Brandon Shimoda is a 2020 Whiting Fellow, and the author of books of poetry and prose, including the forthcoming The Afterlife is Letting Go (with City Lights, 2024), Hydra Medusa (Nightboat Books, 2023), The Grave on the Wall (City Lights, 2019), which received the PEN Open Book Award, and Evening Oracle (Letter Machine Editions, 2015), which received the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America. He is also the co-editor, with Thom Donovan, of To look at the sea is to become what one is: An Etel Adnan Reader (Nightboat Books, 2014) and, with Brynn Saito, The Gate of Memory: Poems by Descendants of Nikkei Wartime Incarceration (forthcoming from Haymarket Books in 2025). He currently lives in Colorado Springs and teaches at Colorado College.
What happens in the aftermath of the Civil Liberties Act of 1988? Are Japanese Americans ever “beyond that,” with “that” referring to the injustices, memories and memorialization of their or their family’s incarceration at concentration camps and the destruction of Japanese American communities? In his essay collection, The Afterlife is Letting Go, Brandon Shimoda traverses the difficult terrain in the dialectic of “innocence” versus “guilt,” “citizen” versus “alien,” “Japanese” versus “American,” to look at how certain types of memorialization are in fact desecration, and reparations an act of erasure, while giving way to a multiplicity of voices through the collection’s choral chapters. I was very moved by the depth of Shimoda’s reckoning with a history, like the stone commemorating the murder of James Hatsuki Wakasa, which cannot simply be dug up to be “protected.” Time itself becomes the material by which grief and resilience of generations of Japanese Americans are wrought in a nuanced undertaking that is at once scholarly and lyrical.
Tiffany Troy: How does the “Prologue: Paper Flowers” set up the essay collection that is to follow? To me, the 1943 murder of sixty-three year old James Hatsuaki Wakasa, one of 8,130 Japanese immigrants and Japanese Americans incarcerated in Topaz, Utah sets up the dialectic of “innocence” versus “guilt”, and the divide within the Japanese community over whether and how to display loyalty, grieve and memorialize the legacy of anti-Japanese racism and violence in the United States.
Brandon Shimoda: Thanks so much for the question (these questions), Tiffany. And also for your summation of the prologue. It affirms part of what I was hoping might come across, although I’m also hoping that what comes across is not limited to my awareness and understanding of what I’ve written. The prologue, for me, is a meditation on a question posed by Christina Sharpe in In The Wake: On Blackness and Being: “How do we memorialize an event that is still ongoing?” Her question is like the sign above the doorway into the essay, and the book, although neither the essay nor the book is an answer, exactly, but a form of living with and into the implications of the question. Wakasa’s murder (by a white guard, proxy for the nation) and the memorialization of it are, for me, perfect examples of how the “event” of Japanese American incarceration is “still ongoing,” in that there is, right now—in 2024, or if you’re reading this in 2025, or 2026, or later—a fight over how Wakasa’s murder should be memorialized, which is a fight over who has the “right” to memorialize not only his murder but the history in general. It’s a fight over how the story should be told and who should tell it. Fight, conflict, battle, debate, argument, rift, divide, breaking heart. This is a simplistic paraphrase; the story is long and involves many people, across generations and communities, embodying ideologies that are both in opposition and overlapping, and sucks into it questions of loyalty, assimilation, white-adjacency, white saviorism, spirituality, celestial manifestations of grief, erasure, and so on. At the center of this particular story is a 2000-pound stone. The stone, originally meant to memorialize Wakasa and console his spirit, was discovered buried in the ground at Topaz. When it was pulled out of the ground—unceremoniously, I should add (i.e. without Japanese Americans or archeologists present)—it became, and continues to be, a Pandora’s box within the Japanese American, especially the post-incarceration JA, community, because of everything that came out of the ground with it. So, the story, the “event,” is ongoing. And its ongoingness is representative and reflective of the ways incarceration has not ended, but is alive and animated. The wound is fresh, because the wound remains open, because the wound has not healed or—because it’s a wound that was inflicted by and within the United States—been permitted to. The Afterlife is an attempt to recognize and appreciate why and how the wound has not healed, why and how the history remains unquiet.
TT: I really admire the conceptualization of the “Prologue” as an extension of the Christina Sharpe quote, and how you delve into the complexities of memorializing the series of seminal events in the Pandora’s box of what it means to be Japanese-American.
You began researching and writing about Japanese-American history because you missed your grandfather. The choral chapters were composed from responses to a questionnaire distributed to over 250 descendants.
What was the process like in conducting original research on site, reading primary and secondary sources about the topic and formulating your own portrait of intergenerational trauma and healing?
BS: I think most of my writing is the consequence of missing someone or something, whether who or what I’m missing is my grandfather, a friend, a part of myself, the past, the point, the energy that exists behind the thing that is obscuring it, out of reach, that I don’t know or can’t define. It’s a good question about the process, or what it was like. I don’t think there’s anything else. Aside from the process, I mean. And I don’t think it has ended, either, despite there being a book. A book is to its subject, as a bookmark is to a book. I wandered around in search of my grandfather for a long time, so long that I eventually wandered through him into places that had no immediate connection to his life—incarceration sites in which he was not incarcerated, for example—but which resonated with his presence, with his being an immigrant from Hiroshima, a photographer, an enemy alien, a prisoner, and so on. It was like walking out of the house in which I grew up and into the wider world. Every encounter and point of contact creates, or has the potential to create, an opening onto another aspect of the world, which means also: a world that gives back to you what you didn’t realize you were looking for. The encounters and points of contact that formed the life of The Afterlife were often incredibly small, sometimes imperceptible, but no less significant, and no less of a bridge into something immeasurable. I have the attention span of a poet. Which means, to me, two things simultaneously: I can concentrate deeply and I’m constantly distracted. That’s my research process. For The Afterlife, I visited incarceration sites, museums, neighborhoods, streets; I read books, oral histories; I looked at photographs; I had conversations with many people (family members, friends, strangers, children, elders, survivors, descendants), sometimes without recording anything or writing anything down. I’m in love with all of that too: everything that does not exist, tangibly speaking, in The Afterlife, except as molecules or a trace. The book was an “excuse” to do research, and the research was an “excuse” to go places and meet people. The research was, after all—and maybe all research is—a consequence, also, of melancholy. Maybe not exactly in the Anne Anlin Cheng or David L. Eng sense, or maybe, but it often feels like the real research question is: Why do I feel this way?
TT: Yes, “Why do I feel this way?” as a mixed race Yonsei? Why did the same woman with the scarf in “Peace Plaza” who thanked you for reading the timeline mounted on the wall on Japanese-American history between 1948-1960 also tell you “We’re beyond that” when you explained that you are writing about Japanese-American incarceration?
In some ways, the idea that Japanese-Americans are made whole by the reparations is a perspective embodied by the Japanese American Citizens League. You write how in some ways, “The community was entrapped in a series of limited viewpoints and positions, in which were implied an ethics of right and wrong—ways to attend to history, to protect and preserve it, to protest and watch over it. Every Japanese American became a flag.”
How did you go about sequencing the collection that is both personal and communal in a way that presents the perspectives held by even individuals you may disagree with, beyond an ethics of right and wrong, and guilt and innocence under an “American” matrix?
BS: Thank you for pointing out, for reminding me, of these moments in the book. It’s one of the great things about a book coming out: being reminded of what I’ve written, because sometimes I forget. I never thought of this book as an essay collection, although now that it’s being talked about in this way, I guess it is, why didn’t I think so? I originally had in mind books like Jean Genet’s Prisoner of Love and James Baldwin’s No Name in the Street, two of my favorite books: my dream was to write a book that was a single, largely uninterrupted (even if fragmented) narrative. (Genet allegedly envisioned Prisoner, which is a 400+ page essay about the time he spent with Palestinians in the refugee camps, arranged like a chessboard; I don’t know if he considered it an essay.) But I had to pay attention to how the book was happening, which was in chapters, many of which began as autonomous essays or talks, each one reflecting, or reporting from, a phase of my learning. But your question about how I structured the book to accommodate the personal and the communal, including opposing perspectives, is so much more interesting than how I’m answering it... My first thought is: Did I? I hope I did. I hope I presented “the perspectives held by even individuals” I might disagree with, and in a way that gives them space to hold their perspectives without me intervening as more than a witness, but maybe that’s impossible, since I’m the one writing it, mediating how their testimonies are being contextualized. I think one way the balance is created, or maintained, is by the number of people who exist in the book—the number of people I spent time with, who make cameos, who speak and tell stories. Because more than 200 people appear—and speak—throughout the book, there are, I hope, fewer binaries, because the variety of experiences and forms of expression articulate the spectrum between viewpoints, with overlaps and folds, repetitions (rhythms) and sympathies. As for me, one of the challenges was to find the middle ground between objectivity and opinion. One of my favorite genres is “creative journalism” (is that a genre?), in which the challenge is inherent and forms extraordinary textures. I’m thinking of books by Gabriel García Márquez (Clandestine in Chile and News of a Kidnapping, translated from the Spanish by Asa Zatz and Edith Grossman, respectively), Selva Almada’s Dead Girls (translated from the Spanish by Annie McDermott), Fernanda Melchor’s This Is Not Miami (translated from the Spanish by Sophie Hughes), among others. I guess what I’m saying is that the challenge, for me, was aided and electrified by the work of Latin American novelists writing nonfiction. One last way of thinking about all of this is: there is, at root, no disagreement in how lonely and confused and chaotic everyone feels.
TT: That’s my interpretation, anyway, which is you let the other side speak even if you’re not down with a vision which treats assimilation into a White system necessarily the best vision for the Japanese-American community.
You do it in a way that is a lot more compelling than telling the woman with the scarf in “Peace Plaza,” “No, you’re wrong.” Instead, you think of and hold on to the meaning of “let go” in your own silence to her dismissal of your investigation. Then that feeling that you hold onto makes its way into the title of your The Afterlife is Letting Go.
It’s so interesting too that you don’t see The Afterlife is Letting Go as an essay collection, which is connected to how you don’t think of the book as a project per se, but as a continuation of your investigation and fascination with the ghosts, legacy, and continual push and pull in your community in the aftermath of the immigration (and exclusion and discrimination from the get-go), Internment, and the Civil Rights Act.
Your essays often center around an image (like the stone or the snap turtle) while also alerting us of the limits of rhetoric. Could you tell us about how you go about constructing individual pieces that might be written for a talk or on assignment?
BS: Oh, I see what you mean: telling people, “no you’re wrong,” that kind of thing. I often assume in the moment, any moment, that I’m the one who is wrong. It’s often only later that I think to myself: no wait, I’m not wrong! Which doesn’t necessarily mean that the other person is wrong, not if the destination of their thoughts is fundamentally different than my own, you know what I mean? It’s better to listen, even if I disagree, because the way people think and feel is the story. If I’m writing about assimilation, or attempting to create a portrait of how assimilation manifests in any particular moment, then I have to let the moment speak, rather than foreground my disagreement or dictate how the moment should unfold. I think this relates to images too, and how a stone or a snapping turtle, or a description of them, embodies, more animatedly, whatever I might be trying to talk about... maybe?
Much of my writing for this book began with fear: the fear that follows saying yes to an invitation by which I am intimidated and overwhelmed, however honored. It’s a mundane fear, but motivating. One of the first pieces I wrote was called “State of Erasure,” which was a talk I gave at the Holocaust Center in Tucson the day Trump was inaugurated. (The chapter in the book that is called “State of Erasure” is an expansion/contextualization of the talk, but is not the actual talk.) My friend, the poet/artist Robert Yerachmiel Sniderman, invited me to give a talk. I said yes because I love Robert, but then I regretted it because I was overwhelmed with the fear of disappointing him, failing the (grim) occasion, failing the museum and its audience. My partner, the poet Dot Devota, rented a small casita in the hills outside of Tucson for two nights so that I could focus on putting the talk together. The fear of letting Robert down, and also Dot, who gave me that time and space, inspired me to write something very fast. It was fear-driven. Another example is when Dionne Brand, a poet/thinker I revere, invited me to write something for Brick (in Canada). I said yes without hesitation, then, once again, regretted it, because how was I going to write something that Dionne would think was good enough to publish! Of course Dionne is exceedingly generous, and the fact that she asked me implied trust. I wrote an essay in a few days, which is not something I normally do. That essay is the chapter called “Japanese American Incarceration for Children.” Sometimes invitations unlock something, like the person is reaching into my mind and unlocking a box, liberating what might otherwise remain enclosed, frustrated. I often spend a long time—sometimes years—turning a question or idea or image over and over in my head, worrying it. Sorry, that was long-winded.
TT: I love how honest you are, in giving the readers a peek into the process of putting together a talk, which like midterms or finals, can be so nerve-wrecking, especially if it’s before a public audience plus a renowned writer that you admire! With essays, especially, and poet’s essay (which Dorothea Lasky defined broadly as essays that find its means less in argument and more in achieving a kind of clarity, even if that clarity is complex) it’s so hard to know if you’re completely missing the point or if you’re reaching toward that glimmer of light in the midst of that man made drudgery that is race-based, racist, and horrific, as you chart who you are within the public sphere as well.
What do you hope for your readers to take away from reading The Afterlife is Letting Go?
BS: I hope that the people who are in the book like it. I hope they approve. I hope readers, in general, enjoy the writing. I hope they find solace. I hope for the kind of experience that I have with my favorite books and movies and music and works of art: a heightening of feeling and attention, even if momentarily or slightly. I hope people fall asleep with it and wake up, hours, days, years later, having, unbeknownst to them, finished it, with only flashes of memory to remind them that the experience happened. I hope I still like the book in five, ten, twenty years, maybe even more than I do now. I know that’s a lot. But it’s hope.
TT: Do you have any closing thoughts with your readers of the world?
BS: Thank you, I love you.
Tiffany Troy is the author of Dominus (BlazeVOX [books]) and co-translator of Santiago Acosta’s The Coming Desert /El próximo desierto (forthcoming, Alliteration Publishing House), in collaboration with Acosta and the 4W International Women Collective Translation Project at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is Managing Editor at Tupelo Quarterly, Associate Editor of Tupelo Press, Book Review Co-Editor at The Los Angeles Review, and Assistant Poetry Editor at Asymptote. She co-edits Matter with Darius Phelps.