Race & Poetry in America

Transcript for Student Voices

Sawako Nakayasu and Jay Gao

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You’re listening to Student Voices, a podcast featuring student-led interviews of Brown University faculty based on the Race & in America panel discussion series, curated by the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America in partnership with the Office of the Provost.

Jay Gao: I'm Jay Gao, an MFA student in the Department of Literary Arts, and I’m speaking with Assistant Professor of Literary Arts Sawako Nakayasu about the recent panel discussion on Race & Poetry in America. Sawako, in the panel you talk about how reading this book, “Thinking Its Presence: Form, Race, and Subjectivity in Contemporary Asian American Poetry” by Dorothy Wang, changed the way you read your own work when it comes to race and experimentalism. What did that book help you realize in your own creative work or practice?

Sawako Nakayasu: Hi Jay, thanks first of all for being in this conversation with me and thanks also for bringing up that book, “Thinking Its Presence,” which I appreciate so much for the way it opens up a much, much deeper conversation about race, and Asian race, in experimental poetics. It's just a conversation I had not previously been a part of, and I had not read some of the writers she talks about in that mode, and so for example, when she talks about Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, you know, I had a relationship with the work but it wasn't a particularly racially nuanced one, and the way that she can articulate a racial subjectivity in a poetics that's, you know, at the level of syntax or structure or just, you know, everything but the very explicit racialized narrative about one's family or displacement or the kinds of poems that people would sort of disparagingly call, like, “identity politics poems.” Dorothy was making space in her book, in her argument, making space for the very, very obvious fact, once you get down to it, that race exists everywhere, in all the structures of thought that we carry as humans and as writers, and so in a way it was kind of shocking to me that I had not thought of my own books, like the the books I'd written before then, as being particularly “Asian” or carrying my own racialized perspective. But it basically helped me change the way I read, not just my own work, but everybody's work, and it's been very meaningful to me.

JG: Yeah, thank you, and you know, that comment about changing the way it affected the structures that we carry with us regarding race, I think it's so interesting from your perspective, and in your work, you know, because you and I, we’ve both spent a lot of time outside of America, you know, we're both in America now, but I'm curious about how you approach race and poetry with regards to ideas surrounding nationality and travel and moving between countries and borders, you know, what ideas surrounding race do we carry with us when we move from the position of being an outsider to an insider. I wonder if you have anything to say about that?

SN: I think there's so much to say about those topics. I’m not quite sure where to begin, but I did spend a fair amount of time in Asia, and one of the important takeaways for me was becoming much more sensitive to the levels of visibility and invisibility; of the way race and power and these national histories really have shaped the current moment, the current whatever is happening, wherever one might be. And so, for example, I was living in Japan, while—no, I was living in China when Obama got elected. But I was living in Japan, you know, when Trump got elected, and I—just having that distance from the US allows you to see the race that's visible in kind of a highlighted contrast to the racial structures that are less visible, and, you know, I would be in Japan, where people would watch the news and go “oh, those Americans, they’re so racist,” but it would feel so ironic to me, thinking and knowing about how much racism existed in Japan, just in much more subtle ways; like, people weren't actively being killed on the streets in Japan for their race the way it happens in the US, but certainly in Japanese history there's a deep, deep history of racism that is, you know, to a large part erased by the government, erased by the unwillingness to teach its citizens its own brutal history. So I, you know, spent a lot of time in Asia actually learning about all the horrifically criminal racist past of Japan, and so holding those things together, while moving in and out of different countries, moving in and out of being among different communities with different sensitivity and ability to read race, became part of how I think about poetry, and the way poetry moves through space, too, and I think I appreciate “Thinking Its Presence” because of the way it talks not just about the poetry—or it talks about the poetry, in an incredible, brilliant, thoughtful way—but it also does that while talking about the communities and relationships of people in the poetic community that we inhabit, and reflects those two things against each other, and it just covers a lot of ground in thinking about race and poetry.

JG: Yeah, and, you know, it gets me to think about, in your example, like, obviously, you know, race is something that affects all of us everywhere, no matter where we are from or where we live, and it makes me wonder how much of that is encoded within systems of language, and especially dominant languages, you know, I'm reminded of something you said in the panel, where you said you want to try and distort language, you want to try and get away, as far as possible, from this idea of legibility and to even stretch away from polite and civil language, which is language that sort of is omnipresent everywhere, you know, I'm curious about your relationship with language and race, when it comes to your work.

SN: Mmhm, thanks for that. I think we were talking earlier about how there's a certain playfulness in my writing, and it's interesting just to sit and reflect on that playfulness because, in a way, it's the ground that gives me space to make some of what I think are my harshest critiques, kind of embedded in that—in a space of play, and I think what I'm wanting to do is to kind of dig up the earth underneath the nice surface but hold it together, so you have this, like, flower garden, and things are nice, people are civil to each other, but not, like-you don't have to dig deep before you see a lot of the problems or the ugliness or the dirt. And I’m sort of interested in kind of playing with that very weird cognitive dissonance that we always have to carry, as we hold our awarenesses in conjunction with the, um, with the… sorry, I lost my train, it was, my train diverged and I wanted to say something else while I was in the middle of a different sentence.

JG: [laughs]

SN: I was thinking about how—so I'm going to take that other train, I'll try to come back to this original train, but I’m very interested in the fact that—and this is also partly in, like, watching film and American film in Asia, and there's just such a strong sense of good and bad in this country: we're the good guys, they're the bad guys. The fact that superhero movies are like such a big thing is really puzzling and weird, but also not surprising because there's such a strong insistence on being a good person, and this is also why people have such a hard time having their racism pointed out to them, because it's such a heavy word and it feels like oh, you're being called a bad person if you are in any way connected to a racist act or event or something, and it’s that insistence on—and cancel culture has something to do with that, too, like people have to be either good or bad—but in reality, most of us, all of us, are good and bad and just in different degrees, and it forecloses a lot of conversation about what—where the problems really are, and so, you know, it allows people to feel like if they're not doing something that's visibly racist or, like, overtly or noticeably racist, then they're perfectly fine and good, you know, so there's that. And then, when you come to language and poetry and the way that it's able to hold a lot more all at the same time, then I'm able to hold a very playful setting in a poem, and then hold that very ugly, horrible thing that I'm really trying to talk to, like it's, you know, like it's a little dumpling, it's covered in something.

JG: Hmm..

SN: I don't know if that metaphor works, but I do think that poetry is a space that I find useful for thinking about race, and thinking about these cognitive challenges that we kind of all hold.

JG: And then, it makes me think of, you know, this idea of playfulness, with ludic themes, with language, as relating back to something you mentioned in your panel, that ultimately poetry is a sort of training in the imagination, and this imagination, I think, is key to reading your work and reading how race and experimentalism and form plays a part in these imaginative poems of yours… I could talk on about this for the whole morning, but I think we're out of time! Thank you so much, Professor Nakayasu.

SN: Thank you, Jay, it is a pleasure.

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Student Voices is a feature of the Race & in America digital publication series developed by the Brown University Library. Our theme music is “see the unseen” by Butter. Explore the series at digitalpublications.brown.edu