In response to a recent posting by Eileen Tabios, who writes, in part:

I’m sure the sunny professor doesn’t realize he struck a nerve with me (or perhaps he does). You see, prior to tending my grape vines (all one stalk of them), I was fairly active in the Asian American literary scene…..but what I noticed is that much of my work never gets classified as “Asian American” or “Filipino American” literature. Why? Because I don’t write the kind of stuff that has mostly become classified (as Timothy has observed) as Asian American works by referencing biography, food and ethnicity. I am not the only “Asian American” poet who’s ranted before at this practice.

I really didn’t mean to strike a nerve — though I realize that now — but my initial hesitation to classify her as such was partly in reaction to what Tim Yu wrote earlier. That is, I didn’t want to simply pigeonhole her poetry as “Pinoy poetry,” as poems (or as a blog) that is only brought up within that Asian context. (Not that that’s a bad thing, but I think the readers know what I mean.) Both Asian Americans (and well-meaning non-Asian editors, etc., out to “diversify” their anthologies) are complicit in fashioning particular tired images, narratives, paradigms, and so on that keep Asian Americans in safe, domesticated categories. And that was what I was reacting to when I wrote what I wrote — I think Eileen and I agree about things, only I came about it the other way round. For instance, I think Lew’s Premonitions is important precisely because it does not simply proclaim Asian American poetry as an “Other voice.” Not all Asian American poets may want their work to be (“merely”) classified as “Asian American poetry,” with all that that label, positive and negative, entails.

She writes as well:

Let me spell it out: if the author is Asian American, that makes the works “Asian American” — the work itself doesn’t have to fit your preconceived paradigms. Kapisch?!

Oh, I completely agree. But — hee hee — let me play devil’s advocate and present a couple of statements:

Chan Is Missing is an Asian American film.
Smoke is an Asian American film.

Both may be true, but is one truer than the other? =)

(There will be a Part 3 to this entry as well, including a response to a letter by Tim Yu, and Dana Takagi gets thrown in there somewhere.)

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(I’m totally blushing. And you should see Eileen’s comments on my blog! Brown skin doesn’t blush easy, but in this case…)

Anyhow, this will be a more rambling entry than usual. The title of the entry came to me as I (thoughtlessly) clicked on the category “Pinoy” (look to your right for the category archives) after I posted the entry on Eileen Tabios’s WinePoetics blog. This was, of course, technically true — she is Filipina, after all — but the entry wasn’t really Filipino in content, and neither is her blog very Filipino either. Whatever “Filipino” means, anyway.

And then a very nice mention from Mac Diva on her Mac-a-ronies blog (a must-read, by the way, along with her other blog, Silver Rights), where she calls my blog “an olio of news, entertainment, poetry and material about the Philippines.” But I feel I’ll let some people down, because I hardly post on Filipino or Filipino American things, really.

Much of this is going through my head lately because of Tim Yu’s tympan blog, where he has a hilarious and thought-provoking entry on writing an “Asian American” poem — link swiped from WinePoetics, natch. (See also his equally interesting response to a post by Ron Silliman.) Or rather, parodies of the four categories of Asian American poems he has seen:

–the grandparents poem
–the family photograph poem
–the exotic food poem
–the erotic poem, usually employing imagery from the exotic food poem

Yeah, it is indeed a little snotty, as Yu put it, but not inaccurate. I can think of a few elements contributing to and mitigating this phenomenon:

1. I see this more often in small student-edited collections: young poets learn from those “Asian American” models (and may be given the same writing exercises, i.e., “write what you know”) and (unwittingly) imitate them. Nothing wrong with this in general, but…

2. This also operates on a “culturalist” level, i.e., stop a random Chinese American person (for instance) walking in the street and ask her or him what “Chinese culture” is all about, and it is likely that family, respect for ancestors, food, etc., will be invoked. Again, nothing wrong with this in general, but…

3. Unfortunately, this becomes reified uncritically as “Asian culture,” and editors/reviewers looking for “a distinctive Asian voice” or something with “an Asian sensibility” would end up selecting an ancestors poem or a food poem because they are coded as Asian. Writers like Amy Tan have been living off the proceeds of this “sensibility” for years.

4. And if outfitting oneself in Asian drag sells, well… this may explain the success of all those footbinding memoirs. How many permutations of “golden,” “lotus,” “heaven,” “jade,” and “dragon” could there be? Thus, the reproduction of Orientalist cliches, both internally and externally.

5. But if ethnicity, in opposition to a “biological” category like race (yes, I know both are culturally constructed), is a combination of “culture” and descent, then it would make perfect sense to have a family poem and a food poem (and food preferences, as Bourdieu argues, are practically seen as hard-wired, and integral to notions of culture) as the two models of the “ethnic poem.”

Something like Walter Lew’s Premonitions was, perhaps conceived to escape those four walls of the Asian American poem-jail (kind of like the prisonhouse of language?). As Maria Damon writes on the backcover blurb:

Neither a multiculti feel-good anthology, an instrumentalist teaching anthology that condescends to its audience and subject matter, nor an Orientalist rehearsal of anti-Orientalism, this book will liberate the reader from the strictures of the known at all levels.

She makes it sound like acid! But that’s beside the point: I think what she means is that the poems contained inside weren’t selected to communicate an Asian American sensibility (though some do), but perhaps because they were written by good poets, to paraphrase Ron Silliman in his post, who happen to be Asian American.*

I’m preparing for two sections of an “Asian American culture” class in the fall, and as an anthropologist, I taught my previous sections from a social sciences angle, only to be told later on that the classes were meant to deal with “the expressive arts.” But while reading through different anthologies recently, I found myself stupidly passing over the fiction and poetry that weren’t specifically coded as “Asian American,” i.e., those pieces that didn’t deal with language or racism or food or repressive tradition, as if “Asian American” couldn’t encapsulate anything else. And so I was therefore unwittingly duplicating some Orientalist notion of what Asian or Asian American meant. In any case, the discussion in class should be interesting next year.

*It should be made clear, though, that this is very different from the fantasy of social colorblindness.

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