In one of my first posts I talked about the journey of Chinese immigrants through Angel Island in the early half of the 20th century, and shared the book ISLAND: Poetry and History of Chinese Immigrants on Angel Island, 1910-1940. I now realize that I didn't share any of the poetry from the book. Here are two poems from the book that were transcribed and translated from immigrant reflections scribed into the wooden walls of the detention center barracks.
34 For what reason must I sit in jail? It is only because my country is weak and my family poor. My parents wait at the door but there is no news. My wife and child wrap themselves in quilt sighing with loneliness. Even if my petition is approved and I can enter the country, When can I return to the Mountains of Tang* with a full load? From ancient times, those who venture out usually become worthless. How many people ever return from battles?
*A Cantonese colloquial term for China.
2 Because my house had bare walls, I began rushing all about. The waves are happy, laughing "Ha-ha!" When I arrived on Island,* I heard I was forbidden to land. I could do nothing but frown and feel angry at heaven.
*The colloquial name given to Angel Island by the Cantonese immigrants.
A facet of the immigrant journey that always fascinates me is the willingness to be cast out into the unknown, the decision to be neither here nor there. I often wonder how this decision is made knowing that venturing out might make you "worthless"? Knowing that this country will most likely see you as worthless, no matter your background, because you don't speak the language. I think perhaps because I was born in the this country, I might never understand what can be worth becoming worthless for.
In March I attended a panel at UCLA featuring Alicia Partnoy, author of The Little School: Tales of Disappearance and Survival, about Argentine political prisoners' writing and art, and I was excited to be able to finally introduce myself. It was also an honor to sit along side William Archila whose book, The Art of Exile--a poetic account of his exit from civil war El Salvador in 1980 and his later return--won the festival's International Latino Book Award in Poetry. I bought Archila's book today at the festival, and am already in love with it. Beautiful images of here and there, and consequently feeling alienated from both feel dreamy and magical, but as William explained at our panel, what we here in the U.S. call Magical Realism is an everyday-way of thinking in Latin American countries.
Walking through booths of Latino publishers, bookstores, writers and organizations made me feel lucky to be a Latino writer welcomed by a supportive community. Sometimes being a writer can be lonely. The act of writing is solitary, but what I love about being a poet is the opportunities it brings to share stories and experience a moment of togetherness. On the truest level this community is hopefully felt when we read a poem about a man's memory of being a boy in El Salvador or a political prisoner's story of survival, but it can also happen in public spaces.
It is about community. We share our stories to understand each other and gain a sense of sameness. Or as Father Boyle, Founder of Homeboy Industries, author of Tattoos of the Heart: The Power of Boundless Compassion, and the festival's keynote speaker said it is a mutual experience. A moment in time when we discover a kinship with one another.
In my household there is an ongoing debate about the state of the Latino community in the U.S. Of course, we all know there is still along way to go, but in my house some think we have focused too much on art, literature, and education and not enough on business and politics. That may be true, but we need Latino writers and poets, books, publishers, bookstores, and community centers if only to have a place to be recognized and seen because no one else is going to do it unless we make them.
As David Orr said in his essay "The Politics of Poetry" (I'm summarizing here and taking liberties) politics and poetry both demand a mastery of rhetoric and politicians--just as poets--are “people who imagine new ways of being and perceiving.” Orr refers to this as a totalizing vision. The politician and poet’s ability to imagine a wider worldview allows both to clarify for a public a new or different reality through language. So yes, it would be good for our community to have more Gloria Molinas and Sonia Sotomayers in places of power, but we also need Luis J. Rodriguez, Sandra Cisneros, Gary Soto, Martin Espada, and Julia Alvarez (to name a few).
Support your Latino writers, buy a book, and let's keep the community moving together.
June 2009 only one thing was on my mind: graduating. In the final weeks of my MFA program, I frantically worked through the last bits of requirements, practicing my 15 minutes of poetry in the mirror, thumbing through the notes and handouts of my senior lecture trying to smoothly verbalize theories I was worried I didn’t completely grasp. This left no time for the outside world. At the exact same time citizens of Iran were gathering in the streets to protest against a corrupt election and tyranical government, Twitter was a flitter, and the entire world witnessed a young woman’s murder captured by the camera of a phone. Did I take much notice? Not really. There was no time.
I remember classmates talking about Neda. I remember people in the commons area saying, “Can you believe what’s happening in Iran?” but I shrugged it off and kept my focus on the hoops in front of me. Then Michael Jackson died, and it was like the whole world stopped. It started with a text. Someone announced, “Michael Jackson is dead,” and suddenly the students around me flipped open cell phones and laptops. Perez Hilton (I went to Perez and got mocked), TMZ, New York Times, Reuters, Los Angeles Times, where flashing before screens as we waited for updates, texted, and Facebooked. Neda was Dead. Iran was imploding on the other side of the world, but here in my world Michael was dead.
A year later, the year anniversary of my MFA, the Green protests, Michael’s death, The Splinter Generation (the zine I edit for) was allowed to republish two poems from Atlanta Review’s Iran Issue. The poems represent some of the first voices to come out of the Green Movement of Iran. This lead me to invite the guest editor of that issue, Sholeh Wolpe, Iranian poet, translator, and editor, to be a guest on Splinter’s BlogTalkRadio show, Splintered Thoughts, and for some lucky reason she agreed. I was instantly paralyzed by my ignorance.
How can I interview a woman about Iran, when it barely broke through my own consciousness? How can I interview her when the main memories of last summer were my senior reading, and listening to Man in the Mirror and tearing up with classmates? How can I talk about Iran when I am so far away in a different country, a different culture, a different state of mind?
I asked our main editor, if he might want to do the interview instead, but he couldn’t. Or wouldn’t. I was the one with the idea; I would be the one to do it. But a year later, and I still knew nothing. What to do, but get to work reading articles, watching documentaries, and reading poetry.
There is a fear that drives much of my work: I am a vapid idiot. I worry that at any moment I will be discovered and kicked out of the creative club, my MFA stripped and my computer cleaned of every poem and essay. There will be a brand too (a t-shirt that reads “stoopid” with an arrow pointed up), that way when I go to poetry readings those around me will be properly warned. Is it that big a fear? In a way, yes. I don’t read the paper, reading novels and poetry books are work not entertainment, I can’t quote Vonnegut, the Brontes are strangers to me, William Carlos Williams an impossible uncle, and worst of all, I like reality T.V., the really bad stuff.
Not wanting Sholeh, or any Splinter listener to know the evil truth, I went to work, and discovered a very complex situation with a beautiful culture and people faced with a tyrannical government. One thing I know, Iranians are not their government. The women stood out to me. Banned from government, made to wear hijabs/niqabs/burqas, restricted in their public goings on, and mostly tied to the home, life is difficult, and yet, they fight. They enter university, wait to marry, and conduct individual protests like allowing some of their hair to be seen below veils. Perhaps a small protest, but it speaks hugely to the strength of the individual.
Before speaking with Sholeh, I searched the cyberspace for a whole universe of knowledge, downloaded, and reflected, but I am still so very ignorant. I have never lived this existence, will never live it, and I feel there is a whole lexicon of knowledge and culture I can never crack. I feel so unequipped, and yet I must try. I may never feel knowledgeable enough to talk about Arabic Nations, and the struggle in Iran, but what I can do is question, search, and when I have someone like Sholeh Wolpe, a poet and activist, I can ask and listen.
I can share my own fears and inadequacies because we are all human. All of us, know matter where we come from, what religion we grew up in (I grew up Catholic), what websites we consider news, what news channel we watch, what country we were born in, what side of the border we stand, what side of the war we happen to be on, are individuals trying to live, trying to be brave, trying to learn.
Highlights from the Sholeh Wolpe interview on poetry, politics, and Iran to come.
The beginning of this month I went to UCLA for a panel on political prisoners of the Dirty War of Argentina of the 70s and 80s, and the art and writing that came from experiences of unlawful imprisonment and torture, but political prisoners are not always in other countries. Here is a touch of WWII history and an annotation of the book May Sky. If it sounds on the academic side, it's because I stole parts of this entry from my grad school critical paper on Japanese internment and witness poetry.
A Little History:
On December 7, 1941, Japanese planes attacked Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. The next day the U.S. declared war on the combined Axis powers of Germany, Italy and Japan. On February 19, 1942, President Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 which declared the Western states under martial law allowing for, according to Anita Haya Patterson––author of “The Resistance to Images of Internment: Mitsuye Yamada’s Camp Notes,”––112,000 Japanese Americans, two-third of which were born in the United State, to be unlawfully and forcefully evacuated from their homes and imprisoned or “relocated” in internment camps. Relocation, as described by poet and historian Violet Kazu de Cristoforo in her book May Sky: There is Always Tomorrow, was inhumane: “The internment of Japanese Americans living on the West Coast involved a process by which they were registered, numbered, tagged with shipping labels, and placed aboard buses, trains or trucks for shipment, under armed guard, to temporary location euphemistically called ‘Assembly Centers’” (51). Such descriptions of the “process” are chilling considering the migration of a population of a people has the sound of a package being sent through the mail.In camps, life was not nearly as dire as the concentration camps of Europe that occurred at the same time, but human rights still were not protected by the law as stated in the U.S. Constitution. People were not directly mistreated with torture or death, but they did face certain injustices such as racial prejudice, unlawful imprisonment, and the loss of individual freedoms. Considered enemies of the state, Japanese Americans throughout the Western states were unjustly imprisoned in camps created out of makeshift bunkers and at times housed in horse stalls usually located in desolate areas. In the Rohwer Concentration Camp, for example, which was located near Little Rock, Arkansas where weather conditions were extreme, barracks were described by de Cristoforo as, “tar paper covered, hastily erected structures with ill-fitting doors and windows which did not close properly. As well, there was no running water and no coal supplies for heating stoves” (62). May Sky: There is Always Tomorrow:
May Sky: There is Always Tomorrow as compiled, translated, and prefaced by Violet de Christoforo is a book that combines history, poetry, culture and human rights, and tells the story of Japanese internment not through photos, facts, or essay, but with a hefty collection haiku written by those inside internment camps. Why haiku? In the introduction from a volume of haiku collected at Rohwer Concentration Camp in September 1944, the poets describe the phenomenon: “In order for us to transcend our condition we must immerse ourselves in nature, and be grateful to find happiness in the life of haiku poetry” (qtd in de Cristoforo 89).
In many poems there is a definite immersion in nature. This haiku by Reiko Gomyo, written while she was imprisoned in at Rohwer uses nature as a symbol for her oppression:
Feeling oppression withering weeds are dense (qtd in de Cristoforo 197)
Or this haiku written by Neji Ozawa while interned in Gila Indian reservations sanatoriam (where the title of the book is taken from) where the sky is a sense of hope:
From the window of despair May sky There is always tomorrow (qtd in de Christofor 223)
Or this haiku by Kazue Matsudo, interned at Tule Lake:
Like minded people gather new shoots sprout from pine tree early summer day (qtd in de Cristoforo 205)
What I find intriguing is how important the imagination becomes when faced with such harsh realities, and that while some of these poets were poets before and after, others may have never picked up a pen or a brush before, but are suddenly drawn to art as a form of coping and survival. Or as de Cristoforo says, "Like a comet, some of the wartime haiku writers emerged only momentarily from obsurity, flashed across the literary firmament and, when war ended and infamous concentration camps closed, vanished into oblivion" (30).
For more on witness poetry from civil rights violations around the world: Against Forgetting edited by Carolyn Forche, with an excellent essay on poetry of witness.
On Friday I headed to UCLA for a panel on Argentina's political prisoners from the Dirty War of the '70s and '80s, and the bookEslabones, a new volume of stories, poetry, and testimonies of political imprisonment and torture from Cordoba, Argentina. In grad school I wrote my critical paper/academic thesis on witness poetry from Japanese internment camps of WWII compared to poetry from the book Poems from Guantanamo: The Detainees Speak edited by Marc Falkoff, and I went to this panel with a continued interest in human rights activity with concern to political prisoners and torture, as well as how the writing process affects those who have experienced such horrific crimes.
Alicia Partnoy, the author of The Little School: Tale of Disappearance and Survival in Argentina, which speaks of her experience as a tortured desaparacido, spoke of the need to tell these stories as "a need to record history," to ensure people never forget.She joked that she writes her story now because someone told her, "We are not getting younger any time soon," but the importance of sharing her experience is no joke as she recalls the process as liberating: "It has to be liberating."
The highlight of the afternoon was Dr. Irene Martinez who read her poem, "Chichi Bruja/las balerinas," from the Eslabones collection that recalled one of her compañeras in prison who would tease Irene for having over grown eyebrows. Once this woman found two scraps of metal during the 20 minutes a week they were allowed outside. The scrap metal became makeshift tweezers this compañera used to reshape all the women’s eyebrows as their personal beautician. Of course, my paraphrase of her poem does not do it justice, but I found it a beautiful story of disappeared women, kept from homes and family including their young children, interrogated and tortured on a regular basis, finding some sense of normalcy, of tenderness, in something as small as two scraps of metal acting as a ballerina’s feet on their eyebrows.
"Being beautiful was also important," Dr. Martinez shared with the room. Partnoy nodded in agreement, and shared how women would make mascara out of toothpaste and ash.
After her reading, Dr. Martinez went through slides from a photography project entitled, "Flying Away of the Mattress." The first slide showed three women, naked, blindfolded and sitting on a floor lined up as if in a sled. She explained that they were forced to sleep multiple women to a mattress, but that the nudity was her artistic interpretation. She stated that these artistic renderings "help me get it out of my system," and that making artistic choices, like the nudity, helped her to "own it." This reminded me of the book Poetry as Survival by Gregory Orr who said “To name something is to assert control over it" (30). It would seem that Dr. Martinez found a form of expression that allowed her to take ownership over a horrific and harrowing experience that has helped her to cope while also educating others.
I wrote my first immigration persona poem while at Antioch. I had started researching poems written inside U.S. detention centers: Japanese internment camps, Guantanamo Bay, and Angel Island. I first learned about Angel Island during my undergrad. I was taking a combination class from both the Asian American Studies and Latino American Studies departments on immigration. There were two professors, and they took turns lecturing on their area of expertise. One day the Asian American professor was lecturing on the immigration of the Chinese, the discriminatory ordinances they had to endure, and The Chinese Exclusion Act that barred entry to immigrants based on their Chinese background. And he said in passing, "You know that's when they started writing poems on the walls at Angel Island."
Angel Island has been considered the Ellis Island of the west, but as Ellis welcomed, as it says on the Statue of Liberty "Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free," Angel Island's main purpose was to keep Asian immigrants, namely the Chinese, out. One of the only ways a Chinese immigrant could enter the country is if he could prove citizenship through relatives already living in the country. The only way to prove such things was to endure hours of interrogation. This created "paper sons:" boys and men who claimed citizenship through false papers. Individuals were held at Angel Island from anywhere from two days to two years.
In 1970, thirty years after the detention headquarters was closed, a park ranger discovered characters etched into the walls of the old living quarters. As immigrant hopefuls were detained at Angel Island waiting to find out their fate, it seems they began to scribe poems about their journey, about Angel Island, about their heartache and hope, on the walls of their barracks.
Back at Antioch I started to research more into this topic. I read the book Island: Poetry and History of Chinese Immigrants on Angel Island, 1910-1940. And as I worked Jenny Factor, one of my mentors at Antioch, suggested I try writing my own poem in response to what I was reading, and that's how this project first began.
An interview from Island:
"My family pushed me to come. They wanted me to make a better living. They couldn't send my older brother because he was too old to match the age of my uncle's paper son. I studied (coaching papers) for a whole summer at school. It included many, many generations. I had to remember everyone's name, the birthday, and if they passed away, when. And you had to know the different points of the village, what it looked like. I remember I had an English cap that we picked up in Hong Kong and inside the cap, my father hid some coaching notes, so that once in a while, I could refresh my memory. But I never had a chance to look at them, because you're among people all the time and you don't trust anyone. There was no private place where I could be alone to study them. One time, they were playing catch with my cap and they didn't understand why I was so upset. I was scared." --Mr. Wong, age 12 in 1933.
From my poem “Boy in an English Cap”*
Father hid coaching notes inside grey lining of an English cap. I wear it on board President Lincoln to shield from harsh ocean winds. I pray it will land in good fortune. Papers nestling above thoughts; head aches under the weight of an English cap, secrets it carries. English key to a riddle I do not understand. Father says it will unlock my future in distant golden lands.
*Poems I hope to publish at a later time will only appear on this blog in portions.
In 1970, thirty years after the detention headquarters was closed, a park ranger discovered characters etched into the walls of the old living quarters. As immigrant hopefuls were detained at Angel Island waiting to find out their fate, it seems they began to scribe poems about their journey, about Angel Island, about their heartache and hope, on the walls of their barracks.