The Cracks Between What We Are and What We Are Supposed to Be: Essays and Interviews

Introduction

INTRODUCTION Hank Lazer Harryette Mullen’s collection of essays and interviews is an important literary event. Like her poetry, Mullen’s essays and interviews are written at several key intersections: speech and writing, innovation and race. Mullen notes that her work “continues to explore linguistic quirks and cultural references peculiar to a merican english as spoken by the multiethnic peoples of the United states” (6). a s you will see, this collection provides abundant evidence of Mullen’s vision of a multiethnic a merica. Mullen’s politics is for linguistic inclusion: “i desire that my work appeal to an audience that is diverse and inclusive while at the same time wondering if human beings will ever learn how to be inclusive without repressing human diversity through cultural and linguistic imperialism” (6). While Mullen claims that her own “inclination is to pursue what is minor, marginal, idiosyncratic, trivial, debased , or aberrant in the language that i speak and write” (6), the results are hardly minor. Mullen is helping us all to imagine and to inhabit a multiethnic culture that has rid itself of xenophobia, and Mullen’s exact provocation is to create a linguistic environment that promotes that acceptance and openness through its intellectual challenges and exemplary linguistic play. Mullen’s writing arrives in an era of charged identity politics, and she is determined to challenge overly simplified versions of identity. she interrogates and complicates identity: “The idea of identity informs my poetry, insofar as identity acts upon language, and language acts upon identity. it would be accurate to say that my poetry explores the reciprocity of language and culture” (6). Mullen, by her own description, is involved in a “construction and ultimate deconstruction of a representative black poetic voice” (51). particularly in the essay “The Cracks Between What We a re and What We a re supposed to Be,” she takes up a ldon n ielsen’s term “interrogate,” which Mullen applies in its original sense of “standing between and asking ques- xiv introduction tions.” Her poetry and essays thereby participate in an interrogative practice where the writing is located “in a space between declarative representations of blackness and a critical engagement with the cultural and discursive practices by which evolving identities are recognized, articulated, and defined .” This writing of “‘other blackness’ (rather than ‘black otherness’)” constitutes a powerful, intelligent disturbance of any homogeneous sense of a frican a merican culture and identity. The result, as Mullen describes it, is to allow “the meanings of blackness to proliferate and expand, thus stretching black identity and making it more inclusive, but also allowing instability in the definition of blackness” (68–69). Mullen’s essays interrogate governing assumptions about blackness: “presumably for the a frican a merican writer there is no alternative to the production of this ‘authentic black voice’ but silence, invisibility, or self-eἀacement” (79). in “a frican signs and spirit Writing,” an important critique of Henry Louis Gates’ work, Mullen argues that “any theory of a frican a merican literature that privileges a speech-based poetics or the trope of orality to the exclusion of more writerly texts results in the impoverishment of the tradition” (79-80). Mullen’s own poetry is a crucial instance of writing and thinking that interrogates the profoundly important intersection of speech and writing : “i am writing for the eye and the ear at once, at that intersection of orality and literacy, wanting to make sure that there is a troubled, disturbing aspect to the work so that it is never just a ‘speakerly’ or a ‘writerly’ text” (216). part of the pathway for Mullen to this intersection goes by way of Gertrude stein’s writing, particularly Tender Buttons, although Mullen’s consideration of stein remains a skeptical one—“although i claim her [stein] as an ancestor , i cannot say that i am a devout ancestor worshipper” (26). a long with exploring the relationship between speech-based and literarybased text, Mullen also questions received notions and categories for poets of color. she writes that “‘formally innovative minority poets,’ when visible at all, are not likely to be perceived either as typical of a racial/ethnic group or as representative of an aesthetic movement” (10). o r, put more directly, “[t]he assumption remains, however unexamined, that ‘avant-garde’ poetry is not ‘black’ and that ‘black’ poetry, however singular its ‘voice,’ is not ‘formally innovative’” (11). it is hard to imagine this assumption remaining unexamined in light of the evidence presented by Mullen’s...