Breaking Silence: An Anthology of Contemporary Asian American Poets ed. by Joseph Bruchac

Abstract

322 Western American Literature Breaking Silence: An Anthology of Contemporary Asian American Poets. Edited by Joseph Bruchac. (Greenfield Center, NY: The Greenfield Review Press, 1983. 300 pages, $9.95.) Ours has always been a multi-cultural society. But only in recent years has this begun to be reflected in the published literature. The first novel by a Mexican American, Antonio Villareal’s Pocho, was brought out by Double­ day in 1959. The first published book of poems by a Japanese American was Lawson Inada’s Before the War, from Morrow in 1971. Now we have Breaking Silence, an extraordinary book and a publishing milestone, since it is the first poetry collection to represent the full range of contemporary Asian American voices. And that range is impressively broad — from the touching memoir of a family burying funeral urns before a 1953 exodus from South Korea, to the challenging stance of a Bay Area feminist coalition called “Unbound Feet Three,” to the love poems of Shawn Wong, whose forefathers arrived from China five generations ago and whose short elegant lyrics make no reference at all to ethnic origins or to Asia. A number of these writers, like Wong and Inada, already have books and awards behind them. Hawaii-born Cathy Song won the 1982 Yale Series of Younger Poets Award for her first book, Picture Bride. Mei-Mei Bersenbrugge (“born in Peking in 1947 and grew up in Massachusetts” ) has twice received American Book Awards from Berkeley’s Before Columbus Foundation. For others this collection is the first appearance outside small magazines. Jeff Tagami is a young Filipino American (“I grew up in isolated farmhouses along the Pajaro River and Freedom, California” ). In spare, tough, com­ passionate portraits he illuminates the lives lived in that dusty world of row crops and cutting sheds. Joseph Bruchac (who also edits a highly respected literary quarterly, The Greenfield Review) solicited work from over two hundred writers and received submissions from a great many more, before selecting the fifty repre­ sented here. “My choices were subjective,” he says in his introduction. “I picked poems I liked the best, with an eye for variety and giving each poet enough space.” The writers come from Honolulu, from Toronto, from Colorado, New York City, Oakland, L.A. They often hark back to cities and landscapes rela­ tives left behind to head east across the Pacific. The book is sprinkled with place names: Shikoku, Chung-Ju, Yangtze, Manilatown, Hiroshima. Many poems are laced with foods and idioms from Asian languages, bringing both fresh blood and new vocabularies into the broad stream of American litera­ ture. The collection’s title is also the title of a poem by San Francisco writer and editor Janice Mirikitani, and that poem is worth dwelling on. Its subject — the World \\T ar ii internment — recurs often enough in these pages to remind us that it is still one of the metaphors central to Asian American experience. The poem is not about the internment per se, but about the long silence Reviews 323 that followed. It is dedicated to Mirikitani’s mother, who as a young woman was sent to Rohwer, one of two large holding camps in Arkansas. Like so many who underwent the shame and dislocation of those years, she had never expressed her deepest feelings about them. In an astonishing, two-voiced poem the daughter pays tribute to the mother who, after thirty-five years, finally speaks out. In 1981, in response to growing demands for some kind of reparation, a federal commission began hearings to investigate whether the government was liable for any injustice done to the 100,000 Japanese Americans interned during the 40s. This woman, who had been raised to bend to authority and not make waves, was among those who appeared. In the poem it becomes the occasion for her not only to testify, but to bear witness at last, to speak her heart. She talks about how family property was vandalized and lost. She wonders why no German or Italian Americans were interned. She remembers a niece who died at California’s Tule Lake camp. When a commissioner says she has gone over the five-minute time limit...