Kareem Estefan Responds

Kareem Estefan is a writer and radio producer. He hosted the radio show Ceptuetics, a WNYU program investigating the poetics of conceptually innovative writers. His own writing shows up in Google searches, on blogs, and soon, in poetry journals called "President's Choice" and "The Physical Poets." He has begun a new blog. It's called disco (not disconnect).

Eileen Myles' new book contains a blog entry on the choreographer and dancer Pina Bausch, who died earlier this year. It concludes with an injunction that feels impossible for me, at this juncture, but nonetheless remains "our job. As a people. To not believe ourselves so much. But to believe our bodies." A difficult occupation, believing our bodies, as our bodies are always already occupied. Reflected in our fluids, amidst the bacteria, are the truly threatening parasites: communications devices that fragment my body and transport "me" elsewhere, a temporal regime that submits my body to external demands of productivity. Now, as before, a feminist approach questions how we have constructed the philosophical, economic, and legal bodies that govern our selves, and demands that we tap our tactile bodies - cyborg, queer, of varying color, age, and form - for the multivocal responses.

As a feminist poet, then, I have failed (so far). I write seldom and less joyously than I'd like. I try to put the body there - in text, online, out loud - but I end up with screen names, disembodied and appropriated figures for the "I" that I attempt to multiply and queer. Instead I affirm the "I"'s hollowness. It is a failure I recognize as a process of testing, trying, and understanding, in this moment where we need to think about the fractured self and its networked relations. Certainly, it is instructive to read contemporary feminist writers like Juliana Spahr, Eileen Myles, Kim Rosenfield, Kathy Acker, Dennis Cooper, and Avital Ronell. Those who tune into the body and perform its rhythms against and alongside the outrages of boredom, bureaucracy, rape and war.

But then little of my time is spent as a poet, being twenty-three and new to poetry and working nine to six for a political talk show. Mainly I raise feminist concerns behind the curtains of the media, in editorial meetings led by two female bosses where, still, feminism is cut off from issues of labor, language, and love. Here it is not an issue of numbers trouble: in our offices and "on our air" women are more than equally represented, though we rarely have women "on air," I notice, to speak about war and peace. Unless they are military wives extolling Facebook for permitting them to 'stay in touch.' What is this touch? I want to ask. Who can and cannot be touched in these networks we have drawn up, now that society has obsolesced?

On a different wavelength, while hosting a show for contemporary poetry, Ceptuetics, I asked feminist poets like Barbara Cole and Juliana Spahr and Anne Tardos how autobiography and anonymity and intersubjectivity figured in their writing. What does it mean to occupy the position of subject and object, something that Vanessa Place and Rob Fitterman ask in their Notes on Conceptualisms, an important book for questions of gender and genre. Problems of identity in writing, how "I" or "we" emerge after the author's been distilled into this or that function, remain central even as more poets employ techniques like appropriation, sampling, and plagiarism.

I wonder how Eileen Myles, skeptical of effacing the personal, might respond to the "I" in works of conceptual writing. "I think that only the implicitly powerful can readily bury their sex or their gods," she writes in an ode to musician/video artist Sadie Benning (of Le Tigre), "and not feel somewhat erased themselves as a result." Conceptual poets or mash-up artists or collagists all need to ask how their editing and erasures subvert or re-inscribe modes of domination. Back when the musician Girl Talk was big, around the time Night Ripper first wowed hipsters and critics with its whirlpool of samples (roughly one every ten seconds), I asked Girl Talk aka Greg Gillis whether he thought of his album as a DJ set or a new piece of music. He responded, "I don't want people to think this is, you know, the Ying Yang Twins meets The Verve. I want them to hear this and say, 'oh, that's that song by Girl Talk.'" I agreed that he had put together something fans would remember as his composition, so I asked him if it was then Girl Talk whispering "beat the pussy up, beat the pussy up" over the monumental strings of "Bitter Sweet Symphony." He paused and said it wasn't really a political album.

Of course I still dance to Girl Talk, I still say shitty things to my mom from time to time, and my friends and lovers have rightly pointed to problematic assumptions I inherit from my parents, from cities in the Northeast, from Palestine and Syria and Lebanon. To ask "are you conflicted in your relationship to feminism?" is really to ask "what follows from your conflicted relationship with feminism?" For me, the answer might be hope or anxiety or breathing or love. Don't hold your breath any longer, men: inject your selves with empathy, monthly doses of mortality. We can only live when we feel this connection of everyone with lungs, when we learn what it might mean to believe our bodies.