The Ethics and Poetics of Alterity in Asian American Poetry

1. Your Otherness Is Perfect as My Death

chapter one Li-Young Lee your otherness is perfect as my death At a 1993 symposium on Asian American literature sponsored by the Academy of American Poets, Li-Young Lee stated: “When I write, I’m trying to make that which is visible — this face, this body, this person —invisible, and at the same time, make what is invisible —that which exists at the level of pure being — completely visible” (qtd. in Hummer 5). While evoking his experience as a raced and ethnic other, Lee’s statement articulates a poetics that resists social inscriptions of racial meanings on the bodily surfaces through exploration of interiority that is elusive, multifaceted, and protean. As Levinas states, “The inner life is the unique way for the real to exist as a plurality” (TI 58). Lyric poetry enables Lee to counter racial or ethnic stereotypes through articulation of the raced other’s irreducible , ungraspable inner life erased in socially constructed uniform collective identities of race or ethnicity that are naturalized by discourses and representations which inscribe supposedly knowable essential differences on the body. Thus by rendering the racially marked body invisible, and making visible its interiority, Lee subverts precisely the logic that encodes the body with ideologies which privilege one particular type of body over others for humanity, citizenship , civil rights, and political responsibilities.1 At the same time, Lee rearticulates the raced and gendered body through a corporeal aesthetics that renders universal the body marked for exclusion, exploitation , and subjugation, redefining universal humanity monopolized by the white body and white male subject. His strategies and aesthetics for rendering the unseen visible and the racial markers invisible offer a unique and viable alternative to predominant modes of representing the body in Asian American literature. Given its social and political valence, the body has been a contested site of competing ideologies in Asian American literature and criticism. Expanding on the well-established notion of the body as 26 | | | Li-Young Lee “the cultural product” (Grosz Bodies 23), Viet Thanh Nguyen in his incisive study, RaceandResistance:LiteratureandPoliticsinAsianAmerica, emphasizes that the Asian American body is “a historical product” “invested with both symbolic and economic capital” (17). In attempting to claim “the humanity of their individual bodies and . . . the legitimacy of their collective political body,” Nguyen argues, Asian Americans “seek to turn the body from being negatively marked by a history of racist signification to being positively marked and marketable in the arena of multiethnic identification and consumption ” (18). Moreover, he finds in Asian American prose writings “not a teleological development of the body but instead the development of multiple versions of bodily signification that exist simultaneously ”(19), including the Eurasian hybrid body, the wounded body, the remasculinized body, and the queer body produced in the contexts of resistance to racism and colonialism. Despite this diversity, however, Nguyen notes a problematic “internal division of Asian America . . . between the symbolic poles of black and nonblack, into bad subjects and model minority”— a division that can reinforce the imposition of Asian Americans’ racial position by the dominant society (30). Nguyen’s contention suggests, among other things, that Asian Americans’ reinscription of the racially marked body within the existing binarized representational systems of racial identities allows problematic and limited strategies for political affiliations and critical intervention. Lee’s corporeal aesthetic offers an alternative approach to the raced body and embodied subject through what Elizabeth Grosz calls “a certain resistance of the flesh, a residue of its materiality left untouched” by social inscriptions (Bodies 118). Exploring the problems and contradictions of the visible and invisible aspects of Asian Canadian and Asian American identities, Eleanor Ty in her recent book, The Politics of the Visible in Asian North American Narratives (2004), offers further insights into Asian North American novelists’ and filmmakers’ reinscription of “their visibility ” that is paradoxically bound up with their invisibility “in dominant culture and history.” She argues that “in reinscribing the meaning of the visible markings on their bodies, the authors succeed in making visible to the public or to historical records the experiences and stories of those who have heretofore been invisible to majority Your Otherness Is Perfect as My Death | | | 27 culture” (12). One major strategy of these authors “is to recreate selves that have been effaced by the screen of the visible. For some, writing, producing a film, or telling a story becomes a struggle to avoid disappearing into oblivion...