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brandonshimoda · 4 months
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THE BOOKS I READ IN 2023
*I read it before
**I read it more than once this year
Aaron Caycedo-Kimura, Common Grace
Adania Shibli, Minor Detail, translated from the Arabic by Elisabeth Jaquette
Ahmad Almallah, Bitter English
Alison Lubar, It Skips a Generation
Atef Abu Saif, The Drone Eats With Me: A Gaza Diary
Brynn Saito, Under a Future Sky
Camonghne Felix, Dyscalculia: A Love Story of Epic Miscalculation
*Carolina Ebeid, You Ask Me to Talk About the Interior
Chanté L. Reid, Thot
*Christina Sharpe, Ordinary Notes
Christine Shan Shan Hou & Vi Khi Nao, Evolution of the Bullet
Christopher Okigbo, Labyrinths (with Paths of Thunder)
Cristina Rivera Garza, Liliana’s Invincible Summer
Dionne Brand, Chronicles of the Hostile Sun
*Dionne Brand, No Language is Neutral
Dionne Brand, Primitive Offensive
Édouard Louis, Who Killed My Father, translated from the French by Lorin Stein
**Emily Lee Luan, 回 / Return
Erin Marie Lynch, Removal Acts
Fady Joudah, Footnotes in the Order of Disappearance
Farid Tali, Prosopopoeia, translated from the French by Aditi Machado
Gabriel Palacios, A Ten Peso Burial For Which Truth Is Sign (coming out 2024)
Ghayath Almadhoun, Adrenalin, translated from the Arabic by Catherine Cobham
Hauntie, To Whitey & The Cracker Jack
Hervé Guibert, To the friend who did not save my life, translated from the French by Linda Coverdale
Hiromi Ito, Tree Spirits Grass Spirits, translated from the Japanese by Jon L. Pitt
*James Baldwin, No Name in the Street
*James Baldwin, Nobody Knows My Name
*James Baldwin, The Devil Finds Work
James Fujinami Moore, Indecent Hours
Jami Nakamura Lin, The Night Parade
Jawdat Fakhreddine, Lighthouse for the Drowning, translated from the Arabic by Huda Fakhreddine and Jayson Iwen
Jed Munson, Commentary on the Birds
Jennifer Hayashida, A Machine Wrote This Song
Jenny Odell, Inhabiting The Negative Space
Jenny Xie, The Rupture Tense
*Joy Kogawa, A Choice of Dreams
Joy Kogawa, A Garden of Anchors: Selected Poems
**Joy Kogawa, From the Lost and Found Department: New and Selected Poems
Joy Kogawa, Gently to Nagasaki
*Joy Kogawa, Jericho Road
*Joy Kogawa, Obasan
Joy Kogawa, The Rain Ascends
Joy Kogawa, The Splintered Moon
*Joy Kogawa, Woman in the Woods
Juan Felipe Herrera, Akrílica, eds. Farid Matuk, Carmen Giménez, Anthony Cody
Kamo-no-Chomei, Hojoki: Visions of a Torn World, translated from the Japanese by Yasuhiko Moriguchi and David Jenkins
Keorapetse Kgositsile, Collected Poems, 1969-2018
*Kiku Hughes, Displacement
Kōno Taeko, Toddler-Hunting, translated from the Japanese by Lucy North
Leila Khaled, My People Shall Live: Autobiography of a Revolutionary, as told to George Hajjar
Lena Khalaf Tuffaha, Kaan and Her Sisters
**Lindsey Webb, Plat (coming out in 2024)
Lisa Hsiao Chen, Activities of Daily Living
Liyana Badr, A Balcony over the Fakihani, translated from the Arabic by Peter Clark with Christopher Tingley
Lucille Clifton, An Ordinary Woman
*Lucille Clifton, Blessing the Boats
Lucille Clifton, Good News About the Earth
Lucille Clifton, Good Times
Lucille Clifton, Two-Headed Woman
Mahmoud Darwish, The Butterfly’s Burden, translated from the Arabic by Fady Joudah
Mahmoud Darwish, If I Were Another, translated from the Arabic by Fady Joudah
Mahmoud Darwish, Palestine as Metaphor, translated from the Arabic by Amira El-Zein and Carolyn Forché
Maya Abu Al-Hayyat, You Can Be The Last Leaf, translated from the Arabic by Fady Joudah
Maya Marshall, All the Blood Involved in Love
Michael Prior, Model Disciple
*Mitsuye Yamada, Camp Notes and Other Poems
Mitsuye Yamada, Full Circle: New and Selected Poems
Mohammed El-Kurd, RIFQA
**Mosab Abu Toha, Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear
Mourid Barghouti, I Saw Ramallah, translated from the Arabic by Ahdaf Soueif
Mourid Barghouti, I Was Born There, I Was Born Here, translated from the Arabic by Humphrey Davies
Mourid Barghouti, Midnight, translated from the Arabic by Radwa Ashour
Na Mira, The Book of Na
Najwan Darwish, Nothing More to Lose, translated from the Arabic by Kareem James Abu-Zeid
Natsume Sōseki, Kokoro, translated from the Japanese by Edwin McClellan
Nona Fernández, Voyager: Constellations of Memory, translated from the Spanish by Natasha Wimmer
Noor Hindi, DEAR GOD. DEAR BONES. DEAR YELLOW.
Osamu Dazai, No Longer Human, translated from the Japanese by Donald Keene
Osamu Dazai, The Flowers of Buffoonery, translated from the Japanese by Sam Bett
The Palestinian Wedding: A Bilingual Anthology of Contemporary Palestinian Resistance Poetry, edited and translated from the Arabic by A.M. Elmessiri
R.F. Kuang, Yellowface
Ryunosuke Akutagawa, Kappa, translated from Japanese by Lisa Hofmann-Kuroda and Allison Markin Powell
Salim Barakat, Come, Take a Gentle Stab: Selected Poems, translated from the Arabic by Huda J. Fakhreddine and Jayson Iwen
Samih Al-Qasim, All Faces But Mine, translated from the Arabic by Abdulwahid Lu’lu’a
Samih al-Qasim, Sadder Than Water: New & Selected Poems, translated from the Arabic by Nazih Kassis
*Saretta Morgan, Alt-Nature (coming out in 2024)
Satsuki Ina, The Poet and the Silk Girl (coming out in 2024)
Sawako Ariyoshi, The Twilight Years, translated from the Japanese by Mildred Tahara
Shailja Patel, Migritude
Sham-e-Ali Nayeem, City of Pearls
Sharon Yamato, Moving Walls
Shivanee Ramlochan, Everyone Knows I Am a Haunting
**shō yamagushiku, shima (coming out in 2014)
Shuri Kido, Names and Rivers, translated from the Japanese by Tomoyuki Endo and Forrest Gander
*Solmaz Sharif, Customs
Stella Corso, Green Knife
*Taha Muhammad Ali, Never Mind: Twenty Poems and a Story, translated from the Arabic by Peter Cole, Yahya Hijazi, Gabriel Levin
Terry Watada, The Game of 100 Ghosts (Hyaku Monogatari Kwaidan-kai)
Victoria Chang, Obit
*Wong May, Superstitions
THE BOOKS I'M CURRENTLY READING, THAT I HAVEN'T FINISHED YET
Chi Rainer Bornfree and Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan, The Portal (not yet published)
Elaine Castillo, How to Read Now
Eqbal Ahmad, The Selected Writings
Essays, ed. Dorothea Lasky
Fadwa Tuqan, A Mountainous Journey: A Poet's Autobiography, translated from the Arabic by Olive Kenny
James Welch, Winter in the Blood
Lan P. Duong, Nothing Follows
Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, Touching the Art
Preti Taneja, Aftermath
Wanda Coleman, Wicked Enchantment
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brandonshimoda · 8 months
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Emily Zemler at the Los Angeles Times asked me to share my thoughts about Oppenheimer the movie. Her article, which was published on August 4, 2023, can be read here.
She also talked to Naoko Wake (professor of history), Paul Ham (writer), Kathleen Burkinshaw (writer/second gen hibakusha), Ryo Morimoto (professor of anthropology), Carol Turner (co-chair of the London Region Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament), Li Lai, (founder and editor in chief of Mediaversity Reviews), Jeff Bock (media analyst), Caitlin Stronell (Nuke Info Tokyo).
Here (below) are the questions you asked and the answer I gave, in their entirety:
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Why have you chosen not to see Oppenheimer? Have you spoken with others who have chosen to skip it for similar reasons? 
I care about hibakusha. If Oppenheimer, the movie, is inspiring people to care about hibakusha, then I'll see it. If it isn't, then I won't. Because, in truth, the movie—specifically what it does and how—already exists. We've already seen and experienced it, in different forms, many times over. What we haven't seen or experienced is a committed, collective acknowledgment and understanding of hibakusha, nor an honest reckoning with a world that produces them.
If not seeing Oppenheimer, at this point, is a form of protest, it is a physical protest—my body is protesting—because even just thinking about sitting through a movie where I would be forced, every second, to anticipate the impending horrors that the events of the movie are producing and to experience that anticipation through the subjectivity of J. Robert Oppenheimer, is throwing my body into upheaval. I am not uncommon in this. I have spoken to many people, especially in the Japanese American community, who have expressed tremendous discomfort in the mere idea of the movie, and grave uncertainty, at least, about whether or not they would put themselves through it, whether or not they would even be able to. In that way, the movie, even before it came out, was already doing the work of retraumatization. White audiences have not, for the most part, had to make these kinds of calculations. They instead have the luxury of being entertained.
From what you know about the film, do you feel the Japanese perspective has been properly represented in the film? Do you have any concerns about that lack of representation? 
J. Robert Oppenheimer would be of far less interest and far less worthy of a Hollywood biopic were it not for the victims of the atomic bomb. The critique that Oppenheimer had no obligation to incorporate the perspective of the victims of the atomic bomb, is, for that reason, defensive and disingenuous. That doesn't mean that I believe that Oppenheimer had an obligation to incorporate the perspective of the victims of the atomic bomb. I don't. Because the movie is about the absence of that perspective. 
It is beyond the capacity and the scope—and beyond the souls of its makers—for Oppenheimer to have incorporated the perspective of the victims. This is important because Oppenheimer is an accurate representation of how the perspectives of the hundreds of thousands of victims of the atomic bomb, living or dead, Japanese or Korean or Marshallese, including communities who have been displaced and impacted by nuclear testing and contamination, are not a priority, at all, but must continue to exist, instead, in the shadows of this kind of sweeping dehistoricization, including the beleaguered genius and ingenuity of white men. 
But then, Oppenheimer is not the place to center the perspectives of the victims or the dead, nor should it be, because the perspective of the victims and the dead should not be incorporated into, and therefore cheapened by, what amounts to big-budget propaganda.
An enormous part of the deep, ongoing frustration is that the voices and perspectives of the victims and the dead are most often invoked, even through their absence, in relation to these kinds of obstructions of justice, the work of which is to reinforce white American hegemony. The victims and the dead should be liberated from this eternal, inequitable association. 
Although the film is clearly from Oppenheimer's perspective, why would it be important for a film of this scale to show what actually happened to the victims of Hiroshima and Nagasak? 
It is doubtful that a film of this scale that accurately and unsparingly depicts what happened to the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki will ever be made, at least not in the United States, because if was, it would shock audiences into a kind of radicalization that the US, as an unapologetically military-first nation, could not afford and would never allow. But also, what happened is so totally beyond depiction that any large-scale film that makes the attempt, would inevitably fail and would deliver to the American consciousness an endurable dramatization.
The scale, the monumentality, of Oppenheimer is important, because it will, for many US Americans, be their first, maybe only—and, at three hours, longest—exposure to the history and the reality of the atomic bomb. It will, in that way, create a limit, a ceiling, on public consciousness and concern. Oppenheimer reinforces, in the guise of false nuance, the tired and ultimately distracting debate of whether or not the mass murder, the incineration, of over one hundred thousand civilians in an instant, was justified. By reducing it to a debate, into the fray of which is predictably thrown the thoroughly documented falsehood that the atomic bomb saved lives, as well as slapdash references to crimes committed by the Japanese Imperial Army, it reinforces disinterest and dismissal. Oppenheimer, like so many works of culture that are pitched primarily to a mainstream (i.e. white) audience, pretends to be opening and engaging a conversation, when it is, in fact, ending it.
Do you feel that Oppenheimer is emblematic of a larger issue in Hollywood in terms of who tells stories and what stories are told?
Yes.
If a viewer wants to seek out more information on the Japanese perspective or other perspective that are absent from the film where should they look?
There are innumerable books, films, works of art, etc. that not only center the perspective of the victims, but that tell a more complete, more honest story about Oppenheimer and the Manhattan Project. I first learned about Hiroshima from a comic book that my parents gave me when I was ten: I Saw It, by Keiji Nakazawa, a survivor of the atomic bomb. That miserable yet revelatory gift was followed by a visit, that same year, to Hiroshima, and the Peace Memorial Museum. (My grandfather was born in Hiroshima Prefecture, my great-grandmother was born and raised there, and my great-great-grandfather was born, raised, and died there.) Among the most profound books that I have read on Hiroshima, in particular, are: Michihiko Hachiya's Hiroshima Diary, Kenzaburo Oe's Hiroshima Notes, Arata Osada's Children of Hiroshima (which was made into a film of the same name directed by Kaneto Shindo), Ronald Takaki's Hiroshima, and Robert Jay Lifton's Death in Life. There is also at least one copy of John Hersey's Hiroshima in every used bookstore in the United States (which means that many people have read it, were forced to read it, and/or decided it was not worth keeping.) Most importantly, testimonies by hibakusha are also widely available, on the internet, in print, in documentary films. These do not, unlike Oppenheimer, take three hours to read or watch, and yet the story they tell is far more profound and their impact will be far more significant and lasting.
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brandonshimoda · 1 year
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THE BOOKS I READ IN 2022, in the order in which I read them (*books I read before, that I was reading again):
Alexandra Chang, Days of Distraction 
Elizabeth Miki Brina, Speak, Okinawa 
Cynthia Dewi Oka, Fire Is Not a Country 
Hanif Abdurraqib, Go Ahead in the Rain: Notes to A Tribe Called Quest 
*Cathy Park Hong, Minor Feelings 
Victoria Chang, Dear Memory 
*Etel Adnan, Of Cities & Women (Letters to Fawwaz)
Sun Yung Shin, The Wet Hex 
traci kato-kiriyama, Navigating With(out) Instruments 
Raquel Gutiérrez, Brown Neon
Solmaz Sharif, Customs 
*Etel Adnan, Journey to Mount Tamalpais 
Lucille Clifton, Generations: A Memoir 
Emerson Whitney, Heaven 
Kim Thúy, em, tr. Sheila Fischman 
Angel Dominguez, Desgraciado (the collected letters) 
Janice Lee, Separation Anxiety 
*Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Dictee
*Cathy Park Hong, Translating Mo’um 
Kyoko Hayashi, From Trinity to Trinity, tr. Eiko Otake 
Lao Yang, Pee Poems, tr. Joshua Edwards & Lynn Xu 
Yuri Herrera, A Silent Fury: The El Bordo Mine Fire, tr. Lisa Dillman (
Mai Der Vang, Yellow Rain
Chuang Hua, Crossings 
José Watanabe, Natural History, tr. Michelle Har Kim
Walter Lew, Excerpts from: ∆IKTH 딕테/딕티 DIKTE, for DICTEE (1982) 
*Bhanu Kapil, The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers 
Vasily Grossman, An Armenian Sketchbook, tr. Robert & Elizabeth Chandler
Hiromi Kawakami, Parade, tr. Allison Markin Powell 
Lynn Xu, And Those Ashen Heaps That Cantilevered Vase of Moonlight 
*Etel Adnan, Sitt Marie Rose, tr. Georgina Kleege 
Jennifer Soong, Suede Mantis/Soft Rage 
*James Baldwin, No Name in the Street 
*Hilton Als, The Women
Dot Devota, >She 
V.S. Naipaul, The Return of Eva Perón 
Yasushi Inoue, The Hunting Gun, tr. Sadamichi Yokoo and Sanford Goldstein
Molly Murakami, Tide goes out 
Adrian Tomine, Shortcomings 
Hisham Matar, A Month in Siena 
Leia Penina Wilson, Call the Necromancer 
Gabriel García Márquez, News of a Kidnapping, tr. Edith Grossman 
Amitava Kumar, Bombay-London-New York 
Elizabeth Alexander, The Trayvon Generation 
Ryan Nakano, I Am Minor 
Constance Debré, Love Me Tender, tr. Holly James 
Hilton Als, My Pin-up 
Victoria Chang, The Trees Witness Everything 
Leslie Kitashima-Gray, The Pink Dress: A Story from the Japanese American Internment 
Emmanuel Carrère, Yoga, tr. John Lambert 
Ronald Tanaka, The Shino Suite: Sansei Poetry 
Patricia Y. Ikeda, House of Wood, House of Salt
Soichi Furuta, to breathe 
Kiki Petrosino, Bright 
Sueyeun Juliette Lee, Aerial Concave Without Cloud 
Nanao Sakaki, Real Play
Esmé Weijun Wang, The Collected Schizophrenias 
Francis Naohiko Oka, Poems 
Geraldine Kudaka, Numerous Avalanches at the Point of Intersection 
Steve Fujimura, Sad Asian Music 
Augusto Higa Oshiro, The Enlightenment of Katzuo Nakamatsu, tr. Jennifer Shyue 
Julie Otsuka, The Swimmers 
Salman Rushdie, The Jaguar Smile: A Nicaraguan Journey 
Margo Jefferson, Constructing a Nervous System 
Hua Hsu, Stay True 
Barbara Browning, The Miniaturists 
Kate Zambreno, Drifts 
*Julie Otsuka, When The Emperor Was Divine 
Louise Akers, Elizabeth/The Story of Drone
Wong May, In the Same Light: 200 Poems for Our Century from the Migrants & Exiles of the Tang Dynasty 
Gabrielle Octavia Rucker, Dereliction 
Trung Le Nguyen, The Magic Fish 
Jessica Au, Cold Enough for Snow 
Tongo Eisen-Martin, Blood on the Fog 
Lucas de Lima, Tropical Sacrifice 
*Like a New Sun: New Indigenous Mexican Poetry, ed. Víctor Terán & David Shook 
Billy-Ray Belcourt, A Minor Chorus 
Kazim Ali, Silver Road 
*Sadako Kurihara, When We Say Hiroshima, tr. Richard Minear 
Simone White, or, on being the other woman
*James Baldwin, The Devil Finds Work 
Christina Sharpe, Ordinary Notes 
*Raquel Gutiérrez, Brown Neon 
Marguerite Duras, The Man Sitting in the Corridor 
Gayl Jones, Corregidora 
*Bhanu Kapil, The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers 
*Etel Adnan, Seasons 
Gwendolyn Brooks, to disembark 
Cristina Rivera Garza, The Taiga Syndrome, tr. Suzanne Jill Levine and Aviva Kana
Gwendolyn Brooks, In the Mecca 
Nona Fernández, The Twilight Zone, tr. Natasha Wimmer
Selva Almada, Dead Girls, tr. Annie McDermott
*Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Dictee
Valerie Hsiung, To Love an Artist
*Theresa Hak  Cha, Exilée and Temps Morts
Dao Strom, We Were Meant To Be a Gentle People
Randa Jarrar, Love Is An Ex-Country
*Dao Strom, Instrument
Osamu Dazai, Early Light, tr. Ralph McCarthy and Donald Keene
Osamu Dazai, The Setting Sun, tr. Donald Keene
Rachel Aviv, Strangers To Ourselves: Unsettled Minds and the Stories That Make Us
Mahmoud Darwish, Journal of an Ordinary Grief, tr. Ibrahim Muhawi
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brandonshimoda · 1 year
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The only tweets I want to save: a 32-tweet transcript of what my daughter, then 1½-2 years old, said on our walks around our neighborhood, Tucson, during the first year of the pandemic, April-October 2020:
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brandonshimoda · 2 years
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My introduction to the Day of Remembrance for Japanese American incarceration, on the 80th anniversary of the signing of Executive Order 9066, Saturday, February 19, 2022, at Colorado College:
My name is Brandon Shimoda. I am a writer and an Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at Colorado College. I want to welcome everyone to this Day of Remembrance for Japanese American incarceration. Today is the 80th anniversary of the signing, by FDR, of Executive Order 9066, which authorized the dispossession, forced removal, and mass incarceration of Japanese immigrants and Japanese Americans during WWII. This is one of many Day of Remembrance events happening this week, including today, including right now. We are here in solidarity with them. I am going to introduce this gathering and our guests—Jami Nakamura Lin, Brynn Saito, Patrick Shiroishi, and Kimiko Tanabe—but first I want to say thank you to a few entities and individuals for their support: to the Arts at CC, especially Ryan Bañagale; the Cultural Attractions Fund; the English Department at Colorado College, especially Erica Hardcastle (who’s behind-the-scenes with us tonight); Tutt Library, especially LeDreka Davis and Jessy Randall. And everyone out there who is joining us tonight, thank you so much for being here.
We are joining you from four different time zones and four different lands, each with their specific relationship to history and memory. I am sitting in a room in a building on the campus of Colorado College, in downtown Colorado Springs, which is located within the unceded territories of the Ute peoples. The original inhabitants of this region also include the Apache, Arapaho, Cheyenne, Comanche, Pueblo, and Shoshone peoples. The territory of the Kiowa and Navajo also extended into Colorado. There are today, in this state, two federally recognized tribes: the Southern Ute and the Ute Mountain Ute. By naming these people, we might contemplate the ways that our presence, including through our creative and critical work, as manifest in gatherings like these—and, looking back, in the incarceration of our ancestors—is borne upon the traditions, knowledge, and resonant energies of the indigenous peoples of these lands.
Every year on February 19th we mark the anniversary of Executive Order 9066. The first official Day of Remembrance took place in 1978, and was, in part, an effort to draw attention to the movement for redress, which called for reparations and an acknowledgment of the violation of the civil rights of the Nikkei community. The movement led to the understanding that incarceration was motivated by race prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure of political leadership, motivations which form a lasting definition of the United States of America. Today, we remember the history in various ways, together and alone, out loud and in our minds, until the day ends and another day begins. Then we mark it again, and again the day after, until the Day of Remembrance becomes Days of Remembrance, and Days of Remembrance becomes a Lifetime of Remembrance.
Each year, the nature of the invitation, as well as the imperative, to remember, changes, is troubled or is deepened, and not because the distance between us and the past becomes greater, but because, given the ways the past remains unresolved and unrelieved, it is constantly being revealed that there is no distance at all.
I have been thinking, today, about the sites where our families were incarcerated—some of which are now memorials and museums, some of which are racetracks and malls, some of which are on native reservations, some of which exist as little more than traces—as being sites of a complex and living reality. On Monday, the Senate passed a bill establishing the Amache camp, here in Colorado, as part of the National Park System. Meanwhile, in the Topaz camp in Utah, a stone monument memorializing James Hatsuaki Wakasa, an Issei who was murdered, in 1943, by a camp guard, was removed, violently, from its resting place, and with it the sacred space of return. Protests have been taking place at migrant detention centers and along the US-Mexico border—protests led by Japanese Americans, including elders who were, when they were children, incarcerated under painfully similar pretenses and conditions.
I have been thinking, today, about the waves of anti-Asian violence that move, with mournful consistency, through the US, about the attention paid to this violence, which also comes and goes in waves, about the rhetoric— which does not come and go in waves—that makes this violence inevitable, and about the need to educate ourselves, again, about the history of Asians in America.
I say again, but I mean always, because education is not a linear achievement but a commitment to consciousness…
Maybe because we are surrounded by the unexceptional evidence of race prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure of political leadership, we are also infused with the desire to take hold of this inheritance, and shape it in new and reparative ways. Because I have also been thinking, today, about the fact that we are in the midst of an extraordinary profusion of art that limns these intersections of history and memory; that carries and cares for the heirloom of intergenerational haunting and healing; that draws from tradition—cultural, aesthetic, folkloric, synesthetic—while inventing wholly new forms of expression. Poetry, graphic novels, children’s books, music, dance, film, photography, art—of recovery and resistance, of conscience and love, being made, especially, by the descendants of those who were incarcerated
This evening we are going to spend time with four of these artists, all of whom are grandchildren of the camps, and all of whom I love: poet Brynn Saito, artist/performer Kimiko Tanabe, writer Jami Nakamura Lin, and musician/composer Patrick Shiroishi. I am going to introduce them in the order they will appear. I will also be posting their full bios, with links to their work, in the chat. They will each present their work, and then we will reunite for a conversation.
Brynn Saito is the author of two books of poetry—Power Made Us Swoon (2016) and The Palace of Contemplating Departure (2013)—and co-founder of Yonsei Memory Project (YMP). YMP awakens the archives of Japanese American history through arts-based, intergenerational, and intercultural public programming. Her poetry has been nominated for a Northern California Book Award and her work and writing have appeared in the New York Times, Vogue, and American Poetry Review. Currently, Brynn is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing and English at California State University, Fresno. Her paternal grandparents, Alma Teranishi Saito and Mitsuo Saito, were incarcerated in Gila River.
Kimiko Tanabe is a freelance dance artist hosted on Lenape land, currently known as Brooklyn, NY. She graduated from Colorado College with a degree in Creative Writing and Dance in 2016. She is currently a 2022 Gallim Moving Artist in Residence and performs in New York City with marion spencer and glenn potter-takata. In her work, she explores the mediums of performance art, dance, writing, origami and paper, and is in a committed partnership with her .38 Muji pen. Kimiko is the granddaughter of Mas and Miyeko Tanabe, incarcerated at Rohwer, Arkansas and Topaz, Utah. She is forever fascinated with Japanese folklore and as a lover of literature she finds herself making important life decisions under the eyes and influence of fiction. For Kimiko, art is intimate and inexact.
Jami Nakamura Lin is the author of the illustrated speculative memoir The Night Parade, which will be published by Custom House/HarperCollins in 2023. As a recipient of the 2016 National Endowment for the Arts/Japan-US Friendship Commission fellowship, she spent four months studying yōkai and folklore in Japan. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, Electric Lit, and other publications. She is of Japanese, Taiwanese, and Okinawan descent; her grandfather, Tom Nakamura, was incarcerated in Amache/Granada along with his family.
Patrick Shiroishi is a Japanese-American multi-instrumentalist & composer based in Los Angeles who is perhaps best known for his extensive and incredibly intense work with the saxophone. Over the last decade he has established himself as one of the premier improvising musicians in Los Angeles, playing solo and in numerous collaborative projects. Shiroishi may well be considered a foundational player in the city's vast musical expanse. His paternal grandparents, Pat Hidemi Shiroishi and Dorothy Sayoko Shiroishi, were incarcerated in Tule Lake.
Lastly, my grandfather, Midori Shimoda, was incarcerated in a Department of Justice prison in Missoula, Montana, under suspicion of being a spy for Japan. My great-uncle Makeo and his family were incarcerated in the Heart Mountain camp. And my great-aunt Joy and her family were incarcerated in the Poston camp.
Thank you again for being here.
Photo: Ansel Adams, Burning leaves, autumn dawn, Manzanar, 1943
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brandonshimoda · 4 years
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R.I.P. (Rest in PDFs), Part I
in progress ...
Part II (N-Z) is here.
Also visit the PDF branch of the Hiroshima Library
Note: If you see your work on here and prefer that it not be made freely accessible, please email me at: [email protected], and I will remove it. Thank you!
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Achille Mbembe, Necropolitics. Translated from the French by Libby Meintjes.
Achille Mbembe, The Power of the Archive and its Limits. Translated from the French by Judith Inggs
Adrienne Rich, Woman and Honor: Some Notes on Lying
Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism. Translated from the French by Joan Pinkham.
Aimé Césaire, Letter to Maurice Thorez. Translated from the French by Chike Jeffers.
Aimé Césaire, Notebook of a Return to the Native Land. Translated from the French by Clayton Eshleman and Annette Smith
Alexis Pauline Gumbs, the introduction to M Archive: After the End of the World
Alex S. Vitale, The End of Policing
All Monuments Must Fall: A Syllabus, created/crowd-sourced by Nicholas Mirzoeff and many others
Amilcar Cabral, Return to the Source: Selected Speeches
Amy Uyematsu, The Emergence of Yellow Power
Andaiye, Counting Women’s Caring Work: an interview with David Scott
Angela Davis, Abolition Democracy: Beyond Empire, Prisons, and Torture
Angela Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete?
Angela Davis, Racialized Punishment and Prison Abolition
Angela Davis, Women, Race, Class
Angel Dominguez, Black Lavender Milk
Angie Morrill, Eve Tuck, and the Super Futures Haunt Qollective, Before Dispossession, or Surviving It
Anne Anlin Cheng, The Melancholy of Race
Anne Anlin Cheng, Ornamentalism: A Feminist Theory for the Yellow Woman
Anne Boyer, No, from A Handbook of Disappointed Fate
Antonio Gramsci, The Gramsci Reader: Selected Writings 1916-1935
Asian American Feminist Antibodies {care in the time of coronavirus}, a zine by Asian American Feminist Collective, in collaboration with Bluestockings NYC,
Assata Shakur, Assata: An Autobiography
Audra Simpson, On Ethnographic Refusal: Indigeneity, ‘Voice’ and Colonial Citizenship
Audre Lorde, I Am Your Sister: Black Women Organizing Across Sexualities
Audre Lorde, Poetry is Not a Luxury
Audre Lorde, The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action
Audre Lorde, The Uses of Anger
Aufgabe, Number 4, Fall 2004, feat. Japanese poetry in translation guest edited by Sawako Nakayasu
Aufgabe, Number 13, 2014, feat. poetry in translation from India guest edited by Biswamit Dwibedy & a special section of poetry from the Moroccan journal Souffles
Bayard Rustin, “Black Power” and Coalition Politics
bell hooks, all about love: New Visions
bell hooks, Black Looks: Race and Representation
bell hooks, Feminism Is For Everybody: Passionate Politics
bell hooks, Feminist Theory from margin to center
bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism
Bhanu Kapil, Reading Lauren Berlant in the Bath
C.L.R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution
Calvin Warren, Black Care
Calvin Warren, the introduction to Ontological Terror: Blackness, Nihilism, and Emancipation
Carrie Lorig, The Book of Repulsive Women: Five Increasing / Rhythms
Cathlin Goulding, Walking the Places of Exception: The Tule Lake National Monument
Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History
Cedric Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition
Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses
Chela Sandoval, Methodology of the Oppressed
Christina Sharpe, Kara Walker’s Monstrous Intimacies (from Monstrous Intimacies: Making Post-Slavery Subjects)
Christina Sharpe, The Wake (the first chapter of In the Wake: On Blackness and Being).
Claudia Jones, An End to the Neglect of the Problems of the Negro Woman
David J. Getsy and Che Gossett, A Syllabus on Transgender and Nonbinary Methods for Art and Art History 
David L. Eng, The Value of Silence
Denise Ferreira da Silva, On Difference Without Separability
Denise Ferreira da Silva, Toward a Black Feminist Poethics
Denise Ferreira da Silva, Toward a Global Idea of Race
Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas
Diane di Prima, Revolutionary Letters
Dionne Brand, An Ars Poetica from the Blue Clerk
Divya Victor, Ten Little Poets
Divya Victor, from Things To Do With Your Mouth
Dot Devota, T H E  D O G W O O D S
dusie 19: The Asian Anglophone issue (edited by Cynthia Arrieu-King)
Édouard Glissant, Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays. Translated from the French by J. Michael Dash.
Eduardo Galeano, Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent. Translated from the Spanish by Cedric Belfrage
Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism
Edward Said, Orientalism
Edward Said, Out of Place: A Memoir
Edward Said, Permission to Narrate
Edward Said, Reflections on Exile: & Other Literary and Cultural Essays
Elizabeth Castle, "The Original Gangster": The Life and Times of Red Power Activist Madonna Thunder Hawk
Elizabeth Grosz, Time Travels: Feminism, Nature, Power
Ellen Wu, Imperatives of Asian American Citizenship (intro to The Color of Success: Asian Americans and the Origins of the Model Minority)
Epeli Hau’ofa, Our Sea of Islands
Eqbal Ahmad, Reader: Writings on India, Pakistan and Kashmir, ed. Sarthak Tomar 
Eric A. Stanley and Nat Smith, editors, Captive Genders: Trans Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex
Errico Malatesta, The Anarchist Revolution: Polemical Articles 1924-1931
Etel Adnan, At Two in the Afternoon. Translated from the French by Sarah Riggs.
Etel Adnan, all the questions in Sitt Marie Rose. From Georgina Kleege’s translation from the original French.
Etel Adnan, Sitt Marie Rose. Translated from the French by Georgina Kleege.
Etel Adnan, To Be In A Time Of War
Eunsong Kim, Appraising Newness: Whiteness, Neoliberalism, and the Building of the Archive for New Poetry
Eunsong Kim, Copy Paper: Ream 1
Eunsong Kim, Dear Machines
Eunsong Kim, Found, Found, Found: Lived, Lived, Lived
Evelyn Nakano Glenn, Unequal Freedom: How Race and Gender Shaped American Citizenship and Labor
Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, R-Words: Refusing Research 
Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, What Justice Wants
Fay Chiang, excerpts from 7 Continents, 9 Lives
Frank B. Wilderson III, The Prison Slave As Hegemony’s (Silent) Scandal
Frank B. Wilderson III, Sideways Between Stories
Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks. Translated from the French by Charles Lam Markmann.
Frantz Fanon, A Dying Colonialism. Translated from the French by Haakon Chevalier
Frantz Fanon, Toward the African Revolution. Translated from the French by Haakon Chevalier.
Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth. Translated from the French by Richard Philcox.
Frederick Engels, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific 
Fred Moten, Blackness and Nothingness (Mysticism in the Flesh)
Fred Moten, from Day
Fred Moten, In The Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition
“from the river to the sea”: Collection of Palestine Solidarity Zines
Gary Okihiro, Is Yellow Black or White?
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Can the Subaltern Speak?
Gelare Khoshgozaran, Airgrams
George Jackson, Blood In My Eye
George Jackson, Soledad Brother: The Prison Letters
Georges Bataille, The Absence of Myth: Writings on Surrealism. Translated from the French by Michael Richardson.
Georges Bataille, The Bataille Reader
Georges Bataille, Blue of Noon. Translated from the French by Harry Mathews
Georges Bataille, Inner Experience
Ghassan Kanafani, The Stolen Shirt. Translated from the Arabic by Michael Fares
Ginger Ko, Ghosts, Models, Visions
Glen Coulthard, Red Skin White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition
Gloria Anzaldúa, How to Tame a Wild Tongue
Grace Lee Boggs, Living for Change: An Autobiography
Grace Lee Boggs, Reimagine Everything
Indefensible: A Decade of Mass Incarceration of Migrants Prosecuted for Crossing the Border. By Judith A. Greene, Bethany Carson, Andrea Black, for Grassroots Leadership and Justice Strategies (2016).
Haunani-Kay Trask, The Color of Violence
Hélène Cixous, Stigmata. Multiple translators.
Hiromi Itō, The Thorn-Puller: New Tales of the Jizō Statue at Sugamo. Translated from the Japanese by Jeffrey Angles.  
Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture
Hortense Spillers, All the Things You Could be by Now, If Sigmund Freud's Wife Was Your Mother: Psychoanalysis and Race
Huey P. Newton, Revolutionary Suicide
The Huey P. Newton Reader. Edited by David Hilliard and Donald Weise
Immigration and Nationality Act, June 27, 1952. See especially SEC. 212: General Classes of Aliens Ineligible to Receive Visas and Excluded from Admission
#ImmigrationSyllabus. Created by immigration historians affiliated with the Immigration History Research Center and the Immigration and Ethnic History Society, January 26, 2017
Interviews with Radical Palestinian Women, compiled by the Shoal Collective, 2018-2021
J. Sakai, Settlers: The Mythology of the White Proletariat
Jackie Wang, Against Innocence: Race, Gender, & The Politics of Safety
Jackie Wang, On Being Hard Femme
Jackie Wang, Policing as Plunder: Notes on Municipal Finance and the Political Economy of Fees and Fines, from Carceral Capitalism
Jacques Derrida, The Work of Mourning
Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference. Translated from the French by Alan Bass
Jalal Toufic, Undeserving Lebanon
Jalal Toufic, The Withdrawal of Tradition Past a Surpassing Disaster
James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time
James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son (essay)
James Baldwin, Nothing Personal
James Boggs, Pages From a Black Radical’s Notebook
Jean-Claude Michel, The Black Surrealists
Jean Genet, Four Hours in Shatila
Jennifer C. Nash, Feeling Black Feminism, the introduction to Black Feminism Reimagined: After Intersectionality
Jennifer Kwon Dobbs, Notes from a Missing Person
Jennifer Tamayo, Poems are the Only Real Bodies
Jenny Zhang, Hags
John Berger, Ways of Seeing
John Gregory Dunne, Delano: The Story of the California Grape Strike
Jose Ortega y Gasset, The Revolt of the Masses
Joy James, The Dead Zone: Stumbling at the Crossroads of Party Politics, Genocide, and Postracial Racism
Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection
Julietta Singh, No Archive Will Restore You
Julietta Singh, the introduction to Unthinking Mastery: Dehumanism and Decolonial Entanglements
Kamau Brathwaite, History of the Voice (from Roots)
Kamau Brathwaite, Nation Language
Karen Tei Yamashita, Literature as Community: The Turtle, Imagination & the Journey Home
Katherine McKittrick, the acknowledgments of and introduction to Dear Science and Other Stories
Katherine McKittrick, Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle
Kathi Weeks, The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and Postwork Imaginaries
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, Chapter 7 of From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation
Keguro Macharia, Queering African Studies
The Kojiki: Record of Ancient Matters. Translated from the Japanese by Basil Hall Chamberlain
Kwame Nkrumah, Neo-Colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism
Lara Mimosa Montes, from The Somnambulist
Leila Khaled, My People Shall Live: Autobiography of a Revolutionary, as told to George Hajjar 
Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Eve Tuck, and K. Wayne Yang, Indigenous and Decolonizing Studies in Education
Lisa Lowe, History Hesitant
Lisa Lowe, Immigration, Citizenship, Racialization: Asian American Critique (from Immigrant Acts)
Lisa Lowe, The Intimacies of Four Continents
Loss: The Politics of Mourning. (eds. David L. Eng & David Kazanjian)
Lynn Xu, Say You Will Die For Me
Lynn Xu, Tournesol
Mae Ngai, From Colonial Subject to Undesirable Alien: Filipino Migration, Exclusion, and Repatriation, 1920-1940
Mae Ngai, Illegal Aliens: A Problem of Law and History (intro to Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America)
Mahmoud Darwish, If I Were Another, translated from the Arabic by Fady Joudah
Mahmoud Darwish, Unfortunately, It Was Paradise: Selected Poems, edited and translated from the Arabic by Munir Akash and Carolyn Forche (with Sinan Antoon and Amira El-Zein) 
Malcolm X Speaks: Selected Speeches and Statements
Manifesto: A Century of Isms, edited by Mary Ann Caws
The Manyōshū, the Nippon Gakujutsu Shinkokai translatton
Mariame Kaba, Toward the Horizon of Abolition: John Duda in conversation with Kaba
Marianne Hirsch, The Generation of Postmemory
Marianne Hirsch and Nancy K. Miller, the introduction to Rites of Return: Diaspora Poetics and the Politics of Memory
Mari Matsuda, Planet Asian America
Mari Matsuda, Public Response to Racist Speech: Considering the Victim's Story
Mark Rifkin, Beyond Settler Time: Temporal Sovereignty and Indigenous Self-­Determination
Mercedes Eng, Mercenary English
Merle Woo, Stonewall Was a Riot—Now We Need a Revolution
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire
Michel Foucault, The Care of the Self (Volume 3 of The History of Sexuality). Translated from the French by Robert Hurley
Michel Foucault, Discourse and Truth: The Problematization of Parrhesia
Michel-Rolph Trouillot, The Otherwise Modern: Caribbean Lessons from the Savage Slot
Michel-Rolph Trouillot, The Power in the Story
Michel-Rolph Trouillot, An Unthinkable History: The Haiti Revolution as a Non-Event
Mimi Thi Nguyen, The Empire of Freedom (the introduction to The Gift of Freedom: War, Debt, and Other Refugee Passages)
Mishuana Goeman, Gendered Geographies and Narrative Markings; “Remember What You Are”: Gendering Citizenship, the Indian Act, and (Re)mapping the Settler Nation-State, from Mark My Words: Native Women Mapping Our Nations
Mitsuye Yamada, Invisibility is an Unnatural Disaster: Reflections of an Asian American Woman
M. Jacqui Alexander, Remembering This Bridge Called My Back, Remembering Ourselves
Mu'in Basisu, Palestinian Notes from Cairo's Military Prison, translated from the Arabic by Saleh Omar
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Part II (N-Z) is here.
The PDF branch of the Hiroshima Library is here.
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brandonshimoda · 4 years
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R.I.P. (Rest in PDFs), Part II
in progress ...
Part I (A-M) is here.
Note: If you see your work on here and prefer that it not be made freely accessible, please email me at: [email protected], and I will remove it. Thank you!
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Naomi Murakawa, The origins of the carceral crisis: Racial order as "law and order" in postwar American politics
Natasha Ginwala, Maps That Don’t Belong
Nathaniel Mackey, Other: From Noun to Verb
Nawal El Saadawi, Woman at Point Zero. Translated by Sherif Hatata.
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, Detained: A Writer’s Prison Diary
Nick Estes, Liberation, from Our History Is the Future: Standing Rock versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance
Occupy Poetics. Curated by Thom Donovan
Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment
Patrick Chamoiseau, School Days. Translated from the French by Linda Coverdale
Patrick Wolfe, Settler colonialism and the elimination of the native
Pëtr Kropotkin, Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution
Phil Cordelli, New Wave
Phil Cordelli, Tidal State
Poetry of Resistance in Occupied Palestine, translated by Sulafa Hijjawi
Reece Jones, Violent Borders: Refugees and the Right To Move
Rinaldo Walcott, Moving Toward Black Freedom, the first chapter of The Long Emancipation
Rinaldo Walcott, The Problem of the Human: Black Ontologies and “the Coloniality of Our Being”
Rinaldo Walcott, Queer Returns: Human Rights, the AngloCaribbean and Diaspora Politics
Rizvana Bradley, Aesthetic Inhumanisms: Toward an Erotics of Otherworlding
Robert Yerachmiel Sniderman, from CEDE; [Truesse, Unknown Worker, Charles]; Chaos and Rectification
Roberto Tejada, In Relation: The Poetics and Politics of Cuba’s Generation-80
Robin D.G. Kelley, Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination
Robin D.G. Kelley, Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression
Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse. Translated by Richard Howard.
Roland Barthes, Mythologies. Translated by Annette Lavers.
Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text. Translated by Richard Miller.
Roland Barthes, Roland Barthes. Translated by Richard Howard.
Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States
Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Fatal Couplings of Power and Difference: Notes on Racism and Geography
Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Forgotten Places and the Seeds of Grassroots Planning 
Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Globalisation and US prison growth: from military Keynesianism to post-Keynesian militarism
Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California
Saidiya Hartman, The Plot of Her Undoing (Notes on Feminisms)
Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America
Samuel Delaney, Times Square Red, Times Square Blue
Saniya Saleh, Seven Poems. Translated from the Arabic by Robin Moger.
Saniya Saleh, Seven Poems. Various translators
S*an D. Henry-Smith, Flotsam Suite
Shosana Felman & Dori Laub, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History
Simone Browne, Introduction, and Other Dark Matters; Notes on Surveillance Studies; Branding Blackness (from Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness)
Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace. Translated by Emma Crawford and Mario von der Ruhr
Simone Weil, The Iliad, or the Poem of Force. Translated by Mary McCarthy
Simone Weil, The Need for Roots: Prelude to a Declaration of Duties towards Mankind. Translated by Arthur Wills
Simone Weil, Oppression and Liberty. Translated by Arthur Wills and John Petrie
Simon Leung and Marita Sturken, Displaced Bodies in Residual Spaces
Solidarity Texts: Radiant Re-Sisters
Sophia Terazawa, I Am Not A War
Sora Han, Letters of the Law: Race and the Fantasy of Colorblindness in American Law
#StandingRockSyllabus, compiled by NYC Stands with Standing Rock Collective
Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study
Steve Biko, Black Consciousness and the Quest for True Humanity
Stokely Carmichael and Charles V. Hamilton, the Black Power chapter of Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in America
Sukoon Magazine, Volume 4, Issue 2, Winter 2017
Suzanne Césaire, 1943: Surrealism and Us; The Great Camouflage (from The Great Camouflage: Writings of Dissent (1941-1945)
Sylvia Wynter, Black Metamorphosis: New Natives in a New World
Sylvia Wynter, “No Humans Involved:” An Open Letter to My Colleagues
Sylvia Wynter, Novel and History, Plot and Plantation
Tamara K. Nopper, The Wages of Non-Blackness: Contemporary Immigrant Rights and Discourses of Character, Productivity, and Value
Tavia Nyong’o, Racial Kitsch and Black Performance
Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Dictee
Thom Donovan, “In The Dirt of the Line”: On Bhanu Kapil’s Intense Autobiography
Tina Campt, Listening to Images
Tina Campt, The Lyric of the Archive
Toni Cade Bambara, The Lesson
Toni Morrison, The Future of Time: Literature and Diminished Expectations
Toni Morrison, Memory, Creation, and Writing
Trinh T. Minh-ha, Documentary Is/Not a Name
Trinh T. Minh-ha, The Walk of Multiplicity
Trinh T. Minh-ha, Woman, Native, Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism
Veena Das, Life and Words: Violence and the Descent into the Ordinary
Võ Nguyên Giáp, People’s War, People’s Army
Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project. Translated from the German by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin
Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa
W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction
W.E.B. Du Bois, The World and Africa: Color and Democracy
Wendy Brown, States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity
Wendy Trevino, Brazilian Is Not A Race
Wendy Trevino, narrative
Winona LaDuke, Traditional Ecological Knowledge and Environmental Futures
Yanara Friedland, Abraq ad Habra: I will create as I speak
Ye Mimi, eleven poems
Yerbamala Collective, Our Vendetta: Witches vs Fascists
Yi Sang, The Wings. Translated from the Korean by Ahn Jung-hyo and James B. Lee
You Can’t Shoot Us All: On the Oscar Grant Rebellions
Youna Kwak, Home
Yūgen, edited by LeRoi Jones & Hettie Cohen (1958-1962), #1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8.
Yuri Kochiyama, The Impact of Malcolm X on Asian-American Politics and Activism
Yuri Kochiyama, Then Came the War
Zora Neale Hurston, Mules and Men
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brandonshimoda · 4 years
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The Hiroshima Library, an itinerant reading room/collection of books on atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and their afterlives, is currently seeking donations of the following books (below), to add to its collection. The Hiroshima Library is reopening at Counterpath in Denver, Colorado, this October.
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Akiko Mikamo, 8:15: A True Story of Survival and Forgiveness from Hiroshima
Atsuhiro Ozaki, The Song of Hiroshima
Becky Alexis-Martin, Disarming Doomsday: The Human Impact of Nuclear Weapons since Hiroshima
Bombing Civilians: A Twentieth-Century History, edited by Yuki Tanaka and Marilyn B. Young
Chad R. Diehl, Resurrecting Nagasaki: Reconstruction and the Formation of Atomic Narratives
Dan Kurzman, Day of the Bomb: Countdown to Hiroshima
Eiichiro Ochiai, Hiroshima to Fukushima: Biohazards of Radiation
George Weller, First Into Nagasaki: The Censored Eyewitness Dispatches of Post-Atomic Japan and its Prisoners of War
Greg Mitchell, Atomic Cover-up: Two U.S. Soldiers, Hiroshima & Nagasaki, and The Greatest Movie Never Made
Harry J. Wray and Seishiro Sugihara, Bridging the Atomic Divide: Debating Japan-US Attitudes on Hiroshima and Nagasaki
Hiromi Tsuchida, Hiroshima Monument II
The Hiroshima Murals: The Art of Iri Maruki and Toshi Maruki, edited by John Dower and John Junkerman
Hiroyuki Agawa, Devil’s Heritage, translated by John Maki
John Auxier, Ichiban: Radiation Dosimetry for the Survivors of the Bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki
Jonathan Fetter-Vorm, Trinity: A Graphic History of the First Atomic Bomb
Kamila Shamsie, Burnt Shadows
Kunito Okamura, May the Seven Rivers of Hiroshima Reach the Galaxy
Mandy Conti & David Petersen, Survivors: The A-Bombed Trees of Hiroshima
Medical Effects of the Atomic Bomb in Japan, edited by Ashley Oughterson
Michael Light, 100 Suns
Michael Perlman, Hiroshima Forever: The Ecology of Mourning
Mick Broderick, Hibakusha Cinema: Hiroshima, Nagasaki and the Nuclear Image in Japanese Film
Mitsukuni Yoshida, Hiroshima and beyond: A heritage of technology
Monica Brau, The Atomic Bomb Suppressed: American Censorship in Occupied Japan
M. Susan Lindee, Suffering Made Real: American Science and the Survivors of Hiroshima
Nagasaki Speaks: A Record of the Atomic Bombing
Naomi Hirahara, Hiroshima Boy
Paul Ham, Hiroshima Nagasaki: The Real Story of the Atomic Bombings and Their Aftermath
Ran Zwigenberg, Hiroshima: The Origins of Global Memory Culture
Rinjiro Sodei, Were We The Enemy? American Survivors Of Hiroshima
Sadako Okuda, A Dimly Burning Wick: Memoir from the Ruins of Hiroshima
The Unfinished Atomic Bomb: Shadows and Reflections, edited by David Lowe, Cassandra Atherton, and Alyson Miller
Toshiharu and Rita Kano, Passport to Hiroshima: The Unthinkable, Inspiring Journey of a Japanese American Family
Virginia Moffa Khuri, Hiroshima: Remembering 1945 & 1958
Widows of Hiroshima: The Life Stories of Nineteen Peasant Wives, edited by Mikio Kanda, translated by Taeko Midorikawa
William J. Schull, Song Among the Ruins
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The Hiroshima Library is seeking copies of these books in any condition (from poor to new). If you are interested in donating one or more of these books, or a book that is not on this list, please contact Brandon Shimoda at [email protected].
Photo: The Hiroshima Library in the Hirasaki National Resource Center at the Japanese American National Museum, Los Angeles.
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brandonshimoda · 4 years
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The Hiroshima Library is an itinerant, sometimes spontaneous reading room/collection of books on the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and their ongoing afterlives, as well as the environments and situations in which the collection either publicly or privately exists. The collection is (currently) 200+ books, including hibakusha testimonies, history and journalism, art and photography, poetry, novels, graphic novels and comic books, art and literary criticism, theory, politics, science, and also contributions by the communities in which it appears. (Donations are always welcome.) It is inspired, in part, by the Rest House in the Peace Memorial Park in Hiroshima; the ice cream vendor in the Hypocenter Park in Nagasaki; the reading areas in the MRT stations in Kaohsiung, Taiwan; abandoned gas stations and strip malls throughout the United States and Japan; as well as mundane, workaday spaces adjacent to catastrophic life, which occupy a frequency between communal mourning and melancholy, private refreshment, and idle and free associative learning, and into which an individual (passerby, tourist, wanderer, child), motivated by an aimless yet open curiosity, might enter and, for a moment, disappear.
The collection was first conceived in 1988 when I (Brandon Shimoda) received, as a gift from my parents, a copy of Keiji Nakazawa’s manga, I Saw It: The Atomic Bombing of Hiroshima: A Survivor’s True Story (English translation, 1982). That same year I visited, for the first time, the city of Hiroshima. I was ten.
The Rest House in the Peace Memorial Park in Hiroshima, for example—located across the Motoyasu River from the atomic bomb hypocenter (detonation point), and surrounded by memorials and monuments to the dead—is an information center/gift shop filled with brochures, benches, and beverage machines, where people can use the restroom, have a drink, and, in the midst of the ruins, let their minds go blank. It was originally a kimono shop, but was turned over, during the war, to the war effort, where it became the site of the murder, by the bomb, of thirty-six people.
The Hiroshima Library was first installed on a dining table in an abandoned house in Marfa, Texas (2015). It was installed at BRUNA press + archive, in Bellingham, Washington, from August through October 2019; in the Japanese American National Museum, in Los Angeles, from November 2019 through August 2021, as part of Under a Mushroom Cloud: Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and the Atomic Bomb; and at Counterpath Press, in Denver, CO, from October 2021 into September 2022. Photo below courtesy of JANM.
Read Sommer Browning’s article on the Hiroshima Library at Southwest Contemporary.
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Visit the PDF Branch of the Library here.
For more information, the library’s catalog, to make a donation, and/or to suggest a location/space for the library, please contact [email protected].
Photo below taken by Kristina Lee Podesva and Alan McConchie at BRUNA.
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brandonshimoda · 5 years
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The Grave on the Wall—an ancestral memoir/book of history, memory, mourning, and forgetting / recipient of the PEN Open Book Award—available at City Lights. 
Read excerpts in: Entropy, Evening Will Come, Fanzine, Harper’s, Lit Hub, The Margins (Asian American Writers’ Workshop), Nat. Brut, The Offing, The Paris Review, and Tricycle.
Read the Nagasaki and Hiroshima chapters.
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"Here we learn that to attempt to recuperate an erased past is an obsessive task, following faint threads into places of memorial, tragic time, aging bodies—the fissures, gaps, and scars of which can never be fulfilled. In the void between, ghosts emerge and disappear as dreams. In a weaving meditation, Brandon Shimoda pens an elegant eulogy for his grandfather Midori, yet also for the living, we who survive on the margins of graveyards and rituals of our own making." —Karen Tei Yamashita, author of Letters to Memory
"In The Grave on the Wall, Brandon Shimoda has conceived a moving monument to his grandfather made not of stone but of fractured memories and dreams, fairy tales and family photographs, pilgrimages to alien enemy internment camps, burial grounds, deserts, and the Inland Sea, all bound together by lambent strands of ancestral and immigrant histories. Within this haunted sepulcher built out of silence, loss, and grief—its walls shadowed by the traumas of racial oppression and violence—a green river lined with peach trees flows beneath a bridge that leads back to the grandson.” —Jeffrey Yang, author of Hey, Marfa: Poems
"Sometimes a work of art functions as a dream. At other times, a work of art functions as a conscience. In the tradition of Juan Rulfo's Pedro Páramo, Brandon Shimoda's The Grave on the Wall is both." —Myriam Gurba, author of Mean
"The legacy of past generations—though we embody them in some way, so often unknowingly replicate their gestures, tones of voices or facial expressions, maybe the curl of a lock of hair—that inheritance so often goes untold, except that Brandon Shimoda begins here accounting for it, beyond the borders of memory and forgetting, beyond the known and unknown. Shimoda intercedes into the absences, gaps and interstices of the present and delves the presence of mystery. Gratitude to Brandon Shimoda for taking on the mystery which only literature accepts as the basic challenge." —Sesshu Foster, author of City of the Future
“The Grave on the Wall among other things reads as a feat to me, as if something truly massive were fit into two hundred pages, without compromise or shortcut or disassembly or surgery. As if an impossible and entire monolith were fit between the covers. I imagine a thoughtfully planed beam of hardwood from a temple otherwise destroyed. Both locating and dislocating us, the marvel of its accomplishment hovers ominous and irreducible, a whole and deep act or care.” —Nabil Kashyap, author of The Obvious Earth, at Full Stop
“The Grave on the Wall is a passage of aching nostalgia and relentless assembly out of which something more important than objective truth is conjured—a ritual frisson, a veracity of spirit. I am grateful to have traveled along.” —Trisha Low, author of Socialist Realism, at The Believer
"Shimoda is a mystic writer. He puts what breaches itself (always) onto the page, so that the act of writing becomes akin to paper-making: an attention to fibers, coagulation, texture and the water-fire mixtures that signal irreversible alteration or change. Does this book end? Is there a sentence that closes it? Or does it keep being written and forgotten then written again, each time a reader opens it (the book) for the first time?" —Bhanu Kapil, author of Ban en Banlieue
"If someone asked me what a poet's history might look and read like, I would say Brandon Shimoda's The Grave on the Wall. It is part dream, part memory, part forgetting, part identity. It is a remarkable exploration of how citizenship is forged by the brutal US imperial forces—through slave labor, forced detention, indiscriminate bombing, historical amnesia and wall. If someone asked me, where are you from? I would answer, from The Grave on the Wall." —Don Mee Choi, author of Hardly War
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brandonshimoda · 5 years
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Flowers of Forgetting (talk/essay), Entropy, August 2021
History of Painting (essay), Hairstreak Butterfly Review, June 2021
The Hour of the Rat (poem), OCTO, February 2021
The Gallery, Tree of Life, Prelude (poems), Gulf Coast, February 2021
from Tomb Model of a Noble’s House (notebooks), Entropy, October 2020
Fort Missoula (from The Grave on the Wall) (video), Japanese American Memorial Pilgrimages, July 2020
from Tomb Model of a Noble’s House (notebooks), Tupelo Quarterly, July 2020
The Grave on the Wall (interview, with Vince Schleitwiler), International Examiner, July 2020
All Souls Procession (poem), The Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day series, guest-edited by Ari Banias, June 2020
49 Stones for the Poetry of Japanese American Incarceration (essay), Literary Addresses series, Smithsonian Asian American Pacific Center, April 2020
The White String (essay), The Yale Review, April 2020
Bayt al-Qasid, the House of Poetry (essay), Prelude, January 2020
from The Temple of the Golden Pavilion (essay), Tricycle, December 2019
The Shadows of Trees on the Wall (essay), The Spectacle, December 2019
Julia Cohen’s and Abby Hagler’s Original Obsessions (interview), Tarpaulin Sky, December 2019
Not a Shadow, But an Echo (interview, with Geoff Martin), Adroit Journal, December 2019
Six poems, Contra Viento, November 2019
from Tomb Model of a Noble’s House (notebooks), new sinews, October 2019
Q&A: The Grave on the Wall and Writing with Ghosts (interview, with Katherine Scout Turkel), Zyzzyva, September 2019
Reading With... Brandon Shimoda (interview), Shelf Awareness, September 2019
The Fruits of Suffering (from The Grave on the Wall; prose), Harper’s, September 2019
We Have Been Here Before (essay), The Nation, August 2019
Between the Covers (podcast/interview), with David Naimon, August 2019
Death Valley (from The Grave on the Wall; prose), The Paris Review, August 2019
5 Artists Who Explore Japanese American Incarceration (essay), Lit Hub, August 2019
The Period of Summoning Relatives (the first chapter of The Grave on the Wall; prose), The Margins, August 2019
Finding Photos of My Grandfather in a Japanese Internment Camp (from The Grave on the Wall; prose), Lit Hub, July 2019
The Grave on the Wall (book, memoir, nonfiction), City Lights Books, July 2019
The Woman in the Well (prose, fiction and nonfiction), Nat. Brut, June 2019
San Xavier (poem), Lantern Review, May 2019
Future Ruins (poem), The Iowa Review, April 2019
an interview, Museum, April 2019
The Bookstore, The Desert, Anchovies (poems), TYPO, March 2019
10 Questions (questionnaire), The Massachusetts Review, January 2019
The Desert, The Desert, Sun Tran, The Desert (poems), spacecraftproject, December 2018
The Desert (poem), The Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day series, guest-edited by Don Mee Choi, November 2018
Gila River (poem), The Brooklyn Rail, October 2018
The Grave (poem), The Believer Logger, September 2018
Soul Mates (poem), Literary Hub, September 2018
Notes from Hiroshima, from The Grave on the Wall (essay), Entropy, August 2018
The (Ongoing) Ruins of Japanese American Incarceration: Thirty Years After the Civil Liberties Act of 1988 (essay), Densho Blog, July 2018
The Body and Migration, with Vi Khi Nao, Celina Su, and Dorothy Wang (reading/discussion/video), Asian American Writers Workshop, New York, New York, March 2018
Japanese American Incarceration: Public Memory and Cultural Production, with Julian Saporiti, Erin Aoyama, Paul Kitagaki Jr, and Robert Lee (reading/discussion/video), International Center of Photography, New York, New York, March 2018
The (Ongoing) Ruins of Japanese American Incarceration: Thirty Years After the Civil Liberties Act of 1988 (lecture/video), Fairhaven College, Bellingham, Washington, March 2018
The Desert (poem), Hyperallergic, January 2018
The Sharing of the Grave (essay), The Asian American Literary Review (the Stateless issue), Fall/Winter 2017
The Papaya Tree (essay), Evening Will Come (The Volta), November 2017
The Ghosts of Pearl Harbor (a talk), given as part of Everywhere It Is Other: Love in Landscapes of Surveillance, a panel/discussion included in Thinking Its Presence, Tucson, Arizona, October 2017. Published at Entropy.
Praying Mantis (essay), The Offing, October 2017
The Woman on the Stairs (essay), Bennington Review, June 2017
Camp Memorials, Silence, and Restlessness, Part 2. With Tamiko Nimura (conversation). Discover Nikkei, June 2017
Camp Memorials, Silence, and Restlessness, Part 1. With Tamiko Nimura (conversation). Discover Nikkei, June 2017
The Night Café (essay), Entropy, May 2017
A Record of Garden Making in Japanese American Concentration Camps (essay), Design Week Portland, May 2017
Patty Yumi Cottrell: Haunted and Obsessed (interview), The Margins (Asian American Writers Workshop), May 2017
Operation Streamline (essay), The New Inquiry, May 2017
Hist Odres de Paradise (three poems), Poemeleon (The Asian Pacific American Issue), May 2017
Corpses & Incarceration (a talk), given in Thom Donovan’s Critical Issues class at Columbia University, New York, April 11, 2017
Dead Butterflies (essay), No Tokens Journal, April 2017
I Am an American: The Photographic Legacy of Japanese American Incarceration (essay), Hyperallergic, April 2017
National Poetry Month Featured Poet (interview), Entropy, April 2017
State of Erasure: Arizona’s Place, and the Place of Arizona, in the Mass Incarceration of Japanese Americans (lecture), The Margins (Asian American Writers Workshop), February 2017
Hist Odres de Paradise (thirteen poems), The Brooklyn Rail, February 2017
Blind Children (poem), Oversound, January 2017
Japanese American Historical Plaza (essay), The New Inquiry, December 2016
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brandonshimoda · 5 years
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The PDF Branch of the Hiroshima Library
Abé Mark Nornes, The Body at the Center: The Effects of the Atomic Bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki
Amy Knowles, "I am a Living History": A Qualitative Descriptive Study of Atomic Bomb Survivors
Arundhati Roy, The End of Imagination
Ashley Martinez, Hiroshima and Mass Trauma Today: Treating Posttraumatic Stress Disorder in Individuals and Communities
Brandon Shimoda, the Nagasaki and Hiroshima chapters of The Grave on the Wall
Camilla Siazon, Moving Out from Under Hiroshima’s Cloud: Understanding Nuclear Genocide through Film
Cathy Caruth, introduction to Trauma: Explorations in Memory
Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History
Claude Eatherly and Gunther Anders, Burning Conscience: The case of the Hiroshima pilot, Claude Eatherly, told in his letters to Gunther Anders
Daisuke Yuasa, Hiroshima as a Social Landscape: Bright Peace and Silenced Alternatives
Daniela Tan, Literature and The Trauma of Hiroshima and Nagasaki
Database of Hibaku Jumoku: Atomic-Bombed Trees of Hiroshima
David Palmer, Korean Hibakusha, Japan's Supreme Court & the International Community: Can the U.S. & Japan Confront Forced Labor & Atomic Bombing?
Dominick LaCapra, Trauma, Absence, Loss
Dori Laub, Bearing Witness or the Vicissitudes of Listening; An Event Without a Witness: Truth, Testimony and Survival
Edward A. Dougherty, Memories of the Future: The Poetry of Sadako Kurihara and Hiromu Morishita
Eiji Yamamura, Atomic bombs and the long-run effect on trust: Experiences in Hiroshima and Nagasaki
elin o’Hara slavick, After Hiroshima
elin o’Hara slavick, Hiroshima Mon Amour
Francesco Comotti, The Magnified Body of Survival Tracing: Communication Paradigms in Hiroshima and Nagasaki’s Storytelling
Günther Anders, Commandments in the Atomic Age
Hiroko Furo, Dietary Practice of Hiroshima/Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Survivors
Hiroko Okuda, Remembering the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki: Collective memory of post-war Japan
Hiro Mitsuo Hayashi, A Tale of Two Cities: Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Literature and Comparisons with Depictions of Post-War Hiroshima
Hiro Saito, Reiterated Commemoration: Hiroshima as National Trauma
Hiroshima’s Path to Reconstruction, edited and published by “Hiroshima for Global Peace” Plan Joint Project Executive Committee (Hiroshima Prefecture and the City of Hiroshima)
Jacques Derrida, Not Now (full speed ahead, seven missiles, seven missives), translated from the French by Catherine Porter and Philip Lewis
Jalal Toufic, Forthcoming
Jalal Toufic, The Withdrawal of Tradition Past a Surpassing Disaster
James Thompson, No More Bystanders: Grandchildren of Hiroshima and the 70th Anniversary of the Atomic Bomb
Jane Orient, Fukushima and Reflections on Radiation as a Terror Weapon
John Berger, Hiroshima
John Malik, The Yields of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki Nuclear Explosions
Junko Kayashige, My Experience of the Atomic Bombing
Kenjirō Okazaki, A Place to Bury Names, or Resurrection (Circulation and Continuity of Energy) as a Dissolution of Identity: Isamu Noguchi’s Memorial to the Dead of Hiroshima and Shirai Sei’ichi’s Temple Atomic Catastrophes
Kurt W. Tong, Korea's forgotten atomic bomb victims
Kyoko Selden, A Childhood Memoir of Wartime Japan
La réaction de Albert Camus au bombardement d'Hiroshima
Lisa Yoneyama, Mnemonic Detours (Chapter 4 of Hiroshima Traces: Time, Space, and the Dialectics of Memory)
Mara Miller, Visualizing the Past, Envisioning the Future: Atomic Bomb Memorials, Fukushima, and the "Fourth Space" of Comparative Informatics
Marc Lafleur, Tracing the Absent-Present of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in America as Sensuous Encounter: Notes on (Nuclear) Ruins
Marcel Junod, The Hiroshima Disaster
Marguerite Duras, Hiroshima Mon Amour. Translated from the French by Richard Seaver
Marianne Hirsch, The Generation of Postmemory
Marilyn McCord Adams, The Problem of Hell: A Problem of Evil for Christians
Mary McCarthy’s review of John Hersey’s Hiroshima
Masao Tomonaga, After the atomic bomb: Hibakusha tell their stories
Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, translated from the French by Ann Smock
Maurice Halbwachs, Historical Memory and Collective Memory
Memoirs of Medical Doctors in Hiroshima (excerpts from Hiroshima Ishi no Karute, Hiroshima City Medical Association)
Michael J. Hogan, The Enola Gay Controversy: History, Memory, and the Politics of Presentation
Michael R. Taylor, God and the Atom: Salvador Dalí’s Mystical Manifesto and the Contested Origins of Nuclear Painting
Michele Mason, Writing Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the 21st Century: A New Generation of Historical Manga
Nanao Kamada, One Day in Hiroshima: An Oral History. Translated from the Japanese by Keiko Ogura, Yoshie Ozaki, Megumi Shimo, and Megumi Morita
Nobuko Margaret Kosuge, Prompt and utter destruction: the Nagasaki disaster and the initial medical relief
Noelle Leslie dela Cruz, Surviving Hiroshima: An Hermeneutical Phenomenology of Barefoot Gen by Keiji Nakazawa
Norman Cousins, Hiroshima Maidens
Paul K. Saint-Amour, Bombing and the Symptom: Traumatic Earliness and the Nuclear Uncanny
Paul Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, translated from the French by Kathleen Blarney and David Pellauer 
Ran Zwigenberg, Never Again: Hiroshima, Auschwitz and the Politics of Commemoration
Robert Jacobs, 24 Hours After Hiroshima: National Geographic Channel Takes Up the Bomb
Robert Jacobs, Radiation as Cultural Talisman: Nuclear Weapons Testing and American Popular Culture in the Early Cold War
Robert Jay Lifton, Psychological Effects of the Atomic Bombings
Robert Jay Lifton and Greg Mitchell, Hiroshima in America: A Half Century of Denial
Robert Jungk, Children of the Ashes: The People of Hiroshima After the Bomb
Ronald Takaki, 50 Years After Hiroshima
Ronni Alexander, Remembering Hiroshima: Bio-Politics, Popoki and Sensual Expressions of War
Sankichi Tōge, Poems of the Atomic Bomb (Genbaku shishū), translated from the Japanese by Karen Thornber
Susan Lindee, Survivors and scientists: Hiroshima, Fukushima, and the Radiation Effects Research Foundation, 1975–2014
Susan Sontag, The Imagination of Disaster
Tadahiko Murata, My experiences as a survivor of the Atomic Bomb
Takayuki Kawaguchi, Barefoot Gen and “A-bomb literature” Re-recollecting the nuclear experience, translated from the Japanese by Nele Noppe
Tamiki Hara, Notes of the Atomic Bombing, translated from the Japanese by Tomoko Nakamura
Taylor Channing Moles, In the Shadow of the Bomb: Nagasaki’s Place in Atomic Memory
Tomoe Otsuki, God and the Atomic Bomb: Nagasaki’s Atomic Bomb Memory and Politics of Sacrifice, Forgiveness, and Reconciliation
Tomoe Otsuki, The Politics of Reconstruction and Reconciliation in U.S-Japan Relations—Dismantling the Atomic Bomb Ruins of Nagasaki’s Urakami Cathedral
William Gamson, Hiroshima, The Holocaust, and the Politics of Exclusion
William J. Blot and Hisao Sawada, Fertility among Female Survivors of the Atomic Bombs of Hiroshima and Nagasaki
Yuki Tanaka, Photographer Fukushima Kikujiro: Confronting Images of Atomic Bomb Survivor
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SYLLABI
The Atomic Bomb in Literature and Memory: Japan and the United States. Michele Mason. University of Maryland
Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and Beyond. Norma Field. University of Chicago
Japanese Literature and the Atomic Bomb. Paul Schalow. Rutgers University
Literature and Interdisciplinary Studies: War and Memory. Viet Nguyen. USC-Los Angeles
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brandonshimoda · 6 years
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an essay on the murder of two Japanese/Issei men in a Department of Justice prison in Oklahoma, 1942, published in the Stateless (Fall/Winter 2017) issue of The Asian American Literary Review. PDF here.
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brandonshimoda · 7 years
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CORPSES & INCARCERATION
The following is a talk that was given on April 11, 2017 in Thom Donovan’s Critical Issues class at Columbia University, New York, New York:
The first corpse I did not see was my grandfather’s. This is where I always start. Because it was not until I did not see my grandfather’s corpse that I learned, or discovered, that NOT seeing a corpse is important—arresting, sometimes even debilitating.
Here’s a picture:
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This is my grandfather, my mother’s father. I have a Japanese grandfather, and a non-Japanese grandfather. This is my non-Japanese grandfather. This is a picture my mother took right after my grandfather died. In other words, this is a picture of my grandfather’s corpse. I have seen it, even if through the medium of my mother. I am seeing it now.
This is not, therefore, the corpse I have not seen.
And there it goes:
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His corpse did not linger. Nor has it had much of an impact. Not yet, anyway. He died in October. After he died, I tried to imagine his naked corpse. I tried, and it was surprisingly easy. I could see it. I could make it out.
Then he was cremated and thrown into the ocean.
My other grandfather, my father’s father, my Japanese grandfather, died in 1996. His was the corpse I did not see. I have also tried to imagine his naked corpse, but have failed. It has been surprisingly difficult. I cannot see it. I cannot make it out. His nakedness is fugitive, evasive. His nakedness baffles me. Baffles, as in: mocks and misleads me. Baffles, as in: I am hoodwinked by his nakedness.
I did not see either of my grandfathers naked when they were alive. I cannot claim the image of their nakedness as an influence. Unfortunately.
I did not see my Japanese grandfather die. I did not see him dead. And I did not go to his funeral. He was also cremated. We scattered his ashes in Death Valley. Here is the hill where we scattered his ashes:
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I buried a copy of my third book, O Bon, on that hill.
O Bon is a book of poetry:
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It was one of many attempts to construct an altar for my grandfather. A space to which he could return. And where I could meet him. O Bon: when the dead return to earth.
I wrote the poems at night while falling asleep. To enact the sensation of sinking through the bed, through the floor, into the ground, to commingle with what has been buried. Subterranean language, subterranean understanding, I thought. Because: I harbor the idea that some part of my grandfather has maintained sentience and understanding, and even the ability to read, and that it exists in the currents of a subterranean spring.  
So as my family was walking back down the hill in the Death Valley, I dug a hole. I placed O Bon in the hole. And thought: Now he can read what I wrote.
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Here is some background on what I wrote and what I write: I have been writing a book about my grandfather for seven years. Not that long, but long enough for it to have started feeling absurd. Absurd and overgrown: weedy, unwieldy, and ultimately incoherent. But maybe, more optimistically: open.
The book is called The Grave on the Wall. There are many reasons for that title. One of which I will show you.
I am also writing a second book about my grandfather, but this one focuses on the mass incarceration of Japanese immigrants and Japanese Americans during WWII. It is called Dementia. And it is, in many ways, a rewriting of The Grave on the Wall, even though The Grave on the Wall is not yet done.
My writing in these books, as well as in my poetry, has been, so far, an attempt, often thwarted, or generally failed, to recover my grandfather’s corpse. To put it another way: I write because I did not see his corpse. To recover my grandfather’s corpse and restore it to a place in which for him, history is—to quote Hannah Arendt—no longer a closed book.
I often wonder what would have happened if I had seen my grandfather’s corpse. If I had seen his body before it was cremated. What would have ended there? The subjects about which I write most often and obsessively are those that escape me, are those I have missed.
The open book: sentenced, by my own absence, to a kind of indentured repetition.
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Here is some background on my grandfather. He was born in a small village on an island off the coast of Hiroshima. 1910. He immigrated to the United States in 1919. Nine years old. Three weeks on a steamship. The Africa Maru:
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Alone: his family was not with him. He was surrounded and cared for, instead, by dozens of young women who were going to the United States to meet their husbands for the first time. Japanese picture brides.
Here is the cover of O Bon again, this time without the text. It is a drawing by Manabu Ikeda, titled Regeneration:
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My grandfather died in North Carolina. 1996.
A month after he died, and a month before his ashes were scattered in Death Valley, he visited me. It was morning—I was alone in the house I grew up in:
This is what happened. It was 8 in the morning. I was sleeping on a couch. There was a crack of thunder followed by a surge of lightning. I woke up. Every light in the house was on. Except, I noticed, the hallway was dark, which was also when I noticed that there was a man in the hallway. He was reaching the top of the stairs. His body and head and hair were black, like a shadow, yet corporeal. He looked like he had been charred. Completely. He was ashes. I recognized him: my dead grandfather.
Seeing my dead grandfather’s ash-incarnation was like wish half-fulfillment. It required belief for me to say that what we scattered a month later in Death Valley were my grandfather’s ashes, and not, for example, the relics of some effigial sacrifice.
Funus imaginarium: a burial in which an effigial body, or an effigy, is used in place of the actual body. Like a surrogate. Because the actual body is INDISPOSED. Burial, therefore, as ritual, as performance. As a matter of imagination, of belief.
My grandfather’s name was Midori Shimoda. Shimoda means: lower rice field. Midori means green.
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This is a photograph of my grandfather taken in 1943. It was taken by a photographer named Peter Fortune. Peter Fortune was commissioned by the Department of Justice to document life in the DOJ prison in Missoula, Montana. Fort Missoula. It was originally built to protect settlers from the indigenous people, the Salish, on whose land they were occupying. Fitting place for a POW prison. It was also an interrogation site. The prisoners included 1000 Japanese immigrants who were being held on suspicion of conspiring to carry out Fifth Column terrorist acts against the United States. All the prisoners were men, all in their 50s and 60s. My grandfather was one of them. He was the youngest: He was 33.
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I lived in Missoula for four years. My first day in Missoula I went to where the prison had been. One of the barracks remained. It was turned into a museum. Small town museum, with pitiable life-size diorama-like reconstructions of prison life, front pages of newspapers on the walls, indefensible haiku, boilerplate photos of Japanese American families, dressed up and tagged, among piles of luggage, waiting to be taken by train into unknown America.
And then: this picture:
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I recognized the man’s face. But it was that kind of uncanny recognition that registers first as nausea.
My grandfather died eight years earlier. And now he was on a wall in western Montana. What was he doing? My grandmother didn’t know. My father didn’t know. No one knew.
This, I said to myself, is a photograph of my grandfather’s corpse.
Actually, I said that later. What I said at the time was:
This is a photograph of my grandfather’s grave.
Actually, I didn’t say that either.
I started crying, then called my sister.
But I say that I said corpse and then grave, because: the photo illustrated a moment in which my grandfather was undergoing a vital transformation. Not the bra and slip, although there is that, but his transformation from Japanese immigrant, Japanese national, to American citizen.
While in prison, he was interrogated by the FBI. They questioned his loyalty to the United States, a country of which he was neither a citizen nor eligible to become one. He was, therefore, not obligated to be loyal, in any way, save for by the dictates of the United States. Asian immigrants were not, in 1943, eligible for citizenship. They had never been eligible for citizenship. Only the American-born children of Asian immigrants were eligible for citizenship. It would be another nine years before Asian immigrants were eligible for citizenship.
And yet, he, with every other Japanese immigrant, as well as every Japanese American citizen, was forced to pledge his allegiance to the United States, or risk deportation. In order to pledge his allegiance to the United States, my grandfather had to simultaneously renounce his allegiance to Japan. And so he became: stateless. Citizenship was staged as a way for my grandfather to pass from statelessness into state-sanctioned identification. To become a citizen:
Or, in Agamben’s words: an immediately vanishing presupposition.
For the immediately vanishing presupposition that is the citizen, both the pledge and the allegiance, in the pledge of allegiance, are euphemisms for: assimilation.
But assimilation is a non-reciprocal, unrequited affair. It is not synonymous with integration. It does not denote a fair exchange. There is no compromise. An immediately vanishing presupposition is either incorporated, or suspended.
My grandfather told the FBI that he believed Japan was HELL. He said, I don’t want to go back to Japan and I wish that they would give me a gun to go and fight Japan. In other words, he did not want to go back to Japan, but he would if given a gun.
This is the moment, for me, in which his corpse first started to show through his skin.
The FBI continued to check up on him for ten years after the war. They visited his photo studio in New York City, Bryant Park, southeast corner, every year, for ten years, until 1955, which was also the year he became a US citizen.
His corpse and its burgeoning production were manifold.
He had Alzheimer’s for 15 years. This is when I came along. As I was beginning to form my sense of reality, he was troubling it. Everything about him was mysterious and strange. But also: he was the only person in my family who, maybe because of his deepening dementia, made sense, and with whom I connected. He introduced me to mysterious and strange conceptions of time. He overlapped landscapes. He looked out a window in North Carolina and saw, for example, the streets of Los Angeles. He saw people that were not there and did not see people who were. He called people the wrong name. He wandered into the woods and got lost. He sang to animals, etc. He was to me and my young mind the quintessential storyteller. I did not realize then that the magic I perceived was in fact a manifestation of a degenerative disease.
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The only thing I remember him ever saying about Japan was this one memory he had of growing up in Hiroshima. The memory, in his voice, was this:
When my grandfather died, I washed the feet of his corpse.
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By the way, many people, including Japanese American citizens, refused to pledge their allegiance to the United States. Which means also, because of the traditionally coercive nature of American false dichotomies, that they were implicitly refusing to renounce their allegiance to Japan, even where there was none. This is true even of Japanese Americans who had never been to Japan, who knew very little about it, and did not speak Japanese. They resisted the loyalty question altogether.
Some of the camps and isolation sites functioned specifically to incarcerate people who refused to pledge allegiance. They were chained and transported in the backs of trucks even further into the infernal desolation of unknown America. Their barracks, their rooms, their cells, got smaller, they shrank, they were basically boxes.
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Did anyone read Rachel Aviv’s article in the New Yorker, The Trauma of Facing Deportation? It’s about a Russian refugee, a young boy in Sweden, who, upon learning that the Swedish Migration Board has rejected his family’s application for asylum, falls into a coma. Not a coma, exactly, and this is important: he is awake, just completely unresponsive. His name is Georgi. He’s incapacitated for a year. He doesn’t leave his bed. He eats and drinks through a feeding tube in his nose. His classmates come to visit. They come to visit, what? His body? His face? More or less a big stuffed doll version of their classmate Georgi? An effigy of the person they once knew … They stare at his face, into his eyes, like he’s underwater, floating. His face is a sundial. They watch the hours pass in shadows. He doesn’t respond. He is one of many hundreds of refugee children who have also fallen into this … trance, this state of suspension. The Swedish call these children apathetic. Like: apathetic children are being loaded onto airplanes and deported. Georgi’s doctor describes it as having fallen away from the world. Another doctor likened it to Michelangelo’s Pieta:
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The official diagnosis is: resignation syndrome. It is, at this point, a condition specific to refugees in Sweden. Roma and Uyghur children are the most vulnerable.
A year passes. The Migration Board finally grants asylum to Georgi and his family. It is not like a moment of magnanimity suddenly opened up in the bureaucratic process, but Sweden was forced to reckon with the fact that their immigration policies were producing what amounted to living corpses.
Resignation syndrome could be viewed, maybe fallaciously, as an astounding form of protest. Maybe also, even more fallaciously, self-determination. Self-determination in the negative: self-extermination. Georgi’s family could not stay in Sweden, but they also did not want to go back to Russia. Their situation was absolutely precarious. Georgi was, in a sense, the expression of his family’s precarious situation. His syndrome was sacrificial. But also: effigial. His condition occupied, or incarnated, concretized, the precarious transitional state into which he and his family had been plunged.
Georgi eventually emerged from his falling away from the world, and, regaining the ability to speak, described what had happened to him:
He said he felt like he was in a glass box with fragile walls, deep in the ocean. If he spoke or moved, it would create a vibration, which would cause the glass to shatter.
The water would pour in and kill me, he said.
I understood that it wasn’t real, he said. The glass wasn’t real. But, at that time, it was very difficult, because every move could kill you.
I was living there.
The way he describes it makes it sound like a place. Neither Sweden nor Russia but a precarious transitional state between nation-states and national identities. Every move could kill you, I was living there: a state of exception. But personalized, applied on a person-to-person, or rather, refugee-to-refugee basis.
Here is a photo of Djeneta and Ibadeta, which maybe you recognize from the article:
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Djeneta and Ibadeta are sisters from Kosovo. They are Roma. And they are refugees in Sweden. They are also living there, in resignation syndrome.
Self-determination in the form of self-sacrifice at the gates. Self-determination in the form of being sealed inside a glass box with fragile walls and plunged into the ocean. It sounds like a metaphor, but the refugee is describing where he was, where he went, and what he felt there.
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In The Drowned and the Saved, Primo Levi describes a certain type of phenomenal, or rather, anti-phenomenal, prisoner in Auschwitz, those prisoners who had completely surrendered their will to live. He calls them: the Muselmanner, the Muselmann.
Their life is short, but their number is endless, he writes; they, the Muselmanner, the drowned, form the backbone of the camp, an anonymous mass, continually renewed and always identical, of non-men who march and labor in silence, the divine spark dead in them, already too empty to really suffer. One hesitates to call them living: one hesitates to call their death death, in the face of which they have no fear, as they are too tired to understand.
He goes on to say: All the Muselmanner who finished in the gas chambers have the same story, or more exactly, have no story; they followed the slope down to the bottom, like the streams that run down to the sea.
The sea. Does the sea share, in any way, the substance of Georgi’s ocean? Georgi is in a glass box. The Muselmann is in bare life. No box, no glass, no mediation; the Muselmann stares out, blankly, with his body. And, as Levi writes, the Muselmann’s death is not death. Is that a way of saying they are dead before they die?
The Muselmann are shells. They are husks. They have so fully assimilated and been colonized by degradation and horror that they are beyond it. They have taken themselves out. It is unconscious. Theirs are preemptive corpses.
But they are also shadows: the shadows of those whose will to live, to survive, is still, despite everything, maintained. The shadows radiate insidious shame onto those who are still invested with the divine spark.
The Muselmann, Levi writes, was used to describe those doomed to selection.
Muselmann means, literally, Muslim.
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Agamben writes in his essay, We Refugees: The refugee who has lost all rights, yet stops wanting to be assimilated at any cost to a new national identity so as to contemplate his condition lucidly, receives, in exchange for certain unpopularity, an inestimable advantage.
He goes on to remind us that the first camps in Europe were built as places to control refugees, and that the progression—internment camps, concentration camps, extermination camps—represents a perfectly real filiation.
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Agamben wrote that in Auschwitz, people did not die; rather, corpses were produced.
Corpses without death, he wrote; non-humans whose decease is debased into a matter of serial production. (Remnants of Auschwitz, page 72)
Serial production: you begin to imagine, in addition to the horrors of mass murder, the wheels of ingenuity turning and picking up speed to produce some kind of invention, some kind of … product, and then that product, serially produced and indefinitely replicated, taking on a semblance of life, the semblance, the aura, of a kind of sentience or psyche or even humanity, with which human beings have the tendency, in their infinite madness, I mean sadness, to imbue even the most willfully inert and inorganic piece of garbage.
Because it is serial: it is perceived as being part of a clan, therefore communal.
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Here is a photograph taken by one of the Sonderkommando in Auschwitz:
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The Sonderkommando were prisoners in the death camps who were given the task of disposing of the corpses. Mass graves were dug. The Sonderkommando dragged the dead out of the gas chambers and threw them into the graves. The Sonderkommando were Jews. The photograph was taken through the window of a gas chamber. Covertly. It is the fourth of four photos, and the only one in which no people are visible. The photographs were smuggled out in a tube of toothpaste.
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According to Genocide Watch, genocide is a non-linear process comprised of 8 stages: classification, symbolization, dehumanization, organization, polarization, preparation, extermination, and denial.
Japanese American incarceration fulfilled 7 of the 8 stage of genocide. All except for: extermination.
Does that mean that Japanese American incarceration was unfulfilled genocide?
Genocide was a word coined by Raphael Lemkin, a Polish-Jewish lawyer, referring to the systematic destruction of an ethnic group, the Jews by the Nazis. Destruction has come to mean, through that example, destruction by killing, though other meanings have included: destruction by dispersal.
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Not only does democracy make each man forget his ancestors, it hides his descendants from him, and divides him from his contemporaries; it continually turns him back into himself, and threatens, at least, to enclose him entirely in the solitude of his own heart. That’s Alexis de Tocqueville, writing in the 1830s. He had been commissioned by the French government to travel to the United States and study its prison system. He ended up writing Democracy in America.
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People bristle when traumas or forms of oppression are talked about in conjunction with one another. As if it is more an act of comparison than stages on a non-linear continuum. But it feels important to go to the far ends of the continuum in order to see where things are situated.
I gave a talk on Inauguration Day at the Holocaust History Center in Tucson, Arizona. I talked about Japanese American incarceration in Arizona. Two of the largest camps were in Arizona, incarcerating 15,000 and 20,000 people, both on active Native reservations. The audience was comprised of Japanese Americans who had been incarcerated; an eighth grade class from the Paolo Freire school; poets and writers and friends and strangers; and lastly, Holocaust survivors.
I talked about how incarceration was not a military necessity, but an expression of white anxiety and rage. I talked about how it coincided with and directly influenced the policy of assimilation of Native Americans known as: termination. I talked about how it was a project of economic exploitation, how the Japanese Americans were instrumentalized in colonizing the west, indigenous lands in particular. And I talked about how it was a project to make legible, to the white imagination, a particular group of immigrants and their citizen children and grandchildren.
The Japanese were conceived of as an undifferentiated mass of untrustworthy aliens mindlessly aligned with the enemy. They were propagandized as vermin, vipers, cockroaches, rats, primitive, subhuman, at first, then, after Pearl Harbor, superhuman, though super- and sub- amount to the same thing: capable of infiltrating, by any means, the sanctity of clean (aka white) space, then multiplying and becoming uncontrollable.
An editorial in the February 2, 1942 Los Angeles Times stated: Perhaps the most difficult and delicate question that confronts our powers that be is the handling—the safe and proper treatment—of our American-born Japanese, our Japanese-American citizens by the accident of birth. But who are Japanese nevertheless. A viper is nonetheless a viper wherever the egg is hatched.
Here is a viper:
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Here is another viper:
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And another viper:
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And another viper:
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And another viper:
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And another viper:
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And two more vipers:
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Vipers, cockroaches and rats are excessive, but more importantly, un-exploitable. They trouble capitalization. They are useless. But, because they are also excessive, they are inflated as symbols of madness and abjection. Their very existence disrupted the narrative by which white Americans arranged their fantasies.
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A brief note on the use of the possessive our:
Our American-born Japanese, our Japanese American citizens. When the camps were closed and the Japanese Americans were removed back to their communities, which, for many of them, were not the same communities they were forced to leave behind, the American people feigned compassion, sometimes even outrage, by repeating the possessive our:
It is a shame what happened to our Japanese friends and neighbors.
Pay close attention to the possessive our, and who is using it.
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The Japanese American concentration camps were not death camps. But incarceration was a matter of serial production. The camps produced what I consider to be a socially significant kind of corpse. The camps produced: citizens. Even though 2/3 of those who were incarcerated were already citizens, their citizenship was conditional and probationary, as it was contingent upon the comprehension and benevolence of the dominant culture. But comprehension is capricious. And benevolence is mercurial. The dominant culture devised a way to convert the undifferentiated mass of untrustworthy aliens and vermin into legible, therefore usable, therefore controllable, capital. The conversion of human beings into human capital is synonymous with corpsification.
Citizenship is a particular kind of corpse: citizenship is effigial, that is: citizens are effigies—effigies of human beings and effigies of human being. Effigy: from the Latin for copy or imitation or likeness of someone or something, related to effingere, from ex-fingere: to mold, to shape, to finger:
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The mass incarceration of Japanese Americans was an attempt to mold, to shape, to finger, an effigy out of an entire ethnic population.
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Related also to the Latin word for fiction.
Look at this effigy of Saint Victoria, and how much she resembles Jesus in Michelangelo’s Pieta:
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And how they both resemble one of the sisters in Sweden:
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And here’s the effigy of Saint Francis Xavier, which resides in the mission cathedral in Tucson:
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The mission is on the Tohono O’odham reservation. Francis Xavier is known for being the first Jesuit missionary in Japan. Japan was called, by Xavier’s biographers, a vast chaos of superstition, which Xavier attempted to pacify and convert, to Christianity. He proselytized in Japan for two years, with little success.
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Effigies are surrogates for human beings. They require belief, or at least, a suspension of disbelief.
Effigies are a rehabilitation of the corpse, because effigies, unlike corpses, possess functional personalities that radiate a kind of warmth by which its witnesses—including its progenitors and beneficiaries—feel gratified. People can redeem themselves before effigies. Look at Xavier, for example, with his colorful blanket. He looks like he has a cold, like he’s taking a nap.
The conversion of human beings into human capital is serial production. It is a process. Exclusion, criminalization, eviction, incarceration; conversion, assimilation; reinstatement into fiction: citizen. The citizen, having proved itself through a series of tests—including pledges of allegiance, implicit vows to forsake language, culture, tradition, ancestry, mother and father and sister and twin sister, etc. in favor of an abstract, blanched, sovereign god—is then automatically enlisted to help run the machine by which the cycle perpetuates itself, ad infinitum.
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I’m not saying that citizenship is a fiction. Not entirely. But maybe the idea that my grandfather, would, by becoming a citizen, no longer have to anticipate the appearance of the FBI, was delusional. He did not create the delusion, but unconsciously or not, he colluded with it, by internalizing the ears and the eyes of the FBI. He became American, in the pejorative sense, which means, he un-became Japanese.
When reparations were paid out to the Japanese Americans (1990-1993), the first person to receive a check was Reverend Mamoru Eto, a 107 year-old first-generation man who was living in a nursing home in Los Angeles. He too was interrogated by the FBI. He too renounced his allegiance to Japan.
We’re not Japanese anymore, he said. We’re American.
Adding: There’s no other way.
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James Baldwin, writing in 1964, called America a loveless nation. The best that can be said, he wrote, is that some of us are struggling. And what we are struggling against is that death in the heart which leads not only to the shedding of blood, but which reduces human beings to corpses while they live.
This is from his essay, Nothing Personal. In it, he talks about more general afflictions with which America, as a force of willfully obtuse and reckless inertia, suffers: ignorance, an inability to trust, the refusal to bear witness, the foreclosure of thinking and feeling, etc., all of which are emotional bankruptcies that are perfectly necessary to and appropriated by and encoded in the development and maintenance of a serial producing security state.
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This doesn’t have a happy ending. But I’ll punctuate the unhappy ending with a smile:
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I used to sleep with this photo. A photocopy: I didn’t hold it, I just placed it in my bed, under my pillow or under my head.
My grandfather’s corpse, my grandfather’s grave, my grandfather’s effigy.
On his way to citizenship.
Here is what he was doing:
The prisoners (suspected Fifth Column terrorists) at Fort Missoula put on a play. Other prisoners, the guards, the staff, even the townspeople were invited. The men chose Madame Butterfly, a play originally set in Nagasaki, though more universally in the colonial imagination. A young United States Navy lieutenant falls in love with a fifteen year-old Japanese girl named Cho-Cho. My grandfather, the youngest prisoner, was chosen to play Cho-Cho. The Lieutenant asks Cho-Cho to marry him. She says yes. She converts to Christianity. When her family finds out, they denounce the marriage, and disown Cho-Cho, which only strengthens the bond between her and the Lieutenant. They marry and immediately after, the Lieutenant leaves for three years. Cho-Cho dutifully waits. One day a letter arrives: The Lieutenant has married an American woman. Cho-Cho writes back: But I’ve given birth to your child, you have to come back, I would rather die than be abandoned. The Lieutenant comes back, but with the American woman. They have come to take Cho-Cho’s son. Cho-Cho never sees the Lieutenant, but meets the American woman, and reluctantly agrees to surrender her son. She gives her son—her half white, half Japanese son—an American flag, then takes a knife and slashes her throat.
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brandonshimoda · 7 years
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PDFs on Japanese American incarceration
Carleen Yates, Kali Kuwada, Penelope Potter, Danielle Cameron, and Janice Hoshino, Image Making and Personal Narratives with JapaneseAmerican Survivors of World War II Internment Camps
Donna K. Nagata, Jackie H. J. Kim, and Teresa U. Nguyen, Processing Cultural Trauma: Intergenerational Effects of the Japanese American Incarceration
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