Shima

A vivid, expansive vision of intergenerational witness and repair.

The village is tilting on its axis. It is turning. All its organs are spilling into the bay.

shima contends with the emotional weight of return as the speaker travels across the ocean to offer prayers at his family grave. Along the way, reverberations of patriarchy and nationalism come to haunt Yamagushiku’s practice of ancestor veneration. In a voice that is spare, yearning and precise, the poet speaks through a cultural amnesia accumulated during four generations and one hundred and fifteen years living in diaspora. The formation of a shima, meaning village in Uchinaaguchi (the most widely spoken indigenous language in Okinawa) allows the poet to grapple with the fragile connective tissue of memory amidst the onslaught of empire. Anchored by an interrogation of the relationship between father and son, the poems work toward the realization that the homeland is an impossible destination. Yamagushiku proclaims “I am taking the sharpest stick and poking the root ancestor. I am insisting that if he awakens I will have something useful to say.”