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

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

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Content UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
Sonic Displacement, Sonic Placemaking: The Poetics of Diaspora
in Yoko Tawada, Jessica Hagedorn, and M.I.A.
DISSERTATION
submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements
for the degree of
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
in English
by
Christopher Santiago
Dissertation Committee:
Professor David St. John, Co-Chair
Professor Susan McCabe, Co-Chair
Professor Bruce R. Smith
Associate Professor Viet Thanh Nguyen
Associate Professor Joanna Demers
August 2015
© 2015 Christopher Santiago
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Page
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS…………………………………………………… iv
ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION……………………………………… vi
INTRODUCTION…………………………………………………………….. 1
CHAPTER 1—Yoko Tawada: Outside the Sound……………………………. 12
CHAPTER 2—Jessica Hagedorn: Sonic Tropes/Tropicalized
Sounds…………………………………………………………………………. 51
CHAPTER 3—I Bongo with My Lingo: Sound and Slang in M.I.A…………. 106
CONCLUSION: Beyond Displacement……………………..……………….. 141
TULA (CREATIVE MANUSCRIPT)………………………………………… 146
WORKS CITED……………………………………………………………… 209
iii
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I WOULD LIKE TO OFFER MY DEEPEST THANKS to my “Doktormutter” and “Doktorvater,” my
committee co-chairs Susan McCabe and David St. John. Without their keen guidance, steadfast
support, and unwavering faith in both my scholarly and creative ideas, this project could never
have been completed.
Thank you, too, to the members of my brilliant committee, whose balance of enthusiasm,
skepticism, and permissiveness allowed me to develop this project while growing as a scholar
and a writer. I trace the origins of my Tawada chapter to Bruce Smith’s seminar, and his
inspirational warmth, wisdom, and knowledge. Joanna Demers’s guidance through the often
thorny field of critical musicology was indispensable. Through his generosity and willingness to
answer both scholarly and professional questions at length, Viet Nguyen provided an exemplary
model for the type of scholar and teacher I would like to become.
I have also been fortunate enough to receive guidance, friendship, and constructive insights from
a number of remarkable scholars and writers in the USC community and in southern California
more generally. John Rowe’s tireless support for both my critical and creative work energized
me; he also provided critical insights into my prospectus that were invaluable in re-framing this
project. Marjorie Perloff and David Lloyd provided a rigorous foundation of critical methods and
approaches, and their mentorship has extended well beyond their remarkable seminars.
I would also like to thank Robert Fink and the UCLA Department of Musicology for allowing
me to audit their graduate seminar on Popular Musicology, which was indispensable in
developing the chapters on Hagedorn and M.I.A. I am also thankful for advice and insights from
Sarita See, Fred Moten, Victor Bascara, Charles Bernstein, Yasemin Yildiz, and the members of
the USC Critical Theory Reading Group, especially Mike Bennett, Samantha Carrick, Patti
Nelson, Stephen Pasqualina, Rob Rabiee, and Alex Young.
Much insight and support was received during the development of the creative manuscript as
well; a thousand thanks to Brandon Som, Josh Rivkin, Oliver de la Paz, Cathy Linh Che, Mark
Irwin, Carl Muske-Dukes, Fox Henry-Frazier, Stewart Grace, Pamela Alexander, Martha Collins,
David Young, Stuart Friebert, Li-Young Lee, Srikanth Reddy, Wayne Miller, Gerald Maa,
Eugenia Leigh, David Walker, Diane Vreuls, Martha Collins, Margaret Rhee, Neil Aitken, Sarah
Gambito, Joseph Legaspi, and Kundiman for their generous attention and advice on both the
manuscript and on individual poems.
The critical portion of this dissertation was completed with support from a Dissertation
Completion Fellowship from The Mellon Foundation/American Council of Learned Societies
and a Provost’s Ph.D. Fellowship from the University of Southern California. The creative
manuscript received additional travel and research support from ACE-Nikaido, Philippine
American Writers & Artists, Inc., and the USC Literature & Creative Writing Program.
iv
I would like to express my deepest gratitude and appreciation for my family, especially to my
wife, Yuri, without whom none of this would have been possible. I am thankful too to my
parents, Rene and Mildred Santiago, to my mother- and father-in-law, Tsuneo Takasugi and
Tomoko Takasugi, and my siblings, Tommy and Lisa Vuong, Eric Takasugi, Alex Takasugi, and
Sean and Connie Santiago, who helped care for our two children during the completion of this
project. I would also like to thank my sons, Aki and Tristan, for their patience and intuition and
joy: they were and are the reason for this and all of my work.
Finally, I would like to dedicate this project to the memory of my mother, Mildred Santiago
(June 6, 1946—May 29, 2015), who passed away unexpectedly three weeks after my defense.
Readers of these poems, and readers of this study of language-music transmitted across
generations, will, I hope, continue to feel her influence. I am grateful to her for the gift of
language, transmitted to me through the music of her Ilongo-inflected English, and will keep
listening closely for her voice.
v
ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION
Sonic Displacement and Sonic Placemaking:
The Poetics of Diaspora in Yoko Tawada, Jessica Hagedorn, and M.I.A.
By
Christopher Santiago
Doctor of Philosophy in English
University of Southern California, 2015
Professors Susan McCabe and David St. John, Co-Chairs
This project investigates the ways in which sound irrupts in the work of Asian diasporic writers.
Combining sound studies practices with a phenomenological approach to transnational texts, the
project seeks to not only develop new readings of diasporic texts—readings which argue for the
indispensability of diasporic literature within a larger literary and social discourse—but to
contribute to a new critical framework for reading sound in literature.
Each chapter listens closely to a text authored by an Asian diasporic author. I take note of
the sonic irruptions that enfold (and are enfolded within) the short stories-cum-literary-essays of
Yoko Tawada, written in both her native Japanese and German; Jessica Hagedorn’s immigrant
punk-rock novel The Gangster of Love; and Sri Lankan/British rapper M.I.A.’s first and second
albums Arular and Kala. Each text is rife with word play, neologisms, code-switching, exacting
transcriptions of speech and soundscapes, sonic worldbuilding, and other forms of sonic
manipulation. My project explores not only the aesthetic, affective, and philosophical
implications of these sounds, but also their political valences as sites of productive rupture in
hegemonies of language.
vi
Through echo and sympathetic vibration, sonic irruptions in literary works make audible a
twofold sonic displacement: one is the author’s displacement from a local ecosystem of sound;
the other is the author’s displacement from a community of spoken language. Together, these two
aspects constitute the sonic dimension of what diaspora studies refers to as the homeland: a
native soundscape that is the originary space of sonic subject formation. Displaced from their
native soundscapes, but never fully at home within their new sonic environments, diasporic
authors paradoxically enjoy the freedom to make metalinguistic commentary on both the target
(second language) and heritage languages (mother tongue). If language is the principal force of
hegemony, then diasporic authors’ sonic irruptions constitute a feedback loop, the noise produced
by bodies simultaneously immersed in and alienated by language. This feedback, I believe, has
the capacity to overload and reconfigure language and the relationships in and between the
bodies that it seeks to regulate.
vii
INTRODUCTION: SONIC DISPLACEMENT AND SONIC PLACEMAKING
IN YOKO TAWADA, JESSICA HAGEDORN, AND M.I.A.
It was like I had audio dysplasia. Instead of seeing double, I heard double, something
besides what Arnaldo was actually saying. “Trouble” when he said “travel,” “gender”
when he said “genre,” “fold” when he said “fault,” or “grammatic fever” when he said
“rheumatic fever.” But after laughing and sorting it all out, we’d come to the ironic
conclusion that it wasn’t a case of miscommunication at all, but understanding.
(Hagedorn 1996 29)
Rocky Rivera, the protagonist of Jessica Hagedorn’s second novel, The Gangster of Love (1996),
leaves the turbulent martial law-era Philippines of her adolescence for post-Hendrix San
Francisco, only to abandon that city for New York to take on the experimental, post-punk scene
of the late ‘70s and early ‘80s. Among the many musicians, artists, rivals, and ex- and would-be
lovers she meets along the way is Arnaldo, the on-again, off-again partner of Rocky’s best friend.
Rocky takes a shine to Arnaldo, partly because he is a fellow immigrant, and partly because she
is fascinated by the way he uses the English language: there’s an undercurrent to his speech, a
ghost- or double-language. Filtered through Rocky’s immigrant ear, Arnaldo’s accented clusters
of phonemes are modulated into sounds that convey warnings (trouble-travel); sounds that
expose false textual, corporeal, and moral binaries (gender-genre, fold-fault); and sounds that
link somatic ailments to linguistic ones (grammatic fever-rheumatic fever).
What passes between Rocky and Arnaldo, they both conclude, is not “miscommunication
at all, but understanding.” As diasporic subjects who speak, sing, and hear the English language
in nonstandard and nonnative modes, Rocky and Arnaldo push the language beyond
conventional usage into a supracommunicative mode, which is achieved through a modulation of
sonic materiality. Arnaldo’s utterances are encoded, inflected, and modulated by his diasporic
identity, but they are also heard “doubly” by Rocky, whose ear was conditioned to hear English
1
words as much by American popular music as by her immersion in the Filipino education
system. It is the sonic manifestation of words—sounded by bodies whose geographical
displacements have left sonic traces in the form of nonstandard speech musics—that disorients,
and reorients, both Rocky and Arnaldo.
Like the protagonist of her novel, Hagedorn belongs to the Filipino diaspora. As a 1.5
generation immigrant (Hagedorn left the Philippines at the age of 11), she possesses firsthand
knowledge of her homeland, but grew into adulthood in the United States. Hagedorn was
encoded at a young age with the prosody, pitch contour, and timbre of Tagalog (her mother
tongue or heritage language) but developed her mature literary output in English (her target
language). Consequently, she has an increased sensitivity to the sonic materiality of both English
and Tagalog.
This project investigates the ways in which sound irrupts in literatures of the Asian
diaspora. In the United States alone, Asians constituted 29 percent of new immigrants in 2011,
up from 5 percent in 1960, the sending nations of the largest populations being Chinese (19.3),
Indian (16.1), Filipino (15.7), Vietnamese (10.9), and Korean (9.4) (Hoskins 7). Combining
sound studies practices with a phenomenological approach to literary texts, the project not only
seeks to develop new readings of Asian diasporic texts—readings which will argue for the
indispensability of diasporic literature within a larger literary and social discourse—but seeks to
contribute toward a more effective critical framework for reading sound in literature.
I choose to describe sonic tropes, manifestations, and events in diasporic literature as
irruptions because I argue that they often occur abruptly, reflexively, even involuntarily, as a
symptom of the author’s displacement between soundscapes and language communities.
Irruption also connotes sudden large migrations of populations, often under violent
2
circumstances, and thus resonates with themes of dispersion and mobility. Finally, the secondary
usage of irruption (according to the OED)—a confusion with its near homonym eruption—
encapsulates the sonic dimension and ludic instability of language. Word plays and puns—both
intentional and unintentional—heighten the awareness of language as sound, language as
arbitrary, and thereby cause language to “careen out of control.” (Bruns 64). In a chapter entitled,
“Why Filipinos Make Pun(s) of Each Another,” Sarita See notes the ways in which a pun may
also act as a “vehicle for the translingual and transnational production of meaning”:
Corny jokes, endless punning, and playful teasing make up the stuff of Filipino/American
everyday life. Polemical, aggressive, and frivolous forms of word play are evidence of a
culture that is “alive and vibrant because of a disposition toward light-hearted bantering
and joking relationships” (Enriquez 13) (See 71—103)
Incorporating eruption as a secondary meaning of irruption in the context of global diasporas
conflates the transpacific/transnational movement of populations with sudden, violent, immersive
outflows of materiality that have the capacity to reconfigure and redefine topographies and
territorial boundaries.
I will argue that the sonic irruption in the work of the diasporic author is an irruption of
interstitial space itself, the liminal soundscape that lies between languages which is both verbal
and nonverbal, a soundscape in which the diasporic author in some respects resides. The various
geopolitical forces shaping the new global literary landscape, forces at work behind this project’s
authors’s dispersion—are a testament to the urgent need to develop new approaches to sonic
literacy.
3
Selected Texts and Authors
Each chapter listens closely to a text authored by an Asian diasporic author. I take note of the
sonic irruptions that enfold (and are enfolded within) Jessica Hagedorn’s immigrant punk-rock
novel The Gangster of Love; Sri Lankan-British rapper M.I.A.’s first and second albums Arular
(2004, XL Records) and Kala (2007, Interscope Records); and selections from the short stories,
interviews, and lyric essays of Yoko Tawada, written in both her native Japanese and German.
Like the protagonist of her novel, Hagedorn belongs to the Filipino diaspora. As a 1.5
generation immigrant (Hagedorn left the Philippines at the age of 11), she possesses firsthand
knowledge of her homeland, but grew into adulthood in the United States. Tawada, a first-
generation immigrant, was born in Tokyo in 1960 but has lived primarily in Berlin since 1982.
Like Hagedorn, M.I.A. (the emcee name of Mathangi “Maya” Arulpragasam) left Jaffna as an
adolescent refugee and resettled in London. She was, however, born and spent the six first
months of her life in London, and is therefore classifiable as both a 1.5 generation and second
generation British Asian.
This study thus focuses on the phenomenological experiences of the Tawada’s, M.I.A.’s,
and Hagedorn's displaced subjects themselves, i.e., their experience as hearing subjects immersed
in new soundscapes which consist both of new language communities and unfamiliar sounds.
Partly as a result of this immersion, each text is rife with word play, neologisms, code-switching,
exacting transcriptions of speech and soundscapes, and other forms of sonic manipulation. This
project, therefore, explores the capacity of displaced subjects to disrupt and reconfigure both the
dominant soundscapes and dominant language through sonic and extra-lingual processes such as
accent, code-switching, deployment of mother tongue/language perceived as noise, musicking,
and the coining or interpolation of new and/or foreign words and idioms into the target language.
4
This project explores not only the aesthetic, affective, and philosophical implications of these
sonic irruptions, but also their political valences as sites of productive rupture in hegemonies of
language.
Structure of the Dissertation and Chapters
The dissertation is structured thematically so that the author of each successive chapter moves
closer toward calling the language of their mature literary output their first language; the first
chapter considers a first-generation writer (Tawada), chapter two considers a writers who is 1.5
generation (Hagedorn), and chapter three considers M.I.A., who left her homeland as an
adolescent and is therefore classifiable as a 1.5 generation immigrant, but who was also born and
spent the first few months of her infancy in London, and could also be considered a second-
generation writer.
Chapter 1 further develops the notion of a native soundscape and a target soundscape in
order to investigate the exophonic stories, essays, and interviews of Yoko Tawada. Through sonic
tropes as well as wordplay and neologism that put pressure on and foreground the sonic
materiality of language, Tawada’s stories remind adult readers that language is first acquired by
preliterate infants and toddlers as sonic phenomena. Through an exploration of Tawada’s
recurrent troping on the womb and mother tongue, Chapter 1 also suggests a revision of the
semiotic as conceived by Julia Kristeva.
In Chapter 2, I engage with Hagedorn’s puns, code-switching (between languages,
registers, and dialects), transcriptions of song lyrics, and arguments, which constitute the
burgeoning aurality of The Gangster of Love. In the novel, sonic exchanges between and among
5
Filipinos in the diaspora serve both as reminders of ancestral/homeland ties and as an ever-
1
present and overpowering keynote of displacement: foreign accents, foreign soundscapes. For
1~1.5 generation subjects of the Filipino diaspora, this displacement is complicated by the
embeddedness of American English and American popular culture within Filipino culture. Not
only is Rocky familiar with Diana Ross and West Side Story before she leaves Manila, she is also
fluent in Philippine English, a recognized variant of the Standardized American English in which
her novel is predominantly written.
Chapter 3 is the most interdisciplinary portion of the dissertation It incorporates theories
of critical musicology, sound studies, sound art, sound poetry, gender studies, and postcolonial
studies in order to unpack Sri Lankan-British hip-hop artist M.I.A.’s complex anthems of
diaspora, word play, and resistance. M.I.A.’s diasporic background as a political refugee, and as
the daughter of a Tamil revolutionary (for whom her first album was named) was integral to her
ascendancy to celebrity status. I will unpack both her lyrical, sonic, and stylistic appropriations;
consider her use of pitch, timbre, and prosody; and explore both the affective, aesthetic, political,
and philosophical implications of her word play, wordmaking, and digressions into the
nonverbal.
The inclusion of M.I.A., the emcee name of Sri Lankan-British hip-hop artist Mathangi
“Maya” Arulpragasam, is intended to both expand and interrogate the strategic formation “Asian
diaspora.” In British English, the term “Asian” generally refers to persons of South Asian
ancestry, i.e., Indians, Sri Lankans, Pakistanis, and Bangladeshis, and not to persons of East,
Central, North, Southwest, or Southeast Asian descent. East Asians, for example, are generally
referred to by their respective country of origin, i.e., British Chinese. The inclusion of a British
Echoing native soundscapes while at the same time echolocating the homeland, using sound to “image”
1
the spatial, cultural, and temporal distance between them.
6
Asian figure in this project of Asian Diasporas, then, disrupts the specific system of nomenclature
applied to Asians in the United States .
2
Theorizing the Sonic in Literature of the Asian Diaspora
Through echo and sympathetic vibration, the sonic irruptions in literary works make audible a
twofold sonic displacement: one is the author’s displacement from a local ecosystem of sound;
the other is the author’s displacement from a community of spoken language. Together, these two
aspects constitute the sonic dimension of what diaspora studies refers to as the homeland: a
native soundscape that is the originary space of sonic subject formation.
Displaced from their native soundscapes, but never fully at home within their new sonic
environments, diasporic authors “sound out” interior and exterior spaces that constitute
interstitial soundscapes. Within these interstitial soundscapes, diasporic authors paradoxically
enjoy the freedom to make metalinguistic commentary on both the target (second language) and
heritage languages (mother tongue); to compose prospective and/or retrospective sonic worlds
that collapse geographical, temporal, and imaginative distances; and, thanks to the special
properties of sonic phenomena and vibrational structures, to sound out and even reconfigure the
geography of interiority and exteriority. Moreover, diasporic authors compromise the integrity of
the target language by importing into it the semiotic energies of their native languages. By doing
3
so, they also imbue the target language with a new vitality.
In crafting this statement, for example, the author sought to avoid the designation American, as the
2
deployment of this term often elides other North American (Canadian), Central American, and South
American identities.
Julia Kristeva’s le sémiotique, as distinct from the study of signs and symbols. The semiotic is the aspect
3
of language that is heterogeneous to meaning and signification. This heterogeneousness, Kristeva
argues, “is detected in the first echolalias of infants as rhythms and intonations anterior to the first
phonemes, morphemes, lexemes, and sentences.” (Kristeva 1980 133)
7
The diasporic author’s liminal placement “between” languages positions the sonic
irruptions in her work as sites of hegemonic rupture, particularly if a) there is first language
interference, or a marked difference between the levels of competency in L1 (mother tongue or
native language) and L2 (the target language); and/or b) the author uses her liminal positioning
as an occasion for metalinguistic commentary. If language is the principal force of hegemony,
then diasporic authors’ sonic irruptions constitute a feedback loop, the noise produced by bodies
simultaneously living amidst and exiled by language. This feedback, I believe, has the capacity
to overload and reconfigure language and the relationships in and between the bodies that it
seeks to regulate.
The relationship between literature, sound, and diaspora has been fruitfully explored by
writers and scholars of Irish literature, African-American literature, and literature of the Black
Atlantic; however, while scholarship on Asian-American and Asian diasporic literature has often
investigated the problem of the mother tongue(s), scant attention has been paid to sound per se.
This study does not, however, seek to essentialize the sonic experiences of refugees, immigrants,
victims of trafficking, and other displaced people, but to serve as a laboratory for the
development of tools for approaching sound in diasporic literature, tools that seek to avoid both
fixations on cultural difference as well as the kinds of oversimplification of panethnic narratives
that have characterized Asian American studies in the past.
In reading the work of displaced subjects, then, this project aligns itself with the
transnational and transpacific study of Asian diasporic communities by acknowledging both the
legacies of Orientalism (e.g., assumptions of feminization, backwardness, despotism, patriarchy,
and stasis) and Pan-Asianism in response to decolonization (e.g., the promotion of mystic
spirituality vs. bureaucratic rationalism, Asian family values and discipline vs. European
8
decadence) that continue to affect contemporary Asian and Asian diasporic subjects. As Viet
Nguyen and Janet Hoskins have noted, Asian diasporic individuals are positioned “between these
binaries, which may affect not only the form of poetic output (the conscious adoption of Eastern
and/or Western forms, the incorporation of Asian tongues) and content (subject matter, etc.) but
the materiality of this content as well. In addition to the marginalization experienced by other
minority communities in Europe and America, other factors that impact Asian diasporic
communities—and therefore legitimize the use of the strategic formation Asian diaspora—
include the lingering trauma an dcultural bitterness of anticolonial and intra-Asian wars, and the
movement of capital through remittances, which “helps lay foundation for diasporic populations
in Europe and America.” (Hoskins 1—38)
Asian- and Afro-diasporic Sound
Hagedorn’s deployment of the Black English Vernacular and fictional engagement with Jimi
Hendrix and other historical figures of African-American musical culture raise the issue of the
politics of appropriation. So too does M.I.A.’s usage of linguistic and sonic tropes coded as
Black, and specifically African-American. In responding to these charges, Martin Ponce unpacks
Hagedorn’s Afro-Asian depictions and appropriations at length, concluding that Hagedorn’s
appropriations are “part praise, part dialogue and address…and part grappling with the
dead.” (Ponce 133) In an interview with Eileen Tabios, Hagedorn explains her decision to
incorporate the Black vernacular into her poetry and prose:
I was trying to figure out how to write and be myself and not imitate French surrealists. I
was thinking of who I am when it comes to language. Well, I’m most at home with the
language of English. But how can I make it my English? I recall when I grew up in the
Philippines that a lot of novels I used to read by Filipino writers were written in this stiff
colonialist English; I was put off by how stilted the language sounded. So I was
floundering around——was my poet’s voice e.e. cummings or Lorca’s?…and I guess my
9
voice as a writer coming up in the 1970s was influenced and inspired by the Black
vernacular. Back then, that particular music was most comfortable to me. I also met other
Filipino poets who were equally Afro-centered because, for them, the playful wit of the
urban Black vernacular was similar to the innovations of Taglish (a combination of
tagalog and English).” (Tabios 272—274)
Hagedorn describes her appropriation of “Black sound” as a conscious act of cross-cultural
identification with an alternative “English” that simultaneously rejected both the “stiff, colonial”
Anglophone tradition in the Philippines and the Standard American English as practiced by the
dominant culture. Through affiliation with the Black English vernacular, then, the immigrant
Hagedorn established a “home” in the “unhomeliness” of the colonizers’ language through
identification with variants developed through the resistance of other subalterns.
Hagedorn’s practice thus forms a counter-narrative to the Asian American movement’s
attempts to “claim America.” This impulse stemmed in part from the perception of Asians by
other Americans as perpetual foreigners. Part of this perceived otherness has to dow with the
particular graphical and sonic pecularities of Asian languages, which are genealogically remote
from European languages and thus lack an etymological “common ground.”
As Lisa Lowe has argued, Asian American subjects are constructed transnationally,
resulting in “the ultimate unassimability of the Asian American subject into the American
imaginary.” The same goes for the sonic identities of Asian Americans. Where Paul Gilroy and
others have underscored the transnational/transatlantic construction of African diasporic sonic
identities, American popular culture has for hundreds of years appropriated and cannibalized
Afrodiasporic sound—in forms including but not limited to spirituals, blues, BEV , swing, call
and response, hip hop, and freestyling. Consequently, the fraught and problematic assumption
that the Afrodiasporic is ontologically American still persists. At the same time, of course,
Afrodiasporic sonic identity is perpetually othered; as a sonic presence within American culture,
10
Afrodiasporic sound is policed and denigrated even as it is celebrated and catalogued. Asian
accents and Asian sounds, however, are invariably perceived to be foreign, even after years of
residency and/or citizenship, even if accented but native born, i.e. raised in an Asian-language
speaking household and/or community in the United States and thus marked with sonic traces of
otherness detectable in speech and mannerisms. Whether the relative acceptance into the
American imaginary of African and Asian diasporic sounds can be attributed to the size of the
populations in question (though the numbers are now reaching parity) or their persistence (for
numerous political reasons, some of which are discussed in Chapter 2, the population of Asian
descent did not experience rapid growth until post-1965), or whether the difference is related to
the genealogical remoteness of Asian languages is a matter that lies beyond the scope of this
4
study.
However, this study is not motivated by the desire to theorize a distinctly “brown” or
“yellow” sound or sonic body; nor is it motivated by a desire to theorize a panethnic Asian sonic
body or sound experience. Rather, the aim of this project is to listen for sonic echoes and
resonances between and among experiences of various Asian diasporic communities, and to
measure the amplitude of these echoes in terms of generational dispersion from a remembered or
mythified homeland and mother tongue. A future study might compare the sonic reception of Asian immigrant populations to those of more recent
4
immigrants from Africa, i.e. Minneapolis-based Somali communities and L.A.-based Nigerian
communities.
11
CHAPTER 1
YOKO TAWADA: OUTSIDE THE SOUND
This chapter listens closely to depictions of sonic displacement in selections from the short prose
of the Japanese-German author Yoko Tawada. In particular, the chapter explores the diasporic
positionality of Tawada’s short stories and prose poems/lyric essays. The vast majority of
Tawada’s narrators are Asian, or specifically Japanese; like Tawada herself, who was born in
Tokyo in 1960 and took up residency in Germany in 1982, the narrators are usually resident
workers or immigrants in a European city, and were born and raised in Japan. As a result of their
geographical, cultural, and linguistic-sonic displacement, these subjects enjoy a heightened
metalinguistic awareness of both the target language of their new country (usually German) and
the mother tongue associated with the homeland (usually Japanese). Their increased aural and
visual scrutiny of language underscores the contingency and uncanny materiality of language
more generally; consequently, Tawada’s prose pieces also underscore the uncanny materiality of
the perceived world.
“When one has a new language mother, one can experience a second childhood,” Tawada
writes in “V on der Muttersprache zur Sprachmutter” (“From the Mother Tongue to the Language
Mother”), the opening story of her collection Talisman (1996 13). Yasemin Yildiz reads Tawada’s
“second childhood” as a heightened metalinguistic awareness resulting from her displacement
from her mother tongue , echoing the author’s own statements in an interview with Bettina
5
Brandt:
Learning and speaking a foreign language can also lead you back to your childhood. You
can suddenly see again, with fresh eyes, so to speak, how children perceive and hear a
language. Perhaps not exactly like a child—as adults, we do not really remember what
our childhood was like—but we can discover things in a foreign tongue that we do not
Yasemin Yildiz. Beyond the Mother Tongue: The Postmonolingual Condition. Fordham U. Press: Yew
5
York, 2012, 130-132.
12
see in our mother tongue anymore. (Brandt. “Ein Wort, Ein Ort, or How Words Create
Places: Interview with Yoko Tawada.” Women in German Yearbook, 2005 8)
The state of “childlike perception” enjoyed by Tawada’s displaced subjects is thus analogous to a
child’s acute consciousness of the sound and shape of language during the early acquisition,
production, and perception of his or her mother tongue.
However, unlike diasporic authors such as Jessica Hagedorn and M.I.A., who were
separated from their respective childhood countries and languages for socioeconomic and
political reasons, Tawada is not interested in (re)appropriating the mother tongue but in
depropriating it. For Tawada, the mother tongue is not a means of achieving a sense of “double
belonging,” nor does it suggest the diasporic subject’s capacity to assert “roots and memories in
two languages” (Yildiz 131); rather, the mother tongue and its seemingly naturalized sense of
kinship and collectivity restricts the subject’s capacity to progress toward postnational identity.
“I’m not well suited to the task of interpreting to begin with,” admits the narrator of “The Bath,”
who has been charged with serving as an interpreter for a business meeting between high level
Japanese and German executives. “I hate talking more than anything, especially speaking my
mother tongue.” (Tawada 2002 16)
Tawada thus offers the interstitial condition of displacement as a corrective for
monolingual and/or monocultural populations desensitized to language’s capacity to delimit and
enforce identity. Through immersion in a foreign language and foreign sonic culture—through
immersion in a target soundscape—Tawada’s narrators are able to hear language, and through it
the sonic world, “as if for the first time.” (Yildiz op. cit.) Furthermore, Tawada’s characters, and
their ethnographic accounts of often quotidian and trivial events and objects, denaturalize
assumptions about national, cultural, ethnic, racial, and gender identity that are tied to the idea of
a mother tongue. Through deployment of linguistic-corporeal tropes—particularly of the womb,
13
(mother) tongue, mouth, ear, and skin—Tawada denaturalizes the mother tongue as a taxonomic
process that inscribes these identities on the body. In so doing, Tawada’s texts approach the
postlinguistic corporeality of formalisms (such as sound poetry), while insisting on the
importance of the diasporic subject’s formation in a specific linguistic-sonic context, i.e. a native
soundscape. Tawada’s work thus forms an interstice between formalisms that seek to divest the
body and its signification processes from signification itself, and the work of sonically displaced
authors such as M.I.A. and Jessica Hagedorn who seek to connect to the mother tongue from
which they have been geographically, temporally, generationally, and sonically displaced.
“Outside the Sound”: Exophony and Ethnic Irony
According to Marjorie Perloff, “Tawada’s poems and short stories, as well as her remarkable
critical poem-essays, have as their great subject the role of what she herself has called in a
Japanese book by that title (not yet translated) exophony.” (Perloff 2010 136-137) For Tawada,
6
exophony, or , describes the condition of being “outside the sound” of the
language in which she writes. Tawada first began writing in her native tongue, but has written in
both German and Japanese since 1988, publishing more than ten volumes in each language.
Although she is a native speaker of Japanese and therefore not “outside” that language, long
absence from her native soundscape has defamiliarized her to its sound shape and daily usage.
Consequently, there are exophonic elements in both of of her substantial corpuses , which in
7
: (Ekusophonii: Bogo no soto e deru tabi). Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten,
6
2003.
For a complete list of Tawada’s publications in Japan and Germany through 2010, see Saito, Yumiko.
7
“Synchronopse der Buchpublikationen von Yoko Tawada in Deutschland und Japan.” In Ivanovic, ed.,
Yoko Tawada, 471-85.
14
addition to poetry, short fiction, and lyric essays includes interviews, plays, lyrics, libretti, and
novels.
Tawada’s prose and verse is noted for its unique structural formation, music, and ear. Her
work is rife with puns, coinages, and syntactical transgressions, many of which surprise and
delight native speakers of Japanese and German. The exophonic positionality of her literary
works has earned critical praise in both her homeland and in her adopted country: in 1996,
Tawada received the Chamisso Prize, the highest literary honor awarded to non-Germans writing
in German; in 1993, her novel, The Bridegroom was a Dog, received the Akutagawa-Sho prize,
the highest literary award in Japan.
Exophonic positionality, Perloff argues, enables Tawada to hear and manipulate the
German language in unexpected ways. “When a writer whose mother tongue is a minor language
begins to create in a major language,” Tawada writes, “a certain change occurs in the target
language. The change is not limited solely to the linguistic level. A particular take on history, or a
new sensorium to grasp the magical, come into literary language.” (2003 10) Tawada’s reading
of Goethe’s well-known ballad “Heidenröslein,” for example, turns on the manner in which
8
Tawada “hears” “the term Die Heiden, the plural noun derived from the Heide: wild meadow or
heath, meaning, ‘heathens, pagans.’” Reading occurrences of “Heidenröslein” across Goethe’s
oeuvre, including in the novels The Sorrows of Young Werther and Elective Affinities, Tawada
posits that Goethe’s references to Heiden are “regularly related to conversion.” In Perloff’s
estimation, this is an ingenious “ecological reading of a poem or song usually understood as the
generic lament for the transience of beauty and love.” But, Perloff continues,
it is not the persuasiveness of Tawada’s argument qua argument that is at issue here but
rather the role such creative reading plays in Tawada’s own exophonic poetics. The point
In a lyric essay entitled “Metamorphosen des Heidenrösleins.”
8
15
about Heiden would not be—indeed has not been—noticed by the native German reader; it
is only in “making it strange” that the exophonic writer raises the deeper issues of both
reading and writing poetry. (2010 142)
Through her (usually unnamed) Asian diasporic narrators, and through her lyric essays
and interviews, Tawada obsessively reenacts the initial experience of displacement: the emigre’s
arrival in Germany, and the early months and years of acclimation to German—and more
broadly, European—culture. In the story “Storytellers Without Souls,” for example, the narrator
compares the experience of leaving Japan for Germany to the loss of the soul:
In a book about Indians I once read that the soul cannot fly as fast as an airplane.
Therefore one always loses one’s soul on an airplane journey, and arrives at one’s
destination in a soulless state. Even the Trans-Siberian Railway travels more quickly than
a soul can fly. The first time I came to Europe on the Trans-Siberian Railway, I lost my
soul. When I boarded the train to go back, my soul was still on its way to Europe. I was
unable to catch it. When I traveled to Europe once more, my soul was still making its
way back to Japan. Later I flew back and forth so many times I no longer know where my
soul is. (2002 107)
By returning repeatedly to this theme and condition of initial displacement, Tawada allows her
narrators to approach European soundscapes in a mode of mock ethnography, thereby
defamiliarizing the mundane and hearing familiar sounds with the ears of a “second childhood.”
Later on in in “Storytellers Without Souls,” Tawada considers the ethnographic gaze by
way of a display of extinct indigenous peoples at the Museum of Anthropology in Hamburg.
Encased in glass cases like “transparent coffins,” the display’s plastic figures are meant to
personify tribes that were “at some point in history, culturally or economically conquered by
others and to some extent destroyed.” (109-110) Museums, the narrator further notes, are
implicated in this “hierarchical relationship between past and present.” (ibid) The narrator thus
demonstrates her awareness of the “power relationship” evidenced by the display, the dominant
Western gaze that is conflated with the defining gaze of the ethnographer, as well as her
consciousness of the stakes involved when that ethnographic gaze is reversed: rather than a
16
European voice seeking to “define” a non-Western culture, the narrator represents an Asian voice
defamiliarizing and, through mock ethnography, “provincializing Europe,” in Dipesh
Chakrabarty’s formulation. “One can look at the doll, listen to the explanations of its ways of
life, view the photos of its homeland,” but there will always be “a veil separating the museum
visitor from the dead doll.” (ibid)
More useful for the narrator is the notion of “fictive ethnology,” which is the very mode
in which Tawada’s displaced narrators approach what they perceive to be the uncanniness of
European culture: “What should their lives look like? How does their language function? What is
this completely unfamiliar system like?” (108-110) Of course, what Tawada describes as “the
endeavor of fictive ethnology” is a mode of storytelling in which “not the described but the
describer is imaginary.” (107, emphasis added) In her fictions, Tawada suggests, it is not the
defamiliarized German culture that is imaginary, but the narrator herself. Here the narrator’s
metatextual self-awareness detaches from the “self” which Rey Chow describes as being
produced “under a regime of coercive mimeticism,” in which “those who are marginal to
mainstream Western culture are expected…to resemble and replicate the very banal
preconceptions that have been appended to them…in accordance with the already seen and thus
to authenticate the familiar imagings [sic] of them as ethnic.”
9
In the case of Tawada’s fiction, Chow’s observation about this “existential trap” of ethnic
representation might be expanded to include ethnic sound. The ear doctor visited by the Japanese
narrator of “A Guest,” for example, peers into the darkness of his patient’s ear canal in order to
investigate a possible infection. After initially misdiagnosing the narrator as pregnant, Dr.
Mettinger tells her that he sees (through a spyglass!) a “stage in a theater.” When the narrator
Rey Chow. Protestant Ethnic and the Spirit of Capitalism. New York: Columbia UP, 2002, 107, as quoted
9
in Kim, The German Quarterly 83.3 (Summer 2010), 334.
17
asks the doctor to describe “precisely” what he sees, the doctor, in “a childish voice,” describes
“a building near a harbor, an officer and several women.”
What do the women standing there look like?
I asked a few more questions, although my curiosity was abating, for I suspected
the doctor of being an inexperienced theater-goer; by the time the women entered, he
would see only old, familiar, boring pictures. His voice became somewhat higher as he
reported:
The women have on long dresses, silk, what do we call them, oh, that’s right,
kimonos, and one of them has a knife in her hand. Now she’s just plunged it into her
belly; a red stain is forming on the white silk, getting bigger and bigger.
I groaned and simply pushed his hand away.
Dr. Mettinger, that is Madame Butterfly, what you describe is not original. (2002
158-159)
Dr. Mettinger synesthetically transposes the visual mode with the aural; quite literally, the doctor
attempts to see what he imagines to be the foreign soundscape of the narrator’s interiority. Not
only does the mise en scène imposed by Dr. Mettinger on the narrator’s interiority belong to one
of the most frequently performed and culturally problematic operas in the world, but the
narrator’s charge in regard to the image’s lack of originality may refer to the transnational
construction of the Butterfly trope as well as to Dr. Mettinger’s complicity in the trope’s
propagation. Librettists Luigi Illica and Giuseppe Giacosa sourced the narrative for Giacomo
Puccini’s Madama Butterfly from multiple European and American authors, including the short
story “Madame Butterfly” by John Luther Long, and the dramatization of Long’s story by David
Belasco as Madame Butterfly: A Tragedy of Japan (1900), whose London production was seen
by Puccini and initially piqued his interest. Long’s story was in turn purportedly based on both
the recollections of his sister Jennie Correll’s travels in Japan alongside her missionary husband
and the semi-autobiographical novel Madame Chrysanthéme (1887) by naval officer Pierre
10
Loti. Even without considering later iterations (see, for example, David Henry Hwang’s M
Butterfly (1988)), the Butterfly trope constitutes a widely disseminated optic and aural fantasy of
Madame Chrysanthéme is also the name of an 1893 opera by André Messager based on Loti’s novel.
10
18
Japan propagated by the Americans Long and Belasco, the British production of Belasco’s play,
the French Loti, and the Italian librettists of Puccini’s grandiloquent tragedy. It constitutes, in
other words, a collective Western fantasy of Asian identity, and Asian female identity in
particular—sonic, visual, and otherwise. Before arriving at the doctor’s office, the narrator
explains that “[t]he interior of my ear is never illuminated by the sun… It doesn’t want to be
illuminated, not even by the doctor’s artificial light. For eardrums can receive sounds only in the
dark.” (153) The narrator’s anticipation of Dr. Mettinger's banal and intrusive imagination, and
her mere annoyance that borders on resignation—“I groaned and simply pushed his hand
away”—implies that the narrator has experienced similar encounters with some regularity.
Through a deconstructionist reading of “Eine leere Flasche” (A Vacuous Flask), however,
John Namjun Kim positions Tawada as evading the expectations of “ethnic abjection” described
by Chow by “dissolv[ing] them in what one can call ‘ethnic irony’, a form of irony that lures acts
of criticism into seeing the aesthetic phantasmagoria of ethnicity.” (Kim 335, emphasis added)
The text appears to rely on a prior, contextual imagination not only of German and
Japanese as extant languages, but also of its author as a Japanese woman living in
Germany writing in those languages. According to this protocol of reading, this text is to
be read, and indeed has been read, as a first-person account of the narrator’s struggle with
gendered terms of self-reference in Japanese…and finally her celebratory embrace of the
gender neutral first person pronoun ich (I) in German as an adult living “in Europe” (56)
…” (Kim 337, emphasis added)
From the standpoint of craft, Tawada is cognizant of her European and increasingly transatlantic
audience, and intentionally crafts first-person narratives that hew closely to her own biographical
details. Tawada not only anticipate readers’s confusion of the German first person pronoun Ich
with Tawada herself, but her metatextual narratives are largely structured around this slippage,
implicating the author, her readers, and critics in prevailing expectations of ethnicity and
authenticity, and leveraging these expectations as part of her larger project to defamiliarize
19
language. What distinguishes Tawada from other authors who repeatedly make use of apparently
autobiographical narrators (Borges, for example) is the degree to which Tawada’s ethnic
markedness and diasporic subjectivity dampen critical consciousness of the metatextual: “at first
glance,” Kim says of “Eine leere Flasche,” “Tawada’s text appears to invite a protocol of reading
in which a riddle of referentiality is nowhere to be found…[the story] appears to offer not a
riddle, but referentiality itself.” With the irruptions of sonic displacement that inhere in Tawada’s
exophonic texts, Tawada invites the reader, like Dr. Mettinger, to look into her “ear,” anticipating
her misapprehensions. The first has to do with gender: “You’re pregnant.” (157) The second has
to do with Tawada’s ethnicity. Rebuked for the banality of his Orientalist projection, the doctor
“turned red, and his lips twitched to seize on words which might still be said.” The narrator,
however, leaves the “strange quiet” of the doctor’s office, a soundscape that “had neither sounds
nor voices nor superfluous objects…no trace of any of the patients who had been treated
here” (155) before the utterance can form.
Corporealizing Language/Languaging the Body
For Tawada, exophony describes the condition of being “outside the sound” of the language in
which she writes. Significantly, the designation is suggestive of the physical position of the
auditor, as well as the geographical and material particularity of sound as place. Place, and the
body that is dis/located in particular places, are conflated in the opening of the story “Storytellers
Without Souls”:
One of the German words I’ve become more and more attached to in recent years is the
word Zelle, or “cell.” This word lets me imagine a large number of tiny spaces alive
within my body. Each space contains a voice that is telling a story. For this reason these
cells can be compared to cells of other sorts: telephone booths, and the spaces inhabited
by prisoners and monks. (2002 101)
20
Tawada’s defamiliarization of cells—the self-replicating “building blocks” or fractals of the
somatic self—“makes strange” the very body that perceives sound while evoking the sonic
qualities of a series of enclosed spaces. In exploring the specifically sonic effects and
consequences of Tawada’s exophonic texts, then, this project appropriates the term soundscape
to consider the corporeality of the displaced subject positioned within a sonic environment that is
different from the one in which she first acquired language.
“Storytellers Without Souls” provides a productive starting point for a consideration of
both the corporeality of the displaced subject and the subject’s experience of sonic displacement,
which I define in part as an increased awareness of subjectivity that results from the subject’s
removal from a native soundscape to a target soundscape . Before considering the efficacy of
11
the term soundscape and developing distinctions between native and target soundscapes,
however, this section considers Tawada’s defamiliarization of the body of the displaced subject
through the various apparatuses of hearing.
The corporeal tropes deployed most frequently by Tawada—the ear, the mouth, the
tongue, the skin, the womb—are also the organs that provide the primary corporeal apparatus of
sounding and perceiving sound. The narrator of “The Bath,” for example, notes that the skin is
the organ that physiologically delimits interiority and exteriority: “The skin is a membrane
separating this world from the other one.” (page number?) Because the vibrational properties of
sounds make things happen to, in, and on the body, sound is experienced on the skin as well as in
the ear. In Sonic Warfare: Sound, Affect, and the Ecology of Fear, Steve Goodman enumerates
My deployment of this taxonomy, which is modeled on theories of language acquisition, i.e., native
11
language and target language, is intended to be functional, and in no way advocates linguistic
essentialism. Although imperfect, the terms native and target are less technical than L1 (first language)
and L2 (second and subsequent languages) and less problematic than terms such as mother tongue,
foreign language, and heritage language.
21
many of the sonic forces that the “military-entertainment complex” deploys in order to coerce
and infect consumers; to repel protesters; and to pacify, disorient, and maltreat internees.
Furthermore, Goodman provides a brief inventory of the acoustic weaponry deployed against
militants and activists alike. The LRAD (Long Range Acoustic Devices) sound cannon, for
instance, can penetrate buildings at a distance of 2,000 meters and can reach 149 decibels , and
12
was originally developed to repel pirates and terrorists at sea; in August 2014, SWAT teams in
Ferguson, Missouri, deployed the LRAD to disperse nonviolent crowds that had gathered to
protest the killing of Michael Brown. Goodman also takes note of the “affective engineering” of
sound system culture, in which bass-heavy dubstep beats overload and “shake” the speakers, a
sonic phenomenon that translates the aural modality into the tactile (Goodman 5-13).
The “vibrato in the bones” experienced by the narrator of “The Bath,” on the other hand,
signifies the presence of a dead woman who has removed the narrator’s tongue and habitually
inhabits her body:
Every evening, the woman visits this world through my skin. I can’t see her…I can’t hear
her either. I can only feel my bones become a conduit for her trembling. Then I hold my
breath and concentrate on this vibrato of bones. It is a sound that cannot be transformed
into music, an oscillation that can never become a note. (Tawada 2002 54-55)
This sound “that can never become a note” could be likened to an enharmonic spelling of the
strange notes of the bike-loom from earlier in the story: “none of the notes had pitch or length,
they were simply born in the distance like a desert whirlwind.” (47) The dead German woman
can thus be equated to the native speaker-level mastery of the language that eludes the narrator;
the “vibrato of bones” that the narrator experiences at the end of the story is a ghostly
premonition of what the language she lives in might feel like if it were her mother tongue.
The threshold at which potential hearing loss occurs is 130 decibels.
12
22
Ears and tongues too recur throughout Tawada’s prose, not only with the ear infection of
“A Guest,” or the narrator’s strangely vanished ear in “Spores” (written and first published in
Japanese), but with the narrator’s perplexity at the custom of piercing ears in the title story of
Talisman. “'What is the meaning of that piece of metal?” the narrator asks a German friend with
a triangular earring. “She looked at me in surprise and asked whether I meant her
‘earring.’ [Ohrring] The word ‘ring’ [Ring] had an unsettling effect on me.” (92-93) Like the
dolls in “Storytellers Without Souls,” the narrator’s fascination with earrings leads her into a
pseudo-ethnographic meditation on the practice of piercing ears.
The narrator of “Tongue Dance” first dreams that she is “one huge tongue” (115), and
later visits a language doctor who attempts to “cure” her unGerman-like intonation (“In the
world of phonetics, pitches are like prostitutes.” (118)). The story closes with the narrator
dreaming of her friend Zoltán, whose name is suggestive of a Hungarian-German diasporic
identity. Zoltán becomes increasingly sexually stimulated by the narrator’s inability to properly
pronounce the final “n” in his name (“I shouldn’t press the back of my tongue against my palate;
the tip of my tongue is supposed to press against the back of my front teeth.” (119)) The narrator
claims that to do so is “physically impossible” for her: “if the ’n’ isn’t followed by a vowel, I
can’t coax my tongue back to the front of my mouth.” (ibid)
The “n” sound is in fact the only phoneme in the Japanese syllabary that can be notated
without an accompanying vowel sound ( ); the standard pronunciation of the final “n” sound is
thus produced exactly as Tawada describes—gutturally, with the back of the tongue pressed
against the palate. The tongue trope in “Tongue Dance” thus conflates the exotified sonic
otherness of the narrator with the sensual materiality of the organ itself.
23
At the same time that Zoltán’s penis begins to harden, his skin becomes more translucent
(a transformation found often in Tawada and suggestive of the corporeal side effects of
displacement); the narrator watches “as countless tiny letters flow into the organ.” (120) The
story closes with the narrator’s frustration with her inability to pronounce the word
“friend” (“Freund”) “because there’s a single ’n’ in the middle of it.” Without the “n,” of course,
the original German would be reduced to “Freud.” Furthermore, she “cries out” a neologism
formed by her interpolation of the vowel “o”— “Frienod!”—providing an accented/reshuffled
echo of one of the German language’s most famous text settings, the “O Freunde, nicht diese
Toene!” (“O friends! Not these sounds!”) of Friedrich Schiller. Schiller’s poem, which
announces the final, choral movement of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 in D minor, Op. 125, also
“drops” the “n” sound in a subsequent line: Freunde (“friend”) becomes Freude (“joy”). At “the
exact moment" that the narrator of “Tongue Dance” cries out “Frienod!”, Zoltán’s “penis
explodes. Liquid characters spurt out of it, gleam briefly in the neon light and vanish again amid
the silence of mute taste buds.” (120)
“Tongue Dance,” then, is choreographed as a graphic (both in terms of its explicitness
and in its emphasis on the written language), parodic depiction of psychoanalysis and
phallogocentrism, with Beethoven as a soundtrack. Not only does the narrator’s sonic and
13
corporeal otherness excite the male Zoltán, but Zoltán—a fellow diasporic subject—is
compelled to discharge the genetic materiality of language, visually coded as alphabetic symbols,
phonemes standing in for the elemental sounds that physically irrupt onto the narrator, who has
been wholly transformed into a silent tongue.
On the sexuality of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 in D minor, Opus 125, see Susan McClary, Feminine
13
Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991.
24
In “Seven Stories of Seven Mothers” (“Sieben Geschichten der Sieben Mütter “), Tawada
characteristically deploys the trope of the womb in order to undermine and defamiliarize the
socially constructed schema of the maternal body and the mother tongue; her goal, in short, is to
deterritorialize language from the womb.
In meinem bisherigen Leben haben die Mütter eine großhe Rolle gespielt. Ich meine nicht
meine leibliche Mutter, sondern sieben andere Mütter: die Stiefmutter, die Gebärmutter,
die Doktormutter, die Perlmutter, das Muttermal, die Muttererde und das
Mutterseelenallein. (1996 100)
Mothers have played a significant role throughout my life. I don’t mean my biological
mother, but seven other mothers: the stepmother; the womb; the doctor-mother or Ph.D.
advisor; mother-of-pearl; the mole or mother-mark; Mother Earth; and the Mother Soul,
All Alone. (my translation)
Chantal Wright describes the difficulty of translating Tawada’s compound words and neologisms
in an essay entitled “Exophony and Literary Translation: What It Means For the Translator When
a Writer Adopts a New Language.”
The essay is structure around six compound nouns and one compound adjective, all of
which contain the word Mutter [mother]; Stiefmutter [stepmother]; Gebärmutter [womb,
literally ‘birthing-mother’]; Doktormutter [female PhD supervisor, literally ‘doctor-
mother’]; Perlmutter [mother-of-pearl]; Muttermal [mole (on the body), literally ‘mother-
mark’]; Muttererde [rich top soil that nurtures seeds, literally ‘mother-soil’]; and
mutterseelenallein [all alone, literally ‘mother-soul-alone’, formed with the help of the
linking morpheme ’n’]. (Wright 2010)
Additionally, Wright explains that “Seven Stories of Seven Mothers” not only reflects an
exophonic author’s metalinguistic awareness of German compounds (Perlmutter, for example),
but represents a radicalization of the German language via Japanese, in that Tawada transforms a
primarily phonetic writing system (German) into an ideographic one (Japanese). “The text,”
Wright argues, “superimposes the Japanese system of word formation onto the German
system.” (34) Kanji, the characters of Chinese origin that constitute one of the three writing
systems of the Japanese language, “may be composed of one or more radicals or classifiers.
Radicals, Wright explains, “are core units of meaning and are ideographic or pictorial in nature.”
25
In “Seven Stories for Seven Mothers,” the narrator “draws our attention to lexical radicals
in the German language, constructing the narrative around one radical in particular —
Mutter…The narrator forges (or renews) conceptual connections between the seiben
Mütter based on their material or surface commonality—in Japanese a material similarity
would already imply a conceptual connection. (ibid)
“Seven Stories” thus inscribes a bravura performance of contrapuntal defamiliarization: the
purported subject of the text is the languaging of the body through corporeal-linguistic tropes of
the womb (“If one could bring together the writing on the inner lining of the uterus with the
birthmarks of the child, a readable text might be generated.”) As the argument unfolds, however,
language is reflexively corporealized (“It might happen, however, that part of this writing later
appears on the skin of an adult. New moles form on your skin that almost look like letters…”) To
structure the argument, the narrator grafts together fragments of the target language following the
ideographic “rulebook” of her mother tongue. In doing so, however, the mother tongue, figured
here as the originary language of the womb, is rendered illegible (“On the inner wall of the
womb, we take notes…The hand in which these notes were written is illegible in this light, and
can’t be read in this world.”)
Sonic Displacement: Soundscapes as Frame Stories
Popularized by composer, sound theorist, and environmentalist R. Murray Schafer in such texts
as The New Soundscape (1968) and The Tuning of the World (1977), the term soundscape
describes “the sounds which form an auditory environment” (OED), or “the sonic dimension of
different ecosystems (rural and urban) that surround humans in their everyday
existence.” (Augoyard 6) More so than other neologisms derived from the back-formation scape
(e.g. Arjun Appadurai’s ‘scapes’ of globalization: ethnoscape, technoscape, finanscape,
26
mediascape, and ideoscape ), soundscape consciously echoes landscape, not only in its early
14
usage as a technical term for an aural composition, but in its suggestion of an aesthetic subject
“placed in the midst” of the “auditory world.”
Sound culture theorists, however, stress the degree to which the aesthetic subject in a
soundscape is “complicit with its production.” “The sounds of his footsteps,” Salome V oegelin
suggests, “are part of the auditory city he produces in his movements through it.” This co-
constitution of the soundscape by the subject is often cited by sound theorists as distinguishing
the aural from the visual modality: the subject’s position in a soundscape “is different from the
viewing self, whose body is at a distance from the seen. The listener is entwined with the heard.”
Furthermore, there is an element of self-reflexivity that results from the subject’s concentrated
attention to the very soundscape she participates in generating. “His sense of the world and of
himself is constituted in this bond.” (V oegelin 2010 5)
Schafer originally deployed the term in a context of urbanism, architecture, ecology, and
city planning, which is further evidenced by the subset of sound culture studies described by its
proponents as acoustic ecology. Arjun Appadurai’s interpellation of such terms as “ethnoscape”
to describe the transnational flow of migrants and refugees is therefore important to this project;
in fact, the discussion of Jessica Hagedorn’s The Gangster of Love and M.I.A.’s albums Arular
and Kala in Chapters 2 and 3, respectively, will describe the profound transformation of urban
soundscapes brought about by the incorporation and expulsion of immigrants, refugees, and
other displaced subjects. Appadurai’s “scapes,” however, outline a conception of flows at the
global level, whereas the soundscapes discussed in this project describe local and particular
nexuses of sound.
See Appadurai, Arjun. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis:
14
University of Minnesota Press, 1996.
27
Even at this localized level, however, soundscape is at best an unstable term. Jean-
François Augoyard critiques the concept for being “too broad and blurred”:
To use a linguistic analogy, the soundscape corresponds to the whole structure of a text,
while the sound object corresponds to the first level of composition: words and
syntagmas. We are short of descriptive tools to work at an intermediary level, that of
sentence grammar or—to leave the linguistic comparison—the level of a code…
(Augoyard 7)
But despite its relative imprecision, the soundscape is a productive model for discussions of
sonic effects that impact diasporic subjects, particularly in its evocation of the perception of
sound(s) in an “inhabited space.” (7) Furthermore, as will be further developed in the next
chapter, soundscapes are inherently temporal; a sound does not precede listening. This is not to
say that a given locality’s acoustical sources are not perceivable prior to the subject’s experience
of listening; in this case, however, the absence of the aesthetic subject means that the soundscape
as perceived from that locality without the subject present is ontologically distinct. Nor is the
native soundscape, a concept I will describe hereafter, “heard” as such by diasporic subjects in
exile. Except to the degree that a portion of the native soundscape might be recorded and played
back, or audiated within the subject’s internal soundscape (see Chapter 2), the native soundscape
can only be perceived by displaced subjects as traces and echoes.
Native vs. Target Soundscapes
The term native soundscape is not intended to essentialize geographical localities and their
indigenous sounds; rather, it is meant to suggest the local ecosystem of sound that the displaced
subject previously co-constituted, an ecosystem that includes both ambient sounds and a
community of spoken language(s). For the Japanese narrator of such stories as “Eine leere
Flasche,” “Canned Foreign,” and “Talisman,” the native soundscape consists of the many
28
registers of Japanese spoken in Tokyo as well as the cultural, technological, and natural
15
cacophony of sounds of a global capital that contains upwards of 30 million residents, or more
than 20 percent of the national population of Japan. Native soundscapes thus comprise the sonic
dimension of what diaspora studies refers to as the homeland, and consists of spoken language,
nonverbal vocalizations, music, and ambient sounds stemming from natural, cultural, and
technological sources. For emigres, native soundscapes are the originary space of sonic subject
formation, a space often likened by Tawada to the womb.
The target soundscape, meanwhile, also describes a nexus of ambient and linguistic
sound, and is meant to be suggestive of the displaced subject’s immersion in this aural complex;
as opposed to the native soundscape, however, the sounds of the target soundscape are at least
initially dissonant and alien, and require acclimatization. Born in Tokyo in 1960, Tawada
graduated from Waseda University with a degree in Russian literature and arrived in Germany at
the age of 22 by way of the Trans-Siberian Railway . She later received a master’s degree in
16
contemporary German literature from Hamburg University, and then earned her doctorate in
German literature at the University of Zurich. The initial, jarring sonic displacement she
experienced upon her arrival and immersion in the unfamiliar stimuli of the target soundscape is
fictionalized in “Canned Foreign”: “Every foreign sound, every foreign glance, every foreign
taste struck my body as disagreeable until my body changed. The Ö sounds, for example, stabbed
too deeply in my ears and the R sounds scratched my throat.” (2002 87)
Despite the persistence of the Japanese monomyth (propagated by Japanese cultural institutions
15
themselves), several regional dialects exist in Japan, many of which are mutually incomprehensible.
Originally, Tawada had intended to pursue graduate studies in Russia (Tawada majored in Russian
16
literature as an undergraduate at Waseda University), but Cold War tensions prevented her from doing
so. Her relationship to German, therefore, is in many ways an accident.
29
Tawada’s accounts of sonic displacement, I contend, demonstrate the usefulness of the
target soundscape model for diaspora studies more generally, if only for the phenomenological
inversion they perform. Immigrants, refugees, colonial subjects from the periphery, and other
displaced subjects arriving in the metropole, articulate and announce their sonic identities quite
literally. This speech is often depicted as noise. Even when these new arrivals possess
competency in the dominant language (i.e., area studies specialists such as Tawada, and
immigrants from sending countries that include a foreign language as part of the education
system, such as Japan, the Philippines, Singapore, and India), their transnational identities are
often marked sonically, i.e., by accent, differentiated lexicons, and/or code-switching. From the
phenomenological standpoint of the immigrants themselves, however, the dominant language in
which they have become newly immersed is noise; so are the prevailing ambient sounds and
musics of the culture that surround them. To conceive of the acoustical ecosystem of the
receiving country as a target soundscape is to bear in mind that one man’s mother tongue is
another man’s babel.
Native and Target Soundscapes in Tawada
Tawada’s 2005 collaboration with the composer Peter Ablinger on an experimental opera project
in Graz, Austria, demonstrates a close familiarity with the idea of the soundscape as it is
specifically conceived by Schafer. Tawada describes the process of writing the libretto in “The
Art of Being Nonsynchronous” :
17
my libretto was not to be put to music and sung as in ordinary circumstances. Rather I
attempted to make a book out of the city’s song. I began my work by carefully listening
several times to the tape recordings Ablinger had made in the city. There were more than
Tawada, trans. by Susan Bernofsky, in Perloff, Marjorie, and Craig Douglas Dworkin. The Sound of
17
Poetry, the Poetry of Sound. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009.
30
four hundred recordings he had made on the street, in factories and schools, on various
bridges, in private homes, restaurants, bars, streetcars, and other locations in the city. The
visitors to the audio-space…could put on headphones to listen to this collection of
sounds… (191-192)
In the early stages of writing, Tawada conceived of the project as ekphrasis, or as a lyrical
transcription of the soundscape of Graz. Although Tawada does not utilize the word
Klanglandschaft (the German equivalent of soundscape), the term she coined to describe her
authorial positionality, exophony (or ), is suggestive of both the physical
position of the auditor in relation to sound and the geographical and material particularity of
sound as place.
In the essay, Tawada also demonstrates her sensitivity to what Schafer has called the
condition of schizophonia induced by the playback of recorded sound. Schizophonia occurs
when sounds emitted through various playback devices are thus “split” from their acoustical
sources which, importantly, the listener cannot see.
I wrote, for example, that someone was opening a door. But how was I supposed to know
it was a person? Perhaps it was only the wind opening this door and not a person at all.
And how could I be sure it was a door? Perhaps it was an oar scraping the side of a boat.
Suddenly I saw a lake at night, a boat swaying upon its waters. The door was no longer a
door, it was a boat, and the person was the wind. (Perloff & Dworkin 192)
Schafer meant for his neologism to be suggestive of schizophrenia, as he views the splitting of
sounds from their geographical locations unfavorably; Schafer contends that separating the
“phonic” content of sounds away from their “visual” sources of production contributes to
increasing levels of anxiety in the urban soundscape.
But Tawada characteristically seizes on the uncanniness of “deterritorialized”
soundscapes and leverages schizophonia as a generative source.
I didn’t want to subordinate the sound to an image to render it explicable. But I was no
longer able to slow down the images that kept popping up one after the other, ever more
of them…I wanted to represent the sound, not the person who was producing it, nor its
31
metaphorical significance. My solution was not to find a solution, but rather to enter into
the crevice between sound and language and make countless little notes. (191-192)
This sliding chain of signification, this free association and generative metonymy of sound, is
telling in terms of Tawada’s bifurcated approach to language as sound: the creaking of a door
and the scrape of an oar against a boat are for Tawada equivalent to translingual homophones;
they constitute a kind of ambient-sonic pun. The essay thus serves as a kind of manifesto:
Language can offer up its own hollow interior for use as a concert hall or sing songs of its
own upon the stage. And all the while it keeps secretly repeating: “I am not music, even
though music is part of what I am. That music is the other sort.” (192)
By framing her argument in the resonant soundscape of a concert hall, Tawada aligns
herself with Pound, Woolf, Eliot, Beckett, and a long tradition of poets and critics of both music
and literature who liken the purely sonic and/or non-referential aspects of language—the “excess
of signification” as Steve McCaffery describes it—to music. The image of the concert hall is a
18
particularly charged and productive metaphor, given its socio-cultural implications and origins as
a locus for the dissemination of specifically European music. Although a survey of the discourse
on language as music and/or music as syntax lies beyond the scope of this study, I will return to
19
the music/language trope in the discussion of Tawada’s depiction of the soundscape of the womb.
Consequently, this trope will hereafter be referred to as language-music, a term borrowed from
anthropology and indicative of the “unified expressive field comprising sounded and textual
signs whose segmentation into ‘language’ and ‘music’ is culturally constructed.” (Faudree
520-521, emphasis added).
Steve McCaffery. Sound States: Innovative Poetics and Acoustical Technologies, ed. Adalaide Morris.
18
Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997, 158.
More recent cognitive and neuroscientific studies seem to provide empirical support to the assertion
19
that music and language are homologous. See, for example, Aniruddh Patel’s study Music, Language,
and the Brain (Oxford University Press, 2010).
32
In the next sentence, however, Tawada, like Jessica Hagedorn in The Gangster of Love,
expands her focus from a metaphorical consideration of language-and-music to language-and-
sound: “There are so many possibilities in the dark treasure trove between language and the
audible. It is so difficult to keep the door to this chamber ajar that holding it open can be seen as
an achievement in its own right.” (192) This gesture of “holding open the door” so as to be better
able to attend to sound (and language as sound) is touched upon in Tawada’s essay “Schreiben
im Netz der Sprachen,” or “Writing in the Web of Words.” “Sometimes I ride the bus through a
city and am surrounded by several conversations in several languages,” Tawada writes. “Two
sentences where one right after the other penetrates my ears by chance don’t yet occupy a
common space.” (“Writing in the Web of Words” 152-153) Tawada’s lyric essay then turns on a
sonic irruption: she suggests that a “frame story” (“Rahmenhandlung”) is needed “to connect
these sentences,” and then compares the Japanese noodle soup, ramen, to the German word
Rahmen (“frame”) which forms part of the compound for “frame story.”
A shop where these noodles can be bought could be called a “Rahmenhandlung,”
Literally translated, this would mean “frame shop.” The pun here is—I am sorry to have
to explain it—that it also refers to a frame in a story or a framework. Historically, these
two words have, of course, nothing to do with each other. That is why such a
phenomenon is not taken seriously and is dismissed as a chance occurrence.” (152,
translated by Monika Totten)
Yildiz notes that Tawada not only puns translingually (between the German Rahmen and
Japanese or ramen ), but underscores the sonically interchangeable materiality of the
20
German word Handlung itself, which forms the “other” half of the compound: Handlung has
multiple meanings, including “action,” “plot,” and “shop.” Tawada’s method, Yildiz argues,
consists of “reveal[ing] alternative moments of connection between two languages that are not
The pun in fact involves at least three languages, as the Japanese word ramen is a loanword from the
20
Chinese or lamian. Thus ramen is written as using katakana, the Japanese syllabary used
for words of foreign origin as well as for sonic and/or onomatopoetic effects.
33
related historically, genealogically, or even geographically.” For Yildiz, Tawada’s “bilingual gaze
focus[es] on finding such moments of linguistic contact hiding in plain sight” (134).
But here is one example of how the application of the soundscape “Rahmenhandlung”
foregrounds Tawada’s ear. As composer and film theorist Michel Chion has noted, “Human
vision, like that of cinema, is partial and directional. Hearing, though, is
omnidirectional.” (Chion 1999 17) Likewise, “Rahmen,” by way of its definition as a picture
frame, may suggest the linearity of the gaze; this linearity is in fact feinted at by Tawada, who
describes the different sentences in different languages entering her ear sequentially, “one right
after the other.” But “Rahmen” may also suggest the simultaneity and contrapuntal capacity of
the aural by way of its definition as “an open window” or “doorway.” In that case, “Rahmen” is
as much a threshold that allows the bidirectional mixing of internal and external noises as it is a
frame that is meant to contain and master visual or sonic content. By framing the utterance
Rahmen/ in the target soundscape of a metropolitan bus, Tawada eschews the
linear “gaze” and its focus on a singular “point of contact,” and instead emphasizes the
immersive simultaneity of the bus’s multilingual babble and heteroglossia. “Rahmen” as door or
window facilitates the worlding of an internal soundscape by the external soundscape, and vice
versa, constituting a “common space” that allows Tawada and the reader to re-perceive the two
chance sentences heard on the bus.
As with the vast majority of her stories and essays, Tawada frames her object of inquiry
—the multivalence of the verbal sound object Rahmen/ — within a retelling or
reenactment of her transplantation from one soundscape into another. The soundscape of the bus
—enclosed and close-quartered; moving with frequent, jerky starts and stops through a foreign
city; and strikingly heterolingual, as opposed to the arguably monolingual and sonically uniform
34
soundscape of a Tokyo bus—is an iteration of the target soundscape and also serves as a
metonym of mobility and immersion. Listening to the world depicted in Tawada as a soundscape
allows for a closer reading of the author’s and narrators’s interaction with the ecosystems of
sound in which they find themselves immersed.
Furthermore, the soundscape of the bus in a foreign city which “frames” the discussion is
a soundscape of unparsed language, where language is foregrounded as non-signifying sound.
Reading Tawada through a filter of soundscapes, particularly in terms of a “bilingual” or
“bicultural” ear, allows the reader to better audiate and empathize this experience. An emphasis
on soundscape brings the materiality of the theater, a reminder of the soundness of the sound of
language, into the silent text. It underscores the sonic vibrancy of Tawada’s texts. Conversely, the
pressure Tawada’s metalinguistic utterances put on language reflexively attunes the ear to
ambient sound within the world of the narrative.
Target and Native Soundscapes in Storytellers Without Souls
Returning to the Zelle or “cells” that open “Storytellers Without Souls” with an ear toward
soundscapes, we can now listen to cells not only as self-replicating, self-perpetuating fractals of
the body, but as any of a number of artificial controlled soundscapes constructed so as to reduce
noise and optimize communications with acquaintances in remote locations (phone booths) or
with intermediaries of the divine (confessionals). Alternatively, cells are constructed so as to
ensure silence and thereby facilitate direct communication with the divine (monk’s cells). In
other cases, silence is imposed as a punitive measure (prison cells).
As occurs repeatedly throughout Tawada’s oeuvre, “Storytellers” is narrated by a
Japanese national living in Europe, and establishes a tension between the narrator’s observations
35
of her European city of residence and recollections of her childhood and early adulthood in
Tokyo, a tension I characterize as sonic displacement. As described earlier in this chapter,
Tawada figures sonic displacement as a “loss of the soul.”
But Tawada further establishes a sense of sonic displacement by oscillating between
uncanny and synesthetic depictions of her native soundscape of Tokyo/Japanese and the target
soundscape of Hamburg/German.
It’s beautiful when a phone booth is lit up at night on a dark street. In the section of
Tokyo where I grew up, there was a park full of ginkgo trees. In one corner of the park
stood a phone booth that was very popular with young girls. From dusk to midnight it
was continuously occupied. (2002 101)
Tawada then subtly performs a precise and economical ekphrasis of the soundscape of Tokyo by
juxtaposing imagery from science-fiction and Japanese myth: a comparison of the phone booth
with the Japanese folk tale (“Taketori Monogatari,” or “The Tale of the Bamboo
Cutter”) (ibid). The folk tale “begins with an old man seeing a luminous bamboo trunk and
chopping it down. Inside he discovers a newborn baby girl.” The bamboo cutter and his wife
raise the girl, and the tale ends with the girl, “who has become a grown woman, flying back to
where she really comes from: the moon.”
The complexity of Tawada’s seemingly off-the-cuff citation of “Taketori Monogatari”
becomes apparent when Tawada’s imagery is read as establishing a native soundscape. Not only
is the native soundscape as depicted by Tawada the relatively monolingual, homogenous
soundscape of Tokyo, but it is gendered as feminine, nocturnal, somnambulant, furtive, and
whispered. For the narrator, “the subject matter of the girls’ conversations was of little interest.
They spoke mostly about the males with whom they had relationships.” (102) Native flora and
the rustling of flat dried leaves are evoked in the park’s abundance of ginkgo trees. The narrator’s
assertion that the girls “could develop their talent for telling stories better in this cell than at
36
home with their parents” is already suggestive of a desire to escape from the banality of one’s
mother tongue, and the social conventions of kinship and collectivity it implies.
Embedded in the dreamlike territory evoked by the bamboo cutter’s tale is technology.
This technology is so jarring in the context of the park that the phone booth
might also have been a spaceship that has just landed in the park. The moon men have
sent a moon girl to Earth to inform them about our life. The girl is just making her first
report. What would she say about the park? Would she have much to report so soon after
her arrival? (102)
“Spaceship” suggests the ambient hum of Tokyo, a metropolitan area that is serviced until
midnight by multiple private and public train and subway lines, even in outlying residential
areas. Furthermore, the juxtaposition of the spaceship with “Taketori Monogatari” evokes the
much discussed cultural and technological syncretism of the Japanese megacity. The rapid
modernization and industrialization of the Meiji Restoration (1868-1912), which saw the
transformation of a feudal society into a modern nation state with a market economy based on
the European model, had morphed Tokyo into a postmodern global capital by the latter half of
the twentieth century (the period in which Tawada stages her native soundscape): feudal
elements of architecture, dress, social interactions, cuisine, typography, music, and art coexisted
alongside ultramodern technological contrivances and transit, telecommunications, and
manufacturing infrastructures unparalleled in their efficiency. The juxtaposition of futuristic
“spaceships” with the bucolic sound world of “Taketori Monogatari” thus neatly encapsulates
this sonic environment. Again, Tawada writes from an interstitial positionality, approaching her
own native soundscape as an ethnographer.
Both tales also operate as origin stories, and stories of displacement: “Taketori
Monogatari” ends with the girl flying home; the tale of the spaceship concerns the displaced
subject’s arrival and initial displacement. Importantly, the gerund form flying (“fliegend”)
37
emphasizes the fact that the tale does not end with a homecoming; instead, it ends mid-flight, in
the process of flying home. Similarly, the spaceship tale involves the girl who “has just landed”
and is “just making her first report” (102, emphasis added). Tawada’s aim in describing the
narrator’s childhood cityscape is to establish it as a conceptual vantage point, one to which she
has access even in displacement—the trope of the native soundscape.
The juxtaposition of the moon girl “flying back to where she really comes from” with the
moon girl who has just landed and whose mission is to “inform” her people about “our life” on
earth disrupts the assumption of the narrator’s ethnic and nationalistic rootedness in Japanese
culture. It also serves as a kind of origin story for the narrator herself: from birth, the narrator
never truly “belonged” to the bamboo cutter and his wife. As an adult, she has been sent to an
alien place, and is reporting back to the reader about her impressions upon being immersed in a
target soundscape.
The native soundscape of Tokyo/Japanese as represented by the phone booth is
simultaneously relational and depersonalized; the image of the “transparent glass box, lit from
21
within,” imbued with the qualities of both a folk tale and a spaceship, possesses the quality of
“lightness” as described by Italo Calvino in Six Memos for the New Millennium (Calvino 3—29).
By contrast, the target soundscape depicted by the narrator—a confessional in Austria that stands
in the “unlit corner of a Catholic church”—is “made of wood and stood there like a tree whose
roots have grown deep into the earth. It couldn’t fly away like a spaceship.” (103) The
confessional suggests heaviness; the vaulted ceilings and stone surfaces of European churches
and consequent echoes; the indoors versus the outside world; the psalms and registers of
cloistered life. In contrast to the postmodern atemporality of Tokyo, the narrator thinks of
For a discussion of the relational aspects of the Japanese language vis-a-vis the omission of personal
21
pronouns, see Kim 340-342.
38
Hamburg as a soundscape that is heavy with the weight of medieval history. Furthermore, in
comparing the confessional to “monks’ cells and prison cells,” Tawada implicitly codes the target
soundscape of Europe as male. “The walls of the cell,” however, “radiated warmth and calm;
right away I though I would be just as happy to stand inside telling stories as the girls in the
phone booth.” (103) The “just as” is a key qualification: although the target soundscape is
jarringly different from the narrator’s native soundscape, both types of “cells” allow the narrator,
like the girls in the phone booth, to develop her “talent for telling stories.”
The Soundscape of the Womb
Tawada’s defamiliarization of the body and dis/location of subjects in immersive soundscapes
meet in her depictions of the soundscape of the womb. In the “Doktormutter” section of “Seven
Stories for Seven Mothers,” for example, Tawada invokes the womb trope to describe the
soundscape of the academy, in which the Ph.D. advisor “nurtures” the graduate student’s
intellectual growth.
Das, was mich am Bild der Mutter fasziniert, hat weder mit Natur noch mit Familie zu
tun. Vielmehr hat es mit einem Raum zu tun, aus dem Gedanken und Bilder entstehen
und sich entwickeln können. Die Luft in diesem Raum hat eine dichte stoffliche Qualität
wie das Wasser in einer Gebärmutter. Daher kann man das, was im Raum lebt, oft nicht
vom Raum selbst unterscheiden. Die Doktormutter ist in dem Sinne die Urform der
Mutter. (1996 101)
You see, my fascination with the image of the mother has nothing to do with the nature of
families. Rather, it has to do with the space that arises at the thought of it, from the very
image—a space that is capable of growing. The air in this space is like the dense stuff in
the womb, the water quality of the womb. Consequently, it often happens that a person
can’t tell herself apart from the room around her, even if she lives there. In this sense, the
Ph.D. advisor is the archetype of the mother. (my translation)
In such stories as “Seven Stories for Seven Mothers” and “The Bath,” Tawada consciously
revises—or re-audiates—traditional and psychoanalytic tropes of the womb and the prenatal
39
subject. In this regard, Tawada is closely aligned with Julia Kristeva , particularly in regard to
22
Kristeva’s theorization of the semiotic (le sémiotique, as distinct from the study of signs and
symbols). The semiotic is the aspect of language that is heterogeneous to meaning and
signification. This heterogeneousness, Kristeva argues,
is detected in the first echolalias of infants as rhythms and intonations anterior to the first
phonemes, morphemes, lexemes, and sentences...[and] operates through, despite, and in
excess of [signification] and produces in poetic language “musical” but also nonsense
effects that destroy not only accepted beliefs and significations, but, in radical
23
experiments, syntax itself... (Kristeva 1980 133)
Inseparable from the semiotic is the symbolic (le symbolique), an aspect of language which is
comparable to Lacan’s Symbolic Order . However, the semiotic does not describe an originary
24
state that precedes the symbolic; instead, the semiotic and the symbolic are combined in different
measures to generate different types of signifying practices. Psychotic discourse, as well as the
“prephonological, prepredictive” speech production of infants, is more densely saturated with the
semiotic; so too is poetic language. These three forms of semiotic discourse—psychotic, poetic,
and infantile—put pressure on language by foregrounding its physicality—what Roman
Jakobson refers to as the “sound-shape” of language, in all its bodily and sonic excess of
signification.
As it foregrounds the sounding body, the semiotic causes language to “careen out of
control.” (Bruns 64). Thus Kristeva sees in the semiotic both a hazard and the potential for
revolutionary change: the primarily semiotic function of infant production is due to the fact that
It is worth noting that Kristeva herself is a diasporic author, born and educated in Bulgaria before
22
emigrating to France. She is also a published novelist.
A semantic inversion occurs here which is worth noting: is Kristeva suggesting that the breakdown of
23
syntax is of greater significance than the destruction of accepted beliefs and significations?
Kristeva describes the symbolic as the “inevitable attribute of meaning, sign, and the signified object for
24
thetic consciousness.”
40
its initial expressive register is primarily emotive and not referential; the psychotic’s is a
symptom of an inability to distinguish between internal and external; the poet seeks to formulate
expressions which lay beyond established syntax, and beyond the niceties of conventional
discourse.
The semiotic, then, could be likened to a “language of the womb,” a trope that seems
inherently oxymoronic—how can the pre-graphical, pre-productive, aural perception of the
prenatal subject be likened to language?—but which Tawada approximates by synesthetic
substitution: “Moles are spots on the skin that come from the time when we still lived in the
womb. If one could bring together the writing on the inner lining of the uterus with the
birthmarks of the child, a readable text might be generated.” The sonic phenomena of language
perceived in the womb is conceived of graphically, as a lost system of writing previously
described in the Gebärmutter/Womb section:
On the inner wall of the womb, we take notes…The hand in which these notes were
written is illegible in this light, and can’t be read in this world. But sometimes I think that
I have vague memories of these notes, and couldn’t write poems without them. (1996
101-102, my translation)
The semiotic is idealized, and the slippage between the unattainable, originary “womb language”
and the poet’s attempts to recover it constitute the lyric mode itself. “It’s a tedious job,” the
narrator continues, “trying to remember” the language of the womb.
Once the subject is born, this womb-language of the semiotic is largely forgotten or
marginalized.
that which was in the womb is not the same as that which is now referred to as “I.” This
is because that place is a very different world than this one. Just as one doesn’t remain
the same after death, one can’t be the same before and after birth. (ibid)
Henceforth, the semiotic irrupts primarily as sound in a) psychotic episodes, b) poetic
transgressions, and c) children’s violations of syntactical and morphological rules during the
41
language-learning process. The semiotic is sidelined by the symbolic—the representational,
conventional, and banal function of language lamented by the narrator of “Canned Foreign.”
Tawada summarizes this narrative of language acquisition in her interview with Bettina
Brandt:
In, through, and with your mother tongue, you grow up, you become an adult. Once
grown-up, we tend to ‘forget’ the childish dimension of language. In your mother tongue,
in the end, you see only the meaning of a word and you no longer pay much attention to
the visual and acoustic characteristics, or the way in which certain words really are funny
and make us laugh. You have to repress these childish elements to become or to be an
adult in your mother tongue. (Brandt 7)
But “Storytellers Without Souls” also likens the semiotic function of language to the language of
those “who travel much farther than sailors and remain in one place even longer than the oldest
farmer: the dead.” In Tawada’s estimation, the language of the dead “cannot be understood, it is
not even audible. How can one hear the stories of the dead? This is one of the most difficult tasks
of literature.” (2002 108)
The narrator of “Seven Stories” also figures the language of the dead as poetic and
sublime, aligning it with the semiotic. In the Doktormutter section, the narrator distinguishes
between two different forms of discourse that roughly align with Kristeva’s semiotic and
symbolic. “I prefer to work in the kind of womb that has two doors,” she explains. “One leads to
the land of the Dead and the other leads to the land of coherent language.” (1996 101)
Essentially unknowable, the language of the dead can at best be approximated through
imaginative acts, i.e., the difficult, epistemological function of literature. Tawada illustrates this
function through the theater, a form in which “knowledge not accessible to us becomes audible,”
and to the ghost of Hamlet’s father in particular, without whose appearance “neither Hamlet nor
the audience would have access to the past.” (2002 108) The elder Hamlet’s explication of his
42
assassination—Claudius’s pouring poison into his ear—dramatically highlights the proximity of
the semiotic/poetic/aural to silence and the language of the dead.
The semiotic might thus be conceived of as a bandwidth that resides on a continuum
between “coherent” and/or “conventional” language and silence itself: the semiotic consists of all
that is between the “zero” of silence and the “one” of the symbolic. On the other side of the zero
point of silence is the inscrutable language the dead. However, in approaching zero but never
quite reaching it, the semiotic is infinitesimal and thus boundless. Consequently, attempts to
approximate this language on the other side of silence irrupt through the semiotic. In Tawada’s
reading, then, Hamlet’s father’s ghost constitutes not only a sonic irruption but an irruption of the
ineffable. In calling for the younger Hamlet to restore the natural order, the elder Hamlet
transgresses the natural order through sound.
Language-Music in the Wombscape
Despite the oral, pre-graphical nature of infant language acquisition, Kristeva does not develop
the implicit connection between the semiotic and the sonic. Moreover, the cognitive models
Kristeva uses to develop the semiotic have been radically revised in the last 30 years, particularly
with studies conducted by NIRS, or near-infrared spectroscopy. There is now a general
consensus among cognitive neuroscientists that the auditory capacities of prenatal subjects are as
well developed by the thirty-second-week of gestation as they are at birth. According to May,
Byers-Heinlein, Gervain, and Werker, prenatal experiences in utero prime the prenatal subject to
acquire the mother’s native language—the mother tongue, for all of the term’s problematic
43
associations —post-partum. (May, Lillian et. al.) Kristeva intuited similar processes in the
25
chora, wherein the semiotic originates. But the chora abstracts the womb into an invisible,
26
formless locus anterior to any space wherein primary processes, as well as social and family
structures, are encoded through the mediation of the maternal body. While Tawada also eschews
these structures (“my fascination with the image of the mother has nothing to do with the nature
of families” (1996 100)) and schema that connect them to the wombscape, her use of embodied
tropes reintroduces the somatic into the discourse of language acquisition.
This emphasis on the somatic is indispensable in considering the phenomenological
experience of the prenatal subject, and thereby re-audiating the semiotic. Kristeva contends that
the semiotic is engendered by the oral and anal drives of the infant. Tawada dramatizes the very
27
same Freudian model in the daughter’s confrontation with the mother in “The Bath.” The
daughter’s regression in response to the “mother-music” of the bicycle-loom reverses the
Freudian narrative of child development: “With every revolution, I became one year younger…I
could no longer stand. My lips and anus grew hot. I was crying like an infant, the shrieks of a
dying child being sucked into it’s mother’s vagina.” (2002 47) Given the cognitive neuroscience
model of prenatal “language” acquisition, however, the timeline of the semiotic is pushed back
further. Rather than deriving from the neonate’s impulse to “master, destroy, or devour,” the
semiotic develops from the prenatal subject’s experience within the wombscape, specifically its
experience of sound as a vibrational phenomenon. The semiotic, according to this re-audiation,
Though Deleuze & Guattari, among others, have underscored the instability of this term, recent fMRI
25
research supports the contention that prenatal subjects distinguish not only between the mother’s voice in
particular and other human voices, but between the mother speaking her first and second languages.
A term meaning “receptacle,” which Kristeva borrows from Plato’s Timaeus.
26
A claim made by Kristeva and derived from Freud: the anal reflects a desire to master and destroy; the
27
oral reflects the impulse to devour.
44
is inaugurated by the vibrational—and thus intermodal (aural, tactile, and even visual)—forces
acting upon and through the prenatal subject.
The most significant of these vibrational forces is the voice of the mother, speaking and/
or singing the mother tongue or heritage language, as it is described in the discourse of diaspora
studies, and the voices of partners, siblings, medical caregivers, community members, and others
who are close enough in proximity to the womb for their voices to be “heard” and “felt” through
the filter of physiological noise. The wombscape’s filtering of voices through the noise of the
mother’s bodily processes—a phenomenon that might be described as womb conduction—
coincides with the developmental stage in which the prenatal subject doe not yet distinguish
between the self as subject and the world is object. This is noted by the narrator of “Seven
Stories,” who observes that in “the dense stuff in the womb, the water quality of the womb…a
person can’t tell herself apart from the room around her.” The wombscape, then, is what R.
Murray Schafer would characterize as a “lo-fi” soundscape, in which a sound signal such as a
voice is muddied and often drowned out by other ambient sounds.
The previously described anthropological concept of language-music, then, is a useful
mode for approaching auditory discrimination of the mother’s voice within the soundscape of the
womb. Charles Bernstein has famously argued that language precedes speech, and that aurality
28
precedes orality (Bernstein xii). Tawada’s trope of language in the womb suggests that language-
as-referentiality precedes language-as-music, or language-music. While Faudree notes that the
division between language and music is culturally constructed, it should be noted that the terms
“language” and “music” are equally constructed by culture. As Douglas Kahn has observed, “the
boundary between musical sound and noise” is fluid and culturally imposed; the point at which
For Bernstein, aurality is defined as the actual sounds produced by the body, as opposed to the more
28
familiar elements emphasized in speech, such as voice, breath, and diction.
45
music may be classified as noise is at “the threshold at which too much of the world is
detected.” (Kahn 71) In the wombscape, then, what the prenatal subject is being encoded with is
not a mother tongue per se, but a mother-way-of-being-sonic-in-the-world.
The Wombscape and Diaspora
The schematization of the wombscape to the mother tongue is made explicit in “The Bath,” a
story Tawada wrote in Japanese but published only in a German translation. The story depicts the
narrator's uncanny experience of returning to the native soundscape “for the first time in years,”
her “head full of impossible memories.”
It was a strange homecoming…Inside it was completely dark…A machine that looked
like a cross between a bicycle and a handloom filled the small room entirely. Behind it,
on a futon, lay my mother, gazing into space like a blind woman.
“Okaasan, watashi yo.”
I hadn’t spoken Japanese in a long time. In the word okaasan (mother) I met my
old self, and when I said watashi (I) I felt as though I were my own simultaneous
interpreter. (2002 41-42)
At first, however, the mother doesn’t recognize her daughter. “How did you get such an Asian
face?” the mother asks. When her daughter protests that she is Asian, the mother cryptically
implies that her daughter has begun to performatively embody her race according to the
expectations and assumptions of the Western culture in which she resides: “You’ve started to
have one of those faces like Japanese people in American movies.” (ibid)
Confronted by the detritus of her childhood room, the narrator asks her mother why she
doesn’t just throw away the diapers, bibs, toys, and other keepsakes that clutter the moldy space.
The mother replies that her daughter might come back, to which the narrator responds: “Even if I
came back, I would be somebody else already.” (45) Suddenly, the mother interjects that it’s time
46
for her “training” on the strange device that the narrator first noticed upon entering her mother’s
home.
She sat down at the bicycle-loom (Fahrrad-Webstuhl) and began to pedal. The pedals
caused chains to move, the chains moved cogs, these moved other cogs, and soon a
mechanical-sounding music began to play. The strange thing was that none of the notes
had pitch or length, they were simply born in the distance like a desert whirlwind, they
wrapped themselves around me and sucked me in. I began to spin round and round. I felt
drunk and sick to my stomach as if after a wild celebration, but when I tried to vomit,
nothing came up but laughter. It was so much fun I couldn’t help it. (46-47)
The cultural machinery of the mother tongue is literalized in the narrator’s Kafkaesque encounter
with her mother. The mother exteriorizes the semiotic language-music of the wombscape, which
has been amplified to carnivalesque absurdity. Here the native soundscape, which is quite
literally generated by the mother, is mind-altering and practically weaponized.
With every revolution, I became one year younger. There was no longer any front or
back, and I couldn’t see. My knees grew soft, my heels grew soft. I could no longer stand.
My lips and anus grew hot. I was crying like an infant, the shrieks of a dying child being
sucked into it’s mother’s vagina. Howling, I vanished into the dark hole of the whirlwind.
(47)
The “mechanical-sounding music” of the mother tongue—a surreal conflation of language and
music, or a sonic irruption of the language-music trope—is equated metonymically with the
“dark hole” of the mother’s womb, which threatens to subsume the narrator’s identity. Instead of
staging a nostalgic reunion with the mother, Tawada depicts the narrator’s mother as an
antagonist.
The narrator of “Canned Foreign,” another story narrated by a Japanese diasporic subject
living in Germany, admits that hearing “people speak their native tongues fluently” makes her
nauseous. “It was as if they were unable to think and feel anything but what their language so
readily served up to them.” (2002 34) Tawada’s narrator expresses disgust with the complacency
and banality of German native speakers living in their own country; to paraphrase Wittgenstein,
these speakers allow the familiarity and readymade ease of their first language to demarcate the
47
limits of their world. The narrator of “Canned Foreign” regards displacement as a solution to this
problem: living simultaneously in and out of a linguistic community affords a better chance at
precision and vitality. In such an interstitial space, one is better able to hear language itself and
the extent to which it constitutes us. For the narrator of “The Bath,” however, the mother tongue
does more than simply lull and desensitize, or pull the wool over one’s eyes. The mother tongue
and its echo of prenatal subject formation and unity with the mother—its echo, in other words, of
the womb—seems to represent a threat to the idea of identity itself.
But Tawada’s conception of a “second childhood” is reinforced by the narrator’s escape
in “The Bath” from the mother’s absorptive womb into her own womb, a “second gestation” in
which the diasporic subject gives birth to herself: “With the last of my strength, I cursed my
mother: ‘Death to the women with scales!’ Suddenly my body was covered with scales and I fell
into my own vagina, the dark hole of the whirlwind.”
Rebirth of the narrator through her own womb is repeated in the Gebärmutter (Womb)
section of “Seven Stories”:
I’m trying to arrange my study so that it’s like a womb. Then I find myself — as I write
— in a womb. At the same time, my womb is in my body, and so I’m going to a
membrane between the outer shell and the inner mother. (1996 100)
By re-appropriating the womb to give birth to herself, Tawada’s narrators deterritorialize the
wombscape from the culturally constructed schema of the maternal body and mother tongue. On
closer listening, then, Tawada’s theme is not the rejection of the mother in mother tongue ( or bogo, “mother tongue”; alternatively rendered as , bokokugo, “mother country
tongue”) but the rejection of the idea of the mother tongue as an originary apparatus that delimits
the subject. In evoking the “music” between “language and the audible,” and in suggesting the
illegible script within the womb, what Tawada proposes is a first language before the mother
48
tongue, a language that is not a language nor a mother tongue per se, but the sonic sensitivity and
awareness of the wombscape.
Tawada divests herself of the mother tongue, but it is the mother-music—her pre-lingual
sonic conditioning through exposure to the “rhythms and intonations” of her mother’s language
—that is the apparatus for her engagement, both through the tongue and ear, with the German
language. With “Seven Stories,” Tawada suggests that prenatal subjects enjoyed a profound, and
perhaps private, proto-language in the womb, but that this proto-language is fundamentally
unknowable. Even the knowledge that we ever possessed this proto-language “is no longer
accessible to most adults.” (100-101) As described by the narrator, “that which was in the womb
is not the same as that which is now referred to as ‘I.’” (ibid) The re-audiation of the semiotic
suggested by Tawada, then, not only draws an analogous relationship between the author
displaced from her native soundscape and the neonatal subject displaced from the wombscape,
but argues that sonic displacement produces a state of suspension, a consciousness of language as
language, that is consubstantial with the experience of the prenatal subject. To hear through the
sonic irruptions of a sonically displaced author is to hear an echo of this originary space.
This model moves away from the poststructuralist assumption that language causes an
endless slide of signification away from the originary wholeness. According to the wombscape
model as conceived by Tawada, such an assumption rises from the insistence that language is
precise and referential; that which is approximate, gestural, emotive, corporeal, sonic, and
musical is not.
Tawada’s work rejects the overdetermining power of the mother tongue, but reinvents the
womb-as-trope as a form of consciousness in which the sounding world is actively perceived in
the same way that it is perceived by the developing subject, in which language as a sonic
49
phenomenon is heard for all of its music and noise. The tropical womb is thus turned inside out,
and the displaced subject goes about the world in a state of “wombness”—constantly in a private
wombscape, hearing the world as if through womb conduction.
50
CHAPTER 2
JESSICA HAGEDORN: SONIC TROPES/TROPICALIZED SOUNDS
Dogeaters (1990), Jessica Hagedorn’s first novel, was both a popular success and well-received
by critics; by contrast, her second novel, The Gangster of Love (1996), was considered in many
early reviews to be “meandering,” “too loose and too fantastic” (Powers 1996), and even a
“disappointing” (Steinberg 1996) followup to her debut. Eighteen years after its publication, the
novel continues to be “critically overlooked” (Balance 2013 77) in comparison to its effectively
canonized predecessor. The difference in reception may stem in part from Hagedorn’s shift from
the depiction of an exotic Third World nation in Dogeaters to the comparatively straightforward
and dutiful chronicling of the experiences of a young Asian American immigrant in Gangster.
“Whereas Dogeaters represented a slice of Third World life in a faraway urban jungle,” Christine
Balance notes, “Gangster brought the hallucinatory effects of U.S. imperialism back
home.” (77-80)
But another factor may be a preoccupation with the visible, or at least the elision of the
sonic, in Hagedorn criticism, and in Asian American literary criticism more generally.
Accordingly, this chapter reassesses Hagedorn’s second novel by developing and deploying new
critical frameworks for reading sound in diasporic literature.
In Hagedorn’s case, visual bias is partly justified by Dogeaters’ repeated riffing on and
reworking of American cinema. E. San Juan, Jr. goes so far as to describe Dogeaters as a
“cinematext,” a designation that lurks behind much of the criticism that continues to accrete
around Hagedorn’s debut. San Juan notes that Dogeaters enjoyed popularity “as an afterimage of
the Marcos-dictatorship interlude in [Philippine] history,” (San Juan 1998a 111) an era in which
the Philippines’ “special status” vis-a-vis the United States, which was normally subordinated to
51
the periphery, was dramatically made visible through the Marcos’s spectacular displays of
wealth, pomp, and privilege.
Although Gangster also engages with cinema, it is more abundant in its citations of
(mostly American) popular music. “Whereas Dogeaters marked cinematic qualities of
Hagedorn’s writerly voice,” Balance continues, “Gangster gestured more toward Hagedorn’s
poetic voice in performance, with its reliance on pop music figures, songs, and places.” (80) In
Part I alone, six chapters take their names from songs of the period: The Jimi Hendrix
Experience’s “Purple Haze” (1967); Martha & The Vandellas’ “(Love Is Like a) Heat
Wave” (1963); Elvis Presley’s “Blue Hawaii” (1961); Betty Davis’s “He Was a Big
Freak” (1974); the classic Tagalog-English kundiman/love ballad “Dahil Sa Iyo” (Because of
You) (1964); and Johnny Guitar Watson’s “The Gangster of Love” (1957/1978), which also
provides the name for both the novel and for Rocky’s own band.
29
Despite this overt musicality, visuality still dominates in discussions of Gangster. San
Juan, for example, accuses the novel of succumbing to the consumerist pressure to reduce
important ideas and arguments to “self-gratifying spectacles.” (1998b 10-13, ital. mine) Jeffrey
Santa Ana cites/sights Time Magazine’s notorious “New Face of America” cover for the special
issue of November 18, 1993, in analyzing Gangster’ s critique of racial hybridity and
multiraciality, and includes Hagedorn in a group of contemporary Asian American writers whose
work “goes against the grain of neoliberal colorblindness.” Enlisting Lisa Lowe, Santa Ana
argues that Gangster’ s “emotions of mixed race render visible ‘the histories of…’hybrid’ cultural
identities.” (Santa Ana 477, Lowe 42, ital. mine) “In many ways,” Paul Cheng (59) argues, both
Rocky’s band is loosely based on Hagedorn’s own band, The West Coast Gangster Choir, which was
29
active in San Francisco from 1975-1980, and was later reformed as The Gangster Choir in New York in
1980. For a detailed history of The West Coast Gangster Choir, see Balance 2013.
52
[Dogeaters and The Gangster of Love] are concerned with the idea of spectatorial delight: the
way in which the spectator takes pleasure in the cinematic image.”
To be sure, issues of in/visibility that are critical to Asian American literary studies have
been productively critiqued in Dogeaters, particularly in Viet Thanh Nguyen’s reading of the
novel’s depiction of queer bodies, subalterns, and the forgetfulness that engulfs the Philippine-
American War . Accordingly, my present study takes note of the connection between the queer
30
body of Joey Sands in Dogeaters’ as a site of visible trauma resulting from colonization and The
Gangster of Love’ s V oltaire Rivera as a sonic subject traumatized by colonization.
But even in discussions of Gangster’ s musical elements, the visual aspects of
performance are given disproportionate attention. In reading Jimi Hendrix as an “emblem” of
both the “rock festival of the Sixties” and of Gangster’ s “anti-colonialist text,” for example, San
Juan cites sociomusicologist Simon Frith, for whom Hendrix’s appeal “rested on the sense that
his apparently uninhibited pursuit of pleasures was on show, for all of us to see and share” (Frith:
66, ital. mine). Furthermore, Frith argues that Hendrix’s importance stems from his “displaying
of desires and feelings rawly, as if to a lover or a friend.” (1998a: 119, ital. mine). Like Frith, San
Juan’s rigorous analyses eschew “purely formal aesthetic questions.” By doing so, however, he
inadvertently succumbs to visual bias.
This study is not the first to note this visual bias in readings of Hagedorn: Martin Ponce's
chapter on Hagedorn in Beyond the Nation: Diasporic Filipino Literature and Queer Reading,
entitled “The Cross-Cultural Musics of Jessica Hagedorn’s Postmodernism,” argues convincingly
for a turn in Hagedorn scholarship toward the aural. By attending to musical cues across
Nguyen, Viet Thanh. Race and Resistance: Literature and Politics in Asian America. Oxford University
30
Press, 2002.
53
Hagedorn’s collections of poetry, short stories, and novels, Ponce demonstrates how music
serves
as a kind of nodal point where cultural meanings associated with race, nation, gender, and
sexuality converge and compete with one another, on the one hand, and where formal
possibilities and artistic lineages are constructed and invented, on the other. (124)
Furthermore, Ponce’s analysis of Dogeaters’ final chapter challenges the prevailing emphasis on
the cinematic by unpacking the chapter’s use of the kundiman, an indigenous musical-poetic
form whose deployment in the novel effectively transposes
film with music, print with prayer, representation with direct address...shifting the
expressive terrain from spectacle and visuality to sound and aurality. The issue here is not
so much whether the postcolonial Filipino can be seen—represented outside the
exoticizing mechanisms of the imperial gaze—but whether she can be heard through the
strains of “native” music. (143)
While reaffirming and celebrating Ponce’s insights, I would qualify his analysis by re-
articulating the broad and unstable nature of music, a category that includes but is not limited to
musical forms, recordings, lyrics, performances, and practices. Furthermore, “the boundary
between musical sound and noise,” as Douglas Kahn has observed, is fluid and culturally
imposed; the point at which music may be classified as noise is at “the threshold at which too
much of the world is detected.” (Kahn 1999 71) The analysis of musical elements in this chapter,
therefore, takes heed of Christopher Small’s admonition to emphasize music not as a noun—an
abstract and idealized phenomenon—but as a verb, or the cultural practice of musicking .
31
In The Gangster of Love, moreover, music is only the loudest manifestation of sonic
materiality. The novel’s many musical allusions are scored within a larger argument about the
sonic displacement of diasporic subjects, an argument that is orchestrated through word play,
code-switching, neologisms, ekphrasis, lyric transcriptions of speech and soundscapes, and other
Small, Christopher. Musicking: The Meanings of Performing and Listening. Hanover: University Press
31
of New England, 1998.
54
sonic tropes and tropicalizations . Without diminishing the importance of sonic irruptions that
32
might be classified as musical in nature, a sonic reading of Gangster must also attend to the
“noise” of language itself, not only in terms of speech as it is uttered, transcribed,
perceived, remembered, and imagined as sonic phenomena within the soundscapes of the
narrative and the sounding/perceiving bodies who occupy them, but also insofar as the narrative
itself is composed of morphemes and phonemes, rhythms, phrases, inflections, and intonations,
which are uttered (or sung) in both the external world of the narrative and in the internal
soundscapes of its characters’ interiorities. Furthermore, if language in the novel can be said to
“sound” at all, it does so in the internal soundscape of the reader.
The widespread use of musical tropes and allusions foreground the novel’s aurality,
priming readers to listen more closely to the novel’s many linguistic articulations of diaspora and
displacement. By drawing attention to the aurality of language, Hagedorn invariably draws
attention to the sonic materials of the narrative itself. As a result, the sonic materiality inherent in
Gangster’ s linguistic and musical tropes forces the reader to think harder about the sonic
experience of diasporic subjects.
My reading thus builds on Ponce’s investigation of Gangster’ s cross-cultural musical
tropes within the larger and more inclusive framework of sound culture studies: music, musical
forms, performances, citations, ekphrasis, and other practices of musicking are each attended to
as one of many sound forms audible in the soundscapes lived in, co-constituted by, and perceived
by diasporic subjects. This sonic framework allows for the transdisciplinary reading of the novel
that deploys methodologies from critical musicology, cinema studies, and linguistics. As Marta
“To tropicalize...means to trope, to imbue a particular space, geography, group or nation with a set of
32
traits, images, and values.” Frances Aparicio and Susana Chavez Silverman, Tropicalizations:
Transcultural Representations of Latinidad (Hanover and London: Dartmouth College Press, 1997)
55
Vizcaya Echano argues, “Hagedorn's rich work demands to be read with an interdisciplinary
approach involving a wide range of analytical tools.” (Echano 71)
Furthermore, a sonic reading of Gangster avoids reinforcing the false opposition between
film as spectacle/visuality and music as an exclusively auditory practice, a misapprehension that
elides the intermodality of both disciplines. Informed by Michel Chion’s audio-visual studies of
cinema, my approach re-audiates Hagedorn’s cinematic gestures and underscores the
indispensability of sound in constructing intersubjective time and space in “cinema” as it is
(re)produced in Gangster, particularly in the novel’s phantasmal construction of acousmetric
voices. In critiquing Frith’s analyses of Hendrix, and the sociological tradition in popular music
studies more generally, Allan Moore notes that Frith
suggests that the aesthetic question (‘how does the text achieve its effects?’) is
secondary to the interpretation of the text’s generalized social meaning: ‘Is it expressive
or liberating? Corrupting or uplifting? Escapist or instructive?’ I…would suggest that
what Frith cites as the aesthetic question is secondary to at least two others, which are
‘what precise effects can the text achieve?’ and even more fundamentally, ‘what does the
text consist of?’ (Moore 6)
Bearing in mind Moore’s critique, this chapter listens closely to The Gangster of Love in order to
precisely describe its sonic effects, and to ask what these effects consist of. Close listening to
Gangter’ s musical citations—and to the ways that the novel’s soundscapes are transformed by
the cueing of the cited recordings’s particular sonic signatures and manipulations of sound space
—causes the novel’s tropical topography/hierarchy to shift. Rather than cohering around Rocky’s
band and the degree to which Rocky and company supersede Jimi Hendrix and other canonical
figures of the period (as San Juan argues the novel attempts to do), the novel instead coheres
around the trope of the diasporic subject dis/located by sound.
Although the novel is framed as a “listening to Rocky,” by the time Rocky returns to the
Philippines at the novel’s close “she is no longer just an isolated individual” but a “collective
56
presence, holding in a composite and synthesizing trope the dispersed and fragmented lives of
generations of Filipinos whose chief claim to distinction is…their unrelenting pursuit of
happiness and their equally inexhaustible capacity to suffer." (San Juan 1998a 121). Two of the
“dispersed and fragmented lives” contained within Rocky provide the key for parsing the novel’s
argument about sonic displacement. One of these figures, Rocky’s brother V oltaire, is a figure of
the vulnerability and malleability of sonic identity. Rocky’s daughter Venus, the second figure, is
literally contained within Rocky, in the physiological soundscape of her body, a soundscape
inundated with Rocky’s voice as heard/felt through corporeal and processual filters. Together,
Venus and V oltaire underscore an anxiety about motherhood, sound, voice, and language, and the
transmission of language, culture, and identity from Milagros to Rocky and V oltaire, and later
from Rocky to Venus.
Acousmêtre and Diaspora
Despite its “weird outbursts and formal shifts” (Powers), The Gangster of Love is a “basically
traditional, linear story” (Ingraham) of departure, exile, and return: Rocky Rivera emigrates from
the Philippines to the United States as an adolescent with her mother, Milagros, and brother,
V oltaire, and grows into adulthood in San Francisco just after its counterculture peak. Later,
Rocky undergoes a second migration, abandoning the diasporic community her mother has
created in the Bay Area for New York, where she fronts a multiracial experimental punk band
called The Gangster of Love (which takes its name from the blues recording by Johnny “Guitar”
Watson). A record deal eludes the group, and Rocky finds menial employment in the service
sector, has a daughter with her former soundman, and flies cross country to tend to her mother in
her final illness. After receiving news that her father Francisco is dying, Rocky decides to go
57
back to the Philippines for the first time in twenty years, and the novel closes with Francisco
waiting anxiously to be reunited with her.
E. San Juan, Jr. argues that the nostalgic impulse for closure as exemplified by the “return
of the ‘prodigal’ daughter” and “reconciliation” with the father ultimately undermines Gangster’s
capacity for political critique. But no such reconciliation takes place; as Echano has noted,
Gangster concludes with an “open ending” (Echano 14). Furthermore, this ending is filtered
through Rocky’s father Francisco Rivera , whose consciousness has been destabilized by age
33
and illness. Hagedorn sets the scene by first letting the reader see Francisco and his household
from the point of view of Naty, the “petite but sturdy sixteen-year-old servant” (Hagedorn 1996
306) who looks after him. “There is tension in the household about Sir’s mysterious daughter,
who’s expected to arrive at any moment,” the narrator notes. “The old man hasn’t seen [Rocky]
in more than twenty years, and Señora Baby’s nervous about meeting her.” (309) As he putters
about, Francisco is further unsettled by the instability and unreliability of visual phenomenon:
the immaculate grooming of his second wife, Señora Baby, reminds Francisco of Milagros and
triggers memories of his younger self; his own sickly appearance, which he takes stock of in a
mirror that Naty holds up for him, horrifies him; and the absence of his youngest son, Kikoy,
who he “hasn’t seen...all day,” and whose facial features lead the other household servants to
speculate that Francisco has been cuckolded , causes him to worry that the boy might have been
34
kidnapped (a phenomenon that has been established as commonplace in the previous chapter).
The shift in perspective is signaled by the final chapter’s title, “Francisco Rivera.”
33
“The boy can’t possibly be a Rivera. Just look at his so-called father’s features…Then look at the
34
boy’s…Look at his nose. He’s much too fair to belong to that crocodile upstairs.” (308)
58
By contrast, voices and ambient sounds are crisp and convey reliable information. Baby
assures Francisco that his son is safe, and he moves toward the patio, where he can hear Kikoy’s
excited shrieks and wails as he plays outside. “Too much jumping! Too noisy!” the boy’s yaya
(nanny) scolds him. Finally, in the last paragraph, Rocky arrives:
Naty takes the mirror away from Francisco Rivera. A car pulls up in the driveway. The
old man hears crunching gravel, car doors swinging open, car doors slamming shut.
Hushed voices. A young child—his son?—whining. The beautiful woman takes a deep
breath, forcing herself to smile at the old man. “See, amor? Didn’t I tell you? She’s here.”
(310-311)
In the novel’s final sentences, Rocky’s father is quite literally listening for her return. He hears
the tires of the car that carry her to him cutting the gravel, the car doors’ hinges and handles
creaking; followed by the doors slamming shut. But the narrative breaks off before there can be
any reconciliation. Rocky has arrived, but Francisco still cannot see her. She is never inscribed in
his visual field, not within the frame of the narrative; the new, diasporic Rocky with whom
Francisco is unfamiliar—Rocky the poet, Rocky the musician, Rocky the mother—is always out
of frame.
The scene is an inversion of a dream Rocky has earlier in the novel, in a chapter entitled
“Los Blah Blahs Three.” In that chapter, Rocky discusses her dream with frenemy and visual
artist Keiko:
“In my dream, I was talking to some man, but he was out of the frame. Probably
my father.”
“At last.”
“You know I never dream about my father. This was the first and only time.”
“You never dream about men, period. Except maybe Fidel Castro.” (248)
35
The entire section is italicized in the original. When asked about italicized words in her poems,
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Hagedorn replied, “I do italics instinctively...Some of them were because they’re meant to be in another
voice than the poet’s. It’s just a way to differentiate. I tend to write them as if I’m writing them to be
performed. It’s a way to suggest another voice.” (Black Lightning: Poetry-in-Progress, Tabios, Eileen, ed.
New York, N.Y.; Philadelphia, Pa.: Temple University Press, 1998, 272)
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In Rocky’s dream, she can hear a voice that is “probably” her father’s, but the voice is separated
from its source. Her father’s voice, if it is indeed her father’s, has become acousmatized: his
voice is audible, but the source of the sound—Francisco’s mouth and sounding body—is not
detectable in Rocky’s (dream) field of vision. In the final lines of the novel, this dynamic is
inverted: Francisco can hear the slamming car doors and the hushed voices of the people who
have just gotten out, one of whom is his daughter, but he cannot see her.
Composer and film theorist Michel Chion coined the term acousmêtre to describe a voice
that is audible but does not appear on screen or seem to have a body. In The Voice in Cinema,
Chion links the acousmêtre with the traditions of the Pythagorean cult and the Judeo-Christian
God, ascribing to it special powers:
1) PANOPTICISM. Like the titular humbug in The Wizard of Oz (1939), the sinister Dr. Mabuse
of Fritz Lang’s film series of the same name, or the artificial intelligence HAL in 2001
(1968), the acousmêtre possesses an all-seeing gaze.
2) OMNISCIENCE. The all-knowing consciousness of the Wizard, HAL, and other filmic
figures can be traced, according to Chion, to the traditions of the Pythagorean cult: acolytes
of Pythagoras were forced to listen to the master’s voice from behind a curtain.
3) OMNIPOTENCE. The disembodied, often reverberant voice of the acousmêtre is meant to
suggest unfathomable power. One of the most famous cinematic examples of this paradigm
comes from Star Wars (1977), in which the Jedi Master Obi-Wan Kenobi (Alec Guinness)
warns his former pupil, the Sith lord Darth Vader (David Prowess/James Earl Jones), that
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Though he speaks from behind a mask, Vader is not an acousmêtre, since his voice, provided by
36
James Earl Jones, is clearly intended to emanate from the armored onscreen body of actor David
Prowess. In The Empire Strikes Back (1981), however—the second installment of the original Star Wars
trilogy—Vader’s rasping voice addresses Luke threateningly from offscreen (“The Force is with you,
young Skywalker, but you are not a Jedi yet.”), temporarily transforming Vader into an acousmêtre. The
transformation prepares the audience for the film’s climactic battle, in which Vader’s awesome power is
revealed and Luke is outmatched.
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if he strikes him down he “will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine.”
Vader does indeed slay Kenobi, and the Jedi Master’s newfound immortality and power is
symbolized by his ability to communicate after death with Luke Skywalker as a sonorous,
offscreen voice.
4) UBIQUITY. After death, Kenobi has the ability to speak to Luke in the cockpit of a starship
in deep space, on the wastes of the ice planet Hoth, and in the swamps of a remote planet
called Dagobah; he is everywhere and nowhere . So too is the voice of the elder Bates in
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Psycho (1960), voiced by Paul Jasmin; Norman’s “mother,” Norma, is present throughout
the Bates Motel, for reasons which become apparent at the film’s end.
When Rocky’s “dream” father speaks to her from out of frame, the acousmetric power
imparted to him links him to the larger patriarchal regime that Rocky, her mother, and her
bisexual brother are trying to escape, as reinforced by institutions both religious (the Catholic
Church) and political (the regime of President Ferdinand Marcos). Marcos himself “appears” in
the Prologue as an acousmêtre, the disembodied voice crooning “I love you” over “the
omnipresent radio” to his lover, an American actress whose taped liaisons with the President
were broadcast over the campus radio station of the University of the Philippines. According to
the prevailing political, religious, and cultural conventions, Rocky’s mother Milagros is expected
to endure Francisco’s infidelities just as First Lady Imelda Marcos is expected to endure the
President's. When Francisco’s servants’ describe him as “that crocodile upstairs,” the reader is
reminded that crocodile is the name Rocky’s brother V oltaire uses to describe Ferdinand Marcos,
the corrupt and ruthless President of the Philippines who was, at the time of Rocky’s family’s
departure, in the midst of a successful attempt to expand his powers and suppress dissent
A line spoken by Liam Neeson, who plays the titular anti-hero in Sam Raimi’s Darkman (1990).
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(“That’s what V oltaire called Marcos now — Crocodile. Imelda was Mrs. Croc, or Croc of Shit,
as V oltaire sometimes said when he was in a truly bitchy mood.” (6)). Furthermore, the family’s
departure was caused by Francisco’s philandering. Fed up, finally, with his cheating, Rocky’s
mother, Milagros, takes Rocky and her brother V oltaire with her to the U.S., refusing any support
from her husband. Hagedorn links Rocky’s family’s domestic upheaval to the unfolding national
crisis in the Philippines: two years later, Francisco marries his mistress “in an illegal ceremony
on September 21, 1972, the day Ferdinand Marcos declared martial law in the Philippines.” (13)
Francisco’s disregard for social mores is clearly intended to parallels Marcos’s.
The mention of Castro in Rocky’s dream increases the sense of Francisco as a charismatic
patriarch, a despot whose unilateral actions caused Rocky’s displacement. After long separation,
and amplified by the erosion of Rocky’s memory of her mother tongue, Francisco has been
transformed in her dream into a disembodied voice, an acousmêtre. Thus, when the narrative
moves toward Rocky’s reunion with Francisco, Hagedorn has established an expectation not only
of Rocky’s reconciliation with Francisco, but of Francisco’s possession of special knowledge and
insight, power and influence, a certain worldliness, and personal charisma. Instead, Francisco,
like the Kansan ventriloquist of L. Frank Baum’s original Oz novel, is unmasked. The final
chapter is the first time Francisco appears in scene; up to this point, the reader has only heard
from Francisco anecdotally and retrospectively. Contrary to our expectations, we are presented
with Francisco’s “limp, ugly body wracked with disease and pain.” His frailty is emphasized
through contrast with the young and capable Naty.
For Chion, Oz’s unmasking marks the end of Dorothy’s initiation. But while Oz is
revealed to be a mere humbug, he still possesses enough wisdom to reveal to Dorothy’s
companions the inner virtues they already possessed; he also has the resources to return Dorothy
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to Kansas, although the attempt fails for reasons outside of his control. Francisco’s unmasking,
on the other hand, reveals his weakness while positioning Rocky as the one with perspective
(geographical, musical, temporal); power (maternal, creative, feminine); knowledge (both of her
father’s philandering and of other cultures and peoples); and ubiquity (the ability to navigate two
worlds and two cultures at once). Part of Rocky’s power and ubiquity stems from the fact that her
presence in Manila is not a return per se but a revisiting. She is there to see her dying father, but
she is also bound to return to the United States to reunite with her own daughter, Venus, and
partner, Jake. Long experience out of the country, in which she has had to learn to negotiate a
balance between fronting a rock band, caring for her daughter, and tending to her own dying
mother on both coasts, has not only changed the way Rocky hears things, but changed the way
she is heard, not only in terms of accent (pronunciation, word selection, intonation), but also in
terms of her nonverbal sonic identity. By shifting the final chapter to a positionality external to
Rocky and withholding Rocky’s visual presence—by keeping Rocky out of frame, in other
words—Hagedorn inverts the acousmetric paradigm, and confers the power of the acousmêtre on
her. Were Rocky to enter into Francisco’s visual field, she would immediately lose this power. By
breaking off the narrative first, Hagedorn leaves the reader in the same position she leaves
Francisco: straining to hear Rocky.
It is a mistake, then, to critique Gangster’s political efficacy on the basis of its perceived
longing for reconciliation; to do so is to miss a crucial subtlety of the novel’s method and
structure, a subtlety that must be listened for. The novel’s obsessive attention to sonic dis/
location is its political critique: due in large part to the lingering effects of colonization and
occupation (Spanish, British, American, Japanese), and the Philippines’ enduring status as a
neocolony of the United States, Rocky, V oltaire, and the other Filipinos they encounter in the
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diaspora were subject to sonic displacement well before they ever left the Philippines. This sonic
displacement—which for Filipino and Filipino diasporic subjects may be comparable to W. E. B.
du Bois’s “double consciousness”— is an internal echo of the (neo)colonization of the
Philippines; it is an echo of the global dispersion of Filipinos that is largely a consequence of
neocolonization. This echo is reproduced in Rocky’s and V oltaire’s production and perception of
sound. During one of V oltaire’s lucid moments, when “his mind is sharp and free from the din
and clutter of demons,” Rocky asks him “impossible” questions such as “What’s Filipino?…
What’s authentic? What’s in the blood?” V oltaire’s reply touches on the transnational, diasporic
identity that Hagedorn contends is constitutive of Filipino, not just Filipino American, identity:
“We’re blessed with macabre humor and dancing feet — a floating nation of rhythm and blues.”
Sonic displacement is a key component of the “floating nation” to which Rocky and
Hagedorn belong. This displacement, however, also enables Rocky to communicate
transculturally and translingually with some of the diasporic and/or outsider musicians, artists,
rivals, and ex- and would-be lovers she meets who do not have cultural ties to the Philippines.
One of these outsiders is Arnaldo, a relatively successful artist who is also the on-again, off-again
partner of Rocky’s best friend Keiko. Rocky takes a shine to Arnaldo, partly because he is a
fellow immigrant (from an unspecified Spanish-speaking country), and partly because she is
fascinated by the way he uses the English language.
It was like I had audio dysplasia. Instead of seeing double, I heard double, something
besides what Arnaldo was actually saying. “Trouble” when he said “travel,” “gender”
when he said “genre,” “fold” when he said “fault,” or “grammatic fever” when he said
“rheumatic fever.” But after laughing and sorting it all out, we’d come to the ironic
conclusion that it wasn’t a case of miscommunication at all, but understanding. (29)
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Filtered through Rocky’s immigrant ear, Arnaldo’s accented clusters of phonemes are modulated
into sounds that convey warnings (trouble-travel); sounds that expose false textual, corporeal,
and moral binaries (gender-genre, fold-fault); and sounds that link somatic ailments to linguistic
ones (grammatic fever-rheumatic fever). What passes between Rocky and Arnaldo, they both
conclude, is not “miscommunication at all, but understanding.” As diasporic subjects who speak,
sing, and hear the English language in nonstandard and nonnative modes, Rocky and Arnaldo
push the language beyond conventional usage into a trans- or extralingual mode, which is
achieved through a modulation of sonic materiality. Arnaldo’s utterances are encoded, inflected,
and modulated by his diasporic identity, but they are also heard “doubly” by Rocky, whose ear
was conditioned to hear English words as much by American popular music as by her immersion
in the Filipino education system. It is the sonic manifestation of words—sounded by bodies
whose geographical displacements have left sonic traces in the form of nonstandard speech
musics—that disorients, and reorients, both Rocky and Arnaldo.
Listening to Her Listening to Herself
Whereas the narrator of Yoko Tawada’s story “Canned Foreign” feels herself to be “outside” of
the German language, The Gangster of Love literally ends outside of Rocky. This is not the first
shift of perspective in the novel, nor is it the most jarring; although most of the novel is filtered
through Rocky’s consciousness, either via first person narration or through close third person
narration, the chapters “King of Cool” and “One Love” are narrated by Elvis Chang, Rocky’s
lover and the lead guitarist of The Gangster of Love. “I’m a great listener,” Elvis tells the reader,
“just like she is. I never interrupt. Unless somebody gets me real pissed off.” The organic shift to
Elvis’s “ears” in “King of Cool” externalizes Rocky at the very moment that she chooses to
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enjoy Elvis voyeuristically by watching him have intercourse with another woman. Being caught
between Rocky’s and Elvis’s reflexive intimacy affords the reader a better sense of the degree of
control that Rocky exerts over their relationship.
“Finally Rocky yawned and said, ‘What are we waiting for?’ She took off her
clothes and started ordering us around…Rocky wouldn’t allow me to come inside
Baba. She pushed her aside and pulled me toward her, murmuring in very bad
French, ‘He is mine, after all.” (118-119)
From Elvis’s perspective, the reader watches Rocky watching Elvis, and sees “the intense look
on [her] face” when she re-exerts ownership over Elvis’s body.
Subsequently, Rocky becomes pregnant, endures a difficult first trimester of pregnancy,
and suffers a miscarriage. The medical procedures and protocols she endures further externalize
and objectify her; she is “anesthetized, wheeled away” and later “euphoric from the Demerol
they’d given her” as part of the D and C (dilation and curettage) procedure to remove the
stillborn fetus. Rather than observing these events through the medicated Rocky, we bear witness
to Rocky’s miscarriage with Elvis’s clarity and helplessness. “All these other doctors came in,”
he recalls, “ignoring me, talkin’ about her in the third person, like she was invisible, or some lab
specimen. They poked fingers up inside her to see if the baby was still in one piece.”
After the miscarriage, Rocky suffers from a bout of postpartum depression that spurs an
end to her relationship with Elvis. “She wouldn’t respond,” Elvis observes. “It’s like she curled
up inside herself and died.” (105-120) Kella Svetich notes that Elvis “positions Rocky as her
own miscarried child,” a representation that further blurs “the distinction between inside and
outside, constructing Rocky’s response to her miscarriage as the breakdown of both psychic and
somatic boundaries.” (Svetich 115)
Shifting to the third person, the chapter “Film Noir” considers the externalized Rocky
from the perspective of her uncle Marlon Rivera, an aging “king of show business” who chose
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his stage name after seeing Marlon Brando in The Wild One (1953). When Marlon isn’t on tour,
“dancing with road companies or choreographing the millionth run of Flower Drum Song or…
playing the Yul Brynner part in a second-rate dinner theater production of The King and I,” he
spends much of his time chatting, flirting, and having tea with his elderly neighbor Isabel
L’Ange, a “[p]art black, Mexican, and Filipino” former “B-movie temptress and reclusive
widow.” When Marlon offers praise for Isabel (“There were contests,” Marlon says, “for the
Isabel L’Ange of the Philippines. You were proudly referred to as Filipina, one of our own.”), she
shrugs, claiming that she “sleepwalked through most of those films.” (80-81) It was her husband
Fritz, she argues, “the legendary expatriate director,” who “guaranteed her an uneasy place in
Hollywood”: “‘I was an uppity n****r, always shootin’ off my big mouth…But when I married
Fritz, well, they couldn’t exactly ignore me.” Hagedorn’s sidelong appropriation of Fritz Lang—
whose own career was marked by displacement and straddled the transition from silent films to
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talkies—sheds light on the chapter’s title, as Lang was a key figure in the development of the
film noir . While simultaneously appropriating a central figure like Lang and relegating him to
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the narrative periphery, Hagedorn recovers peripheral figures like De Vega—and the various
historical figures she composites into Isabel —and allows their voices to be “heard.”
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In her appropriation of liminal ethnic identities, Isabel borrows just as freely as
Hagedorn. “Is she Peggy Ashcroft, or Deborah Kerr?” Marlon wonders as he watches her unlock
the door to her West Hollywood home. “A few nights ago she was somewhere within the
melodious regions of Brazil…a purring, sardonic Eartha Kitt.” (79) Later, Isabel reminds Marlon
Born in Vienna, Lang famously fled Berlin after Joseph Goebbels tried to recruit him to head the
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German Film Institute, an offer which was later accepted by Leni Riefenstahl.
Lang’s film, M (1931), is considered to be an important precursor to the genre. Lang also directed such
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film noir classics as Scarlet Street (1945), Secret Beyond the Door (1948), and The Big Heat (1953).
Isabel claims, for example, that her rivals included Anna May Wong and Dorothy Dandridge.
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of Katharine Hepburn. For Paul Cheng, the many visual identities Isabel chooses to perform
“literalize…an identity built from the movies.” (Cheng 53) In her liberal appropriation of blues,
kundiman, funk, disco, Latin, and punk musical styles, Rocky is Isabel’s auditory counterpart.
Marlon has numerous film and Broadway credits that mirror those of Jose De Vega, Jr.
(1934-1990), the dancer, choreographer, and character actor of mixed Filipino and Columbian
heritage whose filmography includes appearances as Elvis Presley’s best friend Ernie Gordon in
Blue Hawaii (1961); Tatu, a Native Ute youth, in an episode of Bonanza ; and Chino in both the
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original Broadway production (1957) and film adaptation of West Side Story (1961). Moreover,
Marlon appears to be suffering from the early stages of AIDS, the same disease that claimed De
Vega’s life. Hagedorn’s fictionalized recovery of De Vega’s trailblazing career—and her literal
coupling of the “former Forbidden City chorus girl and starlet” Isabel with the famous director of
Metropolis (1927)—reminds the reader that the American cinematic imaginary is co-constituted
by racial and sexual others like Marlon/De Vega and Isabel, others who have performed as and
substituted for whatever ethnic, racial, or sexual fantasy the cinema sought to narrate. At the
same time, their onscreen work contributed to the construction of popular images of people of
color that simultaneously suppressed the hybridity of their constituent parts. “That chick was no
Puerto Rican,” Elvis says to Marlon, referring to Natalie Wood’s portrayal of Maria in West Side
Story. “And her accent was gross,” Rocky chimes in, providing an auditory complement to
Elvis’s visual critique. “But she was a star,” Marlon explains, “and that’s what they thought was
important, you see…and what about me? Did I pass for Puerto Rican?”
“To Kill a Buffalo” (1966). In the episode, Eric “Hoss” Cartwright finds Tatu injured and abandoned by
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his tribe, brings him back to the Ponderosa ranch, and fails in his attempts to “make him a White Man.”
When he realizes that Tatu will always long for the life of the Ute, Hoss gives him a horse and urges him
to “follow his heart,” saying, “Goodbye, little brother.”
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Citing Marguerite Duras, Chion argues that the cinema “has closed off the imaginary”:
because the silent cinema defined the faces of characters with such clarity, audiences were
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robbed of the power to imagine the faces of fictional characters, a power relegated to radio,
literature, and other forms supposedly diminished by the cinema. Sound films, on the other hand,
deprived audiences of the ability to imagine characters’ voices. As Hagedorn’s synecdoche for
the cinematic imaginary in all of its suppressed hybridity, Marlon has participated in the
construction of images that have circumscribed the popular visual and auditory imagination. But
he also proves to be “the only character who grasps [Rocky’s] implacable obsession: ‘She was
reinventing herself moment to moment, day by day’ (87) (San Juan 1998a 116). Marlon gazes at,
listens to, and critiques Rocky; if the cinema has diminished the popular imagination, it still
retains the capacity to imagine, perceive, and construct others.
After paying her final respects to her mother at the end of Part Three, Rocky collects the
“throwaway snapshot” she has lent the mortician to help him in completing her mother’s “final
make-up job.” It is a “sad, lovely snapshot” in which Milagros’s face appears “serene” and
“unpainted.” But her mother’s head is also “cocked, expectant. Listening for something, resting,
waiting.” (283) Where Ponce argues that the issue in Hagedorn’s work “is not so much whether
the postcolonial Filipino can be seen—represented outside the exoticizing mechanisms of the
imperial gaze—but whether she can be heard” (Ponce 143), the shift to Marlon’s perspective in
“Film Noir” turns the phenomenological arrow in the other direction by asking an implicit but
unvoiced question: caught up within and implicated alongside “the exoticizing mechanisms” of
the cinematic imaginary, what can Filipinos in the diaspora hear?
Chion refers to silent cinema as “deaf” cinema, as the characters in such films presumably can hear
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each other and other ambient sounds in their respective soundscapes; the audience simply isn’t privy to
this sonic information, i.e., it is “deaf” to the self-contained sound-world of silent film (Chion 1999 6—9).
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Prologue: Gangster as Gehörbildungsroman
“King of Cool,” “One Love,” “Film Noir,” and other chapters that take the form of jokes, short
screenplays, definitions, and quotations allow the reader to listen to Rocky from external vantage
points; additionally, they remind us that Gangster’ s speaking voices are meant to be heard: not
performed per se, but sounded in the reader’s internal soundscape . The acousmatized
43
externality of the final chapter, however, bookends the novel with the panoramic externality of
the Prologue, which is neither attached to the fixed positionality of Rocky nor to that of any other
single subject :
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There are rumors. Surrealities. Malacañang Palace slowly sinking into the fetid Pasig
River, haunted by unhappy ghosts. Female ghosts. Infant ghosts. What is love? A young
girl asks.
Rumors. Malicious gossip. treacherous tsismis. Blah blah blah. Dire predictions,
arbitrary lust. The city hums with sinister music. Scandal, innuendo, half-truths, bald-
faced lies. Adulterous love affairs hatched, coups d’état plotted. A man shoots another
man for no apparent reason. A jealous husband beats his wife for the umpteenth time. The
Black Nazarene collapses in a rice paddy, weeping.
I love you, someone sings on the omnipresent radio. Soldiers in disguise patrol
the countryside.
Love, love, love. Love is in the air.
Background, foreground, all around.
But what is love? A young girl asks.
A fatal mosquito bite, the nuns warn her.
Rumors. Eternal summers, impending typhoons. The stink of fear unmistakable in the
relentless, sweltering heat. (1)
Serving as a kind of soundcheck, the Prologue delineates the novel’s sonic range,
including range of dynamics (the sub-pianissimo sinking of the Palace—the handgun’s
“The concept of an ‘internal soundscape’ particularly affecting psychological and physiological
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approaches, was proposed by Manuel Perianez in “Testologie du paysage sonore interne.” (Sonic
Experience, ed. Jean-Francois Augoyard and Henry Torgue. McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2005, p.
154.)
Alternatively, one might right consider the subject of the Prologue to be the city of Manila itself.
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fortissimo discharge), frequency and articulation (the low slosh of the waterlogged icon—the
high pinprick sharpness of a mosquito bite), and range of acoustic envelopes (the enclosed
spaces of trysts, plots, and domestic violence—the open space of the patrolled countryside). Like
the stereophonic panning of Jimi Hendrix’s Are You Experienced? and Axis: Bold As Love, the
Prologue shifts dramatically between different types of acoustic spaces, envelopes, and
dispersions of sonic space: love is crooned out through an “omnipresent radio,” suggesting the
tinny playback of AM radios in the enclosed spaces of cars, kitchens, taxi cabs, gymnasiums,
department stores, and dance halls, spaces that reflect and enclose that playback, engulfing the
listener. The soldiers patrolling the countryside call attention to R. Murray Shafer’s distinctions
between rural hi-fi and urban lo-fi. The schizophonia and low-fidelity sound of the troubled
urban soundscape infiltrates the sonic order and clarity of the countryside.
The Prologue shares affinities with sound art and acoustic ecology pieces that
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incorporate text: there is an emphasis on place and relationality; an acute sensitivity to the
qualities of different acoustic environments; and an underlying desire to render the experience of
the context as a whole. Furthermore, the Prologue’s “multimedia composite of elements” (San
Juan, ibid.) is filtered through a present tense that is disembodied: if there is a subject, it is the
nascent, unnamed “young girl.” Only in retrospect, in a structural movement that mirrors the
geography of the adult Rocky’s own nostalgia and homesickness, does the reader identify the
Prologue’s “young girl” as the Rocky of Chapter 1. Whereas the final chapter “Francisco Rivera”
cf. Hildegard Westerkamp, India Sound Journal [1993]. Westerkamp is a self-described “ecologist of
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sound” who uses “environmental sound and language...to find the ‘voices’ of a place or situation, voices
that can speak most powerfully about a place/situation and about our experience in and with
it.” (Westerkamp 5).
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acousmatizes Rocky , allowing her sonic presence to be heard while keeping her out of frame,
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the Prologue briefly observes—visually and sonically—a kind of “proto”-Rocky as part of a
crowd, one voice among a panorama of sounding bodies who tsismis (gossip), argue, admonish,
grieve, wonder, warn, and accuse. It is a voice that could easily be lost in the larger din and
swelter of Manila. Rather than being acousmatized, this nascent Rocky is just barely visible, but
enwombed within the Prologue’s stereophonic sweep.
Rocky is, of course, also Hagedorn’s fictional stand-in, or in the very least Hagedorn
borrows liberally from her own biography in constructing Rocky’s personal history . Sarita See
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notes that Hagedorn, also an actor and performance artist, appears in Filipino/American
videomaker Angel Velasco Shaw’s 1992 experimental documentary Nailed. In the video, we see
Hagedorn sitting “with her back to the camera as she watches Nailed on a small television.
Effectively, we look over her shoulder as we watch her watching a penitent flagellate
himself.” (See 29) I would like to suggest that reading Gangster is a complementary auditory
experience: partly due to the novel’s numerous shifts in form and perspective, there is a sense
that, as the novel presents itself as Rocky’s recollections, the reader is listening to Rocky listen to
herself. This is especially true when the perspective shifts to Elvis’s or Marlon’s point of view
(hearing) or to third person narration. Gangster strategically shifts to internal and external
positionalities, allowing Rocky to hear her own apparatus of hearing. Insofar as Rocky is
Importantly, it is Rocky’s sonic presence that is acousmatized, not her voice, as no dialogue is
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attributed to her. Francisco does distinguish “hushed voices,” but he isn’t able to separate them into
individual voices or to parse their speech streams into words (or even identify the words as being spoken
in a particular language).
Surprisingly, the metatextual layer that separates Hagedorn and Rocky is often elided (see the previous
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note about San Juan). Again, the predominantly sonic modality of the novel might be to blame: a visual
“frame within a frame” structure almost always calls attention to its own form, whereas it is easier to
confuse outer and inner layers in a sonic “frame within a frame.”
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Hagedorn’s autobiographical proxy, Gangster contains yet another self-reflexive auditory layer.
The novel is as much a portrait of a developing ear—the transcription of a young immigrant
woman figuring out how to sonically be in the world—as it is a novel of education. Rather than a
bildungsroman, The Gangster of Love is a Gehörbildungsroman: a novel of “ear training,” the ear
training of a woman who is both an immigrant and an artist.
Like Rocky, Hagedorn is a 1.25~1.5 generation immigrant. Born in the Philippines,
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Hagedorn emigrated as an adolescent and grew into adulthood in the United States, but possesses
sensorially rich memories of her homeland, where she received formal schooling in Filipino
history and culture, as well as in both the Filipino language (Tagalog) and English (or more
specifically, Philippine English; see, for example, Bautista and Bolton 2008). But while
Hagedorn arrived in San Francisco in 1961, Rocky arrives in 1970 . Rocky’s and Hagedorn’s
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dates of arrival thus frame the Immigration and Nationality Act Amendment of 1965, which
abolished the quota systems of the National Origins Formula and replaced it with a new
preference system based on immigrants’ skills and family relationships with U.S. citizens or
residents. (footnote about Auntie Fely, and quote from novel about her as sponsor?) These
reforms resulted in a dramatic increase in the number of immigrants from Asia, particularly from
Rumbaut distinguishes between immigrants “who arrive in middle childhood (ages 6-12)—the classic
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1.5 generation…pre-adolescent, primary-school-age children who have learned (or begun to learn) to
read and write in the mother tongue at schools abroad, but whose education is largely completed here;
and...those who arrive in their adolescent years (13-17), who may or may not come with their families of
origin, either attend secondary schools after arrival or in the older ages may go directly into the workforce
—a 1.25 generation whose experiences and adaptive outcomes are hypothesized to be closer to the first
generation of immigrant adults than to the native-born second generation...” (Rumbaut 1167—1168,
emphasis added)
“Jimi Hendrix died the year the ship that brought us from Manila docked in San Francisco.” (Hagedorn
49
1996 3) Hendrix died September 18, 1970. Rocky’s age is not specified, but just after disembarking in
San Francisco, Rocky’s Auntie Fely remarks, “Raquel! Dios ko! Remember me?...How old are you now!
Not even a teenager yet! Ay! Talaga!” (Hagedorn 1996 9)
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the Philippines. The number of Filipino immigrants to the United States rose “from less than
16,000 during the pre-amendment 1961 to 1965 period to more than 325,000 in the 1986 to 1990
interval, more than a twenty-fold increase.” (Cariño 293-301) By the time of the novel’s
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publication, there were close to three million Filipinos living in the U.S.
This period of increased Filipino immigration coincided with a period of political
violence and economic uncertainty in the Philippines. A speech given by President Ferdinand
Marcos on January 26, 1970—the same year that Hendrix died and Rocky arrived in the U.S.—
ignited fierce protests later referred to as the First Quarter Storm. In the days following the
speech, unarmed demonstrators were brutally attacked by police, and student leaders from the
University of the Philippines responded with molotov cocktails and pillbox bombs. Four students
were killed and three hundred demonstrators were arrested. En route to San Francisco, Rocky
admits to being “relieved to be away from the Philippines after the bang-bang, shoot-’em-up
elections,” especially since everyone, including her father, admits “that the elections were a joke.
Everyone knew Crocodile had fixed it to win. That’s what V oltaire calls Marcos now —
Crocodile.” (6)
A year after the First Quarter Storm, Marcos suspended the writ of habeas corpus; in
1972, he declared martial law. By 1973, many of the survivors of the original protest had turned
to guerrilla warfare, and Marcos called for a referendum to amend the constitution in order to
perpetuate his regime. Backed by American administrations anxious to contain the spread of
communism in Southeast Asia, the President and First Lady would continue to occupy
From 1965 to 1990, the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) reported more than one million
50
Filipino admissions to the United States (INS 1991). During that period, only Mexico sent more
immigrants to the United States than the Philippines.
74
Malacañang Palace, brutally suppressing dissent and embezzling millions from the treasury, until
they were unseated by the People Power protests at EDSA in 1986.
Thus, Filipino immigrants in the 1965-1986 period—the period in which the events of
The Gangster of Love largely take place—left behind a nation fractured by social, economic, and
political upheaval. The novel’s Prologue sets the scene by establishing a troubled sonic portrait
of the capital city. San Juan notes that despite the Prologue’s uncanny and dreamlike movement,
its sequencing of sights and sounds is not “random nor contingent but deliberate”:
Organized around a metonymic axis are the seat of government (the mention of
Malacañang Palace reflects the historical determinateness of the narrative); the Pasig
River that treads [sic] through Manila, the urban center; news of domestic violence
carried by newspapers and radio; the religious icon of the Black Nazarene suffering an
accident; the presence of the military in the countryside, and so on. (San Juan 1998a:
17)
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Moreover, the “rumors,” “scandal,” and “treacherous love affairs,” may refer to the principal
occupant of Malacañang Palace himself—Ferdinand Marcos, the President whose clandestine
affair with the American actress Dovie Beams exploded into public consciousness shortly before
his declaration of martial law. Beams was in the Philippines to star in the motion picture
Maharlika (1970), which was reportedly co-financed by Marcos and sought to exaggerate the
role he had played as a young man in the resistance to the Japanese occupation during the
Second World War. During her liaisons with the President, Beams placed a tape recorder under
the mattress, later claiming that she did so as a precautionary measure, as she feared for her life.
In 1971, at the advent of the Diliman Commune at the University of the Philippines, student
opposition leaders obtained one of these explicit recordings:
These and other critical insights appear in a slightly different form in San Juan’s review, “In Pursuit of
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‘The Gangster of Love’,” Philippine Studies, Vol. 46, No. 1 (First Quarter 1998), pp. 111-121. The
Philippine Studies version, for example, describes the Pasig as a river that “meanders” rather than
“threads” through Manila.
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the students commandeered the university radio station and broadcast continuously over
it a looped tape of Marcos making love to Dovie Beams. The tape was complete with
moans, murmurs, creakings of bed, and even a love song which Marcos himself sang
under the tune of Pamulinawen which every Filipino knew to be his favorite Ilocano
song. His voice and that of Dovie were doubtless genuine. (Mijares 1976)
The voice on Gangster’ s “omnipresent radio” declaring “I love you,” then, may seem at first to
refer to a banal pop song, but may also be heard as the voice of the nation’s de facto autocrat
caught in flagrant delicto. The “omnipresence” of the radio shifts to a more sinister, panoptic
key: the President is an acousmétre, cooing to his American mistress as his secret police “patrol
the countryside” in order to ferret out and silence the opposition.
Soldiers “patrolling the countryside” might just as easily evoke the the American
“intervention” in Vietnam as it does Marcos’s CIA-sponsored suppression of political dissent.
Vietnam was, after all, a key factor in the U.S. meddling in Filipino politics, as American
military assets in the Philippines served as both staging areas for military actions, and ultimately,
staging grounds for refugees fleeing the Fall of Saigon . This relationship is reinforced by
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V oltaire in “Purple Haze” (Chapter 1), who claims that the CIA “had even contaminated the
Pasig River with LSD as part of their ongoing chemical warfare experiments against the
Vietcong” (6). Furthermore, the first chapter’s fixation with Jimi Hendrix deepens the
relationship, as Hendrix’s hard-edged, psychedelic sound is inscribed in the American cinematic
image of the Vietnam War, particularly with such songs as “Machine Gun,” “Hey Joe,” and the
Jimi Hendrix Experience’s cover of Bob Dylan’s “All Along the Watchtower.”
53
See Espiritu, Yen Le, “Militarized Refuge: A Critical Rereading of Vietnamese Flight to the United
52
States” in Transpacific Studies, 2014, ed. Viet Nguyen and Janet Hoskins.
See Forrest Gump (1995), which uses both “Hey Joe” and “All Along the Watchtower.” The sequence
53
with “All Along the Watchtower” shows American soldiers, including the titular character played by Tom
Hanks, patrolling the Vietnamese countryside.
76
Thus, while the Prologue sets the scene with language that seems deliberately vague and
imbued with an impressionistic, unreliable, and half-remembered quality, it in fact manages to
delineate a time and place that is culturally, geographically, historically, and politically discrete.
Fetishization of Sound/The Acoustic Particularity of Spaces
What is most compelling about Gangster’ s self-reflexivity may also be what has caused it to be
overlooked—or under-heard—by critics: the dis/location of its subjects is largely achieved
through sonic tropicalizations, or, to borrow from Hagedorn’s contemporary Victor Hernandez
Cruz, tropical sound. San Juan, for example, mistakes Hagedorn’s sonic tropicalizing, and the
resulting attention to the acoustic particularity of places, as a fetishization of place; the fact of
Rocky’s displacement, he argues, is effectively suppressed, thereby curtailing the novel’s
capacity for political critique.
There seems to be a fetishism of place (a tropic geography of culture, moods, and
enigmatic personalities) that tries to compensate for the secular uniformities of
industrialized society. Rocky knows that a rupture has taken place—her body and
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psyche have been transported in time and space—but pretends that it hasn’t happened:
her mother and relatives cook and eat the native food, talk the same language (now
exoticized or defamiliarized) , and carry on their customary ways...But all the same this
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pretense is grounded on the recognition of the truth of separation, of distance... [italics are
mine] (San Juan 1998b 113)
But it is not place in and of itself that is fetishized in Gangster so much as sound.
Because the instantiation of both recorded sound (in the form of playback) and non-recorded
sound (i.e. speech, performance, and ambient sound) is dependent upon both the sounding body
and the acoustical properties of a given space, and because the perception of instantiated sounds
is affected by the position of a given listener, place—and the positionality of speaking/sounding/
In the longer version of this article published in Post Identity (date), San Juan conflates Hagedorn with
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Rocky, apparently by accident: “Hagedorn knows that a rupture has taken place...but pretends that it
hasn’t happened: her mother and relatives cook and eat etc...” (San Juan 1998a 16, ital. added)
The defamiliarization or deterritorialization of Tagalog will be discussed at length in the next chapter.
55
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hearing subjects within acoustically particular places—is foregrounded repeatedly, beginning
with the Prologue. The physical materials of which particular places are constructed, and their
consequent acoustical properties, are sounded out by characters’ riffs and rants, by nonverbal
cries, and by music in its all its externalized, amplified, distorted, and internally audiated
manifestations. When Rocky’s “glamorous” Uncle Marlon visits, Rocky is “too excited…to
sleep,” and “[t]hrough the thin wall separating us,” she can hear “Uncle Marlon’s low, muffled
voice and the hushed sounds of my mother weeping.” (274)
Those same flimsy, sonically permeable construction materials allow Milagros’s smitten
landlord/downstairs neighbor, a melancholy Hawaiian named Zeke Akamine, to both eavesdrop
and serenade her from below with Hawaiian love songs.
From Zeke's apartment below, the sad, sinuous strains of a slide guitar float up through
the worn floors and threadbare carpets. Faint male voices croon dark harmonies. My
mother reaches for a broom in the pantry, pounding the floor… “Goddam Zeke,” she
mutters, pounding away. As if to mock her, Zeke turns up the music louder. (56)
The semiotic features of midcentury commercial Hawaiian music, which evoke “a potentially
limitless ‘oceanic’ spatiality…remade into [a] ‘utopia’” (Doyle 129), have already been cued by
the chapter's title, “Blue Hawaii”: the classic Elvis Presley title track from the 1961 film of the
same name signals the “languorousness” of commercial Hawaiian music of the 1930s and 1940s,
and ironizes the claustrophobia, squalor, and sonic penetrability of Milagros’s apartment. Thus,
when Rocky describes “the silvery music float[ing] up from Zeke’s apartment,” a “solo voice
lament[ing] his long-gone lover in a flowery, fluid mix of English and Hawaiian,” a reader
familiar with the Presley classic will already be primed to audiate the open sound, reverberation,
and slide guitars “largely shorn of [their] imperialistic and Orientalist connotations.” (Doyle 130)
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Furthermore, the cueing of the film itself, whose original trailer advertises the recently
minted fiftieth state as “America’s Eden,” evokes the neocolonial status of the Polynesian
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archipelago, which in the midcentury American cinematic and aural imaginary was adjacent, if
not coterminous, with the Philippines . This Orientalist conflation is later evoked in the postcard
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V oltaire sends Rocky from Honolulu on his way back to the Philippines, “a photograph of opium
smokers in Tonkin, circa 1900. Indigéne fuming l’opium is what the French photographer has
titled this portrait…” The fact that V oltaire found this quintessentially Orientalist image in a
Honolulu souvenir shop “stocked with aloha shirts, jars of macadamia nuts, maps of Waikiki,
hokey Polynesian pinup calendars,” and “cheap cassettes of popular music” echolocates the
archipelago as both a way station for the transpacific dissemination of Orientalizing imagery and
as a liminal zone through which V oltaire must pass on his quest for repatriation.
Once he arrives in Manila, V oltaire even wants “to renounce his U.S. citizenship,” which
causes his brother-in-law to chastise him. “‘V oltaire, you’re really backward. Everyone else in
this godforsaken country is trying to leave, and you're trying to stay!’” (295) But rather than
having his voice and sonic identity reaffirmed by the return to the native soundscape, V oltaire
ends up being silenced by Manila, swallowed back up by the “sinister music” of the tropical city
still plagued by “[i]incessant rumors.” (297). “The last time I heard from V oltaire was exactly a
week ago,” Rocky’s older sister Luz complains. “He doesn’t have a telephone” and has “been
living in Pasay. In this…dump.” For the remainder of the novel, V oltaire is neither heard from
nor seen. The postcard is a transpacific, “slapback” echo of the image of the decadent,
inscrutable Oriental, echo(locat)ing (from) Tonkin to Honolulu to San Francisco, eastward
Hawaii “achieved” statehood on Aug. 21, 1959.
56
Marlon’s/De Vega’s substitution for “Hawaiian” in the role of Elvis’s best friend Ernie Gordon is the
57
visual equivalent to this metonymy. See the discussion of Rocky’s uncle Marlon above.
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toward Rocky as V oltaire repatriates westward—backward—to the Far East. Thus Hawaii—
described by the trailer as “the Newest Most Shining Star on the Flag!”—operates for Hagedorn
as the reflection point for transpacific echoes of America’s colonial projects in the Far East and of
Rocky’s family’s dis/location and displacement.
Caught within the topicalized echo and reverb of these urban soundscapes, Rocky calls
our attention to the timbre, resonance, tempo, dynamics, proximity, and other sonic qualities of
particular voices, utterances, and musical works. To co-opt Christopher Small’s term, Gangster’ s
immigrants, minorities, and outsiders musick the various sites of the novel. Insofar as their
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bodies and consciousnesses constitute physical and emotional sites and soundscapes, they also
musick each other.
San Juan’s charge of fetishization is quite literally misplaced. It is not that the novel is so
obsessed with the depiction of the place of exile that it denies the absent homeland; rather,
Rocky’s displacement from her native soundscape amplifies both her awareness of the
soundscapes of the new country and of her own positionality within them. The absent homeland
of the Philippines is not suppressed; instead, the self in particular American spaces—the self
perceiving soundscapes and participating in their composition—is represented incessantly. What
is absent is the self, from the homeland, and more specifically, from a native soundscape. The
Gangster of Love does not deny this absence; on the contrary, it makes audible the degree to
which this sense of not-being-at-home is inescapably entwined with the sense of neither-being
wholly-present-in-the-new-land.
Among Small’s concerns in Musicking: The Meanings of Performing and Listening (Wesleyan University
58
Press, 1998) was to recover the sense that music was an action (a verb), something that one does, rather
than an idealized abstraction (a noun). In the next chapter, I will explore various acts of languaging that
take place in The Gangster of Love as well as in the lyrics of M.I.A.’s Arular and Kala.
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Rocky responds to this condition of sonic displacement through speech acts,
compositions, creative productions and collaborations that I will describe as sonic
placemaking . Rather than attempting to recreate or recover the Eden of pre-diaspora or of
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precolonial indigeneity (or inveigh against assimilation), Rocky’s sonic placemaking as an
immigrant and musical artist—and Hagedorn’s as an author and Rocky’s creator—taps into the
semiotic energy of interstitiality: the vertigo of recent arrival, the paradoxical freedom and
slippage of living in a language that is not one’s mother tongue (exophony). Like Yoko Tawada
and M.I.A., Hagedorn engages with placemaking that seeks to create generative sonic spaces of
critique and potential resistance.
Prologue/Presence, Rumor/Room Tone
Hagedorn's increased attention to sound necessarily emphasizes place and presence, both in the
temporal sense of presence and in the sense it conveys in sound recording, especially film
production, with its synonym room tone, defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as “(b) the
ambient or background noise occurring naturally in a particular environment, recorded with
foreground noise (such as dialogue) in order to aid the editing process.” Presence/room tone is
also a shared concern of architecture, urban planning, interactive entertainment/gambling, sound
art, and audio engineering, disciplines which explore the ways in which sounds interact with the
acoustical properties of a given space. Like musical instruments, physical locations possess
In her dissertation, Acoustic Place-Making and the Postcolonial Unhomely: The Politics of Sound in
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Contemporary Irish Poetry (Ph.D. Dissertation, University of California, Irvine, 2011), Julia C. Olbert
adapts Homi Bhabha’s postcolonial unhomely to describe the sonic condition and “acoustic place-making”
of contemporary Irish poets who counter the “geographical violence” (Said, Culture) of English-Irish
colonial history with poetic acts that re/create Irish place. Although acoustic placemaking as Olbert
describes it shares related concerns with sonic displacement and sonic placemaking, my emphasis on
the “sonic” maintains a subtle distinction: the “acoustic” implies the actual sounding of sonic phenomenon
in a given physical space; the “sonic” allows for a consideration of textual “sounds” which are perceived
“soundlessly,” in the reader’s imagination, interiority, or internal soundscape.
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resonant frequencies; when perturbed by the right combination of vibration and air current,
places produce a “tone.”
But how are we to determine the resonant frequency of a verbal work of art? A more
salient question would be to ask whether the novel can be said to sound at all . While Garrett
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Stewart’s theory of the phonotext is invaluable for conceptualizing the ways in which language
(phonemes) sounds aurally in the reader’s head , his analysis does not consider the internal
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sounding of a “phonemic” reading of a text in combination with the ambient sounds,
soundscapes, and/or music that that text depicts. In Gangster, I argue, the reader’s capacity to
effectively render the sonic information in the text—to sound the novel’s heteroglossia,
soundscapes, and musical allusions in her own internal soundscape—is determined by her
relative capacity to audiate. I borrow the term audiation from music education researcher Edwin
Gordon , for whom audiation is the aural equivalent of visualization. Gordon coined the term to
62
describe the process of internally realizing musical sound, i.e., reading a musical score, but it is
useful to describe a reader’s “visualization” of nonmusical sound as well.
In film, and in the subgenre of sound art dubbed phonography , presence/room tone is in
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part created by the positioning of the microphone in relation to the boundaries of the recorded
Audio book versions and oral readings of Gangster do not constitute the novel’s “sounding.” Rather,
60
they are performances of the novel that may render/interpret some of the text’s sonic information (i.e.,
accents, pronunciations, musical intervals if the reader sings portions of the quoted songs) but still require
the listener/audience to audiate much of the sonic information provided in the text, i.e., to imagine the
novel’s ambient sounds and the acoustical qualities/effects of the spaces it describes.
See Stewart, Garrett. Reading Voices: Literature and the Phonotext. Berkeley: University of California
61
Press, 1990.
According to Gordon, “to audiate” is to sounds as “to visualize” is to images. “Although music is not a
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language, the process is the same for audiating and giving meaning to music as for thinking and giving
meaning to speech. Through the process of audiation, we sing and move in our minds, without every
having to sing and move physically.” (Gordon, Learning Sequences in Music: Skill, Contents, and Patterns
1997 5-6)
See/hear, for example, the phonographic work of Francisco Lopez and Toshiya Tsunoda.
63
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space. Insofar as The Gangster of Love can be said to have a room tone, the timbre, frequency,
volume, and other aspects of this background “noise” would vary depending upon the reader’s
relative proximity to the material. How familiar is the reader, for example, with the languages
Rocky code-switches between? A reader unfamiliar with Tagalog might “hear” a word like
tsismis—which itself means rumor—as sibilant noise; alternatively, the reduplicative rhyming
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syllables might sound backward, foreign, or like the neologisms of the playground. A reader
familiar with Mexican slang, on the other hand, might hear the etymological echo of chismosa, a
derogatory term for a woman who likes to gossip.
Similarly, a reader who is not familiar with Tom Jones or The Beatles might hear the
Prologue’s “Love, love, love. Love is in the air,” as bits of banal sidewalk conversation. But avid
fans of popular British and American music of the Sixties and Seventies are likely primed by the
prior musical cues—the city’s “sinister music”; the possibly overused pop lyric “I love you”
crooned over the omnipresent radio; and the blues reference in the novel’s very title —to hear
65
the carefully paced and punctuated first fragment (“Love, love, love.”) as the opening of “All You
Need Is Love.” John Lennon wrote that song specifically for Our World, the first live global
satellite broadcast, which had its premiere on June 25, 1967 and was seen and heard by as many
as 600 million people in 31 countries. The second fragment (“Love is in the air.”) suggests
(somewhat anachronistically) John Paul Young's 1978 hit of the same name, which was
Reduplication is a common morphological feature of Filipino and other Austronesian languages.
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However, since Filipino (Tagalog) conjugates with infixes, or duplicate syllables inserted in the middle
rather than at the end of words (i.e., the infinitive verb kain, to eat, becomes in the future tense kakain,
will eat), words that are not technically reduplications are sometimes heard by non-native speakers as
such.
The title might also be misconstrued as a reference to the Steve Miller Band’s cover of Johnny “Guitar”
65
Watson’s song on the 1968 album, Sailor, or to Miller’s self-referential allusion to the cover in the song
“The Joker” from the 1973 album of the same name: “Some people call me a space cowboy / some
people call me The Gangster of Love.”
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immortalized by Tom Jones’ disco-inflected cover a year later. The inclusion of these
Anglophone pop song fragments in the soundscape of Manila—and their indistinguishability
from the city’s indigenous voices—complicates the sense of what is native about this native
soundscape and what is not: (metropolitan) center is confused with (colonial) periphery, and this
is equated to the dispersion and de-centering of sonic space in the stereophonic recordings of the
period (“Foreground, background. All around.”), which added left-center-right sonic distribution
and panning to the foreground/background relationships of mono recording.
As an acoustical space conceived by Hagedorn and audiated by the reader, Gangster’ s
room tone is rumor: this is established in the novel’s first sentence (“There are rumors.”),
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suggesting human utterances reduced to a low-level, non-lexical, lo-fi background drone. By
employing the passive voice , the first sentence avoids designating either a speaker or speakers.
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The combination of the passive construction with rumor, derived via Old French from the Latin
for ‘noise,’ further emphasizes language as sound: the voice or voices that articulate these rumors
are not localized or synchronized with an image, nor do they designate specific lexical content;
no information is extracted or extractable from them. They serve, in a sense, as the acoustical
equivalent of a Rorschach test. They are sounds only, which we assume to be human, or at least
formerly human (“ghosts”). In this panoramic, disembodied context, however, rumors verge on
the nonhuman, signifying as nonverbal ambient sound. Transposing Alfred Hitchcock’s assertion
that the first thing moviegoers see on screen is the face, Michel Chion argues that “the first thing
people hear” in a sound film “is the voice.” (Chion 1999 5—7) The Prologue upends this
While the novel’s first word, “There,” is not intended to suggest a nominal space, it is worth noting that
66
the novel’s final word, “here,” neatly frames the diasporic narrative, as both words, despite their differing
deployment, refer to Rocky’s/Hagedorn’s homeland.
The passive voice is often maligned as an awkward and undesirable grammatical construction in
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American English, used as a last resort to avoid designating a speaking subject; in Tagalog, however, the
passive voice is phonologically identical to the direct case, and therefore natural sounding.
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“vococentric” hierarchy, recontextualizing the human voice as one among many ambient sounds
in a sonically rich environment.
After the Prologue, it doesn’t take long for rumor to irrupt again: “rumors of foul play”
swirl around the mysterious passing of Rocky’s uncle Basilio’s first wife, “worrisome tsismis my
mother heard all the way back in Manila—but only rumors.” (7) Rumor in the form of Jimi
Hendrix’s half-heard but unparsed mumbles even saturates the left channel of the stereophonic
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frame in “Purple Haze” (1967), which provides the title for Chapter 1. In Marvin Gaye’s “Got to
Give it Up” (1977), whose “low-down rhythm” infects Rocky until she can’t help singing along
and starts putting too many ingredients in the lumpia she makes with her mother, rumor takes
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the form of background natter peppering the track’s seemingly vast sonic space. When Rocky
returns to Manila amidst the transition from the Aquino Administration to that of former General
Fidel Ramos, her sister Luz suggests that despite Marcos’s ouster, Manila is still plagued by
violence and intrigue. “‘It’s awful here,’ Luz interrupts. ‘All the violence. Incessant rumors. You
remember what it used to be like, lots of shooting? Now it’s even worse.’” (297)
Rumor fills the novel’s awkward silences—it is the presence “recorded” alongside the
novel’s many ambient sounds and uttered words. By requiring the reader to audiate these various
voices and soundscapes, Gangster engenders in readers an experience that is homologous to the
sonic displacement experienced by Rocky. Displacement, Brandon LaBelle has noted, is the
inevitable consequence of soundscape composition. This is due in part to an emphasis on
immersion and “original” sound in acoustic ecology and other recorded forms of sound art.
“Both children and adults use a form of linguistic drone: grumbling and mumbling. The general intent of
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grumbling is to mask the intelligibility of a message in the low frequencies when the speaker does not
want to be understood. Mumbling is the oral expression of an intense introverted activity.” (Augoyard 43)
Milagros’s accusation—that Rocky “puts too many ingredients” in her cooking—may be another
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instance of the novel’s self-reflexivity, with Hagedorn recognizing her own tendency to cram novel’s full of
briefly appearing colorful characters and incidents.
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“[T]he presentation of the aural experience of place in recordings always at the same time
involves an acute sense of displacement,” LaBelle argues (LaBelle 211). “Place is never
represented...without an awareness that listening to one place in another place is intrinsically
unsettling, even as it draws the auditor into a powerful identification with the...original listening
experience.” (Montgomery 149) With its obsessive sounding of place, The Gangster of Love is
indeed a novel of ear training, a Gehörbildungsroman for both the displaced Rocky and for the
reader, whose internal soundscape is transformed into a stereophonic space in which center/
periphery, home/exile, and mother tongue/second language are productively confused.
Left-Center-Right: Geographic and Stereophonic Dispersion
If the Prologue serves a kind of soundcheck, then “Yo-Yo”—the Part One epigraph interpolated
between the Prologue and “Purple Haze” (Chapter 1)—acts as a kind of tuning . Taking the
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form of a series of definitions that includes the popular toy that “came to the U.S. from the
Philippines” as well as the adjective suggesting “up and down, fluctuating, or variable”
movement, “Yo-Yo” introduces a trope that “seeks to define the method and architectonics of the
whole narrative” (San Juan 1998b 22) while making clear the novel’s intent to explore the
“tensions between the cultural continuity and transformations shaping Filipina/Filipino American
cultures.” (Echano 1). The yo-yo trope returns again in the epigraph to Part Four (“To Return”),
which takes the form of a quotation attributed to Rocky: “I read somewhere that in Tagalog, yo-
yo means ‘to return.’ I’ve also been told that yo-yo comes from yan-yan, which means ‘to cast
out.’” (285) Rocky’s habitual codeswitching between multiple languages , however, suggests a
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“The poetry reading is a public tuning.” (Bernstein, Close Listening: Poetry and the Performed Word
70
(New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1998), 6.
Including Tagalog, English, Spanish, and French.
71
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crude pun on the Spanish first-person singular pronoun: ‘yo-yo’ suggesting ‘I-I.’ Read as a
tropical tuning, then, yo-yo defines the novel’s structure not as a linear narrative of departure,
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exile, and return, but as a narrative whose architectonics mirror the dynamic, recursive
experience of sonic displacement, in which the native soundscape is imbricated with the
soundscapes of the receiving country. Both the native and target soundscapes , in other words,
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are heard simultaneously, overlaying each other as echoic past and presence.
Gangster, then, is a novel emphatically grounded on the phenomenological perspective of
the displaced, of being the yo-yo rather than beholding it. The epigraph “Yo-Yo” (at)tunes the
reader to the novel’s theme of diaspora: Rocky’s sonic double consciousness—her self-
perceiving “I-I”—will fluctuate across geographical, generational, linguistic, and temporal
distances—will yo-yo, in other words—back and forth between the remembered native
soundscape and the dis/locations of the target soundscape. The chapter that follows (“Purple
Haze”) establishes the target soundscape of San Francisco just after its counterculture peak, an
environment not only rich with mind-altering drugs, indigents, poets, performance artists, and
rock bands, but teeming with an influx of immigrants who had been virtually barred from
immigration to the United States prior to the 1965 reforms (Cariño 293-301).
These new groups included Asian immigrants from the Philippines, Vietnam, China, and
elsewhere, as well as immigrants from Central and Latin America, who brought into the local
Keiko, incidentally, favors yet another slang usage of yo, as an equivalent to “What’s up?” or for added
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emphasis.
The distinction between native vs. target soundscapes is modeled on theories of language acquisition,
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i.e., native language vs. target language.
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linguascape new pronunciations, vocabularies, (mis)appropriations, and directionalities.
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Additionally, San Francisco already had a rich heritage of Asian immigration prior to the 1965
reforms. This heritage is signaled most prominently by the community of manongs who mentor
Rocky and V oltaire, elderly First Wave Filipino immigrant men who had been prevented by anti-
miscegenation laws from marrying and thus establishing families of their own .
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The sudden influx of immigrants into American urban spaces coincided with the
ascendancy of multi-track recording, an era in popular music in which, according to Leila
Camilleri, “the studio becomes a compositional tool in which musical ideas are formed into
sounding matter.” In music of this era, Camilleri argues, “The stereo space acts as a sort of
window through which the listener can ‘view’ the location of sounds not only in an overlapping
construction but in a complex and dispersed structure.” (Camilleri 201, italics are mine) The
majority of the recordings referred to in Gangster—including previously mentioned recordings
by The Beatles, Hendrix, and Marvin Gaye, as well as others by such canonical musical artists as
Bob Marley & The Wailers, Patti LaBelle, Sly & The Family Stone, Curtis Mayfield, and Debby
Boone—were produced stereophonically . Many of these recordings are also characterized by a
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“If one may supplement Arjun Appadurai’s model of disjunctive ‘flows’ (of people, goods, ideas etc.) that
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constitutes the new ‘scapes’ of globalization, one could speak of languages and shifting linguistic
practices as comprising part of a new ‘linguascape.’ In this linguascape, heretofore uncommon language
combinations emerge on a significant scale due to mass migrations and refugee movements...while
postcolonial migrations bring formerly colonized languages to the colonial centers…” Yasemin Yildiz,
Beyond the Mother Tongue: The Postmonolingual Condition (Fordham U. Press: Yew York, 2012)
One of these manongs, known as The Carabao Kid, is Rocky’s poetic mentor, and marks another
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significant divergence from Hagedorn’s own biography. Hagedorn’s poems were first published by
Kenneth Rexroth, whose mentorship Hagedorn describes in the introduction to Danger and Beauty
(2002): “His flat on Scott Street is the ultimate boho heaven for me. Poetry is respected. Writing is life. I
am awed by his library of ten thousand books in all sorts of languages; a kitchen stocked with Japanese
goodies; Cubist paintings on the walls; and a living room where you might chance upon James Baldwin,
Gary Snyder, or Amiri Baraka (then known as Leroi Jones)—in town for a hot minute. I am grateful even
then for my esoteric and streetwise literary education.” (Hagedorn 2002 viii)
Stereophonic is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as “Giving the impression of a spatial
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distribution in reproduced sound; specifically employing two or more channels of transmission and
reproduction so that the reproduced sound seems to reach the listener from any of a range of directions.”
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self-conscious manipulation of the stereophonic window. In the multi-track space frames of
“Purple Haze” and “Gotta Give It Up,” for example, reverberations in space feel both limitless
and dispersed. While Noel Coward’s bass, Mitch Mitchell’s drums, and Hendrix’s virtuosic
guitar performance lie squarely in the center, Hendrix’s voice engulfs the listener, with his main
vocal in the right channel and the semi-coherent mumbling, also Hendrix’s, in the left.
Meanwhile, after two ‘trip’-like guitar solos that ascend in a raga-like modality, Hendrix uses the
hammer-on technique to effect a frenetic and insect-like high-frequency tremolo (2:21) that pans
across the stereophonic space, shifting from the center to the right channel (2:36-2:38), from
right to center (2:43-2:44), and finally from center to left (2:44-2:45).
Figure 1: Stereophonic Distribution of “Purple Haze”
GUITAR
Add’l vocal MAIN VOCAL
(dream mumbles)
DRUMS
BASS
hammer-on/tremolo In “Got to Give It Up,” Bugsy Wilcox’s drum kit is spread out across the stereophonic window,
with the kick drum, snare drum, and cowbell squarely in the center channel, the tom-toms to
extreme left, and the hi-hat to the extreme right. 89
Figure 2: Stereophonic Distribution of “Got to Give It Up”
Marvin
(Party Vocals)
Tom-Tom
Kick Drum
Snare Drum
Hi Hat
Cowbell
E. Piano
In the recording, then, the drum set is actually larger than is physically possible for one person to
play. The song is broadcast into Rocky’s mother’s kitchen, accompanied by the chopping of
Milagros’s knife and the sizzling of a pan on the stove, by “the beat-up transistor radio [Rocky]
brought all the way from Manila,” a radio Rocky “left behind” in her mother’s apartment when
she moved in with Elvis, thereby marking the object as a sonic talisman of Rocky’s recursive
exile.
Musicking in Gangster thus implies aural spatialization. When the reader audiates the
stereophonic songs that Hagedorn cites—played back by transistor radios, Walkmans, jukeboxes,
and high-end sound systems, or remembered in Rocky’s internal soundscape—the reader’s own
internal soundscape is spatialized. Sounds are perceived, in other words, in varying
configurations, densities, and dispersions of three-dimensional space. The clarity with which
these recordings inscribe stereophonic space is both described ekphrastically by Hagedorn, who
as a recording artist is savvy to the possibilities of stereophonic space, and echoed in the novel’s
rendering of three-dimensional space. Immediately after Hagedorn makes clear her intention to
manipulate space stereophonically—Foreground, background, all around—the novel pans with
the sound of a mosquito, a sound associated with sudden proximity to the ear. The mosquito’s
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whining drone ends in an accent, a staccato, a pinprick sensation of discomfort, followed by a
“silence” which is again filled in with the room tone of rumor, conflated with what the nuns warn
the Prologue’s “proto-Rocky" is the fatal bite of “love.” The citation of stereophonic recordings
thus gives the novel increased sonic depth and clarity.
Hagedorn’s novel—and its deployment of stereophonic sound—also offers a rejoinder to
Justin St. Clair’s claim in Sound and Aural Media in Postmodern Literature (2013) that the genre
is subject to temporal/formal limitations which limit its sonic materiality in comparison to radio,
television, film, and other aural media:
given the diachronic nature of linguistic exposition, each successive image of sound in a
novel must necessarily be apprehended individually (unlike, for example, real life or a
film soundtrack, where a klaxon may sound, a woman shout, and a piano trill—all
simultaneously. The result, then, is that despite the overalll cacophony, a reader’s
attention is focused on only one individual aural image at any given moment. (St. Clair 6)
But much like the “layering” of electronic dance music, a novel may introduce one sound that
operates “continuously or frequently enough to form a background,” and subsequently add other
sounds which are heard about the first. This technique of sonic layering might be described as
fugal . This is how rumor operates in the Prologue—rumor is established as the baseline of
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ambient noise; each successive sound—the whispering of ghosts, heated arguments, a gunshot,
the high-frequency whine of a mosquito buzzing close to the ear—is heard above and currently
with the previous sound, and with the substratum of rumor.
Hagedorn manages to sustain and balance these sounds through craft. “Rumor” is
repeated literally at the beginning of the second paragraph, establishing it as a theme and
structural rhythm, and is then transmuted through synonym (“gossip”) and code-switched
The most famous example of “fugal” sound in the novel is likely the “Sirens” episode of Ulysses. In the
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“preamble” to “Sirens,” Joyce schematizes the soundscape of the pub, preparing the reader for the
individual entrances of sounds, many of which are intended to operate continuously in the background as
other sounds occur.
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alliteration: the voiceless palatal fricative [sh] in “malicious” hardens to the voiceless alveolar
affricate [ch] in “treacherous” and “tsismis” (and soon thereafter, “hatched”). Droning sounds,
such as the the “hum” of the city’s “sinister music” are automatically conceived of and audiated
as continuous, particularly when rendered with [m] sound in hum. The rumors begin to cohere,
taking the more definite and dangerous shapes of a love affair, and not just one plot to overthrow
the current occupants of Malacañang Palace but many. Now the implied, gendered violence of
the first paragraph (“unhappy ghosts. Female ghosts. Infant ghosts.”) is realized as a random,
dispassionate murder and a criminally passionate assault, the gun’s discharge made even more
charged by its proximity to “coups d’etat.” This violence has been prepared for sonically through
the subtle introduction of hard [k] voiceless velars, “music” and “scandal” providing a double
accent, the sibilant in “scandal” making the second velar a kind of sting. When the gun finally
does go off—anticlimactically, inconsequentially—duration is suggested through the presumed
echo of the discharge and an imagined ringing in the ears. Once the radio is introduced, so too is
the sense of the ongoing background noise of a crackling broadcast. The diachronic conception
of linguistic exposition, in short, misses the synchronic capacity of the reading ear to audiate a
fugal or layered soundscape; it also underestimates the stereophonic potential of the novel as
demonstrated by Hagedorn’s simultaneously diachronic and synchronic sonic portrait of Manila.
DELIBERATE DISTORTION. DO NOT CORRECT
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The structural relationship between Prologue/soundcheck, epigraph/tuning, and Chapter
1/“Purple Haze” prepares the reader to audiate the psychedelic cacophony and virtuosity of the
According to Roby & Schreiber, when the master tapes for The Jimi Hendrix Experience’s “Purple
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Haze” were sent to Reprise Records for remastering, they were labeled, “DELIBERATE DISTORTION.
DO NOT CORRECT” (Roby & Schreiber 2010)
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classic track by the Jimi Hendrix Experience. Put another way, the sheer aurality of the Prologue
prepares the reader to internally cue up the song, with all of its remembered acoustical power and
properties, upon reading the chapter title. Rocky’s ruminations on her brother V oltaire and his
obsession with Hendrix sustain this virtual playback; so does V oltaire’s singing of the opening
lyric to himself as he looks out from the railing of the ship that has brought them to their place of
exile.
The opening structure also underscores Hagedorn’s own ambitions for the novel. San
Juan misreads Hagedorn’s interest in Hendrix as suggestive of her intention to supersede Hendrix
and other luminaries of the 1960s with The Gangster of Love/The West Coast Gangster Choir;
instead, Hagedorn aims to expand the sonic scope of the novel in the same way that Hendrix
expanded the scope of the guitar. For Hagedorn’s hero Hendrix, the goal was “to broaden
immeasurably the sonic scope of the electric guitar.” According to Charles Shaar Murray,
Hendrix brought the electric guitar forward so as not to be “simply a discrete presence in a larger
mix.” This also brought Hendrix closer to “one man, one guitar” roots of blues music from which
he had come (Muddy Waters, etc.). Hendrix’s playing “came to set the sonic parameters of the
recorded music, and bass drums and voice became in a sense smaller elements within the field
defined primarily by the sounds of the guitar itself. (Doyle 22-23) With The Gangster of Love, I
argue, Hagedorn’s ambition is nothing less than to “broaden the sonic scope” of the immigrant
novel. This is the reason why Hendrix appears in two phantasmic short screenplays; Elvis
Chang’s appearance in these episodes is clarified as well: as The Gangster of Love’s guitarist,
Elvis wields the transformative and dynamic sonic power of the guitar as realized by Hendrix.
Elvis acts a mediating presence between Hendrix’s project and Hagedorn’s; as The Gangster of
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Love’s guitarist and principal songwriter, Elvis defines and pushes the group’s sonic boundaries,
while Rocky does the same for their lyrics.
The famous tritones that open Purple Haze—“a bass pedal E under A# on bass and lead
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guitar”—create “an underlying beat which works to establish a bonding between performer and
audience” (Whiteley 17), according to musicologist Sheila Whiteley. The “pulse-like beat” is
anticipated in the epigraph, and echoed/articulated later in the lyrics: “Don’t know if I’m coming
up or down.” Like the oscillations of a yo-yo, the first two bars of “Purple Haze” whet the ear:
up, down. However, the bond the novel establishes between performer and audience—between
author and reader—is not a bond of “up or down,” but of the fluctuation between the left-behind
native soundscape (Prologue/Manila) and the disorienting new target soundscape (Chapter 1/San
Francisco). Simply put, the “Purple Haze” cue sets in motion a “there—here” rhythm, a rhythm
(and word pairing) that bookends the novel.
The “haze” of sonic displacement in the “brains” of the recently arrived immigrants is
further suggested by the dissonance of the augmented fourth itself, which listeners who have
been conditioned to traditional Western tonality “want” to resolve either inward to a major third
interval in root position (F-A natural in relation to “Purple Haze”’s E-A#) or outward to an
inverted major third (D#-B ). In the first two bars, in other words, the tonality is still ambiguous;
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each note of the opening pulse may be either up or down, here or there. Furthermore, the
extreme, fuzz box-induced distortion muddies the fundamental tones, and “the discordant partials
make it practically impossible to hear the pitch.” (ibid) The snare drum adds to this ambiguity:
The tritone—an augmented fourth, or, specifically in the opening “Purple Haze,” E-A#—is the most
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dissonant and unstable interval, and has been called, among other things, the “devil’s interval.” Camille
Saint-Saëns’s tone poem Danse macabre famously opens with a solo violin playing the tritone A-Eflat.
“Inward” and “outward” intervalic movement refers to the relative proximity of pitches on the frequency
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spectrum, and should not be read as suggesting spatial movement.
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instead of a generic rock back beat, Mitch Mitchell pounds out a quasi-military pulse of quarter
notes which are just perceptibly syncopated by the kick drum.
Hendrix employs an “arsenal of sounds,” including fuzz effect, wah-wah pedal, reverb,
echo, phase, and tremolo, “all of which are common today but were relatively new at the time,”
in order to “extend the expressive potential of the blues.” While Whiteley argues that Hendrix
marshals these techniques, effects, and his own virtuosity toward “a theatrical enactment of a
drug-induced state” (ibid) Hagedorn’s citation of “Purple Haze” is not so much intended to
suggest that the experience of psychedelic drugs is integral to Rocky’s experience as an
immigrant as it is meant to suggest that the experience of sonic displacement is profoundly
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disorienting and destabilizing to the ego in a way that is similar to a “bad trip” or hallucinogenic
experience. Moreover, the “overall anti-structure” that “comes through in the aural experience of
the delivery” of the song is analogous to Hagedorn’s method. “For the listener,” Whiteley
suggests, “the sheer volume of noise [in “Purple Haze”] works towards the drowning of personal
consciousness.” (ibid) Gangster’ s first chapter, with its unrestrained, noisy fluctuation between
the homeland and the place of exile—what might be described as a soundscape equivalent to
code-switching, or scape-switching—operates in a similar fashion. “Don’t panic, baby, it’s just
your ego dying,” Keiko’s disembodied voice assures Rocky when her LSD-induced
hallucinations take the form of a vampiric aswang, a creature “often portrayed as having a long
insect-like protrusion out of its mouth, thanks to which it can suck out babies from the wombs of
pregnant women” (Ancuta 431). The “fatal mosquito bite” of the Prologue may be intended as a
foretaste of the panning, hammer-on tremolo that closes out “Purple Haze.” Or it may be the case
that in that frenetic, high-frequency drone, Hagedorn hears the demonic wings of the aswang.
Although Rocky’s own “ego death” thanks to an acid trip marks an important turning point in her
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relationships with Keiko, her mother, and Voltaire.
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Aswang: Sonic Imprintability and the Permeability of Spaces
The Gangster of Love’ s references to aswang—vampire-like creatures from Filipino folklore that
can be detected by the ominous tik-tik or wak-wak sound they make—are sporadic and seemingly
unrelated. In one early passage, Rocky explains that her family has always believed her brother
V oltaire’s depressive episodes (sumpung, or “contrariness”) are a direct result of the vampires
assailing him while still in the womb:
No one likes to talk about it…But something’s been eating away at V oltaire since the day
he was born. My mother once said that V oltaire was cursed by malevolent spirits who
coveted his beauty while he was still in her womb. That’s how she explains V oltaire’s
frequent bouts of sumpung, black mood swings that transform him from someone sweet
and gentle into someone raging and lost.
Aswangs who prey on pregnant women, tianaks, malevolent duendes —it all
makes perfect sense to me. (19)
Later, while dropping acid for the first time in her friend Keiko’s apartment, Rocky hallucinates
an aswang while vomiting in the toilet:
An aswang with pterodactyl wings swooped down from the ceiling and perched on top of
the sink. Flaming blue coals for eyes. A sorrowful, feminine, blue vampire face. “It’s your
fault,” the vampire eyes accused me.…Was it Milagros, my divine mother aswang, or
Keiko…I lifted my head from the vibrating toilet bowl in time to catch my shy aswang
transforming into V oltaire, into Elvis, then into Minnie Mouse, my mother, who
evaporated into Keiko… (51)
“Aswang” itself is also identified by Rocky as one of the Tagalog words she unaccountably
retains despite her decreasing mastery of her mother tongue. “I’ve forgotten much of the
language,” she tells Keiko, “and it exasperates me. Big holes when I try to speak. Like, how do
you say sugar? I remember aswang for vampire, asin for salt. But not sugar.” (248) The
figurative aswang of sonic displacement have sucked out the “sugar” from Rocky’s vocabulary;
they have made her, in terms of her mother tongue, a ghost in the manner that some versions of
aswang drain and inhabit the bodies of their victims, eventually causing their death.
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Elsewhere in her work, Hagedorn uses the term aswang interchangeably with
“vampire ” to gesture vaguely toward a wide range of supernatural creatures, mostly from the
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Visayan region of the Philippines. But in a profile for American Theatre, Randy Gener describes
the aswang trope in Hagedorn as progressing from the “tossed off reference[s]” of her writing
through the end of the 1990s to the “full-blown metaphor” (Gener 30) of Most Wanted (2007), a
musical loosely based on the life and death of serial killer Andrew Cunanan, for which Hagedorn
wrote the book and lyrics, and Three Vampires: A Parable of the Philippines (2007), an avant-
garde staging for puppets that resulted from Hagedorn’s collaboration with theater director Ping
Chong and the Ma-Yi Theater Company. The modern-day aswangs of Hagedorn’s more recent
work “might be the pimps, prostitutes, and oily politicians in the urban jungles of Manila (the
1998 stage adaptation of Dogeaters); the strippers, drifters, and grifters of America’s seedy
tenderloins (Stairway to Heaven (2005))” or they might be figures like “Danny Reyes, the half-
Filipino gay party boy turned spree killer in Most Wanted” (ibid). Santa Ana sees such vampiric
resonance in Keiko. “By photographing Rocky and other women of color, drag queens, and
transsexuals,” he notes, “Keiko becomes an overnight sensation...her success is predicated on
converting the painful conditions of material reality, such as Rocky’s, into postmodern
kitsch.” (Santa Ana 472)
In addition to this broad valence for the aswang trope in terms of interpersonal relations
and power dynamics, the “aswang-complex” (as folklorists such as Maximo Ramos and Raul
Pertierra have described the recurrence of the trope in Philippine culture) has a historical-
metaphorical valence as well. As Kella Svetich has noted,
“Vampires are my trademark. That’s what we do to each other on some level—all of us. We suck each
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other dry. In nice ways and not-so-nice ways. It’s human, isn’t it? Vampires sap it out of you. They drain
you. They’re all around us.” Hagedorn, in a double interview at the La Jolla Playhouse with Most Wanted
composer and co-lyricist Mark Bennett.
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[s]cholarly studies of the aswang phenomenon refer repeatedly to the connection between
aswang appearances and shifts in national power dynamics, sharing the belief that the
aswang is an instrument of control: patriarchal control of women, colonizers’ control of
the colonized, governmental control of insurgents, parental control of children. (Svetich
89—90)
Felicidad Lim notes that American military strategists aiding the Magsaysay Administration’s
suppression of communist rebels in the 1950s used the aswang to dishearten “both the insurgents
and their village sympathizers.” U.S. Colonel Edward Lansdale even described the Civil Affairs
Office he established as the “psychological warfare division,” and boasted of how his men had
“punctured the necks of captured rebels, drained their corpses of blood, and planted rumors
among the peasantry of an aswang abroad at night” (Lansdale 70-73, Lim 81).
Hagedorn is clearly aware of the connection between the dissemination of the aswang
myth and colonization. Referring to her collaboration with Ping Chong on Three Vampires,
Hagedorn explained, “Ping’s challenge to me was: ‘How could I deal with the Philippines
differently, not like Dogeaters? I think the vampire mythology is key: Vampires suck you dry
and live off you. That’s what the colonizers did—and what they continue to do.” (Gener ibid)
In Gangster, however, aswang is generally indicative of the supernatural creature,
specifically the subspecies of aswang that preys on pregnant women. By exploring Filipino
diasporic subjects’ steadfast beliefs, fears, dreams, and hallucinations in and of these demons,
Hagedorn makes clear the stakes of sonic identity in the novel: the sonic self is eminently
imprintable, vulnerable to external forces of linguistic and cultural homogenization. Aswang,
therefore, foreground the sonic vulnerability of the fetus in the womb, which develops sensitivity
to vibration and sound as early as the thirty-second week of pregnancy. It is not the “figure of
Jimi Hendrix who offers the key to Hagedorn’s project, as San Juan contends, but the figure of
the prenatal Voltaire assailed by sonic vampires.
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The specific powers and dangers Hagedorn ascribes to aswang in Gangster are
discernible in the section entitled, “Los Blah-Blahs: Three .” In this chapter, Rocky hashes out
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her ambivalence toward Tagalog, a language with which she feels she is rapidly losing facility.
Rocky describes to Keiko how, at least in dreams, she has become externalized to her own
mother tongue:
I’ve dreamed entire dreams in Tagalog, but I don’t know what I’m saying. The cadences
in Tagalog are like the Latin cadences in a traditional Catholic mass. (248)
The figure of mass is notable, not only for the history of Spanish colonization and Roman
Catholicization it invokes, but because of its suggestion of passive recitation, language as a kind
of drone or unparsed sound, and of the communal register of language. In the Catholic Mass, the
congregation or communicants who are about to receive the sacrament respond to a priest or
celebrant, but in this image no celebrant is indicated. The closest figure we have to appropriate
and complete the image of the Mass is that of the aswang, which here as in other work Hagedorn
translates broadly as “vampire.” The Gothic undertone of the image is further reinforced by the
recitation in “Latin cadences”: “dead” rhythms and dead inflections.
Thus the figure of the celebrant/aswang is of a sonic vampire, one who not only uses
sound, and language as sound, to torment the fetus in the womb (and later the child and adult
growing in diaspora), but in the dream-images remains just off screen—a demonic acousmétre
—draining the content out of the mother tongue so that all that is recognizable are its outermost,
musical, sonic features.
A recurring trope of depression—or tropical depression, the title of another late chapter—becomes part
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of the structure of the narrative: Rocky suffers from Los Blah-Blahs, or a “blah” feeling. The word is first
introduced in the Prologue (Blah blah blah.) in its alternate meaning: as a kind of flip side to “rumor,” or an
imitation of unparsed speech-sounds which is substituted for actual words when they are felt to be too
tedious or lengthy, The meaning of depression is usually singular: Rocky/Hagedorn creates a neologism
with “Los Blah-Blahs” that conflates the two English meanings (depression + the substitution of borderline
non-significatory sound) bilingually.
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Victimized by these sonic vampires—or the vampiric forces of sound that penetrated
Milagros’s womb, the sonic aspects cultural hegemony imposed upon the Philippines through
colonization and neocolonization, including language, music, film, technology, education, and
urban planning—V oltaire, and to a lesser extent Rocky, has been left supremely vulnerable to
what R. Murray Shafer describes as the schizophonia of postmodern urban spaces; more
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specifically, V oltaire is vulnerable to the schizophonia of exile in the metropole. Rocky fears that
sounds may seep through or penetrate her womb and harm or deform her daughter. Though she
does not voice a fear of aswang, she dreams explicitly about protecting Venus in utero:
She’s curled up in a giant, silver egg-shaped incubator. I know she’s safe inside. Keiko
and I are crouching protectively on top of the incubator. Two fierce hens, hatching and
guarding our chick. It is a silent dream. (275)
Rocky cannot, however, protect Venus from her own sounding. When she wakes from this
dream, she finds herself arrived at home:
Jake and Venus meet at JFK. Jake has a pained look on his face. “Bad news,” he
murmurs. “It’s your mother.”
“What? What about my mother?”
Other people in the terminal turn to look at me. I stifle a sob.
“Calm down,” Jake says. The baby’s agitated by the tone of my voice and won’t
let me hold her. (275)
Rocky involuntarily transmits her anxiety about her mother’s health to Venus through intonation.
The moment highlights maternal linkage and bidirectional transmission: in a literal space of
departure and arrival, Rocky is preoccupied with the declining health (“terminal” illness) of her
own mother, and agitates her infant daughter.
V oltaire’s condition suggests that being “outside” (exophony) or between languages
(sonic displacement) may lead to an increased awareness of the contingency of language
generally, resulting in a state of statelessness, a sense of semiotic license and freedom. Through
Referring to the electronic reproduction of sounds “split” from their sources, Shafer’s neologism is
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intended to convey the anxiety of the urban soundscape through its similarity to schizophrenia.
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her development as an artist, Rocky is able to negotiate this freedom and use it in writing lyrics.
V oltaire, however, is not able to negotiate it as successfully.
The implication is that Milagros (V oltaire’s and Rocky’s mother) somehow failed to
protect V oltaire, whereas she did not fail with Rocky. Rocky is extremely sensitive to sound too,
but is able to wield it, to write and perform and master it, and brings some vitality into the target
language. Rocky and V oltaire’s older sister, Luz, who chose to remain in the Philippines with
their father, never experiences dispersion and is thus deaf to displacement; she never develops an
enhanced sensitivity to sound, musical or otherwise. When a Whitney Houston song comes on
during a radio show by legendary DJ Mello-Yello, the music “literally seems to pain her. ‘Too
big. That girl’s voice is much too big.” (294) Luz is like their father Francisco, who was “a rare
exception in Manila: a man who couldn’t dance. He had a tin ear when it came to music and no
sense of rhythm.” (273)
Unlike Rocky, V oltaire never manages to adapt to life in San Francisco; in fact, soon after
he and Rocky arrive, V oltaire begins to makes plans to repatriate. V oltaire shares similarities with
Dogeaters’ Joey Sands in that he operates across multiple intersections of gender, sexuality, race,
class, and agency. He also possesses an extraordinary sensitivity: V oltaire is victimized by figures
depicted only as voices, sounds, and the soundscapes of San Francisco.
V oltaire’s fixation with Jimi Hendrix, his extraordinary sensitivity and vulnerability, and
his desire to identify first with American counterculture as represented by Hendrix, and later
fulfilling that counterculture logic by seeking to adopt markers of Filipino indigeneity (however
inauthentic these markers may be) are the filter through which Rocky first narrates her family’s
passage from Manila to San Francisco.
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The first chapter begins with Rocky describing Voltaire’ s opinions and feelings toward
Hendrix, Marcos, and San Francisco. V oltaire dresses like Hendrix, tries to become the Filipino
Hendrix, mourns him; he disappears into their new city in amorous escapades that blur
distinctions of male and female, queer and straight, white and black, immigrant and native, and
represent a total immersion and absorption into the soundscape of the new land, a drowning in
the host country’s stimuli as much as a drowning out of V oltaire’s own voice.
Whereas Rocky and her father are flip sides of an acousmetric coin, V oltaire is a victim of
sonic displacement and the novel’s emblem of diaspora, a figure of irreconcilable displacement.
Before leaving the Philippines, he is unable to adapt to the mainstream, conservative,
heteronormative Catholic values of martial law-era Manila; in the United States, he is unable to
adapt to the bourgeois expectations of immigrants in American culture, which include
employment, upward mobility, and apparent heterosexuality; instead, he surrenders his identity
and corporeality in countless intimate exchanges, failures, and breakdowns, displaying an almost
fatal sensitivity to sound, wanting all the while to earn a ticket back to the Philippines, and
ultimately being swallowed back up by it.
Buntot Pagi: The Sting Ray’s Tail as Sonic Resistance
Aswang signal their presence through sound. In investigating aswang and related supernatural
beings on the rural island of Panay, F. Landa Jocano documented “episodes of psychic
disturbance associated with belief in such spirits. Out of a population of less than 2000, he traced
265 persons admitting to auditory experiences which could be called hallucinatory.” (Jocano 43,
italics added) Jocano suspects that these hallucinations were a result of
child-rearing practices, for discipline takes the form of frightening the child…Children
will be told, “Be silent or the aswang will come will come to take you,” and their
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attention may be called to imaginary noises, smells, or images to strengthen this…they
may also be threatened with castration or, for girls, mutilation of the clitoris. These
threats are started very early and are soon reinforced by the telling of stories centered on
experiences which actual members of the community have had with the spirits, with very
circumstantial references to specific places, smells, sounds, etcetera…Because of this,
these visions and other hallucinations should not be seen as symptoms of mental illness,
but rather as part of [the peasants’] “idiom of cognition.” (ibid)
If aswang myths are a cognitive apparatus, then their deployment in Gangster form a link
between indigenous folklore and the schizophonic condition of immigrant subsistence in
contemporary urban spaces of diaspora. Moreover, the allusion to folk knowledge frames
Rocky’s musical creativity as a kind of talisman to ward off the worst effects of sonic
displacement.
The traditional folk remedy for warding off aswang also deploys sound: aswangs are said
to be scared of the slashing sound a stingray’s tail makes as it is whipped through the air, which
is referred to as buntot pagi (or, rushing sound). The tail of a sting ray has a sharp barbed spine;
at the end of the tail is a dagger-like mass of cartilage that remains envenomed postmortem. The
neurotoxin contained within this spike causes numbness and dizziness, and can even result in
death. Wounds inflicted by the tail heal poorly and have a high chance of infection. The tail,
therefore, is a deadly weapon, and is used by practitioners of indigenous Filipino martial arts
such as Arnis, Eskrima, and Kali, who whip the tail threateningly in the air, causing a rushing or
whistling sound. It is this sound that is supposed to frighten away the aswang.
The sting ray’s tail is thus a kind of sonic talisman. A sting ray’s tail is not only barbed
and poisonous, but is also displaced from its natural ambience and sounding environment,
literally ripped from the nonhuman world and wielded in self-defense. It is an appropriated
object, a materiality stolen from the animal, wielded as the promise of violence rather than the
actuality of it, even as it was acquired through violence. Through its phallic form, the tail also
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underscores the aswang complex’s deployment in reinforcing the post-Spanish colonization
patriarchal structure of the Philippines: aswang superstitions, according to Lim, were encouraged
by early Catholic missions as the demonic creatures were often portrayed to be feminine in form.
The propagation of this supernatural image was meant to counteract the influence of the
Baybaylan, the animistic native priestesses who were extremely influential before colonization.
The aswang myth, therefore, simultaneously demonizes and represses the female body: a phallic
object of the natural world is appropriated in order to ward-off this feminized demonic form.
Whereas the speaker of “Stepmother” in Yoko Tawada’s collection Talisman is convinced
that one’s original identity is lost in the womb (“Every child who is born is a fake. One child is
lost at birth, and another child is born.”), for Hagedorn there are forces besides the expulsion
from the womb that can disfigure the prenatal subject. External sonic forces can, in fact, act on
the formative subject in utero. The conclusion the first-generation Tawada comes to is that
figurative and metaphorical birth causes an irreconcilable schism. For the 1.5 generation
Hagedorn, it is not necessarily birth that threatens the subject with irreconcilable deformation;
the forces of schizophonia at work in the environment can harm and disfigure us, pre- and
postnatally. More importantly, however, for Hagedorn, these forces can be resisted. In her efforts
to (re)appropriate and syncretize Filipino, African American, and other diasporic sounds, we
might read Rocky as wielding sound, or a sonic talisman, in order to ward off the vampiric forces
of schizophonia and sonic displacement to protect herself and her daughter, Venus.
Alternatively, we might read Rocky as foregoing this aspect of the aswang myth—a myth
she has not acquired in all of its historical detail but has adapted in diaspora for her own
purposes. After Rocky tells Keiko that she has finally had a dream about her acousmatized father,
both women remark on the rarity of men in Rocky’s dreams. Rocky then tells Keiko that she has
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also had a dream about the Sly, The Gangster of Love’s deceased drummer, whose inability to
reign in his libidinous impulses contributes to his early death. ‘Rocky,’ [Sly] complains in the
dream, ‘there are too many ghosts in your head.’” (248) For both Sly and V oltaire, the cacophony
that results from sonic displacement—multiple languages, registers, soundscapes, voices—
cannot be navigated. Rather than resisting the aswang by envisioning the creative deployment of
sound as the fetishization of a phallic lack, however, Rocky’s acid trip and priest/aswang dream
suggest that she instead has chosen to absorb and coexist with vampiric sound: rather than
enacting a dialectic that results in a hi-fi, idealized sound environment of purity (a standardized,
non-codeswitched English or fluent Tagalog), Rocky chooses to inhabit a sonically fraught,
stereophonically dispersed and deterritorialized soundscape. 105
CHAPTER 3
I BONGO WITH MY LINGO: SOUND AND SLANG IN M.I.A.
“It is a truth universally acknowledged that a radical woman of color in possession of a microphone is a
revolution waiting to happen.”
— Fuad Ahmad (2005)
“She’s a veritable vortex of discourse… She’s a dissertation…given fine fleshy form.”
— Simon Reynolds (“Piracy Funds What?” The Village Voice, February 15, 2015)
“The problem is that M.I.A…is too big to contain; there's entirely too much going on in her art—which
includes not just music and performances, but also visual art, video, fashion, and a kind of meta internet
presence…”
— Eric Grandy (“M.I.A.’s Radical Rump Shaking” The Stranger, Nov 15, 2007)
You don’t get my life
Cause I don’t have a side
And I spread out boy I’m a mile wide
And I got brown skin, I’m a west Londoner
Educated, but a refugee, still
— “M.I.A.”
This chapter listens closely to Arular (2005, XL Recordings) and Kala (2007, XL Recordings),
the first two albums of Sri Lankan-British rapper M.I.A., the emcee name of Mathangi “Maya”
Arulpragasam. The chapter tracks M.I.A.’s rise from underground club darling to global pop icon
and considers the ways in which M.I.A. is made to be, and makes herself out to be, a figure who
quite literally embodies the transnational and transcultural circulation of sound. Attuned and
savvy to the contradictory and sometimes bigoted reactions to her voice, sound, and corporeality,
M.I.A. deploys samples, visual imagery, and performance to remix and interpellate her
experiences of diaspora—specifically her displacement caused by the Sri Lankan Civil War—
into the global sonic imaginary. Through close readings of these two albums, particularly of the
singles “Galang" (2003) and “Paper Planes” (2008), and through an analysis of the sounds and
soundscapes M.I.A. produced and/or co-produced, this chapter explores not only the extent to
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which displacement is M.I.A.’s subject, but the extent to which displacement is figured in her
music through the composition, selection, manipulation, and juxtaposition of sounds (production
and sampling); words as sounds (citation, allusion, codeswitching, neologism, and other forms of
word play), and voice (intonation, pronunciation, timbre, diction, and pitch).
Swagger Like Hers
Nominated for Record of the Year for her controversial hit “Paper Planes,” Maya Arulpragasam
leapt on stage at the 51st Grammy Awards and rapped the song’s first three lines before cutting to
the line from a later verse—“No one on the corner had swagger like us”—that rapper-producers
T.I. and Kanye West sampled for their own Grammy-nominated rap song, “Swagga Like Us.”
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Feeding off a crowd that had already gone wild at the opening guitar hook she and her co-
producers sampled from The Clash’s “Straight to Hell,” M.I.A. hollered out the line, then made
room on stage for West, T.I., Lil Wayne, and Jay-Z.
Despite the superstar stature of this group—decked out in tuxedoes and dubbed “the Rap
Pack” (Gilbert 2009) by Grammy hostess Queen Latifah—most critics agreed that the four male
rappers were overshadowed by the 5’5” M.I.A. “There she was in all her glory,” TIME Magazine
fawned , “happy as can be in her part peek-a-boo, part polka-dot top.” Lynn Hirschberg of the
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New York Times described the outfit more lasciviously, and with an undercurrent of disapproval:
“Swagger Like Us” went on to win for Best Rap Performance by a Duo or Group, and was also
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nominated for Best Rap Song, although it lost in that category to Lil Wayne (featuring Static Major) for
“Lollipop.” “Paper Planes” lost in the Record of the Year category to “Please Read the Letter,” performed
by Alison Krauss and Robert Plant.
The description of M.I.A.’s Grammy performance comes from a listicle entitled “Top 10 Pregnant
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Performers,” which lists M.I.A. as number one. M.I.A. and The Cosby Show’s Phylicia Rashad are the
only two women of color on TIME’s list, which also includes Judy Garland, Lucille Ball, Amy Poehler,
Cher, Jennifer Garner, Sally Field, Shelley Long, Rhea Perlman, and Björk.
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a “black skintight, body-stocking dress, transparent except for polka-dot patches that
strategically covered her belly, breasts and derrière.” (Hirschberg)
“On display was her tremendous skill,” TIME continues. “But did you notice, M.I.A.’s
gigantic belly? Of course you did…The only woman in the bunch, and boy (or girl?) did she
show it.” February 8, 2009, the night on which The Grammies took place, also happened to be
the nine-months pregnant Arulpragasam’s due date. Already dark-haired, brown-skinned, female,
and foreign, M.I.A. exceeded “the cultural norms and standards…expected from a mainstream
music artist” before even taking the stage. But her performance—which presented her somatic
otherness in synchronicity with her sonic otherness (in terms of her accent as well as the
transnational, transcultural content of her lyrics) before a televised audience of 19 million
viewers in the U.S. alone—struck “a particular rousing chord in U.S. mainstream popular
culture” (Haddad 281) that went beyond anything she had achieved before. “It had everything,”
Hirschberg added: “artistic credibility, high drama, a massive audience.” (ibid) According to
Hirschberg, Arulpragasam began to experience contractions while she was performing onstage.
Three days later, M.I.A. gave birth to Ikyhd Edgar Arular Bronfman, her son with then-fiancee
Benjamin Bronfman .
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By performatively foregrounding her own “super-fertile ” corporeality, M.I.A. broadcast
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to a global audience the complex interstitial identity that has served as both a source of anxiety
for her detractors and authenticity for her fans. As a woman of Sri Lankan descent, she has
enjoyed tremendous success in a genre that has traditionally marginalized South Asians and
Bronfman, an environmentalist and former band member of The Exit, is the great-grandson of Samuel
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Bronfman, who purchased Joseph E. Seagram’s & Sons in 1928 and built the company into a distillery
empire.
Super Fertile is the name of a London-based artistic jewelry design house that highlights world issues
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through highly original pieces, and was founded by Kali Arulpragasam, also a graduate of Central St.
Martin’s college, and Maya Arulpragasam’s older sister.
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women. Furthermore, Arulpragasam’s corporeal presence as a Sri Lankan refugee serves as a
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reminder of the Sri Lankan Civil War, a conflict that by conservative estimates resulted in more
than 100,000 deaths and has been largely forgotten and/or ignored by most media outlets.
Bringing global attention to the atrocities endured by Sri Lankan Tamils has, in fact, been the
stated goal of much of Arulpragasam's visual art, music, videos, and interviews. In order to
further this goal of Sri Lankan visibility/audibility, M.I.A. has even portrayed herself as speaking
on behalf of the Tamil diaspora.
Born in west London, Arulpragasam moved with her Tamil parents back to Sri Lanka
when she was less than a year old, only to return to London at the age of ten as a refugee from
the intensifying violence between the LTTE, or Tamil Tigers, and the Sinhalese government; her
father was a founding member of EROS, the Eelam Revolutionary Organization of Students, and
not a member of the Tigers , as is commonly misreported. Following the underground success
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of her first single, “Galang” (2003 ), M.I.A. used provocative interviews and a canny social
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media presence to bolster what pop critic Jon Caramanica has described as her “refugee chic”
image (citation needed).
M.I.A.’s debut album, Arular, received near-universal praise, including a nomination for
the 2005 Mercury Prize. But when Arulpragasam was denied entry to the United States during
the production of her follow-up album, her canonization as the heir to rebel rockers and rappers
See Rose, Tricia. Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America. Hanover:
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University Press of New England, 1994, 146-182.
The official name of the Tamil Tigers is the LTTE, or Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, which has been
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proscribed as a terrorist organization in 32 countries, including the United States and the United Kingdom.
Like the Tigers, EROS members received training from the PLO and took part in military actions.
“Galang” was released in 2003 on Showbiz records, re-released in 2004 on XL Recordings (as the
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second single off the album Arular), and released a third time in 2005 by XL and Interscope Records
Records in the U.S.
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such as The Clash and Public Enemy was complete. M.I.A. alleges that her problems obtaining a
visa resulted from her lyrics and imagery, which expressed solidarity with organizations such as
the Palestinian Liberation Organization (in “Sunshowers,” for example, M.I.A. raps: “You wanna
go, you wanna win a war / like PLO I don’t surren-do”) and were unabashedly critical of
resurgent U.S. imperialism under the Administration of George W. Bush (in “M.I.A.”: “You can
watch TV and watch the media / President Bush doin take over”). M.I.A. had capitalized on
Arular’ s monetary success by buying property in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of
Brooklyn; denied a visa, however, she now found herself displaced again, and “locked out” of
her own home. Thus M.I.A.’s sophomore album, Kala, was produced transnationally, in
Trinidad, Jamaica, Liberia, Angola, and India (the locations are shouted out in “Bamboo
Banga”). The languages, ambient sounds, musical traditions, and musicians of the various
regions in which the album were produced famously influenced the album's eclectic sound;
displacement was Kala’ s condition of possibility.
This transnational characterization was used to praise Arular and Kala. In naming it
Rolling Stone’ s Top Album of 2007, for example, Robert Christgau described Kala as “an
international block party with a sonic imagination nobody else could match all year.” Christgau
noted that Arulpragasam’s sonic vocabulary included sampling from—and references to—such
disparate sources as “Sri Lankan temple music, Bollywood disco, the Pixies, New Order, the
Clash,” and Wreckx-N-Effects. Furthermore, the album “explores worldwide war zones, talking
about third-world democracy and ‘putting people on the map that never seen a
map.’” (Christgau)
But M.I.A.’s transnational aesthetic has also been used to critique her music. In a Village
Voice review that generally appreciates Arular’ s “canny composite of street beats” drawn from
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“Kingston’s concrete jungles, Dalston’s grimy council estates, Rio’s funky favelas,” and
elsewhere, Simon Reynolds argues that M.I.A.’s music may “vaguely” evoke “third-world-
versus-first-world struggle,” but that her identification with Third World struggles—and Third
World sounds—rings false. “Don’t let M.I.A.’s brown skin throw you off,” Reynolds warns.
“She’s got no more real connection with the favela funksters than Prince Harry.” Reynolds’s
misgivings about M.I.A. are a matter, it seems, of critical priorities: the issues of class and
socioeconomic status that preoccupy his analysis of post-punk in Rip It Up and Start Again:
Postpunk 1978-1984 (London and New York: Penguin, 2005) trump issues of race (“Don’t let
M.I.A.’s brown skin throw you off”), gender and postcoloniality (“She’s a dissertation (‘Riddims
of Resistance: Sub-Bass and Sub-altern Pressure’) given fine fleshy form”), and cross-cultural
affiliation (“And what was up with having four genuwine [sic] black girls from the ‘hood troop
onstage to dance for a bit, before M.I.A. herself materialized?”) (Reynolds 2005). The layer of
ironic distance Reynolds employs is perhaps meant to insulate him from hierarchical accusations,
but Ayesha Siddiqi and others have picked up on Reynolds’s subordination of intersectionality to
class-based analysis: “Those baffled by the range of M.I.A.’s sources are eager to dismiss the
collage as inauthentic and tellingly root their anxiety in her ‘ethnicness.’” (Siddiqi 2013)
In the Arular bonus track “M.I.A.,” Arulpragasam herself owns up to the fact that
although she has “got brown skin” she is also “a west Londoner / Educated, but a refugee, still.”
For Lisa Weems, such raps embody “the complicated subjectivity of transnational life; [M.I.A.]
inhabits multiple and contradictory subject positions of privilege and oppression and offers no
apologies for exceeding classification.” (Weems 125) But in attempting to speak transculturally
and transnationally to other populaces and conflicts in the developing world, M.I.A. has
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continually re-appropriated the very image of Third World “girlhood ” that has, according to
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Weems, been used in attempts to undermine the legitimacy of her political and social critiques.
Weems links Third World girlhood to the more general mass media depictions of racialized
girlhood, in which
young brown and black females are hyper sexualized and immature (Brown 2008; Henry
2006), trivial but dangerous (Gopinath 2005; Handa 2003), and, above all, in need of
domestication into and regulation by a heteronormative subjectivity that is in line with
the dominant discourse on gender and development (Ahmed 2000; Hernández and
Rehman, 2002; Jiwani, Streenbergen, and Mitchell 2005).
The visual spectacle of M.I.A.’s pregnancy, therefore, brings her self-identified “Third World
girlhood” into dialogue with her seemingly “domesticated,” heteronormative relationship with
(and engagement to) Benjamin Bronfman.
M.I.A.’s ties to Bronfman, an extremely wealthy American citizen and the son of former
Warner Music Group CEO Edgar Bronfman, further underscore what Candice Haddad has
described as M.I.A.’s crossover into mainstream U.S. culture (and what others have criticized as
M.I.A.’s “selling out”). The spectacle of her pregnant body thus reflects the tension and
intersectionality of her multiple subject positions; it also represents the potential regulation and
sublimation of her foreign, “rebel” image for the purposes of consumption by a mainstream U.S.
audience. At the same time, reactions to Arulpragasam’s performance as a pregnant, foreign
refugee underscore the fear and resentment directed toward immigrant women and/or women of
color, particularly in regard to their reproductivity, a fear that M.I.A. entirely anticipated in “Bird
Flu,” Kala’s second track. “Bird Flu” simultaneously taps into the xenophobic hysteria
“Here, third world girls is used to designate political solidarity, in a sense similar to Chandra Talpade
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Mohanty’s (2003) articulation of third world women and Gloria Anzaldúa’s women of color. For both, these
terms are not intended to suggest a pre-discursive, essentialist lived experience, but an ideological
solidarity that seeks to contest the primacy of gender and sexual difference as the organizing principle of
feminist politics, and bring awareness to how geopolitical location, in addition to race, ethnicity, and
nationality, structures relations between and among women.” (Weems 119)
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engendered by pandemics originating in Asia, specifically the 2005 outbreak of Avian influenza
in Europe, and the term Cutantira p paravaikal, or “free birds,” an unofficial name for women
fighters of the LTTE. Rapping that “Bird flu gonna get you / made it in my stable / from the
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crap you drop / on my crop when they pay you,” M.I.A.’s internal rhymes and bilabial
alliterations warn that the (agri)cultural, ecological damage wrought by colonization and
neocolonization will be revisited on the “first world” through a global epidemic of resistance
fomented by her music. “When I get fat,” she predicts earlier in the song, “I’ll pop me out some
leaders.”
In a globally televised event such as the Grammies, therefore, M.I.A. serves as a
synecdoche for the more than one million Tamils living outside of Sri Lanka. At the same time,
the sonic-geographic markers of her voice—i.e., her South London pronunciation and accent—
are a reminder of the diasporic aspect of her identity; in other words, the visual markers of her
race and ethnicity intersect and re-sound with and against the sonic traces of her displacement to
Britain.
Acton Calling: 147 and 3-3-2
Like Jessica Hagedorn, M.I.A. incorporates Jimi Hendrix’s “Purple Haze” into her sonic portrait
of the city into which she was displaced as a youth: “Blaze a blaze / Galang a lang a lang lang /
Purple Haze / Galang a lang a lang lang” (Arulpragasam 2003) But where The Gangster of Love
echoes Hagedorn’s emigration to San Francisco, “Galang” echoes Arulpragasam’s arrival in
London, the European megacity that was also her place of birth. For both Hagedorn and M.I.A.,
Hendrix’s paean to the disorientation of hallucinogenic experience is a useful reference point for
See Schalk, Peter. “Women Fighters of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Ilam: The Martial Feminism of Atel
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Palacinkam.” South Asia Research, October 1994 14, 163-195.
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immigrants and refugees undergoing physical/mental, spatial/temporal, and sonic/visual
deracination . But where “Purple Haze” attests to the utopian, consciousness-expanding
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possibilities of drug use and counterculture, “Galang,” released as a single in 2003 and re-
released as part of M.I.A.’s debut album Arular in 2004 and 2005, is shot through with the
paranoia, uncertainty, claustrophobia, and ironic fatalism of post-9/11 London. While the
unnamed subject(s) readily partake of illicit substances themselves (“blaze” meaning to smoke
marijuana in a pipe, bong, or rolled into a joint), the track has less to do with the paranoiac side
effects of ganja than it does with the “bad trip” of displacement amidst a distrustful populace:
“Who the hell is huntin’ you? / In the BMW How the hell they find you? / 147’D you Feds gonna
get you / Pull the strings on the hood” (Arulpragasam 2003).
After the terrorist attacks in New York on September 11, 2001, racist incidents against
South Asians and those who appeared to be Muslim increased. General election votes for the
anti-immigrant, far-right British National Party also increased four-fold from 2001 to 2005.
There was also an increase in police surveillance of South Asians and Muslims , as M.I.A.’s
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reference to 147, a police code for incidents involving undercover officers, suggests: “How the
hell they find you? / 147’D you.” Relations worsened following the coordinated bombings of
London’s public transportation system on July 7, 2005 (often referred to as 7/7) by four Islamist
men, three of whom were British-born Pakistanis, the fourth a Jamaican-born Islamic convert. In
Hendrix’s appeal for Hagedorn and M.I.A. may also lie in his having succeeded in expanding the sonic
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scope of his instrument while simultaneously negotiating the pressures and expectations of the ethnic
community to which he belonged with the mainstream culture that extolled and exotified him. Some of
Hendrix’s African-American contemporaries accused him of turning his back on blues and other
Afrodiasporic musics with his turn toward rock. Similarly, some of Hagedorn’s most vocal critics have
been Filipinos and Filipino Americans who take umbrage at her re-appropriation of the term “dogeaters,”
while M.I.A. has been roundly critiqued by Sri Lankans at home and in the diaspora for her perceived
(though inaccurate) approval of the LTTE’s violent methods.
Minority Rights Group International, World Directory of Minorities and Indigenous Peoples - United
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Kingdom : South Asians, July 2008, available at: http://www.refworld.org/docid/49749c8c28.html
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attempting to provide reassurances to the public, British law enforcement engaged in several
high-profile actions that had disastrous consequences and further alienated moderate Muslims
and other minorities. These included the misidentification and arrest of South Asians and
Muslims for allegedly plotting terrorist acts, and the July 22, 2005 shooting death of Jean
Charles da Silva e de Menezes, an innocent Brazilian man who had been misidentified as a
suspect in an attempted follow-up to 7/7. Whereas Suvendrini Perera argues that “Galang” is “a
tale of the new Londoners’ battle for survival” (14), this section argues that M.I.A.’s breakout
single is a broadcast alert for immigrants, minorities, and other subalterns (“London calling”), a
general warning of the danger of having brown skin or a foreign accent in 21st-century London.
There is almost no sampling per se in “Galang.” The only identifiable sample comes from
“Holiday Rap (12” Mix)” (1986) by MC Miker G & DJ Sven, a digital, “water-drop” pop
reminiscent of a desktop alert or a Mario Bros. “jump” that falls on the first and third quarter
note of each measure (i.e., the downbeats), starting at 0:19. The pop/jump sample adds timbre
and fleshes out the frequency spectrum, but it does not contribute to the overall rhythmic
complexity of the song. The bulk of “Galang”’s beats— at once retro and futuristic with their
video game swish and distorted bass hits that simulate the shaking of an overloaded sound
system—were composed by Arulpragasam herself. She wrote “Galang” on a borrowed Roland
MC-505 after being encouraged to compose her own music by both electroclash artist Peaches
and Justine Frischmann, the front woman for Elastica and Arulpragasam’s then roommate. Part
of the original six-song demo tape posted to MySpace by M.I.A., “Galang” was later retooled
slightly by Ross Orton and Steve Mackey (of Britpop band Pulp) when XL Records picked up
the track as a single; XL Records, however, largely left intact the rough, DIY-style of M.I.A.’s
Roland drum machine comps.
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M.I.A.’s deliberately anti-idiomatic and untrained approach to musical composition
echoes Steve Loveridge’s description of her approach to visual art: “Maya LOVED Photoshop.
She never did learn how to use it properly, and that rubbed off on me. She taught me not to learn
the workings of any software more than I absolutely had to.” (Arulpragasam 20012 8)
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The opening beat establishes the track’s rhythmic density with eighth-notes on a lo-fi
closed “hi-hat” embellished by pairs of sixteenth-notes syncopated on the and of 1 and the e of 2,
combining hand-clap accents with a swishing sonority that suggests both a deejay’s record
scratch and the simulated brushed snare drum swing of Super Mario Bros. Combined with the
dry bass hits on 1 and 3, the rhythms form an asymmetrical pattern extremely common in both
reggaeton and electronic dance music : 3-3-2 (with each subdivision representing a group of
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sixteenth notes with the first note being accented). Mark J. Butler identifies this pattern as
“maximally even”: the “attacks,” or the accented first pulses of each sub-pattern, “are distributed
as evenly as possible throughout the measure.” At the same time, like other asymmetrical
patterns, the 3-3-2 pattern is “maximally even without being absolutely even.” For Butler, this
means that patterns like 3-3-2 “can create interest by dividing the measure irregularly” while at
the same time feeling “almost as regular as metrical patterns.” (Butler 84)
This opening rhythmic texture is sustained throughout “Galang,” with the occasional
embellishment of cowbell syncopations and 8-bit pop/jump fills, and with the exception of two
vocal breaks. The 3-3-2 pattern also forms the basic rhythmic cell for most of the album: in
addition to “Galang,” the tracks “Fire, Fire,” “Sunshowers,” “Amazon,” “Hombre,” “One for the
Loveridge continues on the subject of M.I.A. and Photoshop: “It used to take about five minutes to load
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and while it did, we always used to look at the second name in the loading-screen credits ‘Seetharaman
Narayanan.’ Every time, she would point and tell me, ‘He’s Tamil.’” (Arulpragasam 2012 8)
The 3-3-2 subdivision is, as Mark J. Butler notes, extremely common in many musical traditions,
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including Latin (clave) and Afrodiasporic music, although it may appear in any number of embellished
forms.
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Head (Skit),” and “10 Dollar” all feature the 3-3-2 subdivision, while “Pull Up the People”
features the variant 3-2-3. The three “speaker shaking” accents that close each eight-beat cycle of
“Galang” outline the same 3-3-2 pattern, only with greater emphasis, emphasizing the original
eight-beat length of M.I.A.’s introductory line: “London calling / speak the slang now / boys say
wha-gwan / girls say wha-what.” The looping rhythm, and the sense of inevitability and balance
its repetition creates, allows M.I.A. to begin her rap without rhyme, giving the first two lines
cohesion only through outright repetition. Subsequently, the rhythmic repetition also allows
M.I.A. to embellish the bar line with digressive chants that verge on the nonverbal (“ga la ga la
ga la lang Ga lang ga lang,” “ge-d ge-d ge-d down g-down g-down,” “ta na ta na ta na ta na ta na
ta”) that serve as ludic expansions or explorations of the phonemic content of her “freeze-
framed” lyrics. This word play is also indicative of M.I.A.’s diasporic positionality to English,
and to the numerous other languages, dialects, ethnolects, and registers sounding within the
London soundscape. When asked by DesiClub.Com about where her lyrics come from, and
whether they were composed of “elements of different foreign languages or “just ma[d]e up,”
M.I.A. replied, “It’s a bit of both. I don’t really know (Laughs). I think it’s a combination of
being dyslectic and learning English by just the sound of syllables.” (Nand 2006, emphasis
added)
The word galang itself, Arulpragasam claims in an MTV interview, comes from the
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Jamaican patois for the well-known cockney word gwan, or go along—“like,” she further
explains, “‘get on with your bad self”—and was also the name of a camp for Indochinese
M.I.A. visits Subterranean on MTV2, posted on 9/06/12. In the interview, Arulpragasam misidentifies the
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camp as Cambodian.
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refugees on an Indonesian island of the same name that persisted from 1979 until its closure in
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1996. Additionally, galang refers, as Arulpragasam puts it, to “a spice on a Thai menu.” The
word thus neatly demonstrates the sonic transformation, syncretization, and re-appropriation of
common phrases from the language of the metropole to the language of the periphery: go along
—gwan—galang. It also tracks this transformation as it first moves across socioeconomic borders
and then crosses racial ones (“go along” transformed into the working class cockney sociolect
“gwan,” then shifting again into the Jamaican ethnolect/patois “galang”). M.I.A.’s poetics
generate a space that allows for divergent, transnational, transcultural, and translingual readings
of the term galang, and imbue the lyric with both political complexity (the sidelong reference to
postcolonial turmoil and conflict in both Indochina and Jamaica) and synesthetic richness (spice,
street corner and dance floor parlance); they also demonstrate M.I.A.’s fascination with the sonic
contingency of language, and language’s potential for building cross-cultural empathy and
affiliation.
Moreover, the intro’s nursery rhyme-like, “nonsense” riffs on galang, get down, and
down simulate the bewilderment of both the native English speakers whose soundscape has
suddenly been defamiliarized through the introduction of new immigrant languages, voices, and
ways of speaking, and of the recently arrived immigrants abruptly immersed in a linguascape
with which they have little familiarity. Yasemin Yildiz coins the term linguascape to describe the
“heretofore uncommon language combinations emerg[ing] on a significant scale due to mass
migrations and refugee movements...while postcolonial migrations bring formerly colonized
languages to the colonial centers. M.I.A.’s nonsensical riffs, however, remind us that on the
sidewalks of the colonial center, this linguascape is perceived primarily as sound.
For more about the refugee camp, see: Stephen Fitzpatrick. “Galang’s Refugee Hell.” The Australian,
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November 5, 2009.
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When immigrants or colonial subjects from the periphery arrive in the imperial/
metropolitan center, they articulate and announce their sonic identities quite literally. This speech
is often depicted as noise; even when these new arrivals possess competency in the dominant
language (i.e., immigrants from sending countries that include English as part of the education
system, such as the Philippines, Singapore, India, and Malaysia), their transnational identities are
often marked sonically, i.e., by accent, differentiated lexicons, and code-switching. From the
phenomenological standpoint of immigrants themselves, however, it is the dominant linguascape
in which they have become newly immersed—in Hagedorn’s and M.I.A.’s case, American
English and British English respectively—that is noise. So too are the prevailing ambient sounds
and musics of the culture that surround them.
Unlike Hagedorn, when Arulpragasam arrived in London, she “knew only four words in
English, two of them “Michael Jackson.” (Harrington 2005) “She improved her vocabulary
listening to the radio and watching television and soon fell under the sway of hip-hop.”
“Maya tells a story about moving back to England when she was 10. On her first day at
school, her class were working through a sum. Maya put her hand up, because she knew
the answer. "And literally the whole class turned round and laughed at me," she says,
laughing herself.
“The teacher patted her on the head and told her she didn't have to pretend. But she did
know the answer – she just couldn't speak English. She didn't have the words to tell them.
"I didn't care," she says. "I was happy. I was happy wherever.”” (Sawyer 2010)
Thus M.I.A.’s ludic-syllabic digression in the intro to “Galang”—and, as the chapter will discuss
momentarily, in the folk song-like coda—perform the immigrant’s sudden sonic displacement in
a linguascape that she cannot parse.
“Galang” moves directly from intro to chorus—“Blaze a blaze / Galang a lang a lang lang
/ Purple haze / galang a lang a lang lang”—and then proceeds to alternate verse and chorus, with
the intro returning once more in a shorter form before another verse and chorus and the song’s
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coda. Once the verse gets going, the rhymed ends of each line—“Who the hell is huntin’ you / In
the B-M-W / How the hell they find you? / 1-4-7’d you” (emphasis added)— repeatedly land on
the second eighth-notes of the second and fourth beats, which are also continually “clapped” by
the underlying percussion. The shortened line lengths add to the claustrophobia and
breathlessness of M.I.A.’s imagery, with the recursion of rhyme coming less than every two
seconds.
Additionally, M.I.A. vocalizes the alternating end-rhymes with an upward bend of pitch
or intonation, rather than dropping downward as is typical at the ends of English sentences. The
rhyming fragments of the chorus, too—the second of each “blaze” and “Haze”—bend upward.
These vocal gestures resonate with the howls, cries, and other upward twists of intonation in
“Amazon,” which might be construed as either sexual pleasure or battle cries; heavily featured in
M.I.A.’s first single, M.I.A.’s upward-twisting intonation became a characteristic gesture and is
featured in subsequent work (cf. “Bamboo Banga,” Kala’s opening track). Although M.I.A. has
claimed that her falsetto cover of “Jimmy Jimmy Jimmy” (1982) on the Kala track
“Jimmy” (2007) in Parvati Khan’s inherited, Bollywood “feminine” style of singing, is really a
“cover” of herself as a child (her mother and other relatives often paid her to sing the song at
parties when she was a child in Sri Lanka), it is worth exploring the question of whether the
performance might be read as the sonically gendered and/or sonically diasporic equivalent to
blackface, or whether it constitutes a re-appropriation of Arulpragasam’s cultural heritage.
Although such a study is beyond the scope of this current project, M.I.A.’s use of intonation, and
its possible ramifications for coding of race and gender, bear further scrutiny: M.I.A.’s female
African-American hip-hop predecessors, for example—including Salt n Pepa, Queen Latifah,
Lauryn Hill, and Missy Elliott—employ the upward-bending intonation used by M.I.A. less
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frequently, and tend to rap in a lower frequency range more generally. A comparison might
generate more productive questions about gender-coding and intonation, the need to establish
credibility in a profession coded as masculine, and the inherited sonic performance of gender in
Afrodiasporic vs. South Asian music .
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Acting as a sonic equivalent to nonverbal gestures such as a lifted chin or nose, crossed
arms, or thrown up hands, the upward intonation adds defiance to M.I.A.’s delivery. Even Simon
Reynolds, who describes himself as “not a fan” (Reynolds 2009a) of M.I.A.’s music, admits that
“The voice, with its slack enunciation and insistent insolence, is addictive.” (Reynolds 2005) But
when listened to in terms of pitch, M.I.A. sings instead of raps after the song’s first two lines.
The entrance of a synth bass on her first “Slam” (0:19) establishes a key center (B minor),
repeating a root note B on the 1 and three of each bar, then outlining a minor third interval on the
accents at the end of each eight-beat phrase. V ocal pitch does not enter into the song until the
chorus (“Blaze a blaze”), and also outlines a minor third; in this case, M.I.A.’s upward pitch
bend could be read as a blues-derived gesture. The folk song-like “Ya ya hey” coda sung by a
chorus at the end of the song—described by Michaelangelo Matos as a “lift-up-and-over-
moment” so transformative that you can “see the clear skies beyond the council flats” (Matos
2006)—employs the same minor-third interval, but in a descending form, before leaping up to
the minor seventh, and twisting downward on blues notes: a flatted fifth and fourth on the way
back down to repeat the “Ya ya hey” falling minor third.
See, for example, Eidsheim, Nina. Voice as a Technology of Selfhood: Towards an Analysis of Racial
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Timbre and Vocal Performance (Dissertation). University of California, San Diego, 2008.
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Bongo with My Lingo: Textual Sampling in “Galang”
Whereas “Galang” contains little in the way of sampling, it is chockfull of citation, or what
might be described as textual “sampling .” In addition to “Purple Haze,” “Galang” includes
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shout outs to The Clash’s “London Calling” (1979) and Onyx’s “Slam” (1993). Additionally,
“Galang” incorporates vocabulary from multiple languages, dialects, and forms of slang.
Arulpragasam’s first breakout hit performs the hip-hop impulse in language—cuts and samples
and assemble from bits and pieces—while sampling very little from actual records. According to
Arulpragasam, this sonic asceticism had as much to do with a desire for a stripped down,
minimalist sound akin to Public Enemy and Missy Elliott as it did with the limitations imposed
by technique, availability of hardware, and questions of clearances and legality. In any case,
“Galang” stands up to close textual analysis due in large part to the lyrical and narrative depth
generated by M.I.A.’s “textual sampling.”
“Slam” references the hit single of the same name from Onyx’s debut album Bacdafucup
(1993) and its famous a cappella opening chant, “Slam, duh duh duh, duh duh duh, let the boys
be boys,” which is itself a chanted/scatted reworking of The Mohawks’ frequently sampled “The
Champ” (1968) . M.I.A. overwrites Onyx with a foretaste of her own wordplay to come; in
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combination with the previous lyrics, “Boys say what, etc.,” she sets up the expectation that the
It is worth noting that M.I.A.'s lyrical citations are often described by critics as “samples,” although no
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sampling of previously recorded material takes place. “Paper Planes,” for example, is widely held to
sample Wreckx-N-Effects’s “Rump Shaker” (1992). But while “Paper Planes” clearly subverts “Rump
Shaker”’s well-known chorus, “All I wanna do is zooma, zoom zoom zoom / And a poom-poom (all) just
shake ya rump” by overcoding Wreckx-N-Effects’s sexual innuendo with an outright sample of gunshots
and the “cha-ching” of cash registers from Pink Floyd’s “Money” (1973), M.I.A.’s citation is wholly lyrical,
and does not interpellate any sonic material from the “Rump Shaker” recording. The resulting “All I wanna
do is (gunshots) and (cash registers)” are thus a sardonic call out to what might be construed as sexual
objectification and predatory sexuality in Wreckx-N-Effects’s original lyrics.
“The Champ” is a popular hip-hop sample, and is used in over 250 songs, including tracks by KRS-
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One, Eric B. & Rakim, Cut Chemist & DJ Shadow, Foxy Brown, De La Soul, Nicki Minaj, Lupe Fiasco, Q-
Tip, Salt-n-Pepa, and Nas.
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song will be primarily concerned with relations between boys and girls, and may fit the bill for
female hip-hop emcees’ preoccupation (Rose 155—163), with sexual politics and courtship. But
in the next line, she contextualizes the song in the violence of millennial London: “Shotgun get
down…too late you down.” Her riffing at the end of each of these sentences seems to make light
of this violent consequence, as if this violent end were still something eminently danceable.
But the psychological landscape established by Galang’s lyrics is closer to the London
that calls “to the underworld” in the song’s first lyric: The Clash’s “London Calling,” a London
in which “war is declared, and battle come down.” M.I.A. thus knowingly compares the urban
poverty common to newly displaced refugees to the an imagined London on the verge of
apocalypse; in order to navigate and survive, the refugee must learn to “speak the slang now” and
be able to distinguish between Cockney boys’ reactions of “what g’wan” and Jamaican girls
“wha-what?” and “galang.” If the refugee is unable to distinguish between these micro-
deviations in language, he is subject to victimization not only by the “shotguns” of criminals and
radicalized extremists but to the institutionalized violence of the Metropolitan Police: “London
calling see we ain’t got no swing / ‘Cept for the ring of that truncheon thing.” M.I.A. thus
identifies establishment violence against young immigrants and people of color in London in the
2000s with the violence visited against the anti-establishment punks of the 1970s and 1980s
serenaded by The Clash. The Clash’s “London Calling” addresses the nihilism of the Cold War
era “A nuclear era, but I have no fear / ‘Cause London is drowning, and I, I live by the river”;
M.I.A.’s “Galang” addresses the paranoia of the post-9/11 era Britain and living as a “brown
deviant,” thus her identification with the slang of other well-established communities of color/
diaspora in London.
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Furthermore, “London calling” was part of the introductory phrase used by the BBC
World Service (“This is London calling”) during its World War II broadcasts to audiences at
home, in the greater Empire and Commonwealth, and to British forces and allies in Occupied
Europe. The opening section of “Galang,” then, suggests an allied voice of hope to an
underground or occupied people, a voice of reason, perhaps listened to in secret and as the only
alternative to the official propagandistic broadcasts approved by a dominant, occupying, or
colonizing force. Spoken in the opening lines of M.I.A.’s rap, “London calling” is ironized as a
call to attend to M.I.A.’s “telling it like it is,” advising subalterns and other disenfranchised or
dissatisfied “uths” how to navigate the false propaganda of London itself: Speak the slang, not
“the King’s English in quotation,” as the lyrics from The Clash’s “Straight to Hell” would have
it. Hear something like a shotgun? Get down.
Borrowing Kumari Silva’s concept of brown deviance, Lisa Weems contextualizes
M.I.A.’s creative output as navigating the “post-9/11 moment when ‘globalized bodies of
migrant labour’ are highly visible, considered suspect, and…subject to the material and symbolic
regulation of the neoliberal state (167)” (Weems 117). As made clear in the bonus track “M.I.A.,”
the voice giving warning in “Galang” is also a self-proclaimed “brown Londoner,” and the war
being waged is a war that seeks to repress globalized brown bodies like M.I.A.’s own. M.I.A.
speaks the intro lyrics close to the mic, with her voice filtered as if through a public address
system in a station : “London calling,” she announces, a functional, standard phrase ironized by
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her Tamil-inflected South London accent (Lahn-dahn coal-ing). “Galang” thus warns displaced
youths to attend to not only the linguistic register of the London soundscape (“Speak the slang
The swishing, record scratch-like sixteenth-notes could even be heard as suggestive of a train.
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now”) but to its ambient cues as well (“Shotgun get down”). As the de Menezes shooting
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made clear, learning to parse London’s sonic irruptions was a matter of life and death. “Too late
you down,” M.I.A. raps at the end of “Galang’s” intro, either from misheard language or sonic
cues of danger).
The remainder of the lyrics are a bleakly ironic bullet list of ways to navigate both the
police state (“Feds gonna get you / pull the strings on the hood”) and the violence and
exploitation of the council estates (“Pray and you will pull through / Suck-a-dick’ll help you /
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Don’t let ‘em get to you / If he’s got one, you’ve got 2 / Backstab your crew / Sell it out to sell
you”). M.I.A. even paraphrases the infamous Auschwitz slogan, Arbeit macht frei, as “Work is
gonna save you,” conflating the immigrant mantra of hard work and upward mobility with the
false hope of a death camp.
The distorted, overloaded-woofer sound of “Galang”’s bass-hits also signals the influence
of Jamaican sound system culture, and the popular practice “sound clashes” in which two
different sound systems were pitted against each other in one dance/performance space, and
shows M.I.A.’s roots not only in sound system culture, but in the subsequent genres it birthed:,
including dancehall and jungle/drum ’n bass. Since there originally limitations to bass levels
based on the physicality of the record—too much vibration would have caused the record to skip
—deejays spinning these records in a set might crank up the sound levels beyond what was on
the record, causing distortion of the sound; the production of “Galang” mimetically incorporates
this effect into a “virtual” dance space. As this sound evolved into dubstep, the “shaking” and
Although an article on the shooting from The Independent (Mark Hughes, Saturday, December 13,
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2008) details police mistakes that lead to the innocent man’s death, the article’s title suggests (perhaps
inadvertently) that de Menezes’s death was his own fault: “Seven Mistakes That Cost De Menezes His
Life.”
“Council house” is a term for public housing used primarily in the United Kingdom and Ireland. Council
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houses are typically known collectively as council estates.
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vibrational overload experienced by club-goers came to signify both the corporeal intermodality
and the violent potentialities of sound (Goodman 5—13). M.I.A.’s choices of sound via the
Roland MC-505 also have a decidedly lo-fi, retro 8-bit feel; “Galang” is contemporaneous with
renewed interest in 8-bit sound and “chiptunes.” The lo-fi “computer sounds” of Galang are also
suggestive of the surveillance state, anticipating many of the themes explored in M.I.A.’s third
album, Maya (stylized as “/\/\ /\Y/\”) (2010). Indeed, Maya anticipates issues brought to the fore
by Julian Assange and Edward Snowden: “Headbone connects to the headphone / Headphone
connects to the iPhone / iPhone connects to the Internet / Connected to the Google / Connected
to the Government” (“The Message”). In an interview for Maya’ s release, M.I.A. even argued
that : “hackers are the new revolutionaries.” (Noakes 85)
M.I.A.’s beats and lyrics in “Galang” thus embody the fearful subsistence of the youthful
brown deviants—“uths,” as stylized in M.I.A.’s stenciled liner notes—who deal, dance, quarrel,
and angle in the surveilled shadows of European and American capitals. Displacement, both
M.I.A. and Hagedorn tell us through their cooptations of Hendrix, is a bad trip.
But although the prevailing soundscape evoked by the lyrics and dark, overloaded,
dehumanizing sounds is paranoid—evoking both the drug-induced paranoiac state of “One
paranoid uth / Blazing through the hood” and of an immigrant negotiating the mutual threat of
rival gangs, Feds, and truncheon-wielding police—the song is also an infectious, exuberant
dance track, irrupting with sonic jouissance. Slate’s Jon Caramanica describes “Galang” as
consisting of a “breezy and chirpy sound, almost like an elementary-school recess.” (Caramanica
2005) Rob Sheffield likens the entirety of Arular to “the sound of jumprope rhymes in a war
zone.” M.I.A. synthesizes sonic codes—linguistic as well as musical/ambient—from multiple
diasporic groups experiencing, at-best an increased scrutiny in the age of the “War on Terror,”
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and combines them with sonic codes from other resistant/outsider groups and turns them into a
cut for the clubs. This is added to by the M.I.A. performative in-track “DJing”: twice she
withholds the bass, a common deejaying practice that Butler and Robert Fink argue creates a
sense of expectation and goal direction among club-goers: once at 1:47, a fermata on the last
word of the second time through “Sell it out to sell you…”; and again from 2:27-2:37, which
introduces the multiplied voice of M.I.A. belting out a coda that is “so simultaneously
plainspoken and transported you can feel the concrete beneath their sneakers and see the clear
skies beyond the council flats.” (Matos 2006)
Fly Like Paper: Poetics and Aesthetics in Paper Planes
The remainder of this chapter considers the intersection of M.I.A.’s poetics and aesthetics,
particularly in regard to sampling, primarily through the song “Paper Planes.” Before
proceeding, however, this section will address questions of authorship, aesthetics, and
positionality in her work.
Authorship and Sampling Practice
As Candice Haddad has noted, despite the fact that producer Diplo produced only two tracks on
Arular and only one on Kala, “dominant discourses consistently feature and credit [him] for
much of the album’s success.” Haddad further argues that it is “significant that Diplo and other
producers of M.I.A.’s albums are all men,” and that in the discourse that surrounds her music, the
contributions of these men are given such disproportionate attention. (Haddad 288-289)
M.I.A.: Yesterday I read like five magazines in the airplane…and three out of five
magazines said “Diplo: the mastermind behind M.I.A.’s politics!” … I find it really
bonkers .. If you read the credits, he sent me a loop for “Bucky Done Gun,” and I made a
song in London, and it became “Bucky Done Gun.” But that was the only song he was
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actually involved in on Arular…And I just find it a bit upsetting and kind of insulting that
I can’t have any ideas on my own because I’m a female or that people from undeveloped
countries can’t have ideas of their own unless it’s backed up by someone who’s blond-
haired and blue-eyed…
Pitchfork: …I talked to Diplo about a month ago and he seemed to think he had a bit to
do with both of these records …
M.I.A.: Well, I finished Arular and then I met Diplo, and when I went to make the
mixtape [Piracy Funds Terrorism, Vol. 1], I gave him all the tracks, the a cappellas, and
instrumentals already done. On this album [Kala] I self-produced most of the album with
Switch, and nobody’s talking about that … (Thompson 2007)
The implication in much of the coverage of M.I.A.’s first two albums, then, was that she had very
little to do with the actual production—the sound, in other words—of her albums. This is not
only contradicted by M.I.A.’s solo production of her original six-song demo (and her later work
producing acts such as Sleigh Bells for her own label N.E.E.T.), but by the perspectives offered
by other frequent M.I.A. collaborators such as Steve Loveridge:
Sitting next to [her], making a piece of work with her—music, or art, or just baking a
cake—is the most exciting, addicting thing ever. It’s why everyone (including me) who
bitches about how tough she is to work with comes back…Maya has knife-sharp,
unwavering confidence in her own taste. It’s hard to describe because under all the mess
of the music, and her outspoken politics…is basically a human being that puts a blue next
to a purple or a sound next to a word with a speed and decisiveness that you just can’t
compete with. (Arulpragasam 2012 9)
Ayesha Siddiqi also notes the underlying critique inherent in depictions of M.I.A.’s aesthetic as
“cut and paste.” Given how central the practice of sampling is to hip-hop, critiques of M.I.A.
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that deride or belittle her “cut and paste” aesthetic must either 1) Accept sampling as a legitimate
practice but imply that M.I.A. is essentially just not “doing it right”; or, 2) Disapprove of the
practice of sampling in general (and perhaps disapprove of hip-hop itself).
See Negar Azimi. “Brown Girl In the Ring” Bidoun; “M.I.A.’s third album a cut-and-paste
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masterstroke,”Seattle Times; Matthew Bennett, “M.I.A.: Shifting to a Higher Ground”, Clash.
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For the second type, M.I.A. simply serves as a high profile example of what is perceived
to be sampling’s fundamental inferiority, immorality, and/or shortcomings as a creative process.
To borrow Joseph Schloss’s aesthetic distinctions of hip-hop, the first critique has to do with
aesthetics: there is nothing wrong with sampling per se. The problem is simply that when these
critics listen to the beats M.I.A. produces, they just “aren’t feelin’ it.” The second critique is
moral and ontological, and has to do with the practice of sampling itself: the question of whether
or not the beats M.I.A. (co)produces “feel” right is irrelevant; rather, for those who espouse this
version of the “cut and paste” critique, sampling itself, and by extension, the sample-based
practices of hip-hop, is “whack.”
Sonic Displacement, Hip-Hop, and British Dance Culture
M.I.A.’s sonic sensibility was formed by sonic displacement. By this I mean that Arulpragasam’s
transplantation from Jaffna to London resulted in the intensification of her own sonic self-
awareness, specifically an intensified awareness of her own somatic, linguistic, and acoustic
presence within, and co-constitution of, the sound spaces she began to occupy as an immigrant in
London, the target soundscape. At the same time, immersion in these new soundscapes resulted
in a keen sonic awareness of her absence from Sri Lanka, her native soundscape. As defined in
Chapters 1 and 2, target soundscapes and native soundscapes—concepts I have adapted from the
discourse of language acquisition—consist of ambient sound, music, and language, and
constitute the sonic dimensions of the homeland and host country, respectively.
In Arulpragasam’s case, the native soundscape—or the soundscape of her homeland, a
nation in which she lived for the first ten years of her life—was already fractured by
displacement thanks to the Sri Lankan Civil War. Due to the ongoing violence and uncertainty, as
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well as to specific harassment by government soldiers targeting her family because of her
father’s political activities, Arulpragasam and her family were forced to move frequently within
Sri Lanka, and also lived for some time in Tamil Nadu in India. The frequent disappearances of
relatives, friends, and neighbors, the ever-lingering menace and danger of both the Sri Lankan
military and the Tamil separatist rebels, and the sounds of gunfire and explosions all irrupted
against the already dense Sri Lankan cultural soundscape with its lingering echoes of Dutch,
Portuguese, and British colonization. Both traditional and popular Sri Lankan music evince rich
sonic traces of this history of cultural syncretism, which include the intensely polyrhythmic
indigenous ceremonial percussion used in “Bird Flu,” the contemporary influence of Bollywood
music (as evidenced in “Bamboo Bhanga,” “Boys,” and “Jimmy”), and African Baila (or Bayila)
music via the Portuguese importation of African slaves. Additionally, the linguascape of Sri
Lanka included both her mother tongue, Tamil, and Sinhalese, as well as the various and
phonologically distinct dialects of Tamil, which include Jaffna Tamil, Negombo Tamil, and
Batticaloa Tamil. M.I.A.’s native soundscape, then, does not consist of the remembered sounds
and voices of a static and idealized place and time, but represent a slippage, an endless sliding
chain of signification away from the idea of “home.” Her native soundscape is already suggestive
of displacement, and of the deterritorialization of the idea of “home” from that of geopolitical
place.
Unlike Tawada’s Talisman or Hagedorn’s The Gangster of Love, however, M.I.A. can as a
recording artist manipulate the ambient sounds from her native soundscape, or sample equivalent
sounds from other recordings, and incorporate them into her work alongside other musical and
nonmusical sounds and her own voice. Indeed, the violence of the Sri Lankan Civil War that
formed a backdrop to her childhood in Jaffna intrudes upon her work in the form of
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vocalizations, mimetic musical figures, and actual recorded sounds of gunfire. “Fire Fire”’s kick
drum, for example, booms like heavy artillery; the “pop” of the track’s snare drum sounds more
like small arms fire. Meanwhile, M.I.A. dishes out her frantic, sing-song Jody call or military
cadence (“Guerrilla gettin’ trained up / Look out look out / From over the rooftop / … / Load up /
Aim / Fire fire / Pop”) over a minimalist reggaeton beat that includes a sample from Quincy
Jones’ “Ironside Theme” (1967/71), the same octave-leaping, Moog synthesizer “alarm” that was
used in Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill Vol. I (2003) and Kill Bill Vol. II (2004) to evoke The
Bride/Uma Thurman’s bloody desire for revenge. M.I.A.’s military cadence is even shouted out
over tramping boots; instead of being decked out in fatigues and combat boots, however, these
“guerrillas” are ready for the club in “Click suits” and “booted in Timberlands.”
More controversially, M.I.A. (along with co-producers Diplo and Switch) included the
sounds of actual gunfire in “Paper Planes.” M.I.A. responded to criticism of the sounds by
protesting:
If you’re an immigrant you left somewhere and most of the time you fled a war. Gun
sounds are a part of our culture as an everyday thing. If you’ve been exposed to gunfights
and violence and bombs and war then I can use those sounds backing my thoughts…
Look, I’ve been shot at so I’m quite comfortable with gunshot sounds. If you have a
problem with it, go and talk to the people who were shooting at me. (Touré 2009)
Here, M.I.A. positions herself alongside other immigrants who have experienced violence and
war firsthand.” (Weems 123)
Arulpragasam arrived in the U.K. in 1986, not long before her eleventh birthday, and thus
grew from adolescence into adulthood in the London of late 1980s and early 1990s. By the end
of the 1990s, nearly one in twenty Britons defined herself as nonwhite; half a million Britons had
African Caribbean origins, and nearly 1.5 million traced their origins to South Asia. In London
itself, more than 40 percent of the population identified ethnically as other than White British
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(59.79 identified as White British, 27.28 percent identified as “Black, Asian, Mixed, and
Chinese”, and 12.94 percent identified as “Other ethnic groups”) . London was thus an
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environment, as Sarah Thornton argues (Thornton 1995 15—18), in which dance and club
culture were becoming an integral part of the lives of British youth.
Additionally, the intersection of club culture and Jamaican sound system culture were
combining to bring a political and sonic transformation to the club scenes of London. The
musical styles that facilitated the rise of these new club and rave scenes—Acid House, Jungle/
Drum ’n Bass, Trip Hop—made use of hip-hop’s revelatory practice of sampling but in a
different cultural context than that described by Tricia Rose and other scholars of hip-hop.
London dance culture in the late 1980s and early 1990s featured the cross-pollination of Black
Atlantic creative practices with middle- and lower-class white Britons and British Asians.
Filmmaker Steve Loveridge, who was Arulpragasam’s classmate at Central St. Martin’s
College, describes how the teenaged Arulpragasam fit into this new soundscape: “She’d spent her
teenage years with the Bengali boys on Brick Lane, going to Bagley’s nightclub and driving
around London trying to find raves.” (Arulpragasam 2012 6) M.I.A. herself describes this period
in “XR2,” asking “Where were you in 92?” and replying that she and her crew were on “Brick
lane” listening to “Massive” (trip-hop A-listers Massive Attack). “We roll in there like we late /
DJ MCs / Private raves /Keep it secret. Light it mate.”
M.I.A.’s relationship to hip-hop, therefore, is a British one, one that should not be
simplified as an imitation of American hip-hop and its inherent Afrocentric or African-American
(and therefore Americocentric) positionality. British hip-hop has differing but affiliated impulses
with American hip-hop and its specific origins in the South Bronx; as a Sri Lankan-British
Source: 2001 Census, Key Statistics Table KS06, Standard Table S201.
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132
musician, M.I.A. incorporates the practices of hip-hop—sampling, breaks, deejays, emcees—
with different goals than those described by Schloss. These goals are both political and
pragmatic: “When the music's got a beat / Then that's what gets me.”
Although hip-hop is clearly an African-American practice in its origins, my analysis of
“Paper Planes” takes into account M.I.A.’s absorption of hip-hop from a British Asian
positionality, particularly as such a positionality might be described from the point at which
M.I.A. arrived in London in the late 1980s and the degree to which, as Paul Gilroy notes, Black
practices in Britain are part of the Black Atlantic but have different valences from African
American practice. Namely, it is productive to consider M.I.A as a 1.5 generation member of the
Tamil diaspora, growing into adulthood during the intersection of sound system culture and club
culture, which adapts—rather than imitates—the sampling practices of American hip-hop for a
specifically British context. Hip-hop as acculturated by M.I.A. is thus, as Gilroy argues, from
both an African American context and a Black British context.
M.I.A. herself makes clear that she considers herself to be a British, rather than a “more
American” or Sri Lankan artist:
I ask if she feels, as an artist, more Sri Lankan than British. Perhaps, even, more
American?
'No.' She crumples her Taco Bell wrapper.
'Not at all. As an artist I am definitely British. So British, I hate it.’ (Forrest 2005)
M.I.A.’s “hip-hop” practice is thus intentionally divergent in terms of its sampling of
Tamil and Bollywood film productions, and later musical sounds from Trinidad, Angola, and
elsewhere. On the other hand, her practice links her to the British Asian hip-hop producers who
proceeded her—including such artists as Asian Dub Foundation, Fun-Da-Mental, and Panjabi
MC—in terms of their incorporation (or veering away from) South Asian traditional musical
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sounds. She differs from other British Asian hip-hop producers, however, in the extent to which
she samples from Punk, New Wave, and other popular music genres. Breaking many of the
normative practices and aesthetics of American hip-hop as described by Joseph Schloss in
Making Beats: The Art of Sample-Based Hip-Hop (2004), M.I.A.’s diasporic ear resulted in a
sound that American hip-hop performer and producer Nas memorably described as “the future.”
Paper Planes, Paper Tigers: Sampling and Sonic Aesthetics
M.I.A.’s “breezy track” “Paper Planes” contains, according to The Stranger’s Eric Grandy,
“more conceptual layers, musical information, and lyrical self-reference than seems possible in a
three-and-a-half minute pop song.” The track also exemplifies her installation as a figure of the
transnational circulation of sound: co-produced by M.I.A., British deejay Switch (James Andrew
Taylor), and American deejay Diplo (Thomas Wesley Pentz), the track announces itself with a
sample from “Straight to Hell” by The Clash, the legendary British punk band that disbanded in
1986, the same year Mathangi Arulpragasam arrived in London. Her lyrics of border-crossing
and diaspora (“If you catch me at the border I got visas in my name”) speak through wry,
subaltern personae that could be slinging guns, drugs, and forged documents in the contested
zones of Sri Lanka, in Central America, or on the fringes of London. CBS’s censorship of
M.I.A.’s performance of “Paper Planes” on The David Letterman Show, which took issue with
the track’s famous samples of gunshot sounds and altered them to sound more like video game
“pops” or punched paper without M.I.A.’s consent, and also cut M.I.A.’s mic so that she couldn’t
sing the “Some I Some I murder” line, stoked further interest in the song through controversy.
The rapper addressed the Letterman controversy in a blog post on her official MySpace page:
WHEN LETTERMAN CENSORED ME IT WAS WAC OF COURSE!!!!!!, AND YES I
FELT SOOOOOO BAD FOR WHAT THEY DID TO MY SOUND. I WAS ABLE TO
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SOUND CHECK FINE, THEN ON THE ACTUAL TAPING MY TAPING WAS SOOO
DIFFERENT FROM WHAT ID AGREED, AS SOON AS I OPENED MY MOUTH THE
DIFFERENCE BLEW ME AWAY , I FELT I WAS GETTING BULLIED ON
NATIONAL TELEVISION…
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M.I.A.’s surprise and discomfort at the altered sound is detectable in the live performance; she
turns her head toward the deejay but continues with the choreography mirrored by her dancer.
Their rhythmic, trigger-miming right-arm movements seem silly with the benign popping
sounds. MTV’s censorship of the video for “Paper Planes,” which was filmed in the Bedford-
Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn where M.I.A. had bought an apartment following the
success of Arular, further fueled the viral hit. In the same blog post, M.I.A. describes her
frustration upon first seeing the leaked MTV version of the video on YouTube, and realizing the
extent to which the network had manipulated the gunshot sounds:
I DID FIGHT FOR THE SOUND…I CAN FILM MYSELF ANYWHERE…BUT THE
SONG IS WHAT I WANTED TO PRESERVE IN THIS CASE. (ibid)
Less than a year after it was first released as a single, African-American hip-hop artists
Kanye West and T.I.. sampled her work , signaling not only the transcultural circulation of hip-
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hop and M.I.A.’s unconventional contribution of the genre into the cultural context from which
hip-hop first emerged, but perhaps a shortening cycle of sampling and recursion in pop music
more generally.
This section uses Joe Schloss’s breakdown of the moral, ethical, and aesthetic aspects of
sampling in hip-hop to listen closely to “Paper Planes” in order to analyze the sonic effect of the
“M.I.A. Angry with MTV and Letterman Over ‘Paper Planes’” (blog post). Hypeful. 17 Dec. 2007.
108
Capitalization is original. The original MySpace posting has been taken down, which Candice Haddad
contends is an example of M.I.A.’s increasing self-regulation and self-censorship for the sake of public
relations; original excerpts of the post can still be found via Hypeful, Stereogum, and Gigwise.
Although the “Straight to Hell” sample used in “Paper Planes” is not included in “Swagga Like Us,” The
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Clash’s Topper Headon, Mick Jones, Paul Simonon, and Joe Strummer are officially credited as
songwriters along with Clifford Harris, Jr. (T.I.), Shawn Carter (Jay-Z), Kanye West, Dwayne Carter, Jr. (Lil
Wayne), Wesley Pentz (Diplo), and Arulpragasam.
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produced soundscape, including the semiotic contributions of its sampled and originally
performed parts, and to theorize how this effect is produced. “For sample-based hip hop
producers,” Schloss contends, “aesthetic concerns manifest themselves at four levels: the
underlying structure of hip-hop beat, the internal characteristics of individual samples, the
relationships that samples take on when juxtaposed, and shared assumptions and contextual cues
that imbue any given choice with significance.” (136) Schloss qualifies these distinctions by
stating that they were made “for the sake of analytical clarity,” and that in actual practice, “these
categories have a dynamic relationship with each other” (ibid) and are not mutually exclusive.
Furthermore, Schloss admits to a terminological slippage in the term “beat”:
[I]n this case Mr. Supreme is using the term ‘beat’ to refer only to the drum samples in
an instrumental hip-hop composition. The semantic slippage between uses of this term to
mean anything from a set of drum samples to an entire composition demonstrates the
significance of percussion and rhythm to the compositional process.” (205 n. 2)
The Underlying Structure of Hip-Hop Beat
One of the unusual features of “Paper Planes” is that its “beat” is fundamentally established by
the sample of Joe Strummer’s guitar from “Straight to Hell.” The sample establishes the song’s
tempo at a steady 92 beats per minute. The staccato of the original guitar riff anticipates the
duration and consistency of the chorus’s sampled gunshots; indeed, many listeners who were
initially mystified by the track may have unconsciously been reacting to its blasé substitution of
drums and percussion with either other instruments (electric guitars) or ambient sounds
(gunshots an cash registers)
The Internal Characteristics Of Individual Samples
Grandy describes “Paper Planes” as transforming “Straight to Hell”’s guitar riff into “synthetic
sunshine” (Grandy 2007) This jibes with Schloss’s claims about the compositional practice of
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sampling: creating a loop of what is essentially a fragment of an original recording creates an
entirely new compositional unit; as the third chord in the guitar riff from “Straight to Hell” does
not proceed into the decidedly pensive feel and pattern of the original song’s verse, but instead
loops back to the first chord, the sampled chords as a whole essentially create a new relationship
to each other.
The original guitar riff is drier: the reverb on “Straight to Hell” is cut between each new
strum. In the sample that opens “Paper Planes,” however, the guitar—and the overall sonic
environment—is more lush and reverberant. The sample also tweaks the chord’s voicing: the
major third has been pulled out and foregrounded above the root note, making the chord feel a bit
more melodic and less textural. Additionally, the dynamics have been flattened; where “Straight
to Hell” fades in out of nowhere until the kick drum enters in the third measure (at about 0:05),
the guitar riff in “Paper Planes” maintains a steady mezzo-forte throughout. Where the sampled
guitar becomes more reverberant, the kick drum becomes more clipped; Finally, Mick Jones’s
high guitar tremolo that accompanies the opening hook—a sound that Nabeel Zuberi describes as
a “missile whine” that underscores the track’s “invocation to gunplay” (Zuberi 187)—has been
excised in the opening sample on “Paper Planes”; only to be reinserted when M.I.A.’s voice at
the beginning of the first verse.
Interestingly, the more unnatural, cut-off sound of the guitar in the original “Straight to
Hell” is closer to the sonic envelope of the gunshots in the chorus of “Paper Planes.” Because the
shot-sound is repeated so rhythmically and with relative quickness (with no time, in other words,
for the recoil), the sound feels cutoff as well.
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Interpretive Context/Contextual Cues
Most critics read The Clash samples in M.I.A. as simply signalling Arulpragasam’s desire to
strike a “rebel,” political pose similar to the that of the British punk provocateurs. The Clash
sample in Paper Planes, Alex Miller writes for the NME, gave “the clearest indication of where
she sees herself, as the inheritor of true rebel music in an era of corporate punks” (Miller 2007)
But even a cursory reading of “Straight to Hell” reveals that the song specifically addresses the
plight of immigrants, and furthermore draws connections between their experiences and those of
the disenfranchised white working class in Britain. “Straight to Hell” thus demonstrates an
empathy between the white members of The Clash and the immigrant personae—brown, mixed
(“Amerasian”), and otherwise—who they saw changing the demographics of Great Britain in the
1980s.
M.I.A.’s lyrics, and the sonic environment she co-produced in part by consciously
sampling “Straight to Hell,” respond to The Clash’s empathy. Her vocals—and the voices of
children recorded in Brixton in the chorus—is as reverberant as the guitar, and does not contrast
the sound space of the guitar sample, but is meant to fit into it seamlessly. Taking into account
the immigrant theme of the original “Straight to Hell” lyrics, M.I.A. appears, in part, to be
responding directly to The Clash as if in the same venue or performance or recording studio: the
final verse of “Straight to Hell” feels like young disenfranchised subculture Britons listening in
on neighboring immigrants (“Can you really cough it up loud and strong / The immigrants they
wanna sing all night long”), feeling a kind of unspoken identification. M.I.A. reverses this
positionality, listening in on The Clash and responding to them.
In many ways, the “brown deviants” of “Paper Planes” are a more fully considered,
fleshed out version of the personae in “Galang,” with M.I.A, growing in confidence as a lyricist
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creating wry and compelling voices, subalterns with some agency, making fake IDs, running
guns and drugs, crossing borders. These deviants are cousins to Galang’s peddling refugees on
the streets of Acton. Both narratives, Loveridge notes, are genealogical descendants of Gratis,
Arulpragasam’s unproduced screenplay based on her brother Sugu’s experiences in British
correctional institutions as a young offender (Arulpragasam 2012 7—10).
Nowhere/Everywhere
In a piece entitled “Pop Diaspora,” Vice’s Ayesha A. Siddiqi takes issue with Reynolds’
pronouncement at the close of his 2005 review in which he contends that “what’s missing from
Arular is character: not quirkiness…so much as local character—those telling details that
transmit the true flava of a scene. Arular, strictly speaking, comes from nowhere.” (Reynolds
2005, emphasis added) Siddiqi responds: “For pairing divergent geographies, both sonically and
visually, Reynolds decided that Arular ‘comes from nowhere.’ But M.I.A.’s multiplicity
soundtracks a very specific experience—one that doesn’t stop existing just because a white
person can’t validate it.” (Siddiqi 2013) In a similar vein, The Nation’s Jeff Chang argues that,
“perhaps M.I.A.'s ‘nowhere’ was really everywhere--or, to be specific, everywhere but the First
World's self-regarding ‘here.’ At the time of the album's release, she said she felt homeless--and
that she hoped the music might be a way home.” (Chang 2007)
Lisa Weems, however, argues that M.I.A.’s positionality is “[s]imilar to bell hooks’s
perspective of speaking from the margins.” Furthermore, “M.I.A. capitalizes on her visibility that
is made through her displacement.” (Weems 135) This chapter has argued that M.I.A. has
capitalized on her sonic displacement, or the displacement that has made her audible: i.e., the
narrative of her displacement, her refugee back story, generates interest in her work, but is also
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the subject of her work and undergirds the aesthetics that guide her composition. This ties M.I.A.
to Yoko Tawada and Jessica Hagedorn: all three others are displaced, but wield their
displacement. To some degree an exophonic author like Hagedorn and Tawada, M.I.A.
developed into an adult not just outside the sound of the language, but outside the sound of the
culture around her.
Attempts to undermine M.I.A.’s credibility as an “authentic” Third World voice reflect an
anxiety about diasporic positionality itself: that diasporic individuals can have affiliations with
both their country of residence and the homeland. In Reynolds’ case, M.I.A.’s changes in class,
socioeconomic status, education—her very mobility within British culture itself—complicates
the dominant culture’s ability to essentialize foreign cultures and foreign-born citizens.
Reynolds’ charge of “nowhere,” as Chang intuits, has already been answered by M.I.A.
herself in terms of the sample that she incorporates into “Paper Planes,” cognizant of both the
affect of “Straight to Hell”’s sonic materiality and its narrative, and by The Clash: “The
immigrants they wanna sing all night long / It could be anywhere / Most likely could be any
frontier / Any hemisphere / No man’s land and there ain’t no asylum here.”
The problem is the flash and spectacle of M.I.A.—either in her pregnant performance at
the Grammy Awards, or her conspicuous post-birth absence at the Academy Awards, or flipping
the bird to a global audience during the SuperBowl halftime show she shared with Madonna and
Nicki Minaj—misleads some listeners into thinking that one need not listen too deeply or too
closely to such tracks as “Paper Planes.” “Everthing I own is on I.O.U.” she raps on Arular’s first
full track, “Pull Up the People,” acknowledging her debt to her source materials, which include
not only The Clash the sounds and voices that contributed to the development of her aesthetic in
the U.K., Sri Lanka, and elsewhere. “But I’m here bringing you something new.” 140
CONCLUSION: BEYOND DISPLACEMENT
Tawada’s desire to escape the confines and restrictions of national identity and homogeneity as
they inhere in the mother tongue represents a distinctly different configuration between the
displaced subject (Tawada) and mother tongue (Japanese) than those that could be used to
describe Jessica Hagedorn’s relationship to Tagalog or M.I.A.’s relationship to Tamil. Part of this
is generational: as 1.5~2nd generation immigrants/refugees, Hagedorn and M.I.A. were
displaced as adolescents, and therefore received only a partial formal education in their “mother
tongues” before completing their schooling in the American and British educational systems,
respectively. Tawada, however, remained in her homeland until completing her Bachelor’s
degree, and left Japan for graduate studies in Germany in her early twenties.
But another key difference has to do with agency: since Hagedorn was an adolescent at
the time of her emigration, the decision to leave the Philippines for the United States was made
by her parents. This is also the case with M.I.A., whose agency was further diminished in that
she and her family were refugees fleeing the violence of the Sri Lankan Civil War. Tawada’s
displacement, however, was entirely volitional, and reflects the “historically specific cultural and
social phenomenon” of “middle-class Japanese women in the 1980s and 1990s [leaving] Japan in
order to study, live, and work abroad in the United States and Europe,” a phenomenon that as
Yildiz by way of Karen Kelsky’s study Women on the Verge describes as “highly gendered…
since the number of women in this pursuit…dwarfed that of men leaving Japan.” Kelsey further
argues that these women were motivated by the desire for a “different female existence,” one that
might “resist gendered expectations of the female life course in Japan.” (Yildiz 122, Kelsky 2)
Yildiz is careful to note Tawada’s “frequent and unflattering depiction of the more or less subtle
141
violence of German men in their interactions with East Asian women” (124), and that Tawada is
cognizant of the sexist, and specifically Orientalizing, aspects of patriarchy in German culture.
But though Tawada’s departure from both her native country and mother tongue could
thus be described as displacement in response to homeland oppression, her agency is clearly
different than that of the other displaced subjects discussed in this study. So too is her strategy in
deploying the mother tongue trope. In this regard, Tawada’s seeks to denaturalize aspects of both
the mother tongue and target language. Her prose pieces are thus suggestive of the interstices
between languages which are available to those who have the means to achieve a geographic
and/or linguistic separation from the mother tongue. For Tawada, displacement is the condition
of possibility for the sonic poetics of Tawada, Hagedorn, and M.I.A.; but the condition of
possibility for exophony as Tawada conceives it also requires the full acquisition of one’s mother
tongue in order to reject it as such.
Rather than constituting a “permanent handicap” for “having passed [one’s] childhood
and youth in a milieu that speaks a different language” (Weinrich 1336-46) , writing from a
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displaced positionality provides Tawada with a “critical edge and imaginative space” (Yildiz
142). As such, her later stories move toward language and cultural pairings beyond the Japanese-
German interstice of her earlier stories. What Tawada conceives of as the privileged space of
sonic displacement or exophony “requires constant reinvention and questioning of the underlying
concepts of language and identity. It requires constant exit strategies.” (ibid)
Exophony is a productive strategy for Tawada, a well-educated citizen of a wealthy
nation with global influence that has sometimes been problematically described as the first “First
World” nation in Asia, as well as the first nonwhite First World nation. For other displaced
A German Romance scholar, Weinrich refers to authors such as Tawada, non-Germans writing in
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German who had won the Chamisso Prize.
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peoples, however, particularly those from developing nations and/or without the benefit of full
acquisition and education in the mother tongue, identification with the mother tongue is an
integral part of establishing a communal identity within the country of displacement. The mother
tongue in these instances is a valuable resource in staging a resistance to cultural assimilation via
the construction of a multicultural identity, one that insists upon a connection with the native
soundscape, however geographically and temporally distant. As these diasporic communities
envision themselves as “in between,” Paul Gilroy argues, diasporic subjects “and their
transnational kin see themselves as possessing greater flexibility in identity than their more
nationally, communally, or ethnically bounded peers.”
Since capital increasingly seeks to control, commodify, and market ethnic difference, or
otherwise contain or circumscribe it, the greatest danger to this sonic order is posed by 1.5- and
second-generation immigrants who possess a fluency and/or mastery of both the target and
heritage languages, a synthetic command of mother tongue and the tongue of the host country. In
particular, creative-class individuals such as Hagedorn and M.I.A.—musicians, writers, and other
artists and performers who seek to produce original content/cultural capital and circulate these
products in direct competition with those of the normative majority—have the capacity to
destabilize the hegemonic order. First-generation immigrants like Milagros Rivera, who are
content to be relegated to enclaves and traditional roles as model minorities/immigrant
entrepreneurs, and breadwinners, pose little threat to the homogenized soundscape despite their
sonic markers of difference. As long as they remain circumscribed within a particular ethnicized
space (a ghetto or ethnic neighborhood), they are tolerated and even participate in establishing
sonic normativity through their proximity and otherness.
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Furthermore, the “flexible" identity of subjects such as Hagedorn confuse center and
periphery, not only in their depictions of their displaced subjectivity, but in categories such as
“Filipino-American” themselves. Beginning in the 1980s, some litigants with Filipino ancestry
have “sued for American citizenship and have argued that they or their ancestors were born in the
Philippines during the territorial period, 1898-1946, when it was part of the American empire,
sometimes citing British citizenship clauses from America’s colonial era.” (See, page number
needed) The suits, as well as texts such as The Gangster of Love, ask whether Filipinos who
serve in the United States Armed Forces without citizenship are citizens of an autonomous state,
colonial subjects, or second-class American citizens; and whether the Philippines is indeed a
sovereign nation or a neocolony. If, to some extent, the Philippines’ ‘cacique democracy’ exists
in order to provide and safeguard a secondary market for American products (including cultural
products such as music, film, and, to a lesser extent, literature) and a strategically important
military staging post (reaffirmed by the recent treaty signed by the Obama and Aquino
Administrations), then questions of neocoloniality complicate Rocky’s displacement. Is Rocky
displaced transnationally, or is she instead a provincial subject traveling from an outlying
territory to the metropolitan center of power? As NVM Gonzalez and Oscar Campomanes have
noted, it is difficult “to differentiate what is Filipino American from what is Filipino of the
Philippines” (63). In seeking to use postcoloniality to ‘become American,’ the suits brought by
these assimilationists—if pushed to [their logical end] spell the “undoing of America’s
boundaries.” (ibid) If language is the principal force of hegemony, then diasporic authors’ sonic
irruptions constitute a feedback loop, the noise produced by bodies simultaneously living amidst
and exiled by language. As post/colonial subjects living simultaneously as invisible minorities
and as bodies actively forgotten through imperial amnesia, Filipino American such as Hagedorn
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have the capacity through speech acts to overload and reconfigure the very language that seeks to
regulate them.
For 1.5 generation subjects such as Jessica Hagedorn and M.I.A., some of the social
structures tied to the mother tongue must be recovered before they can be rejected; for these
authors, not all of the identities that the language inscribes on the body are unwanted. For
Hagedorn and M.I.A., language is not synonymous with displacement itself but is an echo of
home, by which I do not mean an echo of the Manila or Jaffna of their respective childhoods, but
an echo of the home they continually reify through their maintenance of displaced positionalities.
145

TULA
CREATIVE MANUSCRIPT 146
Thank you to the editors of the journals in which versions of these poems originally appeared,
sometimes in different forms.
Anamesa “[Island En Passant]”
The Asian-American Literary Review “Tula” (as “Tula for V oice, Music Box, and
Extinct Birds”)
FIELD “A Year in the Snow Country”
Kartika Review “Audiometry”
“Where the Fathers Wait”
Lantern Review “Some Words”
The Offending Adam “The Silverest Tongue In the Philippines”
“[Island Without Ancestors]”
Postcolonial Text “The Poet’s Mother at 13, Killing a Chicken”
“Photograph: Loggers at Kuala Tahan”
“Island of Fault Lines” (as “Fault Lines”)
Revolver “Virginity”
TAYO Literary Magazine “[Island of the Shy Mynah Bird]”
“[Nesology]”

“Island of Fault Lines” also appeared in the anthology VERSES TYPHOON YOLANDA: A Storm
of Filipino Poets, Ed. Eileen Tabios (San Francisco & St. Helena: Meritage Press, 2014).
147
tu • la |ˈto
͞ oləә |
Nahuatl: near the cattails; ruined Toltec capital. Tall atlantes,
sun-cut shields. God-nest. Birdsong. Mongolian: willow-
banked tributary of the Orkohn. Baltic: unreachable,
Russified to oblast. Ironworks. Hollow points. Music box gilt
& nielloed with orchids, islands, passerines; tula-work.
Chileno: slang for cock. Also nightshade, bell flower.
Solfége: veil & a sixth. English: square-rigged for new
continents. Almost marsh grass, ghosted to Caddo. Kotule:
savanna tongue, rich in affix, in use by all generations.
Sanskrit: Libra. Scales, stars above our son. Was the weight
of will. Nahuatl from the Nahuatl for ‘what pleases the ear.’
Tagalog: an aporia. Mother tongue: a poem.
148
Audiometry
Because my son thinks I’m a citadel—
soundproof. A repository.
Because horsing around at bedtime he pierced
my cochlea with a pencil.
The first time I saw the inner ear
I thought it looked like a little life, thriving
but not yet big enough
for me to feel for it any kind of empathy.
By what were such things fed?
Would it overgrow its carapace
& make of the body a coppered bell?
And then I was sixteen & crossing
St. Paul with my father. A seashell
in his pocket which for his own reasons
he refuses to wear. He can’t hear
the Chicano keeping pace behind us
lean & loose-limbed
clucking, “Gooks, gooks.”
For years, he’d sat a little further from us
each night at the dinner table
hollowed out by the roll of stock tickers
all through his graveyard hours.
It’s a remarkable machine the nurse
slides into my ear canal, built to detect
lies & arrhythmia & the trembling
of incalculable tranches of earth.
I pulled his pace toward mine but declined
to parse his solitude for him—planes
149
of salt-haloed stone refusing
to let footfalls cut to their holdings.
150
151
Tula
Blood stranger,
we never met: you died so far away
that here the moment
hasn’t passed.
An alien moon
rises. Hearing
birdsong in the forests of the dead
you pin it
in your mind’s ear:
my inheritance
redacted
to a prosody; by flow & respiration
stripped to contour,
archipelago.
Even your last wordless sounds
are in that music my mother
grieved in:
I want
to kiss you, to understand
but I have no body, like the ghost
of a broken star.
152
The Poet’s Mother at 11, Killing a Chicken
As for the bird, its pedigree
was impeccable: rose-combed & indigenous
cockfighting in its blood. My grandfather had folded
its ancestor under his arm
in a bolt of jute & the boxcar dark. He was young
& bound for the provinces, fleeing
with his bride the rifled
capital, the Arisaka Type 99, its stock
chrysanthemum-stamped, the blade
jabbed half-jokingly into my grandmother’s
stomach: swollen the private thought
not with limbs but a stash.
Dowry. Doubloons. Maybe
even meat. In the clatter & sway
the hen held its tongue, producing
eggs but no epiphanies
though the flesh of its forebears had delighted
the palettes of missionaries, good-
intentioned Baptists in the wake of cholera
& re-concentration: nation builders. Tenderfoots.
Virgins still wet with honeysuckle & whitewash.
Who brought among other things Home
Economics, so that fifty years later my mother
would have to corner
& seize it. Wring its wattled links.
Pluck it & gut it & waste
nothing. 153
Tula
An immigrant’s son
I have ears like the blind.
Music comes easily;
night frightens me.
Home late from the hospital, she comes to my door—
I fake sleep.
She sings a soothing song
in the language I never learned:
prayers against rain.
Catalog of mythical birds.
As many names for music
as English has for theft.
Using them I invent
a country with only two citizens.
The word I choose for mother
sounds like the one for dream.
154
Notation
Her singing—sight-reading—while we
were supposed to be sleeping.
Dad downtown in a tower
& thrum of the graveyard shift.
Her piano—even pianissimo
throbbed the snow-muffled rambler.
Hymns that taught what the word is: a spell
for collapsing distances. And folk songs,
her forte, a rep rehearsed for classmates
who sometimes passed through:
they’d belt them out together
flower print crowding the upright.
Afterward cackling in her language:
uncrackable, though I thought I caught
the upshot: why here, in this white cold
& quiet? As if winter could cure a childhood
of cholera & typhoons. Her hand:
she transcribed my favorite melodies
as capitals on scrap paper. I hadn’t learned
notation, but the keys I could solve, a code
checked against the ear. My brother too
& the cousins who came for holidays
some of them born in Manila:
I asked them all to string
songs into letters, caravans
braving the whiteout. Everyone played;
some even understood Tagalog.
Later not one of us could speak. 155
Tula
Music comes easily:
on note pads I puzzle out
birds’ micro-tonal scales, the tala
in which the song thrush improvises: I untangle
the incomplete anagrams of the eleven
Umbric urn rills.
My whistles are so accurate the birds
love me: they come to die in the shallow water
of my e, and e, and e.
156
Tula
One night I am my grandfather.
It’s summer; no wind.
My daughter’s found
work & love in another world.
The pictures of her son look
almost white.
Her political brother’s in prison. The youngest
floats
face down in a river.
It’s a season of abduction.
God is under house arrest.
Doors hang open.
The day before, I saw a man so heavy with blood
his soul couldn’t rise out of his body.
I should send word I’m dying but
no one can move, not even
to wipe the sweat from their eyes.
Noon, not a sound: even the songbirds
are under martial law.
157
158
Counting in Tagalog
isa
you say
each sound back to me
gliding up under ash & sycamore
dalawa
a game echolalia
I’m trying to make up
for lost time
[not time exactly but music]
[not your loss but mine]
tatlo
echolalia a kind of trinity—
a. echoes like yours; acquisition
b. ravings of the damaged or ill
c. a poet’s obsession with sound

apat
I started teaching myself last week
& even called my mother
to say so.
But she said two was not dalawa
but duha.
Ilongo vs. Tagalog. Not mother tongue
but mother tongues.
159
lima
I try
too hard, overpronouncing,
I want to pass so you’ll pass
but for who? When
I was five she brought home a colleague
a Polish RN with no family, who swore
profusely & well
& loved my mother dearly, especially her singsong
accent.
But you don’t have an accent
I said. The way she said words
was the best way. The right way, the first.
anim
You’re getting drowsy, & who wouldn’t
the park still thick with night blooms
even though it’s almost eleven.
Jasmine: sampaguita. Dad says
the scent reminds him of home:
not Minneapolis, but Samaploc
near the Dangwa Market in Manila.
They sell flowers there but I couldn’t find it
working only from stories he’d told.
pito
A harder pity: sputum
a bystander hawks sideways
warding off bad luck
after crouching to peer in his face—
the struck biker, sprawled. My last day
in Manila. Mad traffic
brought to a standstill; even my lunatic
cabbie held his tongue.
160
walo
This close to wala—none, nothing.
Even extinct.
When we get to ten or eleven
something begins to slow
& harden in the mind
—if the organism does not receive
the appropriate stimulus during this critical period—
siyam
Soon I’ll have to stop
or start over
switch to English, Japanese. Tomorrow
I’ll figure out how to turn
1 into 11, 2 into 12, a formula
we’ll both unpack as sound.
Nabokov lost sleep
because he couldn’t stop counting his heart beats
& subtracting them from an estimated
total.
Wild parrots shriek past in a swarm.
I’ve never seen
how far I could get in this tongue.
sampû
You perk up, almost holler; you love the stressed plosive,
the stoppered air.
I can almost hear you pronounce the diacritic
a roof
pitched against rain
161
although I’ve gotten lost & looked
for taxis in it
although it doesn’t fall straight & takes
more than cardboard, more
than a sheet of corrugated iron, & my accent
altered the fare.
162
163
Tula
Like my grandfather
I collect
the songs of birds.
I cut out a music box’s heart
& thread a bird’s soul into its
star-wheel & teeth.
I keep the song of the blue jay
in plain, unfinished wood;
it has the mark of talent
but a tomboy’s voice.
Grackles with their coarse diagnoses
I box up in steel.
The nejimaki-dori with the tinker bird
in a clutch of bared clocks.
Mockingbird & ictine warbler
closed in chameleons’ skin.
Bombycilla shadei in a Chinese box.
Footnote for the hermit thrush.
Shoebox for the linnet.
Thirteen kinds of blackbirds
in chess piece cedar—
the queen a Black Shama.
164
[Island of the Shy Mynah Bird]
1
Before there were mirrors, there were tide pools.
Before tape recorders, the mynah bird.
2
One datu hunts them all into cages:
to protect his people from thinking
they are anything other than island.
You don’t have to kill them.
You have only to cut them off
from anything that sounds:
3
soon they cease to be mynahs & become
mere assemblage
matchboxes swaddled
with pappus & moleskin.
4
The second datu fills his hall with them
everything he says taken up
& repeated: proclamations, condemnations,
secrets let slip in sleep.
165
5
They begin to say things he never dared say.
They argue with each other as he would have argued with himself
had he been a more moral man.
Had he had the imagination.
6
He forgets his village.
7
Like a lost colony they fade
into flora & fauna:
rhyme in the albumen.
Oil leeched into touched bark.
His dominion a noise of syrinx & back talk
parallel settings in phase.
8
The third datu makes a decree: a mynah for every household.
To pray to: alone, in unison.
To attend to carefully as it sings back your sins
the cage a confessional, sound booth, shrine.
9
Each moon they bring the birds
to a conference of cages
so that every strain of praise & wrongdoing
can be linked & learned,
mastered.
166
10
One day, a hut burns to the ground.
Kicked lantern. Dry lightning.
In the confusion, the mynah’s set free. It straight-lines
out beyond breakers
cut loose from its loop of encoding & echo:
11
light. Open ocean. Island
again.
12
Shy & uncertain
it shifts its weight
above a duff of arrowheads
& irises—
13
is it meat — is it ornament —
a twitch & thrum of archive—
167
The Silverest Tongue in the Philippines
after Jaswinder Bolina
I can hear my uncle muttering
in the stillness of his cell.
Badmouthing Aguinaldo. Reciting Marx & Mao.
He has the sharpest tongue in the Philippines.
It’s why His Excellency the President hates him
& why his doomed brother
worships him.
I can hear him all the way
from Bloomington
wheedling inside cowry shells
ice buildup in our gutters.
I won’t be born for years
but my ears are preternaturally sharp.
His brother drops out of school
& joins the partisans in Antique.
Picks up where he left off—agrarian
politics & explosives.
Or maybe it’s his cellmate
who has the deadliest tongue in the Philippines:
but my uncle is alone.
It’s the silence I call
his cellmate because he has to give it space,
be wary of its moods.
It’s big & oppressive; solitary.
He balls up inside minutes, fissures,
the spoon-dug tunnel of his throat.
Even the shrikes
who’re supposed to angle in & give succor
shy away.
He meets me at the terminal
in aviators & a black BMW.
Even I can tell, though I hardly speak
168
the language—he has the silverest
tongue in the Philippines.
Bus boys, shop girls, investors, bureaucrats, even
the cop he U-turns illegally in front of—
they blush, chuckle, kowtow, make promises
to look out for his nephew
who has the most leaden tongue in the Philippines.
We meet his friends in the lounge of the Shangri-La:
oysters, live music. He doesn’t drink
but talks & grows
younger as he does so.
He’s younger even
than I am: the most golden
tongue in the Philippines. He wins an award—for rhetoric—
& the Palace invites him to fly out & speak. But he gets up,
lashes out
at the President seated behind him:
speaks storm surge, speaks outrage, speaks velocity
& eruption.
Now his words are getting muffled:
the blizzards that give birth to me are whiting out his cell.
He’s spellbound. Horrified.
Something’s finally gotten his tongue. He can hear
three hundred miles away: a jeep muttering up
to a checkpoint. Soldiers placing the faces.
His brother makes a break for it
but drops what he’s tucked in his shirt; the blast
doesn’t kill him
but is followed by a sudden report—
a firearm
making more silence
in a dazed & speechless country.
169
Unfinished Poem
We waste nothing, turn scraps
into feasts of loaves & fishes: shredded,
pot-pied, spaded into soy-struck rice. You
had to teach me:
in shielding me
from her own childhood my mother instilled
a distaste for thrift, the scum
boiled out of bone. For me she wanted
abundance; if there were leftovers
she ate them herself.
You learned economy
from your father
his childhood under occupation, the streets
like nicked & blackened bones. His father
hauled crates of matches
& sugar deep into the country
to trade for potatoes & rice.
The crates
their own kind of abundance—extra rations
from a sergeant from Oregon
who didn’t know what Nisei meant
but recognized the authenticity
of your Ojii-san’s Portland accent.
One of those strange recursions of labor.
Of downturn & family history: Japanese,
American. Japanese again.
Their neighbors carried
pendants, kimonos, tea cups—anything
pretty & useless & hard
to get out in the country whether
there was a war on or not. The rice had to last
for weeks. Still
he managed to scrimp for an LP
the only one he could get hold of: Schubert’s
Eighth Symphony in B minor, The Unfinished,
a work no one in his household
particularly liked, but which they listened to
again & again, since it was all that was left
after the world had ended.
170
[Island of the Little Mouthfuls]
Blown coral.
Fecund stone.
Terraced rain & tricycles. Rooms
carved out of oil cans, panties, cracker boxes.
Island before breakfast, without its first cigarette.
Island of exported labor.
Fly wings & beauty marks.
Island with a thimbleful of serum. Island
trying to be a better option
for the beached whale.
Comely island
minus its lowermost ribs.
Composite divided by prime.
Island of tautological coastlines.
Skulls flared with jasmine
course-correcting the night sailors.
171

172
[Island of Fault Lines]
It was Tojo.
It was McKinley.
It was Mauser & Krag
& Arisaka & three hundred years
of brands & chalices. It was rain
& the collarbones of women
bloomed by heat & miscegenation.
It was shoes.
It was corrugated iron.
It was homegrown & inequitable.
It was nephews, friends of friends, the good
life that wanted to keep on keeping.
It was smokeless.
It was capital.
It was the logic of the emerging
global market.
It was ramping up.
Bleeding. The prepared for guest
called away across the water.
It was called across the water
but still it was not American.
It followed this form: a. wandering
b. acceptance c. cast out again
It was hungry. It went to meetings.
It spent a tenth of a day’s wages to dance
with Riot & Exclusion.
It was not American.
It learned how to swim
but could still remember not knowing how to swim
& drowned.
It was evening.
It sat at the bottom of the Pacific & listened
to its eyes being eaten.
173
174
Tula
My friends grow old quick.
They’re boxed in the earth
by the time I stop growing. Their hair
keeps growing.
Mother’s a sketch in a dream book; memories
of her language get mixed up with melodies
girls I meet hum.
My father leaves the room
for a thermometer, comes back to find me
thirty, with an apartment in Phoenix
& no wife.
He shakes his head.
He’ll become a hermit now, bits of leaf in his beard.
On the cave’s wall
the temptations of black angels.
175
Virginity
It fit too tight, tailored too close,
like something you wear with your hands crossed,
lips sewn shut.
I didn’t want to wait, the way I believed
my father had.
He was clean, like Christ
was supposed to make us—
though I’d steal into his bathroom while
he worked the nightshift and rifle Playboys
out from under the sink.
It was a wonder to find
sex had less to do with me
than I’d thought; she
kicked aside the curtain, saw a red rose,
while I came early and watched her face.
Then I envied my father, I envied
my parents, their garden with no names
or even metaphors for skin,
the river between the trees.
176
Tula
I don’t get any mail
for years, not one bill.
The grass growing past my window
blocks out the sun.
On a winter morning,
in a month that lasts seven years, I receive
a yellowing telegram: from my grandfather.
He wants me to come
because he’s dying.
There’s postage due, but we’re given one coin
in the currency of the Dead.
Because I won’t give mine up, the bleached postman
eats every word.
177
Tula
I live mostly in dreams.
From the next cell, a man who says he’s my uncle
teaches me our tongue. We work
on colors first, add flora,
fauna, how a man in our bloodline
killed a famous captain.
He has a disease of the lungs;
his breathing gets worse.
One day I hear them drag his body out.
I’m alone.
Then a voice rasps from a different cell:
my other uncle, the one whose name
is carved into a wall.
He speaks
the language of the dead, the same one
his brother taught me.
The window
he sings. The wind. I cross
oceans, carrying
moisture in my chest feathers.
But I have
no young, no
country to speak of.
My wings grow heavy—
around me, miles
of water & silence.
178
Photograph: Loggers at Kuala Tahan
To be burned together into wet cells is something not to be taken lightly;
+
only after I swear to send copies do they agree to have it taken.
+
Lank & boot cut, they smoldered against the tree line.
For a living
they laid low the mysteries
for which we’d made our pilgrimage.
+
Kuala they said meant confluence.
We drank to it
first emptying our backpackers’ bottle
then something sweet & secret
of theirs—
+
soon, we understood each other
or thought so:
dark & large-eyed
quick to befriend or fight.
+
We were kinsmen,
cousins, brothers, split
by lapse & current & soon
to part ways again—for Sarawak.
For home.
For false starts & failed relations. Days
lashed to this one
only through trade & tariff.
179
+
And rain—
tail-lit, unseasonal; drumming
the cinder blocks of the pharmacy.
We’ve come out
cat-eyed & liquor-bright, crowded
together against a void.

+
The lab tech, a Fijian doubling
as cashier, understands something
of their dubiousness
or else it’s the intensity of their wish to have
in hand
this verandah, this
not being alone, though he loads
only paper
& doesn’t bother to make the room
+
dark. Out on the broad lot, even rainwater is refused.
Out on the broad lot, it pools thick as palm oil.
+
Soon they’ll fire him
for grinning too sagely or too often
giving comps no one asks for. Soon
to give notice I’ll hunt
for my landlord’s face, somewhere off Wade
fused to its screen door
beside a number I never fail to forget
so that I have to nose among the bougainvillea
& carports, which besides the river
are all that stays dry:
slake & slag
squared to the outrush, forgotten most easily
when crossed.
180
+

Dingbat & waterway. Their laughter slashed to the banks.
+
On the white
of the peeled off label, one of them
scrawls the address.
Tahan he says means last.
+
For them
the forest was what they could see
& because at the end of each day they could
still see
more than they could cut the next
they could choose:
fire over water.
Stihl over crosshatch.
Smoke over lianas.
Dusk over sleep.
+
Below us
the restaurant floats;
the Tahan muddies the Tembeling.
+
One of us
had secretly shouldered the Scotch
from Narita to Jerantut
into shade that had never known ice
& consequently teemed with life
so that inside the hide’s rain-smattered slats
we could hold all night
to the idea of tigers.
+
Still I shield the faces
so they do not whorl or ruddle
though I’ve lost what they wrote down
181
& will send the prints
nowhere.
+
We woke to a loop
of birdsong, rising
but never arriving.
+
Nothing
slung near enough
to take stock of us with its stillness
but a troop of backlit macaques
too indifferent to change course.
+
Even in the true dark & downpour
our breathing
had bent blades.
182
[Island En Passant]
The piano I built from memory
while stranded on a desert island.
First I had to realize I needed it:
the rest was mostly guesswork.

In the end I had something new
of bark, bamboo, & grass—
a ramshackle, a shamble, reeds
in rows like maps of muscle.
It was too heavy to move, so there it stayed
going gray in sun & wind
silent after I was rescued
except for the living things it later housed
afraid of their own infinitesimal steps:
music the stars would make if they
were as small as they looked.
183
Tula
But there are no undiscovered countries.
When I get to the Land of the Dead
there won’t be a mile
of wilderness
of unspoiled earth.
The Kings & Papacy of the Dead
will have sent ships to every continent
to raze temples, to pack slaves
to scorch the forests & libraries
into cities of black glass.
The aborigines knew
how certain crushed leaves cleanse a murderer’s soul;
they knew which mollusks to dive for under the swollen moon, whose scraped meat
brings deep sleep, dreams of past lives;
they could catch birds with their bare hands;
they sewed the feathers into royal garments;
they knew how to find the songbirds’ nests, & copied their songs to make a language;
they copied their language to make songs.
They saw the population spiral down, infinitesimally, until all that remained
was a trace, whistling
through the last native speaker on his death bed
whistling
through his memory’s broken teeth.
It will all be slashed, burned.
Smoke over stumped fields.
Like it or not
the Dead keep coming.
184
185
Transpacific
She comes by air; she never learned
to swim — seven thousand islands
& not a single stroke. After a certain age
swimming is as impossible
as learning a new language. We call islands
archipelago but the Italians meant the sea.
A better word: diaspeirin. Tongues, tribes,
coastlines — scattered
before anyone took flight.
From Caticlan
to Kalibo I hardly speak a word.
I keep my mouth shut to pass
though the next passenger might be kin.
My uncle tells me how
he kept from going under: by counting
his own breaths. Jumped into the fishpond
that he jumped in as a boy. How he taught himself
to swim. Solitary confinement
is learning how not to drown in time.
No swimming through concrete.
186
You could swim through blood
but there never seems to be
enough. In one version of his death,
my other uncle falls into a river; the bullets
kill him, not the water. Other times
it’s the President, his secret police, the First Lady’s
tears of sympathy.
Lola goes by bus
to gather his remains. Lolo stays behind.
He’s anchored, has been all his life
to Jesus & his wheelchair. Can’t swim
but he can baptize. He could baptize
a whole town, & does, & dies while watching
planes wheel past: a stroke. Gone
but not his gaze, which cuts my flight path
like a searchlight.
In indoor swimming pools
you can sometimes hear
your own thirty-year old laughter; waves
can take that long. My eldest
takes to water easily; I count his strokes
in Japanese — ichi, ni, san. He’s seven
187
thousand miles away. Too long
& so I’ve left him home.
Tulang: poem pluralized to strangeness.
Made nasal, ng a sound
that will never start its own word
not in this tongue. The ghost of an action:
how a gerund blindfolds
a verb to make it still: come, go.
Going.
188
189
Night Letter to Rilke
Roses, you said, are ruthless in their desire
under so many lids
to be no one’s sleep. So you left Ruth
& went walking
barefoot through empty castles
to feel around you the silence
grow wider. But there’s always
an upbeat; always the strung readiness
of knowing that someone might cry out
& who will hear it
if not us. When I saw his new torso
suffused with purple light
as though not our son after all
but an organ—a heart I’d sung
into each night before
they cut him out looking big & angry—
I knew I must change my life. How badly
you wanted to feel your own death
to account cell by cell
for your own body’s passing.
Is that so different from enduring
the most menial of tasks, the grind
& counterweight, the tedium & vigilance
of seeming to be a god?
Isn’t the preparation to be abandoned
also the prick of the bodied life
first the left arm swelling,
then the right, finally the body
reduced to a bell?
190
Hele in C
Hush—hear the wave-lap, the hull-rime
in lullaby. English spells for sleep
rudder-cut the North Sea. (Dutch
the hushed root.) Later turns in mother’s tongue
to lalabay. English spells force
by forcing C to cede sibilance. Little imp,
it’s late. You root, turn, touch: mother
tongue a boondock song. Do loanwords
imply debt? Sibile fore-sings sybil.
Music spells 4/4 C but sounds
lapping waves in three: lulla, lulla, lullaby.
Bundok, docked in English, implies a debt
of sound. Forces sheering homeward.
Rudders cut the South Seas, spells
for forcing sleep: the Sulu, the Celebes.
Ply this hushed route; sleep sound.
191
[Island Without Ancestors]
Trade winds glad-hand the dropped husks.
No stroke or syllable has ever been made
to mean bone.
You are first, and alone, and final:
the island an eardrum. The island
a womb through which you catch hints
of the sea & its voices.
Driftwood. Whale song.
Tail end of a squall.
Shoals translucent as a backlit sundress —
soft fire, tombstone, frogspawn,
organ pipe — coral
teeming with damselfish.
The interior a green wall
sheer & permian.
Karst limestone nested with swiftlets.
192
ultra / sound
ki-bo the heart strong & fast
111
ki-bo ki-bo device pressed to her skin — turning
112
echo into light
ki-bo ki-bo ki-bo he stirs when she’s at rest
113
bow-grips
like I must have for the moth-
er-music
ki-bo ki-bo ki-bo ki-bo busong — Ilongo for pregnant —
is pregnant with song
but in Tagalog means
irreverent
sound
keys the heart
hope a homophone
for blood-sound
Ilongo (noun): the sound the heart makes
111
Tagalog (verb): to move
112
Japanese (noun): hope
113
193
Some Words
It means a new vocabulary:
oxytocin for the bond
that makes mothers shed milk at a wail
milia for the grainy pimples
on the bridge of his fingernail nose.
And before I’ve read lanugo
the down between his shoulder blades
gone. The scent too: night-
bloom freshness
nape & limb
no name I’ve found though
if it were an ideogram
I ‘d write it rind & aura
field & fold
cycle that must be tended or
to stoke a little fire.
194
Gloss
as many words for lullaby as English has for wave—

breaker
ripple roller
swell surge
sound
hili also envy
lulay island prayer [may you still]
[may you strengthen]

[may your thrashing turn to heft]
hele mispronounced as heal / wakefulness a wound
kantang
pampatulog
incantation
containing song’s Roman root:
[cantata] [cantabile]

indigenized by k but also
that much closer to Ithaca
oyayi altos in Batangas / lull with a huluna
195
huluna spare in text but rich in fioriture
lalabay a channel / between the North Sea /
& the Celebes
lulabay Dutch English Tagalog / cut by hulls & rudders
alaala waves are part of it
waves & a rhythm
kokli eardrum / a loanword /
cartilage & blood-peal
ili-ili no need for it
/ to be re-
turned
katapusan archipelago / arkipelago / I scribe

a seastone in your ear
196
[Nesology]
...the call, from off the shore, of an islandness to come.
Antonis Balasopoulos, “Nesologies: Island Form and Postcolonial Geopoetics”
What matters is a good stroke. Oars cutting the dark. Meanwhile a word on the
tip of your tongue—scatter, sow, deposit.
Through the night your mouth has begun to open
wider when you say it, even to yourself, until it tumbles forward gratefully into
wet unremarkable sand,
haphazard shafts of trees. No regularity to their spacing. No key.
The word is tired, for now, of the sea—
it will make do with this sprawl of backbone, these shoots, this sheltered lagoon.
Its twin, meanwhile, arrives on some other prospect, totaling up the hues, the
curled forms, the riot of coral gusting
that sings more narrowly through it.
Until it shifts. Hardens.
And a new ear is needed, a new music to reconcile their distance, their dissonance
—
197
198
Tula
The port where I’ll find him is dirty & crowded.
Talk of war in the newsstands.
Refugees lined up with passports
& bribes
for a bureaucratic seal
carved from cowbirds’ skulls—
the seal of the Dead.
Bruised & sullen
they’ll eye me like a traitor
a foreigner
a spy
though I’ll have come at last
to my native land.
199
Tula
He’ll be waiting.
He wants me to go with him
on an expedition: he’s one of the ones
who still believe Paradise will be a kind of library.
He has a one-bedroom flat. A window on the gray sea.
Keepsakes & projects to while away the hours:
an ancient cracked urn with a frieze of musicians, birds, & dancers;
sketches for an alphabet with three versions of the vowel ‘e’;
drafts for patterns of kinship; passport photos for a boy;
our race’s lost music, reconstructed
from little evidence
(images
on an urn
light
trapped in skulls
cognates in bird song)
the way you can determine
the Etruscan word for Etruscan.
200
Tula
— down on the street
I see we’re the same age; he’s getting younger —
I had something I wanted to tell him
but already I’m forgetting my name —
201
Tula
little waif
mudlark
why am I following you
down
to the shore’s gray light
I’m too old to keep up
& the sea
is cold
you call out a name
that must be mine
but the outriggers glide to the deep
there you are
clinging
to the gunwale
weeping strange elderly tears
into the low creak of oars
off in mist your slender craft
dissolves
I wave
& try to smile
but my heart slumps
as if we were blood
& not
strangers
202
Tula
Goodbye, little stranger.
If you should find yourself
shipwrecked
shivering in starlit solitude
open your hand
bitten deep
by my parting gift — open
my gift. Broken
you’ll think
radiating nothing into space
save silence.
But on the edge of it
delicate as the fearful
breath of lovers in a next room
something rises:
like a light echo thinning
but not dying:
causing something far off & crystalline
to tremble into music
203
204
A Year in the Snow Country
Later I married, in
the careless zoning of the American West
the sense of not only all the time in the world but
the space too.
Amid the sun-struck strip malls
of Torrance & Gardena we found markets
that smelled like Tohoku’s:
stalls with stewing pork-bone broth;
skate & mackerel bright
with brine & ice; flags
of komachi rice bento’d
& bloodshot with umeboshi: and daikon
cut down to spindles—
radishes I’d seen
grow long as oars
washed white of earth & draped
to dry from the eaves of farm houses;
roofs thatched of water reed
winter-cut & singed to strong
stems, steep-sloped against one-hundred-
and-eighty days of powder & drizzle; all that rain
& reckless growth—
grated, to help my mother-in-law,
a fierce & endless task
to produce a mere garnish, mild as apple,
pinched raw with cheek
of blackened pike; this side of
root & accumulation.
205
Where the Fathers Wait
He hadn’t turned & they were going to rip him out
& he started to come anyway
so they ripped him out in the dead of night.
They took him somewhere
& somewhere below the sheet
your body was still open: we aren’t meant
to see the mess inside us, to see
ourselves turned inside out: we need
the priest to go behind the curtain
because even in passing, the sight of God
will finish us for good.
Later the newborn smell will fade
into something less clean & more human;
later the rooting & hardcover heft. Closed
up again your skin
falls like bread & it could have had more
to do with us, I think,
instead of being a process we witnessed.
But the pain catches up
& the scar recedes obscenely
as if it were all coming undone; as if
no price had to be paid, which is what presence
really means: a remote outpost, perhaps
night, perhaps in another world, where
206
a door opens and your name
is called & all at once you aren’t cut off
from the rest of the world anymore: you are
the rest of the world.
207
Hele
little monsoon
little fist
& groundswell
they lay you out in naked light
tagged like an ashy thrush
little stroke little blood-peal
riptide
displaced by a scissor kick
there are no more oceans to cross
just the same we’ll let you go
but not today
today
you are a room
words crisp as fresh-cut eyelets
today you are a bell
pitched just high of mine
so that when I sound we sway
like boats
no blood conduction no diastole
still you recognize the shoreline
unshrouded
beaten bronze
what we sang to you each night
you fold it in your hand
it cools keeps
even far out of earshot
even deep
in a chirring shoreless continent 208
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Creator Santiago, Christopher S. (author)

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

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Publication Date 07/18/2017

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Tag Asian American literature,Asian diasporic literature,contemporary poetry,critical musicology,diaspora,exophony,hip‐hop,Japan,Literature,Musicology,OAI-PMH Harvest,Philippines,Poetry,popular music,rap,sound,sound studies,Sri Lanka

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Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor McCabe, Susan (committee chair), St. John, David M. (committee chair), Demers, Joanna T. (committee member), Nguyen, Viet Thanh (committee member), Smith, Bruce R. (committee member)

Creator Email chrisandyuri@gmail.com,cssantia@usc.edu

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c3-600245

Unique identifier UC11300350

Identifier etd-SantiagoCh-3645.pdf (filename),usctheses-c3-600245 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-SantiagoCh-3645.pdf

Dmrecord 600245

Document Type Dissertation

Format application/pdf (imt)

Rights Santiago, Christopher S.

Type texts

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

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

Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

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