On the other side of the tracks (PoemTalk #44) (original) (raw)
Fred Wah, 'Race, to go'
from left: Lisa Robertson, Jeff Derksen, Bob Perelman, Fred Wah
Lisa Robertson, Jeff Derksen, and Bob Perelman joined Al Filreis to talk about a poem in a sixteen-poem series by Fred Wah going under the title “Discount Me In.” That series and several others were brought together in a book called Is a Door. Our poem, “Race, to go,” is the first — a proem of sorts — in the “Discount Me In” group, and we have occasion during our discussion to talk about the several valences of discounting. I don't count. The census misses me because I fall between the cracks in racial categories. The neo-liberal moment has cheapened me. Both positively and negatively racially charged language around food, freely punned and intensely oral, turns casual by-talk into rebarbative backhand (creating an effect distinctly pleasurable) and brings into the poem the entire story of official Canadian multiculturalism.
Race, to go
What’s yr race
and she said
what’s yr hurry
how ’ bout it cock
asian man
I’m just going for curry.
You ever been to ethni-city?
How ’ bout multi-culti?
You ever lay out skin
for the white gaze?
What are you, banana
or egg? Coconut
maybe?
Something wrong Charlie
Chim-chong-say-wong-leung-chung?
You got a slant to yr marginal eyes?
You want a little rice with that garlic?
Is this too hot for you?
Or slimy or bitter or smelly or tangy or raw or sour
— a little too dirty
on the edge hiding underneath crawling up yr leg stuck
between the fingernails?
Is that a black hair in yr soup?
Well how you wanna handle this?
You wanna maintain a bit of différ-ence?
Keep or mother’s other?
Use the father for the fodder?
What side of John A. Macdonald’s tracks you on anyway?
How fast you think this train is going
to go?
Bob and Al, the Americans here, learned a few lessons about how different from the American melting-pot version of multiculturalism the Canadian approach has been, where there’s “a pseudo-maintenance of a piquant difference” (as Lisa Robertson put it). Our poem pushes piquant playfully yet angrily hard, to the point where sanctioned everyday cultural practices connect to the larger failures of the neoliberal economy.
In Banff, in 2010, Fred Wah took the opportunity to read many of these poems and to discuss them with Charles Bernstein as part of the Close Listening series; this material is all available on Fred Wah’s page at PennSound. Here is a recording of Fred Wah reading “Race, to go.” Here is a related poem, “Count,” and here is “Mr. In-between.”
August 11, 2011
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