Van Assignment 3: Colonial/Post Colonial Perspectives

I try to see place as a convergence of history, cultural lens and geography. Writing about place is about writing about a relationship to place and, despite the colonial logic that we make place, it is more true and evident that place makes us. Totally not trying to boil that down, especially in light of our unique selves that flourish within the context of place. 

But in holding the complexity that one take on place is that of history, culture and landscape, traumatic or dramatic changes to our place (whether it is where we grew up and lived, where we grew up and left and came back to, or when we leave and are somewhere new) simply changes a people’s history, culture and identity with the landscape (which relates to food, health, spirituality, etc all at once).To me, this is what these poets are able to convey, and doing so with a complicated take on colonialism, which hopefully we can dissect. I’ll start with my two favorite poems by Sin and Chin (not just because of the wildflowers).

Rin’s craft technique is one that I will continue to study and meditate on. It’s apparent that Rin agonized over words with rewarding results. Example: In one sentence, four lines, Rin created a transition away from youthful memories of Marunouchi’s open field, quickly to: 

Days came when the buildings blazed in flames of war, 

Around the postwar Tokyo Station 

Just like a graph of the economic boom

Tall skyscrapers bloomed.

Craft follows content here, where change happens quickly, just as it was experienced and the way it lands on the reader. Immediately we are given this relationship between place physically, within a historical context, and as it relates to culture. This new world is more hetero-patriarchal, which we can find in the line on firms not taking girls straight from primary school and in how even women are questioned about their market value. 

My interpretation is that Rin is identifying a contradiction, that is, if wildflowers are too poor to bring to work represents a conflict between nature and industrialization, if women once had the choice to be wildflowers or work (such as a firm), and the conclusion of the poem is that it was tougher for women to participate in that particular industrial boom AND there are no open fields, women no longer have a place. In this interpretation, Rin’s use of natural elements to speak to the impact on women is stunning. 

In Chin’s Tonight While the Stars are Shimmering, I felt a similar spark. Here, place comes alive and  is vivid and colorful. It deeply informs how one reads the text. A burst a red and a blue silence immediately grounds us in contrasting images; “burst” is a soundful word next to silence. Yet we are also guided to expand our thinking through dichotomies and see what is between spaces (La Jolla and Julian, heaven and earth, sky and ocean, etc). We’re playing around with relationships here, starting with natural elements but preparing ourselves for relationships to people who don’t understand our lived experiences (describing the ocean to the well frog).

Place is more than an undercurrent here, it tells the actual story alongside how the characters interact with one another and their surroundings, differently and perhaps noting it in a gendered/racialized way. So the cockcrow and dog deepen what she means by destiny, and the dangerous dance of the mouse and kitty hawk further deepens just what kind of destiny she has. What better way to seize meaning of this piece than “I take your olive branch deep within me” and to expose the postcolonial tension of sexual or romantic relationships with white men? After a poem that displays no form of reconciliation, understanding or reparations between the narrator and this lover, highlighted by the relationships with and among natural elements, a natural element used as a sexual innuendo kind of is the only way to make sense of the relationship. Thankfully, Chin built it up quite nicely to do so. 

Lastly, I wanted to give praise to Hasan. They have some important takes on how to handle navigating postcolonial emotions/issues/contradictions that I want to spend more time with. Importantly, this piece was also one put some interpretation to and couldn’t find an article or anything as to whether or not I was close to this. I honed in on a particular concept I’ve been mulling over. That once we find ourselves in a new place, of different histories and cultures and landscapes, especially if the place we end up is the very place that has cast the stone to which our migration or displacement was a ripple, we often find ourselves both in valid resistance to that new place and in deep longing to connect to it. 

Throughout A Place Like Water, I found that she had a wildly refreshing take on water. It holds water as the wet city (which I read as London or within England) and compared it to the place worked on by the sun; it holds water as it relates to winter monsoons, its devastation and the questions to the political climate that would equate longterm displacement for folks; it holds water as it relates to being taken to a place they would want to go (like by ship or flying over it); and it holds water as a relationship to those left behind.