Brandon Shimoda, Hydra Medusa

 

            These questions come to mind as I contemplate the intransigent, intractable void that hovers over the ruins of Japanese American incarceration. One element forming the void is the murders of Japanese and Japanese American men inside, outside, and on the perimeters of WWII prisons and concentration camps, murders that exist on and resonate through the continuum of the murder of people of color by state operatives/law enforcement in the United States. The void (shadow) is earth, sky, everywhere in between.
            Kanesaburo Oshima was shot and killed by a guard in the prison camp in Fort Sill, Oklahoma. Toshio Kobata and Hirota Isomura were shot and killed by a guard outside the prison camp in Lordsburg, New Mexico. James Ito and Katsuji James Kanegawa were shot and killed by military police in Manzanar. James Hatsuaki Wakasa was shot and killed by a guard in Topaz. Shoichi James Okamoto was shot and killed by a guard at the entrance to Tule Lake. These men are the most commonly cited, if they are cited at all. (An eighth man, Ichiro Shimoda, was also murdered, also in Fort Sill, but the circumstances of his murder are unclear. Shimoda’s friends suspected that because he witnessed the murder of Oshima, he was detained by the military police, and died in their custody.) There has been neither justice for nor legitimate reckoning with these deaths. The murderers (both individuals and the systems to which they were reporting) reaped the benefit of passing into oblivion. (“THE DESCENDANT”)

Lately I’ve been going through Brandon Shimoda’s most recent collection, Hydra Medusa (New York NY: Nightboat Books, 2023), a self-described continuation of his collection, The Desert (The Song Cave, 2018), a book I have only heard tell of. Hydra Medusa is a complex collection composed as a book of dreams and death, ancestors, parenting and desert stretches through a blend of essays and poems. “Death is what it took for us to be in each other’s company. But what kind of company was I?” he writes, two-thirds through the book. He writes of the incarceration of Japanese Americans during and around the Second World War, and of repeated murders and ancestors, and how lives can’t help but connect to each other. Hydra Medusa is a book on the living and the endless dead, seeking answers to questions that might be impossible to answer, or too individual to fully articulate. As he writes, early on, as part of the essay “THE DESCENDANT”: “What is an ancestor? I have been asking this question, the past few years, of descendants of Japanese American incarceration, many of whom are friends, some of whom are family, some of whom I have never met, but know through their answers. It is an ongoing question.” His is a book on ancestors and the dead and how and where responsibility lands; a cross-stitch of violence and memorialization, deserts and the spaces within which one not only occupies, but lives. He offers this insight, which I think a central point to anyone concerned with elements of extended family, genealogy or ancestors: “Ancestor worship is a process. The exact nature of the relationship between an ancestor and their descendant is always to be determined.” As he writes:

The ancestors, bedecked in robes of night
occupy a pantheon

We see ourselves in, imagine
ourselves

in the shapes
of sparest humility,

Hang me in the alcove, I say,
to the future faction
that might draw me out of the well

There is something curious about the way the non-fiction prose aims for the heart of his subject matter, while the poems write a bit more abstract, writing as a kind of outline around and occasionally through that same purpose. If the prose feels more direct, the poems write slant, attending as a kind of connector between and amid prose sections, comparable to the abstract sections of Terrance Malick’s film The Tree of Life (2011) (a narrative structure more recently put to film effect through Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer, as well). One could also compare this to the work of American poet Susan Howe: the call-and-response of her poetry collections that sit with opening essay and collage-poems as counterpoint of a larger, singular, book-length work. The difference of form isn’t merely used to open for another, or sit in opposition but through a sense of balance between. The structure allows for the possibility of pulling back to see a far larger context, one that suggests itself far larger and ongoing than what is possible within the bounds of even this single book.

The white cross on the hill of rocks
is a house without light
over the greenest fields in the valley

The virgin, embedded in rocks
prepared the white cross
with the attributes of lightlessness

that illuminate subterranean life

where the cross enters earth
children lay flowers

the cross turns at night
into snakes (“SAN XAVIER”)

 

P-QUEUE #14 : Revenge

Are we too bold to present this city, Sanctuary?

[17 January 2017, 2 days after MLK Jr day,

3 days before Inauguration of the Tyrant.]

Am I entitled to my father’s whiteness? Did I believe?

in his return, every scotomizing son to every MacArthur,

pipe and drape, pomp and puddle, replenishing from

boat, leap you from that leak, or lack and muddle,

white liberals here visa hack no safe return nor

safe passage, between venues, or famished strip tease,

adopt to basic frights, and you still want muster to

head of line privilege no white wants against garrison,

a garish rubber bullet, give me a recruiting narrative,

I can believe, in gush we trust, but tarry malevolence

so it does not factfire, your disguise as vacant homily

to rule of law, how to not flirt in white spcaes,

because collaborating sheriffs need not explanation

ache to book private prison, promise me reading

material for my vagrancy, service one white master

for another, and isn’t that what my master[s] is good for,

here chaw like covenant, I’ve returned. Agsubliac Pay!

is so much fun, to jig a brown dance on milky stage,

let’s do it twice,

let’s do it thrice? (Sean Labrador Y Manzano, “REBLANCHEMENT”)

Buffalo poet Allison Cardon’s first issue of P-QUEUE as editor is #14 (2017). For anyone paying attention, P-QUEUE has long been one of my favourite American literary journals [see my reviews of #10-13; #7-8; #5 here], and it appears annually through the Poetics Program and the English Department at SUNY Buffalo. Edited and produced by students as part of the program, it’s comparable to Concordia’s annual headlight anthology; unlike headlight, which attempts to focus on immediate students and graduates, bringing their work out into the world, P-QUEUE has always been more of a mix, allowing students and more established writers to meet and mix within its pages. Subtitled “Revenge,” Cardon ends her introduction to the issue offering that:

It should be clear that revenge is not the only thread weaving this issue together. And yet all of the pieces here do take up a related interest in reckoning: approaches that distinguish structural, historical, and personal accounts from the kinds of bookkeeping in which sunk losses are only to be forsaken, ignored, or forgotten.

The new issue features a wide array of writing and artwork by Sean Labrador Y Manzano, Stacey Tran, Laura Henriksen, Shayna S. Israel, Eric Sneathen & Daniel Case, Woogee Bae, Jocelyn Saidenberg, Brandon Shimoda and Adam Mitts. Highlights abound: I’m always fascinated by the work of Brandon Shimoda (despite being very behind on his work), and am curious about the forthcoming debut chapbook that Laura Henriksen has with Imp. The author of numerous poetry titles, and founding editor of KRUPSKAYA Books, Jocelyn Saidenberg is a wonderful discovery; a poet I hadn’t even heard of before this (which is my failing, obviously). Her poems included here, “from KITH & KIN,” meander and flow in the most incredible ways, writing out loops and twirls and line-breaks that somehow seem both straightforward and disjunctive simultaneously. I’m very keen to see the full project emerges, most likely as a full-length collection (I would suspect) down the road.

OCTOBER

fewer birds are bolder coming closer

as curiosity’s companion for light

to a dream place in that used to be &

is no longer a self interloped & poaching

            I did repair the hole in the rug

with the tools she’d given me

I did repair the breach with Bob

when horrible things happen

the smallest lapse an insult felt

but when intensity

lessens which is worse

to pause to remember to remember

            reading word disorder for order

humiliation for friendship for what

guarantor what author for Martial

making a book makes the book a debt

for its maker & that’s literal when

what costs grow augmented

or not towards the growers

of what may be matter

then I look with solicitude

& console the impossible