Birds of Paradise by Christine Kitano | Lynx House Press 2011 | $15.95

“Plain, gray, and though I didn’t / know Latin then, still could guess / what inornatus might mean,” writes Kitano in the closing poem of her collection, referring here to the baeolophus inornatus, or plain titmouse, that flies into her family’s kitchen and is promptly killed. She demands a funeral, identifying with the poor bird:

Plain gray Christine, also known as
the plain daughter, Filia inornata
of the Kitano family. Plain gray
above, paler gray below; crest gray.

The irony of the plain, filial bird emerges when placed in conversation with the title poem of the collection, “Birds of Paradise,” which refers not to birds but to a plantfrom South Africa that looks like the birds. The title also calls to my mind the “false birds of paradise” plant from the Hawaiian islands that looks like the South African plant. I mention all this in order to call attention to the layers of resemblance and recognition—crucial themes to this book of poems. In the title poem, our plain filia inornata cups the bird of paradise plant in her hand, pretending “to be an African queen, the stunning orange / bird my companion, or Sleeping Beauty, / the flower’s sharp stigma a poisoned spindle.” A child of Japanese and Korean immigrants, her marginality and desires push her to imagine a still greater and still more exotic paradise than the one to whichher family has arrived.

In these narrative memoir poems, the search for self is expressed in instances of the estranged and wondrous. Kitano’s project orbits around moments of mistaken recognition, as in the title poem, for instance, which ends with an image of the speaker’s father: “He swam with such power / I almost forgot who he was.” In “Form,” in which the night and morning of her father’s death are condensed into small moments, traces of him are sought after in his stereo set:

White noise hummed
out of the speakers, from which I tried
to recognize a voice. But no, and when
I drew the curtains open, the room filled
not with ash, but light.

This last line evokes misperception to clarify a perception, something we see often in Kitano’s poems. “After the Show” ends with a road that looks like a rope that looks like a river, while clematis blooms look like stars lining that road, which, “From where I stand . . . might be vanishing.” Another poem, “Insomniac’s Best Nightmare,” ends with the speaker waking from a dream during the day: “The sky is still black—not with night, / but crows.” And in “Finding the Family Tree,” the speaker’s schizophrenic brother “thinks [she’s] someone else,” the girls at school “pretend not to know [her],” and:

In the bathroom mirror, under the humming
fluorescent light, behind the face
of my dead sister, I am sad, again
to find myself.

Kitano uses metaphor to collapse identities and associations into one another. In “Bile,” for instance, the speaker’s mother accuses her of being the source of her unhappiness. The poem’s cinematic angle pans back and forth between the silent “I” and the mother who keeps accusing the “you.” Lines are enjambed on the command, “Look,” and the poem ends, finally, with a conflated identity in which three generations are invoked and the words spoken become incommunicable, nonlinear, supernatural:

My mother cries

for her mother, calls out,
her crooked words Korean,
and cryptic as a spell.

Many of the poems are memories of the poet’s father, and chronicle the end of those who are gone or lost. Other poems form a series on insomnia—that state of being half-awake and without a sense of time—and is perhaps telling of this poet’s writing process, as we see in this ending to “Cooking at Night:” “And I’ll spend every night / like this, writing to someone / who sleeps in another world.”

These are also poems in search of wholeness. Paradise is a ghost in these poems, and its imagining is a stupefied act of grasping and remembering. “Untwinned” reaches for a deceased twin, for whom the speaker invents a personality: “She likes the Greek myths, / the flame-breathing chimera / that swallows its own throat.” But this is just a mirror which the narrator keeps under her pillow. The poem ends: “When I can’t / sleep, I practice fitting my fist / into my mouth. It helps me / to feel whole.” These poems are a self-swallowing act, an effort to consume the past, and an impossible effort to close and fit into a full shape. They are poems of lingering and muted absences. “Luis’s Hands” reaches a momentary closeness between two restaurant employees, but ends with the remains of solitude:

That night,
when I undressed,
I found an amber bruise
on my thigh. I pressed
my dry fingers against it
and went to bed thinking
of Luis, the muted smell
of lemon still on my hand.

And these are poems of existing within narrow margins, even inside the household. Here are a few lines from “Drowning:”

I tried to disappear,
invisibility the best defense against
my mother’s anger. I pinned my hair
across my eyes like a fence,
pulled the drawstring
hood of my sweatshirt
tight against my throat.

Disappearance, a boundary, a noose. This poem ends with a dream “of drowning, face to face,” in which the wish to vanish is impossible. One is always seen, or seeing, even if plain and gray.

Birds of Paradise is an apt title for the collection, as paradise exists only in the imagination, always lost or out of reach, much in the same way as nostalgia. And birds of paradise are only resemblances, creatures or plants or people who seem to belong to this out-of-reach space. The poems thus leaveone feeling close and remote at the same time, estranged and yet familiar.

CONTINUOUS FRIEZE BORDERING RED

Continuous Frieze Bordering Red by Michelle Naka Pierce | Fordham University Press 2012 | $19.00

Michelle Naka Pierce’s Continuous Frieze Bordering Red is made up of five lines spanning sixty-eight pages. Read the first line of the book all the way through, and then the second line, and so on. Pierce conceived of this project during the study of Mark Rothko’s Seagram murals at the Tate Modern in London. She writes a room with sixty-eight sides. We are surrounded.

Pierce chooses to begin with an epigraph by Rothko, the ending of which leads us not toward the grandiose, but toward the uncomfortably intimate: “However you paint the larger picture, you are in it.”

At first I wanted to see Pierce’s text installed, each page depicting a scene in a sequence of discrete panels. I wanted to see the breadth of such a room—I wanted to be inside of it. Then I realized—I’m in it. Pierce is in it. This sixty-eight-sided room is the spectral polygon we inhabit.

***

The scope of this book and the gestures it allows the reader to make—sweeping the eye across the page, continuing to turn, gathering momentum—resemble the panning motions of a camera lens or an artist laying down a wash of paint. But when Pierce zooms in, studying the expanse, she finds the body situated as a color—she finds memory and breakage in what looks solid. Nothing is as fluid as a pan or wash might lead you to believe: “Racial fluidity, as you / know it, is a myth” (43-44). Continuous and continually shifting up close. Zoom out, and it looks like five lines of text spanning sixty-eight pages.

Continuous Frieze Bordering Red succeeds because it takes a two-dimensional visual catalyst (Rothko’s murals) and concentrates on the spatial quality and physicality of the brushstroke, as well as the ways in which the canvases install themselves in a room. It uses this knowledge as a framework for imagining the entrapped/migratory location of the hybrid/mixed race body as it exists in an ever-increasingly benign/brutal police state and allegedly “post-racial” landscape.

Pierce not only commits to creating an architecture in which to situate this/her/our ever-shifting self, but allows us to enter and participate in the texture of that movement/room by catching us in the process of continually turning the page. In a cluster of text not incorporated into the frieze, Pierce concludes, “Yet the architecture cannot be seen from this angle” (32). She doesn’t offer the larger picture in its entirety, but a sequence of discrete panels—a “freeze”—in which we are caught. Using the second person pronoun, Pierce paints her reader into the scene: “You are this continuous sequence with adjacent elements not perceptibly different. / Assassinate. Little more little. Repeat instruction” (24-25).

While reading this book, I was constantly sort of losing my place, or moving back to catch again the beginning of a spectacular sentence (sequence) and propelling forward into an awesome, continuous frieze/freeze, negotiating across pages and multiple horizons. It was an absolute joy to keep turning the pages, to stay in motion with Pierce, to be always already moving/across.

In the process of reading/moving through this book, we are also tracing back over the places we have been, reaching page 68 and returning then to 1, returning/arriving, repeating a trace. Pierce remembers that “[a] cultural trace is repetition [imitating your mother's salty palms as they shape / onigiri]” (26-27). At each tracing, the color deepens, achieves density, must be interrogated, as in: “The confines are / invisible but present [i.e., enforceable]. No one will check your visa. Your accent, however, will be / questioned” (50-52).

***

Rothko's room at the Tate Modern, via guardian.co.uk

Condensation / takes on new significance, as you unpack not only your things but your national identity, which is / already in a state of flux from an ethnic standpoint. Distance plays tricks on your perception. From afar, / it looks as though the entire canvas wasn’t used, but up close, you see beige paint and hope this isn’t idle / commentary on your life. You hear your text [a taxonomy of cultural products] translated into another / language and find it’s like being introduced to yourself in the mirror, only you don’t recognize that it’s / you. Who is this broker between forms and documents, not evenly in between? This is your plight, / which reminds you that moving from one country to another just after birth doesn’t allow for roots to set / in: they are exposed, as you are, dangling from a terracota pot  (3-11).

Pierce strains our focus, placing a line on top of a memory on top of a color, “[a]s if the focal point were always in motion or absent from the conversation” (23). Rothko’s slabs of color offer no “subject” to focus on, no foreground image; as such, Pierce finds the “subject”/herself in/visible in the wash, an object of scrutiny, a body that emerges when stared at. “You arrive within an unfamiliar season and have difficulty embodying the space of ‘I’” (53) and it is this “I” that is either “always in motion or absent.”

The background bleeds/morphs and the foreground blurs. Stories of transportation, train stations, air travel, immigration, customs, access, status, weather, mail, cues, approaching, embarking, departing, arriving, local, locals, location—arise from a single color. In the book’s horizontal orientation, vertical “trips” (reading the line underneath rather than across) offer accidental slippages; “You are living / what some call a polycontinental transexperience. Only no one really calls it that” slips into “You are living / hyphen” (42-43).

The “fucking / hyphen”—a loaded symbol of miscegenation, global intimacies and dislocations—is just one of the marks Pierce contends with as she “convey[s] the floating / border” (51-52) or floating “boarder.” Pierce’s text hyphenates—it breaks both in the crease (of the book) and in the turn (of the page). We read, “A demarcation, where this sentence ends and” turning the page, “this line begins with a reverberation” (29-30). These crossings/hyphens are like painter’s tape under which color seeps to mar the line: “In this unkempt sentence, in this lattice of vagueness, / lies violence” (31-32). Pierce pulls back, color peels. Separation, passing. Not absolutely permanent or perfect, these borders are casually and randomly enforced, fleshy and violent.

You anticipate the worst as you approach customs: / the lines, the interrogation, the sullied plexiglas (2-3).

Boundaries: they exist / on maps. You run into them when you submit your passport. You are annoyed when you are chosen for / a random search [...] Checkpoints are real and insistent and at other times rather benign. / Your sense of direction is confused by this (44-49).

How is it that you are able to walk freely / about the cabin while others risk [der]ision at the hands of Metro station announcers? Your skin, / in the end, is a similar shade of foreign. A 45-minute delay due to “a person on the tracks” broadcasts / the conductor. You’d be wrong to think this wasn’t an act of suicide, even though others may call it illegal / immigration (59-63).

***

This morning you wake to precipitation and soon learn that repeating phrases [even / slowly] doesn’t make them any less foreign to your ear. You ask a local to pronounce something / to make sure that the final letter is silent: “yes, we eat the end of our words.” Definitions continue to / confuse in much the same way you resemble an outcast. Integration renovates the hybrid’s wiring / while leaving the facade more or less intact. “You are as white as a non-white girl can get.” Or: “In this / moment, you seem very Asian to me.” (9-14)

Pierce’s choice to use Rothko’s paintings as an entrance into a discussion of immigration and Japanese American hybridity is an interesting collision. In a long-standing tradition of white painters taking inspiration from Asian forms and painting over history, and in the long-standing reality of indigenous folks being surrounded and subsumed by whiteness and becoming invisible, Pierce inserts herself into the frame of Rothko’s colors. That she enacts herself here in Rothko’s paint ["Yearning: salvage and recovery" (54)] shows that such variation does exist, even once the final stroke has dried.

***

Rothko's room at the Tate Modern, via dieuwkeswaindesigns.wordpress.com

I’ll leave you with five lines / borders / swathes / hyphens:

Can / you reclaim ‘mongrel’? Strain the semantic residue off? (54-55)

The border is a scar on the forearm. Is / a conversation with your naturalized mother or white partner. Is the syllable added in the transliteration / of your name (24-26).

You terrorize the unp[red]ictable scene. / There is no place, really, where you are not alien. But you are studying the cadence of passing from side / to side, the grammar of intricate mobility (45-47).

What is the / impact on the itinerant body? A shifting present. An assortment of venues [...] And you begin to embrace your incongruent parts, to / sketch a shelter out of fragments (21-25).

Indigenous to neither, you remain ainoko (50).

Now, turn / the / page.

INSOMNIA AND THE AUNT

Insomnia and the Aunt by Tan Lin | Kenning Editions 2011 | $13.95

Tan Lin’s Insomnia and the Aunt glows neon yellow—like hilighters, French fries, hot mustard packets from Panda Express, or a Waffle House of scallion pancake-flavored commercial. In this remote control scrapbook Lin grieves the death of his estranged, mixed race aunt, who owned a motel in the middle of nowhere and watched a lot of TV. Tucked among postcards, a photograph of Ronald Reagan bottle-feeding a chimpanzee and footnoted Google reverse searches, Lin tries to extract ghosts from cached pages and remember his aunt’s eyes in the white noise and signal snow of “the Asian American immigrant experience,” which is really just America being watched on TV.

I have watched hundreds of movies with Asians and fake Asians in them, and the one thing that makes them all the same (except the white Asians) is that the Asians never stare into your eyes through the glass of a TV screen and you are never allowed to look too deeply into theirs. I think it is for this reason that whenever I think about my aunt, and TV for that matter, I can never remember my aunt’s eyes (they appear to belong to someone else), and think instead of Robert Redford, who said in an interview that it is necessary for the body to lie to the mind (not the other way around) when acting and that the various strata of lying are continually searching for each other in the wilderness that most people call the truth and that my aunt calls television (11).

Instead of working on this review, I decide to re-watch an episode of the (cancelled) TV series Dark Angel. I think about Jessica Alba in Seattle (driving a motorcycle, and how I always thought she was half-Filipina) and Tan Lin in Seattle (driving 87 miles to see his half-Chinese, half-white aunt), and as I compulsively watch episode after episode on the internet I begin to understand what Lin already knows. Like an addiction, serial television—with its timed commercial breaks, its catchy theme songs, its over-rehearsed staging of the spur-of-the-moment—feeds us with its promise of repetition and allows us to watch from a distance. On TV, sexual tension is always prolonged and people never say what they really mean. When we’re watching, it’s easy to avert our eyes, to lie. Television channels feelings and vends emotions. This is why the corner convenience store sells potato chips and ice cream for one or two dollars more than other places. Thinking about one particular television-consumed immigrant relative of my own makes it difficult to write about this book.

And yet watching my aunt watch TV makes me believe something about myself, like I am going to walk into a room and say something to someone who is there, like what are we having for dinner tonight? or did you hear about the person who put a quarter in someone else’s parking meter and was arrested for it? or it makes me want to talk about my family sitting around the TV listening to Chet Huntley talk about the Vietnam War when my mother says it is time to get up and eat dinner and we get up and eat our rice with red chopsticks out of bowls (one of them is green) my father made and sometimes we never say anything at dinner (18).

Insomnia and the Aunt is about the connection between immigrants and television watching, acting and lying, grief and killing emotions. Lin learns that the television stands in for our silence. It acts as a conduit between relatives, a mode of communication. It allows someone else to have our feelings for us, helps us escape from our “least predictable emotions” and makes it easy to experience moods we can’t find for ourselves (21, 23).

TV promises to fulfill our American dreams, but instead eats the residue of our ghosted desires and re-broadcasts them as lies, as actors acting “natural,” as laugh tracks. This creates an ambient track, a constant noise to ghost-write our lives. Lin and his aunt have watched so much TV together that his aunt has become the television—their feelings for each other, their whole relationship has become a television. In Lin’s book the television becomes a somatic, emotive appliance, digital flesh, his aunt’s re-transmitted body.

In writing about the “delay in the speed of an understanding” (28), or the delay in the grieving process, Lin notes, “Some relatives are meant to be imagined years before or after they died” (14). His aunt, who his parents’ never spoke about—perhaps because she was half-Chinese, or because she ran a motel in the middle of nowhere, or because she spoke “English Translation in Peking Dialect” (27)—has been subsequently forgotten, ghosted, disappeared. Lin grieves her death, tries to remember her eyes and encounters her insubstantiality, her retractable irretrievability, how she haunts a TV set. Lin writes, “A blank computer screen can still remind us of a face” (13). Is memory and grief the same thing?

This is why my aunt thinks all TV, even live TV, is canned, and why she thinks America is basically not a place or even an image, but furniture. For my aunt, the live broadcast of the Vietnam War of my youth and her early middle ages resembled a re-run. My aunt accordingly has very few memories of violence or even racism in America. TV has made her forget all these things. Likewise, it is very hard for me to remember her even though I miss her intensely. The more I miss her the more she becomes furniture or a TV commercial for Tide detergent (19-20).

Julie Patton, remarking on the work of Akilah Oliver in a panel at this year’s AWP Conference, spoke of the United States’ inability to publicly reconcile the historical trauma of slavery within the African American community. It is in the absence of this public reconciliation, Patton said, that America continues to make ghosts, or continues “to ghost” Black bodies, and much of Oliver’s work concerned itself with the processes of grieving and being visited by these ghosts.

I think America’s “continual making of ghosts” resonates with many other immigrant communities of color in the US, in particular the haunted inheritance of Asian American folks, who are often unable to acknowledge trauma or process their emotions around these shared cultural experiences. Instead they bear and pass on silences, so that what becomes shared is a ghost. Lin’s aunt comes to stand for a kind of inheritance, an inherited body of the immigrant condition in America, which is really a condition of America, which is really a television. Lin writes, “TV makes me forget all the colors except the one with an aunt inside of it. An American TV station has many Chinese moods inside of it just like we did, even if it is missing one or two of its actual family members. Once a mood like my aunt gets inside a TV set, it starts to die” (34).

All the poems I gave to my aunt to read while we sat in the Bear Park watching TV have been dead for a very long time. I see them stand up and walk around the room. They look like animals that have been recently stuffed. They shed tears like pancakes. They move around like a little parade with felt-covered batons. They smell of department stores. They tell my father about used cars. They hand my mother grains of rice. They invent songs by Depeche Mode or Tears for Fears. And in this way I know that the things I am feeling are no longer exceptions to the things that recur (44).

“Nonetheless, watching TV with them made it possible for them to wait a very long time for something, I think it was my family, to arrive” (39). Lin is removing photographs of his aunt from this scrapbook, and these deletions mean he is writing about what can no longer be seen. Instead of seeing her image we watch a television screen. We do not look into her face, we aren’t angry when we tell a story about racist discrimination, our faces do not betray any emotion. Instead of writing about Lin’s book, I find that watching Lin watch himself within the space of the book is much more like the truth. We stare.

But paradoxically, staring, especially later in life, removes most of one’s feelings from the world and deposits them somewhere else, whether in childhood, a scrapbook, real life, a former girlfriend, a news story about ozone, a romantic French restaurant, a telephone call, or a movie. I didn’t love someone like my aunt because of who she was, I loved her because she looked at me an awfully long time (45).

Lin‘s Insomnia and the Aunt is a television grieving for us. We can walk away, but we can never stop watching—or stop being watched—by our dead.

SCHIZOPHRENE

Schizophrene by Bhanu Kapil | Nightboat Books 2011 | $15.95

Schizophrenia (literally, “to split the mind”) is defined as a breakdown in relation between thought, emotion and behavior, leading to a sense of mental fragmentation (Oxford American Dictionaries). While fragmentation and the diasporic experience are hardly strangers within the lineages of Asian American literature, Bhanu Kapil’s Schizophrene maps crucial connections between schizophrenia, im/migration, racism, trauma and mental illness. This book arcs through the air in a perpetual state of departure, “[a]nd the line the book makes is an axis” (5) around which perception begins to whirl. Without much visual formatting on the page, we see that the whole image is broken. What is extraordinary about Kapil’s writing is that we experience it as a texture—the psychosis of her narrative registers in us as a sensation.

Partition, schism. Split or division, cleft. Schizophrene focuses on the Partition of British India in 1947 “and its trans-generational effects: the high incidence of schizophrenia in diasporic Indian and Pakistani communities; the parallel social history of domestic violence, relational disorders, and so on” (1). Kapil’s research into migration and mental illness can be traced back to her chapbook Water-damage: a map of three black days (Corollary Press, 2006), in which previous versions of some of the text in the “Partition” section of Schizophrene appear.

In Water-damage Kapil chooses an informative epigraph from Elizabeth Grosz’ Architecture from the Outside: “The psychotic is unable to locate himself or herself where he or she should be: such subjects may look at themselves from the outside, as others would…They are captivated and replaced, not by another subject…but by space itself.” Replaced by space itself, occupied. Replaced by segregated grids and militarized nation-state borders, lines that “split the mind.” “Because it is psychotic not to know where you are in a national space” (41), Kapil cradles the colonized psyche, imprinted by occupation, in her hands.

Touch is an incredibly important part of this book. In the “Quick Notes” at the end of Schizophrene, Kapil clues us in:

From cross-cultural psychiatry, I learned that light touch, regularly and impersonally repeated, in the exchange of devotional objects, was as healing, for non-white subjects (schizophrenics) as anti-psychotic medication. In making a book that barely said anything, I hoped to offer: this quality of touch. (71)

So it is in this way that the book functions as an archive of gestures of restorative touch—a move toward personal and communal somatic healing. If “[s]chizophrenia is rhythmic, touching something lightly many times” (61), then Kapil mimics this mental process as a vibration—in the text’s repetitive pulse, in the ways it begins again, “mid-ocean, in a storm,” and continues to depart.

* * *

Schizophrene begins with several different departures: a book, an aeroplane, a boat, a suitcase, a ferry. In mapping this field of departures and flight paths, in drawing a line from schizophrenia to im/migration and back again, the LCD display crackles, the grid snaps—a zig-zag stem becomes a triptych becomes a door. Only after attempting to track their lines and subsequent arcs do we see the field come alive with fragments. Kapil writes that “‘[a]ll trajectories are [psychotic] in their reliance upon arrival,‘” and so to never arrive (home) means that to depart is a perpetual splintering.

Kapil senses “a flux where the body always is” (6) and discovers boarding passes sewn into her lost coat. Like so many other diasporic subjects, Kapil processes the inheritance and genetics of hand-me-down traumas—of being uprooted and relocated due to war and imperialism—as one would de-frag a harddrive. Kapil wanted to arrive; she indicates that “[t]hese notes are directed towards the region I wanted to perceive but could not” (5). The failure of the book, the fact that Kapil threw a hand-written final draft of it into her snowy garden in Colorado in 2007 and recovered the damaged notebook months later, beginning to write again from its fragments, makes her poetics a poetics of retrieval, a way of massaging the schism.

When I was a child, I used to strip down and beat myself with a stick. Is this, a root distinguished from its branching plant, kept in a jar on a shelf to grow, watered, schizophrenic? Is it a right thing or a mad thing not to want to re-connect, to avoid reading or writing because of what those will bring? (28)

It is the arrival, the rupture of im/migration, and the attempt at re-connection and return that causes this breakage, that requires this touch. When Kapil asks herself, “What kind of person goes home?” (19), she knows that “home” is located simultaneously in several physical addresses as well as in ancestral memory, and that it requires commute time, crossing an international date line and remembering what cannot be explained. The avoidance she mentions above—the fear of re-connecting, arriving/returning and writing—are symbolized in the failure, the release, the throwing of the book into the dark garden. The way this kind of information can function as a grave (41) is both a paralysis and an erasure for many diasporic writers in the process of decolonizing the mind.

These electrobion notes, which are not really notes but dreamed up, basic observations which bely the facts, the following fact, which is turn destroys a content as yet unwritten:

I don’t exist.

I never existed. We shift our chairs to avoid the sunlight, eclipse light, which could damage us forever. (32-33)

This moment in Schizophene instantly recalled a similar moment of im/possible existence in Ronaldo V. Wilson’s Poems of the Black Object (Futurepoem Books, 2009):

Each shot (photograph, point, poem, sentence) my memory, truncation, embrace, deferral, a poetics, is not writing out of or into, but through the center of whatever I mark to be the current state of what is the deliberate gesture in:

It is impossible to say who I am. (59)

Kapil and Wilson are both working with the intensity of fragmentation as diasporic subjects, as colonized subjects, and they both embody that fragmentation as visual and textural fields. Kapil throws the book into the snow, tries to touch everything at once, tries to adhere to the surface of the city, the surface of the page, and fails. But this book is what comes after. “Later that night it rained, washing the country away. A country both dead and living that was not, nor ever would be, my true home.” (69). With this shattering final line, Kapil’s Schizophrene squats inside the wetness of the place that can never be home and retrieves every piece, every penciled sentence.

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.