Juliana Spahr in/on Hawai`i: _well then there now_

Last Fall I taught an honors composition class, which focused on place-based writing. One of our texts was Juliana Spahr's "Dole Street," an essay she wrote in 2001 about the street on which she lived, which runs through the makai (ocean, south) side of the University of Hawai`i, where she taught. "It's amazing that someone who had lived here for such a brief time learned so much about this place," said one student who has lived here all her life. The essay is a marvel of observation, built from a question: what is the history of the street I live on? Out of that question came others: what is my place on this street that I live on? What is my place in the history of what this street means to Hawai`i's history? I begin to feel the force of Spahr's characteristic repetitions in my own syntax. This is her fourth book about Hawai`i, and the one I like best. The others are Fuck You-Aloha-I Love You (Wesleyan, 2001), This Connection of Everyone with Lungs (University of California Press, 2005), and The Transformation (Atelos, 2007). well then there now is published by Black Sparrow (2011). The book has been reviewed in the Honolulu Weekly by Shantel Grace.

Spahr's essay "Dole Street," collected in this volume, is built of narrative history, photographs, personal memories, stories told about place by Hawaiians, immigrants, settlers (more on that last word in a moment). There is a schematic map of the street that reminds me of the image puzzle in The Little Prince. Instead of a snake who has swallowed an elephant, however, this map shows a snake swallowing Honolulu, from St. Louis Heights on one end, to Maryknoll and Punahou Schools on the other. The elephant in the room is what it means to be a white schoolteacher in Hawai`i: "As the stereotypical continental schoolteacher, I need to think about how to respect the water that is there," she writes, "how not to suck it all up with my root system, how to make a syncretism that matters, how to allow fresh water to flow through it, how to acknowledge and how to change in various unpredictable ways" (49).

The best teaching often involves little more than pointing one's stereotypical teacher-finger and asking questions. Here, look at this place you think you know and find out its history, its ecology, its names. While tourism gets a bad name, and for good reason, there's something beautifully touristic about looking at the place you live in with fresh eyes--and then doing the non-touristic hard work of finding out what you've looked at. It's a move from looking to seeing, not one from looking to taking. That's what Spahr tells us throughout this essay and this book.

Asking what this means matters.
And the answer also matters.


But back to that word, "settler." Near the end of "Dole Street," Spahr takes issue with a syncretistic view of Hawai`i (the happy multi-culti view that everyone mixes and gets along, which the tourist bureau propagates): "It is that Dole Street mainly tells a certain history, a history of how the arrival of western education and its separations and refusals to mix came with and was propped up by settlers who came mainly from the continent and their powers" (49). And then the clincher: "It tells an old story, which is also a current story."

Yes and no. Let me historicize a bit. The power of the word "settler" (more powerful to me than to a reader unfamiliar with Hawai`i, no doubt) comes with a long story attached to it. Spahr lived in Hawai`i from 1997 through 2003, spending 2001 in New York City. The Acknowledgments to her book page tells us where her work from that time was published, but there are no dates, except for mention that "Some of We and the Land That Was Never Ours" was reprinted in Best American Poems of 2001 (ironic considering its content). It might bear saying that she wrote her Hawai`i pieces while she was living here. "Dole Street" was published for the Subpoetics collective (selfpublish or perish, it was called) in 2001. This would be five years after Haunani-Kay Trask's well known remarks to the MELUS conference, which was held in Honolulu in 1997. In that address, Trask shifted the operating paradigm in Hawai`i from one that privileged "locals" (for the most part non-white people born and raised in Hawai`i) to one that privileged native Hawaiians and declared that haole and Asians were all "settlers." The first concept was made current by the Bamboo Ridge group (founded, 1979), and the second by `oiwi journal (founded, 1998) and other publications. This speech inspired Candace Fujikane and Jonathan Okamura to collect essays on Asian Settler Colonialism, a text that is used often in English department classes to this day. That text, with less rhetorical panache than Trask's speech, ordains that everyone who came to Hawai`i, whether to own a plantation or to work as contract labor (or as a refugee from the Khmer Rouge), is responsible for the ills that have befallen Hawai`i and for keeping Hawaiians from being sovereign in their own islands.

It's important to think about power, history, race, class. But the Asian settler colonialism argument would not be so powerful if it did not leave out so much out. While it has caused everyone I know here to think and rethink their lives, it paradoxically dehistoricizes Hawai`i and the literature of Hawai`i in ways that mask change. More significantly, it has worked against the creation of alliances across categories, especially racial ones, but also class differences. By making politics a question of blood quantum, it ignores our (inclusive) urgent need to come together in opposition to military build-up, environmental destruction, houselessness, the third-worldization of Hawai`i. And against globalization. The UHM campus displays a huge banner in front of the main administration building welcoming APEC to Honolulu. That is a problem for all of us to tackle.

Spahr's book replays many of these arguments, without explaining them for the reader outside of Hawai`i. Her arguments waver between extremes. Her sonnets on blood take both sides of the debate, showing how everything is interconnected, but also castigating "settlers" (including her and her partners) for "bunkering." "And because we could not figure it out bunkering was a way for us / to claim what wasn't really ours, what could never really be / ours and it gave us a power we otherwise would not have had / and and we believed that this made the place ours." This comes before the very end of this sequence, exquisite in its ambivalences: "this place was not ours until we

grew and flowed into something other than what we were we
continued to make things worse for this place of growing
and flowing into even while some of us came to love it and let
it grow in our own hearts, flow in our own blood. (29)

The enjambment is telling: "what we were we / continued to make things worse." Were the second "we" to fall to the next line, it would be easy: "we continued to make things worse," which is part of what she's writing. But "what we were we" is a crucial question, too, and a more surprising one. That's the question. Are we we because we belong to one or another group, or because we care about this place. So often one's desire to participate in group 2 gets blocked by one's perception that groups 1 matter more.

But I don't think that is the final view, or even the majority view, certainly not when I take my kids to soccer or baseball or hula practice and feel the pull of a larger community than that of the university or the anger in the voice of a father berating his kids, or people yelling insults at one another. All of these happen, but "we" are also welcomed into community, if we enter it on its terms. Which we will we be also provocatively shuts out the possibility of "I." The "I" is lyric, but it is also a bunker, I think I hear (want to hear) Juliana saying to me. Rewrite the lyric as a we and we're getting somewhere. Especially if "we" is that difficult thing, a hard-earned syncretism.

Another essay, "2199 Kalia Road," gets at the conflict between private ownership and beach access in Waikiki. There's an admirable playfulness here; Spahr writes that she liked to "indulge in the myths of Waikiki as much as possible" and to suggest visitors drink a mai tai at the Halekulani, otherwise the villain in this piece. (This reminds me of Charles Bernstein who, on catching sight of the old Tahitian Lanai bar in 1992, exclaimed, "now here's the real Hawai`i!") She gets at the many things missing from the Halekulani's presentation of itself to its temporary residents, including the seediness of its surround. She tells us that the beach has been renamed Gray's Beach from the original Kawehewehe, "which means the opening up." She tells us how nostalgia sells. But she also moralizes. The "fellow working class midwesterners [wander] around with fake smiles on their faces." How are we to know the authenticity of a midwestern smile? The midwest from which these tourists flee is full of "awful midwestern rust and environmental decay" (115), where one presumes the frowns are real. And so it's not surprising that the centerpiece of this essay is a fairy tale in reverse, one that begins in happiness and ends very badly indeed, with a dead haole, pushed into the Ala Wai canal by a man with "anti-caucasian psychosis" (120). In the fairy tale (and like a fairy tale), people are divided into neat binaries. Dillingham is "an evil man," while "now there are two sorts of people associated with Waikiki[,] those who sign deals in the spirit of the Kewalo and live the way of the dredge". . . and those who live the way of the watershed as much as they can" (120).

Yes, Hawai`i often seems to live according to fairy tales, whether those that govern the tourist industry's propaganda, or the one in which the wicked witch of Dillingham is thrown in the canal and destroyed in the very place he (or someone with his skin color) had dredged. I applaud Spahr for offering up these narratives about this place. Her observation and her reportage are wonderful. Less compelling to this reader are those moments when she falls into a previously charted narrative about the role of the "haole" in Hawai`i's history. That's a hard one to think your way out of, but I hope some of us can begin to do that work, make things rather than feed the binaries of inside and outside.

Last weekend I thought I detected a shift in the tectonic plates that compose Hawai`i's literary world. At a reading of "native voices," organized by Craig Santos Perez and Brandy Nalani MacDougall, there was no mention of settlers, no visceral bitterness. The anger there was (and is) folded into erotic narratives (by No`u Revilla, for one). The force of the literature and orature came from within. There were links being made between Pacific Islanders, if not others. There was power there, and it was not the power of division, but of making, joyful making. This is not to say that anger has been overcome, or that it has no role in changing this place. Everyone but everyone in Hawai`i is always already angry about something. But it is to say that things may be happening that push us past the colonial/post-colonial/neo-colonial moment and into a new place, where literatures--whether native or Asian or white--can operate without constant fault-finding.

__________

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"I AM SURPRISED WHEN THE SAME SEASON RETURNS": Albert Saijo in Volcano

[Albert Saijo at 71, 1997]


“Star-crossed sideshow (misheard for Saijo)”: I remember reading that phrase at a Van Gogh's Ear launch in Paris, off the Champs Elysee in November 2002, after saying it alluded to the poet Albert Saijo. After the reading, a man came up to me and handed me his address; said he'd known Saijo's sister when she was Lew Welch's secretary. A couple of years later I handed the address to Albert as he sat beside his wood-burning stove in the cottage he had built himself. The cottage sits near the end of a rutted road in the rain forest that surrounds the active volcano, Kilauea.

The “sideshow” I alluded to was that of William Shawcross, whose book on the Nixon administration's murderous policies in Cambodia I was reading at the time. We would adopt our son Sangha the month after that poem was written. But unintentional allusions are as powerful as intended ones, and seem every bit as striking when the author has some years in which to become the intentional reader of her text. So it seems to me, rereading this memory card, that Saijo's treatment as "sideshow" to official narratives of Beat poetry (or any other kind) needs to end. He has a rightful place in the literary history of the last half-century. (His wife has said that Saijo is often asked to speak to graduate students who want to write about his work, but he turns them away.) There are recent mentions of Saijo in important books on Gary Snyder by Timothy Gray, and on Modernism and Asian-American poetry by Josephine Park. But still.

In Gary Snyder and the Pacific Rim: Creating Counter-Cultural Community, Timothy Gray makes the point that counter-culture was not cross-cultural: “Rarely did their [the Beats'] journeys into that space include conversations with Asian-Americans. Indeed, for all the talk about Asian religion and philosophy during these years, Albert Saijo (whom Kerouac disguised as the 'hepcat' George Baso in Big Sur, and Welch once referred to as a 'very swinging but repressed little Jap, really beautiful . . . with the open little moon face of the children of his race') and Shigeyoshi Murao . . . are the only Asian-Americans to receive much mention in the literature and popular accounts of the Beat era” (168). I will leave that language to speak for itself.

Saijo read at the University of Hawai`i Art Auditorium with Gary Snyder and Nanao Sakaki in 2000. Their approach to reading was dynamic, as they sat facing the audience, calling and responding to each other's work rather than reading from a fixed menu. The event called up all that is best and most problematic about the Zen tradition of American poetry (with Sakaki as spiritual cousin), its reverence for the earth, its reverence for a decidedly male tradition of poetry-making. Snyder was especially problematic on that score.

I forget exactly when my husband Bryant and I first visited Saijo on the Big Island. It must have been not too long after we were married in 1998, because we knew him before we adopted Sangha, and then Radhika, and took them to meet him. So it was the late 1990s. We visited, and talked for hours about things Albert should have known nothing about, but strangely did. He abhorred the internet, but not in knee-jerk fashion. So, while he didn't have a computer, let alone an internet connection, he had read computer magazines and knew whereof he disapproved. He talked about the internet, as he did so many things, conceptually. On a later visit, we noted that he had acquired a laptop—a relative had sent it to him, he said. For a time, he even had an email address that we knew, but it lapsed. Bryant speaks of Saijo as a man who is always present, always engaged, always sitting in his chair beside the stove, as the large windows let the rain forest into his cottage. "He belongs there," Bryant tells me.

Saijo is a peaceful man, though one senses a peacefulness that has been hard earned. The "author's note" to OUTSPEAKS is acrid in its references to President Roosevelt, who was responsible for imprisoning his family, and then drafting him into the segregated army. In his poem, “January 16, 1991,” titled after a date we know as the beginning of the First Gulf War, day after Martin Luther King's real birthday, Saijo writes:

I AM TEMPTED TO GET A TV SET—COLOR OF COURSE—12 VOLT—THE KIND JUST DRAWS 4 OR 5 AMPS—WANT TO SEE BLOODY SMASHUP IN COLOR—LOTSA BLOODY DETACHED YOUTHFUL LIMBS EYES EARS NOSES & TONGUES SACRIFICED TO DIVINITY—LOTSA MOTHER LIGHT EXPLODING ALL OVER DESERT LIKE NOVAS OF COMPASSION—WELL I GOT THE SWEET POTATOES BOILED FOR SUPPER—I GOT CHOPPED UP CHICKEN CORPSE UNFROZEN—THE GREEN BEANS ARE READY—BRING ON THE WAR (Outspeaks: A Rhapsody, 82)

(My students always thought the caps meant he was shouting; he says he always liked the big print books for people who can't see well, all I can say is that his voice was soft but carried weight.) In this passage, the lack of a television cannot save Saijo from witnessing--even participating in--the violence he would see there. Actually he would not have, as the Gulf War was pre-cleansed by the US government and media. Without ever playing a video game, however, Saijo would have understood what had happened, as military power postured as play, inverting the expected movement from war to war-game.

As a teenager, Saijo spent years in an internment camp at Heart Mountain, Wyoming. I find a photograph of him as a very young man, inspecting a camp newspaper, as another teenager turns the mimeo machine:




He spoke of that time as awful and yet strangely liberating to a teen allowed to wander the camp, set free from the usual ties of family and community. When I told him, circa 2004, that I was writing about internment poetry for a conference in Maine, he offered to send me writing by his mother, Misa Saijo, who had been an important haiku poet on the west coast. A large manila envelope arrived some time later, filled with manuscripts. In the short essay I wrote, I noted that she had written about almost everything except internment. No. She had written of that, too, but her internment writings had been lost, leaving her autobiographical writings with a significant gap.

Here, from my essay, which ended up in the Greenwood Encyclopedia of American Poets and Poetry:


The papers Saijo sent me, in a large manila envelope, offered an initial clue as to what was to come in my research on internment camp poetry. The writings by his mother, Asana Miyata Saijo (pen name Misa Saijo), are all from the 1930s and the 1950s and 1960s. There are no camp poems from the 1940s in the small collection. One essay tells a funny story about ticks in the camp, and concludes with the following lines: “How bathed in nostalgia are the memories / of that long ago camp life” (1956, Los Angeles), which hardly seems a final word on such an experience. In the short biography of the mother by her son, running just over 30 pages, printed (in the capital letters Saijo uses for all his writing), this absence is clarified. “HER HAIKU SOCIETY FLOURISHED AS THERE WERE POETS FROM ALL PARTS OF THE WEST COAST IN HEART MOUNTAIN – UNFORTUNATELY ALL HER WRITINGS FROM THESE CAMP DAYS WERE LOST IN THE MOVES MY PARENTS HAD TO MAKE AFTER LEAVING CAMP – HEARTBREAKING.” Saijo’s barely suppressed conflation of the name, Heart Mountain, with the “heartbreaking” nature of his mother’s loss, speaks volumes about the silences that surrounded the internment camp experience and its poetry for decades after they were closed by the US government. [end of quotation] Like many internees, Saijo fought in World War II in Italy. I like to imagine that he crossed paths with my mother, who was in Italy then, and who owned boots given her by "one of the Neecy boys," as she called them. I'm not even sure she knew that the word was Nisei.





Those big capital letters do appear loud on the page when set into type. In their original form, they were not “set” but “pencilled” into letters that illuminate (in the many senses, textual and otherwise, of that word) the words. Juliana Spahr reviewed OUTSPEAKS for Tinfish 6 (1998), and noticed how much was lost in the transfer from handwriting to type in the Bamboo Ridge volume: “since I am a text fetishist, I can't let this review go by without complaining just a little. Saijo writes a visual poetry of scribble and revelation in different colored inks. There is an interesting reproduction on the cover and there are tantalizing black and white glimpses of the visual poems through the book but the book itself presents word by word translations of these poems. Saijo, I want to argue, is a new Blake and his readers deserve an illustrated edition. His manuscript pages are beautiful because they are messy yet readable” (Tinfish 6, 53).” Spahr writes about Saijo's participation in the tradition of Blake and Emerson; to that I would add Dickinson, especially in manuscript. While Dickinson's writings were not bardic, like Blake's, like Saijo's, her sense of paradox, alive in the scribbled forms of the handwritten words themselves, resemble his. Where she said "If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry,” he writes: “HERE IS A BOMB—IT IS MADE OF WORDS—READ IT & IT GOES OFF IN YOUR HEAD & BLOWS YOU AWAY” ( 77). Dickinson writes of herself as reader; Saijo of us as readers. That shift of address marks over a century of attrition on many assumptions, one of them being the ability of the poet to operate as a free agent. That they have both come to be associated with volcanoes is appropriate. Dickinson never saw one, but understood volcanic power; Saijo lives on top of one.

Saijo, like Dickinson, seems a solitary figure. He moved to Volcano in the early 1990s with his wife, Laura, and by the time we knew him, could not be teased out of his cottage. He would have us over and make us lunch and coffee and we would talk, but it was always in his space. He was quoted in the Honolulu Star-Bulletin in 1997, about the time his book was published and his life became more public for a while, as saying: “All you can do is do something with your personal life. Ask yourself how you are supporting what is happening out there and how can you take energy away from this madness.” When I asked two years ago if I could publish one of his books in manuscript, he declined. He was not interested in publishing any more; he was interested in writing. While I hope his later work finds a home soon (in its original handwriting), I respect that sense of privacy, that sense that the work is what matters, that the personal is more than solitary, and that readers ought not be a poet's first priority.

For, while it belongs in literary histories, Saijo's poetry does not reside in a particular time or category (he is not exclusively a Beat poet, or a Bamboo Ridge poet, though he is of course both of those). He is also a contemporary poet whose work crosses--transgresses--many boundaries, whether ethnic or temporal. Saijo's poems concern the particular lacks we now face head on due to our ravaging of the land, air, and the moral environment. And his voice is pitched to speak to readers beyond our time, as well. When I googled "Albert Saijo" I arrived at an odd map that claimed to tell me what authors other than Saijo a reader of his was likely to read. Walt Whitman was virtually alone on the map. Like Whitman, who still speaks to ferry-riders in Brooklyn, Saijo will continue to speak to anyone who cares to listen. His concerns will more and more be ours, and we ought to cup our ears, the better to hear him. His work is urgent.

O MUSE

YES I BELIEVE IN THE MUSE--LIPS PARTED
TONGUE CURLED BUT MUTE--BLANK EYE-SHINE
FOR EYES--O RADIOCARBONIC--HEART TO
HEART TRANSMITTER--NOT JINXABLE--NEVER
STINGY--BIOLUMINESCENT ONE--TELL ME THE
UNIVERSE--GUIDE ME TO THE LAST PERIOD





[photograph of ohia lehua taken on the Kilauea Iki trail, July 3, 2009]