A CONVERSATION SPARKED BY MELINDA LUISA DE JESUS’ “HAY(NA)KU BRAINWASH”
The conversation unfolded through email with John Bloomberg-Rissman sharing his "Mirror, mirror ..." with Marton Koppány. His email was accompanied by an image of Melinda Luisa de Jesus' sculpture, "hay(na)ku brainwash."
Marton Koppány replied with "Dear John,".
John Bloomberg-Rissman replied with a second email.
***
Mirror, mirror ...
By John Bloomberg-Rissman
OK.
I am walking up to a full-length mirror that’s a foot or so from the wall, set
in a white stand. The mirror has text etched into it. Now I am standing in
front of the mirror. I read the text before I look at my face. I think of being
in a museum. I almost always read the little card with the artist’s name and
date before looking at the artwork. I often wonder whether it might be more
interesting to look at the art first. But in this case what is the art? Anyway,
I read. At the top of the mirror:
Imperialist
washing machine
loaded with Filipinos
set
to “white”
watch us spin
add
extra bleach
cycle now complete
Then there is a blank space, or,
rather, several feet of unetched mirror, which of course is never blank, below
which I read:
400 years in a convent
50 years in Hollywood –
And all I got was this poem
OK. And then there’s me. My face, my
torso. I decide to look at me thru the words and not thru the words. I decide
to be caught in both planes at the same time.
It is difficult standing here.
Something confusing and upsetting is rising to the surface ... I’m standing in front of
a mirror, reading the words, over and over, waiting for what is rising to rise,
hoping it makes it all the way to consciousness. The bubble is still rising ...
It
comes to me in an instant. I am a Jew, that’s what. Weird. Not that I’m a Jew,
but that standing here reminds me of that. Why did standing here remind me I’m
a Jew? Because, despite my skin tone’s Pantone number, the whiteness cycle and
the extra bleach were never even applied to me, not really, not by anyone. We
Jews, at least those of us of whose ancestors moved into Europe, which of
course includes Russia and many other countries which were once part of the
USSR, have spent the past several thousand years surrounded by White people,
yet we have never been considered White by them. The word ghetto was first
applied to the urban neighborhoods in which we Jews were allowed to live. I say
allowed, because when we weren’t allowed to live in ghettos, they killed us.
Our ghettos, I suddenly remember, had locked gates on them ... we were
something separate.
I
suddenly remember that I used to work with a very blond Polish woman named
Kasia. At one point, at work, there was a moment an entire visual with
emotional tone to it hit me. It was of a young Jewish boy, who must have been
in his teens, looking longingly thru a chink in the ghetto wall at the Polish
world passing by, the world he didn’t want to join but didn’t want to be locked
away from. She passed by. That Jewish boy must have been me. She and I, we were
from different worlds.
In
the context of this mirror, she was Whiteness. I was definitely not.
I
think: what about blond Jews? And I recall something my wife has said for
years. “Blond, eh? Someone in that family was raped by a White Christian.”
OK.
I know all that, I’ve known it forever. Why is that upsetting now? What is
upsetting about standing in front of these words and knowing that? Yes. It’s
because people of color see me as White. I can point to countless instances. I
think of my friend Aralis, a black Dominican living in San Diego by way of Boston.
We are chatting about something. Charlottesville? When I tell her I’m neither White
nor a person of color, so while I’m not claiming the latter, please don’t
identify me with the former, she thinks I’m making a joke. I must be joking. Later
she tells me she and her boyfriend laugh about it. I don’t think it’s funny.
It’s not a joke. But since I only see her in the lobby of our building, where
we often sit and talk, and since it’s a rather public place, I just let it go.
Right
now, in front of this mirror I can’t let it go. Right now, I am sure that all
people of color see me as a White person. Somehow this mirror surrounds me with
people of color. I imagine them all seeing me as White. I don’t like it. Event
Why
do I capitalize White? Because I’m not talking about skin tone here. Just ask
one of the xenophobic fascists here in the US or in many European countries
what White is. It’s a Race, quote unquote, not just a skin tone. Actually, you
don’t need to ask them. Just read any history of the Jewish people. And you’ll
see that whatever Whiteness is, we’re not it.
In
the decade before I was born, six million Jews were killed by European White
people. I have never been clear as to whether that number included those killed
by those not allied with the Nazis, such as the Russians. Non-European White
people countries put quotas on us, or enforced existing quotas, when we wanted
to escape the killing, thus consigning thousands of us to death. Why? In order
to preserve “racial purity.” I’m not making this up, it’s documented. One of those
countries was the one in which I’ve lived all my life. It’s the one in which I
confront myself in this mirror. It’s one whose imperialist behavior this mirror
is, at least to some degree, putting into question: The United States.
I
don’t know how or when my family moved to the United States. I think, on my
mother’s side, around 1890 or so. I have no idea on my father’s side, but I
have no reason to suspect it was much after that. I was born in Chicago. When I
was about three years old, I came home from preschool one day singing a little
song. It went
Fucking Jew
Fucking Jew
Fucking Jew
Fucking Jew
And
it could be sung forever, as far as I could tell. I sang it til my mother
stopped me. I had no idea I was a fucking Jew (I was maybe three or four, I
didn’t even know what the words meant). It took some other little kid at school
(and my mom) to tell me.
I
was nine when we moved to California. I was surrounded by gigantic blonds. A
year or two later, I was invited to a party by one of them. I couldn’t go,
because the place where it was being held didn’t admit Jews. It was segregated.
Later,
I had friends at university, White people, some of whom told me, “we’re not
prejudiced, of course, we like you,
but Jews ...” and then they would list a whole lot of very weird things. One I
remember in particular. Jews say “LonnnnGisland” instead of the proper “Long [pause]
Island.” What the fuck? I had other friends who said, “If something happens, we
will hide you.” I clearly was thought of as someone outside the norms of this
place. To co-opt an expression that originated in Ireland, I was more or less beyond
the pale. Which I will leave as a pun.
I
grew up during the 1960s and the Civil Rights and all the more radical
movements that followed, and quickly learned about all the sick bullshit aimed
at people of color (and women, but that’s a subject for another time). I used
to march with people of color, so I knew they saw me as different from them. I
knew that White people saw me as different from them. I fell between the cracks
in a way, not quite trusted by both people of color and Whites. I suspect that what I felt then is what I am feeling
now. I suspect that I’ve felt it ever since that preschool incident. This
mirror brings it to my attention.
Why?
I
let a few minutes pass, and just look and read and think.
Because
of the word Filipinos. It occurs to me that there is an actual place called the
Philippines. There is no actual place called Jewland, despite Israel’s insane
pretensions. I would be an outsider in Israel were I to move there, for
countless reasons, only a few of which I will touch on. And I’m not even
talking about Israel’s policy towards the people whose land they’ve stolen and
continue to steal, which ... it’s hard not to rage about it, but I said I
wouldn’t talk about it here, so let’s pass on.
Israel
is not my homeland. I am not a diasporic Israeli. No one in my family, no
matter how many generations you go back, has ever been anywhere near Israel.
Israel is a very recent invention, a post-World War 2 crusader state. But. One
might ask, knowing where Jews originated as a people, am I splitting hairs? Was
my family once from that part of the world? From Canaan? Wikipedia tries to
call Canaan Israel, but must vacillate, because it’s bullshit and they know it.
But maybe. Maybe I have ancestors from Canaan. Maybe from Egypt. Maybe during
the Babylonian Captivity. Hell, maybe someone from my family was born in one of
Abraham’s servant’s tents (and no, I am not in any way claiming Abraham as
“dad.”)
So I
am a person without a homeland. I would be an outsider anywhere I went. The US
is as close as I get to a homeland, and the US is where I learned the “Fucking
Jew” song. And where I have never been allowed to forget it.
This
is some hell of a mirror. I didn’t have the least idea all this would come up
when I looked into it.
The
point is, I can’t look in this mirror as a White person, I can’t look in it as
an Israeli, I can’t look into it as a person of color (the way I read the poem
at least the artist defines Filipino/as as people of color). I can only look
into it as a Jew, which all of my life experience, all of my family’s, my
wife’s family’s, experience has taught us = None of the Above.
But
I can’t really look at it as a Jew either. Not comfortably. Why not? My relationship to being a Jew is vexed. Not
that I would change a thing about it.
I am
a Jew for several reasons, none of which has to do with religious training – I
have none. I know as much about chakras as about the Sefiroth, for instance. I
know as much about Buddhist meditation posture as I do about davening, more
actually. I only know when the High Holy Days are when someone tells me. Beyond,
“Why is this night different from any other night?” I have no idea how to hold
a Passover dinner. My lack of religious training will never be different. I am
never going to join a religion that celebrates Passover, i.e. the mass murder
of Egyptian children (the 10th plague of Egypt, see Ex. 11:1–12:36
in the Judeo-Christian holy book).
This
has put me into conflict with quite a number of Jews, who have told me, and this
strikes me as being as weird a claim as the Lonnnnnn Gisland thing, that it is
people like me who will literally be the death of Judaism. And they have been
angry when they said that. Anecdote: one of the people who wanted me to be
Jewish-for-real invited me to his son’s ritual circumcision. He put me right up
front. I think he wanted me to feel part of something, in order to attract me
to returning to my roots or whatever. Unfortunately for his well-laid plans, I
felt like an anthropologist.
It
has never been explained to me why I should care about the “death of Judaism.”
I can’t think of a single reason why I should care about the death of any
religion. Life is change.
We
didn't circumcise our son. I make no pact with Abraham’s god.
If I
am a Jew it is for three reasons, really.
First,
because my parents were Jews, and their parents were Jews, etc. Tho for as long
as I can tell, my family has been secularized. Not assimilated, we have long
since learned that assimilation is not really a thing, we’re just secularized. As
far back as I can go, my family has had more faith in quantum physics or art than
in rabbis or the Torah. In other words, all I have is a little bit of Jewish
culture, a few words of Hebrew, a few words of Yiddish, and I’ve eaten in delis
... and yet I’m Jewish.
Second,
because I am not a Christian. It is very clear to me that I am not a Christian.
And in the US, people most people are Christians. This is a Christian country.
It is so obvious to anyone who is not a Christian. I don’t know any other way
to say this, and no offense is intended, but I am so not a Christian. It is a
huge thing to live in the US and not be a Christian. You can be Christian
without being a White person, but you can’t be a White person without being a
Christian ... well, that’s not quite true. Some White people have pre-Christian
Norse-Wagnerian belief systems. They think of themselves as the True Aryans.
Third,
because Hitler. This might sound funny. But during the reign of the Nazis it
wasn’t the Jews who decided who was and was not a Jew, it was the Nazis. And
since there are still Nazis, and others much like them who happen to be very
loud right now, I know beyond a doubt that if they come to power they will be
the ones to decide who’s a Jew and who isn’t, not me. And their choice will
determine whether I live or die.
OK. Given
all that, what does it mean to look at this mirror as a Jew, as my kind of Jew?
The mirror, according to the text, is concerned with imperialist oppression of
the Philippines, and the imperialist (and probably also postcolonial and
diasporic) attempt to culturally whiten them.
But
before I can get to what I see, here’s something else I have to mention. I am
not just looking into the mirror. I am in a room looking into the mirror. I am
at the San Francisco Public Library, taking part in the 15 year
birthday celebration of the poetic form Eileen Tabios invented known as
hay(na)ku. And there are other people in the room. Perhaps the majority are
Filipino/as, tho, as Eileen has emphasized, the form is not just for Filipino/a
people. I can’t help but imagine them seeing a White person standing in front
of a mirror with the word Filipinos on it. I can’t help but imagining them
imagining me as something other than how I am to myself. I don’t take this
personally, I know it happens to a lot of people. Besides, it’s just my
discomfort speaking, projecting ... undoubtedly, the other people in the room
have better things to do than watch me stand here. And yet. As Norman Fischer
puts it in one of his discussions of Zen practice, “Imagination is tricky. It
is wild and does not play by the rules. It is impossible to control and cannot
be second-guessed.” So what I imagine is what I imagine, even while I know it’s
just what I’m imagining. I’m being watched. I’m being judged. Not just by
Filipino/as. By everyone present. But also by Filipino/as.
(John Bloomberg-Rissman talks with Melinda Luisa de Jesus (in light-blue
blouse with her back facing camera at San Francisco Public Library)
So,
given all this, what do I see? So many things. Let’s start with the word at the
top: Imperialist. Does that apply to me? Well, since I am a US citizen, and
since the US had and has an empire, yes, tho the Philippines ceased to be a US colony
before I was born. People don’t forget, and, the way I read this mirror,
neither do they forgive. Besides, the US still has colonies. Take Puerto Rico
for instance. Given the recent hurricane and the lack of an even 10% adequate
US response to the devastation it caused, well, shame is only one of my
emotions. My thinking of myself as an imperialist drifts into thought of
USAmerican history, past and present, which is, among other things, settler
colonialist, genocidal, racist. I know I think about this now in part because I
am surrounded by it, but also in part because, after the election of Trump, I
decided to read seriously about it. I am not very far in my reading. The first
few books were about the Americas before Columbus. Then I moved on to read
about the early phases of settlement, which includes reading about the
destruction of the native populations, the origins of African slavery, the
changes in scale and brutality that the colonization of the Americas led to,
its racialization ... I am not very far yet, I am still in the 16th
century, but much of the future leading directly to Trump and his supporters, all
screaming “Whiteness, Whiteness, we’re under attack!!!” has already been put into
motion. Since I am standing in front of this particular mirror, I recall a
racist incident involving some Filipino/as, which I read about a few months
back (since I am writing and not actually standing in front of a mirror at the moment,
I looked it up):
On June 9 [2018], Facebooker Danika Aquino uploaded a
video showing a racist rant addressed to her Filipino friends. “Look at all the
groceries they’re buying. Steal our food, steal our money, steal our jobs,” an
older American woman says after mocking the Filipinos [She mocks them by starting out speaking in English then
morphing it into a series of noises, akin to the ancient Greek interpretation
of languages they didn’t know sounding like “bar bar bar bar bar bar bar bar”].
A Filipino unseen on the camera defends the group, saying “I’ve got a family to
feed,” but the lady replied: “So what? Go back to your country.” Speaking to
GMA News Online, Danika explained that the Filipino who defended the group was
the husband of her friend and neighbor Jenny. The Filipino couple, together
with their 5-year-old child, were in the grocery store they frequent, when the
incident took place. “It was Jenny who started the video because the lady had
stated when they were in line to check out, ‘oh orientals.' Jenny had said ‘is
she talking about us?’ So the lady had kept blabbing her mouth & that’s
when Jenny started to record.” Danika was not present when it happened but
Jenny gave her permission to upload the video. In her post, Danika narrated the
incident: “Earlier today our close friends went to our local Lucky supermarket
store in Daly City and as they were checking out this old racist disgusting hag
was behind them harassing them and making racist comments towards them. This is
exactly what America has turned into and we need to put a stop to people like
her!” Danika, who is of Hispanic African American descent, describes herself
and Jenny as regulars of the grocery store. “It’s literally around the block
from my house and Jenny’s house too. It’s our neighborhood grocery store ...”
This
brings to mind a few other incidents, one of which involved my Chinese-American
friend Nikki. Nikki was involved in a car accident, which was not her fault,
and when she got out of her car the first thing she heard was from a woman who
came out of her house to see what caused all the noise, who shouted, “Go back
where you came from!” not “are you ok?” And I remember that, one day when I was
walking home from work, a guy, who I think may have been drunk, rode by on a
bike and said, “Go back where you came from.” I guess that’s what they say. All
I could think was, I am guessing he doesn’t mean Chicago.
I
can’t imagine what it’s like to experience that regularly. Nevertheless, as my
daughter would say almost every day when she was in junior high and high
school, about one or another injustice, “It makes me so mad.”
My
grandchildren are all mixed, which in the US means they are people of color. I
wonder what their lives will be like. I can't see anything but trouble. It
makes me so mad.
Anyhow,
I know that, regardless of who I am to me, just like everyone else in the room,
regardless of Pantone number, I am an imperialist.
OK. (I
have to keep reminding myself to breathe.)
On
to the next word. Actually, no, on to the rest of the poem, which is of course
hayna(ku) – the name of the piece has “hay(na)ku” in it – til it hits the blank
portion of the mirror, because I have no way to separate it into bits, it means
as a whole, at least as I read it:
washing machine
loaded with Filipinos
set
to “white”
watch us spin
add
extra bleach
cycle now complete
OK.
I take this to mean that the imperialist cultures that have colonized the
Philippines have intentionally and unintentionally “whitened” the colonized
culture and therefore the colonized people, down to the individual level (it’s
not a very big mirror, it’s a one-person mirror). And that the “whitened”
Filipino/a is supposed to see themselves in this mirror, and perhaps evaluate
how “successful” (in whose terms, I wonder) the “white” setting on the implied
washing machine actually is. Note that I am trying to understand the artwork,
not to project what any actual human being might actually think.
I am
not sure at what point the culture of the Philippines stopped being indigenous
and began to be “whitened” by something other and more malevolent than the
normal cultural exchanges that occur with voyaging, trade, etc. My guess would
be in the 16th century, since Spain colonized the Philippines in
1564 (something I glean from a google search, something I imagine Filipino/as
don’t need to look up) which would mean that there has been no culture there
that has not been to some degree or other whitened for almost 500 years. Which,
I think, I mean imagine, might make a Filipino/a feel confused like I feel
about what it means to be from a particular culture, what belonging means, and
so on.
Thinking
of Spanish exploration and colonization reminds me that the Jews were thrown
out of Spain in 1492, which is why Columbus’s expedition left from Palos. The
other ports were too full of ships filled with Jews heading into yet another
exodus.
I
don’t want to be distracted by that, but I remember the family I met that still
has the key to their house in Spain. And I am saddened and angered yet again by
what Israel is doing to the Palestinians, imprisoning them in the Gaza strip, dispossessing
them settlement by settlement. I know, I said I wouldn’t talk about it. But,
now that Israel has declared itself officially Jewish, and nothing but Jewish,
how can I not?
But
back to the mirror, and the poem etched into it.
I
think there is a kind of irony at work here, in the poem (as well as in the
world), since however whitened the culture, and for however many centuries, the
washing machine doesn’t work on the skin. The white setting and the extra
bleach may have had internal effects, but, if my Pantone number allows me to
pass as white, I can only imagine that any Filipino/a who looks in this mirror
will have to say, “Well, John, my Pantone number does not.”
If
my imagination bears any relationship to reality, the bind the Filipino/a finds
themselves in is different than mine. They are, apparently, whitened yet not
white. As am I. But they can’t pass. I can only imagine what that must be like,
I can’t experience it. It sounds worse than my situation. I mean, we both might
be alienated, but there our experiences diverge. It’s much harder to be a person
of color than not. In the White world, that is.
Wait
a minute. OK. Another thought. Hmmmm. A Filipino/a still living in the
Philippines looking at this mirror might – emphasis on might – see something
very different than a diasporic Filipino/a living, say, in the United States. They
might not find whitened an appropriate metaphor for what has happened to them
in quite the same way as a person of color in the White world might. I dunno. I
wonder if this artwork is intended for those who are indeed diasporic and living
in the United States, or other parts of the White world. All this is very tentative.
OK.
Down to the bottom of the mirror now, where I find
400 years in a convent
50 years in Hollywood –
And all I got was this poem
Since
I am standing here and reading this, and since I want to make sense of the poem
the 400 years in a convent can only (only meaning here “as far as I can tell”)
refer to the influence of the Catholic Church over the psyche of whoever is
speaking in the first person here, whoever’s poem it is.
I am
not sure what the 50 years in Hollywood refers to. So I do what anyone living
in 2018 would do, a person pretending to be speaking but actually writing, I
google it. I find a book called Filipinos
in Hollywood, by Carina Monica Montoya, whom I know nothing about. But
here’s the blurb anyway:
The memoirs of Filipinos in Hollywood span more than 80 years, dating back to
the early 1920s when the first wave of immigrants, who were mostly males,
arrived and settled in Los Angeles. Despite the obstacles and hardships of
discrimination, these early Filipino settlers had high hopes and dreams for the
future. Many sought employment in Hollywood, only to be marginalized into
service-related fields, becoming waiters, busboys, dishwashers, cooks,
houseboys, janitors, and chauffeurs. They worked at popular restaurants, homes
of the rich and famous, movie and television studios, clubs, and diners. For
decades, Filipinos were the least recognized and least documented Asians in
Hollywood. But many emerged from the shadows to become highly recognized
talents, some occupying positions in the entertainment industry that makes
Hollywood what it is today — the world’s capital of entertainment and
glamour.
Leaving aside the bit at the very end, which is tangential
in this context, except in the sense of ongoing USAmerican cultural
imperialism, I google to find out a little about those “who emerged from the
shadows” etc. Who might the author have in mind? The first two hits are
15 Filipino Actors Who Are Making It
in Hollywood | Esquire Ph
https://www.esquiremag.ph/.../15-filipino-actors-who-are-making-it-in-hollywood-a1...
Jul 19, 2017 - Filipinos in
Hollywood rarely go unnoticed. When one of our own makes it
to Tinseltown, Pinoy pride goes haywire—no matter how much ...
to Tinseltown, Pinoy pride goes haywire—no matter how much ...
Wow, 34 talented Filipinos in
Hollywood! | PEP.ph
https://www.pep.ph/lifestyle/photos/9704/wow-34-talented-filipinos-in-hollywood
Oct 13, 2016 - You will be
surprised, ang daming may dugong-Pinoy sa Hollywood!
Google
translates that last phrase as “a lot of Filipinos in Hollywood!”
At
this point think about how different the history of Jews in Hollywood is from
the history of Filipinos in the same place (the book blurb being my only
evidence for the latter). For instance, during most of the 20th
century, the very important European film and culture industries translated
more directly into success in Hollywood for both Jewish immigrants and refugees
that the film industry in the Philippines did (how many English-language
histories of cinema mention Jose Nepumuceno, for instance, compared to the
number that mention the Lumière brothers, or Fritz Lang, of F W Murnau, or Ernst
Lubitsch, Charlie Chaplin, Marlene Dietrich, Alfred Hitchcock, etc?) But. I
don’t think that’s the film industry “back home” the main thing. I think skin color
is. I already understand that the experience of people of color is very
different than the Jewish experience.
In
any case, it occurs to me that there is also another side to the story of “50
years in Hollywood” and that is the way people from the Philippines have been
portrayed on screen. I really don’t know anything about this (which undoubtedly
also differentiates me from many Filipino/as in the room), but I am sure, by
the way all other people of color have been portrayed, there is much to be
unhappy about.
Now
I’m down to the last line, “And all I got was this
poem.” At first I don’t like it. I fight with it. It seems too much like the joke,
“My parents went to <exotic place> and all I got was this lousy t-shirt.”
I think: actually, if your experience is anything like mine, and by that I
don’t mean like a Jewish person’s, I mean if your experience is at all slow and
conscientious, like mine has been, or has tried to be, you (I am talking to
whoever the “I” is) got a lot more than just a poem. Then I think: well, maybe
the real poem is not the words, it’s the combination of the mirror and the
words. I mentioned trying to live on both planes at the same time, and this
thought confirms that approaching the mirror that was wasn’t a bad idea. Then
it occurs to me. The artist knows what they’ve done. Maybe “all I got” is meant
to suggest that this poem-mirror goes as deep as one lets it.
*
The above is not exactly a dream, but
it’s imaginary. It was written before the event. Eileen sent me a jpg of the
mirror, which she said would be at the event, and I went from there. Below is
what actually happened. It doesn’t change anything about my relationship to my
Jewishness, but it does say a little something about my self-consciousness.
*
Then we flew to San Francisco.
The next day I tried to get from 871
Fine Arts, near SFMOMA, to SFPL. Traffic was a mess, because of all the good
people participating in Rise for Climate, a global day of protest against those
in power everywhere, who are essentially ignoring global warming. I was stuck
in the backseat of a ride from Lyft for an hour as the driver went this way and
that.
So I decided to read an oral history
Julian Talamantez Brolaski did. Julian is a trans Native American poet. At the
very beginning they are asked their preferred pronoun. They say, “I’ve often
used male pronouns. I grew up having female pronouns applied to me. Um, for a
long time I tried to use xe as a pronoun, X E, and I kind of invented or, like,
cobbled together a pronoun paradigm based on that, like xe, xir, xemself, you know,
like a lot of people have used xe and hir and things like that, or ze, Z E, but
I liked the X E, I thought it looked cool, and I was studying medieval
literature and I learned that she as a pronoun didn’t really come into major
use until the 1400s, and, you know, really only after the printing press. And
so I realized there were all these, that there was a history in the English
language of pronouns that were ambiguous. Like, in old English there was hïe
and hëo and hïe could mean he or she. So anyway, I tried to use xe and get
people to use it, but it wasn’t fully successful and it seemed like people were
much more comfortable using ‘he,’ um, and so they did. Um, and, so I kind of
gave up on that, though it still is something that I use in writing, and it
seems like as of this moment, in 2017, they as a gender neutral pronoun is
becoming much more normalized and widely used. So they is great. Um, I like,
personally for me, I like ‘it’ as a pronoun. And I don’t know, this might be
controversial, um, because people will say like, oh, it’s degrading or
whatever, but I think that it is beautiful because it’s sort of like a great
leveler. Like, I’m it, the wastebasket is it, the lampshade is it, the animals
are it, all the stones are it, and I — it is what I tend to prefer.” So when we
finally arrived at the library, five minutes before the event was to begin, I
had Julian’s words in my head, and I thought, because I was thinking about that
mirror, too, how anything that a mirror reflects is an it. And every it is a I.
And if that be some kind of immanent pantheism, so be it.
When I got to the room in which the hay(na)ku
birthday party / reading was being held, I found that lots of people were stuck
in traffic, that I had time to meet some people. Some I knew, like Eileen and Aileen
and Jean, but most I didn’t. There were, just as I had thought there would be,
lots of Filipino/as in the room. But there were also black people and White
people and I dunno who all else.
As I wandered the room, I saw the
mirror. I stood in front of it. A few feet away Eileen was chatting with a
woman. When she saw me in front of the mirror, she introduced us. The woman
turned out to be Melinda Luisa de Jesús, the artist. We started chatting. I
told her what I saw (much of the above, in a few sentences). She was very
receptive. When I said I saw a Jew, definitely not a person of color but
definitely not a white person either, she said, I forget the exact words, the
equivalent of “No duh.” Then I asked about the whitening, and heard a bit about
what colonization of a culture does. I said that whitening doesn’t work on the
skin, tho does it?, and again got a “No duh.”
They were such conspiratorial no duhs,
I mean she took for granted that we were “allies” so to speak, that, to quote
José Martí, “Peoples who do not know each other should get
to know each other in a hurry, like those who are about to struggle side by
side,” and that we were getting to know each other a little and that it was
good, that I lost all self-consciousness and
felt like high-fiving her.
Later, Eileen spoke about her
intention for the hay(na)ku, and about the anthology for with this birthday
party was also a book launch, Hay(na)ku
15, which “presents
128 poets and translators from 13 countries: Australia, Canada, England,
Finland, India, Luxembourg, Mexico, New Zealand, Philippines, Poland, Scotland,
Thailand, and United States, and how eight languages are
represented: English, Filipino, Finnish, Hindi, Polish, Portuguese,
Romanian, and Spanish”, and how people traveled from as far away as Colorado to
read at the event, I was moved by how goddam proud and happy she was that her
poetic form spoke to so many people within and
beyond the Filipino/a diaspora.
And I thought of all the protestors
outside, trying to save the whole planet, the whole planet, and everyone on it, colonizers and colonized alike, I
thought of the mirror, and how it was no accident that the poem etched into it
was a hay(na)ku, and that how tho it may have been Fiipino/a-specific it wasn’t
Filipino/a exclusive, and how therein
lay all the difference, and I thought of Julian’s words, and how every last it
is an I, and that my I ... my I was welcome here, and my loss of
self-consciousness was affirmed, affirmed, that no matter how many fascists
came to power they couldn’t kill us all, that there were who knows how many
people in the world who were never ever going to get hung up on Pantone numbers,
or on my Jewishness, or on any of those
kinds of differences, people whom I could get to know and struggle side by side with, when it was my turn to read I
tried to tell everyone that ...
And when Melinda read, saying that
one of her poems was about her discovery of sex via The World Book Encyclopedia, but she wasn’t sure it was appropriate
because there were kids in the room, at which point her own kids started
chanting
read
it
read
it
read
it
read
it
read
it
read
it
read
it
read
it
while pumping their fists, and then
she read it, I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that I was in exactly the right
place, at exactly the right time, and I wanted to high-five her again.
*
Marton Koppány responds:
Dear John,
The next two paragraphs will make my letter rather
disproportionate because I can’t help adding a short note to your comment on
your relationship to practicing Judaism. But before that, I’d like to assure
you that I didn’t feel hurt or "angry" at all. How would I? I did
understand the context of your comment very well. Hope you won’t find my notes
out of place, either! We are just sharing our experiences. Also, I’m not
well-versed in those issues, although I have been interested in religious
literatures (especially in Judaism and Buddhism – I consider them literatures,
no more, no less), and in comparative studies for a long time (at the level of
an ignorant who keeps trying). Also, in my childhood, we observed the major
Jewish holidays but I didn’t get religious education. It was in the state
socialism and my parents (class aliens, by the way, because my father ran his
own small furrier shop) were not keen on it, in any case.
"Briefly, the story relates a dispute between R.
Eliezer (ben Hyrcanus, a tannaic sage of the early second century) and R.
Joshua and other colleagues. R. Eliezer tries to prove that the halakha should
follow his opinion by invoking miracles like the uprooting of a carob tree by
his command. Finally, a heavenly voice declares that the halakha should follow
Eliezer, but R. Joshua responds and says (quoting Deut. 30:12) 'it is not in
heaven!' The opinion of heaven is irrelevant in these matters; the decision is
to be made by the sages." And a little bit later David Kraemer (in: The
Mind of the Talmud) adds that there is a suggestion in the Babilonian Talmud,
"placed in the mouth of the prophet Elijah", "that God’s
response is to laugh."
The story, which is about the importance of interpretation
as I interpret it (therefore not completely unrelated to the mirror-function of
the poem/installation your essay is about), has further interpretations, which
now belong to its studying as well. Religions like Judaism (or Buddhism, your
other reference) with several thousand years of history, have gone through long
periods of change (not unlike works of art that have gotten out of their
original contexts), most of them contain myths and myth-like elements, too and
they have different layers in dialogue or even in quarrel with each other. I
don’t think that they should be taken literally, or that anybody would be able
to follow them word for word. Anyway, we won’t kill the first-borns, and won’t
cut a cat into two. (Ok, I’m done with my argumentation, and it might be rather
poor. I tried to be as brief as possible at least.)
I grew up in a neighborhood where most of the people were
Jewish. They, like my parents, had survived the war, and many of them had come
back from concentration camps. And then, with all their experiences, they were
quite different from each other, of course. Nonetheless, when I walk on the
streets of Budapest, many fellow-citizens can read my face. Replace
"whiteness" with "Hungarianness", and there you are. The
mirror-effect functions in a similar way in California and in Budapest. If you
"belong" to a minority group, one option is to quickly learn to watch
yourself and your ideas from the other side, and then (it is optional again)
from the other side of "this side", wherever the actual position of
"this side" is. Error and self-irony become your friends. (I’ll be
back to it when I relate to de Jesús’ poem/installation.)
I should add that I have many friends in Budapest and it is
a very nice place. But back to the street and how we (or "we") can be
quickly recognized (not as human beings or undecipherable inscriptions). It is
not necessarily alarming in itself. It had to be very alarming in my parents’
youth. (Racial laws from the 30’s, forced labor, and then the cattle trucks.
Hungary was an ally of Nazi Germany, but the slow process started here
earlier.) Those times are closer now to the present than in any other period
since WWII. Hungary is flirting with fascism once again. Its leadership is
proudly "illiberal" and more and more maniacally ethnocentric. There
is an ongoing ideological war against the "migrants" (there are
hardly any refugees in Hungary), and the inner and outer enemy who support
them. The symbolism of the messages is getting more and more transparent. (On
the day I’m writing these lines, the European Parliament is due to vote on the
findings of a several years long infringement procedure against Hungary.) (I
know that what we call Europe is changing too, though...)
Thanks to a photo I found at Eileen’s facebook page, I can imagine the mirror-piece in the exhibition hall. I’ve also found an article from 2002 about the Philippines (its colonization and its present time relationship to the US), and about the Filipinos living and working in the US, with "convent" and "Hollywood" in its title. The overall situation for Filippinos (as for other minority groups) in the US might be worse today than it was in 2002.
I
asked you about it and you explained to me that "the t-shirt line is a
stupid USAmericanism, as I think I said in what I wrote, it began as an airport
gift shop sales gimmick, people on vacation without their children were given
the chance to buy a cheap t- shirt with 'My parents went to Budapest and all I
got was this lousy t-shirt' on it, for airport prices, of course."
I
was moved by that last line at once.
"And
all I got was this poem." Too little for four hundred years, isn’t it? But
what could be more valuable than a momentary insight into all the inherited
discriminations, balanced by the ironic "cheapness" of the t-shirt
context, which makes the piece even more effective, creating a distance/space
for contemplating on it? Because Melinda Luisa de Jesús’ installation dares to
speak "against itself" as well – at least that is what I feel. Whitewashing
has double sense: getting vanished and getting rid of bad conscience. I
interpret the work as a reinforcement and also as a protest. The viewer/reader,
looking into the mirror, and reflected in the mirror, can realize both
perspectives at the very same time.
All the
best,
Márton
Dear Márton,
Thank you for this wonderful letter. I know this response
of mine will drift far from Eileen’s topic, and she may not have any use for
it, publication-wise, but I am glad she – and you, of course – will get to see
it.
Perhaps too blithely, it never occurred to me that you
would be hurt or angry. I hope I didn’t say anything that sounded “contra
Judaism” – whether as religion or culture or literature or ... anything ... I
don’t feel contra Judaism any more than I am contra any other human
institution. As Rabbi Karl put it, “Men make their own history, but they do not
make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances,
but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.
The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of
the living.” I feel that we are all being crushed under that nightmarish
weight. Even those who are frantically trying to support it are being crushed.
That’s just the way it is – for me, at least. There is nothing special about
Judaism here.
I am contra some aspects of Judaism – this is not the
place to get into them – but what am I ever in full agreement with? I don’t
consider those at the heart of Judaism, any more than I consider evangelizing
at the heart of Christianity. I consider the heart of Christianity The Sermon
on the Mount, for what it’s worth, but of course that’s “communism” – which I’m
all for as an ideal (we must keep the c lower case in communism, upper-casing
it is the kiss of death). State Socialism has about as much to do with
communism as Trump and his ilk have to do with ending global warming. And I
realize that that sermon is not the heart for most Christians, the Resurrection
is. I am contra many of Israel’s policies, but I don’t identify Israel as
“Judaism” in any sense whatsoever. And it never occurred to me that you would
be offended by my anger at Israel’s slow genocide of Palestinians.
You write, “Briefly, the story relates a dispute between
R. Eliezer (ben Hyrcanus, a tannaic sage of the early second century) and R.
Joshua and other colleagues.” I love those stories. After all, I am
Jewish. I’m as happy to be Jewish as I would be to be anything else. And it
doesn’t appear that “just plain human” is one of the possibilities, and even if
it were there would have to be no hard line between human and any other
creature of any sort before even that label would suit me. I was just reading
how we’ve come close to decimating – in the literal sense of decimating –
krill, which are an extraordinarily important link in the oceanic food chain.
And my heart hurt. Not just because it’s humans who have done it, tho there’s
that, but for all the wonderful creatures who depend on them. And yes, I know
that many of those creatures are quote unquote treyf. But they aren’t unclean
to me. They are my brothers and sisters. I remember going to a botanical garden
with a friend some years ago. Whenever we walked past a plant, he told me its
Latin name. He saw them as specimens. I didn’t. I saw them, branches twisting,
as embodied prayers: dear sun, may there be a way that there will be nothing
between us. And under the ground, tho I couldn’t see it, I could feel their
roots, seeking and seeking. What doesn’t want, with all its heart, to live?
But back to those stories. They are part of me. I
wouldn’t be who I am without them, any more than I’d be who I am without my LSD
experiences, say, or poetry. I have volumes of Talmud and Midrash and Kabballah
at home, in which I read. And sometimes I add my own two cents. Such as “And
then John piped up to remind the rabbis that God might need some
interpreting, since we must remember that God is very tired, God has not had
one moment of sleep since the moment of creation, God maybe gets a little rest,
but just imagine almost fifteen billion years of insomnia ... and when we
interpret, let’s keep in our hearts all the creatures we live among, for
instance, those plants.”
You write about your family some, and what it’s like for
you to be a Jew in Budapest. I have already written about what it’s like for me
to be a Jew in the US, so there’s no need to go into that, but I would like to
tell you a little about my family, in which, since we’ve been together more
than 45 years, I include my wife’s family. My mother-in-law, who is from
Vienna, was 14 when the Anschluss took place. She still remembers, with a
shudder, going to school the next day. All her friends from the day before were
wearing swastika armbands, and none of them would speak to her. Neither would the
teachers, except for one, who found a moment to take her aside and say, “I am
so sorry, Mary,” something which still brings tears to her eyes. She was able
to get out of Austria, and to the US, but she never lived with her family
again. Her father made it over the Pyrenees, which makes him luckier than
Walter Benjamin. About my own family, which is (was?) German, I know nothing.
Except that once, in 1972, when I was graduating from university and about to
head off for three months of backpacking in Europe, my grandmother told me we
had living relatives who were still (again?) in Germany, but she refused to
talk about them. I don’t know what the story is. I know nothing about my
father’s family, I’m not even sure he knew where they emigrated from. I mention
this because you say “Europe is changing.” I am tempted to substitute the word
“reverting” for “changing.” There is a reason that Nazi symbolism, etc. is
illegal in Germany, and it’s not because antisemitism ever actually
disappeared. But of course Jews are not “why Orbán” or why Europe is reverting.
It’s because of brown-skinned middle-eastern and black-skinned African
immigrants, who are desperately looking for somewhere to live. I think of them
when you say “we (or ‘we’) can be quickly recognized (not as human beings or
undecipherable inscriptions) ...”
But I am too quickly skipping over your statement that
“The story, which is about the importance of interpretation as I interpret it
(therefore not completely unrelated to the mirror-function of the poem/installation
your essay is about) ...” Yes. Wasn’t hermeneutics originally developed as a
science of Biblical interpretation? Aren’t the rabbis among the first-recorded
post-Biblical hermeneuts? Aren’t we, looking into the mirror, much like those
rabbis? And then Rabbi John said, thank you, Rabbi Márton, for your
interpretation of what it might mean to look into the mirror. And then a
miracle took place. There were two rabbis in the same place, and one rabbi was
simply grateful for what the other rabbi said, and there was no argument.
All best wishes,
John
*****
John
Bloomberg-Rissman considers
himself a mashup ethnographer. He has been working as such for the past 15
years or so, on a project called Zeitgeist Spam, the first three parts of which
have been published: No Sounds of My Own Making (Leafe Press,
2007); Flux, Clot & Froth (Meritage Press 2010), In
the House of the Hangman (Laughing/Ouch/Cube/Publications,
2016), and as of this writing he is about two years into the fourth part, With
the Noose Around My Neck. Appreciating his inclusion in a number of
anthologies, including three involving hay(na)ku, he also co-edited Barbaric
Vast & Wild: Poems for the Millennium Volume 5 (Black Widow Press,
2015) with Jerome Rothenberg, and he is currently finishing up editing The
End of the World Project (Moria Books, 2019) with Richard Lopez and T.C.
Marshall.
Márton Koppány (b. 1953) lives in Budapest,
Hungary. He has been interested in (visual) poetry and (language) art since the
late 70’s. Recent books in print: Endgames, Modulations, Addenda,
all by Otoliths, 2008, 2010, 2012; The Reader, Runaway Spoon Press,
2012; The Seer, Redfoxpress, 2017. In anthologies: Anthology
Spidertangle, The Last Vispo, A Global Visuage, The
Dark Would and The New Concrete. Recent shows
include: Text Festival, Bury Art Museum, 2011 and 2014; Asylum, collaborated
with Albert Pellicer, Iklectik Art Lab, London, 2017; Foreigners, Bury, 2017.
https://www.thing.net/~grist/ld/koppany/koppany.htm
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