The Yi-Fen Chou Affair
If Sherman Alexie had remembered good advice from Niccolo
Machiavelli's The Prince when he was
deliberating about what to include in The
Best American Poetry 2015, there would be no discussion in American poetry
circles of the Yi-Fen Chou Affair.
Alexie would have used a universal truth, one that is useful in
political practice and literary negotiations and especially powerful in dealing
with the regressive conditions of life in the United States in 2015. In Section XV of The Prince, Machiavelli proclaimed that "any man who tries to
be good all the time is bound to come to ruin among the great number who are
not good. Hence a prince who wants to
keep his authority must learn how not to be good, and use that knowledge, or
refrain from using it, as necessity requires." If Alexie had applied this advice, Kwame
Dawes would not have castigated Yi-Fen Chou (a.k.a. Michael Derrick Hudson) in
a Prairie Schooner blog (see http://prairieschooner.unl.edu/blog/prairie-schooner-and-pseudonyms)
for using "identity theft" in order to get the poem "The Bees,
the Flowers, Jesus, Ancient Tigers, Poseidon, Adam and Eve"
published. As matters stand, Hudson can
smirk as many of his peers burn with anger and blame Alexie, and by association
Dawes, for exposing how aesthetic
judgments are ultimately political ones.
To be sure, the progress of terrorism throughout the world
and the ascent of systemic racism in the United States have more physical and
moral gravity than the hoax of the Yi-Fen Chou Affair. The Affair is a squall not a hurricane. But for those of us who have the luxury of
talking about ethnic American literature and of writing either inside or
outside a range of literary traditions, the hoax is more than a small pest to
be sprayed or swatted with eco-correct instruments.
I recall how Alan Sokal's 1996 publication of a nonsense
article on "a transformative hermeneutics of quantum gravity" in Social Text fed popular disdain for the humanities and theory-enthralled
cultural studies. In the context of that
memory, it angers me that Hudson might believe it is o.k. to steal the identity
of a Chinese American and to exploit good faith efforts to embrace diversity
and fairness in literary commerce. Alexie's
confessional essay "Sherman Alexie Speaks Out on the Best of American
Poetry 2015" (see http://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/ , September 7, 2015)
is a rich illustration of the mind in pain. I am not angry with him for bending
over backwards to be good. Perhaps in an
imagined future I shall thank him for intensifying my anger about the
assumption among some (let me stress
some and not all) self-fashioned white males and females that God blesses their
entitlement to do and say whatever they please and not be held
accountable. Alexie urges us to
"continue to debate The Yi-Fen Chou Problem." Yes, Mr. Alexie I shall do so, remembering as
Peter Johnson suggested that "heterotopias glitter and clash in their incongruous
variety, illuminating a passage for our imagination." [ see "Unravelling
Foucault's 'different spaces', "History of the Human Sciences 19.4 (2006):
75-90]
Jerry W. Ward,
Jr. September 12, 2015
