My Poem published in KARTIKA REVIEW!

Kartika Review is one of the best literary journals dedicated to Asian-Americans.

The current issue– the Spring 2012 issue has just come out.

My first poem has been published in it (page 54).

It is entitled: For Kiyoko, Epitaph/Chikai - which is dedicated to my mother who recently passed, just this past September.

More Butoh 舞踏

Following videos of Butoh 舞踏 performance, the postwar avant-garde Japanese form of the movement expression of life/death, dark/light, inexpressible expression of angst and pain and hope, mystery and disorder, normal/abnormal, deep and disfigured–that I posted earlier, the most famous Butoh performer Kazuo Ohno 大野一雄, left legacies of expression that are unequaled.

Modern western forms of dance and movement almost always developed and focused on aspects and expressions of western interpretations of “beauty.”  Butoh, on the other hand,  is perhaps the expression of angst, death, darkness, disfigurement, complexity, subtly and the in-between places of life/death.  It has its own “beauty” precisely because the “grotesque” and the “horrible” and “scary” are present, developed into form.

Butoh has expanded to a worldwide phenomenon.  It speaks particularly to audiences connected to recent war, violence and the questioning of life.  Below are further modern examples of present-day Butoh.

One of the most famous and well-known troupes from Japan that performs Butoh today, is the Sankai Juku group.  I have included two performances by them below, followed by others.

Sankai Juku: excerpts from ‘TOBARI’

Sankai Juku: Excerpts from: ‘KAGEMI’

Hisako Horirkawa and Min Tanaka: Excerpt from a performance in 1988 in Czechoslovakia

Brattelboro Butoh

Co-Production of  Compañía Cuerpo Transitorio (Barcelona, Spain) and La Compañía Slurp (Buenos Aires, Argentina) performing: “Penélope.”

Beignets!!

Oh God.  I absolutely LUV eating beignets.  Actually even looking at them makes me salivate.  Perhaps it’s really a good thing that I don’t live in New Orleans!!  If I did, I’d weigh 400 pounds—all of it being beignet weight—okay okay with some rice and tempura and dim sum thrown in.

Here is a blog site with a wonderful wonderful take on the beignet:

http://cozywalls.com/2012/01/23/beignets-in-bourboned-butterscotch/

She Who Fought Dictators with Her Voice: Mercedes Sosa and “Todo Cambia”

Mercedes Sosa (July 9, 1935 – October 4, 2009) can be remembered as one of the most memorable, famous, and great singers of the 20th century.   She was known as “La Negra” — the Black One, symbolizing the fact that she often sang for and with, giving voice to, those that are “darker,” and “blacker” –who are now expendable in a global structure, silenced and shunned.

She spent much of her life in prison, then had to live in exile from her homeland because of her leftist views.  She united many music aficionados across South America and in Europe by singing her native Argentinian folk songs as well as those of Cuba and Brazil, often singing of heartache. longing in their connection to loss, politics, and cultural survival.

Here, the video is one of my favorite songs by her: Todo Cambia, (Everything Changes).

I thank Nancho21 who uploaded this nice video on Youtube and I offer an edited version of the translation below the video.

What is superficial changes
What is profound also changes
The mind changes
Everything changes in this world.

The traveler changes his way
Even if this harms him
And just like everything changes
That I change is not strange

Change, everything changes
Change, everything changes

The sun changes its path
When the night prevails
The plants change and dress
in green in Spring

The beast changes its fur
The old man changes his hair
And just like everything changes
That I change is not strange

Change, everything changes
Change, everything changes

But my love does not change
Regardless of the distance
or the memory or the pain
Of my land and my people

What changed yesterday
Will have to change tomorrow
Just as I change
In this distant land

Everything changes
Everything changes
Everything changes
Everything changes

On ‘Pearl Harbor Day’ : December 7th

On a certain You Tube video I found randomly on that site in my search for videos about Pearl Harbor to see how there were patterns on how information and memory are represented, I found some comments by viewers on a couple of sites, that mirror those of comments on Hiroshima 1945.  Some of the people on these sites, commented that the Japanese deserved the Atomic Bomb.  This echoes thoughts and sentiments expressed by many people I’ve known from the Philippines, Korea, Vietnam, and other places where Japanese imperial forces committed atrocities.  So as we all must know and understand by now, is that the past is never gone.  The past lives in different ways and forms, in the present.

When I was eleven and twelve years old, our family lived in Hawaii, in an area called ‘Halawa’ in Aiea.  Until this time, we had moved from Japan to Albuquerque, New Mexico, then to Hawaii.  During these times, I remember that my mother grew steadily despondent and quiet.  But in Hawaii, my mother began to feel enlivened by company and a social life.  All around were families that were of Portuguese, Saamoan, Caucasian, Japanese-Hawaiian, Hawaiian, Black, Puerto Rican, and other ethnic groups that defied the notion of separate and divided.  Our neighbors immediately closest to us, with our front doors not even a meter apart, were the Aiu family.  I was close with the four kids of theif family.  They were Caucasian.  Mrs. Aiu, the mother of the nuclear family, was very friendly and kind and I remember her helping my mother with many adjustments to living in our new home.

She was in her teens on the morning of December 7, 1971.  When I asked her a couple of times, about that day, she would say how horrific it was and terrifying, and she would describe their run into the bomb shelters near the house.  We lived in a housing complex that had been through that attack and remnants of that day are seen in the bullet holes and craters created by Japanese pilots with their planes that day.

One day, I heard my mother crying in her room.  I went to see what was happening and she said to go back to my room and nothing was wrong.  I was afraid and sad.  When I was in my room I heard the front door open and Mrs. Aiu called out to us that she was in.  In those days, in Hawaii, people rarely knocked on doors of friends.  Just as it had been when I was a child in Japan, we enter homes without knocking or doorbells, announcing our presence.  That day I told Mrs. Aiu that Mama was in her room crying and I didn’t know what was wrong.  Mrs. Aiu went in to find my mother in her bed, crying, yet nothing was physically wrong.  Mrs. Aiu pulled my mother’s head gently into her chest and rocked my mother while stroking her hair.  I felt sad, relieved, and inept, not knowing what I–a twelve year-old could do in this situation.  My mother’s loneliness as a military bride in the US had not sunk in for me.

Later that same night, Mrs. Aiu returned with a pot she held with pot-holder gloves.  She carried this into my mother’s room and she opened the lid.  It was oka-yu, or as my mother called it: okai-san (rice gruel).  Mrs. Aiu had also placed an umeboshi (preserved Japanese sweet plum) in the middle of the okayu, with its distinct purple pink color.  My mother again began to sob and Mrs. Aiu held her for awhile, tellilng her that everything will be okay.  I remember this as a photo in my memory.  And soon, Mrs. Aiu began to feed the okayu to my mother as she cried and ate.  My mother said in her broken English: Sank- U, Sank-U.

I remember asking Mrs. Aiu a couple of weeks later why she was so nice to us, since she was a white-American who had been bombed by the Japanese.  She told me that governments and military people play games with people but that is no reason to hate a whole people.  She said that my mother did not create the war and did not make any hatreds and obedience on her own.  So she felt that we should all be taking care of each other as people.

December 1941, Hiroshima 1945, the fire-bombings of 66 major Japanese cities, the devastation of war on all sides of the Pacific and inside of it–all did not begin in 1941 or 1939 or 1925.  The dates are markers of certain events that are used by the people writing the stories.  They may all contain elements of a ‘truth.’  However, it’s never the way are told or shown.  We must think.  Japan’s rise to imperialism had a whole array of reasons that explain (but do not justify) its complexities in the international racisms that existed.  Elite militarisms in desperate contexts as well as moral superiorities.  No American or European group of men in world government, took any Asian nation seriously.  They were inferior.  This creates a certain kind of ‘blowback.’

But I remember Mrs. Aiu’s kindness and sober way of carrying herself in thoughtfulness.  The memories of December 7th, for her, were to be lived with increasing self-education, thought, care across difference.  This contrasts strongly with those who view vengeance as the priority.  However, pain is pain, memory is memory.  How will we, in the world, move forward.  It is easy for those who do not understand the horrifying life of living in war and domination, and who would admonish others to forget and ‘be peaceful.’  This is also violent.  We must work together to forge memories ‘with’ these pains of history in life and to transform them.  Others are still more attracted to violence and the only way they can attain their self-mastery is through the mastery of others.  Violence is a tool.

My mother.  Mrs. Aiu.  Hiroshima. Pearl Harbor.  But there’s always more behind the representations.  Shanghai, Nanking, Brussels, San Francisco Peace Treaty, Manchuria, Taiwan, South Korea, European colonialism, US economic and military wealth, Christian missionaries, racism.

In memory of soldiers who sacrifice themselves in the name of the game of governments, in the name of the military’s game of vying for supremacy or being killed, in memory of those families who suffer.  In the memory of deaths that make our nations and realities.  There is not much else in the world but that we are alive because of people who have died in the name of nation and its constructed honor.  The honorable, the valiant, the inescapable link between valor and violence. In memory, can we construct different memories?

Thoughtfulness.  Kindness. Commitments to forging peace across differences.

Video Trailer: ”Tokyo Ainu 東京アイヌ”

The Ainu people are a people who have inhabited the northern regions of Japan and what might be called Russia by some, as well as the areas now disputed, between Japan and Russia.  The Ainu are a caucasian group who were, as per the everyday norm of today’s most well-known nations, displaced and killed (physically, or culturally/spiritually) and assimilated (which to me, are all forms of killing in some way), what nations do to those who are different to create a “majority.”

This new documentary focuses on the Ainu people who are living in Japanese cities.  In this documentary, the focus is on those living in Tokyo.

Chango Spasiuk – his song “Tristeza”

Horacio “Chango” Spasiuk is an Argentine chamamé musician and accordion player.  You can hear the Eastern European music influence in his Argentinian flair.  His group creates his unique sound. He is one of my favorites.

Revolution – by Junko Nishi, Japanese woman poet

Revolution

^{by Junko Nishi}

Since the images you demand

cling to me

I cannot form my own image.

I am forced to live

by your images,

I am always living like that,

[and] so

I understand

revolution is really body aching.

From Women Poets of Japan, edited by Kenneth Rexroth and Ikuko Atsumi. New Directions 1977, page 132.

In Memorium: Kiyoko Kakinami Cloyd (Nov. 2, 1929 – Sept. 17, 2011)

My mother, whom my “Dream of the Water Children’ Project is devoted to, passed away on September 17, 2011 in Albuquerque, New Mexico.   I will be grieving, mourning, regretting, remembering, giving.  In her honor, I continue my work/life.

CORRECTED: New Blog about the historical Black Pacific

My new Blog site focused completely on my work in the world:

NEW BLOG SITE  (click here)

Some folks have noticed that I am not posting as intensely as I was a year ago.  This is because I am focusing increasingly on my presentations and work on my multimedia project and book: Dream of the Water Children.

I will continue to work here, on my ainoko blog but I will be posting on my Water Children blog, which means I will be on this ainoko site a tiny bit less frequently.  Please continue to follow me.  If you’re interested in following progress on my book and to hear the underpinnings of the project, the historical and cultural legacies and thoughts that will continue to form this multi-layered project, please visit both my website on the book, and the blog.

My Dream of the Water Children WEBSITE  is on the tab at the top of this site with the title Dream of the Water Children along with an overview.  You can ALSO CLICK HERE.

NEW BLOG SITE:  CLICK HERE

Please stop by, support, spread the word, come to my presentations, make comments, “like my posts” and whatever else you can!  Thanks!