Dear Brynn,
It is too soon and too late, though mostly too late, and on time. I’ve been thinking about the pilgrimages you’ve been making, with your father, to the ruins of the concentration camps, and wondering if there will come a time when they will not be necessary. Probably not. You write about the pilgrimage you made to Manzanar, also with your father, in “Displorations in the Desert.” Here is how the poem ends (as if you don’t know this by heart):
Now the ghosts are everywhere. They are free to roam. We’ve unleashed them in their entirety.
That line, or lines—those three exhalations—keep changing, because the circumstances in which I read them keep changing, though that might be an illusion. The country of which we are citizens, of which our forebears, many of whom were also citizens, were enemies, is currently resurrecting its system of concentration camps to incarcerate people who are in desperate need of asylum: who are in desperate need of care, and a country. Some of those camps are the same camps in which our forebears were incarcerated: Fort Sill, in Oklahoma, for example.
Now the ghosts are everywhere, I keep saying (to myself), and more than a cold star burns through my heart.
I have been listening to the testimonies of our elders, like Satsuki Ina, who led a group of Japanese Americans in protest of the use of Fort Sill to incarcerate migrant children. Have you met Satsuki Ina? She lives in Sacramento. She has done many lifetimes of work in challenging and inspiring our community to confront and convert the trauma it has endured. And now she is standing at the gate of memory (as another one of your poems says), sharing her story, most explicitly her rage.
What or how did you feel when you visited Poston and Gila River? What or how do you feel when you stand there, surrounded by what must feel like both the emanations of the past and the sharp, biting pains of the present? What does your father have to say about all this? There is the image of him flinging his arms out, embracing the air, but also letting go some part of himself, the part at the center of such an embrace.
Before I went to Gila River, my friend Carolyn, here in Tucson, said: Look for the koi pond. She described it, but then I forgot her description, and imagined that the koi pond was somewhere over by the olive grove, which looked, from the vantage of the monument, like a head of unruly, dust-covered hair.
Did you see the koi pond?
I ask you that, and I asked you what or how you felt, but you’ve been telling me, you’ve been telling us, all along. In your poems, in this letter. But for some reason the question keeps coming up: What did you feel? What do you feel? As if to ask is to give space not only to what you felt and are feeling, but what I feel and am feeling, or, more importantly: that we are feeling at all. That we are still capable.
Does it matter? What do we do with what we have seen and experienced?
When it rains it the desert, the smell is of creosote. That smell, however momentary, is shared, by all who stand or sit or stretch out or are held above or pressed into the dirt by the weight or weightlessness of their gifts or their sentence or status or that of their ancestors and friends.
To answer your question, I don’t know. I think of all the people who are, right now, being deprived of the conditions and space in which to think, not to mention to think out loud, or on paper,
Your friend,
Brandon