Blog #6-- The Voices, The Instruments

Okay, so I'm really glad that LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs wrote "who you callin' a jynx? (after mista popo)" because these blatantly racist caricatures are all over anime and childhood and have been mass-produced on a global scale.

Diggs' instruments to critique this mass production of racism are the push and pull of languages, as well as the voices/personas of Jynx from Pokemon Mr. Popo from DBZ. The two anime characters are in conversation, though it's hard for me to tell where the characters are located in the setting of the poem.

She builds momentum in their conversation with internal rhyme: "the most obscene fish queen you ever seen," end rhyme: "spin / gaijins" (gaijin means "foreigner" in Japanese) and "souvenir / brassiere," and a constant back and forth between AAVE and Japanese "Kokujin wanna mark me; I got ya kawaii buddies" (Kokujin means "black man" and kawaii is a manga style of "cute" drawing and affect). This clash of two languages puts difference side-by-side, collages it, makes it into a language that gives the two characters the agency to speak to one another about their context.

As a child watching these shows on TV, Mr. Popo was always pitch black and a subservient to Kami (God). I saw both the original Jynx and the altered skin color purple Jynx. Diggs has the two characters discuss these changes in their skin color in order to make them more marketable to a US audience: "with black/purple flesh supposedly offensive. / make no difference in variation, / check it:      cross pollination. // Watashi wa zasshu = mass circulation" (56) ("Watashi wa zasshu" translates in google as "I am a crossbreed/hybrid"). The change in her skin color is in vain, the racism that perpetuated her creation is left intact--this color change is a bandaid fix and only furthers the U.S.'s and Japan's economies without making any real effort to challenge racism. The tie to racism and capitalism is also reinforced with Jynx's reference to Zwarte Piet, the racist colonialist caricature celebrated in Dutch Christmas tradition.

In this poem, racially and culturally charged language and image are Diggs' instruments. Placed next to each other in sentence and line, each cultural shift or translation forces the reader to critically evaluate their place in this exchange--"exchange" as in their conversation and the cultural/globally economic capital that profits off racism.