Week 9_Chloe Azurin_ASA 150E

Chloe Azurin 

Professor Valverde 

ASA 150 E

As someone whose life is inextricably entwined with music, the most impactful chapter I got to read this week was Chapter 4: Lost Chapters and Invisible Wars: Hip-Hop and Cambodian-American Critique. 

In this section, the authors look in more detail at the world the Khmer-American rapper praCh creates. As a refugee from the bloody conflict between Vietnam and the Khmer Rouge who later relocated to Southern California, praCh is no stranger to the fragmentation of memory and communicability that befalls almost all 1st and 1.5 generations. Like so many others who find that everything else fails to fill and thread and weave the gaps together into something meaningful, praCh uses his music to pour out the emotions of growing up as a Cambodian-American. 

Not that any other genre is less fit to convey a diasporic experience, what struck me is how rap is actually perfect for conveying the inconsistency, and the jagged, unfolding bits of the our diasporic experience. Rap is distinct in its origins and material that it speaks of struggle and an urgent need to tell a struggle that is not easily articulated. The pieces of the home country and where our feet are aren’t easily meant to flow together, and rap is not either. 

praCh’s work actually reminds me of one of my favorite artists, Ruby Ibarra. As someone born in Tacloban City but raised in the Bay Area Ruby raps about the diasporic experience, along with the trials of poverty, stifling of creative careers, and racial profiling that are all characteristic of being a POC. The idea of heterotopias and the alternative worlds that both praCh and Ruby create speak to a creation of memory and history, not just hollow reiterations of someone else’s.

My questions for this week are: are there other genres where the diasporic community is teling their stories? and how are these stories being told and collaborated on by both sides of the diaspora?