Display large image of Figure 1

5 The disruptive potential of monstrosity is implicit in Goto’s invocation of the Cyclops-as-banana. It is also ironic, given the poem’s focus on the eye as a marker of difference, a mark of being a/slant from the norm, of seeing sideways rather than straight (which is both a racial and a queer pun), since ‘Cyclops’ literally means "round eyes" — it comes from the Greek kuklos (circle) plus ops (eye). "Round eyes," in its turn, has come to be slang for whiteness, as in ronald Levaco’s 1995 film, Round Eyes in the Middle Kingdom.7 Goto thus works a parodic reversal of the discourse that names the eye as marker of racial difference: "That which you carry with you at all times and / cannot be removed like a costume or eaten like a five course dinner. / The single fold in the eyelid that isn’t there." in the effort to achieve ‘normalcy,’ the i/eye/ 8[me] of the poem attacks the marks of its own monstrosity: "I try scraping the hue / off my skin / with an exacto knife. / I try sliding a razor blade / to slice folds into my eyelids. / It is painful, and now I am deformed / as well as / coloured." The poem thus works three sites of monstrosity against each other: the "slanted eyes" of the racially marked ‘asian’ body, the "round eyes" of the iconic citizen who has projected his own cyclopean monstrosity onto the racialized ‘other,’ and the "deformed" eyes produced by the slicing of a fold into the eyelid. The latter is a procedure whose racialized assumptions are hidden under the bland surgical name of ‘blepharoplasty’ and under its production as simply another beautifying option offered to a willing public by plastic surgeons everywhere.9 By reconstituting each of these as moments in which a monstrous i/eye is realized, Goto revalues the banana-as-cyclops; with or without surgery, the eye of the banana produces a different monstrosity which offers as-yet-unknown potentials for transformation and community. It is a monstrosity whose link to issues of subjectivity and visibility is exemplified not only by the English language pun "i/eye," but also by the English/Japanese pun "me/ [me]," in which the "self/eye" doublet of the first pun is repeated bilingually in the second.

6 The positive potential of monstrosity recurs throughout Goto’s work, particularly in her second novel, The Kappa Child (2001), and her recent collection of short stories, not coincidentally entitled Hopeful Monsters (2004). In the title story, the protagonist, Hisa, gives birth to a much-wanted (but only partially — and thus not — iconic) baby, only to find the others in the birthing room reluctant to hand the child to her. Hisa’s fear is that the baby’s eyes are "too slanted," either because the baby looks too Japanese or because she has Down Syndrome, whereas the baby has actually been born with what the doctor calls a "caudal appendage" — a tail (146, 148). The doctor reassures Hisa and her husband Bobby that the tail is a minor anomaly that can be easily corrected. However, two things change Hisa’s mind about the necessity that the tail be surgically removed. First, she discovers that she herself had been born with a tail; then she discovers that, despite the doctor’s claim that the appendage is only skin and cartilage, it actually is capable of movement, wrapping itself around Hisa’s wrist while the baby nurses. Hisa’s first thoughts, on learning that she had been born deformed herself (a question of mutation that, in the context, cannot help but raise the spectre of radiation-induced mutations and the after-effects of Hiroshima and Nagasaki) are that she wants her tail back, that she has "been an amputee her whole life, without knowing it," and that she "could never tell Bobby. … Bobby would never understand. Bobby liked Japanese girls. Yukatas and hot springs. Bobby didn’t even like bananas" (160).10

7 When she realizes that she can’t go through with the operation, Hisa’s first instinct is to seek the only allies she can think of, the lesbian couple who were in her parenting classes. Unsurprisingly, Julia reacts badly to being told that she knows "what it’s like not to be normal," but her partner, Maggie, is more sympathetic, agreeing to provide shelter for Hisa and the baby. Hisa sneaks out of the hospital and as she does so, she feels "a weight. A balance. A graceful length that slid through air, weaving a subtle pattern" (168). Creating wholeness and balance through the revaluation of monstrosity and abjection is a recurrent theme in Goto’s work, which resists hegemonic discourses of sexual and bodily shame, racial and cultural ‘difference’ (read: inferiority), and the hierarchies of linguistic competence (English counts, Japanese does not). Moreover, Hisa’s wholeness is specifically located in relation to the politics of gender and sexuality, as Goto’s afterword links the baby’s ‘monstrous’ tail to the treatment of intersex babies.11 The epigraph from Stephen Jay Gould suggests that "radically beneficial adaptive traits" create "hopeful monsters" (135); as the mother of one such hopeful monster, Hisa disrupts the iconicity of white maternity and its stranglehold on the nation’s future, repositioning her own body and her child as producers of an alternative futurity in which monstrosity can be revalued and iconicity refused — just as Hisa in the end refuses the normative orientalizing authority of her white husband, the man who likes "Japanese girls" so long as they’re stereotypically ‘authentic’ and not "bananas" or, by implication, Canadian.

8 Mark Libin argues in his discussion of "The Body Politic," particularly the lines "Let’s stand together, naked, / and see who blushes first," that the body of the narrator … challenges the white reader; the body exists as a corporeal objection to the disembodying stereotypes as well as a taunt against European culture’s fear of the Other’s body. … The narrator in this poem insists that the only strategy to counteract the inevitable status of otherness is to commandeer it, selfconsciously shaping the way difference is articulated, addressed, and displayed. (103) For Libin, this is particularly clear in the way in which the poem, like the scene with Muriel’s boyfriend Hank in Goto’s first novel, A Chorus of Mushrooms (1994), attempts to resist orientalizing discourses of asian sexuality.12 Not only do the white Canadians the narrator encounters insist that, as a poet, she must write haiku, but they also "want to dress [her] up in / ke-mo-nees and garter belts. / They want to hear about / Zen and Buddhism and ritual / Hairy Carrie. / They want to squeal over tiny slices of raw fish / and finish off with exotic Oriental sex / whatever that is." Libin argues that "any connotations of sensuality arising from ‘exotic Oriental sex’ … are drained from the stanza by the narrator, who levels these images by cataloguing them with other disparate perceptions of the Orientalist: sexuality becomes conflated with sushi, Buddhism, and hara-kiri" (101).

9 In one sense then, Goto’s cataloguing of the "disparate perceptions of the Orientalist" (which must surely be read, in some sense, as all Canadians for whom this catalogue invokes exoticism) creates a self-reflexive heterotopian space, not unlike Borges’s infamous "Chinese Encyclopedia" quoted by Foucault in The Order of Things.13 The conflation of logically disparate items that are only rendered syntactically significant through the processes of orientalism reveals the extent to which orientalism relies on rendering ‘the Orient’ not only as a "heterotopia of deviance" related to the psychiatric hospital, the prison, and the cemetery, but also to utopia itself as a place that is at once "absolutely real" and "absolutely unreal" ("Of Other" 24-25).14 Patrick French notes that Foucault’s concept of heterotopia in "Of Other Spaces" resonates with roland Barthes’s "enjoyment of a perverse cataloguing and systematizing of everyday life, a different utopian domesticity which ruins the what goes without saying of the everyday stereotype, and imagines a different life" (295). In this sense, the "perverse cataloguing" of orientalist ‘products’ (they are all, after all, meant to be consumed) in Goto’s "The Body Politic" becomes itself the heterotopian space of the mirror that shows the orientalist the extent to which his taxonomies, like those of Borges’s Chinese encyclopedia, "lead to a kind of thought without space, to words and categories that lack all life and place, but are rooted in a ceremonial space, overburdened with complex figures, with tangled paths, strange places, secret passages, and unexpected communications" (Foucault, Order xix).

10 Thus the psychic space of orientalism as heterotopia is at once utopian (and consoling) in its fantasy of unlimited gustatory, aesthetic, and sexual satisfactions (through the racialized production of exotic food, exotic art, and the exotically gendered body of ‘the Oriental’), while at the same time functioning disturbingly to "desiccate speech, stop words in their tracks, contest the very possibility of grammar at its source [,] … dissolve our myths and sterilize the very lyricism of our sentences" (Order xviii ).15 The orientalizing demand for haiku attempts to destroy "in advance" the possibility of a lyricism beyond the limitations of "ke-mo-nees" and "Hairy Carrie," rendering the poetics of "The Body Politic" polemical from the first instance of its writing. The injunction to write haiku thus functions ironically in opposition to Barthes’s own complex attempt to imagine the East (and Japan, in particular), in Foucault’s terms, as the ‘other space,’ a place free from western society’s doxa.16 Barthes saw the haiku as a "utopic recovery" of the everyday: not "the common, the stereotypical," but "the incidental detail of any day, articulated in its singularity and absolute difference, but not as exception to the rule or the commonplace" (French 296). In writing her own insistence on singularity and difference, Goto creates her own resistant poetics which demands the creation of a space outside orientalizing, racializing, and sexualizing discourses, and thus takes advantage of the aporia between "the exotic charm of another system of thought" and its heterotopian and necessary demonstration of "the limitations of our own" (Foucault, Order xviii, xv). The poet re-appropriates her own hybrid, monstrous, and polemical lyricism though her refusal of culturally ‘appropriate’ bodies, racialized as (inauthentically) ‘Japanese’ and not as (even more inauthentically) ‘Canadian,’ of culturally ‘appropriate’ poetic forms, such as the haiku (and also of only orientally appropriate — since orientalism can scarcely distinguish Japanese from arabic, much less Chinese — forms such as gushi or jintishi 17), and of culturally ‘appropriate’ modes of thought that legislate "the stark impossibility of thinking that" (Order xv).

11 Language mediates what can and cannot be thought. Goto notes in "Translating the Self" that while "the act of translation is imposed upon my very existence" (111), language remains both a necessary barrier and a source of delightful possibilities: "i’m bemused and joyful that there are words and concepts that refuse to translate because they do not exist in the culture/language that seeks to translate it" (interview). Goto’s refusal to translate or even to transliterate some of the Japanese (both romanized and not) in Chorus of Mushrooms has sparked intense interest in academic critics. Mark Libin argues that the reader’s incomprehension frees him to "learn by exploring [his] inability, by suspending [his] limitations and by beginning to understand the Other" ("Lost" 137). In other words, the inability to comprehend forces the reader to confront the experience of incomprehension itself and to refuse his authoritative position as the audience for whom translation must occur, for whom comprehension is a right. Mari Sasano similarly focuses on Goto’s insistence that translation in Canada proceeds from an imbalance of power, but adds that there "is no reason that someone who does not understand Japanese could not do some research and find out what these sections mean, as non-English speaking immigrants have had to do with English" (Sasano). Tseen Khoo moves beyond translation of phrases to analyze the ways in which Goto’s "dismantling of who gets to tell the ‘right’ story also diffuses the burden of truth-telling and the educative potential of ethnic narratives" (108). Finally, Steve McCullough looks at the ways in which both the demand for translation and the refusal to understand fail the very trust the narrator asks for in Chorus of Mushrooms. Such failures are counterposed in the novel by moments of perfect, but inexplicable, communication between Murasaki, who speaks only English, and her obãchan, who refuses to speak anything but Japanese. Goto herself says, "I enact a daily translation of existence, translated again into writing. Culture always included" ("Translating" 113).

12 If the dominant culture demands certainty of comprehension while simultaneously insisting on the ‘cultural authenticity’ of otherness from those who are deemed inauthentically Canadian, Goto’s "The Body Politic" both acknowledges and revalues the aspects of culture that become monstrous — and monstrously desirable, as bell hooks has argued in "Eating the Other" — in the face of such orientalizing discourse. Hara-kiri, Buddhism, sushi, slanted eyes, and Oriental sex are not coeval except in the hierarchy of orientalism. For Goto, sex, food, bodies, and language are inextricably linked through both pleasure and danger — the pleasures of their enactment and the dangers of their appropriation and inevitable (mis)translation. Against this, as McCullough notes, Goto opposes singularity or specificity — the specificity of that within a language that is untranslatable into another, the specificity of particular foods and gustatory pleasures, the specificity of particular bodies and their desires (against the normative insistence on the fixity and absolute meaningfulness of ‘sexual identity’), the specificity of particular stories, told by particular people at particular times and in particular ways.

13 In "The Body Politic" one of the moments of specificity is Goto’s repeated rendering of the kanji [me], which is both the Chinese and Japanese ‘ideogram’ for ‘eye.’ "The Body Politic" is itself an impure, perhaps monstrous, form — a hybrid of English and Japanese, of word and image, of the concrete and the linguistic. Answering the demand for haiku, the poet stammers one out, starting over twice before producing the lines "When I speak English / I make up words I like more / Than the ones I learned," thus embedding an actual — and resistant — haiku within a poem that resists the requirement of haiku. By incorporating the kanji , however, Goto also references a long tradition of orientalist influences on traditions of poetry writing in English-speaking countries. The notion that the ‘ideogram’ somehow encapsulates the visual meaning of the word, so that an understanding of Japanese and Chinese characters can be grasped with little or no knowledge of either language, was brought into twentieth-century poetics by people like Ernest Fenollosa and amy Lowell. Indeed, Fenollosa’s The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry, which was edited and published by Ezra Pound, became one of the foundational documents of the imagist movement. Thus the genealogy of imagism and indeed of much visual poetry in English derives interculturally from the curious misunderstanding of Chinese produced by the combination of Pound’s misinterpretation of Chinese art and Fenollosa’s peculiar education in the language by a leading Japanese Sinologist. Goto, in a sense, re-appropriates this history. Her use of the character , which has gone unremarked by English-speaking critics of her work, ironically contradicts the orientalist’s assertion of the comprehensibility of ‘oriental’ writing. As Yunte Huang argues, the "one thing an Imagist poem does … is to project an image of asia by means of linguistic appropriation and reinvention" (62). Goto, however, re-appropriates and re-reinvents, insisting not on the generalizability and comprehensibility of ‘foreign’ cultures, but rather on the specifics of this use of a Japanese character, this resistant performance of haiku, this drawing of an eye, this photograph of the author with which the poem finishes.

Display large image of Figure 2

14 The photograph of Goto is accompanied by the lines "My health, my body, my politic, / a slant, a skin, a slice of — / it’s only that I want someone to know me by my name." Libin notes that the association between photograph and narrator is further strengthened by the word ‘me’ inscribed several times on the surface of the photograph with a stylus. This superimposed inscription refers back to the image of the narrator scraping her skin and slicing her eyelids with razor blades, but it may also signify an inversion of this image, since the incision of ‘me’ onto the photographic surface affirms identity, as opposed to the narrator’s earlier impulse to efface her racialized self. … Goto concludes her poem by presenting a self-referential ‘body’ that directly faces the reader — a proximity enabling the reader to see himself or herself in the eyes of the narrator, as a friend. (104-05) The photograph, however, is different both in placement and in kind from the other images, which include the concrete image of the slanted eye formed by the wordsmy vision I s o b l I q u e
y
e
y
m
is
oblique,

the drawing of the eye looking straight ahead, the hand pointing, the placement of words and letters on the page, including the placement of the letter ‘i’ and of the character . Goto provides a visual hint to the kanji’s meaning by drawing it over her own eye, but, despite Fenollosa and Pound, the clue is likely not enough to make the image comprehensible to the majority of readers. The problematics of translation are further illustrated by the reader’s failure to recognize as language, as a symbol that can be read (thus further ironizing the Fenollsa/Pound position on the legibility of ‘ideograms’). The conjunction of visual and linguistic games with the relationship between corporeality and subjectivity — and especially with the supposition that race and sexuality can clearly be read on the body, in acts of both homographesis and racialization — is, however, clearly expressed in the words and images to the right of the lines i dress with culture
every single morning.
i eat my culture for breakfast,
and bag it for lunch and it simmers
in a slow cooker while i’m out at work.
i eat culture for dinner then I bathe in it
and it’s my sleeping partner at night.

While these lines invoke Barthes’ doxa as the everyday stereotypical discourses that produce multiculturalism as a quaint but ineluctable spectacle of otherness, in the precisely heterotopian form of orientalism, the combination of words and images that accompany them locate them against the assertion of subjectivity: M
the distance from me
t
o

This vertical line thus indicates that the narrator’s eye represents the distance between herself and her Japanese heritage, but also between the English word ‘me’ and the Japanese me18 — between Canadian and Japanese subjectivities. It is overly simplistic to suggest that the ‘eye’ may be one, but the ‘i’ the other. Rather, diasporic subjectivity and embodiment are ambivalently constructed from both and at the same time interwoven in unstable and unavoidable ways. The culture the narrator eats, dresses, and bathes in is thus also the distance between her physical construction as the racialized body of the Oriental other and the monstrous but hopeful positioning of the hybrid self. This is the self that is forced to address the issue of colour because otherwise, "It is produced for me in ways I find intolerable." McCullough argues that the poem’s "litany of false names and racist expectations" produces the same "double logic" that Jacques derrida identifies "at work in the relationship between naming, translating and knowing" when derrida says that "I would say that this desire is at work in every proper name: translate me, don’t translate me" (164). McCullough concludes that not only is Goto’s freedom of speech inhibited by "abusive" demands on the language she shares with the orientalists, but also that access "to her name is thus rendered extremely problematic because of the exclusionary racist languages that cross the space of her experience and her speech" (164). Similarly, the gendering and sexualizing of the author’s body is produced by assumptions that are barely supported by the photograph: Libin calls it "a photograph of a woman meant, presumably, to correspond to the narrator" ("Some" 104). Yet the photograph is more ambiguous than Libin’s assertion suggests — gender and sexuality are read onto the photograph less surely but as inevitably as race. Goto’s body politic is thus a body that is not only caught up in bodily politics, but also produced in these "exclusionary racist languages," as well as in gendered and sexualized language, as estranged from the ‘body politic’ of the nation state.19 it is only in the hopeful monstrosity of hybrid particularity, which resists the generalizing, racializing, sexualizing discourses produced by those who wish to delimit, privilege, and protect their iconic citizenship that the body, the eye, can locate itself within what Giorgio agamben calls "the antinomy of the universal and the particular" (8). This is the process of negotiation in the face of the paradox of being and being-called, of identity and identification, of visibility and invisibility, which inscribes ‘i’s, ‘me’s and ‘ s’ [me’s] over the author’s smiling face, thus recalling agamben’s assertion that Whatever is the thing with all its properties, none of which, however, constitutes difference. In-difference with respect to properties is what individuates and disseminates singularities, makes them lovable (quodlibetable). Just as the right human word is neither the appropriation of what is common (language) nor the communication of what is proper, so too the human face is neither the individuation of a generic facies nor the universalization of singular traits: it is whatever face, in which what belongs to common nature and what is proper are absolutely indifferent. (19) "it is only," as the narrator of "The Body Politic" says, "that I want someone to know me by my name." To know her name, Goto suggests, is a way of producing not monstrosity, but a whatever monster, a hybrid singularity, a syntax in which it is possible to think those things which the dominant discourses of orientalism, racism, and heteronormativity attempt to make impossible to think. Foucault argues that it is imperative to "free thought from what it silently thinks, and so enable it to think differently" (Use of Pleasure 9). In his reading of Barthes and Foucault, Patrick French concludes by questioning whether "Barthes’ desire for an everyday, domestic utopia and Foucault’s heterotopias … finally resolve their internal differences in the figure of singularity?" (304). If, as French suggests, the task is "to re-think the community of singularities, the everyday sociality of the singular," Goto’s "The Body Politic" brings to that task a reminder that such communities of singularities are possible, that a new body politic can indeed be imagined and that thought can be freed to think differently — but only for and by those who are willing to become whatever monsters.

Appendix : The Body Politic, reprinted by permission of Hiromi Goto