Transcript 007 – Chatting with Paisley Rekdal

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Paisley Rekdal – Charla Cultural – Transcript

Adriana: Welcome to Charla Cultural, a little chat about culture from Aster(ix) Journal and City of Asylum. I’m Adriana E. Ramírez.

Karla: And I’m Karla Lamb. 

Adriana: Today we’re chatting with Paisley Rekdal. 

Karla: Paisley Rekdal is an American poet who is currently serving as poet Laureate of Utah. She is the author of a book of essays entitled The Night My Mother Met Bruce Lee: Observations On Not Fitting In, the memoir Intimate as well as five books of poetry. For her work she has received numerous fellowships, grants, and awards, including, but not limited to, a Guggenheim fellowship, the Amy Lowell Poetry traveling fellowship, and a Fulbright fellowship among others.

She has been recognized for her poems and essays in The New York Times magazine, American Poetry Review, The Kenyon Review, The New Republic, Tin House, The Best American Poetry series, and on National Public Radio just to name a few. 

Adriana: We’ll just start with an excerpt from West: A Translation, and then Karla and I will chat briefly before we play more from Rekdal’s performance of West at City of Asylum on September 2nd, 2019. 

Then we’ll transition to an interview I just did with Rekdal regarding West, the Ferrante issue of Aster(ix) Journal, and Rekdal’s newest book, Appropriate or Appropriate, depends how you want to say it. Finally, we’ll talk about what we’re reading and some thoughts for the road. Welcome. 

~~~

Karla: We’re limited on time today, so let’s jump right into Rekdal’s performance of West: A Translation, live in Pittsburgh on September 2nd, 2019. 

Paisley Rekdal: Hi, thank you all for coming and thank you for having us. This has been delightful to hear everyone read. My name is Paisley Rekdal. I’m the poet Laureate of Utah and I’m going to present a little bit, just really just a snippet of a project that I created I was commissioned to write a poem for the 150th anniversary or celebration of the transcontinental and I ended up writing a book-length poem and it’s a multimedia thing. 

You’re going to see a little bit of it, I’m going to perform a little bit of it. There’s a couple of things that non-Utahns would need to know. Robert Smithson maybe some of you know, the famous land artist, Robert Smithson. He designed the spiral jetty, one of the greatest land art works in America, in the Great Salt Lake, but he deliberately chose it because of its proximity to Promontory where the two railroads met as a kind of commentary, and Brigham Young was the Mormon that brought to the Mormons, the LDS, into the valley. It was not Joseph Smith, just in case that’s a question for anyone.

[bell rings]

[Man speaking in Diné]

[Man speaking in Cantonese]

[Man speaking in Greek]

[Many voices speaking in Japanese, Italian]

This is the sound of a train.

[Many voices speaking in Spanish, Italian, Cantonese, Diné)

This is the sound

{POEM}

Karla: Well, what an incredible… 

Adriana: I mean, I feel like, okay, so let me give a little bit of a description of what the project is. So Paisley Rekdal was commissioned to write this amazing piece about the Union Pacific Railroad and how it was constructed. And I love that it is a translation because she brings in so much audio from all these different sources and interviews and archival pieces and puts it together to create a narrative of how, you know, our, essentially our continental U.S. was united through this technology, but that it came at a really great human cost.

Karla: And it was a commissioned piece, right? 

Adriana: Yeah, which I think is so cool that people were like, oh, can you do something to celebrate the railroad? And it was like, yes, but not only am I going to celebrate, I’m going to talk about the dark underbelly of it too. 

Karla: Yeah, I remember watching her performance and the visual elements that she incorporated into the performance just highlighted the impact that emotional, like gravitas, you know, from the content of the work. It was so powerful and honestly, like, it just blew my mind and it’s one of those pieces and performances that you just learn so much from. 

Adriana: Yeah, it’s unearthing, it’s unearthing like a secret history 

Karla: And it makes you feel, and then also like question. It propels you to this, like, like you said, like the dark underbelly. For me personally, I was, I just needed to know more immediately. So I love poems that do that. 

Adriana: Well, and it’s not just that, but it also really talks about how we are complicit. 

Karla: Oh, absolutely.

Adriana: The way that you, you can get on a plane, or you can get, you know, on a means of transportation and you don’t stop and think about like what it took to make this happen, you know, from the environmental impact to the human impact. And it just makes you really think about what has been the cost of our technology and of our own comfort. 

Karla: Yeah. I love too how she said it. It affected pretty much every aspect of human life, you know, from Hollywood to farmers and from the food on the table, I don’t know, every aspect you couldn’t get away from it.

Adriana: It’s one of those first steps of globalization, right? Where suddenly we became connected and people that had been living in pocketed communities now, all of a sudden, this concept of a nation and a cultural identity that’s national begins to be formed. Yeah, it’s amazing stuff. So, for those of you interested in the visual, please feel free to go to westtrain.org.

And you can follow along with us as we play some of the audio here and some curated selections from Rekdal’s performance at City of Asylum. Let’s continue the show.

~~~

[Performance by Paisley Rekdal:]

噩耗 / Sorrowful news

sings the telegram, and Lincoln’s body slides
from DC to Springfield, his infant son, Willie, boxed
beside him. Buffalo, Cleveland, Painesville, Ashtabula.
Two coffins, 1700 miles, 14 days on 14 railroads.
One day a great line will unite us, the president
promised. Father and son displayed
capital after capital. Louisville, New Albany,
Baltimore, Chicago. The black trains beach
upon a tide of roses. Can you believe still
in the promise of this union? I saw, General Dodge
wrote, a little negro drop on his knees and offer prayers.
While above the dark news thrums on wires, gone
gone gone gone, across poles tall as the ones
from which the president ordered 38 Sioux be hung.

~~~

有 識: Have Knowledge

• From the immigration questionnaire given to Chinese entering or re-entering the U.S. during the Chinese Exclusion Act
  

Have you ridden in a streetcar?
Can you describe the taste of bread?
Where are the joss houses located in the city?
Do Jackson Street and Dupont run
in a circle or a line, what is the fruit
your mother ate before she bore you,
how many letters a year
do you receive from your father?
Of which material is your ancestral hall
now built? How many water buffalo
does your uncle own?
Do you love him? Do you hate her?
What kind of bird sang
at your parents’ wedding? What are the birth dates
for each of your cousins: did your brother die
from starvation, work, or murder?
Do you know the price of tea here?
Have you ever touched a stranger’s face
as he slept? Did it snow the year
you first wintered in our desert?
How much weight is
a bucket and a hammer? Which store
is opposite your grandmother’s?
Did you sleep with that man
for money? Did you sleep with that man
for love? Name the color and number
of all your mother’s dresses. Now
your village’s rivers.
What diseases of the heart
do you carry? What country do you see
when you think of your children?
Does your sister ever write?
In which direction does her front door face?
How many steps did you take
when you finally left her?
How far did you walk
before you looked back?

來/Journey
– Robert Smithson on AJ Russell’s photograph of the Transcontinental

This excessiveness of men
spilling, crowding
to mark their X of time

and money, I find
lamentable— their little moment
composed of paper

and light: alienated
spike, relic
in the hands of those willing

themselves be relics, too. Nothing
so linear as human
ego and desire, while the past

turns and returns, indifferent, spirals
like these pelicans journeying
over the red

waters of Rozel, streams
of purple; yucca rimed
with pustules of dust.

Each one lifts, rises: finds
what only some part
of its cells remembers, nests

in the wreck
of what we’ve left, this bulk
of ruined train, its wheel wells

turned the rust
of flaking blood. Of course
they trekked the human

bodies out. We care
for our own, we care
nothing for our own,

making our lives material
so as to free us better
to forget. Who remembers

the names behind those grasping
fingers in the photo? Who recalls
the dead the UP ferried

from its ancient
crash? The metals it left
not as memorial to them, but because

it cost less
to leave the evidence
than drag it all back out.

含 愁/ Hold Sorrow

Imagine a farm, a famine, your mother promised
you’ll learn tailoring. Imagine your father pocketing
$600. Now here’s the boat, its black planks wet
with fog. Here is the room holding a bed, no
mirror, your washbasin. You have one window, wired,
to face the street. He will keep his pants on,
his greasy shirt, his shoes. Imagine the quarter
pressed after into your palm. Your street
will be named for presidents you never heard of,
the city’s lights like strings of blood
in rain puddles. Imagine, if you could, you’d carve
your father’s name on a knife tip. At night,
only the train cries. Your door locks from outside.

思 鄉/ Miss Home

I pick up my life and take it
with me and I put it….
Any place…. that is not Dixie,
Langston Hughes

Ways to die: blasting accident, derailment, boiler
crack. Crushed between trains crossing
at night. Electrocution, bad food, heart attack.
You can work yourself to death, a la John,
a la Henry. Or you can stay at home, and die
anyway: fist and noose, club, gun, knife
in the back. Gossip. Sharecropping. Bottle of rum
with gas-soaked rag. What is freedom
but the power to choose
where you won’t die? What is a train
but the self once yoked to terror loosed
into a force that glides
on heat and steam? You’re so far
from Mississippi, the UP boss said
when we hit Rock Springs. Don’t you miss
your home?  Miss home? I told him.
I’m hoping to miss it entirely.

壤 / Soil

Brigham Young to General Dodge, Union Pacific, 1869

The locusts’ hum, at first, was like a line of flame,
then the air burst into reds, silver-edged
and filled with mouths like snapping scissors.
They ate our wheat, blacked out the skies
until the falling bodies settled like a fog
over Great Salt Lake, the carcasses
brined to a black and growing wall. We thought
the soil here was rich. But who knew how rare
rich was, how terribly fragile, and how
temperamental we’d become
trying to sustain these plots too alkaline
to keep a crop alive. Nothing natural but made
in the beauty of this place. To create a home,
we imported trees and water, we slashed
and burned to excavate a state where nothing
lived, nothing ruled us, and yet in all this nothing
we were subject to the rules nothingness demanded
and allowed, which requires every drop
of blood from our bodies, all that we might plant
and tend and love; that demands all
might still be taken from us and fed to the abyss,
not the faith on which I believe each soul
is nourished. Nothing natural here
but need. Our symbol, as you know, is the hive
of bees, and yet in our strength of will, our number
perhaps you might picture us now
as the locust, which arrives in waves to feed
without satiety, which visits more regularly 
than rain and covers the earth not out of hate,
but because they will survive. Dear General,
all this we have endured, and now you think
we should not remind you of the debt we’re owed, we
who lobbied for this rail road, who agreed to unite
this nation with you, and bring the riches of the East
West to tame its wilds? Do you wonder
at our anger and our exigence? General,
we worked your grading to Monument Point — in thousands
drilled and blasted, rent the very foundations
of the earth until these hills swarmed with our fresh
encampments. We are patient, but we aren’t fools.
If we’d been a collection of mere individuals linked
by money, long ago you’d have seen us crushed
by weather, luck, and the Indian; together in faith,
we have brought this place to heel. We can do more.
Even the locusts, which once again have come
to plague us, make little dent in our labors.
Their dark trails that waver in the heat like iron bars
are merely a mirage, our kerchiefs dipped
in camphor smell not like sweat and earth
but sweet water. They do not stifle, nor blind us
to the promise of the money your company
offered, a promise which has gone, now,
too many months unanswered. We are hungry
for an answer, Sir. We wait for your reply.
Each morning, your railroad tunnel shakes
with the reports of our artillery. You can hear them,
if you listen. The mountains reverberate
from base to summit, ringing back our volleys
with thunderous echoes, as if in anger. 

土 / Earth

1862 Railroad Act, Section 2

That the right    

of way through public

lands granted to said

  company for the construction

of railroad and telegraph

      right, power, authority

  hereby given to said      

company to take    

adjacent to the line

   road, earth, stone, timber said

   right of way is granted to the extent        

the United States shall extinguish

all lands falling      

and required for the said        

with the welfare of the said

falling

required for the said

        Indians the said

    grant      

herein made. 

Not ssh, not gone, but changed (gentle music)

Not a body erased or born of grief alone, but praise.
This country made us grow each another soul,
Not one for Earth or heaven only, but nation:
electric dangerous as a third rail.
We, the middle kingdom between white and its opposites,
its thousand shades of fissure,
our existence would compose into a fantasy of whole.
Our bodies built more than a railroad.
On my 1919 map, red, black, and yellow veins
trace rails lengthwise across the States,
the fragile paper splitting at its seams.
Like any machine, we translate
the magnitude of human force to change.
We’re history. Not silent, not invisible,
not a dream. Not oil, they told me.
The first trains ran on steam.

We cannot count all the debt.
This is the sound of a train.
Then he must not ride on the railroad.

[Transition music]

~~~

So, let’s start off. Tell me a little bit about Appropriate and about this project and the reception that it’s gotten. 

Paisley Rekdal: So Appropriate or Appropriate, however you want to say it, it works both ways, it’s a book about cultural appropriation and literature. And I was approached by an editor at Norton a few years ago who had seen a Facebook post that I had written and said, you know, would you be interested in writing about cultural appropriation? Because the post that I had written had been in response to the poem, “How To” by Anders Carlson-Wee, which had caused quite a stir in social media and was picked up by mainstream media, too, which is, you know, when we’re writing in the voices of people, unlike ourselves, do we cross a line? And if so, what is that line? Can we always recognize it? And I had written about what happens if we take away the dialects that’s in “How To,” it’s basically a poem, supposedly in the voice of somebody who’s homeless. 

Right. 

Somebody who may or may not be African-American, someone who may or may not be from Appalachia; identities that Carlson-Wee himself did not possess.

And so a lot of people kind of jumped on the poem. So I, I kind of thought about it. And I looked at the poem and I said, if you take away the dialect what’s left, what are some of the questions that get raised? And also, I, I did take seriously the fact that Carlson-Wee, we not only pulled the poem after getting a very negative reception, but also apologized and people were still jumping on Carlson-Wee.

I said, you know, and if, if someone does offer an apology, what do we think an apology means? What does it mean to be part of a literary community when, you know, we do harm or when we want to make amends, do we accept that? So the editor had reached out to me and said, do you want to write a book about cultural appropriation? And I thought, not at this moment, not in this social media climate, no, that sounds like death. But you know, I’ve been teaching for many, many years, over 20 years now. And this question about what it means to write in the voice of somebody unlike yourself or write even involving characters unlike yourself in your short stories and your novels and your poems, this comes up in every single workshop.

And it felt a little intellectually dishonest to sort of say, I didn’t want to talk about this subject or write about this subject when I’ve been talking and thinking about it for years. And what would it mean to sit down and actually think about this? So that’s what this book is. It’s a series of six epistolary essays written to an imagined student based on conversations I’ve actually had in the classroom.

Adriana: I didn’t know. It was an imagined student. 

Yes. It is an imagined student cause otherwise that’d be a FERPA violation. 

Fair enough. Fair enough. 

Paisley Rekdal: There. Yeah. So, but I wanted in, and it was important to me. Some people have, a lot of people have asked me about that. Why address this book as a series of letters to somebody?

Adriana: And one of the reasons is that it, you know, when we start writing essays, pedagogical kind based essay essays on a topic as thorny, as cultural appropriation, I think it can, it make somebody like myself kind of get a little bit more didactic than I wanted to be. I wanted to be able to backtrack, to change my mind, to qualify, to bring in the personal experiences that I’ve had.

I’m biracial, I’m a writer. I can see it from a variety of sides, 

kind of getting back to the Montaigne notion of the essay, right. To attempt, to try to kind of be working it out. And so you found like the epistolary worked and gave you something to kind of jump off of if you will. 

Yeah. Yeah, no, it really allowed me that kind of freedom to back, like I said, to backtrack, to try, I think that’s a great way of saying it, you know, to, you know, essays are attempts. They’re, they’re, they’re modes of thinking. They’re not necessarily conclusions. And I thought that that was important because I don’t really trust anyone who feels like they have a definitive answer on what cultural appropriation should be or do or what it actually, heh, what harms or what benefits it brings to us as readers and as writers.

I think that it’s possible that cultural appropriation can do, or I should say appropriation in literature can do multiple things at the exact same time and to hold all of those things in our minds as we’re going forward is in some ways the delight, the anxiety of and the challenge of literature.

And I want it to be able to explore all of those avenues. And a letter really allowed me that. I would also say that by imagining a particular student, it actually forced me to imagine what that particular person would need. And so my editor was at first a little dismayed that I was writing it specifically to a young white male, but the reality is if I was writing this letter or these series of letters to a student of color, I might not have the exact same conversation. I might be able to skip over some steps with maybe the flawed assumption that that student would already be on the same page as me around certain issues of history, certain issues.

It’s a really fair point though, because as I was reading, I found like the things I found myself commenting on or quibbling with even were things that were nuanced that we can talk about as two people color. 

Right. I mean, I probably wouldn’t have to explain the long-term effects of colonialism and the long-term effects of Orientalism to somebody who is a student of color. They would have, if they didn’t necessarily know Orientalism, cause they have not necessarily read Edward Said, they would understand that viscerally. And I think I wanted to gesture towards some of that, that visceral knowledge that people of color possess around this very topic while at the same time, giving that kind of history.

And I would also say there are places where I think it’s important for both students of color or readers of color, writers of color, and white writers too, that they will share a space, which is to, to redefine some of the terms, because I do think that this is one thing that all of us do pretty badly, which is that we lump together all of these different types of artistic practices under one heading and, you know, when we think of appropriation as only material and literary cultural appropriation, that’s the very worst form of appropriation, but there’s all sorts of activities of appropriation that we’re engaged in individually every day. And it’s also a sort of fantasy to sort of say only certain people, certain writers are engaged in appropriation and others are somehow released from that.

We are all in some respects encouraged to, and participating in acts of appropriation, but they don’t have the same cultural historical effect. And that’s something to also bring to the fore, which is, you know, when we’ve got writers of color who are writing in the voices of white writers. Yeah, that’s an act of appropriation, but it’s also something that historically doesn’t have the same kind of resonance or valence. And also, it’s a performance that has been drilled into readers of color and writers of color, because that has been for so long, the default position in literature, 

You know, okay Karla is going to laugh as I say this, because I do manage to bring up Eurovision way more than any human being ever should. Okay. But, I was just listening to old Eurovision playlists, as you do, and there was this song from 2018, that was a country song performed by a band from the Netherlands. And I sent it to a friend who’s a Southern, a white southerner who is a very country music person.

I grew up in Texas and I sent them this link, and they were like trying to articulate why they were offended. And they were like, well, how can a Dutch person understand, you’re like, country comes from the South and this moment of Southern, like, resistance and to the North and you know, all of these things. And, and I, I looked at him, you know, and I waited, I looked at him cause we were on FaceTime, but I, I looked at him through the screen and I said, you know, I think you’re talking about appropriation. That I was, I was reading you. And he’s like, well, no, because I’m white, that’s not appropriation and blah, blah, blah.

And I was like, well, you know, I think we need to unpack our terms here. 

[laughing] Yeah, that’s a good point, right. 

And so, and so, but that’s something we don’t think about is like, you know, the way that like white, Southern culture, like somebody from the south might feel like a little prickly about somebody who is Dutch singing a country song.

Paisley Rekdal: Yeah. And, and that’s the funny thing, because you know, my very first reaction to this as you’re telling story is to think about, I’m sure this person must have listened to Beyoncé’s Lemonade, right, there’s a classic, where she goes, and she does a classic, pitch-perfect country song, and people mad. 

People got mad about that though.

Adriana: But what’s interesting about that and to a certain extent, Percival Everett’s short story “Appropriation of Cultures,” which I talk about in Appropriate, also deals with this too, which is that there’s a kind of fantasy that all of us have about our cultures that only, you know, certain bodies, certain historical positions, certain, you know certain gendered positions, and ability positions actually are able to perform these, you know, aspects of culture and that they somehow don’t get shared in ways that we, you know, obviously we can’t control it, and it, and it creates a lot of pain. Right. I think for all of us having seen parts of our cultures taken and performed badly and in certainly with very racist intent. And so of course we get fierce when we see this, but there’s also this thing that happens where, you know, Black and white Southern culture has, you can’t really pull them apart. 

No, no, you can’t, 

Paisley Rekdal: you can’t 

Adriana: And Latino culture in Texas is also intertwined. It’s totally intertwined.

Paisley Rekdal: Exactly, right. Intertwined. Right? So it becomes a fantasy to sort of say only a certain person is going to be able to perform a country Western song, but then also to take that internationally, which is, what happens, you know, if somebody from another culture entirely takes a musical traditional form or something that we isolate in one cultural context and moment with having a particular political meaning and they perform that and that can be a really interesting and rich discussion to have, because sometimes it feels like, well, you’re just taking it because you don’t understand if you’re thinking about other people who are looking at hip hop and saying, well, hip hop actually speaks to, you know, systems of power and they’re there to critique it.

How is it that I can import hip hop traditions to speak truth to power, to the kinds of oppressions that I’m experiencing in my own culture. And that is in fact how hip hop has traveled, you know, has traveled across the world. 

Adriana: I think a wonderful example of this, and I don’t know if you’re familiar with it, but there’s a Puerto Rican writer named Edward Banchs and he wrote this phenomenal book called Heavy Metal Africa, cause he’s, he’s a huge heavy metal guy. And he spent a couple of years living and, I think, I’m going to get the country wrong so I’m gonna say central Africa, and he got really into the heavy metal scene. And so he ends up writing this book that is a tour of the continent and all of the different heavy metal scenes that he encounters there. And it’s also kind of doing what you’re saying and thinking about like, you know, we think of heavy metal as a white genre, right and yet it is about speaking truth to power. And it’s about, you know, in some ways the rage that comes with poverty and disenfranchisement. And so it translated so well into certain subcultures on the African continent.

And I just, it’s so funny how people react to like the concept of it. 

Paisley Rekdal: Yeah. And because it’s weird, it speaks to, I think, you know, and I share this too. I think all of us, we can’t help, but share this desire for kind of authenticity, right. That there’s, there’s a particular cultural expression.

There are particular behaviors or something that only certain people have and form and, and are native or native indigenous to them. Right? Like they, they are authentic to them and that’s what we’re all sort of in pursuit of. But the fact also is, and it’s a really distressing one, you know, we are kind of constantly taking different types of performances and suturing them to our identities. And we are ourselves a kind of conglomeration of these portraits of other people’s ideas of authenticity. 

So, you know, one of the things that I think is so important, and going back to your example is when someone performs back something that we don’t imagine as authentically them, what is it that they’ve identified about the form, the ritual the, you know, the song or whatever, what, what is it that they’ve identified and how have they translated it? And we may still be offended. We may still be maybe even rightfully angry about that, right? Like there’s definitely certain types of performances that like, if I was to observe a Hopi dance, it’s a sacred dance, and then turn it into some sort of, you know, like visual art project or something like that, that’s absolutely a violation.

But other things that are meant to be shared cross-culturally are shared pretty widely, like many music forms that we engage in, then the question becomes, what are we seeing? What are we translating? How are we maybe in our acts of appropriation, maybe not only commenting on the original forms, but turning it into something new that allows us to better express our own authentic individuality.

And that’s where it gets really sticky because of course you are trafficking in somebody else’s ideas of their territory and sometimes their actual communal memory. But those shared forums sometimes lead to greater global connection and a sort of understanding of shared political changes in grievances even.

Adriana: Yeah. I mean, I think it’s, you speak so much to kind of how it’s all a delicate balance and it’s always a delicate dance. I think I actually wrote in the back, I feel a certain pressure to start all my questions with What for and Why?

Paisley Rekdal: Yeah. [laughs] And I think it’s actually quite useful because I mean, you know, it’s exhausting, it’d be much easier to sort of say, okay, when someone does this, we know automatically always, and for sure it’s a racist act of appropriation, right?

Adriana: Right, right. There’s no rubric.

Paisley Rekdal: Yeah. Yeah. There’s, there are some things that are pretty obvious, right. You know, anything that looks like a kind of minstrelsy generally is. But, but there are a lot of different forms of art and literature that we see all the time that we sort of pass on as, as successful. So the question is why? What is it that we’re seeing in them? And so you’re asking Why and What for really does help us because they start to ask more nuanced questions about why it is that certain performances of other people’s stories, songs, identities don’t bother us and some really do. Because that tells us something not only about the fantasies we have about our identities, but it also tells us about the ways in which we understand how race, ability, gender can be translated and refracted in very useful and very powerful ways through literature. 

Adriana: Well, and I also really appreciated that you went through the risks, you know, there are certain risks, risks of erasure and, you know, risks of kind of silencing and risks of stereotyping. You know, I kept thinking back to your discussion of like Lionel Shriver and you know, how she wore a sombrero and I just kept thinking about how like, oh man, the sombrero is complicated image for Mexicans. 

Paisley Rekdal: Yeah. 

Adriana: Because it’s tied to charro culture specifically, right? And so you’re looking at essentially the equivalent of a cowboy hat and yet it has somehow become a symbol for, like, my entire country.

Paisley Rekdal: Yeah, yeah.

Adriana: And usually in like a horrible way. Like usually it’s like the sombrero kind off blocking out your head or it’s comically large and ridiculous looking and evocative of like Speedy Gonzalez and you know, and so you’re, you’re looking at this thing and you’re just like, oh, you know, like one of the most internationally recognizable symbols of being a Mexican is actually not very accurate or in any way a mainstay of Mexican life.

Paisley Rekdal: Yeah. 

Adriana: Yet it is short cultural shorthand in a lot of respects. And so it was like, ugh, that’s so icky the way it kind of erases and flattens. And you talk about this a lot, but I think you do it in a way that isn’t accusatory to “Student X and that isn’t; I didn’t feel defensive for the student.

Paisley Rekdal: Yeah. That’s good. 

Adriana: You were very kind. Did that take a lot of patience? 

Paisley Rekdal: No, because I started out in my depiction, imaginatively to the letter, in the letters, thinking of a lot of the students that I’ve had and most, I mean, 99 point nine-nine-nine of my students they are really well-meaning. They really do want to try to get it right or to approach it with that. No one, no one starts this with, you know, wanting to hurt somebody. And most of them take a lot of kinda difficult conversations and workshop really, really well. And so I, when I went in with that, I thought, okay, well, I’m going to talk to the student with respect because, you know, that’s the way I try to do it in the classroom anyway.

But then also I do believe that a lot of people are just trying to think through these issues carefully and with nuance and very few people in workshop I’ve found, and I’ve been lucky this way, very few people get defensive about this. They usually kind of come in with a lot of humility around this topic.

Maybe that’s the influence of social media, ethnic studies classes that are being taught on campus. People are much more; people are living incredibly diverse lives now. So people are not, as in some ways, segregated from each other. And so they might be seeing a lot more of these conversations happening in their own homes.

Adriana: I blame TikTok. 

Paisley Rekdal: Yeah, TikTok! Yeah. It might just all be TikTok!

Adriana: I wanted to shift gears slightly and think about there’s a lot about voice. And there’s a lot about thinking about the relationship between, you know, speaker and content, right? Going back to like you know, the poem, “How To,” and, you know, the embodied existence of the poet versus, you know, the voice in the poem. And yet recently for Aster(ix), you engaged in the Ferrante Project, which sort of strips to some degree, the notion of background or biography or that embodiment, right? It’s you know, about the freedom of anonymity. 

And yet, so many of the pieces within the Ferrante Project engage with topics of race and topics of culture and topics of power. And so, you know, considering your work in Appropriate Appropriate, you know, how do you kind of negotiate that stripping of identity to some degree in the Ferrante Project in which, you know, you also participated? 

Paisley Rekdal: I think that’s a great question and I hadn’t even thought about that, but that’s true that so many of us, when asked to strip our identities, went back to something that would look like we reify another kind of identity.

And I think when one of the things that really strikes me now, thinking about your question and thinking about what I did, was that when your writerly identity is erased, there’s a certain way in which readerly assumption is also erased. Would they be more likely to listen to something about the experience of being a person of color, a woman of color if they were not presented with a name that specifically said this particular identity, this particular kind of thing. Would they be more or less likely to hear something that that would be; they couldn’t have heard if they knew it was you? And I think, I think that there’s, there’s something about that. But it is interesting that maybe none of us in the end can give up, I mean, obviously when you’re writing, you’re writing about an identity, right? And you know, you’re creating a character whether the character exists or does not exist. And then even in nonfiction when you’re writing, I mean, you’re creating yourself as a character who may or may not totally embody all the things you really are in life.

And the idea of somehow removing yourself from the identities that everyone is already associated with you from other forms of writing or for just being able to Google what you look like, you know, allows you to maybe more carefully inhabit the identity you want to construct on the page. Whether that is more authentic or less authentic, I think the assumption was that maybe you would say something you felt that you were inhibited to say in your actually embodied life. 

I found that that was in a little bit true for me because I found myself wanting to sort of say some things that might be considered politically incorrect about the ways that we’re seeing maybe some aspects of a gendered identity. And, but at the same time, I was like, you know, would I not have said this in another kind of context? And I’m not totally sure. I’m not entirely sure. To be honest I think I would have to for a lot more, I would have to write many, many more pieces to sort of find out what, what would I, what would I get actually from writing in a voice that was supposedly not my own, but was still utterly my own.

Adriana: Have you ever written under a pseudonym? 

Paisley Rekdal: I have yeah, [laughs] I wrote pornography for a period. I wrote a little pornography. So, you know, so I wrote for money. So yeah, 

Adriana: Soft core?? 

Paisley Rekdal: Yeah [laughs] soft pore, it was not, and I’m not saying what the name was either. But yeah, no, I’ve definitely done a little bit of that. I, you know, but the question is, you know, and I’ve even played with the idea of writing a novel now and not a softpore novel, like an actual literary novel, you know, to sit or see that.

I will say this I’ve talked to a friend of mine, who’s a poet. And one thing that we’ve both kind of worried about as we get older and more established as writers, and we get known for having a particular kind of voice, and we also get known for, you know, we just have a kind of respect. 

Well, you’re the, you’re the Poet Laureate. There’s a gravitas that comes with that! You can’t be writing softcore porn as the…

No, no! You cannot do that! But also, are editors less likely to edit you because they’re like, Well, we just want this name or are they less likely to take a really hard look at your writing? I mean, I I’ve seen writers out there who, as they age get a little, like worse over time and I wonder if it’s because editors are too; they just bow down to the name and just sort of accept that. And so there’s a weird practical desire to go in and restart your career so that someone can continue to make you a better writer. Like good editors have to be fearless. They have to be like, I, I’m not afraid. I’m the one maybe more in control of this than you. 

Adriana: I can’t imagine editing somebody like Stephen King, like who’s written books, like, On Writing. 

Paisley Rekdal: Yeah, right! But that’s a thing. But then again, and I’m not talking about Stephen King here, but I don’t know about his later work, but I’m sure that there are other writers where you read some of their later work and you’re like, God, what was the editor? Did the editor just fall asleep? I feel like I’ve had that conversation a lot. And I wonder how much that is a sort of like we’ve got, X and you know, so-and-so’s book here. We can’t possibly. 

No, I agree with that. I mean, without naming names because who wants to be that guy, but there are definitely books where. I mean, I can even say this about, like, Kurt Vonnegut, right?

Adriana: In Kurt Vonnegut’s later work, you can tell that somebody was like, uhh, you’re Kurt Vonnegut, what am I going to say to you? 

Paisley Rekdal: Mailing this in. Yeah yeah. Okay. Yeah. And no one wants to be that person. So there’s a benefit to starting out and there’s a benefit to being the new writer. And part of it is your own imaginative freedom. And another part of it is like, maybe we’ll get more honesty.Adriana: All right. But let me be devil’s advocate here and say that, you know, there’s also on the other side, there are white writers who have adopted the names of people of color in order to lend themselves some authenticity. Right? Yeah. Curious your pseudonym, is it white? Was it a white name that you wrote porn under?

Paisley Rekdal: I’m not going to say. I’m not going to say. I’m just… 

Adriana: I mean, like, was it a racialized name? 

Paisley Rekdal: No, I mean, I tried to strip it so that you wouldn’t know. I mean, you couldn’t even guess what the gender would be. 

Adriana: Oh, so it’s like all the initials. 

Paisley Rekdal: Initials [laughs] yeah. Yeah, no, I know what’s going to happen after this. Like the only thing everyone’s like: “Paisley Rekdal Pornography.” 

Adriana: No! No! There’s only five people that listen to the podcast. Don’t worry.!

Paisley Rekdal: [laughs] And all four of them are… 

Adriana: Like, no! But you know, have you ever wanted to take on a different cultural identity with a different name? Do you think that that’s okay? How does that work out? Do we approach that with the same kind of like… 

Paisley Rekdal: Oh, that’s so funny. I would immediately write under a white male’s name. I would, I would. Well, with a name like Paisley Rekdal, to be honest, like most of my life I’ve just been thinking, God, what would my career be like if I had a name that did not just scream something, either medical or something, you know? Like, it didn’t sound like a rainbow colonoscopy. Right? It’s terrible, terrible names that I have.. 

Adriana: I would have gone with fashion designer, maybe? 

Paisley Rekdal: Yeah. Yeah, no. I mean, when people hear my name at first, they’re like, oh my Lord, you know, how did you, I mean, I could have come in; if my nickname, my middle name was “unicorn” is the only way it could have possibly gotten worse. So I would go for a name that was utterly anodyne, and I probably would have chosen something that would have signaled like a white male name. Yeah. Yeah. 

Adriana: John Smith IV. 

Paisley Rekdal: Yes! Exactly. Yeah. Winslow something or other.

Adriana: Yeah, that’s pretty good. Yeah, I mean, I think that that’s, that’s always one of those things that I think is very difficult because you think of anonymity as freeing, right, the stripping of voice, but then you have the danger of somebody kind of weaponizing it in some things. Right. 

And so, and then conversely identity the same way. And so yeah. What do you make of people that really like change their names to, you know, Chinese-sounding names in order to get, without publicizing who they are you know, or who take on the Native American identity, even though they are white.

Paisley Rekdal: Yeah. Well, I was thinking about this specifically in the context of academia recently, because there’s just been a slew of academics who have come out or have been outed as… 

Adriana: Fake Puerto Ricans. 

Paisley Rekdal: Yes! Yes..Fake Pretindians. Fake Puerto Ricans. You know, fake Cuban, you know, emigres I mean, and it happens; I, I think they were like nine, just this last year alone. And so the question is why. I mean, these are people who are, I mean, all of them are very intelligent. All of them have published multiple books. Some of them are at the pinnacle of their career. There was a New York Times profile of a young, not a young woman, a scholar, Native American scholar who turns out not to have been a Native American at all, but she and her sister are doubling down on this you know, insistence that they are Cherokee.

So the question is, why does this happen? And I think you nailed it before.

Adriana: Why are they always Cherokee. Okay, sorry. 

Paisley Rekdal: Well, and it’s because it’s, it’s the hardest to prove. The Cherokee, the Cherokee nation was one of the more liberal nations as it turns out in terms of enrollment and accepting people. But then also because the Cherokee were so displaced, and so there’s a lot of different people who could claim, you know? Yeah. I grew up on the east coast, but I’m Cherokee like, because I’m in the, you know, Midwest and I’m Cherokee. So there’s, it’s, it’s yeah, there’s a lot of reasons.

Adriana: As a way to gaining some type of authenticity you think? 

Paisley Rekdal: Oh, absolutely. It’s a way of gaining authenticity, it is, as you pointed out, it’s a way of in the marketplace, distinguishing yourself, capitalizing on what they imagine is the marketplace value of not being white. And, you know, we can talk about that as a fantasy, but there’s some, some level of reality to that, especially when we think of academia where academia fetishizes, and for good reason, all right, I mean, I don’t, I’ve been in academia long enough and we’ve had these very uncomfortable conversations in hiring, which is, say you’re hiring an Asian American, you know, literary position and you get four or five great top candidates. And four Asian American and one is white.

Do we not look at the white candidate? You know, at all? Because one of the questions is, do we want the body as well as the scholarship? Because we may say that’s a form of again, fetishization, and a perverse form of affirmative action. But the reality is that students are learning on multiple levels, not just through the lectures that the person is giving, but also through the presence.

It matters. It matters if the person in front of you is also a member of that world they’re teaching you about because suddenly, you know, you’re having a full relationship with that. And so you may think of that in a very cynical way, but it does have power. So when academia says simultaneously, okay, we now need to hire so much more diversity in terms of the scholarship, the literary studies, but then the bodies that represent these, you know, fields of study also matter, you create a perfect storm. You’ve created the perfect conditions for these kinds of frauds to take root. And it’s the same thing in the publishing world where they say we absolutely need more diversity and we need more, you know, people who come authentically from this, these backgrounds.

So of course, we’re going to get people who maybe are white and who, who think this is a great opportunity to get this… 

Adriana: Well, in some ways it’s getting to exploit, right? Like the comfort of whiteness while still getting to check the box for diversity. 

Paisley Rekdal: Yes! Yeah, exactly. 

Adriana: Yeah. And so everyone gets to feel good and nobody questions the authenticity, because if you do, then you kind of have to think about, you know, your own relationship to darkness, which is complicated.

Paisley Rekdal: It is complicated, right? It is extraordinarily complicated, but again, that word authenticity, right? Like that we’re all invested in. We’re all invested in preserving it. Hiring it publicizing it. Marketing it. And authenticity is, as it turns out, it’s one of the easiest things to fake in worlds in which so few representations come through that we can’t really identify what authenticity is or we’re not, whereas we’re hesitant to call it out if you think it was just a good or a bad performance. 

Adriana: Well, and then authenticity itself gets tricky, right? Because what’s authentic: what lives in the cultural imagination of people or what actually happened? Which I think you know, allows us to kind of think about “West Train” a little bit, right?

And as you know, we have this notion of like the railroad as being this amazing American achievement, the transcontinental thing, you know, there’s famous pictures of presidents and top hats, shaking hands and in the cultural imagination, we think of it as a very positive thing. And yet, you know, in looking at your work on the project, it’s a lot more complex and it’s looking at the kind of dark underside of it and the way that we treated people and the way that we categorize people and even though I’m an American immigrant, I think of myself as American, so I’m including myself in this “We” because I think it’s important to kind of consider our own accountability in how we define authenticity and authentic narratives, right?

Paisley Rekdal: Yeah. Yeah. So for West: A Translation, which is this poem I was commissioned to write because Utah State Poet Laureate and it’s the Trans Continental’s 150th completion was coming in 2019 and that was completed in Utah Promontory Summit.

So they wanted a poem to commemorate this. And, you know, when they reached out to me, it was really a, it was really an honor and I was really delighted because, I mean, again, my name does not signal Asian American. My appearance does not necessarily automatically signal that as well. And they have no idea that my, you know, half my family came from the very area where almost all of the Central Pacific Chinese American workforce came from.

So I was really happy to write this poem [laughs] because I was like, I don’t think they know what they’re going to get. And in fact, they did not know what they were going to get, but they were happy with the results. You know, because I wanted to really think of the, that history and it’s all, it’s monumentality. That it’s not simply a poem celebrating and commemorating the completion of the railroad without actually thinking of the tremendous; what the railroad means. What is it done for/to the country and what has it done for all of the nations that are inside this nation. All of the different people who were either displaced by or worked on the railroad and continue to work on the railroad. I mean, the story of the railroad is the story of immigration and assimilation.

It is the story of displacement and genocide. It’s also the story of radical environmental change. It’s the story of the change of time; the very ways in which we re-imagined time and into different time zones. It re-imagines what an American culture can be by trying to unite West and East together so that people can share these different cultural performances, you know, on the coast.

It creates tourism, it changes Hollywood, it changes gender roles. It changes racial roles on the train. The ways in which people who before lived very private lives were suddenly now traveling in very public ways. You know, etiquette guide books were written specifically to figure out how do you travel on trains?

There’s not one single aspect of American culture that was not touched by the train and changed by it. And so to, to create that I had to figure out how to put all that information to one poem and it wasn’t until I was looking at these poems, Chinese poems carved into the walls of Angel Island. What if I just took one of these Chinese poems and character by character turned it into a way of looking at one aspect of the railroad? Usually workers’ history, something around immigration, race, but the environments, war, I mean, it had a big impact on the ways we were thinking about, you know, post-Civil War reconstruction and also just, you know, is the train finally useful for moving munitions across the country?

So if there’s another civil war that starts, we can just immediately go out there. That’s one of Lincoln’s ideas about the train.

Adriana: Well, and not to mention the displaying of Lincoln’s own body, which you write. 

Paisley Rekdal: Yeah. Yeah. And it’s funny because, you know, I was thinking a lot about Chinese death rituals and the display or the removal of bodies, and that happened, you know, they, the Chinese when they died, they often had somebody come, you know, basically dig them up and ship the bones back to China so that they would not be left on these foreign shores.

They would go back home. And it’s the same thing where Lincoln is distant, you know, Lincoln’s young son, Willie is disinterred and Lincoln and Willie travel back on the railroad to be buried in Illinois and the family plot. So there’s just, you know, there’s so many different, weird echoes and reverberations and similarities and wild differences.

So I made it into a digital poem that multimedia digital poem, and there’s archival material you can look at, too, and it’s going to come out as a book with Copper Canyon in about a year or two. So. Yeah. I mean, it’s a monumental thing. I mean, I just put, spent three years reading about it and…

Adriana: Okay! We are almost out of time and I’m so sad because I want to keep talking to you. So I, I guess I wanted to end with sort of one last question, which was thinking about the way that you incorporate archival footage and kind of how that reverberated with a lot of what I was thinking about what you were writing about in Appropriate Appropriate and, and sort of, you know, who owns what image?

And I also want to add a note that one of my favorite things structurally about this is the way that it really felt like, because we were taking individual words and we were sort of actually doing the act of digging in and delving and zooming in, and that felt wonderful. So that note aside, I guess I want to think about the relationship of the two works, given the use of, you know, so many pictures and images and sounds that are archival and not necessarily of your own production.

Paisley Rekdal: Thank you. It’s a great question. I was thinking a lot about towards the end of this at the scholarship of Cristina Rivera Garza, and she has a wonderful essay called “Disappropriation.” And her argument is what happens when I’m going to really bastardize their argument, which is quite complex. But one of the things she says is essentially like when, you know, workers, bodies are owned essentially, or when other cultural productions are owned by corporations, what is an appropriative act by going into archives? Taking these archival materials, but, you know, reinvesting a different kind of ownership and insisting on a communal ownership. And I liked that idea a lot, especially around this. I mean, West is an appropriative project because I actually go into certain oral history archives and go into the oral history archives of African-American porters and I, you know, use their narratives to string together a series of short poems. And I use the narratives of Irish Americans or Irish workers as well. I use those archives and create other poems out of that. And these are deeply appropriative acts and some people might think of them as really kind of politically problematic.

But I was thinking about that, I was thinking, you know, what is the train? The colon…it is a colonial project. Trains are. It was absolutely about trying to insist upon the labor of other people to forge a nation in which everyone could be assimilated into a national project. And there is something really powerful about going back into the archive and finding the voices that specifically were critiquing that very project.

They, these people were not unaware of what was happening to them and why it was happening to them and what was being done, sort of against their interest. And there’s something about making sure that some of these critiques can get shared and held and seen by more and more people. And you know, with Garza’s final argument is like, what happens if books are finally nothing but notes?

And I thought that was a really a beautiful way of saying it, which is that oftentimes we create these imaginative, you know, lit forms of literature, but going back into the archive and, and, and seeing the very factual information that people have gathered have left and stuff like that, like that, maybe that’s your actual book. That’s your actual poem. 

Adriana: Ugh! It gave me chills. The idea of taking ownership of pictures that were taken by institutions. And then just the idea of when you, when you inhabit a body that is usually you know, the subject of the photograph, but not the subject taking the photograph. Right. And, and that, that shift of taking ownership again gives me, I’m still getting chills.

Okay! Well, thank you so much. This was such an amazing conversation and we were so excited to have you, and it’s been such a pleasure. Yeah. Thank you. 

Paisley Rekdal: Well, thank you. I really enjoyed talking about this and I’m always happy to talk about either of these projects so thank you for the invitation. It was terrific.

[Transitional music]

Adriana: So, Karla, I’m going to kick off our talk by asking you a question. How do you feel about cultural appropriation, and have you ever encountered it on a personal level? 

Yeah. Wow. The, the question is so real because I encounter it pretty much every day. On both ends, you know, I really have to ask myself and like, how am I appropriating someone else’s certain aspect of culture, that’s food, music, you know, even, fashion.

Adriana: Have you ever been, have you ever gotten vacation cornrows? 

Karla: No, no, my gosh, no, no, no, no, no. I know better. 

Adriana: I see, see, you’re saying it all like with like ugh, I know better! Hard-making faces because I can see you on Zoom, even though you’re in California. 

Karla: I’m sorry, have you? 

Adriana: Yes! I totally have. And now I’m embarrassed, but I was a child! But like if you’re in the beach in Colombia, right, there’s hundreds of people wandering around saying, trencitas, trencitas, I’ll braid your hair. Like, it’s a super normal thing that people do in Colombia. And so I would come back from vacation in Colombia with, still my little cornrows sometimes, cause I’d wear them for a couple of weeks. And I never thought twice about it until I became an adult and then I had to be like, ohhh snap. You know, but I think the last time I got them, I was probably like 20, you know, it’s just like, Ugh. 

Karla: Well, so I had to take that back, honestly, because, okay. So, I never got like vacation cornrows, but I did once put my hair and little tiny buns everywhere, which I was trying to go for, like a Gwen Stefani look, 

Adriana: Yeah, was about the same, very 90, very 90s, is very nice. 

Karla: But at the same time where was Gwen Stefani getting it from? You know, like, and back then, I didn’t know. And she was wearing a Bindi. I was wearing a Bindi, like, okay. Yeah, totally, totally guilty of appropriating cultures that, you know, honestly, that I admire. I want to respect and honor those cultures. And I will very much, maybe I didn’t know this, you know, in the ’90s, but now. I, I’m fully like, not wearing bindis anymore, even though I, even though I know the meaning, 

Adriana: well, you could wear a bindi and I mean, and I think that’s kind of, that was like, you know, Paisley Rekdal’s point was that you have to do it respectfully and you have to think about what you’re doing, and you know, the two guiding questions are, why am I doing this and what for which are kind of the same. Right? So like why, what, what do you get from it?

And so yeah, I think you can wear a kimono. You just can’t wear a kimono and then do something stereotypically Japanese in it. Right? 

Karla: Yeah. 

Adriana: And again, I’ll tell you a story. It’s a story where I almost got into a fight, which means it’s a good story. No, it’s not. [laughs] The one. I think it was Halloween. Yeah it was Halloween. Some friends of mine got married on Halloween in Seattle, which is why I was in Seattle on a Halloween night. And we were hanging out at a bar in the University of Washington campus area. So it was college students. And I walk into this bar and I’m in like my super-hot leather goth dress. Like I do. I see this girl dressed like a taco and I was like, okay, she loves tacos. That’s fine. And then she stands up and she puts on a sombrero and her glued on mustache and her blanket get and a bottle of tequila. And then I, it dawns on me that she’s not dressed up as a taco. She’s dressed up as a Mexican.

Hmm. Wow. And as a Mexican I have many, many, many feelings about this. And so I may have gone up to her and been like, yo, what are you in costume as? And she was like, I’m a Mexican taco. And I was like, Hmm. Hm. Hmm. And I was like, you know, it’s not cool. I was just trying to stress it. It wasn’t cool. And then her boyfriend came up and he was like, why are you in my girlfriend’s face?

And you know, I’m like 5′ 2″, but I am chubby, so I guess I could be intimidating. And so he starts screaming. Then my husband comes up and he starts screaming. Everyone starts screaming. We leave the bar because we’re like, okay, whatever, like we got to get out of this scene and we’re standing outside with a friend who’s smoking a cigarette and the dude follows us outside the bar.

And he starts screaming at us about how h is not racist. Right. And then there’s this moment his girlfriend is not racist. And how is it possible that we are choosing the worst possible interpretation of her outfit? And I just don’t remember it being like, wow, like you are so mad about even the implication of cultural appropriation.

There’s like no introspection… that didn’t exist, you know? 

Karla: And when someone gets defensive, that’s like number one red flag that they’re utterly guilty and. Ooh. I can only imagine like, I, that scene is so familiar. 

Adriana: What is it about appropriation that upsets people so much when they’re called out on it? I don’t know. It’s like being accused of stealing. Like if someone accuses me of stealing anything, I’d be like, oh snap, did I steal it? Hold on. Let me first confirm that no theft has occurred. 

Karla: [laughing] Yeah. And, and like Paisley talks about authenticity, you know, and it reminds me of Frida Kahlo, for example, you know, she, you could say appropriated perhaps some indigenous wardrobe, you know, like she’s, it’s fully on record that she did that intentionally, but she was definitely honoring her, you know, her heritage in a way, but she also wanted to, like, she knew the power of fashion and dress and in the ’40s to like, be dressing like an indigenous person.

And in Kahlo’s sense, it was really interesting because, you know, she’s half German, her father is German and her last name is German. And so, you know, Frida comes from, you know Fria, Freya, right. 

Isn’t it like Frie-da. Or something.

Yeah, it’s like “Frei-Dah” in like the German mythology. Right. And kind of in that Pantheon and all of that you know, I think, I want to say she’s like the equivalent of Juno or Hara, but I’m not super cool on that type of mythology. So I don’t want to say the wrong thing. But in a way she wanted to link herself to the Mexican imagination and to Mexican culture through her mother who was fully Mexican. And so she, in order to lend herself authenticity as a Mexican artist, who was painting Mexican themes and really taking, sort of establishing a national identity around art, along with Diego Rivera and Siqueiros and some of the other muralists, like she uses native indigenous dress as a way of connecting to culture.

And I think that that’s really fascinating because that’s, you know, appropriation with a political end. 

Oh, absolutely. And it served doubly to cover her her.. 

Her disability would. 

Yeah, exactly. 

That’s a way of putting it. And yet Frida Kahlo herself has become one of the most appropriated.

Oh my God. I could just go off on that. That’s one thing that I’m always so, yeah, I really get like riled up about cause it’s for sale. It’s a commodity in all over Mexico. And like, for, in like the tourist traps, everything Frida. And I totally feel like my culture, somebody that I feel connected to and like my identity has just been exploited.

Well, sure. Anyone with the bushy eyebrow puts a crown of flowers on their head and fills in the gap and all of a sudden, they got a costume, right? 

Yeah. Tell me about it. 

No, but I love Paisley’s book. I love also how it works as appropriate and appropriate and appropriate. Yeah. Yeah. It’s a little bit of a tongue twister, but I love the double meaning, 

Because it makes you think like, what is appropriate and when am I appropriating?

Yeah is it appropriate to appropriate? No. 

Oh, snap. Now you’ve linked them together in one sentence, 

Oh shit, but right. And then I love to, like, Paisley was talking to the fantasy, right. And then also to the performance and on a daily basis, I could, I mean I get up and basically perform, you know, either for myself or for society or for the job or whatever.

And I put on a certain thing, that’s like a blazer and I don’t go to the club with a blazer. You know what I mean? You know, so it’s all performance and I’ve been thinking a lot about that. And even like words I say, and like where those words come from. Yeah. Like I really love slang. But am I going to appropriate it?

Well, there’s an interesting tension there. Right. Which is, you know, can you appropriate white culture, right. And to some degree, like when something becomes the norm or when something could become so dominant, because it’s become a cultural standard across the world internationally. I dunno. I think this needs to be unpacked a little bit more.

Maybe we need to bring in a white person. We’ll break it down!

Yeah, we definitely don’t have time on this episode. 

[laughing] No, we don’t. And with that end, you know, because we are as usual running out of time. 

Yeah. And it’s so complex. It’s so layered. It’s such a sensitive, fine line that a lot of people are gonna be reactive.

Yeah!

I think it’s a conversation we need to have. It’s such an important, you know awareness that more people need to be…

You know, I’m going to say to the listeners, you know, please tweet at us or message us on Instagram. Find us on Facebook, let us know what you’re thinking about this, because there’s so much to unpack. And if you want more on the topic of appropriation, we’d be happy to do another episode, but we’re not sure how much interest there is out there.

So please let us know, get in touch with us. And we would love to hear your thoughts on, you know, on Rekdal’s working on the interview that we did for sure. And to that end, Karla, what are you reading? 

So I just picked up a new novel. Do you ever read too much poetry and then think like, wow, I need to read a novel?

Yes. Although I read something yesterday without giving any names or saying what book of poetry it is that just kind of made me stop and just go, [sighing] ahhh.

I love that. 

So, you know, something breaks through always and forever. Okay. So yeah, we’re all sick of poetry, whatever. Smacking things down with poetry.

What do you, what novel are you reading? 

Oh, so it’s called Sabrina and Corrina by Kali Fajardo-Anstine.

Ohhh, it’s got a sticker on the cover. Was it a National Book Award finalist? 

There was.

Ooh, I do love books with stickers on them. And I don’t just say that because my book has a sticker on it. 

What about you?

I am forshame reading poetry

Oh now. 

Not poetry! No, we’ve been looking at the Ferrante issue of Aster(ix) again. So I’m going to give that a shoutout. And hilariously, I am reading Joy Harjo, so you should know Joy Harjo is when the light of the world was subdued our songs came through, an anthology of native nations poetry, and it is a phenomenal. I’m reading a couple poems a day and it just, it just makes me, I think, center what it is that I take for granted and really try to appreciate.

And that’s something that, you know, a lot of poetry that is rooted in nature, and that is rooted in the physical world really makes me do. 

Wow. Yes, totally. I love that. So, more poetry. 

[Laughing] No! Down with poetry. 

That’s what it’s about. I don’t want to say that’s all. What keeps me inspired and motivated just to tackle every day and everything that we have to confront just as humans on a daily basis and yeah, to return to, you know, I don’t know the inner-workings, or our interior lives just to connect, but anyhow, yeah, this has been an incredible conversation and I learned so much.

Yesss. So for the road, what would we got? 

Well, coming up later this month on June 30th, City of Asylum is partnering with Real Q Pittsburgh, the LGBTQ film festival organization, based in Pittsburgh and on Wednesday, June 30th, we’re screening a French film and I don’t want to butcher the title. 

 Let’s do it together.

No! Don’t make me do it. Ok, “Le Premiere Marche.”

Le Premiere Marche

Ok. Le Premiere Marche. Yeah. You’re so much better at it. Okay. So it’s basically about the pride March in Paris. So 50 years after the Stonewall uprising, the activist paved the way for LGBT struggles in a territory no one has dared think of, raising new issues, such as intersectionality in Paris.

So. Awesome. 

So check it out, go to City of Asylum.org or alphabet city.org. And there you’ll find information on the real Q film festival. This is so exciting. All right. Well thank you for hanging out with us and for talking about what’s appropriate when it comes to appropriation. -dun-dun-dun-dun. All right. Bye everyone.

Adios!

Alexis Jabour: City of Asylum builds a just community by protecting and celebrating creative free expression. Aster(ix) is a transnational, feminist literary arts journal co-founded by Angie Cruz and Adriana E. Ramírez. Committed to social justice and translation, placing women of color at the center of the conversation

Adriana: Charla Cultural is hosted by Karla Lamb and Adriana E. Ramírez. Voice of goddess is Alexis Jabour. Editorial support by Clarissa A. León. Production design and brand management by Little L. Creative. Our theme song is “Colombia Folk” by Luis Alfonso. And thank you as always to our sponsors Aster(ix) Journal and City of Asylum.