February 8, 2020
Dear Brynn,
Reading your letter feels like you are holding my hand. I imagine us at Gila River, walking together to the half-circle monument of stark white pillars at the top of the rocky hill that overlooks the desert which once caged our grandparents. In this vision of us together, I can let my heart-space soften.
You remind me that we don’t have to carry memories in isolation.
It is easy to feel buried under silence. To not know what to say, to not know where to begin, to feel like we have to hold back our broken hearts and pretend that we do not carry trauma. But I want to believe that every time we tell the stories of our families, we open spaces of healing.
Is it possible to feel that you are both a friend, Brynn, a Yonsei sister, poetic healer, cousin, and auntie all at once? Your writing gives us a cocoon - warm and caring - in which to sit with the heavy truths of our family stories. Brynn, you are much kinder and gentler than me.
I feel rage still burning. I feel angry when I see the photo of my great-grandmother, Tsuwa Masumoto, standing inside the prison of the Gila River camp, holding a photo of a Japanese American soldier; her husband, my great-grandfather, next to her clasping a folded American flag. They are standing at the funeral of their eldest son, my great uncle. My great-grandmother’s face is stoic, and I am enraged. I feel rage when I try to imagine the weight of that flag and the hypocrisy of it.
I will admit that sometimes I also feel tired. Not tired of our community stories, not tired of seeking to understand, honor, and love our ancestors — I feel tired of not knowing if any of what we are doing is making enough of a difference. Is our memory work helping enough people find healing? How can we measure the progress we seek when the technologies of racism continue to exert their unwavering and crushing power?
Last summer, together we wrote a letter to the Editor of the Fresno Bee in protest of the migrant detention centers and the policy of family separation authored by the Trump administration. The words poured out of us — we said “We are great-granddaughters of immigrants and we see our grandmother’s faces in the shadows of today’s migrant detention camps.” We ended our letter proclaiming, “We long for absolution.”
I think what we were describing was racial melancholia.
David Eng says that “racial melancholia is mourning without end.” It’s as if we can’t stop grieving because the violence continues, the trauma still bearing down around us and onto us. So, where do we set our stones of memory? How do we find collective release? What is the antidote to racial melancholia?
At this moment, the path is not clear for me.
But when I pause, and breathe deeply, I feel stronger. I know that I have choices to make with how I live my life and to what I give my energy. Moments like this, getting to gather, share, and listen, and tell truth together, this feels like a release to me.
Perhaps, one antidote to our grief and pain is ritual, perhaps, even radical joy. I like sitting at my jiichan’s grave. Sometimes we laugh together. Every summer I bring him the the first ripe Sun Crest peach I find from the orchard he planted with my father. I like the smell of burning incense, I like folding cranes, I like laughing and messing up the dance steps under a harvest moon at obon. I imagine my great-grandmothers sipping something cupped in their palms (maybe tea or maybe sake?) — and exhaling in a moment of peace.
Ritual practices can return us to the space where we call upon our ancestors’ wisdom and set down the myth of the individual. We can open ourselves to hold each other.
I think of the way I feel when I listen to your poetry — how your words reach out across the distance and welcome me home. When I read your poems, I know the lilt of your voice, I can hear you reading. The space creates a cradle where I can set everything that I feel.
Keep going, please, dear friend. And remind me along the way, to do the same.
With love,
Your sister in arts,
Nikiko