Sexual Desire and Cultural Memory in Three Ethnic Poets

In introducing On a Bed of Rice: An Asian American Erotic Feast, Russell Leong declares, "In America, sex and race were my siblings--as close as sister and brother--full of love and hate, familiar and forbidden at the same time." His claim rings true in numerous works, such as the landmark Asian American poetry anthologies The Big Aiiieeeee! and The Open Boat and Vietnamese and Vietnamese American writings in a recent issue of Manoa. With racial identity and sexuality thoroughly intertwined, analyses establishing equilibria between eros and cultural power dynamics, such as Ann Stoler's "Educating Desire in Colonial Southeast Asia: Foucault, Freud and Imperial Sexualities," convincingly posit sexual desire as "a test of the way we know the interior Other and know our true selves" (29). Until recently, critics have been occupied with unraveling portrayals of Asian Americans--emasculated men as meek intellectuals or sinister villains, and women objectified as "plum blossoms" or "dragon ladies"--and with scrutinizing the gaze that Rachel C. Lee says is "not just male, but imperial" (90). Energy spent addressing liminal figures--such as Lee does with "entertainment workers, beauty queens, bomba stars, prostitutes, and mistresses" in Jessica Hagedom's novel Dogeaters--shortchanges eroticism in ethnic American literature in a broader sense. We ought to eschew condescension towards common experiences, as found in Timothy Yu's reduction of David Mura's visit to Japan to a "return to his 'lost' cultural identity through consumption of a commodified Asianness" (446). Although Yu pigeonholes Westernized poetry as essentially sexist, in that "the coherence of the self is grounded in an erotic body that is emphatically male; the female body is frequently fragmented and figured" (447), it is precisely with a poet's awareness of the "fluidity, proteanness, and insecurity" of self (Xu 267) as a consequence of transplantation into an alien culture, or of contact with a colonizing power, that we ought to begin. That "disequilibrium," in which the speaker "consciously calls his own existence into question" and which many critics believe forms a basis of the lyric poem, is that which Georges Bataille equates with eroticism itself (31). In seeking, on these grounds, to broaden examination of the relationship between sexuality and cultural memory and identity, I have selected lyric poems by three male ethnic American poets of varied experience: Derek Walcott, Arthur Sze, and Li-Young Lee. (1) If, in my readings of these poems, there appear parallels with Alan Roland's question--"How universal is the psychoanalytical self?." and his advocacy of a comparative psychoanalysis decontextualized of the Western culture of individualism (xii, 18), then it is with the qualification that establishing psychological portraits of ethnic Americans requires a sensitive application of both Western and "comparative" modes. If Peter Sacks's Freudian analysis of the elegiac mode, in which the mourner-poet transfers affection for the lost loved one to a suitable replacement-object, applies to endangered cultural memory, then the threatening of a coherent self by external forces effects a rise in cathectic energy, (2) which seems to be universal, taking care to identify the forms that energy takes and the psychic processes it empowers and impoverishes. One defense mechanism to consider is nostalgic myth-making: "As a mediator, nostalgic myth maintains the power relations between hegemonic identities and others. It doesn't actually represent men's sense of loss so much as erode it" (Rutherford 127). Just as the mourner's transference of affection can never be wholly successful, so nostalgia for lost cultural identity and coherent selfhood after the traumas of immigration and resettling, and indeed living in America, can never fully reconstitute the "original" self. Twenty-two years after St. Lucian poet Derek Walcott began his dual residency in Trinidad and the US, he was offered the MacArthur "Genius" Award and professorships at Boston University and Harvard, validation of his status as a major writer. …