Roy Miki: I’ve always harboured an uneasiness with the photographic image and how it frames events, and this would include family photos of the internment years, a period that for me goes from 1942 until the early 1950s. I have always been reluctant to use such photos in my work because of the dangers inherent in their valorization of identity. But when the editors for Random Access File2 were going over the layout, I recall talking about inserting a few photos, though not on the cover. These were to function as a counterpoint to the gathered poems, which were conceived as a movement away from the desire for an identity located or originating in a particular place toward an exploration of the myriad ways that all identities are mediated by power-laden discourses. I used two of my favourite images from Ste. Agathe, both taken by my father. In both photos, my pregnant mother and her three children, my brothers Art and Les and my sister Joan, stand alongside her close friend Nori Hayakawa, who travelled with her to Manitoba from their home in Haney, British Columbia, to help with the kids.
Kirsten McAllister: In the image accompanying your poem “September 22,”3 the one with your mother, her friend, and your siblings, where are you?
RM: Well, I suppose I’m playing with the notion of absence and presence. It will be another few months before I am born, so I’m absent in the new landscape of internment in Ste. Agathe, but in being present in my mother’s womb, I have already begun to absorb the new conditions into which I will be born through the body of my mother. These are the same conditions that will shape the emergence of my consciousness in and of language, more specifically the English language in relation to the loss of spoken Japanese. Like many JCs, my first spoken language was Japanese. My grandmother who brought me up didn’t speak English. But my first language, that is, the language I will think and write in, will be English. Japanese will disappear as a working language. What is interesting, though, from a writer’s angle, is that my first spoken language will remain as a lingual residue, the sounds and rhythms of Japanese lingering tentatively in bits and pieces in the body of memory.
KM: The very first photograph in Random Access File is from Ste. Agathe, and it is also the very first photograph that you include with your poetic work.
RM: I’ve always thought that the Ste. Agathe photo with my mother, her friend, and my brothers and sister captured what is involved in the idea of radical recontextualization. They’re standing there in the middle of Ste. Agathe, a little French Canadian town in Manitoba. They’d just been shipped from Haney, more than a thousand miles away from British Columbia. One landscape has been violently replaced with another landscape. To me that’s radical. Your entire life script has been altered. The photo takes on such symbolic import for me because it was taken a few months before I was born. Though I was conceived in British Columbia, this is the environment that will initially shape my consciousness.
KM: What about the poem you selected to go with that image? I’m thinking about how this image, an image that symbolizes such a profound foundational moment, finally enters the world of language, enters your poetic work. I’m thinking of “September 22,” the redress poem, which ends:
“we” say what’s left
until all’s said
for the sake of story
in our telling
times4
Can you comment on these lines?
RM: As I recall, it was as if the entire redress struggle was about trying to say everything until everything was said, but of course you can’t ever reach that point. When you think of the gulf of years between the mass uprooting and the redress movement, you think of all the stories that were not told, or if told, told to deaf ears. And you think of all the years that JCs carried within themselves the trauma of being branded “enemy alien” and the shame that came from it. It seemed to me that collectively we didn’t have the language to speak about the enormity of all that had happened. But during the redress movement, in the struggle to respond to the injustices of the internment years, what mattered was the effort to say all. Since the “all” can never be achieved, in the post-redress years we need to keep working to ensure that the language of redress is always open to change and transformation.
KM: In a sense, that photograph opens up so much of what was and continues to be unsaid. Uncertainties. There’s the moment the photo was taken, when no one knew what would happen. Now we can look back and see what came of everything, or can we? Then there’s the fact that you’re absent but you’re present. The photo seems to speak to many themes you explore in your work.
RM: That picture was very present in my imagination while I grew up, and this is perhaps why it came to mind while doing the final editing on the book. I was drawn to its wide, open spaces, which were in stark contradiction to the reality that my family was being confined there. All that space and nowhere to go, at least nowhere they could go without a government permit. Nevertheless, there was a position enacted in the pose — in standing together in that expanse of space. The photo serves the function of informing relatives and friends: This is where we are; this is the spatial context of our post-Haney lives.
Arriving in Ste. Agathe, Manitoba, 1942 (from left): Roy’s brother, Art; his sister, Joan; his pregnant mother, Shizuko; his brother, Les; and Shizuko’s friend, Nori Hayakawa. Photo courtesy of Roy Miki.
1 This is an extract from “Between the Photograph and the Poem: A Dialogue on Poetic Practice, Roy Miki in Discussion with Kirsten Emiko McAllister,” in Tracing the Lines: Reflections on Contemporary Poetics and Cultural Politics in Honour of Roy Miki, eds. Maia Joseph, Christine Kim, Larissa Lai, and Christopher Lee (Vancouver: Talonbooks, 2012).
2 Roy Miki, Random Access File (Markham: Red Deer Press, 2002).
3 Ibid., 33.
4 Ibid.