The American Century: Literature since 1945 773she should be demure and modest. “I don’t think that Third World writers can really
afford to separate themselves from the ongoing struggle of their people,” Mirikitani
has said. “Nor can we ever not embrace our history.” That belief has led her to weave
the lyrical and the political together, or sometimes be direct to the point of bluntness.
It has also led her to celebrate rebellion as the only, true tradition that one generation
of Asian-American women should pass down to the next. “My daughter denies she is
like me,” Mirikitani says in “Breaking Tradition” (1987). “She mirrors my ageing, / ”
she adds. “She is breaking tradition.” The daughter becomes like the mother in
wanting to be unlike her. She reflects her, even honors her, by insisting on being
herself, doing things her own way.
Another accomplished Japanese-American poet, Garrett Hongo (1951–), offers a
different nuance on the idea of tradition. Hongo has described his project as a poet
as one “motivated by a search for origins of various kinds – quests for ethnic and
familial roots, cultural identity.” All of this, he has explained, is “somehow connected”
to his “need for an active imaginative and spiritual life.” His “obsession with origin,”
as he puts it, is “more than a nostalgia”; “it is rather a way to isolate, and to uphold
moral and cultural value in a confusing time,” “to produce something of traditional
learning, spiritual value, and personal experience out of the whirlwind” in which he
lives. Hongo has a keen eye for what he has called the “specificities” that “bear
culture.” In a manner that is sometimes reminiscent of the Imagists, he presses the
telling detail into service, the random gesture or casual habit that carries a whole
freight of cultural meaning. So, “the essence / of garlic and black lotus root” can
become a paradigm for the secrets of Japanese culture (“Who Among You Knows
the Essence of Garlic?” (1982)). A woman walking down the street in Los Angeles,
negotiating her way past Japanese and Chicano schoolboys and “the Korean grocer’s
wife,” becomes a cultural catalyst: a guide through, and reflection of, the rich racial
mosaic that is “the Barrio” (“Yellow Light” (1982)). And the poet’s own father, in
“Off from Swing Shift” (1982), betting on horse races with his constant dream that
“maybe tonight” would be “his night / for winning, his night / for beating the odds,”
is made to epitomise, in an oddly heroic fashion, Japanese-American suffering and
stoicism. Hongo is adept, too, at secret histories. His anonymous characters voice
their experiences of living “on the frontier” (“The Unreal Dwelling: My Years in
Volcano” (1985)). As they do so, they reveal an irrepressible spirit that has plainly
cultural, communal origins. In “Something Whispered in the Shakukachi” (1982),
for instance, the speaker of the poem recalls his poverty in peacetime, internment in
wartime, and subsequent survival. “So, when it’s bad now, / when I can’t remember
what I have lost,” he concludes, “I go out back of the greenhouse / at the far end of
my land,” where “the rivers of weather” “shape full-throated songs / out of wind, out
of bamboo.” That reminds him, he intimates, of the bamboo flutes he used to fashion
out of the bamboo on his farm, and play, when he was much younger. It is an apt
image of someone making something out of nothing, or very little: “my land was
never thick with rice, /,” the narrator reflects, “only the bamboo.” It is also a
compelling portrait of the artist as Japanese-American, perhaps Hongo himself,
making music out of his own territory and tradition.GGray_c05.indd 773ray_c 05 .indd 773 8 8/1/2011 7:31:44 PM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 31 : 44 PM