An Actual (South) Asian American Speaks from the Ruins of Best American Poetry

by Rajiv Mohabir

I woke up angry on September 8th, the day the Best American Poetry anthology came out. My greatest literary achievement had been eclipsed by some white man pretending to be Asian American in order to publish his poems, as though being Asian meant he had access to a more privileged consideration of his work by editors from Fully-Verfied. He relied on the white notion of “reverse racism” as a model for publishing his poems that had been rejected when he used his actual name. The “poet” (from here on the “faux-et”), Michael Derrick Hudson, used the pen name of “Yi-Fen Chou” to obscure the fact that he was white. He stole the name of a woman he went to high school with—talk about terra nullius and white entitlement. In his statement in Best American Poetry 2015, Hudson speaks directly about his reasons. The faux-et wanted to point out the oppression of white people by using a Chinese “nom de plume” to show how his poem had been rejected over forty times with his real name, but had made it into this prestigious anthology upon his affecting a Chinese persona.

Hudson relied on the presumption that editors read poems by people of color differently than they do white people’s poems and therefore he could have an “easy in” by using a Chinese name. (This is an Orientalist’s dream in yellow face Technicolor.) In his bio, the faux-et claims to do this strategically, as though to say: “look, white people are subjects of reverse racism.” Only a fool would believe in “reverse racism.” Racism is systemic, structural, something that people of his own ilk have created to make sure they come out on top, to ensure that they drain every last brown country dry of its resources, be it bauxite, labor, or poems.

David Lehman, the founder of the Best American Poetry series, made a statement that left most people dissatisfied. He insinuated that the faux-et’s use of a pseudonym is a time-honored tradition, and this was just a continuation of that trend. Sherman Alexie, the well-known Native poet who chose the poems for this anthology, states his reasoning for including the poet in the anthology in a blog post. He claims that after discovering Yi-Fen Chou’s true identity, removing the poem from the anthology would cast a doubt on all of the other poems selected. He believed that by removing the poem from Best American Poetry 2015 he would be admitting to “racial nepotism.” But by keeping it in he did injustice to us, to me. People of color protested against his decision on the basis that there is no such thing as “racial nepotism.”

The implication in Alexie’s statement is that editorial silence and blind submissions are what keep people out of sticky situations involving “identity politics,” a bad word for liberal white writers. I would argue, however, that nom de plumes and pseudonyms are part of an appropriative tradition whereby cultural productions and identities from the Global South are consumed by the North—black face, yellow face, brown face are strategies in this ideology that seek to represent the lesser-than-white unassimilable body of color as non-entity. Lives in the South and Southern diasporas are not valued the same way that white bodies are despite American liberal attempts at “leveling the playing field” without restricting global capitalism. There is identity politics at stake with this “color blindness” itself in that it’s just a way of denying difference of experience: the “I-don’t-see-color” that wants everyone to appear equal without addressing inequalities in class, gender, sexual orientation, and race. Yet simply put, we are not equal. The white supremacist hetero-patriarchy is a framework that continues to stifle people of color. And in the case of the faux-et and Best American Poetry 2015, white privilege also includes the purloining of identities in order to legitimize your claim. Think Rachel Dolezal and Andrea Smith.

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When I told my mother I was in the Best American Poetry 2015 anthology, she echoed the word, “American?” I don’t know which she believed less—that my poems were read and liked, or that I am considered an “American.” She sensed that I lie when I claim to be American. But it’s no lie, at least nationally—I have a passport from the United States, a privilege that my family had to work hard to get. As a Guyanese writer my layers of belonging are complicated. Claiming to be anything is to trick others about who I am. How can I represent myself when I write about “Asian American” experience?

Even as I consider what it means to send this to a South Asian publication, I feel the lie flower in the back of my throat. I am ethnically Indian—Bhojpuriya and Tamil—but my family has lived outside of the subcontinent since 1885. I claim to be Caribbean, but Guyana is actually in South America. When I say South America people think of Spanish language, but Guyana is the only country in South America with English as its official language. I claim to be Guyanese only to be corrected by friends that I am unmistakably American only to be corrected by acquaintances that don’t buy it with their hailstorm of where-are-you-froms. And to boot, I was born in England. You can see my problem.

So it should come as no surprise that claiming to be Asian American feels like a stretch—but it’s a convenient term when it comes to locating me as a poet. Mostly, it’s for people to recognize me, a category that’s neat and fits well inside American patterns of racialization. I wouldn’t claim to be Asian American when talking with my sister—we’re Coolie. This is something invisible to the American poetic landscape, an in-between place where Creolization and hybridity present a logic of migration. When I say “Me one real Coolie bhai” it doesn’t translate neatly into “I am an Asian American,” or “I am a South Asian American whose parents are from Guyana.” I use the term “South Asian” strategically—my family is from the “Old Diaspora,” another term that is given to us from the outside from people wishing to locate us with their nets of identity.

Are South Asian Americans even Asian Americans? In Impossible Desires: Queer Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures, Gayatri Gopinath posits that South Asians are at the edges of Asian American textbooks and that the definition of “America” in “Asian American” should be broad enough to encompass the “Americas,” which would allow for a reconfiguration of diasporic space. This is hard to grapple with emotionally as it’s been one hundred and thirty years since India has been in my family’s imaginations, that place where our ancestors signed their freedom to Empire with their thumbprints, a mythic homeland to which we point our dreams. When I do use this particular assemblage of identity, it’s to align politically with an entity of literary activists fighting Orientalism and oppression. The term “Asian American” is a hard-won term that needs much personal negotiation.

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Our anger over the faux-et’s appropriation and dishonesty is absolutely necessary. We are right to be angry and to demand that this whole matter be corrected, addressed, and fixed. The stake is the erasure of people of color in a system structured to eliminate us through the pretense of “good” poetry, which presumes poems should be chosen without taking representation into consideration. Yes, racism still exists, and there are still whites-only poetry communities and spaces.

As an actual Asian American represented in this anthology, I have some questions: Does this faux-et believe that I am more privileged because my ancestors were enslaved, raped, and murdered by colonial masters? Is it a privilege to belong to a long line of unlettered farmers who signed their names as thumbprints, tricked by Empire’s empty promises? But can we just please get away from only talking about white people?

My mother cried when I explained that it meant that a writer whose work I love chose one of my poems—one of my Indo-/Caribbean/Guyanese/South/Asian/American? poems based on chutney music to be included in what he considered to be the “best” American poetry. She knows inherently that my poetic genealogy is transnational, nuanced, diasporic, and musical—that it must be. That poetry is an act of survival for us. I couldn’t tell her about the controversies surrounding this task—about representation and the problems that follow the successes of people of color in this nation. How that despite what we achieve, despite our hard won successes, despite her sweat and backbreak, despite her mother’s blood and alienation, our struggles and success are still coopted by white people who think that we, for whatever stilted reason, have it better than they do; that despite everything, the world of American poetry is still only talking about white people.

What I propose is a call-to-action literary activism at its most necessary: stop centering white poets. Let’s replant the garden in the middle of the ruins. Buy books of poetry by poets of color. Read works by people of color. If you like what you read then reach out to them. Send them an email. Tell them that you love their work and that they should keep writing because it has touched you. It’s not easy being a poet of color; it’s easy to feel isolated. Acknowledge the work you love and the poets who spend hours crafting works that they hope will one day speak to others.

Read books and poems by Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Rafael Campos, Chen Chen, Natalie Diaz, Saeed Jones, Jericho Brown, Terrance Hayes, Joan Naviuk Kane, Jamaal May, Claudia Rankine, Jane Wong, Afaa Michael Weaver, W. Todd Kaneko, Purvi Shah, Soham Patel, Chin-In Chen, Henry Leung, Joseph Han, Sarah Gambito, Joseph Legaspi, Amalia Bueno, Rigoberto Gonzalez, Oliver de la Paz, Vidhu Aggarwal, Minal Hajratwala, Cathy Lin Che, Janine Joseph, R.A. Villanueva, Allison Hedge Coke, Sherwin Bitsui, Kimiko Hahn, Tarfia Faizullah, Kazim Ali, Matthew Olzmann, Cynthia Dewi Oka, Sevé Torres, Monica Ong Reed, Suni Chandy, Zakia Henderson-Brown, Charif Shannahan, Ocean Vuong, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Sally Wen Mao, Wo Chan, Kenji Liu, Eugenia Leigh, Barbara Jane Reyes, Allison Joseph, Jocelyn Ng, Amir Rabiya, Biswamit Dwibedy, R Zamora Linmark, Margaret Rhee, Hari Alluri, Emily Jungmin Yoon, Anna Saini, Jay Deshpande, Donovan K?hio Colleps, Paul Tran, Cheryl Boyce-Taylor, Mg Roberts, Derrik Austin, Dan Lau, Christopher Soto, Margaret Noodin, Laura Da’…the list goes on.

One thousand congratulations to all of the people of color in Best American Poetry 2015! Your accomplishments are worth celebrating! I celebrate you right now.

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Rajiv Mohabir is the author of The Taxidermist’s Cut (March 2016), which received the 2014 Intro Prize in Poetry by Four Way Books. His second manuscript won the 2015 Kundiman Prize and is forthcoming from Tupelo Press in 2018. Receiving the AWP Intro Journals Award and a 2015 PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant, he received his MFA in poetry and translation from at Queens College, CUNY. Currently he is pursuing a PhD in English from the University of Hawaii. Read more of his work here.

Photo Credit: © 2012 Charmila Ajmera

Column

Ask the Unicorns: The Novelist in the Mist

Dear Unicorns,

Okay, homies, this is the year I finally finish my novel. I decided my discipline will include, at a minimum, waking at 6 a.m. everyday to write before work. So, I got up at 6 a.m. to write, but found myself in a bit of a quandary, stepping back into the world of a manuscript after a significant amount of time away. Any suggestions for how to tackle re-entry? I found that I had to begin with a read-through in order to jog my memory about what had been written and reacquaint myself with characters . . . then what? Need some guidance around process so as to not feel so overwhelmed.

—Lolan BuSe

Dear Lolan,

The unicorn homies totally sympathize.

We’ve all been there. No matter how committed you are, life and its consequences can intrude, and then suddenly—weeks, months, years later—you’re trying to push through a big giant something to re-enter your book.

I muse a lot about the nature of this something. It feels like that eerie magical fog that conceals certain islands, which you can only find if you know the special witchy words AND you get the right boatman AND the goddesses agree that it’s your time to go there.

You can wander in the mists for a long time, disoriented, like Odysseus returning to Ithaca. Or you can do exactly what you did, which is to say, “Oh, hey, mists. Guess I’m in ’em. What now?”

I’m reminded here of the wonderful advice that my own writing coach, Susan Griffin, gave me over the seven years it took me to finish my own monstrous book (which, it’s important to note, was five years longer than I’d anticipated, which meant that I spent every day for thousands of days in an absolute White Rabbit panic—“I’m late! I’m late! For a very important date!”).

Susan, who’d already been through the special agony of a long-suffering manuscript—in her case, Chronic Fatigue Syndrome slowed her work, which you can read all about in her memoir What Her Body Thought—told me this:

A manuscript is like a lover.

You have to keep giving it a little attention, she said. Even if you just touch it every day, that helps.

In the depth of my writer’s block, there were days, weeks, when literally all I did was touch the manuscript.

It helped.

I’m going to go out on a limb and extrapolate here. (Hey, Mom, don’t read past this. We’re talking about lovers here, okay?)

The thing is, if I haven’t been with a lover for a long time, even one I know deeply, there’s often some shyness. We need to get to know each other again. We can’t just get right into the down and dirty.

Do you ever feel that your relationship with your book is even more intimate than your relationship with any other person?

I do.

So if I have to be away for a long time, it’s good to be gentle coming back. A read-through is a beautiful idea, and maybe even a little gentle editing. Fixing up typos. Listening. Touching. Stroking her hair.

And then, maybe it’s time to express my intentions.

Dear Book,

What I want to do with you now is ____.

Or:

Beloved manuscript,

I’m so sorry we’ve been away from each other. I missed you a lot. How are you? Here’s how I’m really feeling about you . . .

Do this as a freewrite: 10 minutes, no stopping/thinking, just write whatever comes. Get the emo out, and then you’ll probably know where to go. What parts are really begging for your touch.

And then . . .

As you enter a sustained relationship, you may want more than heat and cuddles. You may want to, you know, make plans together.

Notice I said “plans,” not “demands.” Please don’t think I’m saying you should spend hours drawing up an elaborate spreadsheet that accounts for every minute of your writing time and what chapter/subchapter/scene you will be working on at every millisecond.

There are lots of ways to make a plan. The key thing is to not take too much time deliberating—just enough to get going. One of the best ways is to make lists.

Three very helpful lists to keep:

List #1: Descriptions to write

Start a running list of things you’ll need to show not tell: characters, locations, smells, objects, moments, bodies/body parts, what everyone wears, colors that’ll be important in the book. Make the items on your list very specific to your book, and as concrete as possible: Her mood as she enters the abattoir. The key that the detective discovers in the boathouse. What the boathouse smells like.

List at least 20 items. Add to your list at any time. Repeat this exercise whenever you run out.

List # 2: Events/scenes to write

This list is short or long depending on how far you are in the book. Keep it visible and give yourself a nice bold checkmark or gold star when you do one. (Seriously—stickers are very helpful to the book writer.)

In these freewrites, try to stick with the action and keep it moving. Don’t let description slow you down; remember you can always add it later, from List #1. When I walked into the darkened boathouse, right away I could smell [insert smells here—something putrid]. I gagged, then covered my mouth with [??handkerchief? ok, describe later] . . . and that was when I heard a bone-chilling sound.

Notice that this is not fantastic writing. Remember that you can edit later. Make editing notes if you want along the way, or not: I heard a bone-chilling [ugh! cliché] sound. The air started to waver, and so did my knees. Suddenly . . . Keep the action moving.

List #3: Things to figure out

This is an excellent list to keep so that whenever you run into a big gory problem, it doesn’t slow down your writing. (OMG. I killed off Charmaine in Chapter Three, but then in Chapter Eleventeen I showed her rescuing the talking squirrel!) Instead of interrupting your own flow, just jot it down on your list: Charmaine dead in Ch2, alive in Ch11ish— fix. And keep going with your description of the texture of squirrel fur, or whatever.

Now, how do you use all these lists?

On days when inspiration is hot, you don’t. You’re rarin’ to go, so you don’t need no friggin’ list.

On days when you’re willing but just a little empty, or in need of direction, pull a description or scene. One of my clients even plays “freewrite lottery”: she writes her topics on slips of paper and puts them into a fishbowl on her desk. Set a timer, pull one, and go!

Descriptions make for great 10-minute warm-ups to ease you into your workflow each day. They’re fun and get the blood flowing into your fingertips. And you need this stuff, so it doesn’t feel like waste-of-time journaling. Ten minutes of red might result in a list of 50 different metaphors and synonyms for red, which would be helpful if your book is set in Maoist China, or an abattoir.

Scenes require more attention, so think of them as the tofu in the bánh mì of your work session. If your scene feels too big and overwhelming, chop it up. Set a timer for 15 minutes and just write the beginning of the scene; another 15 minutes: write the end. Connect them with the middle. This doesn’t have to happen all in one day. It can, in fact, be lovely to give yourself some suspense by starting something and then leaving the outcome till the next day, so you know exactly where to pick up, and are excited to get to it.

Do, by the way, accept the unicorns’ permission to introduce a sense of play into your workspace, if you haven’t already. The reality is, writing a book is a slog enough of the time, without adding a really heavy bludgeon on top of that. Whatever excites you—colored pens, cartoons on the walls, post-it notes in the shapes of sea animals—is not a waste of time, if it makes you feel excited about working. Don’t fret about wasting time.

You do know the difference between procrastination and foreplay, don’t you? If you treat spending time with your book as just an obligation or, worse, a job—well, we all know how that kind of love affair goes. It’s not pretty. The toughest instruction my Zen teacher ever gave me about my writing process was, “Enjoy.”

And on those days when you’re a little low energy, or the mists are really thick, tinker with your fix-it list. Figuring things out is satisfying, and you may not even need to compose full sentences. Sometimes your problems help solve each other. (All right, look, what if Jerome rescues the squirrel, that’s kind of good because he disappears in the second half and I wrote down that I need him to come back, too, so . . .) Edit or rewrite the problem scene till it works, or just jot a note and add it to List #2.

Look at you, working on your manuscript!

Love,

The Unicorns

Ask the Unicorns is an advice column about living the creative life, written by Minal Hajratwala and channeled directly from the ancient unicorns of the Indus Valley. Got a question about writing, reading, relating, creating, or being desi? The unicorns know. Write to AskTheUnicorns@gmail.com. Please indicate whether you would like us to publish your name or keep your question anonymous. All questions will be considered for publication; they will NOT be answered individually.

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Minal Hajratwala is a writing coach, author of the award-winning nonfiction epic Leaving India: My Family’s Journey from Five Villages to Five Continents (2009), and editor of Out! Stories from the New Queer India (2013). Her collection of poems is forthcoming from The (Great) Indian Poetry Collective.

Ask the Unicorns: Touchstones on the Yellow Brick Road

by Minal Hajratwala

Dear Unicorns,

I’m interested in writing (unsure about specifically what genre) because I feel as though I have so much to say that others need to hear. What are some ways to improve my writing? How do I distinguish between good feedback and bad feedback?

—Joshua Thurman, University of Michigan

Dearest Joshua,

In 1880, the critic Matthew Arnold introduced the idea of “touchstones” to the Western literary world.

In his time, most critics relied on their own personal inclinations, often tinged with an argument about historical significance, to discuss new works of literature.

His essay “The Study of Poetry” was the first to make the radical suggestion that we should create a list of “truly excellent” examples and measure all others against these. He called these examples “touchstones,” after the black stone that metallurgists and smiths of the nineteenth century used to test the purity of silver and gold.

For writers sorting through a lot of feedback—including our often-clamorous chorus of internal critics—I suggest putting this idea to use.

Start a “Touchstones” document or a small notebook. In it, write down the lines that represent, for you, the height of style, emotional expression, sheer ambitiousness, or any other quality you desire and envy and hope to achieve in your writing. Copy out the sentences and paragraphs of your heroes, or even lines that are your own best work. Keep them short. Read them from time to time. Absorb the rhythms and cadences of your touchstones. Feel their heartbeats.

Let your touchstones become your compass and inner guide—not to criticize yourself or watch yourself fall short, but to study. Find the writers you love and learn from them on the page if not in the flesh.

Meanwhile, write with the utmost freedom.

Write as much as you can, and keep doing it no matter what anyone says. Don’t let your touchstones inhibit or narrow you. Learn as much as you can, from any source possible.

You have to write enough, and consistently enough, to tune in to the inner voice.

Easier said than done? Then practice free-writing as taught by “Natalie Goldberg: set a timer, keep the pen moving, get specific, lose control.

The goal is to create a sense of absolute freedom on the page; an intimacy between you and your page that is unshakeable.

You will edit, shape, and craft your words later, and that’s where you can learn the most from other people and their feedback.

But real freedom on the page, liberation of the mind? That’s something you can only fight for yourself. And the inner voice you develop through that good fight will tell you all you need to know about good and bad feedback.

You probably already know the difference in your gut, and if not, you will with practice.

Good feedback resonates with something inside that you know to be true and niggles at you until you solve the question with more (not less) writing. It’s like a string of fairy lights leading you on the path toward your touchstones.

Bad feedback creates a sense of dissonance and disempowerment and threatens to shut down your process.

The same is true of other people’s writing strategies and advice (even from unicorns). Learn everything you can about writing, but listen to it the same way: gut check.

At the same time, it’s important to distinguish petty preferences from true gut wisdom. Try, as best you can, to separate the qualities of the person from the quality of the feedback. Sometimes fools, political enemies, and people with bad breath will also hit upon a helpful truth.

Like many writers, you may find it helpful to find the tribe—whether a big community, or just one close writing buddy or two—who will support your work. Invest in quality time that will feed your work: workshops, conferences, private mentorships. Save up when you can. Don’t be shy about applying for scholarships when they’re available, suggesting barter arrangements, and offering research or administrative assistance to the writers from whom you want to learn. Be a joiner or a leader; there are writers’ groups and organizations for almost every subgenre and subdemographic out there, and if it doesn’t exist, you can create it. Many writers of color find there’s nothing like our own literary communities for feedback we can trust.

Don’t forget that while you’re doing all this work in community to protect your solitude: the core time between you and your page.

I’m afraid that, like so much writing advice, we are now in danger of entering the territory of platitudes. That may be because, as the Tao Te Ching says, “The Way that can be spoken of is not the true Way.”

What you’re really doing when you write is approaching the mystery. You’re like Dorothy approaching—despite wicked witches and flying monkeys—the Wizard. In the end what you’re looking for is home: the home you’ll make out of words, to share your truth with the world that needs it.

In Oz, the Wizard was a fraud. But luckily for us, there is a true Wizard here, one who has all the answers that you need.

Guess what his name is.

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Ask the Unicorns is an advice column about living the creative life, written by Jaggery Contributing Editor Minal Hajratwala and channeled directly from the ancient unicorns of the Indus Valley. Got a question about writing, reading, relating, creating, or being desi? The unicorns know. Write to AskTheUnicorns@gmail.com. Please indicate whether you would like us to publish your name or keep your question anonymous. All questions will be considered for publication; they will NOT be answered individually.

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Minal Hajratwala is a writing coach, co-founder of The (Great) Indian Poetry Collective, author of the award-winning nonfiction epic Leaving India: My Family’s Journey from Five Villages to Five Continents (2009), and editor of Out! Stories from the New Queer India (2013).

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