Category Archives: Writing

Green is the New Red: Cutting through the Fog of Fear

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Congrats to Will Potter! His debut book, Green is the New Red: An Insider’s Account of a Social Movement Under Siege, has recently been nominated by Kirkus Reviews as one of the best nonfiction books of 2011. I was first introduced Potter’s work through articles he wrote for Satya Magazine  on the  “chilling effect” of the government crackdown on activists. Potter had been researching how animal and environmental activists became  the FBI’s number one domestic terrorist threat. He had also provided testimony against the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act. Since then, he has been reporting actively on what he calls the “Green Scare” on his blog, and last April, his book compiling years of research was released.

Green is the New Red is a thought-provoking and riveting read that examines several legal cases against activists. He gives particular attention to Operation Backfire, a series of arsons that took place in the late 1990s, as well as the activists arrested for their campaign to Stop Huntington Animal Cruelty (SHAC7). The book opens with the story of Daniel McGowan, who is also the main subject of recent film If a Tree Falls: A Story of the Earth Liberation Front.

Green is the New Red embodies one of my favorite forms of writing. It is part memoir, part history, part investigative journalism. Belonging to the school of “new journalism,” where an author acknowledges his role in the story, this book  is a thrilling read for both its exhaustive research and the intimate nature of the telling. Potter is reporter, activist and friend. While I find the resulting combined perspective to be one of the book’s greatest strengths, balancing these selves while writing had its challenges:

“No matter how many times I might think I’ve escaped these compartmentalized roles of being either a friend or a journalist, of either being part of the story or telling it, I find that I’m still trying to walk the line between them.” Continue reading →

Monkey Mind: On Nick Flynn, Bewilderment, Torture and the Circus

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In Nick Flynn’s memoir, The Ticking is the Bomb, he introduces  the Buddhist concept of “monkey mind,” the restless, bewildered, unsettled mind.  It is also the structure he adapts for the book.  Like a monkey swings from one branch to the next, Flynn’s memoir  swings from one story fragment to another.  It is a book about torture and impending parenthood; about reading and relationships. These seemingly disparate pieces echo and resonate with one another when juxtaposed (with great care and craft). The pages reveal a mind responding to all that he is reading, witnessing and feeling. ( Flynn quotes Fanny Howe:  “Bewilderement is a way of entering the day ”)

What I am drawn to in narratives is the intersection of the personal and the political.  How does violence  on a global level, or an intimate level, affect our lives, and how do we reconcile and respond to these injustices?

Flynn received an award from PEN for his first memoir, Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, the same night Sam Harris, author of The End of Faith won a sister award from PEN.   Flynn did not know then that Harris’ book advocates  torture, and what bewilders him even more was that Harris was given an award by a human rights organization for it.

Later, Flynn has the opportunity to go to Istanbul and meet with an Abu Ghraib ex-detainee, “Amir.”  “Now if asked, I’ll sometimes say, I went to Istanbul to bear witness, though at the time I was somewhat bewildered as to my role,” Flynn writes.

One of the parts of the book I found most interesting  is Flynn’s anyalysis of Standard Operating Procedures, the film and book project by Errol Morris and Philip Gourevitch. There is further corresponence between Flynn and Gourevitch on his website here. Flynn’s main criticisms are that Morris and Gourevitch take the story of the torturers at their word, and refer to the victims by the often times derogotary nicknames the military police gave them and not by their real names or dignified aliases.  And in one particular controversial passage, it seems Gourevitch suggests that the pictures look worse than things really were.  Flynn writes to Gourevitch: Continue reading →

Junot Diaz and Min Jin Lee Tell it Like it is #origins #doubt #why people want to become writers

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Last Saturday, the Asian American Writers’ Workshop hosted their third annual Pageturner Literary Festival (“the Siberian Literary Festival,” Granta Magazine Editor John Freeman joked when introducing his panel in the afternoon). Those of us who braved the snow/wind/rain to attend the amazing programs at Powerhouse Arena and Melville House, were very glad they made the trek. I couldn’t think of a better way to spend the day then camped out in DUMBO, listening to heartwarming stories celebrating 20 years of AAWWs, a panel on Occupy Wall Street (“There’s a reason why revolutions always happen in the spring”), and another on China and India with Siddartha Deb and Jianying Zha and their “menageries of profiles of people.” Amitava Kumar and Hishan Matar discussed the war on terror and straddling the line between activism and art, and one could just listen to Amitav Ghosh forever discuss history and opium.

One of the highlights of my day was watching Junot Diaz and Min Jin Lee “hang out.” The program description was exactly that. I wasn’t sure what this would entail,  but I was so happy I stuck around to find out. Though neither one of them really uses twitter, the conversation was split up into hash tags. #origins, #doubt, #why people want to become writers. I am going to break this post into # origins, #doubt, #the reader and #we don’t sell anyway Continue reading →

Hibakusha in NY: Ichi go, Ichi e

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“There are so many stories about hibakusha—too many to absorb.  But there is always one story that will stay with you.  Always.  You just have to find it.”  These are the words a young woman “Ami” told Rahna Reiko Rizzuto, author of the memoir, Hiroshima in the Morning.

As I mentioned in my previous post, Rizzuto  weaves transcripts of her interviews of the atomic bomb survivors, the hibakusha, and her own narrative of piecing together this story, infusing the personal and political elements that shape memory and history.

It is UN Disarmament Week, and two hibakusha have come to New York to serve as ” Special Communicators for a World without Nuclear Weapons.”

Wan and I had a chance to hear them speak  at Teachers College in an event organized by the Peace Education program.

“Call me Grandma,” Kazue Sueishi told the intimate classroom that had filled to hear her story.  Born in America, Sueishi returned to Hiroshima as a child with her parents.   She recalled her parents talking fondly of America.  In her nursery school, she remembered being asked to draw something.  She drew something beautiful with lots of crayon colors, and when asked what it was,  she said, “America”

When the war started, she said.  She didn’t feel angry.  She saw a silver  American B-29 plane everyday.  She would refer to it as an angel.  “Good Morning Angel,” she would say.

On August 6, 1945, her family had finished breakfast (an American style breakfast she added).  She was 18 years old at the time and worked in a military factory.  She had a slight fever and stayed home sick that day.  She was out on the street with her friend when it happened.  Blue sky.  Powerful flash.  She covered her eyes with 4 fingers and ears with her thumbs, then slid to a safe spot  like a baseball player sliding into home base.  B-29 had left Hiroshima.  She talked about the burns on her father, how the school building collapsed on her brother.   She saw school children 5-6 years old escaping with their teacher, crying out for their mommies.   She had given them a drink of water and umeboshi pickles which soothed them temporarily.  Later she went to check on them, and all of them were dead.   That is the reality of the bomb.

Continue reading →

Hiroshima in the Morning; Brooklyn in the Afternoon

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It is a beautiful Sunday.  Mookie knows this before we do.  She lays her head on the side of bed, urging us to wake up.  I look at the clock.  We overslept and her vocal communications may have nothing to do with the weather out, and more to do with the fact that she really has to go.  Patiently, she waits as I throw on a hoodie and  pants over my PJs.  Poop bags and treats fill my pockets and we race across the street to the park.  It is gorgeous out, but our morning walk is quick, just enough to get her business done.  There seems to be some sort of a march.  Occupy Brooklyn, I wonder/hope?  No, there are legions in pink, a walk for—against—breast cancer.  They are beautiful, strong and expansive.  But it is too much stimulation for Mookie, and we retreat back home.

Wan and I prep veggies to go into tonight’s vegan chili.  He then drinks chia seed water and programs his playlist for his Sunday long run.  My husband is training for the upcoming New York City Marathon.  Today he plans to run 23 miles.  While Mookie sun bathes in the light pouring in our living room window, I ponder what I should do this afternoon.

Perhaps go for a run myself, or a bike ride?   I really should write.  Keep working on the manuscript; make edits to pieces to send out for submissions; tweak the ending of this; write the beginning of that.  I often feel that in my limited spare time I have to choose between exercise and writing; reading and sleeping.  There isn’t enough time for all, and I’m never satisfied in my progress in any.

I choose to read this afternoon.  Not one of the four books I’m currently immersed in for pleasure or research, but something new.

Rahna Reiko Rizzuto‘s, Hiroshima in the Morning, was just nominated for the Asian American Writers Workshop literary award in nonfiction.   I received a copy, a generous gift, at my first Associates Board meeting at the AAWW this Friday.

I was intrigued by the blurb on the back cover :

“….The parallel narratives of Hiroshima in the survivors’ own words, and of Rizzuto’s personal awakening show memory not as history, but as a story we tell ourselves to explain who we are.”

As I write my own stories that blend memory and history, I cherish examining other narratives and the choices made in their creation.   The very first page, the very first words, draw me in: Continue reading →

Poetry and Performance; Process and Product

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We could all use more poetry in our lives.  I realized that last Friday night while at a book party for Ed Bok Lee and Patrick Rosal at the Asian American Writers’ Workshop.  Both Lee and Rosal read a few long narrative poems-“a subversive act” in our 140 character lives, Rosal said about the form.

“Couldn’t you just listen to these guys all night?,” the executive director of AAWW asked the crowd after the reading.

Yes. I thought.  It was these long poems that spoke to me.  As I listened to Lee read his poems, I watched his body perform them.

“Every Poem is a Performance,” I once heard a poet announce at a reading.   I remember my writing professor, Louise DeSalvo saying, “There’s practice, and there’s performance.”   She reminded us that musicians, dancers, athletes practice every day but they don’t perform every day.  We build up to that.  As writers, we need to adopt a similar understanding.  We work toward that final performance.

Lee’s body knew the words before he spoke them. It was from revision, revisiting, practice  that this poem, this performance was possible.

What I love about going to see poetry performed, is listening to the narrative introductions some poets give about their work.  What inspired this particular poem.  What triggered it.  I sometimes crave that sort of introduction in poetry books.  While the poems themselves do stand alone, I love learning about their incarnation.  Just as their is practice and performance, there is also process and product.

Both Lee and Rosal talked about the earth’s dying languages.  Rosal noted that areas in linguistic decline are also the areas of signficiant ecological loss.  Languages and lives vulnerable to perhaps the same destructive forces.

Lee’s poem “Whorled,” addresses this and opens with:

“Dear speaker in a future age/when only a handful of tongues remain/I write this to you as a song/even as I know it won’t do.”

I enjoyed listening to Lee’s poem “Regenesis” and the backstory of  the “tiny aluminum spoon that could feed crumbs to an ant.”

It was history behind the poem “If in America,” that stirred my interest.  How the story of a Hmong man charged with murder and its portrayal in the New York Times resulted in anger by this writer and later in poetry.  Process is sometimes is equally as fascinating as product.

A Handful of Walnuts

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Every now and then, I read something that I immediately want to share with everyone I know.    I had such an experience recently while reading the current issue of Granta. The issue in print and online has some fantastic writing. (Shout outs to Hunter College MFA Alum Phil Klay and Samantha Smith).  I also really appreciated Nuruddin Farah’s “Crossbones” and Tahar Ben Jelloun’s “A Tale of Two Martyrs,” as well as work featured by Alia Malek and V.V. Ganeshananthan online.  Do check it out.

It was Ahmed Errachidi’s “A Handful of Walnuts.” that triggered something deep. I shared it with lawyer friends, animal loving friends, a friend in prison, writing friends and family members. This is an excerpt from his forthcoming memoir, which I am eager to read.  Errachidi writes of his experience in Guantanamo Bay.  His lawyer Clive Stafford Smith provides an introduction to the piece describing the circumstances that led to his unjust detention.

But it is Errachidi’s descriptions of incarcerated life that brought me to tears.  It was not only the injustice of the situation that is revealed on the page, but a beautiful mind and tender heart that responds to this unfortunate set of events.  I hope you read his words for yourself– how he entertained his fellow prisoners with descriptions of imaginary feasts, his relationship with a visiting colony of ants, and how his mind worked to keep himself alive. “Thoughts were not restricted, even though hands and feet were shackled.”

Thank you Ahmed Errachidi.

And Still Peace Did Not Come- The Power of Stories

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Four years ago, when I first met Agnes Fallah Kamara-Umunna in Staten Island, she told me she collected stories. She carried them with her on a flash drive that hung from a string around her neck. Later, I opened them on my computer and listened:

“Welcome to another edition of Straight from the Heart on UNMIL Radio, 91.5 Monrovia, Harper, and Zwedru; 90.5 Gbanga; 97.1 Voinjama and Greenville; and 95.1 Sanniquellie. Straight from the Heart is a live, phone-in program designed to air your true-life stories and look at how we can become reconciled to what happened to us…. and, in some cases, the shameful things did to others…with the hope that we Liberians can reunite with one another.”

Agnes was a radio host for a UN Radio Program called Straight from the Heart focused on reconciliation after 14 years of civil war in Liberia. The program opened with the Bryan Adams pop ballad after which it was named, but later Tracy Chapmans’ “Matters of the Heart” became the introductory tune.

When we first met, Agnes had just come to New York to complete a course in trauma and recovery and also collect testimony for the Truth and Reconciliation Commission as she did back in Liberia. Liberia was the first country to collect statements for their TRC from members of the diaspora, and Staten Island had the largest Liberian population outside of Liberia. “I collect stories, not statements.” Agnes once qualified.

Her recent book And Still Peace Did Not Come: A Memoir of Reconciliation, shares the stories she has collected over the years as a radio producer and weaves them with her own narrative of life during and after the Liberian Civil war. Continue reading →

“Minds Enough to Lose and Histories that Can Only Hasten the Process”

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As I mentioned in my previous post, last year, I was in a craft course on memoir, which focused on narratives of trauma.  We had just read Teresa Cha’s Dictee.  After the third read, I understood it to be  a fragmented story exploring  rupture and  loss resulting from Cha’s separation from her mother, mother tongue, and her mother land, Korea. Dictee explores what it meant for an individual and a people to be torn apart by colonization, war and migration.

It was around the same time, I had been reading about post traumatic stress disorder in chimpanzees and elephants and was interested in similar questions in the animal context.   What does it mean for an animal as an individual or a species to be subject to similar ruptures?  In The Wauchula Woods Accord, Toward a New Understanding of Animals, Charles Siebert, explores this further when he examines psyche of captive chimpanzees.

Siebert visits Patti Ragan’s Center for Great Apes in Florida, which he calls “a place to house bad dreams.”  These rescued chimpanzees had previously been stripped of their mothers and denied their own chimpanzee culture. They like others born and bred for entertainment or biomedical research may have been “chimps with a name but no recollection of a tree.”  Though these animals are well protected and cared for now, traumatic memories can still intrude their present. He notes that chimpanzees “have, like us, minds enough to lose and histories that can only hasten the process.”

Siebert who has written several thoughtful and beautiful long narrative pieces about animals in the New York Times Magazine, incorporates some of that research in The Wauchula Woods Accord.   The book is framed around one evening he spends with Roger, a chimpanzee in the sanctuary,   but he provides background into a vast body of knowledge of our complicated history with primates.  The story of Lucy is one such example and you can listen to Siebert talk about her on Radio Lab.

What is also particularly fascinating in the book is  Siebert’s description of the history of trials against animals as described in The Criminal Prosecution and Capital Punishment of Animals: The Lost History of Europe’s Animal Trials, where all animals were granted a lawyer—and “accorded the same legal rights as human beings, right down to being provided with the best available defense attorneys, and all at the taxpayer’s expense”   He goes on to suggest that if captive animals today who have been put down as a result of a violent outbreak, were accorded “the same legal privileges as their medieval counterparts, the most amateur lawyer would be able to get them all off on insanity pleas.” Continue reading →

Trauma Song

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This past summer, I was fortunate to participate in a historical writing workshop with the impressive Charles Strozier at the Norman Mailer Writers Colony in Provincetown, MA. There,  I heard a little bit about his latest book on 9/11 survivors, his interviewing protocol and writing process. Earlier this month, he read from the recently published Until the Fires Stopped Burning at a bookstore in Brooklyn.

I was particularly interested in the chapter where he discussed traumasong:

“a deeply psychological state that evoked poetic forms of language, a kind of ‘melodious tear’ as Milton says in ‘Lycidas.'”

During my MFA program at Hunter College, I took a craft course with Meena Alexander,and we read a number of narratives of migration, dislocation and trauma. I became  interested in the impact of trauma on stories and story telling.

There is a loss and forgetting associated with the trauma. Fragmentation occurs. Judith Herman, author of Trauma and Recovery writes:

“The ordinary response to atrocities is to banish them from consciousness. Certain violations of the social compact are too terrible to utter aloud: this is the meaning of the word unspeakable.”

Pattrice Jones, author of Aftershock, Confronting Trauma in a Violent World, further notes that Broca’s area, the region of the brain devoted to language production and comprehension, is partially and even sometimes totally disabled during traumatic experience. Jones writes,

“Traumatic memories tend to stand alone, disconnected from their contexts and from other memories. Traumatic memories also tend to be experienced differently than other memories. They are more strongly sensory and much more difficult to express accurately in words.”

Jones cites Susan Brison who writes “ Saying something about a memory does something to it.” Jones adds:

“when we find words for traumatic memories that are stored as somatic sensations, we move the memories from one place to another in our brains. The traumatic sensory fragments may still persist, but they will be increasingly linked to the more coherent story of the event that emerges as the tale is told over and over again. In this way, fragmented memories literally become linked to their surrounding life stories.”

During the process of listening to his recorded interviews, Charles Strozier noticed something with some of the survivors—a certain cadence in their stories, a certain poetry.  He further  analyzes that language and notes:

“There is no question that trauma can destroy language, as well as the cohesive self, but death encounters seem equally capable of bringing out a language of witness that is highly rhythmic and sometimes metrical, often stanzaic and quite beautiful.”