On February 21, 2021 The Loft hosted More Than A Single Story: Crossing Generations & Racial Lines featuring Douglas Kearney, David Mura, Alexs Pate, and Bao Phi.
This panel presented two generations of collaborations between African American and Asian American male literary artists. The intersections between these four artists explore how poetry and literary culture can form new relationships and understandings and new forms of dialogue between their respective communities. diaCRITICS is proud to publish a transcript of this panel, edited for clarity. To be published in multiple parts, this first section introduces readers to the authors and the beginning of their friendships.
David Mura: Can you talk about your friendships in the various collaborations you’ve worked on and I want to have Bao and Doug start with this.
Bao Phi: Yeah, so I guess I could start. Doug, if that’s okay with you? So, you know, first of all thank you to everyone, you know, the Loft, Carolyn Holbrook for having us, David for moderating, and you know it’s just an honor to be on this panel with you all. I mean, I’m a big, I started off as a fan of you all I’m still a big fan you know I kind of can’t believe I’m here. I mean you heard the bios, Alexs is basically best friends with Steven Spielberg. I mean like Alexs get us a movie man, get us a movie. Make a movie about four of us with Spielberg.
Alexs Pate: I keep turning down the project.
Douglas Kearney: That would be dope. It’ll be dope.
Alexs: I know.
Bao: I think it was 1999. When I was asked to do a poetry reading at some bullshit club in downtown Minneapolis and no one came to it and you know like as writers you all can talk about this. You know how it is sometimes when you’re asked to do a reading. You kind of read for the people who are there or for the other poets because nobody cares about you right?
So I’m reading and I sit down and then this dude comes up and kicks these poems.
What struck me about Doug was that he was a poet and a writer that already had the skills and the voice. He struck me as a poet who was very fully-formed—the skill, the confidence, the content was all there and I remember thinking, “Damn, like, who is this dude?” I want to get to know him because I’m a fan of literature. I’m a fan of dope people and that’s really where we met. And there was this kind of new type of correspondence called email that had popped up, just it started happening.
Douglas: (laughs) Yeah, had started happening.
Bao: I had learned how to use the internet I think two years before we met and we just started emailing back and forth. I don’t know what the statute of limitations of emailing rap lyrics while at work is; hopefully, my bosses at the Loft will not care that that’s what we were doing. I’ll let Doug take it from there.
Douglas: At that event, which was in a little club on what’s the warehouse district, that event was curated by Toriano Sanzone. [Toriano] had arranged this reading and he kept telling me about this guy “Da Bao Da Bao.” He always put “Da” in front of it like “Da Bao. You got to meet Da Bao.” I’m expecting Ultron or something and I saw Bao do his thing and I was like okay all right.
Bao was just fire in there. We began emailing each other back and forth. The idea was every time we’d send a verse. We would have a bunch of different nicknames to kind of like contribute to Wu Tang Clan and Ghostface Killah in particular. They all started off as supreme clientele-esque rhymes and we started doing that. We started doing battle haikus against each other and we had a chance to premiere those at a one-man show at the late great Intermediate Arts of course Bao doesn’t give a damn about what they call stuff. It was this huge collab override. There were fifteen people up there besides Bao and we had the haiku battle, which is not our most surreal performance.
We’ve just been friends since then and when I went back to LA, one of the reasons that I wanted to move back to the Twin Cities, in all honesty, was because that’s where Bao is.
Bao: Yeah and I, for a minute, I thought I was going to move to LA.
Douglas: Yeah.
Bao: A big reason for that was Doug and Nicole and his family. Number two was Roscoe’s Chicken and Waffles but number one was definitely—
Douglas: And Zenku Chicken.
Bao: Zenku Chicken, right yeah.
Douglas: The garlic sauce!
Bao: Two and three, but like number one was Doug.
Douglas: Because I knew where Roscoe’s and Zenku Chicken were so that’s why I was number one because he needed me to find those things.
David: Alexs, you want to talk about the beginnings of our friendship and working together?
Alexs: I think we you know it wasn’t as sort of upbeat and happy as the way you guys came together. I was always a reticent. When I wound up in a car with David driving from here to Winona (I think to do a reading), we spent a lot of time in that car talking about our work. The door opened at somewhere along the way that there was a connection here. His intensity was the thing that sort of got me the most. Like how intense he was about the work he was doing, about his prep. Anybody who knows him and knows his work, those are hallmarks. David is one of the most prepared writers, intellects that I’ve ever come across and I think it was the intellectual connection that made that connection powerful, made it momentarily powerful.
We decided after we did our reading and drove back to get together at an old place, [a café].
We sat there (we’ve written, I’ve written about this and we ultimately did a performance that captured sort of some of that moment), but I just kept looking at him. Like I mean really, are you Asian? Like I couldn’t, I mean, there was a certain way in which David was so professorial and so academic in a way, I could tell he was Marxist or he had been reading Marx. It was just this weird combination of feelings and it just began. As we went deeper and deeper and I and David started to face the racial issues that were confronting him in his life, I became a sounding board for him and I realized I started absorbing qualities that I needed to survive the world that I was in while exchanging my experience with that for him so that his capacity to manage his migration or transition or transformation into a fully inflated man of color was actually happening. Wewe just went through a lot of deep conversations about race, about existence. All the while this man is writing poetry that is just going to change the world. It’s just unbelievable and I still feel that way about his work. So that’s the beginning.
David: I just want to add that we have a line in the show that Alexs and I did where he goes, “When I first saw David, I saw a white man.”
Alexs: I didn’t want to say it directly like that just now, but OK yeah.
David: There was a way, in which you know certainly, when I grew up, I grew up very white identified. I lived in a white Jewish suburb. Nobody talked to me about race. I would say to people, “Don’t call me Asian. Don’t call me Asian American. I’m an American.” It wasn’t until my late twenties when I read Frantz Fanon that I finally woke up and went, “Oh crap, I’m not a white guy. What the hell am I?” Alexs met me as I was, examining all this.
Then Miss Saigon came and I helped start an Asian American arts organization, the Asian American Renaissance. We held protests and we protested against the orientalism and stereotypes in the musical and against the casting of a white actor as a Eurasian and the fact that no Asian Americans were allowed to try out.
When I started having arguments with all my white artist friends about this—none of them would get up today and defend yellow face casting, but back then they thought I had lost it. I wrote an article about these arguments because I had them with every single white artist friend I had and I wrote an article about raising a biracial daughter in Mother Jones and after the article came out, I essentially got blackballed from the local writing community. People wrote to me and said, “Have you become a racial separatist? The reward for community destruction, community is power, said Wendell Berry.” I wrote back and said, I think Wendell Berry was talking about corporations going up and buying single family farms, not one Asian American writing about white writers in Minnesota. I turned to Alexs and I realized that Alexs understood what I was going through in ways none of my friends understood. I began to appreciate just how psychologically astute he was and it made me understand like we had things in commo. He understood my anger. He understood my increasing sense of alienation and as I got more angry—
Alexs: That was the best part!
David: Our friendship just grew because I think Alexs finally began to feel like, “Oh this is no longer a white guy. I can trust him.”
But I think one of the things about trying to develop relationships between Asian Americans and African Americans is you have to get to some point of trust and mutual understanding about certain basics. My going through, for me, such a painful thing but really literally breaking up with the whole white writing community here. My writing was cited as reasons not to hire me as a teacher locally, and Alexs understood all that and then we’ve been talking about doing something and then the Rodney King video hit.
The events in LA, the violence, the conflict between Korean store owners and their Black and Latinx community became a big thing. We decided we would we would do a show together and we thought, we would just got up on stage and say, “I’m Japanese American, he’s African American, we’re friends.” We would be presenting something that people hadn’t seen. We wrote this and performed this whole story with a number of other artists…But the other thing we were trying to do was deal both with the stereotypes of our communities, the way our own communities see each other or don’t see each other, which can often be sort of essentialist. Like there’s only one way of being Black or one way of being Asian American and then also us as individuals, just as individual peoples, individual artists trying to struggle with the racial landscape of America and to form a friendship within that landscape.
That was one of the first times that a video police brutality was seen by a national audience. In recent years what I would say is technology caught up with racism right because Black and brown people have been saying this about the police for years and years. One of the basic things about America is white Americans do not accept the knowledge of people of color as legitimate knowledge, the word of people as a legitimate word. It is only legitimate when white people say this and so that was one of the first instances and Alexs did this great monologue of this older Black man on the corner just talking about seeing the Rodney King video.
Bao: Can I just interject for one quick second, David? You brought up a lot of important things and I don’t want people to miss the part where you talked about how you were basically shunned in the community for speaking out against racism in Miss Saigon. I want people to recognize that and hear that because I think that there are ways in which you led to transformative change in the arts culture and community here in Minnesota and no one—
Alexs: And in the country subsequent to that!
Bao: Yes. Right and nobody, like no one, in Asian American literature, nobody in all of these history books and people who talk about arts and culture recognize you enough for that.
Alexs: Bao, I gotta tell you: I sat at a table at a restaurant downtown Minneapolis (Brenda’s, I think it was) with a group of writers, all ex-friends of David or in the process then of deciding whether they could be friends and spent two hours trying to heal them so that they could see where David was going. It was amazing how people turned their backs on him.It wasn’t a formal blackballing but it was definitely a collaborative ostracizing. It was reduced to his personality or issues that had nothing to do with what actually was going on. David was coming into a political consciousness and it was racialized. It challenged all of that precept Minnesota as sort of the Garrison Keillor, Michael Dennis Brown environment that we had to deal with when we sort of started to rise up.
Contributors’ Bios
Douglas Kearney’s work as a poet, performer and librettist has been featured in many fine publications and venues in print, in-the-flesh and in digital code. His first full-length collection of poems, Fear, Some, was published in 2006 (Red Hen Press). His second manuscript, The Black Automaton, was chosen by Catherine Wagner for the National Poetry Series and was published by Fence Books in December 2009. In 2010, it was named a finalist for the Pen Center USA Literary Award in poetry. In 2008, he was honored with a Whiting Writers’ Award. He lives in the Valley with his family and teaches courses in African American poetry, opera and myth at California Institute of the Arts.
David Mura is a memoirist, novelist, poet, and literary critic. He has written the novel Famous Suicides of the Japanese Empire and two memoirs: Turning Japanese: Memoirs of a Sansei, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, and Where the Body Meets Memory: An Odyssey of Race, Sexuality, and Identity.
Alexs Pate is the President and CEO of Innocent Technologies and the creator of the Innocent Classroom, a program for K–12 educators that aims to transform U.S. public education and end disparities by closing the relationship gap between educators and students of color. The Innocent Classroom has partnered with districts and schools throughout the United States, training more than 7,000 educators. The success of the Innocent Classroom has led to the development of Innocent Classroom for Early Childhood Educators and Innocent Care training for healthcare professionals to build connections with their patients. Alexs is the author of five novels, including the New York Times best-seller Amistad. Prior to these pursuits, Alexs was a professor and teacher at Macalester College, the University of Minnesota, Naropa University, and the University of Southern Maine’s Stonecoast Creative Writing Program, where he also earned an MFA.
Bao Phi is a spoken word artist, poet, children’s book author, arts administrator, and father.
