Our Poetry, Our Bodies: A Chapbook Collection in Solidarity
Featuring poetry by: Katie Lloyd :: Rian Pygin :: Janiel Santos Kiera Klein :: Jessie Graham:: Megan A Pellouchoud
Class Statement Led by Keira Klein
We do not assume or intend to speak for Asian-Americans, we can only speak to what we have learned through course materials and hope to elevate the voices of Asian-Americans. Negative and inaccurate portrayals of Asians through media and socio-cultural narratives create harmful stereotypes for an already marginalized group. Issues of education, immigration, body, militarization, and fetishization affect nearly everyone, but we hope that through poetry we can elevate these issues so the voices of queer people, people of color, and all intersectional identities might be acknowledged, and soon heard. Think of this piece as a segue from inspired students to delve more in depth into issues of race, sexuality, and the meanings assigned to similar concepts. There’s a depth in poetry that cannot be so cleanly achieved through academic writing, and we hope that these works can help to prop the door open to a much needed conversation.
Janiel Santos
Statement
Having never taken a Women-Gender studies course before, I was surprised at how much I loved the course and was able to really engage with the material. The second part of the term's required readings were my favorite, in that the authors created very moving and emotional pieces that spoke to me as both a minority and a woman. This course was a great opportunity for me as a student to learn about the ways in which Asian-Americans are fetishized. Having never taken a course on AsianAmericans, many of these issues had never come to my attention. However, through the readings and engaging discussions I was able to open my eyes and be much more aware of how this community has been exploited and oppressed. For my zine piece I decided to play with two words "Education" and "Wounds". Both I feel are important to Asian-American studies, because as was shown in both Split and Milk&Honey, American education systems don't tend to cater to students of color, and children of immigrants are left forced to learn how to navigate these systems of discrimination and racism. I don't think of myself as a good writer, but I felt that both Che and Kaur did an excellent job embodying the feelings that minority women and immigrant children feel when trying to navigate American society.
Kiera Klein
Statement The major course materials that inspired my poems were Yen Le Espiritu’s “Asian American Women and Men: Labor, Laws, and Love”, as well as Deborah Gee’s “Slaying the Dragon” in addition to my own personal experience and second-hand knowledge. Fetishization, exploitation, and militarization are especially critical issues for Asian-Americans, that I hoped to focus on. Asian-Americans’ unique position in racial hierarchies and relations as racially triangulated between Blacks and whites affords them a unique perspective, one that should be given a platform and utilized to dismantle white supremacy and harmful structures of power. America’s white savior complex has greatly affected Asian countries and Asian-Americans in ways that are largely unacknowledged in larger society and education. Asian-Americans are not a “model minority”, they are richly diverse and variant community with stories that deserve to be told and heard. Language & the Latest Trend 何の話し、 こんなの言葉、 広島恥、東京のお土産、 日本の文化は、君のコスプレ。 着物を着たい？お寿司が好き？ 日本人の声、聞こえない、聞かない。 神社に行って、御神籤を取って、 大凶を読む。 君は神社で残す。 木に御神籤を結ぶつける、 君の激怒で裂ける。
どうして君に大凶が来ました、 全てを取る君。 What story, These kinds of words, Hiroshima Shame, Tokyo Souvenirs, Japan’s culture your cosplay. You want to wear a kimono? You like sushi? You can’t hear, won’t hear, the voices of Japanese people. You go to a shrine, draw your fortune. It reads Great Curse. You leave it at the shrine. You tie it to a tree, Tearing it in your rage. Why did [loss] come to you, The you who takes everything.
Fetishization & Militarization: a Love Story
What a pretty picture, What a queer anomaly, Dragon Lotus Lady Blossom I’m your living, breathing fantasy
Imperialism as courtship, A proposal with a nuke, For an apology, you push me to my knees Because for you to kneel would be a fluke.
White pride and tasteless food, A culture of stolen treasures A history of pillaging A mail order bride for your pleasure.
My wedding gift was a war I didn’t ask for, My cake on an enslaved comfort woman’s back Your tongue waterboards my language My vows your unprovoked attack
How many white men does it take to make a delusion. How many white men does it take to start a war. How many white men does it take to wreck a world. Why do so many white men still want more?
Katie Lloyd
Statement The word I choose as an inspiration is “silence”. We have learned throughout the course that Asian Americans are often confined into certain representations: a hyper sexuality present for the satisfaction of others (particularly white men) or invisibility. What comes with these expectations, I think, is silence. Any expression of Asian American sexuality outside of the prescribed definitions is not given value or recognized. The need to be able to express one’s reality is what inspired the following poems that I wrote. I also took inspiration from Asian American Women and Men: Labor, Laws, and Love by Yen Le Espiritu, Split by Cathy Linh Che, and Milk and Honey by Rupi Kaur.
The Hierarchy of a Woman’s Body
What is my mind’s value?
I struggle to present my ideas to an audience whose attention is commanded through lighting that focuses solely on my body.
Sexuality shadows my brain;
My tits and ass take center stage but, my head is missing.
Who will help me find it in the dark?
To Locate Sadness We confine sadness to tears but,
my eyes simply leak the sadness my throat shuts in, caught between breathes – I’m suffocating: asphyxiated by silence.
My throat holds secrets; the gatekeeper of my thoughts – what’s the password? Wrong. None shall pass.
My mind is full of worlds my tongue will never taste; a hunger I cannot satisfy eating away at my soul. And so,
I need to build a bridge between my mind and tongue; a connection manufactured using only my bricks of thought because the dam in my throat is weak and the water leaking from its cracks, from my eyes, cannot keep the growing wave at bay.
I will be heard because I refuse to drown in silent sadness.
Jessie Graham Hunger Throughout this course there has been a theme of hunger. Asian Americans are hungry for representation, humanization, and, for many, a connection to their history and culture. Representations of Asian American sexuality are usually harmful, rarely positive and almost never queer leaving the vast majority of Asian Americans starving for any representation and good representation. The hunger in books like Milk and Honey by Rupi Kaur, Split by Cathy Linh Che, and Shortcomings by Adrian Tomine are all different but access a similar idea, starvation through cultural erasure. Kaur and Linh Che both discuss a sort of silencing and shrinking. All three authors explore their fraught relationships with their sexuality and the implications of their ethnic identity on these relationships. As a white person, I cannot speak to the experiences of Asian Americans. I can only speak to my experiences and as a mentally ill non-binary lesbian I can speak to a hunger. A hunger to have my sexuality exist outside of fetishistic ideals placed on me by the patriarchal heteronormative ideology of the United States. A hunger to speak and be heard. I cannot speak for Asian Americans but I can speak to my experiences that at the same time are similar and completely different from those of Asian Americans. But we both know starvation in the landscape of representation in American media. My poems explore different kinds of hunger and their interaction with identity and representation. They speak to society’s hunger for the “cool” and easy to digest parts of our identities. Some of my poems speak to my own hunger to be known and to have my truth seen beyond the confines of stereotypes. My last poem connects a community of identities and expresses our experiences and our starvation.
Megan A Pellouchoud The poem “Belonging” is inspired from the text Beyond the Shadows of Camptown and several poetry texts throughout the term, such as Rupi Kuar’s Milk and Honey.
The poem “Belonging” is derived from an excerpt cited from Beyond the Shadows of Camptown:
“Days and Dreams”: “When I think about it, a camptown is like an island floating between Korea and America Neither mainland nor sea, just an island. And just as an island is just an island, the women here are nothing but foreigner’s whores. Temporary honeys for American GI’s, shunned by their homeland, they are called by that name. …. Because it is a rootless island, the women who live here cannot lay down roots either. Women either depend on their pimps or long to go to America because they know all too well the hopelessness of this island life. “ – Novelist Kang Suk-kyung (Page 39)
This excerpt referenced in Beyond the Shadows of Camptown, epitomizes the experience of Korean women whose lives are linked with “camptowns.” The excerpt also largely embodies and extends to the experiences of military brides that joined their husband in the states and further represents their marginalization. Yet, this excerpt and inspired poem could also depict the experience of immigrants from across many backgrounds. The analogy of “camptown” to an island and women between the demands of their pimps and American GI’s not only characterizes the experience for “Western Princesses” within Korea, but can also be applied to the larger experience of immigrant Korean women in America: stuck between the representations of their country of origin and the United States. The conflict of representation, such that the analogy can express, women stuck between nations on an island is alarming, as military brides have restrained agency and limited options for their representation and selfidentification. Despite remarking on this restrained agency, the text does not neglect their strategies and endurance to adapt and negotiate their “impossible” identity. The text reveals that the experience of military brides is largely provoked by the consequences of imperialism and legacy of foreign occupancy that has riddled the peninsula in post-modern challenges. The events of war and split of the peninsula resulted in an impoverished country and left southern Koreans at the aid of the United States. The hierarchy and chain of command that pervades the Korean nation: the colonizer and the colonized is the condition that motivates disconcerting power relations between the United States and Korea. These conditions and power structure underlie the organization of camptowns and interactions between U.S. military personnel and the Korean nation, notably Korean women. After Korea’s experience as a colony of Japan, these conditions inadvertently invited a new, hegemonic power into Korea in order to aid the nation and stabilize the region with security. Korean women underpin the relationship and interactions between the two nations: the metaphoric colonizer and colonized. “War booty” is the expression used to describe the role of camptown women. Their role is ambivalent, between “national heros” that protect virtuous Koreans, or more popularly, “Yankee whores.” In the Korean context, they are pushed between these two representations, being often rendered “Yankee whores” or as “Western Princesses.” This has become the iconic representation of these women within
and outside of Korea, their realities marginalized, prompting the publication of this text and inspiring my personalized poem, “Belonging.” Military brides and their struggles of representation and identity formation pervade their interactions, especially in language (most notably for older generation). On p. 76, one of these women notes, “foreign domination had literally left them with no language to call their own.” This limited her capacity and agency for economic survival, not considering themselves fluent in any tongue, neither English, Korean, or Japanese (from their previous colonizer). This example witnesses the restrained negotiation that extends even to language, further marginalizing their existence between nations. Like being stuck in the ocean on an island between two nations, there are many factors that marginalize their existence. The clashing of Korean and American racial and gender ideologies promotes the marginalization and displacement of their identity. In Korean culture, the virtue of women is dependent on her chastity. When a woman violates this, she is restricted of social mobility and often doomed for a life in camptown. The prospect or idea of marriage to an American soldier remedies this destiny. However, when these women are brought into the U.S. with dreams and promises of escaping their social reality in Korea, they are met with new, racialized forms of exclusion, labelling them legally as “aliens,” which ultimately disillusions their identity formation and representation in the U.S. Therefore, these women are left between nations in the politics of belonging. Their struggles are layered and ongoing as they negotiate their role in society: neither fully recognized citizens of Korea or the U.S.
Note: Asian American Sexual Representations was taught at the University of Oregon in the Spring of 2017. Many thanks to our guest speaker Cathy Linh Che, and our opportunity to read Split. In addition, we read Rupi Kuar's Milk and Honey, alongside critical texts. The cover illustration is from Milk and Honey. Lastly, thank you to the writer-thinkers of this class. Their poetry and engagement created a transformative space of learning, representation, and resistance. -- Margaret Rhee