. . . Or, On Afro-Asian connections, part I
In my last post, I referenced the ways that Black studies discourse has critically engaged with the politics of representing Black suffering and death, noting in particular the wide range of possible effects that these images and live scenes can have on differently positioned witnesses, spectators, consumers, and mourners. That the same image or social event can have widely disparate meanings — for some, another unjust instance of oppression; for the unsympathetic, a justified use of force to maintain the racial order of things — offers one way into the question: what instigates non-Black folks to become politicized? Though that process could be variously defined, I mean it in this context to signal shifts in thinking and behavior whereby a person becomes cognizant of the historical existence and contemporary persistence of state-sanctioned, extra-legal, and interpersonal forms of anti-Black racism and self-consciously seeks to remedy those past and present wrongs.
I’m specifically inquiring about the politicization of Asian Americans in support of Black liberation. Leaving aside, for now, the many articulations of “Asians for Black lives” that are circulating in public discourse, I’ve been able to come up with only a handful of Asian American radicalization narratives more generally in literary history (though undoubtedly there are more I’m missing). Carlos Bulosan’s semi-autobiographical America Is in the Heart (1946) is perhaps the most well-known example of transnational radicalization in the Asian American literary archive. His narrative persona grows up during the U.S. colonial period an impoverished peasant in Pangasinan, Philippines, where his family is subject to immiseration by absentee landlordism and other forms of exploitation, and he later becomes a labor activist and organizer on the U.S. West Coast.
Subsequent Filipinx American martial law novels like Jessica Hagedorn’s Dogeaters (1990), Gina Apostol’s Gun Dealers’ Daughter (2010/2012), and Elaine Castillo’s America Is Not the Heart (2018, a deliberate play on Bulosan’s classic text) feature privileged female protagonists who reject their elite backgrounds and become activists fighting against the repressive Marcos dictatorship. Interestingly, neither Hagedorn nor Castillo overtly explain why Daisy Avila or Hero (Geronima De Vera) joins the New People’s Army in their respective texts. Dogeaters‘ chapter titles narrate the beauty queen Daisy’s political awakening through allusions to fairy tales — “Sleeping Beauty,” “Epiphany,” “Breaking Spells” — but doesn’t divulge how she came to her decision to denounce the beauty pageant as anti-feminist on public television, renounce her crown, and abscond with the guerrilla rebel Santos Tirador. Castillo as well withholds Hero’s reasons for dropping out of medical school at University of Santo Tomas when she is recruited by two NPA cadres. Though Apostol, for her part, does explain why Sol gets briefly involved in activist work as a college student — she finds out that her parents are supplying arms to the violently repressive Marcos regime, hence the title — hers is the least optimistic about the prospects of what I called “revolution from above” in a review of the novel.
There are other literary examples. The Pakistani immigrant Changez in Mohsin Hamid’s post-9/11 novel The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007) comes to recognize how U.S. imperialism operates through military interventions, financial coercions, and immigration policies, abandons his upward mobility trajectory in the U.S. (Princeton degree, a high-paying job at a valuation firm), and returns to Lahore to become a lecturer and political mentor to activist students. The clone Evie in Larissa Lai’s dystopian sci-fi novel Salt Fish Girl (2002) seeks to sabotage the power of the corporations because her and her sister clones’ “human” rights have been nullified by the splicing of 0.03% carp genes into their genetic codes. And a whole array of characters in Karen Tei Yamashita’s recreation of the Asian American and allied social movements in I Hotel (2010) become engaged in a variety of political activities and artistic and cultural work in the Bay Area during the 1960s and 70s.
That period of the Civil Rights and Black Power movements is the setting for prominent Japanese American activist Yuri Kochiyama becoming political — a process of politicization that, as she tells it in Passing It On: A Memoir (2004), was directly affected by her exposure to and engagement with the Black freedom struggle. Born to Issei parents and raised in San Pedro, California in 1921, Kochiyama writes that “In our Spanish-style house with a cactus garden, I was sheltered, lived comfortably and safely, religious, provincial, and apolitical in thought” (9). She reflects on the privileges and limitations that her early years in San Pedro afforded her:
As much as I enjoyed growing up in a friendly cosmopolitan small town, I needed to leave it and grow up, open myself to new ideas, meet new people, learn from life’s experiences. My provincial mentality and apolitical ideas needed to change and develop. I needed to leave San Pedro in order to enlarge my worldview, so that the people and encounters I speak of could become the primary sources from which my political ideas and philosophy have grown. (xxiii-xxiv)
The first major — catastrophic — event that took her out of her small town and her “provincial mentality” was being evacuated, relocated, and incarcerated along with 110,000+ other Japanese Americans following the bombing of Pearl Harbor and FDR’s signing of Executive Order 9066. Kochiyama’s father was detained by the FBI immediately after December 7, 1941, and died the next spring. She and the rest of her family were first sent to live in the makeshift horse stalls at the Santa Anita Racetrack Assembly Center while the camps were being constructed in the U.S. interior, and eventually transferred to the concentration camp in Jerome, Arkansas.
Kochiyama considers the impact of incarceration on her worldview at a couple of moments in the memoir. In the introduction, she writes: “Before the war, I was seeing America with American eyes. What happened to Japanese Americans after Pearl Harbor made me see the world and America with entirely new eyes — Japanese American eyes. In many ways, this marked the beginning of my political awakening and development” (xxiii).
In a later chapter, she describes getting a job at the USO in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, so she wouldn’t have to return to Jerome: “It was challenging but very liberating. First, I was on my own, and second, it challenged my thinking. I knew I was beginning to change my thinking, and I welcomed more changes. How little I understood about anything in life, and until that time was I indoctrinated with status quo mainstream American ideas, but I now knew it was time to go on my own and think for myself” (17).
Given the formative influence that Japanese American incarceration had on changing her “mainstream” American ideas, it is all the more remarkable that she attributes the beginning of her “political activism” not so much to her experience in Jerome’s concentration camp but to her family’s move to Harlem in 1960 with her husband Bill and six children ranging from one to thirteen years of age: “In December 1960, we moved to a new housing project in Harlem — the Manhattanville Houses on 126th and Broadway. It was a low-income housing project surrounded by Latino and Black families, and it was in this new neighborhood that at the age of forty, my political activism began to take shape” (47).
The rest of the memoir goes on to describe a multitude of activists and causes that she worked with and for over the next 40+ years, including her friendship with Malcolm X and her involvement with the Organization of Afro-American Unity, the Hiroshima/Nagasaki World Peace Study Mission, the anti-Vietnam war movement, Asian Americans for Action, the Republic of New Africa, support for political prisoners (Mtayari Shabaka Sundiata, Mumia Abu Jamal, Marilyn Buck, Steve Yip, Yu Kikumura, David Wong, Eddy Zheng, Lolita Lebron, Assata Shakur, Leonard Peltier), and numerous anti-imperialist struggles (she was part of the 19th Venceremos Brigade in 1988 and visited Peru in 1993 on a human rights mission).
Kochiyama emphasizes the pivotal moment that launched this restless activism near the beginning of the documentary Mountains That Take Wing: Angela Davis and Yuri Kochiyama—A Conversation on Life, Struggles & Liberation (2009), produced by C. A. Griffith and H. L. T. Quan. The film splices together conversations between the two women that took place in Santa Barbara in 1996 and Oakland in 2008 and is currently streaming for free on the web through Films for Action. (Ok, so the main impetus behind this inordinately long blog post was to cite this documentary and encourage people to watch it. I don’t see it get a whole lot of airplay.) In the first few minutes, Kochiyama replies to Davis’s invitation to “tell me how it all began,” by saying, “I didn’t become political until late. I was 40. And actually, I didn’t become political until we moved to Harlem. [. . .] And that changed our life because, well, we said, we better learn something about the Black community, Black movement.”
By contrast, Davis describes her upbringing in deeply segregated Birmingham, Alabama, and the white supremacist violence she and the Black community there were subjected to during the Bull Connor years. Her recollections of that childhood in 1996 and 2008 are fairly mild compared to the stark description she provides in a 1972 interview with Swedish journalists while in a California prison that is part of The Black Power MixTape, 1967-1975 (2011). Davis responds to questioning about the Black Panthers, revolution, and violence with an exasperated explanation of having been surrounded by state and vigilante violence all her life, citing, among other incidents, the infamous 16th Street Baptist Church bombing in 1963 that killed four African American girls and injured at least twelve others. Davis ends her critique of the question, “So that’s why when someone asks me about violence, I just, I just find it incredible. Because what it means is that the person asking that question has absolutely no idea what Black people have gone through, what Black people have experienced in this country, since the time the first Black person was kidnapped from the shores of Africa.”
In Mountains That Take Wing, Davis concludes of the impact that the two women’s differing circumstances had on their political trajectories, “I think place has a lot to do with the politicization,” and Kochiyama agrees.
There is much to say about how segregation can throw up obstacles to interracial relationships for someone like Kochiyama, and make being “political” a matter of necessity and survival for someone like Davis. But it is instructive to hear how the Kochiyama family’s first thought upon moving to Harlem is not to try to maintain distance or differentiate themselves from their neighbors but to learn about the Black movement and immerse themselves in the Black community. Passing It On describes the family’s support for Black struggles, in part, through their “Christmas Cheer” newsletters, which started in 1949 but turned political in 1963, as well as their resonantly titled “North Star” family movement newsletter, which lasted from 1965 to 1969. Here’s one choice snippet from the former that is prescient in its call to white and non-Black people of color to reckon with colorism in our communities:
World renown[ed] sociologist, John Hope Franklin, stated: “Almost invariably the Negro progresses only to the extent that the white man advances in understanding that a human being is a human being. The Negro cannot achieve except where the white man has advanced enough to allow him.” But it is not only the white man, but the yellow man, the brown man, and men of every light pigmentation who have imbued self-elevation by lighter-coloring who are guilty of the ferment in race relationship[s]. Each must examine himself for the varying degrees of prejudice are found in every ethnic and religious group at every level and every area individually and en masse, not only in America, but on every continent. The cry, heard round the world, for human rights, dignity, and freedom must be answered with social justice. . . . (110-11)
The “North Star” newsletters, meanwhile, take up such issues and formations as Black nationalism, SNCC and the Black Panther Party, the Republic of New Africa, and Black political prisoners, along with the anti-Vietnam war and Asian American movements.
What I find most moving and inspiring about the documentary is being given the opportunity to watch two seasoned women-of-color activists talking with one another in their homes. Although the film does include clips of them speaking at public rallies, podiums, and conferences, most of it is comprised of extended scenes of their conversations in interior spaces. They don’t try to one-up each other on points of radical theory or political causes they’ve been involved in or famous activists they’ve known (obviously, they are the famous activists we’ve come to know). They don’t try to prove to each other or the camera who is more down with the people or more woke. And the fact that we are listening in on a Japanese American woman and an African American woman discuss their ideas about and experiences with social justice movements breaks with the predominant Afro-Asian studies tradition which manifests an “almost-exclusive focus on men as political and historical actors in the construction of cross-racial solidarities,” as scholars Vanita Reddy and Anantha Sudhakar write in their introduction to the special issue of S&F Online, “Queer and Feminist Afro-Asian Formations.” What comes across in the film is not “heteromasculinity” or “heterosexual couplehood” as the “structuring conditions of possibility for cross-racial solidarity,” as Reddy and Sudhakar put it, but genuine curiosity about each other’s lives and viewpoints and an equally generous willingness to reveal them.
In giving us this glimpse of their conversations, the film shows Kochiyama and Davis modeling for us what M. Jacqui Alexander eloquently describes as becoming women of color:
In order to become women of color, we would need to become fluent in each others’ histories, to resist and unlearn an impulse to claim first oppression, most-devastating oppression, one-of-a-kind oppression, defying-comparison oppression. We would have to unlearn an impulse that allows mythologies about each other to replace knowing about one another. We would need to cultivate a way of knowing in which we direct our social, cultural, psychic, and spiritually marked attention on each other. We cannot afford to cease yearning for each others’ company. (M. Jacqui Alexander, “Remembering This Bridge Called My Back, Remembering Ourselves,” in Pedagogies of Crossing: Meditations on Feminism, Sexual Politics, Memory, and the Sacred [Durham: Duke University Press, 2005], 257-86; 269.)
This isn’t to posit false equivalences across racial-gender experiences and histories, or to assert that directing attention to one group’s oppression to combat the mythologies that substitute for knowledge somehow deflects attention away from oneself or other groups (e.g., the stupid all lives matter response to Black Lives Matter). The dialogues in the documentary themselves contravene such oversimplifications and abstractions, even as they suggest that to become fluent in each others’ histories may require not only yearning for but being present in each others’ company.
Toward the end of Mountains That Take Wing, Davis asserts the need for Kochiyama’s story of politicization to become one of those histories that should be more widely known: “Your history and how you became conscious of fighting racism and inequality and injustice and fighting against war — we need to understand better how that happened so that it’s not accidental, so that we can actually encourage it.”
And she emphasizes Kochiyama’s efforts to work across social differences in these anti-racist and anti-imperialist projects: “Your history as someone who has always encouraged community building across the divisions that usually keep us apart—”
At this point, Kochiyama interjects, “Oh yes, there must be that kind of alliance, that kind of getting to know one another better, and doing things together, oh yes. Ok, so where do you think it has to begin?”
Davis’s answer: “Well, I think it begins wherever you are. My sense has always been that activism isn’t something special. It’s not located in a particular space. It’s about doing the work you’re able to do given the position you’re in at any given moment.”
It doesn’t have to take a dramatic move into open air or closed prisons or a racially different neighborhood to become political. Nor does it require having bombs go off in your neighborhood in response to “integration.” It can begin and continue by critically reflecting on the positions we’re in, here and now, while remaining open to being moved.