To put Rodriguez’s rhetorical strategies in perspective, we might compare Hunger of Memory to another text that portrays the inevitability of Americanization, John Okada’s novel No-No Boy (1957). The novel’s protagonist, Ichiro, has suffered the humiliation of being interned in a camp with other Japanese Americans and decides, when he is later drafted, not to serve in the American army.19 Ichiro has chosen to side with his non-assimilationist mother, and he goes to prison for it. Returning home to Seattle after the war, Ichiro thinks to himself what he is unable to say to his mother, that there was a time when “we were Japanese with Japanese feelings and Japanese pride and Japanese thoughts because it was all right then to be Japanese and feel and think all the things that Japanese do even if we lived in America.” But then
there came a time when I was only half Japanese because one is not born in America and raised in America and taught in America and one does not speak and swear and drink and smoke and play and fight and see and hear in America among Americans in American streets and houses without becoming American and loving it. But I did not love enough, for you were still half my mother and I was thereby still half Japanese and when the war came and they told me to fight for America, I was not strong enough to fight you and I was not strong enough to fight the bitterness which made the half of me which was you bigger than the half of me which was America and really the whole of me that I could not see or feel.20
This passage, taken from a long interior monologue in the middle of the novel’s first chapter, embodies the novel’s recognition of the extent to which Japanese Americans suffer from the idea of the “dual personality,” the idea that the “Asian” and the “American” are incompatible selves at war with one another within the Asian American individual. Trapped within a logic of either/or, Okada’s protagonist believes that he must choose either to be Japanese or to be American. What No-No Boy explores is the deep regret that Ichiro feels after his release, the sense that he has made a mistake, that he has chosen wrongly. And he comes to believe that he has chosen foolishly because what appeared to be a choice was, in fact, never really a choice. No-No Boy portrays resistance to assimilation as futile, but it differs from Hunger of Memory because it openly explores the pain of cultural hybridity, which it can only understand as a state of violence. No-No Boy anticipates a narrative strategy that has proven to be central to the project of producing emergent literature in late-twentieth-century America.
This strategy is to understand hybridity as a crucial fact about identity and to depict the ontology of hybridity as an ontology of violence. Writers as disparate as N. Scott Momaday, Leslie Marmon Silko, Oscar Zeta Acosta, Jessica Hagedorn, Maxine Hong Kingston, and Paul Monette depict characters who have internalized the dominant culture’s understanding of hybridity as a state of violence and self-division. For example, the mixed-blood war veteran, Abel, in Momaday’s House Made of Dawn (1968) experiences his mixed blood as a clash between contradictory frames of reference, a clash that fractures his consciousness, leading him to treat wartime combat as if it were ritual, and ritual as if it were actual combat. The vicious schoolyard beating of a “meek, nervous kid” by a group of “Irish toughs” is an unforgettable incident that occurs early in Monette’s memoir Becoming a Man; later, when threatened by a “football jock” two years older than he, Monette describes himself as “a prisoner who spills all the secrets as soon as he sees the torture room, before the first whip is cracked.” Being in the closet is for Monette an experience of pain: “When you finally come out, there’s a pain that stops, and you know it will never hurt like that again, no matter how much you lose or how bad you die.” Worst of all, he finds that being in the closet has made him internalize the hatred directed toward him: “it makes me sick to hate the way my enemies hate.”21
“Decolonization,” wrote the seminal postcolonial critic Frantz Fanon, “is always a violent phenomenon.” Gay and lesbian texts share with texts of ethnic emergence a preoccupation with the violence of living on the margins of U.S. culture. In fact, many gay and lesbian activists believe that gay studies, queer theory, and the gay rights movement should pattern themselves on “the ethnic model” in order to gain political power. The problem with this strategy, as Dana Takagi points out in her contribution to the anthology Asian American Sexualities: Dimensions of the Gay & Lesbian Experience (1996), is “the relative invisibility of sexual identity compared with racial identity. While both can be said to be socially constructed, the former are performed, acted out, and produced often in individual routines, whereas the latter tends to be more obviously ‘written’ on the body and negotiated by political groups.” This caveat—about the extent to which identities like “Asian American” or “gay and lesbian” can be considered performative—is an important one. But it applies to bodies and not texts, to authors rather than their work. For all texts are “performed, acted out, and produced … in individual routines”: all of them represent a decision either to “pass” as mainstream or to present themselves as “emergent.” In this sense, both ethnic and gay writers share the dilemma that addles Kingston’s poet-protagonist at the end of the first chapter of Tripmaster Monkey: “Does he announce now that the author is—Chinese? Or, rather, Chinese-American? And be forced into autobiographical confession. Stop the music—I have to butt in and introduce myself and my race.” Whether the question is race, ethnicity, or sexuality—and we could perhaps argue for the inclusion of gender and class as well—the dilemma is that of the marginalized author who would be emergent.22
Kingston’s novel suggests that the dilemma of whether or not to introduce one’s race was not something that Herman Melville faced: “‘Call me Ishmael.’ See? You pictured a white guy, didn’t you?” Some queer theorists might beg to differ, however, arguing that texts like “Benito Cereno” (1855) and “Billy Budd” (1924) bear the signs of struggle evident when a gay writer chooses to pass for straight: one of the major subjects in Melville studies during the 1990s has been the question of whether the author was, in fact, either gay or bisexual. Melville, it seems, may have been closer to the margins of U.S. culture than the canonical tradition would have us believe.23
For gay and lesbian writers, being emergent entails both establishing the literary right to explore the dynamics of gay life—in particular the dynamics of gay eroticism—and “outing” those gay authors who have been assimilated into the mainstream literary canon with no acknowledgment of the impact that their sexualities may have had upon their literary art. Part of the project of American queer theory in the 1980s and 1990s has been to locate the closets within the texts of writers like Melville, Henry James, and Willa Cather, to understand what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick has called “the epistemology of the closet.”24 Judith Fetterley, for example, argues that the power of Cather’s My Ántonia is “connected with its contradictions” and that “these contradictions are intimately connected to Cather’s lesbianism.” Unable to write freely about lesbian desire, Cather finds a “solution to the inherent contradiction between American and lesbian” by conflating the two and portraying the land both as female and as an object of desire: according to Fetterley, “in the land, Cather successfully imagined herself; in the land, she imagined a woman who could be safely eroticized and safely loved.”25 Such rereadings of canonical authors have a double effect: first, they demonstrate the existence of a longstanding tradition of gay and lesbian writing upon which openly gay writers can now draw; second, they demonstrate the extent to which mainstream U.S. culture has been shaped by gay sensibility. It is no accident, such critics argue, that America’s bard, Walt Whitman, was a homosexual: who better to embody the ideology of individualism than a gay man cut off from the rest of his “tribe” (to use Paul Monette’s word)?26
Whether Whitman looms as a force of liberation or constraint depends, however, upon an author’s subject position. To Paul Monette, who uses one of Whitman’s Calamus poems (“I Hear It Was Charged against Me”) as the epigraph for Becoming a Man, he is a forefather to be cherished and emulated. For Maxine Hong Kingston, however, Whitman represents the canonical American tradition—so full of the writings of white men—that places the emergent ethnic writer into an oppositional position. Whitman is a figure with whom to struggle and contend and, if possible, one to appropriate, too.