ABSTRACT
Of the various titles which lie hidden beneath the one given above, perhaps the two which need to be unearthed are one of the earliest, “Interrogating Hybridity,” after “Interrogating Identity” by Homi Bhabha, a paper which I first read for a faculty seminar at UCLA in the winter of 1989 and to which this is, in part, a response, and one of the last, “Translating Identity,” a title suggested to me, as fate and the condition of migratory “post-colonial” subjects would have it, by friends of Homi Bhabha’s, several years later, and half a world away, in Canberra, Australia in the summer of 1991. For these words are, in part, a dance across his words. For me, his paper acts as a kind of choreographic blueprint whose steps I refuse to follow completely. Parts of his paper just plain provoked me, and yet at the same time empowered me to think critically, and think differently, about my own work as a poet. I hear his call, my response is not always the expected harmonious one, but the echo of his words remains. Thus these words are as much a dance away from as a dance toward a fellow traveler; another colonial subject-same empire, different continent; his (male) voice of theoretical critical inquiry into other people’s poems makes me high step and kick into a meditation on my praxis as a (female) poet.
