Language and a Poetics of Collage: Catalina Cariaga's "Cultural Evidence"

Abstract

Catalina Cariaga is often referred to as a poet because of her language-centered poetics and experimentation with poetic form. Rather than a retreat into what might seem to be a self-indulgent language game, Cariaga's is resolutely situated in social, historical, and political. Her interrogation of language and form shares with many Filipino American poets an investigation of colonized subjectivity in relation to cultural imperialism, particularly imposition of Spanish and English on Filipinos. Part of this investigation entails poets' exploration of possibilities of using colonizers' language to tell another tale (Abad 3). While Catalina Cariaga's first book of poetry, Cultural Evidence, engages similar issues, experimental poetics reveals a new phase in development of Filipino American in both thematic concerns and technical strategies, especially in use of language to subvert ways in which of racialized and gendered Other are produced through a binary scheme of representation. Like many Filipino American poets such as Gemino Abad, Michael Melo, Fatima Lim-Wilson, Jessica Hagedorn, and Virginia Cerenio, Cariaga undermines English as institutionalized instrument of colonization and as model of official language of culture to which Filipinos and Filipino Americans must conform in their process of assimilation. (1) But Cariaga also seeks to master English in a way that explores alternative strategies for using language to disrupt what Susan Howe refers to as total systemic circular knowledge (28). Employing a poetics of what has been called Language-centered or poetry (Perloff 173), Cariaga subverts naturalized representations of race, gender, class, and culture in seemingly natural, authoritative language. Rather than relying on a conventional mode of narrative or contemplation by lyric speaker to tell another tale from perspective of colonized, Cariaga explores possibilities of collage juxtaposition while developing a language-centered poetics which enables her to accomplish more than what is possible in form of conventional lyric. By insisting on confronting ways in which language is used to colonize, racialize, and commodify Other, her poetics of collage opens up poetic space to multiple voices and languages and to disjunctive histories, allowing different perspectives, utterances, and words to resonate, generate, or undermine one another. Cariaga's poems thus enact a politics of writing by foregrounding structure, materiality, and signifying process of language in a way similar to deployment of language by Language poets, who seek to make the structures of meaning in language more tangible and in that way allowing for maximum resonance for medium as Charles Bernstein asserts (114). Cariaga's experiments with language and poetic form are a salient aspect of postmodern poetry, which Laura Hinton and Cynthia Hogue note, distinguishes itself from modernist by its refusal to naturalize language of text. Hinton and Hogue further note in their introduction to We Who Love to Be Astonished: Experimental Women's Writing and Performance Poetics, that Postmodern poetics foregrounds text's ability to explore material and signifying possibilities of language medium. Interrogating politics of postmodern poetics, Hinton and Hogue call critical attention to relationship between avant-garde writing and dominant structures of power, of white, class, and or gender privilege (2). It is precisely these possibilities of postmodern poetics that Cariaga explores in her poetry. She participates in and contributes to contemporary postmodern feminist poetics through her search for a new poetic language and form to articulate Filipino American and Asian women's multifaceted experience in contexts of intertwining histories, cultures, and raced, gendered power relations. …