A Stream of Memory: An Interview with Paisley Rekdal on West: A Translation
Paisley Rekdal’s latest hybrid collection of poems and essays, West: A Translation, commemorates the transcontinental railroad’s 150th anniversary. In our interview Rekdal noted that, “One of the central questions of the book is: Is American history forward, progressive, recursive, or is it spiraling?” The structure of the book and its multiple perspectives presented reinforce this question, interrupting the dominant narrative to recover fragments of the past forgotten, dismissed, or erased. The many voices in West—such as Chinese and Irish workers, railroad executives and passengers, 19th-century writers and politicians, and African American porters—expand the familiar, univocal story of the West.
KC: The poetry section of West begins with a Chinese poem carved into the wall at Angel Island Immigration Station by an anonymous writer who was detained there and ends with your translation of it, or, as you say, a “carefully cultivated loss.” What did you struggle with in terms of loss of meaning? What did/do you struggle with due to not knowing Chinese?
PR: I forgave myself early for being a bad translator because I don’t have Chinese as a working language, and I wanted those titles to read awkwardly, to be bad renditions, so that when you get a more fluid translation at the end, you feel all the strange parts snap together. But you would also, initially, experience the unfamiliarity of Chinese the way I experience it. I also wanted to play with the phrase “Chinese Exclusion” throughout my book. Obviously, there’s an exclusion of Chinese people in history in America. [The Chinese Exclusion Act] was designed to keep Chinese from immigrating to the US. But there’s also a way in which I myself am excluded from Chinese American history and certainly from Chinese culture. In the book, I write about how my mother repeatedly points out that I’m not Chinese enough, I’m too white-appearing, I’m not like her. What if I am somebody who is also excluded from her own cultural history, by her own family at times? That’s one of the reasons I’m okay with the translation itself being bad. My renditions of the Chinese characters aren’t supposed to be accurate but an approximation, just like how I, as a third-generation Chinese American looking back at her family history, become a translation and an approximation of Chinese culture in America. I think we all experience something like this when we look back at our families’ pasts. How are we taking historical narratives and creating something that makes sense to us in the present but probably misses something of a real truth of the past? Cultural authenticity will never be gained again because of assimilation and evolution: it was always meant to be lost.
KC: Do you think whiteness plays a role in this book? As I read the poems, I was reminded of Sara Ahmed’s “A Phenomenology of Whiteness.” Ahmed states, “Whiteness could be described as an ongoing and unfinished history, which orientates bodies in specific directions, affecting how they ‘take up’ space, and what they ‘can do.’” Fanon talks about it as well.
PR: Yeah, I know Fanon’s work, and I think Ahmed’s description of whiteness is also accurate for West and whiteness. When I think about the people who’ve left the largest material records about the transcontinental, they were all white, and in some ways, they were all trying to make a claim about whiteness in the spaces they were inhabiting or visiting. I think that’s what I was trying to document in poems like Olmsted’s persona poem. To a certain extent, it’s there in Brigham Young’s epistolary poem, too. Certainly, it’s in Burton’s poem and in Kearney’s excised speech. Everyone in the book is trying to answer this question: What is whiteness in this environment? Are we who reside in this space white or are we not white? Are the people I’m looking at white, or are they not white? And what is it that determines whether we’re white? Is it labor? Is it our sexual practices? Is it our physical appearance? It’s surprising to me how these things can pull apart pretty quickly. You think of race as something that’s going to be first a question of appearance. But for many of the writers I document in West, race wasn’t a question of appearance; it was a question of cultural, economic and bodily practice, and, in that, I think West is trying to represent how a lot of 19th century writers and white workers imagined whiteness as an evolving construction. Whereas with other writers and workers in West who would not have been considered white, I’m trying to document their day-to-day understanding of their lives as workers and train travelers. These people suffered under whiteness, but they themselves did not necessarily want to be white. People like Burton, Olmsted, and Young assumed that the subjects of their gaze would want to be white as well.
KC: In the note for “Sorrowful News,” you write, “Death is an invitation. When I was commissioned to write this poem about the transcontinental by Utah’s Spike 150 Committee, my first impulse was elegy.” Then, after revealing some of your family history, you ask, “What do we seek from death’s display?” And in the notes for “Return,” you write, “We treat the elegy as a pathological mode, the mourner incapable of resolving loss. But what if the point of grief is not its resolution but the extension of memory, the insistence that the listener, too, carry our history into the future?” Do you consider West a memorial? If so, what/who do you want West to be viewed as memorializing?
PR: That’s a really great question because I think my gut feeling about the word “memorial” is discomfort. My problem with “the memorial” is that it often has the public function of furnishing a memory or set of ideals we’re supposed to aspire to. Like the elegy, the memorial is there to function as a recitation of public values we’re meant to reinscribe and reinhabit in some way. We don’t just elegize or memorialize anyone. Notice that we don’t preserve the statues and memorials for people we think represented bad historical values anymore. We take those down. When I think of West as a memorial, it makes me nervous because I don’t want people to think that this book is about validating a national portrait that should be recoverable.
That said, I think that there are aspects and values in the stories that I include in West that I want remembered. I also want to change up our ideas about elegy, to make elegy not simply about unending mourning, but about the inclusion of strangers in the act of grieving that becomes a continual process of memory. What I don’t want is for West to become a museum, nor do I want it to be a history because it can’t function as a history. Instead, I think it is an attempt at collective memory. I wanted a polyvocal, polygenre approach to this book to answer these questions: How do we create narrative cohesion from the fragments of the past? How much can we recover from an individual fragment or an individual voice? The reality might be that we recover very little of history’s truth that way, but when you put all the fragments and voices we can find, you have something more complex, closer to the truth. You aren’t just memorializing any one thing or one person; you’re just in a stream of memory itself.
KC: I want to ask you about the website. How did you decide you wanted to do the website? Did you collaborate with anyone?
PR: The website was one enormous collaboration. It would have been impossible to do without Jennilyn Merten of Perpendicular Productions and Gwyn Fisher of AgaveWeb. When I was first commissioned for this poem, I knew I wanted a multimedia experience. But I was a very conservative video maker at first because I wanted to stay as close as I could to the historical images that I found. But Jennilyn is a documentarian and saw things differently. She was the one who pushed for more sound, more innovative openings and closing to the videos, certainly something far more narrative to each poem. It’s an approach that I allowed to happen only towards the end of the project. Now these narrative videos like “Heart” and “What Day” are my favorite ones—they are the most speculative, most imaginative. Without her, I could never have achieved that. I am profoundly grateful to Jennilyn.
Gwyn is the one who coded the website. I came up with the site architecture, and Gwyn turned it into a working site. The architecture is pretty simple, which I wanted because people don’t read the same way on the web as they do in a book, and often they have different complications of reading with tech. I wanted the site to be as accessible as possible because the videos and the text themselves can be tonally complex, so the experience of accessing the site itself can’t be. I also knew that I wanted teachers and students to be able to access the poems in West because I realized, as I was doing research for the book, that I had never been taught any of the transcontinental history myself as a student. Also, why don’t we have more history sites that allow people to experience the past in a playful, creative way? That’s the other thing about making West a website: much of the information on the site is dark, but the website itself is very game-like and playful. It allows you to take control of your own reading and “translation” experience.
KC: One of my favorite poems titled “Not Ash” in the book and “Heart” on the website is a persona poem from the perspective of Sui Sin Far, a multiracial 19th century writer. “Not Ash” is the last poem in the book and feels the most personal. Can you tell me about your connection to Sui Sin Far and the video poem?
PR: One thing to note about that video: All the archival photos in it come from my grandfather Gung Gung’s collection. Gung Gung had this incredible photo album, which I mention in the accompanying essay in my book. Essentially, he doodled poems and little sketches around photos of girls he’d taken when he was a young, single man just arrived in America. My grandfather was a very good-looking guy and obviously he had a lot of girlfriends. If you look at his photo album, it’s this incredible collage of photos that he arranged in elaborate floral arrangements, and then would write poems around them. So, what you’re looking at in “Heart” is my response to my grandfather’s notebooks.
KC: I love that.
PR: I love it, too. And, yes, the person who “plays” Sui Sin Far in “Heart” is me. I had to evolve as a creative maker to accept that video. Because, as I said before, I initially didn’t want to put anything in my videos that felt too contemporary or personal. One of Jennilyn’s first questions was: “Since you’re narrating all the poems, do you want to be shown reading them?” And I said, “God no, this should never be about me.” But by the time I’d written “Not Ash,” I understood that one of the transcontinental’s metaphors of linking East and West was also the metaphor of biracialism. In that sense, the book is as much about biracial identity as it is about the train. What is a biracial identity? Is it a socially progressive movement forward toward post-racial unity, or does it spiral us back to racial categorizations that insist on separation? Once I realized all of that was in play, I thought it would be dishonest not to put myself in that video.
KC: That connection makes sense to me and is a reminder of how you can read something and see yourself in something that you read and what a difference that makes when you read something that is a reflection of you.
PR: Yeah, and it’s a danger, too. Oftentimes we go to the past searching for a story that will reflect something we believe or want to believe about ourselves in the present, and that can make us bad readers of history. But I also think there’s a risk if you’re not willing to see yourself reflected in the past, if you’re not willing to see that you’re part of a long conversation. This is something that, perhaps, in some scholarly circles, we sneer at. Especially if the writer is a woman. People may think, “You’re just personalizing history, thus yours isn’t an intellectual response.” But our intellectual responses can be personal and built out of very profound, emotional questions. If you know why you’re asking these questions, I think it might make you a more creative researcher. I think there’s no question that I was looking for things in the transcontinental railroad history because of who I am. In all of my research on the transcontinental, no one ever mentions people like Sui Sin Far, who rode the train quite a bit and wrote about her experiences within these Chinese communities she encountered. But she didn’t show up in the transcontinental research. I found it also interesting that so few studies have been done about women and the transcontinental, and almost nothing about LGBTQ+ workers, which I thought was a curious absence, considering the vast numbers of male workers on the transcontinental. I think people with a desire to see themselves in history are going to ask more creative questions about history, and get a wildly different story than you’d find in a traditional study of Dodge, or Stanford, or any of the people who benefited financially from the railroad.
KC: In the note for “You,” you write, “I interrupt this text with fact. I interrupt it, too, with imagination. What is factual I express within the limits of poetry, while what is poetic I locate within the limits of the real.” How do you find the balance between authenticity and imagination?
PR: To a certain extent, I couldn’t know because when I’m writing a poem, I’m moved largely by the story that unfolds. After I’m finished with the first draft, I go back and ask, “How close to the text or how far removed can I be?” For example, some of the greatest liberties I took were with Frederick Law Olmsted’s writing. I open my poem “Bitterness” with a direct quote from his A Journey in the Seaboard Slave States. Having read through that book, I noticed his obsession with mixed-race people. While he was clearly pro-abolition, and would, for his day, have been considered racially progressive, for our day he had very regressive ideas about race. That’s one of the things that I wanted to foreground in “Bitterness.” I wanted to show that the train was a space where black and white bodies mingled, which, for him, became unsettling. In his own book, Olmsted never mentions being discomfited by watching a young white woman and a young mixed-race black woman sharing candy: that’s something I had to invent in order to inhabit some other, very true aspects of his text as a whole. Is that something that historians would be satisfied with? Probably not because, again, it’s an active interpretation that leaves the text itself at times behind. Likewise, in my poem “Your,” some of the language I use is directly from Sir Richard Francis Burton’s City of the Saints, but most of the language isn’t. What I kept was the language he used to describe Mormons, which was completely Orientalist. Burton overlaid a 19th century Orientalist perspective of the Middle East onto Utah, which was eye-opening for me. His fascination with Mormon polygamy essentially turned Utah into a “disappointing version” of The Thousand and One Nights, which Burton had once translated into English. I think people would say that my poem was accurate to Burton’s gaze but inaccurate as to what was exactly stated in his text.
Other poems are made completely of direct quotes. All of the phrasebooks for Chinese workers, for instance, are exactly quoted. I rearranged the ordering of the phrases, but those phrases are all in the phrasebooks. With the poems written in the voices of African American porters, however, I used oral histories of men and women who left no other written record I could find except for their oral testimony. Oral histories are interesting because people’s voices are being translated multiple times. First, they’re being transcribed in an interview, and in that transcription, the transcriber might decide to elevate or suppress some of the speaker’s own language based on ideas about “proper” or “correct” English. If the speaker used any racial epithets, sometimes the transcriber records those, and sometimes she excises them, and that’s a really interesting choice, too. So when I work with oral histories, I’m aware that I’m already working with the ghosts of language and with multiple unseen editorial decisions. With the Black porters’ poems, it was really important to ask myself: “What draws me to this particular voice? How can I preserve that and also stay true to the speaker’s story?” It’s about understanding that some people’s presence in the archive has already been altered, manipulated, or is somehow less visible than others’ presences. When I write poems out of those voices, I have to really consider the ethics of my fidelity to that presence in the archive. Basically, what little they offer that feels true to them, I have to preserve to the best of my abilities, even if it’s still an approximation. The person who has almost no presence in the archive but a scrap of voice is a gem, and you have to treat her as such.
KC: In “Antiquity,” you write, “and is it honor or indifference to translate material / into person? As if I could wring the song / note by note out of the bird, isolate the dance / from the dancer in this sepia postcard of a Navajo / performing himself for East Coast tourists / who hang, slack-jawed, from train windows.” What role does performance play in West?
PR: Quite a lot. And it’s an uncomfortable thing. There’s a poem called “Tell” which speaks to some of the same anxieties about performance that are in “Antiquity.” Both mention Native Americans’ actual performances for tourist money which were obviously a mode of survival. As white settler colonialism moves into the West and disrupts Native ecologies and economies, performance of “authentic Indianness” becomes an enforced thing for people who think, “I’m gonna survive however I can.” They start putting on shows, putting on certain aspects of their ceremony, and dressing up for tourists. They recognized that their tribal identity now had monetary value in the world of whiteness. Of course, the persona poem is also a performance of identity, and West is filled with persona poems. I’m not only performing my own identity in this book, I’m performing other people’s identities, too. As the train makes us all try to perform ourselves in these spaces where we’re all thrown together, it’s uncomfortable.
When it comes to persona poems about history, I realize I’m performing people’s ideas about what was, historically, “true” or “accurate.” As much as I try to do that, I also recognize this is probably also a false performance. What I’ve given you is accurate to a degree, but I have no doubt that many people could come to the same texts I’ve read and select different facts from them. They could read West and rightly say, “This is not how I would view the transcontinental; this is not how I would view the final meaning of the train.” There’s also an immense amount of popular scholarship about the transcontinental that’s pretty laudatory. It’s only recently that Richard White writes a popular book called Railroaded, where he makes the argument that the transcontinental was a financial and technological failure, and that the narrative of the transcontinental was always dubious. But again, why would we popularly imagine the transcontinental was a success? Because we’re performing the values of American modernity for ourselves. We’re performing the story that we’ve been told over and over again that this is a story of greatness. But that said, it’s also a performance to say that the story of the transcontinental is nothing but pain, agony, and misery, and it never should have been built. Both of those are polemical positions. The reality is, I think, is that the train is both a positive and negative reality; it had both good and terrible effects.
KC: You have so many great questions in the notes section. In the note for “Antiquity,” you ask, “And is it work or bodies I wish to resurrect, or just a better version of my nation?” I have to ask: How has this project affected your vision of this country?
PR: The questions I ask in the book are questions I haven’t really answered for myself, and I’m still trying to figure out answers to them. I will say there was something weirdly hopeful about doing this research during the pandemic and post-Trump election nightmare because the history of late 19th century America has some curious resonances with our own time that suggests we can, as we once did, tackle with some success. Our current situation with regard to race, class, economic division, and political division is very dire. But I would still make the case from my reading in the 19th century that it was, generally speaking, worse then. There’s something hopeful about seeing that our nation crawled back from the brink of disaster repeatedly, that it did make significant progress with regards to racial awareness. Of course, those problems never went away and, in some cases—especially regarding the rights of indigenous people and Asian Americans—got worse. That’s the spiraling backwards problem that I write about it in the book. But the thing about a spiral is that, even as it circles around, it doesn’t go back to the exact same place. It goes to a similar place. I think it’s important to remember that “similar” is not “same,” and that this allows for the possibility of change, no matter how small. Did it make me feel better about America? No, it made me feel better about the possibility of human change, which has nothing necessarily to do with America. Change is, to me, the human condition. It’s what we’re all temperamentally wired for, which is to work for better values and more good in the world. There’s nothing unique, I think, about America producing that desire or the values we seek. So I don’t think that I came up with a better version of my country, but I did see a better version of where we as humans in this country could go.