February 2, 2020
Dear Nohemi,
This morning I’m remembering that very first workshop for Storytelling for Change: us slightly shielded from the bright, August sun near the Simonian Farms memorial, learning each other’s names and ideas of beauty, stepping into a year-long journey with so many twists and turns—how could we know then? Along the way, you came alive to your writer’s voice, eventually performing for hundreds your marvelous piece on music, family, art, and expression. That culminating day was so cathartic — for me, for Nikiko, perhaps for all of the storytellers, too, considering the ways we had to regroup, regather ourselves after violence and vandalism.
What has storytelling meant to you?
Both of us are embedded in our communities, in our communities’ struggles and joys—descendants of resilient survivors, our immigrant elders risking everything to be here. Do you know the poem by Li-Young Lee, “After the Pyre”? “What kept you alive,” goes the poem’s refrain, “kept you from living.” I think of those lines when I think of the Issei, the Nisei—the first and second generations of Japanese immigrants and Japanese Americans; I think, too, of my Korean family crossing the Pacific, fleeing the Japanese occupation to labor in the sugar fields of Hawaii, then eventually the farmlands of the San Joaquin. What kept them alive (their tough and dignified silence, their labor power, their industriousness)—did it keep them from living?
Do you know what keeps you alive?
Do you know how to live into the grace of their dreaming?
Another poet I love says: “Go to the limits of your longing.”
All the time, I wonder if I’m doing this—living the questions, living into my longing, and theirs.
Thank you for reflecting on these questions with me, for lending your voice to this tapestry of correspondences, this ceremony of ghosts.
With gratitude,
Brynn