I Pledge Allegiance
Hyeunjoo C.
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My artwork is a collection of two poems that detail the experiences I and many others have had as an immigrant living in the United States of America. I've personally always felt that I didn't quite belong here in this country, a feeling that in the past years has only grown stronger as I and my people have been shunned and assaulted. In many ways I feel myself losing my childhood and innocence to hate and fear, over which I have no control; I am frustrated, seething with righteous anger and sorrow because the land which I call home rebukes my embrace. For years this soft discontent has been growing, and eventually when I simply could not take it anymore I put my thoughts onto paper in the best way that one can express oneself: poetry.
I tried my best to channel the feeling of unrequited love that I have towards this nation in my poems, but I also didn't want to create a kind of narrative that only focused on my personal experiences, though I did want my own experiences to play a large part. After deliberation, I decided that using my own experiences along with the experiences of other immigrants to create two poems that weaved in recurring themes of the immigrant experience and inter-generational struggles would be the best way to create the kind of artwork I wanted.
I then spent quite a lot of time on Google Docs trying to write and find the perfect poem; and for my first, I by chance was inspired by the very thing that I feel best represents my frustration: the Pledge of Allegiance.
Here was a pledge, an oath, even, that I had made since as long as I could think; an oath that promised me freedom and equality, liberty and justice, the righteousness and determination that one could only find in America!
Only for that dream to fall apart in front of my eyes.
It was perfect for the kind of work I wanted to make. And so I parodied it, taking the lines and shifting them, moulding them, as so many through time often have to the American ideal, to create a wretched creation of fear and disgust that seemed to both hollowly scream the promises that had never been kept and the dim suspicion that nothing would ever be kept at all.
I'm still rather chuffed at that.
But then, of course, I needed to make a second poem; my overflowing emotions demanded an outlet, and I was compelled to provide one. But after the parody of the Pledge, I found myself rather drained of intellectual capacity.
What, then, was I to do? I pondered over this for quite a while, before eventually coming upon the conclusion that the best way was to simply be authentic, and to tell a story. And so I made a poem that was simply a chronicle of what being an immigrant was like. I liked it well enough, but I felt it could be so much more; and after some deliberation, I realized exactly what was missing.
I then spent hours researching the experiences of other immigrants, coming up with examples from Japanese-Americans to Irish-Americans, from times as far back as the Prohibition to as recent as 9/11, to create one long tapestry of voices that cluster together into lines like a chorus of dysfunction.
I can confidently say that these two poems are probably the most important poems that I'll ever write. Maybe not the best poems, as I'm sure I'll eventually make better ones in time, but the most important by far. No work of mine has shown, in my opinion, that sad longing for a reality that was never meant to be.
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Writing is, to me, a fantastic way that emotions can manifest themselves. Writing reveals in all of us that simple human instinct to share, be it experiences or emotions, that I simply delight in taking part and indulging in.
