SOURCE: Yamada, Mitsuye, and Helen Jaskoski. “A MELUS Interview: Mitsuye Yamada.” MELUS 15, no. 1 (spring 1988): 97-108.

[In the following interview, Yamada reveals her thoughts on writing poetry as a woman and a Japanese American.]

Mitsuye Yamada's own words are the best introduction to her life and work. In 1986 she wrote this statement for Amnesty International: “My writings generally express my ethnic experiences; my literature and writing courses are taught from a multicultural perspective; and my community activities reflect my human rights interests. With these activities I have been working towards integrating the complex fragments of my life into a profound whole throughout most of my adult life. I have tried to contribute towards making our society a truly multicultural one in which our institutions would eventually reflect the experiences of women as well as the working class and ethnic minorities of both sexes.”

Born in Kyushu, Japan, Mitsuye spent most of her childhood and youth in Seattle, Washington, until in 1942 she was removed with her family to a concentration camp in the dry, windswept valley of southern Idaho. That experience was the basis for many of the poems collected in her first book, Camp Notes (Shameless Hussy Press, 1976). Her second collection, Desert Run (Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, 1988), explores a return to those unforgettable events: a physical return and re-experiencing of the desert environment, and a re-visioning of the tragic upheaval of removal and relocation. In 1981 she was featured with Nellie Wong in a documentary film, Mitsuye and Nellie: Two American Poets, which was shown on public television. The film places the artistic work of the two poets in the context of the historical experience of immigrants from Japan and China, and it offers a unique distillation of Mitsuye's life work as expressed in her statement for Amnesty International: the integration of the art of poetry with the activist's commitment to work for change in the outside world.

While her poetry is often meditative—taut, spare, and focused on the interior moment—her life is filled with action in support of the principles she has articulated with reference to her teaching and community involvement. She has been a visiting poet in educational institutions from elementary school through university. Her activities have brought national recognition: she has been a consultant to universities in the formation of Asian Studies programs and is a member of the National Board of Directors of Amnesty International and the Executive Board of MELUS. However, she has always made local, grassroots activity a high priority: she has formed, organized and served on multicultural feminist writing groups, a local Amnesty International adoption group, and many community human relations boards and committees; a recent project was a poetry workshop for disabled children.

Helen Jaskoski has known and worked with Mitsuye Yamada on various human rights and MELUS projects over a number of years. Most of the interview presented here was edited from transcriptions of a four-hour tape made over lunch at Helen's house in Fullerton, California, on May 12, 1987. The whole interview was read and edited at all stages by both. This is but one phase of an on-going conversation on literature, its place in our lives, and its value to us as human beings aspiring, as Socrates would have it, not merely to live, but to live well.

[Yamada]: “Is there a common ground among ethnic writers, or among women writers?” I like this question, because I think there is a common ground among ethnic American women writers. Separately, ethnic writers and women writers are constantly trying to accommodate into a larger structure, and they've experienced that since they were very young.

In ethnic women's groups, there's always an argument about what comes first: your womanhood or your ethnicity? I think that when you're a child within an Asian culture, your first awareness is your impression of being a girl in a family when you have three brothers and a father, and a mother who's always on their side.

[Jaskoski]: You're pretty much alone.

Yes. I have two older brothers and one younger brother. I was always the last one to take a bath—we had this Japanese bathtub. The woman is always the last one to be served. The deference given to the boys in the family and to the father is constant.

When you were young, did you look at that as kind of a law of nature? You didn't like it, but there was nothing you could do about it?

That's right. You do. Then you go to school; you go outside to play, at four or five years old. You find out for the first time that there's another kind of repression in the world, the “Mitsuye chop suey” kind.

That's from your poem, “Here,” about being Japanese in America—and with that companion, “There,” about being American in Japan. So you have grown up with a very particular double vision.

Yes. When I went to school, every morning we had to salute the flag. My mother kept telling me that I wasn't an American citizen. I wasn't sure I was doing the right thing or not, in my own heart, but I had to, everybody had to get up and salute the flag. I remember—I must have been all of six or seven years old—my mother telling me, “Your brothers are Americans, but you're not an American citizen. And so, you have to learn these Japanese things.”

So I had these kinds of separateness in all different levels of my life. I think the first awareness I had that it was okay to express anger, or differentness, was reading the feminist women poets, like Marge Piercy, in the 1960s.

So that's relatively recent.

That's very recent. I had these inklings, but never really saw it expressed on paper, except in The Feminine Mystique. But then I started to read …

You had a question: “How did you come to write poetry?”

Yes. I was thinking along lines of whether this was something that you had always done as a child, or discovered later …

My father was a poet, and he used to write senryu. It's a lower type of poetry than haiku.

More popular?

Yes, a grass roots form.

My father was the founder and president of the Senryu Society in Seattle. I don't remember how often they met at our house. About twenty to twenty-five poets would sit around our long dining room table and recite their impromptu poems as the calligrapher wrote them up with a brush on long butcher paper tacked up against the wall. So it was partly art, calligraphy.

My mother would make sushi in the kitchen and I was the waitress who served them. I remember there was one woman in the group; the others were all men. I remember this one incident: I went into the kitchen and said, “Mrs. Takahashi said that she wants some hot tea.” And my mother said, under her breath, “I don't know what Mrs. Takahashi's doing here. She should be home taking care of her kids.” Something like “Otoko no nakama ni” which literally means “in the company of men,” the implication being “What is this woman doing here in the company of men?”

My mother had never expressed this kind of anger, this edge in her voice. Then she said, “Women shouldn't be writing senryu. They should be writing haiku.”

Haiku is more refined?

That's right. Some senryu is very bawdy, you know. The men would laugh, and you could hear all of this laughing. I have some of those poems on my wall in my dining room: complaints about their wives, their complaining wives, and about their adjustment. It isn't anything like the lofty, abstract poetry that haiku is.

I remember one poem about a laborer who was asked to sign his name to something. He picked up the pen, and he was ashamed of his dirty fingernails, because they revealed that he was a laborer.

Senryu poems are just little glimpses of life. Some of them are quite lovely: thoughts about children, how difficult it is to teach children anything. So a lot of them—from the Japanese point of view, I think—are not symbolic enough. They're not artistic enough because they use street language. My mother made that distinction. Senryu is all right for men, but women should be writing haiku.

So she was making a class distinction.

Yes. Poetry is really a very elitist activity, I think.

You seem in some ways to be following in your father's footsteps: you've organized a group, Multicultural Women Writers of Orange County. But I'm interested in this idea of poetry as an elitist activity. Do you think it's true for us, here—women in twentieth-century America?

Yes, in any culture. You know, the women poets of the world are women who are privileged, well brought up. No peasant girl would know how to write.

And women's writing today?

The writing that women are doing today, where they just let everything hang out or whatever—without form—the academic world thinks that women's poetry has no shape or form. I remember a mimeographed letter, a poem by Alta. It was during the 1960s, and I started to think about the kinds of poems that I had been writing, very traditional, well-crafted. You know what I mean, like T. S. Eliot or Ezra Pound, studying all of the objectivist poems, New York School, all of this. And I began to realize that the kind of things that I had been writing seemed really very meaningless.

E. L. Doctorow wrote an essay about prison poems, and about the pain, the real life tearing of the flesh and the entrails. He says, “Well, we academics know that that kind of poetry is not good poetry. What do our literature teachers say who do not grant art a political character, but who speak to their students of ‘The Human Condition?’” We discard those poems and think that it's just too elemental, that it doesn't have craft. It has just too much pain attached to it. We seem to think that we have to be distanced from the pain in order to be able to write.

I copied that essay for my creative writing students, I remember, because I was just so struck by it: this was exactly what I was thinking.

Yet you had begun writing about your own experience in the internment camp much earlier.

I kept a journal in camp, but most of it got thrown out when I left. Around 1943 I was moving from Cincinnati to New York and I could not afford to ship all that writing with me, because it cost money to ship books. I threw away all my schoolbooks and all my writings at that point. I really didn't need all those Big 5 tablets! My mother must have thrown a lot out in Seattle before we left for Idaho. I don't remember. They just got lost.

In 1943 I thought, “Well, these camp things are sort of interesting.” So I sorted those out and picked out the few that eventually ended up in Camp Notes and Other Poems. There were about a hundred of them that I eventually kept, and a few ended up in that book.

But at that time, I think that I didn't really believe that it was poetry. It was something that I wrote that I was feeling and observing in camp, a historical document.

Then I got married, had kids and so forth. When I started to read some poems in the 1960s, I remember reading Carolyn Kizer's Pro Femina and then Tillie Olsen's Tell Me a Riddle.

This was a turning point …

I read Tillie's story, and I cried and cried. Then I read it again. I read it three times, and I thought to myself, for the first time in my life, “This is what I would like to write like.” Somebody who writes so close to her feelings. I thought, “God, this is better than Faulkner.” You know, the style of her writing was just tremendously moving to me.

I wrote to her through the publisher, but I didn't hear for several years. Then when I met Alta, she said, “I was talking to Tillie the other day and she said she wants to meet you.” We had lunch and she thanked me for the poem I had sent her, “Homecoming,” which was one of the poems later put into Camp Notes. Tillie wanted to help edit that book, and she was one of the people who picked out poems for it.

It sounds as though some place in there you made a transition from being a “housewife who writes” to being “a writer who lives in a house.”

Yes, right. No matter what I did before, like publishing short stories, publishing poems here and there, I was an occasional poet, like a Sunday painter. When I published my book, suddenly I became a poet.

Do you think that's a problem for women writers? Not taking themselves—ourselves—seriously as artists?

That's a real problem. I think it gets put into women's heads. It was put there with my mother. I think that if my mother had been a writer she would have been a very good one, because she was very observant, very sharp, and she remembers a lot. She stores up all kinds of little bits and pieces, and that's the mark of a writer.

She didn't ever overtly rebel about her position as a housewife, but she expressed it in other ways: anger. But not in any unseemly way. She wouldn't directly attack the problem itself, but she would get mad at us, or she was always hurting herself, literally.

My mother's very strong. She used to weigh about a hundred forty pounds, very stocky: sort of muscle all over. She was always breaking things when she was at my house, because she would DUST that table! We used to laugh about this, but if a piece of glass was sticking out, in her way, she would just gash herself in the most horrible way, and I would have to take her in and get her stitched up. She was always hitting herself, getting herself bruised, because she worked so vigorously. It's funny how many years it took to figure out what was really bothering women at that time.

I'm going back to the earlier question of form and craft in poetry. Most of your poems are open poems, free verse. But you were saying that you used to work more with haiku poems.

Yes, that's true.

Have you kept those poems? They're not represented in Camp Notes.

An old one that I rewrote into “The Foundation.” It was one of the early poems.

I see this line: “Disciplined minds finely honed.” That sounds like what you are talking about in terms of craft and artifice.

Yes. The idea in the poem is old. I think the poem started to be traditional, because the idea was traditional.

It certainly doesn't have the direct relationship to specific experience that you have in the poems about life in the camp.

You asked about my poems being very personal first-person lyrics.

This is something I've noticed about contemporary poems by women generally. I've reviewed a lot of collections and anthologies of poems by contemporary Native American women, and have been struck by how—even though many of them express strong political, social consciousness—the predominant form is almost always first-person lyric and free verse. It's hard to call to mind a women poet writing today who takes up, say, political satire or invective, as you find in the eighteenth-century satirists, or the Roman satirists. Even when contemporary poets focus on public issues, they seem to choose very personal conventions.

That's right. I notice that in the collection, Women Poets of the World, about women poets in general. Fifth-century Chinese women are writing almost non-objectified poetry. They're talking about sex, about themselves, and their own specific situation in life. But at the same time, they are talking about broader issues, a philosophical position on pacifism, or whatever, that is the real subject.

But it begins with ourselves.

Well, take Anne Bradstreet, for instance. She wrote a poem about the history of the world. Women poets aren't doing things like that any more.

Adrienne Rich, lately, goes back to connections with historical women. She started that rather recently. She was writing more formal lyrics in college, more formal poetry, and then gradually started breaking away from that and writing more personally. Now, in the past ten years, she has written about Ethel Rosenberg, world politics, issues, that kind of thing.

But I think women started moving away from generalizing, from writing about “generic” things, almost deliberately. Alta said, “I'm going to write a poem with no metaphors, because if I write in a metaphor, men misinterpret it. So I'm going to write a kind of poem that they could in no way misinterpret.” She did start doing that: blatant poems that made people uncomfortable. That's what Doctorow was talking about: the literal pain. The pain that you just hit people in the face with.

That's supposed to be bad poetry, and so it gets disregarded. His thesis is that there ought to be some place in belles lettres that would keep the rest of the poetry alive or honest. And I say that there should be a place for that kind of poetry. People literally dying of cancer, their primal scream: there should be room for that kind of thing. I think, that's what black people were writing in the 1960s, and the women, in their anger started blurting out about rape.

Men wrote about rape all the time, but it was about something else: rape of the land or whatever. So if women talked about their pain in a symbolic or metaphorical fashion, people just thought they were talking about something else. There was never any connection. We couldn't communicate, because we were always missing each other in our communication with each other.

So “academic” standards are really very narrow. They only admit a very constricted range of poetry, of kinds of literature.

That's right. When I read Doctorow, I thought, “This is it.” I think he is right.

As you see it, then, open/free form in poetry is connected to open communication, and to power. And men and women see this differently.

Reza Bareheni, an Iranian poet, was imprisoned by the Shah and was tortured for months. He wrote a book called The Crowned Cannibals.

Bareheni makes an interesting point. He tries to psychoanalyze the Shah, what his problem was. He shows all of the patriarchal values: when a woman couldn't produce a son, she was put away. He was trying to make sense of how the Shah's regime could become as brutal as it was. How could they produce men like this, like the torturers? And he thinks that the reason why is because of the patriarchal emphasis in Iran, that the female was just totally helpless, there was no female principle that was promoted in that culture.

You find a parallel between Doctorow's call for poetry “unimprisoned” by form, and the silenced or censored voices of oppressed people everywhere, and the oppression of everybody in those places where women are oppressed.

Yes. You know, there are so many poets in prison.

You wouldn't think poets would be such dangerous people!

They're not!

But all this opening up the canon, validating new forms and voices, makes certain people very nervous. We hear talk about the loss of “core” humanities curriculum—meaning, as I take it, white male western-European-tradition writers.

Is there some literature that all Americans should be expected to have in common?

Yes, that was one of my questions. In some countries, for instance, literature has a function of creating national identity. In Italy, for instance, every school child reads Dante and Tasso, and so every educated Italian has this as part of a common set of references. In Japan there are certain classics, so that everybody who has been to school has this common background.

Genji no Monogatari—Tales of Genji.

But since we have a pluralist society, is there some American work of literature about which we want to say, “Every educated American has read this”? That would be a common reference point for us?

You know, that would be wonderful if we could compile such a list. We'd get in hot water, probably, for including some things, and excluding others.

Could we even pin it down to one work? Or, if not, is it part of the American identity that we don't have a single “great work” that everyone knows?

I used to think that Invisible Man would be good as a work. I thought that that novel has so much in it that it is a book all Americans should read. But the whole problem with that, for white Americans, is that they can't get past the “black problem” in that novel.

I know what you mean. I related very strongly to Invisible Man when I first read it; I identified with the narrator. Yet I find white students don't see their own kinds of enslavement, their need to be liberated. They don't see that “on the lower frequencies” the narrator does speak for all people.

That's right, they don't. I've taught that novel in American literature for a couple of years, and it's just very, very difficult to get the students past that.

I also liked The Woman Warrior immensely because I felt that Maxine Hong Kingston was also speaking for me. I grew up in a Catholic family, and in that milieu there is a whole hierarchy of priests, everyone is very deferent to this male power structure, and women are carefully excluded from any kind of power or closeness to anything “sacred.” I saw something very similar in Woman Warrior.

I think that's why that book has stirred people's imaginations so much. And yet Russell Leong was talking [at the 1987 MELUS conference] about the leading writers among Asian-American writers, and he didn't even mention Maxine. He ignored her totally. It's very strange.

We are back to the problem of silencing women writers! That reminds me of what you have been going through with another kind of censorship, trying to use the Freedom of Information Act to get back your family papers and investigate your father's imprisonment without trial during the war.

That issue involves more than censorship; it was a case of entrapment. The FBI pieced together my father's activities into an espionage story to justify having him labeled a “dangerous enemy alien,” but after three years had to release him because they couldn't find anything to back up their charges. I'm in the process of working on that material now; it's very complicated.

I had one last question.

Yes. If I had not gone to internment camp … how would my life have been different? I've thought about that a lot.

I used to dream about going away to school. My father had gone to Stanford, and he wanted one of his children to go. My brothers weren't doing too well in school, so he kept saying, as a threat to my brothers, “I want one of my kids to go to Stanford, and it looks like May's the one.”

I don't think my mother would have let me go to Stanford, though. If the war hadn't broken out, I might have gone to Washington State, or the University of Washington. I probably would have gotten married and stayed in Seattle. I think it would have been a very closed kind of life.

It's hard to speculate, of course. But, because of the war—and I hate to say this—but, because of the war I was able to leave my mother. My mother felt that there was no other alternative except for me to leave [the camp] when I did. Then, I was free to go almost anywhere: there was a whole country to go to.

I went to Cincinnati, where I got kicked out of a room I was renting in a sorority house. Apparently the alumni association of the sorority became very upset that there was a Japanese woman living in the dormitory.

It's funny that when these things happen to you, you kind of wipe it out of your mind, into the back of your head, and you don't remember for years and years. I thought about it years later when [my daughter] Jeni was thinking of joining a sorority. I hadn't said anything to her, but I remember having this little gut reaction over what she was going to do. I wonder what I would have done if she had wanted to join a sorority. Fortunately, she wasn't that kind of youngster.

A lot of what you are saying seems to be about how much the past is always with us, and yet how we are constantly revising the past. That's also the impression I get from what you've said about the poems in Desert Run, about your whole feeling about the desert.

Yes, Desert Run is exactly that. The title poem expresses my coming to see the desert with new eyes since moving out here to California.

Having been exiled into it for almost two years during World War II, I fell naturally into the cultural bias of thinking of the desert as a sterile and nonproductive place, a place where we dump our toxic waste, test atom bombs. Or we must water it to make it more attractive or more useful to us; we cannot allow it to be itself. I've learned that there is vibrant life there just as it is.

So you can see why as an older Asian-American woman I've come to identify with the desert. Desert Run also includes poems about my returning to my roots in Japan and finding new meanings within myself.