The Ugly Poem
Through ugly words and ugly imagery, Yu challenges us to abandon Anglocentric literary aesthetics, revealing the generative potential that lies beyond our colonially inherited aesthetic tastes. He refutes the neutrality of aesthetics – the assumption that beauty is universal in its mode and values, instead deliberately elevating the poetic function of ‘bad writing / … [that] turns your stomach’ (20). Leaning into the provocative and undesirable, he elevates an alternative, radical aesthetics of the ugly, unclean, and entangled, befitting the complications of Australia’s ‘[un]revised to whiteness’ reality (149). In the binary that Australia as settler-colony has attempted to instil for its own benefit, in which whiteness is axiomatic of the clean, proper, and desirable, Yu refuses to aspire to whiteness and recuperate the undesirable reputation that whiteness has cast upon all else. Instead, his revelry in vulgarity destabilises such an imposed hierarchy of language and beauty, paralleling Mikhail Bakhtin’s analysis of the carnivalesque that celebrates the bodily in all its ‘gross and exaggerated form[s]’ to render the serious register suspect and challenge the ‘static vertical ordering of values’ (21). In elevating the profane to an aesthetics of its own, Yu exorcises racial stereotypes and demonstrates the potency of marrying politics to aesthetics through confrontation with the ‘ugly’.
Yu utilises vulgar diction and toilet humour to destabilise these artificial hierarchies, celebrating a popular physicality grounded in the grotesque bodily. His carnivalesque references to defecation infiltrate the ‘sacred’, high culturally demarcated space of poetry: he insists that ‘poetry is a laxative / [he] take[s] to the toilet’ (152). Bakhtin would describe this as a ‘hostil[ity] to all that [i]s immortalized and completed’, rejecting the cultural capital ascribed to Eurocentric tradition (199). Yu’s ‘confiden[ce] in [his] own ugliness’ seeks to contaminate the sacred space of poetry, ridiculing its arbitrary value (28). This is exemplified in the short poem ‘The thing is’, which contains only four lines and quoted here in its entirety:
we laugh when someone farts (145)
Here, Yu satirises what Bourdieu identifies as the culturally prestigious medium of poetry, openly mocking and trampling over the poetic register (The Field of Cultural Production 51). He undermines the formal signifiers of the serious register with his overdone line breaks and the assonance of the /a/ in an Australian English ‘laugh’ and ‘farts’. The stanza breaks further suggest a comedically timed pause before the ‘punchline’. In mocking the arbitrary cultural capital assigned to the medium, its generic rules and forms, he prompts an interrogation of aesthetic hierarchy, using poetic ugliness to challenge us to reconsider the value of conventional aesthetics when confronted with the grotesque.
Yu’s destabilising of aesthetic hierarchies is critical as they are loaded with discourses of racial desirability, in which normative aesthetics and its Anglocentric prestige is rendered inaccessible to non-Anglo expressions and bodies. He works this racial element into his critique of aesthetics by inhabiting and confronting the reader with Australia’s disturbing caricatures of Chineseness, reflecting Australia’s ugly image of intolerance back upon itself. In his poem ‘An addition’, he confronts the cosmopolitan capitalist with ‘all the chinese stereotypes / [he’s] studied’, drawing on racist constructions of the coolie labourer ‘turning one match box into ten’, the undesirable ‘who smiles oleaginously’, and the unwanted immigrant who ‘likes to come here / of all the places’ (13). In inhabiting this plurality of racist plaints, Yu draws attention to these caricatures and absorbs Anglo-Australia back into them, refusing them the power of abjection by suggesting that these stereotypes are ‘wrongly given the name chinese / and who can find a perfect match for that / in any australians’ (13). He dissolves the false dichotomy of desirability as it relates to race, critiquing the framing of unclean Chinese behaviours, language, and physicality in opposition to the polished Anglo ideal. Rather than rejecting these stereotypes on behalf of a victimised Chinese-ness, he insists that they also speak to Anglo-Australians. To protest these stereotypes would be to seek a rehabilitation of a clean Chinese image that begs for the cosmopolitan capitalist’s tolerance.
He utilises a challenging ambiguity to puppet perversions of Asian masculinities to offensive conclusions, revelling in his uncomfortable performance that taunts the reader’s willingness to ‘tolerate’, exposing how contingent tolerance of diversity is on Anglocentric propriety. He performs lurid caricatures of Chinese masculinities that draw out the perverse and undesirable, forcing the reader to confront the paradox of Australia’s multiculturalist tolerance that simultaneously seeks to assimilate and differentiate. Through his poetic personas, Yu draws on Western preoccupations with the ‘Yellow Peril’, an emasculating positioning of Asian men as effeminate, distanced from gender ideals, yet predatory and perverse, and thus sexually deviant. Kam Louie’s dissection of Asian masculinities describes its image as such:
sinister and dangerous yellow men on the screen … struck at the heart of an insecure Western masculinity … feral, rat-faced Chinese lusted after virginal white women. The threat of rape, the rape of white society, dominated the action of the yellow formula. (142-3)
Yu savours this image, seeking to exploit its offensive affects. Wenche Ommundsen’s reading of his oeuvre aptly advances that ‘it is easy to be offended by [his] writing … [b]ut such a reaction could be regarded as part of the texts’ orchestrated performance’ (51-2). Indeed, this exploitation of the reader-text dynamic is critical to Yu’s strategic destabilisation of the hegemonic, taunting us by possessing such vulgar bodies.
As a key example of Yu’s strategy of perverse possession, his prose poem ‘Canadian memories’ describes the Montreal red-light district in misogynistic and voyeuristic detail. He paints a scene that reveals more about the perverse persona he inhabits than the landscape he describes by using a pathetic, immature, and sexually charged diction, full of ill-crafted metaphors:
the girls oh the girls the mere sight of them was a long wet dream … the black one was the night itself inviting one to enter her as soon as possible … all the street lamps looked like plump buttocks or bosoms and the street opened like a long deep vagina (30)
We are inclined to find many issues, both ethically and aesthetically with Yu’s representation of these women, but an ambiguity in voice at the beginning of the passage amplifies the potent poetics in such a passage of ‘bad’ writing:
the guy in the office said to me oh boy you should go to st laurent street. the girls there are so pretty so sexy particularly in summers. you should go. i had already been there despite the strict regulation that no one could go out unless in two or threes. (30)
Who is speaking here? Yu’s use of reported speech introduces such ambiguities that even when the ‘i’ arrives in the fourth sentence, it is uncertain as to whether it is Yu’s own persona responding or not. Yu plays into such constructed images of yellow perversion, taunting the cosmopolitanist to exercise the Hagean power of the white nation’s intolerance, and expose the racist assumptions and Anglocentric gatekeeping that rots the foundations of Australian aspirations to a ‘true’ cosmopolitanism. Notably, this ambiguity is resolved later for the cosmopolitanist’s satisfaction, rehabilitating Yu’s literary persona to propriety through a desexing of Asian masculinity: we find that he ‘can’t, [he] finds them so soft like mud … [he] can’t go in’, something his conversational partner attributes to his ‘feminin[ity]’ (31). Now knowing that the misogynistic diction cannot be attributed to Yu’s desexed persona, he is made tolerable again. Through the parallel stereotype of Asian effeminacy, Yu highlights the violent castration of Louie’s ‘yellow rapist’ that is needed for Anglocentric acceptance.
As the Anglocentric aesthetic ideal is characterised for non-Anglo actors as a lack, Yu’s rejection of such an ideal is critical to alternate frameworks of self-determination. In ‘This poem has been revised at least three times’, Yu demonstrates the linguistic analogue to desirability, paralleling the beauty of form and of language, and how they relate to the performances demanded of him to assimilate to colonially inherited aesthetics. He delivers this in a stuttering, self-correctional voice of alterity: ‘I was writing this poem in english / no I mean I was writing this poem in English’ (149). This self-effacing diction draws attention to the impositions of hegemony, reflecting what Chow describes as the racial melancholia of aspiring to the unachievable repression of heterogeneity to assimilate to prescribed aesthetic values (70). Here, Yu characterises beauty through the framing of whiteness and of linguistic revision: ‘I beg your pardon our culture is superior because it is revised to whiteness / by deleting all the unwanted colours’ … ‘a white woman is so beautiful so white so revised’ (149). We are given the juxtaposition of something inherent, racial appearance, and the performative, through language. Here, Yu demonstrates that where alterity can be excised and revised from linguistic performance, this aspiration to a beautiful, revised whiteness is an impossible task when it comes to the bodily. Normative aesthetics, far from being neutral, relies on the maintenance of an image of whiteness in which anything else is excised in an act of melancholia, with dire implications for discourses of racial desirability.
