Beyond Heart Mountain by Lee Ann Roripaugh
(New York City: Penguin Books, 1999. 80pp., softcover $14.95).
Here are shitakiri suzume, Orihime and Kengyu, kakitsubata and the man in the moon. Here is a young girl sawing the ribcage of an antelope. Here is a coyote in her arms. Here is a family who eats “for something more than hunger.” Wrought with the stories of her Japanese ancestors as well as with diasporic fairy tales of her own making, Lee Ann Roripaugh’s first collection of poems seems to say: Once upon a time there were beauty and suffering and the two have never wandered far from one another’s reach.
What is so refreshing about Roripaugh’s construction of various couplings—beauty and suffering, closeness and separation, love and loss, American and Japanese—is that simple dualities never prevail. Rather, dualistic relationships are based on a necessary contingence. Seemingly disparate things inter-are—exist in one body, as do the gravel bits and pearls in the opening poem “Pearls”:
Mother
tells me they’re not found just
floating underwater. She says
oysters make them, when there’s
sand or gravel under their shells.
It hurts. And the more it hurts,
the bigger the pearl.
These lines, follow a stanza in which a group of boys on bikes taunt the speaker:
They kept yelling Kill the Jap!
I ran as fast as I could but fell
in the dirt, got up and fell.
My mother came running to me.
She carried me home, picked out
the gravel, washed off the blood,
tucked me into her bed and let
me wear the ring for awhile.
“The more it hurts, the bigger the pearl,” is not a simple question of suffering leading to gain, for the creator of suffering and the creator of beauty may be one in the same. Someone or something must do the work of transforming one into the other. The gravel on a dirt road and the gravel inside an oyster shell, though similar substances, change according to their conditions.
Roripaugh writes with the awareness that transformation and redemption have a history, that they come at a price. “Oyurushi,” a poem about the loss and retrieval of a friend, has a complicated history, though it begins simply enough as a narrative about two young girls:
She hid her mother’s perfume in a lunch-
box, dabbed it behind my ears, then
gave me a paper cube with a peephole--
I looked inside and saw
You are my best friend.
In stanza two, the speaker betrays her friend and is met by another paper cube: “She folded another paper cube—/I looked inside and read/I hate you.” Not until the final stanza (though we have clues: antelope eyes, rigid arrow of her back) does the speaker confirm the racial identity of her friend and the complications that it brought to their relationship:
She went to live on the Wind
River Reservation. Maybe a drop
of blood gave me courage.
I skipped on another playground
while white girls made slant eyes
held my back like an arrow.
Mary Running Bull, I’m folding
a paper cube for you--
please look inside and see
I am your sister.
Like the oyster shell that holds both gravel and pearl, the paper cube holds the messages: You are my best friend, I hate you and You are my sister. The transformation of the girls’ relationship, made literal through the transformation of these messages, happens not merely over time, but via the speaker’s understanding of the history of racism that has plagued them. By living through her own painful experiences, the speaker recognizes that she too must have a back like an arrow. The speaker forgives and is forgiven through her understanding of history. And the image that sustains the poem—the paper cube—is a vessel that holds both beauty and suffering, a suffering that the narrator transforms.
Closeness and separation, another difficult coupling apparent throughout the book, is most striking in Part II of this three-part collection. Literally the heart of the collection, Part II is set in Heart Mountain, Wyoming 1943, in one of the ten Japanese American internment camps. In the tradition of the poet Ai, Roripaugh writes a series of monologues, each one titled with its speaker’s name. However, unlike the poems of Ai which are typically spoken by voices we expect to be wildly heterogeneous, i.e. a serial killer, a Russian emigre, a widower, a whore, a Catholic priest, each of Roripaugh’s monologues is spoken by a Japanese internee. The result is a stunning display of diversity inside what appears at first to be a relatively homogeneous group. Roripaugh exploits the form to its explosive potential by tracing and retracing the same story again and again, from more than one point of view, revealing the complexities of camp life and of life in general.
Whether it’s Lily Iwasaki’s worries about the absence of her No-No boy brother Minoru, Minoru’s reflections about being separated from his family, Chester Korematsu’s longing for his Japanese girlfriend, Dr. Chikano Okano’s conflicted relationship to his patients, or Sam Toyama’s feelings of estrangement from the family with whom he shares a room, each internee who endures closeness and separation approaches his or her predicament with varying levels of acceptance and resistance. For Chester Korematsu, who has “joined the fire department,” the camp “is a big tinderbox” and he “like(s) being caught/between flames and water.” Paradoxically, what Chester accepts is the unstable, even explosive nature of the camp. Lily Iwasaki, a seventeen-year-old girl born in the year of the tiger, negotiates contradictions as well. Although her “Papa calls [you] No-No boys bad names,” she is making a charm bell for her brother Minoru who has been sent to Tule Lake. And though she knows, “No one will help.” she gets by, knowing that “even caged, a tiger’s/full of rage and cunning.” In the same way that the fate of a gravel bit is not determined solely by the oyster shell that contains it, the fate of Lily’s tiger spirit will not be sealed by the cage of internment. Minoru Saito’s active resistance leads to separation, but what his father may not see is the way in which that separation is inextricably linked to the closeness Minoru feels for his family, in particular for his father, that his leaving the family is ultimately bound with his desire to protect it:
he finally sold it for twenty bucks.
It was the best offer. Funny car
for a Jap to have, the man said
as he drove away, and my mother
had to stop Papa from burning
the twenty-dollar bill. Papa
it was his Packard, not yours,
that made me say No.
While each internee harbors ambivalence by virtue of living in camp, each one renders ambivalence in different ways. Lily’s rage differs from Chester’s fascination with volatility, which in turn differs from Minoru’s defiant No’s. Whereas Sam Toyama, an insomniac who watches over his pregnant wife, each night faces fear and confusion:
And as I lie here with my cheek
pressed against her stomach,
I don’t know anymore
if it’s hope or disillusion I feel
kicking me in the face inside her.
Sadly, Toyama experiences the depth of loneliness which physical proximity to loved ones cannot remedy. Dr. Chikano Okano, too, is displaced by the physical closeness he must cultivate with patients with whom he actually feels powerless. He “want[s] so much to tell him/Your face will be like new,” but he knows that their scars will never heal. Still, before dawn he goes to the ice pond to “skate on crazy reckless blades” and “The man from the maintenance crew/trails after [him], cleaving away/the scars [he] leaves[s] behind.”
Yet not every act of resistance fails, and acceptance is rarely synonymous with passivity. The same internees who chant Shikata ga nai “stuff rags under the barracks door, around cracks in the window to keep out smells.” While many wait in lines for food, Masa Nakahara gathers “wild mustard grass/to make tsukemono—sprinkled/damp greens with salt.” To her, “The pickles tasted so good, earth and brine.” Mr. Toyama’s wife Keiko sews “a bit of lace at the cuffs/and collars of her dress/to make it look prettier.”He draws “stocking seams up the curve of her calves with an ink pen” and “the twirl of her skirt, prickle of eyelashes against [his] cheek almost [makes] him forget/soldiers stationed in watchtowers/with rifles.”
If Parts I and II concern beauty and suffering, closeness and separation, acceptance and resistance, Part III concerns love and loss; though certainly each section of the book is rife with all of these. In “Star Festival,” ill-fated lovers spend their lives as stars that “burn alone” but for one night a year when the once farmer may row across the Milky Way to his once weaver girl, to his love who is “impatient to feel [his] fingers touch [her] face, [his] mouth drink [her], to have [him] inside [her] again.” The loss in this poem is not the opposite of love but integral to it.
“Kakitsubata,” the closing poem, is told from the point of view of a flower that has the capacity to “emerge in human form.” As the internees were confined to their barracks and gave only what they could, so is the flower rooted to the ground, luring her lover in with “intricate pollen and nectar.” She says, “Let me keep you/here, since I cannot let myself be torn away.” “Stay for awhile,” and she “will show you a secret.” Like Roripaugh, she “can tell you/poems so sad the tears will sting/your eyes like bees.” “And when you think [she is] only a dream/you had one night,/the song of sparrows will always tell/you otherwise.”
It is perhaps no coincidence that Roripaugh, the daughter of a Japanese mother and a European American father has an interest in point of view, in seemingly disparate couplings, in vessels that have the capacity to transform culturally perceived opposites. Whether she is speaking of gravel and pearls, the evolving messages inscribed by young girls in paper cubes, the vast starlit sky that both draws lovers together and keeps them apart, or flowers that emerge in human form, the answer to the questions her poems seem to ask is never just beauty or just suffering, closeness or separation, acceptance or resistance, American or Japanese. The answers lie beyond the heart of things, beyond any essential center to a transformative scattering, in a place where boys run like rabbits and coyotes die in the arms of young girls, a place where even the cut-tongued sparrow sings.
(New York City: Penguin Books, 1999. 80pp., softcover $14.95).
Here are shitakiri suzume, Orihime and Kengyu, kakitsubata and the man in the moon. Here is a young girl sawing the ribcage of an antelope. Here is a coyote in her arms. Here is a family who eats “for something more than hunger.” Wrought with the stories of her Japanese ancestors as well as with diasporic fairy tales of her own making, Lee Ann Roripaugh’s first collection of poems seems to say: Once upon a time there were beauty and suffering and the two have never wandered far from one another’s reach.
What is so refreshing about Roripaugh’s construction of various couplings—beauty and suffering, closeness and separation, love and loss, American and Japanese—is that simple dualities never prevail. Rather, dualistic relationships are based on a necessary contingence. Seemingly disparate things inter-are—exist in one body, as do the gravel bits and pearls in the opening poem “Pearls”:
Mother
tells me they’re not found just
floating underwater. She says
oysters make them, when there’s
sand or gravel under their shells.
It hurts. And the more it hurts,
the bigger the pearl.
These lines, follow a stanza in which a group of boys on bikes taunt the speaker:
They kept yelling Kill the Jap!
I ran as fast as I could but fell
in the dirt, got up and fell.
My mother came running to me.
She carried me home, picked out
the gravel, washed off the blood,
tucked me into her bed and let
me wear the ring for awhile.
“The more it hurts, the bigger the pearl,” is not a simple question of suffering leading to gain, for the creator of suffering and the creator of beauty may be one in the same. Someone or something must do the work of transforming one into the other. The gravel on a dirt road and the gravel inside an oyster shell, though similar substances, change according to their conditions.
Roripaugh writes with the awareness that transformation and redemption have a history, that they come at a price. “Oyurushi,” a poem about the loss and retrieval of a friend, has a complicated history, though it begins simply enough as a narrative about two young girls:
She hid her mother’s perfume in a lunch-
box, dabbed it behind my ears, then
gave me a paper cube with a peephole--
I looked inside and saw
You are my best friend.
In stanza two, the speaker betrays her friend and is met by another paper cube: “She folded another paper cube—/I looked inside and read/I hate you.” Not until the final stanza (though we have clues: antelope eyes, rigid arrow of her back) does the speaker confirm the racial identity of her friend and the complications that it brought to their relationship:
She went to live on the Wind
River Reservation. Maybe a drop
of blood gave me courage.
I skipped on another playground
while white girls made slant eyes
held my back like an arrow.
Mary Running Bull, I’m folding
a paper cube for you--
please look inside and see
I am your sister.
Like the oyster shell that holds both gravel and pearl, the paper cube holds the messages: You are my best friend, I hate you and You are my sister. The transformation of the girls’ relationship, made literal through the transformation of these messages, happens not merely over time, but via the speaker’s understanding of the history of racism that has plagued them. By living through her own painful experiences, the speaker recognizes that she too must have a back like an arrow. The speaker forgives and is forgiven through her understanding of history. And the image that sustains the poem—the paper cube—is a vessel that holds both beauty and suffering, a suffering that the narrator transforms.
Closeness and separation, another difficult coupling apparent throughout the book, is most striking in Part II of this three-part collection. Literally the heart of the collection, Part II is set in Heart Mountain, Wyoming 1943, in one of the ten Japanese American internment camps. In the tradition of the poet Ai, Roripaugh writes a series of monologues, each one titled with its speaker’s name. However, unlike the poems of Ai which are typically spoken by voices we expect to be wildly heterogeneous, i.e. a serial killer, a Russian emigre, a widower, a whore, a Catholic priest, each of Roripaugh’s monologues is spoken by a Japanese internee. The result is a stunning display of diversity inside what appears at first to be a relatively homogeneous group. Roripaugh exploits the form to its explosive potential by tracing and retracing the same story again and again, from more than one point of view, revealing the complexities of camp life and of life in general.
Whether it’s Lily Iwasaki’s worries about the absence of her No-No boy brother Minoru, Minoru’s reflections about being separated from his family, Chester Korematsu’s longing for his Japanese girlfriend, Dr. Chikano Okano’s conflicted relationship to his patients, or Sam Toyama’s feelings of estrangement from the family with whom he shares a room, each internee who endures closeness and separation approaches his or her predicament with varying levels of acceptance and resistance. For Chester Korematsu, who has “joined the fire department,” the camp “is a big tinderbox” and he “like(s) being caught/between flames and water.” Paradoxically, what Chester accepts is the unstable, even explosive nature of the camp. Lily Iwasaki, a seventeen-year-old girl born in the year of the tiger, negotiates contradictions as well. Although her “Papa calls [you] No-No boys bad names,” she is making a charm bell for her brother Minoru who has been sent to Tule Lake. And though she knows, “No one will help.” she gets by, knowing that “even caged, a tiger’s/full of rage and cunning.” In the same way that the fate of a gravel bit is not determined solely by the oyster shell that contains it, the fate of Lily’s tiger spirit will not be sealed by the cage of internment. Minoru Saito’s active resistance leads to separation, but what his father may not see is the way in which that separation is inextricably linked to the closeness Minoru feels for his family, in particular for his father, that his leaving the family is ultimately bound with his desire to protect it:
he finally sold it for twenty bucks.
It was the best offer. Funny car
for a Jap to have, the man said
as he drove away, and my mother
had to stop Papa from burning
the twenty-dollar bill. Papa
it was his Packard, not yours,
that made me say No.
While each internee harbors ambivalence by virtue of living in camp, each one renders ambivalence in different ways. Lily’s rage differs from Chester’s fascination with volatility, which in turn differs from Minoru’s defiant No’s. Whereas Sam Toyama, an insomniac who watches over his pregnant wife, each night faces fear and confusion:
And as I lie here with my cheek
pressed against her stomach,
I don’t know anymore
if it’s hope or disillusion I feel
kicking me in the face inside her.
Sadly, Toyama experiences the depth of loneliness which physical proximity to loved ones cannot remedy. Dr. Chikano Okano, too, is displaced by the physical closeness he must cultivate with patients with whom he actually feels powerless. He “want[s] so much to tell him/Your face will be like new,” but he knows that their scars will never heal. Still, before dawn he goes to the ice pond to “skate on crazy reckless blades” and “The man from the maintenance crew/trails after [him], cleaving away/the scars [he] leaves[s] behind.”
Yet not every act of resistance fails, and acceptance is rarely synonymous with passivity. The same internees who chant Shikata ga nai “stuff rags under the barracks door, around cracks in the window to keep out smells.” While many wait in lines for food, Masa Nakahara gathers “wild mustard grass/to make tsukemono—sprinkled/damp greens with salt.” To her, “The pickles tasted so good, earth and brine.” Mr. Toyama’s wife Keiko sews “a bit of lace at the cuffs/and collars of her dress/to make it look prettier.”He draws “stocking seams up the curve of her calves with an ink pen” and “the twirl of her skirt, prickle of eyelashes against [his] cheek almost [makes] him forget/soldiers stationed in watchtowers/with rifles.”
If Parts I and II concern beauty and suffering, closeness and separation, acceptance and resistance, Part III concerns love and loss; though certainly each section of the book is rife with all of these. In “Star Festival,” ill-fated lovers spend their lives as stars that “burn alone” but for one night a year when the once farmer may row across the Milky Way to his once weaver girl, to his love who is “impatient to feel [his] fingers touch [her] face, [his] mouth drink [her], to have [him] inside [her] again.” The loss in this poem is not the opposite of love but integral to it.
“Kakitsubata,” the closing poem, is told from the point of view of a flower that has the capacity to “emerge in human form.” As the internees were confined to their barracks and gave only what they could, so is the flower rooted to the ground, luring her lover in with “intricate pollen and nectar.” She says, “Let me keep you/here, since I cannot let myself be torn away.” “Stay for awhile,” and she “will show you a secret.” Like Roripaugh, she “can tell you/poems so sad the tears will sting/your eyes like bees.” “And when you think [she is] only a dream/you had one night,/the song of sparrows will always tell/you otherwise.”
It is perhaps no coincidence that Roripaugh, the daughter of a Japanese mother and a European American father has an interest in point of view, in seemingly disparate couplings, in vessels that have the capacity to transform culturally perceived opposites. Whether she is speaking of gravel and pearls, the evolving messages inscribed by young girls in paper cubes, the vast starlit sky that both draws lovers together and keeps them apart, or flowers that emerge in human form, the answer to the questions her poems seem to ask is never just beauty or just suffering, closeness or separation, acceptance or resistance, American or Japanese. The answers lie beyond the heart of things, beyond any essential center to a transformative scattering, in a place where boys run like rabbits and coyotes die in the arms of young girls, a place where even the cut-tongued sparrow sings.