Fall/Winter 2006: On Principle

I Spy

With belonging comes responsibility.

By Janine Oshiro

I wanted to be a spy without allegiance--to observe without obligation. I was on my way to Charlottesville, Virginia, to attend a retreat for Asian American poets, and I wasn't sure that I had the best of intentions. I fulfilled all the requirements for attendance: I wrote poems, thus I was a "poet," though usually I preferred to say I was a writer, a writer who mainly wrote poems. In Hawaii, where I was born, I was "Okinawan" (how embarrassing to have Mr. Lee, the shop teacher, look at me on the first day of eighth grade and announce, "Ah, the Okinawan nose"), but now on the mainland, I am "Asian American." I had a hard enough time with these terms separately--how was I to admit to all of them together? Yet I felt compelled to attend this retreat. I wanted to see what Asian American poets were like, though I wasn't convinced that I was one. I prepared myself to be on the outside, neither needed nor in need.

Severe thunderstorms had halted all air traffic, and I was stranded at the Detroit airport. Sitting at the gate, I couldn't help but scan the growing crowd to see if I could find someone who was going to the retreat. A woman with cropped hair and clunky Tevas that overwhelmed her tiny ankles caught my eye--ah, Japanese American. I noticed a young man with glasses and a dark blue backpack slowly pacing the gate area: Chinese American, and he looks studious. Maybe a poet? Announcements drifted in periodically over the loudspeaker as the storm let up enough for a few flights to depart. After almost twelve hours of waiting--and watching--all of my potential Asian American poets were called away to other gates. When I finally arrived at the retreat, half a day late, I spied a man I recognized from the airport. But I had only noticed him as a white man talking with two other men near the gate agent's desk. I had made note of his closely shaved head and the intense energy of his face that focused at the point where bridge and brow meet.

I can only begin to say what happened at the retreat by saying what happened when we gathered to say goodbye. I didn't want to leave. I was the spy who cried. Though I still don't understand where those tears came from, I know they arose partly from a sense of shame at my desire to be an observer and partly from a sense of sorrow at leaving people with whom I felt, to my surprise, that I belonged. My spying had failed me. I was afraid of the way that calling myself an Asian American poet would limit me, canceling out further possibility, and yet I had imposed upon others that same narrow and simplistic definition as I searched through the travelers at the airport. My spying had reduced everyone to their most obvious distinguishing feature, had made people less than the complicated, and sometimes inexplicable, individuals that they are--that I want to be.

By preparing myself to be on the outside, I had forced everyone else into an indivisible mass: They would be the Asian American poets; they would decide the terms; I would have nothing to do with it but watch. I absolved myself of all responsibility. By preparing myself to be neither needed nor in need, I not only disempowered myself, I constituted the identity of "Asian American poet" as something static and uncontestable, as if it could only mean one thing. And this meaning was beyond my control. Theoretically, I knew better.

For years, I had been going back to a statement made by the poet Myung Mi Kim:

Whether it's a historical moment, a question of Asian American identities, thinking through the female body, or seeing a hummingbird, there's a way in which the charge of writing, the charge of participation in language, is always approximate, so the naming does not fix and erode but may resonate and continue to charge.

I thought that I knew what it meant. Yet there I was, naming as if to "fix and erode." I didn't know how to respond to the term "Asian American poet," but I was starting to understand that I would not find the answer by retreating to the sidelines. To believe in the approximation of language is to believe that transformation is possible. It is to believe that the charge of words is dynamic, that the naming gives us a necessary ground to which we can belong, through which we can be "charged" into even greater possibilities.

At the retreat I couldn't find the outside that I had so desired. I found no lookout. Instead, I found people who cared deeply about poetry and each other. It was impossible for me just to observe. I wanted to know the other poets, and not through their most obvious distinguishing feature. I wanted to say to the man from the Detroit airport, I recognize who you are. I wanted to say to everyone, if I hold myself back it is from fear. It was a struggle for me to realize how much I needed to be there, how much I needed to belong to this community.

Observation is not inimical to action. I keep thinking back to the title of poet Claudia Rankine's lyric essay "Don't Let Me Be Lonely," which is displayed on a billboard on the cover of her book. Rankine doesn't simply broadcast, "I am lonely." She shifts the responsibility for action to the viewer of the billboard. Throughout the book, Rankine challenges readers to move through the world differently, to take action. The last image in the book is a picture of a billboard that reads "HERE." "Hence the poem is that--Here. I am here," she says in response to Paul Celan's idea that a poem is no different than a handshake. The action of the poem is reciprocal, unlike the usual action that moves in one direction from the billboard or the TV or the poem to the viewer. I look at the billboard. I watch the news. I am an observer. But Rankine says, "Here," with the knowledge that "a hand must extend and a hand must receive." We do not, and we cannot, act alone. She says that loneliness is the limit of our ability to act: "It's what we can't do for each other."

I started an e-mail correspondence with the man from the airport in an attempt to understand what had happened there--had he also looked around for people going where he was going? He hadn't. But through our exchange I learned how grateful he was that no one questioned his attendance at the retreat, because although he is half Filipino, he is often perceived as being white. He left the retreat feeling, like me, empowered. He wrote, "no one even asked."

When I read those words I was struck by how often I am asked that question--"What are you?"--in its varying degrees of politeness, and how I try so hard to refuse an answer. How could it ever, for anyone, be an easy answer? It was also true for me that the retreat was a place where "no one even asked." Yet with this sense of belonging came a bigger demand, bigger questions. "What are you?" started to sound more like, "With whom do you create community? Where do you make your belonging?" The question wasn't just about me; belonging meant that I wasn't the only one. Belonging meant that it was no one's place to stand back and observe. We were all responsible for the charge; I was responsible for an answer.

Published in the Fall/Winter 2006 issue of Oregon Humanities.

© 2006 Oregon Council for the Humanities