Why I Write About Japan, with links, Part I
When Asked Why I Write Poems About Japanese Mythology
— A letter from the suburbs of Seattle to the suburbs of Tokyo
I will send my voices out over the water
where the same cedars that litter my coast
used to tower over yours. Once green,
your cities have nibbled forests into bonsai.
Our hinoki trees are shipped across the ocean
for your sacred temples now.
Postcards of volcanoes rise from a blue sky
in the background of our homes, we share
zones of tsunami, seasons of weeping cherry.
I read about women’s spirits
haunting peony lanterns in the forest.
Men follow them, fall in love
with women long dead. In shallow graves
rotted with tree roots, they still sing.
And here in pages hammered
from your language into mine,
sometimes with clumsy fists,
I have listened to the bush-warbler
mourn her children, the fox-wife’s eyes
in the darkness have warned me
of the growling of dogs and fire.
And when they disappear in silence,
it is not really silence. Their echoes
burn themselves into stone,
into the living screens of my childhood,
fill my mouth with ghosts.
Ghosts sit in my mouth and sing.
Our grandfathers were at war.
I grew up in the birthplace
of bombs that poisoned children,
burned holes into your sacred earth.
Their poison is part of me.
In the shelter of a shrine, a small girl
holds an umbrella. She becomes a white bird.
She whispers and a thousand cranes,
a thousand burning flowers
pile up inside me, spill out onto these pages.
Forgive me, ghosts, for my hard,
unbeautiful hands, for my tripping tongue,
as you demand a healed future, some untorn prayer.
This poem was written some years ago in response to a question from Marvin Bell about why I decided to write the book, She Returns to the Floating World. It was published in Redactions and will appear in the upcoming book.
The Japanese disaster has weighed on me heavily for the past week or so, and I thought I would write here a little bit about how my life has been tied to Japanese culture since my early childhood. Then I’ll post some links from other sources more useful and possibly more coherent and lovely than my own, including meditations on the quake by Mari L’Esperance and Marie Mutsuki Mockett.
Part I
My father was a robotics expert, and so, as a child living in California and Tennessee in the seventies, we had frequent visitors from Japan, mostly other robotics experts, and family trips to Japan happened on a regular basis – once I had measles so I couldn’t go, another time I had scarlet fever…etc…so although every other member of my family has been to Japan, I never got a chance to go. (This is still true!) My father and brothers would come back with stories, dolls, paintings, new words. I had a collection of Japanese picture books and folk tales, and occasionally, the wives of my father’s business associates would teach me how to make a dessert (I remember something with rice and red bean paste) or teach me how to say a few words in Japanese, or how to sing a Japanese song.
I watched my first Miyazaki movie, Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind, when I was ten years old, on an ancient primordial version of the Disney Channel. My brother and I sat transfixed, and watched the movie over and over again, its figure of a girl riding on top of giant caterpillars, a boy and girl trapped underneath a poisonous forest in a crystal cavern, frightening war figures and women warriors with metal limbs. This was my first introduction to Japanese pop culture, before we watched Transformers and Voltron and the other imports that would become popular in the eighties. At this same time, I read a terrifying book about the bombing of Hiroshima told from the perspective of a young girl (don’t remember the name of this novel, it was in our school library so I never owned it.)
I started to make the connection between the work done by my father at the neighboring Oak Ridge National Labs as a consultant for nuclear waste disposal methods and the bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima. (In case you’re wondering why I’m anti-nuclear bomb, anti-nuclear power, this set of incidents – watching Nausicaa, the book on Hiroshima, and early fourth-grade era research on nuclear pollution impacts – are probably key. And that grad-level class on Ecotoxicology I took during my Pre-Med days. Plus growing up with a Geiger counter in my basement and helping Dad edit papers on nuclear waste cleanup in high school, pretty bleak stuff in case you’re wondering.)
Part II to come.
Some links:
Marie L’Esperance’s meditation on the quake
Marie Mutsuki Mockett’s meditation on Japan from the NY Times
The Future on Nuclear Energy Around the World
My second book’s publisher, Kitsune Books, is donating a portion of their sales to the Japanese Red Cross
How is your April going? Are you doing anything fun for poetry month?
Tomorrow I’m going to the Agitprop poetry reading, and I’m excited. The only question: what kind of outfit goes with black-velcro-walking-boot casts? And I’ve made reservations – I’m going to the LA Festival of Books later this month. It’s a few days before my birthday, so I’m going to celebrate by visiting Santa Monica and other favorite LA spots along with the book festival.
Allrighty, today’s poem-a-day poem…[poof!]
On a more personal note:
I am happy to hear that in a week I will probably be walking again. The bones are healing nicely and the tendon too. The sprain in my right hand is healing up, slowly, but is getting better every week. I am so ready to go out in the sun and walk, walk, walk. The several-flights-of-stairs may still be a problem as I heal, but still, it’s getting better all the time, as the song goes.
With all the time not spent at physical therapy and doctor appointments, I have been reading, writing, reading, and writing. (Well, and a little movie-and-television watching: Vicky Christina Barcelona, it was great to see you!) I have been researching my childhood backyard, Oak Ridge National Labs, part of the Manhattan Project where the very first nuclear bombs were born, and the environmental damage it may or may not have caused (the DOE and EPA don’t see eye to eye on this one, and believe me, the local papers sure as hell won’t say anything negative about the city’s main employer.) So much about this place is still classified, and everyone who worked there forced to sign papers that basically forbid them from saying anything, ever, about anything, so it’s a bit frustrating – a lot of obscure scientific journals have been pored over. Suffice it to say there’s a lot of evidence but not a lot of full disclosure. Leukemia rates, thyroid cancer rates, radioactive white-tailed deer and swallows’ nests…tantalizing data but all leading up to…what?
Writing about my childhood is odd, too – I’m not, by nature, a nostalgic person, and I’ve never been much of a “confessional” poet, so my ability to reach back and conjure up stories and poems is flexing some of my unused writing muscles. In a not-at-all-metaphorical related fact, my childhood home – not only the two-story brick building but the sight of acres of roses, daffodils, lilacs and strawberries, oak trees and woods – hey, it might have been environmentally poisonous but it was still beautiful in that fertile, Southeast-river-and-mountain-valley way – has been razed to dirt. There is literally nothing left to sift through.
But I’ve managed to put together fifty-plus pages now, a new manuscript born into a world of too-many-poetry-manuscripts-and-not-enough-publishers-or-readers. Whispers of the oak trees, the odd neighbors, my childhood friends who were all the children of physicists from other countries – the Geiger counter my father always had out at all hours, his warnings about radiation exposure from snowmen – they are all ganging up on me, demanding to be heard.
- At October 14, 2008
- By Jeannine Gailey
- In apocalypse, Oak Ridge, Qarrtsiluni
2
A poem, “Oak Ridge, Tennessee,” with a little recording of me reading it, went up at Qarrtsiluni today. It’s the “Journaling the Apocalypse” issue, so check it out.
Hey, a blog post with real poetry CONTENT for once. Amazing, you say!
When I started writing poetry, really reading and trying to write “good” poetry (you know, trying to be better than song lyrics) I was eight years old. And I mostly wrote environmental/anti-nuclear war poetry with images of mushroom clouds and “boys in green raincoats.” I’m not sure exactly where this environmental stuff came from – possibly from living in the back yard of Oak Ridge, Tennessee (where they made and processed nuclear weapons) and possibly from reading Madeleine L’Engle’s Swiftly Tilting Planet (about averting nuclear war with time travel!) at an impressionable age.
But, as things went on, and I was chided by professors for trying to obviously to “say something” in our work, etc, the environmental stuff sort of dropped out of my writing. But suddenly, it is back.
It started with writing about Japan, and how Japanese anime is really created out of the shadow of the Hiroshima/Nagasaki nuclear blasts, and then about my father’s work as a high-tech cleanup consultant at various nuclear sites (including Oak Ridge and Fernald in Ohio.) It turns out I knew at a pretty young age that nuclear waste wasn’t easy to contain, protect people from, and certainly the term “Clean up” is awfully optimistic when you’re talking about radioactive waste with a multimillion-year half-life.
Now with my new book I’m writing about this again, more personally – like being exposed to cancer risks (did you know that folks within a ten-mile downwind area of Oak Ridge have a 53% risk of getting cancer, whereas most Americans have about a 5% chance at any given time? This was in my recent research, probably not available even ten years ago to people looking for explanations…) It’s a recurring theme in the short stories of Hakuri Murakami, people who get sick for vague reasons, an undercurrent of paranoia about genetics/the body.
The whole mythology of the X-Men and Heroes has been so fascinating to me, because it challenges us to think of the upside of things like mutagenics. I did a bit of research on PAI-1 deficiency, my own personal genetic mutation, and it seems that although the downside is pretty rough (it acts much like hemophilia) the upside is that studies in mice show that PAI-1 deficiency might have a protective effect against some tumors, cardiovascular disease, and diabetes. Although it has a negative effect in gram-negative pneumonia-catching (which could explain why I spent a few years having pneumonia all the time until I got an pneumonia vaccine.)
Anyway, I’m thinking more about how to incorporate my brain and heart into my poetry – keeping the work interesting artisticly and linguistically, but somehow also having a passionate message. Few poems that are explictly political are spectacular. But there’s got to be a balance. Trying not to write something because you are afraid it might be lame is not an excuse to not write something more ambitious socially.
I wasn’t afraid to write about feminist stuff – violence against women et al, and no one has really smacked me on the head about the content of my first book (although I do get the annoying student questions like “Why are you so angry at men?” occasionally. ) And I don’t want to be afraid to write about this enviro-stuff either. I understand it and I’m interested in it. Is that enough?
