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01.06.2025
we are rejoicing as japanese america is falling into dust
“The word Okinawa becomes an impossibility.”
A particularly disorienting fact: recovery / healing work after "nikkei wartime incarceration" repeatedly becomes the work of reviving the somatics of Japanese imperialism. Often, the "normal" state that a nikkei community or individual wishes to return to is a re-embodiment of the forbidden pleasures of imperial aggression.
For some time now, I have tried and failed to imagine how the incarceration years might be viewed from the perspective of individuals from "Okinawa Prefecture". This poem is the most fitting chaos that I could manage. Notably - the word Okinawa becomes an impossibility and does not appear in the poem.
This poem also owes a debt to the many Black thinkers who remind me that the universal category of the human to which asian diasporic communities clamor toward is built upon a calcified foundation of anti-blackness.
Editor’s note: Below is a simple text version for accessibility.
Splayed across the ocean, two homelands become one, no longer encamped
rising, rising, rising, rising, rising, rising, rising
NO LONGER WILL WE SUPPRESS OUR EROTIC DESIRE FOR JAPAN
NO LONGER WILL WE SUPPRESS OUR EROTIC DESIRE FOR JAPAN
NO LONGER WILL WE SUPPRESS OUR EROTIC DESIRE FOR JAPAN
against a whitening california sky
against a reddening skin shining with pride
appears a dogma of strawberry farms and camp and redress and redress and redress and
NEVER AGAIN will trauma deny us a national architecture, let’s ride pilgrimage
until struggle becomes a highway of government grants gifting intellectual land claims
let’s clamor toward that wretched word: hu!man
(repair me in your image i deserve to perpetuate the unspoken things
all the terrible things are mine)
shō yamagushiku writes from the homelands of the Lekwungen and W̱SÁNEĆ peoples (Victoria, BC). His first poetry collection, entitled shima, reflects ancestors, violence, and tradition.