>> Hello, and welcome back to National Book Festival Presents, brought to you by the Library of Congress. My name is Marie Arana, and I've the very good fortune of being the Literary Director of the Library of Congress which is the largest cultural institution in the world. I have the great pleasure today of introducing a truly fascinating program about poetry and the ways it can profoundly address questions of identity and deeply personal ways of looking on the world. Our guests today are two poets who bring very different perspectives to their work and yet their poems resonate with those same questions, identity, biculturalism, ancestral heritage, belonging. This program represents the final installment of our series Connecting the World With Words. Our two poets today are Kimiko Hahn, the Japanese German American author of nine books of poetry including "The Artist's Daughter," "The Narrow Road to the Interior," "Toxic Flora," "Brain Fever," and most recently "Foreign Bodies" just published this year. And, appearing with Kimiko is Rajiv Mohabir, a Guianese poet of Indian origin whose poetry collections include "The Taxidermist's Cut," "The Cowherd's Son," and most recently a translation of the work of early 20th century poet Lalbihari Sharma. That book is titled "I Even Regret Night: Holi Songs of Demerara." Moderating their discussion is a very gifted friend of the library and a dear, personal friend of mine, Ron Charles, prize winning fiction book critic of the Washington Post. Kimiko, Rajiv welcome to the Virtual Library of Congress. Ron, over to you. >> Thanks so much, Marie, and thank you to Kimiko and Rajiv for being here today. It's a great pleasure to be with you. I hope your loved ones have been safe and healthy during this sudden strangeness. >> Yes. >> Good. Good. We've been invited here today to talk about invention and influence across borders. My own relatives came here in the 19th century from England and Ireland. Could I ask each of you to talk about the route your families took to reach the United States. Kimiko, could you start? >> Sure. On my father's side, that's actually the Hahn side, originally from Germany and that area since border lines being what they are. So, mostly German area probably about five generations ago, four or five generations ago. And, he settled into the Midwest and my dad was born and raised in Milwaukee. On my mother's side, my two grandparents were born in Hiroshima prefecture farming area, and they immigrated to Hawaii, eventually to Maui where they worked on a plantation. And, my mother eventually left the rock right after the war and went to Chicago to go to secretarial school and art school, and my dad was at art school at that point. So, that's where they met. >> Interesting. And, Rajiv, how about you? >> My family came to the western hemisphere from India in the late 1800s. On both sides, my family was indentured to sugar cane plantations in the Caribbean, specifically in the country of Guyana. My parents immigrated to London, my mother before Guyanese independence in 1966 and my father afterward. I was born in London and moved to the United States when I was two years old. >> Such great, complicated stories. I'm curious, too, about your linguistic ancestry and how that enriched your appreciation of language. I think you're both at least bilingual. Is that true? >> Rajiv is bilingual. [laughing] I've got some other things going on, but yeah. >> I would say that I'm very flirtatious with my other languages. [inaudible] bilingual. Claiming that would be a stretch, but I am fluent in conversation, and I do like to write in it. So, the languages that I work with are [inaudible] which is a north Indian language that is an ancestor language to Hindi, and its Caribbean evolved avatar as Caribbean Hindustani or Guyanese [inaudible]. I've also studied Hindi language and literature as well. >> How does that affect the way you write to have all these forms and tenses and other ways of thinking about language? How does that come into play in the writing you do in English? >> Well, it's a very broad thing to say that all writing is an act of translation. I think reading also in these various forms of folk literature and song is a kind of translation act for me. When I think about writing in English for an American audience, I wonder about these traditions that I come from and how to upcycle folk song into my, the poems that I create for consumption, I suppose. But, personally [inaudible]. How do the folk songs live inside of me. >> Right. Right. Kimiko, how about you? >> Yeah. I was quick to say, declare that I'm not fluent in Japanese because I am not. I studied Japanese in college both undergrad and graduate school, and it was tough. It was really tough. So, I do not want to claim very much knowledge in Japanese. I can get by. I studied both modern and classical Japanese in graduate school, but it was a humiliating experience. However, I grew up hearing my mother, well, my grandmother was in Hawaii and we were in New York state in the suburbs of New York. So, but I grew up knowing that she spoke to her mother, and I heard her a few times speaking to her mother in Japanese. So, and my sister. We lived in Japan for a year, my family. So, Japanese was always very important. It was always, I would say part of my body. I was a little white girl. I mean, I was a little mixed girl, not white girl [laughs], growing up in the suburbs. I was half white, half Japanese growing up in the suburbs and knowing that and being reminded of that actually quite often that I was different. So, Japanese really so important to me. It's the baby language is important to me. The baby songs that I actually sing to my granddaughter. So, it's very much a part of my body, and I've made it my business, so to speak, and my pleasure to use that in my work over the years. I've also used my vulnerability, my inadequacy as subject matter because I claim that, you know, I claim that, you know, I claim or I at least admit to that humiliating experience of not being able to speak, not being able to take pop quizzes in graduate school and do well. But the stories and the poetics are super important to me, especially because Japanese women had so much to do with the formation of Japanese literature. So, that not only personally but from a feminist point of view, which is also personal, has been a tremendous thing for [inaudible]. >> We're going to talk about that at the end when we get to "The Pillow Book." >> Okay. >> I want to ask you both about a very problematic significant metaphor in American mythology which is the melting pot. >> Ah, yes. >> It's an old, pernicious idea in this country, older than I thought. It was first used in the letters from an American farmer in 1782. So, it goes way back to the start of America, to the United States. Did you find yourself negotiating with that metaphor, and how did you learn to push back against it? >> Well, I've heard the other metaphor which is the mosaic metaphor which I think is probably a closer one that we use popularly. I mean, I'm of mixed origin, so in that sense, I am personally blended, but I've never felt completely blended, if you will. I mean, I've always felt an outsider no matter where I go. So, that's personal, and it's also a way I look at things socially, especially now what's going on. It's a mosaic even within one so called group or community. It is not homogeneous, if you will. >> All right. It's not melted down. >> No. [laughs] >> Rajiv [inaudible] >> Something that's used for war purposes, right? We're going to melt down this silverware to make bullets or something. I don't know. >> That's perfect. Rajiv, just before we started, Kimiko kindly sent me an essay in which you spoke about chutney music and chutney poems which is just such a great corrective metaphor to the melting pot. Can you talk about that and what that means to you? >> Yeah. Thank you, thank you for this. And, I think about this idea of the melting pot and how it standardizes everything. And, what it really wants is for the vibrancy of our diversity to be, you know, just completely squelched. And so, chutney, as a metaphor, coming from a Caribbean speak which is Creoleized in its own kind of theory for the blending of cultures. Chutney, then emerges in the space where all of the constituent flavors inside of the chutney and chutnification process really make it so that you can taste the individual flavors of, let's say, the cumin and the mango. However, you cannot divorce the cumin and the mango, whether it's in eating a seed of cumin or in the mango itself. They have created all kinds of boundaries, and the contact zone then becomes one place while maintaining the integrity of the original. So, it's kind of beautiful and additive, and in that way, you know, when Kimiko, when you say that Japanese is a language lives inside of your body, this is one of those ways that I understand that. And, it resonates for me because in my house, [inaudible] was not spoken. My grandparents all spoke it, but Bollywood music was very much alive in my home, and it lives in our, it lives in my body as well in this chutneyed kind of way. >> Now, everyone's going to be hungry. >> Yes, that's true. >> You both write so beautifully and intentionally about the complex interplay of cultural influences. Was there a point at which you realized, or it came to understand that assimilation was a kind of silencing that you could effectively refuse, that you wanted something richer, something that embraced your various cultures. Was there like an artistic moment when this came to you that you can articulate? >> Whoo. Large question. [inaudible] going back. Sorry. Really scrolling back to your earlier question about my background. You know, oddly, my father who is the German American, he was very enamored with Asian culture, what was called in the '50, '40s and '50s oriental culture. My mother, on the other hand, rejected her background as a Nisei, as a second generation, as many Japanese Americans did after, during and after the war. So, it was oddly through my father's interest that we came back to my mother's culture, and I also grew up, of course, in the '60s and '70s when cultural identity and black power and yellow power and all of that was really fomenting and burgeoning and blasting open in the most glorious ways so that I, my entrance into all of this was really kind of bursting and pushing back, absolutely, but also embracing. I should add that, too, Asian American, the movement then from what I know was very much about Asian American history. Because of my family being interested in Japanese American culture, I actually had a lot of Japanese Japanese culture. My parents were both artists, so my sister and I took Japanese not just language but Japanese dance, calligraphy. I mean, all this stuff. [laughs] So, I have a bit of an odd background even given that most people's backgrounds from the various movements were kind of anomalous. >> Right. Rajiv, how about you? >> Like, the first time I felt permission to write, I have to say I, you know, living in the United States, I'm lucky that the people who came before me cleared a lot of ground for me to write. People like Kimiko. I remember a poem of yours, Kimiko, specifically about [inaudible] the dance and thinking about, oh, like, it's okay to write about these things that was intrinsic to my understanding of the world around me. And, I have to say also reading David Dabydeen's "Coolie Odyssey." David Dabydeen is a Guyanese who lives in the UK and who published a series or two books of poems that had really kind of broken the scene open in [inaudible] volume called "Slave Song" he spoke from the voices of black and people of color in colonial era painting. And so, the voices were all spoken in Creole. And, seeing Creole written in a book, like the Guyanese Creole that I should also claim as a familial language. It's funny the way that I have been schooled into thinking that what is proper and what is not. Guyanese Creole, like seeing these poems written in Guyanese Creole was something that shook me profoundly, that in fact there was space for this kind of poetry in the world. In the United States, that took a little bit more uncovering for the Creole to emerge, but. >> I'm sorry, Ron, but if I could just add to that as sort of. >> Yes, please. >> Funny dimension which is when I first read T.S. Eliot, going right into the ancestors [inaudible] literary ancestors. You know, because that's who we all were reading in the '60s and '70s and so forth. When I first read T.S. Eliot and I saw that he was using in his poems languages that were not English. >> Yes. >> I thought why did I do that? I got to do that, too. So, in a way, it was pushing back, but I was also saying, oh. He's doing it. >> Right. >> Can I do it with the languages that I know? >> Right. >> So, it was a kind of odd permission. >> From T.S. Eliot. >> Of all people, yeah. >> Yeah. My name is a map, a nautical chart of displacement. This idea that a name being a map is just so profound. I've never thought about it, but it also reminds me that maps are not neutral. You know, maps are not the same as geography. Maps lead and mislead and particular in its determined ways. You know? I mean, we create maps to shape the world. >> Yeah, and I think of, like, that as well in terms of a map being something imprinted on the skin, whether it's color, it's, you know, epigenetic memory. It's migration that never ends. You know, my family has been on the move since the late 1800s, and we are still moving. [inaudible] Boston a year ago. [laughs] But, also thinking about the kind of political orientation of a name and what name I choose to use when there's also a way for me to employ the mask to my benefit. >> Kimiko in your new collection "Foreign Bodies" you have a poem called "Ashes." What do her ashes know? Is such a powerful phrase and so central to our discussion today. Could you talk about that metaphor in terms of how we feel about ancestors, how they persist? >> First, I should talk about another literary ancestor, Emily Dickenson [laughs] and how I learned to take an object from reading her poems and give that object agency. So, what do her ashes know, I might have come out with that line without reading Emily Dickenson, but probably not. Yeah. What do, what is death which is a lot of what I've been thinking about since my father died a couple years ago, especially. And, also what does it mean when one's parents or relatives die? What happens to their history. I have things I never asked my mother [inaudible] for that matter. And now, I'll never know. I just won't. So, what do they know? What will I never know? Maybe I'll have to make those things up. >> It just addresses the immigrant experience so directly. I mean, the way the poem mourns and cherishes, the way it celebrates your mother while acknowledging her absence. That seems to be very central to the immigrant experience. >> Well, it's probably very central to all my poems [laughs]. Mourning and celebrating. >> Yeah. >> Maybe Rajiv, too. >> The language plays into this, too. You write he, your father, shoved her away with direct objects [inaudible]. Of course, physical violence but also the way language, the way grammar is used to intimidate, to silence, to put people in their place. You don't speak like us. You don't speak correctly. That sort of thing. >> Absolutely. Well, and language play for me, as much as Japanese has been both a part of my body but also something that I can't completely feel comfortable with, and maybe English, too, honestly. Always worrying that I'm, my grammar's incorrect when I'm speaking at a faculty meeting. [ Laughter ] Because they're watching and listening. Oh, yes, my train of thought. Anyway, language and language play and also how unstable language is has always been a feeling, an abiding emotion, a reality, and also subject matter. >> Right. >> How slippery and unstable language is. And play. I mean, if it's going to be, if it's going to make trouble for me, I am going to play with it. [inaudible] >> Can you talk about this lovely surprising last line, "She doggedly showed granddaughters how to graft flowers." First explain the botany behind that in case people don't know what that means. >> Oh, grafting is when you, I believe, take the limb of one tree, for example, and graft it onto another tree. So, you might have a white dogwood and you graft on a white dogwood limb. So, you'd have a hybrid dogwood, that hybridity. >> Right. >> That, yeah, so it becomes something else. I originally, that last line was originally sift flour, F-L-O-U-R, and I realized that that was too literal. I had taken all these lines come from the earlier sections. >> Right. >> And, that was too literal, so I wanted to play at some trickster fun at the end. >> Nice. >> Yeah. >> In the interest of time, we should move to, a few days ago, we asked you both to pick a poetry ancestor that you both share which I think is such a wonderful idea. It's such a lovely assignment. I hope you enjoyed it. >> Yeah. >> And, I don't know how you did it, but you both came to "The Pillow Book." Tell us about first how you decided, I mean, how would the two of you ever find a poetic ancestor, but then tell us about this particular book, this remarkable ancient book. >> I have to start with, by saying that I actually came to poetry through Kimiko as a teacher of mine. So, in some ways, if we think about genealogies of poetry, like I am very much, you know, in, descended of Kimiko [inaudible]. So, we would have common ancestors. [ Laughter ] >> Yeah. >> That's nice. >> Yes, although I didn't say, "Oh, Rajiv, we're going to use something that I like." >> Oh, no, no. >> No, I know. I'm having fun. >> In fact, I think it was me that say, "Oh, what about." >> Really. >> Actually, it was you. Actually it was you. I was thinking about what has mattered in your life over the years, everyone from Muriel Rukeyser on and earlier, and you know, so we actually tossed around different names of poems and books and writers, and yeah, and Rajiv said, "Hey." >> Let's go much earlier. >> Yeah. Let's go much earlier. >> Yeah. Now, bring us up to speed on this world classic, 1000 year old book. >> A thousand year old book. She was writing during a time when women were writing in, they were not permitted to write in Chinese which is what the educated aristocracy was doing which is to say the men were writing in Chinese. And, they were writing very stilted poems by then. The women who were not permitted to write in Chinese, they're not taught in any case, were writing in their own language. And so, it was very full throated, very full of energy. So, the women were the dominant writers at that time, and Sei Sh?nagon was writing these snippets and handing them around and showing them off. And, that's how a lot of writing was circulated from what I remember from graduate school. And, you know, in the 1950s, "The Pillow Book" of Sei Sh?nagon became a kind of beat classic. So, it's had an interesting diaspora of its own. >> Yeah. It's just remarkable that it survives, that we have it at all, I think. >> It is. It's remarkable that these snippets or scrolls or books or what have you have come to us, and it's a big collection. So, but that's how much the Japanese value her work. >> Very personally relevant in the kind of lists that emerge, you know, squalid things and. >> Yeah. >> That turn my stomach and things that don't turn my stomach. We were able, then, to kind of see an inferiority written in the poet's vernacular which is astounding. It's this idea of being given permission to write about the things in the world that we interact with. From what I understand, her life that she wrote about was very much, you know, contained within the walls of the court. And so, you know, some people would look at it and be like, oh, this is flippant. Well, you know, this idea of the things that are flippant also have political velocity like "The Pillow Book." You know, when she grants women inferiority and in the 1950s how important this is for American [inaudible], too. >> Right. >> Yeah, and also although she was writing from an aristocratic and sometimes quite bitchy point of view, frankly, sometimes in a fun way. Sometimes in a way that really put down, you know, the peasants and so forth. Aristocrats being what they were, especially during that time. What we can learn from her or one thing that I take from her is her ability to make a personal mythology and to say these are squalid things from my point of view, and you can have your own point of view. And, yes, I do. But, I, but that, but it is, I agree with Rajiv. It's great permission. >> I wonder if she isn't every poet's ancestor because she teaches you to look at ordinary things, to really look. >> Yeah. >> Which is the essence of poetry. Do you have a favorite passage each of you could read, funny or sad or tragic or intimate? >> Sure. A favorite one. Well, that's tough. >> I know. >> And, one of my favorites is probably ten pages long, the one on insects, bugs. So, I won't read that one. I'll read a very short one, "Things That Give an Unclean Feeling." [ Laughter ] It's form Ivan Morris translated this. So, it's a bit of an old school translation, but I like it because he lineates. A lot of the new translations are in paragraph form, but I like this one. "Things That Give an Unclean Feeling" A rat's nest. Someone who is late in washing his hands in the morning. White snivel, and children who sniffle as they walk. The containers used for oil. Little sparrows. A person who does not bathe for a long time even though the weather is hot. All faded clothes give me an unclean feeling, especially those that have glossy colors. That's the whole thing. So marvelous. >> It is. To feel the connection with this person 7000 miles away, 1000 years ago, seems so immediate. You're like, yeah, those things kind of gross me out, too. [ Laughter ] Rajiv, do you have [inaudible]. >> Yeah, actually, I kind of want to stay on the theme of, you know, the unclean and the gross. You know, "Squalid Things," I have been like thinking about a lot recently, and I'll tell you a little bit more about that in a bit. But, "Squalid Things" The back of a piece of embroidery. The inside of a cat's ear. A swarm of mice, who still have no fur, when they come wriggling out of their nest. The seams of a fur robe that has not yet been lined. Darkness in a place that does not give the impression of being very clean. A rather unattractive woman who looks after a large brood of children. A woman who falls I'll and remains unwell for a long time. In the mind of her lover who is not particularly devoted to her, she must appear rather squalid. And so, I've been examining my cat's ear, like, for the last week or so since I revisited this book. But, I have to say what I really, the thing that really appeals to me is the voice and then the pivot at the end of the voice which is not as certain. You know, these are the things that are squalid, and then all of a sudden embodying the perspective of a lover who is not particularly faithful. >> Yeah. A whole novel right there, right? Just. >> Yes. >> Yes. So, much compressed. It is so, I would never have guessed you two would choose this, but it makes perfect sense. [ Laughter ] We've been charged by the library to address how poetry can provide some solace, some direction forward in this fraught moment. I love that question, but I'm deeply suspicious of it. I wonder, I want it to be true. Could either of you, could both of you talk to the way poetry can help us heal the terrible divisions that we're experiencing now? >> I've been thinking a lot about this. Partly because I know that the library was going to ask us this. You know, I think that poetry reflects what is going on internally both for individuals and communities and also reflects what's going on externally, right. Whether it's theme or tone, subject matter and so forth. But, I also think, and maybe especially important today is that poetry amplifies what's going on around us, and for people who read poetry or listen to poetry or for people who don't and to suddenly have this available, I think is remarkable and important. And, a lot of poetry organizations think that, oh, well, it's our mission to bring poetry to the people. Guess what? It's already there. So, it's a matter of us listening, bringing our poems out, listening to other poems, other poets, other poets bringing their poems out. Grass roots organizing and poetry just goes hand in hand, and I think poetry amplifies what's going on. >> Nice. >> Yeah, I love that. I love what you say, Kimiko because I do feel as though, you know, when we look at the signs of protestors, you know, and the chants. We listen to chants of people marching in the streets. They're rhyming couplets. They're, you know, is the [inaudible]. You know, dreaming a better world is the [inaudible]. And, I think that, like, on a personal note, how poetry can be transformative in this way, too, in that connecting with the subconscious mind can betray whatever kind of biases we have. And, if we can be honest enough with ourselves to really do the work of interrogating, you know, the deeply wrought antiblackness that circulates in our communities, you know, and connecting with that, we can then see that the spaces that we need to work on personally in ourselves. Like, it's like Mahu Darish [assumed spelling] said, "I went to poetry to change the world but only to come to find that I have myself been changed by it." So, you know, with that also, I think that, you know, it allows us the space of really flirting with cognitive dissonance. >> Right. Right. Yeah. It's been such a pleasure talking to you both. I'm so glad we had this time today. >> Thank you so much, Ron. >> Thank you. This has been a presentation of the National Book Festival Presents sponsored by the Library of Congress. Thank you for joining us.