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.
Throughout June, we’ll be publishing this conversation in parts. Read Part 1 here.
David Mura: What are the key things that all of you feel like you’ve learned from these relationships and these collaborations with each other, specifically about the intersectionality between Asian Americans and African Americans?
Douglas Kearney: So much of the work that I encountered that Bao was doing in our early meetings were directly connected and influenced by that critical activism that [he was] doing at that level. It was moving through several different spaces at once. Bao had poems like “Miss Saigon” that were drawing that conversation into these other spaces.
Something I’ve learned from Bao is his awareness of issues of artists (present and past artists) in the Asian diaspora and that commitment being so intertwined with not only his work and his presence but also the work that he does. That doesn’t look like a poem on the page. There’s this other activity that’s constantly engaged with and how often he was working within spaces to build these bridges of understanding and yet doing it in such a way that maintained the anger, that maintained the sadness, the profound sadness that he felt was happening to all of the oppressed people that he had seen firsthand and could empathize with.
But something that I learned that’s been extraordinarily important to me from Bao—and I’ve told this story before—but I learned about how white people read different races or read different identities. The example that I have to say about is, there’s a performative quality with that.
Bao and I did a reading and it was a longer reading so we had bigger, louder pieces. I did a piece called “Super Monster Jam,” and after that reading people from the audience came up to me and they’re like “Oh my gosh, that was so intense! That was so brave!” But Bao got hate mail.
Now it wasn’t the tone of the work. It wasn’t the quality of the work. It was, where was this anger coming from and in what packages can that anger exist? And I learned something very important that day, which is: for many white people or people who believe in the particular lenses that white oppression have created, to see anger coming out of a Black person…to see anger come out of those packages is expected, right? It’s thrilling. It’s like riding on a roller coaster. Like, “Oh my god, he’s about to start yelling, oh god! Yeah, I took it, I’m not as bad as my old man, you know?” It’s like going to see a horror movie on purpose, like, “Oh catharsis, oh that was scary, but it’s okay, haha!” In terms of poetry reading, people who go to them expect that. But they didn’t expect it from Bao. Because the idea is, what does he have to be angry about? And that’s powerful.
Alexs Pate: I wanted to say on that point—if you take that same reality and suss out from that what it gives to you is, well for me: when David started to rise up and to challenge the world around him on racial issues, my benefit was I didn’t have to. Like I stepped back. One of the qualities, one of the things that I got from David, was the opportunity to experience peace in a tense moment. If anybody’s going to jail, it’s going to be David and that I can hear that meant so much to me!
So much that we talked about this in order to work together and to build friendship and to build coalition and allyship. You have to go to the deep personal part, you don’t have to do it on purpose. It doesn’t have to happen every minute, but there has to be these moments where you settle. When we started working on “Secret Colors,” our performance piece, we had to settle on so many issues like—
Mura: Talk about that argument you and I had.
Pate: Where we ended up standing outside—
Mura: We were outside. We had a meeting with our producer. We walked outside and we had been rehearsing. If you perform together with different people, you have all these little things about spaces and things and we had this argument—
Pate: Like you always had to be there first, so you could take advantage of me on the stage. Like, “Well if this chair is gonna be more comfortable, I’m gonna get there!” And if we talked about something, if we talked about doing something on Tuesday, then on Wednesday, the piece was already written and I’m like, “Goddamn, David! Give me some time!” And it’s like, who are you, so we stopped—
Mura: I want to interject.
Pate: Yeah, you better interject!
Mura: What I said during this argument was, I felt I was starting so far behind on issues of race behind Alexs, that I had to come prepared, like if I sort of dogged it or didn’t do my work, I was already far behind. I was already trying to catch up and he didn’t understand that. So we had this long argument for like forty-five minutes outside in the snow, and it’s January in Minnesota, so at a certain point I just go to Alexs, “I just want to know, do you care about me?” And Alexs goes, “Damn man, I mean I wouldn’t be standing out here in the snow for a half hour arguing with me if I didn’t care about you.” And that argument was really what cemented our friendship.
Pate: Absolutely.
Mura: And we saw people who did interracial, intersectional things after that, and we always felt like they hadn’t had that argument.
Pate: Yeah.
Mura: Where you just begin to sweep out all the things that you have under the table and some of those—
Pate: All those latent stereotypes. All of that crap.
Mura: Assumptions about the other and just throw them on the table and okay, let’s talk about them.
Pate: And that day ended in tears actually. Not only was it snowing and below freezing, somebody or both of us were actually crying. It was crazy.
Mura: But when he said, “I wouldn’t be out here for you, if I didn’t care about you”—it’s like okay, all right.
Phi: Yeah.
Mura: We can go on now. You sort of have to have that and in certain ways, it’s much harder to have those sort of discussions as a community, right? Because these same issues are going on in communities, but they’re in a public forum. They’re not on a personal level.
Pate: We should say, too, right now there are many relationships like ours in the world.
Kearney: Right.
Pate: Among women, among queer people, among Black and Asian. There are just many people who are doing this and it never gets talked—that’s part of the problem: it never gets explicated. It never gets talked about. It never rises to community level conversation about how close some of us are that cross boundaries and cross generations and it’s time for that to change.
Bao Phi: Going back to that—I grew up a little bit differently from David. I was a Vietnamese refugee who grew up in Phillips and all of you in Minnesota know about Phillips, and so you know I grew up learning about all people, Indigenous people, Black, Latinx struggle, but nothing about Asian American struggle as a high school kid. I’d learn about these movements but it was always like I was always this outsider. Racism is fucked up but I knew I wasn’t white. Like as a Vietnamese refugee in Phillips, there’s no way you think you’re white. You might want to be white. I did, I wanted to be white, but I knew I wasn’t. With that being said—
Mura: Well, the first time you walked down the park, you knew.
Phi: Right, you’re right. So that being said, I was immersed in all of this interest in social justice movements but had no Asian American context and it wasn’t until college where I met David who was extraordinarily patient with me and also Alexs, who was a professor. Here were two men of color who were successful and unafraid and political and talented and I looked up to both of them. I remember taking Alexs’s hip-hop poetry class and being like, “Wow, we as people of color can actually shape the discourse that is missing, and in a way, that’s dope and interesting.” I remember kids were lining up fighting each other for a spot in that class, Alexs.
By the time I met Doug…I was in full Asian American male rage mode and there was a way in which I think sometimes we can all play this “grass is greener” type of thing, right? Where I wanted my rage to be respected the way that Doug’s rage was respected, but I think I had a conversation with Doug after a show and we were kind of talking about it. When Doug gets up there or a Black male body gets up there…when a Black male body gets up on stage, a Black body period gets on stage, everyone expects that body to talk about race and they accept anger as messed up as it is. Like that’s the deal. But if that Black person wants to do, say a love poem or a poem not about race, maybe that audience, no matter what the complexion is like, is like, “What is happening here?”
Whereas for me (I mean, especially back then) if you get an Asian person on stage, first of all they don’t know what you’re doing up there. But second, if they do, if they do know what you’re doing up there, they expect you to make fun of the Asian accent or something and make people laugh. That was kind of our role and that was a different limitation. What I kind of learned from Doug to think about was these are not better or worse. We sometimes do this thing where we, those of us who lack, wish we had something, but really it’s different limitations. Different limitations put on us and that’s something I continually remember in my friendship with Doug on all levels and it goes beyond art.
Mura: I’m going to introduce this question now and answer it first. What is the most surreal performance experience you’ve had together or something about your friendship that a lot of folks don’t know about?
And I will just use two things. One is in relationship with what Bao said. When Alexs and I would do readings together, I would always want Alexs to go first because once Alexs had racialized the stage and I came on with racial stuff, I didn’t have to racialize the stage. It was always already racialized. If I went on [first], people would do what Bao just said, they’ll go like, “What is this Asian American talking about?”
The other thing I’m gonna say is that I’ve had a couple experiences with Alexs where just obvious light bulbs went up. We did a movie for PBS in New York and we got out of the hotel. We’re on a side street off of Broadway and we’re trying to get a cab, so I say to Alexs, “Let’s go down to Broadway and get a cab.” And he says, “Well, maybe I can go with you and maybe you can get a cab, but I’m a Black man with dreads in New York, Manhattan.” …And I thought, oh this is something I didn’t think about.
I remember I was with Alexs and several Black male artists. They were all talking about being arrested for driving while Black and it was just the revelation. What was a revelation is there was pain there, but there they were telling these stories with like sort of mutual laughter at the same time and making fun of themselves. I sort of realized, they wouldn’t have done this if there had been a white guy at the table because like, the same way that Dave Chappelle felt, like I’m telling these jokes, I think Black people are laughing at one thing about the joke and white people are laughing at the other. I understood that even though they were telling jokes, they were laughing, that there was all sorts of stuff underneath the surface—anger and pain and fear.
So do you have a personal or surreal performance or something that you learned? Something about you two that people don’t know about?
Phi: So Doug, do you remember that show we did in Florida in the outdoor amphitheater?
Kearney: Yes, I do. Gainesville.
Phi: Yeah, am I making it up? So first of all, I didn’t know until we got there that was all the serial killings and stuff like that.
Kearney: Right.
Phi: There was that, not to make light of it, but also, I don’t know if I’m selectively imagining it, but did we have concerns about alligators popping up because it was an outdoor [amphitheater]… right?
Kearney: I’m gonna put you like this, if they were joking, they were playing with us. We didn’t show up and say like, “Where’s the alligators?” No, they were like, “Yeah it’s a late night show, it’s been a wetter season, so the water levels are a little higher, so just kind of like be careful there.” And we were like, “What?” I do recall that. (laughs)
Phi: So I think that’s mine.
Then the other story. It was after a performance we did and it was a Q&A. A person’s like, “What advice can you give to a young person of color who wants to be a writer?” You just prepare for that and I can’t remember if you stated it diplomatically or not, Doug, but you were basically like, “Look, if you’re a poet, no one’s gonna read your shit anyway. You might as well be true to yourself and write what you feel and write your truth because you don’t have to worry about scaring off your audience because you don’t have an audience.”
Kearney: (laughs) If nobody’s watching, you might as well be naked and then that way if people do watch, then at least when people go like, “I love this,” you know they love what you actually wanted to do, what you actually wanted to make, what you were actually making.
I tell people, “Look, if you’re coming into poetry for what? To make money? Are you serious?” That’s not to say people don’t get money, but that’s why you got into this? Nah, become a banker or something, like if that’s what you’re worried about, if you want to conform to something as a way of succeeding. There’s no reason to do that in this space and that was something that I always thought about.
Bao would always come to a college and he put me onto so much game, like in a good way. He would research the school in advance. He’d know what the student organizations were dealing with at that time and he showed up like—Hey, just connecting this thing. He’s just connecting people from different communities to an understanding of a collective struggle.
The important thing about that is that it isn’t collective in a sense that it’s all the same. But it’s also not about like bow down to this pain so that we can do something. No, it’s like we want the same things, so it doesn’t make sense to fight amongst ourselves without a desire to come to a space.
See what Alexs, what you and David were talking about means so much to me because there’s an argument that has to happen. There’s a way of getting things out there, but if the point of the argument is so that at the end of it, David’s supposed to say to Alexs, you’re right—
Pate: Right.
Kearney: It’s about sharing with good faith.
Pate: Yes, absolutely.
Kearney: Because otherwise, we’re fighting for a piece of fucking poison pie.
Pate: Exactly. Right.
Kearney: Like what, like what is that? Who wins?
Pate: Exactly.
Kearney: If we’re like fighting each other about this—this is something that Bao and I were talking about. We talked about this on the email. If the question is police brutality, who wins when we’re busy saying, “Oh they hit me fucking harder?” We don’t win.
Pate: Exactly.
Phi: Exactly.
Kearney: Like, who wins with that?
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.
