Book Review
The Hybridity Revolution
- Adebe DeRango-Adem (Editor) and Andrea Thompson (Editor)
Other Tongues: Mixed Race Women Speak Out. Inanna (purchase at Amazon.ca)
Reviewed by Michelle La Flamme
Societies that pride themselves on an imagined monoracial norm have rare glimpses into the multi-racial experience. The contemporary literary phenomenon some refer to as the boom in bi-racial biography
(Spickard) has offered nuanced reflections on the ontological impact of this liminal hybrid position. At their thematic core, most bi-racial and multiracial narratives demonstrate the complexity of this form of embodiment and the semiotics of a body continually affected, and constructed, by the racialized gaze. Several thematic issues are repeated in both Carol Camper’s seminal anthology, Miscegenation Blues: Voices of Mixed Race Women (1994), and the more recent Other Tongue: Mixed Race Women Speak Out (2010). The writing in both anthologies is a bold testament to the pervasiveness of multiraciality and ultimately counters many social scientific conclusions. The interest in such anthologies is also in keeping with the rise in autobiography and critical race theories. In both fields there is a consistent tendency to privilege personal accounts of the mixed race experience and, as Camper claims in her preface, the importance of speaking for ourselves
as experts on our own lives.
The women writers in Other Tongues outline moments of interpellation, the power of the racialized gaze, and the stages of their shifting notions of self based on multiply-coded bodies that challenge monoracial definitions of identity. The work accounts for various individual experiences of passing
and the complexities of a body that is repeatedly read for signs of authenticity. These writers contest the notion of a post-racial
world in that these poems, memoirs, short stories, and art work continually reference the fact that visual identifiers of race are understood within always already
historical and cultural conditions that lead to the racialization of the body despite the individual’s efforts (or best intentions) to defy these norms. The editors of Other Tongues suggest that it offers unique perspectives on the changing racial landscape that [has] occurred over the last decade
in order to offer a snapshot of the North American terrain of questions about race, mixed-race, racial identity, and how mixed-race women in North American identify in the twenty-first century
in a time that is marked by the inauguration of the first mixed-race Black president in North America.
However, the anthology is more personal than critical, privileges women’s voices, and fails to represent the range of mixedness in North America. Given that the themes and content echo Camper’s 1994 anthology, the uniqueness of this collection is perhaps overstated.
The editors have arranged the anthology in three distinct categories 1) Rules/Roles
where writers grapple with the question what are you
and the ontological implications; 2) Roots/Routes
where location, immigration, diasporic moments and family
take centre stage with the politics of hair
; 3) revelations
features words of wisdom and vision[s] of the future.
Hawaiian, Chinese, Japanese, Black, and Aboriginal mixed-race writers express their identities here in writing and visual art. Every North American anthology of racial mixedness addresses the persistence of the question Where are you from?
and What are you?
Here Kali Fajardo-Anstine playfully and ironically suggests [y]ou will hear this question 9,652 times in your life.
The work addresses white privilege and the unique negotiations involved in passing
and otherwise responding to the color line from within and outside of various communities of colour. Some writers, like Amber Jamaica Mosser in Contamination
refer to their very bodies as symbols of the historical legacies of interraciality; my very existence offers tangible proof of the sullying of various bloodlines; it evokes histories of colonization, conquest, invasion, and pain.
Mosser, like many of these writers, ironically reflects on the un-(w)hol(e)liness
that the mixed-race body signifies. Others identify the numerous painful and sometimes comic reactions their bodies have evoked.
The utter loneliness of being lost in a sea of monoracial faces and the quest to find community is a staple part of these narratives. Such efforts include searching for the self in photographs of family and deeply personal tableaux involving penetrating ontological questions as one faces the mirror. Photographs and visual art appear throughout Other Tongues, forcing the reader to notice their own reading of these mixed-race bodies.
Transcriptions of several conversations document the malleability of [our] racial identities
and are predicated on the body being racially indecipherable
(Quinn). Advice for other mixed-race people is offered by several writers, but most explicitly in The Half-Breed’s Guide to Answering the Question
by M.C. Shumaker. Open Letter
by Adebe Derango Adam playfully and ironically lists the names that are used to categorize mixed-race peoples causing the reader to reflect upon the semantics involved in the racialization of mixed race bodies.
Countering the tragic mulatto
and tortured half-breed
narratives of yesteryear, writers here identify moments, sites, and places where people find solace and comfort and describe carefully crafted means to negotiate racial boundaries and still feel whole. A challenge to racial essentialism is offered by Erin Kobayashi: the truth is, I am not a
half
or bi
or multi
human being. I have always been whole. I am 100 percent mixed. Final answer. I hope that answers your trick question.
While this anthology offers new voices, the content on the whole echoes the symbolism, themes, and quests for selfhood in Camper’s earlier anthology. I am still waiting for an anthology that will include writing from Canadian hybridity theorists like George Elliot Clarke, Lawrence Hill, Wayde Compton, Fred Wah, and Drew Hayden Taylor who have written poetry, prose, and critical essays on notions of mixedness. Is there a gender difference in the way in which racial hybridity plays itself out in Canada? Do Canadian writers offer new paradigms, symbols, and themes on racial mixedness that are useful in the larger frame of postcoloniality or hybridity theory? What are the unique features of North America that drive our interest in the experience of mixedness and feed our critical engagement with this form of identity? In what ways is Canada distinct from the US and Latin American articulations of these multiplicities? What are the specific socio-cultural frameworks that define and condition these women’s experiences of multiraciality? What are the future directions for narratives as the hyphenated identity becomes increasingly complicated? Will the mestiza consciousness that asserts mixedness as the norm evolve in other North American sites? What effect would such paradigm shifts have on the lived experiences and semiotics of the multiply-coded and polyracial body?
The next generation of writers will at least have anthologies like this one to digest and reflect upon when they navigate their own experiences of racialization. If it is true that all people require some form of mirroring to develop a stable identity, then these anthologies become the very mirrors that the collected writers themselves searched for while they were growing up.
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MLA: La Flamme, Michelle. The Hybridity Revolution. canlit.ca. Canadian Literature, 31 May 2012. Web. 20 June 2013.
This review originally appeared in Canadian Literature #215 (Winter 2012), Indigenous Focus. (pg. 161 - 163)
***Please note that the articles and reviews from the Canadian Literature website (www.canlit.ca) may not be the final versions as they are printed in the journal, as additional editing sometimes takes place between the two versions. If you are quoting from the website, please indicate the date accessed when citing the web version of reviews and articles.
