Voices of Asian America in the Spoken Word Movement
Migration and memory in the poetry of Jess X Chen, Cathy Linh Che and Sabrina Ghaus
The genre of spoken word liberates poetry from the page, breathing life into verse at the nexus of literature, theater, oral history and political activism. Performed intimately before a live audience, each piece is firmly situated in a community and sociopolitical context in a way that a written book of poetry is not. Often representing the voice of the marginalized, the spoken word tradition simultaneously entertains and empowers those who speak and witness it; it is hence impossible to talk about spoken word separately from the communities where it is performed. I will focus on the Asian and Pacific Islander American (APIA) spoken word community in Boston and the role poetry serves as a vessel for uplifting immigrant narratives here.
First I will explore spoken word as form, tracing the development of spoken word as a fusion of existing artistic and political traditions. To illustrate how these larger trends have played out in the specific context of APIA immigrants, I turn to the history of the EMW Bookstore “East Meets Words” open mic in Cambridge, the longest-running APIA open mic on the east coast. I will delve into pieces by three first- and second-generation immigrants who have featured at the East Meets Words open mic: Vietnamese American poet Cathy Linh Che, Chinese American poet Jess X Chen, and Pakistani American poet Sabrina Ghaus. I will investigate how common themes of love, loss and language weave through their work to shed light on the immigrant experience.
Poetry and the Academy
In the 1980’s, Joseph Epstein’s editorial “Who Killed Poetry” sent the literary world into a tailspin. Lamenting a “divided literary culture” in which “poets and the common reader are no longer on speaking terms,” he proclaimed the atrophy of the poetry community.[1] Poetry was becoming, according to Epstein, increasingly the exclusive sphere of the PhD and MFA-toting crowd. His editorial elicited a storm of responses from critics, writers and professors, including pieces titled “Can Poetry Matter?” and “Death to the Death of Poetry.” As Susan Somers-Willett recounts in The Cultural Politics of Slam Poetry, it was during this time that the question of a dwindling audience for poetry was re-opened: “Who is reading poetry? For whom is it being written? Has poetry’s spirit of necessity and urgency died — not for its practitioners but for its readers?”[2]
Epstein writes of the ‘diversity’ of a past generation of poets: “Occupationally, they ranged from physician (William Carlos Williams) to editor (Marianne Moore) to insurance executive (Wallace Stevens); in personal style, from traditionally formal (T. S. Eliot) to bohemian (E. E. Cummings) to suicidally desperate (Hart Crane).”[3] Still, for all Epstein’s distinctions, this supposedly ‘diverse’ smattering of names is starkly homogenous in other ways. Of the six authors, all are white, and all but one are male. Randell Jarrell, who echoes the growing alienation of the masses from poetry in “The Obscurity of the Poet,” expounds that “art matters [because] from Christ to Freud we have believed that, if we know the truth, the truth will set us free: Art is indispensable because so much of this truth can be learned through works of art alone — for which of us could have learned for himself what Proust and Chekhov, Hardy and Yeats and Rilke, Shakespeare and Homer learned for us?”[4] Hardly a surprise — another list of seven white men.
If poetry is lauded for its ability to reflect the rawness and diversity of the human experience, the world of American poetry has always been and is still epistemologically crippled. Many poets who do not fall into this overwhelmingly white male mold cannot help but wonder: Where are the truths of their experience reflected? This is a question that Asian American poets often seek to answer through their art.
Beyond the canon: The Asian American poet
Monsters and mirrors
For poets of marginalized identities, growing up in a curriculum in which they do not see themselves reflected discounts their voices and teaches insidious psychological lessons to be unlearned.[5] Pulitzer-winning novelist Junot Díaz reflects of his own childhood as a Dominican American:
“There’s this idea that monsters don’t have reflections in a mirror. And what I’ve always thought isn’t that monsters don’t have reflections in a mirror. It’s that if you want to make a human being into a monster, deny them, at the cultural level, any reflection of themselves. And growing up, I felt like a monster in some ways. I didn’t see myself reflected at all.” I was like, “Yo, is something wrong with me? That the whole society seems to think that people like me don’t exist?” And part of what inspired me, was this deep desire that before I died, I would make a couple of mirrors. That I would make some mirrors so that kids like me might see themselves reflected back and might not feel so monstrous for it.”
If you asked me in elementary school as a pig-tailed Chinese American girl what I wanted to be when I grew up, I would have told you that I wanted to be a poet — the highlight of my school year was always the poetry unit of Language Arts class. When my fifth grade teacher Mrs. Knudson told us we could pick pseudonyms for our writing, I remember thinking long and hard before settling on the name Celeste Woods.
Celeste Woods? Somehow, from the age of ten, I had already internalized the belief that proper poets were white, because “Tina YingYing Xu” didn’t sound like a ‘Real Poet.’ The rest of my schooling did little to ameliorate this misconception: In middle school, my favorite poets were William Wadsworth Longfellow and Edgar Allen Poe. In high school, the English curriculum was praised for including ‘great works’ by and about women such as Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice and Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own. For the first time, our class explicitly discussed feminist literary criticism. Yet, even as the addition of women to the syllabus could be considered progressive, the themes these authors tackled in their writing still felt distant — frankly, because they concerned the lives of white women in the English upper class, even as my classroom was majority Asian American. If the point of literature is to hold a mirror to our ‘souls’, or to elucidate ‘truth’, there remains a chasm between institutional education and the lived experience of marginalized identities across which the ring of ‘truth’ is muffled and distorted.
My first Christmas home from college, I dug up a framed poem Mrs. Knudson had hung up on the classroom wall: “Dandelion,” by Celeste Woods. It was a poem from the point of view of a dandelion growing amidst a garden of daffodils, roses and tulips. The dandelion cried out toward passersby, incensed that it was scorned as a weed even as it saw exquisite beauty in itself. Although I was driven to write this poem in fifth grade more by an innocent admiration of flora than anything, today I see in my poem an allegory for the buried narratives of Asian Americans: our stories are seeds carried to this foreign land by the wind, waiting to burst forth from the dirt.
Although we have been told this soil is not suitable for us, even as we have been straight-up called an invasive species, we bloom. In sidewalk cracks and under the most inhospitable of environments, we burst the most brilliant yellow. We have laid our roots everywhere: in universities, in kitchens, in tech start-ups, and on ranches, sometimes invisible and sometimes conspicuously visible. As the proverb goes: “They tried to bury us. They didn’t know we were seeds.
“Can you make this more Asian? Less Asian?”
Even as a handful of APIA poets such as Li-Young Lee and David Mura have reached critical acclaim, the burden of representation is a quandary in itself. Asian American poets often face a Catch-22: if unpublished, their narratives remain wholly absent from literary culture, or — as Edward Said famously warns in Orientalism — represented only by outsiders with an ever-present temptation toward caricature and fetish. Yet when published, the personal narrative is inevitably diffracted through the prism of ethnicity. If critically acclaimed, the work is either hoisted as an ethnographic flag of Asian-America, or celebrated consciously in spite of its Asian-American-ness (as one critic praised Li-Young Lee, his work “transcends color, class, nationality” and is remarkably “universal”).[6]
In a roundtable discussion after a performance at Barnard College, poet Cathy Linh Che professes of friends being asked by editors, “Can you make this more Asian?” while yet other friends are asked, “Can you make this less Asian?” The publishing industry has always been society’s large-scale distributor of stories, and thus, the gatekeeper of mainstream culture. Yet the bottom line of the publishing industry is to sell books — and inevitably, the primary American audience is white, protestant and middle-class. The logic is that either the culture is the story, or inhibits the story: So dress it up, or take it out. What is the worst fate — for a culture to be unrepresented, or misrepresented? Where can Asian-American poets speak without dread of their culture being tokenized, homogenized, or effaced?
The rise of spoken word poetry
The first slam in 1980’s Chicago
While the Academy debated the relevance and diversity of poetry amongst themselves, a new poetic underground began to revolutionize poetry from the bottom up. Emerging from the jazz clubs and coffee shops of urban America and taking cues from blues and rap music, the spoken word performance style took off in the nineties. The first weekly spoken word series was organized by a construction worker in Chicago in 1986, who drew from “low-culture” baseball and bridge terminology to coin the term “poetry slam.”[7] Compared to traditional poetry readings at which guests are expected to listen politely and reserve clapping until the end, slams are known for encouraging interactivity and rowdiness. Judges are selected randomly from the audience, and audience members are encouraged to snap, grunt, moan, and interject as they are moved during slam pieces. A writer for the Black Youth Project comments, “The fundamental lack of pretension in this oral form of poetry is what has given spoken word its charm, its power, and its resonance over the last twenty or so years.”[8]
In 1982, just four years before the first poetry slam, Charles Bukowski declared in the documentary Poetry in Motion, “Poetry itself contains as much energy as the Hollywood industry. As much energy as a stage play on Broadway. All it needs are practitioners who are alive to bring it alive.”[9] In the decades since Bukowski’s words, spoken word has taken him up for the challenge, bringing poetry to life on the stage and imbuing the world of poetry with new electricity.
Spoken word as the art of self-proclamation
The most important metric for scores at a poetry slam is the degree of a performance’s perceived ‘realness’, a potent combination of authenticity and urgency. As literary and theatrical form, spoken word poetry is always written and performed in the first-person. Pieces draw from an incisive autobiographical experience to manifest a politicized identity. Unlike high-culture poetry, whose themes are often held to the metric of universality, spoken word does not expect nor aim for everybody to ‘get it’; rather, it claims only to represent the unique experience and personal truths of the speaker. In this deeply subjective way, performing spoken word is “the art of self-proclamation.”[10]
It is from this act of self-proclamation that spoken word draws its transformative power. Since the rise of postmodernism, identity has been conceptualized not a static essence but fluid and contextual.[11] Susan Somers-Willett invokes the concept of “performativity,” a theory arising out of the philosophy of language to describe “the capacity of speech not simply to communicate but rather to act and consummate an action, or to construct and perform an identity.”[12] The very process in spoken word of exchanging affirmation between the poet and audience in a poetry slam not only describes identity but also constructs identity. The authenticity of one’s marginalized experience is not only articulated, but also confirmed in the performance of a spoken word piece.
This is revelatory in many ways: through this lens, poetry slams become sites of identity negotiation on both an individual and community level. Ragan Fox, a slam veteran, describes the affirmation of identity at slam events as an “uprising of sorts. It’s a declaration from marginal voices that their experiences are important, salient, and deserving of documentation.”[13] In a society that systematically devalues marginal voices, the act of applauding or assigning a numerical score at a performance figuratively and literally confers value to marginal voices as worthy of being heard and celebrated.
Spoken word as oral history and political resistance
In Caribbean-American feminist writer Audre Lorde’s polemic “Poetry is Not a Luxury,” Lorde writes that poetry for the oppressed is nothing short of a vital necessity. Rather than the “sterile word play” that “the white fathers distorted poetry to mean,” Lorde describes poetry as “the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action.”[14] Poetry lays the imaginative groundwork of liberation, articulating suffering and allowing the oppressed to dream of an alternative reality.
This spring, I had the opportunity to walk around Lake Waban with Chicago-based Korean-American activist and writer Suey Park after a speaking engagement at Wellesley College. Suey is best known for her political commentary on Twitter and launching the viral hashtags #BlackPowerYellowPeril and #NotYourAsianSidekick. Beside the glittering water of Lake Waban, Suey recounted a recent conversation with her mother. Although her first-generation immigrant mother didn’t always see eye-to-eye with Suey’s activist work, her mother commented that if she had been the one expressing strong opinions on political issues rather than her daughter, her advocacy work would not be as well-received due to her painfully foreign accent and clumsy grammar.[15]
For second-generation immigrant poets who have watched their parents struggle with language barriers, spoken word becomes a way to tell the stories and voice the concerns their families were never able to vocalize in America. “The key function of literature,” as Chinese immigrant writer Ha Jin proclaims in “The Writer as Migrant,” is “to combat historical amnesia.”[16] Not only does poetry provide a structure for the revelation of experience as Lorde writes, but the very recording of experience as oral history. Growing up immersed in American popular culture, second-generation immigrants are able to bring their experiences into the American mainstream in ways their parents never could. As a vessel for both memory and imagination, constructing the past to deconstruct the present to reconstruct the future, the very writing and sharing of spoken word poetry becomes a political act, in the way that self-expression is a product and locus of power.
The East Meets Words open mic
Poetry and politics are seamlessly interwoven into the event itself. Halfway through each night, there is a time dedicated to community announcements in which audience members are encouraged to direct people’s attention toward local social justice issues. Recent community announcements have included the raising of tent cities in Quincy Center to protest the eviction of Chinatown residents, the establishment of a South Asian open mic on Thursdays, and a fundraising event for a medical mission to North Korea. The spoken word crowd does not shy away from wearing its heart on its sleeve. In fact, Kai Huang, the host of the May 2015 open mic, wore a stethoscope throughout the night in solidarity with hunger-striking students at Tufts University.[18] Between performers, Huang shared his experience on site earlier that day, where he put his medical training to use monitoring the students’ health. That night, the typically lighthearted lyrics of the freestyle rap cipher included homages to the students. Underscoring the interrelatedness of political action and artistic expression, those at EMW recognize that the work of liberation comes in myriad forms.
Looking back on a video commemorating the sixth anniversary of East Meets Words, familiar faces can be seen in the crowd, on stage, and behind the scenes that are still around today. In the video, Taiyo Na, a musician, writer, performer and educator recognized by the Governor of New York for his “legacy of leadership to the Asian American Community,” congratulates EMW on “turning six.” In it, he calls EMW “the northernmost stop on the Underground Railroad for Asian-American artists, nesting a wetland for those migratory birds known as poets, an open stage, an open mic, and an open door for those inquisitive and insatiable souls.”[19] Similarly albeit more broadly, Dominican American writer Junot Díaz compares immigration to space travel, an act of “jumping between two entire existences, two entire temporal moments.”[20] It is at these Asian American open mics that these two existences and temporal moments converge, allowing poets to embrace and explore both universes within themselves in an emotionally and creatively nurturing environment.
Themes in Asian American spoken word
The Asian American experience shares many themes, but is by no means monolithic. (In fact, scholars suggest that the concept of “Asia” itself was a cultural product of the west, and the Asian American identity is formed in reaction to similar racial treatment in America.[21]) I admit the limitations of my endeavor to account for the diversity of this experience, which ranges across gender, country and region of origin, rural to suburban to urban, socioeconomic status, refugee status, age of immigration, and generation of immigration. Striking a balance between breadth and depth, I will focus on the performance and works of three Asian American women poets who were born in the US or arrived with their parents at a young age, undergoing much of their socialization here. However, these three women are regionally and socioeconomically diverse; they represent East, Southeast and South Asian communities. One of their parents has a PhD while another’s parents work in auto shops and garment factories. It is through their words and subjective experiences that I will examine the immigrant experience.
Sabrina Ghaus
Sabrina is a Pakistani American poet, activist, and community organizer raised in rural Ohio and the Bay Area, now based in Boston, MA. Her work has previously been published by the Oakland Asian Cultural Center and in the literary and arts magazine, “Jaggery.” Sabrina writes on themes of diaspora, violence, and love of all kinds, and fiercely believes in the importance of big skies and summer. The chapbook of hers from which I draw is titled Open Wounds, Seeded Heart.
Jess X. Chen
Jess is a Chinese American poet, artist, activist and filmmaker. They are a member of the member of the Justseeds Artist Cooperative, a facilitator of Artists Against Police Violence, and the former coach of the Brown/RISD college poetry slam team who won the national award for “Pushing the Art Forward.” The chapbook of theirs from which I draw is titled From the Earthworm to the Night.
Cathy Linh Che
Cathy is a Vietnamese American poet from Los Angeles and winner of the Norma Farber First Book Award and the Kundiman Poetry Prize. She now lives in Brooklyn and is working on a project documenting her parents’ experiences as extras in the film Apocalypse Now (1979). The poetry book of hers from which I draw is titled Split.
‘Forever shackled to a borderline’: Immigration as a state of being
One of the most fundamental themes in the literature of diaspora is the very question of what constitutes immigration. The Oxford English Dictionary defines immigration as “the act of coming to live permanently in a foreign country.”[22] However, poets have taken upon the job of going beyond the most basic characterization of boarding a boat or plane and landing on foreign soil to aim at the heart of what it means for a human to experience immigration.
In the first line of the poem “Immigrant Love,” Sabrina Ghaus declares, “Since the day I was born I have never stopped immigrating.”[23] In this poem, immigration is conceptualized as a state of existential dislocation. Even though Ghaus was born in Ohio, she lacks a sense of belonging even in the country of her birth due to perceptions of being a ‘perpetual foreigner’ no matter how much she assimilates. Yet, if ‘home’ is not her native country, then where can it be? In this love poem, Sabrina writes, “Just yesterday I crossed the borders of my heart into your arms / I’ve flown border after border and yet / This is the only migration that has ever felt like coming home.”[24] For an immigrant, reclaiming ‘home’ is inevitably tied with finding a site of existential comfort, which can be located as much in physical places as in relationships. For Ghaus, ‘home’ is found in the arms of a loved one, if not any country. The poem ends on a hopeful note, as even those who have left their homes, or are societally excluded from feeling at home, can construct their own sense of comfort in interpersonal relationships and community.
Continuing to play on the idea of immigration as a process as well as a state of the psyche, Jess X Chen asks, “How many undocumented bodies are forever shackled to a borderline?”[25] Although undocumented immigrants have made it across the physical border, it is difficult to build a sense of stability whilst consumed by a constant fear of deportation. In a sense, the undocumented are still in a limbo between countries, “shackled” to an emotional borderline and condemned to eternal immigration.
Echoing Taiyo Na’s and Junot Díaz’s earlier avian imagery, Chen adds, “Perhaps immigration is a form of transformation, driven by an undefeatable optimism for new life: mother and child become a migratory bird as they triumph enormous struggles to reclaim life and community in a new country.”[26] However, like migratory birds in permanent flight, undocumented and refugee immigrants sometimes are unable to truly land. Jewish Egyptian immigrant André Aciman describes the plight of the exiled as “not just someone who has lost his home; he is someone who can’t find another, who can’t think of another. Some no longer even know what home means. They reinvent the concept with what they’ve got, the way we reinvent love with what’s left each time. They bring exile with them wherever they go.”[27]
These poets interpret exile and immigration as states of being. Rather than being temporally and spacially defined, immigration extends far beyond arrival on foreign soil and into the clutches of the heart and mind.
‘Shadow cities’: Intergenerational trauma
Through poetry, these poets express their efforts to understand their parents’ former lives, empathizing with their struggles and sorrows. If immigration is a state of the psyche, then the native homeland is also a place never far in the imaginary. Aciman expounds the concept of the “shadow city,” the idea that the cities in which one has lived are superimposed upon reality like transparent layers of film. He writes, “No Mediterranean can look at a sunset in Manhattan and not think of another sunset thousands of miles away … it is not New Jersey I see when I watch the sunset from Riverside Drive.”[28] Reality is but one layer of the imaginary; the Jersey shoreline can be just as much the Mediterranean Sea. Present experiences and past memories are inextricable in the mind, and experienced and conjured simultaneously.
Yet, while Aciman is whisked back to the images of a “galaxy of little fishing boats that go out to sea at night, dotting the water with their tiny lights till dawn” and myriad other idyllic memories, he had the fortune of leaving Alexandria before the war.[29] Not all refugees are so lucky to have evaded violence. Rather than evoking comfort or bittersweet longing, Cathy Linh Che’s father is constantly recalled to traumatic memories of war in Vietnam. In her poem titled “In every psyche, tiny or dramatic perforations — ”, she remembers of her father:
On Christmas Day, he mistook
the Macy’s star
for the Viet Cong flag.
While watching
Forrest Gump, he told me
how he too carried a friend.
“He squeezed
around my throat so tight,
I thought I’d die with him.”[30]
The title of Che’s poem echoes Aciman’s concept of places as layered transparencies in the mind, but contributes the imagery of “tiny or dramatic perforations.” Each layer of film contains psychological pinholes through which it is all too easy to involuntarily slip between layered worlds. Even as Che’s father goes through his daily life in America, navigating cultural icons such as Macy’s and Forrest Gump, the smallest minutiae have the power to jolt him back into the jaws of near-death in the land of memory. This imagery of layered worlds elucidates Aciman’s cryptic statement, “I am not caught between two points. I am two points caught in the same spot. Correction: I am two points caught in different spots.”[31] Che’s father is not caught between Vietnam and America; it would be more accurate to say that Vietnam and America are tangled within himself. Or perhaps more — that there are two selves: a version of him in Vietnam during the war, and a version of him in America watching a movie with his daughter. To echo Junot Diaz’s time travel metaphor, these two selves exist in two different places and temporal moments, discrete yet embodied by the same individual. In Aciman’s imagery, points on different transparencies bordering the same hole, pervaded by the same fear.
In a poem titled “Bloodlines,” Cathy writes of her mother:
When I dig in,
the bloodlines emerge,
ribs from spine,
each line a bone,
each bone
a story.
I excavate
a skeleton:
War, seizure,
my older sister dead.
Buried in the motherland —
somewhere in Vietnam,
a broken seed, still
waiting to grow.[32]
The theme of linearity is introduced in the poem’s title, “Bloodlines,” which calls to mind bodily veins as well as family heritage. As Che gives her mother a massage, she scrutinizes features of her mother’s physical body and imagines her psychological scars. The sorrows of her mother’s past life — war, the death of her first child — are buried in her mother’s psyche like a skeleton in solid earth. The imagery of memories as buried bones parallels the body of her older sister laying in the soil half a world away as “a broken seed, still waiting to grow.” The interment of both her sister and her mother’s memories of her sister represent a rupture in her family’s “bloodline” as well as the broken linearity of her mother’s life as an immigrant, asked to put her past behind her no matter how difficult. However, the fact that these skeletal memories can be unearthed from her mother’s body still implies that no matter how wide the ocean they cross, the muted sense of loss and regret are ossified in her mother’s very bones.
Pakistani-American poet Sabrina Ghaus also gives voice to her mother’s heartaches in the poem “Talking to My Mother:”
ma, when they braided chameli in your hair
and your kajol ran wet around your eyes and you
missed your father like anything
what did they tell you?
did they tell you about democracy
did they tell you about shopping malls
did they tell you about two years of waiting
did they tell you about how this country steals people
and turns their homes into warzones?
did they tell you about missing your mother’s funeral
did they tell you about fear
did they tell you.[33]
The poem begins addressed to her mother, truncated to a comfortable “ma” and afterward addressed directly as “you.” Carrying an intimate yet colloquial tone throughout, the poem reads as if Ghaus is simply having a conversation with her mother. However, the content of these questions grow increasingly somber, beginning with the innocence of hair braids, to the excitement of democracy and shopping malls, to the frustration of two years of waiting, to the sense of betrayal when she discovers “this country steals people / and turns their homes into warzones” and finally the acute sorrow of her grandmother’s faraway death. The penultimate phrase asks, simply, “did they tell you about fear,” avoiding the specific imagery that the other lines possess and cutting straight to the emotion. By reducing the line to a single abstract noun, Ghaus forces the listener to imagine what chilling memories her mother must have endured for this one word to warrants its own line.
The final phrase tapers off even more quickly, ending with simply “did they tell you.” It redirects the emphasis from the content of the experience toward those who are constantly goading on her mother, who remain an ambiguous “they.” Regardless of whether “they” refers to specific family members or general social expectations, Ghaus builds a sense of driving external pressure through the repetition of “did they tell you.” Coming off as almost accusatory and ending in an abrupt period rather than a question mark at the end, Ghaus channels a sense of indignity at the myths her mother has discovered to be false, one by one. These include the run-of-the-mill stories about the virtues of democracy and capitalism as well as a myriad of other revelations: that it is not so easy to enter America (“two years of waiting”), that she would turn wary and fearful, and that she would have to sacrifice her role in the lives of loved ones (“missing your mother’s funeral”). In the form of a tirade of questions toward her mother, Ghaus captures the gradual disillusionment of immigrants who come to America fueled by optimistic myths to find a very different reality containing hardship, sorrow and fear.
‘The white man’s tongue’: Language as a bridge and a barrier
As poetry is formulated in language, and language itself is often one of the challenges of immigration, Jess X Chen’s poem interrogates the medium of its own expression in English. Second generation immigrants are typically introduced to the world in their parents’ mother tongues, but decline in fluency after entering the English education system. Chen, whose parents brought them to the United States as a toddler, reflects on their relationship to both Mandarin and to China in their poem “Shattered China”:
Motherland, I am sorry.
I severed our umbilical cord
with my own teeth the day
I learned the white man’s tongue.[34]
In the first word of the piece, Chen addresses the poem to her motherland just as Sabrina addressed her poem to her mother. But while Sabrina’s poem took the tone of an interrogation, Jess’s poem is an apology. Extending the metaphor of the motherland to be a literal mother, Jess writes that they severed the umbilical cord to China with their own teeth by adopting English as her primary language and gradually losing command of their native Mandarin. In the way that an umbilical cord physically ties together mother and child, Jess considers language the most direct link a motherland has with her children, a link by which the motherland can nourish them. Yet, Jess has committed the ultimate act of betrayal in falling into the sphere of “the white man’s tongue.” The underlying tragedy is that the very apology is written the English language, constituting a betrayal in its own creation. In this paradoxical way, Chen encapsulates the pain of cultural loss in the immigrant experience. While the poem itself is the smell of a burning bridge, language is also Chen’s way of healing from the burns.
While Chen poses language as a burning bridge, Salman Rushdie proposes that language can constitute a new bridge in its exercise. Rushdie writes in “Imaginary Homelands” that language itself “needs remaking for our own purposes.” What Rushdie calls “linguistic struggle” is necessary because it offers “a reflection of struggles between the cultures within ourselves and the influences at work upon our societies.” While Jess sees their adoption of English as their surrender of their culture to the oppressor, Rushdie suggests, “To conquer English may be to complete the process of making ourselves free.”[35]
Spoken word as a means of self-liberation
For more and more poets in the 21st century, spoken word is the means of self-liberation. Queer South Asian spoken word poet Alok Vaid-Menon discusses their experience coming to grips with how to fight for social justice in a TED Talk. They declare, “to tear at the fabric of our culture — this is what it will take to change the world.”[36] It is with their words that spoken word poets tear and mend the world toward justice, starting with their own identities and communities. In postcolonial literary theorist Gayatri Spivak’s essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?”[37] Spivak asks how the marginalized can commandeer their own narratives. In a world that often silences and co-opts marginalized voices, it could be that spoken word is the voice of the subaltern finding its volume, trembling through beauty into speech.
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Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. Can the Subaltern Speak? Reflection on the History of an Idea (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010).
Somers-Willett, Susan. “Slam and the Search for Poetry’s Great Audience” and “I Sing the Body Authentic: Slam Poetry and the Cultural Politics of Performing Identity” in The Cultural Politics of Slam Poetry: Race, Identity and the Performance of Popular Verse in America (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2009).
Vaid-Menon, Alok. “We are nothing (and that is beautiful),” TEDxMiddlebury, 2013
[1] Joseph Epstein, “Who Killed Poetry,” Commentary Magazine, August 1, 1988, https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/who-killed-poetry/.
[2] Susan Somers-Willett, “Slam and the Search for Poetry’s Great Audience,” in The Cultural Politics of Slam Poetry: Race, Identity and the Performance of Popular Verse in America (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2009).
[3] Epstein, “Who Killed Poetry.”
[4] Randell Jarrell, “The Obscurity of the Poet,” in Poetry and the Age, (London: Faber and Faber Press, 1953).
[5] See recent studies of how the Los Angeles Unified School District’s implementation of Ethnic Studies curricula has increased attendance rates.
[6] Juliana Chang, “Reading Asian American Poetry,” Oxford University Press and The Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States (MELUS) 21, №1, Poetry and Poetics (Spring 1996) 81–98.
[7] Meliza Beñales, “Poetry Slam.” Encyclopedia of Activism and Social Justice. 2007.
[8] Asha, “Hold Onto That History,” Black Youth Project, October 25, 2011, http://www.blackyouthproject.com/2011/10/spoken-word-poetry-hold-onto-that-history/
[9] Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz, Words In Your Face: A Guided Tour Through Twenty Years of New York City Poetry Slam (New York: Soft Skull Press, 2007).
[10] Susan Somers-Willett, “I Sing the Body Authentic: Slam Poetry and the Cultural Politics of Performing Identity,” in The Cultural Politics of Slam Poetry: Race, Identity and the Performance of Popular Verse in America (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2009).
[11] Gary Aylesworth, “Postmodernism.” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Spring 2015.
[12] “Performativity,” Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Performativity.
[13] Susan Somers-Willett, “I Sing the Body Authentic,” 77.
[14] Audre Lorde, “Poetry is Not a Luxury,” in Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches by Audre Lorde (1984).
[15] Suey Park (Korean-American activist) in conversation with the author, April 2015.
[16] Ha Jin, The Writer as Migrant (University of Chicago Press, 2008)
[17] East Meets West Bookstore, “About,” http://www.emwbookstore.com/about
[18] The students were calling to repeal the restructuring of the university budget that would lay off custodial staff.
[19] Boston Progressive Arts Collective, “East Meets Words Sixth Anniversary,” Vimeo, March 2011. https://vimeo.com/28624624.
[20] Marina Lewis, “Interview with Junot Diaz,” Other Voices #36.
[21] Philip Bowring, “What is ‘Asia’?” Far Eastern Economic Review (vol. 135, no. 7), Feb 12, 1987.
[22] “Immigration,” Oxford English Dictionary Online, http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/us/definition/american_english/immigration
[23] Sabrina Ghaus, “Immigrant Love,” Open Wounds, Seeded Heart (Boston, 2015).
[24] Ibid.
[25] Jess X Chen, “Immigration as Transformation,” 2015, Tumblr, http://jessxchen.tumblr.com/post/112481802072/immigration-as-transformation-heres-some-designs
[26] Ibid.
[27] André Aciman, “Shadow Cities,” in False Papers: Essays on Exile and Memory (2001), Kindle location 514
[28] Ibid., Kindle location 610
[29] Ibid.
[30] Cathy Linh Che, “In every psyche, tiny or dramatic perforations — ” in Split (2014)
[31] André Aciman, “Shadow Cities,” Location 1819
[32] Cathy Linh Che, “Bloodlines” in Split (2014)
[33] Sabrina Ghaus, “Talking to My Mother,” Open Wounds, Seeded Heart (Boston, 2015).
[34] Jess X Chen, “Shattered China,” From the Earthworm to the Night (2014)
[35] Salman Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981–1991 (1991), 17.
[36] Alok Vaid-Menon, “We are nothing (and that is beautiful),” TEDxMiddlebury, 2013.
[37] Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Can the Subaltern Speak? Reflection on the History of an Idea (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010).
