{"id":1031,"date":"2010-02-26T17:50:07","date_gmt":"2010-02-26T22:50:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lanternreview.com\/blog\/?p=1031"},"modified":"2010-02-26T17:50:07","modified_gmt":"2010-02-26T22:50:07","slug":"editors-picks-my-issei-parents-now-i-hear-them","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/2010\/02\/26\/editors-picks-my-issei-parents-now-i-hear-them\/","title":{"rendered":"Editors’ Picks: “My Issei Parents… Now I Hear Them”"},"content":{"rendered":"

I was browsing the American Literary History Journal <\/em>the other day and came across\u00a0Corinne E. Blackmer’s “Writing Poetry like a ‘Woman’<\/a>.”\u00a0\u00a0 In it, I found this observation on the subject of writing by incarcerated Japanese American women during World War II:<\/p>\n

The experience of these [internment] camps radically affected the writing of issei and nisei women poets. \u00a0Before the war, issei values of feminine propriety confined women to the household and prohibited public discourse; the experience of the camps, however, blurred men and women into a shared common world. (134)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Though Blackmer makes an interesting claim about the impact of changed spatial and social relations on “the writing of issei and nisei women poets,” I was most intrigued by the mere existence <\/em>of the term “issei and nisei women poets.”\u00a0 I was struck for two reasons.\u00a0 First, I realized that I\u00a0know virtually nothing of “issei and nisei women poets,”\u00a0 nor of the writing they did before or after the war. \u00a0Second, to see the phrase “the writing of issei and nisei women poets” in print, in an academic literary journal, was shocking. \u00a0I had never thought of “the issei poet,” or “the nisei poet” as real figures in the history of American literature though I had certainly wondered what they might say. \u00a0It goes without saying that this realization has prompted me to search out some of these key figures.<\/p>\n

Mitsuye Yamada, who wrote the book Camp Notes and Other Poems<\/em> (Shameless Hussy Press<\/a>, 1976),* during and shortly after the internment, is one of the poets mentioned in Blackmer’s article, whose voice comes to the reader with great force and a radical vision.\u00a0 In the\u00a0poem\u00a0“Neutralize” she writes:<\/p>\n

white floors walls ceiling white
\nwhite chairs tables sink white
\nonly when I close my eyes do I see
\nbeyond the white windowless walls<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The poem, which opens with an epigraph stating “poetry… \/ has been my spiritual guide \/ throughout my incarceration,” details the speaker’s resistance to an outside “They’s” attempt to “kill \/ the sentient being in me,” that is, the seeing, smelling, tasting, touching, and hearing self. \u00a0Her strong and forceful diction, repetition of the word “white,” and conflation of\u00a0objects, surfaces, and imagined\/actual realities makes for a compelling first encounter with a group of writers with whom I am only just becoming acquainted.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

One of Yamada’s earlier poems from Camp Notes<\/em>, which I also found compelling,\u00a0constructs an issei voice through the use of fragmented, non-standard English free verse. \u00a0I found this gratifying because this mode validates some of my own experiments<\/a> with Japanese American “dialect” or “accented” writing.\u00a0 An excerpt from “Marriage Was a Foreign Country”:<\/p>\n

When we land the boat full
\nof new brides
\nlean over railing
\nwith wrinkled glossy pictures
\nthey hold inside hand
\nlike this
\nso excited
\ndown there a dock full of men
\nthey do same thing
\nhold pictures
\nlook up and down
\nlike this
\nthey find faces to
\nmatch pictures.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In this poem, the speaker’s gaze is turned forward toward a future in America,\u00a0a country as foreign to the new bride as that of marriage (as indicated by the title).\u00a0 The speaker, freshly delivered to an alien shore and tinged by her departure from Japan, brings with her the language of a person newly acquiring a foreign tongue. \u00a0Returning to this voice, or listening to the traces of it embdedded still in the Japanese American community, is a curious reversal of history and generational assimilation, and therefore one I find tremendously interesting.<\/p>\n

I appreciate Yamada’s poem because it does for me something that I am unable to do for myself: imagine what a voice shrouded by time and, to a certain extent, cultural taboo (as many Japanese Americans have, through the generations after WWII, worked to shed their accents and mother tongue), might sound like.\u00a0 Because much of Japanese America’s history has been an effort to make the assertion that “I am an American” (as seen in the Dorothea Lange photograph below), to evoke a “non-American,” or non-standard English voice is a risky move.\u00a0 As always, more to come…<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Photo by Dorothea Lange, courtesy of The Bancroft Library. "Following evacuation orders, this store, at 13th and Franklin Streets, was closed. The owner... placed the I AM AN AMERICAN sign on the store front on December 8, the day after Pearl Harbor."<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\n

____________________________________________________<\/p>\n

* Now available as Camp Notes and Other Writings<\/em><\/a> (Rutgers University Press, 1998)<\/p>\n

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<\/dd>\n<\/dl>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I was browsing the American Literary History Journal the other day and came across\u00a0Corinne E. Blackmer’s “Writing Poetry like a ‘Woman’.”\u00a0\u00a0 In it, I found this observation on the subject of writing by incarcerated Japanese American women during World War II: The experience of these [internment] camps radically affected the writing of issei and nisei […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0},"categories":[15],"tags":[230,231,172,232,229,233],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1031"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1031"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1031\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1108,"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1031\/revisions\/1108"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1031"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1031"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1031"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}