University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

Citing passages: citational poetics and transpacific identities

(USC Thesis Other)

Citing passages: citational poetics and transpacific identities

PDF

Download a page range

Download transcript

Copy asset link

Request this asset

Transcript (if available)

Content Citing Passages: Citational Poetics and Transpacific Identities
By
Brandon Som
________________________________________________________________________
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(LITERATURE AND CREATIVE WRITING)
August 2014
ii
Dedication
In memory of Yow C. Som (1914-1994)
iii
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the Center for Transpacific Studies for a generous
fellowship enabling me to complete this dissertation, as well as the Literature and
Creative Writing Program for their years of guidance and support. I would also like to the
thank the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center for a fellowship providing me with
community, space, and time to do a large part of the writing for this project.
I am grateful to Susan McCabe and John Carlos Rowe for continually expanding
the intellectual scope of this dissertation while rigorously pushing—through generous
close reading and commentary—for clarity and precision. Thank you to David St. John
for his insight and much needed encouragement. And gracious thanks to Bruce Smith,
Viet Nguyen, Dorinne Kondo, and Brian Bernards who greatly contributed to the shape
and content of these arguments.
For their insight, encouragement, and friendship, I also wish to thank Stacey
Waite, Michael Bunn, Michael Busk, Elizabeth Cantwell, Josh Rivkin, Alex Young,
Solmaz Sharif, and Jason Bacasa.
Finally, this work would not have been possible without the love and support of
my parents, Gina Burton and Donald Som.
iv
Table of Contents
Dedication ii
Acknowledgements iii
Abstract v
Introduction 1
Chapter 1: Rewriting and Reciting Identity: The Citational Practice
of Paper Sons at Angel Island 16
Chapter 2: Source as Echo: Constructing and Deconstructing Voice
and Identity in Theresa Cha’s Dictée 37
Chapter 3: Craig Santos Perez’s from Unincorporated Territory:
Reinscribing Native Presence and Transit in the Pacific 60
Conclusion 90
Bibliography 95
Appendix A: A Crow’s Robe 100
v
Abstract
Building from the history of Chinese paper sons, those individuals who cited false
identities in order to enter the U.S. during the Chinese Exclusion Period, Citing
Passages: Citational Poetics and Transpacific Identities focuses on the poetic technique
of citation within Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictée and Craig Santos Perez’s from
Unincorporated Territory. This dissertation participates in a larger conversation within
contemporary poetry that reconsiders the lyric mode and self-expression in light of a
reemergence of poetic experimentation that appropriates outside texts. The poets within
my study have a complicated relationship to “self-expression”—their “selves” have been
written for them. That is to say, they have been made subjects in various restrictive and
colonizing discourses. Working through post-colonial and psychoanalytic theories of
identification, I demonstrate how appropriation rather than signaling a post-identity turn
is a central concept within identity formation. Moreover, turning to the social and
political history of Chinese paper sons, we find that both expression and appropriation are
not mutually opposed or exclusive but are utilized together as acts of and strategies for
survival. Indeed, for the poets of this study, citation is a way of building intertextual
alliances while performing a critical and subversive reinscription of those discourses that
have constituted their identities.
Also included in this dissertation, the poetry volume A Crow’s Robe centers on
my Chinese grandfather who was a paper son, citing the false last name Som to enter the
U.S. through Angel Island in 1928. The book utilizes the practice of citation in order to
recall the histories of Chinese Exclusion and Immigration at Angel Island while exploring
the way identity formation is an on-going process of borrowing and assemblage.
1
Introduction
Paper Sons: Citing Lives, Citing Poems
My grandfather entered this country in 1928, citing before immigration officials at
Angel Island a false identity. Under the Chinese Exclusion Act—the first U.S.
immigration legislation targeting a specific race and class of peoples—Chinese
immigrants often turned to illegal methods to enter the country. The most common
practice was to claim oneself as the foreign-born son of a Chinese immigrant who had
already established citizenship. My grandfather did this, exchanging the name Ong for
the name Som.
Individuals who used this method to undermine immigration restrictions are
commonly referred to as “paper sons.” Along with their false last names, paper sons often
received coaching papers or coaching books. These were crib notes that paper sons used
in order to study and recite their new identities during interrogations designed to catch
individuals who might be using false documents. Chinese immigrants wishing to pass
these interviews (sometimes referred to as exams) memorized a long, complicated, and
specific set of details, including fictive family genealogies, family homes, and family
events. In many ways, paper sons performed and cited not just paper identities, but paper
lives.
What might it mean to have an identity that is “paper-made?” In many ways, the
phenomenon of paper sons illustrates the ways in which identities are
contingent—formed by a process that might include resistance as well as collaboration.
Moreover, the specific performative acts of memorizing and reciting for the immigration
2
interviews demonstrates the ways language and discourse are key to how identity is
articulated—both in the sense of assembled and expressed. In defining identity, cultural
theorist Stuart Hall writes,
I use ‘identity’ to refer to the meeting point, the point of suture, between on the
one hand the discourses and practices which attempt to ‘interpellate,’ speak to us
or hail us into place as the social subjects of particular discourses, and on the
other hand, the processes which produce subjectivities, which construct us as
subjects which can be ‘spoken.’ Identities are thus points of temporary attachment
to the subject positions which discursive practices construct for us (5-6).
Here, identity rather than a fixed position is a complex and ongoing process in constant
dialogue and negotiations with written and spoken forces. To document this “meeting
point,” we might turn to citation—its incorporation of evidence and archive—to record
the contentious and collaborative multiplicity of voices. We might also recontextualize,
even alter such citations to begin to undo and rewrite this process.
Along the U.S.-Mexican Border where exclusion policy has turned from Chinese
to Mexican immigrants, paper continues to be the means by which officials enforce and
police identity. As I write this, a recent court ruling affirming section 2B, the “Show Me
Your Papers” provision of the controversial Arizona immigration law Senate Bill 1070,
has made it possible for enforcement officers to question the immigration status of
individuals they stop and believe to be undocumented. As many civil rights activists have
argued, the provision will increase and justify the racial profiling and discrimination
instigated by Sheriff Joe Arpaio and a state government insistent on “cracking down” on
3
undocumented Mexican immigrants. Our nation’s “gatekeeping” continues, policing
borders while perpetuating a system intent on delineating and documenting identity.
Ironically, discriminatory practices and creative practices may both be identity
based, essentializing and reifying those identities that are paper-made. As a poet, I have
attempted to create poetry conscious of this fact and critical of identity policing that
might equate the demands “show me your papers” and show me your poems. But if,
indeed, my poems are my “papers” how might they be objects not of consent but
critique? If I am to take a lesson, one of countless, from my grandfather, that lesson
would suggest not only the strategic ambivalence of identity but the very surrendering of
identity itself. Indeed, as grandson of a paper-son, perhaps the most subversive act, the
most unaccountable move, within a immigration system that discriminates on the very
basis of identity, is to resign identity, in such a way that acknowledges the truly
contingent and collaborative efforts that contribute to the ongoing process of selfhood.
Exploring the connection between the citing of false identity and the poetic
practice of citing another’s words, my poetry manuscript A Crow’s Robe approaches lyric
poetry with a similar resourcefulness— exchanging Romantic notions of self-expression
for a poetry forged from outside sources. Foregrounding the tensions between written and
spoken acts, the book features a series of homophonic translations of Li Po’s “Quiet
Night Thoughts,” a poem cited and inscribed on the barrack walls at Angel Island. These
sound translations procedurally mirror the transliteration of Chinese names into English,
while celebrating a subversive poetics of mistranslation and sonic multiplicity. Also
working from the Angel Island wall poetry, the longer serial poem “Bows & Resonators,”
contextualizes the “chirr” cited in the detainees’ poems by incorporating and reflecting on
4
other invocations of crickets throughout literature. Finally, revisiting and revising the
popular 1938 children’s story The Five Chinese Brothers, the poem “Confessions”
meditates on the fraught complexity of confession and, to borrow from Judith Butler, the
accounting of oneself.
A Crow’s Robe participates in a conversation in which the concerns of
experimental and ethnic literatures are not seen as separate but mutually responsive.
Instrumental to the poems and my understanding of this conversation, my critical
dissertation explores citational practices within poetry, investigating how appropriation
and incorporation—key formal acts within citation—are central themes within
contemporary poetry of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha and Craig Santos Perez. Close reading
the intensely layered and polyvocal poetics of Cha and Perez, I explore how citation can
acknowledge and so locate (site) the discursive powers that write identity as well as
revise and rewrite those powers.
Citational Turns
Much of the conversation regarding citational poetics within contemporary poetry
focuses on a turning away from self-expression and identity as poets strive to make
innovative poetry at a time of unprecedented innovations in technology. Marjorie Perloff,
the most prominent champion of citational poetics, in her recent book, Unoriginal
Genius: Poetry by Other Means in the New Century, argues that the movement towards
citational methods is indicative of a postmodern experience in which the speed and
saturation of information created by new technologies has rendered an anonymous
“amalgam of voices.” “The language of citation,” Perloff writes, “[…] has found a new
lease on life in our own information age” (4). Within the inundation of information and
5
communication brought on by new technologies such as email, Facebook, and Twitter,
the new poetry, Perloff argues, has become more dialogic, working intertextually to place
various texts and media in conversation with each other (11). Moreover, Perloff insists,
our understanding of originality has changed. She asserts, “Inventio is giving way to
appropriation, elaborate constraint, visual and sound composition, and reliance on
intertextuality. Thus we are witnessing a new poetry, more conceptual than directly
expressive—” (11).
Writing on the appropriative practices within conceptual poetry for the anthology
Against Expression, Craig Dworkin writes, “In the twenty-first century, conceptual
poetry thus operates against the background of related vernacular practices, in a climate
of pervasive participation and casual appropriation…[a]ll of which is directly related to
the technological environment in which digital files are promiscuous and communicable:
words and sound and images all reduced to compressed binary files disseminated through
fiber-optic networks” (xlii). Brian M. Reed, in his essay “In Other Words: Postmillennial
Poetry and Redirected Language,” echoes both Perloff and Dworkin when he writes, “In
today’s posthuman poetics, what impinges is data, the 24/7 press of who-says-what
delivered via TV, telephone, MP3 player, e-book, and computer screen.” Reed goes on to
argue, “A poem that emerges from this media surround is likely to operate
differently…its hallmark is not self-expression but redirection, selectively choosing and
passing along other’s words” (773-774).
In each of these assessments of why poets have turned to another’s words, we see
directional metaphors to explain both method and motive for the poet using appropriative
means. Indeed, redirection appears to be a key to Perloff’s theory of poetic innovation in
6
general. Perloff, drawing on Frederick Jameson’s recent study of modernism, The
Modernist Papers, argues in her introduction to Unoriginal Genius that literary change is
a series of turns, a “negative dialectic” responding to and working against what literary
practices have come before. For Perloff, understanding this sense of tradition—those
practices that have come before—is essential to understanding the current practices of
appropriation (and the title of her study):
Once we grant that art practices have their own particular momentum and
inventio, we can dissociate the word original from its partner genius. If the new
“conceptual” poetry makes no claim to originality—at least not originality in the
usual sense—this is not to say that genius isn’t in play. It just takes different
forms. (21)
Here, Perloff argues that in recognizing the particular trajectory—the “momentum and
inventio”—of the literary arts we also recognize how conceptual poetry might forgo
“originality” as yet another “turn” in the pursuit of “making it new.”
My project adds another directional and spatial consideration to this discussion by
considering citation and transpacific migrations. Building from my interest in the history
of paper sons, which entailed the citing of false identity to undermine a system that
discriminated on the basis of identity, my critical work reconsiders the poetic technique
of citation within Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictee and Craig Santos Perez’s from
Unincorporated Territory. While, as we will see, innovative poetics and innovative
technologies are elements in the poetics of both writers, Cha and Perez’s poetry does not
demonstrate a turn away from self expression but rather a more complicated
understanding of identity and subject formation under racialized and colonizing practices
7
in the Pacific. The poets within my study have a complicated relationship to “self-
expression”—their “selves” have been written for them. That is to say, they have been
made subjects in various colonizing discourses. Citation, for the poets I look at, is a way
of building intertextual alliances while performing a critical and subversive rewriting of
those discourses that have constituted their identities.
Whether turning to, as in the case of Cha, a complex lineage of matriarchal
muses—from Korean revolutionary Yu Guan Soon to French revolutionary Joan of
Arc—or turning to native and island centered storytelling, as in the case of Perez—the
poets of my study consistently cite an alternative tradition, one that runs counter to
“Pacific Rim” narratives that continually work to define and shape the Asian and Pacific
region and its peoples. As Rob Wilson and Arif Dirlik have argued, “The futurology of
Pacific Rim Discourse that would take semiotic and conceptual possession of the entire
region depends upon repressing those Pacific Basin others who have not yet subscribed
to the “world economy” as a post-zero-sum game (5-6). Similarly, American Studies
scholar, Yunte Huang has observed the area to be a site “riddled with distortions, half-
truths, longings, and affective burdens” (2). Huang points to a “double vision of the
Pacific”: seeing it as both material object for territorial appropriation and as an abstract
and imagined idea that justifies colonizing practices (4). Thus, inhabiting a region that is
consistently appropriated for expressions of colonial desire and global capital, we find
poets turning to appropriative practices that cite a socially and politically delimited
identity while simultaneously turning to alternative lineages to re-cite/site transpacific
Asian and Pacific Islander experience.
8
Engaging both Asian American and indigenous Pacific Island identity, my project
crosses racial, national, and area studies boundaries in order to attend to what Lisa Lowe
has observed as the “disruption” of the transpacific migrant
1
. Indeed, my focus on the
citational practice of Cha and Perez participates in the “world enlarging” practice first
suggested by Tongan scholar Epelli Hua’ofa—a methodology that cites the
interconnectedness within the Pacific region and in doing so recognizes a “sea of islands”
rather than separate and isolated “islands in a sea” (31). Moreover, understanding and
citing these connections necessarily exposes what Indigeneity scholar Jodi Byrd has
called the “transit of empire.” Byrd writes, “Bringing indigeneity and Indians front and
center to discussions of U.S. empire as it has traversed across Atlantic and Pacific worlds
is necessary intervention at this historical moment, precisely because it is through the
elisions, erasures, enjambments, and repetitions of Indianness that one might see the
stakes of decolonial, restorative justice tied to land, life, and grievability” (xiii). Within
this context, we begin to see, for poets like Cha and Perez, citing textual passages also
documents the movement—the transpacific passages—of migrants in response to the
appropriations of empire.
Other Appropriations
We see the troubling politics of appropriation at the word’s root where we find the
problematic act “to make one’s own.” Engaging the fraught tension between possession
and acquisition, appropriation necessarily raises questions of authority and power.
Moreover, a notion of fraudulence accompanies the term, for to appropriate often

1
See Lowe’s essay “Trans-Pacific Migrant and Area Studies” in The trans-Pacific
Imagination: Rethinking Boundary, Culture, and Society.
9
involves the production of copies however partial and forged. To appropriate the Mona
Lisa is not to steal the painting from the Louvre, but to take and utilize a reproduction of
its image. The extent to which something or someone can be duplicated is significant to
the act of appropriation. Even more significant is the copy’s inevitable failure to be the
original. And more significant than this is the ability of the copy, in that failure, to
question by way of its dissonance and so to destabilize the authority of the original.
Indeed, of appropriation’s many subversive effects, perhaps its most seditious is to
suggest that the original was always only a copy itself in a long interminable chain of
copies.
When turning to racial identity, we find appropriation and copying to be central
terms. Racial formation may be founded on difference, often fabricated and ill-conceived,
but the ways those differences are perpetuated and maintained has a good deal to do with
reproducing those differences to replicate a system of racial hierarchy. Considering the
latter half of the word stereotype, we are reminded of that word’s connection to print
making, to movable type, and to reproductions of figures and ideas that inform our racial
(mis)understanding. When looking at race within the context of colonialism,
appropriation’s making something “one’s own,” may describe the hostile take over and
exploitation of one culture by another. The term is further significant to the colonial
project and its maintenance as the colonizer endeavors to “civilize” and make the
colonized over in its own image (to construct copies), and as the colonized,
correspondingly, appropriates the culture of the colonizer.
It makes sense then to encounter the term appropriation in the work of Frantz
Fanon, in its overlapping of colonial critique and psychological diagnosis aimed at
10
assessing dispossession and alienation. Appropriation is central to the title of Fanon’s
first book Black Skin, White Masks. Fanon’s argument is that the perceived inferiority of
the black man to the white leads blacks to appropriate white language and culture. He
asserts, “All colonized people—in other words, people in whom an inferiority complex
has taken root, whose local cultural originality has been committed to the
grave—position themselves to the civilizing language: i.e., the metropolitan culture” (2).
Writing specifically of the colonial relationship between France and the West Indies,
Fanon describes the transformative power of acquiring the colonizer’s language. He
explains, “…the more the black Antillean assimilates the French language, the whiter he
gets—i.e., the closer he comes to becoming a true human being” (2). Thus, one
understanding of the “white masks” in Fanon’s title is the assimilation to and acquisition
of white culture. However, with this appropriation comes much suspicion. Fanon asserts,
“Among a group of young Antilleans, he who can express himself, who masters the
language, is the one to look out for: be wary of him; he’s almost white” (4).
Indeed, what Fanon stresses is the ways in which to possess a language is also to
possess “the world expressed and implied by that language.” (2). Thus, as the colonized
subject seeks to attain the language of the colonizer, he too, rather than fully liberating
himself by way of language, instead internalizes the racialized world articulated by that
language. Thus, to master the white man’s language is ultimately only to reinforce and
perpetuate the white man’s worldview. By extension, to celebrate black identity within
the white man’s language potentially reifies white constructions of blackness and
blackness as inferior. Ultimately, it is this thinking that underlies Fanon’s critique of the
11
Negritude movement and inspires his famous claim, and revision of Dubois, that the
“black soul is a construction by white folk” (xviii).
The post-colonial theorist Homi Bhabha, working from Fanon’s writings and
Lacanian psychoanalysis, continues this exploration of the colonial subject. In his essay,
“Of Mimicry and Man,” Bhabha argues that the colonial system of appropriation requires
“inappropriate objects” (123). Characterizing the subjugating and civilizing mission of
the British State within colonial India as “colonial mimicry,” Bhabha demonstrates how
the British desire to appropriate the Indian people as British subjects while denying them
as equals leads to “partial” subjects that are ambivalent: similar but different, Anglicized
but not English. (123-5). According to Bhabha, these inappropriate objects, or “mimic
men,” are “ ‘virtual’ and ‘incomplete’”; furthermore they serve both as integral part and
threatening disruption to the colonial project. Moreover, Bhabha, drawing on Lacan,
defines mimicry as metonymic in nature, a long chain of responses and slippages in
which origins are not revealed and essences not established. Revising Fanon’s
formulation, Bhabha states, “Mimicry conceals no presence or identity behind its mask”
(126).
As evident in the work of both Fanon and Bhabha, psychoanalytic theories of
identity prove useful in articulating the effects of colonialism and racism on the
individual. Freud’s theory of identification is central to these discussions; it names the
process by which a subject internalizes or incorporates the other within the subject’s
identity formation. As Diana Fuss asserts, “identification is the detour through the other
that defines the self” (2). In Identification Papers, Fuss’s book-length study of Freud’s
theory of identification, Fuss not only situates Freud’s theory of identification within the
12
context of colonialism but also demonstrates the way in which colonialism informs the
very terms of the theory. She asserts that “[i]dentification…is itself an imperial process, a
form of violent appropriation in which the Other is deposed and assimilated into the
lordly domain of the Self” (145).
Consistently, we see the ambivalent nature of appropriation: the is but is not; or as
Bhabha famously puts it the “almost same but not white.” (30). The appropriative act
points to this in-between state and underscores ambivalence. Highlighting doubleness and
pointing out this split recognizes what Bhabha refers to as the “forked” tongue of
hegemony (122). Mimicry, in its excess, in its inability to be an exact copy, also disrupts
the colonizer’s ability to recognize and reaffirm his/her own identity in the colonized
other. In Bhabha’s words, mimicry obstructs the colonizer’s narcissistic authority (129).
Ultimately, Bhabha argues that to understand mimicry is to understand the tenuous house
of cards upon which colonial hegemony rests. It is within the ambivalent world of
mimicry that “the founding objects of the Western world become the erratic, eccentric,
accidental objets trouves of colonial discourse” (131).
Found art corresponds with my own study of appropriated texts within citational
poetics. Proponents and practitioners of conceptual poetics often evoke the conceptual art
and specifically the “ready-mades” of Marcel Duchamp, whose work according to
Kenneth Goldsmith “put to rest conventional notions of originality and replication”
(Against Expression xx). Here, in Bhabha’s essay we see a similar “found art” but within
the specific context of colonial appropriation and mimicry. Indeed, what these two
discourses share is an emphasis on the visual reframing or relief created by some excess
between hegemonic authority and unauthorized or reauthorized use. The poets of my
13
study appropriate the discourses that have authored their identity as excluded,
unincorporated, and as appropriate—and appropriated—subject. I argue that
appropriation and citation, for these poets is not a turn away from identity and self-
expression but a strategic tool to carve out—as the poets at Angel Island carved into the
very institutional walls that bound them—an identity from the colonizing forms and
spaces that have subjugated and written them as subjects.
Transpacific Passages
Jodi Byrd’s claim above serves to remind us of how cultural practices—elisions,
erasures, and enjambments—sometimes too describe textual and poetic practices. What
we find when examining the correspondences between poetics and cultural politics in the
Pacific is that terms such as constraint, citation, incorporation, and appropriation have
valences that extend beyond conversations focused on aesthetic theory and the literary
arts. Indeed, when taking into consideration the history of Chinese paper sons as
citational practice, we begin to see how subversive citation is a response to the literal
constraint of racial and imperial discursive practices.
In my first chapter, I take a closer look at these discursive practices, outlining the
effects of the Chinese Exclusion Act and how that legislation instigated a system of
documentation and inspection that in turn provided the means for paper identities. Here, I
turn to Tina Chen’s theorizing on impersonation to examine the ambivalent and
contingent performance of paper son identity. I also consider Maxine Hong Kingston’s
transnational and transpacific understanding of paper sons in her text China Men.
Kingston’s representation of paper sons draws parallels between Imperial Exams in
14
China and interrogations at Angel Island. In doing so, Kingston explores the connections
between citing literature and citing citizenship and how this relationship helps to illustrate
the performative fiction of national identity. Finally, turning to the poems at Angel
Island, the chapter closes by considering how the history of paper sons might contribute
to our understanding of the largely anonymous and collaborative wall poetry carved into
barrack walls of the immigration station.
Turning then to the more recent poetry of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha and Craig
Santos Perez, my project investigates how citational poetics expands the boundaries of
the lyric in order to forge intertextual alliances while working to rewrite those discourses
that have written these poets as subjects. Utilizing poetic methods that include
documentary citation, collage, and erasure, Cha and Perez work with, at times work
entirely from, other writers’ words. In doing so, they subvert lyrical practices and
construct poems engaging in a transnational discussion that highlights subject formation
under colonial practices in the Pacific.
My second chapter focuses on Cha’s Dictée (1982). As its title suggests, Cha’s
text examines the way subject formation, like dictation, is a complex assemblage of cited
and recited materials. By highlighting the citational nature of her Disuese, or female
orator, Cha illustrates the way cultural and ideological structures interpellate and
constitute one’s voice. Exploring the historical contexts of Japanese and U.S.
imperialisms, Cha’s Dictée demonstrates how the Diseuse’s oratory is never completely
her own but predicated on and dictated by the engagement of empires in the Pacific.
In my third chapter, I turn to the poetry of Chamorro poet Craig Santos Perez.
Working in a serial mode, Perez continues to compose a single, long poem entitled from
15
Unincorporated Territory in which individual poems are designated as from various
ongoing serial poems within the larger project. Seeking to cite/site but not to fix native
presence on the island of Guam and across the Pacific, Perez practices a citational poetics
that incorporates, alters, and revises the juridical and legislative discourses that have
underwritten the colonial possession of Guam for over 300 hundred years (Rogers 2). In
doing so, Perez documents the long colonial history of Guam while offering a powerful
critique of the United States and its current day neo-colonial practices and military
occupation. Utilizing Edward Said’s notion of reinscription, I attend to Perez’s complex
and layered use of citation to reinscribe native perspective and presence within the very
passages—both textual and oceanic—from which they have been erased.
16
Chapter 1: Rewriting and Reciting Identity: The Citational Practice of Paper Sons at
Angel Island
In response to her father’s silence, Maxine Hong Kingston in her essay “The
Father from China,” constructs various possible narratives for her father’s untold
immigration story. One of these narratives places the father at Angel Island, the
immigration station that operated in San Francisco Bay from 1910 until 1940. Despite the
fact that it was once referred to as the Ellis Island of the West, the immigration station at
Angel Island was built specifically to detain and deter Chinese attempting to enter under
the strict Chinese exclusion laws instituted in the U.S. between 1882 and their repeal in
1943. While detained, the father sees the hundreds of Chinese poems carved into the
walls by incarcerated men waiting to enter the U.S. or to be denied access and returned to
China. Regarding the poems, Kingston writes, “Those who could write protested this
jailing, this wooden house (wood rhyming with house), the unfair laws, the emperor too
weak to help them. They wrote about the fog and being lonely and afraid” (55-6).
Kingston adds that the writers of these poems were mostly “anonymous”; if they did
choose to sign their names they chose a surname and village that was so common that it
would be untraceable.
Eventually, the father during his detention comes to write his own poem on the
walls at Angel Island:
In the middle of one night when he was the only man awake, the legal father took
out his Four Valuable Things, and using spit and maybe tears to mix the ink, he
17
wrote a poem on the wall, just a few words to observe his stay. He wrote about
wanting freedom. He did not sign his name; he would find himself a new
American name when he landed. If the U.S. government found out his thoughts
on freedom, it might not let him land. (56)
Hoping to discover what lies behind her father’s silence, and ultimately to tell the very
stories he is reluctant to relay—“You’ll just have to speak up with the real stories if I’ve
got you wrong,” she taunts in the opening pages—Kingston comes to find her father’s
silence connected to his immigration experience at Angel Island and its formative
presence within Chinese American history. The father does eventually pass the
interrogation at Angel Island. Kingston writes that her father “passed the examinations;
he had won America” (60). But it is clear that he does so by an act of concealment, hiding
not only his real thoughts on “freedom,” but also his real identity. In her treatment of
Chinese immigration at Angel Island, Kingston underscores the curious ambivalence in
how these “China men” expressed themselves as immigrants and as poets.
Indeed, the father’s silence, anonymity, and changing of name all speak to the use
of false documents and forged identity in order to subvert Chinese exclusion laws and
enter the country. In response to the racist Exclusion Laws, Chinese wishing to immigrate
to the U.S., who did not qualify for the exempt classes of merchant, teacher, or student,
forged their right to residency by acquiring a “paper-name.” Citing false identities, these
immigrants became “paper sons” within family lineages that had exempt status or had
already established citizenship. The paper son practice demonstrates the intensely
ambivalent, contingent, and collaborative project of identity formation. Here, identity is
18
not the expression of an inner self but an articulation and artifice resourcefully
performed.
Exploring the connections between Asian American and Performance Studies,
Tina Chen’s book Double Agency: Acts of Impersonation in Asian American Literature
and Culture introduces the concept of impersonation as a paradigm for examining the
ways in which Asian Americans perform a complex subjectivity of multiple and
oftentimes divided allegiances. Working from historical acts of impersonation, such as
the practice of paper sons and daughters
1
, Chen demonstrates how self-conscious
performance in response to socially and politically delimited subjectivity has always been
a part of the Asian American experience. Chen writes, “…embedded within the
performance of Asian Americanness exists the awareness of the ways in which such an
identity has, from its earliest moments in U.S. legal and social history, been constituted as
an oxymoron but comprises the conflicted reality that those who have been ascribed this
identity must nonetheless embody, confront, and adapt to their own ends” (19).
We find an early demonstration of this “self-conscious performance” in the poems
from the walls at Angel Island that have been collected and translated in the anthology
Island: Poetry and History of Chinese Immigrants on Angel Island 1910-1940. Recent
scholarship on the Angel Island poems moves away from content-based readings of the
poems, which see the writings on the immigration station walls as transparent vehicles of

1
Historians report that there were far fewer paper daughters than sons. Indeed, prior to
World War II, the immigration of Chinese women in general was much less than men.
Scholars cite various reasons for this, including patriarchal values in China and the fact
that Chinese men saw themselves as sojourners traveling to the U.S. in order to make
money to return home to their wives and family. But historians have also shown U.S.
legislation excluded women as well as men. In fact, legislation excluding Chinese women
prostitutes preceded restrictions on Chinese laborers. See Sucheng Chan’s “The
Exclusion of Chinese Women” in Entry Denied: Exclusion and the Chinese Community
in America, 1882-1943.
19
self-expression. Instead scholars have emphasized the material elements and historical
factors that constitute the poems’ production and that should inform our understanding of
them. Moreover, these works of scholarship de-emphasize identity, foregrounding instead
the performative and collaborative aspects of the poems while acknowledging the
ambivalent nature of the poets’ subjectivities.
Citing false identity to undermine a system that discriminated based on identity,
paper sons present an incisive example of how identities made illegal by legislative
discourse might be rewritten and recited in order to subvert that discourse. In this chapter,
I will examine how the Chinese Exclusion Act—the first immigration legislation to target
a specific race and class of people and the first laws to make unauthorized immigration
an illegal offense—required and established a system of documentation and interrogation
to which the paper son practice responded to with a proliferation of paper-made and
performed identities. I will look at Kingston’s treatment of paper sons and their
experiences at Angel Island, focusing on Kingston’s aligning of the practice of paper sons
with the practice of literary lineages and citation. Finally, I turn to the poems on the walls
of Angel Island. Following the lead of scholars such as Yunte Huang and Stephen Yao, I
focus on the intertextual alliances within the wall poetry and reconsider their anonymity
as the presence of paper sons carving these inscriptions.
Paper Sons at Angel Island
Passed in 1882, the Chinese Exclusion Act barred all Chinese immigration except
for the exempted classes of students, teachers, diplomats, merchants, and travelers. The
law also prohibited Chinese immigrants from naturalized citizenship. Thus, the act aimed
20
to exclude Chinese laborers and keep out Chinese immigrants with intentions of staying
on and settling within the U.S. Scholars cite unemployment and economic unrest in the
decades leading up to the 1880s as the chief cause for the anti-Chinese movement. Asian
American historian, Ronald Takaki argues that the Exclusion Act was “symptomatic” of
larger tensions between “white labor and white capital.” Takaki writes that the Act was
“designed to defuse an issue agitating white workers…” (111). Erika Lee demonstrates
how the federal law arose out of specifically regional issues within the state of California.
She explains that many Californians pointed to Chinese immigrants as the reason for high
unemployment and low wages. Turning to the Federal government for immigration
legislation, western politicians “argued that it was nothing less than the duty and the
sovereign right of Californians and Americans writ large to exclude the Chinese for the
good of the country” (29). Both scholars cite demographic studies to dispel any notion
that Chinese immigration posed a real threat to American workers. For example, Lee
reports that Chinese immigrants made up only 4.3 percent of the total U.S. immigrants
during the decade of the 1870s—hardly the numbers to warrant the harsh exclusion laws.
Despite the reality of these numbers, the anti-Chinese sentiment and exclusionist
rhetoric persisted. In order to combat what was commonly referred to as the “yellow
peril,” Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act in May of 1882. The law reinforced
the earlier Page Act of 1875 stipulating the exclusion of not only contract laborers, or
“coolies,” but all Chinese laborers, skilled and unskilled. Originally instituted for a 10-
year period, the Act was renewed in 1892 and passed again in 1902 without a terminating
date. With its passing, the Act began what would be six decades of exclusion until the
law was finally repealed with the passing of the Magnuson Act in 1943.
21
As Lee explains, because the law was the first immigration law to have such
dramatic restrictions—the first law in fact to make unauthorized immigration an illegal
offense punishable by imprisonment— the Exclusion Act created the need for a
bureaucratic system that included intricate documentation of immigrants and residents as
well as inspectors to police fraudulent claims. Lee reports, “Prior to the passage of the
Page Law and the Chinese Exclusion Act, there was neither a trained force of
government officials and interpreters nor the bureaucratic machinery with which to
enforce the new law” (41). Thus, the Exclusion Act and subsequent amendments created
“certificates of residence” and “certificates of identity,” which, according to Lee, were
the precursors to present-day “green card.” Until immigration changes in 1928, only
Chinese immigrants were required to possess these documents of identification.
Moreover, the documents were required of immigrants and residents, and thus the law
extended to the whole of the Chinese community, reports Lee (42).
In order to detect immigrants with false documents, immigration officials utilized
a screening process that included medical examination, photo id, fingerprinting and a
rigorous interviewing process. According to Lee, “because official Chinese records of
births, marriages, and divorces were not available, intensive, complex, and detailed
interrogations of Chinese applicants and cross-examinations of their witnesses were
considered the best means to determine exempt status and thus became standard practice”
(85). Inspectors conducted interviews in order to catch individuals in the act of lying. An
applicant’s testimony was compared with the testimony of his or her witnesses. If
inspectors discovered inconsistencies, they determined that the immigrant’s claim was
false. Lee reports that officials implemented the screening process with a “restrictionist
22
mindset” that put the burden of proof on the Chinese immigrant. Thus, Chinese
attempting to immigrate were often automatically seen as potential inadmissibles
attempting to enter by fraudulent means. Lee writes, “By the early 1900s, the immigrant
interrogations had grown longer and more complex. Because they placed Chinese at such
a disadvantage, they were generally considered the most important part of the immigrant
inspection process and remained in place throughout the exclusion era” (87).
In fact, an estimated 90% of Chinese immigrants entering the U.S. during the
Exclusion Period were using false papers (Lee and Yung 84). The most popular method
was the using of a “paper-name.” Claiming to be the foreign born children of Chinese
immigrants who were U.S. citizens, these individuals assumed a false identity and
became paper sons or daughters. Discussing the significance of paper identities in her
book Paper Families: Identity, Immigration Administration, And Chinese Exclusion,
Estelle T. Lau explains, “Adoption of these techniques was not without long-term
consequences for the Chinese—they were forced to change their names, adopt fictitious
family histories, and maintain these deceptions over time until these fictions themselves
became inescapable elements of the stories the Chinese told about themselves” (7).
The specifics of these techniques involved the purchasing of a name or “slot”
listed on the immigration papers of a Chinese individual who had established citizenship
in the U.S. As a U.S. citizen any children the individual claimed would also be citizens. It
was a common practice for a U.S. male citizen of Chinese descent to return to China to
marry and live for an extended period. Upon return, he would claim children on his
immigration papers; the number he claimed would correspond to the number of years he
stayed on his visit. He would claim the conceivable maximum regardless of what children
23
he actually had. This in turn created “slots” to be eventually sold to Chinese immigrants
wishing entrance to the States.
As Lee points out, it was the system of documentation created in order to enforce
the Exclusion Laws that made it possible for “paper sons” to claim and cite false
identities. Lee explains, “Once a Chinese applicant secured admission into the United
States and received the proper documentation, he could use that same paper record to
create as many sponsored immigration slots as he desired” (203). Thus, we see how paper
documentation provided the literal “forms”—the slots, or blank lines used to enter the
names of sons—by which Chinese immigrants were able to claim false offspring and
exploit the system. The written system created to identify Chinese immigrants and restrict
their immigration, in the hands of the Chinese migrants became a system to rewrite
identity and re-inscribe their entry and presence within the United States.
But securing false documentation was only the first step. Chinese “paper sons”
still needed to pass examinations and prove that they were who they claimed to be. By
1910, the U.S. government had built the immigration station at Angel Island to detain
immigrants and to conduct the complex screening process. Ericka Lee and Judy Yung, in
their comprehensive history of Angel Island, report that while only 38% of non-Asian
immigrants were made to go through the station at Angel Island, 68% of all Chinese
applicants were taken to the Island. Indeed, according to Lee and Yung, 70% of the
detainees at Angel Island were Chinese. Moreover, their stay was much longer than most
other immigrants. On average, Chinese immigrants were held two to three weeks, but
some stayed months and even years while attempting to pass the examination system.
24
To aid them in preparations for their interviews, Chinese immigrants utilized
“coaching papers”—sometimes single crib sheets and other times whole books—in order
to study and memorize their fictive identities. In Island: Poetry and History of Chinese
Immigrants on Angel Island 1910-1940, the editors report that immigrants, whether their
“claims for entry” were legitimate or falsified, often traveled with “coaching papers” on
their oversea journey, memorizing all they could and then discarding the papers
overboard as they approached the U.S. port. Looking at coaching materials obtained by
the Bureau of Immigration in San Francisco, Lee reports one “coaching book” contained
over 400 interrogation questions and answers. Specifically, at Angel Island after 1919,
officials ran interrogations by using a board that consisted of an interpreter, a
stenographer, and a chairman who administered the questions. Questions were often
obscure and meant to trap the immigrants in a lie. Some of the questions listed by the
editors of Island include: How many times a year did you receive letters from your
father? How did your father send you money to travel to the United States? How many
steps were there to the front door of your house? Of what material was the floor in your
bedroom? Where was the rice bin located? (22). Lee includes from one coaching book
the advice, “You will be asked whether there are any bricks, chickens, dogs, or
photographs in your house” (197). Lee goes on to report that some coaching papers
included intricately drawn maps, detailing family homes and labeling household
members.
Thus, we see how discursive practices aimed at restricting immigration inspired a
proliferation of writings as well as genealogical and geographical mappings. Within a
literary context, “Coaching Books” might be seen as fictive memoirs or fictional
25
autobiographies. Often written within the form of question and answer, they demonstrate
how identity formation is a dialogic process, a literal social construction. Moreover, the
interrogation process at Angel Island illustrates how the claiming of identity often rises
out of questions of legitimacy and legality. Judith Butler reminds us that it was
Nietzsche’s argument that our sense of a self develops from the need to provide an
account of ourselves in response to accusations of wrongdoing. She writes, “So I start to
give an account, if Nietzsche is right, because someone has asked me to, and that
someone has power delegated from an established system of justice” (11). In this sense,
immigration “gatekeeping” is also identity making, defining and delimiting the
boundaries of not only the nation but also individual subjects.
Citing Passages and Passing Exams: Kingston’s Paper Men
Kingston’s treatment of the paper son history at Angel Island examines national
identity formation by focusing on the roles memory and citation play within the
interrogations at Angel Island. Moreover, through a transnational and specifically
transpacific understanding of paper sons and their immigration experiences, Kingston
emphasizes the way in which national identity is a fiction—one that is discursive and
even literary. Thus, gaining citizenship and access to the fiction of nationality is possible
through literary means and methods—specifically memorization, citation, and recitation.
In order to do this work, Kingston draws a parallel across the Pacific between her
father’s interrogation at Angel Island and the “Imperial Examination”—the series of
26
exams he took in China that qualified him to be a teacher
2
, a government-sanctioned
position. Like at Angel Island, the father for the exams travels away from home to a
government building where he is inspected and imprisoned. Kingston writes, “An official
led BaBa to a cell, where he asked him to undress. The official looked over his naked
body for notes written on the skin, combed through his long hair for hidden papers, cut
open the seams and hems of his clothes” (28). Once in his cell, the father finds himself in
a space haunted by past students studying for the exams—all of whom used the “ring”
mounted on the wall to tie up their “pigtails” to reinforce late night studying. Like at
Angel Island, the walls are ominous with past failures: “Out of the disembodying dark
came screams of men already driven mad, footsteps, scufflings, someone yelling, ‘Ah
Ma. Ah Ma.’ The poets say men have used the ring to hang themselves.” (26). Likewise,
at Angel Island, the father discovers from other detainees that an immigrant scheduled for
deportation had also committed suicide.
But perhaps the most curious overlap is the intense memorization and recitation
required to pass the exams. Before a “panel of scholars,” that mirrors the immigration
officials at Angel Island, the father must recite from traditional Chinese literature. “He
recited by heart,” Kingston tells us, “from the Three Character Classics, the Five Classics
(The Book of Changes, The Book of History, The Book of Poetry, The Book of Propriety,
The Spring and Autumn Annals), and the Thirteen Classic’s by Confucius’s disciples”
(27). At Angel Island, after successive attempts to pass—this too a similarity to many
scholars who failed the Imperial Exams, including the poet Li Po—the Father finally
passes due to an “accurate memory.” Kingston writes, “He had passed the American

2
According to Kingston, rather than claiming exemption as a teacher, Kingston’s “legal
father” used false papers because other family members previously had used this method
and succeeded in entering the U.S. (46).
27
examination; he had won America. He was not sure on what basis they let him in—his
diploma, his American lineage (which may have turned out to be good after all), his
ability to withstand jailing, his honesty, or the skill of his deceits” (60).
It is important to note the way the previous “Imperial Examinations” based on the
recitation of the “Classics” prepares the father for the examinations at Angel Island.
Stressing citation and recitation, the “Imperial Exams” were a test of how well the father
could cite from Chinese literary tradition. Also focusing on memorization and citation,
the exams at Angel Island tested the father’s ability to cite a false or fictive family. Here,
Kingston places the lineages of literary and family predecessors in conversation.
Moreover, she emphasizes how ideas of nation and nationality are both constitutive of
and constituted within these recitative practices. Seemingly, the father trades one national
identity for another as he exchanges one name for the other. However, due to issues of
class and race, the father’s adopting of U.S. nationalism is in defiance of exclusion laws
and so ambiguous and complex. This is best exemplified by the fact that he cannot attach
his real name to his poetic discussion of “Freedom.” What we see then in Kingston’s
representation of paper sons at Angel Island, is the way in which citation and anonymity
enable the father to be both citizen and critical of that citizenship.
Here, Chen’s notion of “impersonation” helps us to understand the ambiguity of
this citizenship. Responding to post-structural critiques of essentialized identity, Chen’s
study incorporates the performance theory of scholars such as Judith Butler, Jane Gallop,
and Peggy Phelan, in order to demonstrate how Asian Americans enact their conscripted
identities and how that enactment presents opportunities for resistance and critique.
Turning to the stereotype as an example of such enactments, Chen argues, “[it] is a role
28
that demands to be impersonated if one is to perform it as a way of claiming it as
constitutive but also as constituted” (34). In Chen’s thinking the “doubled project—of
both undermining and yet not annulling identity is one manifestation of the double
agency of impersonation…” (34).
Indeed, for those paper sons indentured to immigration brokerages or their own
paper families the double-ness of their identity played out in labor-intensive ways that
underscored transnational obligations. Victor G. and Brett de Bary Nee, in their
documentary study of San Francisco’s Chinatown, detail the transnational nature of these
business dealings. They write, “A substantial part of an immigrant’s time in America was
spent working off his debt, contracted at high interest rates to a merchant in Hong Kong
who then transferred the credit to another merchant in San Francisco” (67) Lisa See in
her novel Shanghai Girls demonstrates how some paper sons were indentured to their
paper families. The novel’s narrator Pearl finds out her husband Sam is a paper son, who
has indentured himself to the patriarch Old Man Louie. The revelation comes after Sam
refuses to pull rickshaws for Louie on the lucrative and tourist-busy Chinese New Years.
During the argument that ensues, Louie exclaims, “You’re a rickshaw puller and an Ox.
That’s why I brought you here. Now do your job!” (164). Louie’s words testify to the
ways that paper sons, despite fictionalized affiliations, remained contractually tied to
their transpacific debts as well as transnational identities.
In Kingston’s presentation of the history of Angel Island, we see Chen’s
“doubling” in the repeated performance practiced in both Imperial Exams and Angel
Island interviews. That doubling serves to de-essentialize national citizenship and
demonstrates its “constitutive but…constituted” qualities. Emphasizing the specific roles
29
of memorization and recitation, Kingston highlights the perfomative and citational acts at
the center of the paper son practice. It is a performance that simultaneously pledges
allegiance while maintaining alternative and subversive alliances. Ultimately, the paper
son history points to the ways in which identity formations are contingent upon
performative and discursive acts that might be rewritten and recited in such a way that we
interrogate not potential citizens but the potentials for citizenship.
“I Threw Away My Writing Brush”
The poem listed as number 25 in the Island anthology provides a poignant
introduction to the poems at Angel Island and the paper son history. Ironically, it is one
of the few poems signed. Whether it is a paper name or a birth name, the signature closes
a poem that is fraught with the impossibility of writing the self under the unjust
conditions at Angel Island.
25
I have infinite feelings that the ocean
has changed into a mulberry grove.
My body is detained in this building.
I cannot fly from this grassy hill,
And green waters block the hero.
Impetuously, I threw away my writing brush.
My efforts have all been in vain.
It is up to me to answer carefully.
I have no words to murmur against the east
30
wind.
By Ruan (Island 60)
Angel Island editors gloss the opening conceit as a reference to “great changes.” But
beyond their function as symbol or trope, physical mulberry trees were and still are used
in the production of writing surfaces. The tree’s bark is used for paper, and its leaves are
the sustenance of worms whose silk is central to the production of fine paper and scrolls.
Moreover, such associations with paper correspond with the common practice of
immigrants who threw overboard into the sea their “coaching papers”—those sets of
instructions for memorizing paper relations and identities. Within this context, we might
consider the poet’s conceit as hyperbole for the extensive paper trail of crib notes left
behind by immigrants in their ship’s wake.
The poem continues to further demonstrate a consciousness of writing materials,
or lack thereof. As seen in other poems on the walls at Angel Island, the poet here asserts,
“I threw away my writing brush.” As Georges Van Den Abbeele argues, in his essay
“‘Tears at the End of the Road’: The Impasse of Travel and the Walls at Angel Island,”
this curious statement might suggest that the detainee left behind an education. He
explains, “…what is discarded in this action is not just the instrument for writing but the
professional identity of the one who wields that instrument—that is, the scholar and poet”
(253). Here, too, we might connect this poet’s experience with Kingston’s narrative of a
father who leaves behind his government post as educator in exchange for overseas
adventure and access to “Gold Mountain.”
Elsewhere in the poems, we find similar claims of surrender and evidence of
class-consciousness. One poem begins, “Instead of remaining a citizen of China, I
31
willingly became an ox” (Angel Island 40). As Elaine Kim points out in her formative
study Asian American Literature, the Angel Island poems provide a rare look from
working class perspectives during the early period of Asian immigration. Kim notes that
much of the early writings by Asians writing in the U.S. were produced by what she calls
“Cultural Ambassadors.” These were mostly Asian students, scholars and diplomats,
who, along with merchants, were exempted from the exclusion laws. These writers often
saw themselves as Asians in America rather than Asian Americans, and sought to “bridge
the gap between east and west” (24). Consequently, during the years of restricted Asian
immigration, there exist few autobiographical accounts by Asian immigrant laborers.
Kim briefly points to the testimonial by a Japanese house servant in Hamilton Holt’s The
Life Stories of Undistinguished Americans (1906), Carlos Bulosan’s America Is in the
Heart, and the carved poems in the walls on Angel Island.
But while interpretations which stress the socioeconomic identities of the
detainees are important, the poems’ radical nature is not only in what they say but how
they were written. Thus, Poem 25’s emphasis on writing materials should continue to
remind us of the very walls on which the poems were composed. For Huang, the act of
inscription itself contributes greatly to the significance of the Angel Island poems. Huang
connects the poems written by detained immigrants to the ancient Chinese tradition of
tibishi, a genre of travel writing inscribed on various public spaces, especially walls that
provide travelers of various classes access to and participation within public discourse.
Here, Huang emphasizes how the writings were produced by individuals on the margins
of the production and dissemination of official historiography. Thus, writing on the walls
32
of an establishment was a way to speak back to and include one’s self within established
discourse. Inscription was and is a literal, material act of self-inclusion.
Moreover, the power of writing on walls is, in part, due to the fact that the reader
must stand in the very position the writer stood. Huang alludes to this when he writes,
“…[the Angel Island poems] are all meant to be read by the other detainees who will
stand exactly on the same spots where the poems were composed and who share the same
experiences of incarceration, frustration, and humiliation” (105). Reading the Angel
Island poems, one continually finds poems that comment on other poems and thus point
to the radical empathy within wall poetics between writer and reader:
Over a hundred poems are on the walls.
Looking at them, they are all pining at the
delayed progress.
What can one sad person say to another?
Unfortunate travelers everywhere wish to
commiserate. (Poem 27, 62)
Indeed, within the more than a hundred and thirty five poems collected from the walls,
we find that the detainees have much to say to each other, and thus testify to a solidarity
constructed in response to their shared experience of exclusion and alienation. The walls
themselves become a kind of forum by which immigrants shared experiences and
ultimately constructed community. Often they bear warning and implore detainees to
remember:
My fellow villagers seeing this should take heed and
remember,
33
I write my wild words to let those after me know. (Poem 49, 163)
I leave words to my fellow villagers that when they land,
I expect them to always remember the time they spent
here. (Poem 56, 166)
Often times the poems are intended to be uplifting:
I leave word with you gentlemen that you should all endeavor together.
Do not forget the national humiliations; arouse
yourself to be heroic. (Poem 60, 167)
Often they are nationalist rally cries for future vengeance:
I am now being deported back to my country.
Some day when we become rich and strong, we will
annihilate this barbaric nation. (Poem 39, 160)
I strongly advise my countrymen not to worry,
Even though you are imprisoned in a wooden building.
Some day after China rises and changes,
She will be adept at using bombs to obliterate America. (Poem 42, 160)
It is ironic to consider how this communal and collaborative poetry was occurring
before the eyes of officials at Angel Island, but because of language differences they
could not read the literal writing on the walls. In fact, Angel Island official’s considered
the writing on the wall graffiti. Their response was to fill the wall carvings with putty and
paint over them. It is curious to note that subsequent detainees wrote new poems on each
34
subsequent layer of paint. Rangers on Angel Island today, who lead guided tours through
the barracks, report that the walls were painted over some eight times. With each layer of
paint possessing its own set of poems, the walls at Angel Island demonstrate a
collaborative poetics, a rich palimpsest with the traces of many writings. Thus, when
considering the material and formal history of the poems on the barrack walls—the
repeated attempts of erasure and the persistence of the writing—one has a better
appreciation of the struggle and resistance the poems enact. Transcription and
anthologizing based on thematized content and individualized poems deemphasizes the
radical circumstances, the literal counter-poetics, within which the Angel Island poems
were composed. Huang concludes, “The potency and efficacy of these poems thus come
from their form rather than their content, from their occupying an ambivalent space
between a form of vandalism to be condemned and a form of historical record to be
preserved” (110).
In their own preservation of the poems, the Island editors take part in a longer
history of recopying and documenting. Understanding this history, destabilizes the
framing of these poems as distinct, individual poems and foregrounds the appropriation
of the larger, collective endeavor of what might be more accurately called a wall poem.
Island editors cite three sources for the 135 poems in their collection. The first source
comes from two detainees, Smiley Jann and Tet Yee, who were detained in 1931 and
1932 respectively. They copied many of the poems from the walls by hand. The second
source, the editors report, were the photographs of San Francisco photographer Mak
Takahashi. Takahashi, accompanying Dr. Araki in 1970, meticulously photographed all
the barrack walls that contained writings. The final source for the poems of Island were
35
rubbings made from the actual physical surface of the walls by a local Chinatown
organization, the Kearny Street Workshop. It is fascinating to consider how the methods
used for acquiring the texts—copying, photographing, and rubbing—mirror the methods
of documenting the immigrants detained and interrogated on the island—transcription,
photo id, and fingerprinting.
Attending to the poems on the page without an understanding of their history and
fragile presence on the barrack walls not only misses their radical circumstances but their
radical confluence. One might assume the poems that are collected in the Angel Island
anthology are mostly those first poems, which were, ironically, preserved by the very
putty meant to erase them. But Angel Island editors admit that in transcribing the poems
it was difficult ascertaining one poem from another. Furthermore there is evidence of
more explicit collaboration. Angel Island editors report that poets “borrowed liberally”
from each other and that “some poems might have been written by one person and
revised by another” (24). These facts lead Yao to conclude, “the Island poems [are] a
substantially collective achievement, one that not only transparently records the private
experiences of different beset individuals, but which also stands as a potential model for
collaborative cultural endeavor” (320).
Ultimately, the collaborative effort and the confluence of identities that contribute
to the entirety of the wall poetics—rather than the individual poems of Angel
Island—mirrors the collective ambitions of those paper sons and daughters
3
who
exchanged, corroborated, and constructed their identities in order to resist racist exclusion

3
In 1940 the women’s barracks at Angel Island burned down in an accidental fire.
Through interviews and testimonials of women detained at Angel Island, scholars have
learned that poems did in fact exist on the walls of the women’s barracks. See Erika Lee
and Judy Yung’s Angel Island.
36
and forge their right to U.S. citizenship. Indeed, to return to Poem 25, what we see in the
throwing away of the writing brush is, finally, a surrendering of identity. This is
underscored in the poem’s final lines, which reference the often long and challenging
interrogations at Angel Island: “It is up to me to answer carefully. / I have no words to
murmur against the east wind.” The claim of having “no words” like the discarding of the
“writing brush” points to a contested and ambivalent sense of authorship. I argue that the
bind here is representative of a paper son poet: a poet who speaks but not with his own
words; a poet of constructed and contingent identities; a poet who surrenders identity as
an act of subversion and a critique of institutional powers that discriminate on the tenuous
basis of identity.
37
Chapter 2: Source as Echo: Constructing and Deconstructing Voice and Identity in
Theresa Cha’s Dictée
The wall poetry at Angel Island presents the problematic relationship between
voice and nation. Debates over whether to classify the wall writings as Chinese or
Chinese American demonstrates the way national identities are both attributed and
claimed within writings. But how does a voice in writing represent nation and self?
Reading the Angel Island wall poetry, we encounter national identification, even national
pride within the rich allusions to Chinese myth and literature. We find such
identifications also in the poets’ critical assessment of China’s weakness, and jingoistic
cries for revenge on the national-level. While the poems do not speak to a Chinese-
American identity, per se—the term would not come to be until the late 1960’s—it is
possible to see the roots of such an identity in the material circumstance and production
of the poems. Many of the poems were written by men claiming (often falsely-so)
American citizenship, and the poems themselves were inscribed into the very institutional
walls that were constructed to deny that citizenship. Thus, at the center of the wall poetry,
and any Chinese American “voice” we might attach to it, we find both artifice and
protest.
Within ethnic literatures, it is often authenticity rather than artifice that critics and
general readers celebrate. This authenticity focuses attention on the writer’s identity and a
coherent account of that identity. In such formulations, we see a celebration of voice as
representative of a culture that has been marginalized, oppressed, and largely unheard. In
this paradigm, voice is equated with agency. Specifically in the area of Asian American
38
Literature, Sau-ling Cynthia Wong has argued that “[if] Asian American subgroups are
too small to effect changes in isolation, together they can create a louder voice and
greater political leverage vis-à-vis the dominant group” (6). Wong’s study Reading
Asian American Literature: From Necessity to Extravagance argues for a “textual
coalition,” in which “students of Asian American literature tend to be united by a desire
to ensure that voices of Asian Americans are heard and to make known the richness and
complexity of Asian American writing” (9).
Written in the early nineties, Wong’s study overlaps with debates over
multiculturalism as well as debates regarding the building of ethnic literary canons and
the pedagogical positioning of ethnic literatures. Within critiques of multiculturalism, we
find critiques of the notion of authenticity. David Palumbo-Liu in The Ethnic Cannon:
Histories, Institutions, and Interventions (1995) argues for a “critical multiculturalism”
and cautions against the use of ethnic literature within a multiculturalist paradigm that is
synonymous with pluralism and that seeks only to manage and contain difference rather
than effect real systemic change. Under this multicultualist paradigm “ethnic texts are
read “as authentic unmediated representations of ethnicity” (12). Moreover, according to
Palumbo-Liu, “material history” under such reading practices “is reduced to being an
‘influence’ on the individual writer’s art, an influence that, once understood, can be
subsumed in the production of understanding, not sustained in a critique of historical,
political process” (12). Indeed, for Palumbo-Liu and other critics of the multicultural
model, the problem with multiculturalism is that, as an epistemology, the paradigm treats
culture as something static and looks at cultural tensions over inequality as events of the
past.
39
Palumbo-Liu’s argument against the treatment of identity as static echoes post-
structural critiques of identity and demonstrates post-structuralism’s influence in what
Christopher Lee calls the “post-identity turn” within Asian American criticism. Lee
characterizes the turn as the shift from a politics of identity to a politics of difference and
cites the influential writings of Lisa Lowe, Rey Chow, and Kandice Chuh. Indeed,
incorporating the discourses of transnationalism and postcolonialism in her study Imagine
Otherwise: On Asian Americanist Critique, Chuh argues for an understanding of the
“post-structural attitude” inherent to, and yet often ignored within, the formation of Asian
American Studies. She writes, “ ‘Asian American,’ because it is a term in difference from
itself—at once making a claim of achieved subjectivity and referring to the impossibility
of that achievement—deconstructs itself, is itself deconstruction” (8). She goes on to
assert that Asian American identity should be understood within a post-structural
paradigm as a “state of becoming and undoing.”
My purpose in this chapter is to explore further this “state of becoming and
undoing” by attending to the equally liminal quality of the voice as it is constructed and
deconstructed within the citational poetics of Therese Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictée. I want to
look at Cha’s text, in part, because of its curious reception history and the ways in which
its inclusion within the Asian American cannon overlaps with the above debates
regarding ethnic literatures and issues of authenticity. As scholars have noted, Dictée
existed in relative obscurity until the early 90’s and the publication of Writing Self,
Writing Nation, a collection of essays devoted to Cha’s book. Timothy Yu in Race and
the Avant-Garde: Experimental and Asian American Poetry Since 1965 provides a cogent
reading of Writing Self, Writing Nation and its critics’ attempts at defining Dictée as
40
Asian American writing. For Yu, Dictée stands as both “cause and effect” of the
paradigm shift from cultural nationalism to the discourse of difference and hybridity
(114). However, Yu argues, the readings of Cha’s text fail to attend to the poetry’s radical
form and radical implications for Asian American literature. Yu writes, “Although the
four readings in Writing Self present Dictée as marking a shift in Asian American critical
paradigms, all ultimately pull back from the most radical difficulties of reading this text
as Asian American.” Yu summarizes these difficulties by asking, “If the establishment of
a narrative subject whom we can identify as Asian American is the foundation of Asian
American reading, then can a text like Dictée truly be claimed as Asian American?”
(119)
In my reading of Dictée, I argue that the practice of citation, the “radical form” of
Cha’s text, enacts and produces on the page the ambivalence that critics like Palumbo-Liu
and Chuh argue for in their conceptualization of how we might approach and reapproach
Asian American identity within literature in light of post-structural critiques of the self
and autonomous agency. Indeed, as Dictée’s title suggest, Cha’s citational project
illustrates how identity is not the product of individual choice but the effects of dictated
givens. Anne Cheng discusses Cha’s title as a “metaphoric allusion to the dictaphonic
structure of social and ontic interpellation.” She goes on to reflect, “But how does a voice
on the outside become a voice within, and what are the implications of recognizing that
one’s own fantasies of identity exist in relation to, or even echo, external social
construction?” (158). Cha’s citational practice in its complex bricolage attends to this
“echo,” drawing on multiple sources for its text and demonstrating the various, often
conflicting, discourses that dictate the construction of self.
41
But while Cha’s text incorporates multiple sources, complicating any notion of
one self, it does so in such away that also complicates our determining in any
authoritative way what those sources are. Indeed, this has led Cheng to characterize
Cha’s work as “anti-documentary” (139). While traditional citation marshals sources in
order to claim authority over a subject, Cha’s project remains elusive and suggestive. In
many ways the book confounds our ability to discern source from echo. By troubling
traditional understanding of citation, Cha thus enacts a critique of both authenticity and
authoritative knowledge. In doing so, the text resists the kind of multicultural
appropriation and containment that critics like Palumbo-Liu cautions us against.
The Elusive Voice and its Elusive Sources
Despite conceptions of voice as empowerment, the physical, individual voice is
actually harder to define. In his famous essay, “The Grain of the Voice,” Roland Barthes
argues that our approach, by way of language, to music and more specifically the musical
voice consistently fails to translate the experience. In an attempt to get at what we mean
when we say “voice,” Barthes assigns the term “the grain.” Defined as the “precise space
(genre) of the encounter between a language and a voice,” the grain, for Barthes, attunes
our thinking about voice in such a way that reemphasizes the full potentials of sound over
communication and meaning.
The poet-critic Susan Stewart in her chapter “Voice and Possession,” similarly
reflects on the unreachable voice:
The beloved’s voice is untouchable. It is that which touches me and which I
cannot touch. Yet the one who “owns” it—that is, the one who belongs to
42
it—cannot touch it either. I cannot see my eyes when I see; they are invisible to
me. And I cannot hear my own voice when I speak: I hear only its echo or
resonance and when it comes to me on a recording it comes as a stranger’s voice,
as horrid and uncanny as a glimpse of my own corpse. The voice and the eyes
take part in the more general truth that I cannot witness my own motion as a
whole: I cannot see what is alive about myself and so depend on the view of
others. It is the view point of the beloved that gives witness to what is alive in our
being. (108)
What Stewart and Barthes demonstrate is the ways in which voice eludes us, suggesting
that it is not the space of agency but liminality. Stewart’s observations here could help
with the specific mechanics between voice and identity. Or to build from Anne Cheng’s
reflection, the above might begin to help us to understand how “a voice on the outside
become[s] a voice within.” What Stewart’s discussion points to is how our selves are a
construction of mirrorings and echoes. If we never have an absolute perception of our
physical selves, and therefore must rely on outside sources, then our selves are a
continual pastiche, a citational project dependent on and culled together from exterior
authorities.
Turning to Cha’s Dictée, we find in the book’s opening section the Disuese, the
text’s female orator. From the French, disuese literally means “talker,” yet we are
immediately told that this speaker rather than choosing her own words “mimicks the
speaking” (3). We might read the misspelling, the inclusion of the k, which normally we
find in the past tense and gerund form, as suggestive of some inaccuracy, some lack of
mastery. To mimic is to copy or imitate. Errors may occur. Indeed, errors may be the
43
point. To mimic also suggests ridicule. The misspelling foreshadows the tensions we find
throughout Cha’s text between spoken and written language, as well as those between
standard and non-standard English. These tensions point to the complexities of voice
construction and demonstrate the various constraints operating on speaking subjects.
What is evident here is that Cha’s text begins with an orator whose speech is not her own.
Cha writes, “ She allows others. In place of her. Admits others to make full. Make
swarm. All barren cavities to make swollen. The others each occupying her” (3-4).
Through a staccato and disrupted syntax, we are introduced to our speaker whose words
and body are occupied by others.
The citational nature of the speaker contributes to Dictée’s notorious difficulty.
Like her Diseuse, Cha proves to be a mystery to her commentators. L. Hyun Yi Kang
writes, “My biggest frustration was what I perceived of as the ‘slipperiness’ of the book.
It angered me that the text was not always accessible, that it seemed to speak to a highly
literate, theoretically sophisticated audience that I did not identify with. Most of all, Cha
herself remained elusive” (Writing Self, Writing Nation 76). Here, in Kang’s honest
reflection, we find a reader’s desire for the lyrical “I” or an identifiable narrator. We also
find the desire to find the author herself within the text. Discussing this desire and its
significance, Anne Cheng writes, “What has been difficult to accept about Cha’s Dictée,
therefore, turns out to be not its lack of rhetorical coherence or even its narrative opacity,
but rather the way it indicts our very desire to know and see the ‘other’ through
reading—implicates, in fact, our positions as private, historical, or literary witnesses of
submerged histories” (150).
44
The indictment here of our “desire to know and see the ‘other’” resonates with
arguments against multiculturalism and the ways in which that paradigm seeks to manage
and contain difference. Cha and her Disuese elude our desire for identification.
Furthermore, I argue that evasion plays out in the distance between the spoken and
written word, between the excess of the voice and the regiment of the text. For what we
find in Cha’s use of citation is a consistent absence, a dislocation, so that citations do not
lead us to fixed, original sources, but instead question established equivalencies while
offering radical ambivalence.
Returning to Susan Stewart’s essay, we find that anxieties over the question of
who is speaking have been with poetry audiences since antiquity. Exploring the
complexities of voice and volition, Stewart turns to the debates within Plato’s Symposium
and Republic and those texts’ treatment of poetry. She writes, “In these texts a recurring
anxiety accompanies the idea of poetic will, and this anxiety centers constantly on the
question of whose agency is speaking in the poetic voice—what is the source or cause of
the sound that is heard in poetry? It is an anxiety that affects poet and reader alike;
indeed, it is often expressed as an anxiety about the contamination that might arise
between these two positions” (111). She goes on to claim, “When actors become the
recipients of actions, when speakers speak from the position of listeners, when thought is
unattributable and intention wayward, the situation of poetry is evoked” (11). Kang in her
essay on Cha refers to slipperiness and elusiveness. From Stewart’s classical scholarship,
we see a long history of anxiety attributed to poetry precisely because of its
“unattributable” source and its dubious speaker.
45
Cha invokes classical literature within her text’s structure, which is sectioned
according to the Nine Muses. Herodotus’ Histories are similarly divided and attributed to
the Muses. The daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne, the goddess of memory, the muses
have for centuries been addressed and invoked to aid writers in their lyrical accounts of
histories. Homer’s Odyssey begins, “Sing to me of the man, Muse, the man of twists and
turns…” Virgil begins his Aeneid, “O Muse! the causes and crimes relate…” In these
invocations, the writer is figured as not the source but the relay or medium through which
the Muse speaks or sings.
Following in this long tradition, Dictée opens by way of invocation, providing
two different appeals to outside sources:
O Muse, tell me the story
Of all these things, O Goddess, daughter of Zeus
Beginning wherever you wish, tell even us.
[…]
Tell me the story
Of all these things
Beginning wherever you wish, tell even us. (7, 11)
Between these two invocations we find French language exercises. Under the first
translation exercise, “Ecrivez en francaies,” the sentences to write in French appear
random at first, but upon closer inspection some commonalities are in fact telling. All of
the sentences are claims, and often assertive, even directive. Two in particular address
issues of nationality and native tongue: “If you did not speak so quickly, they would
understand you better”; “The people of this country are less happy than people of yours.”
46
Several of the other sentences operate as proverbs that impart conventional truths and
cultural ethics: “Be industrious: the more one works, the better one succeeds”; “The
harder the task, the more honorable the labor”; “The more a man praises himself, the less
inclined are others to praise him” (8). Here, Cha illustrates that the learning of language
is inseparable from the learning of cultural values. From Cha’s citation of language
exercises, we understand that the Diseuse’s oratory is never completely her own because
whatever language she uses to “tell” the story will be a borrowed language. By
appropriating language exercises, Cha makes explicit the literal forms of mimesis
involved in language acquisition. In this sense, language itself becomes a Muse—the
authority a writer must cite and appeal to in order to construct her account. Thus, in the
second invocation Cha removes the classical reference to Muse and Goddess; her address
and appeal are to language itself.
By pointing to the borrowed and composite nature of the Disuese, Cha focuses on
the way external elements enable and inform one’s voice. Judith Butler in Giving An
Account of Oneself examines the complexities of telling one’s own story and highlights
the way in which any accounting of the self is contingent on exterior linguistic structures.
“But if I can address you,” Butler writes, “I must first have been addressed, brought into
the structure of address as a possibility of language before I was able to find my own way
to make use of it.” Butler goes on the explain: “This follows, not only from the fact that
language first belongs to the other and I acquire it through a complicated form of
mimesis, but also because the very possibility of linguistic agency is derived from the
situation in which one finds oneself addressed by a language one never chose” (53).
47
Exploring the contexts of colonization, exile and immigration, Cha’s Dictée
demonstrates the painful experience of confronting the compulsory acquisition and use of
languages other than one’s mother tongue. Specifically, in the section “Calliope / Epic
Poetry,” Cha addresses her mother Hyung Soon Huo, who at eighteen lived in exile in
Manchuria in order to escape the Japanese occupation of Korea. As many commentators
have noted, during that occupation the Korean language was forbidden
1
. Cha writes:
Still, you speak the tongue the mandatory language like the others. It is not your
own. Even if it is not you know you must. You are Bi-lingual. You are Tri-
lingual. The tongue that is forbidden is your own mother tongue. You speak in the
dark. In the secret. The one that is yours. Your own. You speak very softly, you
speak in a whisper. In the dark, in secret. Mother tongue is your refuge. (45)
This voice, this mother tongue that can only be spoken “in the dark,” returns us as readers
to Dictée’s frontispiece. There we find an image of another wall poetry, this time made
by Korean coal miners under Japanese occupation. The inscription reads “Mother / I miss
you / I am hungry / I want to go home.”
2
As commentators have noted, in a text of many
different written languages, this is the only appearance of the Korean script (Hangul). As
frontispiece, the Korean language is where we begin, but its position also curiously
stands outside the actual text.

1
See Elaine H. Kim’s essay “Poised on the In-between: A Korean American’s
Reflections on Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictée” in Writing Self Writing Nation
(Alarcón, ed.).
2
The translation is provided by Shelley Sunn Wong in her essay “Unnaming the Same:
Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictée’ in Writing Self Writing Nation (Alarcón, ed.).
48
A Transpacific Interpellation
The interplay between voice and volition are central to Louis Althusser’s notion
of subjection by interpellation. The word itself is composed of the prefix “between” and
the verb “to drive,” suggesting that agency is relationally derived. Althusser’s example of
interpellation in his 1970 essay “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes
towards an Investigation)” involves sound and voice. That example depicts a scenario in
which an individual is “hailed” by an officer of the law. As Althusser explains, in that
moment of hailing, as the individual turns to respond to the officer’s address, the
individual is a subject of the state:
“I shall then suggest that ideology ‘acts’ or ‘functions’ in such a way that it
‘recruits’ subjects among the individuals (it recruits them all), or ‘transforms’ the
individuals into subjects (it transforms them all) by that very precise operation
which I have called interpellation or hailing, and which can be imagined along the
lines of the most commonplace everyday police (or other) hailing: ‘Hey, you
there!’” (174)
But Althusser admits that his example is theatrical and that in fact “[t]he existence of
ideology and the hailing or interpellation of individuals as subjects are one and the same
thing” (174). He goes on to insist, “an individual is always already a subject” (175).
Like Althusser’s “mise en scene of interpellation” which temporalizes ideology’s
recruiting processes, Cha’s Dictée wishes to pause that process with a Disuese whose
speech is painstaking and faltering:
One by one.
The sounds. The sounds. The sounds that move at a time
49
stops. Starts again. Exceptions
stops and starts again
all but exceptions.
Stop. Start. Starts.
Contractions. Noise. Semblance of noise.
Broken speech. One to one. At a time.
Cracked tongue. Broken tongue.
Pidgeon. Semblance of speech.
Swallows. Inhales. Stutter. Starts. Stops before
starts.
About to. Then stops. Exhale
swallowed to a sudden arrest.
Rest. Without. Can do without rests. Improper
to rest before begun even. Probation of rest.
Without them all.
Stop start.
Where proper pauses were expected.
But no more.
(75)
Here, stunted speech is enacted in fragmented and period-laden verse lines. The
description is of a speaker for whom speech is “sounds,” “noise,” and a “semblance of
noise.” The word “Pidgeon” is curiously misspelled, joining “pigeon” with “pidgin,” to
represent the mix or hybridity the word signifies and to emphasize the fragile distinction
50
between sound and meaning. Indeed, for this speaker, the equivalencies between sound
and meaning have not reached their “obvious” state: language has not been made
transparent. It is in this gap, this deconstructed moment in which language is strange
rather than familiar that, like in Althusser’s scene of interpellation, we get a glimpse of
ideology at work.
Exploring a multiplicity of ideologies, Lisa Lowe’s essay “Unfaithful to the
Original: The Subject of Dictée” reads Cha’s text as a more specific and complex
engagement with the apparatuses of ideology explored by Althusser in his essay. She
writes, “Dictée can be much more specific about not only the multiplicity and adjacency
of determining ideological valences in the formation of subjects, but also more precise
regarding the connections and conflicts between historically differentiated sites of written
subjectivity” (54). Thus, for Lowe, Dictée’s contribution to the study of ideology is in its
demonstration of “multiple hailings.” Lowe asserts, “Dictée is more specific…about the
conflicts and noncorrespondences between hailing apparatuses; while they may intersect
and coexist, or be linked through the use of similar modes and logics, these apparatuses
are often at odds with one another…”(56). One can see here, in her discussion of Dictée,
Lowe’s formulation for “Hetergeneity, Hybridity, and Multiplicity,” an often-cited essay
published in her 1996 text Immigrant Acts, in which Lowe further explores a politics of
difference as critical of and alternative to a politics of identity. For Lowe, Cha’s “subject”
presents a multivalent difference—as woman, as Asian, as Korean—which is disruptive,
and thus critical of those equivalences that are imperative to the internalization of
ideology.
51
In light of Lowe’s conceptualization of hybridity, we might return to the
“pidgeon” of the above poem and consider its transnational and transpacific subjectivity.
We find the poem situated between two images: 1) an illustration of the biological
apparatus of the human voice and 2) a map of North and South Korea after the 1945
division along the 38
th
Parallel. As transpacific scholar Yunte Huang points out, the
images strangely resemble each other both in shape and in their use of line and label, so
much so that they force us to flip back and forth between the pages, creating a “montage
effect” (138). Building from Huang’s observation, I also see, in our flipping back and
forth, a momentary return to the verse poem and Cha’s Disuese in a moment of
interpellation between multi-national hailings and one’s individual voice. In a stop-start
animated moment, created by the lay out of these three textual pages, Cha deconstructs
ideology temporally in order for us to reconsider the ways that the individual voice is
always already a transnational subject.
Moreover, it foregrounds and questions the notion that is often assumed of the
minority poet’s voice: that it is somehow representative of singular national identity.
What if the image of Korea and vocal apparatus were to be laid on top of the other? How
can a voice represent the various nations presented in the map of Korea? Indeed, consider
the “pidgeon” demonstrated by the map itself. Though it is a map of Korea, its
geographical names are represented in English. The American presence on the map and
in current reality announces itself with the bold “DMZ,” reminding readers of America’s
role in dividing the country post-World War II. Moreover, above the peninsula we find
“People’s Republic of China,” and to its east we find the “Sea of Japan.” Thus, the map
presents the colonial past and present of Korea. Its juxtaposition with the diagram of the
52
human voice, demonstrates the various transpacific and transnational ideologies
interpellating that individual voice. The “[s]tarts and stops” are not just a phenomena of
the Disuese’s speech, but our own experience of reading Cha’s text. Indeed, Cha’s text
presents us with a “[s]emblance,” in the sense of pastiche or collage “of noise.” By these
two images side by side, we begin to see the difficulty of representing the transnational;
we begin to experience just how noisy and unintelligible such a vocal representation
might be.
“Turning Back on the Machinery”
Utilizing the effect of flipping pages, Cha draws on her experience as filmmaker.
Other critics have commented on the unique way in which Cha approaches text as film.
Brian Kim Stefans argues that “Cha was not approaching literature from the angle of one
invested in its various subversions of tradition but rather as a filmmaker…” (53).
Josephine Park in an essay focused on boundaries and partitions, points to Cha’s use of
the page as film screen. She writes, “Dictée repeatedly returns to the film screen: one of
the key innovations of this text is the way in which it manipulates the plastic possibilities
of cinema” (234). Discussing specific film techniques, Anne Cheng points to “jagged
cuts, jump shots, and visual exposition” and compares Cha’s work to experimental
filmmakers such as Maya Deren and Trinh Minh-ha (140).
However, Cha’s appropriation of film techniques is not simply in the service of
making literary innovation. As we move into the section “Erato / Love Poetry,” a section
which Park refers to as a “textual film,” we find Cha experimenting with conventions of
film as well as literature. Entering the section, we find Cha reversing the film convention
53
of placing text—titles and credits—at the beginning and ending of a movie. Here instead
images frame words. The section begins with a photograph of St. Therese of Lisieux and
borrows from her spiritual autobiography, The Story of the Soul. I am interested in how
these cited passages are utilized and to what effect. In the photograph, St. Therese stands
with a sword in her right hand and French flag in her left. Commentators note that the
photo is of St. Therese dressed as Joan of Arc for a theatrical production. The “Erato /
Love Poetry” section closes with another photograph of Joan of Arc. This second photo is
a film still of Maria Falconetti portraying Joan of Arc in Carl Dreyer’s 1928 silent film
The Passion of Joan of Arc. These images frame the section, and emphasize the themes
of gender and religious devotion. They also suggest the themes of artifice and
performance. There are no surviving direct portraits of the historical Joan of Arc.
Ultimately, the photographs frame the text in a gesture of silence, emphasized by
Dreyer’s silent film and by the film still itself: an open-mouthed Falconetti in a moment
of emotive but silent expression.
As we move into the text, we find Cha overturning another convention of cinema.
By describing the Disuese as moviegoer and the theatre she enters, Cha turns the focus
toward the film audience. Cha’s motivation here is best explained in a preface she wrote
for a collection of essays on film that she edited for Tanam press in 1980, two years prior
to the publication in Dictée. Indeed, the preface could serve as an introduction to her
project in Dictée:
The selection of works was made to approach the subject from theoretical
directions synchronously with work of filmmakers who address and incorporate
the apparatus—the function of film, the film’s author, the effects produced on the
54
viewer while viewing film—as an integral part of their work, and to turn
backwards and call upon the machinery that creates the impression of reality
whose function, inherent in its very medium, is to conceal from its spectator the
relationship of the viewer/subject to the work being viewed. (emphasis added)
(Preface)
By way of silence and darkness, a movie theater cloaks the surroundings of the audience,
allowing for what Roland Barthes (in an essay opening Cha’s Appparatus) calls a kind of
hypnosis so that the moviegoer might immerse his or herself in the “reality” of the film’s
world. “To turn backwards and call upon the machinery,” is to bring in focus the
ambience of the theatre as well as the apparatus of the projection booth. We have seen so
far in Dictée the relation between the apparatus of the human voice and Althusser’s
notion of the larger apparatus of state ideology. Here, we have yet another apparatus for
producing ideology and another apparatus that Cha wishes to demystify and bring to our
critical attention.
Bringing our attention to the separation of sound and image in film is another way
in which Cha foregrounds the “machinery” behind our “impressions of reality.” As the
scholar and experimental composer Michel Chion reminds us, in cinema “ we are dealing
not with the real initial causes of the sounds, but causes that the film makes us believe
in.” Thus, the connection between sound and image in film is largely an illusion
constructed by what Chion calls the “audiovisual contract” (28). In Cha’s literary work,
the separation between film and soundtrack parallels the distance between text and
speech, emphasizing temporality and process in order to critique any imagined
immediacy to written language. Throughout “Erato / Love Poetry,” we see Cha exploring
55
this separation through her experimental layout of text and the awkwardly placed page
breaks. Rather than moving page to page, textual passages are abruptly interrupted mid-
sentence and sometimes mid-word, disrupting any voicing of the written text. Space,
sometimes copious amounts, separates the different textual passages. We return to a
passage on subsequent pages, in the sense that we find things further down or below as if
the texts were arranged on a scroll. Or similar to the medium of film, it is as if the texts
were spliced together.
Furthermore, Cha explores the relationship between voice and image by writing a
large portion of “Erato / Love Poetry” within an ekphrastic mode, detailing the scenes
and actions of an unnamed film. The word ekphrasis comes to us from the Greek and
literally means out speak. Working by ekphrasis, Cha describes the close up of an actress’
mouth as she speaks the French words “On verra. Si.” We shall see. If. We are reminded
of earlier passages in which we find the Diseuse struggling with the physical act of
forming speech. But this mouth is the mouth of a proficient speaker:
Mouth moving. Incessant. Precise. Forms the words heard. Moves from the mouth
to the ear. With the hand placed across on the other’s lips moving, form- [page
break] ing the words. She forms the words with her mouth as the other utter
across from her. She shapes her lips accordingly, gently she blows whos and whys
and whats. On verra. O-n. Ver-rah. Verre. Ah. On verra-h. Si. S-i. She hears, we
will see. (99)
Here, we see a contrast between the “Incessant. Precise” speech of the actress and the
stilted or choppy syntax of the passage. That contrast places us in a position of awe and
envy, as we witness the actress “shape her lips accordingly,” and with relative ease
56
perform her role in conveying the story, providing the “whos and whys and whats.”
Curiously, the when and where are missing here. Time and setting are essential to
storytelling, but here Cha leaves them out to emphasize the distance between audience,
film, and historical event. Indeed, these distances of time and space provide a double
reading of the statement “She hears, we will see.”
This distance between speech and writing, between event and representation is at
play in Cha’s specific appropriation St. Therese of Liseux. Born January 2
nd,
1873, Marie
Francoise Therese Martin had an early calling to the church and became a nun at 15. She
died young at 24 of tuberculosis. Her spiritual autobiography, The Story of the Soul, was
published and circulated within the church posthumously a year after her death. The book
became widely translated and published. Along with Joan of Arc, Theresa of Liseux is
one of the patron saints of France. It is curious, somewhat teleological or prophetic, that
St. Theresa would play the role of Joan of Arc and then become a saint herself. Returning
to the words, We shall see, mouthed on screen by the unnamed actress, we see that Cha’s
interest is in what eventually comes to pass, in change over time, and how our
“impression of reality” is an accumulation of those changes. Thus, what might be seen as
authentic is really a construction dialogically made over time with future audiences.
We find this sense of the future in the passages Cha appropriates from St.
Therese’s autobiography. The first passage is a wedding invitation between the young
Therese and the Lord, a union that cannot occur until after death. In the second passage,
we find a critique of the excommunication of women by the Church. Therese looks to the
afterlife when in heaven God will show that “His thoughts are not men’s thoughts” (105).
The final cited passage St. Therese expresses desire for martyrdom and places herself in
57
the pantheon of saints she herself will eventually join: “With St. Agnes and St. Cecilia, I
would present my neck to the sword, and like Joan of Arc, my dear sister, I would
whisper at the stake Your Name, O Jesus” (117).
Anne Cheng refers to these cited passages as “plagiarized…diegetic narration”
(148). Indeed, the difference between diegetic and non-diegetic sound are the focus of
Cha’s citational experiments here. If we read page as screen, all writing is in fact non-
diegetic. Writing’s sonic source is never visible “on screen.” While Cha provides
quotation marks, she does not cite St. Therese nor her autobiography. Perhaps we are to
read St. Therese’s photo at the start of the section as a visual citation. If so, it is ironic
that St. Therese is playing someone else. The photo itself then performs yet another
citation. Moreover, The fact that no direct portraits of Joan of Arc exist suggests that
there is no original source. As Walter Benjamin reminds us “The presence of the original
is the prerequisite to the concept of authenticity” (220). Thus, Cha’s echo chamber of
quotation destabilizes any notion of authenticity.
Continuing with this thinking, we might consider the controversy leading to Joan
of Arc’s execution as an issue of citing sources. Leading French forces in several key
victories during the Hundred Years War, Joan of Arc claimed she had guidance by divine
calling and inspiration. She was eventually tried and executed for heresy, for citing a
source that she, according to patriarchic Christian orthodoxy, had no right to claim.
Again, we are reminded of St. Therese’s critique of patriarchy and her wishful look
toward a future heaven that would establish God’s authority as well as his authorization.
Here, Cha draw’s on the early exegetical tradition of citation. Elizabeth Gregory in her
study of quotation in Modernist American poetry demonstrates that the use of quotation
58
as evidence or proof develops out of the Christian tradition. She writes, “Biblical
quotations served so powerfully as guarantors of the authority of the texts they were cited
within that even today quotations of all kinds inherit some of this association with
indubitability” (4-5). Throughout “Erato/ Love Poetry” Cha’s experiments with text,
image, and voice cast doubt on the machinery and practice of citation in order to
highlight artifice in the authorial and to question the notion of authentic voice.
Conclusion
Beyond their sainthood, what unite the stories of St. Therese and Joan of Arc are a
posthumously revised understanding of their stories and a national appropriation of their
respective voices. Ironically, we find a similar pattern of appropriation when turning to
the reception history of Cha’s Dictée. As noted at the start of this chapter, the
appropriation of Cha’s text into the Asian American cannon overlapped with the revised
understanding of what constitutes Asian America and Asian Americanist critique.
Building from Lisa Lowe’s articulation of the need to attend to the multiplicity of
difference within “racialized ethnic identity,” Kandice Chuh argues that difference rather
than identity should be the paradigm of Asian American critique, and calls for the
“conceptualizing of Asian American studies as “subjectless…[and] motivated by critique
of subjectification rather than desire for subjectivity…” (151) What strikes me here is
that in terms of form and content, citation demonstrates and allows for the
reconceptualizing of the lyric subject as hybrid and constructed of various differences.
Because the citational poet does not present a unified, coherent (ethnic) speaker, we
59
might see such a poetics as operating within as well as expressing the need for the
paradigm that Chuh suggests.
Here in this chapter I have attended to the “radical difficulty” of Cha’s Dictée.
More specifically, I have focused on Cha’s methods of citation and how these methods
complicate our understanding of voice and identity. Through a citational poetics, Cha’s
text presents us with a curious documentation of one’s self. Turning to various female
sources—from classical muses to national saints—Cha constructs a text that troubles any
equivalency drawn between her writing and herself as author. Moreover, we find a voice
interpellated in such a way that any authentic voice seems impossible precisely because
that voice is already authored and dictated within the various apparatuses of race,
religion, nationality, and gender. Thus a citational poetics engages in the practice Cha
describes in her editor’s introduction: “to turn backwards and call upon the machinery
that creates the impression of reality…” Indeed, Cha’s Dictée points to the “dictaphonic”
machinery that produces the impression of selfhood, the apparatuses that engage in
subjectification. In short, Dictée enacts the critique Chuh calls for: one that does not
essentialize subjectivity but instead is conscious and critical of the fraught ambivalences
in what it means to be a subject.
60
Chapter 3: Craig Santos Perez’s from Unincorporated Territory: Reinscribing Native
Presence and Transit in the Pacific
In the opening chapter of Robert F. Rogers’ Destiny’s Landfall: A History of
Guam, we find the “first map of the Mariana Islands” (10). As Rogers explains, the map
was originally drawn in Europe between 1523 and 1527, and it accompanied the
published account of Antonio Pigafetta, an Italian nobleman who was aboard Magellan’s
ship the Trinidad, the first European ship to cross from the Atlantic into the Pacific and
eventually circumnavigate the globe. Because at that time it was the Western convention
to place south at the top and north at the bottom, the map features the large island of
Guam above the island of Rota, which is here drawn inaccurately as two islands. This
earliest of maps does not in fact use the name Guam or the native Guahån, but instead
refers to the island as Isles des Larrons, or Islands of Thieves. Between the islands and at
the center of the map, Rogers reports, is the first drawing of a Chamorro proa. Curiously,
the artist has drawn this sailing vessel, an outrigger canoe that was essential to the daily
lives of the native islanders, with two crewmen in European dress and with a crow’s
nest—something clearly has been lost in translation.
This first map of Guam is part of a larger history of geographical and cultural
misrepresentation that result from and perpetuate what Edward Said has called the
“structures of attitude and reference” that underwrite imperialism
1
. Addressing these

1
Here, Said acknowledges that he is working from Raymond Williams’s notion of
“structures of feelings. Said further explains, “I am talking about the way in which
structures of location and geographical reference appear in the cultural languages of
literature, history or ethnography, sometimes allusively and sometimes carefully plotted,
61
structures in Culture and Imperialism, Said marvels at the unquestioned and pervasive
logic and ideology of colonialism. He writes, “To the best of my ability to have read and
understood these ‘structures of attitude and reference,’ there was scarcely any dissent,
any departure, any demurral from them: there was virtual unanimity that subject races
should be ruled, that they are subject races, that one race deserves and has consistently
earned the right to be considered the race whose main mission is to expand beyond its
own domain” (51). One might begin to assess such single-mindedness by contemplating
the Eurocentricism at the heart of this early map of Guam. We see a failure to actually
envision and include the Chamorro as native to the land and as pilot of his own craft.
Discussing the specific history of the Pacific and the field of Pacific Island
Studies, Keith Camacho, in his introduction to a special issue of the Amerasia Journal
focusing on Transpacific Studies, writes on the connection between 19
th
and 20
th
century
mapping and U.S. empire in the region. In Camacho’s account, Pacific Island Studies
originally was largely defined by non-indigenous “anthropologists and military experts,”
and more often than not was funded by organizations associated with “American
intelligence and military agencies.” Camacho writes, “Reflecting a common trend in the
historiography of the Pacific wherein scholarship tended to follow the colonial flag,
numerous articles, books, reports, and surveys were published in accordance with
American military aspirations and strategies in the Pacific.” Camacho goes on to reflect
that “[i]n its early manifestations, Pacific Islands Studies aimed to influence and control
rather than to foreground and understand Pacific Islander perspectives.” (x) Thus, we see

across several individual works that are not otherwise connected to one another or to an
official ideology of ‘empire’ (52).
62
from Spanish to U.S. empire a long history of utilizing maps in order to erase native
presence and inscribe colonial power and possession.
Elizabeth DeLoughrey has discussed this erasure by linking an “Island-ism” to
Said’s notion of orientalism. In Routes and Roots: Navigating Caribbean and Pacific
Island Literatures, DeLoughrey argues, “Like orientalism, a system of “islandism” was
constructed less through contact with others than through the textual exchange between
Europeans. This is visible in the ideological construction of anticipated island landfall
and the vast array of artistic and literary depictions of island topoi, shipwrecks, and
contact with “Indians” that dominated the colonial imagination” (12). Illustrating
DeLoughrey’s point, Rogers in his history of Guam reports that not a single Chamorro
name is included in the various accounts of the Magellan voyage. Consistently we see
native presence erased and replaced by a colonial vision rendered in countless mappings,
narratives, and decrees.
But if cultural discourse might be the vehicle empowering imperialism, it too
might be deployed to critique imperialism. Said asserts, “Just as culture may predispose
and actively prepare one society for the overseas domination of another, it may also
prepare that society to relinquish or modify the idea of overseas domination” (200). In a
chapter devoted to the themes and strategies of resistance literature, Said writes, “to
achieve recognition is to rechart and then occupy the place in imperial cultural forms
reserved for subordination, to occupy it self-consciously, fighting for it on the very same
territory once ruled by a consciousness that assumed the subordination of a designated
inferior Other. Hence, reinscription” (210).
63
In the previous chapter, I looked at Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictée and how
that text through strategic citation, or dictation, highlights and problematizes identity and
subject formation. My idea is that more than a reflection of a conversation solely within
literary arts, the appropriative act of citation has historical and cultural precedence.
Specifically within the exchanges of power across the Pacific, we find poets relying on
subversive systems of borrowing that are critical of and counter to U.S. empire.
Moreover, rather than a turn from identity toward a greater anonymity, the poets of this
study incorporate both identity and difference—who they are and who they are not—in
order to survive and to maintain traditions in the face of national and imperial erasures.
Turning to Craig Santos Perez and his multiple book-length poem from
Unincorporated Territory, I want to focus on how a citational poetics is instrumental to
Perez’s critique of colonial subject formation. Moreover, I want to argue that turning to
the archive, or the “textual exchange” DeLoughrey cites above, is for Perez a strategy for
reinscribing an “alter/native” perspective that emphasizes Chamorro history and identity
while critiquing U.S. militarism and empire. Perez’s project is to re-inscribe colonial
discourses— cartographic, juridical, and legislative—that have replaced and at times
erased Chamorro self-determinism. Perez’s poetics is conscious of its work to reinscribe
the history, land, and peoples of Guam—a subject matter that has been extensively
written about and made subject by dominant foreign powers.
Excerpting Space: Remapping Where the Poet is from
Perez opens his Preface to from Unincorporated Territory [Hacha] by focusing
on the problems of telling where the poet is from:
64
On some maps, Guam doesn’t exist; I point to an empty space in the
Pacific and say, “I’m from here.” On some maps, Guam is a small,
unnamed island; I say, “I’m from this unnamed place.” On some maps,
Guam is named “Guam, U.S.A.” I say, I’m from a territory of the United
States.” On some maps, Guam is named, simply, “Guam”;
I say, “I am from ‘Guam.’” (7)
Including a colonial history of Guam while focusing on the close relationship between
language and colonial rule, Perez approaches his Preface literally and focuses on before-
ness and derivation. Pointing to various maps, Perez demonstrates the ambiguous
existence of his homeland and his own subjectivity. Moreover, he introduces how that
ambiguous subjectivity is connected to the U.S. and its possession of the island as an
“unincorporated territory.”
As Perez explains, the “unincorporated” status of Guam originated from a series
of U.S. Supreme Court decisions in the early twentieth century referred to as the “Insular
Cases.” These cases reflected the various anxieties that arose with the U.S.’s acquisition
of Guam, Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines after the Spanish-American War in
1898. The issue at the center of the debates was to what extent these lands and their
peoples would be included, or incorporated, under the rights and laws of the U.S.
Constitution
2
. Perez explains, “Guahän is classified as an “unincorporated, organized
territory” of the United States: “unincorporated” because it is an area under U.S.
jurisdiction in which only certain “natural” protections of the U.S. Constitution apply…”
(8).

2
For a comprehensive study of the “Insular Cases” see Foreign in a Domestic Sense:
Puerto Rico, American Expansion, and the Constitution edited by Christina Duffy
Burnett and Burke Marshall.
65
Perez goes on to cite from the specific “insular case” Downes v. Bidwell, a case
that focused on the island territory of Puerto Rico, and resulted in the Court utilizing for
the first time the category of “unincorporated territory” to describe the annexed but non-
statehood existence of the island. American Studies scholar Amy Kaplan, in an essay
tracing the complex history of Guantanamo Bay back to this same court case, writes that
“[t]he decision deemed Puerto Rico ‘foreign to the United States in a domestic sense,’ a
space ‘belonging to’ but ‘not a part of the United States,’ whose inhabitants were neither
aliens nor citizens” (841). Kaplan asserts that the lasting and troublesome legacy of the
Insular Cases and the created term “unincorporated” has continued to legislate “an
ambiguity that gives the U.S. government great leeway in deciding whether, when, and
which provisions of the Constitution may apply overseas, and indeed in determining what
territories may be considered foreign to the United States in a domestic sense” (844). In
Perez’s words, “The Insular Cases ruled that the United States can hold a territory as a
colonial possession without ever incorporating the territory into the United States or
granting sovereignty to the territory, keeping the inhabitants in a state of political
disenfranchisement” (9).
To begin to critique the complicated language of the Insular Cases, Perez singles
out the word “territory” by excerpting and citing the term’s etymology:
territory: 1432, “land under the jurisdiction of a town, state, etc”—probably from
Latin territorium: “land around a town, domain, district”—from terra: “earth,
land” (see terrain) + -orium, suffix denoting place. Alternatively, the original
Latin word suggests derivation from terrere: “to frighten” (see terrible); thus
territorium would mean “a place from which people are warned off” (8)
66
Here, Perez demonstrates a connection between land and violence. One of the last
remaining colonies in a supposedly “postcolonial” world, foreign military forces have
occupied Guam for over 300 years (Rogers 2). Pointing to this violent occupation under
Spanish, Japanese, and U.S. imperialism, Perez suggests that the designation of land as a
territory bears the trace of violent struggle for possession and control of that land. While
Spanish rule over Guam will not begin for another century, by including in his citation
the date 1432, Perez gestures toward Columbus’ voyage to and “discovery” of the New
World in 1492 and suggests that we can locate the colonizing act within these early
Latinate concepts.
Thus, by calling his project from Unincorporated Territory, Perez begins to
reclaim and reinscribe the long history of foreign domination over the island of
Guam—from Spanish conquerors to the U.S. Insular Cases. Moreover, the preposition
“from” is important for Perez’s project, as it signals the poem’s place-based poetics, but
also foregrounds that the poetry and the poetic self are contingent upon, while critical of,
a larger history and discourse. Perez explains the term’s significance:
“I” am “from UNINCORPORATED TERRITORY.” From indicates a particular time or
place as a starting point; from refers to a specific location as the first of two limits;
from imagines a source, a cause, an agent, or an instrument; from marks
separation, removal, or exclusion; from differentiates borders.
from: OE “fram,” originally “forward movement, advancement”—evolving into
the sense of “movement away”
67
These poems are “from UNINCORPORATED TERRITORY.” They have been
incorporated from their origins (those “far flung territories”) to establish an
“excerpted space” via the transient, processional, and migratory allowances of the
page. Each poem carries the “from” and bears its weight and resultant
incompleteness. (12)
Working in a serial format, each poem in Perez’s project is a section from a longer poem
within the extended project from Unincorporated Territory, and each is titled either with
a “from” or the Chamorro equivalent “ginen” (one can’t help but read the word “given”
here too). The word “from” suggests an emphasis on provenance, on origins, on place.
But because we do not see the poems as complete and whole, the series also emphasizes a
fragmented existence. It, too, suggests a deferral. All the poems are “from” elsewhere but
locating those origins is a difficult task. The titles resist the finite. That is to say, they
resist clear starting points as well as points of closure.
While from describes how Perez positions his poems and poetic self, the term
excerpt describes his process. Thus, he closes his Preface by citing that word’s
etymology:
excerpt (v): 1432 from L. excerptus: “pluck out, excerpt,” from ex- “out” +
carpere “pluck, gather, harvest” (12)
Interestingly, both citations for the words territory and excerpt are dated from 1432,
linking the violence in the making of a territory with the excerpting or annexing of land.
However, like Said’s notion regarding culture, the act to excerpt also has two sides:
providing a methodology for colonial practices as well as a resistance to those practices.
Thus, while pointing to the violence in the act of excerpting, the act of plucking out,
68
Perez also outlines the strategic use of excerpted space and passages for the purposes of
coalition (gather) and artistic production (harvest).
Thus turning to [Hacha]’s opening poem “from Lisiensan Ga ‘Lago,” we find
Perez excerpting and gathering all the various names for the island of Guam. Including
Spanish, Japanese, and American English names, Perez provides a short history of
colonization on Guam:
“goaam” ~
“goam” ~
“isles de las velas latinas”
(of lateen sails ~
“guan” ~ “guana” ~
“isles de los ladrones”
(of the thieves ~ (15)
The poems in this series are short poems that traverse the field, or sea of the page. Perez
excerpts the language for the poems and often signals his appropriations with quotation
marks. The other chief punctuation mark is a tilde, which invokes the wave motion of the
sea while emphasizing language and pronunciation. Tilde also has etymological
connections to the word “title,” which would reinforce Perez’s theme of names and
naming. In his essay “Discontiguous States of America: The Paradox of Unincorporation
in Craig Santos Perez’s Poetics of Chamorro Guam,” scholar Paul Lai explains the
significance of the series title. Lai reports, “the title phrase “lisiensan ga’lago is what
69
Chamorro called the strips of cloth they had to wear as identification under Japanese
military rule in WWII.” Lai goes on to connect the phrase to the term “dog tag” (12). Dog
tags, of course, are the metal identification tags worn by U.S. military soldiers on chains
around their necks. Perez’s title thus evokes a layered colonial history while gesturing
toward the large number of present-day Chamorro enlisted in the U.S. military
3
.
Turning the page, we find the poem continuing to discuss the fraught tension in
the history of naming Guam but by including the naming of native Chamorro. Here,
Perez uses a braiding of texts, forcing the reader to assemble possible variations of
syntax. Placing the lines without quotation marks together, we can construct the
following meditation: “geographic absence ~ / because who can stand on the / reef / and
name that / below water or sky / imagined territory ~ / archipelago of ‘ bone carved
word / remade: sovereign.” Spliced within these lines, Perez cites from an unnamed
source the following: “the old census records show” / “a Spanish baptismal name and” /
“chamoru last names drawn / from the lexicon of everyday language” / “it is possible
they changed / their last names throughout their lives” (169). Braiding theses texts
together, Perez suggests that the renaming of the land went hand in hand with the
renaming of the people under Spanish colonialism and within the practices of Catholic
missionary work.
But how should we read the poem’s final words: “remade : sovereign”? Initially,
this final figure reads as summation of the work the poem does: a documentation of how
the names of the island and native Chamorro have changed with each successive change

3
For more on the complexities of Chamorro loyalty to and participation within the U.S.
Military see Michael Lujan Bevacqua’s essay “The Exceptional Life and Death of a
Chamorro Soldier: Tracing the Militarization of Desire in Guam, USA.” Bevacqua
reports, “at present, four of the U.S. Army’s twelve highest recruitment ‘producers’ can
be found in Guam” (35).
70
of power. However, there is another reading that would suggest Perez is commenting on
his own poem and its methodology. By excerpting and assembling these various texts,
Perez has stepped into the role and power of remaking and revision. Indeed, Perez’s
figure of these two words is like two sides of a coin, or sovereign. Thus, Perez points to a
flipside, an alternative way of naming and knowing—one that is native-centered.
The poem also brings to our attention the way in which Perez will be working
with various languages within his poems. Key to Perez’s polylingual poetics is his own
experience with schools in Guam:
The colonial school system on Guam, when I grew up there, did not teach written
Chamorro in the schools, a consequence of Americanization and a sustained
desire to eradicate the native language. In the ocean of English words, the
Chamorro words in this collection remain insular, struggling to emerge within
their own “excerpted space.” These poems are an attempt to begin re-
territorializing the Chamorro language in relation to my own body, by way of the
page. (12)
Here, Perez creates a metaphor between his poetry and the mapping of the Pacific.
Indeed, like maps, the poems in the “Lisiensan Ga ‘Lago” series have a legend or key—a
drawn square that presents equivalencies between English and Chamorro. Turning to the
first appearance of a navigational key, we find the following equivalencies:
hu: I
fino’haya: native words
fino’lagu: foreign words
alientos: breath (34)
71
This key seems to describe the composition of the poet as well as the poem. The poem
maps the self as well as the land. However, like Cha (who is cited for [Hacha]’s opening
epigraph), Perez is not interested in direct translation but troubling the notion of
translation. Because the Chamorro language has been oppressed, indeed erased, by
colonizing cultures, Perez’s poems are a testament to this process. Thus, we find the
poems’ “keys” to be at times unreliable: terms are missing (35-6) and under erasure (83).
Significantly, one poem in the series defines words not literally but figuratively (79).
Another poem translates English terms into Chamorro (77), thus effectively rewriting the
colonizing language.
Perez does reproduce within Hacha four actual maps. The titles of these include:
[Routes of the Spanish galleons: after Rogers, 1995]; [War: in the Pacific Ocean];
[Guam: Pacific hub to Asia]; and [Guam: Military bases]. The maps demonstrate how
Guam due to its geographical location has continually been an instrumental possession
within the struggle for imperial power in the Pacific. From Spanish trade routes, to WWII
military offensives, to current day commercial air travel, Guam has continually been at
the heart of imperial ambitions in the Pacific. More specifically, the maps illustrate the
way in which the movement of imperial power relies on—travels over and
through—indigenous peoples and their lands. Indeed, the maps document what Jodi Byrd
has called the “transit of empire,” and how “the post- and neocolonial geographies of the
global South […] bear the brunt of the economic, environmental, and militaristic needs of
the global North.” (xix).
While the maps document the colonial and neo-colonial history of Guam, within
the context of Perez’s poetic project, they too begin to rewrite that history. Rather than
72
illustrating the islands as small, insignificant, and ultimately dependent on outside
nations, these maps frame the islands at the center rather than the periphery while also
demonstrating how foreign powers have depended on the islands for commercial and
military purposes. Moreover, because land masses in these first three maps are not drawn
but represented by their typed names, there are no distinctions between continents and
islands—a geographical fact that Elizabeth DeLoughrey points out in her opening chapter
when she describes our world as a “terraqueous globe, a watery planet that renders all
landmasses into islands surrounded by sea” (2). This revisionist geography is perhaps
most profoundly evident in the map labeled [Guam: Pacific hub to Asia]. Here, Guam is
at the center and connected by many route lines. The furthest of these lines connects
Guam to [LAX], which appears to be the most detached and “far-flung.” Thus, Los
Angeles rather than a cosmopolitan center here appears to be an island so separate and
distant that one might suspect it to be crippled by its own need and dependency.
As DeLoughrey observes, “…those spaces deemed the most external to the march
of world history may be its source of production” (10). Throughout [Hacha], we find a
reexamination of sources in order to enable us as readers to re-see where Perez is
from—a geography and peoples simultaneously erased as they are violently sought after
and possessed by foreign powers. Pointing to the central role of geography within
literatures resistant to imperialism, Said argues that “[f]or the native, the history of
colonial servitude is inaugurated by loss of the locality to the outsider; its geographical
identity must thereafter be searched for and somehow restored.” Said goes on to assert:
“Because of the presence of the colonizing outsider, the land is recoverable at first only
73
through the imagination.” (225) What we see in [Hacha] is a complex recovery project
that imaginatively excerpts and re-deploys colonial discourse.
Transpacific Counter-narratives: Citing Sea, Craft, and Ancestors
The image of English crewmen sailing native proas in the first map of Guam
foreshadowed a Spanish mandate that took possession of native vessels and limited native
travel. Rogers reports that as part of their “subjugating the Marianas,” the Spanish
prohibited travel between the islands and required native Chamorro to obtain permission
for traveling beyond outlying reefs. Rogers writes, “As a consequence, the original
Chamorro flying proa disappeared by the 1780’s” (30).
At the center of Perez’s [Saina], his second book-length installment of the project
from Unincorporated Territory, is a Chamorro proa, a sakman, that was built in 2007 by
the organization TASI, the Chamorro word for ocean or sea, and here an acronym for
Traditions About Seafaring Islands. The organization named the outrigger canoe Saina,
the Chamorro word for ancestors, and sailed the vessel in September 2008
4
. In the book’s
opening pages, Perez works from Rogers’ history and reports that all that remained of the
sakman after Spanish colonization were a set of architectural drawings made by the
English draftsman George Anson in 1742. As Perez explains, the members of TASI
utilized the Anson drawings in order to build the Saina. Perez reports that the September
sailing “was the first time in centuries a sakman could be seen in the waters around
Guam…”(15).

4
You can find various video uploads of the Saina’s launch on Youtube.
74
Devoting a chapter to vessels and navigation, DeLoughrey underscores the need
to recognize the long history of native seafaring along with its suppression and erasure by
colonizing powers. Waterways and native ships figure in her study’s homophonic title
Routes and Roots and demonstrate the “tidalectic” methodology at the heart of her
comparative research that incorporates both native sovereignty (roots) and diaspora
(routes). DeLoughrey writes, “Although Pacific Island discourse is generally associated
with indigenous sovereignty and a historic relationship to the land, to read these cultural
productions tidalectically one must engage with the vital counter-narrative of
transoceanic routes and diaspora” (96). She goes on to argue, “A focus on the vessel
renders tidalectics visible—it is the principal way in which roots are connected to routes
and islands connected to sea” (109).
In addition to the material erasure of vessels and the physical suppression of
native travel rights, DeLoughrey explains that the denial of native seafaring contributed
to certain discourses that were central in enabling the militarization and colonization of
Pacific islands, specifically those narratives characterizing the island as deserted and
isolated as well as those inscribing the Pacific as an empty Basin, or as “aqua nullius.”
Focusing on the specific native craft, the vaka, DeLoughrey argues that its erasure was
“coterminous” with the ascendancy of naval militarization within the Pacific. She thus
cites the continuing existence of these vessels and their navigation as a “powerful
anticolonial message” (113). Perez’s opening invocation of the Saina’s 2008 voyage
should be seen as an expression of this same critique of colonialism. Like the vaka, the
sakman’s presence in the Pacific waters demonstrates native sovereignty while also
demonstrating native coalitions and agency.
75
Both Perez and DeLoughrey cite and build from Epeli Hua’ofa’s foundational
essay “Our Sea of Islands,” an essay in which migration and seafaring are central to
revising a “belittling” colonial discourse. Hua’ofa’s argument ultimately builds on two
incorporations: one that is transnational and one that is literally transpacific in that it
geographically cites not only land but also the Pacific waters. Hua’ofa outlines the
transnational when he reasserts the “culture history and the contemporary process of what
may be called world enlargement that is carried out by tens of thousands of ordinary
Pacific Islanders right across the ocean.” Such migration, Hua’ofa argues, makes
“nonsense of all national and economic boundaries, borders that have been defined only
recently, crisscrossing an ocean that had been boundless for ages before Captain Cook’s
apotheosis” (30). Moreover, in his call for the use of Oceania rather than Pacific Islands,
Hua’ofa includes and cites the Pacific sea, arguing that Native Islanders possess a
“universe compris[ing] not only land surfaces but the surrounding ocean…” Thus
Hua’ofa offers his famous reconfiguration: a “sea of islands” rather than islands in a sea
(31).
One way to begin to distinguish [Saina] from, while acknowledging its continuity
with, [Hacha] is to explore the book’s turning to the sea as well as the book’s central
tropes of seafaring and navigation. In the book’s opening poem, we find the poet, in the
tradition of Hua’ofa, citing water, but in Perez’s native language of Chamorro:
‘[hanom][hanom][hanom]’ (13). As with all the sections of [Saina], five in total, Perez
begins with an excerpted poem from the series “Sourcings.” The title of this series
suggests a citational poetics, a poetry invested in derivations, appropriations, and citing
passages. Moreover, because members of TASI built the Saina from, as Perez reports,
76
“the Anson drawing,” I want to highlight that this central act within the composition of
the book [Saina], is an act of citation. Moreover, it demonstrates an act that
simultaneously utilizes and resists the actions of colonizing cultures. In its incorporation
of both native and non-native knowledges, the Saina—ship and text—demonstrates the
colonial hybridity and, to borrow from DeLoughrey, the tidelectics central to Perez’s
citational poetics.
What we see in Perez’s citation and incorporation of the Saina for the book’s
opening poem provides us with an introduction for the citational practice within two
central serial poems of the text: “Organic Acts” and “Aerial Roots.” As we see in his
incorporation of Saina, these two serial poems turn to ancestors both in the sense of
family narrative and traditional native folktales. Foregrounding indigenous
narratives—both personal and cultural—Perez reinscribes native perspectives, reshaping
how we see both island and islanders. Moreover, the poems incorporate non-native as
well as native knowledges in such a way that documents colonial erasures while also
testifying to native survival and presence. Finally, both poems extend Chamorro presence
and sovereignty beyond the land of Guam, addressing the phenomenon of the Chamorro
diaspora and ways in which Chamorro traditions persist by way of a larger transoceanic
imaginary and a transpacific citing of passages.
The series “Organic Acts” takes its name from the specific statutes of Congress
that establishes an administrative agency or local government while also defining that
body’s specific powers. Signed in August of 1950 by President Truman, The Guam
Organic Act conferred U.S. citizenship to Guamanians and officially established a
civilian government, transferring power from the U.S. Navy. As Rogers reports, this
77
ended Guam’s 277-year existence under the control of a military government (203). Yet
despite these changes, the doctrine of the Insular Cases continued to apply, negating the
possibility of statehood and upholding Guam’s status as an unincorporated territory of the
U.S. Thus, Rogers states, “…Guam was still bound by the old colonial dogma of the
Insular Cases” (205). Moreover, while the U.S. Navy relinquished government control,
U.S. military forces along with the U.S. government were able to secure their land
possessions on the island, maintaining ownership of “over 36 percent” of Guam.
“Overall,” Rogers asserts, “the navy and air force had little to be unhappy about with the
Organic Act” (212).
Perez includes and alters a passage from the text of the Organic Act of 1950, as
well as two additional amendments issued in later years regarding “tidelands,” areas of
land the are partially submerged by tidal waters. The first document excerpted from the
original Organic Act of Guam is an Executive Order describing U.S. land acquisitions.
As Perez explains in the series “Sourcings,” while instituting rights that Chamorro
struggled for, the Organic Act simultaneously “ ‘legalized’ military land holdings” (43).
In subsequent cited passages, Perez focuses our attention on how the U.S. returned and
then reclaimed “submerged lands.” The partial return of certain tidelands is a testament to
the larger partial or limited decolonization of Guam and it points to the continuing
unchecked power of the U.S. to annex native land and sea.
While excerpting and incorporating sections of the Organic Act of Guam, Perez
also weaves two narratives that work to foreground native perspective on and critique of
the long history of colonization on Guam. The first is the cited storytelling of the poet’s
grandmother as she shares her own personal narrative as a Catholic, a War World II
78
survivor, and an ailing woman about to have surgery. The second is a traditional cultural
myth of a giant fish eating and tunneling through Guam’s center in such a way that it
threatens to split the island in two. In part, the cultural narrative provides a mythical
explanation for the geography of the island, which narrows at its center. Thus, through
the story we see a remapping of the land from native perspectives. Moreover, within the
context of the Organic Act of Guam, the native story offers a critique of U.S.
militarization and occupation—forces that, like the giant fish, threaten to consume and
divide the island. The poem focuses on the grandmother, aligning at times her physical
spirit and body with the land and sea. Moreover, as we saw in Cha’s Dictée, the poem
documents the multiple hailings or interpolations by discourses of race, gender, religion,
and nation. Specifically, the poem chronicles the various ways the indigenous people of
Guam are made subject by successive foreign powers: the Spanish, the Japanese, and the
U.S.
Central to the poem’s documentation of multiple subject formations is the poet’s
grandmother and her religious practice of reciting the rosary. Perez records in the opening
section of the poem, “ ‘you should come earlier she always says / ‘to say rosary with us
at six’” (25). As we continue to read within the poem, we find the grandmother turning to
the rosary to solace her physical pain and to give her hope. “i pray / that’s all i can do,”
laments the grandmother (79). Here, too, Perez provides documentation of the history of
the Catholic Church and the practice of saying the rosary within Chamorro culture.
Indeed, the rosary resonates with the traditional Chamorro tale of the Giant Fish. Perez’s
grandmother recounts the story as it was handed down to her:
after many generations passed
79
to days of spanish
mary came
she
knew how to help [us] (27)
Within the narrative Mary uses a strand of her own hair, like a fishing line, in order to
capture the fish. Here, there is correspondence between Mary’s strand of hair and the
string used to tie the beads of a rosary: “a series / of linked / beads / made from / strong /
thread,” observes Perez (72). Indeed, the line of hair and thread, mirrors Perez’s own
verse line that serves to compositionally string together the poem, conjoining multiple
narratives and cultural traditions.
Reflecting the longer colonial history on the island, the native fish story has two
endings. In his notes, Perez directs his reader to his source, a website hosted by the
government of Guam. On the website, and within Perez’s poem, we find out that there are
two versions of the story. The earlier version refers simply to a “monster” and concludes
when a group of Chamorro women weave a net from their long hair and capture the
monster. The later version refers specifically to a fish. However, instead of native
women, it is the Virgin Mary who weaves a net from her own hair and ensnares the
menacing fish. The change to the story’s resolution reflects the introduction of
Catholicism by the Spanish to the island of Guam, and as in other poems Perez
documents this history by citing from various sources. In pointing out the variations to
the story, Perez cites a complex layering brought on by colonial rule.
As we saw in Dictée, key to understanding the histories of multiple colonizations
is recognizing how the act of religious recitation is central in the making of both national
80
and religious subjects. Building from this understanding, Perez utilizes the practice of
rosary to restring and so reinscribe the prayer within a specific passage from a later
addendum to the Organic Act of 1950, a proclamation reclaiming “submerged lands”
from Guamanian possession:
now therefore i gerald r ford [i tatan-mami : our father] president of [ni gaige hao
gi : who art in ] the united states of america
by virtue of authority vested in me [umamaila’i gobietno-mu : thy kindom come]
do hereby proclaim that lands hereinafter described are exce[r]pted from transfer
[umafa-tinas i pino’-mu : thy will be done] to government of American samoa
government of guam and government of united states virgin islands (100)
In an assemblage that brings together the “Our Father” prayer of the rosary—in both
English and Chamorro—with the text of the Organic Act, Perez utilizes the colonial
practices of recitation and “excerpting” to revision and critique U.S. power to repossess
native lands. Moreover, the merging of the texts points to a similar patriarchal power
within both national and religious authoring and authority. Thus, we are made to see the
grandmother’s testimony, the religious figure of Mary, and the indigenous women of the
original version of the fish story as alternatives to masculine foreign domination.
Indeed, Perez’s poem presents the oral traditions of rosary, storytelling, and
poetry as radical acts of transgression that ultimately facilitate the passing on of native
culture despite the violent disruption brought on by foreign struggles for colonial power.
Following the revised U.S. proclamation, we find the grandmother recounting stories of
81
her own mother’s religious devotion and her struggles during World War II under
Japanese occupation:
“every six o’clock
no matter what we’re doing we had to drop and say rosary
very devoted
we have rosary every night every night
she believed
in the blessed mother
just like us here
now (102)
This nightly devotional is then paralleled with a nightly meeting of neighbors during the
war years. During these meetings, the mother, who spoke “chamorro japanese english
spanish,” would translate from a radio that neighbors kept “buried / somewhere during
the day” (102-103). The grandmother concludes her story by stating, “but we had to be
quiet very quiet like whispering because you never know who’s outside in the dark”
(103). Here, Perez renders this final testimonial in a cut-up presentation placing spaces
between individual letters and words, forcing the reader to assemble the sentence in a
similar way to Perez’s own assembly of the various narratives and text.
Perhaps, too, we are made to see the text as a physical rosary with parts of words
representing individual beads. For, in fact, we are brought back to the oral tradition of
the rosary in the final section of the poem. The grandmother reflects:
“i really miss my mom
her voice is like my voice
82
[…]
“when i say rosary i think i can hear her voice
even here in california (119)
Despite the overlap of Spanish Catholicism with Spanish Colonialism, the rosary, as a
form of oral tradition, is refigured and reinscribed in this passage. Rather than seeing a
line of patriarchal power, we see a line connecting female figures. Moreover, it’s a
connection that participates in Hua’ofa’s notion of “world enlargement,” constructing a
line of echo—built from citation and recitation—across the Pacific.
The series “Aerial Roots” continues to explore these lines of echo, working in
verse and prose in order to present the paradox and possibilities between what is fixed
and what is migratory. From the series title, we see a configuration similar to
Delaughrey’s homophone root/route. However, focusing on air, Perez incorporates the
phenomena of breath, voice, and wind currents. He, thus, builds a correspondence
between the sailing of native vessels and the uttering of native words. Indeed, like we
saw in the series “Lisensan Ga’Lago,” Perez incorporates Chamorro words, choosing to
bracket them and follow them with colons, signaling that a definition is to follow.
Sometimes we do find English equivalents for the words, but often the colons present
empty spaces or connect to verse lines in progress. As we learned in [Hacha], Perez sees
the Chamorro words as surrounded by a sea of English. If we are to take the metaphor
further, the Chamorro words—with brackets as sails—navigate through this sea of
English.
In fact, throughout “Aerial Roots,” we find Perez exploring words as crafts or
vessels, which record the violence of colonialism while also providing the possibilities of
83
indigenous survival and resistance. Under colonialism, just as native crafts were
suppressed and erased, material words, too, under went transformation due to restrictions
placed on the language. Thus, we find in an early poem within this series, Perez
observing that “in written histories the spanish changed all the l’s to r’s—inalahan
became inarajan—” (34). Addressing this linguistic violence that changed native village
names under Spanish colonialism, Perez writes, “…if breath / is our only commonwealth
// if we are evidence of / what words bury [apayua’: ‘sakman’ i say / it say it / navigates
the air—” (34). In this configuration, “sakman”—spoken word and sailing
craft—navigates and continues on despite colonialism’s oppressive written histories.
Moreover, we find an overlapping of the physical sea vessels and the physical
body. Perez writes, “when water grips the end of my throat / hu sangan “saina” / so far
away / say we can cross any body / of water if we believe in / our own breath—” (48). In
another poem from this series, Perez asks “how does sakman cut waves / how do i cast
my cut tongue” (70). And in a subsequent poem, Perez finds these startling
correspondences: “waterlines— / the lines of our palms—skin / chart to read blood
currents—saina, / why have you given me these lines / do your palms mirror / mine, do
the lines of your hull” (105). Establishing correspondences between native vessels, native
bodies, and native languages, Perez constructs poems that testify to native presence and
survival. Furthermore, he argues that in this complex correspondence of
lines—waterlines, bloodlines, canoe-lines, and verse lines—we might revise those
restrictive lines drawn by race, nation, and empire.
Instrumental to this revision, Perez utilizes prose passages that present personal
memories, family narratives, and Chamorro mythology. These prose pieces continue to
84
emphasize the importance of native seafaring and sea craft while stressing
continuities—those lines of inheritance—that extend across a truly transoceanic
imaginary. In the opening poem of the series, we find Perez in dialogue with his father
regarding two hand-carved, wooden models of native canoes—a galaide and
sakman—that the family took with them when they left Guam for California. Here, the
father explains the care with which he packed the canoes for the plane trip:
—so i cut up some cardboard boxes we were using to ship things and i made a
special box for each canoe—with the outrigger sticking out of my hand made box
so i could use it as a handle—even on the airplane i didn’t check it in baggage but
i carried it on—i put one under the seat in front of me and one under the seat in
front of you—you don’t remember? (21)
The passage demonstrates the value placed in these symbols of a larger tradition of sea
navigation. There is irony in the fact the canoes shrunk to models now cross the ocean
with the family in an airplane, and we are reminded of the maps in [Hacha] that show sea
and air travel routes. Exploring how indigenous traditions persist in transpacific transit,
this narrative presents us with one sense of the poem’s title. Following in Hua’ofa’s
example, Perez in “Aerial Roots” practices a similar “world enlargement,” extending
native traditions and epistemologies across the Pacific by way of sea and air.
Throughout these cultural and personal memories, we see Perez returning to
themes that reinscribe native practices and history despite the dynamic shifts brought on
by colonialism and diasporic migrations that threaten those traditions. Reflecting on
personal memories of high school at the “chief gadao academy” where the poet, as a
freshman, learned native canoeing under the coaching of “mr flores,” Perez presents the
85
kind of reeducation that can occur when practicing the intertwined epistemologies of
indigenous language and seafaring:
is remembered mr flores explained that this was how our ancestors counted
“hacha hugua tulu fatfat lima”—i had never heard these numbers before—when
my dad counts he switches, tacks between english and spanish —grandma counts
in spanish—when she read my first book she asked what does ‘hacha’ mean?—i
said hacha means ‘one—she looked surprised, asked in what language?—in
chamorro, i said—she replied: i speak chamorro all my life and i never heard that
word, one is uno in Chamorro—no grandma, that’s spanish—she looked
confused—hacha, hacha, she repeated, feeling the sound in her
mouth—[…]—uno is one i never heard of hacha— (59)
In this passage, we witness the layers of languages and their corresponding erasures
under the changing hands of empire. Reminiscent of the French dictation lessons in Cha’s
Dictée, we recognize the ways in which subjects are re-interpolated within the language
systems of each successive national power. This particular excerpt in the series begins
with Perez reflecting, “[tatalo: i don’t remember who told me that the reef around
guahän is made of our bones—burial / in every wave—” (59). Indeed, we see the ways
languages and their epistemologies get covered over, buried and lost. Yet the sea and its
fluidity suggest a different kind of burial and a different kind of unearthing. Thus, Perez,
using the navigational metaphor of tacking, describes his father’s movement between
languages. This suggests a fluid, coexistence and confluence of both native and settler
languages and cultures.
86
The numeral one, whatever the language, speaks to origins, and Perez’s high
school’s name allows the poet to explore the origin myth of Chief Gadao. As Perez
explains, Chief Gadao, a man of great strength from the village of Inalåhan, accepts a
challenge to a rowing competition by another chief from the village of Tumon. Sitting in
the same canoe and rowing in opposite directions, the two chiefs split the canoe in half so
that each half went on to form the islands Asgadsa and Rota. Here, in a tale of island
origins, we find the canoe giving birth to the land. The story exemplifies the way in
which sea travel has always been the way of life for Chamorro and that such migration
establishes an alternative understanding of sovereignty—one that is in dialogue with land
and sea and one that stretches across the Pacific.
Indeed, the Chief Gadao story resonates with Perez’s own family narrative of
transpacific migration. In the series’ last poem, and the last poem of the book, Perez
returns to his family’s migration from Guam to California the summer after the poet’s
freshman year. In prose, Perez shares the outcome of the two wooden model canoes that
accompanied the family. He writes, “the galaide is at my sister’s apartment in fremont
california and the sakman is at my parents house in santa clara california” (129). The
splitting of Chief Gadoa’s canoe thus parallels the splitting of the two wooden model
canoes central to Perez’s family and their move from island to continent. The two stories
speak to the Chamorro diaspora and the extension of native islander community and
cultural traditions.
87
Conclusion
In his discussion of literatures written in resistance to imperialism, Said pinpoints
a central difficulty when he asserts that the native writer working against colonialism
“must to a certain degree work to recover forms already established or at least influenced
or infiltrated by the culture of empire” (210). Said illustrates his point by looking at the
specific motif of the quest or voyage. Referencing Joyce’s Ulysses, Said writes, “the
decolonizing native writer…re-experiences the quest-voyage motif from which he had
been banished by means of the same trope carried over from the imperial into the new
culture and adopted, reused, relived” (211).
In “Our Sea of Islands,” Hau’ofa shows how the imperialism of the nineteenth
century—a century Said cites for its proliferation of the quest-voyage narrative—was
successful in constructing “boundaries that led to the contraction of Oceania,
transforming a once boundless world into the Pacific Island states and territories that we
know today.” Hau’ofa goes on to write, “This is the historical basis of the view that our
countries are small, poor, and isolated. It is true only insofar as people are still fenced in
and quarantined” (34). Thus, we see that one people’s voyage narrative becomes
another’s story of subjugation.
Perez’s work reasserts the presence of native Chamorro, a voyaging culture,
within the various discourses they have been “banished” from—reinscribing their
presence within the maps, court documents, and government proclamations that have
dispossessed them of their seas and lands. Turning to an archive, going further back than
the nineteenth century, that has made the Chamorro both subject and subjugated, Perez
88
practices a poetics of citation that excerpts from colonizing discourses while
documenting native traditions. In doing so, Perez’s work “recovers” those forms that
have bound, belittled, and erased native islander presence.
Joyd Byrd’s notion of “transit” might further help our thinking about voyaging
and our reading of Perez’s work. Byrd writes, “To be in transit is to be active presence in
a world of relational movements and countermovements. To be in transit is to exist
relationally, multiply” (xvii). Here, Byrd argues for an approach to indigenous studies
that emphasizes a more fluid framework. She asserts, “Transit is slightly provocative, an
incomplete point of entry, and its provenance might be more suited to diaspora studies
and border-crossings than to a notion such as indigeneity that is often taken as rooted and
static, located in a discrete place” (xvi). This understanding of transit, I believe, helps us
to understand the seriality of Perez’s work. Writing a poetic series without start or
ending, Perez presents a long-poem of which we have only excerpts so that the entirety of
the poem is never completely before us. Too, transit helps put into perspective Perez’s
emphasis on native seacraft and voyage, suggesting a sustained agency that recovers the
native islander as voyager and pilot of his or her craft.
We might also see Perez’s poetics of citation as a transit between languages as
well as between written and spoken act. Indeed, Perez’s movement of text—excerpting,
assembling, splicing and weaving—is another kind of agency: one that refuses to see the
written word as fixed but instead chooses to reimagine and revise those discourses that
bind or dispossess. Through a subversive citing and altering of text, Perez constructs
sovereignty in language, authoring native presence and movement where it has been
89
confined or—like in the early map of Guam at the start of this chapter—completely
erased.
90
Conclusion
Writing on the The Waste Land, Modernism’s ur text for citational poetics,
Elizabeth Gregory observes that Eliot’s poem is “primarily concerned with the work of
other poets, and particularly the work of male poets—fathers struggled with in the
poem’s literary oedipal narrative” (67). Gregory writes elsewhere that the poem
ultimately “reaffirms the oedipal lesson that authority is transferable from father to son.”
Beginning with the history of Chinese paper sons, a practice predicated on the transfer of
derivative citizenship from U.S. fathers to foreign-born sons, my project has focused on
authoring and authorizing lineages. But perhaps more true to the oedipal narrative, my
study has explored the misdirection within identity—the ways in which the forces that
constitute our identity need to be constantly rethought and reexamined.
Gregory, in her chapter on Eliot, goes on to revise the male-dominated reading of
poetic lineage offered by Harold Bloom in The Anxiety of Influence by reasserting the
repressed presence of women in both the oedipal paradigm and Eliot’s poem. She writes,
“The appropriation tale is thus part of the poem’s oedipal genesis story, which requires
not just the acknowledgment of fathers but the demotion of mothers as well” (68). Here,
one might recall that at Angel Island the women’s barracks and the poems carved into
those walls were burned down in a fire that was one of the factors leading to the eventual
closure of the immigration station. Thus, beyond the silence often attributed to paper sons
and the poems carved by male detainees
1
, there is the even greater silence of migrating

1
A docu-drama on the Chinese immigrant experience at Angel Island produced by the
California Department of State Parks is titled Carved in Silence.
91
women and their own poems at Angel Island. As we have seen, both Cha and Perez turn
to matriarchal lineages as part of a larger citational project to forge alternative traditions
and alliances while rewriting the dominant discourses that have worked to define and
delimit their identities.
The oedipal paradigm as Bloom famously applied it to literary tradition is quite
literally always about “paper sons”—the anxieties and influences transferred from poet to
poet by way of paper-based texts. While constructing alternative lineages, the poets of
this study have also turned to other media to inscribe and reinscribe their poems. Thus,
we find the poets at Angel Island carving into the walls of their incarceration, Cha turning
to the screen of the cinema, and Perez utilizing hyperlinks connecting bookpage to
webpage. In their turn to other media and technologies, the poets participate in larger
social and political conversations. Poetry off the page often demonstrates the ways poems
might matter, quite physically, in a material and dynamic world. The fact that plans for
the demolition of the immigration station at Angel Island were delayed and eventually
cancelled due to the discovery of the wall poetry, testifies to the ways poetry—despite
Auden’s famous claim—can make things happen. Poetry on the immigration walls saved
the building and secured an important monument to early Chinese American lineage and
identity.
We see the precursor to Bloomian anxiety to literary history and tradition in
Eliot’s own famous observation that if a poet were to continue to be a poet past the age of
25, he would need to acquire an “historical sense” (Selected Prose 38). Towards the end
of the 20th century, Edward Said began his groundbreaking study Culture and
Imperialism by citing Eliot’s notion of history, a “pastness” that continues to have
92
“presence,” and extended the historical sense into a space that is political as well
aesthetic. Describing his own approach to history in his Preface to Orientalism, Said
writes, “My argument is that history is made by men and women, just as it can also be
unmade and rewritten, always with various silence and elisions, always with shapes
imposed and disfigurements tolerated, so that ‘our’ East, ‘our’ Orient becomes ‘ours’ to
possess and direct” (xviii). If Eliot and Bloom’s assessment of literary history calls for
the poet to pursue a mastery of the tradition, Said’s work draws attention to how history
and culture in general has been manufactured to master us.
My project has attempted to sound out some of the silences and underscore some
of the elisions by attending to the ways poetic acts of citation engage in a larger
conversation that include the often underrepresented acts of immigrants and natives in
response to colonizing forces in the Pacific. In such a conversation, appropriation, rather
than posturing as post-identity, describes the very formation of our identities. Thus, for
the poets my study considers, citation (to use the word’s root) calls upon multiple,
alternative, and even fictive traditions in order to reexamine the histories made and the
historical subjects produced under racialized and colonizing discourse within the Pacific.
When I began this project in the spring of 2011, a popular news story in the media
focused on the “birther movement” led by Donald Trump and his call in the run-up to the
2012 election for President Obama to provide his birth certificate in order to prove his
U.S citizenship. In April of that year, Obama posted on the White House website the
long-form version of this document, which he had to formally request from the Kapiolani
Medical Center in Honolulu, Hawaii where the president was born in 1961. But while this
satisfied some of the President’s detractors, many continue to question the document’s
93
legitimacy and the legitimacy of Obama’s presidency. Here, we see how paper (and
virtual) documents continue to be called upon to authorize origins and provide proof of
identity. Moreover, when considering Obama’s own mixed heritage, the incident
underscores the ways in which transracial, transnational, and transpacific identities
continue to be seen as suspect and felonious.
As we have seen, situations confronting an individual with wrongdoing force a
response that recites identity and accounts for oneself. Here, we might consider the early
vilification of the Chamorro people as cheats and tricksters, and the cartographic naming
of Guahån as the “Island of Thieves.” Citation in response to false accusation and
misrepresentation provides evidence of the past while working to also revise that history.
But beyond testifying to citizenship, the citational acts of paper sons at Angel Island as
well as the citational poetics of Cha and Perez participate in a documentation that enacts
a critique of subject formation by pointing to the discursive practices that underwrite
subjectivity. Here, citation recalls the calls of interpellation—the hailings that conscript
us and speak us into subjecthood. Beginning from this meeting point—or in Stuart Hall’s
language, this suture—Cha and Perez begin to rethink and rewrite identity in such a way
that doesn’t essentialize or fix its presence but points to the ways identity is an intensely
dynamic and contingent process that is both collaborative and contentious.
Eliot scholars writing on the The Waste Land have pointed to the dynamic quality
in the identity of the poem’s speaker. In a passage that might describe Cha’s Disuese as
well as Eliot’s own orator
2
, Maud Ellman writes, “The disembodied “I” glides in and out
of stolen texts, as if the speaking subject were merely the quotation of its antecedents.

2
For a discussion of Dictee as Modernist epic see Josephine Parks’ essay on Cha in
Apparitions of Asia.
94
Indeed, this subject is the victim of a general collapse of boundaries” (92). In a poem in
which the speaker moves fluidly between texts and voices, it is fitting that The Waste
Land closes with the speaker turning from the “arid plain” and sitting “upon the shore” to
look over the appropriations he has incorporated. “Shall I at least set my lands in order?”
asks the speaker before launching into a final stanza that cites texts from both West and
East: “fragments…” the speaker famously tells us, “I have shored against my ruin” (19).
Situated across the shores of the Pacific, my poetry and scholarship work to
understand how the inclusion of outside texts within the lines of a poem can give us
larger insights into the construction of identities within the lines drawn by issues of
gender, race, nation, and empire. Citational poetics, in the hands of transpacific poets,
cites in order to transgress such lines and counter the elisions, silences, and
misrepresentations of imperial appropriations. The poets of my study, like the Chinese
paper sons, are and are not the “quotation of [their] antecedents.” Exploring and at times
strategically utilizing this ambivalence, Cha and Perez move between prose and verse
lines as they similarly move between the construction of literary and cultural lineages.
Ultimately, their citational practices expose how “fragmentation” and “ruin” have been
strategies of colonizing discourse. Rather than lamenting the “collapse of boundaries,”
their transnational poetics points to what Epelli Hua’ofa has called the “nonsense of all
national and economic boundaries” (30). Forging a citational poetics that demonstrates
the possibilities of making connections across boundaries, they purse a complex echo of
sources that does not shore identity but rather testifies to its boundlessness.
95
Bibliography
Alarcón, Norma, ed. Writing Self, Writing Nation: A Collection of Essays on Dictée by
Theresa Hak Kyung Cha. San Antonio: Third Woman Press, 1994.
Althusser, Louis. “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes towards an
Investigation).” Lenin and Philosophy, and Other Essays. New York: Monthly
Reviews Press, 2001. 127-186.
Barthes, Roland. Image-Music-Text. New York: Noonday Press, 1988.
Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations. Hannah Arrendt, ed. New York: Schocken Books,
1968.
Bevacqua, Michael Lujan. “The Exceptional Life and Death of a Chamorro Soldier:
Tracing the Militarization of Desire in Guam, USA.” Millitarized Currents:
Toward a Decolonized Future in Asia and the Pacific. Shigematsu, Setsu, and
Keith L. Camacho, eds. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010. 33-61.
Bhabha, Homi. The Location of Culture. New York: Routledge, 1994.
Burnett, Christina Duffy and Marshall Burke. Foreign in a Domestic Sense: Puerto Rico,
American Expanison, and the Constitution. Durham: Duke UP, 2001.
Butler, Judith. Giving An Account of One Self. Bronx: Fordham UP, 2005.
Byrd, Jodi. The Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2011.
Cha, Therese Hak Kyung. Apparatus, Cinematographic Apparatus: Selected Writings.
New York: Tanam Press, 1980.
—Dictée. Berkeley: UC Press, 2001.
96
Chan, Sucheng, ed. Entry Denied: Exclusion and the Chinese Community in America,
1882-1943. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1991.
Chen, Tina. Double Agency: Acts of Impersonation in Asian American Literature and
Culture. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2005.
Cheng, Anne Anlin. The Melancholy of Race: Psychoanalysis, Assimilation, and Hidden
Grief. New York: Oxford UP, 2001.
Chion, Michel. Audio-Vision: Sound On Screen. New York: Columbia UP, 1990.
Chuh, Kandice. Imagine Otherwise: On Asian Americanist Critique. Durham: Duke UP,
2003.
Camacho, Keith L. “Transoceanic Flows: Pacific Islander Interventions Across the
American Empire.” Amerasia Journal. 37:3 (2011). ix-xxiv.
Daniels, Roger. “No Lamps Were Lit for Them: Angle Island and the Historiography of
Asian American Immigration.” Journal of American Ethnic History. 17:1 Fall
1997, 3-18. Print.
DeLoughrey, Elizabeth. Routes and Roots: Navigating Caribbean and Pacific
Literatures. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2007.
Dworkin, Craig Douglas and Kenneth Goldsmith, eds. Against Expression: An Anthology
of Conceptual Writing. Evanston: Northwestern UP, 2011.
Eliot, T.S. Selected Prose of T.S. Eliot. Frank Kermode, ed. New York: Mariner Books,
1975.
—The Waste Land (Norton Critical Editions). Michael North, ed. New York: Norton,
2000.
97
Ellmann, Maud. The Poetics of Impersonality: T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. Cambridge:
Harvard UP, 1987.
Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. Richard Philcox, trans. New York: Grove Press,
2008.
Fuss, Diana. Identification Papers: Readings on Psychoanalysis, Sexuality, and Culture.
New York: Routledge, 1995.
Gregory, Elizabeth. Quotation and Modern American Poetry: “Imaginary Gardens with
Real Toads.” Houston: Rice UP, 1996.
Hall, Stuart. “Who Needs Identity.” Questions of Cultural Identity. Stuart Hall and Paul
du Gay, eds. London: Sage Publications, 1996. 1-17.
Hau’ofa, Epeli. “Our Sea of Islands.” We Are the Ocean: Selected Works. Honolulu:
University of Hawai‘i Press, 2008. 27-40.
Huang, Yunte. Transpacific Imaginations. History, Literature, Counterpoetics.
Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2008.
Kaplan, Amy. “Where Is Guantanamo.” American Quarterly. Vol. 57, no. 3. September
2005. 831-858.
Kingston, Maxine. China Men. New York: Vintage, 1989.
Lai, Him Mark, Genny Lim, Judy Yung. Island: Poetry and History of Chinese
Immigrants on Angel Island 1910-1940. San Francisco: HOC DOI, 1986.
Lai, Paul. “Discontiguous States of America: The Paradox of Unincorporation in Craig
Santos Perez’s Poetics of Chamorro Guam.” Journal of Transnational American
Studies. 3(2). 1-28. Print.
98
Lau Estelle T. Paper Families: Identity, Immigration Administration, and Chinese
Exclusion. Durham: Duke UP, 2006.
Lee, Christopher. The Semblance of Identity: Aesthetic Mediation in Asian American
Literature. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2012.
Lee, Erika. At America’s Gate: Chinese Immigration During The Exclusion Era, 1882-
1943. Chaphill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003.
Lee, Erika and Judy Yung. Angel Island: Immigrant Gateway to America. New York:
Oxford UP, 2010.
Lowe, Lisa. Immigrant Acts. Durham: Duke UP, 1996.
—“Trans-Pacific Migrant and Area Studies.” The trans-Pacific Imagination: Rethinking
Boundary, Culture, and Society. Naoki Sakai and Hyon Joo Yoo, eds.
Hackensack: World Scientific, 2012. 61-74.
Nee, Brett de Bary and Victor G. Longtime Californ’: A Documentary Study of an
American Chinatown. New York: Pantheon Books, 1972.
Palumbo-Liu, David. The Ethnic Cannon: Histories, Institutions, and Interventions.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1955.
Park, Josephine. Apparitions of Asia: Modernism, the Orient, and Asian American
Poetry. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008.
Perez, Craig Santos. from Unincorporated Territory: [HACHA]. Kãne‘ohe: Tinfish Press,
2008.
—from Unincorporated Territory: [SAINA]. Richmond: Omnidawn Publishing, 2010.
Perloff, Marjorie. Unoriginal Genius: Poetry by Other Means in the New Century.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010.
99
Reed, Brian M. “In Other Words: Postmillennial Poetry and Redirected Language.”
Contemporary Literature. 52.4 (2011): 756-790. Print.
Rogers, Robert F. Destiny’s Landfall: A History of Guam. Honolulu: University of
Hawai‘i Press, 2011.
Said, Edward W. Culture and Imperialsim. New York: Vintage Books, 1993.
—Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books, 1979.
See, Lisa. Shanghai Girls. New York: Random House, 2010.
Stefans, Brian Kim. Before Starting Over. Cambridge: Salt Publishing, 2006.
Stewart, Susan. Poetry and the Fate of the Senses. Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2002.
Takaki, Ronald. Strangers From from a Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans.
New York: Penguin, 1990.
Van Den Abbeele, Georges. “Tears at the End of the Road: The Impasse of Travel and
the Walls at Angel Island.” Writing Travel: The Poetics And Politics of the
Modern Journey. John Zilcosky, ed. University of Toronto Press, 2008.
Wilson, Rob and Arif Dirlik. Asia/Pacific as Space of Cultural Production. Durham:
Duke UP, 1995.
Wong, Sau-ling Cynthia. Reading Asian American Literature: From Necessity to
Extravagance. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993.
Yao, Steven G. Foreign Accents: Chinese American Verse from Exclusion to
Postethnicity. New York: Oxford UP, 2010.
Yu, Timothy. Race and the Avant-Garde: Experiment and Asian American Poetry Since
1975. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2009.
A Crow’s Robe
CONTENTS
Elegy / 1
~
Coaching Papers / 3
~
The Nest Collectors / 16
Seascapes / 17
Alba: The Archer Yi / 26
Elegy / 27
~
Cuttings / 29
Noche Buena / 32
Tilde / 33
A Crow’s Robe / 34
~
Bows & Resonators / 36
~
Oulipo / 48
Confessions / 56
The Tribute Horse / 62
Notes / 63
1
ELEG Y
My grandfather’s grave in scorched grass has two names in the
gravestone’s granite: one with strokes—silent and once forbidden; the
other lettered—a stowaway vowel between one aspirate, one liquid.
Speech wears the written in the speaker’s absence to stay the sound &
breath’s passing. I read that the wood, for Thoreau, was resonator
Sundays when towns tolled bells—Lincoln, Acton, Bedford, or Concord.
Pines with resin reverbed in sap what wind sent. A Chinese immigrant,
on his Pacific-crossing, carried coaching papers for the memorizing.
Approaching the island station, these pages were tossed to sea. A moon’s
light in a ship’s wake might make a similar papertrail. My grandfather,
aboard at twelve, practiced a paper-name. What ensued was a debt of
sound.
~
3
COAC HING PAPE RS
Said, my name was a seine net,
torqued by pitch & drawn closed.
Said aloud, my name swallowed me.
Aloud, my name kept me in its net.
Nights, I hauled the wet nets: names
silent & breathless across my desk.
Nights, I mended trawling-tears.
I took needle & thread to names.
4
A paper-name ensures a debt
of sound. A paper wake, a ream
ripsawed by utter-breath, feathers
—tract to vane—my throat. I tamp,
binder (minding catchword order)
pages of crest-to-trough cursive,
a moon’s sentence, a bow’s hull-lap
beneath a farm boy’s footstep.
5
The sea types in italics voices
analogged in the archive: soundbytes
shipsank or shore tossed—babble
for the gleaner. Bowsprit with tin-ear,
I dove & scissored a broomtail
long as the breath my lungs held,
long as the vow vesseling vowel.
Breath to blood, breath fathomed me.
6
At sea, paper turns to slurry.
The pulp’s knit slips in the eddy.
Above are bareknuckled stars:
Hercules’ keystone, Archer’s teapot.
The sea calms & flatlines a blank.
Sign here or breach & breathe.
Fiddle slack the mute knot.
I sift spindrift for sound’s wave.
7
Each sound—trill or siren,
grain-snap of apple, a woodfire—
earbones tap out from air
to sea wave. The ear’s shape
cites physics: the lobe tableau
to a stone’s throw—round, smooth
for the skip that left the ear wake—
rings where the stone sank.
8
At sea, a boy recites a name.
The sea records it in waves.
Som—aspirate, vowel, liquid—
is a vessel of wind & water.
On swells, the bow dips & rises
like a pen signing the horizon.
Som—aspirate, vowel, liquid.
There is a sea on the coaching pages.
9
The first page was lint left
after sifting & drying clothes
washed in a river whose length
stretched so far some claimed
the Milky Way for its source.
A laundry boy when he first
came over, father said of his
father trying to make a dollar.
10
Other sources cite hivemakers.
With its wood-grain mâché,
pulp & slur, a wasp masons—
utters what it gnaws, walls its say.
All good nests recite their trees.
Crack a hive’s hymnal & read
the spackle’s small mouth-print.
Write in that echo, that alphabet.
11
Breath vets veins, pleaches
bones, braids hairpin turns
in the well-dark body. I breathe
in loops, repeats, go to trees—
air between, ornithology. In slip
cuttings—beak-sown, spit-bound—
breath nests the sapling’s coax,
when sounding the body’s bones.
.
12
The g, singing to signing, falls
silent. You listen but it’s you
breathing. To say sea we speak
first an aspirate. Wind starts a sea.
A ship’s bow’s shape writes an A
to mark the indefinite way. A name
is a persona, per son, per song.
Sonar searches the sea by singing.
13
The sea salts away a semblance
of the names in its sibilance.
Wading wavebreak or hunting
wrackline, we are in earshot
of the sea reciting. Nearing port,
the sea is a rehearsing of names
but shore-torn & reassembled
into unnamed sound & syllable.
14
A name goes searching for breath
aligning the sextant of its shape
with the plane of the written page.
I am charting a written name,
reading aloud a manifest of sons
marked Citizen, reciting to sound
out again the purchased names,
to hear what silence stowed away.
~
16
THE NEST COLLECTORS
Then the circuit tripped, and under alley stars
above the breaker box, I found the twig nest
with bits of hatchling shell. I considered the one-
note hum one’s home makes, the murmur
of watt and want the nestlings fledged above,
forming their own warble from need-cry. Once
at a wedding’s banquet, my father, so often frugal,
spoke on the extravagance of the first course,
of the trellises, in sea caves in China, centuries-old
and twine-tethered by nest collectors. Shouldering
gunnysacks damp with spindrift, they forage
swift nests for blood-spittle that binds twig
to twig and is a delicacy seasoning a soup’s broth.
I looked for what bound my nest but found
nothing for profit, or to pawn, though in my hand
it was round as a pocketwatch—a pocketwatch
with fob that once tethered a bird. Mason of the avian,
father said, sipping from his Seven and Seven.
Then the sea bass came with slivers of scallion.
We used our soup bowls, discretely, for the bones.
17
SEAS CAPES
Of the horizon we know
Very little up close and figure
The intent as a streamlining
Of our own inarticulate selves.
Recently, I had the opportunity
To hold one in my hands. Let me
Underscore its resistance to form.
My fingers felt as if thousands
Of miles were between them.
18
Then they moved to the sea.
At the beach they let go
The kite string and the sky
Before them seemed even more
Immense and yet still
Leaning on those instances
That added up to the present
Sackcloth of clouds and wind
Assailing, suddenly all shoulders.
19
The story of the bird is a girl
In a devout grief against a sea
That eddies because its memory
Of the sky is at once collective
And dissipating as it becomes
Sky again. The plan was simple:
Fathom both grief and sea
With stones displacing each
The way a wing does the wind.
20
Underground disorients us
From above which explains why
We’ve forgotten so much of heaven.
A subway car sounds like you
Searching the silverware
For a tablespoon, while tunnels turn
The windows of the train to mirrors
Because the opaque, in its refusing
Of the light, affords us reflection.
21
They say in certain shells
You still hear the sea.
What urgency is there still
Left in such long distant
Phone calls in which the past
Is in our hands by some
Rendering tinged with loss:
The sea in desperate karaoke
Disarmingly maudlin in mono.
22
After this, bridges followed him
Home, shirking responsibility, so
The city was hamstrung. Telling him
Similar dreams of sawing men
In half, they approached the sympathies
That have made them the outbursts
Of our solitudes. Seeing something
Of himself, he watched them return
To tender themselves at dawn.
23
The essential idiom of the sea
Comes to terms in the calligraphic
Coast. Sea brought, kelp dries
In the sunlight on the shore rocks.
Day is a hogtying, a stark light
Drying them out, so she fished
From her day bag a tin of bee balm.
And the tide had its slip knot
And the day moon its oar lock.
24
Overtime, my lips were a kite
Tied off at the back of my throat.
Hers were a beak evolved
From a diet of settling a score.
Godlike, the sea swallowed
For the sake of form. Awe occurs
When we can’t measure certain
Distances, while our mouths open,
As to challenge with our own immensity.
25
Among the ideal forms
Complete and hung past the veils
And valences of the night’s sky
He liked those which explained away
His finding the old answering
Machine with its tape still spooled
And cued: she’d be late. These nights
He put a book down. He walked away.
Ellipses trailed him to the other room.
26
ALBA: THE ARCH ER YI
Because we are helpless in the affairs
of heaven, we place feathers on arrows.
By dowel, the nock’s groove against
its bowstring, the arrow by bird’s wing
by archer’s sight, by aim, superimposing
what is in hand over what is distant,
we arrive at certain conclusions, the end
of this tale for example: after blight
and the consequent famine, nine of ten
suns fell as dark crows. Of the ways
it is told, there’s the account of the emperor,
as the ninth sun lay writhing—dark blood
on dark feathers—placing his hand on
the archer’s shoulder, so the slung bow
was lowered, a discretion, the story would
have us believe, that is, finally, this sun,
this light, still with its obsession to travel
while we go on living in its obstruction,
even now, this morning, your shoulder pale
as scrimshaw, drawing the light to its fletching.
27
ELEG Y
Of Babel’s moon, I have notes. It was a marked card. It lit a chandelier
out of an acacia. The trowel glinted with it. Crickets were out too, and, as
if they sightread stars, settled in to leg-kick song. A light wind blew seed
into the web between tines of a hayrake. A soldier stood letting his horse
drink well water from his helmet. The moon trembled in it. There was
nothing forsaken about it. It simply issued a shadow while burnishing a
surface. This morning, I read that when returning from a trail, Thoreau
knew he had had visitors by what was left behind: a wreath of evergreen,
a name in pencil on a walnut leaf, a willow wand woven into a ring. Its
path not without disruption, the moon, in its orbit, tethers and tethers
again. The morning of the funeral, my father dressed my grandfather:
from the eyelet, each button, new to full; the tie’s knot loose as if it had
swallowed a small bird.
~
29
CUTT INGS
For proof,
prune the canes
& small twigs,
tending
a fluent light
path,
shearing
to satiate
the flowerhead.
For proof,
the turned
out tilma made
a bowl
for December
roses sown
in hill loam
above the desert
diocese.
Be bishop
& penitent
to the portrait—
what bled
thorn-told testimony
offset on
the neophyte’s
coarse garment.
Kneel with me
in this light
& see the sepals
bent back
on blooms
like those about
their cassocks.
30
Make then
the cut clean
above
a five-
leaflet leaf
to prevent
disease & dieback
in the raw
stalk, & so
ensure new growth.
31
A NOTE ON CUTT INGS
In the accounts I have read, there are never shears, not even a small
blade. Can one stem’s thorn cut the stalks of other blooms? Sever, riven:
words with cuts within them. Did the Virgin offer something—a
machete, simple house scissors? Gardening manuals suggest cuts at an
angle, & to choose the buds just beginning to loosen. Both knife &
knowing begin in silence—what appears but does not say, the ghosts of
ragged cuttings. The tilma was a mantle made from the cut fibers of a
maguey plant. The Spanish for knife is cuchillo, the double l read y: a
yeoman’s yoke, a yucca—that desert shrub some call Spanish bayonet. It
is also known, in other regions, as Adam’s needle-and-thread.
32
NOCH E BUEN A
Before another rasp-worked moon, I’ll tender a clutch of cardinals, or the
flush on a runner’s cheek to better render the young girl’s gift to the
Christ-child. Flame Leaf. Star Flower. What is evening in evening? By
what accounting? The sky will go away despite the trees thrashing & the
smoke giving chase from the chimneys. “Too much torn to make a
drawing,” Audubon wrote of a hermit thrush after the day’s hunt. Isn’t it
also true of some stories? The infinite graftings. Here, you take a cutting.
The blood-colored leaf, once over the heart, was thought to increase
circulation. Ingested, it was believed to reduce fever. You might,
however, place it in the pages of a breviary beside a favorite psalm.
33
TILD E
The twine tied about the bird’s leg would some mornings still be wet
from a neighbor’s bath. In air & frayed, the twine streamed out from the
twig-thin leg. In winter, the stone bath froze & kept a feather for itself.
Saying feather will coax the tongue, that molted bird, to its cage. I stayed
in & read for days—sometimes silent, sometimes aloud. With the dark
letters smaller than a millet seed, I made all kinds of sound. Rains came.
Soon, I found the banded bird in a hedge of jade. Cutting the knot loose,
I noted the twine’s tongue-shape, imagined it then in my mouth, gagging
a bit on the filth—a nest’s lice, a field’s dung—the foreignness, the
trespass of what it might say. To return in Spanish—volver—requires the
tongue to buckle & rill. Think burble, think babble. Volume is a word we
use to measure both sound & water. Was I wrong then to think each
letter a liter? Or each page—página y pájaro—fastened & fraught with
syllable? There were so many birds. How boyish, how foolish to follow
just one.
34
A CROW’S ROBE
‘A bridge of magpies’—long-tailed crows
whose caw-worked nest is collage, rich
with heist—joins the two: one, immortal,
who loomed heaven’s vestments; the other
mortal, cattleman, a vaquero with clutch
of stars in his herder’s head. & her gaze
on his herding upset patterns: a bobbin’s
slip was a crooked hem. Audubon drew
grackles, Quiscalus Quiscula, in summer corn.
A team these two— dressed in shadows,
teasing hairs from husks—one watches, dark
pupil in white, while the other cocks back
craw for kernel. Perhaps they are kin to that
crow found in The Classic of Mountains & Seas,
collecting shore stones for retribution. Once
an emperor’s daughter, she drowned too far out
in rough waters, & feathered now, flies
intent on choking dry, stone by stone, an ocean.
A bay’s breakwater, where boats huddle,
is a design of similar ambition & tragedy.
‘I ate wind and tasted waves,’ writes the poet
of his Pacific crossing. Ships then had
presidents’ names: Pierce, Lincoln, McKinley.
Grandfather came in ’28, a steamer berth,
S.S. Madison, to claim himself son of a citizen,
‘a crooked path,’ avoiding exclusion. In another tale,
dubious & apocryphal, I have come across
a robe entrusted to a beggar of Hunan Province
with powers to turn whomever wore it into a crow.
Of its design & material, nothing is written.
~
36
BOWS & RESONATORS
1
A calabash gourd,
from an earthen mould, grown
russet
& rounded,
then fitted with a lid of jade,
once housed
a golden bell, a prized singer
popular with fanciers
in Peking
& the bazaars of Java,
its chime, heard warm nights,
said to strike
the same pitch as the small, sacred
handbells
of ‘Shinto priestesses.’
Talk of the teashop,
fed on wormwood & radish,
this ‘chorister’ once
caught in bamboo trap-boxes
baited
with votive candles
had then each wing waxed to amplify
the song
resonant
in the gourd & rising out of
measured holes,
hollowed from the jade:
the eyes, nose, & claw of a dragon,
that revered go-between
of the terrestrial & the heavenly.
37
2
In the barrack wall at Angel Island—
‘Grief
and bitterness
entwined are heaven sent.’
The moon appears,
though ‘faintly,’
twice
—as moon
& as ‘sun and moon’ for ‘shine.’
The wind outside
is recorded
‘faintly’ also & ‘whistling.’
The insects
beneath the moon
tether its line
& ‘chirp’
—sound & light,
like plucked strings both
vibrate.
The poem over time
was filled with putty, painted, written on
& painted
over again, some eight times.
The thinking was ‘graffiti’
from the Italian graffio, ‘a scratch.’
To invent writing,
‘Ts’ang-Chieh, if certain ancient
books are to be believed,
observed the marks
of birds’ claws
and animal’s foot-prints upon the ground,
the shapes of shadows cast
38
by trees,
...and engraved...
their forms upon the sticks’
The barrack had timbered walls
from woods milled
in the Sierras, felled Sequoias—
those redwoods
named for the Cherokee scholar
who devised for his tribe
an alphabet.
Muir in those groves—
Kaweah & Tule,
Fresno & Mariposa,
Merced & Tuolumne,
Calaveras & Stanislaus—
describes one tree,
‘24 feet inside the bark,’
& thirteen hundred years old
cut down for its stump
to be a dance floor.
39
3
Besprinkled, Bordeaux, mitred, stove,
black & yellow tree,
chicken of the weaver’s shuttle, horse of the hearth,
watchman’s rattle—
fiddlesticks: one rib hook
of teeth
bows against the other wing’s
‘rungs’
(flightless
wings have ladders)
over a resonator,
‘four drums’
of taut skin, smoke-tint,
by which the cricket
in sod, sedge, hall, or hearth
‘throws his music’
—& the bells: pagoda, flowered, golden, stony, & blue.
40
4
‘Sound,’ it has been written,
‘exists
only when it is going out
of existence.’
Yet sound, traveling in waves,
was once thought
to never
go out completely
but to continue at shorter & shorter
frequency,
vibrating faintly. There waiting
on Angel Island,
a poet recorded,
‘The insects chirp outside the four walls.’
Carving the sound, the man
hews & whittles
closer
to the sound coming through,
those ‘stridulations,’
from the Latin, ‘a creaking.’
‘Here the baldest symbol’:
‘each character composed within
an ‘ideal square.’
To square the sound
the radical ‘kou’ in the left hand
corner,
41
a box-spelled warble, a box-made trill.
To its right
a grammatical character
translates variously,
so there is,
at the time of,
if, close, & to.
Twice-made, here in pinyin:
ji
ji
The standard system
of transliterating since the 1960’s,
Pin-yin means
literally
‘spell-sound.’
Ezra Pound in his notes
to the writings of the Sinologist,
Fenollosa, tells us,
‘...unfinished; I am proceeding
in ignorance
and by conjecture.
The primitive pictures were
‘squared’
at a certain time.’
‘The inmates,’
the poem in the wall
continues,
‘often sigh.’
42
5
The ‘object of his bow’—
the grass music
that Thoreau wrote,
‘annihilates time and space’;
the ‘neverend’ Po Chu-i believed
of his sleepless night
during the Tang—
that period when the palace
women first kept
crickets
bedside in cages,
entreating song
with coos or ‘leaf-lettuce.’
Fabre’s ‘hosanna’ from
rosemary
in Provence
has us staring through
the ‘veined pinion’ of a Bordeaux,
which tints things slightly red.
Thoreau’s ‘elixir’—
‘I see clear through,’ he tells us,
‘summer to autumn.’
43
6
Dolbear
to test a law,
walked out under stars
white & clustered,
as summer’s
calf-high,
Queen Anne’s lace
& listened
counting evensong,
like a prosody, on his fingers
to hear the heat & balm
in the chirr
& by logarithm
measure,
in Fahrenheit, the field.
Mic-ing the inner ear,
scientists have recorded the hairs
shook in seawash,
so we might hear what
hearing
sounds like: a night bug
abrading
wing-teeth
—a field
of bulrush & burr,
a cappella
amid chicory,
all
sizzling like a pan steak.
44
7
Shell-shaped, & so traces
of sea, our ears have long been tuned
to pattern.
‘A movement
of what can rebound,’
all sound,
according to Aristotle,
is already echo.
‘Island’ interrogators had translators,
interpreters
who knew dialects
& listened to catch
men quoting other men’s lives
for their papers.
‘Sounds passing
through sudden rightnesses,’
voices sustain
spaces of resonance—
‘Sadly, I listen
to the sounds of insects
& angry surf.
The harsh laws pile
layer upon layer;
Rumor has it, Aristotle had a stammer.
He observed
a voice to be ‘the impact of the
inbreathed against
the windpipe.’
Thus imagined, a voice requires walls
for the breath
‘to knock.’
45
8
In the old tales,
the crisis often involves a prized
cricket’s escape:
whether it’s the rare, long-legged one
for which the minister
of state
trades his best horse, or the
undersized
fighter brought finally to fury
by the tickling
of a ‘pig’s whisker,’
or the favorite of the ruling
court—chestnut
in color,
& able to ‘dance in time’ to the languid
hum of eunuchs.
In the old tales,
there is often a seamstress
holding
a needle
& wanting you to lick the thread.
A travel-weary visitor appears
only to slough off
his skin
beside the ‘rice-granaries’
& sing.
‘I was in the field where memory first happened,’
one
narrator tells us,
that field that swallows
swords & is equally as intimate
with robins.
46
9
According to Pliny the Elder,
‘if a man doe
but touch
the amygdals
or almonds of the throat,
with the hand
wherewith he hath bruised
or crushed
the said Criquet,
it will appease
the inflamation thereof.’
Likewise,
‘...digged up
& applied
to the plase, earth
& all
where it lay,
is very good for the ears.’
~
48
OULI PO
So then me and you come
You assured led by the tongue
Dark fall a winding wind
A detour circles song
Drum din when the rain comes
Erasure the song sung
Details wandering in a wren
Ditto cuckoo song
Truth bends when you hum
Jig lure reel rig seine
Bird calls wander heavens
The fall circles round
Often we were conned
Trees were things wrens sung
Too tall wild in midair
Falsettos so soon hamstrung
49
Kerplunk plans mean you’ve come
Be sure these songs swim
Phonecall frogmen when
Tempos spiral down
Bunkbeds wing me across
Secure belonging’s bobbin
Seawalls make waves mist
Tiptoe tidal flats
Trouble the sea for a son
Feel sure you don’t belong
You don’t write what men say
Sea tales consume song
Trundled nights of a nun
Fissures between rival tongs
You sell wontons here
Detuned doo-wop songs
50
Backhand within each psalm
Young girl in a tea-stained sarong
Make-do the long nightmare
Lingo miscues song
Just in sweet meat buns
Insure deeds with alms
Doorbells wane once you’re in
Dark clouds sluice down shrubs
Strum then strings you’ve strung
Speech chirrs inside tongues
You sell wrong names here
Data research shows
Trunks fend off wind that comes
Leeward they have swung
So long waiting here
This talk cites coos wrong
51
A monk lends me his car
Bugs chirr sovereign songs
Clouds shawl a wan mien
A junco suitor calls
Drunk wren between me and dawn
Expert far-flung tongue
Forestall the fading path
Burrow straight through song
Translate dreams in sons
Be sure to tear shit up
Due to wagers made here
Pray tell absurd sounds
Dressed in tight ass funds
He sure street fought some
Shut out wrong men here
All told buckles song
52
Trumped again add up sums
Leave sure you’ve had your fun
Dutiful sons wandered here
Laid down bicycles in the sun
Locket syrinx in a palm
Procure mahjongg songs
Judo bygone rift rafts
Echoes pseudo song
53
CONFESSIONS
My watermarked mouth
marsh mud
& bay silt
wrackline welt
tongue like saltfish
Teeth seine
& lips purse
make a meadow
of lost boats
in eelgrass & sea lettuce
Harvested seabeds
What was under
I was over or in
Sat in boat cabins
with gill-sucking fish
Know well
the wave cut shore
the hollows
what sea cannot swallow
bay basin dregs
The undertows
the moon tills
o o o
disav w, av w, v w
pitch waves unutterable
as I fish.
54
Rusted from the wet
my rivet
Adam’s apple
smelt from kettle handles
cast clank & clang
Swallowed
like a coke oven
Pig stubborn
pig iron
made for little to say
Made the executioner
sword sing
a smith’s hammer
stammer
to shake him to his teeth
Smith-made
a larynx chinks
Words clamor
pan-chatter
or sustain on steel string
May play my pulse
ear
to the rail
Betrayal
still beats there
55
Thrown in
& then rose out
trans-pacific
of precedents
cedar-like
Essence stretches
tumescent
beach pea & sea-fig
See fig.
11
stilts in sea silt
telos
Tell-tail
my queue availed
to sea wind
Plumb lined
thigh to shin
Fathomed
there abandoned
to sea death
Sleepwalked after
beside a boat-bottom
moon
miles grown
between shoulders & shoes
56
Can’t tinder flame
Kin but unkindled
Whelmed I wear it
livid
yellow
Tied there to ignite
in torch-lit wood
my body staked
forged fake
a look-alike
By that light
was a gilt-edged
page
bound displayed
& given sentence
Char-grit
the smoke left
was lampblack
to sign one
duplicate
Flame both singular
& effusive
can’t tinder which
In et al lynch
who isn’t yellow by fire
57
Long as starlight
could kiss
or hold a note
No concern for bones
swallowed whole
Thought breath
that dive-bird lungbound
intimate
with what let
me say my self
Thought exhales dealt
in essence
spiritus
testing the bellow’s glue
how steam confesses kettles
Sentenced breathless
kiln-locked
cap to capillaries
could not rat or canary-
sing
Lungs heavy holding
held my tongue
throat-long & air tied
alibi
elsewhere
58
THE TRIB UTE HORS E
1
The handscroll woven from silk
has a finch in the cane rendered
in the ink of lampblack. Because
with some beauty you feel the need
to talk aloud to it, tell it about itself,
I got closer until I could see the depth
produced by the silk sucking on
the soot, & slightly self-conscious,
I addressed the bird, asked whether
it were sketched with a switch
of willow or a brush of goat’s hair.
It was endeared & twittered there,
flit in the cane. It asked me if I were
the scholar or the angler, if I saw
the horsemen with the tribute horse
pass the village on their way to court.
59
2
Often ink-stones were roof-tiles,
clay wattle from imperial houses
with names like Bronze-Bird-Terrace.
What kept rain out, kept ink wet.
A brick of ink fledges—a bird
in the stroke settles on the strokes’
branches, lifts & leaves them
a metronome’s sway. A hollow
stroke returns to smoke traces.
The dry brush returns & wets
its bristles in ground soot and gum
kept wet in the stone’s well,
that house for the ink’s dark.
Under roof is want & over,
a well’s winch, a finch’s chit,
light tappings sounding the depths.
60
3
If my song were smoke, I would knot
the braid & cut its movement upwards,
lariat the sinews, harnessing bone
to muscle the kite of the cane birds.
I would knot & bird the line as birds
notch the branch or leave steps
in bank mud. I would thieve the tracks
as I would the pine’s shape as it shadowed
& stretched a figure past the furthest
branches’ reach. Each tree shadows.
Each tree shades. Each tree thirsts
& traffics resin. What a pine darkens
foreshadows its pitch in the pine-smoke.
My song, if my song were smoke, would
rise from kindling & reach, pine-like,
past itself to where the wind takes it.
61
4
A calligrapher, in order to regain
the confidence of birds, selects
a whisker brush fringed with rabbit fur
& bundled with an ivory mount
on a handle hewn from bamboo.
The whisker is plucked from field mice
& the fur from the rabbit’s flank
in autumn before its winter molt.
With thumb & forefinger, a bird’s
beak at the wrist’s service, he has
mastered his strokes—bending
weed, sheep’s leg, dropping dew.
But it is a seed-eating bird he wants
in the stroke-work of the word,
the trill answer in the coarse rustle
of brush across the page grain.
62
5
Dear finch, that you may have fed
on the worm that if left to live
makes the silk thread, on which
—woven now—you, lighter
at the breast, darker on the wing,
flit and rest, poised for flight
out of the cane, suggests a weaving
finer than I might have guessed.
Legend says an empress found
in her tea a cocoon undone
by the water’s heat, & wound
the thread around her finger.
Spinners need spools, dear finch.
Four sloughs & the worm weaves
a cocoon for wings. Seems you,
dear finch, have borrowed these.
63
NOTES
The poem SEASCAPES works from the photographic series Seascapes by Hiroshi
Sugimoto.
Sources for the poem Bows & Resonators include the following: Mark Him Lai,
Genny Lim, and Judy Yung, Island: Poetry and History of Chinese Immigrants
on Angel Island, 1910-1940; Lisa Gail Ryan, Insect Musicians & Cricket
Champions: A Cultural History of Singing Insects in China and Japan; Jean
Henri Fabre, Fabre’s Book Of Insects; Frank Cowan, Curious Facts in the
History of Insects; Ernest Fenollosa (ed. Ezra Pound), The Chinese Written
Character as a Medium for Poetry; Wallace Stevens, The Collected Poems,
Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy; Steven Connor, Sound and the Pathos of the
Air. Thanks to Nick Admussen for advisement with translation.
The quatrains in the poem OULIPO are homophonic translations of Li Po’s “Night
Thoughts,” as recited by Lo Kung-Yuan in Peking dialect for the 1963 Folkways
Record, Chinese Poems of the Tang and Sung Dynasties. Li Po’s poem is also
inscribed on the wall of Room 105 at the immigration station on Angel Island.
Thanks to Amaranth Borsuk for help with the poem’s title.
The poem CONFESSIONS is based on the 1938 American children’s book The Five
Chinese Brothers by Claire Huchet Bishop and Kurt Wiese.
THE TRIBUTE HORSE works from the painting Finches and Bamboo by the Song
Emperor, Huizong, and is indebted to Chiang Yee’s book Chinese Painting.

Abstract (if available)

Linked assets

University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

Conceptually similar

PDF

Reclaiming the book-object: appropriated texts in 21st century poetry

PDF

Synthetic form and deviant transcendence: interfaces between 21st c. poetry & science; & In the crocodile gardens: poems

PDF

Refrains of memory: poetics of loss and the Korean diaspora

PDF

'Machines made of words': poets, technology, and the mediation of subjectivity; and, Pomegranate-eater (poems)

PDF

Bright portals: illness & the environment in contemporary poetry

PDF

H.D.'s dramatic poetics: tragedy, translation, and processional poems; &, The jasmine years: in three books, Los Angeles, 2013-2020

PDF

Sonic displacement, sonic placemaking: the poetics of diaspora in Yoko Tawada, Jessica Hagedorn, and M.I.A.

PDF

Migratory wounds: relayed trauma in contemporary poetry (critical); Seiche (creative)

PDF

The pantoum across the Pacific: the circumnavigation of a poetic form; and, Why can’t it be tenderness (poems)

PDF

The poetics of reemergence: psetry, subjectivity, and political violence in the neoliberal age

PDF

One of many doors: sensing the literary sense through a cognitive poetics-inclusive reading approach

PDF

Ivoirité: the aesthetics of postcolonial rupture in contemporary Ivorian poetry (critical dissertation); & Century worm (creative dissertation)

PDF

The new old motion: contemporary poetry, nostalgia, and the American West

PDF

Modernism's poetics of dislocation

PDF

The metaphysical materiality of Vladislav Khodasevich and T.S. Eliot's poetry

PDF

Herself behind herself concealed: a biomythography of Jamaican womanhood

PDF

Typewriters and cooking smells: associated sensibilites in Samuel Taylor Coleridge, T.S. Eliot, and Jorie Graham

PDF

Embodiments of passing: Vito Acconci's poetics of frequency and Ta(g) A(c)t

PDF

How does it feel to be a problem? Revisiting Cane and the life of Jean Toomer

PDF

Breaching the labial lips: thought and new language in the menstrual poem and Homesick for myself (poems)

Asset Metadata

Creator Som, Brandon (author)

Core Title Citing passages: citational poetics and transpacific identities

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Literature and Creative Writing

Publication Date 06/30/2014

Defense Date 06/29/2014

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag American Literature,Asian American poetry,experimental poetry,OAI-PMH Harvest,poetics,Poetry,race and ethnicity,transpacific

Format application/pdf (imt)

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor McCabe, Susan (committee chair)

Creator Email brandonsom@gmail.com

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c3-425488

Unique identifier UC11286685

Identifier etd-SomBrandon-2585.pdf (filename),usctheses-c3-425488 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-SomBrandon-2585.pdf

Dmrecord 425488

Document Type Dissertation

Format application/pdf (imt)

Rights Som, Brandon

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the a...

Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

Repository Location USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus MC 2810, 3434 South Grand Avenue, 2nd Floor, Los Angeles, California 90089-2810, USA