408 - Marta Mancelos

Japanese American Women Poets and Japanese Women Poets: The Inbetweenness of Sawako Nakayasu’s Work

 

Marta Mancelos

Ph.D. in American Studies (University of Coimbra)

 

In my dissertation I will perform a comparative analysis of contemporary experimental poetry written by women in the Japanese American and Japanese contexts. In order to do so, I will take into account recent contemporary studies of poetry and poetic theory in their multicultural perspective—and, most of all, my particular interest in the Japanese American and Japanese cases, derived from my own experience as an exchange student in Japan, which allowed me to learn the Japanese language and places me in a somewhat privileged position to examine this subject. I will pay special attention to the Japanese American poet and translator Sawako Nakayasu, whose work has been gaining particular interest by North-American critics. This American Studies project uses perspectives which include multicultural, post-colonial and feminist studies—always departing from a critical theory framed by the “L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E School,” which delves specifically into American language and  literary politics.

The aim of this project is, therefore, to conduct a research in the innovative field of Japanese American Studies, particularly in the domain of Japanese American and Japanese women’s contemporary experimental poetry. Such research will only make sense after a deep analysis of the contemporary experimental poetry’s setting that has been establishing itself in the United States.

The main focus of this research will be on the so-called “L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E School,” a group of avant garde writers whose poetics is well-known for its undetermined, incomplete and disjunctive character, as an exercise of counter-hegemonic citizenship. Not that this is a formally defined group, far from that—it comprises authors whose poetics is seldom alike, each one of them has its own individuality. There are, nonetheless, points in common, namely their concern with dominant representation models and its political implications (at both a language and a subject level). These are poets who use language not only to reflect, but also to interfere in the order of the world, and who understand poetry as a constant process of epistemological research (and not as a commodity, a value in exchange on the market). To say “language poetry” is a ubiquitous question: very often, because it does not work, because it is not enough, because more was to be expected of it. One of the characteristics of this school, in a closest relation with the questions this project sets itself to answer, is the critique that this movement makes to the dominant multiculturalism, because it only accepts in the “new” canon the poetry whose models reproduce the prevailing canon (white, occidental and phallocentric).

The author chosen as the specific object of study for this project is Sawako Nakayasu, a prizewinning poet and translator, born in Yokohama, Japan, and immigrant, since she was six years old, in the US. Nakayasu writes poetry, prose poetry, and prose, and her poetry is considered to be part of this perspective of experimental poetry—chiefly following the traditions of the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E School (Nakayasu herself credits as main influences to her work Lyn Hejinian and Carla Harryman). Her long poem in the shape of a book So We Have Been Given Time, Or was awarded the 2003 “Verse Prize,” selected by Ann Lauterbach. Nakayasu also translates contemporary poetry of Japanese women into English, publishing it in the United States. Her translation of Takashi Hiraide’s “For the Fighting Spirit of the Walnut” (New Directions, 2008) was awarded the “Best Translated Book Award from Three Percent” prize. Other than poetry and translation, Nakayasu is also editor-in-chief of “Factorial” magazine, as well as of the translation section of the online magazine “How2.”

My stay in Japan is, to a great extent, responsible for my interest in the Japanese culture, and, as a consequence, one of my objectives with this work is to create a bridge (if such a thing exists) between contemporary Japanese poetry and contemporary Japanese American poetry. Are there common points in the writing of these women poets? Even though they have different life experiences, is their writing in any way similar? And what does that say about our “nature” as opposed to our “nurture”? Do they develop resistance mechanisms to the order in which we accustomed ourselves to look at world? Do they open new paths to the “saying” of the world for us? Are these minor literatures written in major languages?

The literary issue is addressed in the light of the multitudinous powers and hierarchies in which it can be understood, and, in that sense, the question of citizenship politics is addressed as a question of poetics.

In addition to the literary character, another chief component of this research work will be to try to solve identity questions related with emigration. These are, inevitably, questions of “belonging,” of frontier, of “roots,” of transnational vs. local, of deterritorialization and reterritorialization (also of tongue and language), of centre and margins.

As Rae Armantrout, poet and L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E theorist, says, in contemporary poetry there is not only one voice in the centre of the poem—that bemoans or sings the beauty of something/someone—but a multiplicity of voices, each one more counter-hegemonic than the other, with inter-conventional intentions, voices of questioning and reflexion (and refraction) about the world and its reality. And we have to take into account that the term “reality” comprises everything, because, in the words of Lyn Hejinian, another L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poet and theorist, nothing exists outside of what we call “real”. Hence the need—poetic, which is the same as saying social and political—for Experimentalism.

I chose, in this project, the voice of a woman, since that is another place of margin, to be discussed considering all the complexity of social, sexual, linguistic and literary hierarchies that emerge in this context. As Susan Howe, yet another poet and theorist of the previously mentioned poetic-political movement, would say, that is the place of women poets: “out of everywhere” (which is the title of a poetry anthology, published later on by another of the representatives of this school in England, Maggie O’Sullivan). These are also the new cartographies that feminist theorists, as Susan Friedman, demand, and which Franklin Ng searched for in what concerns Asian American women. As Esther Ngan-Ling Chow says in her collection published by Ng, Asian American women accept their multifaceted identities and define feminist matters through multiple dimensions, which embody questions of race, social status and culture, as well as questions of sexual difference, hence creating a transcendent feminist conscience that surpasses those frontiers.

In addition to the various sorts of required contextualization (historical, social, political, of sexual difference, literary—in the US, in Japan, and in the Japanese American community), I will use a methodology of compared literature to try and find the similarities and/or differences between the poetry written by Japanese American women, born and raised in the US (2^nd or 3^rd generations), those born in Japan and raised in the US, and also Japanese women, whose roots are similar, but whose life experiences are distinct. By using this comparative perspective, I will try to better understand the questions of identity, society and culture that will, surely, be useful, not only in the field of literature, but also in the field of social and political sciences—also in Portugal. This debate will always focus on the life and work of Sawako Nakayasu, chosen as case study.