First There Was the Word, Then There Was the Fist (3 of 3)

In these poets’ words, the beautiful, terrible, endlessly messy stuff of life comes alive. Vinh Hua paints striking, but familiar images when he talks about “too strong and too sweet coffee” and “sometimes we drown in love”. In his funny, poignant tribute to a Korean farmer/anti-WTO activist who took his life in protest, Terry Park says, “ I remember the first silence of the morning … cool like well water … big buckets of stillness”. This is terrific stuff. It is this real stuff of life, in contrast to the often-plastic slickly commercial product of mass culture such as MTV, that the artists claim, proclaim, and celebrate – the truth of the poet. It is aggressive truth-telling in the midst of misinformation and oppression; it is a form of resistance.

My favorite quote from African American poet Amiri Baraka is “the purpose of Black Art is to find the self, then kill it”. While there’s a self-hating edge to that statement that is troubling, the first part of the statement is golden. Everything in American society, and even remnants of some of our own feudal culture, tells APIA people to deny the self, and distorts our sense of self, and the truth of our lives. While we must realize the inextricable way our selves are tied to the other selves in the APIA communities, and beyond that, to the oppressed peoples of the world, if we avoid the trap and illusion of individualism, the true excavation and exaltation of self – especially if done collectively - can be liberating. It strikes me that in their dedication of seeing, proclaiming and exalting the true stuff of our lives, these poets are creating a language for our experience, and articulation of our APIA-ness. And in the aggressive assertion of that, against all the bullshit distortion and noise of corporate, distorting culture, there is much power. It’s the beginning of the word becoming the fist, and more power to them and us.

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