we are rejoicing as japanese america is falling into dust

by shō yamagushiku

“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.