“From my book bag I pull out Ki no Tsurayuki’s Tosa Diary where he writes in the voice of a woman who has lost a child. Writes in a woman’s-hand to permit greater emotional license, the men of the tenth century too restricted by their own conventions…
***
I tell several female friends about this piece and only one does not change the subject.”– “The Orient,” The Narrow Road to the Interior by Kimiko Hahn.
A year ago I wrote this:
Responding to Leslie Scalapino (and Tis of Thee)
Because I was taught imperialism was for survival,
I found myself constantly falling in love with imperialistic men
For survival, because by being the colonized I would be protected
Although suffering was inevitable.
I was taught not to love my way of impermanence , to separate entities,
To be logical, when in fact, I could explain the possibility of co-existence,
Or even existence.
One identity has characteristics, the characteristics that aren’t possessed by the other identity.
Because we define others by the absence of those qualities in us, or in them.
At the age of 15, I, the same, had to accept another way of thinking
To survive. Choice was no longer my birthright and I was enslaved by a culture
That blatantly refuses my definition of existence. Or my people’s.
Unconsciously colonized, I attached myself to the praised logic, admiring those who
Have the ability to extract parts of the world, to make sense of them,
When manipulation does not portray truths, at all.
At the age of 15, I was weak, unable to grasp all the entities. I succumbed.
Stumbling at the feet of imperialism for I was told
Existence was only visible through imperialism,
And visibility is the only way to define existence.
All these years I have survived with indignity, except those nights when I dreamed
And again saw the possibility of reviving when that was the only place
That no one could tell me that existence was disputable.
(It was written on April 10, 2006, on my xanga. I was writing a poetry paper then, and I had chosen to write my paper on Leslie Scalapino’s The Public World/Syntactically Impermenance and Fanny Howe’s Tis of Thee. I still constantly re-read those two books as sources of strengths. )
A year ago I responded to Leslie Scalapino publicly on my blog because someone was speaking the words that were only dreaming in me. And I denied them at times.
A woman’s destiny is so far still colonized. Biologically. Emotionally. Economically. Physically.
I had to and learned to make myself a parasite of powerful beings.
A man commented on my poem.
“What are you ranting about this time?”
Ranting? Tell me if you can “rant” like that, dumb fucker. God may have made us all equal, but we haven’t.
It seems quite obvious women haven’t escaped the fate of being colonized
Eleven centuries ago, men were restricted emotionally because of conventions, by themselves. Being melodramatic was a woman’s nature, and still is deemed so, not by women, but by men. But no one says it’s okay.
(CC why are you so melodramatic? You’re just being melodramatic. Stop it.)
An abundance of emotion is restricted. Logically, women are restricted. Melodrama is permitted when a man speaks through a woman’s voice. That’s called fiction.
We’re colonized by fiction, a fact. A woman who’s permitted to express her emotions only exists in fiction, a fact. Is she judged harshly in our world as a fact? A fact. And unfortunately we exist with emotions, a fact.
Contradictory facts. Or not.
At the National Asian American Student Conference female identity’s forum, we go from talking about ourselves to talking about our allies, who don’t share our identities wholly. I was infuriated by someone who was extremely worried about alienating allies. I told her I couldn’t care less about people who pretend to be allies, who have no respect for safe space, who want to claim ownership of our issues– our identities. And more importantly, why are we worrying about allies when we don’t even feel comfortable with talking about ourselves, full Asian, part Asian, adopted, female, LGBT?
Why do we have to change subject all the time? Why is talking about being a woman, being colonized, so hard?
