Dragonfly (pages 20-21)

The next poem in Dragonfly is a transition poem. The two previous poems focus on family in conjunction with pop culture. Starting with this poem we get a series of poems that deal with childhood. This poem focuses specifically on Asian American childhood in San Francisco in the '60s. I've written about this in the blog before: last year, I posted a short story on this very topic titled "Manny's Climb"; when that story had been published in the book Growing Up Filipino: Stories for Young Adults, it had appeared with a preface that explains what happened: during the '60s and '70s, teenagers who were neither white nor black had to choose one or the other of those identities in order to survive on the streets. That's the way it was in San Francisco, certainly, and I would hazard a guess that that happened in many locales. What I saw happening with Asian American kids in particular — both girls and boys — is that they would oftentimes teeter-totter back and forth between passing as white and passing as black. Jive Talk Growing up, I thought I was black. For 2 or 3 years, anyway. Playing the dozens, jive talk, Smokey Robinson and the Miracles. Dancing the 4 corners, A & I, Sophisticated Cissy, Mother Popcorn. Afternoons with Joe, Ronnie, and Resting-His-Eyes Jackson harmonizing with the Tempts: "The Girl's All Right with Me," "Get Ready," "My Girl," "Ain't Too Proud to Beg." At Grattan Playground, our gods were the Big O and Wilt the Stilt. Soft steal like Walt "Clyde" Frazier, a Meadow Lark hook from half court. Knit shirt-jackets like rainbows, creased jeans, black and red pimpsocks, gold dashikis. Talking trash. Doing Muhammad Ali and The James Brown. Testifying, funkifying: Page 20 Get down                     with the get down!                     Get down, brown.                                                   Joker,                                            wild card                               sure is you own.                     Get by                               with the get by!           Get by, Sly.                                                   Getting on, keeping on                                                   for real.                               But don't mean nothing.                     Flaming funk           be jiving junk if you the signifying skunk. Page 21 Here are a couple of images that will illustrate a bit of the fashion spirit of that time. On the left we see typical African American fashions from around 1970. This is how an Asian American teenager putting on blackness would have dressed. As did I during the time described in the poem. On the right is an image of African musicians wearing the dashiki. Not gold as in my poem above but other bright colors . . . the man in the center sports a mainly red one while around him are white dashikis, orange, yellow, etc. From about 1968 on, people in the African American civil rights movement wore dashikis as an Afrocentric statement; this fashion filtered down to common folk, and Asian American youth who were, again, "putting on blackness" followed suit. Bad pun, sorry. Because of the realities of my growing up during that time, I was fluent in Black English (again as a survival practice). A linguistic fluency that also came in very handy during my US Army service from 1972 to 1975. When I use this poem at readings, in fact, I perform the latter part of the poem, the italicized portion, in Black English. There's also an interesting story connected to the closing part of this poem. I wrote this text as a freestanding poem in a beginning poetry writing class with the poet Belle Randall at Stanford University in 1971 or 1972. Then, in probably 1986 or thereabouts, when I was working on my MFA in poetry with Yusef Komunyakaa, I resurrected it, as something that really spoke to my childhood experience, and inserted it into this poem, so that the opening section (the romanized portion) serves as contextualization for the ending section. I sprinkled the latter around the page in order to differentiate it from the part in standard English and to give a sense of its performative quality. Okay, that's all for today. I'd love to hear what you think of this poem or whatever; please comment below. Thanks. Ingat. The image on the left is borrowed from the website PastReunited.com. No attribution of photographer there. I'll be glad to give credit or remove this image if the creator contacts me. If you click on the photo, you'll be taken to PastReunited.com; this specific image is about 14 screenloads down that page. The image on the right was created by Emilio Labrador, resides in wikimedia.org, and is used under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license. DRAGONFLY FIRST CONTENTS PREVIOUS NEXT LAST