The Ethics and Poetics of Alterity in Asian American Poetry

7. Speak and It Is Sound in Time

chapter seven MyungMiKim speak and it is sound in time In her fourth volume of poetry, Commons (2002), Myung Mi Kim raises a number of questions which underline the challenges and politics of a language-centered poetics that she has developed since her first volume, Under Flag (1991). “What is English now, in the face of mass global migrations, ecological degradations, shifts and upheavals in identifications of gender and labor? How can the diction (s), register(s), inflections(s) as well as varying affective stances that have and will continue to filter into ‘English’ be taken into account ? What are the implications of writing at this moment, in precisely this ‘America’? How to practice and make plural the written and spoken — grammars, syntaxes, textures, intonations” (“Pollen Fossil Record” Commons 110). While engaging with these questions in her poems, Kim investigates otherness in gendered and raced power relations, and in the encounters between nations, cultures, and languages . Writing about Korean Americans’ experience of exile and diaspora resulting from imperialist conquest, transnational accumulation of capital, and migration of labor, Kim, like John Yau, is particularly interested in the ways in which English is “contaminated ” by immigrants. Her rendering of English with “foreign” accents dislodges binary constructs of national and ethnic identities which assume essence, fixity, and hierarchy. Interweaving her investigation of language with an exploration of collective memory and history, Kim examines what she refers to as “the questions of translation between cultures and languages and in particular the kinds of resemblances and contaminations that inform how language(s) systematize and engender notions of power” (J. K. Lee 94). Although Kim’s poetics is radically different from that of the other Asian American poets discussed so far, her poems, like theirs, confront the political, cultural, and ethical questions of otherness. As a Korean American whose first-language ability remains at the third-grade level,1 and as a writer who has “arrived at an uncanny familiarity with another language (and having Korean as a tenuous and fierce spectral language)” (J. K. Lee 102), Kim is particularly interested in immigrants’ and colonized people’s relationships with the dominant languages and their mother tongues. Her investigation of these relationships undermines the naturalization of language and its seemingly natural bond to identities of nation, race, and ethnic culture . As the fragmentary utterances in the title poem of her first volume UnderFlag indicate: “What sound do we make, ‘n’, ‘h’, ‘g’ / Speak and it is sound in time”(13)— the English letters n, h, and g are romanized phonemes and are pronounced differently in Korean and other languages. Being a poet who is “attentive to acts of living between and among borders, interstices,” Kim insists on “practicing questions of national narratives, transcultural narratives, narratives of cultural and political diasporas,” or rather “hybridizations of human community” in her poems (J. K. Lee 102–103). For Kim, hybridization of national identity, language, and culture are inevitably related to power relations in the production of meaning and knowledge . Her poems produce “[s]ocial and psychic identifications that disrupt and (re)envision,” and “throw into question conventions of codifying” (“Pollen Fossil Record” Commons 108). In developing a language-centered poetics of otherness, Kim seeks to “[c]ounter the potential totalizing power of language that serves the prevailing systems and demands of coherence” (Commons 110). Through a poetics as such, Kim enacts her sense of the poet’s ethical responsibility. A Levinasian ethics is embedded in Kim’s radical experimentation with language and the poetic form, which executes her conviction of writing “as response and attention” (J. K. Lee 102). Kim’s preoccupation with the way language is used to repress or release otherness demonstrates her conviction about the responsibility of the poet for the other. She regards “[p]oets as ‘agents for the most arduous, most dangerous cause there is: to love the other, even before being loved’”2 (“Pollen Fossil Record” Commons 109). The ethics of this love for the other is implicated in Kim’s poetic renderings of the voices of the other(s), and in her attention to otherness repressed by patriarchal, colonial, and hegemonic discourses. For Kim, reinventing lyric poetry entails “prob[ing] the terms under which we denote, participate in, and speak of cultural and human practices.” She suggests that making poetry as a form of critical inquiry, a political action, and 230 | | | Myung Mi Kim as formal innovation that...