asianamlitfans | Feb. 28th, 2009

A Review of Roy Miki's Saving Face

Timothy Yu’s wonderfully inventive recent monograph on Asian American poetry and language poetry includes a very productive chapter on the formal inventiveness and “first generation” Asian American poetry. I place “first generation” in quotations as a nod to Victoria Chang’s anthology that essentially theorized distinctive generations of Asian American poetics, where the first tended to be characterized by activism and politicism. Yu’s intervention seeks to recover the experimental and often quite radical nature of these earlier poets and if I am long in my introduction here, it is only to say that Roy Miki’s Saving Face (not to be confused with the 2004 movie of the same name that starred Joan Chen and Michelle Krusiec) can be considered a natural extension of Yu’s work, but pushing it northward, across US borders and into Canada. Indeed, Miki’s collection is one that unites an incredibly dynamic use of language (one that reminds me in many cases of both Myung Mi Kim, Rita Wong, and John Yau) as well as a serious activist rhetoric of other poets (Nellie Wong, Merle Woo, and Kitty Tsui for instance) especially as evidenced by the second section of the collection, entitled “Redress” (referring of course to the movement to receive acknowledgement from the government for its racist policy to intern Japanese Canadians on the west coast during World War 2). While Joy Kogawa’s Obasan and Itsuka are often hailed as the go-to texts for Japanese Canadian internment cultural representations, Miki’s Saving Face is a crystalline and astonishing addition, one that deserves considerably more attention than it has received. One obvious reason why Miki’s collection has not achieved the same critical mass is related to the problematic way in which Asian Americanist circles have failed to consider the larger transnational valence of the term “Americas,” something addressed more directly in Eleanor Ty’s re-consideration of Asian American literature as Asian North American literature. The second is that poetry has overall (within the realm of literatures written in English by an individual of Asian descent), regardless of a national affiliation, not been accorded its due; full-length studies are just beginning to emerge on the genre as I have pointed out in other reviews. In terms of its poetic power and content, Miki’s collection does draw very strong connections to Lawson Inada and Mitsuye Yamada and could easily be incorporated into any class related to Asian “North” American literatures on this comparative level alone.

While the content of Saving Face is not restricted to the lyrical depictions of the Japanese Canadian redress movement, I focus on many of those poems precisely because of the combination of aesthetic texture and political content. From section 1, Miki’s long poem, “sansei poem” provides lyrical fragments that explore the characteristics of the Japanese Canadian ethnic community. I use the word “community” here as Miki avoids marking the poems too specifically in order to encapsulate a larger sense of the memory and lyricism inherent in this poetic recovery; I thus excerpt parts 6 and 7 from “sansei poem”:

six

it comes to one name

instead of another

or one place

more than another

is the air

dense with flies

voices scatter likes shadows

easily over a ridge

down the path

through the field

to the streetcar

into the city

which city

they swarmed they

could have been more

so they were nameless

the day shed its skin

seven

relocation – the least of

them waiting like statues

the orchard would be replaced

no semblances

photographs lost in a trunk

& later seen for sale

the sky us blue &

deep as it is wide

of course

they would they say

pry the clouds loose

to float again (18-19).

Part six is particularly vague about its geographic centrality, which is of course, part of the point of the poem. It seems to be a question of settlement and rootedness after transnational movement, as part “five” of the sansei poem sequence divulges, “there ships wait/ to be moved and they/ too cross the pacific” (17). There is the sense then in part six that the presence of the Japanese Canadian immigrant is a ghostly one at first, one that cannot be pinpointed, but as the figure takes on a density in urban locations to the point where “they swarmed,” they seem to enfigure the yellow peril. The phrase, “they swarmed” also recalls the earlier line, “is the air/dense with flies,” suggesting that the flies are rather the Japanese Canadian immigrants who must be contained, stamped out, driven away from the cities. Part “seven” dramatizes this action in the “relocation.” With poignancy, the lyrics detail what is left behind and how even the most cherished of family keepsakes could be discarded in the rush to exploit the vacuum of Japanese Canadian communities.

In “two powell st festival haiku,” Miki takes on the all-hallowed haiku form, in reference to the Powell Street festival. The official site for the festival describes the event and cultural community work as such: “The Powell Street Festival Society’s (PSFS) mission is to celebrate the arts and culture of Japanese Canadians and Asian Canadians, to encourage Asian Canadians to take a leadership role in the development of the arts in Canada, and to foster community development through cultural events. Our main activity is the presentation of the Powell Street Festival (PSF), an annual celebration of Japanese Canadian arts, culture and heritage.” The brief poem that follows takes a rather dichotomous route toward the central subject matter of internment memorialization:

nisei blues

“hey i’ve got time to burn”

leaves around us on the grass –

at last, oh at least!

festival time

internment photos

hanging on the wobbly tent walls –

gusts of the camp snow (55).

“nisei blues” seems to set up the scene of the festival, where there is anticipation and waiting for the festival itself. The first haiku is interesting and noteworthy for a number of reasons. First, the use of quotations in the initial lyric suggests some sort of dialogue, as if direct speech is required here to articulate some message without “poetic” translation, but what the readers receive is an idiomatic phrase. Indeed, the layering here of speech and metaphor continually subverts transparent communication. “At last,” the festival might begin, “oh at least!,” there is something to hold on to in terms of the past. “Time to burn” thus takes on a more sinister import in that it evokes the time taken away, burnt away from Japanese Canadians who were internment who possess only the remnants of that time in the form again of photos. The ephemerality of the moment is conditioned by the “wobbly tent walls” and the inclement weather patterns depicted in the photo itself.

The second section of Miki’s book takes a very interesting approach toward the Japanese Canadian redress movement through what seems to be a mix of both historical documentation and lyric invention. The mixture of “found poems” and creatively inspired poems serve to question the ways in which Japanese Canadians were created to be a kind of suspicious enemy alien, that the very nature of the documentation linking Japanese Canadians as antagonistic to Canadian nationalist interests during the war might be undermined and subverted. Particularly important for Miki is recovering a collective sense of ethnic poetic identification which is at dramatic effect in “history as we”:

history is we

(partially stolen title

signing waivers

o legal jargon

choice for lunch

steak or fish

earth or sea

two components

of settlement

belief in elements

breaks the law

of disfigurement

. . .

legislate against change

permanent & monument

against transition of power

the personal & local

become will of the wisp

the forge of event

filed in closed brackets

isolated insignias mellow

weather blather incorporated

seed implanted sorrow

this motion abused inchoate

. . .

we is i

in the vocab

we is one

excuse me

i’m patient

the sky again
(blue) sky

& the inching

back home (80-85).

I cannot include the entire poem here, but concentrate on the areas where there is an obvious interplay between poetics and politics. This poem is highly indicative of Miki’s incredibly inventive wordplay—one again, the connection with Rita Wong cannot be denied. One line indicative of Miki’s ability to amalgamate a particular sociohistorical context with linguistic innovation appears here: “legislate against change/ permanent & monument/ against transition of power.” There is a repetition in certain sonic packets in the off-rhyme between permanent and monument, the refrain of the word “against,” and the consonance of the “t” sound throughout. The musicality of the lines does serve in contrast to the content of those lines which in reference to redress might denote specifically the challenges in being acknowledged, to shift policy in order to grant “power” to those who had been silenced. This ability to mobilize both sound and content for particular purposes emerges throughout history as “history as we,” where there is desire for a new lyric voice, the historic “we” that emerges in activist poetics. My own sense of activist poetics is that it is often seen not only as less experimental, but necessarily less textured, but one has to further recall the question of “value” in ethnic studies and Asian Americanist critique (or Asian North Americanist critique in this case) and that part of the “value” of ethnic literatures has been the very attention to activism, to the historicizing impulse located within poetics. Given the continued clamor to embrace the post-racial United States, Roy Miki’s poetry collection might seem like a throwback, but what the collection tells us is not that of an archived era or period, but rather that power relations can and will mutate and that language can serve in the project of elucidating what problematic ways this mutation takes shape.

An absolutely brilliant and understudied work.