Long Fiction:
Dogeaters, 1990
The Gangster of Love, 1996
Drama:
Chiquita Banana, pb. 1972
Where the Mississippi Meets the Amazon, pr. 1977 (with Thulani Davis and Ntozake Shange)
Mango Tango, pr. 1978
Tenement Lover: no palm trees/ in newyork city, pr. 1981
Holy Food, pr. 1988 (staged), pr. 1989 (radio play)
Teenytown, pr. 1990 (with Laurie Carlos and Robbie McCauley)
Black: Her Story, pr., pb. 1993
Airport Music, pr. 1994 (with Han Ong)
Silent Movie, pr. 1997 (as part of The Square)
Dogeaters, pr. 1998 (adaptation of her novel)
Poetry:
The Woman Who Thought She Was More than a Samba, 1978
Visions of a Daughter, Foretold, 1994
Screenplay:
Fresh Kill, 1994
Edited Text:
Charlie Chan Is Dead: An Anthology of Contemporary Asian American Fiction, 1993
Miscellaneous:
Dangerous Music, 1975
Pet Food and Tropical Apparitions, 1981
Danger and Beauty, 1993
When Jessica Tarahata Hagedorn (HAY-guh-dohrn) saw her first novel, Dogeaters, nominated for the 1990 National Book Award, it propelled her to prominence in American letters, but her status was the product of decades of gestation. She once said that she had “been writing pretty much all my life,” noting that her grandfather, too, was a writer and that she wrote four-page “little novels,” as she terms them, at the age of six and seven. Although she emphasizes that she always wanted to work in theater, as a performer, writer, or director, her early literary effort was directed toward poetry.
Jessica Hagedorn
Hagedorn emigrated to San Francisco in 1961. She expressed her gratitude to Kenneth Rexroth for his help and encouragement in her dedication to him of Danger and Beauty. An even more seminal influence at that time was the milieu of what she terms the “artists of color” in the Bay Area. She has singled out Ntozake Shange and Thulani Davis as particularly valuable to her career development, as both a writer and a performer, and acknowledges the early work of Winston Tong and Ping Chong’s Nuit Blanche (pr. 1981). Because she wished to see family in Manila during the years of martial law, she visited the Philippines as often as twice a year. Her emotional ties to the country of her birth remain strong, constituting a marked cultural influence. To finish Dogeaters, for example, she returned to Manila for a few months in 1988.
Instead of attending college, she set out to realize her ambition to work in the theater by training with the American Conservatory Theatre. The regimen encompassed mime, acting, fencing, martial arts, and t’ai chi, a perfect program for Hagedorn, whose works’ prominent characteristic is eclecticism. She considers herself a performance artist rather than an actor or a musician, and her work displays the multifacetedness that the term “performance artist” suggests. She defines performance art as “a theater that remains open, drawing from many sources: vaudeville, stand-up comedy, rap music, confessions.” In the 1970’s she organized the West Coast Gangster Choir (the oxymoronic name itself an indication of her penchant for combination), a band with which until 1985 she performed in colleges and universities throughout Northern California. Her play Tenement Lover: no palm trees/ in new york city is an expanded version of a song; Teenytown was staged by the performance trio Thought Music, consisting of Hagedorn, Laurie Carlos, and Robbie McCauley. Another diversifying element in her plays, which are vehicles for protesting racism and sexism, is the presence of social message; here her feminism is particularly visible. Hagedorn’s work has been recognized by, among others, Joseph Papp, who produced Mango Tango in 1978, but both as a stage performer and as a writer of stage performances she has received mixed reviews.
With the exception of Dogeaters, Hagedorn’s books are composite genres, another reflection of her eclecticism. Dangerous Music has as its centerpiece “The Blossoming of Bongbong,” prose fiction featuring a character that recurs in other works as well. Yet some critics, among them Jessica Sakai, have singled out Hagedorn’s poetry, with its “rhythms as insistent and hypnotic as jungle drums,” as the volume’s highlight. Although Hagedorn made two important changes in her life in the later 1970’s–accepting U.S. citizenship in 1976 and moving to New York City in 1978–this did not radically alter her literary style. With Pet Food and Tropical Apparitions she again created an amalgam of prose and poetry, though one heavily weighted toward the former; the incongruity of the title is an indication of the book’s assorted contents. Yet Hagedorn welcomed the move to New York because, as she said, “living in New York is so tough,” and she was seeking to present her principal themes–“otherness, the idea of revolution on many levels, terrorism, dominant culture versus so-called minority culture”–with greater clarity and less sentimentality.
Danger and Beauty is largely retrospective, a sampler drawn from the series of poems entitled “The Death of Anna May Wong,” originally published in 1973 in Four Young Women Poets, Dangerous Music, and Pet Food and Tropical Apparitions. In its last section, however, “New York Peep Show: 1982-1992,” Hagedorn also supplies new material, both prose fiction and poetry. Danger and Beauty displays the maturation of her art over time. Reviewers pointed out certain aspects of her stylistic development, among them the loss of her early playfulness. Critics also noted the characteristic counterpoint of stylistic inclusiveness and thematic concentration.