When the Moon Waxes Red

Representation, Gender and Cultural Politics

Trinh T. Minh-ha

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781135204556
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Popular Culture in Art

In this new collection of her provocative essays on Third World art and culture, Trinh Minh-ha offers new challenges to Western regimes of knowledge. Bringing to her subjects an acute sense of the many meanings of the marginal, she examines topics such as Asian and African texts, the theories of Barthes, questions of spectatorship, the enigmas of art, and the perils of anthropology. When the Moon Waxes Red is an extended argument against reductive analyses, even those that appear politically adroit. The multiply-hyphenated peoples of color are not simply placed in a duality between two cultural heritages; throughout, Trinh describes the predicament of having to live "a difference that has no name and too many names already." She argues for multicultural revision of knowledge so that a new politics can transform reality rather than merely ideologize it. By rewriting the always emerging, already distorted place of struggle, such work seeks to "beat the master at his own game."

The Third Scenario: No Light No Shade

9 Bold Omissions and Minute Depictions^*

DOI: 10.4324/9780203700624-9

^* First published in Moving the Image: Independent Asian Pacific American Media Arts 1970-1990, Russell Leong, ed. (Los Angeles: Visual Communications Southern California Asian American Studies Central, Inc., and UCLA Asian American Studies Center, 1991).

Thanks to Ayi Kwei Armah, I know the screens of life you have left us: veils that rise in front of us, framing the world in neat pieces. Until we have grown tall enough to look over the next veil, we believe the little we see is all there is to see. From veil to veil, the bitter taste of surprise in disfranchisement keeps on renewing. But again and again, we hold fast to what our eyes perceive; again and again we fool ourselves, convinced at each step, that we have grown wise. Recently, in a casual conversation, two visiting writers from Martinique and Guadeloupe remarked with a certain bewilderment that the question of migration was again enjoying a great vogue in the States and that “they all talk about identity and marginality.” Finding myself deeply implied in this “they” despite the fact that my friends tacitly included me on their side while talking, I was suddenly hit by a brief but sharp feeling of confusion as to where my identity lay. Since they, in this context, pointed both to the trendy Euro-American intellectuals eager to recycle strands of subversion and to those for whom the migrant's condition continued to be an everyday reality and an ongoing border struggle, it was difficult to react quickly without speaking simply for or against. Caught between two fixed closures— American and Asian—I was at the same time grateful to be treated as an outsider to the passing trends of discursive thought in North America, and repelled by my friends' apparent refusal to identify (even strategically) with the fight against marginalization. However, their remarks did have a strong destabilizing effect. I was assaulted by intense skepticism as I realized the intricacy of my own participation in what had been indirectly pointed to here as a spurious, fashionable preoccupation of the West raised up for the sake of Western vanguardism and its desire to conserve itself as sovereign Subject of radical knowledge. For the above writers, the word “marginality” clearly did not make sense, nor did its juxtaposition with the notion of “identity” seem any more revealing. They thus reacted to its use with astonishment, if not with sarcasm_ “What marginality? Marginal in relation to whom? to where? to what?”

Perhaps vindicating and interrogating identity takes on a peculiarly active significance with displacement and migration. It becomes inevitable with the questioning of established power relations, or with the daily meddling with the ruling culture. For those who feel settled at home in their land (or in other lands) where racial issues are not an everyday challenge, perhaps selfretrieval and self-apprehension are achieved without yielding to the urge to assimilate, to reject, or to fight for a space where identity is fearlessly constructed across difference. A familiar story of “learning in America” is, for example, the one lived by artist Wen Yi Hou when she left Mainland China to further her education in the States:

I became aware of my minority status only in America…. I asked people there [at the University of California San Diego], “Why did the school select me?” They said when they saw my slides, they were surprised by my paintings. They were modern and very western. How could that happen in Red China? I was surprised that shortly after I started the program, I was asked why my paintings were not traditional Chinese paintings. I was depressed. I did not have any value as a Chinese artist in their minds. My feelings of worthlessness as an artist intensified in San Diego. There was a group of American graduate students who talked about the Eastern influence on Western art. I was in the seminar, but no one talked to me or looked at me. I worried about how they could talk about Eastern cultures and yet they would not even look at a person from the East. I was the subject of the lecture but was excluded.¹

Hear how the story happened again; watch the scenario of disfranchisement repeat itself across generations; smell the poison taking effect in the lives of those who dare mix while differing. The predicament of crossing boundaries cannot be merely rejected or accepted. It has to be confronted in its controversies. There is indeed little hope of speaking this simultaneously outside- inside actuality into existence in simple, polarizing blackand- white terms. The challenge of the hyphenated reality lies in the hyphen itself: the becoming Asian-American; the realm inbetween, where predetermined rules cannot fully apply. Presumedly, the Real Chinese artist should abide by Chinese aesthetics, the authenticity of which is naturally defined on their (Euro- American) terms. After all, who would dispute the fact that Western influence should be challenged in its global domination? But again, who never hesitates to take the licence to decide what is Western and what is Eastern in this context? Indeed, no statements about the negative nature of such an influence could be more dogmatic than those often made by Euro-Americans for the benefit of their non-Western protégés. “Yes, the white world is still a pretty dark one for the man of color,” noted Ezekiel Mphahlele.² It is always mind-boggling to recognize how readily opposed liberal Westerners are to any discrimination in the public treatment of people of color while remaining blind to it in more individualized relationships or when dealing with difference on a one-to-one basis.

A lesson learned from the failure of Negritude is that any attempt at pegging things and reclaiming a denied heritage to construct a positive identity should remain at its best, diacritical and strategical, rather than dogmatic and originary. (The term négritude, created by poet Aimé Césaire to denote a quality common to the thought and behavior of black people, was championed in the fifties by the Society of African Culture in Paris as a concept capable of defining and exalting the negroness of artistic activity.) Racial and sexual discriminations are based on assumptions of biological essences, and with such an affirmation as “Emotion is completely Negro as reason is Greek” (Léopold Sédar Senghor), Negritude, like “Feminitude” (or reactive feminism), ends up trapping itself in what remains primarily a defensive stance. In my struggle to overcome the artistic difficulty that arises when one is angry most of the time and when ones sense of values is continually being challenged by the ruling class, I have never thought of calling my negritude to my aid, except when writing protest material. But is not this elementary—shall I call it “underdoggery”?—that Senghor is talking about? Even he must know, however, that his philosophy will contain his art only up to a point: it wont chain his art for long (Mphalele).³

If Negritude tended to oversimply and to reentrench black values in its assertion, it was mainly because it heavily indulged in binary oppositional thinking. As Wole Soyinka put it, it resulted from the adoption of “the Manichean tradition of European thought,” therefore borrowing “from the very component of its racist syllogism.”⁴ However, as a Vietnamese proverb says, “Bound to be round is the dweller in a calabash / Bound to be long is the dweller in a tube.” Separatism as a strategy, not as an end point, is at times necessary for the emergence of a framework that promotes and entitles second-class citizens to articulate problems related to their condition. Highly privileged are those who can happily afford to remain comfortable in the protected world of their own, which neither seems to carry any ambiguity nor does it need to question itself in its mores and measures—its utter narrowness despite its global material expansion. When the footprints made by the shoes are not readily confused with the shoes themselves, what Negritude has also achieved can never be belittled. Due to it, the creation of a new multicultural alliance with the world's dispossessed became possible. It is in having to confront and defy hegemonic values on an everyday basis, in other words, in assuming the betweenworld dilemma, that one understands both the predicament and the potency of the hyphen. Here, the becoming Asian-American affirms itself at once as a transient and constant state: one is born over and over again as hyphen rather than as fixed entity, thereby refusing to settle down in one (tubicolous) world or another. The hyphenated condition certainly does not limit itself to a duality between two cultural heritages. It leads, on the one hand, to an active “search of our mother's garden” (Alice Walker)—the consciousness of “root values” or of a certain Asianness—; and on the other hand, to a heightened awareness of other “minority” sensitivities, hence of a Third World solidarity, and by extension, of the necessity for new alliances. Unavoidably, the step backward is constantly also a step forward. The multidimensional desire to be both here(s) and there(s) implies a more radical ability to shuttle between frontiers and to cut across ethnic allegiances while assuming a specific and contingent legacy.

Cultural difference is not a totemic object. It does not always announce itself to the onlooker; sometimes it stands out conspicuously, most of the times it tends to escape the commodifying eye. Its visibility depends on how much one is willing to inquire into the anomalous character of the familiar, and how engaged one remains to the politics of continuous doubling, reversing, and displacing in marginality as well as to the necessity of changing both oneself-as-other and other-as-oneself. Fervently we have wanted to belong somewhere at the same time that we have often wanted to run away. We reached out for something, and when by chance grasped it, we often found that it wasn't what we wanted at all. There is one part of us that is always lost and searching. It is an echo of a cry that was a longing for warmth and safety. And through our adolescent fantasies, and however our adult reasoning may disguise it, the search continues (Mai-mai Sze).⁵ The quest for this other in us can hardly be a simple return to the past or to the time-honored values of our ancestors. Changes are inevitably implied in the process of restoring the cultural lineage, which combines the lore of the past with the lore of the complex present in its histories of migrations. As soon as we learn to be “Asians in America”—that is, to come to a rest in a place supposedly always there, waiting to be discovered—we also recognize that we can't simply be Asians any longer. The fight has to focus on our physical and political hereabouts, so that “here in San Francisco/there is Saigon/ their locks of mouths/ damming the Pacific!” (Stella Wong)⁶. Listening to new sounds in the attempt to articulate a specific and transcultural between-world reality requires again, that the step backward be simultaneously a step forward. As A1 Robles puts forth in these lines: “A Filipino fisherman once said / that looking for your roots / will get you all tangled up / with the dead past… / If the mind bothers with the roots / It'll forget all about the weeds … “⁷

I am not a painter who has come to America to paint China.

I am a painter from China who came to America to continue painting.

Why paint?

People need to paint and painting needs people. (Wen Yi Hou)⁸

What is Chinese in America? An artistic event is often presented as a thought, a feeling that has found its form in its formless nature. To paint is to continue painting. The becoming is not a becoming something; it remains active and intransitive. While, for example, for Thomas Mann “a spiritual—that is, significant— phenomenom is 'significant' precisely because it exceeds its own limits,” for Andrei Tarkovsky the film image as acute observation of life is linked to the Japanese Haïku, which he wrote, “cultivates its images in such a way that they mean nothing beyond themselves, and at the same time express so much that it is not possible to catch their final meaning … the great function of the artistic image is to be a detector of infinity … [and to give] the beholder a simultaneous experience of the most complex, contradictory, sometimes even mutually exclusive feelings.”⁹ People need to paint and painting needs people for, in this mutual need, they both exceed their limits as people and as painting. This is the challenge of the hyphen. Chinese artist Shih-t'ao (1630-C.A. 1717/1720) evolved his philosophy of painting around the fundamental notions of “the form of the formless” and “the sound of the soundless.”¹⁰ The basic urge to manifest (not to arrest) the Formless in form seems, indeed, to be what Tarkovsky yearns for through the many words he uses to explicate an aesthetics that remains implicitly admiring of the Haïku as well as of other Asian sources, such as Kurosawa's poetic approach in his Macbeth. What Tarkovsky tries to retain and “make it incarnate, new each time,” is the Formless, or as he said it, the life principle itself, unique in each moment of life. Thus, form is not intended to express form, but rather, formlessness. The non-consumable relationship between form and formlessness or between art and life defies every binarist attempt at reducing it to the old dichotomy of form and content. In Tarkovsky's definition, “the image is not a certain meaning, expressed by the director, but an entire world reflected as in a drop of water.”¹¹

Transformation requires a certain freedom to modify, appropriate, and reappropriate without being trapped in imitation. Chinese traditional arts, for example, do not speak so much of beauty or of aesthetic, as of the spirit—the ch'i. What can be taught and assimilated, indeed, is technical knowlege; not the ch'i—the principle of life that is unique to each artistic moment, event, and manifestation; or the breath that sustains all processes of movement and change. To excel only in the mechanics of a language, be it verbal, visual, or musical, is to excel in imitation—the part that can be formulated, hence enclosed in formulas. Form as formulas can only express form; it cannot free itself from the form-content divide. However, a film can be made the way a tale is spun by many storytellers of Asian and African cultures. Nothing is explained, everything is evoked. When explanations were requested, the storyteller would pause, listen carefully, and after due consideration, repeat exactly the passage relevant to the question. No more, no less. Here, there is no necessity to reduce the plural meaning of the story to some flat explanatory answer, and the questioner is invited to listen again more mindfully to what he or she has missed. Since form cannot be separated from content—the form of the story being (integral to) the story itself—there is no other way to say it without reforming it (that is, un/intentionally modifying, augmenting, or narrowing it). One of the characteristics of Shih-T'ao's principles in painting is precisely the yugen, translated as “subtle profundity” or “deep reserve.” The quality emphasized here is the ability to imply, rather than to expose something in its entirety; to suggest and evoke, rather than to delineate laboriously. “Such works,” wrote Shih-T'ao, “enable us to imagine the depth of content within them and to feel infinite reverberations, something that is not possible with detail painted minutely and distinctly.”¹²

The realm of a film is that of a mediating elsewhere, albeit one deeply rooted in reality. It seeks the truth of reality, or the ch'i of life's fictions, but is neither dream nor reality. Its meaning is never simply true nor false. For it is thanks to its falsity (recreation through the mediation of the cinematic apparatus) that a truth is made percepti...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Yellow Sprouts
• No Master Territories
• She, of the Interval
• The Third Scenario: No Light No Shade
• Notes