Rivendell
Homage to Lost Worlds: Where I Write, Why I Write There
Garrett HongoI constantly find myself having to counteract what pop and postmodern culture provides me as scenic and narrative identities, backdrops for the play of consciousness, yet these manufactured things have the appeal of mass (mis)recognition, visual referents others can attach to a story I'm telling, in prose or poetry, about the past and its places. And I am likewise constantly inspired by the great works of literature not to give in, to find inspiration in the humble regions of my own memory, in a homebound ethicality, in the sere commonplaces of mild existence. I have Walden as our American version of the great Japanese eremitic zuihitsu (poetic essay) tradition practiced by Kamo-no-Chomei, Yoshida Kenko, and Matsuo Basho. And I know that, like them, I write from lost places, neighborhoods I have been taken away from I feel a need to return to.
I write from Kahuku, the plantation village on O`ahu in Hawai`i where I grew up as a child, remembering its Buddhist temple, tofu makers, rows of shotguns, and sandy village square, remembering the fields of sugar cane, the tractors and trailers hauling burned and cut cane down the Kamehameha Highway to the smoking mill at the center of everything. I write from the rocky beaches and sandy promontories where the separate graveyards were for Filipino, Chinese, and Japanese workers. I write from the blossoming plumeria trees, from the ironwoods by the beaches, and my memory of streetvendor calls and my grandfather singing in Hawaiin and Japanese as he washed dishes for his roadside café. I write from this world I left at the age of six, returned to when I was ten, that was lost to everyone as a re-capitalized Hawai`i turned itself away from sugar to embrace tourism.
I write from the small tract home my parents bought for us in Gardena, near Los Angeles, its symmetrical grid of suburban streets, its corner gas stations and liquor stores, the barbed wire around my high school, the razor wire around wrecking yards and auto shops, the tiny Japanese okazuyas and gaudy poker parlors, the rat-nests of palm trees, and the long, cooling, fog-banked and wind-tunneled seaward-bound road at the center of town. I write from my memories of all of us in high school--black kids bused in from Compton, Chicanos from "The Tracks" near Gardena Boulevard, and us Buddhaheads from all over town, worried dress and the latest dances, worried about cool and avoiding addiction to glue and Robitussin even as we hoped we were college-bound. I write about the summer evening Festival for the Dead at Gardena Hongwanji and the intimate spaces for dinnertime cooking my mother and grandmother made, my father watching football and boxing on the TV, exhausted after work and stymied by his social isolation. I write from people who work and want better for themselves and their children.
And I write from what was an intellectual native ground--my years away at Pomona College, where I studied literature, languages, and philosophy and was allowed to develop my deep love for learning and reflection. I found "the better nature" of literary practice there, sponsored in my soul a feel for the finish of language, the finer tone of contemplative emotions. What was better than reading Keats and Kawabata in the mornings, hearing a lecture on jazz operas and Moby-Dick by the fiery and signifying Stanley Crouch, browsing through the home library of the poet Bert Meyers and listening to him hold forth on the Spanish civil war and the last poems of Miguel Hernandez? What was better than reading A Primer of Tu Fu late at night, having a cup of burgundy, and practicing ideograms until I fell asleep over the smearing ink on the soft, absorbent pages of my copybook? A rhyme from Yeats runs through my head as I walk across the yellowing grass of the college soccer field. In the distance, I see the moon ascend over a snow-streaked Mt. Baldy, and I feel a studious complacency rousing into passion in the late spring twilight.
Volcano, the little village where I was born on the island of Hawai`i, is, finally, the first lost neighborhood of my soul. I did not grow up there in that preternatural rainforest and sublime volcanic landscape, but I moved back many times these last years, writing from the ache of my love for that place. It exceeds all the praise and lyric description I can muster. Poet, take nothing from this world but awe and a longing to return to the magnificent beginnings of first things.
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