Christine Imperial: Mistaken for an Empire
Thursday, May 25
Doors 7pm
Reading 7:30pm
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The Poetic Research Bureau hosts a reading by Christine Imperial from her memoir, Mistaken for an Empire: A Memoir in Tongues. The reading will be hosted by Sarah Sophia Yanni, with co-readers Jhani Randhawa and Vinhay Keo also featured.
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Born in postcolonial Philippines into a family—and country—with a complicated history, Christine Imperial learns from a lifetime of experiences that there is no easy path to understanding or belonging. Setting out to renew her relationship to Tagalog, the language she had previously distanced herself from, she contends with the meaning of her dual Philippine/US citizenship along with the conditions surrounding it, reflecting on imperialist and class systems and the history of her birth country. Beginning with an attempt to translate into Tagalog Rudyard Kipling’s “The White Man’s Burden” — Kipling’s ode to American imperialism after the US takeover of the Philippines - Imperial reflects on and writes against Kipling’s poem as she unspools her fractured family’s story.
Reckoning with both the anguish and promise of hybridity, Mistaken for an Empire expands into an exploration of the author’s relationship to English and Tagalog, history, family and state, origin and belonging. By interrogating the many intricacies of individual and national identity and the legacies that shape them, Imperial grapples with the tangled nature of allegiance, whether it be to family, to country, or to self.