Childhood was spent in an open dressing room where white women pulled chenille over their breasts […]
[…]
When I flirted, marbles slivered out of my mouth like amphibious eggs.
Hey saekshi, the American GIs cried to the Korean barmaids, pronouncing saekshi ‘sexy’
though saekshi meant respectable woman, a woman eligible for marriage.28
The speaker doesn’t find herself in pillowy white breasts (primary marker of gilded-cage femininity), in American GIs, or in either iteration of saekshi.29 But neither is the speaker like the Korean barmaids and marriageable women who preceded her. Deconstructed as a Picasso or a 1990s Cosmopolitan magazine collage, the speaker experiences sublingual monstrosity when she attempts to perform. The marbles-in-the-mouth idiom, familiar to English speakers, morphs. The marbles themselves morph into “amphibious eggs,” as in a foreign delicacy from which westerners prudishly recoil, and later pornographically trend. These eggs hatch from Hong’s mouth, dynamic with speech, self-orphaned outlaws gleefully mucking up the lyric parlor, making it hard to ignore their origins.
While Translating Mo’um does much to address the gendered and racial ownership of discourse and the primacy of English in a militarized global economy, these themes burst the book’s seams in many places, and must ultimately go underexplored. Responding to a question about the Guide of her second collection, Dance Dance Revolution, Hong says,
I also wanted to create a kind of flawed antihero, like Brecht’s Mother Courage, and this generated the Guide in the book. The Guide’s voice is fickle, not always virtuous, not always true, full of bravado one minute and then earnestness the next. Unlike fiction, there’s more of an obligation for grave truthtelling in poetry. The voice assumes a truthful virtue even when the poem purports to not have a voice. I wanted to escape from that and create a character.30
Feminist speculative works often assume truth-telling narrators as their guides. These figures soothe the reader aching for an alternative to oppressive paternal instruction, and they lend credence to a project’s world building. In LeGuin’s Left Hand of Darkness—which Hong read while writing Engine Empire,31 but seems to have intuited while writing Dance Dance Revolution—a guide from the “real” world introduces us to the other world, committed to her ethnographic project and the honor codes of scholarship. Octavia Butler’s Lillith from the Xenogenesis trilogy works similarly. In Lillith’s case, ethnography is the key to survival, and thus we assume her honesty inasmuch as we assume her desire to live. In Dance Dance Revolution, Hong begins with one such familiar figure, the Historian. Replacing Translating Mo’um’s lyric I, the Historian’s recognizable masculinity, authority, and methodology may grant him our knee-jerk trust. He does his best to harness the all-seeing god-eye, but his investment in the ethnographic interviews is oddly, unconsciously informed by his own romantic memories (or lack thereof) of his lost father, dead mother, and early sensual brushes. As ungovernable sentiment throws him off his game, Hong hands us off to her wily busker-Virgil, the Guide.
Dance Dance Revolution continues to attend to questions of personal ontology as Historian and Guide tell their stories, but it also addresses those larger, equally brambled, crumbling houses: language and the world.32 The book speculates about the current state of language and globalization, performing its futuristic theories on a dystopic stage. This act of speculation takes place in its expected realm of content, and on those subtler planes: tone, construction, form, and lens. Donna Haraway reminds us that speculate shares a root with respect and species and of its many applications in other-worlding:
Respect is respecere—looking back, holding in regard, understanding that meeting the look of the other is a condition of having to face oneself. […] The specific relationality in this kind of regard holds my attention: to have regard for, to see differently, to esteem, to look back, to hold in regard, to hold in seeing, to be touched by another’s regard, to heed, to take care of. […] I also love the oxymoron inherent in “species”—always both logical type and relentlessly particular, always tied to specere and yearning/looking toward respecere.33
Dance Dance Revolution embraces this tender, multivalent speculative approach. Though the Guide is neither comforting nor conventionally beautiful (she is bald, owing to a genetic condition), and though her history is that from which English speakers have often turned a puritan ear, she holds our attention. She earns our respect through her acrobatic speech acts, her relentlessly particular descriptions, and her empathic lonelitude. We might prefer this busted, living hybrid to the mechanical perfection of the clockwork nightingale that sings elsewhere in Dance Dance Revolution.34 We regard her, sometimes yearningly.
In her first speculative frontier adventure, Hong adapts familiar tropes of US history and sets us in a desert town akin to Las Vegas, adding those little touches that remind us of that secret-keeping city’s present-day visage. In the St. Petersburg Hotel, one finds the “best surgeon fish y beluga / bedtime special,” “snow bears merry en a ball,” and “Babushkas” who “bap your tush / wit boar bristle switch.”35 An unlikely yet ideal setting for what Lyn Hejinian calls a “work of creative genius,” infused with what Adrienne Rich identifies as “historical consciousness.”36 When Rich chose Hong’s book for the Barnard Women Poets Prize, there was a delicious feel of completion. In “Origins and History of Consciousness,” Rich wrote,
No one lives in this room
without confronting the whiteness of the wall
behind the poems, planks of books,
photographs of dead heroines.
Without contemplating last and late
the true nature of poetry. The drive
to connect. The dream of a common language.37
But what makes a language “common”? Must we acquiesce to the dominant discourse, which defines so many of its speakers as less-than, or might we realize our “dream to connect” in Hong’s uncommon pidgin?
In the “Foreword” to Dance Dance Revolution, Hong writes,
In the Desert, the language is an amalgam of some three hundred languages and dialects imported into this city, a rapidly evolving lingua franca. The language, while borrowing the inner structures of English grammar, also borrows from existing and extinct English dialects. Here, new faces pour in and civilian accents morph so quickly that their accents betray who they talked to that day rather than their cultural roots.38
Here we return to Yau’s observation that language “is an inflicted and vulnerable body undergoing rapid change. Parts of it are blossoming while other parts are dying.” While the Desert pidgin blossoms from a grim compost of lost homes, names, and heritages, it also suggests a lyricism more desirable than the lost things themselves. This pidgin is thus both elegiac and embracing. The Guide’s frenetic language play recalls Kristeva’s phrase “puns of hypomanics”:39
Mine vocation your vacation!
… I train mine talk box to talk yep-puh, as you
’Merikkens say “purdy,” no goods only phrases,
betta de phrase, “purdier” de experience40
“I was fascinated by Dante’s Virgil,” Hong says of one source for her Guide, “and I was thinking what a guide means in contemporary times—a guide as crass tour guide, guide as poet and storyteller, guide as revolutionary, or guide in the spiritual sense.”41 This Guide isn’t native, nor is she exactly foreign, as she is more familiar with the ever-shifting language, landscape, and lore than anyone else in this borderland. A former revolutionary, her present-day politics are hard to parse. If she’s a guide in the spiritual sense, she sends us on a bizarre vision quest in a commercialized, hyperbolically artificial, thoroughly reductive model of what we once knew as the world. Hong trusts us to pick up the language, keep pace, and not lose ourselves at the resort town’s desert edge:
She warned the adventurer
there were adventurers before him,
Their Desert memoirs never sold,
they drank themselve
s to sloth.42
In the US American West, we still retain some vestiges of frontier where lost writers might adventure in hopes of finding their own stories. Conceptually, though, Hong’s frontier goes beyond landscape. “I’ve always been preoccupied with the frontier,” Hong admits. “It’s such an American trope first of all. And I like to think of the frontier as being on the borders of language, body, and land.”43 Once colonizing nations had worn out their capacity for expansion, we turned more consciously to other sublime arenas: space and outer space, the human genome, biopower, nation-states, ocean abyss, global technologies, and so on. But language itself provides an endless frontier, an ever-shifting front that may keep that oft-snubbed term avant-garde in play—the very plastic terrain into which we haul our clumsy wagons, in which the greedy among us kill off those less privileged voices, under whose glaring sun some of us will perish. If the frontier is that territory in which white privilege prospects, conquers, and pillages, Hong’s reclamation uncovers a site of unexpected regeneration, a site so thoroughly abject it may save us from ourselves.
Taking Kristeva’s guidance, poets aren’t particularly good at severing from or recovering the lost object in its erotic form. We aren’t keen to give up our mamas, take directions from daddy, or succumb to unspeakable loss. We are, however, often up for an unbelievable symbolic effort. The joys of such an effort include fucking up daddy’s language, screwing with the economy (of language), confessing in hybrid tongues, bringing mommy back from the dead, and constructing new relationships—between humans and/or multispecies—out of rebuilt and repurposed syntax, diction, tone, and affect. In short, new forms of intimacy require new language.44 In this sense, Hong responds to Marjorie Perloff’s rejection of identity poetics by insisting that “poets [of color] who acknowledge language’s artifice and unsettle race via formal deconstruction […] have provided their own ‘lively reaction,’ creating a vanguard of new formal and interactive possibilities.”45 Poets may be stuck with the master’s tools, but many apply them to unexpected ends.46 In a more recent response to a tired line of conceptualist dismissals, Hong reassures us:
Poetry is becoming progressively fluid, merging protest and performance into its practice. The era of Conceptual Poetry’s ahistorical nihilism is over and we have entered a new era, the poetry of social engagement.47
Like many other anti-establishment efforts, poetry’s avant-garde faces a much-needed critique of its white supremacy. In “Delusions of Whiteness in the Avant-Garde,” Hong puts it plainly:
American avant-garde poetry has been an overwhelmingly white enterprise, ignoring major swaths of innovators—namely poets from past African American literary movements—whose prodigious writings have vitalized the margins, challenged institutions, and introduced radical languages and forms that avant-gardists have usurped without proper acknowledgement.48
She ends the essay: “Fuck the avant garde. We must hew our own path.”49 Fred Moten will express similar sentiments, responding to the same lot of nihilist erasures when he suggests (in his response to Perloff’s racism) that poets of color “must leave the poetry world; we must leave it, a condition that ought to fill us with pride and joy.” His compatriots, he notes, are “singing the earth with flavor: dust in our mouths, water in our lungs, blood in our eyes, hands in our hands.”50
For Hong, however, avant-garde is a term that might be redrafted, not as a community to which one belongs, but as a phenomenological topography. Never are frontlines static. Hewing one’s own path creates a new frontline, even if the war zone intimated here sits as much behind as ahead. Perhaps we revisit history, promised a new sound or an uncovered amniotic memory. Might an experimental lyric, an irreverent, silly, deliciously vicious, dead-serious restyling of speech put the finest crack in the dominant discourse’s stubborn facade? John Yau has faith in Hong’s turbulent poetics:
Translation, pidgin, invented dialects, and made-up slang play a central role in a fabricated language that, in its treacherousness and slipperiness of sound and orthography, mirrors the turbulence that is central to our current state of affairs: the arguments over immigration and birthrights.51
Writers may willingly build their own turbulent worlds, but how do they entice readers who might meet the nastiest of doppelgangers, or find core beliefs cored? Time and again, Hong invites us into discomfiting zones likely to reveal fears, inadequacies, and looming disasters. But our Guide is, tongue-in-cheek, unsurpassed in her abilities: “twenty t’ousand guides here but I’m #1.”52 We allocate trust, assume intimacy, and renounce the heavy burden of volition, giving over to the experience.
In one of the volume’s prose interludes, the Historian of Dance Dance Revolution recounts an analogous childhood piano lesson:
Again and again, she played the five notes while I rested my clammy hand over hers. She insisted that I sing the rhyme with her and I sang along in a voice that was just shy of puberty. I felt like the blind being led like this and I was momentarily aroused.53
While the collection leads with experimental poetry’s gait, it returns us to the “clammy hand” and prepubescent ache of the confessional. A poem that whispers come closer, though we know it to be public, speaks privately to each solitary reader. Is it a trickster coyote or punishing angel? When we meet the poet in the intimate space of the reading act, does she insist we sing along, voices cracking, hands damp on the dry pages? The rhyme doesn’t wear out with repetition, but grows deeper and stranger as we map and re-map its uncanny terrain. Paid for her time, her physical skill, and moreover her intimate contact, the piano teacher becomes an unwitting prostitute hired by the Historian’s father to lead him into manhood in the father’s absence.
Our Guide is not so naïve. She’s paid to talk “purdy,” and she knows the value of a good speech. She has tarted up the less appealing sites of the Desert:
I guided misbegodder fool who vacation
en woebegone ruins. Tu, I mean, you tryim.
To flower-arrange words so sand-piss
ash sounds like Melodious plot of
beechen green, try, nary!54
And she invites high rollers into her boudoir, the karaoke lounge:
Impish peeper, impish peeper, you ear-dropping?
When I ululate til mine fes a grapey pulp,
croaking K-pop en dis privacy-room? Me bumming,
see? Shoo, ga, tour is ova, scug …
Shoo …
Non … no, stay. Stay55
Here she’ll spill her story. In the poem immediately following (one of many “Excerpt[s] from the Historian’s Memoir”), the Historian, like a john paying more for the intimacy than the blowjob, discloses tender details of his childhood in Sierra Leone. But the Guide is no Pretty Woman. Bald, wearing wonderfully campy wigs, her eyes as occluded as Cassandra’s, the grotesque mode short-circuits objectification of this woman. We will, as we do Plath’s Lady Lazarus, heed her song. We crunch our peanuts as the Guide, who, bereft of kin like Donna Haraway’s cyborg, “does not dream of community on the model of the organic family.”56 The Guide shows us a world in which any affinity must be conducted along (and any inheritance received via) radical new vectors of identity, and in a mercurial new pidgin: “I’s sum o all I’s rued, sum o me accents / y twill mine worn, travels mine tilled, deaths mine endured.”57
And like Frantz Fanon’s colonized intellectual, the Guide finds herself caught between cultures. “Unwilling or unable” to choose between them, she “will be faced with extremely serious psycho-affective mutilations: individuals without anchorage, without borders, colorless, stateless, rootless, a body of angels.”58 She can’t go home again:
I’mma double migrant. Ceded from Koryo, ceded from
’Merikka, ceded y ceded until now I seizem
dis sizable Mouthpiece role …59
Though fluent in the Desert’s pidgin and sites, she’s no citizen of that physical terrain through which she guides the tourist, and from which the tourist can always escape:
&
nbsp; Though banished, he can come back to him life, begin afresh, aseed, tourist’s privilege be dat he can return, always return, though frum desert he g’won.
[…]
A pitable chap but hab choice to g’won home, I’s covet dat choice. When dim ideas seed in us, how do we’um return, when we can only g’won.60
Rather than a rhetorical question, her statement is fact, an always-already condition of gone/going (“g’won”). We’re tempted to pity the Guide, but is this condition quite Fanon’s “mutilation”? Might we, supposedly whole individuals, insistent on our humanness and selves, really be the mutilated ones?
In her most recent collection Engine Empire, Hong foregoes guides altogether, and invites us to speculate alongside disoriented, macabre Pollyannas, hell-bent on carving out a life in the less-than-they-promised land. In these speakers, we recognize our own symptoms of culture shock, and in these “boomtowns,” we recognize our own world’s potential blowup. Hong builds strange worlds so that we might apprehend our real-world fissures:
Lyn Hejinian wrote, “the border is not an edge but rather their very middle—their between; it names the condition of doubt and encounter—a condition which is simultaneously an impasse and a passage, limbo and transit zone.” My poetic consciousness rests in that transit zone.61
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