Reimagining Citizenship: Meena's written response round #1

Reimagining Citizenship: Written Response #1

Note: I wrote this before I looked at Meena's directions for our written responses carefully...oops!  Anyway, I think I answered most aspects of her question, though I didn't make direct connections to indigenous-Han relations in Taiwan.

A response to Fred Moten’s talk:

What form of writing might disrupt the sense of a discrete self?  A writing of interruption, contradiction, excess, lack, pleasure, brutality, which refuses wholeness, coherence, self-sufficiency, which invites proliferation and incessant dialogical tendrils, which extends exceeds ruptures the limits of language, or at least ruptures the limits of a well-behaved English that is the domain of a particular privileged masculinist-capitalist-imperialist white elite.  What are the poetics of blackness, if by blackness we mean the condition of being “both more than and less than one”?  When might the form of the written word fail us, when might English fail us, when might we throw up our hands, in frustration or exhaustion, and need to cuss our heart out in a US black vernacular, but not know whether that vernacular translates to our audience?  What is at stake in being understandable, and how is that related to the fantasy of the self?  How, in the tradition of queer theory, might we see “failure” as an art, as the possibility of alternative ways of living in the world?

What form of dancing might disrupt the sense of a discrete self?  How might we need to disavow a sense of wholeness, of integration, of being “connected,” of line, of alignment – how might we need to disavow a choreographic sense of completeness and resolution in time and rhythm and phrasing?  What does it mean to not finish a movement?  What does it mean not to finish a choreographic piece?  What does it mean to be endlessly in process – for our work to be “more than” (producing far more than necessary) and “less than” (never finished or brought to completion)?  How does that defy a capitalist notion of product?  How does that sabotage us as artists in a global market?

As dancing flesh, how might it be exhausting to endlessly move?  To be endlessly forced to move?  Forced migration, displacement, the ground dissolving beneath your feet.  Syrian migrants pouring over borders.  To lose home, over and over again.  Trail of Tears.  And how might it be a gift to be constantly moving – or to notice that we are already always moving?  Steve Paxton: small dance.  Koma: the body loves to move, even when sleeping.  Even when dead...

What does recognizing the fiction of the discrete self have to do with Irigaray’s notions of endlessly “becoming,” with feminist notions of permeable subjectivity and the transpersonal subject?  Women have also historically been defined as lack (literal lack of phallus, the lack of rights as a full citizen/person, being treated as property rather than person) and as excess (too irrational, too sexual, too embodied, too emotional) – and thus in need of being controlled.   “His body is not his own” (Moten).  Her body was never her own.  Subject to being sold (= marriage, in its origin; trafficking), cut open, legislated, raped, used for the pleasure of others, reduced to baby-maker, a literal lack waiting to be filled by a male phallus.  Given this fleshy history, what does it mean to reframe our idea of consent when it was so hard-won in the first place?

I stumble, I hesitate to make parallels bumping over gravel between blackness and other minoritarian pothole whiplash experiences more familiar to my lived experience.  Or, as that person in the audience said, “I wouldn’t presume to claim blackness.”  Except that Moten invites us to.  An evangelist for blackness.  A gift you already have.  A universal condition: “more than and less than.”  Why would we want this gift.  And what would that sermon sound like?

The queer theorist in me asks, “Where is the pleasure in blackness?”

On a somatic level, “I” understand the pleasure in giving up the fiction of the discrete and fixed self, of surrendering to vulnerability, to an ever-changing soma, of being entangled with others.  (Though these others are not separable from me, since an “other” is defined in relation to a “self” -- our structures of language fail again; they presuppose an “I”).  “I” understand the pleasure in becoming skin, in becoming flesh.  I understand the pleasure of the assembling-disassembling body (Nita Little), of becoming multiplicity instead of one, of the trillions of cells that independently ask “What if…” (Deborah Hay).  “More and less than one” is a fundamental part of many somatic practices, including contact improvisation, to which Fred Moten keeps referring.  But it feels suspect to turn to these practices as the answer.

It feels suspect because contact improvisation has historically been the domain of white alternative hippie communities.  It feels suspect because contact improvisation historically assumes straightness.  It feels suspect because of how challenging it is to facilitate contact classes in a way that goes well for black dancers, gender non-conforming dancers, etc.  Why is it that inviting vulnerability and melting body-borders is so empowering for some people, and so terrifying and invasive for others?  taisha says (in a paraphrase from memory) that it is not safe for a black person to invite their body to be vulnerable in this country.  Skin hardens as defense.  On some level, I feel convinced that unless I physically experience the brutality, the precarity, the exhaustion of bodies crowded together in piss and shit and blood in the Middle Passage, of Uncle Tolliver being beaten to a pulp while he prays that the Yankees win – that if I experience the pleasure without the brutality, I must be doing "more than less than one" wrong.  Because blackness cannot be easy.

Am I mixing up blackness and antiblackness?

What does it mean to practice blackness/“more than less than one” in the studio but not in life?  Is it even possible to practice blackness in the studio but not in life?

To be a full person is to be a citizen. 

Democracy relies on personhood and citizenship and subjecthood.  Wouldn’t all our legal and juridical systems fall apart if we refuse citizenship?  What would that world even look like?  Would it even be livable?  

Am I mixing up blackness and antiblackness?

“What cultural and aesthetic resources are available to us that would allow us to claim this condition, which is already ours?”  (Moten)  Difference without separability, radical non self sufficiency, quantum entanglement, love.  What is “spooky action from a distance” but viraha sringara?  What is love-in-separation but the recognition that you are more than and less than one?  And how do Indian notions of time and rhythm play into this?  Is sam but the illusion of wholeness that disappears as soon as you touch it?  What would it be to create a series of rhythmic compositions where sam is always khali: empty?

Creative Assignments:

I think there are multiple creative assignments suggested in the above writing, but here are a couple concrete suggestions:

(1)  Create a movement study that embodies – or rather, enfleshes – excess and lack.  Embrace irregularity, and resist wholeness and resolution.

(2) Ask yourself, “What does blackness have to do with me?”  Do a 10-minute free-write addressing this question, then transform some of those ideas into artistic form (movement, video, poetry, soundscape, etc.).

Bibliography

Moten, Fred.  'Wykład prof. Freda Motena: Performans i "czarność"' https://vimeo.com/100330139

Reimagining Citizenship: Meena's Assignment 1

Please listen (and watch depending on how you like to hear) to this talk by Fred Moten at least once. In your written response, please note whatever stands out to you. For example: (1) what stands out to you in his talk? (2) what feels relevant to you? (3) how might this be relevant to your context and research around reimagining citizenship? Or not? (4) please come up with at least 1 possible creative assignment that stems from Fred Moten's presentation

https://vimeo.com/100330139

Please post your written response and at least one creative assignment suggestion by October 5th.

Reimagining Citizenship - Timeline

--> Round 1
Sept 21- Meena assigns reading/viewing
Oct 5 - Written responses with suggestion for creative assignments posted on blog
Oct 19 - Meena decides and assigns on creative assignment (Cyn may post late)
Nov 2 - Creative responses are posted
Nov 9 - Feedback is posted

Round 2
Nov 9 - Sandra assigns reading/viewing
Nov 23 - Written responses with suggestions for creative assignments posted on blog
Nov 30 - Sandra decides and assigns creative assignment
Dec 14 - Creative responses are posted
Dec 21- Feedback is posted. Possible Skype meeting.

Round 3
Dec 28 - Cynthia assigns reading/viewing
Jan 11 - Written responses with suggestions for creative assignments posted on blog
Jan 18 - Cynthia decides and assigns on creative assignment
Feb 1 - Creative responses are posted
Feb 8- Feedback is posted. Skype meeting.

Regroup. Decide on Shy’s integration. Work out details of “Curation/Dramaturgical Round 4."



TBC

Reimagining Citizenship

Starting in July 2015, members of the Post Natyam Collective have been engaged in an online exchange on citizenship and its exclusions.  How does a modern nation-state decide who has the right to be a full citizen, and by extension, to be treated as fully human?  Researching citizenship in multiple geographic and historic contexts, our interests include anti-blackness in South Asia and its diaspora, anti-immigrant sentiment in Europe, and the histories of Han Chinese colonizers and indigenous peoples in Taiwan.  Our activities, which will be archived on our blog (www.postnatyam.blogspot.com), include scholarly research and writings, creative studies, and giving each other assignments and feedback.

blood run: Letters to a Lost Aboriginal Ancestor

These letters are the result of a daily writing practice in which I write a letter to my imagined female indigenous ancestor each morning.

FEEDBACK QUESTIONS:
(1) What ideas, images, or specific phrases resonate with you?
(2) Are there any parts that you find confusing and would like clarification on?  Anything you find problematic?
(3) How might you imagine these being used in performance, installation, or other public sharing of art?  How might they relate to or be integrated with the other blood run material?
(4) Other thoughts?

21 June 2015

Dear Ancestor,

Hi.  你好。 I don't know what language to greet you in, phonemes racing trolling lazily in my blood cells, the pulse and undertow of the Pacific.  I speak to you like dolphins, sonar, vibrations of oceanic language in our bones, your bones long disappeared, turned to dust, wreathed with kelp.  I imagine you, brown skin, lined face, joyful wrinkles around your eyes, unbound feet.  Strong capable hands that till the soil, a child on your hip, taro and sweet potato at your feet, ordering the men around. 

But maybe that is wrong.  Maybe you are young, a young woman with deep-set eyes and a long nose and sea-black waves of hair.  Maybe you saw the dark silhouettes of approaching ships, the masses of men who streamed onto your island like long-queued rats storming the fertile western plains, with horror.  With wonder.  With fear.  With love.

So many generations, an ocean and several languages later, your mixed blood daughter writes you in English.  The history books say we are extinct, your language and people are extinct.  The history books were not written by our people.  I doubt my motives but I want to know you, I take bitter rice wine into my mouth, temples clench squeeze from the harsh alcohol, spew and retch in a would-be blessing.  I kneel at the Pacific, half a world and four hundred years later, and touch the water, waiting hoping to hear you.

Love,
Cynthia

22 June 2015

Dear Ancestor,

Hi again.  It's me, your mixed lost daughter of the future.  Yesterday, I walked along the Pacific, saltwater swirling sand around ankles and calves, and thought about another coast, craggy rocky waves crashing the sailors praying to Mazu for protection as they crossed the black water from Fujian.  What did you think and feel as they crashed headlong into your shores and lives?  What does it mean to think about my origin point as a story of colonization?  What would you think of me?  Would you look at me, scornfully, and tell me I am not one of your own?  Would you look at me as the greatest mistake in the history of your people, to love and trust a foreigner?  Would you regard me with loving abhorrence, the offspring, perhaps, of a forced encounter by the field one night?  Would your heart be sad, betrayed, understanding of the layers of assimilation, of all the lost and imposed cultures and histories that run through my ancestral and dancing body?  What have I inherited, what have I chosen?  Is it possible, dear ancestor, that I inherited my love of border-crossing and cultural difference from you?  Or is that wishful thinking, colonial guilt?  In the end this is the unanswerable question: was your "marriage" to that Han man -- my ancestor, a 李 -- a choice, a survival tactic, an act of violence?

With love and wonder,
Cynthia 李怡欣

June 23, 2015

Dear Ancestor,

Like a little girl or an almost illiterate ABC, I have been practicing handwriting.  Writing Pingpu family names over and over -- or rather the Chinese surnames you were forced to take on -- or which you chose to take on as a tactic to avoid discrimination.  It reminds me that my parents took on Anglo names when they first moved here, my dad's name a strange echo of a Confederate general, Robert Lee, the same name on an FBI no-fly list, the routine interrogations at LAX when he returns from Taiwan.  Wooden prow replaced by metal bird: how we have chosen to leave, now and then.  Someone said that immigration is giving up on one's homeland.  We came in the 70s, before martial law was lifted, when Nixon decided, oops, Taiwan isn't China, China is China, and we thought, the Communists are coming!  the Communists are coming! -- a threat which is true even now.  I don't know what prompted that earlier migration, that other moment of complicity with a settler-colonial project that ended up with me as your descendant.  Years of drought, maybe, like this bone-dry California Gabrielino-Tongva land that I love.  Financial incentives by the Dutch, who could not persuade you to till your land for their profit.  Or arriving with the Manchurian Qing, who managed the indigenous people and the Han settlers by pitting us against each other, as even now we are pitted against each other in my heart, ventricles gasping, blood cells fighting each other for oxygen, as even now we are pitted against each other in Taiwan, the DPP wanting to use aboriginal identity for its own political purposes, you call us pai lang in our language, you call us mother-fuckers in yours.

What's in a name?  What's hidden in a name?  Even as your people took on Chinese names, they were still different than ours. 哀, Ai, sorrow.  猴, Hou, monkey.  毒, Du, poison.  Were the names phonetic translations, like those weird Chinese transliterations of foreign names: Mary becomes 瑪麗 (Ma Li).  Or are there traces of meaning -- red, baby chick, poetry  -- that connect to your lost names, our lost names.  Did you agree, in the end, to take the name 李, wood radical Lee, to enter a Han patriarchal lineage, a woman lost in the branches of men, the native roots and brambles of your matrilineal ancestry disappeared from the naming, the graves, the altars, the books, the family genealogy.  I cannot offer incense to you.  I can only speak, haltingly, these names in colonial translation: Yue (月), Hong (紅), Li (力).  Moon.  Red.  Power.

Love,

Cynthia
李怡欣

24 June 2015

Dear Ancestor,

I wish I knew your name.  Your face.  I wish I had a picture.  A marking on a gravestone in the tall grass, worn by monsoon and time.  A mention of your laughter in a long-ago diary.  A song.  Something to hold onto and let me know that you are real.  Today the scholars tell me you are not real: the geneticists and anthropologists argue, waving their righteous flags, funded by government institutions. 

I remember going to get my hair cut with my mother in Taipei, and the hairdresser saying, Is she part American?  Her eyes look different.  My mother was angry and said I was a hundred percent Taiwanese, raised in the U.S..  At the time I thought, bemused and a little hurt, that my foreign clothes and way of being in my body must have shifted her perception, made her see me as part white, since of course that's what American means in Taiwan.  Now I wonder whether she was really seeing your eyes in my face: deep-set and round with the epicanthal fold.  Mistaking one set of barbarians for another.

I've been rethinking Confucianism.  Seeing its tightness.  What was once framed as the oh-so-predictable rebellion of the white-washed second generation American now presents itself as a decolonial act, as working to undo hundreds of years of assimilation to Han culture.  Queering Confucianism.  Family is a fist, squeezing tight as water runs and dribbles out, instead of gently cupping the water, holding it.  Family is a set of lungs shared between conjoined twins: we cannot breathe without each other.  Family is tightly woven silk, the strength of warp and weft: if you cut one thread, the whole thing unravels.  But what was family to you?  I read Jolan Hsieh's ethnography of Pingpu people, and it looks a lot like love marriage: noseflutes playing, young men and women dancing at harvest, an easy approach and retreat, following the ebb and flow of one's desire.  Did my Han ancestor slip into one of these dances?  Did you feel him beside you and take his hand in yours, smiling?  The collision course of history in one simple gesture?  Did he move to your family home, working hard as all immigrants do, to make sure his clothes wouldn't be hung outside the front door, to win your family's approval?  Did you know that he could come or go, that you need only stay together as long as you wished, that divorce and remarriage would be easy and without stigma, that you could come together and drift apart like duckweed floating on the pond's surface, that you could take for granted, as I never have, the right to choose who to love?

Love,
Cynthia

June 25, 2015

Dear Ancestor,

I imagine you wild-eyed dancing

I imagine you with millet and daikon and dirt under your nails

I imagine you with your mother and an earthbellied pot

I imagine you pouring sweet rice wine laughing fullbodied

I imagine your hands reaching into a steaming communal pot

            sweet potato and wild boar cooked together underground

I imagine you diving, a flying fish

            silverslipping in and out of waves

...my imagination stumbles, comes up empty. 

How can I imagine you when I know nothing about you?

A handful of dirt, salt, water.

Speak to me, please.

Cynthia

July 23, 2015

Dear Ancestor,

Many days, as scholars argue in my head, stroking their long beards and waving their green flags, I wonder if you really exist, if you ever existed.  I feel you frowning, shaking your head at your daughter's doubt, at yet another erasure.  This is how genocide works.  So I continue writing and creating around the possibility of your existence -- hints -- detective work -- signs from a dream world -- delving headlong, shaking, into a bloody history that is far bigger than my own blood lineage.

I've been thinking about rainbows.  Somewhere over the.  Longing.  Pot of gold.  Queer leprechauns.  Oxumare dreams sky, snakes his androgynous spine as raindrops spill and shimmer, the jangle of cowry.  Genderqueer child of Oxum and Oxossi.  Birds fly why oh why can't I cross the rainbow bridge to meet you, to meet my lost ancestors.  It's true, my imagination refracts through a blockbuster film, Warriors of the Rainbow.  And yet what hands calloused torn from weaving.  What blood on my hands gripping machete.  What sacrifice do you require for us to be together?  Must I kill the Han in me?  The Seediq say that across the rainbow bridge in the heavenly hunting grounds, your enemy and you are at peace, the conflict forgiven. Would I have to split my head from my body in one clean stroke, to sacrifice myself to you to mend my warring selves, to heal?  But this is not a Pingpu tradition.  It is a headhunter spirituality from a patriarchal society that allowed the Seediq and the Atayal to violently, valiantly resist their Japanese colonizers.  Seediq Bale.  To kill is to become fully human.  And I doubt this was our way, our matrilocal plains people who married the enemy, loved them, maybe.

Rainbows remind me of Hawai'i, where they appear, spontaneously, in mist and light, my father, bigbellied full of mana, so happy at home there.  The possibility of you around every corner.  Maybe I should've suspected we were Pacific Islanders then.  Rainbows lit up my Facebook feed last month, suddenly everyone was queer, Queer Nation, the Supreme Court legalizing same-sex marriage while my radical queer friends protested.  I know marriage is not liberation, but I am tired of critical queers, of negativity and gatekeeping and exclusion and hopelessness.  I want a world lit up by rainbows, rainbows without blood, pirates without pillaging, where the only blood sacrifice is to cut out the internalized colonizer within.

Love,

Cynthia

Open Round 2: Embodying Ethnography

Here is a movement study that I did for "blood run":


Qing Imperial Tribute Illustrations from Cynthia Ling Lee on Vimeo.
password: "ethnographic"

FEEDBACK QUESTIONS
1. What emotions, visceral responses, and/or meaning does the movement evoke for you?
2. What might you like to see as accompanying sound, if anything?*
3. What do you think about the current arc of the study?  Are there sections that you might like to reorder?  Are there moments you would like to see further fleshed out?**
4. Do you see any connections to other "blood run" material?  How might you imagine this movement living with the other material?
5. Other thoughts or suggestions?

CONTEXT
This movement was developed from some of the visual iconography of the Qing Imperial Tribute Illustrations (1751), which Emma Jinhua Teng discusses in her chapter on "Picturing Savagery" from her book, Taiwan's Imagined Geography.  According to Teng, this work, which took over a decade to complete, was an ambitious project to catalog various non-Han "barbarians" by the Qing.  Over two thirds of the illustrations were of non-Han ethnic minorities living within the empire, including Taiwanese indigenous peoples, though it also included people from other Asian countries and Europeans (163).  They are depicted in pairs of male and female like representative "specimens."  I attempted to embody the different energies, bodily positions, actions conveyed by the illustrations, and to move into and through the different characters with a somatic awareness.

*Some ideas I had for sound included (a) voicing my internal imagery -- "heavy silk," "floating feather," "daikon offering," "chin forward,", (b) visual projection or voiceover of the characters as listed in the original illustrations -- "Korean gentleman," "raw savage of Zhanghua county," (3) music that references the places these characters are from.

**I just realized that I forgot one pair of characters ("Cooked Savages of Fengshan County"), who appear to be the most "refined" of the Taiwanese indigenes represented, so I can add them in if you think it would be interesting.