Authentic Fake

The title of Monica Youn’s newest collection, From From (Graywolf Press, 2023), immediately calls to mind Gertrude Stein’s famous “there there.” Both phrases employ an emphatic excess, a doubling, a repetition to articulate an uncertain, unsettling absence. “There is no there there,” Stein writes in Everybody’s Autobiography (1937) upon visiting Oakland and discovering her childhood home no longer stands. “But where are you from from?” a persistent interlocutor might ask, when an initial question about origins meets an unexpected or unwanted response. “You can’t possibly be from here, no matter what you say.” [1]

Why is that? The reasoning almost always has to do with racialization: “You don’t look like you belong.” The exterior not only indicates but also dictates the interior. Perceived difference must be accounted for and processed through an audit of origins. Appearance is what speaks to authenticity, and therefore the authenticity of otherness needs to be performed, given testimony, even embraced, such that the interlocutor’s own authenticity—authenticity in being from here—can be comfortably and implicitly affirmed. “[A]s if / this whiteness had been your original condition / as if / it hadn’t been what was piped into you, what seeped into each vacant cell, each airhole, each pore,” Youn writes in her previous collection, Blackacre (2016). (Notably, the term blackacre is a placeholder name, analogous to "John Doe," that legal scholars use for fictious plots of land.)

This may not have been Stein’s intention, but “there there” encapsulates the paradox that the racialized, hyphenated, enjambed American is thrown into when confronted by the demand of “from from”: the desire to claim one’s origin as both “there and there,” alongside the feeling, possibly of fear, that any response to the demand will mean they lay claim to “no there there” at all. In an extraordinary meditation on the photographer and activist Corky Lee published in n+1, Ken Chen recalls Lee once telling him, “I’m Asian American. … So I’m a 100 percent authentic fake.” I’ve carried around these words ever since I read them. They are facetious, but they have an edge that cuts true. That status of being an “authentic fake” might be why when I see two ostensibly identical words together, such as “from from” or “there there,” I regard their adjacency as not a doubling down on sameness but as an assertion of irresolution.

And the corresponding understanding of identity—as not a fixed, originary state but as a constant process of reconciling contradictions—might be why I’m not the only reader to connect the two phrases. As I was writing this introduction, Sawako Nakayasu tweeted, “I have a pairing for you: @MonicaYoun's newest, From From, and @thommyorange's There There. Syntax, too, has and holds race. (Ask June Jordan!)” Syntax holds race, and poetic syntax—particularly in the hands of writers such as Youn, Stein, and indeed Nakayasu—can also hold ambivalence.

***

Youn’s From From is filled with pairings, best exemplified by seven poems spread throughout the collection, all bearing variations of the title “Study of Two Figures.” Drawing mostly from mythology and occasionally history, these pairings include Echo and Narcissus, the comic strip duo Ignatz and Krazy Kat (recalling Youn’s 2010 book Ignatz), and Dr. Seuss and his imaginary daughter Chrysanthemum-Pearl. What connects the couples in these poems remains inconstant, unpredictable, and often uncertain. Youn is a master of the poetic conceit, convincingly bringing and holding two figures together while simultaneously dissecting any preconceived ideas of how they must be related. Through these pairings, she also invites readers to consider how they define and differentiate between broader concepts such as myth and history and West and East. “Asia Minor,” a section of the book populated with Greek mythological figures, raises a question: couldn’t the pillars of European culture also be considered Asian? Doesn’t this show how fluid, relative, and illusory such “historical” distinctions really are?

The collection, as a whole, questions who gets (or is made) to represent what. Consequently, I found myself interrogating, poem-by-poem, how authentic any representation of any scale can be. Isn’t the relationship between signifier and signified, vehicle and tenor, always a bit imprecise, a bit unsettled? And perhaps this deeper insight into the ambivalences inherent in any process of association, superimposition, and identification is what poetry in particular can offer to the discourse on race rather than nicely packaged commodifications of identity. The labor of poetry should not be to cover up but to draw deliberate attention to both the power and the pitfalls of the figurative.

At the core of From From is the study of two figures that any racialized, othered subject has to inhabit: how they are seen and how they see themselves. The two are deeply entangled and far from simple to parse. This is Youn’s variation on Du Bois’s double consciousness. In the collection’s opening poem, “Study of Two Figures (Pasiphaë / Sado),” Youn pairs the fictional queen of Crete, who is cursed by Poseidon to fall in love with a bull and who becomes mother to Minotaur, with the actual Joseon Dynasty prince who was sentenced to death by his father King Yeongjo:

… both figures are considered Asian—one from Colchis, one from Korea.
 
To mention the Asianness of the figures creates a “racial marker” in the poem.
 
This means that the poem can no longer pass as a White poem …

But that Asianness, which at first seems to clearly and conveniently determine what this comparison and this poem are about, is then revealed as only one of several “wooden,” “camouflaged,” but constructed containers put around the figures. What actually connects Pasiphaë and Sado is that they “are figures of excessive desire, requiring containment,” and the containers simply “are ingenious solutions to seemingly intractable problems.” In other words, there’s not an inherent similarity or resemblance between the two figures; rather, someone (the king, the god, the figures themselves, the poet) determined both of them were problems and needed to be contained.

The containers, when literalized as the rice chest that entraps Prince Sado and causes his death or the hollow cow through which Pasiphaë has sex with a bull, function as sadistic theatricalizations of the social construction of race. The “bad news” is that Youn doesn’t offer clear answers for how to break open the containers in her poetry, and she doesn’t strike me as the kind of poet interested in reaching correct or universalized conclusions (“Cancel Dr. Seuss!”). In a 2020 interview with the Big Bend Sentinel, Youn states, “I publish op-eds if I’m just trying to make a political argument.” Her poetic tendency is to complexify rather than clarify, to irresolve rather than resolve. Even the last lines of her poems are shown to be temporary resting places again and again, only to be upturned in a later work. 

“Study of Two Figures (Pasiphaë / Sado)” actually continues in a sequel: “Detail of the Rice Chest.” The first poem ends with “The name of the male figure can be translated as ‘Think of me in sadness.’ // The name of the female figure can be translated as ‘I shine for all of you.’” Even with the disclaimer that they are translations (of names, not actual speech), the quotations give the sense that readers finally get to hear some version of the two figures’ voices. Expression escapes the confines of the container. Yet “Detail of the Rice Chest” upends this false optimism, revealing, “After the son’s death, a name is forced into his mouth. // … The son never called himself Sado.” Youn then adds, “There was never a chink in the rice chest.”

This is devastating, but even this is not the last line. These two poems on Sado, like many of the poems in From From, leave readers feeling thrilled by the poet’s restlessly associative intellect and dismayed by the unwieldy tangles that result. Youn doesn’t manufacture the tangles; she assiduously pursues how tightly they are knotted through all cultural exchange. For example, she frequently references classic children’s books (she mentions a young son in her poems), and Dr. Seuss, lately reevaluated for his anti-Asian (particularly anti-Japanese) depictions, is obvious fodder. More surprising is how Youn weaves in writers who don’t explicitly address race in their work, such as Shel Silverstein and Eric Carle. Frankly, I won’t be able to regard The Very Hungry Caterpillar and its celebratory transformation through consumption without some suspicion now.

The actual last line of “Detail of the Rice Chest,” and the whole collection, is a stunning proclamation: “I am the chink in the box.” A whole essay might be written about this line, but just one of the interesting things it does is reveal that Youn also doesn’t refrain from putting herself and her own work up for scrutiny. After all, how can anyone claim to be from here (in this case, the US but anywhere really), to belong to this place, and to write about it without seeing themselves as both affected by and implicated in the various forms of racial violence happening within it?

***

From From often reads as an exercise in self-reckoning. Here, many critics would probably point to the prose sequence “In the Passive Voice,” a Rankine-like, essayistic montage of being an Asian American female subject, reacting to the wave of anti-Asian violence during the Covid-19 pandemic and the 2021 Atlanta massage parlor shootings. However, the easily readable, journal-like style of the writing seems to be a red herring. I wouldn’t claim this as the most personal or sincere part of the book, where the true self-reckoning happens, because the speaker reads much more like a character or a performance than the I of other poems. Perhaps she’s meant to be the poet's doppelgänger, the other half of an uneasy pairing of two figures. She is the obviously privileged, well-educated (and grammar-correcting) Asian American woman living in Brooklyn, who orders hot pink cans of pepper spray over Amazon, checks her smartphone every day to make sure she walks her 10,000 steps, and drinks a complimentary glass of prosecco after being verbally accosted by a disturbed person in front of a restaurant. Despite sharing the container of Asianness, the difference in socioeconomic vulnerability between the speaker and the victims of anti-Asian violence couldn’t be clearer.

Youn is too deliberate and self-aware a writer to include such class-signaling details for no other reason than this being what really happened to her. “In the Passive Voice” is clearly more than an account of racial discrimination and victimhood; it is about capital, mobility, parenting, fetishization, the long history of a group of people defined primarily for how they buffer one group from another, the precarious solidarity that arises from identification through fear, and how all of these (improbably or not) come to be defined through quantification and consumption. In his n+1 essay, Chen observes that “only a tiny fraction of the incidences Stop AAPI Hate documented involved physical conflict … many complained less about any direct encounters with violent crime than about an unease related to the presence of the ‘homeless’” (emphasis mine), but nonetheless, “Asian Americans could now be seen as victims within a liberal milieu that bestows racial recognition in return for trauma. There came a new ontology of dread, anxiety and attackability.”

Because I was lucky to read both texts around the same time, Chen’s essay now seems to me an essential companion to Youn’s sequence. Through it, I came to see that instead of Youn saying, “Look what I’ve been through,” she poses an uncomfortable question: “Look at this woman, not Jane Doe but Jane Choe—with all that she has now, why does she still feel so afraid?” Youn makes Asian American unease, tethered to both race and class, the subject and the speaker of “In the Passive Voice,” thereby offering a textual space of analysis for the “new ontology” Chen describes.

The moments of self-reckoning that ring more genuine to me are when Youn revisits and recontextualizes her own poetics, showing how even the earlier poems that didn’t seem to be about race were nonetheless shaped by race. As mentioned earlier, Ignatz returns in this collection through “Study of Two Figures (Ignatz / Krazy)”; the implicit study of two figures that emerges here is the Ignatz of Ignatz, unconditionally and obsessively loved, and the Ignatz of From From, almost dispassionately dissected into the elements of his visual composition:

The lines of the figure separate the blankness inside the ovals from the blankness outside the ovals.
 
We are told to read the figure as white.
 
In order to read the figure as white we must read the blank background as white.
 
We have often been told that blankness means whiteness.
 
But this does not help us understand what it is that the figure fears. [2]

Formally this poem also can be seen as a telescopic, revisionist detail study of another work, akin to “Detail of the Rice Chest.” But does Youn bring readers closer to or further from understanding who or what Ignatz really is? Maybe the point is that there is no knowable, authentic center, “no there there.” Nonetheless, it's still worthwhile to examine the periphery of affects (whether romantic adoration or racial abjection) and regard them  not as separate trajectories a subject can choose between—“I’m going to write about race” vs. “I’m not going to write about race”—but as being deeply entangled and consequential to each other.

In the section titled “Deracinations,” Youn describes a scene I believe must also be the setting for “Greenacre,” from Blackacre, a lake by Youn’s childhood home, in which she observes

Two pale figures in the lake,
                                            half-
submerged, viewed
                            at an oblique angle.

These two figures are clearly in the middle of something covert and sexual. The girl is a skinny jock, and the boy is characterized by his juvenile racism—he fronts a band called White Minority and is casually cruel to their Black bus driver. Both have names without obvious “racial markers” (Ann Towson, John Hollis) and are presumably white. Still, these details strike me as more incidental than central to Youn’s concerns. Ultimately, she doesn’t spell out what exactly happens to or between the two figures, but she evokes a sense of loss: “the voids they once inhabited can’t be lifted.”

In “Deracinations,” Youn describes what happens in the lake more directly: “A tragic accident,” according to the school principal’s morning announcement. Some blame the girl for having “‘issues,’ / with clear indicators of ‘ideation,’” despite the fact both were drunk, underaged, playing “truth // and dare.” Further, Youn reveals how it came to be that “I was there that night! I was there!”—that as cringeworthy as the name White Minority night be, she too has a crush on one of the bandmates, Trey Carsons, and under the pretense of finding her dog trespasses on his property, knowing he is hosting a party. In this light, “Deracinations” demonstrates how racial and gendered dynamics are foundational to a poem such as “Greenacre,” whether or not this is evident in its content. Youn reveals herself as not having been immune to the seductions of whiteness, power, and entitled bravado, but then again, how many teenagers are? More troubling and more remarkable, Youn shows how her trespass to these seductions is partly what provided the perspective from which a poem such as “Greenacre” was written.

***

“Deracinations” is a portrait of the artist as a young Asian American woman, and Youn interrogates the ambiguous and often contradictory attitudes about authorship’s relationship to authenticity that she’s been pressured to internalize in her development as a poet. Is authenticity something an author actually can represent or convey through writing, or is it an artifice produced primarily for the satisfaction of the audience, therefore authentic only to authority’s desire? For example, Youn describes how her college creative writing instructor tells her, “Write what you know” while simultaneously assigning her to read Seamus Heaney. I recognize this conundrum. The point is not that Seamus Heaney isn’t a great writer (he is); it’s not that he was a white, Irish man. The point is that if Seamus Heaney is what I’m instructed to read, Seamus Heaney is also what I know. But that’s not what I’m being told to write about nor how I can write it. As Youn’s associative thinking demonstrates, knowledge is expansive and multidimensional; it doesn’t fit inside one container. But what is the knowledge that the white American gaze will recognize that I have? And what investments, what commitments, are behind how it determines what knowledge is worthwhile and what is not? That directive, “Write what you know,” can be another way of demanding, “But where are you from from?”

Simultaneously, in college, in a postcolonialism course,

she was taught to distrust
the commodification industry,
 
attempts to package Asianness
for Western consumption.
 
As an artist of color, always ask
yourself: Who is my audience?
 
the prof cautioned. Is this authentic
interiority? Am I self-othering?

Like the advice of the creative writing instructor, this seems like a damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t scenario for the young Asian American woman trying to develop her poetic voice. What, in the end, does authentic interiority really mean? When has she ever not been “self-othering?” Or “other-selfing?” As the scholar and cultural critic Anne Cheng (whom Youn references in “In the Passive Voice”) writes in Ornamentalism (2018),

What makes the yellow woman the exception in the larger category of WOC is precisely the precariousness of her injury, a fact at once taken for granted and questionable. This figure is so suffused with representation that she is invisible, so encrusted by aesthetic expectations that she need not be present to generate affect, and so well known that she has vanished from the zone of contact.

Cheng goes on to describe "the yellow woman as hybrid: present/absent, organic/synthetic, a figure of civilizational value and a disposable object of decadence"—which recalls the motif of ambivalent pairings that runs through Youn’s collection. Cheng’s account might sound bleak, but it doesn’t have to be. What she describes is not what Asian American women are but what they have been imagined to be from a Western—frankly, dominantly American—perspective.

Another, more expansive world is possible. It has long been given that the cultural products of the US have spread to all corners of the globe. That also means they are now being interpreted, appropriated, and detached from national commitments in ways that might not have been foreseeable through an American lens. This is where the first part of the postcolonialism professor’s question is crucial: “Who is your audience?” The answer might not necessarily be what the professor or the poet expects. To return to the final poem in From From, “Detail of the Rice Chest,” Youn writes,

There is a “you” in this poem.
 
You are a member of the English-speaking audience.
 
I let you see into the box, into what is private, into what is foreign, into what is inscrutable, into what has been buried.

The poet also describes herself as “a member of the English-speaking audience,” but still she knows that the US is known as miguk or “beautiful country” in Korean and meiguo in Chinese and that the name Sado “has meaning for Korean-speaking audiences.” Similarly, couldn't there also be a Korean-speaking audience that stands in for the you in this and other poems—an audience that speaks Korean—or any other language—that nonetheless reads English-language poetry, an audience that holds a different kind of gaze than the white, American, English-speaking one? For this audience, mentioning the Asianness of Sado might not create a “racial marker,” and further, members might never have considered that a poem should “pass as a White poem” to begin with.

To be “a member of the English-speaking audience” no longer means that one belongs to or is from a particular nation. English is by far the most commonly used language in the world, a result of British colonial campaigns and, more consequentially, the neo-colonial campaign the US has waged over the last century. However, today, three-quarters of the English speakers in the world are non-native (second-, third-, fourth language) speakers, many of whom don’t even reside in traditionally Anglophone regions. The language is taking on new shape and new life far from its formerly Anglo-American center. As linguist David Crystal pointed out more than a decade ago in the article “Two Thousand Million?” (2008): “The center of gravity of the English language has moved from the native to the non-native speaker. ... And as the non-native group is the primary force fostering the emergence of ‘new Englishes,’ there are going to be implications for the future character of the language.”

A recognition of this global sociolinguistic shift reinforces the idea that a study of racial politics in the US must be, in fact, a study of two figures: the US as nation and the US as Empire. [3] Here and there. One of the most heartening lines of discourse to come out of #StopAAPIHate is a growing acknowledgement that the position of Asians in the US—particularly Asian American women, in light of the Atlanta shootings—is part and parcel of the position of the US in Asia. Filmmaker Gina Kim’s recent VR projects, Bloodless (2017) and Tearless (2021), are extraordinary and unsettling, not only for drawing attention to how millions of Korean women have been conscripted to work in US military “camptowns” as prostitutes but also because of how they turn a Korean gaze back onto US viewers. Don Mee Choi’s work, such as Hardly War (2016) and DMZ Colony (2020), as well as Seo-Young Jennie Chu’s recently published poem “I, Discomfort Woman: A Fugue in F Minor,” also point Anglophone poetry’s lens toward scrutinizing the US presence on the Korean peninsula and the consequences this has had even for those living on US soil.

Youn’s various repetitions of “a member of the English-speaking audience” in “Detail of the Rice Chest” suggest she might already be problematizing or ironizing such categorizations and their conventional connotations and, therefore, the assumptions around whom the audience for these poems should or could be. Still, I wonder if this is the space through which the project of revisiting, recontextualizing, and self-reckoning on display in From From could continue to Youn’s next collection. After all, a collection that troubles the notion of contained origins for the writer might also hold open the idea that there’s no from from for poetry’s audience.