By Audrey Fong
Composed of 38 poems, Asa Drake’s debut poetry collection, Maybe the Body, ranges from poems on the natural world following in the pastoral tradition, to poems that repurpose mythological figures like the chimera and Medusa. As a half Filipino woman, Drake also explores many themes common to children-of-immigrants-literature such as parental expectations and split identity. Ultimately, though, Maybe the Body is a collection invested in discomfort.
From buying into America to cleaving herself time and time again, Drake explores the many discomforts that one experiences as a woman of color and as a child of immigrants. While belonging is not a new topic by any means within diasporic literature, Drake’s exploration of belonging through the ownership of property is different in that it explores the way consumerism convinces immigrants that buying into America can legitimize their belonging (read more about this in our analysis of Ling Ma’s Severance). Drake recognizes that this isn’t necessarily true, writing in “Heirloom,” “It is possible what belongs to me doesn’t dictate where I belong.” Yet, Drake can’t help but buy into America by doing things such as purchasing a home. In “Yonder,” Drake writes:
I check the value of my house on Zillow. My house moonlights
as a more expensive house online. Even the comfort of numbers
scares me. Then there is the comfort that the end of us isn’t the end.
While Drake recognizes that what belongs to her doesn’t necessarily legitimize her belonging, the purchasing of a home is an act of putting down physical roots. After all, owning a home is the pinnacle of the American dream and symbolizes stability, both in terms of having a physical home and being financially stable. Yet, the home’s worth is artificial as shown by how her home appears more expensive online, a space in which appearances mean everything. Not only is real estate often financially unstable, but even homes can disappear in the blink of an eye whether it be because of foreclosure or natural disasters, as Drake recognizes in “I’m Not Here to Speak Until You Feel Clarity”: “The houses were not gone but flooded.”
Consumerism as a tentative mark of citizenship and belonging appears again in the poem, “Afternoon in the Cemetery.” The poem begins at border control and Drake, who is a tourist in this poem, debates “whether the citizen star / on my ID is sufficient so close to the border.” Ultimately, she decides not to board the ferry that will take her across the border, suggesting a lack of faith in the citizen star on her ID and an understanding of how one’s physical appearance oftentimes determines more loudly belonging. Instead, she “[touches] the end / of my hairpin to feel secured by what’s expensive.” Once again, Drake connects consumerism with proof of belonging, that expensive items act as proof of financial stability and, therefore, mark one as worthy of belonging. The expensive hairpin is a part of her costume and performance of being American and culturally middle class. Even if Drake is anxious over the links between consumerism, citizenship, and belonging, she takes comfort in knowing this discomfort and tension between ownership and belonging “isn’t the end,” suggesting something beyond this life (“Yonder”).
Yet, while Drake may know that this discomfort is not the end, discomfort permeates so much of Maybe the Body, most notably in the cleavage of Drake herself. This cleavage is first introduced in the poem, “Disagreeable Aspects of Hyphenation.” The term hyphenated American appeared in the late 1800s/early 1900s as a derogatory term for immigrants, questioning the loyalty of Irish and German Americans. Thus, the title of this poem builds off of this history of anti-immigrant sentiment and informs the reader that being a hyphenated American continues to come with a heavy burden even a century after the term hyphenated American was coined. The hyphenization signifies the cleavage of one’s identity, each hyphen acting as a fraction, suggesting that one isn’t fully American. The poem jumps from “driving through the South” to a coworker telling her, “There’s nothing special about the food you grew up with” to her mishearing her partner: “Who’s happier than Medusa? I think I hear my lover, but I’ve misheard him. He / was cutting her up. Who’s halved more than Medusa? / I can’t say.” Drake’s mishearing of “happier” as “halved” reveals Drake’s own feelings of being halved, of being hyphenated. These lines suggest that she cleaves herself and code switches as a form of survival. Yet these identities are not cleanly cut off from each other; rather, they are connected by a string of hyphens, showing the duality of hyphens as both fractions and connectors. In this code switching, Drake cleaves herself and upon being asked who is more halved than Medusa, she can’t quite say because there are many out there who must cleave themselves again and again. This discomfort that comes with being a person of color repeats itself from “how often [she offers] assistance and [is] asked to gratify” as a public-facing individual to recognizing that the public sees her as person whose role is to offer relief as opposed to seeing her as a person (“I Hear the Moon Rattle, Tooth Loose from the Fun”). This role as comforter is familiar for many people of color. I, for one, have had my share of comforting others such as assuring them that it isn’t racist to dislike kimchi (even though their need to be assured of this does feel microaggressive).
While Drake’s reckoning with race and her identity as a half Filipino child of immigrants informs much of the unease in the collection, Drake expands upon her concerns, touching upon the pervasiveness and normalization of violence. Named after the ultra sour candies that many of us enjoyed in the early 2000s, “Warheads” explores how violence is so ubiquitous and commonplace that a popular candy could be acceptably named after a weapon:
I’m concerned lately
by how I grew up eating candy with a whitehead exploding
into a small mushroom cloud and how this is typical
of settler-colonial order—so much so that I don’t recognize the bombs
as bombs, but as something innocuous and natural, with a future
While the connections between settler-colonialism, racialization, degradation, and violence are clear and often explained in the classroom, their leakage into popular culture has become so innocuous that many of us may not stop to think about it. I certainly am guilty of this. As I worked on my undergrad thesis on nationalist narratives about Hiroshima and the atomic bomb, I didn’t think once about Warheads — a candy I took pride in, as a child, knowing I could eat more of them than my friends could — and how the cartoon mushroom cloud helped normalize U.S. militarism and make it seem, dare I say it, silly when drawn with the face of a person whose eyes are bulging and lips are puckering from how sour the candy is. This normalization of violence is everywhere, from armed forces having recruitment tables on high school campuses to our occupation of islands that both serve as military bases and spaces of tropical paradise. Violence, Drake argues, is not reserved for wars, but is everywhere in American culture. So much so that at one point in her twenties, Drake “tried to act like violent men. / They had a phrase, hurt / but no harm, which meant they committed / what everyone doled out for free” (“Lessons from the Replicant”). To act like a violent man is to act like the type of American who gets ahead, to become a sort of Jack Donaghy (30 Rock) figure, the type of man who gets what he wants at all costs. And this violence is doled out for free without a second thought, demonstrating the ease with which violence pervades our society.
Ultimately, Maybe the Body is a collection that explores questions of home, discomfort, belonging, and stability. Drake’s work is especially poignant in a time of economic instability and powerful during a time when the nation is grappling with who we are and who gets to be here. The discomfort Drake explores is not just for people of color who’ve lived through similar experiences; rather, it pushes readers to consider the source of the unease and how much of our current world is shaped by colonialism, the exploitation of those deemed as other, and violence that it feels normal. In this way, Maybe the Body is disruptive and thought provoking.
Audrey Fong is your stereotypical Southern Californian. She loves the beach, drinks more boba than the doctor recommends, and has an Insta-famous dog. She is the co-founder and co-editor of Soapberry Review.