Me, Myself, and Ai: Queering Identities and Orientations Through the Poet Ai's Archive

Excerpts from M.A. Thesis by Kristen Whang

Advisor: Professor Misho Ishikawa

Abstract

What do we gain when we allow our personal experiences to take the lead and orient us affectively towards the archive? The present study addresses this question by reading the contemporary poet Ai’s published work in conversation with her archival materials at the NYPL Berg Collection. Ai was best known for her poetic performance of diverse identities through the first person perspective, “I.” Based on my affective orientations towards the archive and the patterns around identity I observed as a result, I apply frameworks of interchangeability and multiplicity to read for a queering of identity in Ai’s poetry. The continually shifting mosaic of identity in Ai’s drafts and published work, read through the archival lens of her multiracial phenomenology and informed by my own identity as an Asian American scholar, offers a recuperative poetics of multiplicity which radically destabilizes constructed identities while establishing intra- and interpersonal relationality as essential. I compare the drafts and final versions of two poems from Ai’s second poetry collection Killing Floor (1979), “Nothing But Color” and “Talking To His Reflection In A Shallow Pond,” alongside personal journals and print ephemera, utilizing affect in the archives to navigate socially irreconcilable labels like “multiracial” or “Asian American.”

Introduction (p. 2-4)

Within the maze of hallowed halls comprising the New York Public Library lies the Berg Collection of English and American Literature, “some 35,000 printed volumes, pamphlets, and broadsides, and 2,000 linear feet of literary archives and manuscripts, representing the work of more than 400 authors” (“About the Berg Collection”). Once granted access to this collection, one approaches the guarded reading room, tentatively rings the bell, and enters a plushly carpeted space outfitted with stately wooden tables, golden reading lamps, crown molding decor, and all the grandeur of a classic, old-fashioned library. Tucked away in a back room, the archival collections themselves are hidden from sight, contributing further to the mystery of the archive.

I visited the Berg Collection for the first time through a class field trip last year, where I saw and even more importantly felt the poet Ai’s work. I felt the shiny sheet covers protectively holding her manuscript drafts, the brittle pages of her worn journal, the inky indentations of hurriedly scrawled phone numbers and miscellaneous reminders amidst drafts of poems. As I read her personal accounts on the alienating experiences of being multiracial and feeling split by categories of identity, I felt empathy and sadness for a person I knew only through the archive of materials she left behind. It is through these materials that I began to experience Ai as multiplicitous. She writes, “I am known as many things; mixed, multi-racial, multi-cultural, half-breed, but I always felt misbegotten” (Ai, [Brown Spiral]). Such sentiments reveal the felt discrepancies between external and internal experiences of identity, e.g., the imposition of strict categories and the feeling of not belonging to any of those categories. Ai’s articulation of her multiracial phenomenology suggests a multiplicity of identity through the divergence of “fact” and feeling.

Ai publicly identified as ½ Japanese, ⅛ Choctaw, ¼ Black, and ¹⁄₁₆ Irish, per a personal essay she wrote for Ms. Magazine in 1978.[1] In one of her many notebooks, Ai wonders: “How can a multi-racial person conform & remain true to him/herself? I could not honestly join the Black movement because I didn’t feel Black. But I don’t feel Japanese either or Indian or Irish, I am a multi-racial human being” (Ai, [Brown Spiral]). Her struggle to identify with any individual part of her racial identity traces back to significant moments in her young life, namely the secret around her biological father’s identity as well as the experience of being multiply marginalized in a largely monoracial society.[2] Across her personal accounts, Ai confesses to the confusing and often violent messages directed towards her existence as a multiracial person. Led to believe that there was no place for her within existing categories of identification, Ai chose to defy categorization as both human and writer: “I don’t want to be catalogued & my characters don’t want to be. My poems don’t want to be. If a poet’s work isn’t universal, what good is it? Who the hell wants to read it” (Ai, Holograph Interview Notes). As I would discover, Ai’s vocal resistance to categorization for herself and her characters is a useful lens for reading her poetry.

Reading for Interchangeability and Multiplicity (p. 8-10)

My method of reading Ai’s poetry emerged from the affective resonances between Ai’s archive and myself, and the patterns I observed through this process. To demonstrate my findings, I focus on two poems from Ai’s second poetry collection Killing Floor (1979), “Nothing But Color” and “Talking To His Reflection In A Shallow Pond.” Each poem is dedicated to a Japanese literary-historical figure, Yukio Mishima and Yasunari Kawabata respectively, who intersect at a moment in history when Japan’s cultural milieu was transforming rapidly due to westernization and other influences of the post-WWII period (Takeuchi 29). The tense relations between the U.S. and Japan were certainly felt by Asian Americans like Ai, the internment of more than 120,000 Japanese Americans being just one example. The internment had resounding psychological ramifications, as Kristine Kuramitsu explains:

Like other immigrants, Japanese Americans struggled through the constant negotiation of multiple cultural identities. Yet they were told that this was an impossibility; they could either completely embrace Japanese culture by returning to Japan or completely embrace the United States by renouncing connections to Japanese culture. (620)

Japanese Americans were denied Americanness, demonized and discriminated against by the U.S. because “the simple fact of their ancestry would override any amount of patriotism” (Kuramitsu 620).[3] This historical flattening of Japanese American identity is a key consideration when reading the two aforementioned poems; although they first appear to convey monoracial Japanese identity as singular and monolithic, my archival research suggests we read instead for interchangeability and multiplicity of identity.

The analysis of “Nothing But Color” will illustrate the concept of interchangeability, or the ability to switch one entity with another. Interchangeability implies that the entities are distinct, but similar in some manner that allows them to interchange. This back and forth movement forms the basis of my argument for reading a system of relations which defines individuals in relation to one another, rather than by their constructed identities. I will then demonstrate how “Talking To His Reflection In A Shallow Pond” proposes a multiplicity of identity through a negotiation of the constructed and the essential self, using Bergson’s qualitative multiplicity.

Reading these poems in the context of Ai’s phenomenological accounts of multiraciality and the revisionary movements across her drafts, I establish a relational, multiplicitous conceptualization of identity in Ai’s work, exposing the violent constructedness of identity and the essential relationality between parts of self. Moreover, the lens of Ai’s multiracial phenomenology suggests that her queering of Japanese identity can serve as a case study for queering all identities through interchangeability and multiplicity. The conveyed multiplicity of Japanese identity thus becomes a synecdoche for all identity, including the category of Asian American. Reading Ai’s poetry offers a recuperative poetics of multiplicity which radically destabilizes such constructed identities, offering relationality as an alternative to make sense of our individual and collective existences, generating infinite possibilities of being within the spaces between.

[1] The full essay title: “On Being 1/2 Japanese, 1/8 Choctaw, 1/4 Black, and 1/16 Irish.” Notably, the fractions do not add up to 1.

[2] Monoracism is a central issue in critical multiracial studies; key issues are monoracism’s detrimental effects on seeking social support and community, feeling secure in one’s identity, and exercising autonomy in choosing how to identify.

[3] During the Japanese internment, many Asian Americans wore buttons that identified them as Korean, Chinese, etc. Ji-Yeon Yuh recounts: “There are many reports of Koreans and Chinese in the U.S. being harassed and attacked by white Americans who mistook them for Japanese.” Evidently, both Japanese American and Asian American identity have been conflated with one another and viewed as monolithic.