The Afterlife is Letting Go

by Brandon Shimoda

Overview

"The Afterlife Is Letting Go is a meditative consideration of Japanese American incarceration during WWII by Brandon Shimoda, author of the PEN Open Book Award–winningThe Grave on the Wall."—Matt Seidel, Publishers Weekly's "Big Indie Books of Fall 2024"

"Both personal and choral, The Afterlife is Letting Go is deeply felt, precise, and as generous in its insights as it is unsparing in its critiques of how 'exclusion zones' proliferate and reach across time and space. A stirring, trenchant, and necessary work."—Christina Sharpe, author of Ordinary Notes

In a series of reflective, multi-layered, and sometimes multi-voiced essays, poet Brandon Shimoda explores the “afterlife” of the U.S. government’s forced removal and mass incarceration of Japanese immigrants and Japanese Americans during WWII, excavating the ways these events continue to resonate today. What emerges is a panoramic, yet intimate portrait of intergenerational trauma and healing.

Informed by personal/familial history, years of research and travel, including visits to museums, memorials and the ruins of incarceration sites, these essays take us on both a physical and a metaphysical journey. What becomes increasingly clear are the infinite connections between the treatment of Japanese Americans and other forms of oppression, criminalization, dispossession, and state violence enacted by the United States, past, present, and ongoing.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780872869301
Publisher:	City Lights Books
Publication date:	12/10/2024
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook

About the Author

Brandon Shimoda is a 2020 Whiting Fellow, and the author of several books of poetry and prose, including 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 of To look at the sea is to become what one is: An Etel Adnan Reader (Nightboat Books, 2014) and an anthology of poetry on WWII Nikkei incarceration (forthcoming from Haymarket Books in 2025). He currently lives in Colorado Springs and teaches at Colorado College.

Brandon Shimoda is a 2020 Whiting Fellow, and the author of several books of poetry and prose, including 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 of To look at the sea is to become what one is: An Etel Adnan Reader (Nightboat Books, 2014) and an anthology of poetry on WWII Nikkei incarceration (forthcoming from Haymarket Books in 2025). He currently lives in Colorado Springs and teaches at Colorado College.

Read an Excerpt

Excerpted from “PEACE PLAZA” from The Afterlife is Letting Go by Brandon Shimoda

A woman with a red scarf came up to me in the Peace Plaza in Japantown, San Francisco. I was standing at the entrance to the mall, reading a timeline mounted on the wall: "1948-1960: About ½ of Japantown is razed for one of the first major federally-funded 'urban renewal' projects in the United States. Nearly 1,500 Japanese Americans and over 60 businesses are displaced." Three years after the war, two years after the last of the concentration camps (Tule Lake) closed, and shortly after returning to the cities and towns from which they had been forcibly removed, the Japanese Americans were, once again, being displaced. Before the war, there were 43 Japantowns in California alone. Three remain: in Los Angeles, San Jose, San Francisco.

It was a cold afternoon in August. I heard a voice. "Thank you for reading the timeline." I turned around to see a woman in a red scarf. The way she said "Thank you" made me think that she had written the timeline, had at least been involved in its making.

The most conspicuous feature of the Peace Plaza is the five-story pagoda. It was designed by Yoshiro Taniguchi, and was a gift, twenty years after the war, from Japan. Of Taniguchi's famous works, most of which are in Tokyo, many of which are in Kanazawa, the pagoda is the only one outside of Japan. It was modeled, in form, after the Hyakumanto Darani, miniature pagodas, each containing a Buddhist text, that were commissioned by Empress Koken in the eighth century. (She commissioned one million.) On windy days, the pagoda becomes a wind instrument. The Asian American High School Students Alliance had, that afternoon, set up three taiko drums adorned with purple dragons beneath the pagoda, but the students were nowhere to be found. A short distance away, much less conspicuous, is a slender three-sided bronze sculpture. It stands on the sidewalk on Post Street, like a pedestrian waiting to cross. It was made by Louis Quaintance and Eugene Daub, white men, and consists of three bas-relief panels, each depicting a scene of Japanese American life: a family—man with cabbage, woman with broom, girl with doll; women dancing at a festival; people being driven out of their communities. Quaintance's website refers to the scenes as "dramas" that illustrate "the very real sacrifices, sturggles [misspelled], and eventual survival, and celebration, of Japanese Americans."[1] The same sculpture stands in Japantown in Los Angeles and San Jose. It was funded by the Civil Liberties Public Education Program, created by the Civil Liberties Act of 1988. "The artists task," Quaintance’s website continues, "was to succinctly, expressively, and honestly communicate this story," but why was the task entrusted to two white men, and what, exactly, is the story?

The woman with the red scarf was sansei, maybe twenty years older than me. Her name was Marianne, which she pronounced, "Mary-AHN." Her grandfather immigrated to the United States through Seattle. He eventually immigrated to Beijing, where he died. Her accent kept changing: Japanese, Chinese, British, Southern. When I told her my name, she said it back to me, exaggeratedly, "BRAHN-DAHN." And when I told her that I was writing a book about Japanese American incarceration, she shook her head and said: "We’re beyond that."

What does it mean for people—a community, a culture—to survive a trauma, and how can anyone, including the people, be sure that it has survived, rather than, more simply, not died? If a community or a culture has transformed beyond who and how it was before the threat became real and started moving through it, what can be said to have survived, on the far side of that transformation? And what does it mean to celebrate on that far side, when everyone—in the sky, beneath the ground, or at the bottom of the sea—whose death or disappearance might attest to something different, something not deserving of celebration, is no longer present, or has been forced, by the people who have hurried themselves into the celebratory "beyond," to remain in the past?

At the bottom of the panel of women dancing is a poem by Janice Mirikitani, one of the first Japanese American poets I read, one of the first, for me, who existed. She was an infant when her family was incarcerated in Rohwer, in the flood plain of the Mississippi. The poem is called "Footsteps lead to destiny":

We dance honoring ancestors / who claim our home, / and freedom to pursue our dreams. / Our voices carve a path for justice: / Equal rights for all.

We prevail. / Our future harvested from generations. / From my life / opens countless lives.

The Journey continues...

Who was Marianne speaking for when she said, "We’re beyond that?" Her presence in the Peace Plaza, and her thanking me for me being there, did not suggest that she was beyond at least having an interest in the history of Japantown and playing a role in sharing it. I wished I had the courage or wit or presence of mind, or sympathy, to ask Marianne if she thought it was possible to move beyond an event that has not ended without abandoning all the individuals still mired within it, and without making peace, however uncomfortable, with that abandonment, but I did not say anything. I smiled and felt ashamed—of myself, for the book that I wanted, right then, to put down, and for wanting to put the book down. What I meant to say—but it was too late, the red scarf was flying around the corner—was a book about the ongoing afterlife of...

[1] Last I checked, the majority of Quaintance's website was devoted to a memorial he and Daub made for the USS San Diego, a ship instrumental in the war with Japan.

Editorial Reviews

"Shimoda prises open the language of erasure, and in forensic detail traces the disturbing compulsion to deny and suppress. . . . He connects the use of Executive Order 9066 in the 1940s to today's carceral structures of racial segregation . . . [and] brings together the work of other Japanese American artists, writers and activists to create a potent archive for those seeking strategies, resources and the courage for the journey into what Shimoda reveals as the afterlife where both the past and future are intrinsically intertwined."—Kirsten Emiko McAllister, author of Terrain of Memory: A Japanese Canadian Memorial Project

"Brandon Shimoda is investigating ghosts of our ancestors' pasts, for the same reason that I do: to tell their truths, to preserve history on their terms, to put the reader in both his and their shoes. It's done through a poetic, human lens that centers us in a real and honest way, rather than centering how the white gaze might seek to slant the perspective of what happened to us, or worse, to erase the memory of it."—Elizabeth Ito, creator of City of Ghosts

"Poet and essayist Brandon Shimoda reconstructs an ever-shifting narration, an unforgettable constellation of voices of the Japanese American incarceration survivors and their children, grandchildren, great grandchildren, including his own. Like the 'hinotama: balls of light' witnessed by the incarcerated The Afterlife is Letting Go also sparks of grief—it's a mourning star, orbiting our collective consciousness of night."—Don Mee Choi, author of Mirror Nation

Praise for The Grave on the Wall:

Winner of the 2020 PEN Open Book Award

"Shimoda brings his poetic lyricism to this moving and elegant memoir, the structure of which reflects the fragmentation of memories. … It is at once wistful and devastating to see Midori's life come full circle … In between is a life with tragedy, love, and the horrors unleashed by the atomic bomb."—Booklist, starred review

"The Grave on the Wall is a passage of aching nostalgia and relentless assembly out of which something more important than objective truth is conjured—a ritual frisson, a veracity of spirit. I am grateful to have traveled along.”—Trisha Low, The Believer

"Intergenerational knowledge must be actively sought, researched and retrieved––it's not a given. But while attentive to the work of remembering, Shimoda also writes through the slipperier terrain of experiencing one’s ancestry in the present, never fully manifest but felt and lived."—Frieze Magazine

"In this memoir, Shimoda . . . tells a universal story of the horrors of war both physical and emotional, and the tensions that linger among people long after the wars are over."—Literary Hub

"Relying on his skills as a poet, Shimoda enhances the elusive details of [his grandfather's] life with his own journeys of discovery, creating an impressive prose debut. "—Shelf Awareness, starred review

“Brandon Shimoda’s The Grave on the Wall is a wondrous feat of memory work, reportage, and writing.”—Judges' Citation, PEN Open Book Award

"In a weaving meditation, Brandon Shimoda pens an elegant eulogy for his grandfather Midori, yet also for the living, we who survive on the margins of graveyards and rituals of our own making."—Karen Tei Yamashita, author of Letters to Memory

"Sometimes a work of art functions as a dream. At other times, a work of art functions as a conscience. In the tradition of Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo, Brandon Shimoda's The Grave on the Wall is both. It is also the type of fragmented reckoning only America could instigate."—Myriam Gurba, author of Mean

From the Publisher