Eunhae Han’s Reviews > The Racial Imaginary: Writers on Race in the Life of the Mind > Status Update

I hope that the poems I write can withstand and oblige the contradictions of my selves and my imagination.

The strength of the first kind of poetics that I describe is that it names and gives voice to experiences and realities that are silenced in a white supremacist society. The second poetics is valuable to me because it gets to the language root of racism and attempts to disrupt it.

I truly believe that it is the recognition of the Other that ultimately leads to unification.
Recognition is awareness, not definition.

I remember a teacher in graduate school beginning his workshop by telling us, his students,
"Language is power. Poetry is power. I can show you how to have the power."

I don't believe the imagination is a free zone, an empty space where we are free from the stories we live out here in the world. But I do think it is a place of radical possibility … to a place of seeing even when I was afraid to look, I found the imagination became a place where surprising alchemy … the possibility of transformation in the imaginal realm, on the page, and in my body where stories live

Through writing I explore the ways I am hurt by these aspects of society and find solutions, ways of understanding, and ways around But I think writing could also be a place for me to address and explore the more subtle ways I am misshaped by the parts of society that I "benefit" from, like racism, capitalism, or classism-things that tear into humanness and community

Part of why I write is to free myself. My characters are outsiders trying to place themselves in the world, and in doing this, they create a space that wasn't there before, a place where they can just be, without the limitations, assumptions, questions, and violence the external world puts on them. And the play becomes this place. This process of creating new space for existence that my characters engage in …

That no one can write from a different racial other's point of view? We're saying wed like to change the terms of that conversation, to think about creativity and the imagination without employing the language of rights and the sometimes concealing terms of craft. To ask some firstprinciple questions instead. So, not: can I write from another's point of view? But instead: to ask why and what for, not just if and how?