rob mclennan : Shima, by Shō Yamagushiku

Shima, Shō Yamagushiku
McClelland and Stewart, 2024

Another full-length debut from this spring’s McClelland and Stewart poetry quartet is Victoria, British Columbia-based Shō Yamagushiku’s book-length poem, Shima (Toronto ON: McClelland and Stewart, 2024), a collection built as a collage-text of memory, witness, family history and scrapbook, detailing, as the press release offers, “the emotional, psychic, and generational toll that exile from a pillaged culture impresses on a poet and his community.” Opening with the prose-set “Shima,” the book collages a quartet of sections—“amerika-yuu,” “yamatu-yuu,” “uchinaa-yuu” and “yanbaru-yuu”—which combine into a long poem comparable to a book such as the late Barry McKinnon’s infamous I Wanted To Say Something (Prince George BC: New Caledonia Writing Series, 1975; Red Deer AB: Red Deer College Press, 1990), which was itself an essential long poem of leaving, collage, family history and recollection. “Uncle,” Yamagushiku writes, “Forgive me for shining this light / into your graveyard of an eye // Where are you?” And a few lines further: “You are being vaulted into currency / carved of timber bones, this relic // that you will become, you thought // you had a choice [.]” Comparable to McKinnon’s long poem, but one might say that Yamagushiku’s narratives stretch out into an abstract as well, offering narrative concreteness across a far wider canvas. Even prior to the first piece, Shima offers a definition of the title: “shima, n. 1. A village; a community. / 2. One’s home village. 3. One’s fief. / 4. An island.” The definition informs, but says little, with the history of this Japanese city buried under the weight of what remains unsaid, but for through Yamagushiku’s lyric. Paired with the opening quote by the late Etel Adnan, from her collection Paris, When It’s Naked (The Post-Apollo Press, 1993)—“An ancestral forest within me stirs my / memory and makes life untenable.”—Yamagushiku frames a collection named for this ancestral city, writing around exile, utilizing family/archival photographs and the endless strands of history. “a vastness // disappears // abandons me,” he writes, early on in the collection, “to a cloudless night // all the stars // turn sleep’s path // away from me [.]” As poet and critic Harold Rhenisch offers as part of his own recent review of the collection, published online at The British Columbia Review:

Shima is a book of the sea from an island village in the Okinawan archipelago, and a portrait of that community from the sea. It is about taking a breath and swimming between them. There is also a forest.

The book rises from the Ryukyuan diaspora. It eventually steps back from the turned shoulders of some of Sho Yamagushiku’s ancestors and goes to sea. Before him, there were the Amas, the free-breathing, deep-diving fisherwomen of Okinawa who have been sustainably harvesting shellfish from their ocean for thousands of years.

Shima is a comprehensive collage-work around colonialism and its multi-generational effects, exile and its obligations, providing a compelling family story across four countries and a century of displaced lineage. “July 6, 1904 – Taro leaves Tanna / on a boat bound for Mexico via / New Caledonia. He works the / coal mines as a contract labourer / for La Compañia Japonesa Mexi- / cana de Comercio y Colonización / in Coahuila, Mexico. Taro flees / from the mine’s exploitative / labour conditions with a group / of Okinawan workers across the / border into the United States. / His daughter’s son fathers me.” The text offers echoes, repetitions along threads of fragments held with emotional and lyrical heft, composing a kind of reclamation across these strands of history and loss, from their original displacement to Japanese internment, of soldiers and occupiers, and a refusal to forget family bonds, and origins. This collection is multi-layered and complex, and as subtle as it is powerful, composing a stunning work of empathy and history across the form of the long poem. The collection begins with a six-stanza prose poem that provides the opening salvo of a bookended image of quiet intimacies: the narrator’s father, pulling the narrator’s hair. As the piece opens:

My father stands in his yard holding my hair. Down the sloping crescent, a tangle of strands fastens me to a rainbow. The border dissolves at my feet, feet break, and we disappear. I am far away now, blistering. My father is still holding. Each month away from that ledge gathers in my scalp, drying into dust.

Every evening my father plucks my hair. A cloud of disturbed thoughts darken the sky, bats flying from the recesses. With the hair on my scalp my father finds a rhythm. A love so stretched, without a limit, I feel as though I might bleed.

 

 

 

 

 

rob mclennan’s collection of short stories, On Beauty (University of Alberta Press) will appear in fall 2024. His next poetry collection is the book of sentences with University of Calgary Press, the second in a trilogy of collections that began with the book of smaller (University of Calgary Press, 2022). He is reading in Toronto on Wednesday, but you probably already know that.