Blogging about blogging: Kith and Koko

At some point in the last year or two, I lost track of how to blog, of why I would blog. My blog has gone through a few different styles and phases, following me through a couple of moves in jobs and homes. I’m not too concerned about those shifts nor necessarily about not blogging. I spend enough time on computers and the internet, and I get tired of it. If I don’t have a compelling reason to blog, I figure that (1) there are certainly enough blathering blogs in the sea and (2) this is supposed to benefit me and people I care about somehow (i.e. it should be fun to write and read;  provide information that is really not getting through elsewhere; help build community, networks, or whatever else the internet can build).

Before I entered graduate school, this blog was more grounded in the happenings of the Asian Pacific Islander community writing workshops and other related nonprofit work I was doing. Now, in the thick of graduate school, sometimes it is hard for me to express an idea without tortured academic language, or to openly share ideas at all. We are pushed or self-conditioned to save our good stuff to publish, to not let others get the scoop, and not to publicize half-baked projects. I don’t think that is always bad advice but it can be a burdensome extra layer of thinking nonetheless about what you put out in public with your name attached to it- on top of other hesitations to putting things that can be close to the heart out here for friends, family, spammers, bots, and right-wing crazies to consume and comment on.

So, I have been asking myself what would make blogging worthwhile again. What work, what people and places, am I grounded in? What holes are there in e-conversations that I would like to fill, and what other conversations could I help start? I have some ideas but I realized the thing about blogging is that you can’t wait until you have the perfect tract formed, or else the momentum is gone and your blog is dusty.

There are folks whose blogs I look to often that I think have the goods- who ask good questions and get others talking and asking better questions too- in poetry world and academic-activist world. I’m grateful for their presence out here and would like to be better company myself.

Recently too, I’ve been taken with some blogs run on Tumblr, a host like WordPress, that claims to be the easiest way to blog. They make it very easy to repost items from other tumblrs, blogs, news items, whatever, just like how Facebook lets you post links to articles and videos. I like the way things look on Tumblr: photos look great, quotes are easily edited to highlight the punchiest part. And I also like that it’s quick to create posts and you don’t always need to add your commentary: it is more like you are collecting things in a shoebox. And sometimes others think what you’ve found are gems too (you can like or repost others items and they will appear as notes on the original item)- this can be an annoying echo chamber like Facebook and Twitter, but so far I’ve found the content quite good. A friend of mine keeps one at wordsandsteel, and the posts there and especially the ones at curate made me want to start one of my own.

So, I did, and you can find it at kith and koko.

More on that and on what I think can still inhabit this space soon.

Feeling sorry, feeling brown

They come first from England,
even though America is closer,
is still here, singing,

pounding,
panting.

Blue-eyed wolves blowing lightly
on my door with lullabies, sweet,
and hums, secret,

of reconciliation.

Whispering through the threshold
all their golden-haired
we-said-we’re-sorries, now

please-please, we must

be forgiven.

-excerpt from Sorry Day series, work-in-progress

***

I have had this mess of a poem or poems hanging around for a year or more now: my sorry day series, from which I read at Our Sea of Words recently. These were the poems I brought with me to VONA and Elmaz Abinader’s Political Content workshop last summer. While they got a lot of good feedback and attention there, I had put them down and in a busy year of other things not looked back. I am thinking now that I left VONA a bit more confused about my poetry than I admitted to myself then.

My experience of VONA was that it was generally a lovefest not unlike Our Sea of Words, albeit it was a very broad, diverse community of color with folks from all over, in a way that was especially welcoming and needed to me after a year of immersion in an academic program that sapped poetic language out of my writing. At VONA, I found myself writing more slam-style work (to me, more geared towards the performative, building speed and rhythm up in layers of anger) in workshop as I was influenced by others in the space, which was initially so satisfying, and later made me feel as if I were writing the same poem over and over. Angry and a little bit cute settler-go-home stuff, which I think is fun for everybody, myself included, in those spaces just not what I am interested in writing forever. This is not to say I think less of slam or spoken word or whatever labels folks find themselves using/contesting (I agree with others on how there is no slam or spoken word poetry, there is only poetry): I am trying to say here that the extra emphasis on performing (and perhaps performing on behalf of your particular community of color) at VONA was simultaneously exhilarating and uncomfortable, stimulating and stifling.

Anyway, so when I thought about what to read at Our Sea of Words, I could have picked my VONA performance pieces, but I just didn’t feel like I fit into them in the same way. My sorry day poems are uncomfortable to me too, and yet I am drawn to continuing the work on them, and so they took up the most time in my set list. Ryan mentioned that he thought what I could  have done better during that performance was to take more time to explain what Sorry Day is, where these ideas are coming from. I think he was right and yet I think I might want those poems to get to a place where explaining that is not a completely necessary introduction.

Sorry Day (I have written about it more here and here) is commemorated in Australia on May 26 every year as part of a push by Aboriginal activists to get the government to apologize and make reparations for the Stolen Generations: thousands of Aboriginal children who were forcibly removed from their families and put in state care, from the late 1800s to as recently as the 1980s. Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd did officially apologize in 2007.

My own interest in the idea of Sorry Day follows the more general trend towards state apologies to colonized, enslaved, and other persecuted peoples (California, for example, just apologized for discriminatory practices towards Chinese immigrants who helped build the state in the 1800s). My interest is also particularly wedded to my experiences of Hawai’i, and the apology issued in 1993 by the U.S. Congress and President Clinton for the 1893 overthrow of the Hawaiian kingdom. I am fascinated by the apologies beyond the criticism that they no doubt deserve (though folks tend to forget too that these apologies are often the culmination of years of hard work by community activists). I think there is much more to say about them and the historical losses they index in our maddening constantly-invoked-only-to-be-denied “post-racial” times. And yes, I think there is something poetic to them, and inevitably in our responses too.

I’ve just read this article by Performance Studies scholar José Muñoz called “Feeling Brown, Feeling Down” in which he attempts to theorize a “depression that is not one” in artist Nao Bustamante’s video piece Neopolitan. That is, in Bustamante’s film which shows the Latina artist crying at the end of a film set in 1970s Cuba (Tomás Gutiérrez Alea’s Fresa y chocolate), Muñoz sees a racially-coded performance that is particular to Latinas, not a normative depression coded towards white male angst, but a “feeling brown” that addresses a historical particularity rather than a (supposed) universal one. To Muñoz, Bustamante’s form of depression is not one that asks to be repaired but uses the feeling as “a site of potentiality… Reparation is part of the depressive condition; it signals a certain kind of hope… It is a position in which the subject negotiates reality, resisting the instinct to fall into [delusion]…” I’m not sure that “feeling brown” covers it for me, if it could stretch or be a useful sounding point for something more applicable to indigenous and Pacific Islander “feelings” and community connections, but I am intrigued.

Maybe I have not made enough of the connections between the many thoughts here (and certainly they are not all there in my poem series yet) but this is where I am at, wondering about the potential embedded in big government apologies, in feeling sorry, in trying to be forgiven and how these things productively clash with feeling (or trying to feel) part of a “brown” community, feeling impatient with apologies, and yeah, feeling often depressed but far from done.

***

I saw you next outside, just in from Japan,
swinging the scales of apology,
dragging confusion.

Immediately, I wished you home without
the flash of Hiroshima, Nagasaki,
while other names paraded me by

Bataan, Nanjing, the old banal
Pearl Harbor.

Am I to tally these against you,
our would-be colonizers, as others

have, while our own complaints

stick in our throats-

We suck down your sea of
tourists, stalk trembling past Waikiki
weddings and gun ranges
installed for taking your pleasure in
the American pastime of shooting
black (outlines of) men.

Perhaps our genocide
is only slower, though I am unsure
if I can ever precipitate out
who from who.

-excerpt from Sorry Day series, work-in-progress

Thoughts after Our Sea of Words

I’m not as quick on the blog review uptake as Oscar, Craig or Barbara Jane, but I wanted to write a bit about the reading I helped put together at downtown Berkeley’s Pegasus Books last Monday night.

The event came together through individually meeting and exchanging emails/Facebook messages with both Craig Santos Perez and Fuifuilupe Niumeitolu. Though I didn’t know either Craig or Fui very well, we have a lot of mutual friends through both the UC Ethnic Studies community (they being at Cal and I down at UC San Diego) and the Bay Area Pacific Islander communities. They had both heard that I was a poet through others, and they mentioned they would love to do a reading together if I were ever back in the Bay. I knew I was coming up in July for a visit and so we started talking dates and it all came together pretty easily. Craig invited Professor Caroline Sinavaiana, an acquaintance through them both being published with Tinfish Press, and Fui invited her sister Loa Niumeitolu. My friend Rachel Marcus at Pegasus said she would be happy to host us, and I was excited to read there because I always loved that store, and remember it always having a lot of poetry books and chapbooks.

My impression of the night was that it was a big lovefest- everyone, including me, was happy to be there, excited to meet the other readers and audience members, and enjoyed all the poetry and growing sense of togetherness. Loa said in her introductory remarks that the night was about finding a language where there just hasn’t been one. I think she meant both building languages of cultural/political alliance across Pacific Islander communities in general and perhaps diasporic ones in particular- as well as Pacific Islanders claiming/strengthening their diverse range of voices in poetry and literature. Fui also gave a heartfelt acknowledgment of Craig and Caroline as some of the few Pacific Islanders who have published poetry books, seeing them as folks to look up to and follow. Indeed, it felt great to me to have a mix of poetry experience in the reading, and many mentioned being honored especially by being able to read with and hear Caroline’s work as she was in that space a gracious elder, mentor, kumu.

My feeling about my own reading and work was that I am rusty. Especially compared to some of the solid, lovely work others read and I can’t wait to see again in print. In an ideal world, I would have worked harder to revise and write new work before the reading. I didn’t. I have been out of the poetry world for at least a year, in which school and other commitments have tied me up. Physically, of course, I am also away from the Bay Area and the poetry people and scenes I am familiar with. So, much of the night was simply about being ecstatic that I was reconnecting, that I was still recognizable as a poet to people. I actually think that ecstatic feeling, the lovefest and the related community building, is incredibly important and will push me to keep writing and work harder to be at least a little better next time. I am glad I shared some new work that wasn’t totally polished and now will return to it, maybe put some drafts up in this space even.

Certainly, the night also helped in the possibilities of having a next time: Craig mentioned wanting to get something together later this year in Southern California. I am hoping Our Sea of Words is the beginning of me tapping into a Pacific Islander poetry community that will eventually be not only a lovefest (which, again, was something I was really grateful for Monday night) but also a solid place of challenge and growth, with a presence not only at readings but online and yes, in print with Tinfish and other presses. Barbara Jane has some thoughts up on how community work is not always a lovefest, that it also gets confusing and hateful- and I am thinking I experienced that majorly this year but in the academic Pacific Islander community. Maybe more on that later, but for now: is it just me or does the Pinay writing community really rock at networking, creating an online presence, etc. (and put other writing communities of color, or whatever you’d like to call them, to shame)? I am so often drawn to Barbara Jane Reyes‘ and Kimberly Alidio’s blogs and their candidness about the process of writing, and of being a writer. This is not to say that these writing communities are always mutually exclusive (my experience has usually been in broad, diverse writing communities of color), but I wonder if Pacific Islanders will come to have anything like the Philippine American Writers and Artists blog, if and how it would work and benefit P.I. folks. I think maybe that is a conversation we could have in the future, as there is a growing online presence of Tongan, Chamoru, Kanaka Maoli, Samoan and other writers and artists. I joked later that the night was brought to you by Facebook, but it wasn’t really a joke: without it, I don’t know that I would have connected so easily with Craig and Fui, and Craig with Caroline, etc.

In the past, my readings at Kearny Street Workshop were photographed by some of the lovely Asian Am. scene photographers, like Jay Jao. I was thinking on my way there that it was too bad Jay wouldn’t be there to take pictures, but it turned out that Oscar Bermeo showed up and did us one better. For the love of community readings, he took pictures and videos, which are all available on YouTube. The rise of Facebook culture also ensured that many more photos than I even expected and a continuing lovefest are happening there too. In all, I feel extremely grateful to everyone (including many friends who are not poets or Pacific Islanders) who came out to support, and I’m looking forward to getting back to work, in terms of poems, community, and even this blog.

reminder

Our Sea of Words: Monday, July 13, 7:30 pm at Pegasus Books, Berkeley

I’m incredibly lucky to be reading poetry soon with these other amazing Pacific Islander poets, Caroline Sinavaiana, Craig Santos Perez, Fuifuilupe Niumeitolu, and Loa Niumeitolu. Please stop by if you are in the Bay!

*

Our Sea of Words: Poetry from Oceania and Beyond

Monday, July 13, 2009
7:30 pm
Pegasus Books Downtown Berkeley
Shattuck Ave. at Durant

Maile Arvin is a Kanaka Maoli (Native Hawaiian) poet from Kentucky and Hawai’i. Her work is published in two chapbooks by Kearny Street Workshop, Same Place, Same Time (2006) and 12 Ways: an anthology of the Intergenerational Writer’s Lab (2007). She is also a graduate student in the PhD program in Ethnic Studies at the University of California, San Diego.

Fuifuilupe Niumeitolu is a Tongan American scholar, poet and community activist. Her work has been published in Amerasia, The Contemporary Pacific and The Berkeley Poetry Review. Fuifuilupe is a doctoral student at the University of California, Berkeley and she is on the organizing committee of OLO; One Love Oceania, a Pacific Islander community response to homophobia.

Loa Niumeitolu’s poetry is published in Whetu Moana: Contemporary Polynesian Poetry in English. Her essay “The Route Back to Tonga,” is published in Homelands: Women’s Journeys Across Race, Place and Time. Niumeitolu is a community organizer around issues of prisons and incarceration. She is a founding member of One Love Oceania, a Pacific Island women’s queer support and political group in the Bay Area.

Craig Santos Perez, a native Chamoru from the Pacific Island of Guahan (Guam), is the co-founder of Achiote Press and author of the poetry book from unincorporated territory [hacha] (Tinfish Press, 2008). He is currently a PhD candidate in Comparative Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Berkeley.

Caroline Sinavaiana, Associate Professor of English at UH Manoa, teaches Oceanic and comparative literatures, and creative writing. She has published, lectured, and read her poetry and scholarship in many countries, including the US, China, India, Italy, Barbados, Samoa, Tonga, Fiji, and New Zealand. Poetry collections include: Alchemies of Distance (Tinfish, AA Arts, & Institute for Pacific Studies), and Mohawk/Samoa: Transmigrations (AA Arts). Her book on traditional comic theater in Samoa – House of the Spirits — is forthcoming from the Institute of Pacific Studies. At present, Sinavaiana is completing a new collection of poetry, and a memoir with the working title, Nuclear Medicine.