Eileen Tabios’s Reproductions of the Empty Flagpole is an endless swoon. Reading it puts you in a state of suspension — to misquote her, “an emotion you will welcome as a discovery.” Like a flag torn from its moorings, borne aloft, knowing no nation, just the wind, her poetry is the essence of sensual drift and travel.

But I’m wrong, of course: the central image, after all, is the empty flagpole, or rather, what remains: traces of languorous Manhattan afternoons, the lingering of strangers in cafes and deserts, the cinders of urban longing and belonging.

But these conjured scenarios of wisp and wander conceal a steely interior: “For she has trained men to kneel and she is replete.” It’s romantic in the extravagant sense of the word, and the reader’s obligation is to surrender. Let go, she whispers in your ear. Let go.

[Actual conversation with airport baggage inspector the other day:

Inspector: [looking at cover] What is that?
Me: I think it’s a close-up of a plant.
[Pause.]
Inspector: [looking puzzled] And what does the title mean?
Me: [thinking fast] Not sure. [Pause, then adding lamely:] It’s a book of poetry.
Inspector: Ah, that’s why.]

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Tim Yu writes:

Here’s my question, though–and I don’t have an answer: What is the difference, then, between the category “good poets who happen to be Asian American” and “the fantasy of social colorblindness”? If we reject the idea that the category “Asian American writing” has determinate content, then what does it mean to employ the category at all? In particular, what’s “Asian American” about a text whose only racial marker is the ostensibly Asian name of its author?

(I had to snip a delicious tidbit about a couple of poets that he asked me not to post, alas.)

But let me take a hastily written stab at it: I’m not so sure that I’d agree that “Asian American writing” doesn’t exist as a category, or that it refers to nothing on the ground. I simply reject what “Asian American writing” as a
discursive category has evolved (or devolved) into, as an Orientalist beast defined from within and without. Eileen‘s recovery/rescue of Jose Garcia Villa (in her edited volume of Villa’s work, The Anchored Angel) into the Asian American canon represents a main phase of this project: interrogating what Asian American literature has narrowly come to be. In turn, Tim’s excellent essay argues for Villa as a “proto-transnational” figure, haunting the borders of both “American” literature and “Asian American” literature and whose work, shorn of the usual ethnic signifiers, provides an excellent entry into questioning the notion of Asian American lit per se.

(Villa’s position in Filipino literature is a different story all together. My mother went to school in the ’50s and majored in English, which was why I was exposed to Villa at a young age. (One of her brothers was a poet, another was a critic, and so there was always poetry around the house.) In any case, she was totally into his coconuts/nipples poem, and was trying to explain it to me — now that I think about it now, it seems a little disturbing.

But by the time I went to college in the ’80s, the ’60s had happened, and the world had changed. A lit professor of mine in the Philippines was talking about how literature had to be socially engaged for it to have any relevance, and should not be created as simply art for art’s sake — “like those poems by that American, Jose Garcia Villa,” he said with barely disguised contempt. True story. It’s either that kind of dismissal, or Villa is way too canonized in the Philippines as a kind of distant literary father — enough so that people don’t have to read him anymore.)

(And I’ll digress and muddy the waters even further: if Tchaikovsky was gay, then would “The Nutcracker” be gay music? Or is he simply a good composer who happened to be gay? Does one runs the risk of devaluing sexuality if one says no? Or is there a huge gap in terms of content between music and poetry, i.e., is it less possible to be “ethnic” in music than in poetry?)

There are a couple of positions one can take regarding ethnicity, for instance, but it’s clear that there’s always a dynamic tension between both poles:

1. Ethnicity is elective. That is, all those ethnic markers — whether it be food, or language, or clothing, however seemingly arbitrary they may be — are things to be deployed, to be operationalized, and as such, ethnicity is malleable and flexible and highly contextual.

2. But many people labor under particular ethno-national categories imposed on them by states or other people, and so in that sense they have little choice in the matter. Tagalogs, for instance, like to think of everyone else in the Philippines as Filipino, even though that lived experience of being “Filipino” may be extremely different to, say, a Muslim resident in Mindanao. Ethnicity therefore can be shot through with unequal power relations and as such isn’t all that fluid.

3. And we know in any case that those ethnic choices are a fiction as well, since I have to wear my brown skin all day. Such colorblindness (or generic Americanness) does not exist in the same way for the person of color, as s/he is always/already marked as Other. The idea of race as a cultural construction may have been fostered by well-meaning sociologists and anthropologists, but one cannot wish away those pesky phenotypical differences (regardless of whatever cultural significance is accorded to them). In contrast, an Anglo American can wear four-leaf clovers and drink green beer and, in short, be Irish American for just one day, then retreat to Vanilla American the rest of the year. Asian Americans simply don’t have the “luxury” of retreat. (But to digress again: can literature give the writer that illusion of momentary retreat? But can the text be so easily demarcated from “real life?”)

In any case, there probably shouldn’t be any absolute position — or, ultimately, it may all be a matter of semantics, and the debate becomes pointless after a while. The statements about the Wayne Wang films in my previous entry are, according to Eileen’s criteria, both accurate. But if someone were to say that Chan Is Missing is a “more” Asian American film than Smoke, surely one would agree, and one doesn’t have to be acceding to Orientalist criteria to say that.

I’ll end with something from Dana Takagi, from her essay “Maiden Voyage: Excursion into Sexuality and Identity Politics in Asian America” (found in Russell Leong’s edited volume, Asian American Sexualities: Dimensions of the Gay & Lesbian Experience):

A politics of identity and whatever kind of politics ensues from that project — multiculturalism, feminism, and gay movements — is first of all a politics about identity. That is, about the lack of a wholistic and ‘coherent narrative’ derived from race, class, gender, and sexuality…

And later on in the essay:

The gist of this essay has been to insist that our valuation of hetereogeneity not be ad hoc and that we seize the opportunity to recognize non-ethnic based differences — like homosexuality — as an occasion to critique the tendency toward essentialist currents in ethnic-based narratives and disciplines. In short, the practice of including gayness in Asian America rebounds into a reconsideration of the theoretical status of the concept of “Asian American” identity. The interior of the category “Asian American” ought not be viewed as a hierarchy of identities led by ethnic-based narratives, but rather, the complicated interplay and collision of different identities.

All right, back to grading.

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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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It’s about time I wrote a little something about the sparkling joys of poet Eileen Tabios’s blog, WinePoetics. I imagine her drinking her wine, her entries spilling like tiny diamonds onto the keyboard, getting stuck between the “j” and “k” keys.

I met her a few months back at a reading, where she stumped me with a question on some offhand statement I made (I was introducing the writers) about how poets are needed to imagine the nation. I couldn’t really answer. Then I ran into her again buying Peet’s at SF State (god, this is starting to sound like some kind of mash note), just before she had a poetry reading. (I couldn’t go because I was teaching my research methods class at the same time.) Anyhow, she clearly had no idea who I was. =)

Her latest entry, “Song of the Torn Footnotes,” is characteristically lovely. “Your hands never memorized the circumference of her ankles.” And again: “As the moon rose, we never entered a room whose lights I cancelled from a sudden shyness.”

So, Eileen, if you’re reading this, consider it fan mail. Or better yet, consider it a toast.

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