
shō yamagushiku‘s work is grounded in a diasporic Okinawan consciousness. He writes from the homelands of the Lək̓ʷəŋən and W̱SÁNEĆ peoples (Victoria, B.C.). His first poetry collection, entitled shima, reflects ancestors, violence, and tradition.
A vivid, expansive vision of intergenerational witness and repair, shima is a mosaic of the emotional, psychic, and generational toll that exile from a pillaged culture impresses on a poet and his community.
Interviewed by Yvonne Blomer
Yvonne Blomer (YB): Your poems in shima move lyrically, suggestively; the displacement of Okinawan people, which I didn’t know enough about despite having lived in Japan for two years, is powerful. These poems are a deep and complex exploration of Indigeneity. They recall Ilya Kaminski’s book Dancing in Odessa for how outside sources are pulled into poems that move between place, states and ways of being and an array of real and familial trees and people.
There are so many elements, I could probably ask you more questions than we have space for, but let me begin with the father. What does the figure of the father do for the poems or your lyrical exploration, beyond actual memories or moments between you and your father, or the speaker and their father? The opening poem, and many poems after, are so complex and centered around hair, the father, water, dust, and transformation, a man and later a boy.
shō yamagushiku (sy): The father figure serves as a way for me to draw patriarchy into the frame of shima’s poetic world. By reconnecting with one’s ancestry, especially for a “marginalized indigenous culture” like that of Okinawa I think there is often an assumption that recovering what’s been lost is inherently liberatory – but by embodying ancestry, I am also providing the breeding ground for forces like patriarchy to re-assert themselves – not that they disappeared per se, but that they are now given official sanction to be celebrated through the reclamation of identity. For example, in Okinawa, the Ryukyu Kingdom becomes a mythological symbol of a pristine past, due to its contrast with the current context of dual occupation in Okinawa by US and Japanese forces. What lies beneath a wound is often simply another wound. I’ve found there’s a recurring tendency to understand patriarchy in our own lineages as exceptional – as certain individual “bad men” who commit specifically egregious acts of violence. With shima, I attempted, and often failed, to inhabit patriarchy in a more elemental sense – as fibers and tendons that form the relationships between everyone. In this sense, it is oceanic and so I think this work has both everything to do with gender, and at the same time nothing at all to do with gender. People often view patriarchs in their lineage with a certain sort of reverence and so I think it’s important to question this reverence – to place an ancestor on a pedestal creates the conditions for an eventual fall from grace. In shima, me and my father as individuals become both the vehicles for this work, and are also largely irrelevant to the ebb and flows of history in all its enormity.
YB: The book is broken into sections, each one representing an era or “yuu” and a location such as America, mainland Japan, the Okinawan era, which is profoundly the pull of the island, and the final section centers on the ancestral village in Okinawa. But these locations or eras, (I hope I have this correctly) also capture the many places of movement, forced migration, and notions of home. Can you speak to how you shaped the book or how the book’s shape evolved?
sy: I have ordered shima into amerika-yuu, yamatu-yuu, uchinaa-yuu and yanbaru-yuu. “Yuu” means era in Uchinaaguchi – the dominant indigenous language in what is now Okinawa prefecture. There is a constellation of songs in Okinawa that speak of the shifting yuu’s of governance – depending on what power is exerting the most supreme cultural force. I wish I knew the specific genealogy of this practice, but that would require more research on my part but it is something that came to me, through the sometimes glancing nature with which one interacts with a culture that they understand on certain levels, but largely can’t process linguistically. The book riffs off of this tradition – drawing on lyricalism and melancholy, and the way that the lilting spaciousness of traditional music opens up a space for steadfastness of spirit. The book unfolds in reverse order – beginning with the most surface (and most hegemonic) yuu which I experienced in my life – that of the United States. The poems then move through the “yuus” of Japanese nationalism and Okinawa prefecture (its own sort of hegemony with indigenous flavorings) veering closer and closer to my ancestral village – the final yuu. This process mirrors my journey to claim an authentic ancestry, based in some sort of blood / DNA and “national” claim to territory. I see each of these yuus as forms of propaganda – that while they hold their own medicine, are ultimately failing constructs of home. I’m thinking here about the work of Dionne Brand and her refusal of belonging and warnings against the intoxicating power of nostalgia and homeland. By settling into these constructed yuus, I believe we open ourselves more explicitly to certain violences – such as their corresponding patriarchies (re: first question). The stakes of this violence were clarified to me, as I watched the intensification of zionist land expansion in occupied Palestine. That, the bombs and slaughter of Palestinian life force are being fueled by a “diasporic claim to a homeland”. The stakes in Japan and Okinawa are materially different – but there is a sinister realm, where the confederation of colonial powers cares little about specific geographies – and rather becomes the inertia of our “modern” moment. Okinawa is very far from Palestine, and also it is not. Across the world, belonging often provides cultures with a palatable cover for atrocity.
YB: I was delighted by the note at the end of the book, that a reporter who wrote a story about your return included photos that led to a spiritual leader recognizing your grandmother. This seems like art and life really colliding and spiraling beyond what you could have imagined. What was that connection like, to meet family still there?
sy: Meeting family (my great-grandmother’s siblings’ children) for the first time was full of euphoria – it interrupted the falsehood of linear history and allowed my body to inhabit a spiral – to live the truth that as we forget, we are also remembering. Looking back, I now question the weight that is placed on that moment. The “discovery” of “authentic” family was supposed to answer a question that still lingers in the air, perhaps even more heavily now. At the beginning I embarked on this journey in search of connection and now in hindsight, I realized that materially what I was searching for was primarily a mechanism to disconnect. The ancestors that I believed to have been irreparably severed from, I was actually deeply connected to – and they were taking up too much, often haunted, space in my psyche. So, by touching points of familiarity, by learning their life stories, I was actually able to send them off into the night, with good blessing. I thought I was trying to become my ancestors – in fact, I am trying to shed them. But to return, to that moment of meeting family – I have a poem about “poking the root ancestor” and I felt like, my return was a meddling – and there was beauty in that meddling, and perhaps gifts – but also, I think the process of migration aligned me with the inertia of empire in certain material ways, and so I felt very much an ego within me that seemed to have grown and grown in my time away across the generations. And so, there were many gifts my family left me with, but I’m not so sure I knew how to receive them in a spirit of true reciprocity. I’ve talked with some friends about this, but returning to the homeland (which as I mentioned before, is a word I now understand as a falsehood) – I felt a certain unquenchable greed, to consume an authentic version of something, that really ended up leading me into a pit of darkness, rather than a fleshy body. But also, there is of course liberation in this darkness…but I think it is a liberation that refuses to let the ego move with the abandon it has become accustomed to….
YB: The relationship between land and the Pacific Ocean is so powerful in your poems. The speaker sometimes becomes one or the other or seems to transform into ocean and back to land or forest. These transformations sit alongside changes made to the island of Okinawa by the Japanese and by the occupying U.S. What is the relationship between your connection to Okinawa, its connection to the Pacific and living on Vancouver Island? How does living on this island inform the poems?
sy: I anchor my life in the consciousness of islands. Rather than thinking of Okinawa as an identity marker or political construct, I like to think of it as a spear—a spear which has the capability to puncture or overturn the imperial core. For me, I use this spear as a tool to question the dominance of Japanese people in diasporic spaces. To me, the island lends itself to vortexes and spirals—and so if used intentionally it can help to dislodge the inescapable drive of progress that drives colonization forward.
YB: My final question is really two questions. The use of quoted material from other writers who are part of the Okinawan diaspora as well as images, adds another layer to a very layered book. Can you speak to layers, voices, and research. How did you begin this journey?
sy: I recommit every day to something with no name, which I guess has become a sort of journey. Our atoms never cease to vibrate, yet we are surrounded by a present history that wants to freeze us in place – to deny any synthesis with future. shima is one of many tools that I use to refuse this stagnation, to refuse that which denies what is alive inside of me. And, I try not to put poetry on any sort of pedestal – it is a knife and can be used to liberate us, or it is a knife and it can be used to wreak havoc on the ones who are most dear to this world.
YB: Thank you for this incredible book, sho. A book of transformation, and deep exploration of being in the world. It is a book that speaks to forced migration and colonialism that holds deep meaning beyond Okinawa and into Canadian and North American culture and colonialism too.