Ethnicity, ecopoetics, and Fred Wah's Biotext

Abstract

The Asian‐Canadian writer Fred Wah uses the term “biotext” instead of the more conventional terms autobiography or life writing to describe his work. Wah's biotexts employ many of the formal practices of contemporary innovative poetics in order to complicate the seemingly transparent representation of individual experience that is often found in postcolonial life writing. Perhaps the most extensive investigation of hyphenated subjectivity in Wah's writing occurs in his 1996 biotext Diamond Grill, which explores ethnic subjectivity by suturing self into a particular linguistic and social environment. The title of this book refers to a Chinese‐Canadian restaurant which was owned and run by Wah's father in Nelson, British Columbia. Diamond Grill narrates episodes from Wah's family life, centred in and around the restaurant and often concerning his half‐Chinese father and Swedish‐born mother. This article focuses on convergence between ethno‐ and ecopoetics in Diamond Grill and in Wah's most recent book, Is a Door (2009), a text which represents the culturally destructive effects of natural disaster, while simultaneously foregrounding the shared materiality of language, subject, and the ecosystem. The high degree of formal innovation employed by Wah refuses to rehearse stereotypically normalized themes of racial otherness, and his politicized renegotiation of racial subjectivity through linguistic disruption parallels (and stems from) his writing's critical stance vis‐à‐vis environmental exploitation.