February 6, 2020
Very dear Brynn,
You write me this gift of a letter on a magical date, all twos or nothing, and everything together: 02-02-2020. When I was pregnant with Cyrus, the doctors in Taunton, Massachusetts, gave me the due date of 02-20-2002, though he was sculpted out of my womb four days prior. My grandmother, Kaneez Fatima, was born 02-20-1920. Whatever her due date had been, it occurs to me as I write to you that this month marks the 100th anniversary of her birth in Patna, India--the home she yearned for all her life, the home that I, her granddaughter, have never known.
“Due date”--what a term. Whose dues do we pay with our births? What is due us? What’s overdue?
You speak of memory, grief, and roots. You speak of home. Dear Brynn, Seer Poet, you speak it all.
Between the Asia of my birth and this American continent lie oceans of memory. Of who I was--as a child and young adult; an aspiring scholar and teacher, the daughter of teachers. When my father died in Karachi, on the eve of a visit to us in California, I questioned why I had ever left. But my father understood. His children left the place that he called home for the same reason that his father’s children left India behind to forge a life for themselves in the promise of Pakistan, a country carved into birth like my children.
You speak of moorings. Over thirty years in America--more time than I’ve lived on two other continents combined. Does this land moor me?
I must tell you of a time before my father died, when I became unmoored in America. I had earned that doctorate in Boston, mothered my firstborn, Maya, bought a home with her father. And then one Tuesday morning, when my baby was a year and four months old, and another was on the way, I showed up to teach my composition class, only to realize that there would be no class. Planes had crashed into the World Trade Towers in New York City, and the earth beneath our feet shook.
9/11 was not mine to mourn. I came from a Muslim country, and that made me the enemy. Enemy alien.
I was not allowed to mourn, but grief was mine. I grieved the lives taken and those left in ruins, but I also grieved for the loss, yet again, of home. What I remember of the days and weeks after the attacks is a chilling loneliness--the desolation of knowing that overnight we had become hypervisible and disgraced. Nobody stood up for us; it was too much to ask then.
Nobody but the Japanese American community. I know that, as an organization, the Japanese American Citizens League has its own vexed history vis-á-vis the Internment of World War II. But in the political wilderness of American life post-9/11 the JACL’s lone voice, cautioning against racial profiling, reminding us of a dark history, and championing all our civil liberties, served as the moral center of gravity for America. That voice, urgent and courageous in a climate of fear, kept me, and others like me, from feeling utterly outcast and bereft. Please be sure to convey this to our Elder, Saburo Masada, whose wrenching letter laments that Japanese Americans didn’t voice their solidarity with African Americans in the aftermath of World War II. Sometimes, we do learn from history, and the debt we owed to one community we pay to another.
But to answer your question: what moves me *is* what moors me. Memory, for one. The ties that bind my grandmother to Maya and Cyrus, whom she never knew. The connective tissue of history that infuses India, Pakistan, England, and America’s two coasts into my todays. California, where my mother is now re-rooted, completing the journey my father might have made. This beautiful-ugly city of Fresno, where you, Brynn, have deep roots, where I’m a transplant, where I have seen my children grow, and my students flourish. Fresno, which forgives my encroachment on its fig orchards, takes me in, allows me space to give what I have that’s worth giving, a chance to pay my dues.
"You have been paid for,” Maya Angelou tells us. Yes, my ancestors have paid for me with their rootings and uprootings, their many sorrows along the way. But, Brynn, your Grandmother Alma and your Grandfather Mitsuo, who met where they were interned, “stolen bodies on stolen land,” as your letter to Brandon says--your grandparents have paid for me, too.
From ancestral Asias to this patch of earth where we love and labor, even have our little office-homes in the same hallway--yours less cluttered than mine--we are here now, Brynn. You and I, teaching, writing, ever learning together. I observe with wonder the way you move through our shared work-world--sage eyes, electric energy, and a heart that beats with every grace. Our friendship, wrought earlier by Nikiko’s strong and beautiful hands as you launched the Yonsei Memory Project together, is among the most treasured ties that moor and move me.
With love and gratitude for your letter, and for the harvest of letters gathered here,
Samina