I. THE POETICS OF INARTICULATION

In a 1950 article on the latest crop of minority writers, author Ward Moore contrasts the aesthetics of Hisaye Yamamoto's and Carlos Bulosan's work as follows:

Except that both are serious writers, the two have little in common. Miss Yamamoto, like most contributors to "little" magazines, is a classicist, occupied with form and texture, extremely conscious in her approach; Mr. Bulosan is a romantic who is so moved by the force of emotion that he carries his effects to his readers by sheer passion. His literary discipline is fundamental, evidently established in the very process of learning to put words together efficiently; Miss Yamamoto's is obviously imposed and clearly requires constant enforcement. She experiments, even at the risk of stumbling and floundering. Mr. Bulosan's footing is surer, for his path is narrower; she is an intellectual, he is an artist. (5)

Clearly impressed with Bulosan's social realism at the expense of what is presented as Yamamoto's contrived formal experimentation, Moore hits upon what appears to he a fundamental difference between the two writers: the passion in Yamamoto's writing is often hidden--indeed, unrecognized by Moore--within the subtexts of her intricately constructed narratives, while Bulosan's social realism forcefully purports to tell it like it is. The significance of these stylistic differences becomes even clearer as Moore presents Yamamoto's and Bulosan's views on the politics of writing. The section on Yamamoto concludes with her assertion, "I have no message.... I don't want to tell anybody anything. I just want to write--because writing is the easiest thing for me to do" (5). Yamamoto's avoidance of didacticism contrasts distinctly with Bulosan's response to the question, "Why do I write?":

In the making of the writer there are many factors. There was always something in me yearning to know other people. And I needed to explain my people to others. Then too, I was one of those trying to organize the exploited agricultural workers, many of whom were Filipinos. Writing was merely an inevitable extension of this work. (5)

Unlike Yamamoto, Bulosan clearly has a message; consequently, writing for him is a political weapon, an "inevitable extension" of his labor organizing and his agitation for Filipinos' civil rights. In comparison, Yamamoto--"a classicist, occupied with form and texture'--appears to divorce art and politics. The distinction between the two writers can also be framed in Roland Barthes's terms: whereas Yamamoto's non-didactic, experimental work is "writable" (playful, open, and plural), Bulosan's social realism is "readable" (closed, structured, and authoritarian) (4-5).

Without eliding the important aesthetic and political differences between the two writers, both Yamamoto and Bulosan need to be studied within the multicultural politics of the Popular Front, especially as it pertains to Asian Americans. (1) Strictly speaking, the Popular Front refers to the period of Left-wing coalition building with bourgeois organizations and individuals in response to the rise of fascism in Europe and, as many argued, in the U.S. At this time, new social movements came into being that drew together anti-imperialist, anti-lynching,...