Maged Zaher, train & bus stories, & the corporate person

It's the first of March and I'm sitting in a train station in Olympia, Washington reading a poem by Maged Zaher from Portrait of the Poet as an Engineer (not his Tinfish book, with Pam Brown). The poem is titled, "Forget the bus take the train," but the funny/not-so-funny truth is that I have just realized that the train I was taking to Portland is not running and we're about to be put on a bus, when that bus arrives, that is, through Seattle traffic, and the snowy fog that is general throughout the NW on this day. The young women who dropped me off at the station, two of them students of Leonard Schwartz at Evergreen State College, the other a friend of theirs who heard I love Lakoff & Johnson's Metaphors We Live By and loves it also, had just been telling Greyhound horror stories, the ones they heard (a beheading on a bus in Canada) and those they experienced (one of them had been the only person awake on a bus who noticed the blow job going on behind her seat). And so here I am, reading Maged's poem, contemplating the train I cannot catch, and the bus I will have to. The poem is about globalization, beginning from a line about the KKK playing reggae in the background (ah, Bob Marley in a hood, David Duke smoking ganja). Talk about dread. But I am stuck very locally in Olympia, meaning to get to Portland and then, only then, the next morning to take two planes to Hawai`i, crossing a wide swath of ocean to get home. That would also prove difficult, as planes were delayed, the wind raged in San Francisco, other planes intended for some of us took off before we arrived, and the rest of the story we all know. All's well that ends at home.

When last this story ended (see the last post!), I was in Portland taking a walk with Kaia Sand and her daughter, Jessi, a walk that followed the form and content of her Tinfish book, Remember to Wave. Since then, dear reader, I have traveled to Seattle and then to Olympia, talking about dementia and poetry and memory as I went, meeting old and new poetry friends, seeing family. I learned several things along the way. It can get damn cold in Seattle. One can give a satisfying reading in a bookshop the size of a postage stamp, if that stamp is as lovely as the one called Pilot Books. Students and recent college grads are lively, intellectually engaged people, even if, as one told me, his generation is apathetic, knowing as they do that there's very little out there for them in this economy. Leonard Schwartz's students called me on some apparent paradoxes in Dementia Blog, including the need to remember, even as memory is not set down in linear fashion. That's a paradox I can live with, but it's worth thinking about consciously: that history matters even if it's episodic, like memory, rather than schematic, linear narrative, which is more constructed than memory. Another student said I seemed more passionate about politics in the book than about my mother, which startled me, though I had just said that I wanted to keep myself out of the story. It's not as significant that I went home and wept than it was that my mother's mind was falling apart. But then I realized that it was my mother, so engaged in politics herself, who made me passionate about such things. And so the link was there: passion about politics is also passion over my mother's decline. When she began to care less about politics, we should have known.

Blogs are episodic, so rather than writing back into this post, I will go on. Talking to Maged Zaher was fascinating, not just because he became a minor celebrity at Elliott Bay Books for being Egyptian ("is it ok to be a single woman in Egypt?" asked a much older woman), but also because he spoke about what matters to him as located outside others' interest in him. So he's not so interested in his poetry in writing about being an Arab or in his religious background, which is Copt, but he IS interested in the corporate world, how one navigates it. (He worked for Microsoft and is still in software.) "The other part will always be there," he said to me, "because it has to be, but that's not my focus." Having just ineptly quoted someone back to himself yesterday after a talk, I hesitate to quote anyone ever again, but that's as close as I can get for now to what Maged said. I miss you too. And by the way, how's corporate America treating you? ("Love letters from the middle class," 9). Or, less directly: Cyber-proletariat of the world, chat freely. (15). Cyber shall either set us free or quash us, brain-dead us. Or/and it shall do both. That Maged's poems are obsessed with the Organization and Sex is telling (and sometimes showing). These two intimate spheres connect within and without us. If corporations are people, should they not be permitted to marry? Do we not in fact marry the corporations we work for in a profound and intimate, if usually dysfunctional, way? Usually we wonder what language our bilingual friends love in, but Zaher turns that question on end, only to turn it back on its head a line later in "What if we offended your employees" (75-6):

What language do you do business in?
This landscape was once offered to Eros
And he declined it citing lack of ambition
Later he ventured in Persian carpets and bridging
intellect and passion
I wasn't sure what to do then with the love poems
I inherited
My friend said "no worries, I will get you a date
With the zoo's CIO"
She likes poetry, and she won't test your character
Yet give you plenty of coupons

In 1979's As We Know, John Ashbery ends "The Other Cindy" similarly, linking the corporation to "submission" of various, suggested and suggestive, kinds:

The one [city] with the big Woolworth's and postcard-blue sky.
The contest ends at midnight tonight
But you can submit again, and again. (LoA, 691)

Whether it's Woolworth's or Microsoft, buses, trains, or planes, the questions stay the same, getting more intense each week that Egypt and Wisconsin remain in crisis, and Ohio, and Indiana. So we return to Maged, a citizen of the world--or at least of Cairo and Seattle--whose interest is in the corporation more than in national cultures or religions. He may be on to a tectonic (yes, invoke nature to get away from nation-states!) shift in poetics, as well as in global politics. If our vocabularies have done this to us, who better to focus our attention than a second-language poet who dedicates his book "For the Arabic language" and then writes it entirely in English?

A side-note: we both laughed when Maged told the story of how he was flying into Cairo on the worst day of the Egyptian revolution--the day of camels and horses and whips--and the pilot decided to land in a safer place. That place was Beirut.




[a demonstration in front of Nordstrom by Libyans in Portland, Oregon, February, 2011]

I am now back at my desk, at my mac mini, and Bryant has loaded Donald Rumsfeld's memoirs on our new iPod touch. The world is poetry, the institution, and unknown knowns again, family and politics tangled, but last night's windstorm pruned some branches from the real trees.

An Albert Saijo memory card: on taking Kaia Sand's North Portland walk

The day before yesterday, I took the walk Kaia Sand developed for her Tinfish Press book, Remember to Wave. The walk begins near Portland's Expo Center, now the site of roller derbies and expositions, but once a center that housed Japanese Americans before they were sent inland to be "interned." I wrote about the walk a couple days back (scroll down!). As I left Portland today on the Amtrak Cascade, we passed near the Expo Center before crossing into Washington State. The ride up the coast is beautiful; near Tacoma you feel nearly as if you are scooting across the water. There are islands, ferries, birds. The ride ends in Seattle in the shadow of the baseball stadium. Oh to see Ichiro play in his American home town!

Here is a memory card I wrote in Portland, which riffs off a phrase from Albert Saijo's Bamboo Ridge book, OUTSPEAKS. It's about our walk, and about how a knowledge of history can alter, or at least complicate, our view of the natural world. It's about signs. And it's about a little girl of whom I'm very fond who accompanied us in her off-road pink roller skates; according to Kaia, Jessi--nearly nine--knows the walk as well as anyone. It's also about the deafness of signs, those that cannot respond to us either by speaking or by taking in the sounds the present offers up. History is not abstract; it is a white noise. The journey from Saijo in his youth to Ichiro in his clatters in one's head like wheels on steel tracks.

Saijo's line comes from his bio note; as a teenager, he was interned at Heart Mountain with his family. Henry Kaiser's creation of Vanport is lauded on a sign sponsored by Kaiser Permanente; its tone differs considerably from other accounts of the housing area located on a flood plane, where many workers died in 1948. You can read Kaiser Permanente's narrative here, as well. The site now offers shelter to wildlife, as to golfers and dog walkers with their eager animals.

BEAUTIFUL BIG SKY COUNTRY HIGH PLATEAU SURROUNDED BY MTS. The girl in pink roller skates found a railroad track leading inland from the Expo Center toward Minidoka. She worries about ducks who live in the water against which we're warned. Silhouetted bellies, an arc of geese under cloud, marshland reclaimed from mortal flood. The sign tells us workers got health care. It sits beside a dog park; a deaf woman tells us police are claiming the park for a training center. She's going to write a letter. Positively no trespassing, reads another sign. When someone's certain she remembers, the psych professor says, she's wrong. When I talk to the deaf woman, she responds. I cannot talk to Henry Kaiser on his sign; history renders him deaf, me dumb. He looks out at the grass, the dog walkers, the few tourists. He cannot hear the truck route, or the trains.

For Jessica Wahnetah

--25 February 2011

The dangers of the dangers of appropriation & etc.: teaching _Remember to Wave_ by Kaia Sand

Sins of commission and omission stain the literary history of Hawai`i. When Hawai`i became a state in 1959, James Michener had the novel to seal the deal; he also introduced A. Grove Day's anthology, A Hawaiian Reader, still available in bookstores and (most tellingly) at the airport. This anthology divided Hawai`i's literature into modern and "Ancient" works, moving from Robert Louis Stevenson and Jack London into the afterthought of the creation chant, the Kumulipo. If not, strictly speaking, an omission of Hawaiian orature, this certain qualifies as a back of the bus move, one that has not been remedied by Mutual Publishing in the 50 years since.

Each generation has its renaissance, a rebirth out of the omissions (or commissions) of the generations before. Thus Bamboo Ridge was formed in the early 1980s to assert the presence of local literature, or poetry and fiction written mainly by Asian writers (though early on they published more Hawaiian material than is popularly acknowledged). By the mid-1990s, the need for venues for native Hawaiian literature drove the founding of `oiwi.

Brevity may be the soul of wit, but fails to do justice to the narrative I've just compressed into the size of a literary historical haiku. Suffice it to say for now that there are hot spots in discussions of literature here, and that these hot spots have histories. Yesterday I met with a hot spot where I did not expect one, namely in teaching Kaia Sand's Tinfish Press book, Remember to Wave, which I've blogged about elsewhere and whose description you can find on our site, here. Kaia's project was to walk Portland, a city she's lived in most of her life, and to find its secret histories. As she sits at the Expo Center watching a Roller Derby match, she realizes that this is the place where Japanese Americans were rounded up to be interned. Then she discovers that, at nearly the same time, a part of Portland located in a floodplain was bought by Henry Kaiser; this is where post-World War II African American migrants were shunted after migrating to Portland for work.

Most of my students responded positively to the book, its documentary process, the poet's evidently liberal politics. But a few did not. In responses to the book on our google group, some complained that there was no reason Kaia should care about internment, for example, because she does not have Japanese American ancestors. That her ancestors were Norwegian (a couple thought that Kaia herself was Norwegian) came in for negative scrutiny. Why the emotional link? they wondered, if she were not herself either a part of the event (like Lawson Inada, whose Legends from Camp we read earlier) or if she did not have family who were? Was she not appropriating others' stories, cultures, in the way that some writers here who are not Hawaiian appropriate Hawaiianness? they wondered.

I wrote some key words on the board, making links between categories like ethnicity and emotion; asking students to think about the history of Norway (!); asking them to flesh out the book's plot. I mentioned that the answers could easily be found in the book's introduction, which it turned out some of the students hadn't read (it's that time in the semester, among other problems). Most importantly, we talked about where we find Sand's POV in the book. Is she claiming Japanese ancestry? Is she telling other people's stories? How is she positioning herself? How is her position different from Inada's?

I couldn't resist talking about other issues with story-telling, the book First They Killed My Father, which was criticized because the author had written in such detail about her experiences as a small child. Or the problem of any history of a time before the author was born. The past is foreign to us in the way that other people sometimes are, isn't it? And how could Inada write stories about his own early childhood? Wasn't he actually telling other people's stories? Several students thought that the personal investment was enough; Lawson Inada had been there, and he's Japanese American. Why should Kaia Sand even care?

This, more than most of what went on in class, was a question I took personally. Taking things personally is a danger to a professor, as any of us who teach knows. It's the moment where dispassion meets passion and knees begin to jerk and words fly off one's imagined cuffs. So I said that this book takes the writer's subject position (in this case, white woman) and uses its strengths and weaknesses. Sand cannot write as direct witness without falling into the fake Holocaust memoir trap. But she can write/compose the book using the walk as her real and literary form, and she can present the past to us via documents, the language that is already there for us to re-read (re-reading is so much more powerful than reading, in this case). This course presents an invitation to take such walks and to wonder about the places you are passing over.

Thinking about appropriation has been a necessary part of becoming a citizen of this place. Asking students to think about who speaks about and for whom is a crucial part of our practice as teachers here. But inducing allergic reactions to works that might potentially appropriate is counter-productive. One of my students asserted that Sand's book is "controversial." I had no idea that it was. But if it is to her, then perhaps it's done good some pedagogical work. Do not assign labels easily. Read the introduction before you attack. Allow that empathic imagining is the poet's work, that her methods and techniques are crucial tools in getting her there. Take the risk of crossing a boundary, lest it grow too firm.

Here is Kaia Sand's response to my class, which I asked her to send:


Here are some thoughts... Let me know if I should add more--

I choose a responsibility to think about historical and present-day injustice. I believe it is dangerous to cordon off conditions about which I think according to shared ethnicity, gender, race, class, that it is dangerous to be fortified only by the familiar, the similar, the like (which is one way power replicates itself)

In his poem Legends from Camp, Lawson Inada describes internment as an "American experience," highlighting how important it is not to distance ourselves (whatever our relationship) from the fact of internment, but, rather, to see this as a part of national identity. I took seriously that internment history is part of what USAmericans inherit, that one reason to think about such history is a determination not to inflict such damage again and again. . .

I do challenge myself to continually think about my relationship to the "material" of this book, and to make sure that I do not try to "own" other people's experiences, that I try to account for my vantage point. This is part of why I emphasize the "inexpert" stance--that "what is left open/is left open"--that my responsibility toward thinking about histories of injustice (and current conditions) is inexhaustible, and that I am never "authority"--only committed.

All best,
Kaia

Kaia's skepticism about authority can be seen in the way her book is not so much "authored" as collaged together. Her "I" is hardly anywhere to be seen. But the eye that she casts around her home town does carry its own weight, and that's a kind of unappropriating authority that we should all assume.