky iterations of everything in between), to circulate even more questions around adoption and embryo adoption (check out that play with “play” and “pay” on page 24!).

Repeatedly, the sly, fluted precision of the poems (“we drift through rooms of thefted / antiquity”) is voiced over by something smeary and glittery (reminding me very much of the Aswang’s uprising in Diwata):

and if by invisibility they mean they do not see us
our bows and gnashing teeth
our prom dress feather boa heels
hair glittered gray the fisting and holler
fishnets fishnets breasts breasts breasts
our voices pitched forward into reclamation
the blood in our mouths sweet slick
like our ready-to-take-you between our legs—
. . .
our diy manicures all silvery and chipped
our shouts so lovely so lovely all that licking

Sections of the sequence travel back in time, in memory and in stories, to Beyer’s growing-up years in Japan. A child “tucked into the sled” gapes “at the sky’s star-dense orchestra” and a kind of loopy, tender narrative suggests itself. Is it the orchestra that transmits (a cunning build-up!) the next nonsense-like, charming section with re-ordered words from lullabies?—it begins:

spice went birds
gonna back silver sugar
the crown was pie and ashes and me

Mama’s three silver shells
birds light if tails
I’m a very nimble buy

Another skid in time, and there’s a collective fall off the bike (give you a “chin gash shin gash”—clever tongue-twister chant!) and the narrative picks its scabs only to stick them to the pavement.

All through, the text maintains community and solidarity with “bodies and histories as ragged / as ours but not as privileged.” A certain perspective on the plant motifs, we learn, can purpose the divine: “that’s god: green pulsing.”

Perhaps it is the plantal divine being supplicated in the last section: “Will you come to excavate the pile I have crawled under and cannot / bear to leave?” Or is this “you” future child, or possible futures, or possible future-selves, or self-in-the-present, or memory, or this poem-sequence, or language, or poetry—or is the intervention to be on the part of readers, collectivities? By opening itself up to possibilities of “rescue” through any or all of these apertures, the sequence submits to a vision where the past, present, and future come together to refashion the cultural logics it is questioning. Curiously, it ends with this instruction: “If I am quiet, I might know what the body means without words.” This “quiet” does not seem to be a vacuum; it seems to be filled with information, leaks, for the narrator, and—I would say—for Beyer’s intentional communities (queer, Asian American, urban, transnational). This goes back to the idea of surplus which, through its transgression of boundaries, has the potential to bring about change. Or is it a death-wish, a refusal on the part of “I” to be rescued and extricated from the heap, this inside not-outside? Or, as Iris mused in an email to me this morning: “Is this a prophetic vision?  Or a contemporary trance/hallucination in which traumas of loss and longing and be-longing might be worked out?  Or something else entirely?”

In Gerald Maa’s interview with Arthur Sze in this issue of the Asian American Literary Review, Maa quotes from Auden: “Many things can be said against anthologies, but for an adolescent to whom even the names of most of the poets are unknown, a good [anthology] can be an invaluable instructor.” The same can be said of this 300-page journal, with its wide range of material including: a forum discussion with some of the editors about the “check all that apply” race option on the 2010 Census, an enclosed DVD of Kip Fulbeck’s video short Mixed: Portraits of Multiracial Kids, and a complete bibliography of Carlos Bulosan provided by the Library of Congress’s Asian American Pacific Islander Collection. This is all in addition to fiction, memoir, poetry, interviews with Arthur Sze (on editing Chinese Writers on Writing) and Chang-rae Lee (on his most recent novel, The Surrendered), book reviews, documentary photography, and a short graphic piece.

This issue’s theme is “Counting Citizens” and begins with a discussion about the question of multiracial self-representation on the Census. Jeffrey Yang takes a stance against the very structures of any representation and rejects claims for a ‘post-racial’ present: “not representation but transmutation, alchemy. . . . Representation is the impossible ideal of our democracy, where influence rules.” Srikanth Reddy uses the development of Walt Whitman’s poetry as a model, charting his expansive ownership of multitudes to his subjective position as an individual: “This progression—from the poet as a vatic representative of everybody to the poet as a specimen capable only of registering her own experience—might in some ways be a natural progression, from the exuberance of youth to the epistemological modesty of old age.” He suggests an alternative perspective: that of the Other. Yang riffs on this and together they broach the aesthetic of language arts and “the problem of form—the ‘logic and order’ of an artwork” which seems to find friction between the canon and the margin. A different take on Bloom’s “anxiety of influence,” perhaps, in which the artist is in constant tension between the codified mastery of forebears and the yet unnamed mystery of the present/future individual. Linguistic and cultural transplantation complicate loyalties, heritage, assumptions about audience, and formal considerations. Reddy writes:

To write a haiku or a ghazal in English does not bring us any closer to shifting the grounds of literary representation. In Yang’s memorable formulation, such a literary gesture would fail to “reposition the frame structure.” Rather, our formal labor [as Asian American writers] has to occur beyond the frame, in the abstract conceptual space where form is given particular shapes suited to the particular historical moment.

Other prose in this issue gives us pause for further consideration. Joy Kogawa’s excerpt from Gently to Nagasaki puts the author in conversation with Marjorie Chan, both of them struggling with the atavism of the Rape of Nanking, now generations past: how are they to situate themselves as individuals and as Japanese and Chinese Americans, both in relation to one another and to their respective histories? Kip Fulbeck’s short essay, “Fishing for Identity,” invites attention to, first, the absurdities of race (“everyone is African”) and, second, the complexity of race as an unavoidable layer of interface; he makes a point about proactive identity and distinguishes between “cognizant as opposed to aware.” Eric Gamalinda’s fiction short, “Famous Literary Frauds,” doesn’t touch on race at all, instead examining authenticity and the celebrity-dom of authors, the public face divorced from the art object. And Arthur Sze, in his interview promoting Chinese Writers on Writing, reminds us that the importation of Chinese literature has, since Pound, remained a new business; the number of first-time English translations in the anthology demonstrate how under-represented contemporary Chinese writers are in the Anglophone world.

The poems in this issue span a wonderful thematic and aesthetic range as indicated by the table of contents, which groups poems as sets from distinct poets rather than as individual pieces. The poems begin with Ray Hsu’s subversive political pieces, the first of which is titled “Dear Sir or Madam:” and demonstrates the dizzying effect of formal rhetoric. The content of the poem’s “letter” says very little, using acronyms, pronouns, and vague phrases such as, “to face key policy challenges” or, “We presented / sufficient dignity and overwhelming feeling” without indicating to whom. The lineation only starts to break apart with self-awareness when the collective speaker says, “we are good for the facts.” Hsu’s other poems also appropriate official language, as can be seen from the title “Rights Mix #26,” which responds to each point of The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article #26. The two pieces entitled “Sources” are found poems consisting entirely of quotations ranging from Pat Robertson to Oscar Wilde. Through its syntax, “Haiti (an earthquake)” simulates rubble and mess, throwing sentences into a chaotic babble overloaded with articles and prepositions. Even so, impressions of the scene are left in the way that news tickers might bombard us with buzzwords: “us tragic so assistance, people, said, Suffering, confront that economy in on they the own the region.”

Kimiko Hahn’s series, Haibun from the Summer (2009) immediately follows Hsu’s and, in stark contrast, is apolitical. (She sequesters politics into its own aesthetic locus, as she said in an interview at ASU in October 2009: “I don’t look at poems that have political content as being any different from love poems or anything else. For me it’s another topic.”) As always with Hahn’s poetry, these haibun are unadorned, frank, and reveal the process of her work. Her distinctive use of italics shows us the caesura of her thought, the moments where her mind abides in the oddities or emphases of language: “The things mother did that I copied. The things they may recall as well. To make sure I could distinguish their socks. Distinguished socks.”

Aimee Nezhukumatathil’s poems are shaped by tropes of love and motherhood, especially as they express themselves in a fairytale mode. The fairytale quality of “Dangerous” (which begins, “The rooster talks to the donkey. / The turtle whispers to the rabbit. / The mouse conspires with the lion”) overlaps into “I Could be a Whale Shark,” in which the speaker’s imagination and anxieties at the beach undulate with the waves and sealife beneath the surface. In a short few lines, the pregnant speaker imagines herself “a moon jelly,” “a whale shark,” “a flutefish,” and the husband is her “sweet cuttlefish,” the closeness of whom recalls her mind back to familiarity with her human body. “Dear Betty Brown” is a poem of racial protest responding to the Texas Representative’s suggestion that a foreign name of “a rather difficult language” be changed to a simpler one “that we could deal with more readily here.” Nezhukumatathil equates a generic name-change to “draw[ing] a big fat X across my brown face.” She defends her legitimacy as an American citizen with wonderful images that unravel from indignation to love and back to indignation:

It would mean jamming my hand into a bucket
of mulberries with my Kansan husband
to signal summer & the slow scrape
of leaves across our lawn to signal fall.
It means my mother & father gave
me their names from the coconut shores
of their countries & made a girl
who grew up listening to Elvis while
she did her homework & now writes
poems about people who should know better
to question what is easy & what is difficult . . .

Prageeta Sharma’s dense poem, “Neutrality Maki,” examines Japanese maki as a site of objectification and boundaries. The maki’s aim is neutrality “since it will not apologize / for its doublethink nor its sheen” although, in the maki, we glimpse the potential of a “principle maki” (“there is a sheer desire for certain principles not to exist”) and a “small Geneva maki” as well. The speaker asks, “Where is the neutrality in fueled splits? / Where the discourse is false, and the people falser still?” perhaps referring to Sianne Nga’s epigraph on glamorous objects and viewers’ willfully imposed “cutification.” The maki is a complex image for an ambivalently inward- and outward-looking identity aware of its layers and which, as yet, “hasn’t formed a face; it has fish for its brain / and the surface, only the surface, is intended for a forthright simper.” A more lucid poem, “The Other Profiled in Cerulean,” attempts frank explanation of the poet’s intentions but keeps hitting questions instead: “I’m putting pressure on myself to write myself into the narrative, / the word ‘myself,’ what do I mean?” In a surprising sequence of end-stopped lines, she writes:

Perhaps
the claim of words as objects is a kind of ownership of feeling.
This is what frightens me. I do it too.
But I don’t feel like it’s always authentic.
But ownership is interesting—
I have read how mimicry is ironic compromise,
can the poem dismantle this?

Ching-In Chen’s poems, in keeping with the issue’s theme of “Counting Citizens,” follow what may be a mythical Shiny City, which in her history is one among many “assembled atop courtyards of bone.” The poems begin with a bookburning, though its images recall water—buckets, steam, waste—instead of fire. The bookburning suggests the burning of myth, history, culture: “anthems to side-swipe and heroes to depose of.” These are poems of vivid, though unexplained, loss and destruction, of “a body that would not be / broken apart / again,” of a “book of moths, / offstage light, the footstep of a wise / girl with no hair to call her / own.” Of “my history being stewed without me” and a house that “peels itself / in half, then is no more.”

Pimone Triplett’s The Hungry Ghosts is a series of persona poems spoken by the “hungry ghosts” of Buddhist tradition, starving in a limbo on earth: a metaphysical restaurant “[n]estled between the Sit N Spin Laundry and Frenchy’s Adult Book Store.” As explained in the author’s note, in these poems Triplett has fashioned her own pidgin “that’s been mildly tempered into the Thai and Pali poetic forms called kaap yanii and kaap chabang” which allows her to code-shift through proper and ungrammatical expression, often in service of cadence. We end up with lucid and musical phrases such as: “Sometimes I hear scream and suckle birthing up / far edge this wall of luck.” These monologues are striking as the speakers’ eternal inertness, their “many / / gristled millenia to get through,” illuminates the myopic disappointments and disillusionment of our own lives: after all, “they’re just simple spirit folk trying to find their way to the next level” and they wash up on “these hard-but-haven shores you call yours.”

Other great poems and poets make up this volume, including the Mexican/Spanish influences of Rick Barot’s “Oaxaca Elegy” and Michelle Har Kim’s fine translations (the pages are side-by-side bilingual) of work by Japanese Peruvian poet Jose Watanabe. Adrienne Su’s modern rhymes and Jeffrey Yang’s short lyric fragments are also worth the read. This issue of the AALR is a fine book of aesthetic range and topical treatment sure to stimulate and inspire insight. I consider myself sold as a future subscriber.

What is spit, taken as the title of Esther Lee’s first book of poetry? It can be derogatory, can be DNA and genealogy, can be sustenance and suckling, can be used to form or deform the sounds we make when speaking. The poems in this collection are preoccupied with the mouth, which functions as a site of stagnation just as much as change. The book begins, “When asked if I believe in absolute truths, I cite the lie.” And a few lines down: “Our mouths were stretched to the floor as punishment . . .” In another poem, the mouth is a “rusted hollow,” an irreparably broken car muffler. Later, in “The Real World Is Like This,” the sound of a mother’s “bird-throat” suggests flight, then suggests the clicking sounds of the speaker’s tap shoes driving a rift between her and her sister and, she says, “what my mouth can’t afford.”

Astonishing for a first book, Lee’s signature style is instantly recognizable by the accent she creates visually on the page. The front dedication to her family reads: “I kiss one hundred time[ ].” Generally brackets tell of absence, which can mean revision, loss, or a truncated excess—and in these poems refer to text as much as to personal experience. In the dedication, it is a nod to her parents’ accent. In the “Interview with My [C]orean Father” poems, the bracketed “C” reclaims and reshapes an ethnic label. It also points out how arbitrary are such naming practices, since Corean and Korean sound identical. In “We Are the Happiest Children in the World” and “Ivan / Ivan,” brackets proliferate lines to evoke at once caesura and transition, as we see in:

I tell you I am here mingled [ ] with snow
yellow-white as the page [ ] I suckled from
my grandmother—strange mother—and I [ ] grew

These brackets have a distinct flavor from backslashes, m-dashes, and ellipses; they are a ligature of grammatical pedantry (showing Lee in command of the language) and ungrammatical familiarity (an intuitive, poetic experimentation). They are a punctuation that Lee has made uniquely her own in these poems.

Another trademark is Lee’s blank missives, also the title of her first chapbook and interspersed throughout Spit. The opening poem is titled, “Dear __________cate,” and signed, “Yours, / __________cate.” These symmetrical blanks suggest epistles sent from one unfinished self to another, or between variable selves. They also invite the reader to participate in meaning-making. Some blanks require an obvious part of speech: __________est, __________phobic. Some suggest a theme or emotion: __________quito,  __________pling. Others can be difficult to fill in, like __________eam, and resist the standard proportioning of suffixes. Part of Lee’s play is appropriating the English language and making it her own.

“Tongues for ‘Typhoid Mary’ ” unexpectedly thrusts Mary Mallon into a wordplay of difficult English sounds, including consonant clusters that might be mispronounced by an immigrant: “freshly fried / flying fish, shredded Swiss at sixish. Truly, rurally.” Together with limerick-quick rhymes, Lee’s technique makes a fable out of Mary Mallon. Historically, she was the first known healthy typhoid-fever carrier, and the cognomen “Typhoid Mary” today conjures malignant ignorance and a refusal to cooperate with officials for the “greater good.” Her story is also one of alienation and quarantine, all for the crime of inhabiting her own body. She even changed her name to Mary Brown, hoping to blend in. In Lee’s poem, Mallon’s immigrant background is subtle but present: “Eyeing her Irish wristwatch, she winced since / no selfish shellfish could ease her mood.” The enjambment is telling.

Lee’s sly command of the language sometimes borders on evasion of plain statement; in other words, poetical occlusion. But behind the trumpet of her poems one can usually hear a gasp of breath, a human frailty and voice. And I wonder if her poetic vision is not unlike Mallarme’s, who wrote of the difficult poet: “he hesitates to divulge too brusquely things which do not yet exist; and thus, in his modesty, and to the mob’s amazement, he veils them over.” These subdermal poems roil in family and experience, and get under your skin even when refusing a nominalist simplicity. They feel more than tell; they do more than mean. Take, for instance, the poet’s interviews with her father, which begin as a back-and-forth exchange, then fragment across the page until the conversation meets a gorgeous incoherence. In the third interview, the speaker asks, “Then why stop playing soccer?” and the father answers, “I met you dressed as a bumblebee. My arms fit / around like a honeycomb.” To which the response is: “The leaking / fish market boxes.”

This first book of poems astounds the immigrant narrative. In Spit, we learn that protest and testimony are insufficient lyrics of an older generation; yet, neither are these poems sounding the mechanical jazz of language poetry. Spit is concentrated voice, kaleidoscopic narrative. Expect this poet to impact the present generation, to unveil the lies we tend to cite—which no longer suffice.