Part of what I call this journey that somebody like Miłosz
made, and in a way, Eavan Boland made,
and people like VS Naipaul or Salman Rushdie,
Chinua Achebe made, is the scholarship boy or girl.
They're the one who was bright and chosen from the village
or from the town or from the school in the country
to go to the capital of the world
and to be educated and be educated
by the colonial rulers or the colonial masters
or be educated in Paris at the center of the universe,
and then to make sense of that whole experience of migration
of differences and culture, differences in language.
And that forms a sort of tradition
which contextualizes a lot of what
I see as the great writers of the second half
of the 20th century.
Now, to go from the sort of sublime to the very mundane,
I will talk about my own journey.
You know, I'm a third generation Japanese-American.
I grew up in a white suburb, mainly Jewish suburb.
When I was in high school if a white friend said to me,
"I think of you, David, just like a white person."
I would go, "That's what I want to be.
I want to be a white person."
If somebody would say to me, "You're a Japanese-American."
I said, "no, I'm not.
I'm American.
I'm just an individual."
I went to English graduate school,
and I was really told either explicitly or implicitly there
to call myself a Japanese-American writer,
an Asian-American writer, a writer of color,
was to relegate myself to the literary ghetto,
was to get into literature by sort of back door
affirmative action.
So I said to myself, I don't want to do that.
I want to be judged as an individual.
I was like Amy Tan is now.
I'm just a writer.
I'm not a Chinese-American writer.
But at a certain point in my 20s, I fell into depression.
I got kicked out of graduate school,
and I realized that something was wrong.
And there were many different things wrong with me
at that time, but one of the things I see now
was that I had no language to express who I was.
When the writers that I identified with
were people like Robert Lowell, John Berryman, Randall Jarrell,
Ivy League educated, mainly male, white poets.
And yet when I looked at my poems and what was my poems
I was writing about, I wrote some sort
of bad surrealistic poems, like everybody was writing then,
but then the most interesting poems
were about my Japanese-American background.
I went on, and at a certain point
I was reading Frantz Fanon, "Black Skin, White Masks,"
and Fanon talks about how the Black school
child in the French West Indies colonial education system
reads about our ancestors the Gauls, the French, and reads
about how the great white hunters went into Africa
to civilize the savages.
And Fanon says what is that Black school child learning?
He or she is learning self alienation, self-hatred,
and that identification with their colonial ruler,
and I read that going, oh, that's what I've been doing.
Now the other sort of non-political thing
about that was Frantz also says that the Black man who
constantly sleeps with white women
believes that somehow sleeping with white women
will relieve his feelings of inferiority.
I was like, wow, that's what I've been doing.
And in certain places, the different themes of my poetry
were sort of born right then.
I went on, and I went to Japan, which
I had a whole epiphany about rethinking my own background.
I began reading Black writers and finding language for race
that I found nowhere in my graduate school training.
So I was very educated.
I'd gone through four years of the English major, five
years of English graduate school,
but I really hadn't read very many Black writers at all.
In fact, I'd read a handful of poems by Amiri Baraka,
and that was it.
And I was finding in these Black writers,
like Aimé Césaire, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison,
Alice Walker, a language to talk about my own experience
that I couldn't find anywhere in the traditional Anglo-American
canon.
So I went to graduate school, and at MFA graduate school--
because after I got kicked out of English graduate school
I started writing, and then I went to the MFA graduate
school.
There's some interesting things that happened there.
I was talking to a Black writer and this Black student writer
won a NEA grant, when a lot of the faculty didn't.
And one of the white faculty said
to a friend, a white friend of mine,
us white guys didn't have a chance this year.
There were a lot of minority judges on the panel.
And I mean, OK.
That teacher is never going to say that to me.
All right.
Now this Black student who won an NEA,
he was told by one of his teachers:
literature which drops the -g from an -ing word doesn't last.
When he got up to give his lecture on the Black aesthetic,
one of his professors said in the back of the room, that's
not aesthetics.
That's paranoia.
The other thing that happened to me there was this Black student
gave his graduation reading, and the room was just rocking.
And there were certain poems that he had told me
he wrote for the page, certain poems
that he'd written to be orally transmitted.
And the mixture of that just was a really terrific reading.
The next night a well-known established poet
came in, read what I call the short little series of poems
about being depressed.
And the energy in the audience was just dead.
All right?
So I sat there after that, and I thought, now why
is it that I think that this famous, white writer is
more literary than the poems of my Black friend?
Why do I think that?
When in actuality my Black, poet friend
was doing things with the language
that I didn't know how to do.
Whereas I could write, I think, a passable imitation
of what the white poet was doing.
And then I had to ask myself, why
is it that given the reaction of the audience to the two
different poets, somehow the white poet is
the famous prize-winning poet?
And I just began to think, well, what's going on here?
I don't want to get in make this whole complete talk about race,
but let's suffice it to say that in the discovery
of my own identity I have learned
that my education, the culture taught me nothing about what
it's like to grow up Black in this country,
and that I had not done an education of myself
to understand African-American poetry.
When I read TS Eliot first as an undergraduate,
it felt like gobbledygook to me.
So what did I do?
I run back, and I read all of Eliot.
I went back and read his criticism.
I went back and read the writers that he references to
in his criticism.
I went back and read all the things in the footnotes
to The Waste Land.
By the end of that, the poem was transparent to me,
and I understood why it was a great poem.
But I realized I hadn't done that
with African-American literature.
I hadn't gone back and looked into tradition.
I didn't know the basis of the oral tradition.
I did not understand the history or the context
or the thought of which that poetry came out of.
But I felt qualified to judge it.
Now what happened is I began to think very differently
about literature, and then a few years after that,
I was teaching a course in third world postcolonial literature.
And this is literature in English,
so it was like VS Naipaul, Derek Walcott, Jamaica Kincaid,
Salman Rushdie, Ama [? Ata ?] Aidoo, Bessie Head,
Chinua Achebe, and J.M. Coetzee, Nadine Gordimer,
and then we also read like Sade and Fanon and all that sort
of postcolonial stuff.
At the end of the course I realized that something
about how we define tradition because I realized
that if I had put Toni Morrison or Leslie Marmon Silko
into that group of writers, they would fit in.
But if I put John Updike or John Ashbery in that group,
they would look like they come from another planet.
So I sat there and thought, well,
what if we're talking about universal standards?
Whose universe are we talking about?
Whose world?
And there were themes and ways of writing
about the self in the work which made those words cohere
in a way that made sense to me as well as
a different view about literature, a different view
about tradition.
There were less boundaries, we say between politics
and literature.
There was a sense that they were taught,
that history and literature was taught,
that you had to take in the issues and the context
of colonialism and race.
One of the ways in which I contextualize that comes out
of this statement by James Baldwin from "The Devil Finds
Work."
And I think this defines why the issues of identity
seem to me very important to my own work
and to a lot of writers like myself.
And part of what Baldwin is saying in this quotation
is that if you live in a village or somebody strange comes
into your village, you suddenly understand
that there's somebody else outside your own set of values,
your own way of looking at the world,
and your awareness of that person not only is
an awareness of the stranger but he says it causes you to look
at yourself differently because you understand
there's another way of looking at yourself.
There's another way of looking at the world.
The question of identity is a question involving the most
profound panic--
a terror as primary as the nightmare of the mortal fall.
This question can scarcely be said
to exist among the wretched who know merely
that they are wretched and who bear it day by day.
It is a mistake to suppose that the wretched do not
know that they are wretched.
Nor does this question exist among the splendid
who know merely that they are splendid
and who flaunt it day by day.
It is a mistake to suppose that the splendid have
any intention of surrendering their splendor,
and identity is questioned only when it is menaced,
as when the mighty begins to fall
or when the wretched begin to rise
or when the stranger enters the gates never thereafter
to be a stranger.
The stranger's presence making you
the stranger, less to the stranger than to yourself.
Identity would seem to be the garment with which one covers
the nakedness of the self, in which case
it is best that the garment be loose a little,
like the robes of the desert through which robes one's
nakedness can always be felt and, sometimes, discerned.
This trust in one's nakedness is all that gives one the power
to change one's robes.
Now, this notion of changing identity
when you meet strangers is really
something which we are going through in our culture
more and more, obviously.
I have this poem, which I'll read tonight about how
my kids go to a school.
Their grade school has 35 first languages.
The Minneapolis School System, everybody
thinks it looks like Lake Wobegon,
like a bunch of Scandinavian Lutherans,
but actually the Minneapolis school system
is 80% students of color, 150 first languages.
It's an entirely different world.
It's not the world that I grew up in.
And so when strangers are meeting strangers,
we're all constantly shifting.
And we have to reconfigure, and we understand our identity.
We understand and look at ourselves
in the light of a larger sense of culture, a sense of history.
Now, I want to invoke here a great [INAUDIBLE] father, TS
Eliot.
TS Eliot said two things.
One, he said about tradition, he said, the tradition,
the canon is not unchanging.
It is constantly changing, and he
says, you bring new writers in at the end of tradition,
it alters your sense of the tradition.
This is what Eliot himself did.
I mean, he came in.
He elevated the metaphysicals and the Elizabethans.
He downgraded the romantics because that was his lineage,
and in a sense, he redefined the tradition.
Well, if you put Toni Morrison or VS Naipaul
or Maxine Hong Kingston at the end of 20th century literature,
then your sense of the Anglo-American tradition
changes.
Certain things look differently.
You know, Toni Morrison talks about this
in "Playing In The Dark" about how once race, for instance,
becomes a central American theme, as opposed
to something that's peripheral, certain works become
more central.
Benito Cereno becomes more interesting.
The Pequot looks like a multicultural group,
which it is.
But somebody like Fitzgerald looks like, well, he sort
of missed the boat, didn't he?
Whereas Faulkner becomes I think more central
because he realizes that there were
two primal scenes at the center of the founding of the country,
which was the relation to the Native Americans
and African-American slaves.
The second thing Elliot said is what writers want is wit,
and he said by wit, we don't simply mean great erudition.
He says wit is a sense that people at different times
and in different places have lived and thought differently,
which is simply an argument for a multicultural society,
for multicultural writing.
Not for a monoculture.
And if you look back to what The Waste Land is,
The Waste Land is in a certain way,
it's one of the first performance
poems in the 20th century.
You listen to Elliot read it, that's what it is.
If you recontextualize work differently,
if you define the tradition differently,
then different things happen about the way
you judge literature.
A few years ago, there was a whole controversy where
Harold Bloom wrote about the introduction to The Best
American Poetry, and in the year that Adrienne Rich chose,
he chose none of the poems from Adrienne Rich's year.
And his idea was that these are my criteria
and these poems are just don't cut it.
Now he's entitled to set up his aesthetic criteria that way,
but it doesn't mean it's the only game in town.
It doesn't mean that you can--
for instance, I mean I think Bloom judges poetry mainly
from an Anglo-American tradition,
and it's a specific type of Anglo American tradition.
Or like Helen Vendler.
When Helen Vendler talks about formal verse,
she talks about her verse.
But if you talk about formal verse
and you go you talk about say, public poetry,
and you take Dante, Villon, Blake, Kipling, and Brecht,
and Langston Hughes, you get a very different definition
of what formal poetry is.