The Wartime Letters of Garrett Hongo
Coral Road Poems, Garrett Hongo, Alfred A. Knopf, N.Y., N.Y., 102 pages, $26.
I hate how I do these things.
I scribble so many reviews of literature, cinema and the other arts when I’m aboard damned jetliners — mostly because karma’s sentence for past bad lives apparently includes a never ending tour of the world’s airports.
The problem comes when I put down the yellow steno pad and, well, I end up trying to decipher something scrawled on an airplane tray table a month ago. Which usually means that I have to redo the blasted paper and I don’t have much time to do that kind of thing. It ends up all slap-dashed and disappointing.
Want to know why I haven’t posted my review of Jason Whiteley’s Father of Money? It’s because I can’t find the cursed essay I sketched out in rough draft lo those many months ago.
But that doesn’t absolve me of my responsibilities. Muddle through, I say. So today I bring you a review of Garrett Hongo’s Coral Road Poems, a brilliant bit of verse that Alfred A. Knopf published shortly after the 10th anniversary of September 11.
A slip of a book, it was quickly overlooked by our democracy. That’s a great shame because Coral Road proved to be one of the best meditations on war printed last year, poetry that only could’ve been winkled out of this moment in history by a master at the top of his craft.
When I say that the American combat veteran deserves to read Hongo’s work I’m probably also saying that by dint of his dogged toil and lyrical genius, Hongo has earned you as an audience, too.
Let me tell you why.
*****
Hongo was born in 1951, one of the Yonsei in Volcano on the island of Hawai’i (that would be the Big Island and Hawaii to most of you).
He grew up on O’ahu and then in Los Angeles.
Now into his sixth decade, Hongo’s Baby Boomer generation of Hawaiians shall be the last to remember, if only dimly, the Issei who first immigrated to the islands from Japan to slave in the cane fields. They sired the Nisei, who begat the Sansei and Yonsei in turn, the descendants who would fight in World War II, Korea and Vietnam on behalf of an America that hasn’t always been so kind to her own Asians.
If I were competent in such matters, I would point to the importance of kanreki to a 60-year-old Japanese-American who has with great complexity long explored these sorts of rituals in lasting works that bestride two great cultures.
I then might say something about how Hongo translates two complex literatures, that Japan and the U.S. share one ocean, and that in it Hawaii has been somewhat equidistant, just as Hongo’s writings have paddled the middle current, too.
But I’m not, so I won’t.
Instead I’ll merely say that Hongo long has been considered one of our nation’s great poets, one who bends his verse to the confessional, and that he’s often taken as his subject working class peoples – many times Japanese — history forgets.
Well, that’s putting it quite politely. In the case of America versus the Issei and Nisei, during World War II the former attempted to culturally exterminate the latter through mass incarceration and forced socialization in a sprawl of prison camps.
Coral Road is Hongo’s third major collection of poems and the best he’s written, largely because he has the guts to tackle the politics of the “good war ” as it really was lived then while using it to frame our ongoing war against terror. And he does so mostly in the book’s Sections II and III, those entitled “The Wartime Letters of Hideo Kubota” and “The Art of Fresco,” so that’s where we’ll spend our time.
*****
When the Empire of Japan bombed Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, it focused America’s rage on the Issei and their Nisei children, who were declared 4C – enemy aliens – and barred at first from fighting. Then the War Relocation Authority stole tens of thousands of Japanese-Americans from their communities on the pretext that they could sabotage defense plants, military installations or otherwise aid Tokyo against the rest of us.
About 5,000 others, including Buddhist leaders, reporters and intellectuals, were interned in special camps for the presumed hard cases, prisons run by the Department of Justice and overseen by Border Patrol guards and soldiers.
Hideo Kubota was one of them and Hongo not only dedicated Coral Road to him and his wife, Tsuruko, but wrote seven poems on his behalf, creating a narrative voice we can all agree is quite separate from whomever the real Kubota was.
Hongo’s Kubota engages in a dialogue about dispossession, cultural survival, war and loss not only with the 21st century American reader but also some of the greatest poets who ever lived – Pablo Neruda, Miguel Hernandez, Nazim Hikmet, Charles Olson and many more.
The 15 poems cribbed from “Art of the Fresco,” on the other hand, pay homage to the famed 442nd Regimental Combat Team — the 14,000 men who combined for 9,486 Purple Hearts, 21 Medals of Honor and eight (!) Presidential Unit Citations during brutal fighting in Italy.
Their “go for broke” bravado has endured through the decades and on Oct. 5 President Barack Obama, himself from Hawaii, awarded their survivors the Congressional Gold Medal, the highest civilian honor our lawmakers provide on behalf of a grateful nation.
These were the souls a Baby Boomer growing up in Hawaii and Los Angeles would well remember, the men who “sat stolidly in bamboo easy chairs or perched on diner stools apart from us, sipping whiskey and beer, while the world of our frivolity spun around them,” as Hongo recalls in his preamble to the poems.
Hongo wants to come to terms not only with these two very different forms the Nisei experience took after 1941 but also how war affected the Japanese left home in Hawaii. He’s particularly good at exploring how these unique fates allotted to the Nisei conspired to shape the veterans, prisoners and those left behind, including their children, in the decades that followed.
It’s an ambitious work. And it succeeds.
*****
Let’s begin with Hideo Kubota, the fisherman poet who writes letters to other poets as Hongo’s narrator from 1942 to readers in 2012.
Because we’re reading his words six decades after he was said to have scribbled them, it’s impossible for us to place the Leupp Citizen Isolation Center in Arizona without also considering those detainees snatched from across the globe and incarcerated by us and our allies during this very long war against “terror.”
We also can’t confront the Japanese and the racism meted out to them without recalling the many Muslims living in America today who also have been unfairly tarred with the taint of treason, mostly because they’re slightly different from what we think of as “America” when we’re behaving most stupidly.
Hongo’s Kubota obviously never wrote any letters to his kindred spirits, poets who also were fugitives of history, men removed from their communities by choice or violence and forced to confront this salient reality through art.
But the highly literary contrivance works, perhaps because we realize soon enough that Kubota really is Garrett Hongo, should he ever be sent to a gulag such as the Leupp Citizen Isolation Center .
One of the good things, I suppose, about long incarcerations is that one has plenty of time to imagine one’s existence, to limn the past for clues to how we’ve arrived at where we’re stuck, if nothing else. For a sensitive mind such as Hongo’s Kubota, spelunking the soul, both that of the individual and the larger culture, is vital or he’d never survive the sentence.
In “Kubota Writes to Jose Arcadio Buendia,” Hongo’s poet-prisoner pegs the beginning of his troubles with the landing of a B-17 on the Kahuku Golf Course shortly after Pearl Harbor. From the bomber haloed by curious Japanese, a nervous pilot descends from the hatch and, pistol in his fist, he defines the village, and an entire people, with a filthy slur:
Japs!
He’d said, and it would be the word that brought us, the ignored and isolate,
Into the history of he world to number among its wretches, ripped from our villages,
No longer who we were to each other but who those others needed us to be for their rage.
If you say “muj” or “haji” you’re probably managing the same sort of effect. Sure, we no longer evict whole races of immigrants from their homes and imprison them in prairie towns, but our brainless electric rabble finds the time to agitate against mosques and lather ourselves up against insipid reality TV shows that put a few followers of Islam on them.
In 1941 or 60 years later, we let our American fears scab into hate, and from the marble of that malice we chiseled an Other to despise and punish.
That’s why Kubota ends up in Arizona’s Leupp, an “adobe stockade” in the midst of another concentration camp forged in the smithy of American history – a Navajo reservation, those dispossessed by our long stomp of progress toward the Pacific.
They’re the distant, inscrutable people revealed in a later poem “murmuring their soft language of chuffs and whispers.”
Did I mention that the Navajo code talkers also were awarded the Congressional Gold Medal for their valiant service in World War II, largely because the Imperial Japanese couldn’t make sense of their chuffs and whispers?
Hongo won’t give you anything easily. Complexity upon complexity.
*****
In his letter to Miguel Hernandez Gilabert, we learn all about the sort of world to which Hongo’s Kubota has been consigned. His “face to the bars,” Kubota is trapped as much by steel as the bigotry of federal guards and their long evenings of pointless interrogations, grillings largely caused by the perfidy of lying informants.
But Kubota is an innocent man, in a later poem revealed to be merely the “grand keeper of loans and accounts for La’ie Village.” Caught in a FBI dragnet he’s asked by interrogators why he went night fishing for kumu off Kahuku Point? Those flickers of light over the horizon, was he signaling to the Emperor’s navy?
His explanations are lyrically beautiful: He went to sea to do the “torching/ Wrapping the kerosene-soaked rags in bamboo poles,/ Sticking them into the sand inside the lagoon,/ And then go light them with a flick from my Zippo.”
The flame drew the fish to him, and he netted their schools in turn. So the reef fish become a metaphor for the Japanese immigrant’s experience in America. The kumu swim toward a bamboozling light too good to be real and the fisherman is no longer Kubota, that role now taken by the Americans, their net the detention facility in Leupp.
The inversion of roles shall dog his mind for the rest of his days, just as it eats as a tumor American history: The “wars of our time and their ignorant ministrations,” they shall continue “shedding their black, tyrannical light into the future.” Kubota’s wife is forced into “taking in boarders, doing their laundry and sewing,” his children “growing more trivial by the day/Without word where I have been taken/ Whether I will be returned or simply have vanished/ Into the unwritten history of our country.”
The man to whom he addresses this letter written in verse is Miguel Hernandez. You should probably know that the Fascists gave him a sentence of 30 years of hard labor. He died in 1942 – the same year Kubota writes to him — from tuberculosis.
Before he died, however, Herndandez penned “Nanas de cebolla,” his “Onion lullaby” to a wife so poor she can afford to eat only onions, their baby suckling her onion milk. In the end, the only retaliation he gets on the state is the laughter of a child nourished by the onions, laughter that’s louder than the sobs of his mother.
“Nanas de cebolla” stands as a counterpoint to injustice. So also are many of the poems Hongo writes and puts into the mouth of Kubota, a man imprisoned because he fished at night, just as an entire generation of Nisei went to jail merely because they were born Nisei.
*****
Unlike Hernandez, Hongo’s narrator survives the war. Many of his fellow prisoners didn’t. They were the suicides, the “cold bodies of men who hang like butchered meat/ In the lavatories”
So, what saved an obviously sensitive mind manacled by government men who “slap me like I was a pig and shove me/ Into this dusty cell with no floor but the desert” as he puts it in his letter to Nazim Hikmet , the fugitive poet of the Allied-occupied Turkey after World War I?
I suppose Hongo’s book suggests any number of things. There’s Kubota’s undying love for his wife, Tsuruko. There’s the need to “nurse his own soul in this abandonment,” as he says to Hikmet. Mostly, I think, it’s because he talks to witnesses who came before him, including Pablo Neruda and the anonymous Chinese prisoner poets of Angel Island “trapped beneath the guard towers and history” – plus others who inexplicably won’t write until long after the war is over, men like the Polish victim of Nazi and Soviet occupation, Tadeusz Różewicz and his translator, Czeslaw Milosz, and the Americans Charles Olson, Randall Jarrell, W.S. Merwin and Robert Bly — the men of his father’s generation who would be as a father to Hongo in his long apprenticeship as a poet.
During one magically realistic moment, Hongo’s fictional narrator writes a poem-letter to José Arcadio Buendía, the fictional patriarch of Macondo invented by Gabriel García Márquez for his 100 Years of Solitude. The device is repeated in “Kubota on Kahuku Point to Maximus in Gloucester,” a poem that finds Hongo’s Kubota talking to Olson’s autobiographical dummy, Maximus .
Well, whatever it takes, right?
Hongo’s narrator finds himself slowly recovering from the days of enforced solitude, when his heart would “shrink back small as a walnut,/ Black and withered with the fear of a man who was a number.” He swims alone through the “the black milk of night” to repair “the worn tatter of my soul.” His new found freedom is merely an ongoing “exchange with fear and burden.” Kubota’s lot is to repair the fractured relationships with his wife, his long lost villagers, his parents, “going forth through sickness and argument” to a final reclamation that picks up with fishing.
Which is to say, where all this troubles began:
A cloud massing, unforeseeable, around the blade-edge of Ka’ena Point
One winter’s night, a swarm of misfortune, then the slow peace again,
Fish running with the tide, a soft wind in your shirt pocket.
It is undone business that makes us most calm –
A pine grove’s shade on a dune by the edge of the sea,
Coconuts and glass flats to gather bobbing from the surf.
It is to you, Maximus, I address myself this morning, across oceans
And the continent, with the sea stretching out from my feet.
Olson, mind you, didn’t live to his kanreki, dissipated as the postmodernist poet was by drink and the cancer that hollowed out his great bear of a body.
Hongo is carrying on a conversation with the dead through the dead, and after a few pages of it war becomes merely a loud and insistent backdrop to the more important talks with spirits, and we’re lucky enough to eavesdrop on them.
Sure, your reading of the poem might be informed with some knowledge of Olson, but it doesn’t have to be. You, better than most, understand what it’s like to come back home, stitching your relationships back together again, trying to find your place in the great run of things until that blessed moment when you, too, feel a soft puff of wind bearing you ever so slightly forward.
If you’re like Kubota, perhaps you also shall surrender yourself to the calming inevitability of the undone, letting that slow peace soak into you.
Maybe not.
*****
A compelling theme running through Coral Road is how war tends to wound those far from the battlefield, all those one leaves behind.
Perhaps that’s why I found Hongo’s “Yeux Glauques” quite moving. The poet obviously is riffing on Ezra Pound – the mad poet penned in a Pisan tiger cage as a Fascist collaborator after the war — and his long masterpiece that predated it by a quarter of a century, “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley.”
A few stanzas within a much larger work, Pound’s “Yeux Glauques” (pale blue-gray eyes) is a study in morality and aesthetics, all those cultural and artistic norms overturned by history — most especially the slaughter of the Great War – but which can be redeemed by the artist who appreciates the art long after taste and convention have moved on.
In a world blasted by war, only the artist might still recall that which was beautiful, that which is lasting. As Pound put it in his verses, haunting Pre-Raphaelite portraits stare back at us, “the thin, clear gaze, the same/ Still darts out faun-like from the half-ruined face.”
Like Kubota and Hongo, Olson and Maximus, Hugh Selwyn Mauberley stands in for Pound autobiographically. Pound’s poem is a savage indictment of war and a requiem to that which it destroys – traditions, mostly, that fall to a new world little better than “an old bitch gone in the teeth,” a “botched civilization” that is her afterbirth.
So, I might suggest, is Coral Road an indictment of America and the prosecution never rests in “Yeux Glauques,” which takes up the challenge Pound gave future artists, just as Hongo tries on different masks, with different narrators with different voices, throughout the cycle of poems.
In “Moana,” Hongo steps away from Kubota and becomes a Nisei GI back from Europe. Moana is a woman once loved by the narrator. She became pregnant by an Italian GI her family took in while he served in Schofield. He deserted her and except for a letter posted from a troop ship is never heard from again. Her family on Molokai – the lepers’ island – took the bastard baby in, a child Moana has never seen.
“’Today she would be three,’ she said, then shook away/ My kiss, stood up, and refused to share more pain.”
Beauty still darting out at us, faun-like from a half-ruined face, one might say. I thought Hongo put it well enough through the voices of Moana and his nameless GI, just as he had done so previously with Kubota.
Pound likely would’ve agreed.
*****
Just as “Yeux Glauques” is a conversation between Hongo and Pound told through an invented narrator speaking about realistic wartime events, Coral Road’s “The Art of Fresco” is the poet’s nod to Charles Wright.
It’s fitting because Pound most certainly influenced Wright — a mere boy during World War II — to the point that he used the Cantos as something of a copybook during his travels through Italy.
Pound prepared Wright for the frescoes at the Palazzo Schifanoia in Ferrara , but he couldn’t have improved upon Wright’s division of the splendor into three forms that came to inform his poetry: The life of the everyday, the allegorical life and the ideal life.
As the influence of Pound went to Wright, so Wright flows to Hongo, who finds the perfect vehicle to commune with the earlier poets — the surviving soldiers of the 442nd.
Hongo has long been intrigued by a group of the regiment’s veterans he met during a 1987 ceremony in Arlington. They were combat replacements – not necessarily hard to find in a unit that had to be rebuilt 3 ½ times over because of casualties. Or, as Hongo recalled in the section’s introduction, they were the sort of men who “could move from laughter to tears and then beg my pardon when they wept, ever conscious of dignity.”
I was blown over when I read it, but the combat replacements who survived Salerno, Monte Cassino and Anzio mustered out late and to keep their idle hands occupied while they occupied war-torn Italy, the Army sent them to Pisa and Florence and other cities chock full o’ Renaissance art to study painting, language and cooking.
Having spent a brief time in the Army myself, I couldn’t have imagined passing my hours in Ramadi exploring the art of Ur or Babylon, but this is what the Army did in northern Italy in 1945 and thereafter. Since I de-mob’d where the 442nd trained, Mississippi’s turd bowl of Camp Shelby, the vision is even more difficult to conjure.
But Hongo puts you in their place. These combat replacements experience Italian art much as Wright — and Pound — did. Hongo’s GI narrator reconciles his recent days in battle with the aesthetic grammar of Michelangelo, Angelico, Gioto and Masaccio. Which is to say, he reinterprets the war in poetry that’s at times realistic, allegorical and ideal.
Some will find me harsh on this, but I think Hongo was stabbing at Pound’s lasting meditation on World War I in “Hugh Selwyn Mauberly” – especially how the narrator becomes like Dante’s pilgrim, a doughboy who had “walked eye-deep in hell” while:
believing in old men's lies, then unbelievingcame home, home to a lie,home to many deceits,home to old lies and new infamy;usury age-old and age-thickand liars in public places.Daring as never before, wastage as never before.Young blood and high blood,fair cheeks, and fine bodies;fortitude as never beforefrankness as never before,disillusions as never told in the old days,hysterias, trench confessions, laughter out of dead bellies.
Perhaps because I’ve championed Hongo’s book you’re now going to think me unkind. But Hongo’s jabs with Pound’s sort of imagery missed their marks at times.
The language Hongo employs is too literary, too flowery, to really frame the irony of men getting “orders to pull out” that “came only after half our guys were gone” in the opening stanzas of “The Expulsion” –
screams, explosions, and cries from our men like frail geese,
A corporal blown to dirt and a dithering chaff of flash,
Artillery’s ghastly flowers blossoming up the hill we humped.
Later, silence and the dark, the stench of battle smoke and grief
Like whispers creeping over the hot, loosened ground.
This all seems cribbed from much better poems by writers who outlasted World Wars I and II. Hongo’s verses sometimes read as second-hand, inauthentic, mere decoration. In the early poems of the section, he seems to lack the ear for the horror and loss that a GI would feel after watching his corporal burn into chaff, not to mention the terror of receiving a bouquet of the howitzers’ “ghastly flowers.”
While it doesn’t always work in the beginning, it gets better as the poems build upon themselves. Hongo’s juxtaposition of timeless Florentine beauty with Hawaiian cane fields and the savagery of industrial warfare works more often than not, even when he sometimes borrows words.
In fact, I could argue that these poems gain in intensity because the images are taking back from pawn. For example, Wilfred Owen’s famous recollection of a nameless soldier gassed and “ yelling out and stumbling,/ And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime” and how he had to relive that image nightly before he, himself, is killed in the trenches –
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.
From “Verdaccio for the Dead,” here’s Hongo’s homage: “A soldier’s face then, whitened in lime,/ Hung like the torn paper of a lantern at the edge of things.”
Brilliant line, right? But that’s what we come to expect of Hongo’s narrator , a GI who has walked through Hell and then is trained to paint it. He portrays that torn world with an artist’s eye for detail and irony, even if he’s not fated to be an artist but rather a stolid blue collar Japanese-American worker in a different sort of America rising from the war.
Like Hongo, the GI has learned to speak of Hell through the “language of light and shadow,/The geometries of form and composition,” all that Inferno made “tangible and evanescent at once.” And just as quickly, he leaves Italy and returns to a Cold War that would come to define the future of the Nisei along with the Yonsei of Hongo’s generation — a tense age of mass consumerism and the dull sentimentality of people who didn’t want to confront the real legacy of war, content as they are with television and the whirr of air conditioning.
Hongo might forgive me another prophet of the post-war, the journalist Walter Lippmann. By no means an artist, Lippmann nevertheless understood the Cold War, America and history quite well. He also could fathom something of the human heart during that age, both its coldness and how it might be thawed.
“Love endures only when the lovers love many things together and not merely each other,” he once wrote.
For all the hard-clawed realism scratching at the rungs of Hongo’s verse, what abides for me is the love he has for those Nisei who came before him. It’s an unsentimental, unsparing sort of love, the sort of love one might find in a long marriage, but it’s a love nevertheless because Hongo and his narrators love many things together, including an America who might not deserve their love.
Most especially they love the enduring beauty of language and art. That’s probably a greater love than we have for one another, even if one another is exactly that which we — like Hongo, Kubota and history — can never escape.
Tags: 442nd Regimental Combat Team, Coral Road Poems, Ezra Pound, Garrett Hongo, World War II
