[what happens when the 'naturalized' gets exposed for its artificiality, for its existence as a social construction...]
A: You had mentioned language as it is typically presented, for example, in The New Yorker. You see your presentation and usage is more value free, perhaps?
Q: I think I make the values explicit. There’s nothing like making values explicit to have people questioning their system of values. Think about it. Nobody will admit that they have certain hierarchies of beauty locked in their head. But nothing shames or provokes people more than making those hidden values explicit. They can’t stand it when you take their hidden structures and lay them out in front of them. People just recoil. They like to think that it’s just organic, that there’s no ulterior motive, but in fact there’s deep ulterior motive and if you lay them out people go wild. I enjoy that stuff. Because I write so much about family and about love, it’s not like I’m intentionally provocative. At all. I’m rather conservative in most ways.
[and the dilemma of the 'ethnic' writer...]
Q: Yes. In Drown, though you deal with the subjects of sex and drugs, you are remarkably elliptical in your presentation. You avoid the type of stunning detail you use to such good effect when describing, for example, the boy whose face was eaten off by a pig.
A: If you’ve done drugs, and you’ve fucked, what more do you need? What am I describing and for whose benefit? Who’s benefiting from anthropology? I figure that my audience knows what the fuck I’m talking about. And if other people want their voyeuristic thrills, they need to go elsewhere. Plenty of writers of color will give you that voyeuristic thrill. I just don’t want to participate in those patterns. Way too often writers of color are, basically, nothing more than performers of their “otherness.” I’m trying to figure out ways to disrupt that.
with this latter quote, i feel like diaz really gets to the heart of the matter...and i connect with it a lot, being a writer with a chinese 'ethnic background,' as it might be described in the dominant, popular multiculturalist framework still reining in the u.s. today. how can i tell stories about my sense of chineseness without feeding into an imagination of cultural tourism, of this "voyeuristic thrill," as diaz describes it?
well i think it is possible to tell these more complex stories that serve a political and artistic purpose which confronts the tokenization and this whole phenomenon where 'culture' basically works in the same way as 'race' once did, in essentializing and hierarchizing difference. finding this kind of art, doing this kind of art to break through all that - i think that's pretty much my current project. and it's inspiring to see a popularly read, critically-acclaimed author speak of this 'disrupting' as his desire, his drive.
**
i've been thinking a lot and talking a lot with a friend about the emotionality of one's first/native language. like how chinese seems to speak right past my brain, into parts of my body that remember and feel in a deeper, inexplicable way. songs or poems in english can do that, too - tap into a deep emotional wellspring. but what i'm getting at with speaking and hearing chinese is somewhat different. because it is often the simplest things. just hearing my mother express her anger in chinese. talking to my dad about the weather. and i listen so unembarrassed to chinese pop songs, which would sound terribly cheesy translated into english.
so i love this emotion-language-sexuality passage from cisneros' story "Bien Pretty," the last piece in Woman Hollering Creek, which we've also been reading in the other america:
I'd never made love in Spanish before. I mean not with anyone whose first language was Spanish. There was crazy Graham, the anarchist labor organizer who'd taught me to eat jalapeños and swear like a truck mechanic, but he was Welsh and and had learned his Spanish running guns to Bolivia.
And Eddie, sure. But Eddie and I were products of our American education. Anything tender always came off sounding like the subtitles to a Bunuel film.
But Flavio. When Flavio accidentally hammered his thumb, he never yelled "Ouch!" he said "¡Ay!" The true test of a native Spanish speaker.
¡Ay! To make love in Spanish, in a manner as intricate and devout as la Alhambra. To have a lover sigh mi vida, mi preciosa, mi chiquitita, and whisper things in that language crooned to babies, that language murmured by grandmothers, those words that smelled like your house, like flour tortillas, and the inside of your daddy's hat, like everyone talking in the kitchen at the same time, or sleeping with the windows open, like sneaking cashews from the crumpled quarter-pound bag Mama always hid in her lingerie drawer after she went shopping with Daddy at the Sears.
That language. That sweep of palm leaves and fringed shawls. That startled fluttering, like the heart of a goldfish or a fan. Nothing sounded dirty or hurtful or corny. How could I think of making love in English again? English with its starched r's and g's. English with its crisp linen syllables. English crunchy as apples, resilient and stiff as sailcloth.
But Spanish whirred like silk, rolled and puckered and hissed. I held Flavio close to me, in the mouth of my heart, inside my wrists.
Incredible happiness. A sigh unfurled of its own accord, a groan heaved out from my chest so rusty and full of dust it frightened me. I was crying. It surprised us both.
"My soul, did I hurt you?" Flavio said in that other language.
I managed to bunch my mouth into a knot and shake my head "no" just as the next wave of sobs began. Flavio rocked me, and cooed, and rocked me. Ya, ya, ya. There, there, there.
I wanted to say so many things, but all I could think of was a line I'd read in the letters of Georgia O'Keefe years ago and had forgotten until then. Flavio...did you ever feel like flowers?
***
p.s. while looking up lin zhipeng yesterday, i re-discovered (i'd already seen some of his work, but had no idea it was him) the work of chi peng. fascinating guy, fascinating work :]
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