Hyphen: Asian America Unabridged Blog, February 2, 2015
An Interview with Poet Brian Komei Dempster
I first met Brian Komei Dempster in Winter 2000 as a student in his Kearny Street Workshop writing class, held in his grandfather’s Buddhist church in San Francisco’s Japantown, and was immediately impressed by his warmth and patience. Brian has edited two books of personal stories by Japanese Americans who were incarcerated in WW II camps — From Our Side of the Fence and Making Home from War. His debut poetry book Topaz, which won the 15 Bytes 2014 Book Award in Poetry, was published in 2013 by Four Way Books.
What I admire most about Topaz is its skillful interweaving of the historical and the personal, which reflects the way that inherited family legacies are both a burden and a gift for one to sort through and integrate. Brian’s story — and the speaker’s quest in the book — is further complicated by his mixed race heritage and upbringing by a Japanese American mother and white father. As a Chinese American, I’ve experienced cultural bifurcation but, through Brian’s work, have discovered a new world of racial dualism. His fearless investigation of its nuances and conflicts is inspiring. He can write of a grandmother’s grief and then seamlessly present the sexual angst of adolescent males: his ordering and juxtaposition of poems reflects the multi-layered resonances of the speaker’s life.
Brian’s poetry is carefully crafted, with formal experimentation, yet remains accessible to a broad audience. It is personally expressive, though grounded within the context of family and community. His poems chart new territory and speak hard truths. Most importantly, for me as a writer, they feel authentic.
Brian’s poems have appeared in New England Review, North American Review, Ploughshares, and numerous other journals as well as various anthologies, including Language for a New Century and Asian American Poetry: the Next Generation. He is a professor of rhetoric and language and a faculty member in Asian Pacific American Studies at the University of San Francisco, where he also serves as Director of Administration for the Master of Arts in Asia Pacific Studies.
Jeffrey Thomas Leong: Can you tell us about your name — Brian Komei Dempster — and where it comes from?
Brian Komei Dempster: My father’s name is Dempster, which has European roots, and my mother’s maiden name is Ishida, which is Japanese. The name Komei was given to me by my grandfather, Archbishop Nitten Ishida. I didn’t always use Komei, but as I got older and became a writer, I felt I had to use Komei; otherwise someone might not know who I was, not get the half Asian part of my identity. According to my grandfather, the name means “tall, high, clear –like a mountain. ” The fact that my grandfather — who’s a priest — gave me the name imbues it with gravitas.
JTL: Did you begin using Komei after you started writing or before you started writing?
BKD: Probably the overall shift for me was in my early twenties when I discovered Asian American Studies. As a professor, I prefer to be identified as mixed race. And, as I worked with Japanese Americans who were in the camps, having the name was also very important.
JTL: Do you remember when you first became aware of the Japanese American internment camp experience? Was it something that your family on your mother’s side shared with you when you were younger? Or was it a shock at some point?
BKD: I was an undergrad at the University of Washington taking an introduction to Asian American Studies course, maybe my first one. We were reading Prejudice, War and the Constitution. Peter Bacho, the professor, opened up the lecture one day speaking about the wholesale
incarceration of over 120,000 Japanese Americans during World War II. And it was shocking. I honestly cannot recall having heard about it before that moment; I think I was 20, 21 years old. Why didn’t my family mention this? I asked myself. So I went home, and I asked my mom that day, “Were you incarcerated, and do you remember this? ” She said, “Well, I remember little, I was just a kid.” She was maybe six months old at the time of Pearl Harbor.
Given that she remembered so little, she added, “Why would I bring it up to you?” There’s a deeper thing in Japanese American culture that complicates this telling. I learned that you had to be very careful about how you navigate the silences, because there’s a reason for them. Looking back, I might have made some of my uncles and aunts feel uncomfortable. There was this sense of “Don’t push too hard.” I felt I should take what they were willing to tell, and if I sensed discomfort, to respect their silence.
JTL: Let’s talk about the poems in Topaz. There’s a juxtaposition of cultural and racial heritages from your mixed race background. How do you see yourself as a mixed race writer?
BKD: In talking about mixed race issues in this book, issues of Japanese American identity are addressed in a more organic way, connected to what happened during camp. As a mixed race person, if I’m talking about the Japanese part, there’s no way I cannot talk about being white as well. Part of being mixed race is that there’s these two sides, and at times people only see one. My poems show how the mixed race issue gets reduced or simplified by others. The poems are trying to complicate that, make it more true to actual experience.
For example, in “Origin,” the question, Where are you from? is a reductive one that many Asian Pacific Americans are asked. I was asked that question even as a mixed race person. What the poem attempts to do is to question the question, to weave in different parts of an identity that will, in a sense, counter the reductiveness: Buddhism, sexuality, issues of gender, Hiroshima bombing, get woven into, Where are you from? It’s a battle between simplicity and complexity.
JTL: Let’s look at “Temple Bell Lesson.” I’ve heard you read this poem before. It feels traditional in form, almost haiku-like with its suddenness of perception and economy of words.
BKD: This poem went through many, many revisions and at one point was much longer. There’s this temple bell in our family church, and I was trying to express what it meant historically, in terms of the camps, and then, to my son in the future. It’s using some principles of haiku, focusing on that single image, exploring it, and a quick entrance and exit out of the poem. I’m trying to embody the past, present and future, through the simple image of the bell. You take for granted that it’s there, but it really does have so much symbolic power.
JTL: In a couple of poems you choose a strategy of layering. I think your poem “Transaction,” is definitely one of them. The poem starts with the image of the mother, and then in the third and fourth lines, the personage of Vincent Chin enters, then the speaker is inside a strip club in Seattle. So there’s three locations presented here.
BKD: When I wrote this poem, there was no intentional strategy in mind of juxtaposition. Things connected in my mind intuitively. At the time, I was researching what had happened to Japanese Americans, Vincent Chin had stuck with me, the hate crime and the devastating thing that happened to him. And the strip club. I realized a linear narrative was not going to work, and I had to keep going back and forth. It was really a natural way for me to write, juxtaposing connected but disparate events, seemingly dissimilar things. For me, it was almost a way of thinking, and it became a way of writing.
JTL: I’ve thought that readers might like the wartime incarceration and prison camp poems in Topaz but find poems about gender and sexuality to be too risqué. There’s the embarrassment of talking about homosexuality, or any kind of sexuality issue, in the Asian American community. It’s traditionally been taboo!
BKD: That was one of my concerns about the book’s reception. But sexuality is natural, intimacy is part of being human. Those who really
understood the book, who supported it the whole way through, never said a word. In fact, they complimented me for the risks the poems were taking. The Japanese American community, by and large, has really embraced the book. And I mean the whole book. So I get readers who are Nisei who tell me things like, “Your book made me believe that poetry can be something I can love again.” So actually, the reaction has been the opposite.
JTL: Did the subject of the book change over time? Did you think it was going to be, just a book about the camps originally, then it evolved?
BKD: Perhaps. Especially given that the book has stuff about Nanking, about Hiroshima, and tries to address some of the atrocities that the Japanese committed during World War II towards other Asians, including what they did to Koreans. That part came later, because I started to think, Japanese Americans were persecuted here, but that doesn’t mean that all those of Japanese descent were innocent. And it’s also distinguishing between Japanese in Japan and Japanese Americans, which was not done very well by certain representatives of the U.S. government.
So it’s acknowledging those two different threads: they were both persecutor and the persecuted; they were wrongly conflated — Japanese in Japan were seen as the same as Japanese Americans. The fact that my wife is Chinese is also why I reflect that history. Because my son is half Chinese, one quarter Japanese, one quarter European American, I had to get that into the book to make it even more integrated with his mixed race journey.
JTL: Because of your personal background, do you feel that perhaps your perspective upon these historical experiences is unique, as opposed to the monoracial Asian American writer? Do you bring something else to the table?
BKD: Well, there’s definitely no sense of judgment. Whether you’re monoracial or biracial, you bring something to the table. The key is being really, really honest and specific about what you bring. One of my mentors, Garrett Hongo, said to me, and I am paraphrasing here: Look you’ve got to confront the mixed race stuff. You can’t represent yourself as monoracial, because that’s not even true. Yes, that’s what I can bring. Though I’m influenced by my predecessors’ body of literature, there’s an obligation to advance it. I hope poems about being mixed race are bringing in questions of inheritance.
What are the long term effects of history? In “Transaction,” the mother is getting a check that redresses injustices done to her as a baby. Vincent Chin is mistaken by American autoworkers for a Japanese. The mother’s identity was stereotyped, and there’s the theme of mistaken identities. But the speaker is an adolescent trying to figure out his sexuality in a rite of passage for young males, a strip club. The notion is that, if he pays money, there’s intimacy, even though that’s false. The speaker’s not innocent but participating in a sexist system of objectification.
Does the speaker feel a need to assert power because his predecessors were disempowered? Because his mother was persecuted, does he try to assert his own masculinity to redress past wrongs, even if it’s not ethical or right? These are questions I grappled with as a young half Asian American male.
JTL: You have an ability to see both sides, and not all writers do that. I think a lot of writers of color, particularly of the first generation, were really strident. Is this due to your personal background?
BKD: It’s probably a result of being mixed race, and having written the poems over a fifteen year period or so, where over that time I became a father, married someone who’s Chinese, and started to think about mixed race children today. If I had written a book just about camp, it wouldn’t have been true to me. I had to have those poems about Nanking and others, or the book would never be done. I’m more of a moderate; I can bridge. One person who read this manuscript said there’s really not much commentary. What they meant is there’s not much judgment. We all need to take responsibility for our own prejudices.
JTL: You mentioned that part of your journey is getting married to a person of Chinese ancestry, but also being a father. How does that play into what you’re writing about now?
BKD: Yes, it’s everything in my new work. So in Topaz you’ll notice that Brendan is mentioned a couple of times. My son has epilepsy, he doesn’t speak yet, and he’s nine years old. My next manuscript is called “Seize.” The primary thread is being the father of a child who has a disability. It’s like he’s trapped inside his own mind and body, wherein his perceptive intelligence is very high, but he cannot articulate himself with words, the language most of us take for granted. I feel part of the father’s journey is to understand his son’s lexicon, whether it’s communication through babble, eye contact, hand gestures, or other means.
Jeffrey Thomas Leong is a San Francisco Bay Area poet and a 2014 graduate of the Vermont College of Fine Arts MFA in Writing program in poetry. His recent poetry appears in such publications as Crab Orchard Review and Bamboo Ridge.