Living-with-invasion
A post shared by Chris Rodriguez (@thebanoet) on Feb 10, 2017 at 3:15pm PST
A post shared by Chris Rodriguez (@thebanoet) on Oct 24, 2016 at 10:04am PDT
Once I was in a group of friends and we were all talking about “problematic tattoos,” which in this context primarily referred to tattoos that could be grouped under the wide (and, in my opinion, unrigorous) rubric of “cultural appropriation.” Though, at the time I admit, I was more sympathetic to the term’s use. After laughingly pointing out some problematic tattoos that we could think of (as though the identification of the problematic itself was sufficient grounds for self-congratulation/satisfaction), one person in the group, a friend of mine, turned to me and pointed at my forearm. My very first tattoo, my right forearm has, for roughly seven years, proudly displayed a Japanese woodblock print from an eighteenth century series of prints entitled The Faithful Samurai. The dynamic pose of an archer named Mase Chudayu Masa-aki was captured in a print that I had seen a number of times throughout my childhood, and I decided to get it as my first tattoo when I was nineteen. The Denver artist, named Ben Thompson, who completed the tattoo, reworked it until it was a unique, personal work for the both of us. This reconceptualization of the original piece can mostly be located in the face, which no longer displays the masculine loyalty of Mase Chudayu Masa-aki, who proudly stares down the audience, but instead features a more feminine face, looking slightly off-kilter and downward (in fact most people ask me where “she’s” from,” or what “she” is).
And sometimes I think about my mother, though I try not to if I can help it. My mother is Filipina and grew up very poor in Stockton, California. She compulsively tells stories about her childhood with a smile and an excitement that attempts to betray the harsh content of the stories, in which her dog was kicked to death by a racist mailman, or how her classmates didn’t know what “Filipino” was, therefore resorting to Mexican slurs like “wetback” and “spic” when insulting her and her family members. Raised by her grandmother, she also tells stories of how her grandmother was present for the Japanese invasion of the Philippines. She tells stories of how the Japanese soldiers brutalized the Filipino people, adult and infant alike. One detail in particular has stayed with me, in which babies were torn from the arms of their parents and impaled on soldiers’ bayonets. Perhaps a contested historical point, this detail, whether materially verifiable or not, is less important in the slippery realm of truth, and more important for the feeling it produces, which is probably more truthful if we’re being honest. Perhaps embedded in this detail is the fear—and realization of the fear—of invasion itself, in which the foreign occupants violently insert themselves into a home. In Lacanian terms, the lack of invasion, through which anxiety is assumed to operate, is not the root cause of anxiety. The anxiety of invasion is not an anticipation of invasion, because that would displace the anxiety onto another time and space, creating a deceptive diversion in which the locus of anxiety is always deferred. Rather, the fear is in the invasion itself, not in anticipation of it, but in the already-existing feeling of invasion, a non-deceptive and originary feeling of the home as itself never un-invaded. It is the baby grafted onto the bayonet, and horrifically not vice-versa, an atrocity which is somehow already present non-linguistically. In this formulation there is the heim, or home, as always-already the unheimliche, or the uncanny. But now I’ve gotta stop talking about war, because I don’t wanna piss off Adorno, and I’ve got his words vamping in my eardrums. “Writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.”
So we all know that there are places that are terribly misused by the powerful. We all know that. But what we don’t know is how my supposedly problematic tattoo is the baby grafted onto the bayonet, but hopefully also vice-versa. Look at the video of the tattoo, the way it penetrates the skin repeatedly, though this is a video from a different tattoo I got and hopefully is pretty funny. Needles grouped together for different parts of the tattoo, whether lining or shading, are pushed repeatedly and rapidly into the skin, invading the home and populating it with an ink that is maintained in the skin as an infection that your body always fights off. White blood cells are hungry for that ink, but they can’t quite take it all, so it just stays there, a memory of invasion. So we’ve gotta think of all this as a way to live, my unknowing need for the reconceptualization of the samurai as my mother, because I’m always my mother, to be honest, even though I try not to think about it. And living is mobility, a living-with-the-graft, I don’t wanna invoke the horrific image again, so we’ll call it the graft-of-invasion, which is always-already there, the always-deferred point where the ink meets the skin. And we’re flickering, between these categories that are deceptive, because we can’t put words to that pre-feeling, the presentiment of the graft, because maybe the graft is the presentiment. And I’m my mother and she’s me and I hope she knows it, even if she tries not to think about it, that she can’t die, because I’m me, because we’re both together a dissolved drop of ink in a glass of water, if that glass of water was skin.
And lastly, I know I know, that was a good place to end, all sentimental with my mom like we’re beautiful and this shit can be overcome by way of beauty (yeah right whatever). But honestly, there’s this other thing, and the needle is already there, so we’ve gotta think about it. So I have Crohn’s Disease and every two months I get intravenous infusions of something called Remicade. And it helps, and I keep living, because I graft this machine onto me, and I’m maybe grafted onto it, too. And mobility is a form of living, and maybe living is a form of mobility. So, like, tattoos spread across time and space and skin and even sex and gender are subverted but then, in my treatment of Crohn’s, the same span is collapsed all into one double-image, that of me and the machine. So the image of the kid with the needle in his arm is somehow an image of the anxiety of invasion, but is also a living-with-invasion. And here I am, stitching these videos together to make my point, in MOV and mp4 format, grafted to each other by words. But they were never so separate as they seemed I don’t think. So, just don’t talk about cultural appropriation like it means something in and of itself, because what is culture but a deceptive trace of the hard work that we need to do. And I’m guilty of it too and this isn’t meant to throw shade at my friend who pointed at my tattoo. The point of this is to just think about stuff a little more I guess, and for that reason, I’m thankful that I was forced to think through my tattoo. At the risk of using another word so much that it loses its meaning, I think we’ve gotta be more rigorous about culture, which is a grafting, but from what onto what I don’t know. I guess I’m gonna go call my mom now.