About Jessica Hagedorn Essay, Research Paper
Oscar V. Campomanes
A novelist, poet, multimedia and performance artist. Jessica
Tarahata Hagedorn had been in the United States for only three years (after moving from
the Philippines at age thirteen) when her poems caught the attention of Kenneth Rexroth.
Rexroth, a San Francisco-based artist, encouraged her to hone her writing and edited the
book that first featured her poetry, Four Young Women (1973). Forged in the heat of
the early 1970s ethnic revival, her early forays into poetry, playwriting, and short
fiction employed the psychedelic and rebellious idioms particular to that period.
Anthologized in Mountain Moving Day (1973), Third World Women (1973), and Time
to Greez! (1975), she soon produced her first collection of poetry and fiction, Dangerous
Music (1975).
While in San Francisco, Hagedorn took acting lessons and subsequently developed an
interest in the performing arts that was to steer her into multimedia work. Her experience
as a lyricist for a band configured her poetry as one of effect and rhythm, proving
congenial to her interest in interpretive readings and theater, After Joseph Papp produced
her collaboration with Thulani Davis and Ntozake Shange, Where the Mississippi Meets
the Amazon (1977), she moved to New York to work as a playwright and musician,
involvements that stamped her poetry with distinctively performative strains. Papp
produced her first play, Mango Tango, in 1978. She then mounted a score of
productions in New York, from Tenement Lover (1981) to Holy Food (theater:
1988; radio: 1989), as well as one in San Francisco, Teenytown (1990).
Pet Food and Tropical Apparitions (1981), a novella that incorporates a surreal
vignette and seven musical poems, distinguished her as an eclectic and highly experimental
artist. It won her the American Book Award for the same year and helped her secure
Macdowell Colony Fellowships in 1985 and 1986. Another Macdowell fellowship in 1988
allowed her to complete work on Dogeaters (1990).
Pet Food clearly contained the seeds for Dogeaters; this accomplished,
hilarious, and hyperreal, novella is driven by two memorable cinematic moments. A starlet
recounts the sordid sequence of her newest skin flick in which a virtuoso pianist plays
"A Moonlight Sonata" while she performs sex with an anteater and five West
Indians on top of a grand piano. George Sand, the youthful but hardbitten
protagonist-poet, gives form to her morbid desire for patricide and suicide in cross-cut
images of Filipino guerillas slaughtering her politically powerful father and her alter
ego. Character sketches for the top, middle, and bottom "dogs" that populate
Philippine society in Dogeaters inhabit this novella’s world of maladjusted migrant
youths and social deviants. What one critic described as "the cinematext of a Third
World scenario that might be the Philippines" in Dogeaters is first seen in
this ensemble of deftly-spliced "rushes."
The cinematic metaphors are apt since Hagedorn has acknowledged Manuel Puig as an
influence and has now moved into video- and filmmaking. Included in sixteen anthologies of
women’s, ethnic, and third world writing since 1975, Hagedorn made her debut as a
screenwriter with Wasteland (the title was subsequently changed to Fresh Kill), a
feature film produced and directed by Shu Lea Chang.
See also: Robert Rydell, Visions of Empire (1984). "Interview with Jessica
Hagedorn," Dispatch 6, no. 1 (Fall 1987): 14-18. Epifanio San Juan, Jr.,
"Mapping the Boundaries: The Filipino Writer in the U.S.A.," Journal of
Ethnic Studies 19, no. 1 (1991): 117-132. Shirley Geoklin Lim et al., eds., The
Forbidden Stitch: An Asian American Women’s Anthology (1989).
From The Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States. Ed.
Cathy N. Davidson and Linda Wagner-Martin. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995.
Copyright ? 1995 by Oxford University Press.
Jessica Hagedorn: Cultivating the art of the melange
By SOMINI SENGUPTA
Source: http://somerset.nando.net/newsroom/magazine/thirdrave/dec496/stars/1204me.html
NEW YORK (December 4, 1996 15:03 EDT) — For the record, Jessica Hagedorn
issued this warning before the scheduled
interview: "It’s not really ‘Lunch With.’ It’s ‘Merienda With.’ "
You see, once, a book critic had upbraided her for failing to translate
"merienda" in her first novel, "Dogeaters." So, this time she was
determined to translate everything that landed on the table, including the dinner rolls.
So (again, for the record), let it be said that merienda is a light,
late-afternoon Filipino feast. And there is perhaps no more fitting place for merienda
with Ms. Hagedorn, a poet, performance artist, rock-and-roll band leader, novelist and
Filipina diva, than Cendrillon. It is a fashionable SoHo bistro, where traditional
Filipino fare is masterfully tweaked; where, with a wink and a touch of culinary genius,
the bibingka becomes a rich souffle of gouda and feta instead of the traditional
water-buffalo cheese, and where the paella is a steaming cornucopia of shrimp, long beans
and indigo-colored rice, instead of the standard long-grain white.
Ms. Hagedorn, 47, doesn’t cook much. But like the brains behind
Cendrillon, she too has cultivated the art of the melange, in life and in literature.
Like the critically acclaimed "Dogeaters" (Pantheon Books, 1990)
and her numerous plays and poems, her second novel, "The Gangster of Love,"
published in August by Houghton Mifflin and scheduled for paperback release by Penguin
next year, is a cornucopia of eccentric characters full of drama, bravado and sass. In the
world of "The Gangster," colonizer and colonized collide, and Americans of
different shades and sensibilities bump into each other, not always pleasantly. And the
spirits of Ms. Hagedorn’s fellow eclecticists — Jimi Hendrix, Frida Kahlo, Sly Stone –
roam through the novel. (Cultural nationalists may be pleased to note that the novel also
traces the Filipino origins of the yo-yo.)
"Maybe it’s the more positive side of appropriation:you take from
many different sources, not to steal, but to pay homage to it, to say these are your
influences, to add your own thing," Ms. Hagedorn said. "I don’t believe in
sampling some Tibetan music just to make it sound groovy, but you do your homework, you
understand what you’re doing with it."
In an interview, the poet and writer Ishmael Reed called Ms. Hagedorn a
"vanguard artist," whose work has crossed over narrowly defined racial
categories and embraced African-American, Latino and Asian traditions. Her two novels, he
said, are "the kinds of novels that will be written in the next century."
"They make the typical American novel look very gray," he added.
Ms. Hagedorn was 13 when she came to the United States from Manila in
1963. Her parents had divorced, and she and her two older brothers were told they would be
leaving in a week. "It was so stunning and strange," recalled Ms. Hagedorn, who
now lives in Greenwich Village with her husband and their two girls, who are 13 and 5.
"We said goodbye to everyone and everything in those seven days."
But America had come to her much earlier — in the shape of rock-and-roll.
At 7, she recalls, she heard Fats Domino and Chuck Berry on the radio. "I was like,
‘What is that?’ " she said. "I responded to it physically. It was a very
visceral reaction."
Years later, as a young writer in San Francisco, she would have a
similarly visceral reaction to the Beat poets and the black arts movement of the 1960s.
She would be dazzled by the poetry of Leroi Jones, now known as Amiri Baraka. With her
rock band, the Gangster Choir, Ms. Hagedorn would sing the irreverent funkadelic tunes of
Sly and the Family Stone. And she would collaborate with writers like Ntozake Shange and
Thulani Davis on performance pieces in the 1970s (called spectacles, at the time).
In 1978, one of those spectacles brought her to New York City. Soon, the
Public Theater produced several of her performance pieces. And in 1990,
"Dogeaters" was published and nominated for a National Book Award, in the
fiction category.
Since then, she has co-written a screenplay and edited a collection of
Asian-American fiction. These days, she is considering an offer to write a theatrical
adaptation of "Dogeaters" for the La Jolla Playhouse in California and
collaborating with a friend, the film maker Angel Shaw, on a documentary titled,
"Excuse me … Are you a Pilipino?" ("Pilipino" is a humorous
reference to a distinctly Filipino pronunciation. The question posed by the title is one
that Ms. Hagedorn, who is of German, Spanish, Chinese and Filipino ancestry, is frequently
asked by fellow Filipinos, who, much to her chagrin, sometimes disbelieve that she is
one.)
Ms. Hagedorn has not always been popular among Filipinos. Many were
outraged by the title "Dogeaters," which is a nasty slang term for Filipinos. At
a reading in Hawaii a few years ago, an avuncular-looking man stood up in the front row.
"He kept pointing his finger, like, ‘J’accuse, j’accuse,’ " she recalled.
"He accused me of wanton disregard for the people."
She didn’t let him finish. "I said: ‘I know, I know. I set the race
back 400 years.’ " Describing the incident, Ms. Hagedorn rolled her eyes. "What
is literature for?" she snapped. "You don’t go to literature and say I need to
feel good about my race, so let me read a novel."
That kind of reaction, she said, "was more about how they were being
viewed by Americans — read white — than it was about anything else." She added,
"It was really insidious."
c.1996 N.Y. Times News Service
? Copyright 1996 The New York Times News Service and ? Copyright 1996 Nando.net
An Interview with Jessica Hagedorn
by Kay Bonetti
Source:http://missourireview.org/interviews/hagedorn.html
Jessica Hagedorn was born in 1949, and raised in the Philippines. At the age of 14 she
moved from Manila to San Francisco, were she became a protege of poet and translator
Kenneth Rexroth. Hagedorn’s work includes poetry, prose, performance art, and music. For
10 years she was the lead singer and songwriter of the Gangster Choir band. Her
multi-media theatre pieces include "Holy Food," "Teenytown,"
"Mango Tango," and "Airport Music." Her first novel, Dogeaters,
published in 1990, received the American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation,
and was a finalist for the National Book Award. In addition to Dogeaters, Jessica
Hagedorn’s books include a collection of poetry and short prose, Danger and Beauty,
which combines the work from two previously published collections of poetry and short
prose, Dangerous Music, and Pet Food and Tropical Apparitions. Jessica
Hagedorn is also the Editor of Charlie Chan is Dead, a groundbreaking anthology
of Asian American writing.
This interview with Jessica Hagedorn was conducted by Kay Bonetti for the
American Audio Prose Library in April 1994. The American Audio Prose Library has produced
recordings of readings by and Interviews with 126 contemporary writers. For a catalog of
complete listings, call 1-800-447-2275, or write AAPL, PO Box 842, Columbia, MO, 65205.
Bonetti: Jessica Hagedorn, you’ve worked in such a variety of mediums:
poetry, prose, theater, rock ‘n’ roll—with The Gangster Choir—and also film. What
medium are you busy with right now?
Hagedorn: I’m preparing for a multimedia theater piece, Airport
Music, that’s coming up in New York City. And I’ve just finished work on a film, Fresh
Kill, I actually wrote a couple of years ago—you know how long it takes to make a
movie—for an independent filmmaker named Shu Lea Cheang. It was based on a story of
hers, so in that way it was a real collaboration. Most of it is shot in New York City,
which was really a crazy thing to do but we lived through it. And now it’s making the
rounds of festivals and looking for a distributor. And the theater piece which involves
film and slides and soundtrack collages, I’ll be performing in as well.
Bonetti: Dogeaters begins at the movies. You seem to be
fascinated artistically by film. Can you tell me why?
Hagedorn: Because the movies really shaped my life. Growing up in the
Philippines, I loved all kinds of movies. We had a very healthy film industry there when I
was a child. It’s now gotten very limited. They only make action movies and hard-core
exploitation movies. Women get raped; men get shot. But in my childhood, they had all
kinds of movies—to rival Hollywood’s really—musicals, dramas, comedies. They were
wonderful. I would go see those movies faithfully every week. It was my big treat. And I’d
go see all the Hollywood movies that would come to Manila. We didn’t have television until
I was about eight years old, so it was either the movies or radio. A lot of radio drama.
That was our television, you know. We had to use our imagination. So it was really those
two things, and the comics, that I immersed myself in as a child.
Bonetti: In Dogeaters, you make delightful use on many
different levels of Love Letters, the radio serial that Rio’s grandmother is so
enamored with and that Rio listens to in the bedroom off the kitchen late at night while
they eat rice with their hands. The servants come in too, and all socioeconomic lines are
crossed.
Hagedorn: Right. There were also horror shows on the radio. Very
terrifying and thrilling to me as a kid. They had all these creepy sound effects. They
would come on at ten o’clock at night, and I just would scare myself to death.
Bonetti: Did they import any of the American ones like The Shadow,
or was it all produced in the Philippines?
Hagedorn: We produced our own. The radio was, and still is, a real
instrument of communication there because a lot of people, in the villages way out in the
southern regions, for example, can’t afford TVs. There might be one TV per village, but
with electricity being so scarce, the radio’s still used in the home, or the community
will all listen in to the one radio. Politicians use it. When I covered the elections
there two years ago, the radio was really used as a primary medium for political
campaigning. Can you imagine that here?
Bonetti: You used that radio serial Love Letters in several
ways: to comment on the story that’s happening within the novel and just as a very blessed
incident between the girl Rio and her beloved grandmother. Had you by any chance read Aunt
Julia and the Scriptwriter at that point?
Hagedorn: Yes. I had read it years before when it first came out, and
I loved it. Did you notice the torture scene in Dogeaters, when the soap opera is
used as foreground to a very painful happening in the background? That was the most
difficult chapter to write for me. I think torture is so loaded, you know, that it’s hard
to make it effective. And the radio drama was the way I managed to get through it. For me,
it worked really well.
Bonetti: Absolutely. Vargas Llosa, too, in Aunt Julia uses
the soap opera to great effect.
Hagedorn: Well, I have been definitely influenced more by Latin
American writers than by any other type of writer. They are very close in terms of
voice—their humor, their fatalism, their…well that over-used term "magical
realism." It’s a wonderful term that’s just been used so much we don’t know what it
means anymore. But the way they can use language and visions and surrealism without being
corny, and the humor that’s always there, is very close to a Filipino sensibility. More so
than—now this is a completely personal perception—other writers from Southeast Asia.
Bonetti: What is your particular ethnic background? I would like to
talk about that a little bit because the whole question of what it is to be Filipino runs
throughout your work.
Hagedorn: I’m part Spanish. My paternal grandfather came from Spain
viaSingapore to Manila. On my mother’s side it’s more mixture, with a Filipino mother and
a father who was Scotch-Irish-French; you know, white American hybrid. And I also have on
my father’s side a great-great-grandmother who was Chinese. So, I’m a hybrid.