Language and a Poetics of Collage: Catalina Cariaga's "Cultural Evidence."

This article analyzes language and a poetics of collage in Catalina Cariaga's book of poetry, "Cultural Evidence." Cariaga is allegedly often referred to as a language poet because of her language-centered poetics and experimentation with poetic form. Rather than a retreat into what might seem to be a self-indulgent language game, the poetry of Cariaga is resolutely situated in the social, historical, and political. Cariaga's interrogation of language and form shares with many Filipino American poets an investigation of colonized subjectivity in relation to cultural imperialism, particularly the imposition of Spanish and English on the Filipinos. Part of the investigation allegedly entails the poets' exploration of the possibilities of using the colonizers' language to tell another tale. While the book of poetry engages similar issues, its experimental poetics reveals a new phase in the development of Filipino American poetry in both its thematic concerns and technical strategies, especially in its use of language to subvert the ways in which knowledge of the racialized and gendered Other are produced through a binary scheme of representation. Like many Filipino American poets such as Gemino Abad, Michael Melo, Fatima Lim-Wilson, Jessica Hagedorn, and Virginia Cerenio, Cariaga allegedly undermines English as the institutionalized instrument of colonization and as the model of official language of the dominant culture to which Filipinos and Filipino Americans must conform in their process of assimilation.