Janice Mirikitani's Love Works

[pylduck.livejournal.com]

Today, as a way of getting back to my dissertation chapter on performing poetry, I re-read this volume of Mirikitani's selected work and her inaugural address as San Francisco Poet Laureate for 2000-2001.



Love Works (City Lights, 2001) is part of the series of books published of SF's poets laureate, fittingly by City Lights Books with its long history in the San Francisco literary and poetic scene. The inaugural address is wonderful for the way it allows Mirikitani to articulate directly her conception of the power of poetry and language. In fairly idealistic terms, she notes, "Poetry gives form to the power of imagination and speaks as the conscience of real life. . . . Poetry, for me, is the act of speaking the truth of the inner self and being connected to or informed by the community" (10). The volume has a nice selection of Mirikitani's work, including perhaps her best known poem "Breaking Silence," which weaves together her mother's voice as she gives testimony during the Congressional Commission on Redress and her own voice as an activist reclaiming the stories and words of Japanese American internment experience:

. . .

We were told that silence was better,
useful like go quietly,
easier like don't make waves,
expedient like horse stalls, and desert camps.

     Mr. Commissioner, the US Army Signal Corps
     confiscated our property. It was subjected to
     vandalism and ravage. I was coerced into
     signing documents, giving you the authority
     to take . . . to take . . .

I particularly like a series of SF locations and sounds that she traces in her inaugural address, a catalog of sorts of the distinctive communities that comprise San Francisco woven through the music and rhythms of various peoples:

City Lights in North Beach, Ferlinghetti's temple of poetry & famous beats. I still hear Ginsberg's "Guru Ommmmm" in an antinuclear drone.

Chinatown: Rhythm from Kearny Street Writers Workshop, the ghost of I Hotel, and manong Freddie's banjo strums, longing for home. But it is the powerful year of the Dragon, Chinese voices warn.

. . .

Samba of the Mission: the beat taps our feet, the heat grabs our hips, our lips can't resist roses - in the teeth of our possibilities.

There's a poem titled "You Bring Out the 'B' in Me," too, that reminded me of Bao Phi's "You Bring Out the Vietnamese in Me", both poems that explore how others' perceptions of the speaker's racialized/gendered body create an intersubjectivity and a kind of social meaning. Mirikitani's poem in particular considers her presence in Hawai'i with her black husband and how a "tanned, blond woman / in bikini" is unable to see her. (Bao Phi notes his poem is after Sandra Cisneros's "You Bring Out the Mexican in Me." It's also definitely worth watching his performances of the poem, available on YouTube.)

A Review of Staceyann Chin’s The Other Side of Paradise: A Memoir (Scribner, 2009).

[stephenhongsohn.livejournal.com]

 A Review of Staceyann Chin’s The Other Side of Paradise: A Memoir (Scribner, 2009).

 

When I was first learning about Asian American literature, I had the chance to watch a documentary about Asian American women poets, which featured among them: Shirley Geok-lin Lim, le thi diem thuy, Marilyn Chin, Myung Mi Kim, among many others.  I recall being taken aback by the difference in style and performance of Staceyann Chin’s poetry in this documentary as it was confrontational, angry, in-your-face, direct, and stood apart for many reasons from the other poets, so it was with the greatest of interest that I review her memoir, The Other Side of Paradise, a life story which contextualizes the emergence of Chin’s artistic predilections and propensities.  While I have not had the tendency to review many memoirs in this blogging community, I do realize their importance and will try to rectify my predilection toward poetry and narrative fiction where possible!  As I had stated in my brief spotlighting of Jane Jeong Trenka’s upcoming memoir, Fugitive Visions, the best memoirs (at least from my limited perspective) are those in which the writer tends to render the life experience in all of its murky contradictions, and Chin’s memoir can be seen to operate from this angle, with its unflinching characterization of Caribbean sociocultural politics. 

 

The best place to start is the pun of the title, where Paradise serves to reference a city located in Jamaica in which Chin lives most of her young life.  Paradise, as you might expect, is not so luxurious, extravagant, or as welcoming, and contrasts directly and ironically against its name.  For Chin, life in Paradise is marked by constant poverty, movement, brutality, sexual harassment, depression, physical and emotional abuse, among other such obstacles and challenges.  Chin seems well aware of the various ways in which the cards were stacked against her such that the prologue details how important it was that her personality was marked in her birth condition.  Despite being born in trying circumstances and probably prematurely, her crying voice signified her as a fighter.  It will be this fighting spirit that continually re-asserts itself through the memoir, where determination and stubborn refusals motivate her to move beyond what limitations there might exist.  Shuttled from one family member to another, Chin’s life is characterized by constant itinerancy, where problematics of race, class, gender, and sexuality collide.  Chin, as we discover, is biracial, of both African and Chinese background, but her father is completely absent from her life.  Her mother, while more present, nevertheless leaves much of the child-rearing duties to Chin’s grandmother and relatives.  In this respect, Chin is at least psychically orphaned from the heteronuclear perspective, but it is clear that she attempts to create new kinship structures, ones that leave her some sense of a family life beyond blood relatives.  Another determining inequality structured in the memoir is that of the difference between her class status and those she meets in various schools and other such social environments.  Chin constantly makes note of the palatial nature of specific houses in contrast to the places that she resides or how certain portions of Jamaica are seen as much more “upper-class” than others.  Despite the fact that her existence is also challenged by her status as a girl and woman, Chin continually seeks out any method to ensure that she receives an education, including confronting her birth father for monetary support.  As Chin grows older, she reveals some of the problematics of sexual maturation, including the surfacing of her queer sexuality and the predatory nature of the various men who have resided in the same locations she does. 

 

While the memoir is episodic in nature, Chin is able to sustain readerly interest through carefully structured chapters that seem to suggest a kind of intellectual development over time.  Where Chin leaves us is in the evolution of her artistic identity, a place where she finds solace in the sonic quality of words and how they can be paired with definitional meaning in spectacular fashion. 

 

I end this review by remarking on the importance of the hemispheric perspective to Asian American literary studies, that we must be cognizant and remind ourselves of the different trans-regional formations of Asian American literature, including that which is touched by and influenced by Caribbean histories and social contexts.  Earlier, I had a chance to review C. Dale Young’s luminous Day Underneath The Day and Shani Mootoo’s Valmiki’s Daughter.  Chin’s The Other Side of Paradise adds to this rich and growing body of work.

 

Buy the Book Here:

 

http://www.amazon.com/Other-Side-Paradise-Memoir/dp/0743292901