Oct 13, 2010 | Events, Hiroshima in the Morning, The Writing Life
“Grub Street is thrilled to announce that Rahna Reiko Rizzuto has won our 2010 National Book Prize in Non-Fiction for her memoir, Hiroshima in the Morning, published by The Feminist Press.
“Rizzuto will lead a class on the craft of narrative non-fiction at the Muse and the Marketplace conference April 30-May 1, 2011. She will also lead a free craft class for members in our space.
“Head juror Grace Talusan described this wonderful book in these words:
“In her memoir Hiroshima in the Morning, Rahna Reiko Rizzuto explores what happens when a bomb finds its target. Initially, she’s in search of stories about Japanese Americans during World War II and survivors of the atomic bomb. Her husband and sons, ages 3 and 5, stay in New York as Rizzuto travels to Hiroshima, despite criticism that she’s a “bad mother” for leaving her family for months to write. She’s steeped in stories about fate and survival, about how someone survived because of a seemingly mundane and arbitrary move. She is collecting material for her second novel, including interviews with survivors of the atomic bomb named Little Boy, when a new ground zero is created in New York. The world around her as well as the world she’s created with her husband will never be the same. Her family pressures her to come home, but Rizzuto won’t leave Japan or her work. She writes, “So there is that moment, then; the last breath of before: when life is about to change, utterly and forever, into something we have no way to conceive of. When the trajectory is already being drawn and there is no way to stop it.” Using diary entries, emails, telephone transcripts, and oral histories, Rizzuto pieces together a masterful collage about Hiroshima, 9/11, ambivalent motherhood, a doomed marriage, and a writer trying to understand what narrative means amidst so many kinds of bombs hitting so many beloved targets.”
Thank you so much to Grub Street – to the jurors and staff and the whole community of writers. I look forward to meeting you in Boston in April.
Oct 11, 2010 | The Writing Life
Please bear with me. I know I disappeared after September 11th. This has not been proof of post-traumatic stress, or mourning (though we should all mourn) the beginning of the Afghan war, but rather something magical. A book is being born. It is a gift from God knows where, and maybe I mean that literally!, but all I know for sure is that I have to show up for it. I cannot remember a race to the end of a book like this, this kind of excitement. And we are almost there.
Come to the readings on the west coast, if you can, and I will tell you then if you ask.
Sep 11, 2010 | Random Thoughts
Sign the Charter for Compassion.
Sep 7, 2010 | Events, Hiroshima in the Morning
When: September 22, 2010 8:30 PM EST
Where: Facebook. Be sure to like Rahna Reiko Rizzuto on Facebook.
Who: You!
What: A Live Chat with author Rahna Reiko Rizzuto about her new book, Hiroshima in the Morning. There will also be a chance to win a Koa carved bookmark from Hawaii and receive an entry into the grand prize.
Help us spread the word about the trailer for Hiroshima in the Morning!
Tweet a link to the trailer
Share it on Facebook
Email the trailer to your friends
Post it on your website for blog
Send an email to mypalamy@gmail.com with Hiroshima in the Morning Trailer as the subject line and everything you did to spread the word. If you post the trailer on your blog, please include a link to the post.
You’ll be entered to win a special Hawaii gift pack including: 1 package 100% Kona coffee, 1 package of Maui pure cane sugar, 1 package organic luau seasoning rub, 1 pound Alaea Red Sea Salt, and 1 box chocolate covered macadamia nuts, along with a copy of Hiroshima in the Morning.
Aug 19, 2010 | The Writing Life
“Extreme reading is like cannibalism. You take a book, like a piece of food, and eat it. For sustenance, for blood, if not to ritually ingest the soul or heart or power of your enemy or someone you loved. You take it in and chew and grind and tear it down to the smallish bits, to the things that you can swallow. You rid yourself of some of it and keep some of the rest. Sometimes you keep what may not be the best for you. Your body knows what’s good for you, but sometimes you don’t listen. The things you eat and keep become a part of you. You re-create inside yourself, with caverns, juices, processes you can and can’t control, a kind of meat.”
– Rebecca Brown, American Romances, City Lights Books, 2009
Aug 5, 2010 | Hiroshima in the Morning, Our Nuclear Age
On the 65th anniversary of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, we risk losing the memories of the survivors.
I went to Hiroshima in 2001 to interview the hibakusha — literally, the “bomb-affected people.” I made this journey as a Japanese-American woman who had no knowledge of the atomic bombings — no experience of war at all.
When I got to Hiroshima in June 2001 and began my interviews, good-hearted people shared their testimonies with me, all beginning with where they were the moment they saw the plane, where they fled to, and who among their family and friends survived. Even those stories with some gore in them — descriptions of how the six rivers of the Hiroshima delta were so swollen with bodies that you couldn’t see the water — were curiously detached. It was not that they were afraid to offend the American interviewer. It was that they had forgotten precisely what it felt like.
The survivors recited the facts I had found in books: 100,000 dead within days, 100,000 more dying; everything within two kilometers irradiated; thirteen square kilometers burned to the ground. Drinking the water was deadly. Small fleshy body parts, like ears and noses, melted long before the people themselves died.
Often, the hibakusha ended our conversations with a speech about the need for peace and nuclear disarmament. There were even people who expressed their belief that the world was already at peace, and that, by dying spectacularly, the victims of Hiroshima had made it impossible for any sane leader to use nuclear weapons again.
I couldn’t bring myself to tell them that their sacrifice was almost invisible where I came from. Photos, film, documentation of the city had been confiscated and censored almost immediately after Japan surrendered, and the only indelible image of the bombing was the power of the bomb itself: the “shock and awe” version of the mushroom cloud. John Hersey’s Hiroshima, first published in 1946, remained the only “oral history” account released by a major, commercial American press. As a result, most Americans know almost nothing about nuclear fallout beyond the 1950’s advice to stock your bomb shelter with canned food.
But after September 11, 2001, when terrorism exploded on television, the interviews began to change.
Witnesses recalled being trapped under beams, screaming to be saved from the tornadoes of fire that were whipped up as the shock wave advanced. One woman I spoke with, who was about eight at the time, told me about trying to fit her mother’s eye back into its socket. Another remembered giving her child water and watching his lips attach and pull off onto the spout of the kettle. One man said:
They brought my sister home, lying on a door. She died the next night, calling, ‘Mother, help me, please.’ My sister’s agony, her terrible burns, her skin slithering off… it was common at the time.
The global instability — the terrorist attacks, the anthrax, the war in Afghanistan — had seeped into the past and made the kind of unconscious link between inhumanities that only trauma can. The hibakusha had been stripped of their trust in the future, and they passed that insecurity to me.
In 2001, living at the world’s first “ground zero” and watching on TV as my New York City home adopted that label, war seemed to be an act that could only be possible if we could fool ourselves into believing that other people’s children were not as precious, or human, as our own.
Hiroshima should have taught us not to be such fools.
This article was first published by the Progressive Media Project. When I sat down to write something for this anniversary, I realized that nothing has changed, except the date. So I changed the date. It is now also available on The Huffington Post and Discover Nikkei.
Jul 27, 2010 | Motherhood in the Media, Random Thoughts
The two things that everyone wants to hear:
You are safe.
I see you.
It comes up in the context of children, in an article on The Huffington Post by Judith Acosta about verbal healing, but it’s what we all want, even when we have grown beyond those fragile, trusting years, even after we have been disappointed in friends, rejected in love, worn out by work, surprised and confused. It is why we marry, why we create community and organize religion. Why we buy things we think we will possess forever; why we think we can own anything.
And it is why, I suspect, we believe the fear-mongers when they say: “You are just like us” (I see you); “Trust us to keep the bad/different guys away from you” (You are safe).
My most vivid memories of my mother, even now that I am one, are of her assuring me that whatever the latest dishonorable, stupid thing I did was, it would pass. I would not have to carry it forever. Stealing candy from a store when I was in grade school. I remember the panic, the sinking in my stomach that I could never make this right, that I could never be worthy of my parents’ love.
You are safe, she said. I see you.
And though that was close to forty years ago, I can still feel that gift she gave me. I can still feel her climbing into my bed to hold me and wipe my mistakes and inadequacies away. To thank her, I often try to give that same sense of safety and being seen to everyone I meet, even if just in a smile. Thank you, Mom.
Can you still feel your mother?
Jul 12, 2010 | Motherhood in the Media, Random Thoughts
This is the first summer that my boys are going to camp.
It’s a New York thing, and I am not originally a New Yorker. Where I grew up, summer was about hanging around, making yourself useful and finding a way to entertain yourself with a paper cup and a stick. But in Brooklyn, early teenagers attend camp. Soccer camp, tech camp, baseball, math, music camp: each one offers a focused specialty, a set of skills that will give your child an edge in the competition to come. I confess that, when camp finally seemed inevitable, I, too, was eying the summer as an opportunity to introduce my younger son to a new and notable talent – digital storytelling? film? – that he might become passionate about just in time for seventh grade, when every New York child must find some way to stand out from the tens of thousands of other smart, wonderful kids who are applying to the same high schools.
Instead, my sons are attending an all-purpose “summer experience” day camp in Brooklyn, where my fourteen year old is a Counselor in Training. Which means, far from distinguishing himself as a prodigy, the bulk of his days are spent taking care of seven year olds.
“It’s awesome,” he says.
Why? I ask him. Why on earth? What person, especially a teenage boy, would look forward to spending his free time with a large group of little kids?
It just is, he says. It’s fun. They have a lot of energy. They like to hang on him, and pull on his arms, and cling to his legs so he can’t go anywhere without them.
The CITs, as they are called, do get time to play dodge ball and other games (my son tells me proudly that his group won yesterday) and they also have time off – during Arts and Crafts and Swim for example – when they can go to their own counselors and do something supervised for a half hour or so. Their counselors, I am told, are also awesome. But my son usually chooses to hang out with the kids.
There is a boy who can’t swim because of an ear infection so he and my son shoot hoops and hit baseballs. A young man who is taller than his mother and a kid half his size: “You’d never believe it, Mom. He can hit the ball up to the ceiling. He’s amazing!” Or he hangs out in art class to see what they are drawing. “That’s great. That’s a beautiful picture,” he says mimicking himself as he wanders among them.
This is his choice. This is not Facebook, or texting, or any of the things he usually likes to do. He tells me, as if it just occurred to him, that he hasn’t logged onto Facebook in the past three days.
Who knew that my son would find his best summer experience, not in soccer or tech, but in caretaking? In New York City, we are conditioned to focus on self-improvement, every child for himself, with self being the center. We are transient, high-tech; we are busy. By the time school and guitar lessons and homework are done every evening, there is not a lot of time for service, or for taking care of others, or for anything except going to sleep.
But this summer, in this camp, my son is practicing love. We didn’t plan it that way, but I am so grateful. He is finding new priorities. He is celebrating others. And he is enjoying every minute of what he discovers.
And it is awesome.
Jun 23, 2010 | Random Thoughts
My father recently sent me a picture of my mother playing with a lizard. It was a Jackson’s Chameleon, green and black with three horns on its head. You might think how cute, or that she was visiting a zoo with children, or that she is an intrepid exotic animal lover. You might begin to question your assumptions, though, when I tell you that my mother has dementia, and the lizard was something she and her caregiver rescued from the side of the road.
Last night I had dinner with Kenny Fries, renowned disability expert and author of several books, most recently, The History of My Shoes and the Evolution of Darwin’s Theory. We were talking about disability, and Alzheimer’s, and a Father’s Day article in the New York Times, by Katy Butler called “What Broke My Father’s Heart” about a family’s struggle with stroke, dementia, pacemakers, and aging. We were both moved by the story. He had some issues, however, with the disability aspects, particularly with questions about quality of life, and who decides when a life is worth living or what the experience of that life is.
Kenny is a born disability activist. He was born missing bones in his legs. The majority of the rest of us, the “normal” ones, do not start life thinking much about disability. But we will all become disability activists eventually. Because, we are all on a life path that ends in disability. It is not other. It is, or will be, us.
This notion of disability as both ordinary and inevitable is part of what Kenny is writing about in his next book. Disability has entered my life in the form of my mother, just as it has for some five million people who have Alzheimer’s, and ten million unpaid caregivers who love them. These numbers are projected to explode, and I may become one of them. If I don’t develop Alzheimer’s, something else will happen to disable me (unless I fall off a caldera and am killed instantly). But if I do, I have my mother to look to for my future.
She has been losing her memory for twelve years. She can’t feed herself, dress herself, put together a sentence. She needs full time care. Yet she can enjoy her grandchildren, even if she doesn’t remember their names. She laughs. She apparently likes lizards.
Would I want this for myself in a perfect world? Would I prefer the alternative of “assisted death” that author Terry Prachett is advocating for?
One of the strategies that Kenny Fries espouses is for our society to turn away from the “illness model” where we try to cure disability or treat it in nursing homes, and give assistance instead to families who are trying to help their loved ones live quality lives. The strain that Katy Butler’s mother suffered, caring for her husband for seven years at the expense of her own health and life, doesn’t have to be the norm. It is something my father would do, though we are not at that stage quite yet, but not something any of us would want for him. For the moment, he has managed to get some help from home caregivers who amaze me with their joy and patience and competence. They are helping my disabled mother to live a life of laughter and hugs and Jackson’s Chameleons.
A life.
Jun 17, 2010 | Random Thoughts
I know why BP is lying to us. But why are we lying to ourselves?
This oil spill has become a blot — not just a slick, deadly blot in our ocean, but a black spot on our vision so that we can no longer see the future, or the past, or even the present clearly. And it isn’t just the spill we can’t see, but oil itself.
BP, of course, is counting on this blindness. We can watch the oil blasting out of the broken pipe. But if we don’t measure it, if we drop dispersants on it so it hides out of sight, they know we will forget it, even as it is happening. We will question whether the dead dolphins and turtles that washed up on shore might be entirely unrelated, since they were not (yet!) obviously suffocated by oil. We will forget that the oil is already in the water, as the Governor of Florida did when, on May 12th, three weeks after the rig exploded, he called for a marketing campaign to tout Florida’s clean beaches. BP knows that it doesn’t matter that the chemicals they are dumping into the oil are full of cancer-causing compounds and neurotoxins that might kill 25% of all organisms in their path, not to mention move up the food chain, because we will forget, or not make the connection, even if we are all growing two heads 20 years from now. They have seen from the Exxon Valdez spill that they can spend nearly two decades fighting against paying the tab and win.
The future is on their side, because the future is too overwhelming for us to think about.
Then there is the past. Who cares? Looking back is merely whining and Sunday morning quarterbacking. Plus, it’s boring. We don’t really want to have to sift through and assign blame to all the deregulation and grossly mismanaged oversight by previous administrations that allowed this to happen in the first place. Even that sentence is exhausting to read. The problem is now. The Obama administration is now. We want the spill stopped, and they are the people who are responsible, even if this just dropped in their laps and they don’t have a clue how to do it. We want it to go away. We want it to have no effect, to never have happened; we want the oil that is continuing to impregnate our ocean after more than 50 days to never touch our white beaches, and if Barack “Whose ass do I kick?” Obama can’t do that, we will blame him for everything he has done, and everything he hasn’t done, both at the same time.
The problem with being blind to the past and the future is that the present is also too overwhelming, and too confusing, for us to see.
Consider Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour who blames the national press for scaring away the tourists who should understand, like he does, that the tar balls on the beaches “are no big deal.” What about Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal’s protest against a moratorium on new permits and the suspension of already approved drilling projects because of a “potential” loss of up to 10,000 jobs? Just this morning, Louisiana Senator Mary Landrieu echoed that protest on the grounds that deepwater oil rigs “employ, directly, hundreds of people and indirectly thousands.” These are the voices of local representatives for the people whose beaches are being covered in oil “like chocolate,” “like pancake mix,” where all the fisherman are beached, communities are suffering, an ecosystem that exists nowhere else on earth is effectively dead. Yes, lost jobs are terrible, especially in this economy, especially for these communities. But in what formulation of “now” does it make sense to blame Obama for hurting people (whose lives are now being ruined by an oil spill) by trying to ensure some protection against future spills?
It’s like we are sitting in a car, driving down a road and we can see a brick wall in front of us. We are going to hit the wall. But this is the only car we have. This is the only road there is. We can’t think about stopping the car, about walking, about making a new road. This is our car, this is our road, this is the wall. And so we crash.
Why can’t we envision a life without oil? Why is oil such a given in our system, so much a part of our narrative, our identity, our way of understanding the world, that we can’t imagine letting go of it?
Oil, as energy, is a newcomer to the history of man. We only drilled our first oil well about 150 years ago. Electricity, cars, followed. A juggernaut to be sure; a systematic change in our way of life. But not an essential part of our being.
In fact, in that last 150 years, we have welcomed many new technologies into our daily lives – airplanes, television, telephones, computers, faxes, and personal electronics of all kinds – and we have also seen many become obsolete. My 12 year old has never seen a rotary phone except in a museum; his is the generation for whom “phone” is the thing in your pocket that also plays music, locates you through a satellite, and shoots video. He has never played a record, watched an eight-track, used a floppy disk, or typed on a typewriter. Televisions must now be HD, or have a converter box to function; there is a lively argument about whether, and for how long, printed books will continue to exist.
We live in an age where we are tumbling over ourselves in the quest for bigger and better and new. While there are many early adopters, many more of us have gotten so used to the breathtaking pace of technological advancement that we wait for the next generation, or the competition’s answer, before deciding what to buy. Everything becomes obsolete so fast.
Why not oil?
Why do we think instead:
This is how we do it.
This is how the world is.
This is how we’ve always done it.
There are no other jobs. There is no other solution. This is the only way.
No, no, no, and no.
But still we are stuck in our black blot, seeing neither past, present or future, suffocating, as surely as the pelicans are, in oil.
Why do we believe this is how it must be?
Also posted on The Huffington Post.
