Restless Energies: Reaching for the Far Horizon

"Asian American" is a mind-bending consciousness-expanding category. In a good way. We should take pride in knowing that "Asian American" bedevils boundaries and eludes containment. Years back, when Jessica Hagedorn's first anthology Charlie Chan is Dead (1993) was published, a prominent mainstream literary critic, while generally favorable in his remarks about the collection, was nonetheless frustrated and puzzled by the range of authors included in it. I, along with co-author Lavina Dhingra, had remarked at the time on his irritation that more than half the world's geographies are represented by these writers, thereby making "Asian American," in his view, a label without much utility. By contrast, I have always seen the impossibility of pinning down "Asian American" as its particular power, its ethical seed, its creative and pedagogical nucleus.

Crafting and/or reading Asian American literature is not only an exercise in increasing emotional complexity and representational texture but also a thoughtful deliberate endeavor to imagine the world as a connected "reticulate" network. The challenge for a writer is to make the global dimensions of the narrative intensely intimate and relevant, urgent and immediate. The reader in the United States has to be moved to care—about the drought in Somalia, the earthquake in Pakistan, the ethnic conflict in the Philippines, the abuse of human rights of South and Southeast Asian workers in the Gulf—and care because these disruptions signal something about our shared world. Eric Chock's poem "Strawberries" lays out in perhaps too obvious a way, as I've said elsewhere, the vision of the seemingly quotidian personal act of eating a strawberry being embedded in ever widening circles of impact that implicate the exploitation of "brown illegal alien fingers,/back bent under the California sun/that used to belong to his forefathers anyway" and the "green plastic baskets [in which the strawberries are packaged]/that will not decompose, but fill the air/with toxic fumes as they're incinerated/in the city dump …"

But there is the more oblique suggestion of the fraught relationship between the internal and external in Prageeta Sharma's poetry such as these lines from "On Rebellion":

I wasn't bearing oranges, limes, or even lemons./All of it blurred together so that a mere suggestion made by/an outside force was something to be freely ignored./I could nod off, I could misinterpret, it could be reconfigured as a negotiation.

I'm certainly not advocating or prescribing that Asian American literature should always gesture toward larger "outside force[s]" and global issues, but the scope of the deeply examined personal life necessarily engages the swirl of energies that are local, national, and global, and the best Asian American writing entwines these threads as it weaves its richly textured tapestry. A case in point is the remarkable play Disgraced by Ayad Akhtar—a gripping and provocative examination of identity, love, ambition, trust, and betrayal (of self and other)—that is embedded in both obvious and subtle Islamophobia. Akhtar's Muslim American protagonist who resists and even rejects his ethnic and religious background is brilliantly conceived and executed; this is a play that is superb in its depiction of character and internal conflict. At the same time, it illuminates in astonishing ways how personal psychology is always braided with historical and current political realities.

A writer who is both fiercely concerned with aesthetics and just as passionately political is Arundhati Roy. Admittedly, she is not South Asian American but South Asian (specifically Indian), but her vision is so vast, so alive to the connections among seemingly disparate nations and regions, that reading her is akin to seeing a location simultaneously with zoom and wide angle lenses—microscopically local and macroscopically global. In an interview with South Asian American writer Amitava Kumar, Roy says about the aesthetics of her writing:

To be able to express yourself, to be able to close the gap—inasmuch as it is possible—between thought and expression is just such a relief. It's like having the ability to draw or paint...