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Antipodes of Asian American literature: heterolingualism and the Asian Americas

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Antipodes of Asian American literature: heterolingualism and the Asian Americas

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Content ANTIPODES OF ASIAN AMERICAN LITERATURE: HETEROLINGUALISM AND THE ASIAN AMERICAS by Michelle Har Kim 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 (COMPARATIVE LITERATURE) May 2012 Copyright 2012 Michelle Har Kim And get d with the f watch me Chu ri ka nu gu nya na bo da c nu gu ... n [T]he prod producing becomes d Figu down with th fly human be e freak it in K pi kyura mu a nada na na challan nom na do … (for duct is some g: between th detached … re 1: Librairi he irrelevant eing— Korean: ulla kara nun Redman hana do upd rget it) ething remov he act of pro giving the v ie des Antipo funk to mak n da — ved or deduc oducing and t vagabond, no —Deleuz odes, Paris. ke ya jump —Redman, “B cted from the the product, omad subjec ze and Guatt Photo by Ak Blow Your M e process of something ct a residuum ttari, Anti-Oe kira Mizuta L Mind” f m. edipus Lippit ii iii Dedication For my little half-Korea Dae Han Imani, para mi gran amor Garren, without whom I would starve; for the angels Jacob Israel Littleton, Isaac Kwock, and Iris Chang, and for Josh Rutkoff—who is threatening to read this. iv Acknowledgments I hesitate to include this section; forgive me as I’m sure to forget important ones who have given me encouragement. As I sat in on a seminar a few years ago, Roberto Díaz happened to mention Jane Eyre and Rochester’s muttering about “the antipodes of the Creole.” On another day, as I waited for the weekly edification of an Akira Lippit seminar on “the world” with Alex Montes, I mentioned the fascinating quote, and Alex began raving about de Acosta’s world-telescoping in Historia natural. The only other text I had was Flores, which I could only manage to write about after hoarding all of Gabriel Giorgi’s office hours to myself. Thanks to Viet Nguyen and to Lan, who welcomed me to USC by taking Garren and me to dinner in the antipodes of Saigon. David Lloyd at one point observed, with some curiosity, that I must be insane. That day I asked him to be my advisor. Thanks to permutations of funding from the University of Southern California and the Department of Comparative Literature, an Association for Japan-U.S. Community Exchange Nikaido Fellowship, and an Oberlin Alumni Grant, I was able to travel to Buenos Aires and interview Anna Kazumi Stahl, a meeting that changed my life. In Lima my tocaya, the poet Michaela Chirif, lifted the hood off of several of Watanabe’s poems, not to mention moments of his amazing life. On a tourist visit to one guano island, Garren paid attention for me and happily snapped pictures as I puked off the side of the boat. Gracias a Siu Kam Wen’s patience with my castellano, and for meeting me all the way in Waikiki. Elaine Kim and Richard Snyder supported me in translating more Watanabe; Naoki Sakai, Héctor Velázquez, and Gerald Maa helped me move forward. When I was really frustrated about my language ability and multiplying species of ignorance, Yukari Yanagino insisted that my non-nativeness was an asset. Meeting Donald Pease and Asian Americanist v Donnatella Izzo in Dublin moved me, finally, past Chapter One. And thanks to Clara Chu and Karen Tei Yamashita’s generous emails years ago I decided to try my hand at the field. I’m lucky to have met Jeanhee Kim and Hala Halim during my first attempt at graduate school; as an undergrad, Anuradha Needham taught me how to read, and this got me into this mess in the first place. I owe so much to Randa Issa and Ayana McNair—who guaranteed time and space for a maniac who needed to stay home to keep her new son and damn self alive. Thanks to everyone who took care of Dae Han. Isa Seong-Leong Quintana is my hero, mentor, and gran hermanita of the academic universe. Mayumo Inoue was often the only one around that could half understand what I was trying to say. There were conversations with Elaine Yee, Jeehyun Lim, Pashmina Murthy, Olanna Mills, and Cam Vu that helped me get out of bed in the morning. Sabeena Setia, Lynn Amores, and Rasmia Kirmani Frye always entertained my jokes and dished out praise, despite my lack of progress and their own tangible careers. Without viable evidence of success, however, Imani Wilson would do no such dishing; she traveled here to give me a nod and change some diapers when Dae Han was born, and came out again to see me through the defense—as did Nigel Hatton, who flew in some strange Bermuda-triangular circuit to get down to LA. Beyond love to Mom, Dad, and Garren, who don’t get exactly what is happening, but still think I’m the greatest. vi Table of Contents Epigraph ii Dedication iii Acknowledgments iv List of Figures vii Abstract viii Preface x Introduction Antipodes of Asian American Literature: 1 Heterolingualism and the Asian Americas Chapter One Antipodes, Televised: Anna Kazumi Stahl’s 20 Flores de un solo día Chapter Two Becoming-Animal in the Asian Americas: 50 Ruthanne Lum McCunn’s God of Luck and a Triptych (Three Poems by José Watanabe) Chapter Three The Heterolingualism of Siu Kam Wen 78 (with a Detour Through Julia Wong Kcomt’s “Mendigo en un banco de oro”) Chapter Four Repeating chinas: The Irrevocable Genericities 107 of China Mary and la china poblana Part I: China Mary 117 Part II: La china poblana 132 Chapter Five Pedro Shimose’s New World Localizations 154 Epilogue Against Trees 186 Bibliography 190 vii List of Figures Figure 1 Librairie des Antipodes, Paris. Photo by Akira Mizuta Lippit ii Figure 2 Francis Bacon, Lying Figure with Hypodermic Syringe, 1963 70 Figure 3 Golden Spike Ceremony at Promontory, Utah, May 10, 1869 72 viii Abstract This dissertation frames a series of Asian American texts that are written in Spanish and/or that cite Asian diasporic lives in South America, and investigates the ways in which they challenge the implicit singularities of North America and the English language as premiere locales for Asian American literature. For critics of traditionally Anglophone Asian American literature and its putatively organic emergence within the geo-cultural boundaries of North America, the “foreignness” and potential confusions introduced by these texts’ castellano and invocations of Asian American Others allow for readings that do not gravitate toward representations of the exceptional Asian American who manages (or fails) to accede to voice as a dissonantly singular individual, citizen-subject or cultural hybrid. The trope of “coming-to-voice” need not be a compulsory crucible for, but rather a point of view of, subjectivation within Asian American literatures. Due to the wider and more discrepant ranges of scholarship necessary to make sense (and nonsense) of the Asian Americas and its unwieldy linguistic, historical, and cultural terrain, a purview of “the entire hemisphere from the Yukon to Patagonia,” as Kirsten Silva Gruesz puts it, is well equipped to identify not only Asian American literature’s originary axioms of U.S. and North American exceptionalism, but also its Anglophonicity and prioritization of the liberal subject who steers herself toward individual self-awareness. Rather than assimilate the authors investigated here—Anna Kazumi Stahl, José Watanabe, Siu Kam Wen, Julia Wong Kcomt, Joan Didion, and Pedro Shimose, among others—as exemplary writers of an Asian Latin American hybrid individuality that iterates a dual-culture or dual-world schema, this project tracks the palpable foreignness and conspicuousness of language in their writings. Drawing in particular upon the philosophy of ix Gilles Deleuze, it reckons with Asian American texts as muddled fertilities rather than panethnic additions to Asian American heterogeneity. In a de-emphasis upon the location of representative Asian American authors of Latin America, and upon reading in ways that tend toward the biopolitical (the “dimension or the level at which human life is inscribed, constituted, recognized, and defined within a given sociopolitical order,” as Gabriel Giorgi and Karen Pinkus define it), the following chapters promote a vigilance toward destabilizations of the monolingual and geographical bounds of traditional Asian (North) American literature, and a watching out for irruptions that render the imprecision and ambiguity of another identificatory location: that of the Asian American as an evident subset of the liberal human. x Preface At the time of this writing, most of the Spanish sources cited in this manuscript are unavailable in English. To help readers, I have included my own translations and left them uncited. Documentation is only provided, in other words, for translations that are not mine. A reader familiar with castellano will see that my renditions are, at best, uneven. As translation is not really about “producing” some final product, I’ve tried to emphasize all their irregularities (along with my mistakes) by generally providing original excerpts and their translations together in the main body of the text. If a citation proves helpful to you but has some discrepancy, please feel free to contact me. Translations of poems by José Watanabe in Chapter Two have appeared recently in the Asian American Literary Review, and are also available on the Japanese American National Museum’s Discover Nikkei website. For citations from Shimose’s first eight books, from Triludio en el exilio to Reflexiones maquavélicas, I refer to the pagination of his 1988 anthology Poemas. 1 Introduction Antipodes of Asian American Literature: Heterolingualism and the Asian Americas [S]pheres are the original product of human coexistence … these atmospheric- symbolic places for humans are dependent on constant renewal. —Peter Sloterdijk 1 I longed for only what suited me—for the antipodes of the Creole. —Rochester to Jane Eyre 2 New World Antipodes This inquiry maps literary figurations of the Asian Americas as the other “end” or another “side” of the world, that is, as an antipodes from the vantage of a traditionally Anglophone and U.S.-based Asian American literary field. Antipodes is more versatile that its older cousin antipode, and perhaps even more so in its near obsoleteness; an antipodes can refer to a pair of diametrical locales upon the earth, or a single point on the globe directly opposite to where we are. Integral to it is the tripartite notion of place in human geography as “a point on the earth’s surface; the locus of individual and group identity; and the scale of everyday life.” 3 The term can also refer to people, the denizens of locales “who dwell directly opposite to each other on the globe, so that the soles of their feet are as it were planted against each other; esp. those who occupy this position in regard to us.” 4 One’s antipodes can thus be one’s utter human inversion—just as Rochester in Jane Eyre fantasizes his perfect mate to be one thoroughly contrary to Bertha Mason. Like Bertha to Jane, our antipodes are our topsy- 1 Sloterdijk, Bubbles: Spheres Volume I:Microspherology, 46. 2 Brontë, Jane Eyre, 298. 3 Holloway et al., “Place: Connections and Boundaries in an Interdependent World,” 165. 4 “antipodes, n.” 2 turvy Others whose uncanniness, with the threat of confusion and invasion from a distance, cordons the comfortable and heimlich security of home. To accommodate for European explorers’ face-to-face encounters with a New World that incited unforeseen world pictures, the idea of the antipodes facilitated projections of Others in lands of bizarre oppositions. Inverted and grotesque people were known to roam “upside down, using a huge foot as a sun-shade,” as “hybrid species, black swans, and so on … contributed to this picture of an unfamiliar, incredible world.” 5 In the case of Australia, there were various reasons to steer clear of Terra Australis Ignota, the unknown land—“it was upside down, lacked sunlight, was inhabited by monsters[;] or one would burn up in the equatorial Torrid Zone before reaching it.” The possibilities of unexpected worlds incited uncanny inversions, doublings and displacements that afforded “no foothold to be had without an inversion of past attitudes.” 6 To reckon with one’s antipodes is to reckon with a narcissism of absolute centrality vis-à-vis a picture of the world— “if you could travel around it in a circle,” as Plato observes, “you would repeatedly take a position at your own antipodes.” “For the whole universe,” he continues, “is spherical, and to say that some region of it is its ‘above,’ and another is ‘below,’ makes no sense.” 7 For Peter Sloterdijk, incipient globalization spurred by colonial movements is what inverts the notion of the insular and protected home; from the era of Columbus, he says, “human beings can remain neither at home nor in their traditional world-spaces.” 8 Both Plato and Sloterdijk reconsider 5 Fausett, Images of the Antipodes in the Eighteenth Century, vii. 6 Elison, Deus Destroyed; Topsy-Turvy 1585, 1. 7 Plato, Timaeus, 56. 8 “los seres humanos ya no pueden permanecer, como si estuvieran en casa, en sus tradicionales espacios interiores de mundo.” Sloterdijk, Esferas, Vol 2, 711. 3 the adequacy of right-side-upness, the “happy identity” vis-à-vis their world pictures. (As Adorno bluntly observes, such a “picture of a temporal or extratemporal original state of happy identity between subject and object is romantic […] a wishful projection at times, but today no more than a lie.” 9 ) Written during an era of New World navigation is a fascinating text about Japanese culture written in 1585 by the Portuguese Jesuit Luís Fróis. Father Fróis lived in Japan for over thirty years and wrote a Balzacian sweep of treatises about Japan, 10 including a collection of roughly 600 aphorisms elaborately entitled: Treatise that contains very succinctly and briefly some contradictions and differences in the customs between the people of Europe and those of this province of Japan. 11 The Treatise reveals an antipodal split, a possible alternative to the theory of planetary deep time through a schema of inversioning that positions Japan at the other end of a familiar European world. 12 The uncanniness of the intimately foreign frames an outer limit to Fróis’ human terrain, and figures contrary poles between which one might extrapolate a spectrum of relative and finite shades of life. A nearly mathematical formula of inversion renders an ostensible precision, ending with a final chapter called “Of Various and Extraordinary Things Not Insertable Into Previous Chapters,” a title whose unwieldiness shows Fróis’ difficulty in processing his observations of Japan 9 Adorno, “Subject and Object,” 499. 10 Manuel Loureiro, “Jesuit Textual Strategies in Japan Between 1549 and 1582”; Cooper, “Européens & Japonais: Traité Sur Les Contradictions & Différences De Moeurs, Écrit Par Le R. P. Luís Froís, Au Japon, L’an 1585”; Cooper, “Historia De Japam, by Luis Fróis.” 11 Fróis, Tratado sobre las contradicciones y diferencias de costumbres entre los europeos y japoneses; Topsy- turvy 1585; EuropaJapão. 12 Dimock, “Literature for the Planet.” That is, reading that considers the other side of the world, even when “territorial sovereignty produces cultural artifacts,” like literature, that are “likewise territorially predicated, likewise bounded by the geopolitical map,” 175. 4 beyond his rubric of extreme mirroring. 13 From his vantage of intimacy with and within Japan, which antipodes would he consider home? Each offers an intelligibility through the other, that is, through a framework of inversion that emplaces otherness and renders familiarity from the exotic. 14 Such figurations captivate and de-center Fróis as unquestionably European, as they oblige a reconsideration of his vantage and anthropocentricity. They allow the Jesuit missionary to reckon with a pivotal asymmetry between two categories “selected according to the differing contexts of the same object” that are nonetheless distinct approaches to the human. 15 Fróis stumbles upon the struts of a regime, the assumption of a knowledge naturally forking into anthropos and humanitas. Where anthropos “cannot escape the status of being the object of anthropological knowledge,” Nishitani Osamu observes, humanitas is “never defined from without[,] but rather expresses itself as the subject of all knowledge.” 16 Centuries later, American Unitarian minister Arthur May Knapp also invokes the antipodes, yet resists its power to reset his world frame. Writing about late nineteenth- century Japan, Knapp indignantly refuses his own uprooting, unwilling to reflect upon his possible objectivation by the world, or to think in terms of a hypothetical world picture. Scrutinizing “the Japanese character” does not bring him to face his status as subject-cum- object; he sees only the “insoluble enigma” of Japanese people, their “hopeless 13 “De algunas cosas diversas y extraordinarias que no se pueden bien insertar en los capítulos precedents.” Tratado, 121. 14 Where Gestell has been traditionally rendered as “enframing” by translators like William Lovitt, Samuel Weber describes Heidegger’s “framework” also as a kind of “installation” or “skeleton,” preferring the awkward “emplacement” as its English translation. Weber, Mass Mediauras, 124; Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays. 15 Osamu, “Anthropos and Humanitas: Two Western Concepts of ‘Human Being’,” 260. 16 Ibid. 5 contradictions and paradoxes … here is a people about whom anything could be said, and everything would be true, [and] no adjective … would be wholly out of place in a description of their mental and moral characteristics.” 17 As if on a flat earth, upon which knowledge, like the putative sovereignty of the nation-state, “is fully, flatly, and evenly operative over each square centimeter of a legally demarcated territory,” 18 Knapp evacuates all confusion regarding Japan in an insistence upon his own uprightness: Inversion is the confirmed and ineradicable habit of the far Oriental. It characterizes, not only the general mode as well as every detail of his outward life, but also his intellectual and moral being. It is not simply that his ways and thoughts differ from ours. They are the total reversal of ours. In our childhood we were accustomed to picture the inhabitants of the antipodes as standing upon their heads. We were so far right in our imaginings that that is really the only thing the far Oriental does not do in inversion of our ways…. That bent is carried so far as to become a somersault. 19 Like Narcissus, who cannot turn his head from a world delimited by the outline of his face, nor hear Echo’s pleas as anything other than attenuations of his own voice, Knapp is unruffled by Japan. His refusal to think beyond the “far Oriental,” betrays an unwillingness to see himself at a distance; Knapp is the kind of assuming man that “swallows the object, forgetting how much it is an object itself.” 20 Fróis, despite bearings thoroughly calibrated with regard to imperial Lisbon’s status as early modern Portugal’s metropole, works hard to accommodate the remotest congruencies of antipodal places. Where Fróis’ conspicuous labor of inversioning enmeshes us in a topsy-turviness of place and of human subjectivation, Knapp sweeps all potential chaos under the rug of an ostensibly stable world. 17 Knapp, Feudal and Modern Japan, 137–8. 18 Anderson, Imagined Communities, 26; qtd. Dimock, “Literature for the Planet,” 175. 19 Knapp, Feudal and Modern Japan, 137–8. 20 Adorno, “Subject and Object,” 499. 6 “The first five years of my life I lived in amoebic bliss,” says the narrator of Monica Sone’s Nisei Daughter, “not knowing whether I was plant or animal, at the old Carrollton Hotel on the waterfront of Seattle. One day when I was a happy six-year-old, I made the shocking discovery that I had Japanese blood. I was a Japanese.” 21 Exemplary of the strong trope of a life honed by the interpellation of Asian American consciousness, this passage shows an awareness that sheds away more muddled or indiscrete modes of being, in an enabling and resituating of the Asian American as indivisible despite surrounding divisiveness, allowed finally to merely “be” (i.e., be a self unified) amidst non- correspondences of identity that appear to ostensibly fade at the herald of the Asian American individual. Yet what of “becomings” that pertain to plant or amoeba, 22 instances that foil the common happiness of uninterrupted identity between subject and object, the mere human subject and her world—where mere, “after all, means the removal of the character of usefulness and of being made”? 23 In a spirit antipodal to such happiness, and from the unsettling and uncomfortable vantage of a non-native translator with gaping knowledges of the languages and cultures explored here, this dissertation attempts to venture past the Anglophonicity and exceptionalism of a field implicitly “of” the United States and Canada. 24 21 Sone, Nisei Daughter, 1. 22 “How could lines of deterritorialization be assignable outside of circuits of territoriality? Where else but in wide expanses, and in major upheavals in those expanses, could a tiny rivulet of new intensity suddenly start to flow? What do you not have to do in order to produce a new sound? Becoming-animal, becoming-molecular, becoming-inhuman, each involves a molar extension, a human hyperconcentration, or prepares the way for them.” Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 34. 23 Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art,” 30. 24 i.e., as “Asian Asian Canadian writing” continues to be an “an uneasy component of Asian American literature at large,” yet based upon the notion of two national spaces that are linguistically and culturally akin to each other.” Huang, “Introduction: The Makers of the Asian American Poetic Landscape,” 8. 7 Dissertation Overview (Abstract) This dissertation frames a series of Asian American texts that are written in Spanish and/or that cite Asian diasporic lives in South America, and investigates the ways in which they challenge the implicit singularities of North America and the English language as premiere locales for Asian American literature. For critics of traditionally Anglophone Asian American literature and its putatively organic emergence within the geo-cultural boundaries of North America, the “foreignness” and potential confusions introduced by these texts’ castellano and invocations of Asian American Others allow for readings that do not gravitate toward representations of the exceptional Asian American who manages (or fails) to accede to voice as a dissonantly singular individual, citizen-subject or cultural hybrid. The trope of “coming-to-voice” need not be a compulsory crucible for, but rather a point of view of, subjectivation within Asian American literatures. Due to the wider and more discrepant ranges of scholarship necessary to make sense (and nonsense 25 ) of the Asian Americas and its unwieldy linguistic, historical, and cultural terrain, a purview of “the entire hemisphere from the Yukon to Patagonia,” as Kirsten Silva Gruesz puts it, 26 is well equipped to identify not only Asian American literature’s originary axioms of U.S. and North American exceptionalism, but also its Anglophonicity and prioritization of the liberal subject who steers herself toward individual self-awareness. Rather than assimilate the authors investigated here—Anna Kazumi Stahl, José Watanabe, Siu Kam Wen, Julia Wong Kcomt, Joan Didion, and Pedro Shimose, among 25 What we know about Asian Americans is not always or necessarily narrativizable, in other words. “Nonsense is that which has no sense, and that which, as such and as it enacts the donation of sense, is opposed to the absence of sense.” Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, 71. 26 Gruesz, Kirsten Silva, “America,” 17. 8 others—as exemplary writers of an Asian Latin American hybrid individuality that iterates a dual-culture or dual-world schema, this project tracks the palpable foreignness and conspicuousness of language in their writings. Drawing in particular upon the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, it reckons with Asian American texts as muddled fertilities rather than panethnic additions to Asian American heterogeneity. In a de-emphasis upon the location of representative Asian American authors of Latin America, and upon reading in ways that tend toward the biopolitical (the “dimension or the level at which human life is inscribed, constituted, recognized, and defined within a given sociopolitical order,” as Gabriel Giorgi and Karen Pinkus define it 27 ), the following chapters promote a vigilance toward destabilizations of the monolingual and geographical bounds of traditional Asian (North) American literature, and a watching out for irruptions that render the imprecision and ambiguity of another identificatory location: that of the Asian American as an evident subset of the liberal human. Chapter Outline Chapter One, “Antipodes, Televised: Anna Kazumi Stahl’s Flores de un solo día,” explores the work of the Buenos Aires-based author and of Asian American literature’s assumption of English as its lingua franca. A native of Louisiana, Stahl lives in Buenos Aires and writes fiction in Spanish. Her novel introduces us in medias res to the routine and rhythmic life of Aimée Leverier, a happy resident of Buenos Aires who discovers—through the frightening and world-augmenting news of an inherited home in a nearly forgotten New Orleans—that she was born not in Argentina, but in the U.S. South. The severe insularity of her familiar 27 Giorgi and Pinkus, “Zones of Exception.” 9 world is abruptly intruded upon by a letter from the farthest ends of the earth—the other end of the world—that funnels in memories of her past as a young girl growing up in New Orleans, and the muddled reasons that have led her to the Southern Cone, the antipodes of Louisiana (“where? To the four winds, to another universe, to the end of the world” 28 ). Dismayed to realize that she is a foreigner to both the Spanish language and to Latin America, she embarks on a journey northward to settle her inheritance. Amidst the intensity of a suddenly vivid and familiar Louisiana, Aimée can hardly wait to return to Argentina. Once back in Buenos Aires, she knows “that she’s arrived home, and come to feel at home, as if she’s finally put her feet on the ground.” 29 Flores problematizes the narcissistic U.S. Asian American subject that takes mother tongues and motherlands for granted. Chapter Two, “Becoming-Animal in the Asian Americas: Ruthanne Lum McCunn’s God of Luck and a Triptych (Three Poems by José Watanabe),” discusses McCunn’s novel about a Chinese coolie’s dire escape from a nineteenth-century Peruvian guano mine, and explores a history of indentured labor that followed the abolition of black slavery. Is it possible to reckon with the novel’s intervention without a rubric of intra-Asian American insertion or incorporation of emblematic Ishmaels? How might we de-center the anticipated Pacific Asian American protagonist as the hero who immediately satisfies our relative lack of knowledge through “coming to voice”? Asian American Studies’ bourgeoning critical discourse around the “coolie question”—whether “the recruitment and employment of coolies represent a relic of slavery or a harbinger of freedom,” as Moon Ho Jung inquires 30 — 28 “adónde? A los cuatro vientos, a otro universo, al fin del mundo.” Stahl, Flores, 83. 29 “[que] ha llegado a casa, a sentirse en casa, pareciera que puso por fin los pies sobre la tierra.” Ibid., 332. 30 Jung, Coolies and Cane, 14. 10 allows us a different vantage point regarding God of Luck—as does the lean and haunting verse of Peruvian poet José Watanabe, whose writing compels a reading that curbs the desires of liberal exceptionalism. Antipodal motifs of animal encounter are unmistakable in his work, as his conjurings of dogs, fish, and other forms of life never deploy the animal as a discrete metaphor. Animals appear at the very edge of the world; to cite Deleuze’s description of Francis Bacon, “Instead of formal correspondences,” Watanabe exploits “a zone of the indiscernibility or undecidability between man and animal.” 31 The poet’s animal- becoming thus moves “against” humanitas and the human subject as the only ground through which we can know ourselves. Chapter Three, “The Heterolingualism of Siu Kam Wen (with a Detour Through Julia Wong Kcomt’s ‘Mendigo en un banco de oro’),” investigates the fiction of an author who moved with his family from mainland China to Hong Kong at age six, and to Peru at age nine. After failing to acquire Peruvian citizenship despite 25 years of residence in the country, Siu’s family relocated to the “relative paradise” of Honolulu where the author learned English. 32 Unlike the east-west vector of Chungpa Han’s migration in Younghill Kang’s novel East Goes West, 33 Siu migrates from south to north as his fiction dwells between the canninesses of his two non-native tongues. The novel La estatua en el jardín was first published in Spanish and followed by the author’s English translation, 34 although Siu wrote the novel Viaje a Itaca first in English to stem the “paralysing effect” of his anxiety about technique and style. Heterolingual authorship occurs not only through the 31 Deleuze, Francis Bacon, 20. 32 Lin, “A modo de prefacio,” 5. 33 Kang, East Goes West: The Making of an Oriental Yankee. 34 Siu, La estatua en el jardín; The Statue in the Garden. 11 author’s stylistic privation, but also through a trope of inexhaustible translation. As critics attempt to compress this restlessness into some guarantee of “Chinese Peruvian” legibility, Siu’s work wrestles with the claustrophobia of representation per se through which “‘familial’ and ‘conjugal’ situations appear unnaturally large, as if seen through the distorted focus of a microscope … with only an isolated or mere ‘local color’ significance.” 35 “Repeating chinas: The Irrevocable Genericities of China Mary and la china poblana,” Chapter Four, draws upon Laura Hyun Hi Kang’s deconstruction of “Asian American women” in her Compositional Subjects: Enfiguring Asian/American Women. This chapter explores an unlikely Asian American text: Run River, Joan Didion’s narrative of the decline of a California pioneer family, and its remarkable character China Mary. Despite the veteran nanny and housekeeper’s domination of her employer’s household affairs, China Mary never officially “speaks” or accedes to realist voice through the demarcation of quotation marks or formal narration. All we have is the oblique citation of her name, a generic signifier for “Chinese woman” and a moniker that was occasionally embraced by some nineteenth-century Asian women in the U.S. West. A similar tug-of-war occurs with China Mary’s antipodes, la china poblana, a popular Mexican icon of mestiza femininity. 36 La china’s emblematic status is especially curious, as her popular legend iconizes a figure foreign to Mexico, a poor girl from Delhi unwittingly shuttled by way of the Manila- Acapulco Galleon to the New World. Antipodes of one another, China Mary and la china refer to generic yet “real” women whose comparative relief stretches the ostensible limits of 35 Renza, “A White Heron” and the Question of Minor Literature, 32. 36 Gillespie, “Imagination Beyond Nation.” 12 “Asian American women.” They highlight the stubbornness of linguistic signs of racialization in cooperating with Asian America’s desire for literary verisimilitude. Chapter Five, “Pedro Shimose’s New World Localizations,” explores the poetry of the celebrated Bolivian poet who refuses the label of transnational subject. “I cannot deny my Japanese ancestry,” says Shimose, but “I am NOT Japanese; I am a mestizo Bolivian who speaks and writes in Spanish.” 37 His brand of mestizaje is distinct from Asian American dissonant hybridity as it shuns the category of exilic cosmopolite. Hardly of a standard Spanish, Shimose’s Andean and Amazonian inflections illustrate a vernacular castellano “that cannot be taken for granted and that, in consequence, cannot function as a vehicular language.” 38 Such interruptions to vehicularity offer an example of how Shimose maps Asian American belongings without narrations of immigration to an evenly multicultural space, and negotiates with indigeneity and the local. Dissonant Hybridity Rooted in the multiculturalisms forged by the enfranchisements of the Civil Rights era and the social movements that sparked institutional possibilities for Ethnic Studies and ethnic literatures, Asian American literature has traditionally been qualified by a dissonant hybridity with regard to the liberal individual and national citizenship. A rhetoric of difficult or impossible reconciliation between one’s affiliations with a marginalized immigrant past and normative American present has often been figured in Asian American critique, if not overtly by primary literature, then as a hybridity and dual-worldness, a “transitivity” or “undecidability,” as David Palumbo-Liu observes in Asian/American: Historical Crossings 37 “Entrevista con Pedro Shimose,” 88. 38 Nadal, “Editorial.” 13 of a Racial Frontier. A classic illustration of this appears in the 1974 Asian American anthology Aiiieeeee!, whose preface stakes out the infamous refusal to be assimilated into any singular “Asian” or “American” sphere. This myth of being either/or and the equally goofy concept of the dual personality haunted our lobes while our rejection by both Asia and white America proved we were neither one nor the other. Nor were we half and half or one more than the other. Neither Asian culture nor American culture was equipped to define us except in the most superficial terms. 39 Palumbo-Liu notes a like straddling where the “social subjectivity” of Asian Americans “vacillates between whiteness and color”: The occasional absence of “Asian American” from racial categories in America reflects the undecidability of the term. Asia/America resides in transit, as a point of reference on the horizon that is part of both a “minority” identity an a “majority” identity. This constant transitivity evinces precisely the malleability and resistance of “America” with regard to racial reformation. 40 Lisa Lowe approaches Asian American dissonance from a scene of culture and Marxist contradiction in Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics; “to thematize Asian American cultural productions as countersites to U.S. national memory and national culture” is to operate as a space for racialized identities and cultures unaccounted for by the abstracted individual or citizen. 41 It is also to name the contradictions of Asian immigration, which at different moments in the last century and a half of Asian entry into the United States have placed Asians “within” the U.S. nation-state, its workplaces, and its markets, yet linguistically, culturally and racially marked Asians as “foreign” and “outside” the national polity. 42 39 Chan, Chin, and Inada, Aiiieeeee!, x. 40 Asian/American, 5. “As in the construction ‘and/or,’ where the solidus at once instantiates a choice between two terms, their simultaneous and equal status, and an element of indecidability, that is, as it at once implies both exclusion and inclusion, “Asian/American” marks both the distinction installed between “Asian” and “American” and a dynamic, unsettled, and inclusive movement.” 1. 41 Lowe, Immigrant Acts, 4. 42 Ibid., 8. 14 If Asian American literary space is posited as a space of relative freedom from (unfreedoms of) monoethnic or deracialized culture and society, comparatist Naoki Sakai poses a particularly relevant question: “in which direction … are we being freed,” he asks— and “what does it mean to be freed from the myth of [a] monoethnic society?” 43 We might ask this regarding Asian American literature’s “freedom” as a field vis-à-vis English, American or Anglophone literature, discussions of the field’s discrete pluralisms, 44 its canonical overrepresentations by Chinese American and Japanese American texts, 45 and its early masculinist axioms. 46 As Asian American literature forges hemispheric claims increasingly motivated by transnational and global purviews of migration and diaspora, the idea of its heterogeneous freedom from monoethnicism and essential identity becomes more conspicuously axiomatic. Originally based on an infrastructure of east-to-west Pacific movements, Asian American transnationality is complicated by vectors not of American pluralism, but of the plural Americas whose ranges of location and time extend explicitly beyond U.S. politico-geographical parameters and bring to light the U.S. exceptionalism that has equipped the Asian American subject to claim (and to reject) the evenness and entirety of the United States and North America as home. 43 Sakai, “Nationality and the Politics of the ‘Mother Tongue’,” 1. 44 See, for example, Koshy, Susan. “The Fiction of Asian American Literature.” 45 See Chan, Chin, and Inada, Aiiieeeee!; Kim, Asian American Literature; Wong, Reading Asian American Literature; Chan et al., The Big Aiiieeeee! An Anthology of Chinese American and Japanese American Literature. 46 See Chin, “Come All Ye Asian American Writers of the Real and the Fake.” 15 Regulative Homolingualisms: Anglophonicity and the Asian American Exception That Asian American literature is untethered to essentializations of community or ethnic identity due to the naturally and variously discrepant sub-ethnic formations of Asian Americans is a notion based upon two regulative ideas 47 rooted in “paradigms of ethnicity,” as Susan Koshy explains, “produced in the inaugural moment of the field.” 48 The first idea is of the field’s uncontested, putatively appropriate, and “placid body” 49 of English. Naoki Sakai describes homolingualism as a “regime” in which an enunciator does not necessarily speak, but rather “adopts the position representative of a putatively homogeneous language society and relates to … addressees … also representative of an equally homogeneous language community.” 50 The address of homolingualism does not occur through the use of only one language. It pertains to the stances, attitudes, and assumptions based on a commensurate give and take with regard to speaking/writing and understanding, that is, the presumption of replete communication. If we speak or write in radically different languages, however, there is nonetheless the possibility of homolingualism, 51 because homolingual community is not about language per se, but rather the ethos of figuratively speaking the same language, of seeing each other eye to eye, and of being on the same page. Asian American homolingualism is thus an ethos of ethnos, an Anglophonicity corroborated by 47 “Immanuel Kant,” explains Naoki Sakai, “introduced the term ‘regulative idea’ in his Critique of Pure Reason. The regulative idea does not concern itself with the possibility of experience; it is no more than a rule according to which a search in the series of empirical data is prescribed. What it guarantees is not the empirically verifiable truth but, on the contrary, ‘‘forbidding [the search for truth] to bring it[self] to a close by treating anything at which it may arrive as absolutely unconditioned.” Sakai, “How Do We Count a Language?”; Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 552. 48 Koshy, “The Fiction of Asian American Literature.” 49 Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 107. 50 Translation and Subjectivity, 4. 51 Ibid. 16 Asian American literature’s English variations, i.e., tropes of “broken” English, pidgin, creolized English, and inability or refusal to speak English. If translation, an act and idea little discussed in Asian American literature, wields neither replica nor finished product, and is an ambivalent (and difficult) act that anticipates those who absorb and “respond to my delivery with varying degrees of comprehension, including cases of the zero degree at which they would miss its signification completely,” 52 one might describe the experience of translation as an “agony of language.” 53 It would indeed be remarkable, as Edouard Glissant observes in Poetics of Relation, to consider Asians of the Americas as a “people comfortably established within the placid body of their language, who cannot even comprehend that somewhere someone might experience an agony of language and who will tell you flat out, as they have in the United States, ‘That is not a problem.’” 54 Neither agonies of translation, nor the idea that antipodally “foreign” languages can produce spheres unassimilable by humanitas or anthropos, can be registered by an Asian America entrenched in homolingual Anglophonicity. With explicit unevennesses of (un)translatability, the Asian Americas work against “the conventional conception of translation … as a process of homogenization and establishing equivalence.” 55 Its plural, messy and disorganizing potentialities render “our” Asian American community as a chaotic body of dissensus at odds with, or simultaneous to, its extrapolated coherence. 56 52 Ibid. 53 Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 107. 54 Ibid. 55 Sakai, “Translation,” 71. 56 Asian America’s “limits are, in summary, the implicit pluralism found in contemporary constructions of Asian American identity, the commodification of that racial identity, the ideological heterogeneity of a diverse Asian American population, and the willingness of a considerable portion of that population to participate in 17 A second regulative idea occurs by way of Asian American literature’s American exceptionalism, “the dominant structure of desire out of which U.S. citizens imagine[] their national identity.” 57 The abstraction and formalization of Asian Americans’ hybrid uniqueness within Asian American Studies generally, extrapolates an Asian America with striking correspondence to the idea “of the United States as foundationally and fundamentally different from other nations” 58 due to its presumably clean break from Europe and its feudal past. 59 Historian David W. Noble explains that When middle-class Anglo-Americans in 1776 rejected the English king, they rejected their identities as subjects. Now citizens, they could escape the artificial worlds of the aristocratic and peasant classes and achieve a classless and artless relationship with nature. But this, of course, was also the vision of the French middle classes in their revolution of the 1790s. And it would be the vision of the English middle classes as they made a gradual and peaceful revolution toward self-definition as citizens. 60 Arguably taking the turns of a Turnerian U.S. frontier narrative, the story of Asian American literary studies and Asian American Studies often “begins” with and anchors itself in the vital activisms of the 1960s and 70s. As does the post-revolutionary citizen of the United States or Europe, the field sees itself as activated by a turn from an old world of artificiality toward a new world of self-aware hybrid dissonance that, whether qualifiable or incommensurable, stands in for ethnic singularity. and perpetuate such commodification and the social and economic practices that lead to it. By recognizing these limits and by encouraging a move to dissensus rather than consensus, we can deliberately bring ourselves into a moment of crisis, disrupting the equilibrium of racial identity and its commodification that we have begun to take for granted.” Nguyen continues: “If this world of strife is a possibility for Asian America, then perhaps the viability of Asian America as a political category with a clear ideological orientation is doomed.” Nguyen, Race and Resistance, 24–25, 30. 57 The New American Exceptionalism, 1. 58 Lipsitz, “Foreword: The Unpredictable Creativity of David Noble,” xii. 59 Noble, Death of a Nation, xxiii; Brinson-Curiel et al., “Introduction,” 3. 60 Noble, Death of a Nation. 18 This is not to say that to exit the English language or its North American environs is to escape certainly from the heft of Asian American narratives of hybrid dissonance embedded in U.S. exceptionalism. To cite Audra Simpson, a literary critic’s antipodes in the field of anthropology, this project attempts to see where reading can go “when difference is not the unit of analysis, [and] when culture is disaggregated into narratives rather than wholes.” 61 Reading disaggregations of community where “individuality that is different from that of a thing or a subject” 62 is to map an anti(Oe)podal Asian Americas that has as much to do with localizations and emplacements as it does with narratives of individuation heralded by progressive consciousness. It reveals a ubiquitous, classically literary compulsion to “defend the notion of the indivisibility of place as a condition of the individuality of the subject.” 63 Despite subjectivations and subjecticities 64 that are so awkward without the coherence, alleged repletion, and flatness of place (take, for example, No-No Boy’s Ichiro or the eponymous Katzuo in Augusto Higa Oshiro’s La illuminación de Katzuo Nakamatzu 65 ), Asian American Studies and Asian American literatures, as Kandice Chuh notes in Imagine 61 Simpson continues, explaining her desire to explore what happens “when proximity to the territory that one is engaging in is as immediate as the self, and what this then does to questions of ‘voice.’” “On Ethnographic Refusal,” 68. 62 Kaufman, “Introduction,” 6. 63 “[T]he development of aesthetic theory can be understood as a (perhaps ultimate) effort to defend the notion of the indivisibility of place as a condition of the individuality of the subject. This effort to establish a concept of place as self-contained and unified, as well as the problems it encounters, can be traced back to the earliest stages of Western philosophy[….] For without the unity of place, the unity of the subject becomes difficult to conceive. It is the function of aesthetic theory, as it is developed by Kant, to help secure this ever more problematical unity of place by introducing the no less problematical notion of form.” Weber, Mass Mediauras, 4. 64 “Why advocate such a neologism,” asks Ian Balfour, regarding the unwieldy term subjecticity. “[T]he word now tends so often to come with the considerable baggage of psychologism, as well as with connotations of individualism and sometimes its attendant ideologies, as if the subjective were a matter of sheer difference, that is to say, absolutely subjective.” “Subjecticity (On Kant and the Texture of Romanticism).” 65 Okada, No-No Boy; Higa Oshiro, La iluminación de Katzuo Nakamatsu. 19 Otherwise: On Asian Americanist Critique, still stand to gain from poststructuralist interrogations of knowledge and subjectivation, interventions that indeed helped to establish grounds for the fields’ existence. 66 The following exposition of mostly Spanish-language texts does not attempt to show that the spaces of castellano, South America or Latin America have been excluded from, and warrant incorporation into, canons of Asian American literature. It rather prioritizes a precariousness of community in the literary Asian Americas by way of antipodal world- expansions of community—with the expectation that these plural American fertilities will, along the way, enter into world-shrinkages and morph into irritations, confusions, and not knowing. Precariousness community is a place that Asian American literature and its critique can explore further, especially through the act and idea of translation not as a conventional “process of homogenization,” 67 but as heterolingual engagement through which, like Aimée in Flores de un solo día, “one addresses oneself as a foreigner to another foreigner.” 68 66 Chuh, 5–6. 67 Sakai, “Translation,” 71. 68 Ibid., 75; See Neilson, “Opening Translation.” 20 Chapter One Antipodes, Televised: Anna Kazumi Stahl’s Flores de un solo día We show respect by taking off our hats; the Japanese show respect by taking off their shoes. European women regard and desire blond hair; Japanese women … fiercely maintain their black hair. We eat with our hands; from a young age, Japanese men and women eat with two sticks. We write with twenty two letters; they in 48 cana and infinite characters…. In Europe we strive for clarity … in Japan, equivocation is the proper mark of erudition. —Luís Fróis, Tratado em que se contêm muito sucinta e abreviadamente algunas contradições e diferenças de costumes entre a gente de Europa e Japão (1585) 1 [A]lguien dijo que había un mundo en el sótano. Se refería, lo supe después, a un baúl, pero yo entendí que había un mundo. —Jorge Luís Borges, “El Aleph” 2 Thirtysomething-year-old Aimée Leverier lives with her husband Fernando and mother Hanako in downtown Buenos Aires. We meet her just before a pivotal disruption in her harmonious life, a life devoted to managing her flower shop and caring for Hanako, who is deaf and mute. Aimée and Fernando look forward to Hanako’s steadfast and daily routine of placing an ikebana arrangement of striking flowers on the living room table. One strange afternoon, the predictable and familiar cycle is rudely interrupted: there are no flowers, only 1 Fróis, Tratado sobre las contradicciones y diferencias de costumbres entre los europeos y japoneses, 38, 45, 73, 97, 124; for the modernized Portuguese see Europa Japão: um diálogo civilizacional no século XVI: tratado em que se contêm muito sucinta e abreviadamente algumas contradições e diferenças de costumes entre a gente de Europa e Japão; See also the annotated English-language Topsy-Turvy 1585, trans. Robin D. Gill; Topsy- Turvy 1585: The Short Version: a Translation and Popular Introduction of the Famous Treatise by Luis Frois S.J. Listing 611 Ways Europeans & Japanese Are Contrary. 2 “I’d heard someone say there was a world down there. I found out later they meant an old-fashioned globe of the world, but at the time I thought they were referring to the world itself.” “The Aleph” trans. Norman Giovanni. 21 an ominous letter from abroad, addressed to Aimée. It announces the death of Aimée’s grandmother in New Orleans, the norteamericana city of Aimée’s youth. Despite the long estrangement and distance between granddaughter and paternal grandmother, the news jars Aimée’s collectedness with the threatening notion that Aimée’s seamless life pertains not to the world, but to merely a world, one possible world among uncountable and potential others. The sudden heir of the house of her young childhood, a home begrudgingly unforgotten, Aimée is hailed by this foreign letter toward the cloudy events that once transported her and her mother from the southern United States to Buenos Aires, the antipodes of New Orleans. Warding off the world-pluralizing foreignness evoked by the antipodes, Aimée vainly insists that her proper place, here in Buenos Aires, is uncontestable and absolutely under her control; “ella está donde debe estar, que éste es su lugar … con todas las cosas que ella conoce, que entiende y determina por sí misma” (“she is exactly where she should be, that this is her place … with everything that she knows, that she understands and determines on her own terms”). 3 Her arrogation of the local only renders the bounds of her local life more conspicuous. Aimée’s world begins to unravel, and radically destabilizes her feeling “at home.” She engages with herself as if she were a stranger at the other end of the Americas, a place where the inverted seasons, “el olor a otro sol y a otro río” and “[l]os gestos, la cortesía, la vestimenta y el ritmo del habla” 4 (“the smell of another sun and another river,” and “the gestures, the courtesy, the dress and the rhythm of speech”) are of a distant culture, location and language dizzyingly foreign. As Aimée faces herself as an Other at the end of 3 Flores de un solo día (Editorial Seix Barral, 2002), 72. 4 Flores, 331, 165. 22 the world, the static of her overlapping selves sets a stage for her begrudging “return” to New Orleans, an ambivalent U.S. homecoming. Which of these diametrical American cities is Aimée’s true home? Or is she “unhomed” in dogged dislocation? 5 These questions, however, are arguably premised on a static identity based on a reified home. “Are there ways to approach the homeland,” inquires Viet Thanh Nguyen, “without reproducing many of the same features and assumptions of our discourses regarding identity and racial formation in the United States and around Asian Americans?” 6 Nguyen’s antipodal affirmation: to avoid the ineluctable blind spots of the egoistic subject by “looking at oneself as another or oneself as the other,” in a watchful “estrangement whereby we get distance from ourselves and our own assumptions” about the primacy of subjectivation and subjecticity. 7 Assuming that Asian American literature has traditionally been based on the notion of returns, however hopeful, disappointing or blighted, to a reified (beloved or rejected) home—as well an equation of hybrid home-sharing that we might call a kind of unhomeliness, this paper reads Stahl’s Flores de un solo día as a novel that offers a distinct location for these—a preferred place far beyond North America, in the antipodal Southern Cone. Stahl’s novel not only problematizes the narcissistic Asian American subject premised upon a stasis of a U.S.-American home and world. It also questions the idea of world as perceived by, and utter object of, the human. 5 “[T]he ‘unhomely’ ... has a resonance that can be heard distinctly, if erraticly, in fictions that negotiate the powers of cultural difference in a range of transhistorical sites.” Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 13. 6 Nguyen, “Not Like Going Home: On Ambivalent Returns to the Source.” 7 “Why advocate such a neologism,” asks Ian Balfour, regarding the unwieldy term “subjecticity.” “[T]he word now tends so often to come with the considerable baggage of psychologism, as well as with connotations of individualism and sometimes its attendant ideologies, as if the subjective were a matter of sheer difference, that is to say, absolutely subjective.” Balfour, “Subjecticity (On Kant and the Texture of Romanticism).” 23 Like Luís Fróis’ New World Treatise, Flores narrates a productive confusion as it questions the dogged narcissism through which Aimée re-frames her home and world picture. She finds herself amidst a broadening and confusing new world in which she is reframed. The letter’s unexpected news of inheritance threatens Aimée’s peace with regard to her local space and su local—her workspace or atelier, in castellano rioplatense—whose encroachment from a foreign outside Aimée defiantly but vainly refuses to engage. With the figuration of these diametrical poles and the static dissonance between English and Spanish, Aimée’s dislocation is at the expense of her ability to affirm everything around her as indisputably object. Steeped in an unraveling world, she insists that she is in “su cocina, con su tazón de chocolate caliente y su radio prendida”; that “en su lugar, no hay ‘sorpresas’ de esta índole, capaces de transportarla al otro lado del mundo” 8 (“her kitchen, with her cup of cocoa and her blaring radio … in her proper place there should be no “surprises” with the capacity to transport her to the other side of the world, without explanation”). Finally reading the Louisiana letter, Aimée fumbles through flashbacks of her own voice, and experiences a weird world-doubling and world-augmentation; we find her vigilantly watching herself, as if she were another. Her calibrated porteño life is perforated by the end of the world, with bits of clarity that make her aware of her failure to forget her migration as a child to the Southern Cone. Aimée traduce siguiendo la línea del tipeo con el dedo sobre el papel. Ha perdido la costumbre con el inglés, y de a momentos tarda en recordar ciertas palabras o en descifrar el orden de las frases, por lo que primero le resulta confuso todo, hasta que de pronto, el sentido se esclarece como una foto en el líquido del revelado. Igual no es tan dificultosa la tarea. Es el mensaje mismo del que resulta enigmático. Se quedan en silencio, pensándolo…. Por algún motivo, el asunto la abruma, ser enfrentada de golpe con esa historia tan lejana. Tan irrecuperable. Sí, recuerda 8 Flores, 99, 72. 24 nombres y caras, hasta tonos de voz, perfumes. El problema es el mismo que le generó leer el inglés de la carta: siente que reconoce las palabras, pero el significado es escurridizo ye se le escapa. Revisa algunas de ellas—we duly notify, the express agreement, the holder, the owner, not by marriage or blood relation—y de repente, como un rayo, se le aparece una vocecita en la mente que dice: “I am eight, and I … this is my … her name is … just for a little … because then … to take us back to …”. ¿Es ésa su propia voz? ¿De cuándo? ¿A quién está diciendo todo eso? 9 *** Aimée translates, following the typed line with her finger across the paper. She has forgotten the turns of English, and is at moments slow in remembering particular words or in decoding the grammar of certain phrases; at first everything seems completely confused, until soon the feeling becomes clear, like a photograph in developing liquid. There is nothing as hard is this; the message is so enigmatic. She thinks, silently…. she’s overwhelmed, face to face with this history from so long ago. So irrecoverable, but yes, she remembers names and faces, even the timbres of voices, smells. It’s what reading in English brings to light: she sees the shape of the words, but the meaning slips away. She looks again at some of them—we duly notify, the express agreement, the holder, the owner, not by marriage or blood relation—and suddenly, in a flash, a subtle voice in her mind says: “I am eight, and I … this is my … her name is … just for a little … because then … to take us back to …”. Is that her voice? From when? And to whom is she speaking? Tightly wound, Buenos Aires becomes undone before Aimée’s ears. She is baffled by the uncanny voice of a young girl who speaks in a coherent but unfamiliar language from another place: it is her voice that speaks to herself, as if she were another. New Orleans’ intrusive presence emerges as an emblem of a past to be excavated, and de-centers Aimée’s rigorously local Buenos Aires. Which city is Aimée’s true home, and which language is her “mother tongue”? If we take the notion of “mother tongue” literally, how is one to categorize the tongue of Aimée’s mother Hanako, who does not use language per se? Bouts of sleepless confusion will finally press Aimée to vacate her assumptions of her pure porteño home and take a vacation to the United States. However, instead of discovering neat chapters of her past to be slid cleanly into her present world picture, she finds that instead of “lo confiable y cómodo, apareció en la niñez de Aimée primero una rareza, inesperada y 9 Ibid., 71–72. 25 inexplicable, y luego la confusión, la amenaza, la ruptura, el desplazamiento 10 (“Instead of trust and comfort, suddenly amidst the childlike Aimée appeared a strangeness, unexpected and inexplicable, and after this confusion, vulnerability, rupture and displacement”). Staring at the foreign document, Aimée nods slowly as she reads the English legalese. Transported back to her own childhood elsewhere, she appears to learn a simple word: heir. Murmura la palabra ‘heredero’ in inglés que suena como la que dice ‘aire’: ‘Heir. Air’”. —¿Qué?—[Fernando] levanta la cabeza de nuevo para preguntar—: ¿Qué dijiste? —No, nada.—Responde con lentitud, con la boca torpe. 11 *** Aimée murmurs the word “heir” in English; it sounds like the word “air”: “Heir. Air.” “Huh?” Fernando raises his head again to ask, “What did you say?” “No, nothing,” she mouths slowly, lethargically. We catch Aimée between languages; her Gregor-like warbling upsets secure representation, and “move[s] toward its extremities or its limits.” 12 The inscrutable sound that signifies immateriality and nothingness comes to interpellate Aimée and makes her an heir, emplacing her in a relationship with blood, inheritance and patria. Oddly removed and distant from each other, these homonyms, indeed like strangers, situate Aimée in an inevitable geographical broadening, the inevitability of seeing herself vis-à-vis a radically enlarged and relevant world. Modern life is englobado, now global life in which we can no longer take the air or “natural” environment for granted as abundantly or transparently life- 10 Ibid., 228. 11 Ibid., 73. 12 Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, 23. 26 sustaining. As “la nada” or airy givenness is inverted into solid thingness, “life and breath under the open skies no longer signifies what it did in past epochs,” observes Peter Sloterdijk; “human existence is now obliged to explicitly identify and reckon with its symbiosis with the invisible.” 13 Flores’s air undergoes a subjectivation and gains disturbing substance. Made heavy and life-sustaining by the global, it obliges a questioning of the comfortable relationship between the human and (the representability of) world. Antipodes, Televised Centuries earlier, Jesuit father José de Acosta similarly revises the axiom of air as utter nothingness in his 1590 Natural and Moral History of the Indies. Acosta cites a fascinating text by the early Christian Lactantius (ca. 250-ca. 325), 14 for whom a spherical earth was extremely dubious: “What reason is there for some to affirme,” [says Lactantius,] “that there are Antipodes, whose steppes are opposite to ours? Is it possible that any should bee so grosse and simple as to believe there were a people or nation marching with their feete upwards, and their heades downwards, and that thinges which are placed here of one fort, are in that other part hanging topsie turvie: that trees and corne growe downwards, and that raine, snow and haile, fall from the earth upward…. The imagination and conceit which some have had, supposing the heaven to be round, hath bene the cause to invent these Antipodes hanging in the aire.” But whatsoever he saieth, wee that live now at Peru, and inhabite that part of the world which is oposite to Asia[.] 15 13 “la vida y la respiración bajo cielo abierto no pueden ya significar lo mismo que en tiempos pasados”; “la existencia humana está obligada a reconocer explícitas disposiciones a la simbiosis con lo invisible.” Sloterdijk, Temblores de aire, 141. 14 Lactantius, 1. originally written during the early fourth century. 15 Acosta, The Naturall and Morall Historie, 22. “‘¿Qué camino lleva lo que algunos quieren decir, que hay antípodas, que ponen sus pisadas contrarias a las nuestras? ¿Por ventura hay hombre tan tonto que crea haber gentes que andan los pies arriba y la cabeza abajo? ¿y que las cosas que acá están asentadas, estén allá trastornadas colgando? ¿y que los árboles y los panes crecen allá hacia abajo? ¿y que las lluvias y la nieve y el granizo suben a la tierra hacia arriba? y después de otras palabras añade Lactancio aquestas: El imaginar al cielo redondo fué causa de inventar estos hombres antípodas 27 Lactantius’ intransigence is no different from Aimée’s, as one for whom “up and down remain[] absolute, privileged directions,” as another critic describes, “with the consequence that Antipodeans must be people literally standing on their heads.” 16 Flores’ antipodal unraveling is contextualized by the “topsie turvie” sensation in a short piece by Stahl published in the Argentinean daily La Nación. Celebrating Buenos Aires’ immigrant history, the paper’s 2004 Christmastime magazine supplement printed a selection of autobiographical pieces by new porteños of various immigrant and ethnic backgrounds. Entitled “Mi primera navidad en la Argentina” (“My First Christmas in Argentina”), 17 the collection’s finale is a vignette by Stahl, who fondly recalls her first Christmas in the Southern Hemisphere as an U.S. student awed by the summer heat of December. Born and raised near New Orleans, Stahl is currently based in Buenos Aires, her home for well over a decade. “Mi primera navidad” recalls the holiday when Stahl’s Spanish instructor joined her and two other norteamericano students for a summertime get-together in Buenos Aires. Donned in a Santa Claus cap and shorts, the teacher arrived with a piping hot turkey and a VCR recording of falling snow. “Así vivimos la Navidad por primera vez invertida” (“And so we had our first inverted Christmas”), Stahl writes fondly, virtually mapping two poles at which two people could stand and be anti podus, foot against foot. Inversion and bipolarity elicit a shifting sense of scale and retracting outer limits. They colgados del aire. Y así, no tengo más que decir de tales filósofos, sino que en errando una vez, porfían en sus disparates, defendiendo los unos con los otros.’ Hasta aquí son palabras de Lactancio.” “Mas por más que él diga, nosotros que habitamos al presente en la parte del mundo, que responde en contrario de la Asia, y somos sus antíctonos.” Historia Natural y Moral De Las Indias (en HTML). 16 McCready, “Isidore, the Antipodeans, and the Shape of the Earth.” 17 “Mi primera navidad en la Argentina.” 28 suggest a world that no longer radiates from one center, but that is a conglomeration of interconnected anchors—a world “out there” that uproots and restabilizes, however precariously, the immediacy of one’s positionality. Such static downshifts the world into a provisional picture. Winter during “la Navidad invertida” is experienced through a screen upon which the world doubles and is thrown into confusion. The world is oddly more fully present, as its “ends” have been drawn together; snow and the wintry terrain are teleported close— premised, one could argue, on a “defensive” and “compensatory” farsightedness 18 that resonates with Deleuzian immanence, a “read[iness] for any eventuality” invoked by watching TV, rather than just looking at it. 19 To watch is very close to watching out for or looking out for, that is, being sensorially alert for something that may happen…. To ‘watch’ something … is to be on the alert, to watch out for something that is precisely not perceptible or graspable as an image or a representation. To ‘watch’ is to look for something that is not immediately apparent. It implies an effort, a tension and a separation. 20 Aimée’s telemediations of both cities are funneled and mediated by television, the letter, and the telephone. “Toda la tarde fue así para Aimée, movimientos bruscos, cambios de ambiente, vistas, caras, voces, temas de enfoque: fue como caer presa de una máquina de diapositivas enloquecida que pasa el contenido de costumbre pero sin orden y a toda velocidad” (“All afternoon was like that in New Orleans, abrupt movements, sudden changes of scene, looks, faces, voices, so many things to consider: it was like she was jammed in a 18 Mass Mediauras, 113. 19 Ibid., 113. 20 Ibid., 118–9. 29 photo machine amidst a flurry of developing negatives”). 21 These stimuli threaten with a foreign chaos, when, for example Aimée speaks to (or rather, is spoken to by) her overeager attorney Lafourche for the first time in New Orleans, through the uncanny conduit of “el telefono acunado entre el hombro y la mejilla” (“the telephone cradled between her shoulder and her cheek”). 22 Aimée mira otra vez el cuadrado sombrío del televisor. Hay una insinuación de brillo en la pantalla. Al lado está el mueble más bajo, con los estantes. Aimée hace memoria: … Videos. Africa mía, Alice, Buenos días, Vietnam, Caro diario, Casablanca… Y arriba está la carta. Recordar la carta le despierta otra sensación, no tan neutra. Desata una cadena espontánea de contradicciones, de movimientos entre las ansias y la resistencia, y otra vez está incómoda. 23 *** She looks again at the somber TV frame, and the slight glow on the screen. To the side there’s a low shelf; Aimée remembers what’s on it … Videos. My Africa, Alice, Good Morning, Vietnam, Dear Diary, Casablanca. The letter then awakens another sensation, not so neutral. It opens a Pandora’s box of contradictions, of movements between anxieties and resistance, and she’s uncomfortable again. While television’s weird temporal overlapping renders faraway things and events immediate by projecting them into local space, “what is … close remains strangely removed, indeterminably distant.” 24 The separation of Buenos Aires and New Orleans—cultural, linguistic and American antipodes—is crucial for Aimée’s peace of mind, as is the cleft between English and Spanish. As Martin Kohan notes, “a medida que [Aimée] aprende español, va olvidando el inglés: no los acumula” (“as Aimée learns Spanish, she forgets English; they do not overlap”). 25 The separation remains intact; Aimée will not relinquish 21 Stahl, Flores, 322. 22 Ibid., 132. 23 Ibid., 76. 24 Weber, Mass Mediauras, 124. 25 Kohan, “La encarnadura de los recuerdos.” 30 her prioritization of Spanish over English. Despite its apparent and colloquial fluidity, English hisses into the text’s castellano in an uncomfortable cramping, an invading parasite, i.e., the “static” of radio or television in French. 26 Aimée will eventually “emplace” her fateful letter on a shelf below the television—a screen that glows with the potentialities of the rigorously forgotten videotapes beside it, “a Trojan Horse introduced into the heart of the domestic fortress that we call ‘home.’” 27 A Style of Blindness Gustavo Geirola notes the blindness of the number of the Aimée’s apartment “9 o B,” or noveno be. This rhythmic iteration of no ve, no ve (“one cannot see, one cannot see”) haunts Aimée’s elaborated routines and their historical and architectural layerings: Ciertos detalles de la construcción [del departamento] muestran que, antes, se trataba de un mismo espacio íntegro y enorme, el hogar de un patricio, que luego fue dividido y repartido—dos veces—entre más personas con menos recursos. El departamento de las ventanas primero fue tan sólo un gran salón de juegos, antes de pasar a ser cuatro corrales de conventillo para diez o más obreros inmigrantes en sus inicios desesperantes en el país, y al final terminar recompuesto en su condición actual. Sólo en algunos detalles—las manijas, unas tejas de repuesto, la sorpresiva cantidad de rejillas en determinados lugares, una abertura sin explicación en una pared—revela lo que fue y ya no es. 28 *** Certain details in the construction show that in the past, this apartment was spacious and unobstructed, the home of a noble person that was later divided and redistributed—twice—between more people with fewer recourses. The room with windows was once a large game room, before being divied into four pen-like tenement rooms for ten or more immigrant workers in their desperate beginnings here in the country, until finally the space was reworked into this configuration. Only particular details—certain handle fixtures, replaced tiles, the surprising number of grills in certain places, an opening without explanation in the wall—reveal what the apartment once was, and what it is no longer. 26 Mass Mediauras, 115. 27 Ibid., 122. 28 Flores, 7–8. 31 Aimée’s equilibrium is premised upon the inability to “see” beyond her immediately local purview—much like the outer-bodied experience of a fieldworker who gazes across a field, senses intact and undisturbed, “filled” with what she sees 29 : the worker “tends to ‘experience’ there the sheaves of wheat and barley rather than any self-conscious state of feeling in her eyes.” 30 Aimée’s vacation north, then, is one toward particularity, and a vacation of outer- bodiment, as it were, for which there is only equivalence of body and “pure” subjectivity. The acute displacement of seeing herself as a stranger produces a heightened technical awareness; the text continues with a motif of screens, revealed pictures and developing film. Más que un bloque de lo recordado, siente desovillarse como una cinta o una película larguísima y fina, llena de datos e imágenes, sonidos grabados de voces, consejos, cariños y declaraciones…. Quizás sea natural en cualquier ser humano, pero la mente de Aimée—en medio de una cronología que mayoritariamente contempla lo habitual, lo que era reconfortante y “asi como siempre”—va como un imán al momento disímil, a la discordia con el “como siempre” y el “sé como es”. 31 *** More than a coherent memory, she feels as if she were unraveling like a tape or a long reel of flim full of facts and images, recorded sounds of voices, advice, endearments and declarations…. Maybe it would be natural in any human, but in Aimée’s mind— in the middle of a chronology usually took for granted the habitual, the comfortable and the always—is attracted like a magnet to the asymmetrical, and discord with the always and familiar. In New Orleans Aimee overtly reckons with the layers of her inheritance. Finally on her street and facing the house of her childhood, she hears her own stream of consciousness a little girl: papá contrató a otro arquitecto. Durante un período, los dos estuvieron trabajando en la casa, y los dos trajeron sus equipos de obreros. En todos lados había ruidos de 29 Scarry, The Body in Pain, 165–6. 30 Ibid. 31 Flores, 228. 32 martillos, de rasqueteo y las voces de una docena de hombres extraños. Fue como si la casa se hubiera desplazado de golpe, como si se invirtiera, cambió sólo desde adentro, pero era como si la invadiera otro mundo y que ese mundo fuera lo que la dejara transformada. 32 *** dad hired a different architect. For a while the two worked on the house, with their employees. Everywhere there were hammering sounds, scraping and the voices of a dozen strange men. It was like the house had suddenly shifted around, as if it was inverted, it changed only inside, but it was as if another world had invaded ours, but it was that world that was completely transformed, not ours. Aimée finally remembers home as a Faulknerian rehaul, antipodal to the layered histories and past constructions of noveno B. A Proper Cleft Soon after its publication in 2002, Flores was reviewed by critic Elvio Gandolfo in the Argentinean magazine Noticias. “Pocas veces una novela está tan claramente dividida en dos mitades” (“Rarely is a novel so clearly divided into two halves”), he muses. 33 For Gandolfo, the text suffers from a conspicuous distinction between two narrative worlds, a hard shift from the first “half” into the next. Referring to Aimée’s receipt of the fateful letter and her following trip to New Orleans, Gandolfo does not know what to do with the novel’s rivenness. It is as if he would prefer a cleaner whole, without cleavage and with a consistently homogenous style. “The first half is serene, displaying itself bit by bit, creating a solid world of routines, eaten away at by a mystery. The second is a typical novel of “inheritance”…. In the Argentinean half, the facts square up with a commendable literary command. The “American” half, however, almost falls into an excess of best-selling 32 Ibid., 239. 33 Gandolfo, “Las raíces del presente (reseña de Flores de un solo día).” 33 anecdotes, although “de qualité.” 34 Gandolfo, says Stahl, “said that I should have written one book, rather than two.” 35 For Gandolfo, Flores’ style is just as strange and problematic as its form. Stahl’s use of castellano is questionable due to her mixed heritages, neither of which can claim a native relationship to standard or colloquial Spanish. Her out-of-place and un-Latin hybridity, for Gandolfo, is manifest in her writing. “A transplant to Argentina, daughter of a Japanese mother and an American father,” he writes, “the risk run by the (split) structure of the book also invades the use of language. A better edition would have pared off errors like the characters who muelen los dientes [an incorrect way to say “to grind one’s teeth”] instead of rechinarlos [i.e., the proper Spanish usage].” 36 When we meet Aimee’s two employees, the nemeses Javier Nakamura (a sansei porteño who prefers bookkeeping to sales) and Ariel Lambaré (a blond self-appointed connoisseur of all things Japanese), we hear Javier gnash his teeth when Ariel waxes poetic about things ostensibly Japanese: “el Japón o el budismo,” for instance, or “la meditación, la poesía haiku.” 37 “Javier se muele los dientes cuando Ariel se explaya sobre esos temas.” 38 This inauthenticity, however, occurs in a scene that itself questions the reification of proper relationships between ethnicity and cultural objects. Like the style of Kafka through which 34 “No solo [un] viaje separa las dos mitades,” he adds. “La primera es serena, se despliega poco a poco, crea un mundo sólido de rutinas, carcomido por un misterio. La segunda es una típica novela ‘de herencia’…. En la mitad argentina, los hechos se insertan en un flujo literario muy logrado. La ‘americana’, por momentos parece al borde de caer en el exceso anecdótico del best seller, aunque sea ‘de qualité….” 35 “Interview with Anna Kazumi Stahl at her Apartment in Buenos Aires.” 36 “Instalada en la Argentina, hija de madre japonesa y padre norteamericano … el riesgo que corre en la estructura del libro también invade el use del lenguaje. Una mejor edición hubiera limado las palabras erróneas, como los personajes que muelen los dientes en vez de rechinarlos.” “Las raíces del presente.” 37 Stahl, Flores, 44. 38 Ibid. 34 “secure aesthetic distance is undermined,” 39 this stumbling of proper usage—the “property” of the se 40 —cannot help but transform “disinterested observation” 41 into pride or discomfiture. Aimée se levanta muy temprano. Está oscuro todavía, pero se mueve a ciegas en la casa, con la seguridad de quien está habituado al lugar. Saldrá a la calle y volverá antes de que la luz asome por las ventanas de Junín. Usa la entrada de servicio, en el fondo del departamento, y baja por el ascensor que no tiene espejo. La luz es fuerte y hace resaltar los colores: Aimée tiene pelo largo, castaño claro, que lleva suelto, a veces ajustándolo atrás con hilo o un lápiz para trabajar o cocinar. Como es invierno, lleva una campera verde, una polera blanca y un enterito de jean, con botas de goma negras. Es una mujer pequeña y delgada, pero ágil, casi atlética en sus movimientos. Tiene unos treinta y cinco años, y más que linda, tiene algo especial, un mínimo misterio en su cara que llama la atención. De facciones delicadas y mirada franca, confunde al que trate de adivinarle el origen: tiene los ojos de un marrón tan claro que asemeja la miel y rasgados como los de un gato. Se le ve un aire oriental, pero no se puede definir. Por eso, muchas veces, los otros se quedan mirándola, cosa que fastidia a Aimée; su personalidad hace que prefiera el trabajo a la seducción. 42 I have not included a translation of this apparently clear passage, which is emblematic of the novel’s halting yet smooth, mundane yet pointed style. It limns an everyday quality of a morning (as Aimée is one “habituado al lugar”) with its subtle anticipation of the future tense (“saldrá,” “volverá”)—illustrating that despite its sharp lucidity, this morning is like so many others. The routine of Aimée’s life is emphasized in a fresh prose that Pedro Rey describes as both “quintaesencialmente porteño[],” (“quintessentially from Buenos Aires”) 39 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 339. 40 Giorgio Agamben links the derivative themes of “the Greek hethos (and ēthos), ‘custom, habit, dwelling place’; the Sanskrit svadhá, ‘character, habit’,” and “the Greek idios, ‘proper.’” Ereignis, or “event,” he notes, is “semantically linked to this sphere.” “*Se: Hegel’s Absolute and Heidegger’s Ereignis,” 129. 41 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 346. 42 Stahl, Flores, 11. 35 and “una prosa limpida, de ritmo seco y por momentos extraño” (“a limpid prose, with an dry and sometimes strange rhythm”). 43 “Anna writes in such a strange way but she doesn’t know it,” a colleague of Stahl’s explains. 44 The author’s spare style halts and stays the reader, drawing attention to itself despite its clarity. It is at if such syntax conveys that there is nothing new to passively see, yet so much to anticipate and watch; it flaunts a nearsightedness through its castellano rioplatense—“el único que conozco” (“the only Spanish I know”), Stahl explains in an interview. 45 Such “poverty” and minor Spanish articulate a persistent interiority. Yet like the fieldworker who looks up at the sun too quickly, losing the equilibrium of vision and “becom[ing] more self-conscious of the event of ‘seeing,’” 46 Stahl’s Spanish foregrounds a cracking of homeostasis through pain or poverty induced upon “standard” castellano or language in general, heightening the awareness of one’s televisionary quality, inauthenticity, over-clarity, and blindness. Flores’s style and formal cleavage are key if we are to “get the picture” of Aimée’s new world as a “thing” far from utter thingliness. Indeed, “to get the picture,” observes Heidegger, “throbs with being acquainted with something, with being equipped and prepared for it.” 47 43 “La sintaxis del silencio.” 44 The critic Paula Cortes Rocca mentioned this to me in 2007. 45 Rey, “La sintaxis del silencio.” 46 Scarry, The Body in Pain, 165–6. 47 “The Age of the World Picture,” 129. 36 The Ambivalent Hybrid Subject While our ear is drawn toward Flores’ utterly (but not quite) castellano rioplatense (through which we witness an unhomely depiction of the surfaces of Aimée’s home), the description of Aimée in the above passage draws our eye toward the strange transparency of her face and its unhomely resistance, as the narrator’s literary style limns Aimée’s own style: her clothes, her visible aire. This exotic(izing) moment harbors the stylistic workings of deterritorialization, as the conspicuous detail of the surface abstracts the face from its worldly context, or, on the other hand, inflates it to overwhelm and “envelop[] an unknown and unexplored landscape.” 48 Usually “individuating, socializing and communicative; in the close-up, however, the face becomes an autonomous entity that tends to destroy this triple function: social roles are renounced, communication ceases, individuation is suspended.” 49 Like the attempt to picture the world, Aimée’s close(d)-up face blurs subject (the reader as the young man who desires) and object (Aimée), deflecting our “swallowing” of the object, our desire for it and to know it. After the intrusion of the fateful letter, Aimée watches her husband, as he watches her: Los dos se miran, pero de modos diferentes. Fernando observa a su mujer con atención y con una especie de preocupación clínica, tal vez habitual en un marido medico. Aimée, más que verlo, parece estar leyendo, en busca de un sintaxis, una combinación signativa de los sentidos más pequeños y más evidentes. ¿qué ve? Las palabras pasan como títulos de película por la pantalla de su mente: “Marido. Médico. Porteño. Hombre.… Pero no lo suficiente como para ayudarme a clarificar nada de esto. Porque no sabe más que yo. Y eso son fragmentos nomás. Partes, sin relación entre sí.... 50 *** 48 Smith, “‘A Life of Pure Immanence’: Deleuze’s ‘Critique and Clinique Project.’ (Introduction).” 49 Ibid., xxxii. 50 Flores, 99. 37 The two look at each other, but in different registers. Fernando observes his wife attentively with a clinical eye or preoccupation, perhaps expected from a doctor. Aimée, more than just seeing him, appears to be reading, hunting for a syntax, a combination of subtle and obvious signs. What does she see? Words pass like subtitles on her mind’s screen: “Husband. Doctor. Porteño. Man…. But none is sufficient, none helps me clarify any of this. Because he doesn’t know any more than I do. And these are mere fragments, parts, with no relation between one another…. An instance of “[t]he organization of the face … undone in favor of its own material traits,” 51 the conspicuous figuring of the narrative eye-as-lens is iterated. When eye and sight are “techonologized,” the wholeness of characters decompose, along with the possibility of any yoking omniscience or fully knowable world. We face the technology of the face to reconsider the givenness of socializing and communicative individuation, or the denotation of a true interior subjectivity. Aimée’s unique facial features, we want to assume, derive from her Anglo and Japanese parentage setting her apart from most porteñas, and hint at a curious racial mixture and the availability of some translation of ethnic hybridity. Gandolfo reads Flores as an exploration of the two cultural worlds that he assumes comprise the axes of Stahl’s cultural experience, porteño and Asian; for him it is ultimately a novel “a la vez muy oriental y muy argentina.” 52 But is this surface-seeing, corroborated by Stahl’s motif of technologized emplacements, enough to have us believe that the “aire oriental” of Aimée’s face is a surface that should properly seduce us—and those who can’t help but stop and stare at her—into assigning her an authenticity afforded by a mixed ethnic interiority? Stahl writes that her own family was not one to idealize the double-cultured syncretism of East and West or some “‘fusión armoniosa’ … del encuentro entre culturas” 51 Smith, “‘A Life of Pure Immanence’: Deleuze’s ‘Critique and Clinique Project.’ (Introduction),” xxxii. 52 Gandolfo, “Las raíces del presente.” 38 (“harmonious fusion” of the meeting of two cultures”). 53 Stahl accepts neither this romantization of transindividualized ethnic or national half-halfness nor the orientation of a clear axis between two distinct ethnic or national worlds. She parries the desire to “locate” her as an ethnic sum: Soy de ascendencia japonesa y alemana. Nací y me crié en Norteamérica y, desde los 34, resido en Suramérica donde escribo ficciones, y enseño letras. Aunque parecería lo contrario, mi vida NO sirve como un buen ejemplo de las dificultades de pertenecer a más de un “mundo” cultural … no experimenté limitaciones por tener una ascendencia mixta, mitad occidental y mitad oriental…. Mi padre, un arquitecto, y mi madre, una traductora y docente de lengua japonesa, sabiamente aceptaban la imposibilidad de una “fusión” entre lo oriental y lo occidental. Por eso, nunca sentí la carencia de tal cosa: ¿quién echa de menos algo que nunca se pensó como atractivo o siquiera posible? 54 *** I am of Japanese and German heritage. I was born and raised in North America and, since the age of 34, have lived in South America where I now write fiction and teach humanities. Although it might seem quite the contrary, my live is NOT some ideal example of the difficulties of relating to more than one cultural “world” … I did not suffer limitations for having some origin half occidental and half oriental…. My father, an architect, and my mother, a translator and teacher of Japanese, wisely accepted the impossibility of a “fusion” between “East” and “West.” Because of this, I never felt a lack of such a thing: who would want something that was never attractive or even possible? Freud claims narcissism to be part of the natural “instinct of self-preservation” to be overcome, “a lost object … destined to become missing.” 55 We envy narcissistic children and animals for their “power of retaining a blissful state of mind.” 56 The desire to posit ethnicity is the desire for the self-preservation or “self-regard” of narcissistic identity for Rey Chow, one that has become a North American perversion with which Asian American 53 Stahl, “Mujeres que viven en (o entre) dos mundos—Oriente y Occidente.,” 77. 54 Ibid., 77–78. 55 See Freud, “On Narcissism: An Introduction”; Chow, The Protestant Ethnic and the Spirit of Capitalism, 139. 56 Chow, The Protestant Ethnic and the Spirit of Capitalism, 140. 39 literature is preoccupied. We long for things unattractive and impossible, namely the narcissism of “transindividual” ethnic selves. 57 For the ethnic subject that emerges vis-à-vis Asian American literature the world is anchored by the coherence of U.S. national experience (however plural) and the English language as the modern and adequately mimetic lingua franca that no longer links the once “epistemic authority” of ethnicity to Asian “languages and cultures of peoples who are ‘over there’ on the other side of the world.” 58 The rubric of stable and authentic ethnicities, in other words, gives rise to a dogged scene of aesthetic forms that oblige the ethnic confessional; for Asian American literature—with no legitimating Asian language to share English’s regime, explains Chow—visible features of the body supplant foreign languages as the authentic markers of ethnic identity 59 . Racial and phenotypical hybridity is foregrounded at moments in Flores through Aimée’s “aspecto de una modelo de ‘Bennetton’” 60 equivocally playful or ironically flaunted. However, this is the extent of her “confession” as a hybrid subject—and of Flores’ affinity with Asian American literature as premised upon racial difference as a hybrid liminality that rewards the racialized subject a perspectival freedom and a latent essentiality. Indeed, “U.S. multiculturalism,” observes Kandice Chuh, has failed “to allow for the complexity of ‘ethnic literatures,’ which are effectively coded as transparent, self-evident expressions.” 61 57 Ibid., 141. 58 Ibid., 125. 59 Ibid. Chow adds, as “Tomo Hattori has observed, ‘Asian American literature is still understood, for the most part, as literature written by Asian Americans. Because many of them no longer have the claim to ethnic authority throught he possession of ethnic languages, Asian Americans are perhaps the paradigmatic case of a coercive mimeticism that physically keeps them in their place … and, I would add, in their genre of speaking/writing as nothing but generic Asian Americans.” 60 Stahl, Flores, 161. 61 Chuh, Imagine Otherwise, 232. 40 The desire for transparency is not the only call toward which Flores will not turn. Its hybrid moments are contextualized with another “slipper[y] … somatic or semiotic category” 62 : mestizaje or racial mixture, racial hybridities initiated in the early modern era of Spanish colonization. As a field of negotiation, mestizaje is distinct from the rubric of racial miscegenation in the United States that is contextualized by nineteenth- and twentieth- century histories of plurality through difference, or multiculturalism. 63 Aimée, a foreign intrusion upon both mestizaje and U.S. multicultural hybridity as a racial essence, is inauthentic to both. Her “aire oriental” and unreadable racial hybridity is a stubborn wedge between these antipodal U.S. and Latin American legacies. If there is the added complexity of mestizaje as “one of the most attractive features of Latin Americanness for those reading and interpreting the region from the outside, especially from the North,” 64 we can read Aimée’s face as one that foils the desire to see it as a flag of authentic depth. Is a rather coquettish figure of inauthenticity, a manufactured individuation. Flores will not embrace the “transparency” of ethnic representation, however hybrid or mestiza. El local Aimée does not engage in the hail of ethnic trans-subjectivity or narcissistic “self regard”; her narcissism of a different putative center: Buenos Aires, its disembodied castellano, and 62 Scarry, The Body in Pain, 7. 63 “Until the last decade of the twentieth century … [m]any early nation builders viewed mestizaje and its rehabilitation as a vital key to progress and development…. In many early texts of postcolonial criticsm, at least, mestizaje still provided an effective tool with which centuries of colonial domination based on racial and cultural difference could be halted or reversed. Throughout this period, mestizaje—especially in counterdistinction to the racial practices of the United States which allowed little room for such ideas—was generally considered antiracist, anti-imperial, and more inclusive of a greater portion of Latin America’s diverse citizenry….” Marilyn Grace Miller, Rise and Fall of the Cosmic Race: The Cult of Mestizaje in Latin America (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2004), 4. 64 Miller, Rise and Fall of the Cosmic Race, 25. 41 the enclosed spaces of her apartment and her flower shop. Returning to Stahl’s motif of face- reading technics and the passage from Flores above, the close-up also signifies Aimée’s closing-up as a transparent subject as she frustrates the hailing that would have her “aire oriental” denote some true or prior ethnic or hybrid interiority, what Chow claims is a constructed self-regard to be worked at, maintained and defended. Aimée’s insistence upon utter familiarity, like Knapp’s, requires work to keep her subjecticty (and the world as a secure object) from unraveling. It takes work to “know” Aimée as it does for Aimée to control the precincts of her home and world. Aimée’s preference of “labor over seduction” plays out in the motif of routine cycles of work, as the local scaffolds the security of the local world as the most relevant world. A precarious sublimity emerges through immersion in el local, from Hanako “compenetrada con su trabajo” (“engrossed in her work”) 65 in her room or su local, to Aimee who helps her, achieving “un rato [en que] no hay otro sonido que el agua y el susurro de hojas, pétalos, o telas mientras madre e hija trabajan” (“a moment in which there is no other sound but water and the whisper of paper, petals and cloth while mother and daughter work”). 66 The flower shop provides a space where Aimée and her antipodal employees can roll up their sleeves and work together in difference-subsuming synchrony, “una ilustración didáctica del espíritu de equipo: los dos muchachos trabajaban codo a codo con su jefa” (“A didactic illustration of teamwork: the two mean work shoulder to shoulder with their boss”). 67 Sublime work, paradoxically un-belabored, is a virtual home of a strange calm. But despite its proper and 65 Stahl, Flores, 19. 66 Ibid., 110. 67 Ibid., 43. 42 heimlich comfort, home is a place that takes work to stabilize; its “natural” canniness is a precarious peace that requires consistent labor. HanEchoes The encounter with and discovery of Aimée’s home at the other end of the Americas do not accumulate as depth of experience, broader self-knowledge, or Bildung in the incorporation of the individual into the greater social order. Flores’ minor style foregrounds Aimée’s “individual concern” as it crescendos into a register that is “necessary, indispensable, magnified, because a whole other story is vibrating within it.” 68 This other story is a new axis that emerges through Aimée’s antipodal reworlding, that of Hanako’s coming to voice. The hermetic Hanako, who does not leave the apartment, appears to need the keen stability and predictability of the home as “un universo conocido y previsible” (“a familiar and predictable universe”). 69 Her agoraphobia takes root in “los bombardeos que vio de chica en el Japón de la Segunda Guerra Mundial” (the bombings she witnessed as a girl in Japan during World War II). 70 She and Aimée live in a precarious peace, a state “of distinctness without domination, with the distinct participating in each other,” 71 shadowing each other in a bond of unspoken understandings as “madre e hija (aunque muchas veces parecían invertirse los roles) hicieron frente a todo desde su indivisibilidad, cada una el sostén de la otra a través de un equilibrio de naturalezas opuestas” (“mother and daughter (even if they often appeared to switch their roles), were indivisible, and created a mutual 68 Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, 17. 69 Stahl, Flores, 16. 70 Ibid. 71 Adorno, “Subject and Object,” 500. 43 sustenance through an equilibrium of their distinct personalities and natures”). 72 This precarious peace, a blind twinness sans parasites, underscores Aimée’s blindness toward New Orleans and Hanako’s trauma-ridden “home” of U.S.-occupied Japan, where she was taken under the wing of Henri Leverier, Hanako’s to-be husband and Aimée’s father. It is Aimée’s negotiation with her inheritance at the other end of the world that leads her to Henri’s old friend, the architect Phillipe Chalmette. When he lays eyes upon Aimée, Chalmette no longer repress his adoration for her mother. A fellow Occupation soldier, he recalls Henri’s accidental shooting of Hanako’s father, and Henri’s subsequent atonement: taking the young Hanako home to Louisiana. It Hanako’s transversal story that comes to light once Aimée allows herself to remain open to the unexpected, bringing us to see that “no es ni tonta ni enferma,” as Chalmette explains, “es de otro universo” (“she’s not sick or stupid, she’s of another world).” 73 Doctors diagnose Hanako’s impairment as a failure to produce language: “La afectación neurológica en este caso, desde la infancia,” they explain, “excluye ese tipo de maniobra mental: la paciente no comprende un orden lineal en el tiempo, no conecta los efectos con sus causas, no puede comprender ni componer una sintaxis. No puede.” (“Her neurological disorder excludes that kind of cognition: the patient cannot think linearly, connect cause and effect, or compose or comprehend syntax. She can’t”). 74 Yet Hanako expresses herself through ikebana, Japanese for “the keeping alive of flowers,” derived from ikeru, to arrange, and hana, flower. “Aimeé encuentra imposible no concluir que Hanako 72 Stahl, Flores, 11. 73 Ibid., 294. 74 Ibid., 115–16. 44 piensa” (“Aimée finds it impossible not to conclude that Hanako thinks”). 75 Hanako’s arrangements indeed produce syntax, “a connected order or system of things” 76 or “harmonious adjustment of parts or elements” 77 that “ofrece[] una experiencia, una pequeña complicidad” (“offers an experience, a complicity”). 78 Se concentra en un solo elemento que será central—dos calas gemelas, una rama de naranjo, flores de cerezo—y lo contempla desde una quietud alerta, como si buscara algo, casi como en una comunicación que prescindiera de lenguaje y de señas, que escapara a la percepción de los individuos comunes (como son, por ejemplo, los médicos). Luego, en algún momento, empieza el movimiento, y es un intercambio: Hanako da a las flores forma, altura y aire, definición; y recibe de ellas color y calidez o frialdad, la curva o el ángulo severo, y de esa sociedad a la larga lo que emerge es una expresión, la sugerencia (casi más completa de lo que podría hacerse por medio de las palabras) de un sentimiento, una postura o actitud. 79 *** She concentrates on an element that she chooses as a center—two twin lilies, the branch of an orange tree, cherry blossoms—and contemplates them with an alert calm, as if looking for something, almost in a communication that ignored language and signs, or that would surely escape the perception of regular people (like doctors, for instance). Later, she begins to move with the flowers, and it is an exchange: Hanako gives the flowers form, height and air, definition; in turn she absorbs their color, heat and coolness, the curve or hard angle, and from that complicity what emerges is an expression, a suggestion (almost more complete than the suggestivity of words) of affect, sentiment or disposition. A “perfect and unformed expression,” or “a materially intense expression” 80 , Hanako’s ikebana is like Flores’ minor Spanish, a vernacular within the cramped space of medical diagnoses and traditional sense from which Deleuzian lines of flight are almost 75 Ibid., 116. 76 “syntax, n.” 77 “syntax, n.” 78 Stahl, Flores, 116. 79 Ibid. 80 Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka, 19. 45 palpable. “Engañosamente sencillas” (“deceptively simple”), 81 the poetry of evanescent flowers comprises a distinct language that is not simply a weightless parsing of verbal sounds, but one “torn from sense, conquering sense, bringing about an active neutralization of sense.” 82 Hanako’s flowers overtly flaunt an affective and sensorial materiality that makes a sense inaccessible to vehicular syntax or language per se. When she sings the only song she knows, “[l]a letra no significaba nada a Hanako, pero la melodía y la voz del que se la había cantado, sí parecían comunicarle un mensaje intacto” (“The words had no meaning for Hanako, but the melody and the voice in which she sang indeed appeared to communicate with her, as if a coherent message”). 83 The possibility of a different meaning, a distinct history or another world is at large; Aimée’s world-cleavage is the condition for their emergence. After the world-widening letter, Aimée desperately looks for Hanako’s new arrangement of the day “en confirmación de que la ausencia de ayer era tan solo una excepción” (“to conform that its absence yesterday was only an exception”). 84 The flowers are there—but she cannot foresee that the large and elaborate arrangement, “como in frenesí congelado o fotografiado,” might convey more than “un instante de felicidad” (“like a frenzy frozen or photographed … an instant of happiness”). 85 Aimée soon leaves for Louisiana; Hanako’s next arrangement, on the following day, is described to her by her husband on the phone. Today’s arrangement, explains Fernando, 81 Stahl, Flores, 116. 82 Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka, 21. 83 Stahl, Flores, 36. 84 Ibid., 126. 85 Ibid., 130. 46 viene con ilustración. Lo hizo Hanako … es sencillito, por supuesto, pero lo hizo sola con tinta china, creo, o con un marcador grueso, sobre una hoja del papel madera que tienen ahí para envolver las flores, ¿viste? Bueno, en una hoja de esas puso una casa, con una puertita y dos ventanas, y está como sobre el agua, quiero decir, está sobre unos pilares metidos dentro del agua, em, como en el Tigre, ¿entendés como es?... —¿Qué casa será? —¿Eh?—responde Fernando un incredulidad—. ¿Qué decís? Vaya a saber, de una revista, de la tele. Parece sólo un dibujo, Aimée, un adorno para las flores del día. 86 *** comes with an illustration. Hanako drew it, it’s simple, of course, but she did it with black ink I think, or a thick marker, on a sheet of [tissue] paper that you guys use to wrap the flowers, you know? Anyway, on one of those sheets she drew a house, with a little door and windows, and it’s kind of on the water, I mean, on a pier or columns on the water, like on the Tigris, you know? “Which house do you think it is?” “Huh?” Fernando responds, incredulous. “What do you mean? It’s probably from a magazine, or TV. It’s just a drawing, Aimée, an ornament for the today’s flowers.” Delighted but unaware of what the drawing represents, Fernando faxes a sketch of it to Aimée’s New Orleans hotel. The vacation of her porteño insularity at the other end of the world in New Orleans has prepared Aimée to follow the flowers’ line of flight. Through a web of technics, that is, Hanako’s floral craftsmanship and the echo of Fernando’s scrawled reproduction, Aimée makes out a house in the suburbs of Delacroix, where Aimée’s paternal grandfather Oleary once lived, an abandoned home that Aimée has never seen, and that will emplace her vis-à-vis the antipodal cities that bookend her unforeseen world expansion. Which Way Home? Well on her way toward exhuming her inheritances, Aimée remains certain that does shed not want any “gran cambio en su vida” (“big change in her life”) 87 Despite the uncanny 86 Ibid., 255. 87 Ibid., 261. 47 familiarities that arise, and her intimate and corporeal knowledge of the spaces of her childhood, Aimée’s vacation does not lead to the accession of property once rightly hers. Nor is it a reclaiming of her origins. It is as if she wants to return to a state of “hanging in the aire,” as Lactantius imagined his antipodes. Al contrario de empezar asuntos, desea cerrarlos, y poder por eso volver a su vida como ha sido y es. No espera que cambie, sino que se complete con esta parte que faltaba o, mejor dicho, habiendo hecho las preguntas que faltaban hacer. Por más que sea confuso, es mejor que no reconocerse en nada, vivir en un olvido que ni se sabe lo que es, suspendida en el aire. 88 *** She doesn’t want to start on any new investigations, she wants to close them, to finalize them, in order to return to her life as usual. She doesn’t want anything to change, only to close the book on this missing piece of her life, or rather, to have the questions asked that need to be asked. No matter how confusing, it seems better to do this than to live in a forgetfulness that you don’t even know about, just hanging in the air. Aimée asks around town for directions to another old house that once belonged to her grandfather Oleary. She encounters a young stranger in which she sees an uncanny flash of herself. “Mi nombre es … Ramón Méndez,” he tells her, “[p]ero no hablo español.” 89 It is the articulated sound of “una paradoja” for Aimée, 90 who only days ago could hardly make sense of English’s foreign sounds. She faces another antipodes, an “ethnic” outsider at home here in Delacroix, a native non-native speaking the traces of a once “authentic” tongue. Until this moment Aimée has felt estranged, guarded, and watchful in this place of her “origin,” a place that remains unfamiliar territory. Steps away from Oleary’s old home, Aimée experiences an abrupt sublimity, an unanticipated sublimity and effortlessness: she is warmly greeted by Ramón’s uncle Evaristo, who at once speaks to her in Spanish. “En medio de la 88 Ibid. 89 Ibid., 303. 90 Ibid. 48 frase en español,” she notices that Evaristo “dice ‘Delacroi’ de la misma forma que en inglés” (“In the middle of his Spanish phrase, he says ‘Delacroix’ just like in English.” 91 Aimée escucha el acento particular, entre gallego y caribeño, y se relaja. En realidad, le causa una sensación más visceral que lingüística, una impresión como podría ser la que da la lluvia en primavera, o las gardenias con rocío, las azucenas en el papel perfumado, la sábana fresca después de un baño caliente. Es su idioma, y no tiene que esforzarse más. 92 *** In the middle of a sentence in Spanish, she notices that Evaristo says “Delacroix” in that same Southern accent. She listens to the peculiar accent, somewhere between Galician and Caribbean, and she relaxes. Actually, it causes a visceral sensation that could be like spring rain, or dewy gardenias, white lilies in perfumed paper, fresh sheets after a hot bath. It’s her language, and she no longer needs to exert herself anymore. Aimée’s acute and canny comfort in hearing “her language” within unfamiliar U.S. territory is a homecoming before her return to Buenos Aires. It maps out the cozy but imprecise edges of a language that has no secure ties to one particular location—not even 9 o B in Buenos Aires, where literal language is scarce, trumped by gestures, flowers and silence. No matter that Evaristo’s accent is neither porteño, nor that he notices the foreignness of Aimée’s “casteghiano” of the Southern Cone. 93 Such heimlich immanence for Aimée is not due to the vehicularity of a standard Spanish, but to the peculiarity of Evaristo’s inflection—a local English from here, a local Spanish from elsewhere—that both disarms Aimée and underscores Flores’ world-reckoning not through the unintrusive, mimetic eye of language, but rather its palpable technics. As Deleuze and Guattari describe Kafka’s Czech- and Yiddish- inflected German, “[t]his language torn from sense, conquering sense, bringing about an active neutralization of sense, no longer finds its value in anything but an accenting 91 Ibid., 305. 92 Ibid. 93 Ibid. 49 of the word, an inflection.” 94 This is not to say that Aimée is a world citizen or unhomed migrant, as Kafka emblematizes for Deleuze and Guattari. Despite all antipodal threats and televised dislocations that allow her to envision herself at a distance, Aimée’s home of preference is neither Buenos Aires nor New Orleans, but of vernacular Spanish and minor language. Hardly able to finish all legal proceedings and get back on the plane, Aimée has no desire to stay in New Orleans. She is ecstatic to be back en route toward her family, to leave the North American heat, and to return to winter in the Southern Cone. From the airplane, two homes, one local and one linguistic, converge from her bird’s-eye view. She laughs, “la única persona que se ríe en el avión, a 10.000 metros de altura sobre ¿qué será?, podría ser Venezuela, ¿o Brasil, Paraguay?” 95 A projection of a pan-American canniness sets the stage for Aimée’s return. Through gifts, gestures, and approximations of meaning, Aimée exchanges news with Hanako, and experiences a new sensation—”that she has arrived home, and has come to feel at home; it feels as if she has finally planted her feet on the ground.” 96 The static of antipodal American estrangements has led Aimée to see that noveno B is not the center of the world, but a world of her own chosen vantage. 94 Kafka, 21. 95 “the only person laughing on the plane—ten thousand meters over, what could it be, Venezuela, Brazil, Paraguay?” Flores, 325. 96 “[que] ha llegado a casa, a sentirse en casa, pareciera que puso por fin los pies sobre la tierra.” Ibid., 332. 50 Chapter Two Becoming-Animal in the Asian Americas: Ruthanne Lum McCunn’s God of Luck and a Triptych (Three Poems by José Watanabe) 1 The points of Asian American literature’s methodological overlap with Asian American Studies are points that resonate with the biopolitical, to iterate Gabriel Giorgi and Karen Pinkus’ definition, “the dimension or the level at which human life is inscribed, constituted, recognized, and defined within a given sociopolitical order.” 2 That is to say that the two fields are alike in their vital counting, categorization, and management of discrete voices, their meanings and degrees of visibility. Based upon Naoki Sakai’s dismantling of the claim that cultural, social and linguistic heterogeneity is narrativizable under a rubric of variegated but shared experience, 3 this chapter challenges such panethnicity as an adequate claim for the Asian American humanities. 4 What follows is a brief comparative reading of two lesser- known Asian American texts: U.S.-based Ruthanne Lum McCunn’s God of Luck, published in 2002, 5 and a short selection of poems by the late Peruvian poet José Watanabe (1946- 2007). Their comparison brings to light inevitable blind spots that scaffold the implicit disavowal of homolingualism and monoethnicism within traditional Asian American literature. 1 English translations of the poems in this chapter appear in “José Watanabe,” The Asian Amerian Literary Review 2(2011), and are also available on the Japanese American Museum’s Discover Nikkei website at http://www.discovernikkei.org/en/journal/article/3790/. 2 Giorgi and Pinkus, “Zones of Exception.” 3 As mentioned in the Introduction. “Nationality and the Politics of the ‘Mother Tongue’.” 4 See Espiritu, Asian American Panethnicity. “Focusing on Asian Americans, this study asks how, under what circumstances, and to what extent groups of diverse national origins can come together as a new, enlarged panethnic group. The theoretical questions concerns the construction of larger-scale affiliations, where groups previously unrelated in a culture and descent submerge their differences and assume a common identity.” 5 McCunn, God of Luck. 51 Like the modern novel for Mikhail Bakhtin and Franco Moretti’s Bildungsroman, 6 Asian American literary corpuses have widely been based on the quantitative insertion and expansion of voices, that is to say, a proliferation of vantage points by Asian American citizens, noncitizens, and subjects as authors and protagonists of literary work. This is due to an implicit correspondence between ethnic field, author, and literary subject (an underrated protocol discussed in the next chapter). Paired with this axiom is the priority of and assumption of depth with regard to the narrativizable voice, another premiere ordering principle of the field that has produced the dogged emblematization of the Asian American figure simultaneously ordinary and extraordinary, as told through the story of the adept hero or racialized protagonist’s (mitigated or impossible) accession to surrounding socio-political, national, cultural or linguistic spheres. What if we were to cull Asian American literatures from what we might see as a formless, undifferentiated, unseen or unknown Asian American community, an entity perhaps more adequately understood as a precommunity or chaosmos of “literature” (quoted to emphasize the impossibility of its total definition)? 7 Like the chaosmos and what we can grasp of it, literature can be imperfectly “defined not by its disorder but by its fugacity” 8 —a vital description of the areas where the humanities are unable to overlap with the social sciences or biopolitics. Instead of basing readings of Asian American literature upon the proliferation of securely situated points of view, in other words, its corpuses and critique stand to gain from a shift toward the notion of senses of points of view, that is to say, the 6 Moretti, The Way of the World; Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination. 7 The “chaosmos” appears at moments throughout, for example, Deleuze's Difference and Repetition.. 8 Toscano, “Chaos,” 43. 52 possibilities of both situatedness and potentiality of vantage per se. Our unlikely model is not the twentieth-century Irish painter Francis Bacon, but rather his work as seen through the lens of Gilles Deleuze’s Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation. 9 Bacon’s half-meat and half-animal figures stage the clarity of metaphor and figurative narration as intrusive with respect to other possible species of freedom, as they wrest emblematic power from his human-like outlines. Meaty figures appear fleshy against variegated planes of color, yet stripped of depth, as Bacon “narrates” anti-protagonists that “take the image ‘away from the interior and the home.’” 10 “[W]here it is impossible to reconstitute any plausible scenario, a sense of point of view is given,” 11 Bacon suggests the recasting of Asian American literature as a body of immanent incoherence whose chaos is more available through the heterolingualism of the Asian Americas, where reading can de-emphasize and a de-objectify the Asian American hero despite the field’s subjectivating calls to be constituted and recognized in a panethnic “becoming-Asian American”—an impossibility like that of “becoming-human,” as human becoming signifies a taming of virtual potentiality and the obviation of process and uncertainty. Excluded from the Deleuzean palette of becomings, becoming-human only affirms the humanism and subjectivism that has always and already been secured upon Man as the measure of all things. 9 Gilles Deleuze, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, trans. Daniel W. Smith (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 110. Deleuze cites David Sylvester and Francis Bacon, Interviews With Francis Bacon: The Brutality of Fact, 3rd ed. (Thames & Hudson, 1988); Deleuze's selection of Bacon's paintings is unfortunately not reproduced in the English translation. See Gilles Deleuze, Francis Bacon, Logique De La Sensation, vol. 2, 2 vols. (Paris: Éditions de la différince, 1981). 10 Deleuze cites David Sylvester, Interviews With Francis Bacon: The Brutality of Fact. 3rd ed. Thames & Hudson, 1988. 11 “A Politics of Fact and Figure (Afterword),” 138. 53 God of Luck Ruthanne Lum McCunn’s God of Luck presents a little-known voice for the Asian American literature, that of the indentured Asian coolie who digs on the nineteenth-century guano islands of Peru. The novel narrates the story of the Ah Lung, a young man kidnapped from his Cantonese village and forced upon a miserable boat passage to Macau. During the journey across the Pacific with other soon-indentured Chinese men, Ah Lung is swindled into signing a five-year contract to mine guano off the Peruvian coast. A peerless fertilizer of its time, the hardened bird feces was an extraordinarily lucrative global export of the mid- nineteenth century. 12 Ah Lung’s wife Bo See, his parents, and his siblings in China are all left to compensate for the loss of his manpower at the family silkworm business; Bo See begins to strategize different ways to boost their income in order to fund a search for her husband at the other end of the world. On one of the Chincha Islands, well known for their rich guano reserves, Pedro Chufat, the island’s only shopkeeper and non-digger Chinese resident, smugly informs the indentured Ah Lung that here “there’s no hope of escape for a digger like there is … on the mainland.” 13 Caught between the desire to take his life and the virtual suicide of an attempted escape, Ah Lung sets his mind on an unprecedented flight from the island plantation, as he carefully maps out how he might elude not only his black overseers, but also the other exhausted and psychically broken coolie laborers. On the fateful day, he approaches several mestizo boatmen with his painstakingly rehearsed phrases of Spanish. Ah Lung manages an impromptu language with the aid of further gestures and bodily contact. 12 See Foster and Clark, “Ecological Imperialism.” 13 God of Luck, 189. 54 They mercifully hide him in an empty supply boat, upon their return trip from the islands back to Perú’s Pisco coast. The boatmen leave him frightened and bewildered in a cave on the mainland, at the foot of a promontory. “Roberto’s straw hat hides my queue, shadows my face. My pants are a gift frpm Miguel, my shirt from Luis.” 14 “Vaya con Díos,” a boatman repeats to Ah Lung. Díos? Who is Díos, Ah Lung wonders as he waits with spells of patience and anxiety, as if for Godot. With this vantage from beyond the U.S. and Canada, Ah Lung’s story is new for Anglophone fiction. It tells of the journey of the coolie to the Pacific guano mines during the era of “Chinese bondage in Peru,” 15 an era that served the begrudging abolition of black slave labor across the globe. During the mid-nineteenth century, as railways catalyzed advancements of commercial farming and scientists learned of guano’s incredible fertilizing properties, a “series of mad rushes ensued as guano islands were discovered, scraped clean, and abandoned.” 16 Mined in few places across the world, the most lucrative guano was on Peru’s arid islas chincha, where Ah Lung has been shuttled. Utter subject of his circumstances, a new world unfolds. The enormous barking slugs are, I’ve learned, sea lions. Their droppings and those of birds are called guano in Spanish. And so effective is this guano supposed to be as fertilizer that, although there are five-hundred diggers on this island, we can’t get ahead of the demand; there are always well over a hundred ships from around the world waiting—most for two or even three months—to be loaded. At night we have a respite from the head-splitting clamor of the sea lions and birds. But even in sleep, the sharp, pisslike smell of guano pinches my nose, eyes, and throat, and when I begin digging at dawn, a dank, dense mist wraps around my bones. 14 Ibid., 222. 15 Stewart, Chinese Bondage in Peru. 16 Schwarz, “Does Guano Drive History?”. 55 By midmorning, the sun burns off the last trace of mist, the heat grows stifling as the days before a big wind, my chest threatens to burst from lack of air. The clouds overhead, resembling sheets of pale smoke, are too thin and hang too high in the sky to provide any ease from the sun’s arrows, any hint of rain, and I long for them to turn dark and heavy, then shatter in brilliant flashes of lightning and thunderclaps, letting loose a deluge. But no rain falls here. That’s why droppings beyond reach of the pounding surf don’t wash away, why these gray, treeless hills and steep cliffs are solid guano, the sharp, pisslike smell so pervasive …. Tightening my grip on the sweat-slick handle of the pickaxe, I swing. As the axe arcs, lightning streaks up my arms and across my shoulders; my heart thrashes against my ribs. Then the axe strikes ground, and my whole body shudders. Grit nettles my calves. Chalky powder spirals up, thickening the haze from hundreds of axes hammering the hard-packed guano, shovels tossing crumbling clods through screens, filling baskets and wheelbarrows with the dist, dust that clogs my nostrils, seeps through my lips, coats my tongue, settles in my throat. My eyes, afire, flood. Snorting and coughing, I swipe at them with the sodden rag around my neck. Nothing clears. I cannot see beyond my hands and feet. But the devils driving us have eyes like hawks, the strength to send us spinning with a kick, to cut us down with their rawhide whips, and although my arms protest, I raise my axe, bring it down. 17 An integral part of la trata amarilla, or “yellow trade,” 18 from 1849 to 1874 approximately 100,000 Chinese coolies were transported over the Pacific to become laborers on the sugar plantations and guano mines of newly-independent Peru. 19 After Peru’s official abolition of slavery in 1854 that followed the end of the transatlantic slave trade, Chinese coolies replaced former Afro-Peruvian slaves as they “worked alongside a small number of free blacks and Indians from the sierra (highland); on some plantations, they constituted the 17 God of Luck, 163–5. 18 See for example, Hu-DeHart, “Latin America in Asia-Pacific Perspective” and “Opium and Social Control: Coolies on the Plantations of Peru and Cuba.” 19 Evelyn Hu-DeHart, “Coolies, Shopkeepers, and Pioneers: The Chinese of Mexico and Peru, 1849-1930,” Amerasia 15:2 (1989): 92. 56 sole labor force.” 20 The commodification and exportation of guano required gamut of “forced Indian labor, followed by [black] slaves, then … Chinese coolies’ [sic], and [later] Japanese and Polynesian workers.” 21 The industry’s scope between 1849 and 1881 was remarkable, as “countless vessels flying the flags of Great Britain, France, Portugal, Spain and the United States … hauled an estimated three-quarters of a million Chinese to Australia, Brazil, Cuba, Hawaii, Peru, Tahiti, and the United States.” 22 The islands were a place where centuries-old deposits had become hard and compacted, and in many places had to be blasted with gunpowder…. Then the stones and sand … had to be separated before [they] could be conveyed by ships’ launches or to the waiting vessels … the islands are just three rocks, their brown surface cracked by a hot tropical sun whose savage beams are rarely intercepted by a cloud—rocks upon which no rain has fallen for centuries. Here men toiled at work as dangerous as mining, watched over by brutal overseers whose task was to ensure that each man fulfilled his daily quota of digging, moving, or loading the foul-smelling material. 23 God of Luck’s realism emerges from this little-known topos that is “paradigmatically concerned with the relationship of the Americas to the local or national.” 24 Written in English, the text is woven with subtle indications that its characters are not English speakers. Dialogues and thoughts take place in a virtual Cantonese, as a rough and foreign Spanish, compulsory for Ah Lung’s hoped-for escape, occasionally interrupts the text. Despite the novel’s historical underpinnings of American magnate and U.S. national policy profit motives—the U.S. Guano Act of 1856, for example, abruptly invests U.S. citizens with power to take possession of any “island, rock, or key” as territory “appertaining to the United 20 Hu-DeHart, “Opium and Social Control,” 170; see also “Chinese Coolie Labor in Cuba and Peru in the Nineteenth Century: Free Labor or Neoslavery?” 21 Hollett, More Precious Than Gold, 25. 22 Skaggs, The Great Guano Rush, 162; Stewart, Chinese Bondage in Peru, 162. 23 Hollett, More Precious Than Gold, 118. 24 Chuh, “Of Hemispheres and Other Spheres,” 619. 57 States” 25 —neither the United States nor North America figures into God of Luck as a stepping stone or desired destination for this protagonist of the Asian Americas. Would the incorporation of Ah Lung as an Asian voice of the Americas have us read God of Luck as a new cimarron or runaway-slave narrative for Asian American literature, a template of the liberal path toward a no-longer benighted or passive consciousness? How can we reckon with God of Luck’s interventions through the heterolingual and multi-axial precedent of the Americas of the New World, due to and despite a rubric that anticipates all Ishmaels within a securable and representative plurality? Evelyn Hu-Dehart, Moon-Ho Jung, Lisa Lowe, and Mae Ngai all continue to grapple with the “coolie question,” the relative historical ambiguity and silence that goes hand in hand with the coolies’ illegiblilty and their murky politico-human status under rubrics of universalized freedom. 26 Strange migrants at the brink of slavery’s abolition, they are the latest wave of laborers upon whom no one can ascertain a clear “status with respect to freedom and enslavement, polar terms in the dialectic at the center of modern political philosophy.” 27 In God of Luck the issue is imperceptible, hidden by positive affirmation of the human’s formality. Where such in-humanity is unamenable to clean representation, how might we seek out contours repressed by either the humanly enfranchised subject or the “almost-subject” struggling in the throes of imminent politico-economic survival? 25 US CODE: Title 48,1411. Guano Districts; Claim by United States. The U.S. Guano Act of 1856 vested U.S. citizens with the power to take possession of any “island, rock, or key” as territory “appertaining to the United States.” 26 Hu-DeHart, “Chinese Coolie Labor in Cuba”; Lowe, “Haunted by Empire”; Jung, Coolies and Cane. 27 Lowe, “Haunted by Empire,” 204. It is undecided, as Moon-Ho Jung puts it, as to whether coolies “represent a relic of slavery or a harbinger of freedom.” Jung, Coolies and Cane, 4. 58 Ah Lung’s pursuit of liberty achieves nothing short of refusing the conditions of his possible extermination. Yet is it possible to read him as other than he who attains humanity or who becomes human, as a movement against discrete human figuration? As we have noted, if “becoming” is a continuous and proliferating restlessness rooted in neither individual freedom nor normative human experience, but in a chaotic scenario where the “truth” of origins are of precarious stability, then “becoming-human,” “becoming-man,” and “becoming-Asian American” are contradictory. To accede to the certainty of Asian America and the Asian American is impossible, that is to say, if writing is allowed exceed the certainty of objective models and discrete human figuration. 28 Here we can consider the animal as a catch-all signifier for innumerable genres of life. “Animals,” in their plural haziness, signify the human’s precarious limit, “an ambiguous excess upon whose elimination human identity consolidates itself.” 29 Like the French l’animot, which we cannot help but hear as the plural animaux, 30 animals signify the artificial clumping of ostensibly non-rational and variegated life. Can nineteenth-century indentured Asian labor of the Americas pertain to this animal hoarde, the informal multiplicity that swarms around the narrativizable hero? Posing a risk of our romanticization of life before nineteenth-century guano would rival twentieth-century petro-dollars, 31 the Inca understood guano’s power for agriculture, and decreed that anyone who neared the birds would be put to 28 See, for example, Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus; Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature; Colebrook, Gilles Deleuze. 29 Lippit, Electric Animal, 9. 30 Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am. 31 Hollett, More Precious Than Gold, 18. 59 death. 32 The Incas’ divestiture of the human is a stark contrast to the nineteenth-century cemeteries on guano mines that “reportedly overflowed with the rotting corpses of those who failed to survive and ... [were] buried in graves too shallow to protect remains from scavenging dogs[.]” 33 Fields across the world were fertilized by human digger bodies in a spiraling cycle of labor, profit, and shit—what the poet César Vallejo neologizes as calabrina tesórea, or “fecapital ponk” in his 1922 collection Trilce. Quién hace tanta bulla, y ni deja testar las islas que van quedando. Un poco más de consideración en cuanto será tarde, temprano y se aquilatará mejor el guano, la simple calabrina tesórea que brinda sin querer, en el insular corazón, salobre alcatraz, a cada hialóidea grupada. Un poco más de consideración, y el mantillo líquido, seís de la tarde DE LOS MAS SOBERBIOS BEMOLES Y la península párase por la espalda, abozaleada, impertérrita en la línea mortal del equilibrio. 34 *** 32 David Hollett, More Precious Than Gold: The Story of the Peruvian Guano Trade, 32; Frederique Apffel- Marglin, Subversive Spiritualities: How Rituals Enact the World, 96. Cited is Alexander von Humbolt, who in turn cites the writing of Inca Garcilaso de la Vega. 33 Skaggs, The Great Guano Rush, 61. 34 Vallejo, Trilce, 13. 60 Who’s making all that racket, and not even letting the islands that linger make a will. A little more consideration as it will be late, early, and easier to assay the guano, the simple fecapital ponk a brackish gannet toasts unintentionally, in the insular heart, to each hyaloid squall. A little more consideration and liquid muck, six in the evening OF THE MOST GRANDIOSE B-FLATS And the peninsula raises up from behind, muzziled, imperturbably on the fatal balance line. 35 Written well after the golden guano era, no Chinese laborers appear to this poem’s field of vision. Vallejo sketches no human presence, only hints of stinky, capital-generating feces in a peculiar, rigorous, and frustrating syntax that, as Michelle Clayton observes, “does not … simply seek out the referent” or offer any testimonial role to Latin American or any other writing. 36 Like an animal, the poem “does not speak ‘like’ a man but pulls from the language tonalities … to open the word unto unexpected internal intensities.” 37 There is no compliance with any sanction of verisimilitude that saddles Asian American writing with the “burden of authenticity” or weight that doggedly imbues “Asian American literatures [with] some immanent, ‘real’ meaning.” 38 35 Vallejo, The Complete Poetry, 167. 36 “Trilce’s Lyric Matters,” 88. 37 Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, 22. 38 Chuh, Imagine Otherwise, 20. 61 The islands’ will and desire, and our lack of consideration for them, are hauntings of recent in-humanity, the abuses of labor and natural resources, and the incoherent “voice” of the coolie. Ralph Waldo Emerson’s 1860 essay “Fate” likewise haunts the United States with death and dispossession, as Eduardo Cadava observes: “the German and Irish millions, like the Negro,” observes Emerson, “have a great deal of guano in their destiny. They are ferried over the Atlantic, to ditch and to drudge, to make corn cheap, and then to lie down prematurely to make a spot of green grass on the prairie.” 39 From Emerson’s scenario of animal becoming, subjectivations haunt and are haunted, as other vantages seep through the crevices of God of Luck’s becoming-human, that is, its formal human story. José Watanabe 40 As “children of Japanese immigrants, we heard ... that someday the whole family would return to Japan. The dream wasn’t too convincing, not even for our parents.” 41 The fifth of eleven children, José Watanabe spent his early childhood in the sugar plantation town of Laredo, about three hundred miles north of Lima, in the region of La Libertad. There his issei migrant father met and married his Peruvian mother—“a mestiza Peruvian,” Watanabe elaborates. 42 One fateful day his father found himself with a winning lottery ticket, which allowed the Watanabe clan to relocate to the regional capital of Trujillo. Once in the city, the young José was able to continue on with his schooling —at the very middle school once attended by the illustrious Cesar Vallejo. 39 Cadava, “The Guano of History”; Emerson, “Fate.” 40 This subsection is a revised version of the biography included in “José Watanabe,” Asian American Literary Review. 41 Watanabe, “Elogio del refrenamiento,” Elogio del refrenamiento: antología poética, 1971-2003. 42 Randy Muth, José Watanabe. 62 A year after receiving the 1970 Premio Poeta Joven del Perú, Peru’s Young Poet Award, Watanabe published his first poetry collection Albúm de familia (Family Album), in which we can hear the beginnings of a lean verse that renders an illusory simplicity of the natural world. Uncanny moments emerge, shared by all lives human, animate, and inanimate—a triangluation over which Watanabe will have us ruminate throughout his work. Critics have made much not only of the following eighteen years during in which he did not publish a second book, but also of his quiet distancing from the fractious and anti- establishment verse produced by the Peruvian poets dubbed la generación del 70 (the Generation of the Seventies). “Wata,” as some endearingly called him, retrospectively saw his early-career hiatus and turn from his contemporaries as no big deal: “nada notable,” we might say—a phrase that echoes Albúm’s “Poema trágico con dudosos logros cómicos” (“Tragic Poem With Dubious Comic Outcomes”). His repertoire of published verse would resume in 1989 with El huso de la palabra (The Spool of the Word), followed by six more collections of poetry. Watanabe’s Poesía completa, published posthumously in 2008 (Madrid, Pre-Textos), offers us the entirety of the celectrated poetic oeuvre, ending with the omega Banderas detrás de la niebla (Flags Behind the Fog, 2006), where we might sense deeper breaths between verses and a more self-reflexive prosody. Also included are Historia natural (Natural History, 1994), illustrated by fellow Japanese Peruvian Eduardo Tokeshi, Cosas del Cuerpo (Bodily Things, 1999), and La piedra alada (The Winged Stone, 2005)—which was packaged with an audio CD featuring Watanabe’s own soothing, lenient voice. Antigona (2000) appears in the compilation as well: a one-woman play produced by the renowned theater collective Grupo Cultural Yuyachkani, whose Theresa Ralli asked the poet to fuse 63 Sophocles’ timeliness with the persistence of traumas remembered by families of Peru’s disaparecidos, those who disappeared during the nation’s colossal violence of recent decades. 43 Watanabe has written several children’s books and screenplays, the latter of which includes director Francisco J. Lombardi’s 1985 adaption of Mario Vargas Llosa’s La ciudad y los perros (The City and the Dogs). He has also contributed text for the photographic history La memoria del ojo: cien años de presencia japonesa en el Perú (Memory of the Eye: A Hundred Years of Japanese Presence in Peru, 1999), whose images attest to the delights of everyday life, as well as to the confusion and losses surrounding World War II, with its deportations of about 1700 Japanese Peruvians to U.S. internment camps. 44 Unnanounced at his door on another fateful day, Watanabe discovered the eager musician Rafo Ráez desperately offering to put his poetry to music. The sudden friendship resulted in a rock CD released in 2000, Pez de fango (Mudskipper). The “Shallow Depth” of Allegory Where God of Luck’s compelling heroism allows for clear and heroic Asian American figuration, the following triad of poems by Watanabe may be seen as a less coherent triptych, not in the classical sense where two outer panels are subordinated to a central figure, but rather in the vein of the recurrent and unsettling triptychs in the oeuvre of Francis Bacon. 45 The painter’s triptychs are like “movements or parts of a piece of music” that harbor an 43 Taylor, “Notes on Antigona.” 44 Barnhart, “Japanese Internees from Peru,” Pacific Historical Review. 45 See Bacon’s Triptych - August 1972, online. 64 elliptical rather than linear organization, 46 staging indistinct, meaty, and animal-like “protagonists” that fray representation, and refract the potentiality of an extended multitude based the simple multiplication of a discrete entity. It frees multitude, in other words, into a becoming of subjective vantage. Watanabe’s ethnic hybridity evades the call of stable ethnic categorization that has arguably been a premiere point of authorization for Asian American writers. His father migrated from Japan to Peru in 1916, and met his mother, a mestiza Peruvian woman, on the sugar hacienda where they both worked. 47 Despite popular familiarity with Watanabe’s mestizaje, i.e., as a mestizo not in the traditional sense of being of mixed native, Spanish and/or African descent, but as a Japanese Peruvian, 48 the poet has often been described by Peruvian critics as a writer whose style is strongly inflected by a presumably static Japanese literature and culture, particularly the haiku form. 49 Watanabe’s wife, the poet Michaela Camino Chirif, recalls that in a Peruvian television interview, Watanabe was once asked if he could speak and write Japanese. With gravity he responded, “I did once, long ago, but I remember so little of it now.” 50 Watanabe neither spoke nor wrote Japanese, and his resolution to this public question that he later recalled with laughter (as his wife also did), is an example of the anticipations of Japaneseness that he navigated. 46 Deleuze, Francis Bacon, 60. Deleuze's selections of Bacon are available in editions of the original French Francis Bacon, Logique De La Sensation, Vol. 2. 47 Muth, José Watanabe, 21. 48 Watanabe, “Elogio del refrenamiento.” 49 See Muth, José Watanabe. 50 Personal Interview with Michaela Camino Chirif. 65 A U.S. critic looking for traditional themes of dissonant hybridity in Watanabe might anticipate various figurations or allegories regarding the poet’s ethnic trials of cultural difference with respect to mainstream Peruvian society, themes about his father’s immigration to and assimilation in Peru as an issei migrant, narratives about work in the canefields, or about José’s autoethnographic, autobiographical or semi-autobiographical experiences growing up Japanese Peruvian in the rural town of Laredo. Such emblematic narratives of success or tragedy, however, do not assume center stage. The (extra)ordinary individual who emblematizes the whole does not lend to such easy thematization. A palpable motif in Watanabe’s lean and haunting verse occurs through serial and captivating encounters neither with humans nor with society as we know it, but with animals, in an ongoing motif of anthropocentric short-circuiting, a distillation of the priority of human life. Conjurings of dogs, fish, stones, and other animate and inanimate forms of life, refrain from deploying the animal as a discrete metaphor—thus clipping off its certain ability or authority to “speak” as part or for a coherent community. Animals, as well as inanimate stones, earth, and walls, appear at the edges of Watanabe’s world, interrupted in figuration and unconcerned with holistic metaphors of individual emancipation. It is through these “animals” that we read against humanitas’ grain, and against the human as the point through which we can understand and know ourselves. 51 The figuring of particular rats, gulls, and frogs, on one hand, and imprecise multiplicities on the other—allows us to reckon with the divergent contributions of both God of Luck’s rugged protagonist and Watanabe’s themes of escape from man’s centrality. Without corroborating an anthropocentrism once taken for granted in painting and the novel, Watanabe blurs the 51 See Osamu, “Anthropos and Humanitas: Two Western Concepts of ‘Human Being’.” 66 obvious “delineat[ion] … of man’s architectural or natural environment around the human figure, the setting in which he was the measure.” 52 A Watanabean Triptych Though its narrative is sparked by birds that create a line of flight from the zafra, the burning of the sugarcane fields after their harvest, the poem “El guardián del hielo” neither protagonizes an animal, nor paints in abstractions devoid of recognizable living beings. Disguised as amenable to allegory, we witness a curious metamorphosis, a subtle pull toward strangeness and “lo efímero”—a becoming-animal that initiates shiftings into that or those things which one will never utterly become. We are left with an odd self-knowledge that curbs human exceptionalism. 52 Ficacci, Francis Bacon 1909-1992, 12. 67 El guardián del hielo Y coincidimos en el terral el heladero con su carretilla averiada y yo que corría tras los pájaros huidos del fuego de la zafra. También coincidió el sol. En esa situación, cómo negarse a un favor llano: el heladero me pidió cuidar su efímero hielo. Oh cuidar lo fugaz bajo el sol … El hielo empezó a derretirse bajo mi sombra, tan desesperada como inútil. Diluyéndose dibujaba seres esbeltos y primordiales que solo un instante tenían firmeza de cristal de cuarzo y enseguida eran formas puras como de montaña o planeta que se devasta. No se puede amar lo que tan rápido fuga. Ama rápido, me dijo el sol. Y así aprendí, en su ardiente y perverso reino, a cumplir con la vida: yo soy el guardián del hielo. 53 *** 53 Watanabe, Cosas Del Cuerpo. 68 The Ice Guardian So we came across each other in the breeze the ice vendor with his broken cart and I who would chase birds escaping the burning of the cane. The sun too had found us. At that moment, who could deny the merest favor: the vendor asked me to watch his ephemeral wares. Oh to care for evanescence under the sun … The ice began to trickle under my shadow—as useless as it was desperate. Its dissolution traced svelte and primordial beings with the fleeting density of quartz crystal and suddenly they were pure forms as of mountains or a planet abruptly ravaged. How impossible to love what so quickly fades. Love swiftly, said the sun. And I learned, in her perverse and ardent kingdom, to honor life: I am the guardian of ice. As much of Watanabe’s work, consciousness and passion in this poem neither originate, nor can be contained within, discrete human boundaries. This turn from the human point of view is exploited by the peculiar ability of literature that, like Bacon’s paint, can “desubjectify consciousness and passion” by stripping out easy figuration. 54 It would seem that there is a clear equivalence between precarious human life and melting ice. An ostensibly bounded substance or experience, thingly and icy “life” oscillates between semi- 54 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 134. 69 rigid form and opaque semblances. Guardianship of the melting wares radically fails, as both the narrator and his worlding unwittingly blend into each other in hazy and imprecise description. A splitting narrator (who simultaneously manages past and present modes), a sunny potentate, the vendor, and evanescence itself all swim between subject and object, unwilling to bear the depth of extended allegory—as in Bacon’s Lying Figure With Hypodermic Syringe, where Deleuze observes the inverse of a proper syringe that would transmit a helful substance into the body. Instead he finds “a body attempting to pass through [a] syringe” for no clear purpose or metaphorical allusion. 55 It is in this sense that Watanabe’s poem emulates Bacon’s “solitary wrestling in a shallow depth[] that rips the painting away from all narrative but also from all symbolization.” 56 55 Deleuze, Francis Bacon, 17. 56 Ibid., xv., Deleuze’s emphasis. 57 Bac Figure con, Figure Wi e 2: Francis ith Sryinge. Bacon, Lyin g Figure with h Hypoderm mic Syringe, 1 1963 57 70 71 Human or otherwise, depth of life is not at stake in “The Ice Guardian,” even if our desire is piqued for a palpable accumulation of experience to overcome the anxious failure to capture or salvage the vague primordial things, amorphous quartz, and disappearing planets, all objects with elusive formality. Absence of formal communication occludes our sensation of depth and allegory; any specter of remaining community is the trust of the absent and anonymous ice vendor. Here is a flatness of individual experience, strange ambivalence, and un-guarded complacency regarding the deficiency of some communication or language that might adequately translate the ice’s transmissions, its uncanny omnipresence or extratemporality. Happenstance encounters of vendor, narrator, and sun contort the figural power of rational man and his ice-object. They elicit the desire to “know” more of, and to be a part of, this fading diorama that betrays no human correspondence. As Bacon’s figures often do, the narrator and his objects here bleed into each other and all over the place— indeed, a certain response to the question “What if one became animal or plant through literature”? 58 David Eng has discussed how the fictions of Maxine Hong Kingston and Frank Chin engage with the silent absence of nineteenth-century Chinese railroad workers in the classic photograph of the “Golden Spike” ceremony at Utah’s Promontory Summit. As in Trilce’s opening poem, no Chinese laborers are visible in this record of celebrating the joining of the Central Pacific and Union Pacific railroads in May 1869. Kingston and Chin reckon with this absence, observes Eng, by looking against and awry at photography’s mimetic realism as a way to incite “memory’s errant wanderings” and “bring us to a place where we have never 58 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 4. been visita 59 Eng 60 Gol before.” 59 R ation of labor Figur g, Racial Castr lden Spike. Riffing off an rers whom w re 3: Golden ration, 37, 56, 5 n official vis we cannot se Spike Cerem 57. sual scenario ee: mony at Prom o, the image montory, Uta now harbor ah, May 10, 1 rs a ghostly 869 60 72 73 Ratas y gaviotas En el promontorio, a media altura, donde no llega el romper de las olas, hay una gruta honda como nave de catedral. Por las delgadas cornisas que dan al mar algunas ratas equilibrian y alcanzan la cueva después de saciarse con los despojos de las mareas. Y por el aire entran las gaviotas que anidan en las altas salientes. Sólo sus alas blanquean en la oscuridad que desciende hasta el piso donde brillan, supongo, los ojillos rojos de las ratas. Es difícil ver la cueva. Al frente sólo está el mar abierto. Los pescadores que hoy me llevan a puerto San Andrés navegan frente a este aislado promontorio arrullados por el motor de sus pequeños botes. Los pensamientos parecen haber cesado: las ratas y las gaviotas no son viejas alegorías. Todos hemos entrado en una rara inocencia. El mar también se ha despojado de sus historias y nos lleva con la pura física de navegación. 61 *** 61 Watanabe, Banderas detrás de la niebla. 74 Rats and Seagulls Within the promontory, halfway up past the break of the waves is a cavern, deep like a cathedral’s nave. Along its delicate cornices that overlook the ocean several rats balance themselves and reach the cave after sating themselves with the spoils of the sea. And through the air enter seagulls that come to nest in the outcroppings above. Only wings flash in a darkness that descends to the ground where, I imagine, the rats’ red eyeballs glimmer. It is hard to see the cave. Its entrance is only open sea. Today the fishermen who take me to the port of San Andrés navigate the face of this isolated promontory lulled by the motor of its little boats. All thoughts seem to have ceased: rats and gulls are not old allegories. We all have entered into a strange innocence. The ocean too has stripped itself of stories| and carries us with pure physics of navigation. Is “Ratas y gaviotas” haunted like the Golden Spike photograph, unable to repress the ghosts of indentureship? As in Trilce, there are no coolies here, but a nearly absent narrator who, in turn, senses that he loses himself in, or shares himself with, the nearby animals, the ocean and the cliff. 62 We witness the failure of Romantic bliss, a strange in-the-zone human abstraction in gazing up at the promontory (where Emerson would have liked to perch). In alleged absorption into nature and the “purity” of theoretical physics that would ideally foreclose allegory and memory’s “errant wanderings,” neither the narrator nor we can disavow this scene’s layered historical hauntings. Let’s again compare Watanabe’s poetry to Bacon’s half-human and half-meat figures. Where representation is putatively given and abstracted from the conditions of its existence—like the ostensibly representative Asian 62 San Andrés, mentioned in the poem, lies off the Pisco coast to which Ah Lung fled the guano mines. 75 American “body—both Bacon and Watanabe “converg[e] on a similar problem: both renounce[] the domain of representation and instead [take] the conditions of representation as their object.” 63 Is “Ratas y gaviotas” also haunted with mid-nineteenth-century diggers in a way that betrays anthropocentrism’s scrambling with anthropomorphism? Can we tap the energy of in-humanity that renders the elision of racialized human traffic palpable, that is, as conspicuous through literature? El nieto Una rana emergió del pecho desnudo y recién muerto de mi abuelo, Don Calixto Varas. Libre de ataduras de venas y arterias, huyó roja y húmeda de sangre hasta desaparecer en un estanque de regadío. La vieron con los ojos, con la boca, con las orejas y así quedó para siempre en la palabra convencida, y junto a otra palabra, de igual poder para conjurarla. Así la noche transcurría eternamente en equilibrio porque en Laredo el mundo se organizaba como es debido: en la honda boca de los mayores. Ahora, cuando la verdad de la ciencia que me hurga es insoportable, yo, descompuesto y rabioso, pido a los doctores que me crean que la gente no muere de un órgano enfermo sino de un órgano que inicia una secreta metamorfosis hasta ser animal maduro y dispuesto a abandonarnos. Me inyectan. En mi somnolencia siento aterrado que mi corazón hace su sístole y su diástole en papada de rana. 64 63 Deleuze, Francis Bacon, xiii–xiv., his emphasis. 64 Watanabe, El huso de la palabra. 76 *** The Grandson A frog emerged from the bare and newly-dead chest of my grandfather, Don CalixtoVaras. Freed from a mesh of veins and arteries, it fled slick and red with blood until it disappeared in an irrigation ditch. They saw it with their eyes, mouths, and ears and remained this way always in the cogent word, beside other words of equal power to conjure it. That night continued in eternal balance for in Laredo the world was organized like it should be: by the profound lips of elders. Now, when the scrutinizing certainty of science is insufferable, I, furiously decomposing, insist the doctors believe me, we cannot die of a failing organ unless it sparks a secret metamorphosis until it matures into an animal ready to abandon us. They inject me. In my drowsiness I am terrified that my heart beats systole and diastole in the chin of a frog. Neither becomings-animal in Watanabe’s poetry, nor emergent “animals” of narrator and speaker, conjecture or serve as easy metaphors about human experience. They gesture, merely, toward a dissolution of such humanist grounds. In “El nieto,” the appearance of the grandfather-as-frog muddles in/human boundaries and baffles reasonable explanation. Yet it is not only this that draws us into its becoming-animal. The axis of the human has no secure place here; the poem maps “against every convention of mapping, a terrain open to animal 77 being,” 65 and generates questions about the constitution and quest for narrativizable voice. “Minorities,” implore Deleuze and Guattari, as if peering into melting ice, are like “seeds, crystals of becoming whose value is to trigger uncontrollable movements and deterritorializations of the mean or majority.” 66 In a spreading, demotion or perhaps sharing of the formal man for whom the other-than-human world would appear as a thing devoid of humanitas, Watanabe provides Asian American literature with a “strategic anti-essentialism” (Kandice Chuh’s rendering of George Lipsitz’s variation upon Spivak): a sense of essentialism’s point of view, an antipodes to the “subject-driven primacy” of the field. 67 65 Lippit, Electric Animal, 128. 66 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 106. 67 Chuh, Imagine Otherwise, 10, 29. 78 Chapter Three The Heterolingualism of Siu Kam Wen (with a Detour Through Julia Wong Kcomt’s “Mendigo en un banco de oro”) His extraordinary cultural situation “between two worlds,” the Asian and the peruano-occidental, allows him to paint with … skill and depth the Chinese enclave in Peru … and the reality of China. — Guillermo Niño de Guzmán 1 Forget it Jake. It’s Chinatown. —Walsh, in Polanski’s Chinatown 2 Multiple Migrancies Asked about being a writer of two worlds and two cultures, Siu explains that he is a “double immigrant,” and appears to slide nicely into an anticipated rubric of Asian Americna hybrid dissonance. “I feel twice uprooted, not only as a Chinese person in Peru, but also as a Peruvian … a Chinese Peruvian living in the United States. I’ve had to deal with two different languages, Spanish and English, and each of them took years to learn.” 3 A pulling back from our “unnaturally large” grossie au microscope, 4 however, threatens to unravel the happy hybrid. Siu’s patriarchal heritage exhibits foreign horizontalities; he describes his family as “a huaqiao (migrant/émigré) family, with almost every single male in the 1 Guzmán’s then-unpublished manuscript is quoted and translated by Lin, “Writers of the Chinese Diaspora,” 60–61. 2 Polanski, Chinatown. 3 Siu, “Entrevista a Siu Kam Wen.” 4 “In major literatures … the individual concern (familial, martial, and so on) joins with other no less individual concerns, the social milieu serving as a mere environment or background; this is so much the case that none of these Oedipal intrigues are specifically indispensable or absolutely necessary but all become as in one large space. Minor literature is completely different; its cramped space forces each individual intrigue to connect immediately to politics. The individual concern becomes all the more necessary, indispensable, magnified, because a whole other story is vibrating within it.” Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, 17; Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka: Pour Une Littérature Mineure, 30; Renza, “A White Heron” and the Question of Minor Literature, 32. 79 household living and dying on foreign lands. My grandfather lived and died in Canada; my two uncles lived and died in Peru; and my father lived in Peru and died in Hawaii.” 5 Notwithstanding his command of his “mother tongue” of Lungdu 6 (and of his Cantonese and proficient Mandarin), Siu Kam Wen is a prolific writer of novels and short stories in Spanish and English, both nonnative languages. He penned his first short stories in Chinese as a teen, and began to write narratives in Spanish at twenty nine—a certain anomaly with respect to the archetypical Asian American author anchored by the English language and the rubric of Oedipal migrancy across the Pacific. Siu’s writing maps a heterolingualism not only vis-à-vis the uneven overlappings of his “mingling and cohabitation of plural language heritage” 7 ; his multiple relocations deterritorialize the traditional “East Goes West” Asian American paradigm (exemplified, as noted earlier, in Younghill Kang’s Bildungsroman 8 ). As a five-year-old child from the farming village of Zhongshan (in the Guangdong province), Siu and his mother moved to Hong Kong; three years later in 1959, the pair traveled to Lima to reunite with Siu’s father, whom Siu had only known as an infant. After failing to acquire Peruvian citizenship after 25 years, the author’s family would finally relocate not to the U.S. mainland but to Honolulu, where Siu currently works as an 5 Lee-DiStefano, Three Asian-Hispanic Writers from Peru, 124. 6 also Longdu or Lungtu, a dialect of China’s Chungshan (Zhongshan) district of Kwangtung (Guangdong) spoken by about twenty million people (“un dialecto chino hablado por sólo 20 mil personas. También habla el chino mandarín y cantonés, además de español, inglés y francés.”) “Hoy Presentan La Vida No Es Una Tómbola De Siu Kam Wen.”Kun Chang, “Review of The Lungtu dialect: a descriptive and historical study of a south Chinese idiom.,” The Journal of Asian Studies 16, no. 2 (February 1, 1957): 301-303, http://www.jstor.org/stable/2941398; See Søren Egerod, The Lungtu dialect: a descriptive and historical study of a south Chinese idiom (Copenhagen: E. Munksgaard, 1956). 7 Sakai, Translation and Subjectivity, 6. 8 East Goes West: The Making of an Oriental Yankee. 80 accountant for the Hawai’i State Foundation on Culture and the Arts and continues to write fiction in both Spanish and in English. Siu’s first published collection of short stories, El tramo final (The Final Road), 9 garnered a great deal of critical discussion and acclaim in Peru. Vital for most critics writing in either English or Spanish is “stark reality” of the colonia china or Chinese community in the El tramo final, its autoethnographic portrayal by a native of Lima’s Chinese community. With the exception of one story—“En alta mar,” discussed briefly in this chapter—the collection’s protagonists are denizens of Lima’s barrio chino and its environs during the 1970s-80s. 10 Published the year Siu relocated to Hawai’i in 1986, 11 the collection delves into various trials and tribulations of Chinese Peruvian housewives, quarreling shopkeepers, recently middle-class and still-struggling chinos, boys whose minds wander during a lost sister’s wake, and an adopted Peruvian raised in China who travels to Lima as a complete foreigner. “For a social scientist,” asserts an anthropologist, El tramo “is valuable for being a near testimonial that truly reflects the reality of Chinese lives.” 12 Other critics refer to the stories’ intriguing depictions of everyday life in Lima’s Chinatown. 13 Siu reminds us that not all stories are about the barrio per se; many take place outside of the enclave. 14 9 El tramo final and La primera espada del imperio (The First Sword of the Empire, 1988) was followed by Ilusionismo (self-published through Lulu Press in the anthology Cuentos completos, 1998). The first two collections were originally published through Peruvian editoriales (publishing houses). El tramo final has been translated into French as Le Dernier Bout de Chemin in Caceres-Letourneaux’s monograph.. 10 Kerr, “Lost in Lima,” 56; Lin, “Writers of the Chinese Diaspora.” 11 Lee-DiStefano, Three Asian-Hispanic Writers from Peru, 124. 12 Kerr, “Lost in Lima,” 58; Kerr cites Humberto Rodríguez Pastor, 58 13 See e.g., Kerr, “Lost in Lima,” and Béatrice Caceres-Letourneaux, “L’oeuvre.” 14 Lee-DiStefano, Three Asian-Hispanic Writers from Peru, 126. 81 How can we incorporate Siu into Asian American literature as we de-center the pressure for his writing to convey a realism of Lima’s barrio chino? If we bundle together the author as the particulates “himself,” his “oeuvre,” and “his community,” can Siu ultimately turn from the call to be counted as a Chinese Peruvian author of hybrid heroes? A “unique voice among Latin American writers,” 15 Siu is read for his empirico-experiential and auto-ethnographic emblems of Chinese diasporic, what Francoise Lionnet describes as “the defining of one’s subjective ethnicity as mediated through language, history, and ethnographical analysis; in short … a kind of ‘figural antholpology’ of the self.” 16 A brief comparison of El tramo and Siu’s second collection of short stories, La primera espada del imperio” (The First Sword of the Empire), reveals more about such pressures. A brief glossary at the end of El tramo translates into English words like sen-hak (recent immigrant) and tusan (one born of Chinese immigrants). Helpful for the those unfamiliar with Chinese, the glossary also corroborates Siu’s positionality as native informant from the Peruvian colonia china, that is, Chinese settlement or community, i.e., Chinatown. Yet this “theme of acculturation … disappear[s] completely in Siu’s La primera espada 17 ; in these latter stories we witness an evasion of the demand for ready emblematicity regarding coherent community. Also written in Spanish, Siu’s second collection begins with a cycle of stories taking place in ancient China, deploying various spin-offs of the Chinese 15 Caceres-Letourneaux, “L’œuvre De Siu Kam Wen à Lima Réalité et Imaginaire de la Communauté Chinoise Du Pérou,” 88. 16 Lionnet, “Autoethnography: The An-Archic Style of Dust Tracks on a Road,” 99. 17 Kerr, “Lost in Lima,” 59. 82 swordsman novel genre. 18 The stories use few Chinese words (li and shih-ti, for example), yet notably leaves them without translation. La primera espada’s final three stories have an even more ambiguous relationship to “Chinese people,” respectively offering narrations of a housemaid who fends off her male employer’s sexual advances, and two limeña prostitutes from the point of view of a mutual john. The hero of the last story, “El engendro” (“The Freak” or “The Monster”), is an illegitimate son conceived by a Chilean soldier’s rape of a young Peruvian woman in 1880 during the War of the Pacific. R.A. Kerr categorizes these latter stories as “non-Asian,” “fictionalized interpretation[s] of Hispanic Peruvians,” 19 an implies an authorial strategy to be explained with regard to fixed diasporic identity. The acclaimed critic Roberto González Vigil observes that Siu’s “extraordinary cultural situation ‘between two worlds’ ... allows him to paint with similar skill and depth the Chinese enclave in Peru … and the reality of China.” 20 Maan Lin notes the oddity in the assumption that La espada’s kung fu stories, “fables far removed from contemporary realities,” not to mention the actualities of the Tang dynasty, would harbor a certain verisimilitude. 21 The Color of Homolingualism Insofar as literary relays of “local color” 22 are a crucible for immigrant and ethnic literatures, they undergird the homolingual community, that is to say, the notion that the speaker/author 18 The stories generally take place in the seventh- to ninth-century Tang dynasty. Kerr, “Lost in Lima,” 59; Lin, “Writers of the Chinese Diaspora.” 19 Kerr, “Lost in Lima,” 61. 20 Lin, “Writers of the Chinese Diaspora,” 60–61. 21 Ibid., 61. 22 Renza, “A White Heron” and the Question of Minor Literature, 32. 83 individuum is an unmistakeable subset of “our” community, 23 understandable through mimetic transmission of language between speaker/author and “us.” Homolingualism happens when “we” all figuratively speak the same language and are on the same page, a crucial assumption for Asian American literature’s navigation and management of pressures of “immanentist” verisimilitude. 24 Homolingual address might cursorily be understood on a literal level, as an English- language articulation vis-à-vis an implicitly English-listening U.S. Asian American community. But it is not adequately described as a “condition of conversation in which both the addresser and the addressee supposedly belong to the same language community.” 25 It rather pertains to a commensurate give-and-take, the assumption of equivalent import-export regarding securely corralled meanings; it is based, in other words, on the impossible idea of replete communication. Even if we were all “of” variegated languages, we would still capable of addressing each other homolingually. Homolingualism would not necessarily be dominant if we were simply to communicate strictly in Urdu or castellano rioplatense; more than upon language’s literay consistency, it is premised upon the “assurance of immediate apprehension or an expectation of uniform response.” 26 How and to what extent can we consider the non-English languages of the Asian Americas without just aggregating Spanish and English in whole-language terms, or in gestures that occlude their proliferative and restless differences—a question that already glosses over the differenciations within one “language” (Siu’s Luntu dialect would be an 23 Sakai, “Translation,” 75. 24 A description by Sue-Im Lee, “Introduction: The Aesthetic in Asian American Literary Discourse,” 3. 25 Sakai, Translation and Subjectivity, 4. 26 Ibid., my italics. 84 example here)? How might we reckon with Siu Kam Wen’s unpublished Chinese-language stories and mixed Spanish- and English-language fictions, that is, without falling back upon the notion of pan-languages spoken by clearly defined communities whose telos is to equitably “represented”? Siu and his Work It is the uneven triad of Siu’s authorship, prolific writing, and extrapolated community, that resonates with the energies of minor literature as explored by Deleuze and Guattari in their Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature. The freight of marginal status is an aspect of “Siu’s” deterritorialized relationship with the languages in which he writes. Like “Kafka’s” bizarre German, the strangeness of Siu’s persona “inevitably diminishes his authority to represent situations which will have more or less the same esthetic or ideological effect for all readers beyond those of similar minority ilk […] Whereas in ‘great literature,’ say of … Henry James, such ‘individual affairs’ take on a universal significance.” 27 Rather than discuss Siu as exceptional for his juggling of discrete cultural and linguistic belongings, this chapter aggregates the author, his work and “his” community as entities that strain, rather than uncritically gloss, “the solid and fundamental unit of the author and the work” within Asian American literature. 28 The author as street informant who works at, enacts, and transmits secureable representations of appropriate ethnic community is an equation of identity that quiets the static that inevitably must emerge from the “paradoxical singularity of an author’s name.” 29 In his essay “What is an Author?”, Foucault observes how Roland Barthes 27 Renza, “A White Heron” and the Question of Minor Literature, 31–2. 28 Foucault, “Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology” 205. 29 Ibid., 210. 85 indiscriminately untethers of texts from their specters of author-itarian authorship. It seems that Foucault would love to, as Barthes, participate in such a “call for a form of culture in which fiction would not be limited by the figure of an author.” 30 It would be pure romanticism, however, to imagine a culture in which the fictive would operate in an absolutely free state, in which fiction would be put at the disposal of everyone and would develop without passing through something like a necessary or constraining figure. Although, since the eighteenth century, the author has played the role of the regulator of the fictive, a role quite characteristic of our era of industrial and bourgeois society of individualism and private property, still, given the historical modifications that are taking place, it does not seem necessary that the author function remain constant in form, complexity, and even in existence. I think that, as our society changes, at the very moment when it is in the process of changing, the author function will disappear, and in such a manner that fiction and its polysemous texts will once again unction according to another mode, but still with a system of constraint—one that will no longer be the author but will have to be determined or, perhaps, experienced [experimenter]. 31 Foucault cannot describe this unctuous organization of non-authorial authority, and does not allude to a textual topos of infinite registers. He rather reasserts the continuity, however unpredictable and unmanageable from our perspective, of limited exegesis or bliss with respect to literary life. Foucault’s authorship—a “mode” neither formalized nor cleanly severed from the given 32 —echoes formalist discussions within Asian American literature. Sue-Im Lim frames the mapping of the field and its critical discourse as a careful balancing of an “immanentist understanding of literature ... and the countervailing attempt to argue that literature represents ‘something else.’” 33 What are these “something elses” in the face of Asian American literature’s returns to arborescent cohesion? Foucault and Barthes clarify the stakes of redistributing literary 30 Ibid., 222. 31 Ibid. 32 See Cheah, “Given Culture.” 33 Lim, “Introduction: The Aesthetic in Asian American Literary Discourse,” 3. 86 experience and reading, as does Jean Luc Nancy in his limning of the inoperative community as a space unavoidably and precariously shared, one that we tend to simplify through “equations” like the “solitude of the writer/collectivity, or culture/society, or elite/masses.” 34 To grapple with the “exigency of literary experience of community or communism” 35 would be to read for chance exposures of the something-elses and elsewheres in texts that would otherwise map an author cleanly “back” to her selected or canonical oeuvre and in turn back to her corresponding communities. Can Asian American literature reconceive immanentist togetherness as a togetherness of unlikely others, in a way that “communism can no longer be the unsurpassable horizon of our time”? 36 Sakai’s heterolingual “mingling and cohabitation” is an instantiation of such anti- communism, a togetherness-in-static where “Noise is essential to speech. Din is discourse.” 37 Non-mellifluous multiplicity bolsters the cogency of the regime of homolingualism in Asian American literature. To invite more fraught dispersions of Asian American literatures across languages, families, and expectations of comprehension, is to generate “[t]ransversal communication between different lines,” and “scramble … genealogical trees” 38 to avoid the presumption of a field whose tensions, stories, and forms have no predication by the materiality and various labors of language per se. It is to avoid grappling with such links between languages, and seeing translation in its tropes as “poietic 34 Nancy, The Inoperative Community, 76:8. 35 Ibid. 36 Ibid. 37 Glissant, Carribbean Discourse; qtd. in Moten, “Resistance of the Object,” 7. 38 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 11. 87 social practice[s] that institute[] a relation at the site of incommensurability.” 39 We cannot think that despite linguistic difference, Asian American literatures of the Americas will naturally coalesce around particular tropes and forms (e.g., the inadequacy of the state and universalized individual, the immigrant Bildungsroman); or that the literary trajectory of a text of Jamaican patois, for example, will certainly resemble that of a Hawaiian pidgin. This would posit a homolingualism, a repetition of originations of identity and of the heroic translator who flawlessly melds one language-object into another replica. Translation, Sakai warns us, is not heroic; it “need not be represented as a communication between two clearly delineated linguistic communities. There should be many different ways to apprehend translation in which the subjectivity of a community does not necessarily constitute itself in terms of language unity or the homogeneous sphere of ethnic or national culture.” 40 The compulsive yet impossible abstraction of language unity corroborates Fred Moten’s explanation that the “value of the sign, its necessary relation to the possibility of (a universal science of and a universal) language, is only given in the absence or supersession of, or the abstraction from, sounded speech—its essential materiality is rendered ancillary.” 41 Translation in the abstract glosses past the stickiness and sonority of language; it straitjackets contingent value with utter exchangeability. 39 “Translation is an instance of continuity in discontinuity and a poietic social practice that institutes a relation at the site of incommensurability. This is why the aspect of discontinuity inherent in translation would be completely repressed if we were to determine translation to be a form of communication. And this is what I have referred to as the oscillation or indeterminacy of personality in translation.” Sakai, Translation and Subjectivity, 13-14. 40 Sakai, “Translation,” 15. 41 Moten, “Resistance of the Object,” 13. 88 Jequetepeque, reque, y panqueques: Julia Wong Kcomt Let’s detour through a short poem by Julia Wong Kcomt, whose poetry instantiates impossibilities of heroic translation through heterolingualism. A once-limeña (resident of Lima) and now-porteña (resident of Buenos Aires), Kcomt is the author of seven collections of poetry, most recently Un pequeño bordado sobre la vergüenza (A Perfect Needlework on Shame, 2011). 42 Her 2008 novella, entitled Bocetos para un cuadro de familia (Sketches for a Family Painting), has been described as a “jigsaw puzzle” as seen “through the history of a family of Chinese immigrants in the warm terrain of Chepén; all from a language populated with details and reminiscences that transport us to times and lives that we will never know but upon which we can spy.” 43 Kcomt was born in Chepén in Peru’s La Libertad province, and has studied law and literature at both the Universidad de Lima and Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú; she has also studied sociology and philosophy in Germany, and English literature at Macau University. 44 Kcomt relates this academic history with a humor that ironizes such cosmopolitan pedigrees, in a “forgetting or constructive destruction.” 45 The flap of the novella Bocetos prints a glib biography: Hija de inmigrantes chinos. Estudió Derecho y Literatura en las Universidades de Lima y Católica del Perú, más no llegó a concluir ninguna de ellas. También siguió Sociologia y Filosofía en Tuebingen y Freiburg en Alemania, con el mismo resultado. *** Daughter of Chinese immigrants. She studied law and literatura at the universities of Lima and Católica in Peru, yet did not finish at either. She also studied sociology and philosophy in Tuebingen and Freiburg in Germany, with the same result. 42 Wong Kcomt, Un pequeño bordado sobre la vergüenza. 43 “Qué bonita familia: Incursión novelística de la poeta Julia Wong.” 44 Castañeda, “ChepenCultural.” 45 Williams, Gilles Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition, 37. 89 The following poem is from Kcomt’s 2002 collection Los Ultimos Blues de Buddha, whose its title is from a popular apocryphal quote often attributed to the Italian Peruvian Antonio Raimondi (1824-1890). Author of El Perú, a five-tome exploration and exposition of Peru’s natural life and resources, the natural scientist and geographer Raimondi is said to have lamented Peru’s lack of accessibility to its own natural wealth. Although the phrase does not appear in his work, Raimondi is nonetheless often credited with having likened the country to “un mendigo en un banco de oro.” 46 46 Alcocer Martínez, “Conjetura y postura frente al dicho ‘El Perú es un mendigo sentado en un banco de oro’.” 90 Mendigo en un banco de oro Tú me prometiste Ich werde mit Dir gehen y caminamos esas arenas anchas de Máncora los agrestes cerros de Chachapoyas Te vendo un pedazo de país, gringo hermoso. Gringo hermoso, yo te había tocado entero como a una pieza vieja en mi piano desafinado. Pero Germany es un lugar major para la ciencia y la confianza carita de niño aléjate tu no correrás el mismo riesgo de los niños en las escuelas de mi pueblo repetimos los nombres sin saber qué significan mochica jequetepeque pakatnamu lambayeque queque reque un lugar puede ser solamente sonido 47 *** 47 Wong Kcomt, Los Ultimos Blues De Buddha, 19. 91 Beggar on a Bench of Gold You promised me Ich werde mit Dir gehen and we walked those broad sands of Máncora the rough hills of Chachapoyas I’ll sell you a piece of the country, beautiful gringo Beautiful gringo, I had touched all of you like an old key on my untuned piano But Germany is a place better for science and intimate trust babyface go away you won’t risk anything like the schoolchildren in my town we repeat the names without knowing what they mean mochica jequetepeque pakatnamu lambayeque queque reque a place can be pure sound Reminiscent of Watanabe and Stahl in its deceptive simplicity, this poem invokes gradient nearnesses with an antithetical fracturing of affinities—a string of antipodal associations calling for an extension into relationships between and across pueblos and languages, and communications. The first verse’s consonant-ridden, coarse promise in its “original” language (“Ich werde mit Dir gehen”), “interrupts” the vocalic castellano that has only just begun its versing. Its halting parses out a rhythm of interruptions and textures of relation. 92 This title’s “impartial” pathos, with figures of inequity and misattribution, introduces the poem’s heterolingualism that slowly toggles between spaces of intimacy and distance: a beloved “gringo” and a narrator who wants him to leave; his physical familiarity to the narrator despite or due to the out-of-keyness of their touching; a chorus of Mochica words (perhaps sung by schoolchildren in unison), perhaps more recognizable to a Peruvian ear versus other Spanish textures. Though inclusive of properly nouned, appropriate places with which a reader may have varying degrees of (un)familiarity (the beach town of Máncora, in the Peruvian Piura province; the mountainous city Chachapoyas, which refers to the eponymous northern province of Peru; the scientific and oddly intimate Germany), intimacy here is not anchored upon quantifiable measures of distance, “‘authenticity or ultimate belonging’ 48 … so much as the degree of involvement, engagement, concern, and attention one gives to it.” 49 This kind of intimacy implies a working at versus a conclusive identification of measure, a laboring engagement and a concern (thus a difficulty) that overcomes fixed intimacies, intimacy’s ostensible pleasure (i.e., to closely know an other thing or another) and its meaning, with grappling’s in relation—“What is contact if it always intervenes between x and x? A hidden, sealed, concealed, signed, squeezed, compressed and repressed interruption?” asks Derrida. 50 Intimacy as strange unbelonging again brings us to the microscope and telescope, Kafka’s “cramped space” that charges Oedipal, commonsensical, and mundane details with hyperbolic allegory and political legibility. A laboring at intensities is exacted from us, and uninstalls the inurement to that which can 48 Stoler cites Boym, “On Diasporic Intimacy.” 49 Stoler, Haunted by Empire, 15; Heidegger, “The Thing.” 50 Derrida, On Touching: Jean-Luc Nancy, 2. 93 “disturb[] the anticipated homogeneity of a single ‘natural’ language.” 51 One wonders of Asian American literature: “How many people today live in a language that is not their own?” 52 The Mere Significance of Local Color In his essay on Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictee, Sakai begins with an observation by James Snead: The temptation to regard ‘language’ or literature’ as the guarantor of a nation’s ‘pedigree’ (remember that natio has in Latin an almost eugenic connotation) recalls the similar (and frequently more destructive) employment of the concept of ‘color.’ In both cases an apparently exclusionary process is meant somehow to isolate the pure ‘pedigree’ of a race, a language, or a literature, even as that process ends up in a compensating search for some emblem of universality. 53 Snead’s semblance between the caste of national literature and nearly eugenic authenticity is premised upon the probability of mimesis and verisimilitude, literatures that can transparently offer a wholesale access to the paradoxically emblematic lives and regular occurrences of distinct communities. We are reminded of the “realist aesthetic as a regime for the production of history.” 54 How far is the category of ethnic literature able to stray from realist registration of “local color”? For the category to hold, must it be tethered at least in part to such a regime? Foucault’s notion of authorship as regulator of “the fictive” and its 51 Sakai, Translation and Subjectivity, 25. 52 Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka, 19. 53 Snead, “European Pedigrees/African Contagions” qtd. in Translation and Subjectivity, 18. 54 Lowe, Immigrant Acts, 104. Lowe’s discussion of the Bildungsroman is a premiere example: “In both England and the United States, the novel as a form of print culture has constituted a privileged site for the unification of the citizen with the imagined community of the nation, while the national literary canon functioned to unify aesthetic culture as a domain in which material differences and localities were resolved and reconciled. The bildungsroman emerged as the primary form for narrating the development of the individual from youthful innocence to civilized maturity, the telos of which is the reconciliation of the individual to the social order.” 98. 94 literature’s polysemy appears to address itself specifically vis-à-vis ethnic authorship’s burdensome intimacy with official history and mimetic representation. The management of local color is, of course, no unique concern for Asian American literature. In the 1955 essay “El escritor argentino y la tradición,” Jorge Luís Borges ruminates over the claustrophobic intimacy between contemporary Argentinean writing and lo gauchesco, “natural invocations” of gaucho life or whose thematization for Borges is overembedded in Argentina’s historical imaginary. Borges problematizes the axioms of major Argentine literature and demonstrations of its local origins: its citations of gauchos, its landscape and its pampas, its castellano’s unique diction in relation to the Southern Cone and Spanish generally, its national themes and configurations. 55 “My skepticism,” Borges explains with Deleuzian uncertainty, “does not relate to the difficulty or impossibility of solving this problem, but rather to its very existence[. R]ather than with a true mental difficulty, I take it we are dealing with an appearance, a simulacrum, a pseudo problem.” 56 One might revise ethnic authorship and its relationship to the local and local color—a unit paradoxically natural, originary, and in need of iteration in the eyes of national literature—as simulacra, in order to posit uncategorizable, extra-conceptual life, as well as forms that escape the radar of intimacy-as-knowledge, unmistakable measure, origin or identification. The concept of authenticating and local realism occludes the chaos of unclear categorization (How else might we identify an Asian American “work”?), and offers a prehensile sightline to limit messier palpabilities of the local (take, for instance, the safety of Aimee’s local in Flores). 55 emblematized, as Borges explains, by the anti-establishment fugitive of the epomymous Martín Fierro by José Hernández, in El gaucho Martín Fierro (1872) and La vuelta de Martín Fierro (1879). 56 Borges, “The House of Asterion,” 177. 95 Critic Rolando Sánchez Mejías ruminates over “The Argentine Writer and Tradition,” and illustrates the local compressions of fixed regional and ethnic identities. He cites a moment in which Borges pokes fun at the alleged coherence of “Arabs,” the weight of the Koran’s emblematic status, and himself—as the author remembers reading about Mohammed and the Koran in Edward Gibbon’s eighteenth-century Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire: Gibbon observa que en el libro árabe por excelencia, en el Alcorán, no hay camellos; yo creo que si hubiera alguna duda sobre la autenticidad del Alcorán, bastaría esta ausencia de camellos para probar que es árabe. Fue escrito por Mahoma, y Mahoma, como árabe, no tenía por qué saber que los camellos eran especialmente árabes; eran para él parte de la realidad, no tenía porque distinguirlos; en cambio, un falsario, un turista, un nacionalista árabe, lo primero que hubiera hecho es prodigar camellos, caravanas de camellos en cada página; pero Mahoma, como árabe, estaba tranquilo: sabía que podía ser árabe sin camellos. Creo que los argentinos podemos parecernos a Mahoma, podemos creer en la posibilidad de ser argentinos sin abundar en color local. 57 *** Some days past I have found a curious confirmation of the fact that what is truly native can and often does dispense with local color; I found this confirmation in Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Gibbon observes that in the Arabian book par excellence, in the Koran, there are no camels; I believe if there were any doubt as to the authenticity of the Koran, this absence of camels would be sufficient to prove it is an Arabian work. It was written by Mohammed, and Mohammed, as an Arab, was unconcerned: he knew he could be an Arab without camels. I think we Argentines can emulate Mohammed, can believe in the possibility of being Argentine without abounding in local color. 58 Reading with a humorously antipodal grossie au microscope, Borges disassociates the ostensibly obvious if-then clause linking together local color and realist re-creation, as he toys with his own oversimplifications amidst an endearing intimacy with the Prophet staged 57 Borges, “El escritor argentino” qtd. in Sánchez Mejías, “Y por bigotes dos hilos.” 58 Borges, “The Argentine Writer,” Labyrinths, trans. Irby, 181. 96 by notions of the truly native, the exemplary book, and Mohammed’s unmistakable Arabian nature. Borges asserts—indeed utilizing the same crafty logic—that a lack of local color would best emblematize and affirm a plenary Arab-ness of both author and his work. Mejías, upon reading this, can’t help but notice that “in the Koran—which I suppose Borges never came to read, at least completely—the camel indeed appears, not just once, but many times, in direct and oblique ways.” Its appearances, however, “do not invalidate Borges’ thesis; in reality the camel, in itself, cannot define a reality as complicated as a country, a book, or an emotion. 59 Borges’ own simulacrum of camel reading corroborates a chaos repressed by verisimilitude. Siu the Inexhaustible A deterritorialization occurs in Siu’s cacophonous writing process, a restlessness of translation and prolificness that does not necessarily abide by a coherent extrapolation of ethnic or other community. The protagonist of his semiautobiographical Viaje a Itaca (published in English as Journey to Ithaca) takes a trip back to Lima from Honolulu to kindle a romance with an old female friend; once in Lima he finds himself in the throes of potential romance, as well as of the 1990 Peruvian presidential election between Mario Vargas Llosa and to-be-president Alberto Fujimori. Particularly curious about Siu’s process of writing this memoir-like narrative is that he first drafted it in English, then translated it into Spanish—a progression intended to avoid the “paralysing effect” of his anxiety regarding his writing technique and style. Like Anna Kazumi Stahl, who describes writing in her nonnative 59 Sánchez Mejías, “Y por bigotes dos hilos.” “Sin embargo, resulta que en el Corán—supongo que Borges no lo llegó a leer, al menos completamente-, el camello sí aparece, y no sólo una, sino muchas veces, sea en forma directa, sea oblicuamente. Aparición que no invalida la tesis de Borges, pues en verdad el camello, en sí mismo, no puede definir una realidad tan compleja como un país, un libro o una emoción.” 97 Spanish as an escape from on overawareness of her native English, Siu alludes to an idiosyncratic sparseness in his castellano, a poverty that incites an English fertility. Although Siu’s writing does not exhibit a poetics of privation per se (as does Stahl’s Flores or the poetry of Watanabe), it is nonetheless a negotiation that is peculiar to his movement through (the difficulty of) language acquisition, from an already “foreign” Southern Cone to a U.S. territory. Siu works through the notion that “Humans are always foreigners vis-à-vis language, and in this sense languages can only be ‘foreign’ languages.” 60 This restlessness appears in Siu’s themes and formal choices: Yo alterno entre escribir sobre cosas autobiograficas y temas simplemente fantasticos. Así que … no tengo ningun problema en … de un … un registro a otro. Incluso considero como … eso es que es una ventaja y porque una vez que termino una novela o un libro de cuentos de tipo autobiografico, cambio de tono, y voy al registro fantastico. 61 *** I alternate between autobiographical things and themes that are simply fantastic. So I have no problem moving from one register to another. I consider it an advantage, because once I finish a novel or a book of autobiographical stories, I change my tone, and go to a register of fantasy. Siu’s novella The Statue in the Garden is an example of this register, a surprising interweaving of four long stories that take place in nineteenth-century Paris, and pay homage to Argentinean Adolfo Bioy Casares and the nineteenth-century French historian Prosper Mérimée. Starring the French courtesan Liane de Pougy and Le Pétomane, the famous fartiste of the Moulin Rouge, this bizarre novella was first published in Spanish, and then translated by Siu into English. With most of Siu’s other works, The Statue is available through the North Carolina self-publication house Lulu Press—whose alternative status corroborates Siu’s minor literariness. Populated by native nineteenth-century Parisians and 60 Sakai, “Nationality and the Politics of the ‘Mother Tongue’,” 18. 61 Siu, “Entrevista a Siu Kam Wen.” 98 no Chinese Peruvians, The Statue in the Garden was actually first written in Spanish as La estatua en el jardín, thanks to Siu’s inexorable desire to translate. It has become a practice for me to do what our friend Pilar Blanco calls “autotraducción” with all my newest production. I wrote Viaje a Itaca in English, then translated into Spanish. I wrote La estatua en el jardín in Spanish, and then translated it into English. Now I have spent one year and ten days writing the 326- page La vida no es una tómbola in Spanish, and then took six or less months to turn it into English. I found out that translating from Spanish to English was easier than translating from English to Spanish. It took me nine months to write Viaje a Itaca, but no less than two years to render it into Spanish! 62 Incidentally, Siu has translated his La vida no es una tómbola as This Sort of Life; when I recently asked him if he would look for a U.S. publisher, he said that he only translated it for his coworkers. What is Asian American literature supposed to “do” with such prolific translations that “disturb[] the anticipated homogeneity of a single ‘natural’ language”? 63 The author’s experimental agitation is reminiscent of the young Sarah Orne Jewett, who, in her own words, wrote with a similar restlessness, “without much plan” and simply for her own “pleasure,” in a “sketchy” style that she herself likened to her own actual pictorial sketching. 64 Renza interprets this as a “major poetic principle of un pictura poesis, its function here to self-conceal the ‘higher’ parameters of publication which surround her act of writing. Sketching, in short, transforms narratives into ‘views’ …. It also converts the pressure to construe writing as serious artistic work into the desire to preserve it as ‘pleasure.’” 65 62 Siu, “What-is-art.com (No Longer Available).” 63 Sakai, Translation and Subjectivity, 25. 64 Renza, “A White Heron,” 154–155. 65 Ibid., 155. 99 Siu’s virtually inexhaustible writing and translations continue to multiply despite “the business part of writing,” which struck Jewett as “very noxious.” 66 The range of Siu’s formal and informal writing, particularly that which does not resemble autoethnographic narrative (take the “Chinese” and “non-Chinese” stories of La primera espada del imperio, or Siu’s non-fictional treatise on aesthetics Deconstructing Art, only available in English from the self-publishing house Lulu Press; or his translation of a selection of Notes of a Pianist by the nineteenth-century Louis Moreau Gottschalk, “New Orleans’s … Chopin of the Creoles” 67 about whom Siu also has written an unpublished short story) alludes to an elsewhere of pleasure, a “somewhere else” beyond Asian American immanentism that could be construed as authorial pleasure. One can’t help but recall Barthes, who straddles a discursive boundary between immanentism and elsewhere: “I control the contradictory interplay of (cultural) pleasure and (non-cultural) bliss, and that I write myself as a subject at present out of place, arriving too soon or too late (this too designating neither regret, fault, nor bad luck, but merely calling for a non-site): anachronic subject, adrift.” 68 Asked why he stopped writing stories in Chinese as a young person, Siu explains: “I realized that if I were to write in Chinese, I wouldn’t have much of a public. And being in Peru, I think that one would have to try to write for a more local public.” 69 “I am not a mainstream writer in the Latin American literary scene,” the author explains in another interview. “Because we write about an ethnic minority and often for a niche readership, 66 qtd. in Renza. 67 Kirsch, “Diary of a ‘One-Man Grateful Dead’ (Louis Moreau Gottschalk).” 68 Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, 63. 69 “Me di cuenta de que si yo escribía en chino no tendría mucho público. Y estando en el Perú, creo que uno debe de hacer el intento para escribir para un público local.” Sotomayor, “Entrevista a Siu Kam Wen.” 100 writers like myself will never get the kind of recognition that other writers enjoy.” 70 Siu imagines a readership other than that projected by the compression of El tramo’s Chinatown, and gestures toward the disjunctures of his anticipated affiliations. “En alta mar” Such disjunctures of the “anachronic subject, adrift” are exemplified in “En alta mar,” the sole story that occurs well beyond the temporal and geographical coordinates of the colonia china in El tramo final. Its fascinating seven pages juxtaposes two narratives of passage by boat, hyperreal in their extreme sensory detail. The first story describes an extremely sick man who hallucinates and babbles in an unknown Chinese dialect, “seguramente no era native, como los demás, de la provincia de Kuang-tung o de Fukien, sino de alguna otra.” 71 He is aboard a nineteenth-century coolie ship that has left Macau, has passed Yokohama, and is headed toward the Peruvian port of Callao. Initially loaded with 739 to-be laborers for “las grandes haciendas, los administradores de las islas guaneras y los constructors de los ferrocarriles,” 72 the dysentery-ridden ship has lost 180 men due to the conditions of its confines, where “los culíes se hacinaban como puercos [y] el aire era irrespirable por el hedor que esa multitud infrahumana…” 73 (“the coolies were packed like pigs, the foul air unbreatheable due to the subhuman multitude…”). The man remains unknown to the rest of the ship. The second story follows another dying character, the captain of a junk carrying (probably Hoa) refugees from Saigon’s Cholon. Conditions are hardly better; “El vaivén de 70 Lee-DiStefano, Three Asian-Hispanic Writers from Peru, 127. 71 Siu, “En Alta Mar,” 88. 72 Ibid., 90. 73 Ibid., 87. 101 la nave era incesante … [y e]l olor nauseabundo de los vómitos llenaba todo el cerrado ambiente de la bodega” (The incessant rocking of the ship and nauseating stench of vomit filled the entire boat’s cabin”). 74 An antipodal twist emerges. Like the “foreign” language of the coolie that remains undeciphered, in an ill haze the captain hears “a miniature tower of Babel” that surrounds him with various dialects of Chinese, along with French and Vietnamese tongues. “[P]udo reconocer el cantonés, el amoy, el hakká, el Swatow y algunos otros dialectos chinos. También oyó hablar el anamita y el francés….” 75 Without a known destination, the ship is swarmed and looted by pirates; the capitan’s health declines. Without clues to weave a correspondence between the two stories, the narrative thwarts a coherent resolution. Like Watanabe’s animals, we see no distant shore of ready metaphor or easy constellation of community, Chinese or human. “Dejo a criterio del lector decidir cuál de los dos, el culí o el refugiado, fue el feliz sobreviviente” (“I leave it to the reader to decide who, whether the coolie or refugee, was the thankful survivor”). 76 La vida no es una tómbola The critical discussion regarding Siu’s later novel La vida no es una tómbola (which Siu renders as This Sort of Life) 77 is similar to that of the collection El tramo final. La vida no es una tómbola narrates the growing pains of young Héctor, a young Chinese boy pulled out of middle school by his father in order to help with the family grocery. Like Siu himself as a 74 Ibid., 88. 75 Ibid., 89. 76 Ibid., 89, 91. 77 “Tómbola” is a lottery. Tómbola is based on El tramo’s opening story “El Deterioro” (“Deterioration”). 102 child, Héctor “resents the suffering he had to withstand during his childhood and adolescence[] when he was forced to work as a clerk in a small grocery that his parents owned in … [a] working-class neighborhood ….” 78 Héctor’s limited options in Tómbola remind us of El tramo final’s virtually shrinking barrio chino, where critics tend to “place” all characters, as the circuit of author, oeuvre, and barrio garner a trite legibility that one might describe as biopolitical, vis-à-vis autoethnographic parameters of compression, ghettoization, and embodiment of community. Likely due to its “return” to a realist-autoethnographic style, Tómbola has enjoyed as much critical praise, if not more than, El tramo final. The novel fuses together three stories: of the young protagonist Héctor’s coming of age (in a return to El tramo final’s story “El deterorio”); Hector’s once estranged tercer tío, his third and youngest uncle Elías, who comes to Lima to learn Spanish and make amends with his brothers; and of the gorgeous but inscrutable Maggie, who, though attracted to Elias, refuses to work for her father’s business forever. Héctor “es el único de los tres principales personajes de esta novela que tiene un futuro”; “… es básicamente un disfraz que me puse a fina de tomar distancia con un traumatico pasado al que todavía no puedo evocar sin sentir tristeza” 79 (“he’s the only one of the three principal characters of this novel that has a future”; “he’s basically a mask I put on to gain some distance from a traumatic past that I still can’t recall without some sadness”). Apart from Tómbola’s compelling autobiographical lure, it reckons with writing, language, and elusive readership and a non-immanent, unpredictable and unanticipated public that are evident when we zoom outward from the critical discourse fixated upon his 78 López-Calvo, “Sino-Peruvian Identity and Community as Prison: Siu Kam Wen and Other Survival Strategies.” 79 Siu, Tómbola, 291. 103 ethnographic renderings of Lima’s colonia china. When the young and angst-ridden Héctor writes his first painstaking story, he challenges his insular shyness and dares to enter into a relation and thus a risk—”In order to fail, we must work. When we do not address, we cannot even fail to communicate.” 80 Héctor relates his writing to a readership of one, his good friend Jorge. Influido por la literature <<pastoral>> de los anos treinta en China, Héctor había escrito una historia bucólica de diez páginas en apretados caracteres que dibujaba con gran esmero en un block escolar. La había completado en dos semanas durante la hora de la siesta, después del almuerzo.… “—Bueno—dijo Jorge, evitando mirarle en los ojos—. La historia es interesante, y está bien escrita… En efecto, la reserva que tengo no tiene nada que ver con el cuento mismo. [end 39] … Cuando escribiste ese cuento—dijo Jorge— ¿Qué público tenías en mente? “—Cómo qué público? Alguien como tú o yo, supongo. “—Y ahí es donde pienso que está el problema—dijo su amigo, sonriendo—. Alguien como tú o yo. No alguien como esa pareja que vemos caminando delante de nosotros, o como la veintena de gente que tenemos alrededor de nosotros en estos momentos. ¿Sabes cuántas personas como tú o yo hay en todo el Perú? Probablemente no más de viente mil. En cambio, las que no son cómo tu o yo se cuentan en millones. Es para este público de millones que debes estar escribiendo, si lo que escribes está destinado a ser leído algún día. 81 *** Influenced by the “pastoral” literature of the thirties in China, Héctor had written a bucolic story of ten pages in carefully drawn characters that he wrote meticulously in his school notebook. He completed it in two weeks during his after-lunch siestas.… “Well,” said Jorge, trying to avoid looking straight at Héctor. “The story is interesting, and well written … to be honest, the reservation I have has nothing to do with the story itself…. When you wrote it,” said Jorge, “what public did you have in mind?” “What do you mean ‘what public’? Someone like you or me, I guess.” 80 Sakai, Translation and Subjectivity, 195. 81 Siu, Tómbola, 39–40. 104 “And that’s the problem,” said his friend, with a smile. “‘Someone’ like you or me. Not ‘someone’ like that couple over there—walking right in front of us—or like the swarms of people around us at this very moment. Do you know how many people like you or me there are in all of Peru? Probably not more than twenty thousand. On the other hand, those that aren’t like you or me are in the millions. It’s for this public of millions that you should be writing for, if what you write is destined to be read someday. We are left to wonder what details Héctor’s secret Chinese text harbors. For Jorge it nonetheless fails to communicate to and for a public that he feels should be for all those addressees who are utterly unlike “us,” that is, “all of Peru.” This disjuncture between the young Héctor’s writing and Jorge’s imagined community exposes a grappling with writing and a public whose shape, literacy, commonality or community—i.e., whose virtuality—is unpredictable. Where Jorge envisions a neatly-bundled public quantified by “millions” of national readers; Héctor, who will not scribble again in Tombola (has Jorge’s advice been misaddressed?), does not share his “us” and “them” distinction. In sharing, the potential flux of what could be branded as community is exposed, or put up for negotiation. 82 As with all writings of beings-in-common, the community projected through the prism of Siu’s text, is a retrospective one. Siu includes a prologue for Tómbola, and writes: “Me alégro haber escrito esta novela ahora y no veinte años atrás” (“I’m pleased to have written this novel now and not twenty years ago”). The temporal gap is compounded by a cross-Pacific, spatial distance: No quise terminar esta novel en una nota sombria. Si hubiera vivido en el Perú,—y especialmente en Lima—tal vez lo habría hecho, pero después de pasar veinte años 82 Nancy, The Inoperative Community, 293. “Being in common means, to the contrary, no longer having, in any form, in any empirical or ideal place, such a substantial identity, and sharing this (narcissistic) ‘lack of identity.’ This is what philosophy calls ‘finitude[.]’” “Finitude, or the infinite lack of infinite identity, if we can risk such formulation, is what makes community. That community is made or is formed by the retreat of by the subtraction of something: this something, which would be the filfulled infinite identity of community, is what I call its ‘work.’” 105 bajo el dorado sol, el benigno clima y el espiritu de aloha de las islas hawaianas me siento incapaz de sentir el mismo mórbido pesimismo que me había impulsado escribir El tramo final, mi primera coleción de cuentos. 83 *** I didn’t want to end this novel on a somber note. Had I lived in Peru—and especially in Lima—maybe I would have, but after spending twenty years under the golden sun, the mild weather and spirit of aloha of the Hawaiian islands, I feel unable to feel the same morbid pessimism that had incited me to write El tramo final, my first collection of stories. The happy realism that projects commonness (i.e., of Chinese Peruvians, of Peruvian immigrants, or of limeños) is conditioned by Siu’s distance not only from Peru, but from the over-stylization and experimentation he finds characteristic of the Latin American Boom. To be severed from lo telurico, he claims, he had to leave Peru. Had Siu remained, he explains, hubiera sentido tal vez la compulsion de escribirla como lo hacía todo el mundo en esa época: con una artificialidad y aberración de lo natural disfrazadas de innovación técnica y estilística. Los que pertenecemos a la generación de los ochenta nos sentimos siempre como unos invitados que han llegado tarde a la fiesta; la fiesta era el llamado <<Boom>> de la literatura latinoamericana. [… L]os narradores de la generación inmediata nos vimos forzados a hacer como provincianos llegados recién a la capital: imitar a nuestros ilustres predecesores en su cosmopoltismo y vanguardismo, o ser clasificados por los críticos como <<telúricos>> e ignorados por el resto del público lector. 84 *** I would have felt perhaps the compulsion to write it the whole world would have back then: with an artificiality and artifice [aberración] masked by so-called technical and stylistic innovation. Those of us who belonged to that generation of the eighties felt like guests who came late to the party—the party called the Latin American “Boom.” [… T]he narrators of the next generation, we found ourselves having to act like provincials new to the big city [la capital]: having to imitate the avant-garde cosmopolitanism of our illustrious predecessors, or be classified by critics as “earthbound” and unknown by the rest of the reading public. 83 Siu, Tómbola, 291. 84 Ibid., 293. 106 In Honolulu, Siu continues with his restless writing and translation, assuming no common traits with “Hawaiian literature,” and “tied as much to Peru as ... to China.” 85 “I systematically return to Peru. I don’t know why.[...] I just finished a short novel inspired by a double crime committed in Honolulu. 86 But when I started to write, I couldn’t have it take place in Hawaii; instead I situated it in Peru during the seventies. Weird. I don’t identify as much with the people, despite having lived for over twenty years here in Hawaii.” 87 Does the author consider himself a peruano? Ese es un tema que yo siempre eludo (risas). Por nacionalidad yo soy norteamericano, por nacimiento soy chino, pero por afecto soy peruano. Mira, como individuo me pueden calificar como chino, o como chino nacionalizado norteamericano, pero como escritor, yo me considero un escritor peruano” 88 *** That’s a topic that continues to elude me (laughs). My nationality is American, by birth I’m Chinese, but by affectation [afecto] I’m Peruvian. Look, as an individual they can classify me as Chinese, or a U.S.-nationalized Chinese, but as a writer, I see myself as a Peruvian writer. Siu thus illustrates communities as “presuppositionless,” entities that “cannot be presupposed ... only exposed.” 89 With his delayed and procrastinated renderings of community and his inexhaustible writing, he is an archetypical author of the Asian Americas—a status only corrobortated by the glib description of himself as a Peruvian writer who writes for “all of Peru.” 85 “sigo ligado por un cordón umbilical tanto al Perú como a China,” Kerr, 55. 86 Siu told me in an interview that his coworker’s husband was a detective on the case! 87 “Sistamaticamente vuelvo al Peru. No se por que. Hace dos semanas acabé una novela corta inspirada en un crimen doble ocurrido en Honolulu. Pero cuando me puse a escribir, no pude ambientarla alli, sino en el Peru de los anos 70. Curioso. Yo no me siento compenetrado con la gente de alla a pesar de tener mas de veinte anos en Hawai.” “Hoy presentan la vida no es una tómbola de Siu Kam Wen.” iloaldia.com. 88 Sotomayor, “Entrevista a Siu Kam Wen.” 89 Nancy, The Inoperative Community, xxxix. 107 Chapter Four Repeating chinas: The Irrevocable Genericities of China Mary and la china poblana in Joan Didion’s Run River and Francisco de la Maza’s Caterina de San Juan La acción del tiempo que todo lo destruye, lo ofusca y oculta, hay que anticipársele, escudriñando, puntualizando y recogiendo las tradiciones y noticias fidedignas, antes que el vulgo las altere o desfigure, y convierta un acontecimiento histórico en ridícula conseja popular. *** The act of time destroys, obfuscates, and hides all; one has to anticipate its movements so as to scrutinize, specify, and corroborate actual traditions and reliable accounts before the masses alter and distort them, and convert a historical event into a popular and ridiculous story. —Nicolás León, Catarina de San Juan y la china poblana: estudio etnográfico-crítico 1 The very term “particular person” requires a generic concept, lest it be meaningless. Even in proper names, a reference to that universal is still implied. They mean one who is called by that name, not by any other; and “one” stands elliptically for “one human being. —Adorno, “Subject and Object” 2 An Atomic Introduction Using a slippery slash in the place of an earlier hyphen or traditional space that holds together the term “Asian American women,” Laura Hyun Hi Kang posits “Asian/American women” not as a descriptive label, but “as a productive figure.” 3 A term first slashed apart by David Palumbo-Liu in Asian/American: Historical Crossing of a Racial Frontier, Kang slashes “Asian/American” in an “awkward shorthand for the cultural, economic and 1 León, Catarina de San Juan y la china poblana, 7. 2 Adorno, “Subject and Object,” 498. 3 Kang, Compositional Subjects, 2, 5. 108 geopolitical pressures of the continental … the national … and the racial-ethnic … as they come to bear on an implicitly more solid gendered ontology.” She emphasizes the recent term’s diffusions and dissipations, 4 and the congealings of “Asian,” “American,” and “women,” historico-political clusterings that reveal “dispersed and sometimes linked fits and starts at the agonistic intersections of feminist, antiracist, and anti-imperialist social movements in the late 1960s and 1970s.” 5 Rather than present a narrative of a category coming to voice, Kang presents “Asian American women” (without discrete distinction from the Asian American woman, as a chaos of overaggregated individuations that knot together—a “forgery,” in other words, of conceptual approaches to subjection mobilized by the academic disciplines and disciplinarity per se. Wrestling with the term’s scaffolding, observes Kang, “offers a promising nexus for studying the synchronic-diachronic calibrations,” 6 not of secured atoms of inquiry at a particular moment (whether “our” present moment, or moments of critique after the advent of Asian American Studies), but of figures that precariously fit into a schema of verticality in time and space, that is to say, of Asian American literature’s presentism and implicit North American and Anglophone axioms. In What is Philosophy, Deleuze and Guattari observe the problematic particulation of all concepts. [E]very concept always has a history, even though this history zigzags, though it passes, if need be, through other problems or onto different planes. In any concept there are usually bits or components that come from other concepts, which 4 “As in the construction ‘and/or,’ where the solidus at once instantiates a choice between two terms, their simultaneous and equal status, and an element of indecidability, that is, as it at once implies both exclusion and inclusion, “Asian/American” marks both the distinction installed between “Asian” and “American” and a dynamic, unsettled, and inclusive movement.” Palumbo-Liu, Asian/American, 1; quoted in Kang, Compositional Subjects, 2. 5 Ibid., 5. 6 Ibid. 109 corresponded to other problems and presupposed other plans. This is inevitable because each concept carries out a new cutting-out, takes on new contours, and must be reactivated or recut. 7 The particulates “Asian,” “American,” and “woman” all bundle into a call of atomic individuation, along with a resonance of atomic propulsion (i.e., the bomb, a significant theme within Asian American and Asian diaspora studies) and of the atom as a “hypothetical body, so infinitely small as to be incapable of further division.” 8 “In the vast archive of an infinitely divisible space and time,” attests Akira Lippit, we are atomically and strangely multiplicitous within a universe of potentially endless calibration. 9 Atomic space emerges from a universe divided infinitely to the point of a hypothetical irreducibility. The logic of the atom, the atomology, sustains a paradox: infinite divisibility that ends, despite the endless nature of atomic division, in a hypothetical figure, small and indivisible, and also perhaps invisible. Gilles Deleuze calls this effect of ‘pure becoming’ ‘the paradox of infinite identity.’ You are an atom in Borges’s Library, an infinite identity, infinitely divisible. 10 Unintuited bourgeonings undergird “infinite identity” and the precariousness of Asian American women’s individuation. As James Williams puts it, to understand the individual as a discrete and merely “identifiable particular” or exemplary instantiation “is a mistake” 11 ; individuals are not atomic in this undivided sense. Individuals “must not be thought of as 7 What Is Philosophy?, 18. 8 Lippit, Atomic Light (Shadow Optics), 6. 9 Ibid. 10 Ibid., my italics. “‘Atomism, the preeminent discourse of Western materialism (at least in antiquity and, more convincingly, since the seventeenth century),’ says Daniel Tiffany, ‘contends that the authentic material existence of any body (as opposed to its merely phenomenal appearance) consists of infinitesimal and irreducible particles called atoms.’ Because of the invisibility of atoms, atomism relies, says Tiffany, on images. Your death imagines you as a hypothesis,” ibid.; Lippit cites Daniel Tiffany, Toy Medium: Materialism and Modern Lyric (UCP 2000); Deleuze says that “The paradox of this pure becoming, with its capacity to elude the present, is the paradox of infinite identity (the infinite identity of both directions or senses at the same time—of future and past, of the day before and the day after, of more or less, of too much and not enough, of active and passive, and of cause and effect),” Lippit, Atomic Light, 6n6. Lippit here cites Deleuze’s The Logic of Sense. 11 Williams, Gilles Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition, 189. 110 members of a species,” as Deleuze observes; “they cross species and are a condition for the emergence of a species…. Categories of actual things only emerge because individuals vary with their sensations.” 12 Kang’s “nexus” articulates this type of Deleuzian-Borgesian paradox. She wrangles with projections of equivalence among “Asian American women,” as she looks for triggers of differenciation—a term that shows Deleuze’s distinction between the French differéncier versus différentier 13 —with regard to the generic concept-category. 14 A differential vitality is mobilized against what Kang describes as a “redoubled consolidation of disciplinarity through a further minoritization of difference,” and “[t]he prevailing reduction of Asian/American women as belated and still minor objects of study within established disciplines.” 15 Can the “Asian American woman” account for that which is or was prior to her own subjectivation(s)? Can we acknowledge or recuperate what is or was before, or now exceeds, the compelling hail of “the Law” 16 of its binding, 12 Ibid. 13 Williams, Gilles Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition, 186. “Deleuze makes significant use of the distinction in French between differéncier, to make or become different, and différentier, which is restricted to the mathematical operation” (Patton xi). “The relation of Idea to actual identity involves a pair of related processes, from Idea to actual thing (differenciation) and from actual thing to Idea (differentiation)” 14 “Our mistake lies in trying to understand Platonic division on the basis of Aristotelian requirements. According to Aristotle, it is a question of dividing a genus into opposing species: but then this procedure not only lacks ‘reason’ by itself, it lacks a reason in terms of which we could decide whether something falls into one species rather than another.… Division is not the inverse of ‘generalisation’; it is not a determination of species…. It is not a question of dividing a determinate species, but one of selection. It is not a question of dividing a determinate genus into definite species, but of dividing a confused species into pure lines of descent, or of selecting a pure line from material which is not.” Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 59–60. 15 Kang, Compositional Subjects, 4–5. 16 “The turning around is an act that is, as it were, conditioned both by the “voice” of the law and by the responsiveness of one hailed by the law. The “turning around” is a strange sort of middle ground … which is determined both by the law and the addressee, but by neither unilaterally or exhaustively…. But where and when does the calling of the name solicit the turning around, the anticipatory move toward identity?” Butler, “‘Conscience Doth Make Subjects of Us All’: Althusser’s Subjection,” 107. 111 at least nominally, to account for the immense heterogeneity of human figures that might produce but also are made by these objects and domains. On the other hand, their very epistemological commitment to a particular object of study or domain of inquiry acquits them from full, total coverage of every possible kind of personhood. Considered against this paradox, how are Asian/American women inducted within and across these disciplinary demarcations? 17 Induction is further clarified by Foucault on discipline: Discipline only exists insofar as there is a multiplicity and an end, or an objective or result to be obtained on the basis of this multiplicity ... The individual is much more a particular way of dividing up the multiplicity for a discipline than the raw material form from which it is constructed. Discipline is a mode of individualization of multiplicities rather than something that constructs an edifice of multiple elements on the basis of individuals who are worked on as, first of all, individuals. 18 What about the Asian American women exceeds this minoritization? What is shed, in other words, from the “redoubled consolidation” whose discrete particularizations and generic occlusions collaborate to reify the establishment of its disciplined coherence? 19 Personaefications This chapter thus promotes atomology and strange 20 individuality grounded by infinite particulation through which the Asian American woman, or Asian American women, is not discovered or excavated, but rather inducted. With regard to electricity and magnetism, induction refers to “bringing about an electric or magnetic state in a body by the proximity (without actual contact) of an electrified or magnetized body.” 21 In logic, induction is to 17 Kang, Compositional Subjects, 3. 18 Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, 12. 19 Kang, Compositional Subjects, 5. “Put very schematically, Asian American studies and other ethnic studies—and, I would add, women’s studies—often sanction an epistemological authority of “being,” wherein the investigating or representing subject’s shared racial-ethnic identity with her object(s) of study can imbue knowledge-claims with an especial legitimacy and experiential wisdom.” 218. 20 e.g., also in the sense that quarks can be classified as “up,” “down,” or “strange.” 21 “induction, n.,” my emphasis. 112 “infer[] a general law or principle from the observation of particular instances.” 22 Deduction, conversely, moves forward or builds assertions from the ground of secured axioms, a “process of deducing or drawing a conclusion from a principle already known or assumed; spec. in Logic, inference by reasoning from generals to particulars.” 23 In a deductive vein, Kang’s Asian/American women of the “writing self” and “transnational worker” emerge through the putative repletion of literature and anthropology. Yet induction, as Thomas Fowler observes in his 1876 Inductive Logic, “may or may not employ hypothesis, but what is essential to it is the inference from the particular to the general, from the known to the unknown” 24 in ways that, invest and incorporate demands and disavowals, “burden[s] and … alibi[s]” 25 inextricable from human figuration and subjectivation. The Asian American woman’s generic work operates through impulsion without contact—particularly if our rudimentary acts of naming and categorizing human instantiation are always and already invocations of prior events of figuration, a regress that underpins our intuitive reliance “on arguments for the necessity and universality of synthesis.” 26 “Any given actual circuit of an animal’s territory or utterance in a given accent implies a synthesis of prior repetitions,” explains the Deleuzean critic James Williams. 27 “More shockingly,” if we press Deleuze’s atomology further “with respect to causal explanations based on causal relations between well-defined things, an actual individual is only a synthesis of prior individuals ... any series 22 Ibid. 23 “deduction, n.” 24 Fowler, The Elements of Inductive Logic, quoted in “induction, n.” 25 Kang, Compositional Subjects, 3. 26 Williams, Gilles Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition, 13. 27 Ibid. 113 implies an infinity of other series, where an individual member of the series stands out due to the variations in intensity it expresses.” 28 Kang’s framework echoes the claim that difference and repetition allow a mode of thought radically apart from sameness and identity, and apart from a grounds of atomic indivisibility that renders human figuration as uniform and exchangeable. Frustrated with the dogged similarities of Asian American women re- presented and circulated among disciplinary circuits of racialization, gendering, and multiculturalism vis-à-vis the liberal academy, Kang re-sensitizes us to such equivalences through generic induction and forgery. The principle of uninterrogated and uninterrupted identity often presents itself a crucible, a Law that seals off possible fissures and differenciations that threaten to operate “against the law” of resemblance and generality. 29 It is rather the unpredictability of variegated, bizarre, and precarious probabilities for identity, the penumbra of “stuff,” if you will, that could pose a productive problem for translation, but that is instead rendered away at the hail of continuity rather than what continuity affords: “the variation of an intensity in an idea or sensation.” 30 Juidith Butler discusses the Althusserian turn as a concealed strangeness. Negatively charged in a virtual guilt, the turn “is not necessitated by the hailing; it is compelling, in less than a logical sense, because it promises identity.” 31 What follows are two inductions of Asian American women as conceptual personae unable, as Whitman puts it, to “contain multitudes.” China Mary and la china poblana 28 Ibid., 14, my italics. 29 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 2. 30 Williams, Gilles Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition, 12. 31 Ibid., 108. 114 emerge through arrays of singularities, 32 fractal particularizations at the fringes of a naturalized category. These “women” reveal a static integral to Asian American categorization and individuation, an exemplary status that reveals an afforded consistency, a limitless series of instantiations whose unwieldiness compels a strange form of community. While conceptual personae offer a prehensility of relative impartiality, they also present the heterotopic problematization of Descartes’ cogito. 33 (There are entities of identity, Deleuze and Guattari assure us, “other than the created cogito and the presupposed image of thought.” 34 ) Like “Socrates”—through whom we know through a “Plato” who has been reassembled and regenerated from an actual life—conceptual personae are “heteronyms” that render the self as “always a third person.” 35 “In philosophical enunciations” engendering conceptual personae, Deleuze and Guattari tell us, one “do[es] not do something by saying it, but produce[s] movement by thinking it.” 36 “China” as Rhizome Asian American women as conceptual personae offer mutational potentialities for the vertical subject, reactivations of space not unlike the “englobing” (i.e., as englobar connotes below) of the Spanish permutations of la China, chino, and china during the era of the many-headed 32 “A singularity is just this becoming of the sensible, the virtual power of the sensible, its untimely possibility. […] Singularities are not images within time—not perceptions organised into a coherent and ordered world— they are the events from which the difference of time flows. Time, or the flow of life, is just this pulsation of sensible events or singularities, which we then experience and perceive as an actual world.” Colebrook, Gilles Deleuze, 127. 33 See Foucault and Miskowiec, “Of Other Spaces.” 34 Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, 61. “Actually there is something else, somewhat mysterious that appears from time to time of that shows through and seems to have a hazy existence halfway between concept and and preconceptual plane, passing from one to the other” 35 Rodowick, “Unthinkable Sex: Conceptual Personae and the Time-Image.” 36 Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, 64. 115 nao de Manila, also known as the Acapulco-Manila Galleon Trade of 1565 to 1815. 37 The first Asians of the Americas, Sucheng Chan explains that in amidst these many-headed New World routes, “Filipino and Chinese sailors and stewards were employed in the specially constructed ships that carried cargoes of Chinese luxury goods between Manila and Acapulco by the late sixteenth century, while some Chinese merchants had set up shop in Mexico City by the seventeenth.” 38 In his 1971 biography of the icon Catarina de San Juan: Princesa de la India y visionaria de Puebla, the celebrated Mexican art historian Francisco de la Maza depicts the fascinating mutability of these terms. We embark upon his virtual seventeenth-century galleon: La nao de la China zarpó de Manila en mayo de 1621. Venía cargada de ricas y abundantes mercaderías para la Nueva y la Antigua España. El viento, leal, curvó las velas hacia Oriente…. Sobre la cubierta de la nao se veían, además de los marineros españoles, portugueses y novohispanos, algunas familias criollas; frailes de San Augustín y de la Merced; varios filipinos, chinos de Cantón, isleños de Java, indostanos de Coromandel y de Malabar. Para los blancos, los demás eran “chinos,” aunque sus ojos no fueran oblicuos y su tez fuera morena. Todo que venía de Luzón y Mindanao era “chino” y, con más razón, los filipinos…. 37 “This trade became one of the most lucrative and enduring global enterprises the world had seen at the time. Acapulco’s place in this global enterprise was epic. Scholars have noted that Acapulco was the “epicenter of this transnational enterprise, a feat that communicated empires and that brought its men closer together despite the wide variety of tongues and creeds.” The Acapulco-Manila galleons were often referred to as the “Nao of China,” due to the overwhelming amount of Chinese goods that were sent to Mexico.4 These trans-Pacific voyages were responsible for the lucrative trading that occurred, which included precious metals, an enormous array of luxury goods, medicinal plants, agricultural products, and people. The ways in which both Mexicans and Filipinos crossed vast oceans to live and become part of each other’s societies attests to an extensive historical connection that had lasting implications on each other’s history.” Guevarra, Jr., “Mexipino: Multiethnic Identity and the Formation of the Mexican and Filipino Communities of San Diego, 1900-65,” 19– 20. 38 Asian Americans: An Interpretive History, 25. 116 La legendaria y misteriosa nación china, el Celeste Imperio, fue llamada por los griegos, de la cual no tenían la menor idea, la Sérica o país de la seda. Marco Polo la llamó Catay, y los portugueses China, desde el siglo XV, derivando el nombre de Tsin, por llamarse entonces así de la dinastía reinante. Con el nombre de China se englobaron grandes regiones, si bien distinguiéndose dos importantes: Cipango, el Japón, y el Gran Mogor o Mogol, o sea, la India. 39 *** The Manila Galleon embarked from Manila in May of 1621. It came stocked with riches and an abundant goods destined for both New and Old Spain. The trusty wind turned the sails toward the Orient…. On the deck of the galleon one could see, in addition to the Spanish, Portuguese and New World sailors, several criollo families; monks from San Augustine and Merced; various Filipinos, Cantonese, Javanese islanders, Indians from Coromandel and Malabar. For the whites, all of these were “chinos,” even if their eyes were not slender nor was their skin brown. All from Luzón and Mindanao were also “chino” as well as, more sensibly, the Filipinos. The legendary and mysterious Chinese nation, the Celestial Empire, was named by the Greeks, of which they not the slightest knowledge, [la Sérica] or silk country. Marco Polo named it Cathay, the Portugese China, from the fifteenth century, deriving it from the name Qing, so as to name it after the reigning dynasty. With the name China it englobed great regions, even if it had to distinguish itself from two others: Cipango, Japan, and the Great Mughal or Mogor, in other words, India. “The role of conceptual personae is to show thought’s territories, its absolute deterritorializations and reterritorializations.” 40 If we posit that conceptual personae are to thought as minor literature is to language, la china engages in a stammering work of mutation. Contextualized by the description of her immanent passage, her figure neither reiterates a formal model nor reproduces an Asian American woman whom we are compelled to reterritorialize into non-ambivalence or subsume into a silence-to-voice model. La china then “do[es] not add one more work to the great tradition; it disrupts and dislocates the 39 de la Maza, Catarina, 21. 40 Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, 69. their italics. 117 tradition.” 41 Theatrical characters conceived through enunciation, conceptual personae are “true agents of enunciation” 42 generated by the utterance. (Divesting the speaking subject’s intentionality and identity, Deleuze and Guattari deploy “utterance” and “stammering” in lieu of a “speaking” that is neither not coherently speech nor situated at or produced from the mouth. 43 PART I: China Mary Joan Didion, Author of Enunciation H. Jennifer Brady describes novelist Joan Didion as a Sacramento native, New York denizen, and “mythographer of the West Coast.” 44 Didion is a counter-critic of the traditional U.S. frontier imaginary as promoted, for example, in John Peck’s 1837 New Guide to the West and its allegorical claim of an Eldorado discoverable just beyond the ever-extending boundary of the United States. 45 The idea is informed by John Turner’s 1893 classic The Frontier in American History, where American democracy’s self-reliance and optimistic individualism undergird the wane and retrospection of the late-nineteenth century U.S. frontier. 46 “For both Turner and Didion,” observes Brady, “the closing of the frontiers signaled the turning point of American history, an event as definitive in its implications as the expulsion from Eden.” 47 41 Colebrook, Gilles Deleuze, 103. 42 Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, 65. 43 “In enunciation, in the production of utterances, there is no subject, but always collective agents.” Deleuze and Parnet, Dialogues II, 71. 44 Brady, “Points West, Then and Now: The Fiction of Joan Didion,” 454. 45 Ibid., 453. 46 Ibid. 47 Ibid., 454. 118 Yet such American sanguinity is dubious for Didion. Her 1963 debut novel Run River portrays the deteriorating marriage of Lily Knight to Everett McClellan, a landed Sacramento couple whose settler ancestry harks of the Turnerian ethos of Western expansion. A “child of the frontier promise” with roots in pioneering Anglo-American families that tacked through nineteenth-century Kentucky, West Virginia, Missouri, and the Sacramento Valley, 48 Didion makes clear—despite the “truth” of her clarification—that Run River is not exactly autobiographical. It wasn’t except that it took place in Sacramento. A lot of people there seemed to think that I had somehow maligned them and their families, but it was just a made-up story. The central incident came from a little one-inch story in The New York Times about a trial in the Carolinas. Someone was on trial for killing the foreman on his farm, that’s all there was. I think I really put the novel in Sacramento because I was homesick. I wanted to remember the weather and the rivers. 49 If this a-biographical claim is by the writer about “the author,” Run River is haunted, by the New York Times murder and pervasive vision of the Turnerian frontier, and Didion’s own experiences and arborescent genealogy (“The author is a subject of enunciation but the writer—who is not an author—is not” 50 ). Didion is thus a “subject of enunciation … first of all a spirit: sometimes [s]he identifies with his characters or makes us identify with them, or with the idea they represent; sometimes, on the other hand, [s]he introduces a distance which allows [she] and us to observe, to criticize, to prolong. But this is no good. The author creates a world, but there is no world which awaits us to be created.” 51 Insofar as there is a possible claim of Run River’s non-correspondence (or mere coincidence) with actuality 48 Ibid., 454–5. 49 Didion, “The Art of Fiction No. 71.” 50 Deleuze and Parnet, Dialogues II, 51. 51 Ibid., 52. 119 despite the novel’s autobiographical probabilities, “real life” is reciprocally and parasitically haunted by what Borges might call lo irreal, and Derrida the “spectral law” of testimony. 52 For Deleuze it is, famously, the virtual. An irrevocable ambiguity between actuality and virtuality is invoked with the persona of China Mary. Let’s examine her instantiation in Run River. Run River’s China Mary China Mary. She was an entrepreneur par excellence who ran a multifaceted business empire. “Madam” was only one of the hats she wore. She was the absolute ruler of Tombstone’s “Hoptown,” a slang name for the Chinese community. —“Richard Selcer’s Top 10 Madams of the Old West” 53 A vital part of the infrastructure of the McClellan household in Joan Didion’s Run River is China Mary, the veteran housekeeper, nanny and domestic-space manager who has worked for Everett’s family, the McClellans, since the days of his grandmother’s matronage. Unlike other minor characters in the novel who appear less ambiguously racialized, 54 China Mary’s virtually silent but salient presence might be read as a haunting one that strangely thwarts our desire to assign her a stable ethnic qualification. With a trust in Didion’s text that undermines her own skepticism of “formulat[ing] a meaningful regional literary history through a realist-based aesthetic,” Krista Comer surmises that China Mary’s “speech patterns” indicate that she is African American. 55 Yet Run River gestures toward the 52 Derrida and Blanchot, The Instant of My Death / Demeure, 91. 53 Selcer, “Wild West’s Top Ten.” 54 Gomez, for instance, is the ranch manager whom Everett’s father in law Walter Knight alleges to pay “more than any Mexican in the Valley,” Didion, Run River, 36. 55 Comer, Landscapes of the New West, 41, 73. 120 character as ethnically Chinese, especially if we consider the currency of the terms “John Chinaman” and “China Mary” in the nineteenth-century U.S. West. However, the text indeed only gestures. At the level of its literal style and technics of quotation, the narrative purposefully obscures China Mary’s “speech” as well as her voice—and along with these the decidable issue of her racial identity. Who is Run River’s China Mary? This is the longest passage that invokes her: In the beginning the afternoon was no more than a question of sugar, or the lack of it. China Mary had baked four cakes and given them as prizes in a parish raffle; when Lily asked her what they were going to use for sugar during the rest of October— during the entire rest of 1944, for that matter, since China Mary had traded some of their November stamps to her sister for extra sugar—China Mary shrugged and continued whistling “Coming in on a Wing and a Prayer.” Good works, Lily wanted her to know, would cut no ice down at the OPA. It was one thing for China Mary to go around ingratiating herself with Father Ford; it was quite another to do it with the whole family’s sugar stamps. There were some women in this world, announced China Mary, untying her apron and throwing it at Lily’s feet, a great many women in this world—for example that saint (God rest her) who had been Everett’s and Martha’s and Sarah’s mother—who would count God more important than a little bitty sugar. Thirty years she had worked on this ranch and no McClellan, not one, had ever tried to tell her how to run her kitchen, and there were some spoiled young ladies who were going to be punished by God if they didn’t start thinking about their Church once in a while. “It’s not my Church,” Lily had snapped, aware that she was beaten: her error, as Martha observed immediately, had been the mention of Father Ford, who had personally brought about China Mary’s conversion and secured a place high on her personal hagiology by assuring her that Dennis Kearney, who with several hundred exclusionist followers had set fire to a San Francisco laundry operated by China Mary’s grandfather in 1877, had probably been a bad Catholic if indeed he had been a Catholic at all. As Martha pointed out, Lily would never learn how to get around China Mary if she couldn’t get it through her head not to mention Father Ford. 56 It is 1944; Lily squabbles with China Mary over sugar, scarce during this wartime era of President Roosevelt’s Office of Price Administration and food ration stamps. 57 As one 56 Didion, Run River, 115–6. 57 Barton, “World War II Foods.” 121 critic observes, due to carefully dated events in Run River (Knight senior’s death in 1848, for example), we never “lose the sense of precise historical time.” 58 China Mary has worked at the McClellan estate for thirty years, which dates the beginning of her employment there at about 1914 and calibrates her time with the family between the two world wars. Whether she lives with the McClellans, and whether the space of the house and the kitchen is currently her only home is unclear—yet her authority within this arena is unmistakable, even despite the sardonic tone above that describes her as stubborn, domineering and, to the extent that her name invokes some kind of racialization, perhaps negligent of her implied relationship of subservience to the McClellans. At the excerpt’s surface, as indeed throughout much of Run River, tenses and voices shift without a consistent or identifiable system of quotation or citation. Yet China Mary’s dominant logic and “voice,” leaves room for a merely superfluous citation of Lily’s voice (“It’s not my Church,”) immediately after which Lily knows she has lost her battle. China Mary does not officially “speak.” She whistles and sings, yet Run River never demarcates her voice with quotation marks, nor can we rely on its narration for the exactitude of her words or diction. The novel signposts the two World Wars and other major events in the lives of the McClellans and the Knights, as it depicts China Mary’s palpable intimacy with the McClellans, and her authority over and knowledge of their home (“China Mary sings Knight a song about how you’re off to get a rabbit skin to wrap your baby bunny in, which delights him to no end”; “If, after querying China Mary and checking the pockets of all the coats in all the closets, they could still find no change in the house, they played for 58 Henderson, Joan Didion, 42. 122 toothpicks…” 59 ). Despite her haziness, China Mary’s personal history is conspicuously under Run River’s radar—that is, except for the year 1877. In 1877 China Mary’s grandfather ran a laundry in San Francisco. According to Paul Ong, “[t]he Chinese entered the laundry industry soon after they began immigrating to the United states in large numbers in 1848. By 1853 Chinese laundrymen were a common sight in may parts of the state. By the end of that decade Chinese easily constituted a majority of the laundry workers, marking the beginnings of an occupational specialization. In the following three decades the Chinese continued to dominate the occupation, comprising over three-quarters of the work force.” 60 We also know that the grandfather’s laundry was burned down or was at least set on fire by Dennis Kearney—arguably a metonym for the violence of the 1877 anti-Chinese race riots that he incited, though Jerome Hart notes that “California had for many years been opposed to Chinese immigration. Kearney discovered no new issue; all he did was to capitalize an old issue in order to win over the discontented workingmen.” He was a vociferous leader of the pro-labor Workingmen’s Party and an orator who gave lectures throughout California on his anti-immigrations and anti-Chinese views. Early in his career he “concentrated on one issue, and concocted the slogan, ‘The Chinese Must Go!’ With this he began and ended his speeches.” 61 The 1877 riots led up to the following year’s state legislation that explicitly prohibited Chinese property ownership. 62 Unlike Lee in Steinbeck’s East of Eden, who comes into sharper relief and particularization—fully human once he drops his pidgin and speaks a standard English—Run 59 Didion, Run River, 109, 108. 60 Ong, “An Ethnic Trade,” 95. 61 Hart, “The Kearney-Kalloch Epoch (online).” 62 Ibid. 123 River’s China Mary never accedes to “true voice” or standard diction demarcated by citational syntax. The text haunts her with an inscrutability and non-particularity, that is to say, a dogged genericity. Her name has a larger North American historical context that proves equally elusive. With fewer documented references than those of its male counterpart “John Chinaman,” 63 “China Mary” was probably coined at some point during the nineteenth century by English speakers of the U.S. West as a generic term for Chinese women in general. Curiously flexible, the name was embraced by many of the women whom it addressed as a proper American name. Rumination upon the label reveals further paradoxicality. A reader might infer a sense of airy jocularity from the dated name, overlooking its superficially incorrect grammatical construction. Why isn’t the term “Chinese Mary” or “Mary Chinawoman,” to pair with “John Chinaman?” Of the gendered pair, which term came first? As a proper noun instead of an adjective, the “China” in China Mary stubbornly signifies a place/geographical site, the bounded location of a foreign nation-state, perhaps implying some congruency to America or California. Again stubbornly, it modifies, derides or even exceptionalizes the otherwise mundane familiarity or exemplary iconicity of the name Mary. There seem to have been instances of a “China Anne” 64 and a “China Polly” (after Polly Bemis, a lately renowned Chinese Idahoan frontierswoman), but the most widely used of these names was clearly Mary. What caused Mary to stick versus another common name? Does the name refer to the Christian Mary in its religious and/or exceptional connotations? If so, to which 63 Although we should avoid the assumption that that these were used to describe couples because I have not yet found an instance where “John Chinaman” and “China Mary” are used to describe a man and woman together, and neither are the terms used plurally. 64 “PBS - ‘Ancestors in the Americas’.” A voiceover from Loni Ding’s documentary of the same name. 124 Mary, the mother of Christ or perhaps more aptly Mary Magdalene, whose trade as a prostitute continues to be disputed? Lucie Cheng Hirata notes that among the first Chinese women in the United States was very likely “a twenty-year-old prostitute from Hong Kong who landed in San Francisco late in 1848.” 65 Perhaps the standardization of the moniker has something to do not only with the high ratio of Chinese women who worked as prostitutes, but also with the figure’s discursive life; according to Kang, “[t]he nineteenth-century Chinese prostitute appears in the earliest discursive productions of and by Asian/American women.” 66 Hirata does not mention the name of this Hong Kong woman, 67 but she is probably Ah Toy, a prostitute and later madam also known as China Mary. According to Sylvia Anne Sheafer she was the second Chinese woman to arrive in San Francisco in 1849, the first to become involved in a Chinese-against-Chinese civil suit. 68 Historian Judy Yung cursorily discusses the generic name in her chapter called “Rural Life,” which attempts to survey the Chinese diasporic scatterings in the American West after the Gold Rush. “[D]ue to language barriers and prejudices,” says Yung, “Chinese women were rarely fully understood or accepted. Rather, they were considered curiosities and given ‘generic’ names like ‘China Mary,’ just as their men were generally referred to as ‘John Chinaman.’” 69 Yung tells of two 65 Hirata, “Free, Indentured, Enslaved: Chinese Prostitutes in Nineteenth-Century America.” Hirata quotes C. Gentry, Madams of San Francisco (New York: Doubleday, 1964), but does not identify the woman’s name. 66 Kang, Compositional Subjects, 304. 67 Hirata, “Free, Indentured, Enslaved.” 68 qtd. in “Storytelling Guide: an Analysis of the interweaving of Themes, Content, Voices, Images in Ancestors, Part 2 Chinese In The Frontier West: An American Story,” Center for Educational Telecommunications, 1998. <http://www.cetel.org/classguide2.html>. 69 Yung, Chinese Women of America, 25. 125 particular China Marys that “led a unique life,” but whose details barely flesh out a sustained biography. China Mary of Sitka, Alaska, for example, ran away from her riverboat home in China when she was nine and worked her way to Canada when she was thirteen. Widowed twice, she settled in rugged Sitka, where she learned English and the language of the Tlingit Indians. A rough, hard-working woman, she was an expert fisherwoman, hunter and prospector. Her other occupations included cooking; operating restaurants, laundries, and dairy and fox farms; and serving as a midwife, nurse, and official matron of the federal jail in Sitka. China Mary of Evanston, Wyoming, outlived three wealthy Chinese husbands and died at the age of one hundred in 1939. Her real name was Ah Yuen. Well known for her beauty, friendliness, and ability to speak English, she was the “toast of her countrymen” throughout the mining and railroad camps of the West. She worked as a cook during the pony express days and always made a point of participating in Evanston’s annual Cowboy Days celebration. When she died, she was buried in the Evanston City Cemetery in black embroidered silk clothing she had saved for occasion. 70 ) Other traces of singular and biographical data are linked across various locations and hypertextual China Marys. 71 In Evanston, Wyoming, there was a China Mary who was “the first Chinese person to own property north of Chinatown.” 72 (Evanston, incidentally, also has a street called China Mary Road. 73 ) In Arizona’s Tombstone Boothill Cemetery, a gravestone reads: “Born in China, Died in Tombstone Dec. 6, 1906, Aged 67 Years.” 74 This China Mary 70 Ibid. 71 “Hypertext, a term coined by Theodor H. Nelson in the 1960s, refers also to a form of electronic text, a radically new information technology, and a mode of publication. “By ‘hypertext,’ “ Nelson explains, “I mean non-sequential writing -- text that branches and allows choices to the reader, best read at an interactive screen. As popularly conceived, this is a series of text chunks connected by links which offer the reader different pathways.” Landow, “The Definition of Hypertext and Its History as a Concept.” 72 Gardner, “Chinese Woman in Evanston from 1896 to 1900.” 73 In zip code 82930. 74 Lacy, “Below the Mogollon Rim.” 126 was the wife of Ah Lum, co-owner of the Can-Can Restaurant with Quong Keel Ah Lum was also the “Worshipful Master of the Chinese Masonic Lodge.” China Mary was the absolute ruler of “Hoptown” and all its denizens. She not only ruled them but also virtually owned them body and soul. Her word and her decisions were undisputed law, and none disobeyed. It was extremely unusual for a woman, any woman, to occupy such a position in the American West…. In spite of all her shady operations and the fact that she was Chinese, Mary was respected and well-liked in Tombstone. She would lend money to anyone who impressed her as honest and hard-working. No sick, injured or hungry person was ever turned from her door. She once took a cowboy with a broken leg to the Grand Central Boarding House and paid the bill until he recovered. At her death, a large number of people attended her burial in the Chinese section of Boothill. Her funeral had all the pomp and ceremony of a lavish Chinese extravaganza. 75 These hypertextual China Marys are, in their heroic embellishment, biographical and satisfying, as if China Mary’s generic anonymity could better function as a proper name in the cyberworld of “fiction,” otherwise known as “simulation and simulacra.” 76 Unlike the X of Malcolm X, the variable par excellence that denotes pure exchangeability and the violent deletion of a once given name—Didion’s China Mary, and the generic name that traveled through the nineteenth-century U.S. frontier, are distinctly enigmatic. They neither refer to renaming or nominal erasure, nor ring of one bearer’s exceptional status. Virtual Testimony In Where I Was From, Didion quotes Carey McWiliams’ claim that anti-Asian sentiment was “a social and psychic necessity of the situation” 77 to foreground Saxon Brown and Billy Roberts, characters in Jack London’s The Valley of the Moon. Saxon and Billy invoke the “truculence on the question of immigration … in California” and nineteenth-century anti- 75 Traywick, Tombstone’s Boothill; “Boothill,” The Spell of the West; also see Johnson, “Boothill.” 76 Derrida and Blanchot, The Instant of My Death / Demeure, 29. 77 McWilliams, California, The Great Exception, 185. 127 Asian sentiment that helped to manufacture the imagined community of California and perhaps the more general the idea of the West as “illusion[s] of a cohesive community joined against the menace of the foreign-born.” 78 Within a short catalog of racist Californian laws that she uses to punctuate the exclusionary American “spirit” of Saxon and Billy, London’s “two ‘real’ Americans,” Didion refers to California Supreme Court case People v. Hall, in which a prior conviction a white man was reversed because the judgment was based on the testimony of Chinese witnesses. “In 1854,” she tells us, without naming the case, “an existing law prohibiting Negroes and Indians from testifying in court had been extended to also prohibit testimony by Chinese.” 79 Didion’s reference to People v. Hall draws a relationship between induction and the parasitical and paradoxical relationship of testimony to the literary in Derrida’s in Demeure: Fiction and Testimony—a text that began as “a way of seeing.” 80 We understand testimony as that which is uncontaminated by the virtual, that is, “unrelated to literature and especially, in literature, to what presents itself as fiction, simulation, or simulacra.” 81 Despite its claim as incontrovertible, clear, and irreplaceable, in order to maintain its veracity, testimony is based upon the specter fiction—which we might also call literature. “[T]here is no testimony that does not structurally imply in itself the possibility of fiction,” says Derrida. 82 The 78 Didion, Where I Was From, 78–9. 79 Ibid., 79. 80 Derrida and Blanchot, The Instant of My Death / Demeure: Fiction and Testimony, 15. 81 Ibid., 29. 82 “If this possibility that it seems to prohibit were effectively excluded, if testimony thereby became proof, information, certainty, or archive, it would lose its function as testimony. In order to remain testimony, it must therefore allow itself to be haunted.” Ibid. 128 haunting is a stylistic threat to Platonic stylelessness 83 and the imminent invasion of fiction. In prohibiting the perceptibly stylistic, the law secures viable testimony based on the fiction’s expungibility. Undergirding the genericity and particularity of “China Mary,” People v. Hall signposts the nineteenth-century sentiment of “pervasive racial hostility toward Asians.” 84 The case is itself a latent fiction that haunts London’s “American” fiction that, despite its own literary status, attempts to prohibit a dangerous simulacra subjectivity that undergirds the generic voice vis-à-vis the law and the court. When Martha whispers to Lily within unambiguous quotation marks, “You’ve got no right to my brother,” Lily is “less angry than frightened: harsh words between women seemed to her unthinkable, an irreparable rent in the social fabric.” 85 Martha can damage relations between women in speakable ways that China Mary cannot; although China Mary’s power in the McClellan household looms large, her exact speech and particularity are syntactically held at bay. The haunting is a stylistic threat to Platonic stylelessness 86 and the imminent invasion of fiction. In prohibiting style, the law secures viable testimony based on the fiction’s expungibility. Undergirding the genericity and particularity of “China Mary,” People v. Hall signposts the nineteenth-century sentiment of “pervasive racial hostility toward Asians.” 87 The case is itself a latent fiction that haunts London’s “American” fiction that, despite its own literary status, attempts to prohibit dangerous simulacra undergirding the generic voice vis-à-vis the law and the court. The racialized voice haunts stylelessness, in other words. 83 Plato, Phaedrus. 84 Didion, Where I Was From, 78. 85 Derrida and Blanchot, The Instant of My Death / Demeure, 29. 86 Phaedrus. 87 Didion, Where I Was From, 78. 129 When Martha whispers to Lily within unambiguous quotation marks, “You’ve got no right to my brother,” Lily is “less angry than frightened: harsh words between women seemed to her unthinkable, an irreparable rent in the social fabric.” 88 Martha can damage relations between women in speakable ways that China Mary cannot; although China Mary’s power in the McClellan household looms large, her exact speech and particularity are syntactically held at bay. Syntax and punctuation problematize citation and voice in Run River. As if heralding truthful testimony, quotation marks indicate the unadulterated site of citation, as if speech were occurring at this very moment. Quotation marks elevate “liveness” above the mediated text in a “quasi-mechanical reproducibility.” 89 Run River’s text parries China Mary’s testimonial bounds. It toys with its own access to the tools that produce the particularization of a “China Mary” or “Asian American woman.” “China Mary” cannot help but to refer to a complete package of static racial identity. But Didion makes her character’s voice inimitable. Just as the author foils the pluralist/multiculturalist thrusts of the 1970s and the uninterrogable categories of minority subjects to whose adherents “the idea that fiction has certain irreducible ambiguities seemed never to occur … nor should it have, for fiction is in most ways hostile to ideology,” 90 she will not let us get to the bottom of China Mary. Run 88 Derrida and Blanchot, The Instant of My Death / Demeure, 29. 89 “In the law, the testimonial tends … to exclude all technical agency. One cannot send a cassette to testify in one’s place. One must oneself be present, raise one’s hand, speak in the first person and in the present, and one must do this in order to testify to a present, to an indivisible moment, that is, at a certain point to a moment assembled at the tip of an instantaneousness which must resist division. If that to which I testify is divisible, if my attestation is divisible, at that moment it is no longer reliable, it no longer has the value of truth, reliability, or veracity that it claims absolutely…. The moment one is a witness and the moment one attests, bears witness, the instant one gives testimony, there must also be a temporal sequence—sentences, for example—and, above all, these sentences must promise their own repetition and thus their own quasi-mechanical reproducibility.” Ibid., 32–33. 90 Didion, The White Album, 112. 130 River’s incorporates a fallout of the live truth-telling voice whose immediacy and sonic materiality cannot be linked to an individual mouth, as diction, idiom, and accent remain hauntingly available. O John! Let’s consider an excerpt from Yong Chen’s Chinese San Francisco, 1850-1943: A Trans- Pacific Community (2000), 91 in which two sources are quilted together: an Atlantic Monthly article from 1870 and a California guidebook from 1873. Note the ways in which both double and single quotations work and are layered in this historiography, as Chen underscores his own historiographical techn ē. In an 1870 article S. Andrews recalled an earlier encounter with a Chinese laundryman in a San Francisco hotel: “John! John! O John!” he called loudly, only to be ignored. Andrews then ran toward him and said: “I want you to do some washing for me, John.” “‘Me not John,’” the laundryman replied firmly. Andrews remembered that moment well: “He answered with some dignity, handing me his card, on which I read, ‘Hop Long.’” At the time white Americans called all Chinese “indiscriminately by the easy euphonious appellation of ‘John.’” 92 Clearly, Hop Long refused the insulting appellation and asserted his own identity. 93 Chen’s management of already-mediated citations of S. Andrews’ experience and Nordhoff’s ear for the “euphonious” induces a testimony of disidentification with the moniker “John Chinaman.” These quote-technics weave around and simultaneously expose a certain illegibility of the misrecognized subject through which emerge questions not unlike the ones we have been asking about China Mary. What can be known besides this re-interpellated 91 Chen, Chinese San Francisco, 1850-1943. 92 Chen notes that in Charles Nordhoff’s California, for Health, Pleasure and Residence the chapter on the Chinese in California is titled “John.” 93 Chen, Chinese San Francisco, 1850-1943, 124. Chen cites S. Andrews, “Wo Lee and his Kinsfolk,” Atlantic Monthly 25 (Feb. 1870): 224. 131 resistance? Does the laundryman, if he is a laundryman, verbally respond to Andrews with a Chinese name, and if so, why is this elided? Why does he hand Andrews a card? And what kind of card is it, some identity card or a business card? Is Hop Long the name of the Chinese man’s laundry and not his own name, in which case Chen affords him yet another méconnaissance? In this excerpt, the card, all or part of whose text this “Hop Long” appears within quotes, deceptively clarifies what the speaking voice cannot, as Chen represents citations haunted by latent divisibility, non-singularity and that which lies beyond their formal quotation. The card represents—or evades representing—what the euphony of “John” implies: the cacophony of the Chinese man’s actually spoken name, whether his name indeed is or is not “Hop Long,” and his potentially accented voice. Here we see—or conspicuously fail to hear—the substrate that drops out of textual quotation, the voice’s very literal materiality and sound. Among the various qualities of the experience of speaking in a voice or listening to one, are its temporal immediacy (that Derrida would say is an example of something paradoxically “singular in general … it refers … has a unique, factual, and undeniable referent—and an irreplaceable signature” 94 , timbre, volume, and the euphony or cacophony of its accent to a contingent listener, all demoted by the quotation’s negligence of sound’s necessary stylization and its encroachment upon standardized language. When the materiality of the written word, on the other hand, represents or attempts an incorporation the accented voice, what we get is unmistakable style, the pidgin genre of “Chinese” orality and irreverent violation of proper syntax. With regard to Run River, What Krista Comer thinks is a realistic black diction is a foil; Didion wants to empty out assumptions of Chineseness by making us aware of what we do not really hear. Where China Mary is brought forth by Run 94 Derrida and Blanchot, The Instant of My Death / Demeure, 91. 132 River, the text parries the clarity of her testimonial bounds, toying with its own access to the technics of its particularization of an Asian American woman. PART II: La china poblana [A]hora sale mi china; esa hija de México tan linda como su cielo azul; tan fresco como sus jardines floridos, y tan risueña y alegre como las mañanas deliciosas de esta tierra bendita de Dios y de sus santos.… La china tiene otra cualidad inappreciable en los tiempos que corren: jamás padece enfermedades morales ni de conveniencia, y nació á prueba de jaquecas, convulsions de nervios, desmayos y demás agregados adherentes al sexo delicado lánguido y romántico por añadidura…. 95 *** Here comes my china; the daughter of Mexico as lovely as its blue sky; as refreshing as its flowering gardens, and as cheerful and smiling as the delightful mornings of this land blessed by God and his Saints…. La china has yet another quality that we no longer value in these times: she suffers from neither moral infirmity nor self interest, as she was born immune to headaches, nervous convulsions, fainting, and other attributes appointed to the delicate, weak, and not to mention romantic, sex. — “La china,” D. José María Rivera, 1855 An emblem for Mexican womanhood whose story emerges during the forging of the Americas, la china poblana—referred to as la china, or even more endearingly as la chinita 96 —the legendary figure also known as the devout Catarina de San Juan (c. 1607- 1688) stirs perplexing potentialities for “Asian American women,” a welcome figure in the context of what Lisa Lowe describes as the relatively “sparse[] attention to the role of Chinese and Indian migrations to the early Americas.” 97 Discussions of la china poblana as an early Asian American woman have been pioneered by historian Evelyn Hu-Dehart and literary critic Roshni Rustomji-Sterns, both who have wrestled with the archival 95 Rivera, “La china,” 90–91. 96 Bailey, Art on the Jesuit Missions in Asia and Latin America, 1542-1773, 39. 97 Lowe, “Haunted by Empire,” 192. 133 strangenesses and silences that make it difficult to accord this figure clear narratavizability. 98 “Mirrah-Catarina does seem to be the first person from India—and maybe from Asia—in the Americas about whom we have extensive written contemporary accounts.” 99 Scholars once positioned at the fringes of the Asian American Studies, Hu-DeHart and Sterns have also encountered their object’s tricky instantiation and rendering into a viable depiction of la china poblana’s true life and times, and of presenting her as an Asian American woman. The only certainty about la china is her irrevocable ambiguity. Wearing “many faces and no face,” she is utterly beyond the sum of her parts. 100 “She is ageless—we do not know when she was born, nor when she will die. Her origin is equally hard to pinpoint, though she has passed undisturbed through centuries of our history, wearing her glittering, ornate costume with pride and poise … the product of innumerable images, legends, myths and fantasies.” 101 Narrations of la china poblana tend toward depictions of “a life” in an indefinite sense, a narrative induction or coincidence despite the chaotic, swarming ruptures within identity’s firm grounds. Forging la china and Mirra‐Catarina “In the china poblana lies the very essence of Mexicanness,” writes one critic 102 ; another observes that the modern-day china poblana, a.k.a. la china, connotes an archetypical “well- 98 “The main sources for Catarina’s life are three published texts, namely, a funeral sermon by Francisco de Aguilera, S.J., and hagiographies by Alonso Ramos, S.J., and José del Castillo Grajeda [also R-S Amerasia 29]. For his Sermón, Aguilera consulted the notebooks of Father Ramos, who had served as Catarina’s confessor for the last fifteen years of her life.” Morgan, Spanish American Saints, 119. 99 Rustomji-Kerns, “Mirrha-Catarina de San Juan: From India to New Spain,” 29. 100 de Orellana, “Para vestirse de mexicana (China Poblana: Dressing Mexican),” 65. 101 Ibid. 102 de Orellana, “Para vestirse de mexicana (China Poblana: Dressing Mexican),” 65. 134 dressed, independent mestiza woman.” 103 Various critics of literature and history, following in the footsteps of the clerics who penned hagiographic accounts of her life some years after her death in 1688, 104 have attempted to excavate and render coherent narrations of la china’s true life and times by hemming together fragments and navigating through the “myriad of [her] guises ranging from humble, obedient, and virginal—to flirtatious and promiscuous, a precipitator of men’s demise.” 105 Jeanne L. Gillespie begins her essay on la china poblana by visualizing “a dark-haired, dark-eyed young Mexican woman dancing the jarabe tapatío (Mexican Hat Dance) and wearing a white embroidered blouse, a full green skirt adorned with ribbons, and a red rebozo (shawl).” 106 This image is enhanced by Luís Andrade’s celebration of Puebla’s monument in erected in 1941, 107 an edifice whose renovation was celebrated in 2007 and dedicated to the figure that, “with her multicolored sequined cap, her richly embroidered bodice and the irreplaceable fringed shawl, forged forever[] not merely the icon, but the national archetype of the virtuous Mexican woman.” 108 As with China Mary, the motif of forging or forgery (forjar, in Spanish) is evident. “Originally a symbol of civic pride for the city of Puebla,” says another scholar, “she went on to epitomize the 103 Gillespie, “Imagination Beyond Nation.” 104 Morgan, Spanish American Saints, 119. 105 Risse, “Catarina De San Juan and the China Poblana: From Spiritual Humility to Civil Obedience,” 70. 106 “Imagination Beyond Nation,” 19. 107 Hu-DeHart, “La China Poblana and Other Constructions of Asian Latinos/as,” 1. 108 “CATARINA DE SAN JUAN, creadora del clásico tipo nacional femenino de la ‘China Poblana’ … forjó para siempre … el ARQUETIPO NACIONAL de la virtuosa mujer Mexicana ….” Luis G. Andrade (1941) qtd. in R. Carrasco Puente, “Bibliografía De Catarina De San Juan y De La China Poblana,” Secretaria De Relaciones Exteriores, México (1950); also see Bailey, Art on the Jesuit Missions in Asia and Latin America, 1542-1773, 37; Gillespie, “Imagination Beyond Nation,” 19. 135 Republican spirit following the French invasion (1862-1863), and eventually embodied the very essence of México itself.” 109,110 Two strands meet at this the juncture of this icon said to “represent[] all Mexican women.” 111 The first is with regard to her status as national heroine who hails from the city of Puebla, but also del pueblo, i.e., of the town, village, or community. The second emerges from la china’s early seventeenth-century Pacific New World routes during the epoch of the Nao de Manila or Manila Galleon, in whose path a young Indian girl was once upon a time transported not from China, but from Delhi by Portuguese pirates. She “arrived in New Spain aboard the Manila galleon around 1619, at approximately ten years of age.” 112 Sold as a servant or slave to an officer of New Spain, she was baptized by Jesuits in the Philippines, and was revered as a devout Catholic visionary in the religious city 113 of Angelópolis, or Puebla de los Angeles “en la Nueva España, a fines del año de 1621,” 114 where she spent the remainder of her long years. De la Maza beads together her chameleon names: “Mirra, princesa de la India, esclava en Filipinas, se hizo visionaria católica en Puebla. La ‘china’ poblana Catarina de San Juan, pudo ser santa Catarina de Puebla.” 115 He adds a final epithet: “Santa Catarina,” the title yearned for by those who praised the foreign woman’s legendary 109 Bailey, Art on the Jesuit Missions in Asia and Latin America, 1542-1773, 37. 110 La china “attracted the attention of countless foreign artists that captured their image on canvas and on paper,” and her avatars were “celebrated by folk troupes, lauded in poetry, reenacted in plays and cinema, and extolled by politicians.” De Orellana, “Para vestirse de mexicana (China Poblana: Dressing Mexican)”; Bailey, Art on the Jesuit Missions in Asia and Latin America, 1542-1773, 37. 111 de Orellana, “Para vestirse de mexicana (China Poblana: Dressing Mexican).” 112 Morgan, Spanish American Saints, 119. 113 León, Catarina de San Juan. 114 Vargaslugo, “Introducción,” 14. 115 de la Maza, Catarina, 19. 136 religious devotion, and who contributed to the momentum toward her sainthood in the late seventeenth century—an effort muffled by the Catholic church and the Inquisition. 116 If forgery invokes the notion of “excogitation … fictitious invention, [and] fiction,” 117 the novahispana Mirra-Catarina’s continuity and identity with the modern-day china poblana in elaborate folk attire is a forgery said to have been seeded much later in the 1896 Historia de la ciudad de Puebla by Antonio Carrión, 118 an author apparently no stranger to embellishment. 119 The two-tome Historia tells of another devotee who streamlines the heroine’s story by further embroidering her saintly iconicity 120 : con la desaparición de la CHINA POBLANA, acabó el ángel bueno de las clases desheredadas de la Puebla de los Angeles; pero el pueblo, siempre grato, siempre noble y siempre grande, conservó la memoria de su Santa, la imitó en vestir, y de ahí el origen de las CHINAS. 121 *** with the disappearance of the china poblana [i.e., Catarina San Juan], the underprivileged classes of the city of Puebla de los Angeles lost their guardian angel, but the people, ever grateful, noble and good, conserved the memory of the saint, imitating her style of dress, and that is the origin of las chinas. 122 More fastidious critics, however, ascertain an incommensurable gap between the two “worlds” of the Mexican heroine: on one hand, a historiographical account of the pious 116 which banned and led to the disappearance of the Primera parte, the crucial introductory tome of a tripartite hagiography penned by Jesuit father Alonso Ramos in 1692. Morgan, Spanish American Saints. 117 “forgery, n.” 118 Carrión, Historia de la ciudad de Puebla de los angeles. 119 according to León, Catarina de San Juan; Tibón, “Las dos chinas: Catarina de San Juan y la atractiva mestiza (The Two Chinas).” 120 Ramón Mena, whom anthropologist Guiterre Tibón describes as a “the mythomaniac attorney.” Tibón, 66. 121 Mena, “La china poblana (Apunte histórico).” Anales del Museo Nacional de México, ép. 2ª, t. IV, p. 577- 580. México, 1907. Qtd. in Carrasco Puente, “Bibliografía de Catarina de San Juan y de la china poblana,” 78- 81. 122 Qtd. in Tibón, “Las dos chinas: Catarina De San Juan y la atractiva mestiza (The Two Chinas),” 66; León, Catarina de San Juan, 37. 137 Catarina de San Juan, inducted through various interests in and against the extranjera’s possible sainthood; on the other hand is the impeccably dressed and keenly visual poblana woman. Catholic father and ethnographer Nicolás León corroborates no connection between them. “The working class did not imitate her style of dress, as another kind of attire was popular in that era, one much less likely to be the ‘origin of las chinas.’” 123 No one can rest without an attempt to tie or pull apart the two strands that wander “everywhere”—Mirra the Indian girl who becomes “Santa” Catarina de San Juan, and the traditionally dressed “poblana” both Pueblan and peasant—tangled with slippages of linguistic signs, ideas of national and regional pride, and vestiges of national, colonial, and gendered identity. “[T]here is unfortunately there is nothing certain that we know of that can tie together the loose ends of the historical persona and her folk costume.” 124 Only elisions can forge a subjectivating narrative of two Asian American women who cannot be One. Yet we cannot but be compelled by the fascinating attempts to suture together her narratives, in the compelling quest for the whole subject. But this discussion intends neither to validate the historical claims nor the illogical reasoning behind la china’s unlikely iconicity. It is rather to accord her a different venture as a faulty, “open” emblem whose disjunctions, “by the very fact that they are disjunctions, are inclusive.” 125 La china and China Mary, more clearly in the context of their grapplings as “Asian American women,” cannot but emit static, disjunctive overlappings of vital genericities. They question the extent 123 León, Catarina de San Juan, 34, 37. 124 Vargaslugo, “Introducción,” 17. 125 Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 42. “That is because the breaks in the process are productive, and are reassemblies in and of themselves. Disjunctions, by the very fact that they are disjunctions, are inclusive. Even consumptions are transitions, processes of becoming, and returns.” 138 that Asian American women ostensibly matter or are postulated as matter—the axiomatic “matter of fact” of “being” that, insofar as it qualifies a racialized genre (of the human or of woman), quantifies a reified standard of certainty and exchangeability, along with familiar sensibilities of femininity, citizenship, and national pride. Their atomic utterances reveal them as afforded rather than obvious, and without identificatory ends. De la Maza’s Baroque Biography: Catarina de San Juan Let’s return to Francisco de la Maza’s biography (a work said to stand out among his repertoire of texts on novohispano art 126 ), and his genealogy of authors who have attempted to suture together life histories of the eponymous heroine also known as la china. De la Maza sets himself apart from the typical biographer; remarkable about his brief and vibrant text is not the coherent or realist presentation of Catarina’s true life and times. It is rather the text’s embrace of “the rich ornamentation of Baroque art” through a thematic of multilayered visualities and florid potentialities que revestía los templos, de los dorados retablos, de las imágenes estofadas, de las maravillosamente complicadas yeserías polícromas, porque reconoce que esos ámbitos numinosos fueron fuente inspiradora, estimulante, para la imaginación piadosa de Catarina. 127 *** that enveloped the temples, of the gilded altarpieces, of the muiltilayered images, of the marvelously complicated polychromatic plasterwork, because he recognizes that these numinous ambits were sources of inspiration, so stimulating for Catarina’s pious imagination. 128 Referring to the ornamental style “characterized by a profusion of scrolls, spirals and other adornments dominated by curved lines, a style developed mainly in the seventeenth and 126 Vargaslugo, “Introducción,” 14. 127 Ibid., 17. 128 Ibid., 17. 139 eighteenth centuries,” 129 lo barroco evokes a chaotic, kaleidoscopic, and archival quality that “endlessly produces folds…. [It] twists and turns its folds, pushing them into infinity, fold over fold, one upon the other.” 130 De la Maza’s biography oscillates through the forging of his baroque hero, “a young girl china, later married and … a role model for Spanish, criolla, native, and foreign women … an indominable character”. 131 The chapter “Nace la princesa” (“A Princess is Born”) begins with an injunction to fold in the variegated work of prior biographers and their glosa, their commentary and gloss in understanding la china: Sigamos, de las manos de sus biógrafos, esta glosa de la vida de Catarina de San Juan, ni china ni poblana, visionaria católica, casada, virgen y mártir, venerable y vulnerable, condenada por la Inquisición, olvidada ya de todos, pero tan interesante como las mil y una visionarias del mundo, unas santas, otras beatas por la Sagrada Congregación de Ritos y otras proscritas y consideradas heterodoxas…. Explicó Mirra su origen diciendo que había nacido en el imperio del Gran Mogor, en una ciudad cuyo nombre no recordaba. Este Gran Mogor o Mogol, era, sencillamente, La India. El padre Juan González de Mendoza dice en su antes famosísima Historia de China, de 1585, que “este gran reino está repartido en quince provincias, donde residen los gobernadores y virreyes, que en la lengua de los naturales se dice Cochín.” La redacción no es clara. Cochín puede ser todo el reino o una provincia. Vamos a un viajero del siglo XVII, el francés Bernier. Nos dice que … “llegó al puerto de Surata, en el Indostán o imperio del Gran Mogol”; cita luego las ciudades de Agra y Delhi como “principales” y nos explica que el nombre de Gran Mogol se aplicaba tanto al imperio como al emperador, y así tuvo que entrar al servicio, como médico, del Gran Mogol, que era en 1650 Schach-Jehan, el cual … era mahometano. 132 *** Let us follow, in the hands of her biographers, the commentary regarding the life of Catarina de San Juan, neither “china” nor “poblana,” a Catholic visionary, married, virgin and martyr, venerable and vulnerable, condemned by the Inquisition to be forgotten by all, yet as remarkable as this world’s thousand and one visionary heroines, some sainted, others beatified by the Sacra Rituum Congregatio, or exiled and deemed unorthodox…. 129 “barroco.” 130 Deleuze, The Fold, 3. 131 de la Maza, Catarina, 46. 132 Ibid., 37. 140 Mirra explained her origin by claiming that she was born during the Great Mughal Empire, in a city whose name she could not remember. This Mughal or Mogul Empire was, of course, India. Father Juan González de Mendoza says, in the once renowned History of China, in 1585, that “this great sovereignty is divided into fifteen provinces, where the governors and viceroys live, that in the language of the natives is called Cochin.” The exposition is unclear. Cochin could be the entire empire or a province. Let us consult a traveler of the seventeenth century, the Frenchman Bernier. He tells us … “he arrived at the port of Surat, in Hindustan or the Great Mughal Empire” … and explains that the name Great Mughal referred to the empire as much as it did to the emperor; Bernier entered into service, as a doctor, to the Great Mughal, who in 1650 was Chah-Jehan … a Mohammedan. De la Maza draws from not only recent historiography, but colonial New World accounts—some of whose “interviews” with Catarina are “less valuable as records of actual historical events than for what they reveal about novohispano social values in the late seventeenth century. 133 Rather than cull together a developmental narrative of the debutante subject based upon historical certitudes to represent his object, the author “pleats” a baroque narrative with a hypertextual spectrum of inconsistencies, allegations, and recollections about Mirra-Catarina that are vouched for, recycled, and imagined. La china’s Irrevocable Horizontality La china’s chameleon names illustrate a bourgeoning of particulate pleatings. “The name Mirra,” de la Maza observes, “which is not Chinese, is possibly Aryan or Semitic, like her mother’s name, Borta. Mirra—which translates as “bitter”—was then Hindustani, Hindu, or Indian, but not china, except as an endearing name [apelativo], according to what we know.” 134 Rustomji-Sterns elaborates that the name may also be “the diminutive of Miriam in India … there is also a Moslem name “Mihr” (often transcribed into Roman script as 133 Morgan, Spanish American Saints, 121–22. 134 de la Maza, Catarina, 37. 141 “Mihra” or “Mehra”)” that means “the sun” or “affection.” 135 As for the atomic poblana, there is certainly a “convergence of words in the term … one one hand pueblerina (“village girl”) or plebeya (“plebeian”), and on the other, native of Puebla. 136 Undeniably rhizomatic is the movement and momentum of the word china. De la Maza observes that la voz “china,” en femenino, aplicada a personas, fue sinónimo de sirvienta, aunque también, en Sudamérica, de manceba. En México fue siempre para criadas—o esclavas—y tuvo un carácter meliorativo y cariñoso. Aun hoy es un sobrenombre de simpatía y se usa, principalmente y sin distinción de sexos, para los que tienen el pelo rizado. Los señores de la Nueva España y del Perú pedían y compraban esclavas “chinas” que eran casi siempre filipinas, y, a veces, malayas or indostanas. 137 *** the feminine noun china, applied to persons, was synonymous with servant, although also in South America, could also be a concubine. In Mexico it always denoted maids—or slaves—and had a respectful and endearing quality. Even today it is a nickname and is used, primarily and without distinction between sexes, for those who have curly hair. The señores of New Spain and Peru sought and purchased “chinas,” slaves that were almost always Filipina, at times Malay or Indian. Regarding the word “china,” Father Nicolas León consults García Icazbalceta’s 1899 compendium Vocabulario de mexicanismos: comprobado con ejemplos y comparado con los de otros paises hispano-americanos. 138 † China. f. Encontramos esta palabra en diversos países hispanoamericanos, aplicada siempre a cierta clase de mujeres, que no es la misma en todas partes. En Bogotá le da 135 Rustomji-Kerns, “Las Raíces Olvidadas De Mirrah-Catarina (Mirrah-Catarina’s Lost Roots),” 72; Rustomji- Kerns, “Mirrha-Catarina De San Juan: From India to New Spain.” An example of a “vertical” excavation of voice is Roshni Rustomji-Sterns’ exposition of la china poblana as an Asian American woman whose Muslim origins were surpressed by her hagiographers (this is corroborated by Morgan). “The possibility of Mirrha-Catarina’s Muslim background is touched upon by Francisco de la Maza, who reminds his readers that Akbar, the supposed grandsire of Mirrha, was a Muslim. But as he points out, Ramos prefers to overlook this fact, to forget it “porque le repugna que Borta fuese no sólo ‘gentil’ o ‘pagana,’ que esto le era soportable, sino musulmana” (Because the idea that Borta was a gentile or a pagan would be bearable for Ramos but definitely not the idea that she was a Muslim. That would be repugnant to him).” Rustomji-Kerns (this appears to be her own translation), “Mirrha-Catarina De San Juan: From India to New Spain.” 136 Tibón, “Las dos chinas,” 68. 137 de la Maza, Catarina, 21–22. 138 León cites the fourth edition of 1905. 142 Cuervo (§ 561) el equivalente de «chica, muchacha, rapaza», y añade (p. 530) que viene del quichua china, hembra de cualquier animal, criada, moza de servicio, y que no tiene masculino. (Acá tampoco). Granada (p. 194) confirma el origen quichua de la voz, y cita autoridades para comprobarle. Allá significa «la india ó mestiza que vive entre las familias del país, ocupándose regularmente en servicios domésticos». Cita a Palma como autoridad de que la voz [word] se usa asimismo en el Perú; mas [but-very fml] Arona no la trae. En el Ecuador significa «criada, doméstica, sirvienta» (CEVALLOS, p. 53), en Cuba es término de cariño entre mujeres (PICHARDO, página 122; MACÍAS, p. 437; ARMAS, p. 72), y en Costa Rica simplemente niñera (FERRAZ, p. 50). Lo mismo en Guatemala (BATRES, p. 215). Por Rodríguez (p. 162) sabemos que en Chile chino es el plebeyo, y que la terminación femenina, que es más usada, suele tomarse en mala parte. Confirma el origen quichua; mas si éste es cierto ¿cómo llegó hasta acá la voz? *** † China. f. We find this word in various Latin American countries, always applied to a particular class of women, yet with different meanings. In Bogotá, de la Cuervo’s etymology it is the equivalent of “lass, young miss or girl,” and he adds that it derives from the Quechua china, the female of an animal, a maid or a house servant, and that the term has no masculine counterpart. (Nor does one exist here in Mexico.) Granada confirms the word’s Quechua origen, and corroborates this by citing authorities. There the word means “an india or mestiza living among families in the country, dealing generally in domestic work.” He cites Palma as an authority to show that the word has the same meaning in Peru, yet Arona does not mention this. In Ecuador it means “maid, domestic help or servant” [,] in Cuba it is used a term of endearment among women[.] The same is the case in Guatemala[.] Through Rodríguez we know that in Chile, chino signifies a commoner, and the feminine version, used more often, is usually taken as an insult. He confirms the Quechua origin; however, if this is certain, how has the term come all the way here? China could also refer to “an occupation rather than ethnic makeup,” Filipinos in particular; one critic claims her to be “in fact Filipino,” without compromise. 139 Chinas of the Philippines were desirable “because these girls were known to be honest, clean, and eager to help … they were loyal, rarely ran away, and served their masters as respectfully as they would their own parents. This was one reason for the popularity of the slave market in Manila.” 140 There is no end to the re-rooting/routing of the name “china”; Emma Yanes Rizo even surmises that the word’s origin could be entwined with “the Chatina women of Juquila, 139 Perlin, Eight Bright Candles, 28; Tibón, “Las dos chinas,” 66. 140 Perlin, Eight Bright Candles, 28. Sources are unclear. 143 Oaxaca,” and thus with another patron saint altogether: “The Cha tñas, as they are known, have a grand tradition of embroidery and weaving. Curiously, in Juquila the legend of the Indian princess coincides with the costume, as the Mixtec Indians there are very devoted to the Virgin of Juquila, also known as the Saint Catarina of Juquila.” 141 Anti(Oe)podal Lineage De la Maza’s narrative echoes the storytelling of a heroine whom, despite the denial of her formal canonization into Catholic sainthood, he inserts his “Mirra-Catarina” into “the thousand and one female visionaries of the world,” a canon precariously lauded and despised. She is re-centered, not only regarding her informal sainted status (and rejected bid for sainthood), but also regarding the Spanish Golden Age, as de la Maza likens her to a baroque figure of another siglo del oro—the mythical Scheherazade of the Islamic Golden Age, wizard of the endlessly riveting story. Known to have been gifted with religious prescience, visions, and fantastic religious devotion, in de la Maza’s translation of her putative agrammaticality, Mirra experienced mercedes de cuando yo era chiquilita, personas que conocieron mis padris, contaban para mi, ellas mismas, cuando me miraban echando ternuras de llanto: grandis persona es esta nina, sangris real tene. 142 *** [With intentional misspellings and errors in grammar:] much mercies from when I was this girl, people know my parents, they just themselves say when they see me they shouted and screamed: she a great person, she has royal blood. Like Scheherazade, who leaves a begrudging father to be taken by a murderous sultan, de la Maza’s Catarina is a prelude to patriarchical disavowal. Although Mirra’s father is “an 141 Yanes Rizo, “Cielo de lentejuelas: travesía por el traje de china poblana,” 77. 142 de la Maza, Catarina, 38. 144 absolute ruler of Arabia and India,” she cannot recall his name. 143 De la Maza reads Mirra’s “voice” nested within the narrative by Alonso Ramos, one of Mirra-Catarina’s cleric biographers: su abuelo, padre de Borta, se llamaba Maximiano o Maximino, “emperador de la Arabia y de la India,” dice, de una vez, el padre Ramos. El nombre le sonó a conocido y recurrió a sus historias clásicas, encontrándose al emperador romano Maximinio (308-314 d.C.), por lo cual supuso que era el ascendiente directo del Maximino arábigo-indostano. 144 *** her grandfather, Borta’s father, was Maximiano o Maximino, “Emperor of Arabia and India,” Father Ramos says but once. The name sounded familiar to him, so the father turned to his classical history, to find the Roman emperor Maximinio (308-314 C.E.), and assumed him to be a direct ancestor to the Arabian-Hindustani Maximino. Ramos surmises that this ancestor, Mirra’s paternal grandfather, was possibly the Mughal ruler Akbar (1556-1605). 145 The postulation complicates the undecidable issue of Mirra’s lineage, adding potentialities only celebrated by de la Maza: No se olvida que Maximinio el romano fue el verdugo de la virgen santa Catarina de Alejandria, cuyo nombre, llevaba la china Mirra ya cristianizada y le sirve para reafirmar la orientalidad de Mirra-Catarina, pues ésta le contó una vez que se le había aparecido la santa de Alejandria, y la había llamado “paisana.” Y otra vez se la aparecieron la misma santa Catarina de Alejandría y san Juan Bautista y altercaron sobre a cuál de los dos quería más Catarina. La primera dijo que a ella, pues “era de su patria y llevaban el mismo nombre.” El segundo alegaba que “también tenía su nombre y que se la había encomendado el Señor …[.]” 146 *** We cannot forget that Maximinio the Roman was the executioner of the virgin Saint Catherine of Alexandria, whose name the Christianized china Mirra adopted and thus served to reaffirm Mirra-Catarina’s Oriental nature. Mirra recalled once that Saint Catherine of Alexandria had appeared before her and called her “countrywoman.” On another occasion Saint Catherine of Alexandria appeared to her again with John the Baptist, and the two saints argued over whom Catarina loved more. The first claimed it was she, as Catarina “was of the her homeland [patria], and shared her 143 Graxeda qtd. in De la Maza, Catarina de San Juan, 38 144 de la Maza, Catarina, 37. 145 Morgan also cites Ramos’ Primera Parte. 146 de la Maza, Catarina, 37–38. 145 name.” The second retorted that Catarina ‘also shared his name, and that God had entrusted her to his care…[.]’ Anti-Oedipal jumps from a nameless but formally aborescent Mughal father to the Roman Maximinio of the fourth century; from Maximinio the executioner of Santa Catarina (a geographical link that astonishingly confirms Mirra’s “orientalidad”) to Saint Catherine and Saint John the Baptist’s incredible contest over la china’s allegiances, as they jockey over their bonds of kinship in a rhetoric of shared homelands, patron naming, and heavenly decree. Such horizontalities echo other anti-genealogical events (or perhaps anti-events), the unknown details of the exact date and location of Catarina’s birth, when and why she was named la china (one account claims that this began following her marriage in Puebla to a Chinese slave, Domingo Suárez, “for being the wife of a Chinese, not native herself of China” 147 ) or whether she was able to parry sexual advances by sailors, merchants and other men affiliated with the Manila galleon, as well as the Asian suitors who were unable to win over an “otherwise defenseless Catarina” who guarded her “immaculate sexual condition.” 148 La china is said to have been baptized in Cochin, where Un príncipe japonés, hijo del emperador, naturalmente, se enamoró de ella.... Pero Mirra, impertérrita, lo despreció. Luego advino un enamorado plebeyo, indostano…. Como tampoco le hizo caso, el plebeyo la golpeó, “con manos y daga; la ató, desnuda, y cogiéndola por las cabellos, la azotó hasta no hallar lugar para nuevas heridas.” 149 *** A Japanese prince, son of an emperor, naturally fell in love with her…. But Mirra, fearless, paid him no mind. Later a plebian Indian suitor appeared on the scene…. As she did not acknowledge him either, the plebian struck her, “with his hands and knife, tied her up naked, and taking her by the hair, beat her until there was no more area to be discovered for new wounds. 147 “por ser mujer del chino y no oriunda ella misma de la China.” Ibid. 148 Morgan, Spanish American Saints, 120. 149 De la Maza (cites Ramos), Catarina de San Juan, 42. 146 Mirra-Catarina refuses marriage into Japanese royalty, sustains injury by a paisano (preferring to affiliate herself the paisana Santa Catarina), and continues to guard her celibacy, even when married to the emasculated chino Domingo. Patriarchy and “natural” fraternity are thwarted as De la Maza’s biography thematizes a horizontality of naming that runs counter to a realist aesthetic and genealogy by way of blood, marriage, and children. Such baroque shifting, without a standard, original or viable aborescence, render such pleatings as unfaithful to an original; as her enfolded name suggests, Mirra-Catarina is “a heterogeneous or heteromorphic creature, just as the butterfly is folded into the caterpillar.” 150 De la Maza’s Catarina de San Juan offers an exercise in modern philosophy and a break from the assumption of la china’s Asian American grounds, as Mirra-Catarina illustrates the “splendour” of the I, the “pronoun ‘one’” of Samuel Butler’s Erewhon, “the originary ‘nowhere’ and the displaced, disguised, modified and always recreated ‘here and now.’” 151 La china’s Technicalities “How do we know what we know about Mirra the Indian woman,” asks de la Maza, “Mirra the ‘china’ poblana, and later, the venerable Catarina de San Juan?” 152 Three seventeenth- century authors are accredited with penning the crucial primary sources regarding Mirra- 150 Deleuze, The Fold, 9. 151 Ibid. (Continuum translation.) Such baroque shifting reminds us of Lisa Lowe’s anti-oedipal move in Immigrant Acts: “To avoid th[e] homogenizing of Asian Americans as exclusively hierarchical and familial,” she says, “I would contextualize the “vertical” generational model of culture with the more “hoizontal” relationship.” Immigrant Acts, 63-64. Lowe builds upon Stuart Hall’s discussion of cultural identity as “becoming,” and reads for rhizomatic rupture. Stuart Hall, “Cultural Identity and Diaspora,” in Identity: Community, Culture, Difference, ed. Jonathan Rutherford (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1990), 225. 152 Vargaslugo, “Introducción,” 26. 147 Catarina, as de la Maza, with a pleating humor, alludes to the ambiguity of each author’s text. Jesuit father Francisco de Aguilera wrote and presented what is known as El sermón, Catarina’s funeral address delivered in January of 1688. 153 In preparing the speech, Aguilera referred to the notes of the Father Alonso Ramos, confessor to Catarina during her last fifteen years. Ramos published a vida of Catarina (i.e., “vida de santo,”) in three volumes after her death in 1689, 1690, and 1692 respectively. 154 The primera parte, accessible today, was banned by Spanish and Mexican inquisitions in the 1690s. 155 De la Maza’s parenthetical inquiry about veracity, actuality and authorship is not merely literal. It sets a stage for grapplings with adequate, virtual, and untenable answers. Who are these three originary or originating hagiographers, and to what extent can they be held to the letter—this particularly in a New Spanish context where “once a woman gained a reputation for sanctity, male clerics took over the hagiographic process.” 156 “We know very little of Father Francisco de Aguilera,” de la Maza tells us of the first; of a second, Alonso Ramos, “we know nearly nothing.” 157 De la Maza endearingly describes Ramos as having an exceedingly “fertile imagination”; “with a childlike spiritual candor, he believed what we 153 Morgan, Spanish American Saints, 119; de la Maza, Catarina, 26. 154 Ibid., 119; i.e., biography of a saint, Ibid., 4; These were respectively entitled Primera parte, Segunda parte, and Tercera parte … de los prodigios de la omnipotencia y milagros de la gracia en la vida de la V. sierva de Dios Catarina de San Juan, natural de Gran Mogor, Ibid., 120. 155 Morgan, Spanish American Saints, 120. 156 Ibid. 157 “Poco sabemos del padre Francisco de Aguilera. De Alonzo Ramos, tampoco sabemos casi nada.” De la Maza, Catarina, 26–27. 148 wanted to when it came to Catarina; even if at times she doubted herself, Ramos held full confidence in her and in himself.” 158 Historian Ronald Morgan discusses the complexities of the Spanish American vida de santo, which derives from the thirteenth-century saint’s Life or “hagiography proper” that narrativized the reverent hero’s “virtues, miracles, and exemplary death.” 159 Vidas functioned not only to affirm a protagonist’s sanctity in order to incite the faith of the community, but to corroborate the distinction of the New World criollos, sons and daughters of Spanish heritage for whom the New World was their true home. As a strategy that could add to or rupture the canon of saints (in a move toward canonization), the hagiography worked “to exalt criollo achievement, defend criollo character, and define criollo identities” particularly vis-a-vis Europe. 160 Working amidst these seventeenth-century narrations of Catarina’s life, Morgan finds himself in constant negotiation with representation as such, through the hagiography’s “complex problem of authorial voice”: “the hagiographer is technically author of the work, but does his narrative reflect his own voice or that of the protagonist who first described her experiences to him?” 161 Even if Alonso Ramos, for example, “claims to recount details from Catarina’s childhood, adult years, and interior mystical life just as she had described them to him in the confessional (al pie de la letra), he does not ….” 162 Amidst other factors that haunt the “vertical” life of Catarina, Ramos’ text is 158 “Con … un candor de espíritu digno de un niño, creyó todo cuanto oyó de Catarina y si ella, algunas veces, dudaba de si misma, Ramos jamás, ni de ella, ni de sí mismo.” De la Maza, Catarina, 27. 159 Morgan, Spanish American Saints, 3. 160 Ibid., 4. 161 Ibid., 123. 162 Ibid. 149 imbued by an “authorial presence … marked by moral preachments to his readers as well as his knowledge of Roman Catholic doctrine, printed histories of the Jesuits in India, and rules governing female mystical activity”; it draws the ostensibly clear “facts” of our devotee’s “lineage, early life, and conversion” as a hybrid blend of memories, “religious desires, and performance goals and the historical, hagiographic, and professional concerns of her confessors.” 163 De la Maza implies that much more is known about a another narrator, the seventeenth-century José del Castillo Graxeda. The parish priest was another of Catarina’s confessors and author of the succinct and “more cautious” Compendio de la vida y virtudes de la venerable Catarina de San Juan (1692). 164 What de la Maza finds particularly striking about Graxeda is that he is “un prosista excelente.” 165 [Graxeda t]empera los excesos de Ramos; no recurre a tantas digresiones; sus juicios son discretos. Un enorme favor nos hizo Graxeda: trasladar la torpe manera de hablar de la “china” poblana Catarina; sin eso nos hubiéramos quedado con la falsa imagen que nos da Ramos de que la “relación” que recibió de Catarina como hija de confesión, fue “clara, distinta, fácil y perfecta y que más parecía elocuencia angélica que humana.” 166 *** He tempers Ramos’ excesses; he does not resort to as many digressions; his prejudices are discrete. Graxeda indeed does us an enormous favor: he transcribes the sluggish speech of la “china” poblana Catarina; without this we would have remained with the false notion that Ramos had indicated of the “connection” [“relacion”] he experienced with Catarina as a confesssor as one that was “clear, distinct, easy and perfect and that appeared as an eloquence that was more angelic than human.” Clarifying the overt ambiguity of these translations, de la Maza presents an example (“entre cien, que Ramos le hace decir”) of Catarina flaunting an impeccable eloquence: 163 Morgan, Spanish American Saints. n.p. 164 Ibid., 120. 165 de la Maza, Catarina, 27. 166 Ibid., 27, 34. 150 Está mi corazón como una tabla en blanco, pronta a la voluntad de su pintor, para que imprima, dibuje, bosqueje, delinee y pinte en mí cuanto quiera el Señor, sujeta en todo a la libertad de sus pinceles, deseando y proponiendo por instantes no retroceder de su gusto ni exceder en lo más mínimo cosa de su divino querer…[.] 167 *** Here is my heart like a blank slate, primed to the will of its Painter to imprint, draw, sketch, delineate and paint what the Lord wants, subject to the freedom of his brushes, wishing and hoping each instant to neither come short nor exceed in any way His Divine Will. Nicolas León gives us an example of Mirra-Catarina’s voice within Graxeda’s text. “Here is an instance of her habitual locution,” he writes, citing her “recollection” of her mother’s Anunciation-like experience (as recollected per the memory of a padri, her apparent mispronunciation of “padre,” or priest). With misspellings and odd grammar (that I will refrain from translating), Graxeda stylizes Mirra-Catarina’s voice with baroque phrasing and accentuation. Quando … aquí yo echar en nacimiento, o quando mi Madris parió para mi: la Virgen Santísima ayudó mui ben a mi Madris, y dixo: Borta bayas en levantandote del cama, y en aquel yervas debajo de tinaja grandis, haz hoyo, y alli hallarás tesoros para que cries el niña muy ben, que la nombro por mi hija. Esto Padri Castillo contaron para mi: si assi fué, alabante triunfante, y militante; y si no fue assi, no conozco para ti maldito pestífero, bayas en el profundos. 168,169 Where Ramos refines and rearticulates la china’s rough speech, Graxeda draws attention to her rather “unpretentious nature, noting the simple, ungrammatical quality of her speech. His Compendio reads like an interview, alternating Catarina’s spare, awkward words with his 167 José del Castillo Graxeda, Compendio de la vida y virtudes de la venerable Catarina de San Juan (México: Ediciones Xochitl, 1946) as qtd. in de la Maza, Catarina, 34. 168 Castillo Graxeda, Compendio as qtd. in León, Catarina, 27–28. 169 De la Maza brings her words into further focus: “Cuando yo echar en nacimiento, cuando mi madris parió para mi, la Virgen ayudó muy ben a madris y dijo: Borta, vayas en levantando del cama y en aquel hierbas, debajo del tinaja grandis, haz hoyo y hallarás tisoro para cries el niña ben, que la nombro por mi hija....” Catarina, 38. 151 own interpretation of their meaning. 170 León ruminates over her bizarre articulation of Spanish that could be due to a native Prakrit tongue, a naturally morphological issue, or perhaps a cerebral defect. 171 Mirra-Catarina, in other words, must be translated—a notion underscored by her purported illiteracy, non-native grammar, and possible mental deficit or difficulty in speaking—not to mention by her apocryphal remains, bones that reveal an Eastern home (“her cranium reveals [denuncia] an Oriental origin.” (!!)). 172 The immediacy of la china’s voice is decidedly remixed, repeated, and re-authenticated; she is persistently technical. Instant Animal La “china” de Puebla fue extranjera, sin idioma propio, tartajosa, analfabeta, pobre y esclava, en la provincia de una colonia de un imperio vasto y soberbio. Muchos poblanos le decían “perra china embustera,” y ella contestaba mansamente: “Es verdad, ángeles míos, vuesastedes dicen verdad y así echen ruego a Dios no me perda.” 173 *** The “china” of Puebla was a foreigner, without her own language, a stammerer, illiterate, poor and a slave, in the outskirts of a vast and imposing colony. Many townspeople would call her “lying china bitch,” and she would softly respond: “It’s true, my angeles, you tell the truth and I beg God not to let me go.” Joan Didion’s novel and De la Maza’s biography are open narratives of Asian American women that induce rather than excavate their protagonists’ “voice.” Without a deductive method to deploy a genus or generic form to explain and contextualize a 170 Morgan, Spanish American Saints, 137. 171 “No sé si por la naturaleza morfológica de laz lengua prakrit, nativa de Catarina; por el muy poco trato y conversación con las personas de habla castellana o por un defecto de organización cerebral, nunca pudo hablar el castellano ni medianamente, no obstante su larga vida.” Ibid., 27. 172 León, Catarina, 36. His exclamation. 173 De la Maza 47 152 “recognizable linearity that depicts a unified subject’s progress from youth to maturity,” 174 both anti-heroes emerge from motifs of illegibility and biographical blindnesses. Where China Mary appears elusively omnipotent in her domain, Mirra-Catarina speaks “with such clarity and proficiency that, in her babbling language, she could say with quickness things that others took much more time to explain ….” 175 It is a revelation of her “capacity for instinctive, almost telepathic communication” that would have us reassess the natural efficiency “of human language and consciousness as optimal modes of communication.” 176 If animals are devoid of reason and cannot “exist without language,” as Lippit observes, then “[a]nimal being can be understood as determining the place of an alien thought.” 177 La china’s alien babbling—and, for that matter, China Mary’s haunting lack of sonority—is like Marx’s freakish commodity that “speaks” suddenly “with a phonographic, rematerializing inscription.” 178 Abrupt legibilities are instances of becoming-animal: being, or the desire to be, other than what or how one is (“No animal confirms man,” as John Berger says, “either positively or negatively”). 179 The alien-animal “words” of the Moten-Marx commodity open uncertain but fertile qualifications for that which was merely quantifiable 180 ; China Mary and la china poblana’s competing testimonies are similarly technical and persistently frustrating. 174 Lowe, Immigrant Acts, 129. 175 Graxeda qtd. in de la Maza, 34 176 Lippit, Electric Animal, 2. 177 Ibid., 6–7. 178 Moten, “Resistance of the Object,” 14. 179 Berger, “Why Look at Animals,” 5. 180 “For Saussure such speech is degraded, say, by accent, a deuniversalizing, material difference; for Chomsky it is degraded by a deuniversalizing agrammaticality.” Moten, “Resistance of the Object,” 14. 153 Their personae stage Asian American women as a problem, that is to say, an swarm of non- identical atomic moments, or Asian American becomings-animal. 154 Chapter 5 Pedro Shimose’s New World Localizations Madrigal andino 1 Cuando te conocí—Cuando yo te conocí te hiciste dueña de mí —HUAYÑO 2 Cuando te conocí no hubo incendios en el cielo, ni temblores de tierra, sólo floreció el papal 3 junto a la piedra. *** Andean Madrigal When I knew you—When I knew you I made you my queen —HUAYÑO When I knew you there were neither fires in the skies nor quakes of land only potato-earth bourgeoned alongside the stone. Considered to be “without doubt Bolivia’s most representative contemporary poetic voice,” 4 Pedro Shimose Kawamura’s extensive oeuvre includes various genres of writing, from his acclaimed poemarios (editions or volumes of poetry) to his short stories, articles, journalistic work, and textbooks on Latin American literature—not to mention the original music he has written and performed. This chapter is a cursory exposition of Shimose’s poetry as an opening into another “side” of the classical world of U.S.-centric Asian American literatures. 1 From Bolero de caballería, Shimose, Poemas, 378. 2 “m. Wayño, huayno, guaiño. Canción popular de los Andes, de acento melancólico.” Ibid., 399. 3 “papal.” 4 Clifford, “Pedro Shimose (1940- ),” 321. 155 The ways in which Shimose’s localizations, like those of the fiction of Siu Kam Wen, invoke local life and language do not denote or prioritize the ethnographic realism of Asians in Latin America—of Japanese Bolivian life, where emplacements 5 of “culture” for traditional anthropology for example, denote difference “always against a norm of sameness.” 6 Shimose’s “localizations” are inflected with human geography as they emphasize “place considered with reference to some particular event or circumstances connected with it,” or more simply, where things happen, i.e., “a quarter in which certain things are done.” 7 As with the other writers to be explored in this project, with Shimose we witness a correspondence between the Asian Americas as a speedily widening and unwieldy locale amidst the hemispheric and planetary, on one hand—and on the other hand, an antipodal feeling that “the frantic abolition of all distances,” as Heidegger observes, “brings no nearness.” 8 The widening and pluralizing frame of the Asian Americas, the known and unknown complexities of its linguistic, cultural, and indigenous contextualizations, underscores a need for further knowledges and specializations to grapple with spheres and worlds as our objects. “As mobile as we may be, or become,” observes Sam Weber, readings of new world literature and new-world readings of Asian American texts—like Aimée’s television in Flores de un solo día—render us “even more localizable.” 9 Especially for the reader of Asian (North) American literature, Shimose’s poetry introduces unanticipated belongings through which emplacements and localizations do not 5 Weber, Mass Mediauras, 71. 6 Simpson, “On Ethnographic Refusal,” 78. 7 “locale.” 8 Heidegger, “The Thing,” 163. 9 Weber, Mass Mediauras, 5. 156 prioritize the positionality or thwarted articulation of the ethnic Asian’s individualized voice vis-a-vis the nation. With respect to the field’s strong theme of dissonant hybridity and desarraigo (uprootedness), Shimose has us reconsider the Asian American locale as a staged scene or setup, a variation upon the traditional theme of negotiation with originary or “imported” Asian cultures recently translplanted to the geopolitical and linguistic spaces of the U.S. and Canada. Like that which Amy Stillman claims to set Pacific Islander Studies apart from Asian American Studies—its “paradigmatic experience of indigeneity” 10 — Shimose’s poetic “localizations” occur through laudatory yet inevitably fraught invocations of indigeneity, whether renditions of subaltern workers, Bolivian colloquialisms amidst eruptions of U.S. English, or homage to a pre-Columbian site. The presence of native life and language in Shimose suggests a core problematic for an Asian American framework would traditionally add or assimilate the Latin American poet into a panethnic or multiculturalist rubric. Pedro Shimose was born in 1940 in northern Bolivia, in the port town of Riberalta in the Beni province. A rubber collection outpost since 1882, Riberalta is at the juncture of the Beni and the Madre de Dios rivers, both major veins of the Amazon system. A major agricultural port and trading outpost with Brazil, the town was a place where the “young Pedro would have been exposed to a variety of different languages in addition to Spanish and the Japanese of his parents and their associates, including Portuguese and various Amazonian and Andean Indian languages.” 11 Shimose’s mother Laida Kawamura Rodríguez was [a 10 Stillman, “Pacific-ing Asian Pacific American History,” 241. 11 Sisson, “Intertextuality,” 150. 157 Bolivian woman] of Japanese lineage 12 ; his father Ginkichi Shimose was a gardener and Japanese immigrant. 13 “I’d say that I was born and raised in the heart of a lower-class peasant [campesina] family,” says Shimose in an interview, “in a rural and small-town provincial [provinciano] atmosphere (provincial as in “province,” not in mentality. Riberalta is one of the most cosmoplitan areas of Bolivia).” 14 At the age of nineteen, upon moving to La Paz from Riberalta, 1516 Shimose studied law for two years 17 as at the Universidad Mayor de San Andrés. 18 “I wasn’t interested in any of it except for Indian law, and I spent much more of my time at the School of Philosophy and Letters than at my own department.” 19 “I left when I realized that the profession was tailored [conditionado] to the intrests of the powerful. A lawyer is nothing more than an instrument to exploit of the weak.” 20 Shimose became a journalist, and at the age of twenty, won his first poetry prize. 21 He would return years later to the academy as a literature professor at the Universidad Mayor de San Andrés. 22 12 Gudiña, “Pedro Shimose > Poemas Del Alma.” 13 Chávez Taborga, Shimose, Poeta En 4 Estaciones, 16. 14 Sisson, “Intertextuality,” 150. “[D]iríase que nací y crecía en el seno de una familia de clase media baja, campesina, y en un medio rural y provinciano (provinciano de “provincia,” no en cuanto a mentalidad. Riberalta es una de las poblaciones más cosmopolitas de Bolivia).” 15 Clifford, “Pedro Shimose (1940- ),” 321. 16 Ibid. 17 Sisson, “Intertextuality,” 124 18 Clifford, “Pedro Shimose (1940- ),” 321. 19 “[N]o me interesaba—me ha dicho—casi nada de la carrera, salvo del Derecho indiano, y me pasaba más tiempo en la Facultad de Filsofía y Letras que en la mía.” Rozas interview. 20 From Gumucio D., Provocaciones; qtd. Sisson, 124; qtd. Clifford, 321. 21 Clifford, “Pedro Shimose (1940- ),” 321. 22 Ibid. 158 Shimose has published ten books of poetry, from the compilation Triludio en el exilio (1961) to his most recent No te lo vas a creer (2000), the latter published a year after receiving Bolivia’s Premio Nacional de Cultura in 1999. When citing Shimose’s first eight poemarios, this chapter refers to the pagination of the multi-volume anthology Poemas (1988)—a comprehensive edition that includes Triludio en el exilio (1961), Sardonia (1967), Poemas para un pueblo (1968), Quiero escribir pero me sale espuma (1972) (libro con el que mereció el Premio Casa de las Américas) Caducidad del fuego (1975), Al pie de la letra (1976); Reflexiones maquiavélicas (1980), y Bolero de caballería (1985). The author has lived in Madrid ever since he left Bolivia in 1971—the year of Hugo Banzer’s coup and succession to the presidency, which heralded the repressive and violent regime that would be called el banzerato. The tide of its power was, to cite Teodosio Fernandez, “the catastrophic blow that reinstated ‘order’ in Bolivia in 1971, putting an end to the political process that existed in the country.” 23 The banzerato was responsible for, among other acts of violence, the detainment and torture of approximately 2000 dissidents and left-wing insurgents. 24 Shimose would not return to Bolivia until 1984, and published Bolero de caballería shortly after. The poet’s repertoire also includes the anthology Riberalta y otros poemas (1996), the short story collection El Coco se llama Drilo (1976), and the two textbooks Diccionario de autores iberoamericanos (1982) and Historia de la literatura latinoamericana (1989). His expansive oeuvre includes his years of writing as an essayist and journalist, and Shimose is also known as a musician and a composer of, for example, the Bolivian hit song “El 23 “el golpe de estadoque [que] rinstauró el ‘orden’ en Bolivia, en 1971, terminando con el proceso político que vivía el país,” T. Fernandez 4 24 “Hidden Cells Reveal Bolivia’s Dark Past.” 159 sombrero de Saó.” 25 Translations of the his work appear in eleven languages 26 —yet nearly none has been translated into English. To my knowledge at the time of this writing, two works have been formally published in English: the short story “Number One Son” 27 and the bilingual edition of Reflexiones maquiavélicas/Machiavellian Reflections, translated by Michael Sisson and published in Madrid. 28 Dissonant mestizaje If dissonant hybridity denotes a reified Asian American ethnos and “an aeshetics or stylistics of cultural production,” 29 the ethics of dissonant hybridity is strikingly similar to the pivotal idea of racial fusion, micegenation, and distinction expressed by mestizaje, the term that heralds the space and the idea to be called el nuevo mundo. “Perhaps no part of the sum total of the historical formation and configuration of Latin American national and regional identity has been as pervasive or comprehensive as the elaboration and employment of the concept,” observes Marilyn Miller. Advent and idea, mestizaje denotes a “[c]ruzamiento de razas diferentes” 30 and “genetic and cultural admixture produced by the encounters of ‘dis- encoutners’ (disencuentros) between Europeans, the Africans who accompanied them to and in the New World, indigenous groups, and various others ho arrived in the Americas from 25 Sisson, “Intertextuality,” 42; Sganga, “Casos y letras: Pedro Shimose.” 26 “Pedro Shimose (Kalathos).” 27 Pedro Shimose, “Number One Son,” in Columbus’ Egg: New Latin American Stories on the Legacy of the Conquest, 73–80. According to Michael Sisson, the story was once called “El hijo del japonés” but later changed to “El hijo de W.M.,” in El Coco se llama Drilo. “Intertextuality,” 149n39. 28 Shimose, Reflexiones maquiavélicas/Machiavellian Reflections. 29 Miller, Rise and Fall of the Cosmic Race, 7. 30 “mestizaje.” 160 regions such as Asia.” 31 Like the Asian American basis of dissonant hybridity, mestizaje operates not only as a “conceptual tool” but also a “conciliating synthesis, a claim to a double or multiple American heritage … which transformed deficiency into plenitude or stigma into a sign of proudly assumed identity.” 32 Créolisation’s Poetic Priority With a principle enfolding fusion, Edouard Glissant describes mestizaje’s French cognate métissage as a “meeting and synthesis of two differences.” 33 The term, however, is aborescent for Glissant, a multiculutralism without relevance for a world where “no people has been spared the cross-cultural process.” 34 Glissant prefers the term créolisation, and claims for it a non-conciliatory flexibility that does not “glorify ‘unique’ origins that the race safeguards and prolongs”; it rather “deconstruct[s] … the category of ‘creolized’ … as halfway between two ‘pure’ extremes.” 35 Compelled by the Deleuzian rejection of the “murderous notion of identity, a unique root-identity that kills whatever surrounds it,” 36 Glissant is on the hunt for “a concept of difference without negation,” a view whose starting point is not “subordinat[ion] to the 31 Miller, Rise and Fall of the Cosmic Race, 1. 32 Mestizaje “was adopted as a conceptual tool which would allow Latin America to understand and to assert itself, from Inca Garcilaso, to Simón Bolivar’s ‘we are a small human species’ and to José Martí’s ‘our mestizo America’.” Poupeney-Hart, “Mestizaje,” 38–39. 33 Glissant, “Beyond Babel,” 561. 34 Glissant, Carribbean Discourse, 140; “I call ‘creolization’ what happened in the Caribbean, and what has happened in every archipelago, and what happens everywhere today because the world as a whole is becoming creolized. Europe too is becoming like an archipelago, an archipelago where regional realities are like islands, open islands. Little by little, as Europe establishes itself, it also decomposes into iselands that are open to each other.” Glissant, “The French Language in the Face of Creolization.” 35 Ibid. 36 Glissant, “The Poetics of the World: Global Thinking and Unforeseeable Events.” 161 identical,” 37 but the bourgening of a vital, “global ‘chaos’ which proliferates everywhere.” 38 Yet unlike Deleuze’s vitalism, Glissant’s historically and figurally Carribbean context refracts explicitly through American and European imperialisms, the bases of “deadly root- identit[ies] … painfully acquired through slavery and the plantation” 39 and of categories of wealth based upon the extraction of Bolivian and Andean resources (particularly silver and tin 40 ), what Walter Mignolo describes as a racialized “system of social stratification” and classification: the colonial matrix of power, an installation through which, as David Lloyd notes, “both imperialism and nationalism seek to occlude troublesome and inassimilable manifestations of difference by positing a transcendent realm of essential identity.” 41 Mignolo describes the system that invented Occidentalism (e.g. Indias Occidentales), that created the conditions for Orientalism; distinguished the South of Europe from its center (Hegel) and, on that long history, remapped the world as first, second and third during the Cold War. Places of nonthought (of myth, non-western religions, folklore, underdevelopment involving regions and people) today have been waking up from the long process of westernization. The anthropos inhabiting non-European places discovered that s/he had been invented, as anthropos, by a locus of enunciations self-defined as humanitas where “truths” of identity decidedly promote modern coloniality. 42 Glissant’s correspondences with Deleuze’s exposition of difference, as that which is nonidentical and without the “truth” of identity, 43 helps us to identify both philosphers’ 37 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, xix–xx. 38 Dash, Edouard Glissant, 23. 39 Glissant, “The Poetics of the World: Global Thinking and Unforeseeable Events.” 40 Hudson and Hanratty, “Bolivia - The Liberal Party and the Rise of Tin.” 41 Lloyd, Nationalism and Minor Literature, x. 42 Mignolo, “Epistemic Disobedience, Independent Thought and Decolonial Freedom,” 2–3. 43 and not as Michael Dash has more carefully explained that the restlesness of “Relation (‘relating’, in all senses of the word) is opposed to difference and, more than in his previous essays, G ranges beyond the Caribbean to describe a global condition.” Dash, Edouard, 22. 162 priority of the restless morphings that are idiosyncratic to language, literature, and poetics. Opacities that pertain to these, in other words, literary “distance[s] from the continuity of the familiar,” 44 must be guarded, claims Glissant. “[A]n appetite for opportune obscurity in translation must be created; and falsely convenient vehicular sabirs must be relentelessly refuted.” 45 We cannot “presume truly to ‘understand’ one another, precisely because these acts of understanding have, in the history of colonialism, proved synonymous with oppression and objectification.… Opacity can take the form of simply hiding from the surveillance of the colonizer, but the more complex forms of opacity involve a deliberate obscurity.” 46 Claims for heterolingualism as both openness to failure and open archipelago are unlike Naipaul’s description of calypso, for example “a purely local form. No song composed outside Trinidad is a calypso. The calypso deals with local incidents, local attitudes, and it does so in a local language. The pure calypso, the best calypso, is incomprehensible to the outsider.” 47 Glissant and Deleuze rather counter the notion of a lingua franca that “postulates a sphere of linguistic homogeneity” 48 where pure utterances only precede secondary or belated translations. The actuality of any communicating community, however—or that which, we could add, is a requirement of any community’s “we,” is the actuality of faulty correspondence and missed transactions, where “we” are an uneven and even erratic set of readers, writers, listeners, and speakers, an “essentially mixed 44 Adorno and Jephcott, Minima, 80. 45 Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 120. 46 Mahlis, “Edouard Glissant and Postcolonial Theory (Review of Celia Britton. Edouard Glissant and Postcolonial Theory. Charlottesville: U Virginia P, 1999. 224 pp.),” 554. 47 Naipaul, The Middle Passage, 66. 48 Sakai, Translation and Subjectivity, 4. 163 audience” with “ruffled” feelings and empathies that taint all communication, and leave no guarantee of “immediate apprehension or an expectation of uniform response.” 49 Shimose’s Heterolingualisms Shimose enacts heterolingual localizations and emplacements through poetry’s citations of indigenous and local language and culture in the form of colloquial bolivianismos, words, and phrases borrowed from and mixed with native languages. These harbor a certain heterolingualism as they retain varying degrees of foreignness for even the Bolivian reader. The multi-volume Poemas, as does Shimose’s 1996 anthology Riberalta y otros poemas, 50 includes a short glossary to help decipher various words the appear across the included volumes, from !alalay! (“interj. para expresar que hace much frio”) 51 and taquirari (“a popular song in the Bolivian plains [llano]”) 52 to Enín and huiracocha: Enín. El Dorado. Los guaraníes cultivaron el mito de un imperio indígena gobernado por Enín o Gran Paytiti, en el cual abundaba el oro y otras riquezas. Los españoles establecidos en Asunción del Paraguay confiaban encontrar el Imperio del Enín en la región de las llanuras bolivianas. Viracocha. Amo, señorito, patrón. Ser legendario divinizado por los incas. Los conquistadores fueron identifados como hijos de este dios, por eso les llamaron “huiracochas.” Por extensión, todo hombre blanco. 53 *** 49 Ibid. 50 Riberalta y otros poemas. 51 Shimose, Poemas, 397. 52 Ibid., 402. 53 Ibid., 398–399. 164 Enín. The Guarani cultivated the myth of an indigenous empire governed by Enín or Great Paytiti, abundant in gold and other riches. The Spaniards that settled in Asunción, Paraguay believed that they would one day find the Empire of Enín in the region of the Bolivian plains. Viracocha. Boss, master, patron. A legendary being deified by the Incas. The Conquistadors were identified as children of this god, and so named them “huiracochas.” White men in general, by extension. In “Ramón Beyuma,” for example, a poem about an “ordinary man of the people” appearing in the collection Quiero escribir pero me sale espuma (1972), 54 bolivianismos like “camba, buri, jumechi, callapo, gualusa, etc.” 55 are not fully familiar to all readers of Spanish; their heterolingual operations are opaque to even the Bolivian reader. “Shimose’s Amazonian lexicon,” observes Sisson, “is foreign to the speech of the Bolivian altiplano,” a point corroborated by their inclusion in the collection’s glossary. 56 Shimose describes Sardonia (1967) as “la pérdida de la armonía, la angustia de un hombre que descubre que el mundo es como es y no cómo se la habían pintado” 57 (“the loss of harmony, the anguish of a man who finds that the world is as it is, and not as he has portrayed it”). Its poem “Cuento” (“Story”) can be read as an emptying out of official narrative of the nation and its attendant emblems of progress. Signs of leisure are muddled with those of illness and derisory links to mythology, as they are overcome with sounds of viaje (journey), vagón (wagon, or carriage), and vacío (empty space), words that are flipped around in a rhizomatic flux: 54 Sisson, “Intertextuality in the Poetry of Pedro Shimose,” 176. 55 Ibid., 176. 56 Ibid. 57 Rozas, “Encuentro con Pedro Shimose, premio de poesia casa de las americas.” 165 Carta a una estrella que vive en otra constelación Gobierno de los peores, la tierra está envenenada: fútbol, huelgas, beisbol, y no hay salmones en la lluvia, equilibrio perfecto, reforma agraria, Estado, los mosquitos no desovan, complot, imperialismo, golpes de estado, tuberculosis, cán- cer, lepra, sífilis, momias de faraones, los mismos jeroglíficos diciendo otras cosas sin — absurdo con — aburrimiento Fatum Ananke piedra que me pesa Destino solo sin nadie sin nada no debes no puedes no quieres Viajante viaje vagón vagón vacío vagón viajero vacío ¿hay alguien? vagón vagón vacío ?Adónde? vacío vagón viajero vagón vagón vagón vagón vagón vagón vagón vagón vagón !NoooooooooO! Así vivieron muchos años y fueron muy felices … 58 *** Letter to a Celebrity in Another Constellation Government by the worst, this earth is poisoned: soccer, strikes, baseball, no salmon in the rain, perfect equilibrium, agrarian reform, the State, mosquitoes no longer spawn conspiracy, imperialism, coups d’etat, tuberculosis, cancer, leprosy, syphillis, pharaohs’ mummies, the same heiroglyphics saying other things without—absurd with—boredom 58 Shimose, Poemas, 75–76. 166 Fatum Ananke stone weighs on me Destiny alone with noone with anything you shan’t can’t don’t want Voyager voyage wagon wagon void vagón voyager void hello? wagon vagón void Which way? void vagón wagon voyager wagon vagón wagon wagon wagon wagon wagon wagon wagon NoooooooooO! And all they lived happy ever after … With a consonant sonority that appears somewhat hopeful, the above “Carta a una estrella” (“Letter to a Celebrity”) generates a rhythmic salve against poverty, capitalist crisis, and the absurd. duduliandudu liba’ndududulib […] millll milliones de agonías Made in USA, Fort Knox, todo el oro del mundo y Wall Street con sus depósitos de sangre me zumban los oídos en la sordera de la Bolsa y las estrellas descienden hasta el abstruso mecanismo de la explotación del pobre. Capitalismo popular, comunismo capitalista, cataclismo en el absurdo del absurdo, arce azucarero florecido en sintaxis sin taxis, ¡taxi! 59 *** 59 Ibid., 49–50. 167 duduliandudu liba’ndududulib […] millll millions of agonies Made in USA, Fort Knox, all the gold in the world and Wall Street with its blood banks my ears buzz in the deafness of the Stock Exchange and the stars descend toward the abstruse mechanism of the exploitation of the poor. Popular capitalism, capitalist comunisms, cataclysm in the absurd of the absurd sycamore sugar bowl budding in sin tax is no taxis, Taxi! Where the heavy-handedness of “Fatum Ananke,” paired Greek and Latin words for “fate,” nearly lost in the mundane gurgling of wagons in “Cuento,” in “Carta a una estrella,” gringo buzzwords for value, prestige, and wealth (“Made in USA,” “Fort Knox,” and “Wall Street”) are prefaced by the lyrical nonsense of “duduliandudu ….” Failures in communication are flaunted by foreign instances “outside” of castellano that turn potential affect into a sonic palpability as they fracture any assumption of “cultural or civilizational communality.” 60 Such gringo citation in “Carta a una estrella,” however, is not restricted to Sardonia. Dominated by themes of exile and the events of Bolivia in 1971, 61 Quiero escribir pero me sale espuma has seeded the most critical commentary of all Shimose’s work, especially after having won the Casa de las Américas prize for poetry in 1972. 62 Regarding its title is taken from the opening line of Cesar Vallejo’s sonnet “Intensidad y altura,” 63 Sisson surmises that “Vallejo’s situation in 1937-38 was not unlike that of Shimose in 1971-72: a Spanish- 60 Morris, Foreword to Translation and Subjectivity, xv 61 Shimose, Poemas, 49–50. 62 Sisson, “Intertextuality.” 63 from Poemas humanos (1938). 168 American expatriate living in Europe, at a time when hope of social progress and reform was acutely threatened by fascism and militarism.” 64 Quiero escribir emulates Vallejo’s exercise in unwitting fertility that constitues “la maduración del desarrollo dialéctico del pensamiento de Shimose” (“the maturing of an evolving dialectic in Shimose’s thought”). 65 In the poem “American way of life/Bolivia,” snippets of U.S. culture in an agrammatical English adorn an thoroughly superficial object of a speaker’s programmatic desire. 66 American way of life/Bolivia 67 Te quieren hacer de nylon, te quieren fabricar un corazón de plástico, te filmarán la sonrisa, te medirán el cráneo, te vestirán de marines y bases militares, codificarán tu amor para sus jaranas, te harán bailar cuando les dé la gana, strip-tease / American Dream Corp., cantarás huayños para La Voz de América y contarán tu vida en el Reader’s Digest. Fabricarán tus sueños en colores, te darán sortilegios en conserva, pop in out camp very good Batman yes! reducción india week-end Made in USA Visión publicará un reportaje con afiches de turismo, te instalarán escaleras mecánicas de bajada (nunca de subida) enviciarán tu aire, tu cielo azul será un túmulo escuro y dirán BOLIVIA TYPICAL COUNTRY IT’S WONDERFUL 64 Sisson, “Intertextuality,” 159. 65 Ortega, “Pedro Shimose, Poeta Comprometido,” 68. 66 in a way that is Reminicent of Adolfo Bioy Casares’ La invención de Morel (1940) 67 Shimose, Poemas, 142. 169 crecerán rascacielos, te encerrán en jaulas, te enseñarán cómo se caza el dólar, programarán tu alma y tomarás píldoras para dormir, dormir, dormir. *** American way of life/Bolivia They want to make you out of nylon, they want to make you a plastic heart, they’ll film your smile, measure your cranium, dress you with Marines and military bases, codify your love for the jarana, and make you dance at their whim, strip-tease / American Dream Corp., you’ll sing huayños for the American Voice and tell your life story to Reader’s Digest. They’ll manufacture your dreams in color, give you spells sealed in a jar pop in out camp very good Batman yes! Indian reduction week-end Made in USA Visión will publish an spread with glossy tourism ads and install escalators for you that descend (but never rise) they’ll contaminate your air, make the blue sky your dark tomb saying BOLIVIA TYPICAL COUNTRY IT’S WONDERFUL they will cultivate skyscrapers, imprison you in cells, teach you how to hunt the dollar and program your soul and you’ll take pills to sleep, sleep, sleep. Whether abrupt acts of violence 68 where “el lector puede enterarse de quienes son los transmisores del imperialismo cultural norteamericano que, según la perspectiva del hablante, humillan al país” 69 or benign intrusions, 70 choppy and agrammatical exhibitions of English 68 Sanjinés C., Tendencias actuales en la literatura boliviana, 102–103; qtd. Sisson, “Intertextuality,” 168. 69 Bornstein, “Nueva Poesia Socio-politica,” 229; qtd. Sisson, “Intertextuality,” 167. 70 Sisson observes that they “do not interact dialogically in any way,” ibid. 170 are intentionally botched with, to cite Deleuze and Guattari’s description of Kafka, “interactions, reinvestments, [and] exchanges” in which “[e]ach failure is a masterpiece, a branch of the rhizome.” 71 Persistent mis-enunciations from speaker to addressee return in the poem “Explicación del destierro,” also from the collection Quiero escribir. “Explicación,” however, exhibits a distinct heterolingualism vis-à-vis yet another “foreign” language. Explicación del destierro 72 En el tercer pétalo del aire nado contra la corriente con una fruta verde en la mirada el tucán y las linternas poemas una carta una guitarra Espartaco 2000 años inFORDmerockefeller & CIA hamburguesa snack bar escribo Ama sua, ama llulla, ama khella (no seas ocio, no seas ladrón, no seas mentiroso) escribo (se dan por aludidos) te fríen las hormigas te hierven la manteca corazón podrido del estaño “repúblicas bananeras”, pero no nos sueltan, ¿eh? el caos y la anarquía en el país de las maracillas orden paz inversiones OK inversiones dólares relajo metes uno, sacas tres, rotula un sobre me vigilan violan mi correspondencia me siguen firmo un artículo converso me fotografían busco empleo NoNoNoNoNó me inventan historias me calumnian […] *** 71 Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, 39. 72 Shimose, Poemas, 169. 171 Explanation of Exile Upon the third airborne petal I swim against the current with a green fruit in my eye a tucan and lanterns poems a letter a guitar Spartacus 2000 years inFORDmerockefeller & CIA hamburger snack bar I write Ama sua, ama llulla, ama khella (do not idle, do not steal, do not lie) I write (they take it personally) the fry ants for you boil up lard heart moldy with tin “banana republics,” but they don’t let us go, eh? the chaos and anarchy in wonderland order peace inversions OK dolar inversions I relax put in one, get back three label a letter they watch me rape my correspondence the chase me I sign an article I converse they photograph me I look for work NoNoNoNoNo they make up stories about me [make up my past] they slander me […] Perhaps familiar to a reader as Aymara—jaqi aru (“the language of the people”) or aimara in castellano 73 —the rhytmic iterations of “ama” in the line “Ama sua, ama llulla, ama khella” suggest that its following line is a castellano translation (“no seas ocio, no seas ladrón, no seas mentiroso). A language officially recognized by both Peru and Bolivia, Aymara is the second most widely spoken native tongue in the Americas, after Quechua; 74 Used by several ethnic groups, it is dominant in southeastern areas of Peru and the Bolivian Andes. The insertion of the Aymara line above in “Explicación” appears to “convey[] an ethical content, 73 Gall and Hobby, “Worldmark Encyclopedia.” 74 “The Aymara people do not inhabit a clearly demarcated territory of the Andes. It is estimated that 2 million Aymara reside in Bolivia, 500,000 in Peru, and 20,000 in Chile,” Gall and Hobby, “Worldmark Encyclopedia.” 172 rather than a mish-mash of fragmented and potentially empty signifiers.” 75 Its “foreign” mellifluity nonetheless contributes to the fragmentation and exploitation of putatively corralled signs. Tiwanaku 76 Tu nombre amarillea, oscurece y cae gastado al fondo de la piedra. Todo es muerte en ti, figuración del tiempo muerte que no acaba de morir, muerte en lucha a muerte con tus dioses y tus ángeles de piedra Profundo, el sueno de la piedra intenta definirte pero el frio se filtra por tus ojos, se hace noche en ti, tristeas, tus siglos son escombros tu sombra se derrumba a cada instante, se agrieta a cada instante se desplomba en el polvo a cada instante. Tu funeral camina por telaranas y tormentas. El olor de la muerte te persigue: 75 Sisson, “Intertextuality,” 172. 76 Ibid., 196–7. 173 to escarcha envejecida, tu paciencia arrugada, tu circulo, tus sellos. Ya no estás, piedra vencida, ciega, piedra de soledad, te estás muriendo. piedra demolida, de la noche a la noche tu nombre es nada, piedra sometida, piedra de silencio piedra. *** Tiwanaku 77 Your name yellows darkens falls spent, at the foot of the stone. All is dead in you, time’s configuration, death that neer stops dying, death in a struggle with death with your gods and your stone angels. Deep, the dream of the stone tries to define you but the cold filters through your eyes, turns to night inside you, you sadden, your centuries are rubbish, your shadow crumbles away moment by moment splitting and cracking 77 Reyes and DuVal, “Tiwanaku,” 49–51. 174 moment by moment, tumbling to the dust moment by moment. Your funeral treads through cobwebs and storms. The smell of death chases you: your aging rime, your wrinkled patience, your circle, your eyebrows. You are no more you blind, conquered stone stone of loneliness, you’re dying, demolished stone, from night into night— your name is nothing. Vanquished stone silent stone stone. From Shimose’s collection Caducidad del Fuego, “Tiwanaku” references the pre- Aymaran and certainly pre-Colombian “megalithic” 78 empire (also spelled “Tiahuanaco”) that, according to archeologist John Janusek, “forged a vast and coherent cultural identity out of profound social diversity.” 79 The Tiwanaku people were likely “the dominant society in the basin of Lake Titicaca from at least 100 CE to approximately 1200 CE. At its height … Tiwanaku’s influence reached as far as modern-era Chile and Argentina.” 80 The remarkable extant ruins show “the ruins of a center that had thrived long before the Inca.” 81 Abandoned before the arrival of the Inca who saw it as a sacred place, stones from Tiwanaku were 78 Janusek, Ancient Tiwanaku, 6. Janusek cites British naval cadet Clemens Markham (1862). 79 Ibid., 16. 80 Kinsbruner and Langer, “Tiwanaku”; also see Janusek, Ancient Tiwanaku. 81 Janusek, Ancient Tiwanaku, 6. 175 repurposed for churches and buildings in nearby towns. 82 Shimose’s recurring motif of la piedra in Shimose’s verse evokes and mirrors this recycling of stones, whose connections with indigenous, ancient, and/or in many respects unknown life and events might be taken as an alternative figure for Dimock’s deep time. Shimose’s inflections of indigeneity are localizations that do something other than satisfy anticipations and demands of “real” or didactic ethnographic depiction of one’s (doggedly hybrid) local space, particularly of the intimate place one calls home. And yet inevitably, to speak of indigeneity courts a similar anthropological and ethnographic trap. “To speak of Indigeneity,” explains Audra Simpson, “is to speak of colonialism and anthropology, as these are means through which Indigenous people have been known and sometimes are still known. In different moments, anthropology has imagined itself to be a voice, and in some disciplinary iterations, the voice of the colonised.” 83 Does the same not apply to Shimose, “el poeta ‘social’ de los años 67-71” 84 potentially the Bolivian or Andean “informant” for our project of constellating an Asian American literature of the Americas, whose citations of indigeneity or native life are at times explicitly nostalgic, fashioned as once-lost and now lyric voices reincorporable through poetry? With a directness that arguably becomes more oblique in the poet’s later work, 85 Shimose monumentalizes another site in the final poem of his first collection Triludio en exilio (Triludio in Exile, 1961). 82 Kinsbruner and Langer, “Tiwanaku.” 83 Simpson, “On Ethnographic Refusal,” 67. 84 Wiethüchter, “Poesía Boliviana Contemporánea: Oscar Cerruto, Jaime Sáenz, Pedro Shimose y Jesús Urzagasti,” 99. 85 as, for example, in the forlorness of the lines “La realidad no es culpa mía/Yo no la hice.[…]/Para mí el amor fue una tortura./Envejezco./Vivir me desespera./Mi soledad: mi gloria” in “Scherzo Aimara” from Caducidad del fuego, Shimose, Poemas 224. 176 Moxitania 86 India vegetal tallada en esmeralda, cuando la noche sacudió sus alas y estrellas cayeron en tus cuencas, en tus ojos se miraron la selva antes de ser selva la pradera antes de ser pradera y el río cuando no era más que una gota suspendida en el aire. […] antes de que los dedos se alargaran hasta el pensamiento de la cifra, el caimán arrastraba su sombra por el légamo, el piyo igualaba su velocidad con la del grito y el motacú ensayaba su abrazo con el bibosi antes del júbilo interplanetario. Antes de la forma pero después del tacto; antes del sonido pero después de la música; antes del color pero después de la luz, yo te amaba mujer de lluvia cernida [sifted] por las manos del verano, con mi corazón hecho de luna Pero Dios borró tu sexo para convertirte en barranco donde el hombre construyera su cabaña con cogollos de palmera; para convertirte en pampa donde los caballos machacaran tus huesos con sus cascos de diamante y donde los toros embistieran tu sonrisa con sus cuernos de itaúba; para convertirte en limo donde los arados rasgaran tu morena espalda como la yuca morena; para convertirte en siringa donde la cuchilla hendiera su filo para ahogar la sed de la tichela y para convertirte en laguna donde los peces te recorrieran en presencia de los pájaros. 86 Shimose, “Moxitania.” This is a much later revision of the original poem in Triludio. 177 *** Moxitania India of flora carved in emerald, as night shakes out its wings and the stars fall into your mines the jungle sees itself in your eyes before it was jungle the prairies before all grassland and the river no more than a young sphere suspended in air. […] before your fingers lengthen into the mind of the cipher the alligator dragged its shadow through the mud the chirp overtook the shriek and howl and the motacú rehearsed its embrace with the bibosi tree for all interplanetary jubilation. Before form but after touch; before sound but after music; before color but after the light; I adored you, woman of rain sifted by the hands of summer through my lunar heart but God erased your sex to make you a ravine where man would build his shed with hearts of palm; to turn you into the plains where horses would smash your bones with diamond hoofs and where bulls would charge your smile with horns of itauba; to turn you into silt with plows trudging across your back dark like the brown cassava; to transform you into a siringa into whose trunk the knife would cleave its blade to slake the thirst of the tichela and to change you into a lake where fish would hover about you in the presence of birds. 178 Moxitania is an alternative name for the Bolivian departamento (the region or province) of Beni, which is the current-day jurisdiction of Shimose’s hometown Riberalta. It is appears with one of the most curious definitions in the glossary of Poemas. Moxitania. Nombre culto del actual departamento del Beni, Bolivia. El sacerdote austrohungaro Francisco Javier Eder S.J. bautizo asi a esta region habitada, entre otras, por la tribu de los “musus”, “mojos” o “moxos”, perteneciente del groupo arawako. Creó esta palabra en su obra. Descriptio provinciae Moxitarum in Regno Peruano. Buda, 1791 (Poemas 400) *** Moxitania. The learned name for the current jurisdiction of Beni, Bolivia. The Austrohungarian priest Francisco Javier Eder S.J. this baptized this inhabited región, among others, after the tribe of “musus,” “mojos,” or “moxos,” i.e., the Arawak. He created this word in his text Descriptio provinciae Moxitarum in Regno Peruano. Buda, 1791. Shimose’s obliquely genealogical definition is nested by a colonial vantage, and illustrates that indigeneity is an object—perhaps the heterolingual object par excellence—that evades the identity principle. Indigeneity is not indigenous, that is to say; Audra Simpson reminds us that “people left their own spaces of self-definition and became ‘Indigenous.’ … a category that did not explicitly state or theorise the shared experience of having their lands alienated from them or that they would be understood in particular ways. 87 Like the anthropologist, the poet inhabits a role of liason or modern interlocutor that is neither “self- ascribed … nor without a serious material and ideational context; it [has always] accorded with the imperatives of Empire and in this, specific technologies of rule that sought to obtain space and resources, to define and know the difference that it constructed in those spaces and to then govern those within.” 88 87 Simpson, “On Ethnographic Refusal,” 69. 88 Ibid., 67. 179 The Legitimation of Exile Shimose’s alienation by his national homeland of Bolivia affords the author a worldly desarraigo, a vantage point of the “specular border intellectual.” 89 For Edward Said, for example (and for his Swift, Conrad, and Auerbach) the exile’s uprooted condition is “the state of never being fully adjusted … for the intellectual in this metaphysical sense is restlessness, movement, constantly being unsettled, and unsettling others.” 9091 The iterated distancings of “Moxitania” echo this work of exile, arguable the strongest theme in all critical work of Shimose, 92 from the commentary around the poet’s first volume of poetry Triludio en exilio, which constitutes “la evocación de un destierro existencial” 93 and Poemas para un pueblo, in which “La sensación de desarraigo y la búsqueda de la patria a través de recorrido poético por Bolivia” 94 —to Quiero escribir and the volumes that follow, all conceived after Shimose’s departure from Bolivia and evasion of the persecution of intellecuals after the Banzer’s coup in August of 1971. “[L]a poesía de S expresa un doble exilio: de un orden mítico y de la madre patria. A partir de Quiero escribir el exilio—ese síndrome latinoamericano—será una de las experiencias determinantes de su obra y sin duda, 89 Curthoys and Ganguly, Edward Said, 78. 90 Said, Representations of the Intellectual, 39. 91 Ibid. 92 Sisson, “Intertextuality,” NP. 93 Ortega, “Pedro Shimose, Poeta Comprometido,” 63. “La moral política poetizada en Poemas para un pueblo,” written both while Bolivia was under the rule of president René Barrientos Ortuñno (“gobierno que supone el entreguismo total al capitalismo yanqui”) and on the heels of Che Guevarra’s asassination, “sufre ante los sucesos entre 1969 y 1971 [when Barrientos died and the then-colonel Hugo Banzer Suárez came to power as presidnent] una radicalización ideológica así como un paralelo enriquecimiento en el tratamiento de la palabra poética que traduce esta crisis.” 66. 94 Wittingham and Moore, “La relación lenguaje-historia: poscolonialismo y posmodernidad en Poemas para un pueblo y Caducidad del fuego de Pedro Shimose.” 180 una de las más amargas.” 95 “En Caducidad del fuego surge el tercer exilio: la separación física de Bolivia o la expatriación, efectuándose el triple exilio: físico, existencial y linguístico. 96 Shimose’s status as a political and intellectual exile, a known figure in “world literature,” is a potentially new and negotiable border for an Asian American literature of the Americas. Traditional Asian American literature and its dissonant hybridity may be said to share a similar dilemma in which one cannot “go back to some earlier and perhaps more stable condition of being at home; and, alas, you can never fully arrive, be at one in your new home or situation.” 97 Exile affords Shimose a similar point of planetary departure for Wai Chee Dimock, who links Osip Mandelstam and Dante in an exilic circuit that exceeds the national and “challenges the power of the territorial as a determining force in literature.” 98 In an fascinating interview with Debbie Lee DiStefano, Shimose’s discussion of his national and ethnic identity belies this potential claim to cosmopolitanism. DD: Have you always felt Bolivian [...] haven’t you had the sensation of being a foreigner, a Japanese immigrant? PS: I have always felt Bolivian. I was educated as a Bolivian and no one ever denied me the right to be a Bolivian. Where I did experience this sensation of foreignness was in Europe, where the majority of people don’t really know peripheral countires like Bolivia.[...] I can’t deny my Japanese lineage, but I AM NOT Japanese. I am a mestizo Bolivian who writes and speaks Spanish. My thoughts and my feelings are Bolivian. My language [lenguaje], thus, is Bolivian.[...] 95 Mitre, “Cuatro Poetas Bolivianos Contemporaneos,” 150. 96 Wittingham and Moore, “La relación lenguaje-historia,” 292. This is epitomized, they say, by the poem “Dialogo en piedra.” 97 Said, Representations of the Intellectual, 39. 98 Dimock, “Literature for the Planet.” 181 DD: Do you feel that you are a cultural hybrid [un ser culturalmente híbrido]? PS: A human being is not a plant or a beast under experiment. A human is imminently a social, cultural, and linguistic product. To be a mestizo is not to be a hybrid. 99 Drawing upon José Vasconcelos’ Darwinist roots, Shimose shuns the designation of cosmic cosmopolite to claim his deicdedly nationalist rendition of being mestizo. And indeed one would be hard-pressed to identify any trope or theme of a defining hybridity, consonant or dissonant, in Shimose’s verse. The author’s national brand mestizaje foils the attempt to emplace him or to formalize his status as a transnational Asian subject of the Americas, or to fold him into an articulation of “a planet whose topography is saturated with these neo-liberal values” 100 —mappings whose potentialities are dim if we consider that there are nearly no English translations of his work. Indeed more labors of translation are sorely needed, in order that Shimose might attain the planetary “valuation Dimock has discerned in Dante’s and Mandelstam’s writings.” 101 99 “Entrevista Con Pedro Shimose,” 88. 100 Pease, “Extraterritoriality.” 101 Ibid. 182 “Huelga de hambre” Huelga de hambre 102 -Mi palabra es estaño, pero no vale nada. -Nadie me hace caso. -Mi palabra es pobre y no se escucha. —Mi hombre no está contre el gobierno pero tenemos hambre— decía una mujer con su guagüita en brazos. La ciudad no sabe lo que pasa más allá de la ciudad. […] estamos cansados de verle la cara al hambre todos los días hasta en sueños, de toparnos [butt us] con sus fusiles apuntándonos [pointing at us] más de cuatro siglos. Ya no tenemos miedo, huiracocha. 103 Por eso hemos venido a denunciar con hambre nuestra hambre …. *** 102 Shimose, Poemas, 340. 103 Shimose’s own definition of huiracocha in the glossary of Poemas: “m. Viracocha. Amo, señorito, patrón. Ser legendario divinizado por los incas. Los conquistadores fueron identifados como hijos de este dios, por eso les llamaron ‘huiracochas.’ Por extensión, todo hombre blanco.” Ibid., 399. Viracocha, Huiracocha, or Wiraqoca, the term refers to the “creator deity originally worshiped by the pre-Inca inhabitants of Peru and later assimilated into the Inca pantheon…. According to tradition, after forming the rest of the heavens and the earth, Viracocha wandered through the world teaching men the arts of civilization. At Manta (Ecuador) he walked westward across the Pacific, promising to return one day. He was sometimes represented as an old man wearing a beard (a symbol of water gods) and a long robe and carrying a staff…. He probably entered the Inca pantheon at a relatively late date, possibly under the emperor Viracocha (died c. 1438), who took the god’s name.” “Viracocha,” Encyclopædia Britannica Online (Encyclopædia Britannica Inc., 2012), http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/629767/Viracocha. 183 Hunger Strike -My word is tin, but worth nothing. -No one notices me. -My word is poor, unheard —My husband is not against the government but we are hungry— said a woman cradling her little one. The city doesn’t know what is happening beyond the city. […] we are tired of staring at hunger’s face every day and in dreams, its pistol whipping us aiming at us for over four hundred years. We are no longer afraid, huiracocha. We have now come to denounce our hunger with hunger …. Published in his 1985 collection Bolero de caballeria (Bolero of Chivalry or Military March 104 ), “Huelga de hambre” schematizes the dogged inability to be heard and enfranchised through the claim of one’s voice. The submerging of voice is in line with the traditional Asian American literary trope of being on the same page in sentiment or sympathy, in an ethos of shared comfort that echoes descriptions of liberal representative government based on “feelings and interests which arrange mankind according to localities.” 105 The voices at hand, however, are neither of nor about Asian bodies. The speakers appear to be mostly indigenous tin miners, 106 or those related to them, whose plight is contextualized by Bolivia’s post-1964 government by René Barrientos Ortuñno, the 104 These translations of the title are by Clifford, “Pedro Shimose (1940- ),” 283. 105 for example, by J.S. Mill and Yukichi Fukuzawa. See Sakai, “Nationality and the Politics of the ‘Mother Tongue’,” 8, 35n4; John Stuart Mill, Considerations on Representative Government. 106 Hudson and Hanratty, “Bolivia - The Liberal Party and the Rise of Tin.” 184 authoritarian regime that “caused the fragmentation of the groups that had [once] democratized politics. Toward the end of the 1970s, mass-based protests and politicization began again, especially when tin-miners grew more vocal and organized.” 107 “Huelga” thus ventures into a metaphysical cleft between the human voice and existence as a putatively unnuanced fact. There is a chasm between the speaking voice(s) on one hand, and huiracocha/reader on the other, in a weird intimacy that toggles and splits the huiracocha/reader into yet another somewhat heard yet dwindling voice, in a palpable questioning of (human) being as “our” given and uninterrogated denominator. Distance is articulated with the claim to a poverty of physical sustenance and of words […], as its promotion, whether illogical or irrational, is challenged by a collective embrace of life’s further dwindling. The hunger strike’s curtailment of life is oddly countered by that curtailment’s intensification—in a way that takes a stand, as that poem stakes out a place more than it places or situates: When now man, in the midst of beings (physis) to which he is exposed (ausgesetzt), seeks to gain a stand (einen Stand zu gewinnen) and to establish himself, when in the process of mastering he proceeds in such and such a way, then this proceeding against beings is supported and guided by a knowledge of beings. This knowledge is called technè. 108 There is no explicit discussion here of what we might roughly call technology, speedier modes of transportation, radio, or say, television (what Heidegger sees as the 107 “Bolivia’s 1952 revolution and civilian rule were follwed by an authoriarian govt starting in 1964, … Methods such as hunger strikes for the release of political prisoners gained a wider audience and fostered support for civilian opposition groups. Political tensions grew within Bolivia and fear of leftists become more acute, leading to a military coup in 1980 shortly after a hotly contested election. Bolivian politics has become somewhat less polarized recently.” McCarthy and Sharp, Nonviolent Action, 74. 108 Weber, Mass Mediauras, 59–60. Weber’s translation is of Heidegger’s Nietzche. 185 pinnacle “of every possibility of remoteness” 109 ), matrices that nonetheless allow the persistence of trying to see the world as a unified locale. “Huelga” reminds us that the versified voice, like television’s mediation, can produce intimacies that have nothing to do with actual “shortness of distance,” 110 an uncanny illustration of technical knowledge that comments upon the unevenness of (human) being. This is an example of how reading Shimose can retain an openness regarding questions about the formal individual, with regard to the Asian Americas and technical writing “not addressed at making or producing particular things[,] but rather at ‘the unlocking of being as such.’” 111 109 Heidegger, “The Thing,” 163. 110 Ibid. 111 Weber, Mass Mediauras, 60. 186 Epilogue Against Trees The map, then, is not an instrument of reproduction but rather one of construction.[...] Deleuze and Guattari use the rhizome to emblematize a new form of thought and politics that is not trapped in the rigid formations of the state, the unconscious, or language. [...] Like the navigator who in one trajectory uses the metro, the bus, and the foot in combination—thereby integrating a network of bodily and mechanic locomotion into one “assemblage”—a rhizomatic or nomadic thought would forge linkages or connections between diff systems of knowledge-formation. —Eleanor Kaufman 1 To use the language of Deleuze and Guattari’s polemic against the intrasigencies of trees, Asian American literature’s geographic and linguistic entrenchments function as an “abstract machine of overcoding” that “defines a rigid segmentarity, a macrosegmentarity, because it produces or rather reproduces segments … laying out a divisible, homogeneous space striated in all directions.” 2 Deterritorializing alternatives to such compartments could be described as antipodal; but the term would only partially capture the unpredictable fertility of extra-dimensional mapping through which the individual can be something other than merely subject. More apt would be a combination of antipodal and the term’s very own antipodes, the homonymic anti-Oedipal and its senses of anti-coagulation, anti-“ever-living men and women” 3 and anti-Asian American—to the extent that the Asian American non-nomadic and firmly rooted in an unmistakeably American home. 1 “Kaufman, “Introduction,” 5. 2 A Thousand Plateaus, 223. 3 Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence, xviii. 187 Two more examples come to mind that further illustrate the becomings discussed here. In Augusto Higa Oshiro’s novella La iluminación de Katzuo Nakamatsu, 4 the eponymous professor’s schizophrenic hallucinations chart a cleft world. Katzuo compulsively sees himself as a weird aggregation of two men whom he idolizes: Martín Adán, the celebrated but insane Peruvian poet whose stylized verses recur rhythmically in Katzuo’s mind, and Etsuko Unten, a fiery Okinawan Japanese colonist who worked tirelessly for Japanese social justice in Lima. Adding further axes to Asian American literature’s traditional hybrid embrace of a subject’s discrete cultures, Katzuo’s two “worlds” are utterly indistinct. His identity as a selfsame individual is persistently and annoyingly interrupted, unable to cohere amidst his forest-like “uberrhythms,” lush natural and animal sensations that abruptly crop up to assuage his acute paranoia in the urban belly of Lima. Neither Adán’s impossible life of an aesthete nor Unten’s life of imperio-political and familial duty is immune from “positive constraint” or “human arbitrariness.” 5 Antipodes abound as La iluminación sheds light on the palpable elision of Okinawan affiliations with regard Japanese colonial history in Peru and in the Americas. The text conspicuously refrains from any clear critique of Unten’s devotion to Japanese “heroic expansion” and the purity of his raza, an anti-mestizaje: “This mess of jumbling races [is] impossible, even more for a Japanese,” says Unten). The inexorable mediation and flux of Katzuo’s body, his sanity, and his worlds hinder a neat narrative of the in-dividual or liberal subject’s edification. “Starting over,” the refrain of Wong Kar Wai’s film Happy Together, offers another recalibration of the normal locales and linguistic emplacements of Asian American 4 Higa Oshiro, La iluminación de Katzuo Nakamatsu. 5 Schiller, “Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man,” 108. 188 community. 6 For the couple Yiu-Fai and Po-Wing, restarting a rocky relationship entails traveling to the farthest possible place from home: the city of Buenos Aires, whose cold unfamiliarity—an other-worldliness enhanced by Cheng’s trek to Argentina’s Ushuaia, a.k.a “el fin del mundo”—intensifies the Hong Kong denizens’ abrupt relocation at the other side of the world. When Fai sees Hong Kong upside-down and inverted, and “hears” the city as a static jumble of radio and television sounds, we sense that his world has become dizzyingly and irrevocably enlarged. Once yearned for as hopeful finales to his travels, neither Hong Kong nor Po-Wing is a secure “home” for Fai; neither is a place to which he will “return.” An unwitting Asian American protagonist, Fai’s putative origins and foundations no longer anchor his increasingly nomadic identity. If Asian American literature’s negotiations with community are primarily read through the form of dissonant hybridity, the successful or foiled ascent of the racialized protagonist toward sharper self-definition or national subjecthood, say, from Sui Sin Far’s Mrs. Spring Fragrance and Younghill Kang’s East Goes West, to Carlos Bulosan’s America is in The Heart and Sia Figiel’s They Who do Not Grieve, 7 this recapitulates the trump of ethnos’ singularity enhanced by “new,” intra-communal voices once repressed by official or more powerful narratives. Sub-ethnic and sub-generic excavations thus mimic the discreteness of Asian American voices within multiculturalist ethnic arenas, securing the idea that “ethnic identity can be directly and objectively experienced,” and that among Asian Americans, “communication of ideas and sentiment … is guaranteed from the start.” 8 How 6 Wong, Happy Together. 7 Eaton, Mrs. Spring Fragrance; Kang, East Goes West; Bulosan, America Is in the Heart; Figiel, For Those Who Do Not Grieve. 8 Sakai, Translation and Subjectivity, 2. 189 are we to read, say, the pícaro Rey Archimedes Blondel Castro and his escapades through the fictional Arab state of Bohaiden, in Timothy Mo’s novel Renegade or Halo2; or the tribulations of António Castro’s (of no relation to Rey) Jewish ancestors who convert to Catholicism in Shanghai Dancing by Austrailian author Brian Castro? These Anglophone narratives, with their intense depictions of “foreign” spaces, histories, and non-English textures, compel strategems of heterolingualism where “‘We’ are rather a nonaggregate community” 9 unable to occupy one language or be on the same page. Heterolingualism and dissensus are a far cry from community’s dissolution; they are a place “where our differences and failure in communication can be manifest.” 10 Such strange community, or community of strangers, can accommodate non-individuums and self- cancellations by which Asian Americans can continue to assume the forms of both an “achieved subjectivity and … the impossibility of that achievement,” as Kandice Chuh describes. 11 This is certainly the case if we are able to reduce our anxieties about turning toward the call to be counted—that is to say, if community can be a virtual locale where “the people are missing.” 12 9 Ibid., 4. 10 Sakai, “Translation,” 75. 11 Chuh, Imagine Otherwise, 8. 12 Asked about the “relation … between human struggle and the work of art,” Deleuze responds: “It is the strictest and for me the most mysterious relation. Precisely what Paul Klee wanted to say when he said: ‘You know, the people are missing.’ The people are missing while at the same time they are not missing. The people are missing: that means that this fundamental affinity between a work of art and a people who do not yet exist is not, and never will be, clear. There is no work of art that does not appeal to a people who do not yet exist” (my italics). “Having an Idea in Cinema (On the Cinema of Straub-Huillet),” in Deleuze and Guattari, 19. 190 Bibliography “A Politics of Fact and Figure (Afterword).” In Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, 130– 150. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003. Acosta, José de. Historia natural y moral de las indias (en HTML). Estudio preliminar y edición del P. Francisco Mateos. Biblioteca Virtual Miguel de Cervantes, n.d. http://www.cervantesvirtual.com/obra-visor/historia-natural-y-moral-de-las-indias-- 0/html/. ———. 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Creator Kim, Michelle Har (author)

Core Title Antipodes of Asian American literature: heterolingualism and the Asian Americas

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Comparative Literature

Publication Date 04/24/2012

Defense Date 02/22/2012

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

Tag American studies,Asian American literature,Asian American studies,Comparative Literature,diaspora,ethnic literature,ethnic studies,Gilles Deleuze,Globalization,hemispheric,Literature,OAI-PMH Harvest,translation,transnational,transnationalism

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Lippit, Akira Mizuta (committee chair), Giorgi, Gabriel (committee member), Lloyd, David C. (committee member), Nguyen, Viet Thanh (committee member)

Creator Email kimmiche@usc.edu,michelleharkim@gmail.com

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c3-9783

Unique identifier UC11290348

Identifier usctheses-c3-9783 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-KimMichell-631.pdf

Dmrecord 9783

Document Type Dissertation

Rights Kim, Michelle Har

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...

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