disClosure: A Journal of Social Theory, Vol. 21: Self/Story

Editor's Preface -Eir-Anne E dgar and Tim Vatovec

Telling our stories and understanding the stories of others is formative. The process of narrating our lives helps us make sense of disconnected events, emotions, and our connections to others. The study of self, story and narrative reveals the ways in which the divisions between high and low culture have eroded. Perhaps this explains the attraction of reality television, the success of the seemingly mundane as expressed in the blogosphere, or a myriad of other quasi-voyeuristic activities, such as the rise in importance of the Facebook status. The pleasure of telling stories and listening to or reading others' stories bridges the gaps that separate us from one another. This edition of disClosllre explores the theme of self, story and life narrative in a variety of areas, disciplines, and media.

Creating this preface for the twenty-first edition of disClosllre provides us, the editors, with a sense of how this edition's story has evolved. Self, story and life narrative is a broad topic, and also one that attracted a variety of scholarly, creative, and artistic submissions from all over the globe. We were fortunate to receive submissions that trouble the notions of narration; that ask questions about authenticity and truth; that give us a fresh look at a practice that is as old as mankind itself. The Spring Lecture Series of the Committee on Social Theory gave our Collective an opportunity to discuss many of these issues with some of the leading scholars involved in Social Theory. Drs. Sidooie Smith, Keith Knapp, and Terry Castle explore topics such as narrative and authenticity; social theory and academic practice; and the future of intellectual pursuit in their interview discussions. In this edition, you will find scholarly articles that examine the links between national identity and personal history, authority in autobiography, fragmentation, and a host of other topics. Self/Story also includes a wealth of poetry, prose, and vibrant visual art As with any life story, the narrative of the twenty-first edition of disCiostire is linked with the stories of others who create, question, and challenge. We hope you enjoy this story - we happen to think it's a great read.

Acknowledgments In compiling and completion of this issue of disCloslire would not have been possible without the assistance of Rebecca Lane and Jeff Zamostny, the editors oflast year's issue.

We would also like to thank Dr. John Erickson for the ongoing support he provides as our faculty advisor, along with the guidance Dr. Suzanne Pucci has offered as the current head of the Committee on Social Theory at UK. As with each issue, this year's edition is an extension of the team-taught, interdisciplinary course offered each spring by the Committee, which is centered on providing different perspectives on a common theme. Last year's course, entitled "Self/Story: Perspectives on Life Narrative," co-taught by Dr. Jeremy Popkin (History), D r. Marion Rust (English), Dr. Richard Smith (psychology), and Dr. - j-

Matthew Wells (Modero & Classical Languages, Literatures and Cultures) was the guiding theme for this issue. Many thanks to Naomi Norasak for all of her work on behalf of the Committee on Social Theory and disCiostire. Finally, we would like to thank the members of this year's Collective, and wish Richard Parmer and Tom Loder luck in compiling the 2013 issue on Security.

Collective Members

Eit-Anne Edgar is a PhD. candidate in English at the University of Kentucky. Her research focuses on feminist, queer, and African American texts of the Cold war era and issues of American citizenship. Her article on Charlotte Perkins Gilman and the novel Herlaffd can be found in the spring 2011 issue of World Lilerary Hislory. Eir-Anne's article discussing the television show "RuPaul's Drag Race" and issues of drag performance and authenticity appears in the fall 2011 issue of SllIdies iff

Poplllar Cllllllre.

Tim Vatovec is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Geography at the University of Kentucky and is a past recipient of the Graduate Cerrificate in Social Theory. His research interests include rural preparedness issues, cultural landscapes, and social theory.

Wendy Cawthron is a Ph.D. student in the D epartment of E nglish at the University of Kentucky.

Craig Crowder is a Ph.D. Candidate in the University of Kentucky's Department of English. His research interests include literature of the Left, labor studies, and social movement rhetoric.

Tom Loder is a second year master's student in the Department of Geography working under Tad Mutersbaugh. His interests include political ecology and economy, natural resources, agriculture and feminist and rural geographies. Currently he is working on a project involving biogas production on dairy farms in Vermont For his Ph.D. he hopes to explore natural resource and energy issues in the United States/Canada and/or Brazil. Tom will serve as the co-editor (with Richard Parmer) of the forthcoming issue of disClosure on Security, expected spring 2013.

Heather McIntyre Or.iginally from a small town in West Virginia, Heather McIntyre is a second year PhD. student studying American literature at the University of Kentud:y. The majority of her research focuses on the manners in which gender identity, religious identity, and Sel\'Uality converge in Appalachian fiction Richard P armer Originally from Roanoke, AL, Richard earned his BA in English and History at Presbyterian College and his MA at East Tennessee State University. He is currently a Ph.D. student at the University of Kentucky, where he studies ecocrit, gender, and sexuality in eady American and Appalachian literature. He will serve as co-editor of the fortl1conung issue of disClosure on Security (with Tom Loder), spring 2013.

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Con tributors:

Don Adams is a Professor of English at Florida Atlantic University, where he teaches modem literature. He is also an occasional visiting lecturer at two universities in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. In all of his creative and critical work he is concerned with the self as story and identity. His most recent work has been published in The Gqy and Lesbian RevielP (essay article on Ronald Firbank) and Hypenon: The Future of Aesthetics (essay article on James Purdy). A larger work, Alternative Paradigms ojLiterary Realism, was published by Palgrave in 2009.

Chris Barry is an independent artist and scholar from Australia (Melbourne/Victoria). He is affiliated with The University of Melbourne, where he completed his doctoral research in 2009. His Faculty was The Victorian College of the Arts & Music. The cover art image, Untitled (Se!f-Portrait), comes from the series Displaced Objects (1986).

Lee Skallerup Bessette holds a Ph.D. and is currently an Instructor in English at Morehead State University. She has published on translation, Canadian and FrenchCanadian/Quebecois literature, science fiction, and Caribbean literature in French and English and has edited a book of essays on Quebec writer Anne Hebert. She has presented on everything from teaching literature to the direction of higher education.

Her current research includes the use of technology and social media in teaching writing and literature, as well as a more traditional project on the works of Haitian author Dany Laferriere.

Lori D'Angelo earned her MFA from West Virginia University in 2009. Her work has appeared in various journals including Word Riot, Dmnken Boat, and StÂŁrring.

Catalina Florina Florescu earned her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Purdue University in 2007. Her works analyze the multifarious manifestations of the writing process, with a special emphasis placed on the idioms of pain and suffering.

Over the years, she taught Mythology, Latin, Writing and Literature at Purdue University, Rutgers University, and St. Peter's College. She is currently teaching at Stevens Institute of Technology and Hudson County Community College. For her outstanding results, she has also been awarded fellowships granted by Purdue Research Foundation and Modem Language Association's International Bibliography Program. Her first book, Transacting Sites of the Liminal BodilY Spaces, was published in 2011. In addition to her academic work, which has been published in book chapters and peer-reviewed journals, she has written two plays, Transitional Object and Three as in Tn-angle or the Aftertastes ofLife¡ Her memoir, Inventing Me, will be soon released in Romania. More information about her work can be found on her blog: http://catalinaflorescu.blogspot.com .

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Jane Grellier coordinates the First-Year Communication Program in the School of Media, Culture and Creative Arts at Curtin University, Perth, Western Australia, which provides academic literacy courses to 2,000 first-year students each year in the Faculties of Humani ties, and Science and Engineering. Jane is currently working on a Ph.D. involving auto-ethnographic research of first-year students' experiences and responses to learning. Her research interests are in reflective practice, academic literacies, and the teaching of writing.

Nicholas A Henson is a Graduate Teaching Fellow in the Department of English at the University of Oregon, Eugene.

Paul Hetherington is Associate Professor of Writing at the University of Canberra, Australia, and Chair of the Writing Research Cluster in the Faculty of Arts and Design. He has published eight collections of poetry, including the verse nove~ Blood and Old BelieJ(2003) and It FeeLr Like DisbelieJ(2007). He edited and introduced the final three volumes of the National Library of Australia's four-volume edition of the diaries of the artist Donald Friend, was founding editor of the quarterly humanities and literary journal Voices (1991-97) and is one of the founding editors of the international online journal Axon: Creatipe Explorations (2011-) . His poetry prizes include a Chief Minister's ACT Creative Arts Fellowship and volume four of The Dianes ojDonald FnetJd was shorilisted for the Manning Clark House 2006 National Cultural Awards.

Danizete Martinez is an Assistant Professor of English in the Department of Language and Literature at University of New Mexico, Valencia Campus. Her scholarly interests focus on Chicana/o identity and cultural production within literary studies.

Joy Denise Scott is currently working on her Ph.D. in the Social Sciences at Curtin University. Taking an auto-ethnographic approach, her research revolves around her teaching and living experiences in the Shanghai academic community as cultural border-crosser and in-betweener. Joy is also a sessional academic in the First-Year Communication Program in the School of Media, Culture and Creative Arts at Curtin University, Western Australia.

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Glimpses of E cstasy The Public Shaping ofPersonal History in Carlos Bulosan's Amenca is in the Heart - Nicholas A Henson

One of the most intriguing aspects of the radical Filipino writer Carlos Bulosan's Amenca is illihe Hearl: A Persoflal History (1946) is Bulsoan's use of an autobiographic persona as a means for conveying his life. Bulosan shares the name Carlos with this autobiographic persona, but through the course of the book he is more intimately known as AlIos among his family. This distinction in names and personal identities is a crucial component in the unique ways Bulosan constructs AlIos's personality. AlIos's life describes a specific set of events but also strives to encapsulate the Filipino immigrant experience in the United States prior to World War II. Through AlIos, Bulosan struggles to describe the Filipino community and its experience in a country hostile to their presence with some sense of unity. By recounting his experiences, AlIos depicts Filipinos as both empowered individuals striving to achieve the American dream and perpetrators of violence and vice. ear the middle of the text AlIos describes one of his reasons for writing his life story: "it was not easy to understand why the Filipinos were brutal yet tender, nor was it easy to believe that they had been made this way by the reality of America.'" For AlIos the goal in writing is to gain the knowledge to "synthesize the heart-breaking tragedies" he witnesses and "interpret them objectively."ii The movement towards objectivity is not a simple one since, as AlIos dedares, "There were times when I found myself inextricably involved, not because I was drawn to this life by its swiftness and violence, but because I was a part and a product of the world in which it was born."iiI The swift and violent life by which AlIos defines himself serves as the primary challenge he faces in the text. As he tells his Story he must communicate and repudiate the root causes of that life. AlIos goes on to say, "I was swept by its tragic whirlpool, violently and inevitably; and it was only when I had become immune to the violence and pain that I was able to integrate my experiences so that I could really find out what had happened to me in those tragic years."iv On the level of autobiography, the persona of AlIos provides Bulosan this ability to integrate Bulosan's personal experiences along with the experiences of the Filipino community in America as a whole.

Bulosan's own life was not typical of all Filipino experience, however it did leave him uniquely suited to synthesize Filipino immigrant experience and convey that o:perience to a large.r literary audience. Bulosan was born on ovember 2nd , 1911 in Mangusmana, Binalonan, in the central Philippines. v D ue to the poverty of his family, Bulosan and two of his brothers eventually immigrated to America. T he seventeen-year-old Bulosan arrived in Seatrle on July 22, 1930.vi His artival came at the height of the Great D epression when Filipino immigrants primarily foun d work through seasonal farm labor and in the service induStry.vii Bulosan was litrle prepared for life in the U nited States. As Carey McWilliams notes in his introduction to A1Ilenta is ill Ibe Hearl, " he had completed only three years of schooling and spoke little if any E nglish."viii While Bulosan would go on to work for a short time, his poor health kept him from heavy labor. Instead, Bulosan's brothers supported him while he educated himself at the Los Angeles Public Library. Bulosan also went on to work as a union activis t and journalist seeking to improve the lives of Filipinos in America."' It was Bulosan's work as a radical organizer that best prepared him for his tas k in Amenca is ill tbe Hear1. Besides the early experience it gave him writing for publications like Tbe New Tide in 1934, it allowed him to meet and interact wi th other writers. x Eventually Bulosan's struggles -2-

with tuberculosis and kidney problems conftned him for an extended period in the Los Angeles General Hospital.xi It was here that Bulosan completed his literary and political education by reading a book a day.xii Bulosan would go on to have success as a writer of poetry, fiction, and essays, but as World War II ended and the Cold War began the issue of his socialist politics plagued him. Despite his serious health problems Bulosan lived until September 11, 1956 when he died in Seattle from advanced broncho-pneumonia after drinking and wandering the streets all night.xUi As E. San Juan Jr. puts it, "he was a victim less of neurosis or despair than of cumulative suffering from years of privation and persecution."xiv Despite his hardships, Bulosan's life did lend itself towards the goals he puts forward through AlIos in America is ill the Heart. Bulosan was able to gain an education and experience writing which let him integrate his experiences and the experiences of his fellow Filipinos. Carey McWilliams notes this synthesis in his introduction to America is ill the Heart by arguing that "one may doubt that Bulosan personally experienced each and every one of the manifold brutalities and indecencies so vividly described in this book, but it can fairly be said ... that some Filipino was indeed the victim of each of these or similar incidents."xv This leads McWilliams to label America is ill the Heart a "social classic," which immediately points to the text's alternating purposes of personal and communal identification and historical recording. xvi As such, Bulosan's creative additions to AlIos's life can continue to represent Bulosan's personal history insofar as he remains affected by these events even if they did not happen to him personally.

Nevertheless, AlIos's claim to objectivity in relating a life riddled with vice and violence highlights the primary difficulty behind relating a personal history. Bulosan's attempt to encapsulate Filipino immigrant experience and his use of an autobiographical persona raises a question not of accuracy or verisimilitude in regards to Bulosan's life, but of the distinct role public discourses can have in shaping a personal history. Through the course of the autobiographical novel Bulosan alternates between depicting his personal experiences and confronting the larger issues facing the Filipino immigrant community. Foremost among these issues in An,erica is ill the Heart are the stereotypes of Filipinos as violent, depraved, and sex crazed that dominated discourses about that community prior to World War II in the United States. Bulosan's personal history seeks not only to subvert the vitriolic racism that fueled such stereotypes, but also to confront the social conditions facing Filipino immigrants in the United States that reinforced these essentializing stereotypes. As such, Bulosan does not shy away from writing about crime, prostitution, poverty, and violence in the lives of Filipinos. However, Bulosan focuses on these features of Filipino life as effects of the limitations placed on the Filipino community by the hostility of the general American public.

Each episode in AlIos's life then becomes a means for Bulosan to contrast his internal desires against the external influences that restrict those desires. While these contrasts can be read as moments that undermine the facts ofBulosan's life with fiction, they operate instead more as moments of schism where Bulosan's pressing concerns about public discourse are disrupted by private desires. By tracing these schisms, we can come to read A lI/erica is in the Heart as a model for how to still read a text that purposefully conflates public discourses with personal history as autobiographical.

Nowhere is this dichotomy of internal desire versus external restrictions more prevalent in the text than in Bulosan's depictions of his relationships with women. The women AlIos encounters in the text often fall into two categories: the nurturing mother or the immoral woman. Added to this division is Bulosan's nuanced approach to sexualized situations throughout the text. In each instance Bulosan presents his discourse about sex in a carefully crafted manner that places AlIos as an innocent observer or victim who is -3-

surrounded by immorality. By protecting AlIos's sexual innocence Bulosan directly attacks one of the most the common stereotypes of Filipino sexuality. In Mae M. Ngai's words, it was commonly believed that Filipinos "fancied white women."xvii Sexual depravity was considered systemic and "the notion that Filipino men were oversexed was commonplace."¡viii The breadth of these stereotypes is particularly stunning. In her discussion of stereotypical sexualized depictions of Filipinos Ngai makes particular note that even Carey McWilliams, the socially progressive journalist who provides the introduction to America is ill the Heart, is susceptible to these stereotypes. gai comments that "even the liberal Carey McWilliams was susceptible to the influence of racial stereotyping. In his pluralist tract Brothers IIlIder the Skill, McWilliams wrote that Filipinos' "'sexual ex~eriences are, indeed, fantastic."'x", Bulosan's depiction of se>.'Ual issues reverses the rhetoDc of fantastic sexuality and its extreme version, sexual depravity, away from Filipino men and projects it on whites and white women in particular. At the same time Bulosan seems to castigate women for sexual depravity, he turns to personal relationships with white women to describe an idealized image of America that is both welcoming and nurturing to himself personally and to Filipino immigrants in general.

When approaching the text as autobiography, Bulosan's own relationship with America and his sexual identity become increasingly opaque. Bulosan's critique of reigning discourses about Filipino sexuality cannot be separated from his own artitudes about sexuality and his portrayal of women in America is ill the Heart. In his critiques of white representations of Filipino sexuality Bulosan presents a ttoubling depiction of misogynistic violence towards women while at the same time depicting women as representing the redemptive side of America. The multifaceted nature of women is an example of a schism in the text's portrayal of a unified persona whereby we can examine the dueling pressures of relating a personal history and projecting a public face for Filipinos. AlIos then becomes an amalgamation ofBulosan's personal experiences and an idealized representation of Filipino immigrants in the United States that is impossible to dissect. Instead, Bulosan's personal history presents readers with an oscillating image as nuanced and as troubling as his depictions of American culture and its efforts to ostracize Filipino immigrants. As such, the most productive way to read the self proclaimed personal history of America is ill the Heart is to trace these oscillations between Bulosan's public projections and private omissions.

While Bulosan's work has been receiving increasing critical attention since its rediscovery in the 1970s, it remains widely unread. A brief overview of the text then becomes advantageous for those unfamiliar with the text. Separated into four sections, the text begins with AlIos's early life and focuses on the economic hardships of AlIos's family as they attempt to survive as farmers in the rapidly changing colonial atmosphere of the American controlled Philippines. As AlIos and his family slowly lose their land due to debt incurred from paying for the education of one of AlIos's brothers, AlIos decides to leave home at the age of thirteen to ftnd work. At this time, AlIos begins his education by learning to read and slowly earns enough money to emigrate to America. With his arrival in America, Bulosan moves the narrative towards its primary purpose of examining Filipino e.xperience in the United States in parts II and III. In these sections, Bulosan depicts AlIos as constantly wandering up and down the Western United States as a migrant farm worker. Early in his experiences, AlIos is overwhelmed by the violence and racism that Filipino workers faced at the hands of the white communities where they found themselves working. Eventually AlIos reunites with two of his brothers who had also immigrated and becomes acquainted with a number of radical artists and union organizers. AlIos soon finds himself drawn to socialism and radical labor movements and he sees them as representing the best hope for improving the working and living conditions of Filipino immigrants. To this end, AlIos begins his career writing for a radical publication advocating for Filipino rights. Part IV highlights AlIos's -4-

prolonged struggle with tuberculosis and his education through his use of the Los Angeles public library and the tutelage of two female friends he makes during his convalescence.

After numerous surgeries, Allos is able to leave the hospital and return to a semblance of a normal life. No longer able to support himself, Allos becomes an economic burden on his brothers. Nevertheless, Allos finds limited solace working as a labor organizer. At the text's conclusion, Allos, his brothers, and his fellow radicals each find themselves being overwhelmed by the violence and depravity affecting the Filipino community in America.

Yet they quickly discover a newfound hope with the beginning of World War II. As many of Allos's companions enlist in the Army to defend both the Philippines and the United States, Allos's faith in the American dream is reawakened.

Bulosan's effort to represent Filipino experience blurs the nature of his personal history in relation to the genre of autobiography, which ostensibly presents the author's life story in retrospect. As Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson note in their work Readillg Autobiograpf?y, writers of autobiography become both the subject and the object of investigation in autobiography. Bulosan's autobiography fits into this description in many ways through its bildungsroman structure and representation ofBulosan's education and achievement of intellecrual integrity. Yet the task of representing the Filipino immigrant experience in America places an additional pressure on Bulosan's work. As Smith and Watson note, for life narrators, "personal memories are the primary archival source," but this source is necessarily "a subjective form of evidence, not externally verifiable; rather, it is asserted on the subject's authority."" Bulosan's authority as a narrator of his life depends on his ability not only to document his life, but to document the collective experience of Filipinos in America as well. Augusto Fauni Espiritu points to this pattern as proof that Bulosan presents himself, or at least the literary representation of himself, as a Christ like figure. Bulosan depicts Allos as suffering from the sins of Filipinos in America while remaining innocent himself. Allos then functions as a redemptive figure for all Filipinos since his desires for education and self-improvement represent the core Filipino characteristics that Bulosan suggests would supercede their destructive lifestyles if given the chance. While there are far reaching symbolic ramifications to such a characterization, the general structure of one person standing in for an entire people is a compelling one in regards to America is ill the Heart.

The relative success or failure of Bulosan's attempt to encapsulate the Filipino experience in pre-World War II America has been the focus for much of the criticism surrounding the book. In particular, America is ill the Hearfs strong focus on the plight of the Filipino worker places an explicit emphasis on Filipino laborers in America. This allows critics such as San Juan Jr. to claim that the Filipino peasant-worker is the hero of the text.

In order to depict this story San Juan Jr. notes, "it is necessary to employ a mediating device, a consciousness that will bring the various interesting possibilities together in some discernable pattern of meaning or purpose."xxi San Juan Jro's interpretation establishes Bulosan's personal history as merely a vehicle for the much larger story of the Filipino people in America. Martin Joseph Ponce, on the other hand, describes the text as only a semi-autobiography and the criticism around it as focusing on it as an immigration narrative.

Ponce provides a succinct description of the criticism surrounding America is in the Heart since its rediscovery in the 1970s: "consonant with the [Asian American] movement's emphasis on claiming (or disclaiming) America, subsequent interpretations often examined the book's attitude toward the U.S., valuing the narrative's insistent critique of labor exploitation and racism, while questioning its seeming 'affirmation' of America in the concluding pages."xxii Further criticism since the text's rediscovery in the 1970s has "stressed a transnational, postcolonial (or anticolonial) approach to U.S. Filipino literature more generally."xxiii -5-

Yet within these interpretations there remains the question as to what the sub tide of "personal history" might mean to A merica is ill the f!eart an~ how we ~ght.interpret Bulosan as a writer of autobiography attempting to relate his own history and Idenoty. More importandy, these interpretations also fail to account for the ubiquitous .nature of sex in the text and the moral interpretations Bulosan places on the text's sexual epIsodes through Allos's reaction and narration. Integral to an understanding of Bulosan's work as an autobiography is an expanded definition of autobiography based on the use of self-narra~on to interpret and influence American society. Parr ?f this inte~re~tion of a~tobio~aph~ IS based on Benedict Anderson's theories of the naOon and naoonalism as bemg an lIDagmed political community."xxiv Anderson's work moves av:ay from. des~ribing nationalis~. in terms of genuineness and examines it through the way naoons are 1IJ1a?lOed by c.o~uruoes.

Anderson also posits the importance of community in the quesoon of naoonalis.m. As .

Anderson puts it, "it is imagined as a comnllmitJ, because regardless of the actual meq~ty and exploitation that may prevail in each, the nation is always conceived as a deep, honzontal comradeship. Ultimately it is this fraternity that makes it po~sible, ~v~r the pa~t two centuries, for so many millions of people, not so much to kil.l, as willingly to die for such limited imaginings."xxv This imagined fraternity canno~ be disco~~e? in ~elation to ~ulosan's efforts to portray Filipino fraternity in the text and to mtegrate Filipmos mto Ame~can . culture. It is equally important to note that this purpose serves as the text's final pomt WIth the beginning of World War II. Bulosan concludes the text by focusing on W~rld War II, one of the largest influences on the integration of Filipinos into American socle~. ~ulosan describes it as "a signal of triumph," but one that " took a war and a ~eat calanuty 10 o~ country to bring us together."""VI The tragedy of war brings about uruty through nece~slty that allows Filipinos to serve in the armed forces of the United Sta~e.s ~s well as b~g about a sense of unified purpose to the disparate elements of the Filipmo commuruty.

Bulosan's use of autobiography to eJo;plore these issues of community are particularly relevant since, as Steven Hunsaker posits, autobiography can operate as a means to change national character through a challenge to imagined communities. According to Hunsaker, autobiographies that posit such challenges "imagine new versions of the cornrnunity for . themselves within otherwise restrictive national siruations" through the process of "speaking against previous models of national identity to establish new, more liberating, ?r more . convenient models of nationality."XX"" Hunsaker also posits that authors engagmg 10 this method of reshaping ideas of nationality "portrqy themselves selecting, rejecting, shaping, and reimagining the natio n to suit their own political and ideological goalS."xxviii In this. sense, the communal and the personal narratives in the text share a common goal of portraymg an idealized concept of community as decided upon by an idealized portrayal of self. Thus Bulosan's idealization of himself through Allos can project an idealized America that ~ . eventually accept his hope to ''become a part of her great tradition."..ix Allos can r~gam his confidence in the American dream, despite all that he has suffered and conclude his personal history with the declaration "I knew that no man could destroy my faith in America that had sprung from all our hopes and aspirations, eVe1:"xxx Amenea is ill tbe He~~ the.n re~resents a . critique of the dominant American culture and its mistreatment of Filipmo unnugrants while also implicidy rejecting those same critiques in favor of projecting the idealized America springing from Bulosan's hopes and aspirations.

It is under this structure of critiquing and idealizing America that Bulosan approaches the issue of Filipino sexuality. Bulosan counters the representation of Filipinos as "sex-crazy" or "sex-starved" by depicting the Filipino struggle in the United States as.a fundamentally American struggle for improvement. xxxi Bulosan presents Allos as struggling

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against racist stereotypes about Filipinos while still portraying their genesis in the decadent lifestyles Filipinos led in America. Yet Allos rejects these lifestyles as an identifying m.1rker for Filipinos by exploring the limitations America placed on the immigrant population. As Allos puts it, ''1 knew that our decadence was imposed by a society alien to our character and inclination, alien to our heritage and history."xxxil Allos's narration furthers this theme through his many descriptions of his travels in America as an attempt to escape an unknown terror. Allos's movement from place to place in America is continually punctuated with depictions of Filipinos engaged in some sort of vice. Allos's prayer upon reuniting with his brother, Amado, is typical of Allos's reaction to these conditions. Seeing that Amado had turned to a life of crime, Allos begs, "Please, God, don't change me in Americal"xxxiii In observing these vices Allos struggles to remain innocent and true to his goals of selfimprovement and improving the lot of the Filipino population, but this struggle serves as his defining characteristic.

Allos's desire not to be changed by America serves to establish Bulosan's counterargument to racist perceptions of Filipinos. Bulosan projects an idealized new model for America by depicting Filipino struggles for freedom from racism and exploitative labor practices in the United States. Integral to this is Allos's work in the labor movement.

Bulosan sums up his own efforts at establishing this freedom through literature when Allos's brother, Marcario, declares the desire to build a new America through the Filipino union movement. As Marcario puts it, "we must advocate democratic ideas, and fight all forces that would abort ow:: culture."uxiv According to Marcario, "this is the greatest responsibility of literature: to find In our struggle that which has a future.""sv Bulosan's own work in relating these words then takes up the task of building a new world. This task becomes more apparent as Marcario continues his speech: We mu~t live in America where there is freedom for all regardless of color, station ~d beliefs. Great Americans worked with unselfish devotion toward one goal, that IS, to use th.e pow~r of ~e .myriad peoples in the service of America's freedom. They made .It their gwding pnnClple. In this we are the same; we must also fight for an Amenca where a man should be given unconditional opportunities to cultivate his potentialities and to restore him to his rightful dignity ... America is also the nameless foreigner, the homeless refugee, the hungry boy begging for a job and the black body dangling on a tree. America is the illiterate immigrant who is ashamed that the world of books and intellectual opportunities is closed to him. We are all ~at ~ameless foreigner, that homeless refugee, that hungry boy, that illiterate J[[J[OJgrant and that lynched black body. All of us, from the first Adams to the last Filipino, native born or alien, educated or illiterate - We are America!xuvi With ~arcario's declaration of an all-encompassing community of Americans, Bulosan estab~shes. the new and more liberating model of nationality in the text. This model ties Amencan Ide~s of freedom with the depiction of Filipino struggles in the United States. In short, MarcarJ?'s s?eech makes Filipinos and other castigated members of U.S. culture the heart of Amenca Slnce they are the ones pursuing the American dream.

Yet B~os~'s new imagined community of America is an ambiguous one defined equally b! wh.o IS still abse~t ~s by who make it up. Bulosan's depiction of this new America works p~arily as a repudiaoon of one standard - that is the racist practices that castigate the fore.lgner,. the refuge~, and the lynched black man - but it only hints at the possibility of a m~re Jncl~slve alternative. This ambiguity leads to what Meg Wesling describes as "the tensIOn behind the contradictory impulses of the novel as the text seems at once to criticize the exclusionary promise of the American Dream whil~ at the same time aspiring to achieve - 7-

that myth's fulfilJment."nxvii In relation to the numerous depictions of violence that whites direct at Filipinos Wesling notes, "Bulosan leaves the reader to learn from those moments that Carlos Carlnot fully comprehend," which in turn points readers " to the sum of his experiences as an archive of oppression and violence that stands in fundamental opposition to the ideals of America."xxxviii This pattern of definition by exclusion extends to Bulosan's depiction of sexual politics in the book. As Rachel Lee points out, Bulosan's "portrait of the nation presents an abundance of absences and exclusions - that is, one does not have a confirming sign that establishes what an 'America in the heart' is."uxix Instead America is identified by what it is not, namely the numerous acts of violence and tragedy Allos faces.

Bulosan is forced "to wonder at the paradox of America," which is at once filled with whites who will attack Filipinos in a labor camp and others who will offer Filipinos "refuge and tolerance."sJLee describes Bulosan's work with America as a definition-by-negation which requires "supplementary narration, for the cumulative descriptions of what an entity is not helps approximate but does not reveal what that object is.''xIi As Lee notes, instances of violence serve as examples of what must be expunged from the text's definition of America, but other instances of intra-ethnic violence and violence against women indicate a subtext to Bulosan's primary purpose. These instances primarily surround erotic needs or passages and, according to Lee, demarcate a pattern of eroticized women as obstacles for Filipino fraternity and advancement. Lee points out that Marcario's speech about America has an inherent masculinist bias since it leaves women, and prostitutes in particular out, of its introductory clause. Bulosan does not portray these women as legitimate laborers who can partake in the types of movements and social advances that Marcario puts forward in his speech. As Lee putS it, "women are not only uruecognized as labor but appear the Other of labor - the abject identity against which male labor defines itself."xlii Bulosan presents a double standard by which the men who deal with prostitutes are redeemable while the prostitutes themselves are outside redemption. Taking Lee's observations into account, women, and prostitutes in particular, are placed outside the social order and are a direct obstacle for Bulosan's reformation of Filipino identity.

The nature ofBulosan's treatment of women in the text begins to mark the uneasy representation of sex that permeates A lllenta is ill the Heart and marks the limitations of his personal history. Throughout Bulosan's depictions of women the issue of sex is either carefully avoided or it is presented with a morality that fits in with a socially acceptable representation of sex but nevertheless ostracizes female sexuality. In her examination of the female subjects in Alllerica is ill the Heart, Cheryl Higashida notes, "Bulosan's exclusion of female sex workers from the radicalized working-class body also speaks to his need to desexualize the Filipino working class, in response to the hypersexualization ofPinoys."xliii Bulosan's depictions of Allos's antiseJo:ual relationships \vith white women are necessarily complicated by the dual purpose behind his personal history since it necessitates he try to counteract the common stereotypes Filipinos faced. I use the term antise}""Ual based on Higashida's characterization of Bulosan's creation of Allos. Higashida argues that Bulosan invests "Allos with an asexual (or even antise}""Ual persona)."xliv As I will go on to show, Allos does embrace what he describes as natural attitudes towards sex, but rejects immoral se}""Ual views. As such, Bulosan projects a particularly focused antisexual persona rather than an asexual one through Allos. However, Allos's antisexuality does not erase the topic of sex from the text. Instead, much like Bulosan's assertion about America, sex becomes a dual discourse about what is and is not apparent in any given relationship that is overshadowed by stereotypes and preconceptions.

The dual level of discourses on sexuality Bulosan engages in is reflective of Foucault's work in The History ofSexllality. Bulosan works to repress Allos's se}""Uality, yet in doing so he creates additional discourses about sex that would normally be disqualified by -8-

the stereotypes Bulosan is fighting against. By focusing on the sexuality of whites, Bulosan is able to disrupt the normal power relations between whites and Filipinos. As Foucault states, the issue is not "to determine whether one says yes or no to sex" but rather "to account for the fact that it is spoken about, to discover who does the speaking, the positions and viewpoints from which they speak."xlv In regards to Bulosan's representations of sex and sexual relationships we must, as Foucault suggests, locate "the forms of power, the channels it takes, and the discourses it permeates in order to reach the most tenuous and individual modes of behavior."xlv; The result for Bulosan's work is to view it as directly refuting the common images of over sexualized Filipinos in discourses about sex. Yet these discourses of sex and sexual repression are acted out on a personal level for Bulosan through his adaptation of his own relationships.

This personal connection for Bulosan's representations of sex again raises the question of how to categorize America is in the Hearfs personal history. While so much of the text concentrates on presenting a public face for Filipinos, the text's sexual episodes indicate the collision of the private and the public. By placing Allos in sexualized situations, Bulosan is forced to confront his own sexual history and his second-class sexual status in America.

Biographical accounts of Bulosan suggest that the antisexual portrayal of Allos is in fact an invention in America is in the Heart. In his introduction to America is in the Heart, Carey McWilliams quotes John Fante's description of Bulosan as being particularly interested in Caucasian women. McWilliams's account notes, "those 'Caucasian women' were always as interested in him as he undoubtedly was in them. Most were large enough to have held him in their laps with ease but they adored him as much as he adored them."xlvii Additionally, according to biographer Susan Evangelista, "Carlos was deeply attracted to white women, and they to him."x1vili Evangelista goes on to suggest that Bulosan had a deep connection with two women, Sanora and Dorothy Babb, who are fictionalized as Alice and Eileen Odell in America is in the Heart. In the text, Bulosan depicts Alice and Eileen as having platonic relationships with Allos's struggles with tuberculosis. These relationships focus on helping Allos improve himself through education. In her biography of Bulosan, EvangelisL't suggests that these women were not just interested in providing Bulosan with reading material.

According to Evangeista, Bulosan was likely in love with Dorothy, but was "terribly sensitive to outside pressures against interracial relationships."xlix Evangelista cites a 2 May 1940 letter Bulosan writes to Dorothy. In the letter Bulosan states that "When shall we have the freedom to talk and live and admire freely? Human values are sacrificed because of the bigotry of those who would try to mother us. The night was horrible: the people were staring at us because we dared to walk down the street together. I walked home in a nightmare."1 Bulosan's awareness of this bigotry in this letter highlights his careful rewriting of this relationship into Allos's platonic relationship with Dorothy in America is in the Heart.

These observations about Bulosan's personal life do not invalidate Bulosan's characterization of the text as a personal history. He embellished his relationships with the women in his life in order to present a more compelling case for reworking the place of Filipinos in the imagined community of American identity. What the conflation of fact and fiction suggests is the fractures in identity that inhabit this personal history as it is caught up in the task of raising up an entire people. As such, Allos's experiences cannot be read as a direct representation of Bulosan's life, yet neither can Allos be wholly separated from Bulosan. Instead they can be directly related to an attempt by Bulosan to map discourses of sexuality and race into a nationalist dialogue that disrupts the power relations between whites and Filipinos. Bulosan's work then operates as an attempt to channel the discourses surrounding sex towards a more open and accepting attitude towards Filipinos. Each of Allos's sexual encounters forces readers to question Bulosan's presentation of sexual stereotypes. The text's emphasis on antisexual Allos's persona and the social constraints that - 9-

he is operating under serve to undermine particular racist sexu~ st~reotype~, yet ~ reversing these public stereotypes Bulosan also reinforces the sense of his povate seXIst amtudes.

The result of this inseparability between the public and the private is that Allos refutes ste.reotypes about Filipino sexuality from the position of a victim. Allos's victimization comes in part from Bulosan's display of the hypocrisy that whites show in regards to morals about sex and sexuality. Yet this victimizati?n also yields a troublin~ representation of women. One such example occurs after a dinner party where Allos IS employed as a servant. The white dinner guests declare Filipinos to be "se~ starved" an~ a danger to the daughters of the elite white partygoers. h Early the next morrung Allos carnes a tray upstairs to the lady's room and finds that: The lady of the house was still in bed. She got up and went into the bathroom when she heard me knock on the door. She came back to the room without clothes, the red hair on her body gleaming with tiny drops of water. It was the first time I had seen the onionlike whiteness of a white woman's body. I stared at her, naturally, but looked away as fast as I could when she turned in my direction. She had caught a glimpse of my ecstasy in the tall mirror, where she was nakedly admiring herself.Hi Even in this scene Bulosan carefully treads the distinctions between Allos's sex'Uaiity and his innocence. Allos's gaze is described as at once natural, yet it also has a distinctly sexual result in Allos's self proclaimed ecstasy and the fact that Allos "did not forget her for a long time."liii Bulosan places the issue of gratuitous sexuality on the part of the white woman.

Allos's ecstasy is telling since he declares that it is the first time he has seen a white woman naked. Obviously Allos is attracted to women and to white women, yet this discourse is subverted by the need for Allos's gaze to be an innocent and desexualized one.

The dynamics of the scene are also important since Allos's reaction reverses an episode Allos relates early in the text when he was a teenager desperate for money in the Philippines. While living in the small city of Baguio, an "American lady tourist" sees Allos looking "conspicuously ugly" and asks him to "undress before her camera."liv Ac.cording to Allos, the tourists often took pictures of the native population, but generally aVOIded Christian Filipinos like Allos. Instead the tourists "seemed to take particular delight in photographing young Igorot girls with large breasts and robust mountain men whose genitals were nearly exposed, their G-strings bulging large and alive."lv Between these two scenes, Bulosan reverses the source of the gaze from the colonizer to the colonized while also highlighting the hypocrisy of the lady of the house by n~~.g her own se~'Uaiity and admiration of her naked body after the dinner party where Filiptnos were deeded as sexcrazed. This points again to Bulosan's efforts to empower Filipinos. Cynthia Tolentino points to Allos's experiences posing for tourists as representing a shift in perception.s.tn conceptions of Filipino agency. Tolentino notes that Bulosan depicts the way that Filiptnos become ethnographic objects, but that the depiction also points to Bulosan's development of a subject capable of reporting and judging this process of objectification. Allos's experiences with the lady of the house serve to further develop this knowing subject. By reversing the gaze, Bulosan creates a carefully constructed image of sex and se~'Ual!ty . between the white elite and Filipinos. Bulosan brings to light the sex'Ual hypocnsy inherent tn white representations of Filipinos as well as highlights the power structure of white over Filipino present in his relationship with the lady of the house. No matter what he does, Allos's self-described natural gaze is always already immoral and punishable in the eyes of the whi te eli teo

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Allos's reaction to his brother's continued employment by these white elite, and the lady of the house in particular, pushes beyond the reversing of a stereotype and instead places Allos as the victim of sexual abuse. Allos becomes upset at seeing his brother "working for people who were less human and decent then he, and who believed, because they were in the position to command, that they could treat him as though he were a domestic animal ... "lvi In this description Bulosan directly confronts the dynamic of power inherent between the white elites and his second-class status in America. Allos is unable to even complete his thought about the injustice present in the household that his brother works for, rather ending his condemnation with an ellipsis. The unspoken thought is hinted at only a sentence later as Allos declares what he hears shouting at the edge of his mind: "I will never let them touch me with their filthy hands! I will never let them make a domestic animal out of me!"lvii This declaration comes despite the fact that no one has actually touched Allos, yet it immediately calls to mind sexual abuse since it follows the highly sexualized episode with the lady of the house. Bulosan then flips the stereotype of Filipino sexuality and places the Filipino as the victim of sexual abuse at the hands of a white woman.

Shortly after the scene with Allos's declaration, he appears as a victim of sexual abuse and even rape in his one explicit sexual experience in the text. While working planting cauliflower, Allos is led to a bunkhouse for the migrant laborers where a number of farm workers have hired a Mexican prostitute. The men decide to force Allos to lose his virginity.

Allos reports, "the men pinned me down on the cot upward, while Benigno hurriedly fumbled for my belt."lviii As Allos is approached by the woman Allos states "the men released me, withdrawing sheepishly from the sheets. Then, as though from far away, I felt the tempestuous flow of blood in my veins."lix After the prostitute and Allos finish copulating, Allos immediately runs away. Allos ends the episode with another unfinished thought as he declares "I entered my tent, trembling with a nameless shame ... "lx Allos is unable to fully articulate the shame that he feels from this sexual act or the troubling ramifications of his initial reaction to it. Just as with the scene with the lady of the house though, Bulosan points to the natural reaction of Allos' ecstasy. In the act of copulating Allos gives an enthusiastic description of the act that hints at the creative power of sex: It was like spring in an unknown land. There were roses everywhere, opening to a kind sun. I heard the sudden beating of waves upon rocks, the gentle fall of rain among palm leaves. Was this eternity? Was this the source of creation? Then I heard a thunderclap - and suddenly the sound and stench of humanity permeated the air, crushing the dream. And I heard the woman saying: "There, now. It's all over."lxi Allos's reverie is broken by his ability to sense the sound and stench of humanity surrounding him. Any redemptive image of sex is lost through the context of the scene, which serves as an example of the vice surrounding Filipino lives. This operates on two levels since Alios's reaction is obviously related to the identity that Bulosan has built for him and he must reject the atmosphere and morals of the bunkhouse and the prostitute.

Symbolically, it is also a reintroduction of a judging public that Bulosan himself was so sensitive of in his own life. Were Bulosan to write a sex scene that Allos wholeheartedly enjoyed, he would play into the stereotypes he is attempting to subvert. Yet when these facto.rs are, momenta.rily, removed from the text the act of sex itself becomes a powerful creatIve force that Allos relates to eternity and creation. While neither Allos nor Bulosan linger over it, the positive nature of the act is alluded to both in Allos's reaction and the fact that the shame is distinctly left nameless. This shame could be either Allos's shame for having been forced into sex, or Bulosan's shame that any acceptance of sex must be purged from the text.

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The dueling depictions of sex in the text are also indicative of Bulosan's troubling approaches to the text's female characters. For example, Bulosan's reversal of the gaze from the colonizer to the colonized during Allos's scene with the lady of the house does not detract from Bulosan's clearly sexual depiction of the lady of the house and Allos's ecstasy.

There are numerous ramifications to this gaze and they hint at Bulosan's sexism. In regards to Allos's sexual encounter with the Mexican prostitute, Allos speaks of the Mexican woman only in terms of her nudity and her gaze. The descri.ption of sex is entirely on~-si~ed and the woman's voice breaks the idealistic dream by dedanng the event over and asking If Alios liked it. As Lee and Higashida have pointed out, Bulosan's depiction of women is parti~arly troubling, but his attitudes towards women are not an issue Bulosan completely ignores In the text. In a later episode Allos describes his feelings about women who would evoke emotions in him. Allos declares he is afraid "of such emotions because they emanated from pity," which he seeks to harden himself against. lxii With some .level. of re~0r.se All~s admits, "I hurled contempt at women who tried to arouse deep emotIons In me. Ixw Alios s admission comes after he has a drunken evening with a married woman named Teresa who begins crying after Allos's repeated attemptS to touch her. Teresa is later revealed to have an unhappy married life. This revelation leads Allos to contemplate whether there is "a happy situation in the world outside of books" and to reflect on his studies. lxiv Bulosan here emphasizes the creative power of literature, but in doing so he overwrites Alios's own culpability or his implicitly sexual approaches towards Teresa. While Allos may present literature as a redemptive place for happy situations, a reader of hllenca is in the Heart may have a difficult time agreeing given Allos's blase attitude toward Teresa.

Allos's pity or disdain for women is often dependent upon the social class of the women in question. Allos's reaction to the socially elite white lady of the house leaves no mistake about Bulosan's contempt for the upper class or for racist whites. In the case of the Mexican prostitute, or other prostitutes in the te.xt, Bulosan's descriptions hint at his discomfort towards his own social position and, at times, the victimization of these women.

Of particular importance to this relationship is the way that the victimized women, prostitutes or not, remind him of his sisters. This is present in two particular cases. The first occurs when Allos overhears a young woman being raped on a train going to California early during his time in America. The woman reminds Allos of his olde.r sister Francisca and Allos notes how "innocent-looking she was, and forlorn, and I felt that there was a bond between us, a bond of fear and a common loneliness."lxv The second instance occurs when Allos directly alludes to his sisters when he meetS Marian, a woman who cares for Allos after whites attack him for being a labor agitator. .

Marian is essentially a mother figure in the text and she works to support Allos's educatIon before she dies from syphilis. After taking Allos in she tells him, ''I'll help you. I'll work for you. You will have no obligations. What I would like is to have someone to c~e for, and it should be you who are young."lxvi Allos notes how Marian's hands show the SignS of manual labor and he states "my heart ached, for this woman was like my little sisters in Binalonan. I turned away from her, remembering how I had walked familiar roads with my mother."I"'i Marian's familial-like role is undermined by what Bulosan omits from the text. It is unclear how Marian is able to financially support Allos though prostitution is a possibility as she often disappears only to reappear later w:ith large amounts of money for Allos. Whatever the source of the money, Bulosan elides the issue of sex in regards to Marian's death from . syphilis. Allos's pity in these reminders of his sisters point to the distinct possibility that his sisters may have been forced into prostitution themselves due to the family's financial . situation in the Philippines. When Allos first sees a prostitute he is told "there are many gJIls like her in Manila ... they came from the provinces hoping to find work in the city. But look where they have landed."lxvlil From the limited perspective provided in A,I/eI1Ca is ill the Heart, - 12 -

the reader can find it well within the realm of possibility that AlIos's sisters may have gone to Manila or other cities seelcing money and were forced into prostitution. This in turn enhances Bulosan's focus on AlIos's victimization since it ties him closer to the victimization of many of the women and prostitutes found throughout the text While victimization is integral to the representation of women in the text, it is also important to note the instances where women are not depicted as merely victims, but also as actors suffused with their own agency. These women are intellectuals who influence AlIos's own intellectual and political growth, but who have the fiscal stability to avoid the fate of prostitution that haunts so many of the other women in the text. Higashida argues that the systemic crises of the Depression decade "provided some women with opportunities to insert themselves into, and rearticulate the terms of struggles of global significance."Wx The emphasis on these women in the text leads Higashida to conclude that "even as Bulosan evacuates women's issues from the fight for democracy ... he testifies to the ways in which white female radical intellectuals refuted the very logic of brotherhood that he adopts, which would segregate women from the most salient political issues of the time."lxx It is intriguing to note that it is a similar systemic failure, namely the Depression and World War II, which facilitates Bulosan's efforts at reimagining the place of Filipinos in American society.

Bulosan's struggle against discrimination in America is il1 the Hearl illuminates the utilization of these systemic failures to build something new. The question that faces Bulosan's work is whether he subverts one discrimination by implicitly replicating it on another community.

This implicit replication of discrimination is the case for many of the women Bulosan describes in the text Yet Bulosan also portrays women in positive terms that, while not entirely liberating, nevertheless identify them with the improved America he is striving for. For AlIos these women come to represent the idealized America he is trying to find. In regards to one of these women, Eileen Odell, AlIos declares "she was undeniably the America I had wanted to find. "wi This America is not a country or an object, but rather it is "human, good, and real."lxxii AlIos's attachment to Eileen hints at Bulosan's own attraction to Dorothy Babb, the real life inspiration for Eileen. This attraction to a woman leads to AlIos's most explicit description of America. AlIos's description of Alice and Eileen's lives suggest that they had a life of poverty, but that Alice had grown up "rapidly and had sent herself through school" as well as helped Eileen do the same.luiii Alice and Eileen both have backgrounds that mirror AlIos's own attempts to escape poverty, gain education, and engage in radical politics. The result of this background is that Alice and Eileen are "decm!' white women who stand out as the gendered - but not sexualized - representation of what America can be. wiv Wh.at.B~osan projects this v.ersion of America to be though is a white woman supporting SOCialist Ideas and sympathelJc toward - if not attracted to - a Filipino intellectual.

According to Higashida, "Bulosan undoubtedly idealizes these women such that they figure as s~ogate moth.e:s for .AlIos, but they are still unmistakably represented as political subjects who parlJclpate ill the struggle over the meaning of the war between Labor and Capital."lxxv Notably, Bulosan chooses Eileen as a figure for America rather than another mothe~ figure: Miriam. The idealization of America then must hide both the personal attraclJon that Bulosan had for the women in his life and any hint of overt sexuality.

This idealization of America and of AlIos's relationship with a woman cannot override the text's outright violence towards women at times and its problematic portrayal of women in general. As Higashida is careful to note, AlIos's antisexual persona does not free ~ul~san from culpa~ility of sexism in his depiction of prostitutes in the text. She states, 'Thi~ fe~r of sexuality buttresses Bulosan's refusal to perceive the material realities of proslJtulJon and sexual abuse, which at best he perceives to be the bestialization of women and men; at worst, he implies that women invite violence upon themselves."lxxvl The most - 13 -

problematic scene Bulosan depicts between AlIos and a woman occurs when AlIos meets Helen, an agent of anti-union interests who serves as an antithetical figure to the idealized Eileen. Helen is a highly sexual figure who lives "as husband and wife" with multiple Filipino men , but she is also a woman that AlIos has no attraction towards.lxxvii While Bulosan makes Helen's status as an anti-union provocateur through her actions in undermining a number of union efforts at organizing, it is important to note AlIos's reaction to her. Once Helen admits her hatred of Filipinos, AlIos strikes "her in the face with a telephone receiver" with enough strength that it causes something to fall from her mouth.lxxviU After being restrained, AlIos focuses on the damage done to the Filipino labor movement by Helen's machinations rather than a reflection on his own actions. The damage that he does to Helen is, to Bulosan, not worth reporting as it is only "something" that falls from her mouth rather than a more specific description. Further, Helen becomes symbolic of whites, and white women seelcing to hold back Filipino empowerment. If Eileen serves as a symbol of an idealized America, Helen represents the racist and exploitative side of America.

Contrasts such as those between Eileen and Helen serve to highlight Bulosan's discourse on sex in his personal history. It is not enough to argue that Bulosan merely presented a sexist portrayal of women in the text or that he was solely interested in the advancement of Filipino immigrants while everything else fell to the wayside. Instead Bulosan's discourse in America is ill the Hearl oscillates between the multiple purposes behind his self-portrayal. Sex and sc.'CUal relationships between Filipino men and white women were central to the question of Filipino empowerment and equality in the United States thanks to the prevalence of anti-miscegenation laws. But it was also personally important to Bulosan through his relationships with white women like Dorothy Babb. What we can conclude from Bulosan's representation of these issues is that he faced an impossible task in subverting stereotypes about Filipinos by subverting his own sexuality. The schisms between identity and the portrayal of sexuality in the text note the limitations of the idealized persona Bulosan was forced to create for himself in the name of political empowerment for Filipinos.

The last appearance of Helen and AlIos's violence against her ultimately mark both Bulosan's troubling portrayal of women as well as the limitations of an overt sc.\.-ua.l discourse that subverts sexuality in favor of the Filipino labor movement. As Jennifer P. Ting argues "sexuality is thoroughly political" and Bulosan's personal issues with se},:uality and sexual identity must then be read as a discourse that is not secondary to that of nationalistic reform but one concomitant to it. wilt Any attempt to decipher Bulosan's self representation must take into account both Bulosan's nationalistic purpose as well as the demands of his personal se}(Uality and relations with the women in his life. Within these relationships exists the inextricable connection between sell:uality and violence.

This connection is best seen in the repetition of a particular description that Bulosan uses at two different points in America is ill the Hearl. At the end of part I AlIos is confronted with a prostitute and a client having sex. The experience is so shocking to AlIos that he is unable to articulate his feelings and he ends up running away from the scene. After running away, AlIos states, "I put my arms around a post and tried to ease the wild beating of my heart. I wanted to cry. Suddenly, I started beating the post with my fists."lm Much later in life AlIos has a similar reaction, but this time in response to an assault by police officers.

After AlIos and a group of prominent Filipinos are humiliated when two police detectives unwarrantedly interrupt their dinner AlIos flies into a rage. He gets a gun and contemplates murder and is only stopped when his brother Marcario takes the gun away. AlIos describes how "for a moment I looked at him with hatred, then I turned, went to my bed, and lay face down, holding my chest against the wild beating of my heart."lxxxi In both of these scenes Allos's heart remains at the center of the description. It is a wild thing that AlIos struggles to - 14 -

control and in both cases Allos has turned to violence in some way. At the same time these scenes point towards the symbolic importance of Allos's heart. In order to describe an idealized America, Bulosan chooses to describe it as being in the heart. As such, he uses interpersonal relationships with women as a means of exploring the numerous facets of Filipino experience in America. If Allos's struggles with the wild beating of his heart suggest anything. it is the inexorable connection between sex and violence in the text. Whatever Bulosan's personal shortcomings in regards to sexism, he remains trapped by a racist rhetoric regarding sex. As such, each of Bulosan's efforts to express sexual relationships is always already marked by this violence and a sense of Allos's victimization in a set of depictions that Bulosan could not entirely control as his personal history necessarily reacted to public need. It is only by tracing these moments of subversion of the personal that the te.xt can truly be seen as a personal history.

Notes: 1. Carlos Bulosan, AU/erico is in Ihe Hearl: A Personol Hislory, (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2000),152.

2. Ibid.

3. Ibid.

4. Ibid.

5. E. San Juan ]r. On Btroll/ing Filipino: Stleded lf7ritings ofCorios BlilosOII, (philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1995), 3.

6. Carey McWilliams, introduction to AII/erico is in Ihe Heorl: A Personol Hislory, (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2000), xv 7. San] uan ] r., On Becoll/ing Filipino, 3.

8. McWilliams, introduction to AII/erico is in Ihe Heorl, xv 9. San Juan ]r., On Becoll/ing Filipino, 6 10. Susan Evangelista, Corlos Bliloson ond His Poetry: A Biogropl!J ond Anlhology. (Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 1985), 10 11. Ibid., 11-12 12. McWilliams, introduction to AII/erico is in Ihe Hearl, xvii 13. San]uan]r., On Becoll/ingFilipino, 37 14. Ibid.

15. McWilliams, introduction to AII/erico is in Ihe Heorl, vii.

16. Ibid.

17. Ngai, Mae M. III/possible SlIbjecls: Illegol Aliens ond Ihe Maleing ofModem AII/erico, (princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 110.

18. Ibid.

19. Ibid., 117.

20. Sidoni.e Smith and ] ulia Watson. &oding A lilobiogropl!J: A Gllide for Inlerp~ting Ufo NOTTotilltS (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota Press, 2001), 6.

21. E. San]uan ]r., Corlos Blilosan ond Ihe IlIIoginoh'on oflhe Closs Slmggle (Que?on: University of the Philippines Press, 1972), 94.

22. Mattin Joseph Ponce, "On Becoming Socially Articulate: Transnational Bulosan," JOllmal of Asian AII/ericon Stlldies 8, no.l (2005): 51.

23. Ibid.

24. Benedict Anderson, lJl/ogined COII/lllllnilies: Reflections on Ihe Origin and Sp~ad ofNationolisll/. (New York: Verso, 1991), 6.

25. Ibid., 7.

26. Bulosan, AII/erico, 319.

27. Steven V. Hunsaker, introduction to A lilobiogropl!J ond National Idenlity in Ihe A lllmcos (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1999), 5.

28. Ibid., 6.

29. Bulosan, AII/erico, 327.

30. Ibid., 327.

31. Ibid., 141.

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32. Ibid., 135.

33. Ibid., 126.

34. Ibid., 188.

35. Ibid.

36. Ibid., 188-189. . , All . I . h 37. Meg Wesling, "Colonial Education and the Politics of Kn~wled~ l~ Carlos Bulosan. s 'mco s III I e Hearl." MELUS: The jOllrnol of Ihe Soriety for Ihe SllIdy of Ihe Mlllh -Elhll/c LJlerolll~ of Ihe UII/led Sioies 32 no.2 (2007): 58.

T .

38. Ibid., 73. . . .

39. Rachel C. Lee, The AII/ericos of Asian Alllericon Lilerolll~: Gendmd Fldlons ofNohon ond ronsnohon (princeton, N]: Princeton University Press, 1999). 21.

40. Bulosan, AII/erico, 147.

41. Lee, The AII/ericos ofAsion AII/ericon Lilerolll~, 25.

~.~.,D. ., .

Bul d 43. Cheryl Higashida, ''Re-Signed Subjects: Women, Work, and World 10 th.e Flcoon.ofCarios . os~ an Hisaye YamamotO" in Tronsnotionol Asion Alllericon Lilerofll~: Siles ond Tronnls, ed. Shirley Geok-Lin Lim (philidelphia: Temple University Press. 2006), 44.

44. Ibid.

. ks 1980\ 11 45. Michel Foucault. The Hislory of Sexllolity Volllllle I: An Introdllction. (New York: V10tage Boo . , ".

46. Ibid.

47. McWilliams, introduction to AII/erica is in Ihe Heorl, viii.

48. Evangelista, Corlos Bliloson ond His Poetry: A Biogropl!J ond Anlhology, 12.

49. Ibid.

50. Ibid., 13.

51. Bulosan, Alllmi'o, 141.

52. Ibid.

53. Ibid.

54. Ibid., 67.

55. Ibid.

56. Ibid., 142.

57. Ibid.

58. Ibid., 159.

59. Ibid.

60. Ibid., 160.

61. Ibid., 159-160.

62. Ibid., 258.

63. Ibid.

64. Ibid., 260.

65. Ibid., 11 5.

66. Ibid., 212.

67. Ibid., 211.

68. Ibid., 92.

69. Higashida, "Re-Signed Subjects," 46.

70. Ibid., 47.

71. Bulosan, Alllmca, 235.

72. Ibid.

73. Ibid., 230.

74. Ibid., 229.

75. Higashida, "Re-Signed Subjects," 47.

76. Higashida, "Re-Signed Subjects," 44.

77. Bulosan, Alllerica, 200.

78. Ibid., 203.

79. Jinnifer P Ting, "The Power of Sexuality," jOllrnol ofAsian Alllerican Stlldiu. 1 no.l (1998): 66.

80. Bulosan, All/erica, 93.

81. Ibid., 308.

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Works Cited:

Anderson, Benedict. Imagined COllJmllnities: Reflections 011 the Origil1 and Spread ojNationalism.

New York: Verso, 1991.

Bulosan, Carlos. America is ill the Heart: A Personal History. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2000.

Espiritu, Augusto Fauni. "Suffering and Passion: Carlos Bulosan." Five Faces ojExile: The Nation and FtiipinoAmerical1 Illtellectuais. Stanford: Stanford University Press. 2005.

Evangelista, Susan. Carlos Bulosal1 and His Poetry: A Biography and Anthology. Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 1985.

Foucault, Michel. The History ojSexllality Volume I: An Introdllctiorl. New York: Vintage Books, 1980.

Higashida, Cheryl. "Re-Signed Subjects: Women, Work, and World in the Fiction of Carlos Bulosan and Hisaye Yamamoto." In Transnational Asian Arllerican Literature: Siles and Transits, edited by Shirley Geok-Lin Lim. Philidelphia: Temple University Press, 2006: 29-54.

Hunsaker, Steven V. Introduction to Atltobiography and National Identity ill the Americas.

Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1999.

Lee, Rachel C. The Amtncas ojAsian American Literature: Gel1dered Fictions ojNatioll al1d Transnation. Princeton, N]: Princeton University Press, 1999.

McWilliams, Carey introduction to America is in the Heart: A Personal History. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2000.

Ngai, Mae M. Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making ojModem America. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 2004.

Ponce, Marrin Joseph. "On Becoming Socially Articulate: Transnational Bulosan," joumal ojAsian American Studies 8, no.1 (2005): 49-80.

San Juan Jr. E. Carlos Bulosan and the Imagination oj the Class Stmggle. Quezon: University of the Philippines Press, 1972.

- . On Becoming Filipino: Selected Wnlings oj Carlos Eulosan. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1995.

Smith, Sidonie, and Julia Watson. Reading Autobiography: A Gllide for Interpreting Life Narratives (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota Press, 2001), Ting, Jinnifer P. ''The Power of Sexuality," jOllmal ojAsian American Studies. 1 no.1 (1998): 65-82.

Tolentino, Cynthia. "In a 'Training Center for the Skilled Servants of Mankind': Carlos - 17 -

.

Bulosan's Professional Filipinos in the Age of Benevolent Supremacy." American Literatlire 80 no.2 (2008): 381-406.

W lin M "Colonial Education and the Politics of Knowledge in Carlos Bulosan's es g, ego . of h '''. I . E h . . Istile . th Hea. rt" MELUS'. The Joumal Of the Soaer"for the Stutfy 0 t e lvLilitz- t mc ~::/ A ",mca Literatllre oj the United States 32 no.2 (2007): 55-7

e

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Telling Stories from Haiti Dany Laferriere and Authenticzty and Authority in Autobiography - Lee Skallerup Bessette

Introduction On June 27, 2011, the website GOOD.is published the article "I'm Gonna eed You to Fight Me On This" by journalist Mac McClelland. i In it, she describes her PTSD, acquired when she was sent to cover the rapes that were taking place in Haiti postearthquake. As McClelland watched one rape victim reduced to hysterics when they spotted one of her rapists, McClelland suffered her own trauma. As a result, McClelland negotiated to be "raped" violently by a friend in order to overcome her PTSD. Within hours, the backlash against McClelland's piece had appeared online.

The most widdy-circulated reaction comes from a group of 36 female reporters who have lived in and written about Haiti for years. In an open letter to the editors of GOOD.is, the women write: In writing about a country filled with guns, "ugly chaos" and "gang-raping monsters who prowl the flimsy encampments," she lMcClelIand] paints Haiti as a heart-ofdarkness dystopia, which serves to highlight her own personal bravery for having gone there in the first place. She makes use of stereotypes about Haiti that would be better left in an earlier century: the savage men consumed by their own lust, the omnipresent violence and chaos, the danger encoded in a black republic's D A. Unfortunatdy, most Haitian women are not offered escapes from the possibility of violence in the camps in the form of passports and tickets home to another country.

For the thousands of displaced women around Port-au-Prince, the threat of rape is tragically high. But the image of Haiti that Ms. McClelland paints only contributes to their continued marginalization. While we are glad that Ms. McClelland had achieved a sort of peace within, we would encourage her, next time, not to make Haiti a casualty in the process."

Michad Deibert, another journalist who has also lived in and written about Haiti, comments that "I don't think I have ever read something that has viscerally struck me as more narcissistic as a piece of writing about rhls country I dearly love" and asks if the future of journalism is, indeed, ''Where the suffering and struggle for survival of the majority of the world's population merdy provides a backdrop for navd-gazing to even further promote what has already become our incredibly inward-looking, sdf-referential culture?"iii Perhaps, however, the most disturbing aspect of rhls situation is the one voice and story that is completely subsumed by first McClelland, then by those who would criticize her; the voice and narrative of the rape victim who "triggered" McClelland's PTSD. In an essay published on essence.com, Haitian-American author Edwidge Danticat gives voice to Sybille/K* (as she is referred to in McClelland's essay/article/1\vitter feed). Danticat, \vith K* /Sybille's permission, reveals that McClelland live-tweeted K*/Sybille's post-rape ordeal, without her permission, and endangered her safety when McClelland exposed their location through her Twitter feed and subsequent article. In a handwritten letter, in Haitian Creole, which was sent through a lawyer to Mother Jones (where McClelland's article on Haiti originally appeared), reads: - 20-

You have no right to speak of my story.

You have no right to publish my story in the press.

Because I did not give you authorization.

You have no right. I did not speak to you.

You have said things you should not have said.

Thank you Later, in an email to Dantic~t, .K* writes "I want victims in Haiti to know that they can be strong and stand up for their nghts and have a voice. Our choices about when and how our story is told must be respected."iv I begin with this example because it represents one of the central tensions when ~g about life ~ting in and about Haiti, or other postcolonial countries: whose voices are gtven,~e ~u~on~ to speak and what are those voices permitted to speak about, and how can nauve VOJces counter the First World voices that have often spoken for or spoke.n over ~em. Dany Laferriere, in his multiple versions and revisions of his autoblOgraphical novelv.L:e golll des jeulleIJiles (Dilling IMth the Dictotor in nglish translation) would. ~eem to be ex~g these very questions. While not offering any concrete answers, Lafernere confronts a FJrst World.reader (albeit subtly) with their expectations and then slyly subv~rts .the~ to great effe~t. In his second novel, Eroshilllo, Laferriere begins the process of ~uesu~rung Jdeas of authonty and story-telling in a short scene. The scene became an iconic lIDage m Le g~lIt desjeUl1eI jiles, both the original novel and the movie. Soon after the movie was released m 2004, Laferriere published a new version of the novel one that almost doubled in size. The a~dition~ to the. new ver~ion complicate the rel~tionship between reader and author, the autoblOgraphical pact' , and underscore issues of both gender and class.

Laferriere and Life Writing . .D~y ~aferrie~e is the author of 20 books and screenplays all centered on various penods ~ his life growmg up under both Duvaliers in Haiti, then as an exile in Montreal. His father, Wmdsor Laferri~r~, wa~ exil.ed by Papa Doc in 1959, when Dany was only six years old. Dany was alre~~y livmg Wl.th his grandmother in the countryside, hiding in plain site beca~se o~ the poliucal work his father was doing in the capital. Dany moved back to Portau-Ponce.m 1964. an~ became ~ journalist in 1972 for the newspaper Le NOllvelliste, as well as ~or Le ~eht Somedz Sozrand Radio Haiti-Inter. In 1976, Dany's best friend and fellow Journalist, Gasner Raymond was found decapitated by Baby Doc's security forces, with the message that he was next. Dany left for Montreal, leaving behind his family. His work has won numerous awards, most recently the prestigious Prix Medicis from France. .

Early in j'ems commeje vis, Laferriere talks about the ongoing argument he has with his aun~ ~ymo~de (who we ~eet at the beginning of Legolll desjelll1csfil/es) about the auth~nucJty ~f ~s novel.s: "J'~ beau essayer de lui faire com prendre que mon travail ne conslste p~s a .dire les faJ~s r.n:u,~ plutot a faire surgir I'emotion qui compte et rien d'autre, pou: elle, Je .deforme la realite. [I tried to explain to her I'm not interested in the facts when I wnte, but mstead focus ~~ the emotion and nothing else, but for her, I'm warping reality.] vl In o~er. words, for Lafemere, emotion trumps what most of us would consider a factual de~cnp.uon. Reality and emotion for Laferriere are not mutually exclusive, and one cannot eXIst WIthout the other, but for him, emotion fuels the recreation of reality not the other way a.roun~. Elsewhe.re, ~e puts it as follows: "As for the matter of the pe:centage of true facts m ficuon or ficuon m true materials, I have my way of being a writer. When I talk about my books, I always say that they are an autobiography of my fee.lings. I'm not - 21 -

interested in recounting my life in any traditional way ... The life I dream is as true as my actual Ii fe. "vii This impacts how we understand Laferriere's writing more generally.

Elizabeth Walcott-Hacks haw suggests that this "hybrid action" berween the real and unreal, between real life and dream life, is a reflection of Laferriere's refusal to be easily categorized: ''Just as his writer's ''1'' has no fixed or rooted nationality, so too does Laferriere inhabit a liminal identity, dancing at the borders, forever in motion."viii Gillian Whitlock suggests that what Laferriere is doing is a part of a larger tradition of Caribbean life writing: "In place of authenticity and a unified, organic sense of subjectivity one finds a profoundly historical, political, and contingent sense of self-identification ... Caribbean subjects have never been able to take for granted the occasion for speaking, nor the terms in which they will be heard and recognized."i. Laferriere not only explicitly comments on the subject of authenticity and subjectivity through his elusive "I" identity, he also problematizes the issue of who is privileged, or authorized, to speak through numerous intenextual references.

V.S. Nail'aul, Douaruer Rousseau, and the Artist's Role E roshlilltP is Laferriere's second novel. It fmds the narrator (Laferriere's alter-ego, Vieux) "trapped" in the apartment of a Japanese-Canadian photographer, Hoki. He is there alone, as Hoki has traveled to ew York because of the assassination of John Lennon.

Laferriere, in an interview, has revealed that he had never been the kept man of a Japanese woman, but he would have wanted to be. xi The book is a fantasy, but one that turns into a rumination on how we deal with trauma, specifically, the trauma of the atomic bomb. As I have written elsewhere,xil the book becomes one author's attempt to understand how people, the ordinary and the artist alike, deal with an event so traumatic, it literally changes the direction of history; in the book the trauma is the atomic bomb, but in Laferriere's case, it is the murder of his best friend and subsequent exile to Montreal. This is an important question for Laferriere, as he, at this point in his career as an author, is attempting to figure out how to write about his own traumatic experiences growing up in Haiti.

Towards the end of the novel, Laferriere quotes a Japanese photographer, Hiromi Tsuchida, who travelled to Hiroshima to chronicle the afrermath of the bomb. He quotes: Even if I could commune with the suffering of the victims, what would be the result? All I perceive is the deep gulf between the victims of the atomic bomb and ordinary people. I must recognize that this collection of photographs will not succeed in bridging this gap. There is nothing left for me to do about this, except admit the shame of my artist's vision.¡ iii It is interesting to note that even though the photographer is from Japan, thus in a supposedly privileged or authentic position to comment on the disaster, he is left powerless in the face of such destruction. He is not trying to speak for the victims, but instead trying to bridge the gap between the victims and those who were spared the immediate trauma of the bomb. But, as Laferriere points out throughout the narrative, trauma has touched the lives of so many who were not in Hiroshima when the bomb was dropped: survivors of the Holocaust,Japanese ex-pats who weren't even born when the bomb was dropped, German descendants of former Nazi soldiers, Americans and Europeans left at once horrified and relieved as the bomb signified the end of the destructive force of World War II. 0 who, indeed, has the right or the authority to speak about the trauma of the bomb? Laferriere is also questioning how an artist is supposed to interpret and communicate that trauma.

Tellingly, the quote from the Japanese photographer comes immediate after a section describing Port-au-Prince, Haiti; this is Laferriere's first mention in his books of his - 22 -

prior. life, the life befor~ his exile to Montreal. In both COfllfllmtJaire l'omollr allec 1111 Negre salis se fi:hgller and most of Eroshiflla, the nationality of the narrator remains vague and unclear.

This scene would r~-appear in Le golit des jellfles.filles (1992), his second novel dealing with his life and c~dhood In Haiti under the Duvalier dictatorship. This juxtaposition of scenes is not by acad~nt and would seem to point us to Laferriere's effort to work through his own ~agm.ented life, pre- and post-exile. It is worth noting that the novel immediately following EroshtnJa IS L'odellr dll caft (An Aroma of Coffee), describing some of his time living with his ~andrnother.~ P~tit-Goave in.~ Haiti. Most interestingly for the purposes of this paper IS how Lafemere titles this sectlOn: 'Un paysage du Douanier Rousseau retouche par V.S. N~paul" [A landscap.e by Douanier Rousseau Revised by V.S. Naipaul]; Rousseau and Nrupaul's work as arosts has been problematically received particularly in relation to authenticity and authority, not to mention each artist's problematic use of race in their work.

Henri Rousseau, often called Douanier Rousseau because he worked as a sort of municipal customs agent,xiv was known as a "Primitive Painter". This primitivism comes from the fact that he was a self-taught painter whose art contained a sort of naIvete that <ii!fered from the art that was being produced during the same period. xv According to Henri Behar, R~ussea~ possess~da "fres~ess of imagination, the childlike vision he managed to preserv~ .1n all his works, XVI a quality that harkened back to a more primitive, oral and folkart tra~tlon tha~ was being largely.i~ored by Modernism. xvii But it may also be applied to the subject of his ~ost fam?us PaJ11t1ngs, what are referred to as his Jungle landscapes. In them, Rousseau paJ11ts exotic landscapes, animals, and "natives;" subjects he had never observed first-hand.

Guillaume Apollinaire describes a version of Rousseau's life that is completely ~abncated but that atre~p~ to justify or lend authority to Rousseau's painting and subjects: In many artlcles [ApollinaJre] states that Rousseau went to Mexico with troops sent by Na?o~eon III to supp~rt Maximillian, and this is the memory of the 'forbidden' tropical fruits In ~entr~ ~enca tha.t obsessed him in his Jungle paintings. Never sent to foreign par~s ~w:.ng his military se!Vlce, Rousseau found the tropics at the J ardin des Plantes in Pans. XVlU In fact, Rousseau's obsession with lush jungle landscapes would seem to reflect a much more mundane impulse: "This impecunious suburbanite, aware that he had led an unadventurous life, was through the evocations of the 'incredible f1oridas' ... to satisfy his own need for dream, for escape."x;" How Rousseau represented these fictional worlds to :vhich he escapes is an important consideration in order to understand why Laferriere Includes Rousseau in his writing. .

. Two p~tings ~ ~articular seem to we~-illustrate Rousseau's fictional escapes. "The Sleeping Gypsy' ls.a paJ11tJng of a dark-complexIOned Black woman, sleeping in the middle of the desert. Looking over her is a lion, and beside her are a lute and a vase. The woman is exotic, unreach~bl.e, silent, and contains mystical properties; Jean Cocteau, in a 1926 catalogue descnptlon, puts it ~usly: "And perhaps it is not without motive that the painter, who ~ever overlooks any detail, has been careful to omit any prints on the sand around the sleeping f~et. The gypsy did not come there where she sleeps. She is there. She is not there.

She oc~ples ~o human site."" This is the Black woman as no-body, as escape, as fantasy.

But the !mage JS taken further when Cocteau asks, "Should we regard this picture as one of Rousseau's dreams and the gypsy as his projection of Rousseau himself the ignored artistmusician?"..i The p~~g is indeed. fantasy, but that fantasy is a produ~t of and produces an engendered and racIal !magery that IS problematic at best, racist at worst. One wonders why Rousseau chooses a black woman to embody his crisis, or why a foreign, postcolonial landscape. It does not seem fair or just to use a dominated and subaltern figure to represent the fantasies of a dominant culture. .

- 23-

Fantasy and the fantastic are prominently featured in the painting "Tropical Landscape: An American Indian Struggling with an Ape." It is, indeed, just as the title describes. The Native American is dressed in the most stereotypical of cosrumes: feather headdress, bare-chested, nothing more than a feathered skirt covering his lower-half. The image is "drawn from the rich, romantic tradition or the oble Savage" and has appeared in other forms elsewhere in Rousseau's work. xxii Of course, a ative American would not be found in a jungle, nor would he be facing off against an ape. But the lush vegetation that Rousseau paints is also imagined: "Rousseau creates new flora and does not even atrempt to describe any plausible landscape ... [taking] on a value that is more poetic than descriptive."xxiU Interpreting this wholly imaginary and unreal landscape is not unproblematic. Rousseau could be, once again, projecting his being into the figure of the Native American, or perhaps he is illustrating the imagined and unreal aspect of the stereotype itself; this sorr of image of the ative American, at the end of the nineteenth century, "had become a cliche of the circus and theater."xxiv This could be the work of a sly social critic or the fantasies of a naIve, child-like painter. Descriptions of Rousseau and his approach to art would suggest the latter interpretation, showing again a racially coded version of escape and fantasy.

The landscape, however, that appears in Laferriere's book does not belong entirely to Rouseau; it is "retouche" by V.S. aipaul and thus further problematized and mediated.

Depending on your view, Naipaul is either one of the greatest E nglish writers of the twentieth century or one of the most important apologists for Imperialism; or, more accurately perhaps, both. A great deal of praise focuses on aipaul's skill as a writer to capture details of the surroundings and that he "has disproved all the identifications that critics have attempted, the labels of 'West Indian Writer' and 'Emergent Third-Worlder,' 'Mandarin' and 'Transplanted Indian' ... Wholly original, he may be the only writer in whom there are no echoes of influences."xxv This "originaliry" that Naipaul possessed lead to his emergence "as one of the most thoughtful writers of the postwar period because of his shifting and challenging views on at least one great problem fundamental to our age [the postcolonial condition)."u vi It is arguable that the view Naipaul offers challenges our VIews, as it could simply reinforce old colonial discourses that have fallen out of favor. Laferriere himself defends Naipaul as a writer and artist: "Une type comme Naipaul n'est ni raciste ni antipatriotique. C'est un critique feroce. C'est ainsi qu'il regard Ie monde" [A writer like Naipaul is neither racist nor unpatriotic. He is a ferocious critic. That's how he sees the world.]xxvii One can understand how a writer like Laferriere who was himself exiled because of his ferocious criticism of those in power would defend aipaul, but while Laferriere defends Naipaul, others disagree.

In 1987, when brrJShifl,a was first published, Edward Said had just two years earlier publicly accused Naipaul as being a "witness for the Western persecution" of the Third World xxvlii and that he favored "the rritest, the cheapest and the easiest of colonial mythologies about wogs and darkies."uix Said ell:plicitly states that Naipaul, because he is an Indian Trinidadian, "has had ascribed to him the credentials of a man who can serve as witness for the third world; and he is a very convenient witness. He is a third worlder denouncing his own people, not because they are victims of imperialism, but because they seem to have an innate flaw, which is that they are not whites" (465).xxx While critics were praising his travel narratives, The Middle Passage and A ll A rea rifDarklless, as being refreshingly honest and critical because Naipaul's "most pressing insights go directly against the grain of the standard liberal bias held in common by most Western intellectuals today," "'! critics like Said were pointing to the larger issue of neo-Imperialism that seemed to run through Naipaul's writings about the Third World.

- 24-

This also doesn't take into account his clearly biased at best, racist at worst, view of Blacks. In VS. NaipaJlI.¡ A Malena/isl Reading, Selwyn Reginald Cudjoe outlines the way aipaul treats Blacks, particularly in The Middle Passage, Naipaul's account of his return to the Caribbean after living in England. aipaul thought that "the egro was condemned to 'penn anent inferiority'''xnii and he "could not describe the egro in other than physical tenns because he could not grant that African peoples in the Caribbean had a spiritual or mythological tradition. Accepting the notions of the English racists, [Naipaul] could not move beyond the colonizer's confined vision of the society."XlO<m This attitude is repeated often in Naipaul's fiction, notably; In a Free Siale, The Mimic Mm, and The OvermJwded Barracoon, granting us "only stereotypical responses to the conditions of the subject in postcolonial societies"xniv where "blacks remain in a state of 'sweet infantilism,' without language and without basic intelligence."xxxv It is interesting, then, that Laferriere chooses Naipaul to "rewrite" or "revise" the landscape we are about to read.

The scene in question takes place one hot summer night in Port-au-Prince. Naipaul is in Haiti to write a story for the magazine Ro/ltiJg Stolle. The fictional Naipaul is accompanied by a group of Haitian girls, whom he chauffeurs in his "Buick 57." Naipaul, as described in this brief passage, seems completely detached from the surroundings. Despite the heat, Naipaul barricades himself in the Buick in an effort to understand "this lunatic asylum of a city": A guy with a dozen watches around his arm yells something at Naipaul and lifts his wrist. A woman's knotty hand guides a little boy dressed in a new sailor suit. Pan left to Bazar La Poste: a neck of a cola bottle, fat lips and ivory-white teeth part for the pinkish liquid ... Slow motion: the red throat of a bottom feeding fish sucking up its food ... Interior: Naipaul drowning in his sweat and the specks of dust washing over the glass in flakes of liquid silk, in reddish streaks, in sarabands of ectoplasm detaching the retina of the eye. xxxvi In the heat and chaos, even Naipaul's eye becomes detached from himself, and it is clear that Naipaul is unable to make much sense of his surroundings. It would be impossible to make sense of a place like Port-au-Prince if one stays locked in the car, unwilling to venture out into the chaos, unwilling to see beyond the superficial bodies that parade in front of him.

Further along, while sitting, waiting for the girls to get ready, "Naipaul observes. The black back on the cockroach like the broken neck of a beer bottle. Its fine antennae in constant movement. Naipaul's foot crushes it and it vomits out a whitish substance."xxxvii Previous to that passage, the women's (black) bodies have been described tenderly and it is shown how the women take care of each other: "Michaelle brushes Pasqualine's silky hair in front of the large oval mirror ... Michaelle strokes the nape ofPasqualine's neck and gently kisses it.

Then rubs her back with eau de cologne."xxxviii Naipaul would seem to want to crush the black bodies and expose the "whitish substance" while the girls themselves attempt to care for each other and build affection. Naipaul cannot capture Port-au-Prince when his goal at the outset is to destroy.

As homage to Rousseau, we can assume that this scene is wholly fantasy, created from ~~ferrier~'s imaginati~n; like the ape and the Native American, Naipaul had never been to HaItl, ~~r did he ever wrJte for Rolling Slone. The figures of the young women, as imagined

by La~ernere, or even all ?fPort-au-Prince, are locked in a battle with Naipaul, who resists knowmg them or the reality they present to him. Tellingly, the section ends thusly: "In the back seat the girls are laughing, showering perfume and powder on each other. Naipaul turns around and catches powder puff in the eyes. The girls keep laughing. The Buick (an oblong black mass) speeds on. There is no destination. Coolly into the Apocalypse.""",i. Once again, - 25-

Naipaul has his sight compromised, this time not by.the city itself, bu~ by. the girls. In a book already titled "Eroshima," one cannot miss the phallic (but also colorual) lIDagery of ~e Buick aipaul is driving. This modern, Western, patriarchal ins~~nt.maytemporarily . shelter aipaul from the chaotic city, but it will also playa role ill blinding him to the reality around him, guiding him (and, unfortunately, the girls) towards the Apocalypse.

But how is what Naipaul does in this brief passage any different than what Laferriere has done throughout the rest of the novel? Laferriere admits at the close of the book that "I am interested only in cliches, and the foremost cliche concerning Japan is . eroticism. I fell madly in love with a Japanese woman when I was 12 years old. A .HokusaI engraving (I believe). A tall girl with horizontal eyes ... For me, su~reme elegance IS Japanese.

The women's clothing. Especially the fabrics. And, of course, thelt feet (which I can only imagine). I am not talking about modern Japane~e women ... Japan has become .

Americanized."xl The book is a fantasy, a collection of reflections based not on reality, but the reality Laferriere imagines. The difference, it would seem, and this becomes the c~ntral. distinction between Naipaul in Port-au-Prince and Laferriere in the rest of the book, ill ~elt approach to the subjects in question. Laferriere, in Eroshima, never se.eks to crush the subject in order to expose the repulsive innards, but instead watches, reads, lis~ens, and ~~empts t~ learn. He does seek to appropriate the voices, but lets them speak to him. Lafemere doesn t lock himself in a car to cut himself off from the world around him, but instead immerses himself in the fantasy, which is often sidetracked and even derailed by reality which he embraces.

Laferriere has said that an artist needs to be free to e:,<plore any subject in any way that slhe wants to: "Personne ne m'a demande d'ecrire, donc personne ne me dira quoi ecrire."xli Laferriere's sentiment towards art closely echoes how Italian Futurist, Ardengo Soffici, described Rousseau's art: "[Rousseau] has understood this truth, that in art everything is allowable and legitimate if everything concurs in the sincer.e expression o.f a state of mind."xlli The problem comes when we try to decide at what pOillt does an arost begin to appropriate otherness or begin to misrepresent their subject m.at~er. ~ous.seau never claimed to be capturing reality; his p~ntings were purel~ a product of his lIDa~atlOn. ."

Laferriere describes the chapter as bemg a landscape prunted by Rousseau bu~ retouche by V.S. Naipaul, whose position within postcolonial writing is ~qually problema?c. Th~, " invocation of these two artists, whose subject matter often mvolved the e..XOtlC, the savage, and the primitive can be read as a dig at those who would elevate an ar.tist to speak or represent a whole people rather than their own subjective position: This sectlo~ co~es at the end of a novel, written by a Haitian-Canadian, that is concerned Wlth Japan, ~os~a, and the victims of World War II, suggesting that Laferriere is well aware of the diffic.~ty ill the current critical moment to examine questions and cultures outside of our own.x~" But ?ne also cannot ignore the accusations that have been placed at the feet o~ auth?rs like NaIpaul that their work, through its critical veneration (or perhaps because of It), rrusrepr~s~~ and even further marginalizes postcolonial voices. It is a delicate and difficult task, wotlng m the first person about a postcolonial and traumatic situation. Laferriere, in this brief passage, pushes the reader to examine these issues.

Le Gout des jeunes fiUes, Take One . .., vu Le golll des je/Illes jilles " was published in 1992 and appeared in English as DIIIIIJg IVllh the Dictator in 1994.xlv It is the stoty of one fateful weekend in 1971 when the narrator (implied to be the author but who remains nameless throughout the narrative) is forced to. hide out in the house of the young girls he has watched from across the street for years. His friend, Gege, has symbolically fooled him into thinking that th~ Tonton.Macoutes (Duvalier's civilian security force) were after him; Gege leads him to believe, ill fact shows - 26 -

him, fabricated evidence that he has cut off the testicles of a Tonton Macoute who had earlier.~enly harassed the narrator. Over the weekend, the narrator reads the poetry of MaglOlre Samt-Aude, and learns about the lives of the girls he has only ever fantasized about. !hes~ are the same girls that appeared in the brief scene in Eroshima. The novel (clearly Identified as such on the cover) starts, however, "Vingt ans plus tard, une petite maison it Miami" (Twenty years later, in a little house in Miami).

It is in this house, belonging to two of his aunts, that Laferriere establishes his view o~ authenticity when it comes to writing about his life story. His aunt Raymonde confronts him ab~ut the rec~ntly published (although not referred to by title) L'odeur du c'!ft, a book ~bout his early childhood in rural Haiti with his beloved gtandmother Da: "Your book is a lie from first page to the last," she tells him.xlvi When Laferriere tries to deflect his aunt's criticism by telling .her "O.f co~se, ~unt Raymondet's fiction,"xlvil she isn't buying it. His aunt takes offense 10 that if he IS gomg to use real people in his stories, then he has a responsibility to "get it right." But what does it mean to "get it right?" She is particularly upset by her nephew's portrayal of his grandfather, her father.

"Everything you wrote about my father was lies."

Apparently I wasn't going to be spared. Even if I did draw a very fair portrait of my grandfather.

"He was my grandfather, Aunt Raymonde," I stammered.

"I know. But that doesn't mean you knew him."

"A grandfather is different from a father. I mean, he might be the same person, but he has two different functions."xlvill A bit further down, Raymonde continues with the defense of her father: "Let n:e finish young man. You had your opportunity, and now everyone knows everything about us, people I don't know and I'll never know ... My father sent us to Port-au-Prince to study. You can't imagine what that meant back then.

This man," she said, pointing to the large photo of my grandfather that hung above the telephone, "this man sacrificed himself for his daughters, and that's not in your novel. " xlix The perception of any given situation will depend on the position of the observer. Laferriere can o~y see his grandfather as his grandfather, while his aunt has built him up so much in her =d as a father that "she'd poisoned her sisters' lives with her obsession with one man."1 Neither Laferriere nor his aunt is wrong in their recollections of the man who was both her father and his grandfather, but both views are also flawed and highly subjective.

In fac.t, one could rea~ aunt Ray~~nde's apartment as an image for the challenges in te~ a story any sort of :;liable :va~; It IS filled with newspapers and magazines, along WIth a TV that IS always on: The MIa/lit Herald, Ebo'!Y, The Amsterdam Ne/vs, Free Black Press.

Aunt Raymonde lives off of coffee and the TV news."" She goes on to tell her nephew a few of the pIeces of bad news she has heard: two men break into a house, shoot a woman in the head, and set her on fir;; a man loses ~~ job, doesn't tell his family, and the next morning shoot~ ,up a McDonald s; a boat of Haltlan refugees abandoned off the coast of Florida. :aferr;,ere, ho~ever, shows ~ow incomplete her knowledge is of the events, how limiting the facts can be m understanding a story. He asks if the man who went on to shoot up the McDonald's made love to his wife the night before and how the owner of the boat filled with Haiti~n refugees could have abandoned them in the middle of the Atlantic ocean. 1I1 His aunt's stones lack cont~xt, emotio~al details that could make the events more meaningful, more real, rather than slmply headlines meant to shock and horrify. In the quest for "just the .

u:

- 27 -

.

facts" news would seem to have lost its ability to move people. And, if the news is as reliable as aunt Raymonde would seem to believe, why the various sources for her news?

Even the variety of news sources she consults implies the inherent subjectivity that comes when telling any story, news or otherwise.

After leaving his aunt's, Laferriere receives a phone call from Miki, whose house it was he used to watch from afar and escapes to that fateful weekend. She points him to an issue of Vogue magazine, where a picrure of one of the other girls is fea~ed. Lafe~ere reimagines the weekend when he was trapped in Miki's house .and expenenced thCl! world.

He conceives the story this rime like a screenplay, complete WIth a cast of characters. The number of women, from Eroshi1lla to this version, have expanded from four to six, and we have the added story of young Laferriere and Gege, who were wholly absent in the first version. "Scene 1, Vendredi apres-midi," opens in exactly the same way as the passage from E roshifl,a: Choupette drowning her chicken in ketchup. This rime, however, rather than Naipaul picking them up, Papa picks them up in his Buick, a high-ran~ T~~ton M~coute.

"Scene 3" contains other parts of the passage from Eroshima, and the similantles contlOue on throughout the narrative. There is a writer from Rollillg Stolle magazine there to profile the music scene in POrt-au-Prince (but it's not Papa), as well as a foreign photographer who becomes enamored by one of the girls.

One of the most significant differences between the brief passage told in Eroshi1lla and the expanded universe of Les go/lis desjel/llesjiles, however, .is that we get dial~~e between the girls, talking about their lives, their hopes and thCl! dreams. Each ~ 10 the narrative is given the opportunity to "confess" to the narrator as he sleeps on their couch, looking to evade caprure. Rather than silently performing for fiction~ aipaul's gaz~, ~e narrator learns of their hopes, their dreams, and of their fierce detemunatlon to SurvIve 10 an unforgiving place. The image of the girls in the car \vith Papa remains as well, as the narrator often watches them drive off, both from his own window at home, and then from the window of his hideout. These girls that he has often fantasized about become flesh and blood women with complex emotions and motivations for their actions. Miki, the ringleader, and who we know will go on to own her own fabric shop, knows that her youth and looks will only protect her for so long; Marie-Michele is studying medicine and looking for any way out of Haiti¡ Marie-Flore Miki's cousin, who is trying to escape her lecherous father, at fourteen kn~ws more th~ a girl of that age should about men and seJ."Uality; Pasqualine is only with Frank, another Tonton Macoute, in the small hope that she might get news about her imprisoned brother. We also know, again from the introduction to the story, that Choupette, Papa's woman, and perhaps the hardest of all the girls, ends up a Jehovah's Witness after Papa (who finally left his wife and kids for her) shot another man that she had been fooling around with. Unlike Naipaul in the brief scene in E"oshilll~, Laf~iere allows the women to speak and gives voice to their individual strength and collective grIef. The Rollillg StOIlC reporter and photographer from Voglle playa small, but .i mportant role in the narrative in examining the question of authenticity and authority to \Vote a~out Haiti. They are there to cover the (very real) musical revolution that was currently taking place in Haiti at that time, and the novel often makes reference to real bands that were popular at that time, such as Les Shleus-Shleus. But the journalists were also dr~w~,~? the more cliched aspects of Haiti: "landscape, music, dance~ voodo~, the l~cal beau.tle~. tu As the narrator puts it: "Their mandate was different. The Rollmg Stolle Journalist was aurung f~r the heart of things. The photographer stayed on the surface. You have to read both ma~es to get the complete picrure.""v But the complete picrure still remains elusive. TI~e m~slC1ans are understandably hesitant to talk to the American journalist, who keeps prefaClOg his . questions with "without talking politics ... " The musicians warn him against using words like - 28 -

:'expl~sion," "upheaval," or, worse, "revolution" when talking about their music. lv The

:v,

Inte1"V1 e .however, comes to an abrupt end when the reporter asks: "Do you think ... that all of this IS due to the fact that, when all is said and done, Haitian artists refuse to face reality?"lvi It is almost laughable to accuse these men in Port-au-Prince, one of whom it is implied, be forced to .p~rform oral ~ex on a .Tonton Macoute as retribution,lvII of ~efusing to face re~ty. These ~~sICJans a:e makin~ musIc and trying to survive. And, according to Gage Averill, the musIcIans of this generatlOn, years later, helped inspixe the overthrow of Baby Doc .'viIi We see a privileged foreign writer try to impose his vision of what Haiti should be and an artist's role within that system.

wi!I

. . Lafe~ere, through the narrative, continues to probe the question of being an artist In a dictatorship, or any sort of volatile political situation. Magloixe Saint-Aude is considered to ~e one of the best poets of Haiti, or, according to the author, one of the best poets, p~nod, bu~ he ~S? has a :ery ~roblen:atic history with Frans;ois Duvalier, having supported him and his poliCles, helpIng him get Into power. Laferriere examines whether an artist's political views or history disqualify him from being a truly great Artist?

Three hours later, I was engaged in conversation in front of the little oval mirror.

Myself and the Other.

OTHER Aren't you forgetting that Maglore Saint-Aude never had to worry while Duvalier was in power?

SELF Isn't that for the best?

OTHER Maybe, but do you want to know why he was so free SELF If you want to tell me.

OTHER See? You're denying it already.

SELF I'd rather have Saint-Aude free on the streets of Port-au-Prince than rotting away in Duvalier's prisons.

OTHER He was Duvalier's friend till the end. They even died the same year.

SELF So what? Saint-Aude was never a political poet.

OTHER Yet he was at the origins of the Duvalier ideology.

SELF Prove it. .

OTH~R In June of 1938, your Saint-Aude signed Le mallifest des gnats, the Canbbean eqwvalent of Hitler's Meill Ko",pf Who signed with him? Carl Brouard, ano~er anarchist poet who enjoyed a state funeral when he died, the shadowy Loomer Denis and the sinister Duvalier himself.

SELF You're going a little too far. You know the manifesto created increased awareness of nationhood. .OTHE~ Aw~eness of Duvalierism, that is. Even during the darkest years of the dictatorship, Sa/nt-Aude never repudiated Duvalier.

SELF But his work did.

OTHER Explain yourself.

SELF Saint-Aude's work is the negation of his political thought.

OTHER Which proves he's fake.

SELF You're not convincing me, brother. ..

Silence fell upon us. We evaluated each other like boxers at the weight-in.

OTHER So, for you, is he still the greatest poet of the Americas?

SELF I'm afraid SOIIiI Throughout the narrative, the poetry of Saint-Aude is shown to have sustained and stre~gthened th.e narrator tha.t fateful v.:eekend, regardless of the hand Saint-Aude may have had In creating It (by supporting Duvalier and the dictatorship, which enabled the Tonton - 29-

Macoutes to te.rrorize the city). For example, the narrator reflects on his starus as prisoner in the Milci's home, observing that he may be no safer there than outside. He opens the SaintAude's book of poetry at random and finds the lines "The prisoner's poem/As memory's sun sinks," and then thinks to himself: "That's crazy! I came to this place and found a book that expressed my emotions perfectly, what I was feeling at that very instant. A poem touches us when it speaks specifically of our state of mind at the moment we read it.''1x The "Other" side of Laferriere may have doubts and reservations about Saint-Aude, but the "Self" understands how powerful and¡ beautiful the poetry is and what the poetry represented to a young and confused boy.

These questions of politics and art, fiction versus the truth or reality, haunt Laferriere more generally and this novel in particular. David Homel, Laferriere's long-time translator and the translator of Dillillg with the Dictator, explains why he chose the title he did for the English translation, "for reasons of reception": Though the problem started with HOIII to Make Love to a Negro, Laferriere's first novel, it reached its culmination with All AroIlIa ojCojJee, his third work. In the Globe & Mail, a reviewer complained that the book was not political, and that any book by a Haitian writer set in Haiti had an obligation to be political .. .! have heard similar comments about other Laferriere books. A formalist poet with only a theoretical knowledge of political representation dismissed Le gollt des jeulles jilles as being "too frivolous, too Iight."II; For the English audience of the book, the political elements of the novels were requixed to trump any other concerns that the artist, Laferriere, may have had. Much like the fictional Rollillg 510lle journalist accused the musicians, Laferriere is facing accusations that he is essentially ignoring reality. But it isn't just the concern about being political; much like Laferriere's aunt Raymonde, many critics of the novel focused on how the book got it wrong, or focused on the fictional narure of the book. Nathalie Courcy and Dennis F. Essar both speculate on the author's actual age in the story, putting him either at the age of 18lxli or 20.'xm Le golll desjelllles jillas is the first of Laferriere novels that critics can attempt to compare with history because Lafertiere closes the novel with the revelation that Duvalier has died. In the novel, it is Monday morning, but in acruality, Duvalier's death was announced on April 22, 1971, which was a Thursday.lx;v The novel implies however that the narrator is much younger than 18 years old, still being babied by his mother and aunts, dutifully srudying for school, playing pranks with Gege, and even still going to see movies with his mother and aunts. This age difference is made much more explicit in both the movie adaptation and the subsequent expanded novel, where the narrator makes clear that the events during that fateful weekend happened when he was fifteen years old.I..' Regardless of the facrual truthfulness of the narrative, Laferriere is faced with a series of impossible choices in composing the narrative of his life: be honest about the emotions and be accused of being dishonest or a-political. In rewriting Le gollt des jeulles jilles, Laferriere appears to be addressing these criticisms head-on.

Le gout des jeunes fiUes, 12 years later I"oj There are two major additions to the 2004 version of Le gollt des jeulles jilles; the first is the addition throughout the text of excerpts of a published diary by the character MarieMichele. It is revealed in the beginning of the narrative that Marie-Michele had been lying about who she was at that time; she wa not, as thought, a medical srudent fighting to find a way to escape Port-au-Prince, but instead a member of the upper-class, part of the city's elite who lived in a mansion in the rich part of town. The journal itself, however, is wholly fictional. The second addition to the book is a Coda at the end that reveals that Aunt Raymonde is dying of cancer. The person who would seem to have held Laferriere - 30-

accountable for writing "the truth" was about to pass away. The newly revised novel now is explicitly filled with a fictional counter-narrative to Laferriere's original story. This is not a coincidence.

When he goes to see Aunt Raymonde, Laferriere is confronted with the difficulty of even telling her story; much in the same way the two argued over his portrayal of his grandfather, her father, Laferriere (and thus the readers) are confronted with the myriad of possible ways of understanding his aunt. His mother's description of her sister is of someone who was theatrical, but manipulative: "Elle [Raymonde] orgarusait tout un spectacle et finissait par arracher Ie oui qu'elle voulait. On savait qu'elle jouait, mais elle etait irresistible" [She put on such a show that she always ended up getting what she wanted. We knew she was playing us, but she was irresistible].1xvii The family even went so far as to call her a little dictator. Her sisters and nephew embrace that about her, as Laferriere states "c'est elle qui m'a toujours dit de me laisser personne diriger rna vie" [she taught me never to let anyone control my life].lltV;u Raymonde's daughter, however, has a different view of her mother and her attempts to control, to dictate, leading her to move far away from her mother.lxb nce ~gain, ,!,e are reminded that there are multiple stories that are taking place at the same time, lnvolvtng the same people, and we can only ever really offer our own admittedly biased position and perspective.

Marie-Michele's journal remains problematic and difficult to evaluate. Sophie Kerouack, in one of the only studies of the novel that includes the journal, says that the journal provides a "contrepoint narratif [qwl enrichit les evenements passes de toute une gamme de sensations et de perceptions qui leur donnent profondeur et temoignent, en quelq~e sotte, de leur. veritable authenticite" [... narrative counterpoint, enriching the events descnbed WIth sensations and perceptions that add depth while bearing witness to their authenticity].lxx The irony, of course, is that the journal is wholly fictional, a creation exclusively of Laferriere's own imagination. But he nonetheless chooses the form of a journal, published as Fast Lane: Girls, Food, Sex, Music-The Sixties ill Haiti, based off of MarieMichele's personal writing during the time when she was hanging out with Miki and the other girls, a time that overlaps with the narrator's experience hiding out at Miki's. It is also published in English (although appears in French in the book, and one would imagine that it was "originally" composed in French by Marie-Michele). The diary or journal as a form of life. ~ri~, is often seen as a more spontaneous and less mediated form of life-writing; Philip Lejeune g~es as far as calling it "anti fiction," explaining "L'autobiographie vit sous Ie charme de la fiction, Ie journal est aimante par la verite." [Autobiography lives under the spell of fiction, the journal is drawn to the truth].I..; But while the author of a journal may not know how the story ends, Laferriere nonetheless reveals that Marie-Michele's journal is as mediated a document as his own autofictional/alterbiographical writing.

~aferriere emphasizes ~at "si elle [Marie-Michele] a garde Ie caractere spontane des observatl~ns et des commentaries, elle a quand meme retouche Ie style trop naIf (d'apres :ll~) de la Jeun? ~doles~ente"surd~uee qu'elle etait. La style d'ecriture de la premiere version etalt souvent telegraphique. [... If she kept the spontaneous nature of her observations and comments, she nonetheless revised her self-described overly-naIve style of the precocious teenage that she was. The writing style of the first version was often telegraphid.lxxi; Here we clearly see that what we are reading is not the original or first version of Marie-Michele's story, but an adaptation. We can also assume that the work has been translated from French into English (although we are reading it in French), a further mediation. At the end of the b~ok" Laferriere imagines an interview between a reporter from Vibe magazine and MarieMich:le? where, she reveal,s that "La ver.sion manus~ripte allait plus vite a l'essentiel, mais mon editeur m a demande de Ie retravailler. Bon, disons que ce n'est qu'un journal - 31 -

personnel ... Comme on a voulu en faire un livre, j'ai du adapter un peu certaines histoires.

J'en ai jete d'autres, que Ie public nord-americain n'aurait pu comprendre. L'editeur m'a beau coup aide en ce sens ... " lThe manuscript went more quickly to the essentials, but my editor asked me to rework it. I mean, it was just a personal journal ... Because we wanted to publish it as a book, I had to adapt some of the stories. I got rid of other ones because the North-American reader wouldn't have understood. My editor helped out a lot in this regard ... ].Ixxiii While Laferriere often gets criticized for the fictional nature of his narratives, or his attempts to claim that they are, in fact, autobiographical, Marie-Michele's work is celebrated for its realism and insight, even though it is as mediated as Laferriere's own text.

Again, it is interesting that not only does Marie-Michele publish her journal, it becomes a runaway success. The lPashlilgtOIl Post says "pour la premiere fois, nous pouvons penetrer dans la tete d'une jeune fille de clix-sept ans prise au piege, dans un pays en chute libre, d'une c1asse sociale aveugle et insensible" [For the firSt time we are privy to the innerthoughts of a seventeen-year-old girl who is an insider to a class that is both blind and insensitive to the chaos of their country].lxxlv But why is her voice given a privileged position over the girls that Laferriere writes about in the narrative? Even being able to write a journal implies that Marie-Michele possesses more privilege and thus more political power than the girls she hangs out with. Keeping a diary involves certain material comfort, including literacy, private space for writing, and the materials on which to write. The diary represents "modernity's most important sites of freedom, a place where individuals can be alone ... "bexv The ability to even produce a diary represents a "particular historical context that reflects class and race as well as gender."lxxvl Laferriere's narrative shows just how over-crowded and public the lives of the lower classes are; there is rarely only one person in Miki's house and the narrator observes that his mother continually goes through his possessions.lxxvii If anything, Marie-Michele's journal reveals just how privileged she was as part of the upperclasses of Port-au-Prince.

I wish to focus now on those examples from her journal that reveal how MarieMichele silences the voices of the lower-class women she spends her time with. Before becoming enamored with Miki, Marie-Michele, when she was twelve, wandered out of her upper-class enclave into, what she called "Les Moyens-Ages" [the Middle-Ages] which she infinitely prefers to her "modem life" in "Ie Cercle dore."lm;jj There, she meets a peasant woman, Esmeralda, and her five-year-old son, Nanou, with whom she immediately feels connected to: "Je me suis glissee a cote d'elle, jauqu'a me mettre sous son ventre. Son corps mou. Son odeur particuliere. Son souffle doux .. .Je m'enfouis sous les larges seins d'Esmeralda pour sombrer dans Ie sommeil comme une pierre dans la riviere ... Esmeralda ne sait pas lire, mais elle sait tout ce qu'il faut savoir pour vivire en harmonie avec son envitonnement" [l slid in beside her, under her belly. Her soft body. Her unique smell. Her soft breathe . . . I burry myself under Esmeralda's large breasts to sleep the sleep of stones in a river ... Esmeralda can't read, but she knows everything she needs to in order to live in harmony with her environment].I..;x This is a particularly stereotypical view of the lowerclasses, specifically of a black woman, there to mother and serve an upper-class child. While Esmeralda may open up the country to Marie-Michele, she remains incredibly detached from this woman: "Cela a dure six mois, jusqu'a ce jour j'arrive et je ne les trouve pas. Esmeralda et Nanou, envoles comme des anges. Personne pour me renseigner. Je n'ai pas ete triste" lThis lasted six months, and, one day, I arrived and I couldn't find them. Esmeralda and Nanou flew away like angels. No one to ask where or why. I wasn't sad].IxXX Marie-Michele romanticizes Esmeralda and is untroubled by her and son's disappearance, completely negating Marie-Michele's claim that she was finally able to see her country; from the main narrative, we know that people don't flyaway like angels, but disappear in the night at the hands of the Tonton Macoutes. Marie-Michele may now know some of the myths and - 32-

legends of her country, but she is still blind to the reality experienced by most of the people living there. Laferriere, in an interview, explains: C'est dans Le golit des jeunes filles que, pour la premiere fois, on a donne la parole a des femmes d'une classe sociale dCfavorisee - c'etaient des jeunes ÂŁilles qui habitaient la maison en face de chez moi -, presque des prostituees. Ce n'est pas moi qui ai parle en leur nom; elles se sont exprimees librement tout au long du livre, on dit leur misere, leur bonheur, leur fac;:on de voir la vie. J'ai voulu leur redonner leur dignite humaine, montrer aussie ce que la dictature avait fait de la femme haItienne. C'est un des rares livres haItiens a voir douze femmes comme personnages principaux.'xni

rJ.n Le gout des jeunes filles, for the first time, women from

the lower classes are given a chance to speak, young women who lived across the street from my house. These young women were almost like prostitutes. And it wasn't me who was speaking in their name; they liberally expressed themselves throughout the novel, talking about their misery, their joy, they outlook on life. I wanted to give them back their human dignity, show what the dictatorships did to Haitian women. It is one of the rare Haitian novels that features 12 women as main characters.]

Laferriere gives a voice to the women in the novel while Marie-Michele barely even records a line of dialogue from Esmeralda, and remains unmoved when the dictatorship takes her and her son away.

The narrator himself is never mentioned in the journal, even though the journal clearly makes reference to an event that happened in Miki's house while the narrator was there. In Laferriere's narrative, he witnesses Made-Michele making a reference to Sagan, and she is shocked to discover that Choupette, possible the most vulgar of the group and MarieMichele's chief rival for Miki's attention, seems to know a great deal about Sagan. llOIxii MarieMichele's reaction to this revelation, and her attitude towards Choupette once again reveals her class privilege and bias in her perceptions of what is happeni.ng. Marie-Michele doesn't believe that Choupette could possibly know anything about Sagan and did it explicitly to humiliate Made-Michele. She points out, "Choupette, eUe, est completement enfoncee dans les marecages de la vie quotidienne. La culture reste, pour elle, quelque chose d'inatteignable" [Choupette is buried so completely in the morass of daily life that culture, for her, is unattainablel.'lOIXmBut is this not the same immersion that Made-Michele once celebrated in Esmeralda? And, if Marie-Michele herself is a good example, why isn't it possible that Choupette does in fact read Sagan and have an entire hidden life that MarieMichele isn't aware of? Marie-Michele, however, sees what she wants to see, and it is convenient to compare Choupette's perceived ignorance, to that of her mother's, who is only interested in culture insofar as it helps her maintain her social statuS.I"'iY Laferriere has commented in an interview about his approach to writing, particularly about those in a subaltern position: Ma position d'ecrivain, c'est de faire entendre la voix de ces anonymes desarmes qui se retrouve face a une elite economique toujours assoifee de sang, d'argent et de pouvoir. Mais comment parler de tout c;:a dans un roman sans l'alourdir? C'est ce que je me dis chaque marin en entrant dans la petite chambre OU je travaille. J'y arrive en plongeant dans la vie quotidienne qui, tel un fleuve, emporte tout sur son passge: les drames personnels comme les evenements historiques. n suffit de suivre la vie (sans protection) d'un individu ordinaire pour que se deroule une epoque sous nos yeux. De plus j'ai pour principe de ne jamais ceder Ie premier plan au dictateur.

Mon but c'est exposer dans ses multiples facettes, la vie des gens do nt la dictature - 33-

empeche l'epanouissement. Cet aspect moral tisse en filigrane la trame de mes romans. luxy [lMy position as a writer is to allow the voice of those who are anonymous and oppressed by the economic elite, always hungry for more blood, money, and power, to be heard. But how to talk about that without writing a "heavy" novel? It's what I ask myself every morning when I enter the room where I work. I do it by diving into daily life, a river that carries everything in its journey: the personal drama along with the historical events. You only need to follow the life (without protection) of an ordinary individual to see an entire age unfold. Plus, I have it on principle that I never give the primary importance to a dictator. My goal is to expose in its multiple facets, the lives of people for whom the dictatorship has limited their development.

This morality weaves through all of my novels.]

Is Marie-Miche!e and the other women of the Cercle dore also victims of the social and economic order? There is some indication that, yes, the Cerele is something that needs to be destroyed, or at least challenged due to its rigid structure and hypocritical tendencies. But it is hard to equate the "sufferings" of Marie-Michele and her upper-class friends with the trials that we know Miki and her friends are faced with. Made-Michele clearly states that they do not have to worry about the Tonton Macoutes, her friends and she herself travel freely to any and all parts of the world, they are able to afford food, shelter, and any other luxury they desire. While Marie-Miche!e dreams of another Che Guevara coming from her generation and class, Miki, Laferrere, his mother and aunts, and the other girls all have to deal with the day-to-day reality of living under a dictatorship. Even though Made-Miche!e's diary much more explicitly examines class distinctions and the politics of that time, commenting on her parents' hypocrisy and petty concerns contrasted with those of Choupette or Miki for example, her narrative perspective is narrow and ultimately more limiting than the perspective Laferriere's original narrative provides.

In conclusion, when we look at the three textual versions of Le gout des jeunes filles, we see that Laferriere has put forward a complex challenge to the idea of authenticity and authority in regards to writing about Haiti. Like Mac McClelland, if we come full circle to where this essay began, Marie-Miche!e isn't interested in Haiti, other than to serve her own goals and purposes. Laferriere, through Marie-Miche!e, also shows that being a "native" of a given country does not necessarily mean that the narrative they produce will be an authentic representation of life in that place at that particular time. On the other hand, including Marie-Miche!e's diary shows that multiple narratives are possible, even necessary, in order to understand the larger picture of any situation, situations that are complex and multi-faceted.

Mac McClelland's marginalizing and silencing of *K's narrative highlights how far we have yet to go to be able to really hear and understand the stories coming from Haiti and other Third World countries. Life writing in any form, for Laferriere, is always highly subjective and mediated, but can be enlightening, even if it is in ways that are wholly unintended.

Notes: Mac McClelland, "I'm Gonna Need You to Fight Me On This: How Violent ex Helped Ease My PTSD," Good. is, June 27, 2011, http://www.good.is/post/how-violent-sex-helped-ense-my-ptsd/ .

II "Female Journalists & Researchers Respond To Haiti PTSD Article," Jezebel, July 1,2011, http://jezebel.com/5817381 / female-journnlists--resenrchers-respond-to-haiti-ptsd-article.

i

- 34 -

Michael Deibert, "Michael Deibert's Haiti Blog: journalism in Haiti: A few thoughts," Michael Deibert's Haiti Blog, june 27, 2011, http://deiberthaiti.blogspot.com/2011 /06/joumalism-in-haiti-fewthoughts.html.

iii

iv Edwidge Danticat, "Edwidge Danticat Speaks on Mac McClleland Essay I Essence.com," essence. com, july 9, 2011, http://www.essence.com/2011 /07/09/ edwidge-danticat-speaks-on-macmcclelland/ . v There is, of course, much debate surrounding the nature of Laferriere's writing. It has been classified as autofiction, autobiography (the author himself calls his first ten novels "An American Autobiography"), or even "alterbiography" Oana Evans Braziel, "'C'est moi l'Amerique': Canada, Haiti and Dany Laferriere's Port-au-Prince/Montreal/Miami textual transmigrations of the hemisphere," Comparative American S/lidies 3 (n.d.): 29-46.). The author himself says, inj'ecris ((I"lff/eje vis, "je n'ai pas signe de pacte de verite avec personne" (Dany Laferriere, j'em's comme je vi! (Editions La Passe du vent, 2000), 49.), a direct reference to Philip Lejeaune's "pacte autobiographique." He goes on to say, however, that "je ne suis pas un ecrivain; n'etant pas ecrivain, je ne peux envisager que I'autobiographie" (ibid. 200). Philip Lejeune, in reaction to the term "autofiction" writes: "Les plupan des 'autofictions' sont lues comme des autobiographie: Ie lecteur ne saurait faire autrement" (philippe Lejeune, "Le journal comme 'anti fiction'," all/opac/e.org, 2005, http://www.autopacte.org/Antifiction.html.) My translation: Most 'autofictions' are read as autobiography; the reader does not know any other way. vi Laferriere 2000, 44. All translations, unless otherwise noted, are my own. vii Quoted in Renee Lanier, AII/qfic/iofl and Advocacy in the Fraf/((Iphofle Caribbean, 1st ed. (University Press of Florida, 2006), 22. viii Elizabeth Walcott-Hackshaw, "Dancing at the Border: Cultural Translations and the Writer's Retum," in Echoes of/he Haitiafl revoilition, 1804-2004, ed. Martin Munto and E lizabeth WalcottHackshaw (Kingston, jamaica: University of the West Indies Press, 2008), 157. i, Gillian Whitlock, ''From Prince to Lorde: The Politics of Location in Caribbean Autobiography," in A His/ory of Ii/era/lire in the Caribbean. cross (III/liral s/lidies, ed. A Arnold (Amsterdam;Philadeip hia: j.

Benjarnins, 1997), 328. , Dany Laferriere, Eroshifffa, Nouv. ed. (Montreal: Typo, 1998). .; Laferriere 2000,161. .;; Lee Skallerup Bessette, "Dany Laferriere, japanese Writer? Borderless Texts, Borderless Trauma," in Diasporic COflsriosflm: Ii/eratllm frofff the Pos/coloflial World, ed. Smriti Singh and Achal Sinha (Germany: VDM Verlag Dr. Miller, 2010), 80-91. .;;; Dany Laferriere, Eroshifffa: A flovel (Toronto: Coach House Press, 1991), 82. m Rousseau was never actually a customs agent. According to Roger Shattuck, Rouseeau was a "gabelou" or an employee of the municipal toU service (Robert Shattuck, "Object Lessons for Modem Art," in Henri ROllsseall: wqys, ed. Roger Shattuck and Museum of Modern Art (New York, N.Y.); Galeries nationales du Grand Palais (France), English-language ed. (New York; Boston: Museum of Modern Art, Distributed by New York Graphic Society Books, 1985), 11). This is one of the many exaggerations or outright lies concocted about Rousseau by those around him. 'v Carolyn Lanchner and William Rubin, "Henri Rousseau and Modernism," in Heflri Rolisseall: wqys, ed. Roger Shattuck and Museum of Modern Art (New York, N.Y.); Galeries nationales du Grand Palais (France), English-language ed. (New York; Boston: Museum of Modem Art, Distributed by New York Graphic Society Books, 1985), 35-90. ,vi Henri Behar, ':Jarry, Rousseau, and Popular Tradition," in HMri Rolisseall: esJqys, ed. Roger Shattuck and Museum of Modern Art (New York, N.Y.); Galeries nationales du Grand Palais (France), English-language ed. (New York; Boston: Museum of Modern Art, Distributed by New York Graphic Society Books, 1985), 27. ,vii Ibid, 23-4.

- 35-

Shattuck 11. ,i, Michel Hoog, "Rousseau in His Time," in HMri Rolisseall: wqys, ed. Roger Shattuck and Museum of Modem Art (New York, N.Y.); Galeries nationales du Grand Palais (France), English-language ed.

(New York; Boston: Museum of Modern Art, Distributed by New York Graphic Society Books,

..iii

1985), 28-34.

Quoted in Roger Shattuck and Museum of Modem Art (New York, N.Y.); Galeries nationales du Grand Palais (France), eds., Heflri Rolisseall: wqys, English-language ed. (New York; Boston: Museum of Modem Art, Distributed by New York Graphic Society Books, 1985), 140-1. ui Ibid. ru Ibid, 226. uiii Ibid. ..;v Ibid. ""VPaul Theroux, V.S. Naipalll, an ifl/rodlichiJfl/o his worle. (New York: Africana Pub. Corp., 1972), 7. ""vi Robert Morris, Paradoxes of order: SOfffe perspectives on the jic/ion ofV.S. Naipalll (Columbia: University

U

of Missouri Press, 1975), 17. " vii Laferriere 2000, 63. uvi. Edward W. Said, "lntellectua.1s in the Post-Colonial World," in The new Salfffagllfldi reader, cd.

Robert Boyers, 1st cd. ([Syracuse N.Y.]: Syracuse University Press, 1996), 437. """' Ibid, 438. "'" Edward W. Said,john Lukacs, and Conor Cruise O'Brien, "Intellectuals in the Post-Colonial World: Response and Discussion," in The flewSalfffaglindi reader, cd. Robert Boyers, 1st ed. ([Syracuse N.Y.]: Syracuse University Press, 1996), 465. ...i Ibid.

Selwyn Cudjoe, V.S. Naipalll a fffa/erialist readiflg (Amherst: University of Massachuserts Press,

m.

1988),80. u.;. Ibid. "",iv Ibid, 146. m v Ibid, 152. m vi Laferriere 1991, 79. "",vii Ibid, 80. ....uilbid . u .;, Ibid, 81. .1 Ibid, 83 .

• li Lafetriere 2000, 55. My translation: No one asked me to write, so no one can tell me what to write. xlii Shattuck et al. 251. ,II. Laferriere comes back to this issue much more explicitly in his more recent work Je mis IIfI icrivaifl

Japoflais (Boreal, 2009). .liv Dany Laferriere, Legollt desjellfJeSjilles: Rofffafl (VLB Editeur, 1992). .Iv Dany Laferriere, Dill/ilg lvith /be dicta/or (Coach House Press, 1994). .Ivi Laferriere 1994, 15. .Ivii Ibid, 16. ,Iviil Ibid, 17. ·1i'Ibid.

IIbid, 18.

Ii Ibid, 10.

Iii Ibid, 10-13. llii Ibid. 63. liv Ibid.

Iv Ibid, 65. lvi Ibid.

Ivli Ibid, 140-1.

- 36-

lviii

Gage Averill, A d'!) for the hlllller, a d'!) for Ihe P'!Y poplllor mlln& olld power ill Haiti (Chicago: University

of Chicago Press, 1997), 154-60.

Iix Laferriere 1994, 25-7.

Ix Ibid, 106.

David Homel, "Tin-Fluting It: On Translating Dany Laferriere," in Cllllllre ill Trollnt: Trollslotillg Ihe Ulerotllre ofQJlebe&, ed. Sherry Simon, 1st ed. (Montreal: Vehicule, 1995),47-8. !xii Essar, 933.

Ixi

Nathalie Courey, "Le gout des jeanues filles de Dany Laferriere: du chaos a la reconstruction du sens," Priren&e Fron&ophone 63 (2004): 86. lxiv Essar, 933. !xv Dany Laferriere, Le gout desjeunes.jilles. (VLB editeur, 2004), 32. lxiii

~ For a discussion of the movie version of Legout des.jmnes. jilles., see Mylene F. Dorce, "Le gout des Je.unes filles de Dany Laferriere: De I'oeuvre romanesque a la production cinematographique," in Riro bun... : Hllmollr et lronie dons Ies. lil/erolllre! et Ie anemo fronrophones, ed. Christiane Ndiaye, Essais. (Montreal: Memoire d'encrier, 2008), 263-277 and Lee Skallerup Bessette, "Becoming a Gwo Neg in 1970s Haiti: D~y Laferriere's Coming-of-Age Film Le Gout des Jeunes Pilles (On the Verge of Fever)," in Gory ThIrd Smens: A Stlltfy ofViolen&e and MosClilinity in Posl&ololliol Films, ed. Swaralipi Nandi and Esha Chatterjee (New Delhi: Zubaan Books, 2011). !xvii Laferriere 2004, 304.

Ixvili Ibid, 307. !xix Ibid, 312.

La

S~phie Kerouack, "Zone de turbulence: Port-au-Prince out Ie mouvement perpetuel dans Le gout

des Jeunes filles de Dany Laferriere," Frollrophonies d'AlI/eriqlle 21 (2006): 87.

Ixxi Philippe Lejeune, ''Le journal comme 'anti fiction'," olllopo&le.org, 2005, http://www.autopacte.org/Antifiction.htrnl.

Ixxii Laferriere 2004, 33.

Ixxiii Ibid, 325.

Ixxiv Ibid, 323.

Ixxv.Jeremy D. P~~kin, '~hilip Lejeune, Explorer of the Diary," in On diary, ed. Jeremy D. Popkin and Julie Rak, by Philippe Lejeune (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2009), 12.

Ixxvi Suzanne Bunkers, Inmibillg Ihe doify: mti&ol eJJ'!)s 011 wOlI/en's diaries (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1996), 5.

Lavii Laferriere 2004, 236-7.

Ixxvili Ibid, 256-7.

Ixxiz Ibid, 258-9.

La. Ibid, 259.

Ixxxi Dany Laferriere, COllversoliOlls ove& Do,!)! Laferriere: illlerne/lls (Montreal: Les Editions de L'l Parole Meteque, 2010), 46.

Laxii Laferriere 2004, 245.

Ixxxiii Ibid, 250.

Ixxxiv Ibid.

Dany Laferriere, Un An De Vim Par TmljJs De Colostrophe (Henry Knisel Le&llIre Series) (Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 2010), 9-10.

!xxxv

-37-

Dismemberment in the Chicana/o Body Politic Fragmenting Nationness and Form in Oscar Zeta Acosta's The Revolt of the Cockroach People, and Alejandro Morales's The Rag Doll Plagues - Danizete Martinez

Dismemberment tends to expose the social and political inscription of the human body and hence of the subject.

-Margaret E. Owens, Stages ojDisfllelllbemJellt

Twentieth century body studies have frequently centered on corporeal fragmentation and have attributed the phenomenon to the human psyche's response to advancements in science, technology, and communication, and how these shifts have influenced our basic process of socialization. Jacques Lacan has referred to this as the "fragility of the ego" and ascribes it to an inevitable repercussion of entering the symbolic social order; hence, the fracrured body has become a metaphor for the modern fissured psychological condition.' Here, I consider how trearments of dismemberment center on the construction and deconstruction of Chicana/o nationalist discourse. I focus on the cracks of radical discourse in Acosta's The Revolt oj the Cockroach People (1973) and in the postmodern apocalyptic historiography of Morales's The Rag Doll Plogtles (1992) in order to illustrate the thematic resonance in twO distinct historical moments and novelistic forms whose crises focus on violence directed towards the body and its relation to the Chicana/o body politic.

These texts reveal that within each form of violence and within each instance of dismemberment there exists a differently encoded set of implications that account for the excision and extraction of the body within the larger framework of Chicana/o culrural discourse. This includes the obvious aberrations to the integrity of the physical body, as well as to discursive fragmentations that imply cracks in psychological, social, and political spheres in different moments in Chicana/o history. In these narratives, dismemberment is an enacrment of violence that deconstructs pre-given notions regarding a fixed Chicana/o identity, and Acosta and Morales characterize what happens when the Mexican-American subject internalizes, resists, and rejects ambiguous racial discourses.

Traditionally in twentieth-century body studies, threats to the integrity of the body begin as a threat towards individual dissolution. Helaine Posner suggests that this preponderance is the result of the cultural isolation of the individual and the following inevitability that leaves the subject vulnerable to social, political, and physical assaults that are aesthetically expressed through the dismemberment of limbs, internal organs, and bodily fluids that-when separated from their body proper-assume a subjective liminality.ii Oscar Zeta Acosta's The Revolt of the Cockroach People and Alejandro Morales's The Rag Doll Plogtles demonstrate how these same threats of corporeal violence and dissolution are also present in Chicana/o literarure, and point towards a shifting individual and collective cui rural identity.3 Much as Lazaro Lima asserts in The Lotillo Botfy (2007), I also maintain that dismemberment in Chicana/o cultural production reveals critical social upheavals that indicates "a divide that fracrure[s] alliances, elid[es] ethnic and racial identities, and disembod[ies] subjects from the protocols of citizenship." Two critical examples of this division in Chicana/o cultural production is evident in the nationalist and post-nationalist narratives of Acosta and Morales who treat dismemberment-resulting from autopsy and disease--as endemic of the fractured alliances that continue to suffuse the real and imagined corporeal integrity of the Chicana/o body politic.

- 38-

lviii

Gage Averill, A d'!) for the hlllller, a d'!) for Ihe P'!Y poplllor mlln& olld power ill Haiti (Chicago: University

of Chicago Press, 1997), 154-60.

Iix Laferriere 1994, 25-7.

Ix Ibid, 106.

David Homel, "Tin-Fluting It: On Translating Dany Laferriere," in Cllllllre ill Trollnt: Trollslotillg Ihe Ulerotllre ofQJlebe&, ed. Sherry Simon, 1st ed. (Montreal: Vehicule, 1995),47-8. !xii Essar, 933.

Ixi

Nathalie Courey, "Le gout des jeanues filles de Dany Laferriere: du chaos a la reconstruction du sens," Priren&e Fron&ophone 63 (2004): 86. lxiv Essar, 933. !xv Dany Laferriere, Le gout desjeunes.jilles. (VLB editeur, 2004), 32. lxiii

~ For a discussion of the movie version of Legout des.jmnes. jilles., see Mylene F. Dorce, "Le gout des Je.unes filles de Dany Laferriere: De I'oeuvre romanesque a la production cinematographique," in Riro bun... : Hllmollr et lronie dons Ies. lil/erolllre! et Ie anemo fronrophones, ed. Christiane Ndiaye, Essais. (Montreal: Memoire d'encrier, 2008), 263-277 and Lee Skallerup Bessette, "Becoming a Gwo Neg in 1970s Haiti: D~y Laferriere's Coming-of-Age Film Le Gout des Jeunes Pilles (On the Verge of Fever)," in Gory ThIrd Smens: A Stlltfy ofViolen&e and MosClilinity in Posl&ololliol Films, ed. Swaralipi Nandi and Esha Chatterjee (New Delhi: Zubaan Books, 2011). !xvii Laferriere 2004, 304.

Ixvili Ibid, 307. !xix Ibid, 312.

La

S~phie Kerouack, "Zone de turbulence: Port-au-Prince out Ie mouvement perpetuel dans Le gout

des Jeunes filles de Dany Laferriere," Frollrophonies d'AlI/eriqlle 21 (2006): 87.

Ixxi Philippe Lejeune, ''Le journal comme 'anti fiction'," olllopo&le.org, 2005, http://www.autopacte.org/Antifiction.htrnl.

Ixxii Laferriere 2004, 33.

Ixxiii Ibid, 325.

Ixxiv Ibid, 323.

Ixxv.Jeremy D. P~~kin, '~hilip Lejeune, Explorer of the Diary," in On diary, ed. Jeremy D. Popkin and Julie Rak, by Philippe Lejeune (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2009), 12.

Ixxvi Suzanne Bunkers, Inmibillg Ihe doify: mti&ol eJJ'!)s 011 wOlI/en's diaries (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1996), 5.

Lavii Laferriere 2004, 236-7.

Ixxvili Ibid, 256-7.

Ixxiz Ibid, 258-9.

La. Ibid, 259.

Ixxxi Dany Laferriere, COllversoliOlls ove& Do,!)! Laferriere: illlerne/lls (Montreal: Les Editions de L'l Parole Meteque, 2010), 46.

Laxii Laferriere 2004, 245.

Ixxxiii Ibid, 250.

Ixxxiv Ibid.

Dany Laferriere, Un An De Vim Par TmljJs De Colostrophe (Henry Knisel Le&llIre Series) (Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 2010), 9-10.

!xxxv

-37-

Dismemberment in the Chicana/o Body Politic Fragmenting Nationness and Form in Oscar Zeta Acosta's The Revolt of the Cockroach People, and Alejandro Morales's The Rag Doll Plagues - Danizete Martinez

Dismemberment tends to expose the social and political inscription of the human body and hence of the subject.

-Margaret E. Owens, Stages ojDisfllelllbemJellt

Twentieth century body studies have frequently centered on corporeal fragmentation and have attributed the phenomenon to the human psyche's response to advancements in science, technology, and communication, and how these shifts have influenced our basic process of socialization. Jacques Lacan has referred to this as the "fragility of the ego" and ascribes it to an inevitable repercussion of entering the symbolic social order; hence, the fracrured body has become a metaphor for the modern fissured psychological condition.' Here, I consider how trearments of dismemberment center on the construction and deconstruction of Chicana/o nationalist discourse. I focus on the cracks of radical discourse in Acosta's The Revolt oj the Cockroach People (1973) and in the postmodern apocalyptic historiography of Morales's The Rag Doll Plogtles (1992) in order to illustrate the thematic resonance in twO distinct historical moments and novelistic forms whose crises focus on violence directed towards the body and its relation to the Chicana/o body politic.

These texts reveal that within each form of violence and within each instance of dismemberment there exists a differently encoded set of implications that account for the excision and extraction of the body within the larger framework of Chicana/o culrural discourse. This includes the obvious aberrations to the integrity of the physical body, as well as to discursive fragmentations that imply cracks in psychological, social, and political spheres in different moments in Chicana/o history. In these narratives, dismemberment is an enacrment of violence that deconstructs pre-given notions regarding a fixed Chicana/o identity, and Acosta and Morales characterize what happens when the Mexican-American subject internalizes, resists, and rejects ambiguous racial discourses.

Traditionally in twentieth-century body studies, threats to the integrity of the body begin as a threat towards individual dissolution. Helaine Posner suggests that this preponderance is the result of the cultural isolation of the individual and the following inevitability that leaves the subject vulnerable to social, political, and physical assaults that are aesthetically expressed through the dismemberment of limbs, internal organs, and bodily fluids that-when separated from their body proper-assume a subjective liminality.ii Oscar Zeta Acosta's The Revolt of the Cockroach People and Alejandro Morales's The Rag Doll Plogtles demonstrate how these same threats of corporeal violence and dissolution are also present in Chicana/o literarure, and point towards a shifting individual and collective cui rural identity.3 Much as Lazaro Lima asserts in The Lotillo Botfy (2007), I also maintain that dismemberment in Chicana/o cultural production reveals critical social upheavals that indicates "a divide that fracrure[s] alliances, elid[es] ethnic and racial identities, and disembod[ies] subjects from the protocols of citizenship." Two critical examples of this division in Chicana/o cultural production is evident in the nationalist and post-nationalist narratives of Acosta and Morales who treat dismemberment-resulting from autopsy and disease--as endemic of the fractured alliances that continue to suffuse the real and imagined corporeal integrity of the Chicana/o body politic.

- 38-

D ismemb ered O ntology The motif of dismembennent is present at the inception of Chicana/o cultural production, beginning with its pre-conquest mythology. The legend of Coyolxauhqui clearly demonstrates such violence as the Aztec Moon goddess was dismembered by her brother, the Sun god Huitzilopochtli. Many Chicana feminists such as Gloria Anzaldua and Cherne Moraga have approached the goddess's dismemberment as an opportunity to discuss the issues of oppression and violence that have worked to repress women and sustain a patriarchal cultural dominance. In later folklore that emerged from the cultural conflicts between the United States and Mexico, the theme of bodily fragmentation is also portrayed as a powerful fonn of resistance, most explicitly in the legend of the California-Mexican bandit Joaquin Murieta that emerged when the first post-Mexican American War generation were becoming U.S. citizens (1848-1910).4 As Shelley Streeby and Jesse Aleman have already successfully illustrated, The Legend ofJoaquin Murieta (1854) critically engages issues of race and class in relation to American literature and national discourse. 5 For Aleman, Murieta's decapitation is a literal and metaphoric act that "severs the head of radical ideology from the racialized body politic and leaves it dismembered." 6 By situating Murieta's myth among other severed bodies of the dispossessed that include Santa Anna, New Mexico's spinosa brothers, and "the entire Mexican body politic that remained in Mexico's far northern frontier [. ..J that functions as a reminder of the centrality of colonialism in the heartQand) of American culture," Aleman acutely notes that the legend is another important example of how fixed constructions of race collapse under the scrutiny of idealized national discourses.1 The following examples enact multi-varied perspectives of a distinct Californian Chicana/o sensibility--during, and after the 1960s-1970s Chicano Movement--ruJd reveal how dismembennent as a metaphor for cultural and individual fragmentation is key to understanding trends and fissures within this national discourse. Acosta's and Morales's tex demonstrate how the act of dismemberment positions Chicanas/os within a tradition of resistance in Mexican-American identity politics, specifically in how Acosta looks for a revolution to reorganize the positioning of Chicanas/ os within the dominant socioeconomic American paradigm through protest and radical nationalism. Likewise, Morales invokes an apocalyptic vision of the future for Mexicans, Chicanas/os, and AngloAmericans alike amidst impending ecological disaster. Through the metaphor of dismemberment, each text demonstrates the different ways racial ideology is radicalized, internalized, and rejected, and depicts a shifting national discourse that resists a static construction of collective and individual ethnic identity.

Cracks in Chicano Nationalism in O scar Zeta Acosta's The Revolt of the Cockroach People The Revolt of the Cockroach People marks a significant rupture in Chicano nationalism when Acosta, a seminal figure in the Chicano Movement, fl!lds himself actively participating in the dismemberment of his own people. D ismemberment and fragmentation are intrinsic themes in Acosta's work and life and are vehicles for expressing his personal fissures in both Anglo-American and Chicana/o culture at large. In Lima's discussion of politicized cultural production in the 1960s and 1970s, he points out that, ''The Chicano Movement intervened in the national scene with symbolic representations of collective histories of dispossession during an age characterized by [... J scripted notions of American identity through fictions of equality, national allegiance, and the promise of political participation." 8 Yet, instead of supporting this idealization of colJective identity (in assuming that collective histories lead to collective futures), Acosta subverts the ideology through dismemberment. J:-lis narrative contribution to the corpus delicti of Chicana/o cultural production is a discursive deconstruction of the collective ideali.z ation at the core of the Movement. 9 By orchestrating the fictional young vato loco Robert Fernandez's autopsy, Acosta realizes his complicity in the - 39-

dismantling of the Chicana/o body and suffers a psyc~olow:cal ~smembennen~-or . fragmentation-in the Lacanian sense of the word. This ~plit ulomately lea~s him to re!ect the nationalism he was deeply committed to and forces him to reevaluate his construcoon of identity and his connection to the Chicana/o community.

Much has been said concerning the ambiguity of Acosta's politics. Manuel Luis Martinez argues that while "the nationalist movimiC11to opted for a militant and isolating separation because it no longer believed in the possibility of a trans formative politics," I~ .

Acosta, who was not capable of eradicating his "Americanness," and who sought to mamtaill his individuality within the larger Chicana/o community, was unable to give himself entirely over to Brown Pride and the concept of Aztlin, the mythic homeland place of the Aztecs that symbolized a hopeful Chicana/o utopia. As a discursive strategy that functioned as a counter history Ie l.S. master nnrr:l1ivcs, zrl:in hccame a unifying force f(lr Chic:lnn~, Mexicans, and recent immigrants. This singulan vision allowed for a. disparate community to unite and identify with a common struggle, thus constructing a monolithic ideology that was grounded in a collective identity. However, as Acosta's narrative demonstrates, the differences among individuals and their ideas concerning constructions of the Chicano body politic were vast and subject to stresses ranging from person to person and state to state. As a result, the nationalist ideology that seduced Acosta in TheAlltobiogrophy of a Bro/ll/1 BuJJalo (1972) is characterized in its dismembered form in Revolt to articulate cracks in 1960s and 1970s Chicano national discourse.

Acosta's fragmented and scatological prose is another example of his opposition and substantiates the rascuache and the grotesque as transgressive characteristics in Chicana/o narrative. According to Tomas Ybarra-Frausto: ''To be rasquache is to be down but not out [... J Very generally, rasquachismo is an underdog perspective-lo.s de abajo .. .it presupp~ses a world view of the have nots, but it is a quality exemplified in objects and places and SOClal comportment ... it has evolved as a bicultural sensibility. 11 In this regard, to be rascuache is to be resourceful and successful in overcoming economic and social obstacles; it's an attitude born out of a dignified humility of making the most with what you have and agitating the status quo. 12 In Revolt, Acosta's use of rascliachislIIo and dismemberment are written ways of linking him to his proto-Mexican self and are means of negotiating his identity. 13 Acosta's rascliachisTlJo is transferred through his writing, which as Hector Calderon notes has not always been well received for its digression, self-indulgence, and lack of structure. Indeed, Martinez has also pointed out that numerous Chicano/a scholars such as Juan Bruce- ovoa have criticized Acosta for his megalomaniac beatnik aspirations and lack of direction. 14 However, if we consider the radical implications his narrative style offers, his books, as Calderon suggests, can be considered a true reinvention of a new genre. 15 J:-lis fragmented style and his reordering of his readers' expectations is a radicalization of narrative .fonn.

Raymund A. Paredes also observes that Acosta's hyperbolic and outrageous style IS an extension of his personal excesses and paradoxes and is intended to push readers into a nihilistic and apocalyptic understanding of contemporary life. 16 I-lis narrative is another example of how his use of dismemberment and fragmentation reify the pluralities of Chicana/o experience, perspective, and cracks of Chicana/o nationalism.

Acosta's cultural paradox-of admiring and resisting fearures of both AngloAmerican and Chicana/o ideologies-motivated his political involvement and also quashed it. After realizing that he did not fit into either paradigm-neither with the Anglo-American counterculture, nor with the Chicana/o nationalists-Revolt consequently became an account of Acosta's struggle berween homogenous constructions of identity and cultural difference.

As an incongruous, uneven, and protean figure, Acosta is also fragmented and dismembered from both Chicana/o and Anglo American bodies in the very same ways that his narrative - 40 -

takes shape. Indeed, Acosta's personal life reflected through his letters, poetry, college essays, unpublished manuscripts, and in the legal documents by and about him convey a fragmented life made up of many disparate parts held together by a self-consciously constructed narrative. Robert Lee comments on the various reinventions of Oscar Zeta Acosta: There is the anarcho-libertarian Chicano raised in California's Riverbank/Modesto and who makes his name as a Legal Aid lawyer in Oakland and Los Angeles after qualifying in San Francisco in 1966. There is the Airforce enlistee who, on being sent to Panama, becomes a Pentecostal convert and missionary there (1949-52) before opting for apostasy and a return to California. There is the jailee in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, in 1968, forced to argue in local court for his own interests in uncertain street Spanish (or calo) after a spat with a hotelkeeper. Finally, there is the Oscar of the barricades, the battling lawyer of the schools and St. Basil's protest in 1968. This is the "buffalo" who becomes La Raza Unida independent candidate for S?eriff of Los Angeles in 1970, who regularly affirms his first allegiance by signing himself "Oscar Zeta Acosta, Chicano lawyer" and who finally leaves for Mexico in despair, madness even, at the internal divisions of Chicano politics. 17 !he tensi~n of trying to control, or rather repress parts of Acosta's disparate p~rsonality erupts 10 the novel when he witnesses the autopsy of Robert Fernandez, who died under suspicious circumstances while being held in custody of the Los Angeles Sheriffs department. F.ernandez is a seventeen-year-old Chicano with a long history of drug addiction and trouble WIth the law. To Acosta, Fernandez signifies the historical consequences of sustain.ed par~digmatic racism: "The /Jato loco has been fighting with the pig since the Anglos stole his land 10 the last century. He will continue to fight until he is exterminated." 18 In this case, his body is dismembered to mirror divisions within the Chicana/o body politic and fissures fraying a unified national discourse, echoing social conditions that have a historical gro~cling ~th ~oaquin Murieta, the Mexican folk hero who eluded the Texas Rangers. In addition to his dismemberment, fragmentation emerges in political implications in that Fernandez's death alienates Acosta from the Movement.

Acosta's association with Fernandez and his family is book-ended by the rise and fall of Acosta's identification with a singular Chicana/o nationalism. Before Fernandez's family approached Acosta for legal guidance, he and one hundred others had gathered to protest the arrest of twenty-one Chicanos and Chicanas at the St. Basil Church the day before. Acosta experi~nced C~~ana/o.nationalism at its height and embraced the spirit of commuruty by collectively reslstlng raCIal, economic, and educational prejudice. Unlike in Brown ~uf!alo where Acosta is in~estigating his hyphenated identity and feeling outcast from both SIdes of the Anglo and Chicana/o culture, his initial involvement with the movement gestates in ReIIoltwithin a subversive space of protest that he has collaboratively created.

Tho~gh ~e Fernandez family does not actively participate in Chicana/o militant politics, they Identify Acosta as a .fellow Mexican American willing to hear their story and help them face the Los Angeles Police Department. They believe that Fernandez did not commit suicide as the sheriffs department claimed, but that he was murdered and that the crime was covered ~p by the a~thorities. Supported and held in high esteem by the Chicana/o commuruty, Acosta IS co?fident that the judicial system will crack under pressure, and requests for the exhumation of Fernandez's body and for another autopsy to take place where Acosta himself will be present.

An a~topsy !s supposed to be a systematic procedure that must be performed .

Without emotions, dJstaste, or sentimentality in order for the pathologist to discover the - 41 -

events and circumstances that led to his or her demise: ''The dead body on the table is many things: a testimonial to a failure of the healing arts; a testimonial to the violence humans inflict upon one another or upon themselves; and concrete evidence of our mortality." 19 However, the debacle of Fernandez' autopsy does little to relate the circumstances of the victim's death; rather, it becomes a symbolic psychological dissection of Acosta. As the most salient grotesque scene in the novel, the autopsy represents not only the dismembering of Fernandez's body, but the severing of Acosta's identity politics and the institutional dismembering of the Chicana/o body. The stress of the situation and his political disillusionment leads to Acosta's political disassociation with Chicana/o nationalism and triggers an internal psychological spli t: he is unable to live up to the stereorype of the underdog hero that he has created for himself. Witnessing the heap of butchered bodies foreshadows the horror of Femandez's autopsy and Acosta's own complicity in the violence: "I look around at these men in the room. Seven experts, Dr. aguchi and a Chinese doctor from his staff, the orderly and a man from the Sheriffs ... they want IIle, a Chicano lawyer, to tell them where to begin. They want lIIe to direct them. It is too fantastic to take seriously.

'How about this? Can you look there?' I point to the left cheek." 20 Fernandez's autopsy also represents Acosta's personal and political dismemberment from a discourse that fails to include individuals on the fringe of society like Fernandez and Acosta: Naked bodies are stretched out on [hospital carts]. Bodies of red and purple meat; bodies of men with white skin gone yellow; bodies of black men with blood over torn faces. This one has an arm missing. The stub is tied off with plastic string. The red-headed woman with full breasts? Someone has ripped the right ear from her head. The genitals of that spade are packed with towels. Look at it! The blood is still gurgling. There, an old wino, his legs crushed, mangled, gone to mere meat. 21 For Julia Kristeva, the corpse is a sign of abjection, and its defilement a rupture of primal repression. Abjection shares the same interstitial realm with the severed body in that both represent the improper, unclean, and disruptive moments in our dominant systems of order that are often signaled by haunting representations of the Other. They are both presences that avoid assimilation yet cannot be gotten rid of. She reminds us, as does Freud, that primitive societies sanctioned a space for the abject and taboo as a reminder of unknown universal forces: ''The abject confronts us, on the one hand, with those fragile states where man strays on the territories of animal. Thus, by way of abjection, primitive societies have marked out a precise area of their culture in order to remove it from the threatening world of animals or animalism, which were imagined as representatives of sex and murder." Z2 As a rupture of primal repression, abjection takes on the negative qualities of psychological fragmentation that are sinister, scheming, shady, perverse, corruptive, lawless, and immoral.

Kristeva maintains that the corpse, then, is the utmost manifestation of abjection: "It is death infecting life." Likewise, in this scene Acosta wields the dismembered corpse of Fernandez to represent the subjugated institutionalized body of the Chicana/o subject.

With Acosta's complicity in Fernandez' autopsy-a literal dissection of the brown body-he is enacting this same search for truth about himself and his role in the Chicana/ o community, and as they hack away at the corpse he feverishly gets caught up in the violence and with horror realizes his participation in the dismemberment of his own people: And when it is done, there is no more Robert. Oh, sure, they put the head back in the place. They sew it up as best as they can. But there is no part of the body that I have not ordered chopped. I, who am so good and deserving of love. Yes, me, the - 42 -

big chigoll! I, Mr. Buffalo Z. Brown. Me, I ordered those white men to cut up the brown body of that Chicano boy, just another expendable Cockroach. 23 Elizabeth Klaver points out that according to Western epistemology, the cutting up and literary and visual representation of the dead body is a culturally constructed act for selfknowledge. 24 This she likens to the act of autopsy that Michel Foucault has identified as seeking a "residence of truth in the dark centre of things." 25 As a major figure in the Chicano Movement, Acosta finds himself actively participating in the dismemberment of his own people and he betrays the inefficacy of its political purpose. He recognizes his complicity with members of the group that symbolically represent the dominant order systematically oppressing Chicana/o civil rights. Furthermore, Acosta realizes that he will never be able to completely escape the cultural bifurcation-the splitting of Mexican and American identities-that has haunted him throughout his life.

In the novel, revolt is initially expressed in Acosta's involvement with the Chicana/o rebellion against the dominant Anglo paradigm, but after Acosta's psychologlcal breakdown overhis irreconcilable hyphenated-self, Acosta revolts against narrow nationalist identity poli~cs. Fernandez's autopsy symbolically enacts a severing of the Chicana/o political body and illustrates Acosta's psychologlcal dismemberment After Fernandez's case is again ruled as a suicide and dismissed by the court, Acosta's internal struggle comes to a head and he begins to demonstrate ruptures in Chicana/o nationalist ideology by pulling nJovidas and inciting rebellion. The fmt instance occurs when he and his militant friend, Gilbert, bomb a local Safeway in support of the United Farm Workers, and later when Acosta is alone and bombs the courthouse killing a fellow Chicano. His disillusionment with the Chicano Movement culminates in a massive cultural severing and his narrative demonstrates the limitations monolithic or one-dimensional identities impose on his sense of individuality.

Dismemberment in Acosta's narrative signifies ruptures in monolithic identity politics, anticipated radical shifts in Chicana/o identity politics, and also forged new paths in Chicana/o cultural production that acknowledged and celebrated the erratic and incongruous driving forces punctuating a cultural schizophrenia. Acosta's split ftom a rigld set of Chicana/o identity politics that marks the height of the Movement signals a trend in Chicana/o discourse and literary production that privileges essentialized, or stereotypical, depictions of ethnic identity. After he realizes that the inherent fragmentation within the movement is also consonant with individual Chicana/o identity, he cannot accept a national discourse that-to him-ignored these complexities and projected a singular image that was limited in scope and essentially negated the dynamism that predicated this ideology.

Apocalyptic Energies in The Rag Doll Plagues In an interview with Frederick Luis Aldama, Morales states that his writing is not apocalyptic; rather that it contains two major apocalyptic energles of deconstruction and cre~tion. 26 This statement underscores the same cultural tensions at play in Acosta's story; yet ill The Rag Doll Plagllei, Morales uses dismemberment as a reaction to disease in order to demonstrate violence done to the brown body, whereas in Acosta's case, it is a social disease that leads to a cultural severing. Morales shows us that the same social tensions that pervaded Acosta's time and novel-perhaps slightly occluded by a more politically correct climate--are in~eed.still present in a transnational/post-national worldview. In The Rag Doll Plagues, where historlcal events span pre-nationalist to post-nationalist Chicana/o histories, dismemberment becomes an analogy for colonial misrule, miscegenation, hybridity, and ruptures in the national experience.

The novel deals with the themes surrounding the diseased and the deteriorating body, a metaphor for what many critics such as Marc Priewe in "Bio-Politics and the - 43 -

ContamiNation of the Body in Alejandro Morales' The Rag Doll Plague!' (2004) has identified as the withering of the Chicano and Anglo-American body politic, colonial misrule, and a subversion-contarnination--of racial and cultural purity. As a result of preventative measures against disease (as depicted in Book One "Mexico City") or as a means of ensuring job security and keeping the wheels of capitalistic production spinning smoothly (depicted in Book Three ''LAMEX''), severing is indicative of diminishing humanistic values and pervasive ecologlcal consequences resulting from racist and greedy decision making on the part of the dominant socio-political class. Fragmentation rendered as corporeal disfigurement in The Rag Doll Plagues articulates the limitations and dangers that rigld notions about race and class continue to violate the Chicana/o body politic.

Morales' novel follows three incarnations of Doctor Gregory Revueleas as he leaps backward and forward in time, beginning as a Spanish doctor representing the Royal Protomedicato in Mexico City. Divisions between colonizing ideology and indigenous culture signals the consequences of a crumbling empire through bodily dismemberment due to disease, debauchery, and a collapsing infrastructure. This symbolic dismantling of European colonial rule not only anticipates a political severing of Mexico from Spain, but also predicates how dismemberment is used to depict ambiguous constructions of race and class throughout The Rag Doll Plaglles. Indeed, Morales claims that "Mexico City" deals with the limitations and moral issues of science and ecologlcal consequences of poor administration on the part of the Spanish colonies. '1:7 His sharp contrast between the haves and the have-nots in ew Spain renders the wealth in obscene decadence while the poor are diseased and living in filth. Dr. Gregorio Revueltas is sent from the majesty of Spain in 1788 to attend to an epidemic that is quickly infiltrating Mexico's center from its periphery. The areas where death is highest are inhabited by the poor who are unable to afford and implement basic preventive measures that would stave off infection. As the disease progresses and adds to their squalor, it subsequently infects the judgment of its victims, and further alienates them from the ruling class: As we passed the Palace of the Inquisition, men and women squatted facing each other and deposited excrement and urine into the canal that ran down the center of the street. As they met their human needs, they conversed ,vith ease and cordiality. Upon finishing, they simply raised their garment and walked away. They had no paper nor cloth to practice anal hyglene. It was cleaner to defecate and stand than to employ your hand to wipe away the clinglng or watery excess. onetheles~, many adults and children did use their hands. The windows of the houses along this street were tightly closed in a desperate attempt to keep out the gases of decaying animal and human waste.

Immediately before the carriage, a window suddenly opened. Without warning, a pail of excrement and urine was tossed out. At many points, the drainage ditch running down the middle of the street was clogged with the manure and urine from animals and human beings. Puddles formed in which to [Gregorio'S] absolute consternation [he] observed children playing happily. When a cart would roll through the puddles, its wheels stirred up an intolerable rankness. 28 In addition to their lack of hYglene, Gregorio witnesses adults and children glving themselves freely over to sexual degeneracy: young men are sodomizing young boys; a scantily cla~ woman is openly performing fellatio while others look on; a few men, women, and children are cleansing their genitalia with water from the dirty ditch; and children are offering to masturbate Gregorio. 29 The people's vulnerability to the disease is reiterated in the ways tJ:at they perform as a community. No one is safe from contamination, and the people of MeX1CO have taken to their own defenses. They refuse the established social paradigms and resort to - 44 -

c~val behavior, and by rejecting the social expectations of good conduct, the poor and

diseased sever themselves from hegemonic contro!'

Dismemberment is also enacted through environmental racism and its relation to ~e. body politic. ~ Mona is ~ result of pervasive race relations between the Spanish and llldigenous populations that IS perpetuated through empirical discourse and the exploitation of the native body. Maria Herrera-Sobek notes in "Epidemics, Epistemophilia, and Racism: Ecological Literary Criticism and The Rag Doll Plaguel' (1995) that the degenerative envir~~en~ is a direct .result of racial inequality and empirical discourse. The corporeal explOItation IS twofold III the Spaniards' greedy overdevelopment and urbanization of Mexican land, and in their treatment of the natives as beasts of burden who literally carry them across the river on their shoulders and bear the burden of their exploits. 30 As an epidemic that originated in the periphery of Mexico City and soon made its way to the center, La Mona grows to become an apocalyptic force that is blind to race and class diffe~ences and des~bilizes the oppressive ideology of the ruling class. The galvanizing remams of the coloruzed and colonizers-"stockings of skin, grotesquely swollen, reddish blood as is sausage" 31--are physical reminders of the pernicious consequences of ambiguous constructions of race and power.

Violence to bodily integrity is also enacted through aggressive and freakish amputation intended to stave off infection. This method, however, is only a temporary treatment and can only slow the deterioration. It gives patients--at most-nine months to a year more to live. All victims, Spanish and indigenous alike, are forced into an interstitial state where ~e uncertain conditions of their existence mirror the future of empire as well as the construCtions of class and race that sustained its ruling power. And like Acosta who also Internalizes an ambiguous national discourse, Gregorio becomes instrumental in the severing of the ethnic body: The pungent smell of vinegar made my eyes tear. I counted twenty-five cadavers on the tables in a room occupied by nine students. We moved closer to watch the two men perform the amputation of the left arm of the female cadaver. Carefully they severed through the museu/lis pectoralis mqjorand sliced down to the humerus bone.

The surgeons then cut around the bone and sawed the arm off. The procedure took about an hour. The arteria and the vena were knotted and the wound dressed. Father Antonio congratulated his joyful apprentices for the precise surgery accomplished.

The two men were excused. The younger one handed me his scalpel. 32 This scene represents how a fragmented nationalism is a cultural event in Mexican history: pres~nt IS Father J ude, ~regorio's personal assistant who represents the indigenous part of MeX1c~ cultur.e; GregorJo, who represents a European imperial presence; and Father Antoruo and his cohorts who represent the assimilated aspect of Mexico that adheres to Western rather than traditional medicine. Here, three different facets of Mexican culture collectively participate in the mutilation of the Mexican body, and while FatherJude's lacerated face testifies to how the dismemberment functioned in Mexico's past, Father Antonio's generation of mixed Mexican natives and Spanish emigres signals the critical role of mestizos/os in Mexico's future. .Gregorio:s na~onalistic sympathies begin to diminish after he begins performing amputations on his patients and comes to identify himself with Mexico rather than with Old Spain. 0egorio's ~ecision to align himself with Mexico is another implication of the crumbling of empJre. Set at the brink of Mexico's nationhood and within the historical context of the French Revolution, severing in the beginning of The Rag Doll Plaglles also - 45-

marks Mexico's separation from Spanish empire. Book One closes with a sense of optimism for the future of Mexico as Gregorio reflects: I labored for a better world, a better Mexico for Monica Marisela. I sensed a new attitude toward life grow within the people. University and students conversed about freedom and equality, about rationalism and liberalism. Intellectuals declared that human beings should no longer be oppressed by the trinity of the king, the priest and the landed aristocrat. They proclaimed that governments should be based on the consent of the people, that religion should be a private matter, that society should no longer be divided into hereditary classes, that a person should rise as high as talent would carry him. These ideas soon circulated amongst folk. In the streets, in churches, in taverns, I heard the people discuss the future of their country. 33 Dismemberment through amputation in ''Mexico City" is depicted as a conduit of growth, a manifestation of what Mikhail Bakhtin identifies as the essence of principal growth, 34 0r a catalyst for radical change. This is also an example of what Morales himself has termed an apocalyptic energy of creation that is necessary in the process of moving forward. 35 Indeed, we do see that as internal political relations in Mexico improve, so do the social and environmental conditions, but not until after LA Mona takes full course. In its manifestation of our basic primal fears of otherness and death, The Rag Doll Plaglles illustrates how the dismemberment and destruction is an integral part of the life cycle.

Book Two: Delhi takes place in the present, and similar to the preceding and final sections of the novel, it also intertwines issues of disease, plague, racism, and class conllict throughout the narrative. Here, however, ecological concerns are expressed through ~e threat of the AIDS virus and its effects on Gregorio's girlfriend as well as on the relations between the Anglo and Chicana/o communities. In his discussion of AIDS in Elias Miguel Munoz's The Cnalest Peiforlllance, Lima acutely observes, "the issue of writing [is] a . contestatory and transgressive practice in the age of AIDS, and the forms of cultural amnesIa it attempts to destruct." 36 In this middle section of the novel, the infected individual is not brown and poor-but rather Gregorio's Anglo and privileged girlfriend who experiences social stigmatization from the disease and turns to the Chicana/o body for support and sense of community. Disease and dismemberment in this section operates as a precursor for the destructive outcomes in the books conclusion.

While "Mexico City" ends with some semblance of hope, the aggressiveness of disease and racism in ''Delhi'' foreshadows deteriorating race relations for the rest of the novel where dismemberment is a future projection of unresolved tensions between national and post-national identity politics within the Chicana/o body. Set approximately in 2090, race relations, class divisions, and border identity in "LAMEX" have grown more complicated since "Mexico"; it concludes with deteriorating race relations between Anglos, Mexicans, and Mexican-Americans in the U.S. The fragmented Chicana/o body, manifested in themes of mutability and life on the desert border, underscores fears about a future humanity that privileges hyper-capitalism and homogeneity over traditional values and subjective identity.

Doctor Gregory Revueltas, a third incarnation of the twO central characters in the previous chapters, is involved with a bio-political regime that is trying to control.raging epidemics that are plaguing the LAMEX region and are the results of the ecologtcal damage done to the earth. Just as AIDS and cancer threatened earlier populations, an entirely new set of environmental concerns has also brought about a new threat of mutable and spontaneous diseases. Gregory and his partner/lover Gabi Chung are assigned to the liE region to -46 -

investigate a spontaneous virus that has killed over 500 individuals. While race and class divisions are pronounced in "LAMEX," Gregory finds a cure that transcends race, class, gender, and age and is inherent in the Mexicans whose blood has been genetically mutated to survive the devastating ecological effects that have transpired in the last hundred years.

Gregory's discovery has deleterious effects on his community: Mexicans are commodified for .their blood. and beco~e a status ~ymbol for middle and upper-class Anglos, inflaming th notion of MeXicans as objects of deSIre, hatred, exploitation, and subjugation. In the end, Morales renders a pessimistic view of race relations between Anglos, Mexicans, and Mexican-Americans in the U.S. and reconsiders how issues of a1terity in the future are subject to the abuses of mankind and the loss of humanity. 37

This is clearly expressed in the hybrid robotic-human form that Gregory's colle~es-~e G~bi-are assuming. The body in this hybridized state depicts the diversity of Chic~na! 0 Identity and stresses the threat that an over-reliance on technology and mech~atlon has .on a global level. Gabi willingly has her arm amputated and replaced with an artifiCIal one to Increase her work production, advance in her field, and gain job security.

While her productivity initially increases, her body eventually rejects the "new" arm as Gabi succumbs to greed and corruption. The correlation between Gabi's decaying body and her ~or~ degeneracy connects her to the destructive forces of La Mona. In this regard, Morales IS dOing something unique with dismemberment in that his narrative posits disease and disability. ~s a cons~que~ce of failing humanism, namely due to the main characters' greed :d ambltl?~. Gabl sacrific~s part of her b~dy and her humanity to fulfill personal ambition.

In her willingn~ss to sacofice her humaruty she negates her authentic self and freakishly come~ .to symbolize the dangers of capitalism and the erasure of the subjective identity in an exploltlve labor system. Gabi becomes a broken and subjugated body not only because of ~hat she ha~ lo~t, but more importantly because of what she has become--an apparatus to a bigger machine Intent on controlling humanity, or more fittingly, an apotheosis of a Big Brother and postrnodern crisis. 39 . In ~s sense, my interpretation of Gabi's roboticism is similar to Donna Haraway's approXImation of the cyborg that represents "transgressed boundaries, potent fusions and dangerous possibilities which progressive people might explore as one part of needed' . a1 wor. . k " 40 And yet, while cyborg imagery can, as Haraway suggests, show us "a way poli tic out of the maze of dualisms in which we have explained our bodies and our tools to ourselv~s," 41 it fails to do this in Morales' narrative. Instead of symbolically representing a synthesIs ~f cultured, gendered, and political hybridities, Gabi stands as a composite of our psycholOgIcal and cultural monsters-America's perception/projection of Otherness in the form of what the performance artist Guillermo Gomez-Pena identifies as the "ethnocyborg." .. Gabi's faith in an artificial value system is in direct opposition to Gregory's traditional values. Gregory, unwilling to undergo dismemberment for fear of how it will haunt him, is a proponent of basic humanism. His self-awareness and appreciation of his ances~ are extensions of his holistic attitude that literally and metaphorically saves him from dismemberment as medical director of the Los Angeles Mexico City Health Corridor: "I would not allow myself to be carved up and shaped into what the Directorate considered a model optimum efficient doctor. Voices from the past and present warned me not to allow ~em to deconsa:u~t my.humanity." 42 Unlike Gabi, he views the elective amputation as a direc.t threat ~o his Identlt>: and considers it an explicit method of oppression by the dorrunant .ruling class. While the methods for dismemberment have changed with technolOgIcal advancement, the act retains the same metaphoric degree of violence done to the body and places the amputee in a liminal position. Morales likens this ambiguous bearing - 47-

to

he

h

to what Foucault terms as "Heterotopia": "disorder in which fragments of a large number of possible orders glitter separately in the dimension, without la.w o.r geometry, ~f the heteroclite ... in such a state, things are laid, placed, arranged In sites so very different fro~ one another that it is impossible to find a place of residence for them." 43 For Mor~es: ~s interstitial--or bordered-positioning becomes an opportunity to explo~e a dete.mton~~d consciousness within the Chicana/o identity; it is simultaneously a negation and investigation of essentialist ideologies that have shaped Chicana/ 0 post-nationalis~, as ~ell as a consideration of how these tensions will take shape in the future. This ambiguous positioning also helps us understand Morales' narr.ati?n of th~ ethnic body. Manue! MartinRodriguez suggests that " [Chicanas/os] are a hybnd In .mutatlon, ra~er than a. static essence" and that racial survival in The Rag Doll PlagueJ IS portrayed In the coming together of different worlds and not in the preservation of unchanged ttaditions and customs, but rather in transformation and adaptation. 44 While dismemberment in The Rag Doll Plagues.is enacted through the metaphor of dismemberment to demonstrate fissured r~ce relatlo~s, It also functions as a paradigm for re-evaluating a more flexible understanding of Chicana/o identity politics--one that avoids positing Chicanas/os as a finished cultur~ product, and rather strives to implement a new radical consciousness that embraces the Idea of illtemal differences and constant growth.

Crisis and Capitulation . .

In Borfy lV"orks, Peter Brooks investigates the ways in which natural bodies .are marked, organized, and produced as cultural artifacts. He .co~siders how. the body IS. constructed in modern narratives and, in turn, comes to Slgrufy the totaliry of the mind and language: "the body furnishes the building blocks of civiliz~tion, an~ eventually .of language itself which then takes us away from the body, but always ill a tensIon that reminds us that the rcind and language need to recover the body, as an othemess that is somehow primary to their very definition." 4S He notes that while earlier narrative views of the body demonstrate a more unified sensibility about the body and its functions-pa.r?cularly in th~ world-turnedupside-down Renaissance carnival traditions captured by Rabelrus-the bod~ In ~odem literature has become problematic. Fragmented representations of the body ill Chicana/o cultural production exemplify this.

In an iromc rendering, the disorganization of the representative bodies!n The Re~/t oj the Cockroach People and The Rag Doll PlaglleJ illustrates Homi Bhabha's conception of nation and nationness as "the measure of the liminality of cultural modernity." The fragmented body in these texts that deal with Chicana/o nationalism echo Bhabha's and Edward .Said's assertions that modern social cohesion is a myth and that there is "no single e:ll.'planatlon sending one back immediately to a single origin [... ] j~st ~s th~re ~re no simple discrete . formations or social processes." 46 Indeed, the discurSIve lffipli.ca~ons ~f dismemberment In Chicana/o cultural production appear to be fragmented from Its Inceptl~n as pre-contact mythology demonstrates. In Tbe Latino Borfy, Lima asser.rs that the narrative tr~arrnent"of the "Latino subject" is conditioned by circumstances resulting from a sense of crIS~S and .call attention to the cultural manifestations of historical conÂŁlict that have resulted In publicly rendered and redressed modes of being both American and Latino [...] Crisis identi~es are therefore always grounded in the recognition of a capitulation that see.ks an ~'{pl~atlon or resolution in and through narrative." 47 In Acosta's and Morales's stones, theu: CrIses of dismemberment both succeed and fail in explaining and resolving violence done to the Chicana/o body. They successfully illustrate the tensio~s leading ?p t~ tl1~ mom~~ of crises and demonstrate the necessity of considering theIr cultu.raIlmplicatl~ns, but It ~s only through the narrative, the act of telling the story, that they hint at a discurSIve resolution.

- 48-

And yet, there is no clear resolution in either novels; however, great possibility resounds within these narrative cracks and overall theme of fragmentation. In the larger sense, to dismember refers to partitioning or div:iding something, and to disembody means to separate or "free" something from its concrete form. While these sundered forms perform as allegorical fissured representations of the Chicana/o body politic, these disembocliments more importantly document the discursive evolution from a rigid set of identity politics to a more heterogeneous, flexible, and thus creative understanding and acceptance of the contemporary Chicana/o identity and cultural production. If we consider the root resolvere to mean "loosen," or "release," Acosta's and Morales's dismemberment and disembocliment signify the cathartic and constructive possibilities of fragmentation in political, cultural, and social discourse.

Notes: Lacan, The LAnglloge of Ihe Self: The Fllnction ofLAnglloge ill P!]ChOOIlOIYtiS, Trans. Anthony Wilder (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1968), 4.

2 Helaine Posner, "Separation Anxiery," Corportol Politics (Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1992), 22-30.

3Margaret E. Owens, Sloges of Dismemberment: The Frogmet/led Botfy ill LAte Medieval and EarlY Modem Drama (Newark: Universiry of Delaware Press, 2005), 12. Margaret Owens argues, "A fascination with corporeal disintegration may very well constitute one of the few foundational and cross-cultural features of humaniry. Fears about bodily integriry, after all, are metonymic for a fear of death, an undeniable universal" (12).

4 Implicit in Ridge'S description of Murieta's life and death is an inherent fragmentation in his personal life and cultural assumptions, and also among his own people, who, after he is killed, are left leaderless and displaced. In effect, Murieta is an embodiment of all of the U.S. Southwest that was severed from Mexico, and his sundered form parallels the way people of Mexican decent were generally received by the dominant Anglo-American culture.

5 In American Sensations: Closs, E"'pirt, and the Prodllction of Poplllar Cllltllrt, Streeby analyzes how dime novels popular in the mid-to-late nineteenth century signify racial and social complexities in relation to the U.S.-Mexican War and the construction of nineteenth-century empire and what these texts reveal about "race, nativism, labor, politics, and popular and mass culture in the United States."

Streeby, Shelley, American Set/sotions: Class, Empirt, and the Prodllction ofPoplllor Cllltllrt (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Universiry of California Press, 2002), xi.

6Jesse Aleman further argues that Murieta's decapitation is still very present in current Chicana/o literature. While Murieta is heroicized for his defiance towards dominant Anglo-American law and sociery and signifies early Mexican-American protest, his decapitation also shows how Murieta is a relevant embodiment of Chicana/o history. In addition, he is also a projection of future cultural fragmentation within the Chicana/o communiry. Jesse Aleman, "Assimilation and the Decapitated Body Politic in The Uft and Advenllll"tJ ofJoaqll/n Mllrieto," Arizollo QllorterlY 60, no. 1 (2004): 74.

7Jesse Aleman, "The Ethnic in the Canon; or, On Finding Santa Anna's Wooden Leg, MELUS 29, no. 3-4 (2004): 175.

8 Ibid., 63.

9 In "Reading the COrpllS Delecll' in The LAtino Botfy, Lima analyzes Tomas Rivera's .. .And the Earth Did Not Devollr Him (1971) as one of " the most important texts written and recovered before the civil rights apogee of the 1960s and 1970s" (17). In my view, Acosta's Revolt is connected---'olnd indeed indebted-to this body.

10 Manuel Luis Martinez, COlllltering the COllntermltllre: Rereodingposhvor Diue/lt fro", Jock Kerolloc to TOil/OS Rivero (Madison: Universiry of Wisconsin Press, 2003), 173.

II Tomas Ybarra-Frausto, "Rasquachismo, a Chicano Sensibiliry," in ChicolloArt: Ruistonce olld A./fim/otion, 1965-1985, eds. Richard Griswold del Castillo, Teresa McKenna, and Yvonne Yarbro Bejarano (Los Angeles: Universiry of California Press, 1991), 156.

12 As Uan Stavans outs it, "He is, was, and will always be considered by the Anglo bourgeoisie as I Jacques

- 49-

vulgar, inferior, undeserving, tasteless, of low qualiry. Mestizo. and without hope. Rascuac~e i.s a sine qua non term to describe his idiosyncratic artitude [... J Zeta IS /lilly pero ml!} rasC1loche: the limit, an extreme. Uan Stavans, Bondido: The Death and ReJllmction of Oscar "Zeta" Acosta (Evanston: . .

Northwesteco Universiry Press, 2003), 5-6.

13 Stavans writes: "Read attentively, every single piece of fiction and autobIOgraphy by Zeta has him as the sole protagonist. Both his published books are about hi s heroic ~dventures, .and the last ~ook he was drafting before his death also deals with his own ego. He used hterature to mvestlgate his dualiry, his hyphenated selr' (Ibid, 66). .

14 Manuel Luis Martinez, COllntering the COllntermltllrt: Rertadillgposhvor Diuenl from Jack KerolloC 10 Tomas RilJtro (Madison: Universiry of Wisconsin Press, 2003),150. . . .

IS Hector Calderon, No"otilJts of Grtoter Mexico: EUf!}s on ChlCollo Literary HIStory, Genrt, and Borders (Houston: Universiry of Texas Press, 2005), 5.

16 Raymund Paredes, "Los Angeles From the Bartio: Oscar Z~ta ~costa's The Revoll of the Coc~rooch People," in LA. in Fiction: A Collection of Original Essf!}s, ed. DaVld Fme, 209-222. (Albuquerque.

Universiry of ew Mexico Press, 1984), 213-214. " 17 Robert Lee, "Chicanismo Beat Outrider? The Texts and Contexts of Oscar Zeta Acosta, College Literotllrt 27, no.l (2000): 162. .

18 Oscar Acosta, The Revolt of the Cockroach People (New York: Vmtage, 1973), 9.

19 Ibid., 3. .

10 20 scar Acosta, Tbe Revolt of the Cockroach People (New York: V~ntage, 1973), 1.

21 scar Acosta, Tbe Revolt oftbe Cockroach People (New York: Vmtage, 1?73), 9. . . .

22 Julia Kristeva, Powtrs of Horror. A n Euqy 011 Aijechim (Ellropeall PerspechlJts: A Senes III SOCIal Thollght and Cllltllral Criticism), (New York: Columbia Universiry Press, 198~), 4.

23 Oscar Acosta, The Revolt of the Cockroach People (New York: Vintage, 1973), 104. .

24 Elizabeth Klaver, Situ ofAlltop!] in Conttll/porary Cllltllrt (New York: SU Y Press, 2005), ~'.

2S Michel Foucault, The Omer ofTbings. Trans. Robert Hu.rley ~ew York: ~outle~ge, 1~91), XVl. .

26 Frede.rick Luis Aldalma, 2006. Spilling the Beolls ill Cbiconolondla: COIIlJtrIohons With ll7nters and Arti.rtJ (Austin: Universiry of Texas Press, 2006),181-182.

27 Alejandro Morales, Tbe Rag Doll Piagiles (Houston: Arte Publico, 1992),22 28 Ibid., 26.

Ibid., 28. .. . . al Li C.. . d Marla Herrera-Sobek, "Epidemics, Epistemophilia, and Raosm: EcolOgIC terary rltlosm an Tbe Rag Doll Ploglles," TbeBilillgllolReview20, no. 3 (1995):100-~02.

31Alejandro Morales, Tbe Rag Doll Ploglles (Houston: Arte Publico, 1992), 27.

32 Ibid. 38 33Aleja~dro Morales, The Rag Doll Plaglles (Houston: Arte Publico, 1992), ~2. . ..

34 Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelois olld His 1170rld. Trans. Helene Iswolsky. Bloommgton: Indiana Uruverslry

29

30

Press, 1984), 26. . .., d A . (A ' .

35 Frederick Luis AldaJrna, Spilling the Beolls ill Chicollolondlo: COIIlJtrsoholls With Wntm all rti.rls ustln.

Universiry of Texas Press, 2006), 181 -182. . ..

36 Lazaro Lima, Tbe LAh'lIo Botfy: Crisis ideJItitiesill AII/ericoll Literary olld Cllltllrol Mell/ory (New York. .. . ., C.. . d NYU Press, 2007), 141.

37 Maria Herrera-Sobek, "Epidemics, EpistemophIlia, and Raosm: Ecological Literary ntlosm an Tbe Rag Doll Ploglles," The Bilillgllol Review 20, no. 3 (1995):106.

38 Ibid., 107 US li ' 39 This same metaphor of pervasive hyper- mechani~a.tion can a~so be applied to the .. po oes aimed towards Mexican immigrants and border polioes. ee Pnewe (405~. . .,.

40 Donna Haraway, "A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Sooalist-Femuusm m the Late Twentieth Century," in Simiolls, 0borgs, olld WOII/eJI (New York: Routledge, 1991), 154.

41 Ibid., 181.

42 Alejandro Morales, The Rag Doll Plaglles (Houston: Acte Publico, 1992),143. . ...

43 Michel Foucault, Tbe OmerofTbillgs. Trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Routledge, 1991),. X.VUl â&#x20AC;˘ â&#x20AC;˘ 44 Manuel M. Martin-Rodriguez, "The Global Border: Transnationalism and Cultural Hybndism 10 Alejandro Morales's Tbe Rag Doll Pltlf,lIes," The Bilillf,lIol Review 20, .no.3 (199~): 94. ., 45 Peter Brooks 1993 Botfy Il70rk: Ol?jects of Desirt ill Modem Non'O/71Jt (Cambndge: Harvard UruveCSlry Press, 1993), xii-xiii.

- 50 -

Edward Said, Pos/modem Cllllllre. London: Pluto, 1983),145.

47 Lazaro Lima, The utiI/O Botfy: CriJiJ Identities ill Anmicall Ulerary alld Cllllllral Memory (New York: NYU Press, 2007), 6.

46

â&#x20AC;¢

- 51 -

Works Cited:

Acosta, Oscar Zeta. The Autobiography of a BroJlln Buffalo. ew York: Vintage, 1972. ___ . The Revolt ofthe Cockroach People. New York: Vintage, 1973.

Aldalma, Frederick Luis. Spilling the Beans in Chicanolandia: Conversations With Writers and Artists.

Austin: University of Texas Press, 2006.

Aleman,Jesse. "Assimilation and the Decapitated Body Politic in The Life a/ld Adventures of Joaquin Murieta." ArizonaQuarter!J 60, no.1 (2004): 71-98.

---."The Ethnic in the Canon; or, On Finding Santa Anna's Wooden Leg." MELUS 29, no.

3-4 (2004): 165-82.

Bakhtin, Mikhail. Rabelais and His l1?orld. Trans. Helene Iswolsky. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984.

Bhabha, Homi K. The Location ofCultslre. London: Routledge, 1994.

Brooks, Peter. Body Work: Oijecls of Desire in Modem Narrative. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993.

Bruce- ovoa, Juan. "Fear and Loathing on the Buffalo Trail." MELUS 6, no.4 (1979): 3950.

Calderon, Hector. Narratives of Greater Mexico: Essqys on Chicano Literary History, Genre, and Borders. Houston: University of Texas Press, 2005).

Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things. Trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Routledge, 1991 .

Haraway, Donna. "A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Cenrury". Si,,,ialls, C;Ybo'l,s, and l1?olllen. ew York: Routledge, 1991.

Herrera-Sobek, Marfa. ''Epidemics, Epistemophilia, and Racism: Ecological Literary Criticism and The Rag Doll Plagues." The Bilingual Revie/v20, no. 3 (1995): 99-108.

Klaver, Elizabeth. Sites ofA utopsy in Contemporary Cultllre.

ew York: SU

Press, 2005.

Kris teva, Julia. Po/vcrs of H orrar: An Essqy on Al?jectioll (Ellropeall Perspectives: A 5en'es ill 50cial Thought alld Cllltliral Criticislll). New York: Columbia University Press, 1982.

Lacan,Jacques. The Lallgllage of the 5e!f: The FUflctiOIl ofLallguage ill P!)IChoalla!Jsis. Trans.

Anthony Wilder. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1968.

Lee, Robert. "Chicanismo Beat Outrider? The Texts and Contexts of Oscar Zeta Acosta."

College Literature 27.1 (2000): 158-178.

Lima, Lazaro. The LatillO Body: Crisis Identities ill AJllelican Literary alld Cultlll'Ol Mef/lory.

York: NYU Press, 2007.

- 52 -

ew

Marrin-Rodriguez, Manuel M. "The Global Border: Transnationalism and Cultural Hybridism in Alejandro Morales's The Rog Doll Plagues." The Bilingllal Review 20, no.3 (1995): 86-98.

Martinez, Manuel Luis. COlmten"ng the Countereulture: RereadillgposhlJar Dissent from Jack KerrJllac to Tomds Rivera. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003.

Morales, Alejandro. "Dynamic Identities in Heterotopia." In Alejandro Morales: Fiction Past, Present, and Future Petject, ed. Jose Antonio Gurpegui, 14-27. Tempe: Bilingual Review/Press, 1996.

--. The Rog Doll Plagues. Houston: Arte Publico, 1992.

Owens, Margaret E. Stages ojDisl1mnberment: The Fragmetlted B04J in LAte Medieval and EarlY Modern Drama. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2005.

Paredes, Raymund. "Los Angeles From the Barrio: Oscar Zeta Acosta's The Revolt oj the Cockroach People." In LA. ill Fictioll: A Collectioll ojOn"ginal Em!}s, dd.

David Fine, 209 222. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1984.

Posner, Helaine, ed. "Separation Anxiety." Cotporeal Politics. Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology: 22-30, 1992.

Priewe, Marc. ''Bio-Politics and the ContamiNation of the Body in Alejandro Morales's The Rog Doll Phgues." MELUS 29, no. 3-4 (2004): 397-412.

Rodriguez, Joe D. "Oscar Zeta Acosta." In Dictionary ojIJterary Biograpf?y: Chicano lI:7n"ters, eds.

Francisco A. Lomeli and Carl R. Shirley, 3-10. Detroit: Gale Research, 1989.

Said, Edward. Postmodem Culture. London: Pluto, 1983.

Saldivar, Ramon. Chicano Narrative: the Dialectics oj Difference. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990.

Stavans, nan. Bandido: The Death and Resurrection ojOscar 'Zeta" Acosta. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2003.

Streeby, Shelley. Amen"can Sensations: Class, Empire, and the Productioll ojPopular Culture. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2002.

Uribe, Maria Victoria. "Dismembering and Expelling: Semantics of Political Terror in Colombia." Popular Culture 16 (2004): 79-95.

Valdez, Luis. Mummified Deer and Other Plqys. Houston: Arte Publico, 2005.

Ybarra-Frausto, Tomas. "Rasquachismo, a Chicano Sensibility." In ChicanoArl: Resistallce alld Ajjimlatiol1, 1965-1985, ed. Richard Griswold del Castillo, Teresa McKenna, and Yvonne Yarbro Bejarano. ~s Angeles: Wight Art Gallery, 155-62. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1991.

- 53-

o

Wild minds searching earfy scholars groping in the gap - Joy Denise Scott and Jane Grellier

JOY ..

009)¡ hi h , 10 ~ C This paper builds on an earlier co-constructed narraove (Grelli.er and Scott 2 Jane and I articulate our struggle as beginning researchers seeking to become auth~no~, ethical auto-ethnographers. A year later, we find ourselves as 'in-betweeners' ~op~g ~ the. gap between self and other, and seeking to understand its nature and our posJOonality 10 this space.

JANE

The two of us wrote Anti-Oediplls together. Since each of us was several, there was already quite a crowd.

(Deleuze and Guattari 1987,3)

The writings of Deleuze and Guattari (1987), particularly their concept of rhizomes, provide strong frames for the work that Joy and I do, both tog~ther and separately. We each choose to speak in a range of voices - the voice of the acaderruc, the student, the te~cher, the att curator, the wild explorer, the reflector, the life story writer, and so on - which w~ see as equally valid and valuable. We also evoke other people's voices, both verbal and VIsual, intettwining them all in our exploration. For these reasons we choose to label our own voices throughout this piece, rather than to try to cr~te a. disembodied voice th~t speaks for both of us - both and neither. Sometimes we engage 10 dialogue; at others a senes of interleaved monologues.

In this paper Joy and I refer from time to time to our separa~e, ongoing auto-ethno~phic. projects, as we grope our way to a deeper, richer unders~?IDg of the s~f-other r~aoonship.

My research involves working with first-year srudent paroC1p~ts at .C~ Uruverslty, . listening to their voices as they reflect on their learning ~~rlences 10 the.lr early months 10 the institution. I also coordinate the first-year Commurucaoons Program 10 the Fa~ult:y of Humanities at Curtin, which provides credit-bearing compulsory ~ts ~ commurucaOons Qabelled in other universities as Composition, Rheto.ric or Acaderruc !iteracy programs~ ~o a range of first-year srudents outside the school to which I belong: While much of the \VrIoog I am currently doing centres on the srudents' voices, my. ow~ vOIces .as teacher, researcher, srudent and member of the institution are more central 10 this co-wotren paper.

The image that underpins my auto-ethnographic writing is that of a choral br~d, in which the voices of students, teachers, and the institution interweave in harmony, dissonance and cacophony, blending with and cutting across my own voices.

JOY . .

For me the image is one of undertaking embroidery as a form of r1ru~.

Ritual as the craft of writing - to word stitch the multiple threads of lived experience to create new ways of thinking and being and challenge the binary constructs of eastern and western.

Ritual as a solitary pursuit - embroidering a space for self-reflectio? .

Ritual as cultural learning - a novice involved in a performance of Intercultural translaoon.

- 54-

Marrin-Rodriguez, Manuel M. "The Global Border: Transnationalism and Cultural Hybridism in Alejandro Morales's The Rog Doll Plagues." The Bilingllal Review 20, no.3 (1995): 86-98.

Martinez, Manuel Luis. COlmten"ng the Countereulture: RereadillgposhlJar Dissent from Jack KerrJllac to Tomds Rivera. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003.

Morales, Alejandro. "Dynamic Identities in Heterotopia." In Alejandro Morales: Fiction Past, Present, and Future Petject, ed. Jose Antonio Gurpegui, 14-27. Tempe: Bilingual Review/Press, 1996.

--. The Rog Doll Plagues. Houston: Arte Publico, 1992.

Owens, Margaret E. Stages ojDisl1mnberment: The Fragmetlted B04J in LAte Medieval and EarlY Modern Drama. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2005.

Paredes, Raymund. "Los Angeles From the Barrio: Oscar Zeta Acosta's The Revolt oj the Cockroach People." In LA. ill Fictioll: A Collectioll ojOn"ginal Em!}s, dd.

David Fine, 209 222. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1984.

Posner, Helaine, ed. "Separation Anxiety." Cotporeal Politics. Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology: 22-30, 1992.

Priewe, Marc. ''Bio-Politics and the ContamiNation of the Body in Alejandro Morales's The Rog Doll Phgues." MELUS 29, no. 3-4 (2004): 397-412.

Rodriguez, Joe D. "Oscar Zeta Acosta." In Dictionary ojIJterary Biograpf?y: Chicano lI:7n"ters, eds.

Francisco A. Lomeli and Carl R. Shirley, 3-10. Detroit: Gale Research, 1989.

Said, Edward. Postmodem Culture. London: Pluto, 1983.

Saldivar, Ramon. Chicano Narrative: the Dialectics oj Difference. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990.

Stavans, nan. Bandido: The Death and Resurrection ojOscar 'Zeta" Acosta. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2003.

Streeby, Shelley. Amen"can Sensations: Class, Empire, and the Productioll ojPopular Culture. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2002.

Uribe, Maria Victoria. "Dismembering and Expelling: Semantics of Political Terror in Colombia." Popular Culture 16 (2004): 79-95.

Valdez, Luis. Mummified Deer and Other Plqys. Houston: Arte Publico, 2005.

Ybarra-Frausto, Tomas. "Rasquachismo, a Chicano Sensibility." In ChicanoArl: Resistallce alld Ajjimlatiol1, 1965-1985, ed. Richard Griswold del Castillo, Teresa McKenna, and Yvonne Yarbro Bejarano. ~s Angeles: Wight Art Gallery, 155-62. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1991.

- 53-

o

Wild minds searching earfy scholars groping in the gap - Joy Denise Scott and Jane Grellier

JOY ..

009)¡ hi h , 10 ~ C This paper builds on an earlier co-constructed narraove (Grelli.er and Scott 2 Jane and I articulate our struggle as beginning researchers seeking to become auth~no~, ethical auto-ethnographers. A year later, we find ourselves as 'in-betweeners' ~op~g ~ the. gap between self and other, and seeking to understand its nature and our posJOonality 10 this space.

JANE

The two of us wrote Anti-Oediplls together. Since each of us was several, there was already quite a crowd.

(Deleuze and Guattari 1987,3)

The writings of Deleuze and Guattari (1987), particularly their concept of rhizomes, provide strong frames for the work that Joy and I do, both tog~ther and separately. We each choose to speak in a range of voices - the voice of the acaderruc, the student, the te~cher, the att curator, the wild explorer, the reflector, the life story writer, and so on - which w~ see as equally valid and valuable. We also evoke other people's voices, both verbal and VIsual, intettwining them all in our exploration. For these reasons we choose to label our own voices throughout this piece, rather than to try to cr~te a. disembodied voice th~t speaks for both of us - both and neither. Sometimes we engage 10 dialogue; at others a senes of interleaved monologues.

In this paper Joy and I refer from time to time to our separa~e, ongoing auto-ethno~phic. projects, as we grope our way to a deeper, richer unders~?IDg of the s~f-other r~aoonship.

My research involves working with first-year srudent paroC1p~ts at .C~ Uruverslty, . listening to their voices as they reflect on their learning ~~rlences 10 the.lr early months 10 the institution. I also coordinate the first-year Commurucaoons Program 10 the Fa~ult:y of Humanities at Curtin, which provides credit-bearing compulsory ~ts ~ commurucaOons Qabelled in other universities as Composition, Rheto.ric or Acaderruc !iteracy programs~ ~o a range of first-year srudents outside the school to which I belong: While much of the \VrIoog I am currently doing centres on the srudents' voices, my. ow~ vOIces .as teacher, researcher, srudent and member of the institution are more central 10 this co-wotren paper.

The image that underpins my auto-ethnographic writing is that of a choral br~d, in which the voices of students, teachers, and the institution interweave in harmony, dissonance and cacophony, blending with and cutting across my own voices.

JOY . .

For me the image is one of undertaking embroidery as a form of r1ru~.

Ritual as the craft of writing - to word stitch the multiple threads of lived experience to create new ways of thinking and being and challenge the binary constructs of eastern and western.

Ritual as a solitary pursuit - embroidering a space for self-reflectio? .

Ritual as cultural learning - a novice involved in a performance of Intercultural translaoon.

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As practitioner and cultural "in-betweener", my research explores the multiple voices of self and Chinese other/s as we border-cross our daily experiences within the Shanghai academic co=unity.

JANE We take the image of groping from theologian Ann Taves, who wrestles with the boundaries between spiritual theory and practice, describing her struggle as "groping one's way forward in search of language and methods to enable one to adequately express a particular way of seeing things" (2003, 193). Taves' concept of the researcher needing to alternate selfconsciously between being engaged and detaching herself provides us with a taste of the complex relationships we are beginning to explore. Michelle Fine helps us enrich this concept even further: we do not move smoothly between the self/other or theory/practice spaces; we are "knottily entangled" (1994, 72) in working in and through the gaps.

JOY: Wild mind groping in the gap - the hyphen between auto and ethnography Deep within us resides a place of being and knowing - a gap in the inner mind through which we are dialectically linked to the universe; this 'wild mind' is the site we are connected to when we write (Goldberg 1991, 31 -33).

As social science researchers engaged in scholarly pursuits, Jane and I find ourselves enmeshed in an interpretative performance, weaving together multiple threads of lived experiences and knowledge constructions. Using our ragbag of appropriated goods, following a long tradition of appropriation to create new meanings, we grope within the gap of being and knowing, whose inner dimensions reveal margins and centres, spaces and presences, and the possibilities offered by eastern dialectics to dissolve the western dualism of self and other. Consciously or not, we border-cross between our personal histories and locations, suturing together meanings that frequently shake our academic beliefs.

When we use wild mind/sand ponder how we are going to write up our research, we intuitively sense how we are constrained by our own thinking and beliefs. 'Wild mind' allows us to penetrate our interiors, and to grope around for authentic ways to capture moments of lived experience and the multiple voices of self and other, which otherwise remain voiceless in the margins of our papers. Exploring our positionality is vital because it forces us to acknowledge our own power, privilege, and biases, just as we are denouncing the power structures that surround our subjects (Madison 2005, 7).

By choosing "auto-ethnography" with a hyphen, as opposed to a slash or a seamless interlude with no visible gap to grope with, Jane and I draw attention to the multiple voices that speak in our stories, and the people for whom they speak. We reveal the gap between self and other in order to stitch together diverse ways of knowing that are worked from threads of lived experiences and speak of intimate relations. As writers and researchers, we set the scene for our readers, for we recognise that even when writing about others, our ~~rds interpret :md shape the meanings our readers will make. As Fine (1994, 72-74) argues, It IS we who decide how to paint our respondents' stories. When we work the hyphen we are choosing to get involved with those we study. To undertake such a performance, one of interpretatio~, list.ening,.transporting oneself into another's cultural space is deeply personal an~ ~ of dialectical twiSts and turns. It is a performance of soulful struggle. This is a political act and cuts at the heart of academia by challenging the narratives of the dominant, dis.tanced scholarly voice (Conquergood 2002, 145-146). When we begin to listen to the vOices of the other/ s, we engage with wild mind and become open to the possibilities of new ways of being, or of becoming ...

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JANE: The self-other gap in western cultures And man has the left limbs detached more than any other animal because be is natural in a higber degree than the other animals; now the ri?bt i~ naturally bo~ better than the left and separate from it, and so in man the nght IS more espeClally the right, more dextrous that is, than in other animals. ... f~r th~ starting-point is honourable, and the superior is more honourable than the mfenor, the front than the back, and the right than the left.

(Aristotle 350BC/2007) As well as the right/left distinction set up by Aristotle, western people b~ve. internalised a vast series of other dualities, including self/other, white/black, good/evil, ncb/poor, man/woman, west/east, mind/body, reason/emotion, and theory/practice..P~wer lies.in the first half of each pair being seen as valuable in opposition 10 the other balf. This IS the baSIS of the oppression of those categorised as defined in the second balves by those w~o defin~ themselves in the first halves (Collins 1986). The power is strengthened by the lDterlocking nature of oppressions, with the dualities underpinning race, class and gender oppr~sions being unspoken and often undisputed (Collins 1986; hooks 2000). So ~eeply mgr~ed are these dichotomies in western cultures that even those who want to aVOId such posltJons, and who struggle to stay alert to their moment-by-moment effects, find it impossible to eradicate them completely from their thinking.

Perin (1988) suggests that the western reaction to the other (and by inference t~ all the aspects that are seen as the second or inferior halves of the ~ualities - bla~, evil, poor, woman, east, body, practice and so on) is visceral and affective rather than mtellectual, and thus very difficult to control. Basing her work on liminality theories developed by Arnold van Germep (1908/1960), she contends that those wbo are labelled in these inferior bal~es are confined to the borders or margins of society, and seen as disordered, fearful, polluting, and thus dangerous.

So I grope with my responses to the other: If, as a westerner, I share this visceral response, if my reactions are as autonomic as breathing, sweating or vomiting, then what can I do .to alter them? If I try to think myself out of sweating, I sweat more profusely; I have as little chance of intellectualising myself out of my reactions to the other.

JOY: The dialectical relationship between the Chinese self and oth~r/ s .

While living in Shanghai I frequently found myself groping \vith the legaCles of anClent Chinese philosophers, legacies that have, during the last four thousand years, sha?ed the Chinese way of life, just as the Ancient Greek and Roman worlds have shaped mlDe. The Chinese world view is rooted in the philosophies of Taoism, Confucianism and, later, Chan Buddhism (Nisbett 2005, 12). Although the many traditional Chinese schools of th~ught have diverse and often conÂŁlicting points of view, all schools place a strong emphaSIS on the concept of a holistic cosmic universe in which all people share a similar nature (Stuurman 2008, 15). To make sense of such a world, unlike the ancient Greek philosophers :vbo saw humans as independent and separate from nature \vith the power to control all objects and events within it, Taoist philosophy placed emphasis on a complementary "betweener" relationship, where there is no separation between the object and the subject (Ch~g 2011, 19). This betweener relationship symbolises the dialectical nature of the cosmos, m t1~at all things are also contained in their opposite. Under such conditions Chinese ~ntology IS orientated towards the self as an agent of becoming, a performer caught up m a c.y~e of change and emergence through interconnected relationships and experiences. Tlus IS a way - 56 -

of life in which paradox and uncertainty can exist - where there are questions but not always answers.

Foreigner in the city Joy Denise Scott

Foreigner exported cOfllfllodity Dressed in colonial sheep clothing Sweating occidental appearance Thl!J see nry skin Illhife flIask TOllch nry hair lack IlIslre gold SflIell "ry perfllflle - opillfll - exotic not Sense "!Y fear of Tao-like other Wild flIind - flIe - callght deep in flIarginaiised gap S ofllething intangible, cannot define No longer secure Not nertled in mitl/ralIY formed sqfe cocoon Feel se!! unravelling - transparent - thread bare Arflls spr'!Jed out in stllpendolls grope Ac.cording to Tu Wei-~g (19~5, 231 -232), the idea of a unified self is present in Confucian philosophy; the ConfuCIan self Includes a necessary relationship with the other. A principle of Confucian practice is the complete awareness and acceptance of the other as part of one's self-develo~ment. He ~gues that the Confucian self sees life as part of a spiritual sojourn through which ~e attamment o~ s~gehood is an ultimate goal. This way of thinking, says Tu, s~e~ts the no?on of s:lf as resldinÂĽ at the centre of all one's relationships with others, bemg In.volved In a continuous learning endeavour with spiritual enlighterunent. He emp~a~lses that Confucian learning, although concerned with scholarly pursuits in the form of WOtlng, also acce?~ates the need for ritual performance. Mind and body become unified through the. art of.dis~lpline to create a person who is ready for living in the everyday world, complete Wlth obligations and responsibilities to one's immediate family and the universe as ~ wh~le (fu 1985). Thus, from a traditional Confucian perspective, it is nonsensical to Imagme that the adult self is separate from the other, as both are a necessary condition of the whole person (C~u 1985, .260). Only through the ceaseless cycle of continually opening the self to the other IS the Chinese self able to cultivate a sense of completeness as opposed to fragmented identity (fu 1985,232).

As J~e suggests earlier, our w.estern notions of self and other are historically and culturally engrruned. Intellectually, emotionally and physically, we are inclined to enshrine a gap between self and other as a boundary marker for highlighting and categorising differences. ~s w~stern ~eople we s.h.are a ten.dency to be cult-like in our obsessive worship of personal ~dentlty, unlike th~ traditional Chinese self which views personal identity as being Interconnected Wlth the other far more than the self (Chu 1985,258). To be otherwise does not appear to make sens: to ~ tradi~onal Chinese mind. Consequently, Jessica Benjamin in T~e B.onrir of Love (1988, CIted In Eakin 1999, 52) sees a paradox in the way traditional western thinking does not see the relationship between self and other as a necessary condition of one's identity, especially when, in determining our personal independence, we are necessarily dependent on others to acknowledge our independence.

JANE: Alice as in-betweener Joy and I. framed our previo~s paper (Grellier and Scott 2009) with images from the Janet and John reading books, the Enghsh early reader series through which we both learned to read in - 57 -

the 1950s. It seems apt, therefore, that I now move on to the first book that I read for myself and loved as a child: Alice's Adventllres in Wonderland, with its evocative illustrations by John Tenniel.

1¡-

1-

I~-=-

-

I -=~~~-=1 --

Figure 1: Giant Alice Watching Rabbit Run Away (Carroll 1974, 18)

Alice is the first in-betweener that I, and most western children of my age, were familiar with _ cast adrift in a foreign world whose rules she did not understand; unaware how long she would be there, and constantly putting herself into awkward situations through her changes in size, which emphasised to the inhabitants and to herself the fact that she was a stranger in Wonderland (Figure 1).

Alice's child nature is central to the narrative, in that she is highly adaptive to her new world, and excited about its strange experiences and "people". The story advances because of her willingness to drink liquids marked "drink me" and eat cakes marked "eat me", with only a momentary adult fear they might be poisonous. Her reactions are visceral and affective, but they are moments of intrigue and enthusiasm rather than fear and disgust. Her life perspective is closer to the Chinese dialectics Joy has outlined than to the western dualism I discussed earlier - she notices the ways the characters resemble humans she knows and almost ignores their oddities.

One solution to our problem of engaging 'with the other, then, might be to foster our Alice nature - to be intrigued, adventurous and inclusive. But this would seem impossible for most adults who have lived for any time in western cultures.

JOY: Hearing the voices in the gap In China, silence is part of everyday conversation. As a philosophical concept, silence and speech are dialectically linked: one cannot exist without the other (fang 1999, 7). It is tlle intangible silence - the gap that surrounds the spoken words - that gives the voice its fullest meanings but, ironically, for some of us this gap triggers our deepest fears .

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My first impressions and experiences of China are interwoven with my relationship with a Chinese academic named Chen. In the early days of our working together, out of my depth cast adrift in 'the silent gap' that defied cultural translation - I groped around with our two opposing notions of silence. Chen's silence was his response to situations where nothing he could do or say would change anything; for me, words were my reply when I needed control, where silence was not an option. Between the exchange of words and non-words my western mind collided with Chen's ancestral heritage. Why, I asked myself, did Chen not speak when deadlines descended upon us? Chen's dearness to my frustration and continuous pleas - for information, confirmation, or anything to release me from my fear of silence brought me ever doser to the edge. But no matter how hard I pressured Chen, he never wavered in his direction; never spoke a word that he could not stand by. Nor did we ever lose our way. By listening to Chen's unspoken voice I came to appreciate the power of silence, that the utterance of no words creates a powerful voice.

On the 17th May 2004 I had been living and teaching in Shanghai for nine months when Chen died suddenly. Although I did not realise it at the time, the China I had known and experienced for the five years leading up to that moment vanished. In reflecting on my multifaceted relationship with Chen, and in particular the time that comes later when there is no voice to be heard - a temporal space in which there is an absence of sound, a vacuous silence - it is a time very difficult to bear. As Dolar says, ,[t]he absence of voices and sounds is hard to endure' (2006, 13). The phase after Chen's death is a deeply situated transitional stage of my research journey, residing within a temporal gap, amongst Chen's many lived and silent voices and the emergence of other Chinese voices. I have learnt to appreciate that within our society we do not always hear or listen to all voices, but that when they stop and we are eventually forced to stop and hear the silence, it is like a deafening roar (Dolar 2006, 14). Where are the voices? What will we become without them? As an auto-ethnographer my task is dear: to engage wild mind and grope around in the gap between then and now and . ..

An act of re-discovery: Wild mind groping in the gap Joy D enise Scott Within temporal gap ensnaT'td I. Whm silence SCT'tallli her wail sOl/nd bllt a shadolv be.

In darfe!y death mood linger.

Groping in mllrl'!] gloom.

Wild mind stirs seeleing answer tearing illllsion of veil.

Wild mind tOllching ham/oniolls SIImnder.

Head and sholliders bOlved.

Eyes - fingers positioned Ivorleing 'chin Iven R sewing silence - sOllnd.

Fragile tlJrtads - time - shllllie back andforlh.

Tenderness deliberate - embroidering voices - jlOlV. Stitching - needling IVqy jonvard ApplYing 'tllan chen g T'tconnecting voices - old - lJelV. Piercing - plllling - looping - et1hvil1ing - close.

PearlY voices glide across silky reach pllllltped - vital- sbi"JflJering infinite Illstrolls minllte seed pods.

IntimatelY embroidered sllrfaces eme'l.e tbrollgb gap I

2

Chinese embroidery term: OJill.'''' - short and lo ng stitches; Chinese embroidery term: li,all ,b," - Peking knot similar to Prench knot

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JANE: Living in the gap: the rhizome . .

I come back to my earlier question, "How do 1 live with the gap, given my western vIsceral reactions to the other?"

My first possibility comes from Deleuze and Guattari's (1987) image of the ~zome. Instead of the dualistic either/or image of the tree, with its hierarchical roots becorrung smaller as they divide and sub-divide deeper into the soil, Deleuze and Gua~ offe: the "figuration" of the rhizome, the "and ... and ... and ... " of infinite lateral connecoons, Wlth each node conjoining with every other node, and with open access throughout the system for expansIOn: ... a rhizome has no beginning or end; it is always in the middle, between things, interbeing, intermezzo. The tree is filiation, but the rhiz~me is aIli~ce, ~quely alliance. The tree imposes the verb "to be," but the fabriC of the rhizome IS the conjunction, "and ... and ... and ..." This conjunction carries enough force to shake and uproot the verb "to be." ... Between things is by no means an average; on the contrary, it is where things pick up speed. Between things does not. designate a localizable relation going from one thing to the other and back agrun, but a perpendicular direction, a transversal movement that s~eep~ one and the o~er away, a stream without a beginning or end that underrrunes ItS banks and pIcks up speed in the middle. (Deleuze and Guatrari 1987, 25)

~~----------~------~--------,~

E

I'Q

, Figure 2: A Fresh Rhizome of Cilllij1lga Rocelllosa (Lloyd and Lloyd 1884-85, Plate 23) Michelle Fine might see Figure 2 as a very apt in1age of the " knottily entangled" relationships of self and other.

1 am seduced by the possibilities the rhizome offers. Rather than being a verb, 1 ~an aspire to be a conjunction, to embrace the nature of alliance in the gap. Rather than focusmg on the - 60-

nature of the self and the other as two banks of a stream, I can be in the stream itself, in the space between the two, an interbeing. Deleuze and Guattari (1987) write of humans as 'becomings' rather than beings. However, I cannot think myself into an understanding of this position (or non-position), because the intellectual act would put me back into my treelike nature that Deleuze and Guattari abhor - I need to find a non-hierarchical, nondualistic way of absorbing this "figuration". So I grope on, encouraged at least by the rhizome that has the power to undermine the tree.

In addition, I am comforted in my groping by the concept of "and ... and ... and ... "; because of course Deleuze and Guattari would embrace the notion that I can be both westerner and easterner, both mind and emotion. So I can accept that I may have visceral reactions of discomfort and fear in strange situations, and that I am seeking my rhizome nature in the same moment. I am an interbeing, a becoming.

JOY: Artist as 'in-betweener': the essence of the rhizome Bamboo is the ultimate rhizome. Its qualities are deeply interconnected with ancient Chinese philosophical thought pertaining to personal development, and bamboo is a dominant theme throughout the history of Chinese art, as an object of fine art and poetry. With a deeply situated history in Chinese culture going back over 7000 years, the bamboo, suggests Kathleen Buckingham (2009, 2-5), is the essence of multiplicity, with over 1500 uses. As a plant it defies borders of categorisation, for whilst in many parts of the world bamboo is seen as grass, in China it is considered a tree.

Figure 3: Qin Yifeng "Lillefteld Series No. 189 (Delaig" Acrylic on canvas, 1996 Size 78 x 106 cm (width x height) Chinese artist Qin Yifeng (Figure 3) positions himself in the gap among the roots of ancient Chinese philosophy, the idea of repetition as deep learning, and the ritual of Chinese bamboo painting and abstract art. Qin's art is not concerned with the wholeness of the art object, but rather with the between space. He takes the position of <in-betweener', groping - 61 -

with the gaps that are between: between body and spirit; between representation and context; and between artist as maker and artwork as entity. The relationships between thinking and doing and being and experiencing for Qin are what art is all about. Chinese art curator Gao Minglu (2008) argues that, unlike the western art world, Chinese Abstract artists are engaged in a dialogue between artist and object, in which the use of mark-making evolves as a form of spatial dialogue, through which the artist records the mundaneness of everyday urbanised existence. He claims that such artworks are concerned with the aesthetics of self development and are meant to be experienced rather than read. Such artwork, says Gao, is not about the wholeness of the art object in which there is a need to explore the special relationships between the centre and the edge; rather the focus is on the space itself (2008), the between space.

As Qin's sole subject matter, bamboo articulates the ultimate rhizome experience of <interbeing', as Jane described earlier. Through his preoccupation with bamboo we enter a Chinese mind engaged in continual exploration of his subject to acquire deep learning. The repetitive brush strokes can be understood as a way of breaking down the essence of the bamboo, until it is but a series of marks and gaps between. By penetrating the gaps Qin comes to understand the structure of the bamboo, leading him to new translations. In Qin's work we see the vibrations of a becoming China; the warp and the weft of the bamboo's sinewy rhizome system opens up before us with ever-increasing possibilities and permutations. His work is the epitome of wild mind engaged in continuous and multiple translations that defy categorisation.

JANE: Living in the gap: the Trickster

Figure 4: A Decorous Puck (1847) Figure 4 is a sanitised version of the original 1639 woodcut of hakespeare's Puck from A Midsllfllfller Nigbt's Dreafll. Although his penis and breasts have been removed for Victorian audiences, he is still both rich and ambivalent: his male phallic torch and female \vitch's broomstick suggest his complex and threatening nature, along with the horns and hooves of the devil, the bat flying overhead, and the group of humans, perhaps \vitches and warlocks, dancing on the earth beneath him. On the other hand, his facial e.xpression is benign.

Through his horns and hooves, the jug of ,vine in the foreground and the pipe-player in the background, he is associated with Pan, the god of hunting, music and revelry, who protected shepherds and appeared throughout wild mountain areas, but who came also to be identified with the devil in Christian cultures.

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The character of Puck provides me with a possible response to the problem of my visceral, affective reaction to the other. He is a Trickster (Kamberelis 2003; La Shure 2005; Perin 1988), a mythical, liminal character who exists in the borders, " betwixt and between ... much like a sewer dweller would have access to a city at any number of points" (La Shure 2005).

Shakespeare's sprites, Puck and Ariel from The Tempest, flit between physical and spirit worlds, causing havoc, mischief and some joy by enchanting characters to fall in love with each other. Other commonly cited tricksters include the Winnebago Trickster, Brer Rabbit, the Egyptian god of confusion, Seth, who is "a messenger and omen of evil and death ... who reverses all ordinary expectations, disturbs the peace, deserts his friends, and crosses lines of every kind" (perin 1988, 10), the Greek messenger god, Hermes, "thief, trickster, and culture hero of the Greeks, he is also 'god of the roads' and an ambassador who protects people from strangers" (perin 1988, 10) and the Hindu god Krishna who is able "to lure women into the moonlight to dance with him, then to multiply himself in order to appear fully to each and thus gratify their unique desires, and finally to disappear at dawn" (Garrison

2009,75).

In my reflection on living in the gap, the trickster sits alongside the rhizome as a possible way of being. This involves accepting the ambivalence that is fundamental to all tricksters, who are both "sewer dwellers" and magicians, deserters of friends and protectors from strangers. To Deleuze and Guattari's "and ... and ... and ... ", the Trickster offers "neither ... both" (Kamberelis 2003). The implications of this for my role as teacher, researcher and student need much further reflection.

JOY: Groping in the gap with/between the vulnerable other and self How I construct knowledge of self and other is not just based on cultural and historical determinants but is also relational, in particular where a strong element of trust and intimacy is present. In perceiving my own independence as conditional upon the acceptance of others, as suggested earlier by Jessica Benjamin, I appreciate that my cognisance of self and independence is shaped to a large degree by my intimate relationship with others. Thus my understanding of Chinese academics and students and my interpretation of their behaviours are intricately interwoven with my relationships with people such as Chen, as well as my relationships that predate my experiences and relationships with the Chinese. I learn about and experience Chinese people not just by what I read about them in texts written by western scholars (where frequently the Chinese subject is misrepresented and or misunderstood), but more importantly through my actual lived experiences and intimate relationships with Chinese academics and students. Yet, as Shirley Neuman (1992) emphasises, we have great difficulty in interpreting our own personal experiences in our relationships with others, particularly when certain cultural things in our lives are hidden from view. It is not always easy to see the ways in which we are related to others (Eakin 1999,56-57) and how the voices in those relationships impact upon us.

The ways in which I am situated in my own research, and the relationships I shared with Chen and other Chinese people, need to be understood in terms of my own subjectivity, how this shapes such relationships (Madison 2005, 9), and my understanding of the Chinese other. Our encounters with others within our fieldwork allow us to grope with multiple representations of self narratives, and these aspects of identity are what we, as researchers, tend to foreground in our ethnographic narratives (Herzfeld 1997,169). Herzfeld argues that the self narratives we draw on during our research activities are not necessarily representations that we would choose for ourselves back home. He infers that as researchers, when we reflect on our positionality in the field, and attempt to unpick our multiple representations of self, our actions might reveal contradictory aspects about our personal character that we have not previously considered. Significantly, these kinds of - 63-

personal contradictions can create environments in which we cultivate empathy with our research respondents at the risk of overriding our own personal values; we might fail to comprehend that certain modes of behaviour and thinking could be damaging to us in our home culture. Herzfeld stresses that at these moments we have the potential to learn the most from our experiences in the field, as they allow us to consider our own inner contradictions within a particular experiential moment (1997, 169).

JANE: Chorus: Teacher as rhizome and trickster A chorus of voices is starting up, seducing me to explore my rhizome and trickster selves as a university teacher. The voices of Jane Tompkins, Professor of English at the University of Illinois, Henry Giroux, Professor of English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University, and Jim Garrison, Professor of Philosophy of Education at Virginia Tech, interweave with the voices of some of the first-year student participants in my auto-ethnographic research project at Curtin University in the and ... and ... and ... of a rhizomatic chorus: Jane Tompkins (1996; 2006) bemoans the university's emphasis on students' individual intellectual performance over the engagement of the whole person in the wider learning community: and ...

My point is that clOJsroom leaming can constrict a person 's hori~ns even OJ it broadens thelll.

Leaming too Ivell the IeSSOIlS of the clOJsroom exacts a price. Its exclllsive enphasis 011 the plmfy inlellechlal and ilrjomlational aspects of leaming, on leaming as illdividllalistic alld competitive, can create a lopsided person: a person who can process ilifOmlation efficientfy, Slllll!llarize aCCliratefy, articrilale ideas, and make telling points; a person who is hardworking, knows how to pleOJe Ihose in allibority, and who vollies high petjomlance on Ihe job above all things (Tompkins 1996, 211).

Jim Garrison (2009) calls on me, as teacher, to embrace the " prophetic trickster" archetype: to find ways to work within a dualistic educational system to trick students into a passion for learning; to refuse to accept societies' definition of a successful student, going beyond literacy levels and marks in examinations; to flOd cracks in the limiting systems in which I work, and hold open these cracks so that students can pass through. In his concern for marginalised students, he echoes Michelle Fine's focus on the hyphen: and ...

II lakes Ibe inelllsive logic of a tricksier to even begin 10 conprelJelld Ihe meaning of hyphenated identities (sllcb OJ Mexican-American) Ihal defy Ihe law of noncontradiction V'I and nol A is always Jalse). ConvenhfJllai logic does nol work wilbollt fixed identities. In addition, tbe byp'ben is a link between two or ",ore worlds and a poros [the Greek word for a gateway] tbrollgb which possibility pOllrs. The logos of exclllsion fllIISt often bllild walls and post gllards arollnd p"re and perjecllwrlds 10 keep Ollt illlflligrants of borfy, ",inti, and spirit. (Gamson 2009, 82)

The first-year students I work with are in transition between the worlds of school and university. Many of them feel that the university community "builds walls and posts guards" around its world, as suggested in this response from student James White: 3 and ...

No, 1II0St of ollr lectllrers dOIl't kllolv ollr lIames tbisyeOl: lvI'!)'be tbry're wa:ti,o/> 10 :ee iflve . sllrvive firstyear. Tben tbry'll tbillk it's Ivortb Pllttillg SOllIe effort illto liS. It S lIke slllk or sWlmif Ive Slvilll tben tbry '/I take liS setiollsfy lIextyear.

All student names are pseudonyms. Students are aU first years, and were interviewed as part of my auto-ethnographic research project, 2009-2011.

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As an antidote to this feeling of being excluded from the community, students value trickster qualities in their teachers. 4 In response to my interview question, "What qualities in your teachers most help you to learn?", students focused on the importance of their emotional connection and engagement with their teachers:

The sense that th'!) have passion for Ivhat th'!)'re lalking abollt (Michael Foster) One of the things Ihat's most appealing is a lecttlrer actl/alb explaining whal makes them passionate abollt a SIIo/ect. To knolv that,yoll begin to askyollrse(f as a slt/denl, "Wow, I/JOllld Ihat be something that wollld make me passiollate abollt it as weIR" (Gabriel Morelli) and ... It's jllst a fYde - if the lectllrers give !/Ich all emotiollless delivery then everyone isjllst ~ned Ollt, 1I0t asking qllestions - it goes both IJlqys. (Lorry David) and ... I learn better if I have a personal connection lllith the teacher. That's the most important port. If I feel I don 't know theperson at all, I can't learn from them becallse I don't lis/eli to the,,,. (5a11l Tllcker) and ... and ...

Jane Tompkins sees university education systems as taking their toll not only on students, but also on teachers: and ... The separation [bel1J1een my private life and"(J lJIork) has been very painful and almost crippling (Tompkins 2006).

Henry Giroux, too, expresses concern for the effects of the academic community on teachers. He echoes Deleuze and Guattari's advocacy of the rhizome in his criticism of binary approaches to education: and ... Ctt/turalpolitics jomud in binary oppositions ... both silence alld invite people to deskifl themselves as educators and mlttlrallJlorkers (Giroux 1992, 21).

The chorus calls me to explore healthier relationships with my students, and with myself as teacher and member of the university community. My students' positions as immigrants in the academic world challenge me to reflect on my own position in the institution and my own views of teaching. Tompkins, Garrison and Giroux join in this reflective chorus. And as Fine (1994, 1972) reminds us all, our relationships in any community are not straightforward but "knottily entangled".

JOY: Wild mind reflecting As my friendship with Chen deepened, so did my trust in him. But it is of some personal concern that in coming to trust Chen I am now faced with a puzzling dilemma. How am I able to write about people who have become my friends? The ways I write about Chen become a complex and censored writing approach. I have the potential to stitch together a richly nuanced embroidered narrative that speaks about Chinese teaching and learning with a sense of authenticity; however, as Fine argues, in creating deeper relationships with people, my speech becomes censored, my knowledge is expanded but there lies a silence in my words. I nurture a sense of closeness and yet this closeness lures me into acts of complicity (Fine 1994, 70).

4

Much of my future writing will focus on the voices of the student interviewees.

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In being intimate with Chen and Chinese other/s, it becomes difficult to be dispassionate.

Reworking my own notions of selfuood impacts on how I write about lived experiences, both mine and those of Chinese others like Chen. What selves and voice/ s should I choose?

In reflecting on my life in Shanghai, I grope around in the sanctuary of my deepest memories, untangling the remnants of lived experiences in the gaps between self and other/so My memories are not yet ready to be unravelled - that will be for another day.

JANE: Gaps in the institution

Alice Cramped in Rabbit's House (Carroll 1974, 34) I return to Alice for my final thoughts on gaps in the institution. Though I am visibly "out of place" with many of the student participants in my research, I am in a position to challenge the space between them and the university. As an in-betweener in the institution .(p~­ teacher, part-academic, part-helper, part-student), I can learn to play the propheoc trIckster to hold open the gap so that I can move between the two worlds and, I hope, enable my colleagues and the first-ye.llr students to understand that gap better. Like Alice, I see my momentary awkwardnesses in the two worlds as ju t part of my "becoming", the and ... and ... and ... of the strange world of the university. I occasionally need to push my arm through the window in order to fit into this world, but I trust that my ultimate conclusion will not be that "You're nothing but a pack of cards", or that it has all been a dream and it is now time to wake up to real life.

**************************** Postscript - one year later JOY: It's one year after we first wrote this paper together, and I'm even more aware, and equally challenged, by the incredible comple:city of residing in the gap ...

JANE: ... knottily entangled in my connections with others, as a learner, teacher and early career researcher inside the institution.

JOY: Yes, I'm still ambivalent-not sure of my position. Where do I fit, if at all? So the gap for me continues to be something that is beyond definition-a yang and yin dimension that is constantly shifting between self and other, and east and west.

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JANE: I'm fascinated by the ways my ambivalent position in the university influences my relationships with my students.

JOY: As I continue to write, memories of Chen and China are now beginning to unravel, to reveal more nuanced understandings.

JANE: Reflective writing continues to be important to me, and I challenge the students to reflect too on their position in the institution. My current writing seeks to allow the students' voices to speak in chorus with the voices of academics and administrators.

JOY: I'm even more committed to auto-ethnography, and continue to engage with Jane and others in long discussions as to whether we write the tenn as one single word, or link the two words with a slash or with a hyphen. As an ongoing reflective process, my consciousness has evolved to see the act of auto-ethnographic writing as being something that engages my body, intellect, cultural and ancestral legacies, life experiences and heart. For me to write about the other in my research, I have realised that the only ethically responsible thing to do is to write about my own life in relationship with others.

JANE: This is why I write rhizomatic analyses, and co-creations, and multi-voiced choruses ...

JOY: ... and poetry...

JANE: ... and try to resist the pull of writing for and about others.

JOY: Yes. As Brazilian scholar Claudio Moreira contends 'the only way I could write about the "the Other" was through my own lived experience as an "Other." (2011, 590) For me there can be no other way.

JANE: When Joy and I write co-created pieces, I love the way our voices weave in and out of each other, echoing, undercutting, reinforcing, clashing ... The spaces around and among our voices open up possibilities rather than limiting them. I like Garrison's (2009, 82) description of the hyphen as "a link between two or more worlds and a poros [the Greek word for a gateway] through which possibility pours".

JOY: To understand the other, I believe we must first understand ourselves, in highly personal, relational work that can only be processed in the gap where other and self are necessarily interconnected.

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Works Cited: A Decorous Puck 1847. University of Victoria, Canada: Internet Shakespeare Editions. http://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca.

Aristotle 350 BC/2007. On the Gait ojAnimals. Translated by A. S. L. Farquharson. http:// c1assics.mit.edu/Aris to tle/ gaicanirn .htrnl.

Benjamin, Jessica. 1988. The Bonds ojLove: P!ychoanafysis, Feminisnl and the Problem oj Domination.

Toronto: Pantheon.

Buckingham, Kathleen. 2009. "Deep Roots in Culture, Shallow Roots in ature: Identifying Sustainable Bamboo Management Challenges for China and the Implications for Multidisciplinary Research." Paper presented at International Association of Agricultural Economists Conference, Beijing, China, August 16-22. http:// ageconsearch.umn.edu/bitstream/ 51468 /2/IAAE%20Buckingham%202009 .pdf.

Carroll, Lewis. 1974. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland & Throllgh the Looking Glass & The Hllnting oj tbe Snark. London: The Bodley Head.

Chang, Chung-Yuan. 2011. Creativity and Taoisll/: A Stllcfy ojChinese Pbilosopf?y, Art and Poetry.

London: Singing Dragon.

Chu, Godwin C. 1985. "The Changing Concept of Self in Contemporary China." In Clllt7lre and Self: Asian and Western Perrpectives, eds Anthony J. Marsella, George DeVos, and Francis L.K. Hsu, 252-277. New York: Tavistock.

Collins, Patricia Hill. 1986. "Learning from the Outsider Within: The Sociological Significance of Black Feminist Thought." Sodal ProblelJls 33 (6): Sl4-S32.

Conquergood, Dwight. 2002. "Performance Studies: Interventions and Radical Research."

The Drall/a Revielll, 46(2): 145-156.

Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. 1987. A Tbollsand PlateallS: CapitalislJl and Scbi~pbrenia.

Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Dolar, Mladen. 2006. A Voice and Notbing More. Cambridge, MA.: MIT Press.

Eakin, Paul John. 1999. HOlv Ollr Lives BecolJle Stories: Makillg Selves. Ithaca, .Y.: Cornell University Press.

Fine, Michelle. 1994. "Working the Hyphens: Reinventing Self and Other in Qualitative Research." In Handbook ojQllalitative Researcb, eds Norman K. Denzin and Yvonna S. Lincoln, 70-82. Thousand Oaks, California: Sage Publications.

Gao, Minglu. 2008. "Does Abstract Art Exist in China?" ArtZineCbina.colJI. http://www.artzinechina.com/display_print.php?a=470.

Garrison, Jim. 2009. "Teacher as Prophetic Trickster." Edllcational Tbeory 59 (1): 67-83.

Giroux, Henry A. 1992. Border Crossillgs: Cllltllral Workm alld tbe Politics ojEdllcatioll. New York; London: Routledge.

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Goldberg, Natalie. 1991. Wild Mind: Uving the Writer's LJe. London: Rider.

Grellier, Jane, and Joy Denise Scott. 2009 . Seeking Jane and Jqy: The S Inlggle to Become Allthentic, Ethical Allto-Ethnographers. http://hgsoconference.curtin.edu.au/ previous/identity.c&n.

Herzfeld, Michael. 1997. ''The Taming of Revolution: Intense Paradoxes of rhe Self." In Allto/ ethnograpf?y: Relvriting the Se!! and the Socia~ ed. Deborah Reed-Danahay, 169-222. Oxford; New York: Berg. hooks, bell. 2000. Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center. 2nd ed. London: Pluto Press.

Kamberelis, George. 2003. "Ingestion, Elimination, Sex, and Song: Trickster as Premodern Avatar of Posonodern Research Practice." Qllalitiative Inqlliry 9: 673-704.

La Shure, e. 2009. About: What Is Liminality? http://www.liminality.org/ abou t/whatisliminality/.

lJoyd, John Uri, and Curtis Gates lJoyd. 1884-85. Dnlgs alld Medicines oJNorth America: A

Pllblication Devoted to the Historical and Scientific DisClissioll oJthe Bota!!}, Phan"afY, Chemistry alld Therapelltics oj the Medicillal Plallts oJNorth America, their Constitllenls, Prodllcts and Sopbistications.

VoL 1. Cincinnati, Ohio: J.U and e.G lJoyd.

Madison, D. Soyini. 2005. Critical Ethnograpf?y: Metbod, Ethics, and Peifomlance. Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage.

Moreira, Claudio. 2011. "Tales of Conde: Autoerhnography and rhe Body Politics of Performative Writing." Cllltllral Stlldies <=> Critical Metbodologies 11 (6): 586-595.

Neuman, Shirley. 1992. "'Your Past ... Your Future': Autobiography and Morhers' Bodies."

In Genre, Trope, Gender: Critical Ess'!)'s I?J Northrop Frye, Ullda Hllicheoll alld Sbirl~ N8IImanll, ed.

Barry Rudand, 51 -86. Ottawa: Carleton University Press.

Nisbett, Richard E. 2005. The Geograpf?y oJTholight: HO/v Asians alld Westemers Think DifferentlY and Wf?y. London: Nicholas Brealey.

Perin, Constance. 1988. Belollging ill America: Readillg behveen tbe Unes. Madison Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press.

Stuurman, Siep. 2008. "Herodotus and Sima Qian: History and the Anthropological Turn in Ancient Greece and Han China." JOllmal oj World History, 19(1): 1-40.

Tang, Yangfang. 1999. "Language, Trurh, and Literary Interpretation: A Cross-Cultural Examination." JOllmal oj the Hislory oJIdeas 60 (1): 1-20.

Taves, Ann. 2003. "Detachment and Engagement in rhe Study Of "Lived Experience"."

Spiritlls 3: 186-208.

Tompkins, Jane P. 1996. A Ufe ill SchooL¡ What the Teacher Leamed. Reading, Mass.: AddisonWesley Tompkins,Jane. 2006. "Jane Tompkins and rhe Politics of Writing, Scholarship, and Pedagogy." Interview by Gary A. Olson. JAC 15 (1), http://www.jacweb.org/Archived_volumes/Tex c articles/V15_I1_0Ison_Tompkins.htm.

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Tu, Wei-Mingo 1985. "Selfhood and Orherness in Confucian Thought." In Cllltll': and Self: Aiall and Weslem Perrpectives, eds Anrhony J. Marsella, George D eVos, and FranCIS 1.K Hsu, 231-251. New York: Tavistock.

Van Gennep, Arnold. 1908/1960. The Rites oJPassage. Translated by Monika B. Vizedom and Gabrielle 1. Caffee. London: Roudedge and Kegan Paul.

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Finding Myself in Fiction -Lori D'Angelo "A blank page is mine enemy," my husband,Joseph, said. He had taken to speaking in Shakespearean English ever since his last book was rejected. I have to admit this was annoying. Worse than that though were his bad rewrites. From Hamlet ''To write or not to write, that is the question." Or from Romeo and Juliet: "Is a rejection letter by any other name just as sweet?" You see what I mean, you get the gist. In rejection, my husband had become insufferable. Before, when he was successful, his arrogance had been grating but tolerable. He was like William Hurt or Willem Dafoe. You can stand them in certain roles but not in others.

Failure was a role J oe did not wear well and, as I say this, I realize that I sound a little like Joe talJcing in overly pretentious English. One day, incensed, I told him that he was like Spenser who deliberately tried to sound like Chaucer. It annoys Joe sometimes that I am educated. Sometimes, I think Joe would like a submissive wife who bakes things for him and tells him how smart he is, even when he is acting like an ass. But he doesn't admit this to me.

He doesn't even admit this to himself.

"Spenser was brilliant," Joe said in response to my criticism. But Joe doesn't think this. He never liked Spenser. He just wanted to start an argument. I didn't. I just wanted him to realize that his book getting rejected by fifteen publishers was not the end of the world.

Even if his book never gets published, it is not the end of the world. He could write another one or he could not write another one. Either way, life would go on. But when you live with a writer who has once been successful, he becomes terrible when he is not.

"Yeah, you're right, Spenser was brilliant. Perhaps more brilliant than Shakespeare," I replied. He didn't agree with this statement, and I didn't believe it. But I said it because he had boxed himself into a corner by stating opinions that weren't his.

He knew this, and better yet, he knew that I knew it. He gave up. He said, "Diane, why can't you be more sensitive sometimes?"

I shrugged. I didn't tell him why. The reason was simple. He thinks he needs sensitivity but giving it to him only makes him delusional. He then begins to believe that his bad work is good. He wrote his best work, a novel that was both critically acclaimed and well-received by the public, during the fourth year of our marriage after my miscarriage when we were fighting like pit bulls, and the novel was semi-autobiographical. He wrote about himself and he wrote about me, and then he claimed that none of it was true. But people who knew us well knew he was lying. He wrote things that should have stayed between us, and I can't forgive him for that.

Joe liked to joke that his books are his babies, but the fact that we didn't have any children was tremendously painful, at least for me. I don't know if it was quite so painful for Joe. When I miscarried, that morning when he brought me back from the hospital and I stood there stunned because I felt like I'd been shot in the head, what Joe said to me was, "Pull yourself together, Diane. This happens to people allover the world, everyday." But it did not happen to me everyday. That was what I said, that's what I told him. And guess where that ended up? In his book. In his goddamn bestseller. The only consolation I had was that I came out looking like the more sympathetic character. My friend, Lois, says that most people would have divorced Joe for pulling a stunt like that. But I knew what I was getting myself into when I started dating a writer. He told me when we first got together who all his stories were about, which lovers and friends they were based on. Some of the people he wrote about weren't literary and didn't even know that they'd made it into his fiction. Early on in the relationship, he told me after sex, ''I'm going to write about us, Diane. My best work is -72 -

going to be based on us." At the time, I was flattered. Even when Joe warned me, "Some of it might not be pretty. The best fiction usually isn't" But I'd laughed then, because, I thought, what do I have to worry about?

It's a startling experience to find yourself in fiction, especially when the fiction is well-written and the made-up details say more about you than the real ones ever possibly could and you realize that you can sometimes come off as a cold-hearted bitch. When I finished reading that book, the one that was a best-seller, Joe asked me, eagerly, as if he needed my approval, "What do you think, Diane?"

"It's honest," I said. That and nothing more.

"But what do you think it's going to do to our relationship?"

"I don't know," I said. ''But how could it be worse than what we've already done?" he responded. And he was right. We'd already tteated each other like shit. I sometimes wondered if Joe tteated me the way he did just so he could write about it later, about what an asshole he'd been. Of course, he'd change the names and the locations. Instead of writing about our lives in boring Ohio, our fights would be in exciting places like on Fifth Avenue in New York.

I sometimes teased him, "Why don't you make it the Empire State building?" "Too Deborah Kerr-Carey Grant," he replied dryly. He didn't miss much. He didn't ever miss much. Even now, when he was writing badly and acting like an ass, he didn't miss much. So it shouldn't have surprised me when he put the typewriter away - yes, he was writing with a typewriter even though there really was no reason for it unless it was sadistic, to torture his agent and his publisher who would then have to employ some flunky to retype the whole book on a computer- and asked me, "Diane, what's wrong?"

"Aside from your behavior?" I asked.

"Yes, aside from that" So, I told him even though I didn't want to. "I think I might be pregnant again." All of my previous pregnancies had ended in miscarriages and horrible fights which led to brilliant stories for Joe. "And I don't want it to be like the others." By this, I meant I both didn't want to have a miscarriage and didn't want the miscarriage, if I had one, to end up in the pages of Joe's next novel.

"Have you been to the doctor?" Joe asked me.

"No," I said. I was afraid to go.

"Then how do you know?"

"I just know, okay?" I said, exasperated. In my head, I wondered if Joe was already storing up these lines in case it happened. "Do you want our baby to die again so you can write about it?" I asked.

"What a horrible thing to say," he said. But he didn't say no.

In the pantry, I took to canning goods. We owned a house in the country. One of Joe's crazy ideas to help him write. He had the money. He'd made a shitload off that bestseller about our screwed up marriage and how nasty we were to each other. Kind of like The War of the Roses but more contemporary. Also, unlike those people, we didn't get divorced. I'm not sure if that book was real or not. After a half an hour, Joe entered the pantry.

"What are you doing?" Joe asked me.

"Stockpiling for winter," I said.

"Diane."

"I don't know what I'm doing, okay, just like you don't know what you're doing with that shitty book."

"Thanks for being honest."

"No problem ."

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"I thought the pantry was merely decorative."

"At one time, it was used. And if I have this baby... " I began, afraid to hope.

"Maybe it'll work out this time," he said.

"Do you want it to?"

"Yes," he said, and I believed him.

During my fifth month, I was bitchy as hell. I had never made it that far before and didn't know what to expect. I didn't realize that pregnancy could get worse as it wore on. In the past, I had only gotten the first few months, kind of like an appetizer. My pregnancy made me manic and fervent. I began building igloos out of ice cubes in the kitchen. "Those are going to melt," Joe told me the first few times. After a while, he just gave up and cleaned up the puddles after I grew tired of the igloos.

I walked around the house playing with ice cubes and wearing inappropriate halter tops that showed off my pregnant belly. "You can see it now," I said triumphantly.

Joe was surprisingly tolerant. He didn't even try to stop me when I insisted on going out wearing clothes that made me look ridiculous and fat. I let my hair grow long and wore shirts that showed off my growing rummy and Joe was affectionate and loving, even in public. I re-read his book, the bestseller, and noticed things about the male character that I hadn't before. He had wanted to have a child too, just as much as the wife. But you wouldn't notice this unless you did a careful reading. I told him about it in bed while he was wearing his reading glasses and learning about serious academic things.

"I reread your novel," I said.

"Which one?" he asked half-attentive to me, half-reading some essay about the metaphysical poets.

"You know your magnum opus, the best-seller."

"Personally, I don't think it's my best work."

"No, it's good," I said. "You manage to convey things about the . . . male character, very subtly." I had decided that I would refer to his alter-ego as the male character.

"I think that's why the critics liked it. One of them called it heartbreakingly beautiful."

"I thought that it was just a bunch ofBS at the time," I admitted.

"And now?" he asked as he put the academic book down on the nightstand.

"Now, I don't know." I hiked the halter top up so that my pregnant belly was fully exposed. Joe kissed it; then he kissed me. He kept on doing that, and we didn't speak.

I was eight months pregnant and had stopped wearing halter tops. By now all the ones I had didn't fit anymore anyway. But, in the evenings after I napped and Joe wrote, Joe liked to sit with me. He liked to rub my stomach and kiss it, and I let him because I didn't mind. I liked the affection. I liked that we could communicate without speaking. When we spoke, one or both of us was bound to say pompous things. But when we sat there together, it really was beautiful and I remembered why I had married him in the first place.

On the day I was going to give birth, I woke up and knew. I told Joe, "It's going to be today.

We're really going to have a baby today."

Joe looked worried.

"If I was going to lose him, it would have been before now, don't you think?"

"I'm sure you're right," he said.

The birth was hell. I can see why some women stop after one. I can also see why some women never want to stop. Holding the baby after, even though I was tired and hurting all over, really was amazing. Before I drifted off to exhausted post-birth sleep, I asked Joe, "Will you write about this?" He didn't answer, but I already knew he would. I - 74 -

wanted him to. When I'd called Lois, months before, and told her I was pregnant, she asked if I was crazy.

"D idn't the doctors say you might not be able to have kids?" she'd reminded me. I hated her for being so practical and reasonable. ow, I felt glorious and triumphant.

Nothing I had do ne in my life to that point compared with the experience. I know thar's 1950's housewifey of me to say, but I really felt that. I wondered how j oe felt. I wanted to call Lois and gloat. When I woke up, I asked joe, "D o you think you'll love the baby better than your novel?" He didn't answer. I thought it was because he couldn't decide. Later, I realized that it was because he was recording it. I was helping him write his next novel. I would be in it. My character, wearing her halter tops and building igloos out of ice cubes, would come off as a little crazy. When Lois called and asked if any of that were true, I totally lied.

"This one's a little less autobiographical," I told her. She sounded doubtful. I could tell that even over the phone. But I didn't care. joe's new novel was a bestseller. H e had stopped speaking in bad Shakespearean English, and I was hugely pregnant again. This time, I was having a girl. joe would write about it, I knew, but it wouldn't bother me because I was happy. joe was happy too. You could tell that, despite the male character's cynicism, if you read his last book carefully.

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s

SELF-PORTRAIT # 3: A DREAM -Don Adams

It's like this: I was in the store one day, poking around, as it were, when I grabbed a package of panty hose and walked smack out the door, only to be nabbed by the establishment's crack security, who turned me over (naturally) to the state.

So that I was in prison, then, along with all of myoId friends (acquaintances, really) from school. So this is lvherey ou were all thoseyears.

They did not seem at all surprised to see me, but were rather amused (mildly) that I - the great one - should end up, after all, like them.

I thought, ''When I stole the panty hose, it was as in a dream, and dream-logic demanded that I be landed here, with Clay Copeland, Pat O'Brien, Gary McCarver and the rest, where I am to be made to feel a bit awkward, it would seem, at first."

Later it was brought home to me that my mother's son is in the clink; my throat clenched as I stared at the bars.

Then I concocted a plea for mercy, like a threat, or poem, addressed, dear reader, to you.

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wanted him to. When I'd called Lois, months before, and told her I was pregnant, she asked if I was crazy.

"D idn't the doctors say you might not be able to have kids?" she'd reminded me. I hated her for being so practical and reasonable. ow, I felt glorious and triumphant.

Nothing I had do ne in my life to that point compared with the experience. I know thar's 1950's housewifey of me to say, but I really felt that. I wondered how j oe felt. I wanted to call Lois and gloat. When I woke up, I asked joe, "D o you think you'll love the baby better than your novel?" He didn't answer. I thought it was because he couldn't decide. Later, I realized that it was because he was recording it. I was helping him write his next novel. I would be in it. My character, wearing her halter tops and building igloos out of ice cubes, would come off as a little crazy. When Lois called and asked if any of that were true, I totally lied.

"This one's a little less autobiographical," I told her. She sounded doubtful. I could tell that even over the phone. But I didn't care. joe's new novel was a bestseller. H e had stopped speaking in bad Shakespearean English, and I was hugely pregnant again. This time, I was having a girl. joe would write about it, I knew, but it wouldn't bother me because I was happy. joe was happy too. You could tell that, despite the male character's cynicism, if you read his last book carefully.

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s

SELF-PORTRAIT # 3: A DREAM -Don Adams

It's like this: I was in the store one day, poking around, as it were, when I grabbed a package of panty hose and walked smack out the door, only to be nabbed by the establishment's crack security, who turned me over (naturally) to the state.

So that I was in prison, then, along with all of myoId friends (acquaintances, really) from school. So this is lvherey ou were all thoseyears.

They did not seem at all surprised to see me, but were rather amused (mildly) that I - the great one - should end up, after all, like them.

I thought, ''When I stole the panty hose, it was as in a dream, and dream-logic demanded that I be landed here, with Clay Copeland, Pat O'Brien, Gary McCarver and the rest, where I am to be made to feel a bit awkward, it would seem, at first."

Later it was brought home to me that my mother's son is in the clink; my throat clenched as I stared at the bars.

Then I concocted a plea for mercy, like a threat, or poem, addressed, dear reader, to you.

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-77 -

From "Life Stories" -Paul Hetherington 1. Monterey Cypress

2. Bombs

At the bottom of the oval the twisted Monterey Cypress was a green-fringed broken corkscrew where we climbed to hide from the furious history teacher.

He was loolcing for the culprits who'd chalked "liar" on the board after he'd praised America's cause in Vietnam.

Next to it we buried childish, risque COrNCS; nearby a broken drain drizzled a stale aroma like old washing-up onto frothing soil and the curved tongue-and-groove of the gardener'S shed leaked smoke and whisky smells.

Under that Monterey we found a clump of mushroomsAgancus bispomsgrowing in the grass: upturned, pale boats, bulbous, taut umbrellas with tender brownish strutsand you, at twelve, plucked five.

Sauted lavishly in butter in a shimmering smooth-black pan, releasing and gathering their copious, staining moisture, the woody, earthy flavours soaked our crunchy toast.

Only afterwards did we read that, all too often, AgO/ictis was rNstaken for Afllollila, the notorious Destroying Al1ge/, even by experts-an imposter with its own exquisite taste, purveyor of organ failure.

One of my father's stories could have been a parable: last from a mess hut in Darwin during the war he faced a line of Japanese bombs with the slit trenches' protection an impossible short distance away.

There was a moment of seeing his own oblivion, and, perhaps, because of his lapsed Catholicism, an aura of an afterlife as death ambled near in clumping, explosive steps.

His training had taught him to lie on the ground and, after bombs fell either side and dirt sprayed his helmet, to the surprise of his mates he stood up, pale but cheery, saying something they didn't catch.

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- 79-

The X-Rayed Memory of a Cancerous Breast

-Calalilla Fiorillo Flore!C/1 In memoriam, to beautiful mother

Breast, Sin, ~Lm, Borst, Sein, Brust, a'[~eOt;, Seno, ~, ~ 1:lJ-, Peito, rpYAb, Pecho (English, Romanian, Chinese, Dutch, French, German, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish.)

It is remarkable how languages function because, if for the word ''breast'' there are almost completely distinct versions in the thirteen languages selected (above), on the other hand, for the word "cancer," seven of these languages share an almost similar form. It appears that this illness cares little about the linguistic barrier. Put differently, cancer is a word that breaks up bodies and tears families apart; yet, ironically, we belong to a larger community because of it. Mom was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1990 and died because of it two years later. I have ever since accepted cancer as a provocation.

"The X-Rayed Memory of a Cancerous Breast" somewhat resembles x-ray images, although, instead of seeing an individual's inside, we observe some words that "speak" to all of us. This poster is part of my Scrabble-Cancer Project, which has started as a realization of the playfulness dimension of our lives. Garnes are collective, social, and inventing. Scrabble-Cancer is a project where I expose and challenge the linguistic impact of this illness on us. "Scrabble" is a rough word, meaning it has only two vowels and six consonants. The first three are hard consonants (scr-), and, when people pronounce the word, they almost choke. Despite its vocal toughness, it remains open to various combinations of words. The grids are retrieved from my own exploration into the subject of cancer.

Ever since mom died, I have exhumed and reenacted this ordeal on numerous occasions. It is a ritual in self-discovery and a way to pay a tribute to beautiful mother.

My project follows the philosophy of artistic installations, in the sense that its main characteristic is fluidity. Ultimately, the configuration of any Scrabble-Cancer grid changes from users to users because mutability represents its sine-qua-non feature. This particular grid has 22 words, 12 horizontally and 10 vertically. Once a grid is completed, it can be used as a map to navigate and explore further not used but implied ideas. Moreover, a grid can be read from left to right, top to bottom, and diagonally. There is no strict rule on how one wants to use a grid. In addition, when an initial browsing is done, we could continue the game of creating sentences with those chosen words.

In all the grids, the central word to be "dissected" is placed in the middle. After I had arranged the letters in the noun "breasts," there were two immediate others that came to mind: "seW' that goes down the first "s" in "breasts," and "protest" that goes upward in the grid and borrows the "t" from the central word. A woman's breasts contribute to tlle development of her self-esteem and image; yet a woman does not want to be judged on tllis singular physical aspect, hence the "protest" word that could be employed as a noun and as a verb simultaneously to enl1ance its message.

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Another interesting combination is "oncology" and "God," where the two words share the vowel "0." They both speak volumes about cancer: on the one hand, the branch of medicine that devotes its research to cancer is called "oncology." On the other hand, science alone has not always proved to be effective by itself. People pray a lot when in pain. People remember God then more frequently. People are more vulnerable in uncertain situations, and hospitals have that unforgettable combination of smells that resuscitates our true fears.

Still, another useful association starts with "fake" and then goes down in two directions with "erotica" and "fantasy," respectively. The last two words parallel each other and form a team, a pair We may suggest that "erotica" and "fantasy" are intertwined to increase the word previously addressed, "self." Given the large industry devoted to various obscure marketing strategies using women's breasts (e.g., provocative intimate apparel, lewd magazines, adult movies), we may feel justified to add "fake" into the equation and generate further debates.

Over the years of research and personal introspection, cancer has reminded me that it is a random mutation at the cellular level, and therefore its recovery is in part a matter of chance. This i why we find "surgery" and "pray" as another tandem here, joining medicine and spirituality again.

Personally, when mom was diagnosed with cancer, she was advised to undergo surgery and have mastectomy. She refused because she wanted to still have her two breasts. Today, more and more women decide to have a radical double mastectomy to ensure that the cancerous tissue is completely removed from their breasts' site.

There are some words that apparently seem to make no sense whatsoever: "ghost," "hunt," "exhume," "zapped." I beg to differ. We possess this invaluable quality called associative thinking that allows us to embark on several linguistic journeys. Any grid from Scrabble-Cancer Project intends to bring together people who suffer from this illness as well as their family, friends, and community members. A person with cancer has moments of distrust when s/he may feel invisible, like a ghost. Having replaced a comfortable personal bed with a neutral hospital one, having exchanged her/his personal attire with standard hospital gowns, having given up makeup to palenes and exhaustion, then we could better comprehend why patients feel like a "ghost." Furthermore, healthy people waiting for their dear one's recovery do feel like "ghosts," too. It is not a permanent feeling, but it is a recurrent one. When faced with the issue of life-and-death situations, we relapse into our fearful mode if only for a couple of minutes. Cancer "exhumes" our concerns, misconceptions, and poor medical education. Yet we are on a hunt to win this battle. Having seen breasts zapped because of mastectomy, we have witnessed the shock that is cancer.

To conclude, there are many other ways to read this grid, just as there are many other ways to create different grids by focusing on "breasts." Take a piece of paper, pick up a pencil, draw a square and think of a word associated with cancer that challenges your intellect. By so doing, you have already become part of this ongoing project.

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"Scrabble" by Catalina Florina Florescu

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Facebookisms, Alex, 2011, hand cross stitched embroidery and aida cloth, 9"xl4", Toutant.

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Faccbookslms, Blake, 2011, hand cross stitched embroidery and aida cloth, 9"xl4~ Toutant - 85 -

Facebooklsms, Egyptian Protests, 2011, hand cross stitched embroidery and aida cloth, 9"x14", Toutant - 86 -

Facebookisms, Nacasha,20 II, hand cross stitched embroidery and aida cloth, 9"x14", Toutant - 87-

Telling Stories: Discussions with Sidonie Smith. Keith Knapp. and Terry Casde

Sidonie Smith is Martha Guernsey Colby Collegiate Professor of English and Women's Studies at the University of Michigan. Her research interests include autobiography studies, feminist theories, and women's literature.

Interviewers: Bir-Anne Edgar and Tim Vatovec DC: What do you think is the value of social theory? What role does it play in your work?

SS: I am really interested in questions of how it is that autobiographical narratives produce their authenticity effects. What aspects of a narrative convince a reader or an audience that this is an authentic, and "true" story? We can observe how scandals erupt when charges are made that a narrative presenting itself as "true" may not be true in part or at all. And this leads to another question: what are the factors internal to a narrative and external to a narrative that lead to charges of hoaxing? Julia Watson and I have been trying to tease out answers to these questions in two kinds of autobiographical narratives: instances of witness narratives and charges of false-witnessing and instances of ethnic autobiography and charges of the impersonation of an indigenous subject.ln the latter case, we are thinking about how certain metrics of authenticity shore up the perforrnative production of what it means to be indigenous. Social theory is central to getting at the anxieties that produce the scandal of the hoax as well as the ways in which narratives project, or not, convincing authenticity.

DC: We were talking a little bit - well we were talking a lot about the issue of authenticity. Do you think accuracy is, then, connected to authenticity? To be authentic does a narrative have to be 100% accurate?

What is accuracy? I think that it was a really good point when you were discussing the Internet, right - I mean to do fact checking. I don't remember - this is about memory too, because memory is so loopy because what feels right or truthful to you as you experience it might be factually inaccurate?

SS:. Well, that's the complicated thing: when you invoke the word 'accuracy' or 'truth,' what is the kind of truth you are invoking? Truth to what? Truth to facticity? Truth to a social reality? Truth to a shared history?

A psychological truth? We tend to think of the opposite of truth as lies, but that is not always productive for exploring the ways people tell life stories and the social work those stories do and the ways in which particular life stories gain saliency at particular historical moments. Stanley Fish quipped, that even if an autobiographical narrative is full of lies, it nonetheless speaks a truth - in this case a truth to character. Or consider the multiple kinds of truth that the South African 'Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings acknowledged. The Commission's Final Report emphasizes the importance to the reconciliatory process of acknowledging and pursuing multiple kinds of "truth." Factual or forensic truth provides evidence for esmblishing the "what" of what happened in the past. Personal truth comes from witnessing to the subjective experience of suffering and victimization. The process of coming to a fuller understanding of, or knowledge about, the context of everyday life under apartheid produces social truth. Healing and restorative truth emerges through the production of a collective, consensual narrative of nation through which the new South Africa can remember its past, found its future, a narrative of nation that listens for the voices of the fom1erly voiceless and disenfranchised. In its process, then, the TRC negotiated the complicated relays among positivist truth, subjective truth, social truth, and narrative truth. Or approach the question of truth through theories of and research on memory. Neuroscientists mlk about the neuro-plasticity of the brain, and about - 88 -

the way memories are re-constellated at the moment of remembering. Such a generative reconstellation complicates any simplistic notion of a truth to memory.

Keith N. Knapp is Chair of the History Department at The Citadel, The Military College of South Carolina, and Westvaco Professor of National Security Studies. His research on filial piety, ritual, and Confucianism in early China has been published in English, Chinese, and Japanese. His current research explores the genre of collective biography in early Chinese historiography.

Interviewers: Tom Loder and Richard Parmer DC: What specifically made you get into autobiography?

KK: Most Chinese histories are organized in the same way. They have the annals, which are year-by-year studies of what the emperor does and then there are biographies. The annals are the really rock solid history, because there are court reporters who are supposed to be taking down the emperors' words and actions. The biographies are supplementary materials that are supposed to explain what happens in the annals. Those biographies are set up to help flesh out the bare bones that the annals provide, but the annals are much more reliable because they have all of this apparatus behind them. But the annals are fairly dry reading and terse, the biographies on the other hand are much more fleshed out and narrative. To do any research on early medieval China, you have to read biographies and quite a lot of them. It was when my material was all biographies, I found that they had all of this really weird, wacky, wonderful material that made them very compelling. I personally know very little about autobiographies written in this period, because there are so few. That was Professor Wells' subject for his book. Whatever was there he found it. His material really struck me as interesting. One of the things that he shows is that these accounts are mainly tropes strung together, but they don't really reveal anything about the person themselves; so early Chinese autobiography isn't all that revealing.

DC: Are there particular theorists you find you gravitate towards?

KK: Social theory has always been really important for me. At Berkeley we had this great historiography class that all history graduate students had to take. I had this Indian specialist who had us read many different works on early modern Europe. He introduced us to the Annales School and Fernand Braudcl and others, so that really was a great moment where you had all these competing approaches that all focused on Europe, but the professor said, "Ok. This is what they've done, but you can apply this to your own field." That was extraordinarily helpfuL One of the social theorists that heavily influenced me was Emile Durkheim and his The Elementary Font/! oj the Rtligiolls Life. When I started teaching and tried to explain Chinese ancestor worship, I started telling students that what's sacred in China is the family. This is god, this is what all aims are for and all your actions are taken to benefit this. I then realized that this is all Durkheim: Durkheimian social analysis of this religious form. It was a very powerful way of looking at this. It gave me incredible insights into how people approached life. Durkheim and Weber, in their exchanges, and in their different approaches, have been very important. Weber for bureaucratic functions and charismatic leadership.

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DC: One more question I wanted to ask. Is there anything about your work that people would ask you, but never get around to?

KK: The thing is that, how I would characterize my own work is that I'm really interested in the ordinary. In some ways I'm a very weird person, but in other ways I'm very ordinary. What often happens when we look at in past cultures is that the ordinary doesn't stand out or isn't even visible, because the people who get noticed are extraordinary and the words that get treasured are extraordinary. Fine literature, that's what people will want to read, they don't want to read the schlock that's common like Romance novels. Two hundred years from now, how many people are going to read romance novels that were produced at the end of the 20th century? Unless hel she is a scholar, nobody's going to want to read them. The elegant commercial slogan of "Cotton is the fabric of our lives" will be lost as well. That's what I'd like to recover. How did ordinary people think and see their world. These common assumptions about how things work actually draw on history. This is where someone like Fernand Braudel who develops the AnnaIes School methodology of the longue duree. Economic, geographic change is very long and imperceptible to history. These things that don't seem so important, how people live with their family, actually have a tremendous effect on history. Yet, because they are not seen as important at the time, they aren't noted. It's this pursuit of the ordinary, which is a weird thing to pursue, is really what I'm after. The more I can reconstruct the lives of these people who lived in the 2nd through the 7th century, the happier I am. It's like a huge puzzle with a bunch of pieces missing. but just recovering those few pieces gives us a general idea, even though it might be one with a bunch of holes. Each time I can add a piece to that puzzle, I'm really happy. 'The Exemplary Everymen" was an article I wanted to write for a long time, because I felt that I got back some of the texture of the lives of these people living in 5th century southern China. Through the accounts of these two commoners, we can see the daily routines of life and how they interacted with each other. When I'm able to do that, I feel the most successful and personally the happiest.

Terry Castle is Walter A. Haas Professor in the Humanities at Stanford University. She had published nine books, including The Professor alld Olher Writillgs. In her spare time, she enjoys creating art.

Interviewers: Richard Parmer and Heather McIntyre DC: And I was wondering with all of the issues surrounding theory today within academia is there any hope for it or is there a way to salvage it as an intellectual pursuit?

TC: Well, that is a great question, Heather, but one so complex I can hardly begin to marshal my feeble brain cells to answerl I was a Ph.D. student in the late 1970s, just as 'theory' began to infiltrate American higher education and academic culture--\vith the translation from French of people like Roland Barthes and Derrida and indeed other critics who renewed interest, for example, in the Russian formalists of the teens and twenties. But even then I was a bit ambivalent about what people were calling theory--especially the version known 'Continental' theory. Most American scholars in English departments read Derrida and others only in translation, and one's understanding tended to be highly mediated, peer-group-driven, and simplistic for this reason. More and more English professors were really only-- I guess the polite word would be 'appropriating'--concepts which by this point were ninth or tenth or eleventh hand. ow I was definitely illjllle/lced by some of the French theorists--especially Roland Barthes, an extraordinary and amazing writer.

Then--and now--I make a permanent exception for him. And when I wrote my second book--on 18th century - 90-

fiction, the masquerade and the camivalesque-I was very, very influenced by Bahktin. Yet at the same time, J never wanted to throw myself overboard into 'theory.' Something always held me back. Yes, my first book, on Samuel Richardson, was mildly posrstructuralist, and the second book (as noted) Bahktinian. But I tried to avoid sounding like I was writing some sort of weird 'French-in-translation' or 'Russian-in-translation' with large dollops of fashionable jargon. I wanted to find my own way of saying something and most import'lnt, I wanted to make my writing accessible to people who were not necessarily immersed in theory. A lot of the quasi-scientific terminology sounded absurd and anachronistic, too, when applied to some of the historical figures I was most interested in at the time. I never wanted to write something, say, like "Alexander Pope and 'Heteroglossia'." I would have felt rlishonest and silly doing so.

And increasingly, when I began teaching at Stanford, I found that more and more of the English Ph.D. students most drawn to 'theory' had not read very much literature in the old-school sense. You'd say something about Dickens's Blfak HOl/Jf or UfyJJeJ and they would never have read it You know, at least the New Critics read stuff! In turn, then one had the canon wars and culture wars and all of the attacks on the trarlitional English-American literary canon--these events reinforced the large-scale falling off of interest in the English and American literary classics. Of course I'm not dissing the 1980s and 1990s critique of the canon--it was hugely necessary and important. In my own historical field--eighteenth-century fiction--the rerliscovery of lost works, in particular, works by women authors, was a tremendous gain. I totally supported these efforts at bibliographic recovery and the opening up of the canon into new areas. But in some cases, the baby went out with the bathwater. Beginning in the 1980s, or so I found in my teaching, more and more advanced students had read works by the fashionable theorist of the moment-- whether Guattari or Benjamin or Jurlith Butler or Katherine Hayles or Eve Sedgwick--but had no real knowledge of literary history.

If you pointed this absence of knowledge out- if you saw it as a bad thing, a sad thing, an impoverishing thing--you were liable to run into a lot of 'political' and ideological resistance from both students and other professors. It was not impossible to encounter students assailing Dickens as a sexist pig, say, or arguing that he was to be despised as a 'British' author because the British happened to be very good at colonizing other countries and peoples in the eighteenth and nineteenth century; then you'd find the student in fact had never read Dickens. I may be an arch-reactionary, but I think that the so-called 'turn' to theory-now thirty years on--was in some ways very damaging. It had a terrible effect on the lllriting of literary criticism--of writing about books. Academic writing about literature has entirely lost any general readership-has lost its crerlibility with even literate, highly educated, non-academic people. The urge to read good literature and talk about it has by no means vanished from mainstream American culture: witness the huge interest in book clubs and book groups in, literature blogs on the Internet and so on. But people want to read books and talk about them in human and complex ways- not be bludgeoned, in half-baked jargon, with all the reasons they are ideologically unsound. Literature--and literary criticism--cannot be reduced to moralizing. Literary works are often contrarlictory, transgressive, absolutely unassailable to any idea of political 'right thinking' or critical grandstanding about 'doing the right thing.' So much of great literature is about doing the wrong thing--Iook at Killg Lear or Crillle alld PI/lliJhlllellt or J.M. Coetzee's DiIgrace--and it describes this wrong thing so fantastically well, with so much force and beauty, that one marvels at the power of another human being (the Author, a figure supposedly dead, but definitely alive and kicking) to mess so profoundly with one's mind. Great works of art are always deeply rebellious. And so many people in the high-flying academic theory crowd, especially some of the Marxist and 'oppositional' critics, are very well-off, materialistic, and conventional people. Absolutely complacent and vain about their position in the system.

Happy consumers. I think it's absurd to say you're a revolutionary or your thoughts are deeply subversive when you're pulling down a big salary as a senior professor, as part of a university elite, when you've got a - 91 -

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nice house and lifetime job security. I don't think literature is about being a happy consumer. Or at least the kind of literature that liVe! is not about existing comfortably within the academic system.

Let me assure you--I am not opposed to 'rlifficulty' or complex argument or intellectual se.riousness of any kind. I don't make my criticisms out of some anti-intellectual bias: e.g., "Oh, you're using all these big words that we don't understand, so we're going to just let it all hang out." What I don't like is the bad writing, and the second-order nature of so much that passes itself off as literary theory these days. And more broadly, a lack of intellectual curiosity. And then of course, there's theory and there's theory. I ask my students and they say, ''Well, we're very interested in making theoretical 'interventions' about such-and such."

CIntervention' is exactly the sort of theory-word that I loathe.) I will say to them, "Have you read Rousseau?

Have you read Schopenhauer? Have you read ietzsche? Have you read Freud?" Have you read Durkheim? Often, no, hardly anything, and now they're Ph.D. students in a literature program. Along with an absence of general historical knowledge- very few of my students, even some of the advanced, could tell you very much, say, about the French Revolution or the First World War--too many lack any broad familiarity with the history of ideas, generally. There are so many amazing intellectual figures out there who are just somehow not 'hip' to them, or even on the screen: Max Weber, Norbert Elias, Simone Weil, Erwin Panofsky, Simone de Beauvoir--even someone like Ruskin, on the visual arts. Mind-blowing. I ask my students, "Did you ever come across these people?" And they say, "No," and I think, "So, what will it be, then? Althusser--and only Althusser--forever?"

But you know I could just be getting old and cynical. It could be that something completely unexpected is going to happen that will change everything. There will be some genius who comes along, maybe even in an English Ph.D. program! A lowly graduate student who turns out to be a genius, and I do believe in geniuses.

That would be funny. Academics, for the most part, are 1I0t geniuses which is wh)' they are always saying-or have been saying of late--that genius doesn't exist. Everything is 'culturally constructed. That there is no authority before whom we should genuflect. But I believe that true 'seers' exist: people with extraorrlinary artistic and linguistic capacities, extraordinary imaginations, people who see absolutely what no one else is seeing. There are visionaries and beautiful monsters. And sometimes, you know, with great artists-Shakespeare, Mozart, Samuel Johnson, Keats, Wagner, Virginia Woolf, Manet, Picasso, Walker Evans, De Kooning, oh, I could go on forever--all you can do is just bow down and say thank you.

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