In The Afterlife Is Letting Go (City Lights, Dec.), poet Brandon Shimoda reflects on attempts to memorialize the mass incarceration of Japanese Americans during WWII.
In the book, you talk about the “neverending contest and crisis of memorialization.” Can you explain what you mean by that?
This book, and all of my writing, is really trying to understand memorialization as not necessarily consoling us or offering a way to connect but as a way of distancing ourselves from an event. Thinking about the Japanese American community in particular and all of the different ways that we memorialize incarceration in Japanese history, at every single one of those sites, the historical events are not resolved. There is always some contest between opposing viewpoints. So the memorial becomes more of a reflection of what we’re undergoing in the present than a representation of the event we’re memorializing. To me, that is always a crisis. Memorializing either comes from a crisis or is presenting a crisis.
What was your method for visiting sites and gathering material?
I usually go into a situation like a journalist, with the intention of finding out information. But I get distracted, I guess partly in the way that a poet gets distracted. I want to connect with the particular thing being memorialized, but then my mind wanders, and I start to pick up on something else. And usually, I discover that what I’m distracted by is telling me something more insightful or illuminating.
You copiously quote from conversations with the descendants of incarcerated Japanese Americans. Why was it important for you to include their voices?
I think this research was born in a way out of loneliness. I did a lot of it during lockdown, so talking with these people was a very practical response to feeling like I’m wandering through these landscapes alone. These landscapes and the subject didn’t really come to life for me until I invited other people in. And then I just wanted to step back, because what they were sharing with me was so beautiful. Also, I was writing about a collective experience, and I felt like if the book was just from my subjectivity, then I would be defining that collective experience.
What might a more effective or healing form of memorialization look like?
It’s not something that can be externalized. Maybe I’ll be in conversation with somebody, either a survivor or descendant, and we’re just having a meal or emailing or on a bus ride together. And there could just be a moment of really intense and really warm feeling, and it vanishes almost instantaneously. But for that moment, something is transpiring between us or around us, and it feels like a memorial. It’s not something that can be expressed or contained, and you have to appreciate its fleetingness.
