Reading for Queer Openings: Moving. Archives of the Self. Fred Wah.

Fred Wah is a writer of the contemporary, not the archive. He writes poetry “as a way of reading and thinking” (Faking It 1). I read his poetry as a way of thinking and writing. My focus therefore is on “the archive effect” as an act of reading, “an experience of reception rather than an indication of official sanction or storage location” (Baron 7). Many affect theorists assume that “a vital re-centring of the body” necessitates a shift away from “the text and discourse” (Gregg and Siegworth 1). But, as I will argue, if bodies are at the centre of “the affective turn” (Clough and Halley; Pedwell and Whitehead), readers, texts, and language remain key theoretical touchstones. In Denise Riley’s words, there is a “forcible affect of language,” which courses through us “like blood” (Impersonal Passion 1). In Faking It (2000), Wah’s millennial collection of essays on poetics and hybridity, he speaks of the poet as archivist and of poetry being written out of “archives of the self” (237). For Wah, writing involves rereading such archives, not to confirm what is known, but to “get through” (232) to someplace else. From the vantage point of some new place, we see the “openings” that enabled the transformation. The experience of reading the work of Fred Wah is similarly transformative and requires active, embodied readers. In Wah’s investigative writing practice, he explores his mixed Chinese/English/Swedish identity. I found in it, queer openings where I could examine the experience of being a white, supposedly heterosexual, woman who felt like and eventually came out as a lesbian. Although scholars across the social sciences and humanities agree that there is no “singular crosscutting definition of affect” (Cifor and Gilliland), affect is, as Marika Cifor argues, “a force that creates a relation between a body and the world” (8). As Ann Cvetkovich says in the interview cited as an epigraph to this chapter, “the archive of feelings” gives us permission “to turn down the volume on the voice of critique and pay attention to the strong feelings that get attached to things” (Carland and Cvetkovich 73). My strong feelings have always been attached to the things we call poems. This chapter explores therefore what it means to access archives of the self through reading. I consider the reasons why and how I read, and reread, the work of Fred Wah in my early essays on his work (Rudy Dorscht, “mother/father things”; Rudy, “& how else”), during our collaboration on the Fred Wah Digital Archive (S–2010), and since I began writing this essay in 2016. Along the way, I say something of what I’ve learned about archives, queer openings, affect, and my body