MCLC: When white poets pretend to be Asian (1)

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When white poets pretend to be Asian (1)
Source: The Guardian (9/19/15)
The 'Yi-Fen Chou' poetry scandal goes beyond 'yellowface'
Michael Derrick Hudson use of a Chinese name when writing was racist and latest case of ‘yellowface’ in literature, but the word has a complex backstory
By Jane Hu
My father immigrated to Montreal from China 24 years ago. At five, a first generation immigrant newly arrived in British Columbia, I was promptly placed in an ESL class when I began kindergarten because I didn’t speak any English. More than 20 years later, I’m an English PhD candidate at University College Berkeley. In my life I alternate between my English name, Jane, and my legal Chinese one, Shan-Jie.
I list these biographical details first for two reasons: one, because I believe in the truth of the cliché that we rarely match, in person, what we look like on paper. Two, because biographical facts, and their relationship to art and ideas, were at stake in last week’s controversy over the Best American Poetry 2015 anthology. And I found myself slightly confused as to how often people resorted to the term “yellowface” to describe what happened.
The controversy began after more than 40 rejections, a white man named Michael Derrick Hudson submitted his poem The Bees, the Flowers, Jesus, Ancient Tigers, Poseidon, Adam and Eve under “Yi-Fen Chou” with the explicit hope that the name would get his work published. It did, not only in a journal but also as a selection in this year’s Best American Poetry. “I realize that this isn’t a very ‘artistic’ explanation for using a pseudonym,” Hudson conceded in his author biography. He’s right. On most levels, it isn’t.
Hudson’s artlessness goes beyond his submission strategies. To my eye even the title of Hudson’s poem The Bees, the Flowers, Jesus, Ancient Tigers, Poseidon, Adam, and Eve, which reads like a bad Tinder profile, is egregiously inconsistent both in theme and its use of the definite article. That is about as much space as I think is worth devoting to the analysis of Hudson’s work. One can’t resist the suggestion that he might never have had to adopt a pseudonym had he been a better poet.
“Yellowface” has its appeal as a term for this: most people can conjure the ugly spectacle of Mickey Rooney’s performance as Mr Yunioshi in Breakfast at Tiffany’s. But does the analogy fit in this case?
The very word “yellowface” implies that you’ll have a face to look at; as academics might put it, it’s quite literally “embodied.” That doesn’t map so easily onto reading and writing, as Christopher Fan, an Asian American an Asian American literary scholar and co-founder of the Asian American magazine Hyphen, told me by email. “But,” Fan added, “the term draws a great deal of political energy from its parent term, blackface.”
I don’t have a problem with calling what Hudson did racist. But I want to be careful about the potential consequences of the term “yellowface,” in this case and others. As Timothy Yu, a professor of English and Asian American studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, told me over email: “If we call all such performances ‘yellowface’, in the most extreme version this would suggest that any attempt to, say, translate Chinese poetry into English is inherently racist, which I certainly don’t think is the case.”
White modernist poetry, as it happens, has a long history of obsessing over the Chinese. Ezra Pound wrote what he called “translations” of Chinese poetry after discovering Ernest Fenollosa’s unpublished notes on Chinese poetry and Japanese Noh drama. Pound, like all the modernists, wanted to revitalize poetry in the West. He thought that in translating these poems he was introducing new life into the form – one that did away with the overwrought sentimentality of Victorian poetry and instead took up a language that presented things directly.
Was Pound’s translation of Chinese poems yellowface? Certainly the form Pound chose for his translations has been deeply influential; it established a kind of terse, abstract, and exotically impressionistic poetry as inherent to “Asian-ness,” at least in the Western imagination. His translations of classical Chinese poetry in Cathay are full of imagistic snapshots: “Blue, blue is the grass about the river”; “Mind like a floating wide cloud”; “Surprised. Desert turmoil. Sea sun.”
And the exchange, for Pound, did go for both ways. His most famous poem, “In a Station of the Metro,” uses that same terseness to achieve its effect: “The apparition of these faces in the crowd; / Petals on a wet, black bough.” And while not an actual translation, the poem approximates – or we might say “translates” – the form of the Japanese haiku. Pound even described it as “hokku-like.”
Unlike Hudson, Pound hoped to express the experience and character of being Chinese (and sometimes Japanese) – his translations attempt a kind of “authenticity” that Hudson has no interest in. In his most famous translation, The River-Merchant’s Wife, the speaker is, actually, a Chinese woman.
Pound’s alignment of Chinese inscrutability with the formal impressionism and abstraction of modern poetry had consequences for other forms. For instance, there aren’t a lot of novels that engage in this sort of yellowface. This is partly because the clichés of Chinese American experience Pound established are not narrative – spread out, full of interiority, and novelistic – but terse and elliptical. Lost in translation, you might say.
Other poets, though, continued where he left off. Think of TS Eliot’s Four Quartets: “The stillness, as a Chinese jar still / Moves perpetually in its stillness.” Or Marianne Moore’s Nine Nectarines and Other Porcelain: “It was a Chinese / Who imagined this masterpiece.” More recent poets, too, have carried the obsession: Kenneth Rexroth continued Pound’s project in One Hundred Poems from the Chinese.
This impression of Chinese-ness is a Western vision has very little to do with whatever you might call the “Chinese experience.” Instead, it has far more to do with engaging in the real roots of modernist American poetry.
Slowly, often clumsily, white American poets have become more self-aware on this point. Billy Collins, for example, in his rather elliptical Reading an Anthology of Chinese Poems of the Sung Dynasty, I Pause To Admire the Length and Clarity of Their Titles, he explores how writing modern poetry is to be obsessed with the terse and iconic images of China.
Comparing Hudson to Pound and Eliot, of course, feels like giving the former too much credit. But Hudson undoubtedly benefited from American poetry’s curiosity about – and fixed ideas of – all things Chinese. It’s right there in the justification Alexie quotes: “I hadn’t been fooled by [the poem’s] ‘Chinese-ness’ because it contained nothing that I recognized as being inherently Chinese or Asian. There could very well be allusions to Chinese culture that I don’t see. But there was nothing in Yi-Fen Chou’s public biography about actually being Chinese.”
Was it “yellowface”? Only insofar as Hudson exploited and masqueraded under an Asian identity for his own benefit. But it’s also part of a long tradition of something white American poets have been doing a long time.
by denton.2 at osu.edu on September 21, 2015
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