Do Better Now

Abstract

Do Better Now Michelle N. Huang (bio) On June 10, 2020, as protestors streamed into the streets in the wake of George Floyd's murder by the Minneapolis Police Department and in support of Black Lives Matter, the statue of Christopher Columbus that stood [End Page 303] in Boston's North End was decapitated. His headless body was put in storage indefinitely, pending further review by city officials. It was not the first time Columbus had lost his head—it had been taken earlier in 2006, and in 2015, the statue was drenched in red paint and tagged "Black Lives Matter."1 Largely missing from discussions of the statue's purported cultural significance was its relative newness—that it was erected in 1979, less than five years after the Fall of Saigon, by pro-Vietnam War activists and the Knights of Columbus. Just as Confederate statues are new—not old—monuments to racism raised during Jim Crow and the Civil Rights era, the Columbus statue spun a new mythos, one that bound America's "origins" to its imperialist projects abroad.2 That Vietnam was called "Indian country" by American soldiers deployed there starkly manifests how Vietnamese, Lao, and Cambodian death was patterned on the murder of Native Americans.3 Further, bringing BLM into relation with the Columbus statue also reminds us that many modern warfare tactics and weaponry used by the police to brutalize Black bodies were learned from America's wars abroad—one infamous example is Chicago Police Department Commander Jon Burge's use of electric shock, mock execution, and suffocation to coerce confessions from over two hundred Black and Brown incarcerated people from 1972 to 1991. In particular, Burge's method of electroshocking prisoners bears more than a family resemblance to the "Bell telephone hour," a practice whereby American troops jolted Vietnamese captives using a hand-cranked army field phone.4 I confess an allergy to the word "new," because it so often disavows the animating presence of the past. The Boston Columbus statue is only one small figuration of America's intersecting imperialisms. Its amalgamated Cold War/Columbian context also situates Franny Choi's poem "The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On" (2019).5 Choi's speaker locates her readers in post-apocalyptic times—"the apocalypse began / when Columbus praised God and lowered his anchor" (286). As Indigenous philosopher Kyle Powys Whyte (Potawatomi) reminds us, "Anishinaabek already inhabit what our ancestors would have understood as a dystopian future," a world degraded by settler colonialism's cultural and environmental destruction.6 But Columbus's "discovery" is not the only apocalypse: pointedly without dates, Choi's poem interlaces domestic American violence with conquest abroad. The anaphoric repetition of "There was" traces the repetition of racist, imperialist American logics that crisscross the world, from the Dakota Access Pipeline ("the apocalypse of pipelines legislating their way / through sacred water") to chattel slavery ("the apocalypse / of dogs and slave catchers whose faces glowed by lantern-light") to refugee crises ("the apocalypse of boats") to illegal abortion ("Coat hanger apocalypse"). Interleaved are the conditions of the speaker's family's diasporic displacement during the [End Page 304] Korean War: "There was the apocalypse of the leaving, and the having left— / of my mother unsticking herself from her mother's grave as the plane / barreled down the runway." These constellated apocalypses add up: we have already lost the world, many times. In her work on post-apocalyptic fiction, Heather J. Hicks enumerates some of its generic conventions, among them "ragged bands of survivors," "defunct technologies," "poignant yearning for a lost civilization," and "extreme violence."7 Taking Choi's poem and Whyte's provocation about ancestral dystopia into consideration, it is clear that minoritized people have already been living in post-apocalyptic times. This is a sentiment Chang-rae Lee affirms when he writes that immigrant narratives are "essentially dystopian in nature; for what does such a fiction describe if not a world in which the beliefs and practices are unfamiliar and sometimes backward, in which the morality is skewed, and whose every civil contour feels wrong, if only to its newly arrived hero, who must venture into and negotiate his way through...