from: Deirdre Lashgari, Violence, Silence, and Anger: Women's Writing as Transgression
(Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 1995).

Disrupting the Deadly Stillness:
Janice Mirikitani's Poetics of Violence

Deirdre Lashgari


my poems

strung like bloody beads across my throat,

my disembowelment, my seppuku --

scarlet entrails

twisting from the open wound. . .


my unbeautiful hunger,

this selfish desire to be loud, bigger

than light, this longing

for movement, my own . . . .

(from "It Isn't Easy" 50)

Janice Mirikitani's collection Shedding Silence is multi-genre, incorporating poetry, short stories, and drama arising largely but not exclusively from the Japanese American experience.1 In this volume she establishes a daring poetics of violence in which she appropriates -- makes her own -- what has been defined as taboo, inappropriate, improper. Here she speaks the unspeakable names of violence -- against women, against Asians, against the planet. She gives voice to those who have been constrained to silence in the face of violation, thus shattering powerful gender- and culture-based injunctions to "keep still."

She reclaims her vision and her voice, and helps us reclaim ours, by creating an aesthetic counter-violence, violating boundaries, violating patriarchal assumptions, violating the reader's own resistances and silences. By peeling the ceremonial covering off the face of violence, she disrupts the deadly sameness, the status quo imposed by social constructs or literary genre. When she shocks, it is with purpose, a way of daring us past our squeamishness, shaking us into hearing, speech, and action.

Yet she is also remarkably gentle with her characters/ speakers who are not yet capable of speech or action. In fact, whenever her writing seems to imply a binary opposition between us and them, or good and bad, she immediately deconstructs her own implied construction. Many of her poems cry out against the pain of externally or internally imposed silence. At the same time she insists that we see what Western, and especially European American, feminists often miss, or mis-see -- the complexity of the silences as well as the angers of people of color as they respond to multi-faceted violence. She gives us no easy dichotomy between the traditional silent woman and the "modern" woman who has broken through her silence. Neither is "right." If we as readers fall momentarily into a polarized stance in relation to the world, we are never allowed to stay there.

It is this shifting awareness of ambivalence and ambiguity, of multifaceted experience, which shapes the recurrences of one of the key images in the book. It is interesting that a work about silence and the rending of silence should begin with three poems in which a central image is the knife. For the silenced victim, the knife turns inward, against herself. But the corollary of this self-violation is the implied possibility of a move from silence to anger, turning the knife (literally or symbolically) against the victimizer instead of the victim, cutting through to truth.

For example, in the first poem of the book, "Without Tongue" (1), the character is initially described as "without tongue" because words would be powerless against her father's repeated sexual assault. Then she "lifts the rock where she had buried the knife,/ afraid she would use it to kill her father." What follows is suggestive and ambiguous, leaving us unsure whether the purpose of the blade is to silence herself, definitively, or to cut through silence with contra-active violence. "Her tongue tastes its cold steel edge,/shrill like blood." After she makes and drinks (remembers drinking?) "shiso no ha" tea, "Chinese flowers bloom in her throat."2 The poem ends with the line, "She cleans the blade and returns it to the drawer." Is she cleaning it of dirt? or of her own tongue's blood? Is it going back in the drawer to use again against herself? Or are the suggestions of self-inflicted violence only an unenacted undercurrent of threat beneath a surface threat against her father?

Because we don't know, the poem leaves us profoundly disturbed. Because the language is left deliberately unclear, we can't wrap up the images in neat explanations, and they cling to us and haunt us, forcing us to circle back to the poem, as the character circles back to the knife. The poem's disturbing indeterminacy has enfolded us, implicated us. It does not so much give us meaning as impel us to make meaning, drive us into movement through the revolting images of a knife in the tongue or the heart of the father, into active revolt.

As we reread, the pivotal mid-lines of the poem take on new meaning, metaphorical. Blade of knife merges with blade of tongue. The "cold steel edge," the "shrillness," e/merge from out of the rock she had turned herself into, buried herself under, to hide from the desire and terror of "killing daddy." ("Keep quiet. Don't tell anyone, or you'll be responsible for killing me.") At the end of the poem, the "blade" goes back into hiding -- but nearer to hand, no more "under stone." "Chinese flowers bloom in the throat"; form and significance begin to emerge where before there was nothing.

The complex and disturbing indeterminacy of this first poem sets the tone for the rest of the first section (also entitled "Without Tongue"), and for the rest of the book as a whole. As we read further, what we have read accompanies us, continually shifting its face, its voice, surprising us.

The knife image reappears in the second and third poems. "Jade Junkies" describes a Japanese American woman who, "cut deep" when her G.I. lover abandoned her in the "middle of America," has now "carved out a place" for herself as owner/ cook in a small town sushi cafe. Like her character, Mirikitani can "do anything with a knife" (3). She takes the image of "cutting" through a virtuoso multiplicity of variations, the metaphorical implications dancing in and out of the literal, revealing the human vulnerability under the tough image of the poem's persona. She could

dice
an onion before a tear

each stroke quick

like a blink

thinner than your skin. (3)


As the knife slices vegetables, it simultaneously slices through her customers' (and former lover's) racist reduction of her to exotic sexual prey. In an unnervingly deft reversal of the power imbalance, the character "skins" her customers (as she later "slips fish from scale to skin") making them "crave," redefining the sexism and racism they can't even see. She can't change their flawed perceptions of her, but, because she is aware as they are not, she can protect herself from them.

In the third poem of the book, "Prisons of Silence," the image of the "knife in the tongue" becomes explicit as embodiment of the self-destructive power of silence. This poem carries further the technique of split focus which we saw in "Jade Junkies," where the lines blur between the literal description of food being cut and the "cuts" of emotional pain. Here, Mirikitani violates the boundaries between personal and political -- or rather, crossing back and forth, she makes us know the two realms were never separate. Part 2 of the poem speaks the tenderness and passion of the love between the speaker and her husband "before the war." Part 4 speaks his death and the distance now between them, the "walls of silence." Part 6 speaks .pa
"containment" and "burial," and describes how "I rebuilt my life/ like a wall, unquestioning." (8)

Indented, encased by the personal walls, is the larger history the speaker has tried to bury in silence. This history of racism, internment, humiliation, and the silence not just of one person but of a community -- threatens to burst through the speaker's carefully built walls. It is as if another self lives within her, blurting out what she has tried to hide.


A country of betrayal.

No one speaks to us



We would not speak to each other. (6)

The lines "Who lives within me?" and "Where is home?" weave through the personal love story and the public history it encloses, until by part 6 the formal separation between them disappears. "Their laws" and "their crimes" worm their way into the personal voice, until finally



He awakens from the tomb



As the language here obliterates the distinction between political and personal, it also blurs the distinction between the speaker and the man she loved/loves. Syntactically, the "tomb" is his, then(and) hers. It is he who lives, she who is interred. "He" (alive in her love for him) "unearths [her] rage," which she now knows to be no other than her love.

That other self within her, that "stranger with knife in her tongue/ and broken wing" (7), is no longer a stranger but her (now multiple) selves:

There is a psychological violence in the very process of breaking through silence. To see, to acknowledge, to speak -- this is dangerous to political and ideological structures. But in not-speaking, one violates herself, as the violence of Mirikitani's images in "Breaking Silence" suggests: "Pride has kept my lips/ pinned by nails." (35)

The anger which fuels the act of breaking through silence need not express itself explicitly in words. The mother's testimony before the 1981 "Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Japanese American Civilians" is restrained. And in the short story "Tomatoes," the deadly threat of Hanako's rage is clothed, but by no means hidden, in words of oblique action and seeming quiet politeness.

Hanako understands, suddenly, that the neighbor Mr. Haufmann has defined her young daughter as sexual target, "there for the picking," as he lifts her "high in the air, her skirt flying above her panties," "gave [her] pears and figs....ripe and sweet," and "let [her] stand on his shoulders so [she] could reach the top branches." (37-40) Without raising her voice, without being explicit about her understanding of Mr. Haufmann's designs on the child, Hanako reverses the power relationship, redefining his implicit definition of woman and girlchild as "tomatoes," "pickings." Shifting the locus of implicit violence from them to him, she lets him know that she will stop at nothing to protect her daughter. She inquires politely about Mr. Haufmann's wife and sons. At the same time,

Hanako's hoe high in the air, whacked like a sword through a ripe tomato, juices springing up, smearing the soil.

her voice low and glinting now like her blade as she whacked off the head of another tomato smearing the handle red. (39-40)

She speaks her meaning without words, and is understood. The young child Lisa stands, "her eyes wide and instantly older, seeing Haufmann wilting shriveled in sweat and the wrinkles of his wet shirt" (40). Mirikitani here redefines the gaze, now as the female power to annihilate patriarchy's deadly threat of appropriation. In violating the "appropriate," she reclaims her anger and her proper -- or own -- dynamic being.

One of the polarities Mirikitani denies us is the easy division between women (certainly the principal focus of this book) and men. Part 1 of the book ends with "Slaying Dragon Ladies" (with the epigraph "On seeing the movie 'The Year of the Dragon'"), a harsh and jolting poem which plays menacingly with popular Western stereotypes of the "Asian woman":


The poem's tone seems parodic one moment, genuinely angry the next -- as if the silenced woman is "putting on" the costume of the stereotype as a way of claiming her valid rage, much as the narrator of Kingston's The Woman Warrior clothes her timid social persona in the secret cloak of the avenging woman warrior, Fa Mu Lan. She is also "putting on" the reader, trapping us in a "no-man's land" in which we can neither take the speaker's stance seriously nor dismiss it. Thus the reader, male or female, is backed into a binary corner in which repudiation of the patriarchy seems to include men as well. Read in isolation, the poem dares us to respond, "Ok, now we've got her figured! She has it in for men."

Of course, whenever we have anything "figured," Mirikitani trips us up. The next section, "It Isn't Easy," begins with three tender and empathetic love poems to men -- "In Remembrance" for her uncle Minoru, framed by two poems for her husband4. "In Remembrance" reminds us that it is not only women who respond to the unspeakable pain of "unjust punishment, racism, and rejection sharp as blades" by silencing themselves. (53) Echoing the way the earlier poems played with multiple connotations of "knife," the speaker shifts the poem's focus from victim to agent of transformation as she shifts the implied definition of "blade." She vows to speak out -- "she" multiplied -- what her uncle could not speak: "Our tongues are sharp like blades/ we overturn furrows of secrecy" (54).

Then, suddenly, without preparation, we are hit with the terrifying short story "Spoils of War," in which a young Asian woman is brutally raped, murdered, and mutilated by a soldier back from Vietnam. Again, it would be tempting to see this story in terms of a polarization between the vulnerable woman and the male "enemy." Paradoxically, what prevents a binary opposition is precisely the split narrative structure, in which the perspective alternates between that of the young woman, Violet, and that of the unnamed Vietnam Vet.

The story opens with Violet jogging on a running path in the hills above the campus in Berkeley, thinking of her European American lover, their involvement in protests against the Vietnam War, her parents' distancing from her because she was not born a son. Suddenly, without warning, we realize we are no longer in her mind but someone else's -- a consciousness which assaults us with its increasingly psychopathic violence and brutally sexual and racist language. By violating the boundaries between the characters, between the sympathetic "hero" and the "villain," Mirikitani makes it impossible to maintain a good/bad, us/them split in our response. In fact, she suggests that encapsulating the evil in the person of a polarized "enemy" is to cover it over and make real healing impossible, as an abcess hides and protects the deep infection.

By denying us any neat polarization, by simultaneously repelling us, confusing us, disturbing us, she also makes it impossible for us to keep the horror of the story at arm's length, separate from our own safe lives. As the crazed violence of the veteran overflows the boundaries of the young woman's life, so violence on a national and international scale overflows the neat protective walls we have erected in our lives.

We are repulsed by the mind of the veteran; and we are at the same time forced to understand the influences that have brought him here: the horror of the war which the draft and/or the economy threw him into; the racist and sexist ideologies inculcated by military training and the daily hell of combat; the way the imperatives of killing have violated the borders between here and there, now and then, in his mind, so that he can no longer distinguish between his flashbacks of war and the reality of the present.

The way this story juxtaposes the thoughts of the rapist and those of the victim simultaneously domesticates and universalizes his violence. The narrative cannot be kept within the "box" of aberrant pathology, seen as the story of an individual rapist. The narrative structure brings the man out of the box, out from under the label. It places him in a human context, and thus a larger context. The rapist is not simply this man; he/it is the whole interlocking system of sexism/racism/ military-sanctioned violence loose in our society, seeping into our "safe" doings and thinkings.

Mirikitani's use of imagery reinforces this violating of boundaries between the "good guys" of the private world and the "bad guys" who threaten it. Thinking of her parents' grief over the death of their infant son when she was a child, and how they have used that unforgiving grief to wall her out, Violet envisions their silence as being "like blades beneath their tongues." (58) Parents as well as soldiers may carry weapons that can kill; the rapist is not the only one poisoned with sexism. And at the end of the story, in a terrifying confluence of the rapist's violence and the tenderness of a father at home, the text reads: "Gently he wraps the arm in his flak jacket. Carries it like a child to his van and leaves" (62).

In obliterating boundaries, freeing the narrative from a definitive past into a never-resolved, never-finished present, the text does not minimize the horror of the rapist's act; on the contrary, it increases and multiplies it. We feel horror not only at the loss of Violet's young life, but also at the violation of the soldier's humanity through all the larger structures of violence in our society. As we see in the soldier's monologues, the distinction blurs between Violet and Vietnamese women or populace, or land -- as part of the "spoils of war." The war is not just "over there"; life here is being "spoiled" as well. The author is demanding that we, confronted with these widening circles of violence, move from a polite and distancing silence to an anger capable of making changes.

Mirikitani sets herself a difficult task: to get us to face the manifestations of violence in our world, not to turn away but to act. The question is, how to get us to see what we'd rather not have to see. A writer may "slap us upside the head" to get us to pay attention, assaulting us for example with "inappropriate" language or images. But that strategy is hard to sustain effectively for long: it soon has the effect not of jolting us awake but of numbing and desensitizing us. Mirikitani prevents that numbing through a use of paradox and contradiction which keeps us from reducing the pain to the frames of a narrative, or a snapshot.

In the first lines of the poem "Shadow in Stone," the author deflects our tendency to distance the unspeakable and unbearable horror of atomic war. Confronting the impossibility of making the horror felt to us, her readers, now, she opens the poem in a touristy tone, as if the speaker were writing a postcard home from Hiroshima 1984, recounting the "August heat," the museum visited, the park.

Then the tone shifts with the double-edged words "I come to you late" -- late in the year, and thus in weather that's too hot; and too late to see, hear, feel the horror of the bombing. She breaks the silence of the tourist-like distance that separates all of us from the horror -- the distance in time, the distance of our resistance to hearing -- by giving voice in turn to the river, to a person whose shadow burned into the stone, to the bowl from which an old man fed his dying daughter. Mouth to mouth, the mute witnesses speak through her.

Only the first voice, that of the river, attempts to speak the horror directly, remembering

By the end of this passage, this direct voice is also stilled -- in part by the inadequacy even of these appalling words, in part by the excess of the words, which threaten to make us shut down because it hurts too much to let them in. "Photographs remind us of a holocaust/ and imagination stumbles, beaten, aghast" (31).

The voices that follow -- that of the shadow in stone and of the disfigured bowl -- do not assault us through the brutality of their images. They reach us instead through the banality of horror, the sheer mundane everyday simplicity of their language and imagery. One strategy is to juxtapose the common noun, unadorned ("teacup," "iron," "coins," "bowl") with an accompanying adjective, the imagination's attempt to see ("distorted," "crippled," "melted," "disfigured"). Often, though, the lines are stark in their simplicity.

The woman behind the shadow had always seen the sun as "a kind friend who has gently pulled/ my rice plants skyward." Describing the day of the bombing, she says, "No, I did not see the sun." The voice of the bowl describes how the old man fed his daughter "droplet by droplet/ into the crack of her mouth" and "rocked her still body/ watching the red sunset" (31). Mirikitani knows when to give her readers space to breathe, to be still, to watch. She understands that the silences in and between words are also necessary if we are to hear the experiences of others, the human heartbeat, the breathing in and out.

In the narrative/poem "Assaults and Invasions," Mirikitani uses other strategies to bring us into the work. In this case, it is not enough to hear. Through a deft manipulation of repeated images and phrases, she moves us from being to acting, from hearing to demanding to be heard. Also, by mixing genres and points of view (or vantage points), she prevents the reader once again from keeping "dirty problems" wrapped in discrete -- or discreet -- packages. Domestic and international assaults and invasions are both brought into open view, out of the closet, off the sanitized television screen. Moving in and out of the two perspectives, the author forces us to see them as intimately connected issues of power and control.

The narrative presents an account of Linette, whose husband beats, rapes, and slices her up. Lest we recoil, or frame this horror in a "domestic violence" box, she interposes passages of poetry into this story in which she implicitly draws the analogy between domestic and foreign violence, other "assaults and invasions." In the process of transgressing boundaries of genre, she erases other boundaries as well. We begin by individualizing Linette's story, personalizing her pain. But the interposed text forces us also to see her story as part of a much larger picture. As we care personally and passionately about this particular woman, we are also asked to care about our government's assaults and invasions against other countries, which the media too often allow us to generalize into safe abstraction. Moreover, the text demands that we not only see the analogies and the connections, but that we also see our own responsibility for this whole configuration of violence. And that we do something.

Linette is caught in a classic double bind. "He said she wasn't any good, dumb and weak even for a woman." (80) Yet, when she takes action (moving, calling the police, begging "the courts to restrain him"), he becomes "enraged by her acts of defiance." Whether silent or angry, she "deserves" to be beaten. The analogy with Grenada suggests that small third world countries too are "asking for it" if they seem "dumb and weak"; and if they resist, take a stand against the abuser, they define themselves as the enemy and "deserve" to be destroyed.

The language in this piece is hard to take. After Linette has moved out, reported her husband, tried to get protection, he finds her:

...When she wouldn't whimper or cry or open her thighs this time, he with his razor began to slice small slivers of flesh from her breasts, her crotch, her belly, like scaling a fish, until her body bubbled like a red carp. Her mouth so thick with pain, she could
hardly scream stop it. stop it. stop it. (80)

We readers want to cry to Mirikitani: "stop it stop it." The pain is too much. The language is too much. Not good art. Too ugly. Too explicit.

Mirikitani here challenges the assumption that literature must be "polite," "discreet," "within bounds." That literature must not be "political," or angry, or take a position. Mirikitani's

work suggests that everything we write is political and positioned.

And if we are never angry, it can only be because we have walled ourselves off from truth, refusing to see the daily violences which assault our fellow humans on this planet. There is no such thing as "inappropriate language" if it communicates effectively the truth it carries. On the other hand, whitewashing truth, falsifying language into tea-table politeness, is inappropriate. In this piece, the speaker/ narrator asks, "So why do I think of this woman on the day of the invasion of Grenada?" The text answers through its interwoven repetitions: "flesh," "slivers," "thick with pain," "scream," "stop it."

Her mouth so thick with pain, she could hardly scream
stop it. stop it. stop it. (80)


..we want to scream, stop it. (80)

We beat our fists against the windows, weeping in the passageways... stop it. (81)


...surprise that she had made him stop it. (81)

We cannot catch our breath, our tongues too thick with rage, beating our fists against windows. (81)

Linette, despite her pain, does manage to scream, to take action to stop the violence. As the text increasingly implicates us in the scream, it also moves us out of the impotent and inarticulate rage which keeps us isolated, enclosed, unable to breathe, toward a collectively empowered voice which can end the violence, both at home and abroad. Unlike Linette and others for whom no effective action seems possible except a contra-active violence, we do have options. We can still act by being heard.

We must breathe deeply.

Escape through the windows.

We must gather, find each other.

Hear the heartbeats, the power in our veins.

We must clear our voices,

take action to make ourselves known.

We must stop it

stop it

stop it. (81)

We do not have the luxury of the aesthetic "propriety" which shuts out the unaesthetic, uncomfortable sounds of pain. Once we hear these cries, we can no longer turn away. Moreover, we do not have the luxury of immobilizing and ineffectual anger. We must find in ourselves and each other an anger with the transforming power to heal. In the passage above, the final period suggests that our voices, energized by creative anger, can stop the violence.

Yet in the structure of the whole book, as in individual sections and pieces, we are not permitted any cathartic certainties or resolutions. The ambiguities and contradictions remain, still murky, demanding that we readers enter into the frame of the work, unravelling what we can. We are left with the task of speaking out the truths we think we understand, and acting collectively out of our passionately individual perceptions.

In this never finished task, we are not alone. The book ends with the long play "Shedding Silence," from which the book takes its title. A central motif in the play is the continued sniping hostility between Jadine, the "big mouth" rebel, and her conservative and patriarchal brother Russell. At the end of the play, the mutual misunderstandings in the family as a whole persist, but with a blurring of the lines of division. The tone now is gentler, less hostile. A healing has taken
place, a reaffirmation of the community within the family despite or rather, with -- all their differences.

In terms of plot, of the actual interactions among the characters, there is no apparent justification for this perceived movement toward healing. To understand this shift, we need to imagine the reader/audience as part of the cast. The impression we get of a healing among the characters is actually a reflection of our response to the play's deconstructing of its initial binary oppositions -- rebel/conservative, idealist/pragmatist; mother/daughter, father/son, brother/sister; male/female.

What has happened? Again and again, the play moves characters out of their locked opposing pairs. The sexism of the men is contextualized as we are allowed to hear their voices when they are not locked in polarization and can admit to each other their confusion, insecurities, childhood pain. The mother's hostile opposition to Jadine is deflected by Uncle Tosh and the grandmother. Tosh dares to break the sentimentalized silence the parents have woven to protect them from the truth about their grown retarded son Hiro. The grandmother, outside the circle of family warfare, shifts the locus of conversation to Hiro's difficult birth in the internment barracks. As the rest of the family is drawn into memories of the camps, breaking the taboo against mentioning them, they indirectly validate Jadine in her work to obtain reparations for internees. The splits and polarizations have blurred as the complexities of each person are spoken and heard.

The play ends with images suggestive of healing and community. Tosh says, "Let's all have a drink"; and the family members "gather at the table to toast and feast." The spirits of the dead, Grandfather and Chieko, "float off stage, singing" (162).

Yet there is no easy closure. Even here, the discord seeps past the boundaries of the play, the section, the book, demanding to be acknowledged. Beneath Tosh's call to drink and toast is our -- and his family's -- awareness of his alcoholism; beneath the sibling teasing lies real hurt and difference. And the songs of Grandfather and Chieko carry reverberations of the stories they have told us: of Grandfather's rage at the guards for starving the internees, a rage which almost got him killed; of the racism involved in Chieko's failure in the theater and her white ex-G.I. lover's betrayal.

As Mirikitani shows in the early poem "Generations of Women," the paradoxes and contradictions are inseparable from the movement toward community.

In form as in content, Mirikitani does violence to conventional definitions of the proper, crossing boundaries, continually unraveling our comforting either/or polarities. She mixes genres within a work, shifts voice and point of view, establishes tone and patterns of imagery only to undermine them, and merges disparate realms of significance, transgressing the expected. In the process of violating formal expectations, she also violates our discrete ground as readers -- sucking us into the work through the holes she has knocked in our defenses, through the fissures in its surface and the indeterminacies in its meaning. She refuses to let us off the hook. She not only shatters her own silences and the multiple silences of her characters; she also demands that we participate in the continually unfinished process of disrupting the "is" and breaking through to an empowered "becoming."

Notes


1. Janice Mirikitani, Shedding Silence (Berkeley, CA: Celestial Arts, 1987). (Citations to this text are hereafter given by page number only.) Previous works include an earlier volume of poetry, Awake in the River (San Francisco: Isthmus Press, 1978; second edition 1984) and an edited collection entitled Time to Greez! Incantations from the Third World (San Francisco: Glide Publications, 1975). Her work has also been published widely in journals and anthologies.

2. Shiso no ha is an herb the leaves of which are used in preparing pickled plums. Tea made from this plant is believed to be good for anyone who is feeling unwell or is suffering from a sore throat. (Thanks to Doris Okada for this information.)

3. In the quotation from "Slaying Dragon Ladies," the singular "it" for the antecedent "eyes" appears as in the original.

4. Mirikitani's husband, Cecil Williams, is the African American minister of San Francisco's Glide Memorial Church. Mirikitani has played a leading role in Glide's multi-ethnic social justice and community-building work.


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