Since at least the 1993 publication of Cultures of United States Imperialism (particularly the essays by Vicente L. Rafael and Walter Benn Michaels) there has been a “Pacific turn” in American studies. The conceptual potentialities of this Pacific turn stretch back to before the Founding, as the work of Michelle Burnham and Paul Giles demonstrates, and continues to the present day.Footnote ¹ While “transpacific” American studies stands in dialogue with its far better-known and -established cousin “transatlantic” American studies, these concepts are not, as Giles makes clear, homologous: “any reconceptualization of US culture in terms of transpacific relations necessarily involves wider and more complicated geopolitical juxtapositions” than transatlantic reconceptualizations.”Footnote ² This essay will attend to these wider and more complicated geopolitical juxtapositions beginning with the 1898 US acquisition of the Philippines and annexation of the former Kingdom of Hawaii. Denise Cruz and Erin Suzuki characterize these “two key events” as “completely chang[ing] America's relationship to the Pacific.”Footnote ³ In particular, this essay will examine these geopolitical juxtapositions in the fiction and poetry of the Filipino-born José Garcia Villa.

Born in 1908, Villa became the enfant terrible of Filipino writing in English, scandalizing some and electrifying others with his sexually charged “Man-Songs” (1929). The publication of these poems brought him to court; he was fined fifty pesos for “polluting public morals.” It also led to his suspension from the University of the Philippines for a year since the poems were deemed “indecent and obscene.”Footnote ⁴ At the same time he also wrote a story called “Mir-i-nisa” that he considered “absolute trash” in order to win a thousand peso prize from the Philippines Free Press.Footnote ⁵ Winning the award, Villa arrived in the United States in 1930 and began studying at the University of New Mexico.Footnote ⁶ In the US, he met with enormous success and was celebrated by writers like Marianne Moore, Edith Sitwell, e. e. cummings, Alfred Kreymborg, Conrad Aiken, and Louis Untermeyer. While he lived in the US for the remainder of his life, his presence was felt strongly in Philippines. As Timothy Yu puts it, “he wielded tremendous authority as perhaps the preeminent authority on Filipino letters in English, regularly editing anthologies of Filipino poetry and fiction and propagating his aesthetic views in essays and reviews.”Footnote ⁷

The relation between these two Villas – the Filipino and the American – and the movement between them are especially important for understanding the conditions of possibility for transpacific analysis. While it might be tempting, for example, to divide Villa's first book-length work Footnote to Youth: Tales of the Philippines and Others (1933) between the “Tales of the Philippines” and the “Others,” seeing the former as heteronormative, Filipino local color fiction, and the latter as queer, American experimental autobiography, I follow Martin Joseph Ponce in refusing this bifurcation. Ponce argues both that Villa publishes homoerotic fiction set in the Philippines before he publishes his queer autobiographical tales in the US and that his work can be described as that of neither “an apologist for U.S. imperialism nor an advocate of Filipino nationalism.”Footnote ⁸ Cruz, however, is more skeptical of understanding Villa as a transpacific subject, understanding Footnote as a text characterized not by “triumphant fusions, but by remarkable oppositions.”Footnote ⁹ She highlights the text's “irreconcilabilities” to disrupt “a celebratory rubric of elite, transpacific aesthetics and its imagined, queer possibilities that are linked to the presumably liberating space of the US.”Footnote ¹⁰ Perhaps the moment in the Footnote that comes closest to the queer possibilities of a transpacific aesthetic is the text's climax in “Young Writer in a New Country”: Villa's highly charged “white birth” “in the white land.”Footnote ¹¹ This birth comes at the end of five linked autobiographical stories narrating his journey to and life in the US:

Here, Villa controversially imagines himself reborn as a white man in America. In one of the only readings of this moment in the scholarship, Ponce registers the possibility that this moment of “literary self-genesis depend[s] on erasing racial and colonial difference” even as he ultimately does not think this occurs.Footnote ¹³ I think such an erasure does occur and that it is registered in part in the coolness of the rebirth. Earlier in the story, Villa mentions that he finds America to be “cold” but that his roommate, Ernest, who “has lived in America all his life,” “does not find it so.”Footnote ¹⁴ Thus I read the coolness of his rebirth as a sign of becoming American, adapting and feeling at home in the New Mexico desert and endowing him with the power to write about both the US and the Philippines. His stories are “afire with coolth,” melding the heat of the Philippines with the coolth of the US. Like his stories, he is born “of the homeland and of the new land.”

As Ponce argues, Villa becomes a “father of tales,” “recasting the language of procreation to figure literary creativity,” but this potentially heteronormative and patriarchal role of the father is made queer in relation to literary creativity and to his being the “lover to the desert.” Here, to quote Villa's “Man-Songs” which anticipate his “queer songs” becoming “queerer still,” Villa has lost his love David, but instead finds love for the American desert and peace in the desert. “Young Writer in a New Country” ends with the peace of God and the peace of the desert:

Here, Villa asks forgiveness of his native land for his becoming white and for desiring the peace that God and the desert offer. This moment contests the “irreconcilabilities” that both Ponce and Cruz understand to characterize his work. Irreconcilability suggests an oscillation, a discomfort, an uneasiness that seems here belied by Villa's sense of peace. However, I think that both Cruz and Ponce correctly articulate the way in which Villa's oeuvre does not provide us with an easy bidirectional fusion (even if this autobiographical moment does), but instead offers the complex geographical negotiation that Giles articulates – particularly around the question of orientalism.

In order to explore this transpacific negotiation of orientalism, I want to turn to Villa's poem “Dame Edith Sitwell Reading.” Sitwell was an avant-garde poet and literary celebrity. She and Villa were friends and correspondents and she advocated strongly for his work, helping him to find publishers, including his work in anthologies, and writing a preface to his Selected Poems and New (1958).Footnote ¹⁶ Though “Dame Edith Sitwell Reading” does not deploy Villa's pioneering technique of “reversed consonance,” I will argue that we must understand the poem precisely through this method of composition.

Describing this technique at the end of his widely acclaimed volume of poetry Have Come, Am Here (1942), Villa writes, “The last sounded consonants of the last syllable, or the last principal consonants of a word, are reversed for the corresponding rhyme. Thus a rhyme for near would be run; or rain, green, reign. For light – tell, tall, tale, steal, etc.”Footnote ¹⁷ Taking a hint from Marianne Moore's contention in her review of Have Come, Am Here that “the principle of reversed consonance has been extended to content,” I am interested in this technique as a figure for a transpacific queer aesthetic.Footnote ¹⁸ Rhyme has a prescribed catalog of possibilities; this limitation accounts for the humorous non sequitur in W. H. Auden's lines from “Letter to Lord Byron” (1937):

Here, the requirement of Auden's rhyme-royal makes a particular pairing compulsory. Villa's reversed consonance instead creates new possibilities for coupling, suggesting a queer content, one which imagines pairings hitherto unimagined, or as Villa puts it, “never … used in the history of English poetry, nor in any poetry.”Footnote ²⁰

But reversed consonance is queerer still; in his “A Note on Reversed Consonance” Villa writes,

Here, reversed consonance displays a queer promiscuousness, unthreading the possibility that rhymes come in couples by putting three words in congress with one another. That this queer aesthetic is also a transpacific one is thematized in the volume's title, Have Come, Am Here, with its suggestion of both of journey and arrival recording a transpacific crossing. But this crossing transpires at the level of form as well as content as the rhyming consonants reverse, transverse, and cross one another with each rhyme. That is, each rhyme is a transpacific crossing and arrival made queerer with each inversion in the transposition of letters and in the sexological sense of the invert.

With this queer transpacific aesthetic of reversed consonance in mind, I want to turn to “Dame Edith Sitwell Reading.” The poem depicts a reversal at the level of content rather than form: specifically Sitwell undergoing what the text terms “a two- / way metamorphosis” with Sitwell embodying a majest[ic] Chineseness before inhabiting a “tweed[y]” Englishness and then transforming back into a “Chinese empress” (hence the doubleness of the metamorphosis). I quote the poem in full:

Yu's suggestive reading of this poem, particularly his claim that Sitwell functions “as a model of his [Villa's] self-presentation,” is instructive in understanding Villa's relation to both the management of transpacific orientalism and queerness. While Yu understands Sitwell as “exposing the contradiction [between Anglo-American modernism and orientalism] he inhabits,” I see Sitwell as providing Villa a model for responding to the melding, mixing, and conflation of transpacific circuits of orientalism.

From the poem's opening line (“Her entrance is a masterpiece”), the poem is entirely focussed on the performance of her poetry reading. That is, it foregrounds the form of her reading rather than the content of her poems (an elision which is signaled by the ellipses in the antepenultimate line of the poem): “Edith begins to read …” In place of the reading itself, this ellipsis merely signals the fact of her having read. Because the poem is one of Villa's “adaptations” transcribing and lineating (as he tell us) nearly word for word from Gerald Weales's 1957 article “The Poet as Player,” it is – at the level of form – devoid of Villa's poetic material in the way that it is devoid of Sitwell's poem. The elision of Sitwell's poetry allows Villa to focus on her style of reading and the majestic figure she cuts in her “[e]xotic robe: this one red / Cut through with gold.” The exotic robe in the traditional Chinese colors of red and gold resonates – as Yu argues – with Villa's own orientalized status among modernists (most obviously in the famous picture of mid-century writers taken at the Gotham Book Mart). Alongside China and the Philippines, the poem opens a third oriental geography – namely India in which the actress Margaret Rutherford (whose name ends the poem) spent part of her childhood. With these geographies in mind, I want to argue that Sitwell embodies what Colleen Lye calls the “combinatory notion” of “Asiatic threat.”Footnote ²² While for Lye this threat is composed of the combination of Japan and China, I understand Villa to be negotiating a series of less fixed points. That is, I see Villa's aesthetic as engaging the Orient of the Western imagination in its vastness, traveling its regional circuits from India to China to the Philippines. That is, the poem is itself an adaptation to this orientalist condition.

While theorizations of the transpacific have movement at their heart – in the journey, in the crossing – they begin and end with fixed points (in the case of Villa, the Philippines and the US). But I am arguing that this poem and the reversed-consonance method that it extrapolates eschew fixed points of departure and arrival and instead offer neighborhoods, regions, and adjacencies. Sitwell's “[m]assive brocaded knitting / Bag” might be Chinese, but it could be Indian or Peruvian. Her abrupt personality change seemingly summons the “English country house,” but then we reverse course and arrive in China. I want to suggest that this combinatory, anagrammatic orientalism both insulates Villa from orientalist thoughtlessness, ignorance, indifference, and attacks and queers its geographic specificity, relegating it to a queer non-place.

The lack of definitional fixity – a hallmark of queerness – is also summoned by Sitwell's own complicated relation to same-sex desire (and in this way she is, as Yu argues, also a model for Villa's self-presentation). Sitwell never married and denied that she was a lesbian (and her biographers concur, seeing no reason to disagree with her assessment). In a late interview, she states, “I write in the rhythms of Sappho, though I do not have that lady's unfortunate disposition.”Footnote ²³ She was surrounded by same-sex desire as many of her closest friends were queer men, including her brother Osbert, and she spent much of her life in love with Pavel Tchelitchew, whose desires tended toward men. Both Wyndham Lewis and Noel Coward “outed” her in literary works, claiming she was a lesbian.

Sitwell's sexuality, located in the neighborhood of lesbianism, but not necessarily part of it, similarly models the unlocatablity of Villa's sexuality. Thus I want to suggest that attending to Villa's transpacific queer aesthetic in some ways theorized through and resonating with Sitwell's own suggests a model for American studies, one which eschews the chimeric stability of points of crossing to see movement characterizing all aspects of the transpacific.