Displacements
Juliana Chang, Walter K. Lew, Tan Lin, Eileen Tabios, and John Yau
Marjorie Perloff's essay "In Search of the Authentic Other" offers a groundbreaking
assessment of identity politics and its relationship to poetic taste. There
are three additional things to note about the Yasusada hoax.
1. The hoax worked equally well in both mainstream and experimental circles.
Here, after all, was a victim of the bombing of Hiroshima, who also wrote
experimental poetry in which he acknowledged not only that catastrophic event
but also extreme states of human feeling. Thus for mainstream poets, who believe
that feeling and personal anecdote are the generating principles of a poem,
Yasusada provided a way to honor otherness, in the form of an experimental
writing linked to an unthinkable historical event. For experimental poets,
Yasusada's practice of avant-garde techniques offered an escape into writing
that was also deeply and openly moving. For both groups, in short, Yasusada
embodied a break from prevailing aesthetic agendas, and an archetype of readily
assimilable difference: he lived in another country and another time; he wrote
in another language; he was a victim of a catastrophe engineered by human
beings; he had experiences we will never have. Because he fulfilled these
qualifications, Yasusada represented the emblematic Other, removed from historical
time, a creature of myth. Thus the "hoax" demonstrates something very real:
that the myth of the Other refuses to die.
2. It is disturbing that Kent Johnson, the alleged perpetrator of the hoax,
found it necessary to reprise the stereotype of the deferential Asian in order
to point out the relationship between a classical Japanese form, renga, and
the postmodern practice associated with Ron Silliman's "new sentence." In
so doing, as Perloff notes, Johnson displaces and diminishes the accomplishments
of contemporary Japanese poets. This is not an isolated incident: Beneath
a Single Moon, the anthology of contemporary American Buddhist poetry
that Johnson co-edited with Craig Paulenich, similarly displaces Asian American
poets from the practice of Buddhism. As Walter K. Lew has written of that
volume:
The 45 American poets whose essays and poetry on Buddhist practice
comprise the anthology are all Caucasian, and the book only mentions Asians
as distal teachers (ranging from Zen patriarchs to D.T. Suzuki), not as fellow
members or poets of the sangha . . . When one considers the relative obscurity
of some of the poets included in the book, one wonders how it was possible
not to have known the Buddhistic poetry of such writers as [Lawson Fusao]
Inada, Al Robles, Garrett Kaoru Hongo, Alan Chong Lau, Patricia Ikeda, and
Russell Leong. . . . [Gary] Snyder's introduction deliberates the question--`Poetry
is democratic, Zen is elite. No! Zen is democratic, poetry is elite. Which
is it?' . . . perhaps he should have also asked whether Zen and poetry, as
reconfigured in American Orientalism, are racist."1
3. Like most hoaxes, Johnson's is fueled mainly by the potential for self-gain.
And like all hoaxes it is complex--his act of yellowface at once plays into
an existing and apparently vigorous orientalist fantasy, exposes American
ignorance of both Japanese poetry and recent Japanese history, and levels
a critique against an experimental writing community to which the author also
seeks to ingratiate himself. In this last respect, Johnson's act is doubly
disturbing: he wants the taint of scandal without having to take responsibility
for the stereotypes he celebrates.
1 Walter Lew, ed., Premonitions: The Kaya Anthology of
New Asian North American Poetry (Kaya Publications, 1995).
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