Wednesday, January 29, 2014
Reshaped Stories -- Sara B.'s Question
How does Kaia Sand's walking poem actively (or not) reshape the story of the Japanese internment camps? Keeping in mind, perhaps: "I misheard much, rearranged some, but mostly tried to 'get it down.'" In other words: Where does Kaia Sand stop and Clara Yokota begin?
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Kaia Sand's account of the history of Japanese internment camps encompasses lists, photos of signs and advertisements, drawn worlds through implied maps and stitched patterns, a narrative connecting the camps to a flood - though this is written sideways to orient the reader differently - a Roller Derby advertisement, and poetry typed into xeroxes of historical documents.
ReplyDeleteIt may not be possible (or productive) to brainstorm a comprehensive list of everything these strategies and forms do to shape the story of the internment camps. But to mark a few things.
Sand pays attention to gender difference by including certain images - an advisory to pregnant women to avoid fish, roller derby names, meditating on a fisherman and Clara Yokota's name inscribed in stone. So that gender and bodies become a question, or at least a presence, in and through the narrative.
"Uptick" is cinematic in its form and pacing, which allows for different kinds of visual and historical knowledge to be brought into the frame, as well as different temporalities and pacings - that of reading versus that of watching.
Perhaps these specific strategies ask us to account for gender, embodiment, and for different forms of media in historical accounts of the camps. Keeping the narrative open for multiple points of entry, multiple ways of seeing.
It seems to me that any re-visiting of material (documentary material or any kind of material) entails a reshaping of story -- I think that's part of what's both useful and unsettling about poetry, that it draws attention to the materiality of language as a tool for shaping perception and experience, and that it can create a gap between an experience (or story) and its representation (which itself is an experience or story). In that gap the person reading or experiencing the work has space to come to new consciousness.
ReplyDeleteI also think a lot about the lines that open the book:
How do I notice
what I don't notice?
These lines frame the poetics of the entire work, as I experience it. And frame my thinking as I move out of this book and into the world.