(Evelyn Lau, Other Women, 184)

1. The Register of the Visible

The title of the lead article in a relatively recent and controversial issue of the lifestyle magazine Vancouver was ‘Greetings from Asia Town’ ; the accompanying visual consisted of a collage of women’s faces, both ‘Caucasian’ and ‘Asian’, with some dissolving into each other. The accompanying article (North 1996) suggested that Vancouver’s population would be half ‘Asian’ in the next century and that the resultant mix would precipitate either tribalism (with its suggestion of serial conflict) or the kind of ‘morphed’ assimilation illustrated by the collage. Although the latter might be perceived as the more benign alternative, it could also be read as conjuring the spectre of miscegenation, the blurring of differences as the direct result of genealogical contaminations. Indeed, the visibility of ‘difference’ is itself registered via these markers of normative racialisation. The visible body itself, what the viewer sees in terms of its corporeal inscriptions, supposedly ‘explains’ these differences which in turn evoke both the incommensurabilities of postcolonial theory (the untranslatabilities of cultural difference) and the ‘lifestyle incompatibilities’ of ‘culturalism’ or cultural racism. The latter is at the core of what Etienne Balibar has dubbed (rather alarmingly) academic racism, ‘theories of academic racism mimic scientific discursivity by basing themselves upon "visible evidence" (whence the essential importance of the stigmata of race and in particular of bodily stigmata) … they mimic the way in which scientific discursivity articulates "visible facts" to "hidden causes" … a violent desire for immediate knowledge of social relations.’ (Balibar 1991:19). Balibar goes on to elaborate this nexus between racism and the visible as leading to a further convergence of racism and the politics of cultural difference:

In an attempt to uncouple the visible from such mechanisms of naturalised racism as described above I wanted to find a way to take into consideration another of the senses, that of hearing. As noted, the register of the visible permeates much current theory but the aural dimension, including the category of voice and, for example, accent, has remained somewhat under--theorised. Following this train of thought suggested that classical western opera might represent a particularly fertile field as well as the genre of the conference presentation itself, where these speculations were first aired. In an exploratory effort to investigate these fields, I recently ‘staged’ a performance piece dealing with the first novel of Canadian poet Evelyn Lau. Clearly the attempt to separate the visual from the aural functions more clumsily in print and is symptomatic as well of the impossibilities of translation at the heart of all cross–cultural and, for that matter, cross–disciplinary work. On the other hand, an alertness to ways in which translation is intrinsic to many of these debates is also signalled by the sometimes awkward transitions between the ‘here’ of the conference performance and its other temporalities when translated to the conference publication (which traditionally expunges any reference to the original context and delivery). I will therefore try to evoke the interpretive strategy for this endeavour while at the same time attempting to foreground its limitations. Retaining a first–person narrator in an academic essay is also an attempt to convey the performative aspects of this paper.

Working against the usual aural expectations set up by a conference delivery, the introductory ‘mise-en-scène’ (an obligatory exercise when minority or non–canonical writers are being used) deliberately excluded my reading voice when, for the first fifteen minutes, a series of overhead transparencies were projected which began with extracts from Lau’s novel (Lau 1995: 184;189-90), from one short story (Lau 1993: 50), followed by the cover of her second collection of poems Oedipal Dreams (Lau 1992) with its iconic portrait of the artist. The fourth transparency commenting, amongst other things, on this cover was from a piece by the Canadian critic Misao Dean:

The fifth transparency was from an interview with the Canadian journalist Jan Wong:

The final transparency was accompanied by the first moment of sound in the presentation and consisted, perversely, of an extract from the soundtrack of the film made of Lau’s first text, the autobiographically--based Runaway: Diary of a Street Kid (Lau 1989). The extract chosen dealt with a heuristic moment in the film when the protagonist experiences an epiphany in the consulting room of her analyst:

At this point my own voice was introduced in a series of questions: What happens when the visual intervenes, in print or the mind’s eye of the reader, when we join the voice to a body, have the voice issue from what has been coded as a ‘visible minority’ face? How might one circumvent the ‘disguise’ of the stereotype (to echo Lau), the ‘orientalist’ camouflage Lau’s public persona apparently adopts so that her private self won’t be recognized in the streets? One way to arrive at an answer is to consider what we as readers or audience desire from the so–called minority writer who becomes constructed as part of the current quest for ‘cultural difference’ and who is often covertly racialised (or sexualised) as ‘deviant.’ The term ‘desire’ and its link with ‘differential racism’ (as described above) suggests the field of psychoanalysis for, as Ali Rattansi, following Bhabha, has pointed out, ‘The ambivalence of racism … is particularly open to psychoanalytic interpretation for it is in psychoanalysis that the notion has its strongest roots. … [it] does not reduce all racisms merely to supposedly eternal and universal psychic mechanisms’ (Rattansi 1995:272--3). The question of desire in psychoanalysis, is posed, for example, by Slavoj Zizek, ‘The original question of desire is not directly "What do I want?" but "What do others want from me? What do they see in me? What am I for others?" ’ (Zizek 1996:117). How, in other words, can we as readers not project the expectation that Lau should ‘inform’ us about what would, in Canada, be termed her visible minority status, acknowledge it in some way and, if not, how do we avoid constructing her in terms of a refusal or denial? These are the familiar burdens imposed on the minority writer (Gunew 1994).

Canadian poet and short story writer Evelyn Lau represents an enigma in a Canadian and North American west coast context where Asian--American and Asian--Canadian ethnic or diasporic canons are being hastily assembled with a great deal of relish, given the demographic changes along the west coast over the past decade (Cheung 1997; Lee & Wong--Chu 1993; Lim and Ling 1992; Karpinski and Lea 1993; Silvera 1994; Wong 1993). The semi-autobiographical work which shot her to precocious fame at the age of 18, Runaway: Diary of a Street Kid, dealt with a protagonist preferring a life on the street to the constrictions of family expectations projected upon her. That the family were Chinese immigrants was almost deliberately incidental, in the written text at least. The expectations concerning the Chinese as ‘model immigrants’ in terms of their abilities to assimilate are succinctly outlined in the extract quoted earlier by journalist Jan Wong, herself the author of a recent bestseller Red China Blues: My Long March from Mao to Now . In the film made of Lau’s book it was another matter, for the demands of the visual medium meant that the ethnic identity of the protagonist and her family inevitably registered a certain kind of coded presence. Following this first text, Lau’s poetry and short stories have subsequently explored an overtly heterosexual underworld of sadomasochism, prostitution and drug addiction and have been seen as deliberately avoiding any hint of a racialised perspective, in relation to which she supposedly has an ‘insider’s’ knowledge (Dean 1995; Kamboureli 1997: 534). It may be, however, that an emerging group of Chinese–Canadian critics interpret the insider--outsider dynamics differently. For example, in the words of Elaine K. Chang, ‘Throughout Runaway, Lau identifies herself as Chinese only when her ethnicity signifies a measure of difference, and not sameness or "belonging." ’ (Chang 1994:114) Lien Chao, author of the first full--length study of Chinese–Canadian writing in English perceives Lau’s highly self--conscious individualism as being at odds with the ‘collective’ impetus of other Chinese–Canadian writers who are at pains to write their community into Canadian culture and history (Chao 1997:156--184). Chao also perceives Lau’s subject–matter as restrictive and stereotypical. Thus from many directions Lau is perceived as flouting or refusing the so--called ‘empowering’ categories with which critics are eager to provide her, rarely appearing in anthologies of Asian--Canadian writing and, by her own account, refusing to participate in ‘multicultural’ events (Lau 1994b).

For those of us who for several decades have attempted to deconstruct totalising national--cultural narratives and their attendant regulatory institutional regimes in the name of women, of anti-imperialism and critical multiculturalism (Gunew 1994), her apparent refusal precipitates a revisiting of theories around the question of how to situate the authority to speak and write for those designated minority cultural players and how to set up interpretive strategies which move beyond the thematisation of cultural difference, a thematisation which in turn functions to reinforce difference as a mechanism leading to marginalisation since difference is always posited in relation to an implicit (and invisible) hegemonic norm. The dominant reference points for minoritarian questioning of the hegemonic are a mixture of postcolonial histories with their legacies of scepticism towards totalising theoretical frameworks, invocations of anti-racism (often in opposition to the perceived wimpy liberalism of multiculturalism) and the perceived essentialisms of identity positionings. The slick invocation of terms such as tribalism, ethnic absolutism and ethnic cleansing in relation to coverage of the war in the former Yugoslavia in particular (Gunew 1997), are competing with principled attempts to constitute local pedagogies which incorporate an ethics of recognition in relation to minorities. In the necessary tension between global diasporas, with their networks and coalitions, and localised manifestations and negotiations, how might one locate or construct intellectual and pedagogical interventions that avoid the compromised categories of ‘ethnic community’ and of the general reductionism of identity politics?

The debates around identity politics have a particular resonance within global feminism although their detailed meanings are often dependent on local contexts. The phenomenon itself was seen as arising out of the ‘consciousness–raising’ tactics which are historically credited with the birth of second–wave feminism and led from the articulation of women’s differences to the definition of other group differences. But, increasingly, these differences have congealed into imprisoning essentialisms which are often perceived as obscuring more than they illuminate, of occluding intra--group differences and ‘intersectional identities’ (Crenshaw 1995 :333). In the UK critics such as Nira Yuval--Davis warn that an identity politics which couples women with ethnicity within the political framework of multiculturalism obscures the political (rather than simply cultural) nature of ethnicity and can lead to the kinds of fundamentalism currently on the rise all over the world. Indeed, as she contends, political ethnicity uses ‘cultural resources to promote its specific purposes’ in the name of the self-enclosed ethnic community in which women rarely are permitted to play a progressive role (Yuval-Davis 1994:411). In the US Martha Minow argues that identity politics ‘may freeze people in pain and also fuel their dependence on their own victim status as a source of meaning’ (Minow 1997:54). She goes on to state that, ‘Identity politics tends to locate the problem in the identity group rather than the social relations that produce identity groupings’ (Minow 1997:56). In Solidarity of Strangers: Feminisms After Identity Politics, Jodi Dean states that, ‘The articulation of particular identities has led to the rigidification of these very identities. At the legislative level, this rigidification appears as the reinforcement of minority status with its negative connotations of inferiority’ (Dean 1996:5). She continues her elucidation in the following manner:

The solution however, as argued by Analouise Keating in the context of the struggle by ‘women of colour’ to asserts their own politics of difference, is ‘not to abandon all references to personal experiences but rather to take experientially based knowledge claims even further by redefining identity’ (Keating 1998:36). Keating draws on Chela Sandoval’s concept of ‘differential consciousness’ and, like Rattansi, on Homi Bhabha’s notion of ‘ambivalent identification’ as a way to move to such new definitions of identity. This is why Lau’s case seems such an exemplary and compelling one. Do we see her as a minority writer who refuses the ‘ethical responsibility’ of representing her community and of choosing the deliberate individualism often associated with the subjectivity of late capitalism (Elam 1997) or do we use her example as a way to move beyond the constraints of identity categories as figuring the ‘new racism’, like Rattansi, or the limits identified by the feminist critics cited above? The following discussion comprises some sketchy notes towards a possible interpretative strategy for approaching such texts. Having attempted to ‘set the scene’ and to explain how a project to establish the anti–universalist focus on cultural difference has been appropriated by a ‘new racism’ organised around an economy of visibility and, in particular, an emphasis on the visibly--racialised body, I will now link the question of the visible to the acoustic: voice and sound, the aural dimension residing within these questions.

2. The Acoustic Register

In marked contradiction to film, one of the cultural domains where there is conventional acceptance of the disjunction between visible bodies and audible voices is opera. Western opera demands a suspension of disbelief not only with respect to the ‘fat tenor/soprano’ and the nubile characters they are asked to represent but, as well, in relation to the gender--crossings and ‘color--blind’ casting that have always been the present in this medium. What the audience ‘sees’ does not get in the way of what they are asked to imagine. Until recently, for example, few of the non--European roles in the standard canonical repertoire were actually sung by those from the requisite categories but there have, however, been flurries of controversy around cases where leading roles were sung by non--European singers. A systematic study of the chequered history of race and opera has still to be written. Generally speaking opera audiences are accustomed to hearing the voice and imaginatively substituting a very different body from the one which they see on the stage. So how might this affect a reading of Lau’s work in relation to the question of desire as posed by Zizek?

In the reviews heralding the reception of Other Women critics wondered whether Lau would, or could, ever move beyond a somewhat romantic adolescent rebelliousness suggested by the prevailing obsession with the underworld of sadomasochism and prostitution (Gunning 1995; Kornreich 1996; Chao 1997). My argument is that, in a sense, Lau’s work invites a more allegorical reading , allegory being the supreme modality where what you see is not what you get and opera, in its splitting of the visible and the audible, helps us recognise this.

Indicative of soap opera rather than opera proper, the novel’s title, Other Women, suggests that the women referred to are those who disrupt the dyad of the heterosexual couple. Instead the text is narrated from the point of view of the traditional ‘mistress’ so that the other woman is actually the ‘wife’. Thus the whole text, and much of Lau’s prose work, can be interpreted as celebrating a nostalgia for the ‘normal’ via the concept of symbolic identification. One needs to be reminded that within psychoanalysis the operations of identification are not with actual people but with possible ‘types’ or, more precisely and following Lacan, with positions in language where language constitutes the symbolic order. Slavoj Zizek delineates the following distinction here between imaginary and symbolic identification:

This site is the place of the Other (the symbolic order) from whence the gaze and the interrogation proceed and thus is identified with social doxa, the hegemonic codes of the social world. As constituted in Lau’s work it becomes the location of social heteronormativity. The symbolic identification of the adulterous woman is with the position of the wife insofar as she connotes the heterosexual couple. She/they is/are in the place from which they observe her and where she wants to be. Consider the following extracts (which constituted the first transparency):

What is described here are not imaginary identifications with an ideal self but attempts to gesture towards a place from which the ‘normality’ of these figures may be registered and atomised. These sections from the novel as well as the supposedly ‘heuristic moment’ in the film script (when everything is ‘explained’), all point to the identification of a referential moralistic voice echoed as well in the extract from Jan Wong’s prescriptive evaluation. There are certain societal standards, designated by invisible or spectral scripts, against which the protagonist transgresses -- visibly and stereotypically. Paradoxically, the excesses of sexual perversion and addiction serve to confirm such social standards since the norm as measure is always there as a point of nostalgic invocation, as demonstrated by the closing pages of Other Women from which these quotations were taken. What is at one level a text dealing with obsessive emotional addiction is at another level the reconfirmation of the bourgeois heterosexual couple as constitutive norm for sexual--social relations. The fact that the chapters alternate between first--person and third--person intimate functions as a reminder of the mirror--image, the to and fro, mutually constitutive relationship of the adulterous woman and the wife. That is one kind of reading.

But that is not the whole story and there are other excesses at work beyond this. If we return to western opera, there are moments when the point of the music, or aria, functions to exceed meaning -- as signifying the very disruption of meaning. In the words of Wayne Kostenbaum, ‘When heterosexuality unveils itself as sumptuous and delusional, the libretto shatters, and shadow--knowledges speak ... by loving Butterfly’s entrance more than her death ... by never outgrowing this entrance phrase, I can speak another Butterfly’ (Kostenbaum 1993:200). And Michel Poizat in The Angel’s Cry, ‘but when Callas sings, when she’s going to kill herself, maybe it’s idiotic, but I snap ... it’s hearing the voice, the music, I fall on my knees (Poizat 1992:26). The music leaks beyond the container of meaning provided by the libretto, the narrative, and thus permits multiple identifications, including gay ones (Abel 1996: 32-34). This exhilaration permits precisely the kinds of disruptive and paradoxical identifications which opera in a sense personifies by imbuing a visible and living body with the suggestion of ventriloquism. The instability of corporeality indicated by the imaginative possibilities of opera means that it is a genre where, historically at least and unlike film, the tyranny of the visible has been unseated by the precedence of the aural. We are reminded that in Zizek’s formulation any manifestation of voice is always to some extent ventriloquised and exceeds the explanatory parameters of the body it ostensibly occupies. In a recent piece aptly titled, ‘ "I Hear You with My Eyes": or, The Invisible Master’, Zizek traces what he calls the homologous mechanisms of gaze and voice in the following manner:

Which brings us to opera and to Madama Butterfly, the most obviously orientalist of operas. In the many recent attentions Puccini’s opera has received, much has been made of the fact that Cho-Cho San functions as the traditional good women who sacrifices herself in the name of maternity. She has also notoriously figured as the paradigmatic orientalist fantasy of the ultimate victim and ultimate seductress, both child and femme fatale, a combination informing, for example, Misao Dean’s essay quoted earlier. David Hwang’s play M. Butterfly has explored one kind of gloss on the opera and David Cronenberg’s film of the play, a slightly different variation. The sustaining fantasy in these two depictions is that ‘Butterfly’ really wants to be the cad Pinkerton and vice-versa, that Gallimard finally realises he wants to be Butterfly rather than to possess her. But isn’t this constant see--sawing or mechanism of vice--versa that which has always sustained such binary frameworks for decades and isn’t this why one needs to find a way beyond such a paralysing impasse? Therefore we return to the delirium of the aria and of music in general as documented by Jacques Attali and now many others in the developing field of sound theory. Zizek again:

On the one hand we see on stage the stereotype of Butterfly; we see the stereotype of Lau’s adulterous woman and invest it with the ‘withheld orientalism’ of the author (as suggested by the critics’ demands for her to inform us about her ‘ethnic’ knowledge) but perhaps it is possible to break this move by turning from the visual to the acoustic, by situating Lau’s text not in the genre of ‘dirty realism’ (suggested by the prevailing themes in her work) but the lyrical genre of opera and sound. This move might also be facilitated (were there time and space) by including her poetry which has been identified as traditionally lyrical in style, a contrast perhaps with the confrontational themes of her work (Wah 1997--98). Turning now to the work of Kaja Silvermann on the disembodiment of the female voice, her suggestion in relation to desire is that perhaps it is the mother whom the daughter wishes to seduce (‘both to seduce the mother and be seduced by her’, Silvermann 1988:153) rather than the Freudian heterosexual seduction scenario of the father and daughter. If we recall the film script extract quoted earlier, there is a classic psychoanalytic example of this scenario in the sublimated form of male analyst and female analysand; meanwhile the protagonist recounts her own family saga as one where the father is merely absent while the mother has a mouth. In Other Women the narrator, speaking of herself in the third--person, repeatedly states that : ‘It seems incredible to her, that at last she is making a sound’ (Lau 1995:13) and ‘she could open her mouth, and with just a few words, enter Helen’s life’ (Lau 1995:8). The place of symbolic identification reinforces the norm but by focussing on sound rather than sight and the disjuncture between body and voice we are also reminded that the heteronormative couple is itself sustained by the fantasy of its perverse double. What is undeniably all--powerful in Lau’s text is the open and speaking (singing) female voice which appears to exceed the meanings of normativity we have been attaching to it. Where that delirium may lead in terms of finding other meanings to Lau’s oeuvre remains to be seen and would necessarily include her poetry.

Arriving finally at karaoke, one could suggest that it functions as a consummate example of mimicry and ventriloquism. The reason for invoking the odd conjunction of operatic karaoke in relation to Lau’s work is that it is clearly not operatic in the classic sense since its preoccupations, in Other Women at least, suggest an accent on accessories and lifestyles that we have come to associate with soap opera. Operatic karaoke takes bathroom singing to new soap operatic heights. It is both the ultimate accolade and parody of this western musical form, though not necessarily from a race--conscious or postcolonial perspective. Western opera has always exceeded and been constituted by its own parodic contradictions (what you hear governs what you imagine). In Lau’s work the reader’s imagined ventriloquisms of the authorial body are undone by the delirium of the textual voice which exceeds the very norms it ostensibly functions to sustain. It might be productive, therefore, to learn to listen for voice outside the traditional narratives of race as presently constituted, with their normative privileging of the visibly raced body. These are the possibilities for exceeding the claustrophobic paradigms of identity politics which can be constraining even when benignly situated in the realms of postcolonial and multicultural interrogations. Here might be a way for those ‘intersectional identities’ (Crenshaw 1995) and ‘differential consciousnesses’ (Keating 1998) which are part of the new ways for defining identity to be articulated. Questions of desire (‘What do others want from me? What do they see in me? What am I for others?’) continue to be posed by those designated minority writers to their audiences or readers.

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