Watanabe-McFerrin's Navigating the Divide - Exorbitant, Rebellious

Feb 6, 2020 - The Berkeley Times, Wyndy Knox Carr, Knox Book Beat -- 

Linda Watanabe McFerrin’s Navigating the Divide: Selected Poetry and Prose is mostly emotive and sensual “creative non-fiction,” with short stories and pieces of her sexy zombie thriller, (yes, really), Dead Love, brought in for good measure. 

Linda joined the Berkeley Poets Cooperative in 1984, headed by Gail and Charles Entrekin, whose “love permeated their poems and filled the space around them,” she said in her introduction, “One Door Closes.” “I can see why the Co-op thrived for all those years… the sessions were thrilling – full of risk and dread and elation. Charles and Gail were the perfect hosts…Everyone was opinionated. Not a lesson was wasted.”

Even though she turned to writing more prose than poetry eventually, Linda used those workshops to become a truly gifted writer, editor, coach and mentor; also hosting the fabulous and useful Left Coast Writers’ meetings at Book Passage bookstore in Corte Madera first Monday evenings of every month.

Charles and Gail Entrekin 

Navigating is a tasty smorgasbord of Linda’s work, varying from profound and insightful coming-of-age sections of Namako: Sea Cucumber, The Hand of the Buddha short stories and poetry to her entertaining and enlightening parts of Dead Love and her excellent travel essays. She slides from ruthless gangsters in fancy taxis to six-year old Tina casting “the vague shape of her longing” up to her Grandmother in heaven to searching out Shinto shrines and kami “folk deities” to Tamara pouring “Jack Daniels in a Dixie cup” when “She was moving toward some sort of crisis and she didn’t like it” with editor Ted’s “all-powerful masculine vortex.” Just on the edge of too-funky, her ear for dialogue, brushstroke character-definition and succinct metaphors pull us on:

Compared to Selita, Terrell’s “other girlfriends” were “like a closetful of cheap nylon nightgowns, they seemed only marginally alluring and infinitely replaceable.” (p. 70) Describing her father prepping dinner, he’s “Standing at the counter with one of Ineko-san’s blue aprons wrapped around him”…”making a big mess with a huge pile of shellfish, moving back and forth between counter and stove, cutting the heads off shrimp and slipping them out of their wafer-thin jackets of exoskeleton, pulling off funny blue veins, then rinsing them in a colander. They were shiny and grey, with big heads festooned with antennae and a pair of beady, accusing black eyes. It was actually the first time I realized that shrimp had heads,” (p. 46) and then, from “Something to Rave About,” 

“In the kitchen, two tall women with red hair stood at an enormous industrial stove, stirring soup. They looked like twins. Both wore short black cocktail dresses, chef’s toques and threateningly pointed, six-inch stiletto heels that made them appear taller still. The chef’s toques were stiffly starched columns topped with a poof that made them look like they had their red heads up in their respective clouds.” (p. 297)

Linda and Joanna Wandering in Paris!

Her eye for detail, sense descriptions, contemporary male-female relationships and the pleasures and perils of travel and family life; especially as a Welsh-Japanese-American, are second-to-none. Her “genres, cultures and points of view” kaleidoscope from her Grandmother’s tiny traditional town life in rice-paddy Japan to “right-now” super-urban Tokyo, Opium Wars and Cultural Revolution Shanghai from 1884-to-present and “the 96th Avenue Baptist Church.”

Exorbitant, rebellious and admitting to anything; good, bad or downright evil, Watanabe-McFerrin is a new voice sprung from Old Berkeley coming forward to be reckoned with.

The Fifth Woman by Nona Caspers

The Fifth Woman by Nona Caspers
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I get to the middle of Nona Caspers’ book, The Fifth Woman, and suddenly I want to write. D. H. Lawrence’s requisite to great writing, “An interesting mind at work” leaps out at us from the page. That’s why I do this for free, I’m thinking, so I can read free books like these and feel like this… Wow. It’s like a really long prose poem, cut into sections; a sort of mystery play of grief and recovery, loss and redemption; but through a contemporary, Bay Area writer’s life; a transplant from the Middle West, as many of us are.

The clarity of her sentences pulls me into a story I’ve “made up” about the huge, empty house at the corner of Avalon and Claremont that I’ve wanted to write about for weeks, “Its children’s bedroom windows gazing open but empty, southward to the wide, waiting world…” I leap from mere words on the page to a Creator’s viewpoint, The Large. I haven’t read anything this perfect since Laurie Anne Doyle’s World Gone Missing, so right.

It’s a different voice than Doyle’s, of course; plot, thought and emotional pattern; but clear and right in the same way, as if we’re brought into the moment of each story purely, succinctly, cracking open a flat, gray rock and discovering a bright chunk of gold.What used to be surrealism, now called “magical realism” since Allende and Ionesco brought them into fiction and stories; makes immense, mythic and multidimensional the ordinary world.

After a series of interlocked grim but gripping portraits, scenarios and incidents; guided by her beckoning Mother’s image as she steps out her back door into the yard outside; she boards a bus, is transported to a primal deer hunt out of Gen X techie San Francisco, and she stalks and kills, dismembers and transports her venison; recollects her Father, memories of her lover, Michelle; converses with a worm, a bear, her own heart, as she moves through a time where impossible things happen. Like recovering from an intimate death.

Getty Images, Free, Park & Fog

Where are her images from? Her dreams, feelings, hallucinations? Her world is ours, metropolitan, everyone’s. But so full of love, longing and precision. Everyone who’s ever loved and lost, lost hope, kept going, watched time drag and days dwindle and sag, then finally caught sight of a shoelace that’s just a shoelace, a day that’s just a day.

My heart grows wide, my mind triples with these writers. A voice of song, a breath of time, a breeze of hope…

The Berkeley Times, 9 January, 2020, © 2020 Wyndy J Knox Carr

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The Beadworkers, Stories by Beth Piatote

The Beadworkers by Beth Piatote
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Author Beth Piatote's book shows us clear truth of Indigenous survivals in a hostile world which has mistaken their way of life and individual lives as "hostile" and inferior. Piatote, a Nez Perce and an Associate Professor of Native American Studies at Cal Berkeley, gathered a packed house at the Tuesday night Ohlone Café University Press Bookstore on Bancroft Way for her reading of parts of The Beadworkers, recently released by Counterpoint Press, another Berkeley endeavor. We munched “the first foods of that place” and drank dark herbal teas as Beth read and Café host Vincent Medina gave a quick historical background of the place, people, language and its foodstuffs.

It was the day after an Alameda County Superior Court judge turned away a quick approval process for the planned development on the historical West Berkeley Shellmound, halting the bulldozers for perhaps another five years, in recognition of the site’s “cultural heritage.” Cultural heritage is the foundational material of Piatote’s book, expressed in beautiful, funny and poignant characters and their tales and lives in poetry, story and a short play.

Antíkoni crafts a rewriting of the Antigone story around the seizure and possession of “thousands of ancestors’” remains “held across the street” in the anthropological “collections” of the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum, confronting Kreon as an “apple” (red on the outside and white on the inside) who has bargained away her “outmoded” respect for the bodies of their ancestors. He has taken what he sees as “the only path to power” “Through diligence and obsequious posture,” ignoring both justice and their community, as represented by a chorus of the legend-telling Aunties. Antíkoni, her brother and the Aunties defy him with immediate action and timeless legends of the interconnectedness of all life on Mother Earth.

Language, family, land, cyclical returns, collective care and labor illuminate these tales of loss and revitalization, resilience, humor and attention. Prayer, ways of expressing the aesthetics of “We are those people from that place,” and the “adaptability” and “continued practice” for the forms their culture and communities hold flow through her work, inspired by Indigenous “tactile working together” from beading a sash to protecting the waters of North America and the world for the salmon and at Standing Rock as well.

All Our Relations! Aho!

Kreon’s son says to him, “you remain an Indian. And an Indian is no one without his Tribe.” Truth told. A very good collection. More to come, please!

Water Protectors Camp 1 Dec 2016 reutersmedia.net

The Berkeley Times, 9 January, 2020, ©2020 Wyndy J Knox Carr



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Rebel Lawyer: Wayne Collins and the Defense of Japanese American Rights by Charles Wollenberg
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

In Rebel Lawyer: Wayne Collins and the Defense of Japanese-American Rights, Charles Wollenberg, former Chair of Social Sciences and Professor of History at Berkeley City College, sounds unnerving alarms recurring in the present as well. Wollenberg states that his “argument is that the United States Constitution is not self-starting; it needs human intervention to transform its noble words and principles into concrete reality.”

A researcher and writer of Berkeley: A City in History in 2008, Wollenberg scrupulously followed attorney Wayne Collins’ defenses of “the rights and liberties of the West Coast’s Japanese and Japanese American population,” and drew a good-sized crowd to the eclectic and elegant temple of creativity that is the ACCI Gallery (Arts & Crafts Cooperative Inc.), 1652 Shattuck Ave. Our curiosity was not disappointed.

Mr. Wollenberg explained that Fred Korematsu was one of the irascible but deeply persistent and committed Collins’ defendants, as was Iva Toguri D’Aquino, a U.S. citizen unwillingly captured in Japan and forced to read radio scripts as one of several “Tokyo Rose” voices, with whom he pursued citizenship reinstatement and pardon for over 20 years. Collins was connected to the defense, release and eventual recompense for thousands of detainees at Tule Lake detention camp and elsewhere on the West Coast.

They survived years of discrimination encumbered, interned, threatened with deportation and/or disenfranchised by public fear and Franklin Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066, echoing racialized past U.S. domestic legal wrongs through post- 9/11 anti-Muslim attacks and our present Southern border panic and inhumanity.
Irish-American Wayne Mortimer Collins mobilized not only his defendants, but whole communities of volunteers to work for their rights and personal dignity, inspiring civil rights lawyers and social justice advocates well into the 21st Century.

Waiting for Registration 1942

Collins died in 1974, but by that time Dorothea Lange’s exhibit of photos of the 1942 initial removal and incarceration had been presented by the California Historical Society and toured the country, significantly moving public and government opinion.
In 1983 a U.S. Commission “unanimously concluded that the policy of removal and incarceration was unnecessary, unconstitutional, and motivated by racism and political expediency.”
Same world, different challenges – or is it? Are they? Hear, hear!


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The Tango War: The Struggle for the Hearts, Minds and Riches of Latin America During World War II

by Mary Jo McConahay
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

In The Tango War, Mary Jo McConahay uncovers this neglected, generally unknown history of “the competition between the Allies and the Axis” for land, resources and political dominance in captivating detail. As a veteran journalist traveling worldwide and posted to cover wars in Central America and the Middle East for 30 years, this graduate of Cal Berkeley gives us a "masterful" and compelling rendering by not only describing key events, but by following political and individual persons involved in governing, map-making, aeronautics, rail and road-building, resource-hunting, diplomacy, propagandizing, spying and fighting battles.

McConahay and Maya Sapper

They were escaping, filming and doing things as unheard of as rounding up Japanese Peruvians to deliver to FDRs detention camp in Texas, turning away ocean liners of European Jewish emigrants in Havana or sinking U-boats and Italian submarines in the Caribbean. Over a vast territory in our own hemisphere, “a distance of 6,640 miles from the Rio Grande…to the Argentine Antarctic,” action and human drama roils in the background of her history as smoothly as a Bogart and Bacall script.
This is the book to read if you never did figure out which side of the continent Chile and Argentina are on, where the rubber, oil and Panama Canal are exactly; colonial and imperialist heartlands, heroes and landscapes; what the U.S.A. really did and did not do.

McConahay describes curving Amazons of intrigues, alliances, courageous acts and vile betrayals. In some of the most shocking cases, mass murderers brought along the “Fourth Reich” and its hatred of communists, resolving to settle quietly working for Bayer, Krupp or Volkswagen in Central and South America or backing fascist dictators.

Hollywood film crews and Disney animators explored and exploited the favelas and carnivals of Rio for U.S. PR, whole neighborhoods of urban European Jews bought up and settled in the pampas to raise alfalfa and cattle, celebrating the remainder of their holy days in peace. Who knew?
Same world, different challenges – or is it? Are they? Hear, hear!

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Judy Wells' Dear Phebe: The Dickinson Sisters Go West

Dear Phebe by Judy Wells
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Judy Wells’ Dear Phebe: The Dickinson Sisters Go West, resurrects her ancestors in a poetry and prose reimagining of her great-grandmother and great aunts and uncles’ lives, culled from a trove of letters found in the 21st Century which were sent to Phebe before and after she came West from Massachusetts. Wells’ work is an exposition of the pioneer wife’s existence after she moved to Walnut Creek in 1865 as described in family letters, but poignantly reconstructed by Wells from the 21st Century. It’s a beautiful book from Crockett, California’s Sugartown Publishing, not light, but profoundly moving in a “real-life” way. “Delia,” she has one character say, “your pride in teaching/ gives you money and power/ to change your life.” True then as now!
Not exactly “mail-order brides,” the three sisters were highly sought after helpmeets, courted by dozens of suitors. The dangers, joys and losses of their young wife-and-motherhood and maturation and in her great-uncle’s grim Civil War history appear materially in Wells’ own life as she holds her grand-nephews, Nathaniel and Damon; and then as she recites “the names of my dead in the last year.” It is all fabric of the same cloth as she bluntly observes:
“I want to accept death
though I do not accept death.
I want to be courageous
though I am often fearful.”
It makes me want to read some of her eleven other poetry books and prose, including I Have Berkeley and The Berkeley Literary Women’s Revolution: Essays from Marsha’s Salon, co-edited with Marsha Hudson, Bridget Connelly, Doris Earnshaw and Olivia Eielson.

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Julia Vinograd!

Between the Cracks by Julia Vinograd
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Julia Vinograd’s Look Out, Between the Cracks and Detours: published by Zeitgeist Press in Berkeley, teach me why she was SO MUCH MORE than “the Bubble Lady” of Telegraph Avenue. She changed things outside herself by changing herself and by seeing and feeling things differently because of what and who she had seen and felt. The real power and simple, original imagery of her poetry cut a sharp line directly between the intellectual voice of reportage and observation of Phebe and the overwhelmed verbal heart-lava of Disorder.
She reminds us that “I was young” in “ANNIVERSARY OF PEOPLE’S PARK,” but “I remember when heroism grew wild/ as dandelions/ and people talked about how to get rid of it.” Her balance of leaden truth distilled with our greatest human desires, dreams and hopes is ferocious and visceral while seamlessly blending her focus on immediate experience with the much-needed long view.
In MY COUNTRY, she says, “I rode a bright red royal tricycle/ through my endless country/ and never believed anything could change.”
And then the clarity of her persona and voice in TRUCK:

I drove a truck down a highway at night
following the white line to the middle of the road.
The truck was packed with poems
wrapped in brown cardboard boxes
and bumping against each other when I drove over
fallen branches from the storm. Beetles and dragonflies
crashed against the windshield
until I sprayed them loose.
There were no other cars. Hunting owls. Wet mice.
A rest stop coming,
coffee, burger, pie, bathroom, jukebox.
The poems dragging me back,
my feet on the gas pedal.
The white line opening me up again,
forever.

Now THAT is our poetry. That is our voice.

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