Brandon Shimoda Ignites the Collective Imagination at futurefeed

With the cancellation of the March Split This Rock Poetry Festival as his starting point, Brandon Shimoda's latest contribution to futurefeed illuminates concepts like ancestry, silence, and shame within Japanese American literature, all set before the backdrop of the Covid-19 pandemic. Shimoda was scheduled to read and discuss his work on a panel at the festival alongside Japanese American poets Brian Komei Dempster, W. Todd Kaneko, Mia Ayumi Malhotra, and Brynn Saito.

Later in the essay, Shimoda invites his colleagues to respond to this moment, asking how they imagine the conversation might have gone, had they congregated. An excerpt:

We did not gather before an audience to share and discuss our work, and the work of other Japanese American poets. We did not gather to discuss the literature of Japanese American incarceration. We did not gather to share stories about our families—our parents and aunts and uncles and grandparents and great-aunts and great-uncles and great-grandparents, nor to connect their stories to each other’s stories and to our work. We did not gather to talk about any of the things that often come up in conversations about Japanese American history and memory—silence and shame and trauma and racism and resistance and redemption and reclamation, i.e. FBI raids and disappearances and family separation and buses and trains and blacked-out windows and wind and dust storms and horse shit and barbed wire and guard towers and guns and protest and performances and dances and art-making and festivals and gardening and winter and spring and summer and fall and time and time and time and time, and so on, including the ways we have inherited these things, and how each of these things has evolved, under the pressure of our inheritance, into talismans, into mirrors, into matches we strike, over and over, against our skin, to ignite a spark—to illuminate, to set fire.

We did not gather before an audience to share or discuss any of these things, because there was no audience, because there was no reading/panel discussion, because there was no festival, because there was a global pandemic—because there is a global pandemic—which brought down with it large gatherings of people then smaller gatherings of people then even smaller gatherings of people then gatherings of people, and then people.

Of course I am only imagining what might have been shared and discussed. But it is important to imagine…

Read more at futurefeed.