To know what you’ll sound like is worth noting-1

1Rankine, Claudia, Citizen (Minneapolis: Greywolf Press), 69

2

On the format of this zine: It was heavily inspired by Claudia Rankine’s Citizen and Jasbir K. Puar’s Terrorist Assemblages. I could have written a whole essay about how Rankine uses assemblage theory in her experimental poetry. Instead I made this zine.

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Table of Contents Introduction……………………………………………………...………5 Killing Rage2 and Entering the Shadow Beast3 …………………….…10 Poetry is not a luxury4 ……………………………………...…….……30 Resonating and Expansion of the Self ………………………..…….…38 But where is the hope? ……………………………………….………..47 Note on Intelligibility…………………………………………..………52 Conclusion………………………………………………………..……55

2 bell hooks 3 Gloria Anzaldúa 4 Audre Lorde

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Preface This is my labor of love Though at times my anger may frighten you Understand that it comes from a deep sense of responsibility You cannot change Any society Unless you see yourself Belonging to it Responsible for changing it5 Loving it For what it is Not what it pretends to be This was my Wellesley experience Filled with disappointment and anger And love and confusion And a deep sense of hope This is what I will remember This is what I will choose to remember

5 Grace Lee Boggs

5

Introduction

6

Young students of color have been asking me about being a Political Science and English major. I want to emotionally prepare them. For sitting in a classroom and feeling angry and not seeing that anger reflected around you. For feeling silly for getting so emotional. For feeling angry that the people around you are not. For feeling invisible when you so rarely see yourself reflected in your syllabuses. For feeling selfish for asking that asian americans be included in discussions of race. For feeling angry that you are made to feel selfish. For wanting everything, black political thought, latinx political thought, asian political thought. For sitting across from the heads of these departments and trying to explain why you need to see yourself reflected. For them to throw back at you, “but we need black and latinx theorists too.” I know that. Do you not think I don’t see the pain reflected in my black and latinx friend’s eyes? Yes I want asian theorists. Yes I want asian mentors. But my anger comes not just from my own pain. It comes from that false narrative they want to place upon us that we somehow have to fight one another for recognition. From whom? My white race and political theory professor? My white diaspora in literature professor? Am I suppose to sit there grateful that you are introducing me to a pain you have never felt? I am grateful. Would I have read Anzaldúa otherwise? Or Lahiri? Probably.

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Sometimes people forget I am not angry at you But the whole system That brought us here Both uncomfortable But clearly I am also angry at you You, the friend, the teacher, the world Understand It is so much more than us But it has everything to do with us Because what we do In each moment Make up this world6 The careful handling and thoughtful awareness Of who we are and where we are Should never be too much to ask Darling, I am not asking I am demanding All that and so much more Call me greedy But I want it all I want to construct a self outside of the self placed on me I want to deconstruct the self so we can all see the arbitrary borders Between you and me He and she

6According to Puar, “the futures are much closer to us than any pasts we might want to return to or revisit. What does it mean to be examining, absorbing, feeling, reflecting on, and writing about the archive as it is being produced, rushing at us-literally to entertain an unfolding archive?” Puar, Jasbir K. Terrorist Assemblages: homonationalism in queer times. (Durham and London: Duke University Press), xvi

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Human and Other Us and them Teach me then How to stop trying to encompass All these contradictions And learn to expand beyond the need for boundaries To embrace The fact That I am And will remain A demanding bitch So when my friend tries to tell me not to scare off those first years by telling me, “people read theory for different reasons” I am confused. So she explains: “You read theory for something to believe in, for something to hold on it, for something to dream about…….” 7 Yes. And? Books saved my sanity, knowledge opened the locked places in me and taught me first how to survive and then how to soar. 8

7 In times like these, you are reminded of what Claudia Rankine wrote in Citizen. About the “historical self” and the “self self.” Instantaneously your attachment seems fragile, tenuous, subject to any transgression of your historical self. And though your joined personal histories are suppose to save you from misunderstandings, they usually cause you to understand all too well what is meant. You wonder, am I being unreasonable? You wonder if showing her this will upset her. You wonder why you are sitting there, anxious about whether or not you will hurt her feelings. You realize that of course, you care. Of course your love her. Of course that is why it hurts the most. (Rankine, Citizen 14)

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So tell me. What am I suppose to be teaching them? Those who come to me for advice, for a reflection, or a moment where I can attempt to hold their hearts in mine. To separate themselves from the theories built on their backs? To learn to detach and use it as intellectual exercise? No. Instead I tell them. If this a journey you want to go on, and think long and hard about this, then do it. God knows, I want to leave behind these spaces knowing that others will continue straining against them. But I also know the emotional cost of doing so. So I tell them:

Nobody’s going to save you. No one’s going to cut you down, cut the thorns thick around you. No one’s going to storm the castle walls nor kiss awake your birth, climb down your hair, nor mount you on the white steed. There is no one who will feed the yearning. Face it. You will have to do, do it yourself.9

This is me. Doing it myself.

8Anzaldúa, Gloria. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco, aunt lute books), Preface to the First Edition. 9 Anzaldúa,Borderlands, 187

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Killing Rage and Entering the Shadow Beast

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As immigrants, we’re told by society and our parents, to be grateful. Things, were, after all, much worse where they came from.10 That is why they moved here in the first place. Look at all we’ve achieved. Like it or not, your achievement will be used and folded into the narrative of the American Dream. Your achievement will be used to push black bodies down. To put black rage down. So where am I? How can I wear their rage as mine when I know, the term people of color is too often too reductive of the different ways in which we have all been racialized. To hide that we’ve done this to each other. Your history is not mine.

10 Lucia: I feel like sometimes that experience, or hearing your parents experience makes you not want to question the inequality that exists in this country, the inequality that- Lily: You should be happy to just- Lucia: It's that, but back at home you wouldn't have that. And even though if you a privileged person, or a white person might not know that, but you think that they think that. You're like, no then they're going to question me. And I think that that's something I struggle a lot, and I struggle my first year when I was here in college but also I think I struggle a lot now with the media, the music, for me sometimes now that I'm in college and I go to parties, I sometimes hear a lot of privilege and white people singing along to this music that for example, Kendrick Lamar writes. I'm like, are you singing it just to sing it? Did you just memorize the lyrics because you like the rhythm. At the end of the day are you really taking into consideration, this music was written for certain people and I sometimes just feel so angry that they just sing along just to sing along to it and not really checking their privilege. And not really like, anyone can sing, but do you really understand what he's saying? And I think sometimes that also, now that I'm here in college I just don't know how to question this but I do question it once I'm at home, I should have said something. Interview with Lucia Ortega conducted on 4/27/16

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In her book, Intimacies of Four Continents, Lisa Lowe tracks the figure of the Chinese indentured servant, the “coolie” in history. After the Haitian Revolution, in 1803, colonial administrator John Sullivan laid the groundwork for the introduction of Chinese indentured laborers in the British West Indian island of Trinidad.

. . the danger of a spirit of insurrection being excited amongst the Negroes in our colonies.. . . no measure would so effectually tend to provide a security against this danger, as that of introducing a free race of cultivators into our islands, who, from habits and feelings could be kept distinct from the Negroes, and who from interest would be inseparably attached to the European proprietors. . . . The Chinese people . . . unite the qualities which constitute this double recommendation. 11

Lowe notes that while the British called this new work force free, “the men would be shipped on vessels much like those that had brought the slaves they were designed to replace; some would fall to disease, die, suffer abuse, and mutiny; those who survived the three-month voyage would encounter coercive, confined conditions upon arrival.” 12 She suggests that the term coolie had “a shifting, historically contingent” definition designed for “an intermediary form of Asian labor, used both to define and to obscure the boundary between enslavement and freedom, and to normalize both.” 13 Used to normalize our own and other’s oppressions. How, after all these years and so many more waves of immigration, can we as Asians, American or not, detach from the “European proprietors?” 11 Great Britain Colonial Office Correspondence, co 295, vol. 17) Lowe, Lisa. The Intimacies of Four Continents (Durham: Duke UP) 69 12 Lowe, Intimacy, 70 13 Ibid, 71

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Here we are, on similar ships all constructed by white supremacy but in such different circumstances, given such different labels and designations. And yet, I have so much to learn from their anger. If this emotional journey is one that you have gone through before me, then maybe you wrote for me too. Maybe this is why the colonizers took such care to keep the Asian and Black laborers apart on those plantations. Made sure they had separate living quarters even as many of them were working the same fields. Maybe that is why Lorde made care to mention Asian American, Caribbean, Chicana, Latina, Hispanic, Native American women. Because she knew that she too had something to learn from them. She knew that if she participated knowingly or otherwise, in her sister’s oppression and is called on it, to answer with her own anger only blankets the substance of their exchange with reaction. She knew that our energies were better spent, not by fighting truths between us, but by holding one another’s hearts more carefully and honestly.14

14Lorde, Audre. On the Uses of Anger

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So here I am, reading Audre Lorde and bell hooks and Claudia Rankine and finally being allowed to feel. Finally being allowed to understand that there is an anger that is destructive and one that is constructive. They understood that pain is unavoidable. They understood that the higher up you climb into the white people’s world, the more that rage will begin to fester inside you as you are asked to smile politely on the outside. Until you are sitting beside an anonymous white male that you long to murder. Until you are imagining stabbing him softly, shooting him with a gun you wish you had in your purse. As you watch his pain. As you say to him tenderly. “racism hurts” 15 I first felt that killing rage not towards a white man. Frankly, I did not grow up with many of them around. Instead I felt it towards my mother. The person who first hurt me, who first loved me, who first loved me so much it hurt. I would imagine taking a knife from our kitchen and stabbing her with it. I knew I would never do it. But when the rage I felt inside threatened to spill out of me, that was how my mind and my heart dealt with the loss of power that comes with abuse. I did not need Fanon16 to tell me that violence could be a cleansing force. At 13, I felt the emotional need for that imagination of violence. At 21, I read about him describing the process of decolonization and felt disappointed. Where was the love? Where was the holding of each other and the community building? Where was the magic? Where, indeed, was the feminism?

15 hooks, bell. Killing Rage: Ending Racism (New York: Henry Hold and Company) 8 16 Frantz, Fanon. The Wretched Of the Earth (New York: Grove Press) 96

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Enter Lorde. Enter hooks. Enter Anzaldúa. Enter the lived experiences of all the women throughout time who held the emotional weight of oppression in their hearts and still made something beautiful out of their world, their families, their children, their community. Enter me, asking myself all the questions that must have kept them up at nights years ago. Lily: How does your anger differ from Fanon’s? How do you cultivate your strength without hardening up the most beautiful parts of yourself? hooks: I grew up in the apartheid South. We learned when we were very little that black people could die from feeling rage and expressing it to the wrong white folks. We learned to choke down our rage. This process of repression was aided by the existence of our separate neighborhoods. When I left the apartheid South, to attend a predominantly white institution of higher education, I was not in touch with my rage. I had been raised to dream only of racial uplift, of a day when white and black would life together as one. I remember my first feelings of political rage against racism. They surfaced within me after I had read Fanon, Memmi, Freire. They came as I was reading Malcolm X’s autobiography. As Cornel West suggests in his essay, I felt that Malcolm X dared black folk to claim our emotional subjectivity and that we could do this only by claiming our rage. Like all profound repression, my rage unleashed made me afraid. It forced me to turn my back on forgetfulness, called me out of my denial. It changed my relationship with home-with the South- made it so I could not return there. Inwardly I felt as though I were a marked woman. A black person unashamed of her rage, using it as a catalyst to develop critical consciousness, to come to full decolonized self-actualization, had no place in the existing social structure.

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Confronting my rage, witnessing the way it moved me to grow and change, I understood intimately that it had the potential not only to destroy but also to construct. Then and now I understand rage to be a necessary aspect of resistance struggle. Rage can act as a catalyst inspiring courageous action. By demanding that black people repress and annihilate our rage to assimilate, to reap the benefits of material privilege in white supremacist capitalist patriarchal culture, white folks urge us to remain complicit with their efforts to colonize, oppress, and exploit. 17 Lorde: My response to racism is anger. I have lived with that anger, on that anger, beneath that anger, on top of that anger, ignoring that anger, feeding upon that anger, learning to use that anger before it laid my visions to waste, for most of my life. Once I did it in silence, afraid of the weight of that anger. My fear of that anger taught me nothing. Your fear of that anger will teach you nothing, also. Women responding to racism means women responding to anger, the anger of exclusion, of unquestioned privilege, of racial distortions, of silence, ill-use, stereotyping, defensiveness, misnaming, betrayal, and coopting Every woman has a well-stocked arsenal of anger potentially useful against those oppressions, personal and institutional, which brought that anger into being. Focused with precision it can become a powerful source of energy serving progress and change.

And when I speak of change, I do not mean a simple switch of positions or a temporary lessening of tensions, nor the ability to smile or feel good. I am speaking of a basic and radical alteration in all those assumptions underlining our lives. Anger is loaded with information and energy.18

17 hooks, Killing Rage, 16-18 18 Lorde, Audre. On the Uses of Anger

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Lily: I get it, you learn from it, you grow from it, you let your understanding of oppression come not from theories but from your own heart beating inside you and that is what propels you forward. You know, I often struggle with reconciling my emotional truths and lived experiences with the theories that I read, so thank you for showing me what that might look like. Lately, I’ve been working on this podcast that I named after the fifth chapter of Gloria Anzaldua’s book Borderlands. It’s called “How to Tame a Wild Tongue.” She said that you don’t. That it must be cut out. I think I view my project as an alternative. If the world seeks to cut out our tongues then I wanted to hold them carefully by interviewing poets of color, all of whom who straddle two languages and cultures and are straining and fighting back against those arbitrary borders in their poetry. We talked a lot about the sadness and anger we feel from having to assimilate into American culture and slowly becoming less and less proficient in our mother tongues. Ferni: So my native language is Spanish so I grew up speaking Spanish in my house up until I went to pre-school when I was about 3 or 4 so that's when I started hearing English language and learning it. When you're a kid you pick up things very very quickly so it was a lot easier for me to learn it as opposed to someone who just recently immigrated to the US who is just beginning to learn English. So I picked it up pretty quickly in pre-school and I was in dual language programs up until third grade which was great but then, I don't quite understand why, and I'm still kind of confused as it why I was moved out of dual language programs after third grade because I know a lot of my peers were still in dual language programs. I don't know, it was always weird to me because moving into just regular English speaking, not like regular but English only classroom settings was, I didn't think about it much then, because I was in the third grade so I was just not going to be able to speak Spanish but like its fine because I can speak it at home. But now I'm just like, that's kind of messed up in a lot of ways because again

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you're separating me from the language that I've grown up speaking and kind of painting these English only classrooms as the gifted classrooms or a superior classrooms which is, I mean, I don't know if that still happens at the school that I was at, I think a lot of the programs are actually dual language, and a lot of non-native Spanish speakers are actually enrolled in those programs which is awesome but back in my time there, that was very exclusive, very much segregated or separated so still confused by it but I think it says a lot about the school system, I mean I don't know if they intended to do that but when you think about it..... Lily: Well whether or not the intended is like, oh English is the language of academia. You know? As if knowledge was solely that....that's definitely something I struggle with as well. What does it mean to critique the American nation-state and yet still use the language of its cultural imperialism. Ferni: Yeah, like holding it up to a higher standard or caliber of excellence. So again, just establishing a very clear binary between developed.... Lily: How does that history and sort of your own thinking about that inform when you write your poetry? Ferni: So I haven't written too many poems about, well just like too many poems, I typically just write to write and its mostly getting my thoughts out onto the paper but I did write two poems for one of my projects for my Borderlands class and two of them were specifically about language because that is one of the major themes that both Moraga and Anzuldua focus on in their books and I'm talking about Borderlands and Loving in the War Years. So they both focus on language and they talk a lot of about how language has been a tool of the master, oppressor, and kind of has allowed these oppressors to create these very exclusive spaces like academia, so we see that both in my experience with elementary school education but also now when I find myself at

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Wellesley because I actually find that I'm losing a lot of my Spanish. Not like losing it but its just become harder to articulate what I want to say. Lily: Well when most of our classes are in English, then all the ideas that we learn as radical as they may be, in my head it’s coded as English. Ferni: Exactly, so they talk a lot about that and they're like, well these institutions, who was it, Anzaldúa or maybe Moraga, you know these institutions were made this way, they were made to uphold these hierarchies of, I don't know, just these hierarchies of who is superior and who is not, and the master did not create these institutions in order for them to be dismantled by the people they're trying to control or just surveil or police and so I forgot what your question was…. Lily: That's okay, do you want to read some of your poems? Ferni: So the first one is called Mothertongue. It has Spanish in it, but again, this was very intentional, obviously, I can definitely translate once I'm done. Lily: Or don't, up to you. Ferni: It's called Lengua Materna so Mother Tongue.

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The “r’s” flow out of her mouth smoothly, unlike the hands that have provided for and protected me, imprinted with the sacrifices made and the years of strenuous work that she’s endured Her accented English collides with her warrior of a Spanish tongue where words that were once at war have been recolonized My mother’s tongue has been cut out and left to dry, molded and cut up to ensure that the violence and suffering it has lived through are painted over with flavors like, “romantic” and “cultured” Omitting ingredients like “exploitation” and “oppression” that were key in its inception The repackaging of my mother’s tongue, processed to exist under society’s surveillance, erases the history whose fibers once wove together to construct la lengua materna de la raza cósmica Now it is here in the academy that I find my own tensions lie in reclaiming my mother tongue and re-inscribing its fabrication with the love, resistance, and healing that it was born out of Es ella la que me confronta con tensión Para enseñarme la lección: Que mis raíces y verdades son sistemas de comprensión Una educación que nunca se enseñará en esta institución One that is capable of standing alone

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Ferni: So essentially, that's the end of it. So basically the last verse or the last stanza when I start speaking in Spanish, its saying, I'm talking about how my, or my mother's lived experiences which I touched upon earlier and my own lived experience are systems of comprehension or knowledge. Like I should not be reading about this, I mean I could be reading about oppression and these like systematic, these structures that exist in society that continue to perpetuate oppression. But when you're living it, I think that’s like, that’s also just as important, an important way to know, to understand the world. But obviously sometimes you don't have to words to just express what that oppression is.19 Lorde: But you must keep trying. As long as you can create, you have power!

Do not let you head deny your hands any memory of what passes through them not your eyes nor your heart everything can be used except what is wasteful (you will need to remember this when you are accused of destruction.) Even when they are dangerous examine the heart of those machines you hate before you discard them and never mourn the lack of their power lest you be condemened to relieve them. If you do not learn to hate you will never be lonely enough

19 Interview with Ferni Cruz conducted on 4/20/16

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to love easily nor will you always be brave although it does not grow any easier 20

Lily: But it is so hard. How do I still love with all this anger inside me? How can I call myself a pacifist when my imagination is so violent sometimes? Anzaldúa: Darkness you must befriend if you want to sleep nights.21 We try to make ourselves conscious of the Shadow Beast, stare at the sexual lust and lust for power and destruction we see on its face, discern among its features the undershadow

Not many jump at the chance to confront the Shadow-Beast in the mirror without flinching at her lidless serpent eyes, her cold clammy most hand dragging us underground, fangs bared and missing. How does one put feather on this particular serpent? But a few of us have been lucky-on the face of the Shadow-Beast we have seen not lust but tenderness; on its face we have uncovered the lie22 End Scene.

20 From “For Each of You,” first published in From a Land Where Other People Live (Detriot: Broadside Press) 21 From “Letting Go,” published in Borderlands by Gloria Anzaldúa 22 Anzaldúa, Borderlands, 42

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How to face your deepest, darkest, thoughts and recognize that it is a part of you. It is only by entering that Shadow-Beast, by embracing what we are told are the darkest parts of ourselves can we find that tenderness. To articulate is to release. To write it out is to no longer give those violent thoughts the power it has in our imaginations late at night.

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I wrote this next poem after watching the Documentary “Who Killed Vincent Chin?” and realizing the precariousness of being a Model Minority. How easily our conditional acceptance will disappear once the global tides of commerce change. How white rage knows no differentiation between a Chinese man and a Japanese man. As if Vincent Chin had anything to do with the downfall of the auto-industry in Detroit. As if it was anything but the hubris of capitalism turning its ugly head back in on itself. I wrote it because I was sitting in the library, wanting to cry, wanting to scream, wanting to stab that white man who never served a day in jail, sitting there, being interviewed, refusing to apologize for what he had done. His sadness, it seems, was only for the inconvenience that killing another human being brought upon his life. He seemed confused by the Asian community’s anger. Was it because he did not think chinks could feel anger? Could not feel pain when one of our own is killed? Did it make us too black? Does that disrupt your American Dream? Historically, Asians were brought into this country as a source of labor to keep free black people down. Our indentured servitude was not merely a condition of our labor, it was how you racialized and created the “Chinaman,” the racialized Other. Only the racialized Oriental is yellow; Asians are not. Asia is not a biological fact but a geographic designation. Asians come in the broadest range of skin color and hue.23 But our brilliant hues do not matter when they feel threatened.

23 Lee, Robert. Orientals: Asian Americans in Popular Culture, (Philadelphia: Temple University Press) 2

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Inspired by “Who Killed Vincent Chin?24 To see the world for what it is You need not read Complicated High minded Theories Just observe The distance Between what they say And the reality That beat at his skull Until there was no life Left in his limbs And how many others? How many bodies lie bleeding While heads are turned in the other direction? As we mourn his death How many other Unmarked graves Lie waiting for their flowers Must we buy out all the shops To cover up all that pain No one had to die For us to understand Why we were told to keep our heads down But what’s the use Of keeping your head buried in the sand When they are beating your body Up above?

24 Who Killed Vincent Chin? (1987) Directed by Christine Choy and Renee Tajima-Pena

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What we refuse to see Does not just disappear If you think

Your job Your house Your devotion to the ideals of this nation state

Can you save you Look around If you can not find it in others Look inside yourself Denial is a white man’s game Though we all want to turn a blind eye White supremacy will not project us Did we really think it would?25 And even if it could Would we ever want To build out houses On the backs of those Who made this nation possible Though it was not us who did the whipping We are no more immune to benefitting from their labor Those of us allowed in Should not forget all those who were shut out After all Weren’t we all leaving our homes for something better? What made the value of my parent’s lives Carry any more weight Than anyone hoping to enter any nation today? Sometimes, we lack the right words 25 In reference to a comment made by Kabzuang Vaj at the panel, “#Asians4BlackLives, combatting Anti-Blackness in Asian Communities” organized by the Asian Awareness Month 2016 Committee at Wellesley College.

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To ask frankly of each other Why it was that so many of our parents Feared for our future In ways we did not see reflected In the eyes of our white friend’s parents It may have been a different fear But haven’t we all At some point or another Felt that desire for whiteness What we must begin to acknowledge Within ourselves and each other Is that what we were searching for Was not a second skin But to be loved for our first But that love need not come from the ones who never saw us in the first place Who do not carry the precious and precarious weight Of our irreducible complexities26 How the fuck do they think they can save us When they can barely figure out How to carry their own complicity Excuse me if I do not want to be the vessel of your white tears Or be your resolution for centuries of violence I have enough to carry on my own And I am far too brilliant To speak in tongues catered to your needs Let us instead speak to one another In a language we shall create together I do not yet know what it will sound like But hopefully

26 Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble (New York: Routledge) Preface (1999)

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It will teach us To love each other better.27

27 Inspired by Zoe Krause’s tattoo

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Later, when you are watching a documentary on Grace Lee Boggs she says: “Violence does not leave room for other’s capacity to change. It denies them that human capacity for transformation.” 28 You realize how much you have personally grown and are still growing. You realize why it is important not to deny others the same potential for change. You begin recognizing how much your own mother has changed, and is still changing. You begin seeing the potential for the world to change. You begin coming to terms with your own militant optimism. You begin seeing how that is tied to your faith, and your deep, abiding love for liberation theology and your queer brown socialist Jesus theories.29 So what to do with all that anger, that pain, that deep sadness of not being seen? If not to stab then what? To love? To once again be asked to expand your heart to include them and not the other way around? 30 No. You write poetry.

28 American Revolutionary: The Evolution Of Grace Lee Boggs (2013) Directed by Grace Lee 29 I think we all know God was gender non-binary. 30 “Oppressed peoples are always being asked to stretch a little more, to bridge the gap between blindness and humanity. Black women are expected to use our anger only in the service of other people's salvation, other people's learning.” Lorde, Audre. On the Uses of Anger

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Poetry is not a luxury

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Poetry, especially for those of us who have had selves placed upon us violently, is a great form of release. It is a place where our emotional truths are centered. It is a place where we need not be judged by what others place upon us, but can openly and honestly state what lies within. It is through poetry that we give name to those ideas which are, until the poem, nameless and formless-about to be birthed, but already felt. For women, then, poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action. Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought. The farthest external horizons of our hopes and fears are cobbled by our poems, carved from the rock experiences of our daily lives.31

31 Lorde, Audre Poetry is not a luxury

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Lily: Why do you write? What does the writing of poetry do for you emotionally?

Tina: I think writing it is, I don't know if it sounds dramatic to say to survive, but maybe to stay sane. It's always been in the moments where I feel like I'm about to explode I reach for a pencil, and paper, and whatever comes out of that it’s like these words are boats for whatever emotion I'm feeling and I can just like, let them float down this whatever stream and kind of feel like I don't own them anymore, or maybe I am owning them by doing that, but they don't burn as much. So, if you flip through my journals from high school there are some days where I'm like, I have my notes on one side and on the other side there's all this angst, difficult high school angsty poetry but it’s easy to laugh at now but back then it really was a way to not scream.32

Ying: So for me writing is always because it’s for me. I remember someone, people always ask me, or they would see writing as a hobby, they would be like oh I could never get into writing or like, oh I don't have enough free time to do fun things like that. But for me, writing has always been out of necessity and it's to make sense of the thoughts I have and the experiences I have, especially when I can't verbalize it immediately. Or my brain has so much going on I can't make sense of it unless I write so when I read about what Audre Lorde said about poetry, its out of...you know I actually have it written down somewhere

"And where that language does not yet exist, it is our poetry which helps to fashion it. Poetry is not only dream or vision, it is the skeleton architecture of our lives. It lays the foundations for a future of change, a bridge across our fears of what has never been before." 33

And so when Audre Lorde writes it, it's this whole long thing about how

32 Interview with Tina Xu conducted on 5/2/16 33Lorde, Audre Poetry is not a luxury

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just like poetry is not a luxury and it's not something- you don't have to say more than that.34

Ferni: Writing has always been something that I've turned to when I need to get feelings out and express things. I tend to be pretty expressive with my face but often times with words they don't necessarily seem to convey the same message that I would like them to. Sometimes I just get flustered and don't exactly know how to say the things I want to say but with writing it's kind of just it just spews out of me. It is also a space that allows me to be very care-free and just say what I want to say without having anyone really judge me or even just try to interpret what I'm saying because I don't typically show people my journal so it's kind of space that is for me. Yea, it's just a space that demonstrates my true feelings whatever it is I'm experiencing that day or in that moment with certain situations that I may have encountered.35

34Interview with Ying conducted on 5/28/1635Interview with Ferni Cruz conducted on 4/20/16

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The path from writing for one’s self to performing is not easy. At first, writing is simply a way of surviving. Something to hold the anger, love, pain, passion you feel. You do not call yourself a poet. Poetry for you might mean, that sterile word play that, too often, the white fathers distorted the word poetry to mean — in order to cover their desperate wish for imagination without insight.36 So though we have always had the imagination and insight, we don’t always see ourselves in the poetry we were taught. Lucia: Actually when I first started writing, I didn't call it actually writing. I just called it thoughts. Because as someone who learned how to speak Spanish first, Spanish is my first language and I was always bad at English even up until high school, even now I'm so bad at English that I felt that when I wrote, it wasn't right and I thought, what are people going to think about this so I never call it poetry nor writing, I just call it my thoughts and ideas. Once I went back to reading what I had written. I was like this is so many grammatical errors. This is not good, when will I be a good writer? And just when people would always tell me you have so much grammar mistakes on your writings. That makes you feel uncomfortable and not want to call your writing writing, just ideas. I think that's always how I always saw my work, as ideas, and feelings on paper. 37 Ariana: I appreciate, I don't know how to read poetry, I feel as though I'm bad at reading poetry and when I'm writing my own poetry I'm usually thinking about how I'm able to say it, that's why I'm more likely to call whatever I'm writing a spoken word rather than a poem but one of my friends actually called me a poet during Latinx cultural show, what is the heck is this label? I still don't feel comfortable with it, I mean it'll be really cool to have but I don't know if I belong in it but the process of writing is me, like sometimes I'll get these spitfire ideas where all I have is two lines and the ideas surrounding that so then I have to go around

36 Lorde, Audre Poetry is not a luxury 37 Interview Conducted with Lucia Ortega on 4/27/16

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those two lines and merge all the ideas surrounding those into actual words and stanzas and phrases and spaces and I really like talking fast so I try to put that into my poetry and for me I know a lot of people, especially at mic nights, they'll read whatever they've just written which I think is really admirable, but for myself I really like to memorize what I have written because I like to have the presentation, and I feel like its a little more powerful if I'm dedicating myself to put in this time to memorizing. 38 Ferni: I definitely try, it's really tough trying to navigate the whole language barriers and stuff like that, especially since poetry is like, I mean it doesn't have to be so romantic but it’s typically thought of in that way, and using big words and stuff like that. I for one am not someone who even speaks in a romantic fashion, I'm just not very.....

Lily: Poetic in the white male sense? Ferni: Yeah, exactly so I try to always be considerate of how accessible the language is to my audience, or even just to me. If I don't understand what I'm saying, I really should not be writing it, and so I am placing myself at the center of both my narrative but also the audience and the reader, I'm sort of centralizing myself and locating myself in that space.

38Interview with Ariana Gonzalez Bonillas conducted on 4/25/16

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And yet, somehow, our words for ourselves leapt outside of our journals. One way or another, I had listened to all of their poetry before our interviews. How else could we be sitting across from each other on my futon talking about their poetry? Why then, do we put our poetry, our voices, our pain out on display? Ferni: Yea no, it's interesting though that this question is brought up at this time because I just recently performed one of my pieces and you saw it so it was actually two weeks ago at the Lantinx cultural show where I performed one of my pieces. Given it wasn't me performing it alone, I was with my sister but in a way I think that was more powerful because we are sisters and what we experienced is very very similar regarding identity and being Mexican American and never feeling like you belong to one or the other so it's all obviously very very scary to just put, well at least for me coming from my own experiences, putting out these very personal narratives and like you have to be vulnerable on stage which is like terrifying but at the same time I think it's really really powerful for people to witness that and for people to hear those thoughts even if they're not like understood by everyone I think that's kind of what's more beautiful about it because it just goes to show the nuances and complexities that exist in people's lives and people that you know personally you can learn a lot from them through their writing.39

Ying: So for me writing is really that personal and also what I've come to realize is that I'm not afraid to be vulnerable with people, like in my friendships, less so with my family, but in my friendships with people and when I'm sharing my writing I always find it easier to read a really personal poem in a room full of people I don't know versus reading it one on one with someone I really care about. So after I do all of that writing I've learned over the years that when I write that specifically about myself, sometimes that resonates with people who have felt similarly or have had similar experiences and I find open mics as a space for that so to get to that vulnerable part of you with people you don't

39Interview with Ferni Cruz conducted on 4/20/16

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know or haven't met but as soon as you share something like that and they resonate with it, you automatically have a connection with another human and its a lot deeper than what you could get just starting a conversation with someone you don't know.40

40Interview with Ying conducted on 5/28/16

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Resonation and the Expansion of the Self

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Ying: So I really like that about sharing at open mics but another thing I've realized is that sometimes open mics are also scary because sometimes I really see how people sharing something is almost like a cry for help. So when people share such deeply personal traumas or even thoughts that they're going through right now that are that self destructive as they describe, I think, I've always used the stage as that too, it's also a release outlet or a cry for help, someone notice me and that I'm going through this, and it hurts so much that I need to shout it out on this mic. So I've also like had that realization about open mic spaces so I wish after people shared, instead of just clapping and calling it a night people did something to build community together, or follow up with someone like "you sounded really in pain when you read that, are you okay?" So that's how I imagine spaces like those. Lily: I definitely agree with that, I get very emotional when I hear so many people sharing their deepest fears, thoughts, dreams. To some extent, can we all just stay and hold each other’s hearts for a little bit? I definitely resonate a lot with that. Just going off that, I guess you mentioned, obviously, that you write for yourself. But at the same time, you realize other people can resonate with this. Is there a kind of audience that you are specifically writing to, or think about when you write, like oh are there people who are going to be able to relate to that?

Ying: Let me think, I like, I think about the people who have a lot of thoughts going on in their head but maybe during class they don't share, or during writing groups with people they don't share, or at open mics they don't share. I think about people like that because that's who I was before I started doing all of this. And I feel like sometimes, I just wish people had more space to share their stories too because, like when you see someone performing really confidently at a mic people just assume that they've always been doing that and that like, oh this comes naturally and it's not like me. But I think about for people who are still trying to find their voice and articulate what they're thinking and defending themselves when other people don't agree. So I think about that and then I guess like, the poem I wrote about walking in this institution that’s

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built on white supremacy. That was a love letter to myself but I would choose to share it in a people of color open mic or like the Asian Awareness Month Coffee House because I know that there are people who feel that way and may not be using writing as a means for articulating it. But if they hear it, they'll resonate with it. Or they'll really feel something and that's really powerful.41 Ferni: For me, it’s about people who have gone through similar experiences with regards to identity. And I think that's huge. I don't want to say universal, but it's a very common experience for a lot of people who are bicultural or biracial or multicultural or multiracial. Kind of dealing with those inner tensions that exist when you're told you don't belong to one side completely or the other side completely. So finding that space where you're allowed to express those feelings and share those thoughts. So I think those are the two main groups. I do write a lot of stuff in Spanish and that allows me to kind of... that automatically sets the stage for who it's meant, for when people can access the language then you know it's kind of, well this is, I can access this, I know what she's talking about, or at least I understand what she's talking about so this is for me.

I just thought of this quote that I heard recently at a conference I was at, I forgot who said it but one of the presenters said her friend had always told her you know writing is so powerful and said something like, I must write myself into existence because a lot of us don't have those narratives to turn to in this society we live in which is very white, heteronormative, patriarchal, really erases a lot of identities that are important obviously. 42 Ariana: Lately I've been writing and thinking about what kind of character do I want to write about that I can fall in love with and also be someone I that I needed when I was younger. 43 41Interview with Ying conducted on 5/28/1642Interview with Ferni Cruz conducted on 4/20/1643Interview with Ariana Gonzalez Bonillas conducted on 4/25/16

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Poetry is my love letters to myself, for myself. But you see that self is so much more expansive than any liberal, neo-liberal, structuralist, post-structuralist theorist could imagine. It has always been. There is no affective turn. Women of color have always been there. Perhaps not in your language. Perhaps not in your canonical works.

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Love Letter to All the Queer, Christian, Asians Who Have Come To Me For Advice: For Those Times I Can’t Be There To Hold Your Heart Breathe in Breathe out You are going to be okay You deserve to live In a place that not only tolerates But celebrates all of you We think we have to choose As if the world ever gave us easy decisions As if the boundaries we think are set in stone Have always been there Will always remain Why then would they invest so much In protecting their fragile understandings of the self? Why do I frighten you? Who am I asking that to? My mother? My church? My lover? This is my home this thin edge of barbed wire.44 How do you make a home Out of place that makes you crazy How do you contain The (r)evolutions playing out in your body?

44Anzaldúa, Borderlands, 25

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Let me tell you a secret: There is no way to contain it It will always make you crazy constantly The real task Is coming to a new understanding of sanity To recognize the beautiful Magnificent Clashing of cultures Creation of new worlds That you can be But let me backtrack: Maybe you feel Stuck Between a feeling and an action Maybe all this Feels more like destruction Understand There is a pain that can be productive And one that destroys everything in its path The struggle has always been inner45 And we are asked to keep it that way But what is the point of Of keeping your head buried in the sand When they are beating your body Up above? You want it to stop You want the world to stop So you have a moment to understand What it is that you want But it will not

45 Anzaldúa, Borderlands,109

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It will not stop weaving Cautionary tales out of your life No matter how many times You want to scream out I am a person too The first step Is not to stop the world That will come later Always Awareness of our situation must come before inner changes Which in turn come before changes in society46 Nothing real happens Unless it is first imagined by us So what kind of reality can you imagine? What kind of living That is living and not surviving? Living does not mean Pushing the unacceptable parts of yourself Into the shadows Living does not mean Putting all that we are Into neat categories Labeled by the same hand That tells us Time and time again We should be grateful To be allowed to exist I am grateful For my mother who loves me so intensely it hurts

46 Anzaldúa, Borderlands, 109

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For a God who is often used to contain me For these books That saved my sanity Opened the locked places in me Taught me first to survive And then How to soar47 The world is too beautiful Not to be felt You are too magnificent Not to be shared I cannot promise it will be easy But remember since day one you already had everything you needed within yourself it’s the world that convinced you you did not48 Now you must start the The enviable task Of learning Your own brilliance.

47 Preface to First Edition of Borderlands, Gloria Anzaldúa 48 https://www.instagram.com/p/BCq7pCjnA6C/?taken-by=rupikaur_

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We use whatever strengths we have fought for, including anger, to help define and fashion a world where all our sisters can grow, where our children can love, and where the power of touching and meeting another woman's difference and wonder will eventually transcend the need for destruction.49 What people do not understand is that, this anger comes from a deep love. If we did not love this world so intensely, it would not be able to hurt us so deeply. We construct selves because the world has placed upon us violently enforced borders that we’ve been straining against before we had labels like affect, slantwise, performativity. We do not seek to deconstruct the self in the way that post-structuralists do, because our hard-won emotional truths feel too close to our hearts and we stake our reality on it. Nor do we wish to continue playing into the same old ideas of Western Humanism that deems us subservient, wild, unreasonable, too emotional. How can I be too emotional when it is my own heart, threatening to beat out of my chest. Is my blood too messy for you? Instead we share our selves. We share the selves we’ve constructed in our rooms late at night when we are wondering who we are outside white supremacy. Outside heteronormativity. Outside borders. We share because we’ve come to see that others are struggling too. That they are asking themselves the same questions. We seek to be the mirrors we never had growing up, first for ourselves, and then for others. In that, we expand the definition of the self. In that, we expand our souls. We evolve. And in that. We are the revolution. 50 49Lorde, Audre. On the Uses of Anger50 “Revolution is evolution towards something much grander in terms of what it means to be a human being.” - Grace Lee Boggs

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So where is the hope?

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When your white professor asks you, in a room with white students, where is the hope, you don’t want to give it to her. You don’t want to give it to her because that seems too easy. Because some days, you don’t feel it. Because on the days that you do, you know how much emotional work, how much struggle, went into cobbling together your militant optimism. You want to scream out, why do you think I’m so obsessed with Grace Lee Boggs? I am not obsessed with one person, I am obsessed with surviving. Hope is survival because if I am not dreaming, I am having nightmares.

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Sometimes, you have to sit in the pain. Sometimes, you need to sit with the weight and the history that you have been complicit in, that you have suffered from, that will be etched into your skin forever. Sometimes, the end of class cannot be about “things getting better,” sometimes class needs to end with letting us sit in it.

Do not let the other students get up and leave at 4:45, moving on with their lives, leaving the theory in classroom; theory is lived, and the students of color in this room know the realities of that all too well. We cannot simply leave the weight in the classroom. Ask yourself, what is it that allows you to leave the weight in the classroom?51

51A

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Hope—a four letter word for misfortune Misfortune—a departure from the comforts of pessimism Pessimism—the opposite of optimism Operating between hope, misfortune, and pessimism is always made for slight discomfort. Discomfort in that way that the pigment somehow seep through layer upon layer of dying skin and hair. An immovable, unshakeable, itch beneath hollow bones and broken spirit. When you ask me to find the misfortune in my own life, I will always extend my condolences to you, as I refrain from wiping the sadness that falls from your hopeful eyes.52

52 Anjali

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Lily: There's more questions than answers. I think though this state of confusion is like, I don't know, I always like to think about pain, or confusion as productive or destructive. And there is pain and confusion that is so destructive because it paralyzes you in place and prevents you from speaking, prevents you from living, prevents you from being all the, irreducible complexities that you are. And that is horrible and that is sometimes what the structures of this world and those voices had told us. You don't deserve a voice, you don't deserve a space in this world. But then there's also the other kind of pain and confusion that is, I am trying to create a new world. I am trying to live in the world I want to live in and not the one that has been violently enforced upon me. And that is also deeply painful and confusing because you have fucking no blueprint for it. But I think out of that pain and in those struggles, I feel my heart and my spirit and my soul, toughening and strengthening but not being bitter and not being closed off but like, even in the most painful experiences of my life I think there's a moment where I just feel the pain. But then afterwards when I try to come to a better understanding of it and I'm trying to reframe my own life and my own narrative, that is also deeply painful and confusing but it’s incredibly productive. Tina: I think what allows you to not be bitter about it is a) to be able to make sense of it b) to feel like it’s for something, it's not isolated. Other people feel the same pain as a result of these same systems, of whatever, of migration, or colonization, industrialization, who knows- all of the isms. But there's so much, because I was having this crisis when studying political theory. What is the value of coming up with all of these words that make these texts so unwieldy and inaccessible to so many people. But recently I've realized that there's so much value in being able to name your pains. And in naming them embedding them in this larger system that a) makes you feel like you're not alone and b) gives you some sort of hope that you can change it. Not only for yourself and your own pains but for the pains of other people. 53

53Interview with Tina Xu conducted on 5/2/16

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Note on Intelligibility

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Inspired by Ozawa vs. United States When he went up against the Supreme Court they told him in no uncertain terms, you are not one of us/ You do not belong and there is nothing you can do to change that/ It’s something in your blood/ You are an infection that our laws try to inoculate against/ You are an alien that our judicial system has codified. 1991 (read: 48 years after the repeal of the Chinese Exclusion Act) My mother carrying in her belly a child who would grow up dreaming of becoming the head of a nation that not so long ago told her they did not want any of her kind/ She does not yet realize that to be the first also means to be the only one. My friend told me over lunch, lately she’s been thinking about the effect of history on her body/ What she means is/ What’s the difference between the way the words fall on their souls/ Do they carry it in their hearts long after the bell has rung? A lady told me over the phone, the Chinese are buying up all the land/ I sat there trying not to let that fire consume me/ Fantasizing about responding to her in Chinese/ 这片地从来都不是你的。 I wonder what it means to reject the American Dream/ When that was the price of my education/ Then again, worth can not be measured as such, and ideas have power because it can not be spent. I was not always a person of color/ The hue of my skin and the shape of my eyes never meant more than the type of foundation I should buy/ I want to remember that freedom but shed the privilege. And what is the deal with a good stereotype/ As if anything that made me less human could possibly benefit the complexity of my soul.

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I refuse to be your plaything, your submissive reverential wife, cook, maid, and blowup exotic fantasy all rolled up into one/ Fuck that/ I roll my own j’s and there isn’t a man needed to light me up. Their greatest fear is that we don’t need them/ Their greatest fear is that one day we will collectively awaken from our black and white dreams and realize that to be unrecognizable in their language is not a thing we contest. Let them study their conceptions of universal humanism/ Let them continue to worship at the altar of philosophers who/ In the same breath extol the sanctity of man and then reduce whole continents to pre-history. I do not exist in a language you may understand, but do not mistake my foreign tongues with unfamiliarity of your culture/ I, like the rest of the world, am well versed in the limitations of your imagination. I used to worry that I did not fit into the boundaries of this world/ I sought to translate the terms of my existence in philosophies they would understand/ Just as I had done so many times for my mother/ When she told me to answer the phone/ Knowing her accent would make the person on the other line/ Assume things about her worth/ I worry now that I was not patient enough/ Did not acknowledge the precious weight of my/ Perfect/ (Un) Accented English. These days, to be intelligible means less to me/ Than being my own center of gravity/ And if they wish to enter into my orbit, it will be on my terms/ They will have to learn to speak my language- one part concocted from the hidden pasts of my people, one part distilled from the crucible of my experience. --My Education

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Conclusion

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Lily: I was telling, in the other interview, one time when I was interning on Capitol Hill, the first day before I walked in I looked at the marble dome which is the ultimate symbol of power, US imperialism, democracy, freedom. All these things and I stood there for a second and I thought this is so strange because my great grandmother had her feet bound in China, then lived through the Japanese invasion and then the civil war, and then cultural revolution. You know, there are so many other figures in my past life, but I think I feel most connected to her because she helped raise my mother and it just felt so strange because I'm like, could she have ever imagined that only two, three generations later that someone, like her direct descendent would be walking into arguably, if you view it that way, the most powerful place on Earth as an intern, as somebody who is like, looking to join that world. Mind blown. I feel privileged but also I wonder what was lost along the way of that multigenerational journey. What languages, foods, cultures, conceptions of self worth as Chinese people have we lost in this quest to do better. And what does even better mean? Tina: I was going to say, when you were looking up there, if I put myself in your shoes would I have felt pride or would I have felt, if I were thinking about what my grandparents would have felt. Would it be like, they would be so proud of me that their sacrifices were worth it to propel me into this place of power or is it like, is it a betrayal of some sort.

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I used to be dismissive of my mother’s warnings When I told her that politics was my passion I told her, America is different There, people don’t just disappear They do not get shot for simply speaking out And besides, you did not move to this country For me to keep my head down That was before I entered the belly of the beast Some call it Capitol Hill I call it living proof that this country was never made for me Or anyone who couldn’t smile As old white senators debated While a few blocks away The city languished from lack of funding That was before I understood The centuries of philosophy that was needed To establish this world order Where your ability to speak English And the whiteness of your skin Are valued universally Once you begin to see white supremacy You start seeing it everywhere You start realizing that the most salient reminder of its presence Lies not in these white institutions But back home in 上海 Where you are prized For the paleness of your skin And your fluent English By other 中国人 When they are calling you 老外 As a compliment

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Not an insult I am still trying to understand How true power lies not in their halls But within my own heart and the ones beating around me But when I see the fear in their eyes When they know that I am coming For their ideas, their ideals, their dreams I understand What a disruption I can be If I concentrate If I remain awake I understand Why my mother is afraid I want to say Do not be afraid for me Be afraid for them