Oct 17, 2011 | Random Thoughts
On Saturday, at the Anita Hill 20 conference, Gloria Steinem observed that our country is getting out of control. And that’s a good thing. “Right now we have turned against two wars; in about 20 minutes we are no longer going to be a majority European American or white country; we have a proud African-American family in the White House; and we are critical of our financial institutions in a way we have never been before.” The resulting backlash – more guns being bought, more racist groups, more virulent violence and violent rhetoric, more legislation against personal and women’s reproductive freedoms – comes from people who, “through no fault of their own, were born into a structure that made them believe they had a right by birth to be in control” and whose identity rests on this control. She gives us this scary, powerful and hopeful metaphor: domestic violence as a microcosm of our political situation:
“The time of maximum danger for a woman who is about to escape a violent household is that moment just before and just after she escapes. She is most likely to be seriously injured or murdered at that moment because she is getting out of control.”
“We are in a time of danger and we need to protect each other. We need to know that. We are about to be free and we are not going to stop.”
Keep each other safe. Keep fighting. It is darkest, as they say, just before the dawn.
Oct 16, 2011 | Events, Hiroshima in the Morning, Motherhood in the Media, Our Nuclear Age, The Writing Life
I will be talking with Cecilia Skidmore on The Open Mind on WGVU Radio today and next Sunday. Her program complements a national PBS series called Women, War and Peace. Listen in to the streaming broadcast online, or download the segment at your convenience.
The show airs in Grand Rapids, MI at 7:30 a.m. and 6:00 p.m. on Sundays.on WGVU-FM 88.5 and 95.3.
Link is here.
Oct 12, 2011 | Hiroshima in the Morning
The finalists for this year’s Asian American Literary Award in non-fiction this year are:
A Foreigner Carrying in the Crook of His Arm a Tiny Bomb by Amitava Kumar (Duke University Press Books)
The Lucky Ones: One Family and the Extraordinary Invention of Chinese America by Mae Ngai (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)
Hiroshima in the Morning by Rahna Reiko Rizzuto (The Feminist Press at CUNY)
Come to the third annual Page Turner Festival, hosted by the Asian American Writers Workshop for a day of readings and panels, and a night of celebration and awards. Check out the link above for updates!
PAGE TURNER
Saturday, October 29, 2011, 11am – 7pm
POWERHO– USE ARENA, 37 Main Street, Brooklyn
$5 per event / $20 all day pass / $30 all-day pass (w/ AFTERWORD party)
Sep 22, 2011 | Random Thoughts
Clemency: a disposition to be merciful.
Letter (excerpt) from Troy Davis, executed last night in Georgia after the U.S. Supreme Court refused to intervene without comment:
“As I look at my mail from across the globe, from places I have never ever dreamed I would know about and people speaking languages and expressing cultures and religions I could only hope to one day see first hand. I am humbled by the emotion that fills my heart with overwhelming, overflowing Joy. I can’t even explain the insurgence of emotion I feel when I try to express the strength I draw from you all, it compounds my faith and it shows me yet again that this is not a case about the death penalty, this is not a case about Troy Davis, this is a case about Justice and the Human Spirit to see Justice prevail.
“I cannot answer all of your letters but I do read them all, I cannot see you all but I can imagine your faces, I cannot hear you speak but your letters take me to the far reaches of the world, I cannot touch you physically but I feel your warmth everyday I exist.
“So Thank you and remember I am in a place where execution can only destroy your physical form but because of my faith in God, my family and all of you I have been spiritually free for some time and no matter what happens in the days, weeks to come, this Movement to end the death penalty, to seek true justice, to expose a system that fails to protect the innocent must be accelerated. There are so many more Troy Davis’. This fight to end the death penalty is not won or lost through me but through our strength to move forward and save every innocent person in captivity around the globe. We need to dismantle this Unjust system city by city, state by state and country by country.
“I can’t wait to Stand with you, no matter if that is in physical or spiritual form, I will one day be announcing,
“I am Troy Davis, and I am free!”
Sep 9, 2011 | Events, Hiroshima in the Morning, The Writing Life
There have been, in the last weeks, so many things to do: speeches to write, visuals to prepare, plane trips that require me to be patted down and my bags unpacked and gone through by hand because my books and my computer cord in my carry-on are so close together in the x-ray screening that the entire line was nearly shut down to deal with the threat that is me. But now I am on my way to Los Angeles – five airborne hours – with nothing but the present moment. I can read the book I brought – Amy Waldman’s The Submission – for nothing but pleasure. I can daydream. I have been preoccupied with what to say to an audience I cannot yet see and whom I have not met. But to decide so far in advance what I should offer them and what they need to hear is to constrain the future. To predetermine it and make it less than it might otherwise be. I am not an historian, or an expert, or even an advocate. I am an artist, and a witness, and so I have decided to lecture less and engage more. To be in the moment when it comes. Wish me luck.
Sep 5, 2011 | Events, Hiroshima in the Morning
This weekend, to mark the tenth anniversary of the September 11th attacks, I will be speaking and reading from Hiroshima in the Morning at the Japanese American National Museum. The program starts at 2 pm. The museum, if you have never been there, is beautiful and features the names of former internees of the WWII relocation centers – including my mother’s, grandparents’ and great uncles’ – etched in the glass.
Come join me, and please pass the word along! Reservations are apparently encouraged, but that doesn’t mean it is too late!
JAPANESE AMERICAN NATIONAL M– USEUM
369 East First Street
Los Angeles, California 90012
phone: 213.625.0414
When making a reservation, e-mail [email protected] or call 213.625.0414 at least 48 hours prior to the event.
Aug 26, 2011 | Random Thoughts
We (the boys and I) are in Hawaii visiting my Dad as we usually do a couple of times a year. Yesterday, fishing out of Kona, my oldest caught his first big blue marlin. Not exactly the Old Man and the Sea; the Tropical Sun is a very luxurious boat. This fish weighed about 250 pounds – we tagged and released it after walking it along side the boat to make sure it had revived and could swim. What a thrill for a 130 pound young man who has been fishing the Hawaiian waters all his life (his first fishing trip at age two!).
Aug 18, 2011 | Hiroshima in the Morning
“Are we so naïve as to think that we can bring peace to the world through words? Yes we are. What else do we have?”
– Elie Weisel
Hiroshima in the Morning has been nominated for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, “the first and only annual U.S. literary award recognizing the power of the written word to promote peace.” This year’s nominees include Nelson Mandela, Isabel Wilkerson, Kai Bird, and Siddhartha Mukherjee, among many other gifted writers. It’s an amazing honor to be nominated, and to be on any list that also has Nelson Mandela on it.
Wish me luck. Take a look at the list and read the books!
Aug 15, 2011 | Our Nuclear Age
The crisis in Japan is far from over;
it may be gone from the headlines,
but it is not gone from our hearts.
Donald & Era Farnsworth’s Sacred Pine depicts a pine tree in Rikuzentakata, Japan, a coastal city almost completely flattened by the tsunami following the 2011 Touhoku earthquake. Incredibly, this single pine was left standing from a grove of more than 70,000 trees planted along the shore three centuries ago; the tree has emerged as a symbol of hope and renewal in an otherwise devastated region.
For more information, to purchase or make a donation, (or to investigate my tiny connection to this beautiful work) click here.
Aug 9, 2011 | Our Nuclear Age
A moment of silence for the anniversary of the bombing of Nagasaki.
In the words of Harry S. Truman, our President, on August 11, 1945, explaining the use of the two atomic bombs:
“The only language they seem to understand is the one we have been using to bombard them.
“When you have to deal with a beast you have to treat him as a beast.”
Source here.
