MEDITATIONS ON HOME
David
Mura
Tales
of Hybridity
A man who lived in the hotel
run by my father’s family
had a child with a Native
woman.
Up in Alaska, canning salmon.
the women kept moving to
seasonal
labor.
(The men saw no reason
to fish for someone else.) Iron
Chink they branded
the canning machinery
and who cares Nips
manned its welding
as the Native women scooped
innards and bones from
souls close to their own.
How does the living man speak
to the living woman
fleeing the Christian
missionaries
for potlatch and native belief?
Why didn’t she choose her own?
Why did he leave?
The heart
conceals nothing but
the heart, which is invisible
to history but never
the body.
Issei. Tinglit.
Hiding in plain sight.
A baby called China Jim.
Recall May as an avenue
into summer.
A tryst
in the fields.
Jesus
and a Jap girl.
Sighs
in the gathering heat
and the first weeds.
Tell me a story
in seventeen syllables.
Write me a window
where his face appears
and she turns around
like a promise
that can only be whispered
and never kept.
Which of them can believe
in God?
The gods tell us tales
for which we pray
but our skin simmers
as the summer enters
and the strawberries ripen
and mother’s characters
look away a moment
as father mutters
hayaku,
hayaku
and the earth proves us
mortal providing fruit
and sorrow
in equal proportions.
Half and half.
An impossible notion.
Once there was a house.
In the suburbs.
My father recalled
nothing, though there
were legal documents
he signed.
No
love affairs, no
violence.
Just
a blank memory
as if he ran away
and never returned.
I wished only
for a cruel instinct.
Instead I weep.
I pull on a
coat
and it’s cold.
I lie down
and I’m clay.
I shake my hands.
Fists won’t appear.
Only forbidden
pleasures. Kisses
from white girls
and the separation
that exists in a room
where two lovers
have given up
their ghostly embrace.
We were a colonized people.
We were a colonizing people.
We were never a people.
A nation.
A tribe.
In the story
that brought me
to the frozen heart
of the continent
dawn breaches the river
beneath the bridge
and a poet leaps
into immortality
or away from
the personal life.
There is no
personal life.
My father learns English
before I can be born.
I learn Japanese
to forget who I am.
And our faces turn
to history
strangers to the happa
children who
slam doors
in anger
or exhuberance
running through my home.
From Turning
Japanese: My Grandparent’s Kuni
--David
Mura
Going
to Japan brought me right up against the idea of home.
Home, in one sense, is a limit. It
restricts by categorizing: he was born in
the country of____, the city of ______, in the home of ____. The Japanese, those insular, rooted,
island
people, are highly conscious of where they come from, their kuni . In contrast, I was pleased when my Japanese
teacher told me that Abe Kobo, the Japanese novelist once remarked, "I
have no kuni ." A
compatriot, I thought, another of the
homeless.
Long
ago, for my ancestors, the village of my name was the center of the
world, and
the mountains or the seashore, the edge of that world.
Sure of their kuni , their gods, their
values, those ancestors knew what lay
beyond was the realm of unreality, the country of the dead, the
dwelling of
phantoms and nothingness. Generations
removed from those ancestors, I suffered from a lack of a center, a
fixed point
from which to chart the stream. Instead,
I was constantly sinking into the foam of formlessness, a dissolving
identity--What God do I believe in? Who are my people?
What language do I speak? What are
my customs? How shall I raise my children? Where will I be a year from now, ten years,
at my deathbed? What is my history, the
stories of my family, the myths of my people?
The
man who emigrated--my grandfather-- carried within him the memory of
home, the
former world, the place where he was once "real." It
tore at him, that memory, and yet it kept
him anchored: He knew where his home
was, knew that he had lost it. The son
of that man--my father--believed he could make the new place his home. The task was probably impossible, but it kept
him occupied. The son of that man--myself--realizes what?
That the new home--in my case, a Jewish
suburb--is no home, is, in fact, for me an absurdity, a sham, and that
the old
home is lost in unreality.
At
the time I went to Japan, I saw my sense of homelessness and my
defiance of
limits as intimately related to my reaction to stereotypes. If American culture wanted to see me solely
as Mr. Moto or the buck-toothed gardener, I wanted to outplay, to leap
beyond
the bounds of, other people's conceptions of me. I
would not choose, would not settle; I would
keep my options open. I countered with
the illusion I could be anything. One
day, Yeats said, the poet will wear all masks.
Perhaps that was the reason it took me so long to return to the
lost
center, my grandparents' kuni.
David
Mura
is
a poet, creative
nonfiction writer, critic, playwright and performance artist. A Sansei
or third
generation Japanese American, Mura has written two memoirs: Turning
Japanese: Memoirs of a Sansei
(Anchor-Random), which won a 1991 Josephine Miles Book Award from the
Oakland
PEN and was listed in the New York Times Notable Books of Year, and Where the Body Meets Memory: An Odyssey of
Race, Sexuality and Identity (1996, Anchor).