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  • Fred Wah Remixed:"where you are is who you are"
  • Joel Katelnikoff (bio)

The following essay is a work of Recombinant Theory. The essay remixes the work of Fred Wah, rearranging his critical and poetic writing in new patterns, producing original aphorisms that are directly indebted to Fred's own concepts and style. The essay might also be considered a "fake" essay; all of its contents have been produced through a set of artistic constraints rather than being composed in the style of a conventional academic essay. The recombinant essay is not a straightforward expression of my own beliefs; it does not use conventional citation; it is not a report; it is a demonstration.

The idea of this being a "fake" essay corresponds with Fred's own concept of "Faking It" (also the title of his collected critical essays). Fake Language is the language of the outsider; it is accented language; it is language that doesn't pass as institutional, or as an authoritative vessel of meaning. It is an alternative form of discourse for those unable to speak in the discourse of the insider. Fred dramatizes this concept by showing how his father, a Chinese immigrant, inadvertently mispronounced the word "soup" as "sloup," then fabricated an elaborate explanation for how his pronunciation could actually be correct. Fakery is an intuitive and creative relationship with truth, and Fred says, "I guess I picked up on that sense [End Page 205] of faking it from him, that English could be faked, and I quickly learned that when you fake a language you see everything else is a fake."

Outsiders have a distinct vision of languages, cultures, and institutions. Without being at home, without belonging or acceptance, everything looks particularly false, including and especially the outsider's own attempts to participate. In my own experience, I know this fakery well, because I have never really had a role model for the proper use of language, and, for the most part, I've only ever been able to speak and think in fragments, like my own father, first-generation literate, who was never able to finish his sentences in speaking, who would forfeit his own words even as he produced them. Fragmentary speech and thought hasn't been amenable to writing (poetry or cv lines), but, like Fred, I've developed tactics for Faking Language to fill or mask the gaps in my literacy.

In the introduction to Faking It, Fred says that, to write critically, he's always written poetry. This hybridization of genre is a double fakery, both of theory and of poetry: it's fake to infuse poetry with philosophical formulations, and it's also fake to bring poetry's perceptual practices into the critical writing process. Fred says the act of faking language "is not so much fraudulent as generative," producing new possibilities of thought through new possibilities of language, while also calling out the artificiality that motivates every practice and product (even, and perhaps especially, in conventional theory and poetry). Fakery is a tool for "a poet who's never trusted meaning and its prior constructions."

If conventionally formal writing is orchestral (expertly adhering to sheet music), Faking It is improvisational jazz (generating spontaneous variations on riffs and techniques). Faking It doesn't perform with its mastery already-in-place, doesn't transcend its situation, doesn't know what it is until it is. Faking It is a fast-access brain activity, continually seeking methods for assembling diverse techniques in inventive ways. The result may be euphony or a vast clatter. As Fred says of the jazz influence in Faking It, "a freely moving line playing off of and against the bound chord progressions showed me the delight of distortion and surprise." Faking It invents what it is as it becomes it.

During my recombination of Fred's writing, his jazz-inspired techniques have had a potent influence on my own critical methodology: specifically, in remixing Fred's work I've developed a syntactic device capable of synthesizing the flow of a run-on sentence and the concision of the fragment, yoking these elements together under a third technique: that of repetition. Fred discusses each of these...

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