Avant-Garde and Brown-ness

Avant-Garde and Brown-ness
I had lunch a few weeks back with my friend Christine and we talked about the problems of "political correctness." The topic has been on my mind since I read a blog post about multiculturalism and the avant-garde. To begin with, I have problems with poetry of the moment being described as avant-garde, as if we had some sort of foresight to discern what is groundbreaking and what is "la moda." I think if we can bandy the term "avant-garde" around like we do, then we're just as entitled to bandy about "Victorian" or "Modernist" (and I guess we do this by attaching the term neo- in front of the traditions. But this term, like "Language" poetry, is often used to describe poetries that don't enact mimetic moments of epiphany and/or don't fall under the really frustrating term "accessible," versus acknowledging the very specific movement of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry (as in the workshop comment: "this poem is very languagey).

There are, of course, different approaches to poetry, to mimesis, to realism and recognize that these differences create true aesthetic schisms. As far as I'm concerned, these schisms are mostly syntactical and class-based (a post for another day), but they've become deeply politicized. This politicization has come to affect writers of color and notions of representation in poetry. We all want to imagine a Bennenton ad universe of poetry, one in which we aren't considering a poet's cultural, sexual, or racial identity, but that's not going to happen because that shit is deeply entrenched in the behemoth of American society.

At the center of this conversation are two impulses: the impulse to be inclusive within the discourse and the impulse to participate and shape the discourse. Both of these impulses have, at their center, a utopian vision of how art should live outside of cultural subjectivities. This is, in part, because the culture of art has always been the purview of the privileged. Yes, we can all go to museums and take creative writing classes at a community college, etc., but the sense of entitlement behind these impulses is not accessible to anyone. I can only speak for myself; the notion of using the opportunity of higher education to become an artist instead of doctor, lawyer, etc. was a hard sell to my mama.

When we do, the pressure is enormous to "represent," to uncover all of these oppressed narratives without acknowledging that there was a larger dominant narrative "colored" narratives were pushed against. When I entered the arena of poetry, I looked around and found that there weren't that many of us around. In fact, while I was in graduate school, one of my instructors perpetually called me by the name of the only other Latina in the program even though we looked nothing alike. It was hard not to feel tokenized. There was nothing explicit about my exclusion from a poetry that interrogated language. I was trained as an undergraduate to use my cultural experience as source material. After a while, this bored me. I was introduced to work that problematized language in a way that felt familiar. English isn't my mother tongue and so the notion of signification was truly resonant.

One poet I like to consider in this light is Juan Felipe Herrera who employs strategies of linguistic play. I believe that any bilingual poet, any poet in possession of layered languages, of twisted discourses, likewise possesses an a priori predilection for such linguistic play. I write with the ear and tongue of a poet mediating two languages, two often opposing syntaxes; formal play is a product of this constant negotiation. I strongly believe that this component of Latina/o identity and experience—the experience of mediating Spanish and English, and the strangely beautiful results concomitant—should be as fundamental a part of the conversation surrounding Latino/a identity and experience as the narrative works that would describe such identity and experience.

"Experiment" was a very powerful (and political) force in Latin American poetry and I am a descendent. I don't need to be integrated into any conversation. I am already there. Like anyone else, I am living and using that living to dive into poems. On the other hand, my relationship to language and how language can come to tell stories doesn't necessarily have to be linear and working class. If you'd like to other me, I'll other you back.