“To those who have told me I couldn't make hip-hop because I was an Asian girl: One. Hip hop was birthed to be a home. Hip hop was born to be a life.” The words pierce through the air as Gretchen Carvajal boldly begins her self-composed slam poem, “Asian Girls and Hip Hop.” They spearhead her creative, performative argument about why she, an Asian American woman, should be able to confidently speak in the rhymes and rhythms of hip-hop. Carvajal contends that Asian female rap exists “to speak about what is missing… to speak about being so much while being nothing at all… to speak for ourselves.” This defense spills out of her mouth and onto the stage as a voice to her ethnic and gendered experiences, an explanation of why such vocalization is so important to her identity expression.
However, she seems to forget whose voice she is using. She claims to speak for herself, but she borrows the voice of another; she claims to speak as an Asian woman, but she uses a historically black art form to put forth her words. There is a danger in this disjunct, that Carvajal speaks with another’s voice to navigate her own specific social identity, especially in the larger and longer historical context of Asian misappropriation of black culture. Cross-cultural interactions have too often become misinformed and offensive, creating tensions between minority communities that would otherwise be stronger and stand in solidarity. In the scramble to find our unique voices, we as members of our own cultures have forgotten the empirically empowering art of speaking together. As culture and identity expression continue to expand in the centers of cosmopolitan society, we must examine the complexities of adopting and appropriating voices that are not our own, with the vision of singing in harmony rather than shouting alone.
Hip hop was begotten to be a home, a life – from its very conception, hip hop was meant to be a refuge and rallying point for the black community, to help marginalized individuals voice their experiences against the grain of dominant narratives. In his article “Mapping and Re-Membering Hip Hop History, Hiphopography and African Diasporic History,” James G. Spady clearly specifies that “African American youth gave birth to Hip Hop” (132). They were the ones who labored to “mine the rich veins of their oral heritages as they [moved] from imitation to creation, from representation to invention, and from being destroyers of old forms to creators of new ones,” according to novelist Gayle Jones (qtd. in Spady 127). There is, as mentioned, a particular value in not simply imitating existing forms of expression but creating new ones that are clearly distinct. Black youth learned to harness that power and to imbue it in the language and music they created. Hip hop was the product of their strenuous labor, the gold that they mined from the oral histories of their community. It was their creation, the medium through which they passed on to future generations their cultural DNA, their identity, and their experiences. It was the timbre of their voices, one that distinctly sprung from and belonged to them.
Asian Americans, however, never came to possess such a distinct and deeply rooted voice. Because they speak a foreign tongue, because they are unfamiliar bodies to America, Asian American women are not heard when they speak. Sunny Woan, in her essay “White Sexual Imperialism: A Theory of Asian Feminist Jurisprudence,” specifically addresses the historical gendered silence of Asian American women, shaped by the white sexual fantasies that are prescribed onto their bodies. There is a “stereotype of the Asian woman as hyper-sexualized yet demure and submissive,” informed by the cultures of pornography, mail-order brides, Asian fetishes, prostitution, and sexual violence (Woan 278). These persistent portrayals of Asian American women as compliant, soft-spoken, non-dissenting objects for male domination have even resulted in physical harm. As Princeton graduate Helen Zia puts it, “the image of Asian American women being exotic and passive and [unwilling to] fight back and speak up” has indeed bred the racialized sexual predation that is prevalent today (qtd. in Woan). There is a real danger in Asian American female silence and a desperate need for their voices to be heard. But instead of being heard, they are simply translated into consumable, controllable commodities that speak what the majority wants to hear, packaged neatly in the stereotypes that stain the fabric of society. Their voices get caught in the process of translation, and their Eastern tongues are lost in the loud clamor of the West.
It is precisely because of this lack of a singularly Asian and female voice that Carvajal borrows from hip hop to voice her experiences. “How this my second tongue spittin’ better bars than you? … I wipe my spit off of this mic with your existence; I'll never have you thinking Asian women be submissive.” As an immigrant born in a third-world country, she recognizes that even English is not intrinsic to her, that she speaks in her second tongue to confront to her audience. She speaks in this learned language, English, to translate her thoughts into words, her words into a story, her story into a message that rings out loud and clear enough for her audience to hear. But Carvajal does not simply translate her native thoughts into English; she also translates the typically silent Asian American female experience into the articulate vernacular of hip hop. “I use hip hop to resurrect the women who came before me. I spit bars to release myself from mental prisons that encapsulate me.” Hip hop is her chosen vessel for voice, to give life to the women who have suffered in silence before her, to give vitality to her own mind in a refusal to submit in such silence.
Thus, hip hop has become a shared language that goes beyond its black beginnings. According to Susanne Stemmler, hip hop has become “not only an exclusive expression of the Afro-American and Latino identities,” but also a culture that “has its roots in the Afro-American experience but has transformed into a global urban language employed by the ethnic minorities in several cities of the world” (qtd. in Spady 128). Hip hop has expanded past a singular community to a larger political and social movement, having become a powerful tool for protest against discrimination and oppression. It is now a shared language that diverse minorities borrow from to speak the same truths about social fragmentation along racial and cultural lines. In “Hip-Hop & the Global Imprint of a Black Cultural Form,” Marcyliena Morgan and Dionne Bennett also examine the spread of hip hop, with a more explicit focus on the ever-changing nature of the global music and culture scene. They argue that, as hip hop began to spread to countries that do not primarily speak English, “artists typically developed their own styles, drawing from local and national cultural art forms and addressing the social and political issues that affected their communities and nation” (Morgan and Bennett 184). Hip hop did not simply spread in a static, unchanging form, but rather shifted and molded to fit the societies to which it was exported. It created a culture of dynamic art and expression, constantly tailored to its wielders and writers.
Morgan and Bennett celebrate this exportation of hip hop, remarking that while “mainstream American discourses have marginalized, maligned, and trivialized hip-hop music and culture, multicultural youth in America and around the world have come together to turn hip-hop into one of the most dynamic arts and culture movements in recent history” (191). They maintain that hip hop is misused and abused by American culture, in its birthplace, but when it is shipped abroad, other world cultures warmly embrace and cultivate the art form. This claim, however, is an unrealistically optimistic generalization of hip hop’s reception across the world, especially in light of the countless global controversies that have centered on cultural appropriation and racist ignorance.
Specifically, in this time of such unregulated shaping and changing of hip hop, there has arisen the deep-rooted problem of ignorant, even offensive appropriation in Asia. While black culture has increasingly been consumed and praised by Asian audiences, the shallow cultural understanding that accompanied the increased contact has resulted in terribly disrespectful instances of caricature and even blackface. Crystal Tai’s online article, “Asian Hip Hop: An Homage to a Genre or Cultural Appropriation Driven by Racism or Ignorance?” specifies multiple such instances. For example, “China, Japan and South Korea have all had their own instances of blackface on national TV,” in which popular celebrities or models will don a “caricature of how [they think] black artists [perform]” (Tai). Hip hop and its prominent artists are often commodified as a look, a sound, and image that Asian celebrities can use then quickly dispose of. Even when Asian artists emulate black artists out of respect rather than self-interest, “there is little actual understanding of identity and culture. In many cases, celebrities and influencers are criticised for borrowing from other cultures without acknowledging the history and heritage behind them” (Tai). Without deep understanding or acknowledgement of the history of hip hop, even honest appreciation becomes twisted into a hurtful and shallow portrayal of black artists. Thus, too easily appropriating hip hop often begets offensive representations of what is actually a rich genre and an effective, expressive art form.
This damage from cultural ignorance appears not only when hip hop enters Asia, but also when Asians enter the hip hop scene in America, a case that is perhaps more closely tied to Carvajal’s own performance. Because of the incredible popularity of hip hop, many Asian youths strive to participate in its music and culture, in its origin country. While Carvajal presents a distinctly female performance of hip hop, this increasing interest in hip hop is also common among Asian males. One such example is Brian Imanuel, a viral Asian rapper once called by the stage name “Rich Chigga.” Wei Tchou, in his New Yorker article “Rich Chigga and the Difficulties of Keeping It Real,” echoes a sentiment common among most racially conscious audiences: “it made me queasy to pronounce his name, given its breezy proximity to a racial slur.” Imanuel had not meant to be offensive in his rap name but had simply copied the artists that he grew up listening to. But nonetheless, he is now “regularly chastised on Twitter as racist,” bolstered by the fact that, in the past, he casually included the N-word in his lyrics (Tchou). In response to the backlash, Imanuel has made a move to remedy his mistakes, changing his stage name to Rich Brian and resolving to write more sober songs about his own experiences. It is somewhat relieving to see his regret and his remedial actions, but the entire scenario calls into question how he came to so easily cross the line between innocent appreciation and ignorant appropriation. It becomes even more important in light of the many Asian Americans who join him at this blurry boundary, who wish to partake in the expansive and exciting culture of hip hop.
It is important to note, then, that many Asians at this boundary have successfully and respectfully found empowerment and comfort in their identity through hip hop. Morgan and Bennett conclude their essay on hip hop’s expansion with this:
Through their unprecedented global movement of art and culture, the citizens of the hip-hop nation have used their unique and collective aesthetic voices both to ‘possess’ and transform the world, a process that has not merely afforded them power, but has also enabled them to produce new forms of power, beauty, and knowledge (192).Hip hop, if mediated ideally, is a powerful language that can change and combine worlds to diversify the voices that can be heard through art and culture. Asian Americans can add their unique voices into the chorus as well, to lend to the harmony a dimension that cannot emerge from any other cultural body. And in that act of expression, Asian Americans can also harness political power in a healthy, productive way. So, while hip hop can easily be abused and misused, it has most definitely been integral in many instances of Asian empowerment and expression.
Hip hop is especially powerful because of its physical performativity; the presentation of the Asian body through powerful and vocal poetics enables those Asian bodies to dictate how they are seen and interpreted by their audiences, even in gendered contexts. Chong Chon-Smith’s “Afro-Asian Rhythms and Rhymes: Hip-Hop and Spoken Word Lyricists” specifically focuses on the problem that Asian males face, as their bodies are rendered spectacles by the white gaze. For the Asian male body’s experience of hypervisibility, Chon-Smith presents “the Asian-black interface of spoken word and hip-hop as a revolutionary practice… one that disrupts the constancy of racial magnetism in matters of social policy and public discourse” (117). It is a subversive tool that ruptures the existing social constructions that haunt the Asian male body. Because their performances are necessarily public, Asian males can take their audiences captive and lead them into radically new understandings of Asian men. While the white gaze tries to prescribe certain sub-level roles to Asian males, “the close kinship between spoken word and hip-hop has been a powerful and influential relationship for Asian American masculinities to question their current reality as marginal men and to assert their rightful… ability to self-determine their understandings of the ‘human’” (Chon-Smith 137). By performing in front of live audiences, by dictating the discursive atmosphere of their shows, Asian males recreate their masculinity and even their full humanity through spoken word and hip hop. They need not be the silent, compliant men that the white gaze perceives them to be; they can vocalize their own interpretations of their identity, by selecting and stringing together words of their choice, each line of poetry an emblem of their agency in expression.
Because Chon-Smith’s analysis only pertains to Asian male bodies, there is a need to expand and apply his conclusions to Asian females to better understand Carvajal’s performance. In fact, Carvajal herself presents the female counterpart of this empowerment through hip hop. She tells her story, of being “born in a third-world country, raised in the West,” of dreaming of rocking “crowds to show this people that I can move y’all, like a giant wave that no one can surf, that will water the world one day, that will cure the drought of a people.” This poem is uniquely her and is intrinsically tied to her experiences as an Asian American woman. Her audience cannot deny the difference her body brings to the stage, and instead of letting them define her as they will, Carvajal defies preconceptions about Asian female silence through her vibrant, vocal poetry. She chooses the content, she chooses the form, she chooses the presentation of her body and her identity in her powerful poetic performance. She, like the Asian males in Chon-Smith’s essay, uses spoken word to assert her rightful ability to self-determine. It is a liberating exercise of agency, one that does not come to Asian women often or easily. It is the intersection of poetry and hip hop that creates such a special space for her, and it is her haven, her chosen place of refuge.
When Chon-Smith introduces the Mountain Brothers, an Asian American hip hop trio, as the male example of such effective empowerment, he delineates why they are so embraced by the hip hop community: They “know the importance of paying due respect to African American hip-hop while at the same time promoting an Asian American sensibility” (133). They explicitly allow the blackness of hip hop to speak through their performances, acknowledging the political and social power of hip hop that empowers their use of this form. This layering of voices is what sets them apart from the offenses of Asian blackface or Rich Chigga’s language, holding them in appreciation rather than appropriation of black culture. Black history and Asian experience are combined, emulating Zadie Smith’s “Dream City,” where “everything is doubled, everything is various. You have no choice but to cross borders and speak in tongues… to represent the true multiplicity of [your] experience.” Instead of pretending to speak with a single voice, of Asian experience alone, performers intertwine racial experiences and allow for both distinct voices, black and Asian, to speak in tandem. Then, “the voice relinquishes ownership of itself, develops a creative sense of disassociation in which the claims that are particular to it seem no stronger than anyone else’s” (Smith). The Asian voice does not assert itself over the black art form, nor does it forcefully drown out the historical and cultural significance tied to hip hop; the two voices converge, complementing rather than competing with one another, each voice empowering the other.
Carvajal’s performance assumes an ambiguous position along the appreciation-appropriation border, because she addresses the “white man’s tongue” that she speaks over and against, but not the voices that she speaks with, found in the historically black voice of hip hop. She claims to speak for herself, but does not recognize that she does not speak by herself; she is not alone when she uses the medium of hip hop to put a voice to her experiences. In “Voices and Selves: Beyond the Modern-Postmodern Divide,” Mitchell Aboulafia expounds upon Sadie Smith’s conception of Dream City; she claims that inhabiting different perspectives enhances the ability “to listen to the voices of those who are strangers, and do so in a manner that is relatively impartial and respectful” (8). If Carvajal’s poem is to be held up as an instance of empowerment, in impartiality and respect, she must herself acknowledge such different perspectives, particularly the black history that colors the voice she uses. The cross-cultural contact that happens within her poem allows her to be “true to [her]self” while still recognizing the influences of “different cultures,” as her speech becomes a space for cultural connection and appreciation (Aboulafia 11). Carvajal’s performance of Asian experience through hip hop must be read as a continuation of a deeper, richer history of Asian empowerment through a black art form, an accumulation of bold, creative, and dissenting voices that weave together the threads of hip hop that create the fabric of speech she uses to unfurl her experiences. It is not simply her voice that speaks, but a multiplicity of historical voices that together empower the voice with which she speaks.