76 Field Trip Against Witness: Anti- commemorative Asian/American Poetics A Pile of Past: Lawson Fusao Inada’s Anti-commemorative Poetics Timothy Yu Cathy Park Hong’s essay “Against Witness” offers a critique of a commonplace about poetry: that its primary political function is to bear witness to historical events. “In an era when eyewitness testimonies, photos, and videos are tweeted seconds after a catastrophe,” Hong (2015) writes, “poetry ’s power to bear witness now feels outdated and inherently passive.” Hong cites the example of Paul Celan’s “Death Fugue,” which became so institutionalized as a poem memorializing the Holocaust that Celan himself wearied of it: “Rather than an act of remembrance, the recitation of ‘Death Fugue’ turned into a mantra to ward off difficult engagement with the past.” Hong calls this a movement from witness to commemoration : “It becomes all pious gesture and drained of meaning. When a poem becomes commemorative, it dies” (Hong 2015). What are the implications of Hong’s critique for Asian American poets ? Many well- known Asian American poems are, in fact, grounded in accounts of historical injustices. Perhaps the most prominent example of such injustice is the internment of Japanese Americans by the U.S. government during World War II, a historical trauma evoked by poets such as Janice Mirikitani, Mitsuye Yamada, and Lawson Fusao Inada—all of whom were themselves interned. One might argue that the history of Japanese American internment has not even reached the level of “commemoration ” in American public awareness that would render its poetry clichéd; many Americans remain ignorant of the facts of internment, and supporters of recent efforts to block refugees and Muslims from entering Field Trip 77 the United States have even cited Japanese American internment as a positive precedent. There is little risk, it would seem, of the American establishment trotting out remembrances of Japanese American internment as a “pious gesture” anytime soon. Nonetheless, many poems of internment do display a consciousness of the risks of commemoration. Such poems do not offer an easily digestible narrative of historical experience, nor do they present a pious moral clarity . Indeed, many complicate the very notion of witness itself by injecting uncertainty into the act of recollection or by refusing to speak for the totality of internee experience. These are anti-commemorative poems of self- critical remembrance, acknowledging the complications of the language of witness while also engaging directly the continuing resistance of audiences to the true historical lessons of internment. Lawson Fusao Inada’s Legends from Camp offers a remarkable, book- length example of an anti- commemorative poetics. Published in 1993, Legends from Camp is grounded in Inada’s experience of being interned as a child. Yet the very title of the collection signals that something more ambiguous than remembrance or commemoration is at work in these poems. What Inada offers are not “stories” or “experiences” from the internment camps but legends. This may seem a curious choice: a legend is not, after all, usually a story from one’s own experience but a story received from others. Moreover, it is a story whose relationship to historical fact is unclear—“a traditional story sometimes popularly regarded as historical but not authenticated,” as the Oxford English Dictionary has it. But Inada also plays on a second meaning of legend: an inscription, a piece of writing. His title calls attention to his poems not as transparent acts of witness but as moments of writing, focusing our attention less on historical facts than on linguistic acts. The book’s title sequence is a series of short poems with headings such as “The Legend of Protest” and “The Legend of Flying Boy.” A reader looking to this sequence for a poetry of witness is likely to be disappointed; these brief pieces are understated, telegraphic, and aphoristic, often marked by dry humor. Many of the poems do not have a first- person speaker, and many fulfill their title of “legends” by presenting stories that seem to have circulated in camp, overheard rather than directly witnessed. And most are quotidian, chronicling seemingly minor incidents rather than dramatic events. The dramatic title “The Legend of Flying Boy” heads a poem that turns out to...
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Sep 12, 2023
Sandra Mayer 
