July 27, 2019
Dear Valarie,
I begin, again and again, these letters to you. Starts and stops across these days, as I make my way from the desert and home to sea-level, to the howling heat and summer in the Central Valley—remember?
Today I had a vision: I was over me and listening, standing over my own body, pulling frayed, dark rope-strands by the handful from the heart’s cave, unlacing the bright green muscle, coaxing it out of hiding.
What is intimacy? Releasing ghost pains from an unanswerable era. Two pink wings floating over desert mountains.
I stored up the purest words / for making new silences
Valarie, all of the voices from the memory archive, the museums, and the daily news ricochet around my chest and the altitude compresses light. Is it safe? I no longer know who I am, or who I am becoming. Sometimes, I’m a tiny, spindly, golden tumbleweed in the floating world. Sometimes, I’m crushed lavender.
The night is shaped like a howling wolf
So I go again to your letters, on nights like these, and the dream you had of the two of us in the unlit elevator wearing black dresses, then plunging into water. You are my always-company. My memory when I forget myself, my friend and muse. “Don’t measure your success based on outcomes,” you said to me when I arrived here: “measure your success by your faithfulness to the labor.” Valarie, I have done that—returning again and again to the writing desk in the artist’s outpost, intuiting memory, coaxing story from tule reed and stone. Feeling through the dark and recording my dreams: the one where we’re dismantling whiteness with poetry; the one where I understand, finally, art as the eros-energy that leads to activism.
I recall with all my lives / my reasons for forgetting
Are the ancestors happy on the other side when I visit their paper lives? Are they hurting? As soon as I wonder this, I see my elders on the news standing before rows of hanging folded cranes at the war station in Fort Still, protesting with testimony, with memories.
Childhood clamors up from my cryptic nights
They were children when sent to the camps, the ones standing for morning justice, story-telling and standing firm against military guards, demanding an end to the brutality of human detention, and camp life, and living and dying in the harshest swamps and deserts.
Joy Harjo calls it mythic time: “moving, living, alive time,” which she also calls memory and, elsewhere, dreaming. When we stop prostrating ourselves to linear time, start praying to the circles shaping our every gesture, our intergenerational life-patterns and brightest dreams, does the game change?
In one version, I walk the Butte Camp built on the Gila River Indian Community’s sovereign land, I wander from barrack block number nine, where my grandmother’s family was held, to barrack block number ten, where my grandfather’s family was held, and I see the two of them—Alma and Mitsuo, father’s mother and father—talking through the desert heat. Perhaps she’s leaning against the wood in a long dress, clasping her hands, her hips shifted to one side, ankles lightly crossed. Perhaps he’s preparing to leave for training—off to the Presidio in San Francisco, having enlisted in the Military Intelligence Services to serve the country that imprisoned him and his family. Perhaps they are saying goodbye.
In another version, Alma is turning toward me. I am walking by her barrack and she sees me and reaches with two hands. The picture in my mind goes from black-and-white to color. I smell the salt-musk of olive trees, feel the burnt winds, the mesquite’s sturdy gaze. She takes my hands in hers and smiles.
Truth-seeking is a creative act.
Healing is resistance.
How can I heal anything if I can’t heal my own body? Or: how can I help to heal my community by healing my own body? Echoes of a question you have asked me—
Not knowing is the most intimate way
If you dare to frighten / the truth out of this old wall—
Val, I dare differently now. All of my eyes open, all of my senses attuned to what wants to be spoken and seen in this knife-edge of an instant, this gleaming now, this never-again moment, this birthed and birthing future.
In the third version—the future vision—I am with my daughter’s daughter in the garden where I was raised, the one where my sister and I played down the days of summer, where grandmother Alma sat on the concrete steps by the screen door, laughing herself to breathless tears.
The night is the color of the eyelids of the dead
All of my hair is silver-white. I love the night’s color. I love the many eyes threaded to mine.
Write me well.
Love,
Brynn
P.S.
What was it we wanted, watching the orchards from the front seat of my parked car, waiting for our futures to arrive—are we living into our desires? That was decades ago. I worry I wasn’t writing to you, my sister in the struggle, this entire letter. Not to you, but to history. Which is missing the point, in my mind, as you are alive. So tell me about the sea. About your children and poem-making and the shape of your daughter’s laughter—her reaching for the blue world. Tell me about the book—you on the brink of making public your story. How does it feel? Tell me about love: what have you learned? "I love you, tell me everything" is what we say to each other—and I shared this with Marion and Akiko and Pastor Saburo and my mother and father when we gathered in my kitchen last week to write letters. And I think it worked. So, yes. Tell me, dear one.
Who are you in the new year?
Who do you know yourself to be?
Love (again, always),
Brynn
Notes: Italicized lines in the above letter (unless noted below) are from Alejandra Pizarnik’s Extracting the Stone of Madness: Poems, 1962-1972. Joy Harjo’s quote is from a lecture on Native American women writers delivered at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics (thank you, Josh Rios, for this resource). “Not knowing is the most intimate way” is from the Zen text, The Book of Equanimity. “Truth-seeking is a creative act” and “Healing is resistance” are quotes from the community garden outside of the IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts in Santa Fe, NM.