Ugh. I wrote this awesome comment in response to Judith's comment on private/public and self-policing borders. But now my comment's been lost. I want to blame this on my most recent blog skin tinkering, but let's not be all negative and blame-y. Maybe my comment will show up in the next time zone or something.
Anyway.
Judith asks a really good question regarding conventional narrative literary forms. How are these, how is utilizing these helpful and not helpful in communicating the fine points, nuances, the chaotic and contradictory aspects of our cultural practices, contemporary and historical political survival strategies. Certainly for me, this is where the alleged "experimental" comes into play. Though for me, "experimental" merely means tweaking, adjusting, discarding, defacing, radically altering already existing poetic forms, tools, devices, whatever else you like to call them, in order to get closer to what I really mean to say, closer to what I believe I am trying to reveal or (re)present. What I am saying here is nothing new.
But here's something else worth noting. What if our communities don't want our practices and beliefs to be revealed? This reminds me of Professor Robert Black's Native American History class at UC Berkeley, which I took in like 1990. A student had asked him what he thought of Leslie Marmon Silko's work, since we were on the subject of how Native American artists represent themselves and their communities, versus how American and European ethnographers and anthropologists discuss and represent Native Americans' beliefs and cultural practices.
I think what Professor Black said surprised me then, and definitely confused me (mind you, I was at the very very beginning of my Ethnic Studies education in 1990). Regarding Silko's Almanac of the Dead, that while she was writing from general experiential knowledge or community membership knowledge, still "she gave away too much."
Even now I struggle a little bit with this "giving away too much," what it means, what is "too much." Admittedly, I did not finish Almanac of the Dead (so long!) but I have read Storyteller and Ceremony. I know that Silko writes from a culturally informed place, and I read her narratives as heavily influenced by the languages and narrative devices of oral tradition and ritual. I have also heard criticism that she writes from a self-exoticizing place. I will argue against this last part, by saying that in utilizing oral tradition devices (trance-like incantatory repetition, et al), in anchoring in or ritually contextualizing cultural objects (or culturally contextualizing ritual objects), her work has that tendency to be read as manufacturing "authenticity." Precisely because she is viewing, representing, discussing fine ritual and cosmological details from the "inside," as she understands them, and/or as she means for us to understand them.
In terms of what this means for me and my writing, I think about the safety that comes with obscurity. If no one knows who you are and if no one knows your work, then personal and political attacks seldom occur. If no one knows about the practices and beliefs of your community, then appropriation seldom occurs. You remain comfortably under the radar of popular culture.
Many years ago, in a Pier One Imports store, a fellow Pinay writer and I were perusing the "World Music" section's numerous, brightly packaged, mass produced South Asian music CD's. She then said to me, "Sometimes I am so glad that Filipino culture is hella obscure." I get what she meant.
Still, one disadvantage of remaining under the radar of popular culture is the possibility of being subsumed into a larger grouping, thus allowing the blurring of historical, cultural, linguistic differences. Although this subsumption may not always feel like a "disadvantage."
But I have a problem with invisibility, and I have a problem with being silenced. I have a problem with being censored, and I have a problem with coerced ventriloquy. I have a problem with allowing others to speak for me, and I have a problem with allowing others to represent me.
And being able to speak for myself is oftentimes, many times, most times well worth the public criticism that comes with being visible and audible.
Let me end with this picture Oscar took inside the Bowery Poetry Club, just because it makes me happy to be out there, in Poetry World:
