Reading is Resistance: Letters to Memory

You read as who you are now. Sure, you read with your accumulated knowledge of literature, with your awareness of the arc of human history, with your long term identity, but you also read with how you slept last night, how shitty your commute was, how great it was to catch up with a friend you haven't seen in awhile, whatever you ate, whatever you just saw on Twitter, whatever you feel right now. You read with your mind and your self, but you also read with your needs. And no matter when they were written or what they are about, it is amazing how often books sfill your today needs.

Letters to Memory was completed in 2015. It has nothing to do with Trump or our current political moment. It doesn't connect the racism that allowed Yamashita and her Japanese-American family to be imprisoned in a concentration camp during WWII to the racism behind Trump's attempted Muslim bans, nor does it compare the story of her family packing up their homes and their lives at the start of WWII to the terrorist raids by ICE on human beings just trying to make a decent living today. It's not about the dangers of isolationism. It's not about how America so often rejects the exact forces that make it a unique place in the world. It's not about living in conflict with fascism.

And yet, Letters to Memory is about American racism, it is about one part of a community turning on another part, it is about how one navigates a system that has decided they are lesser human beings, and it is about the stories we tell about ourselves and our nation. I argue elsewhere that resistance is a life-style in the same way that being a reader is a lifestyle and when you bring those two together, you read to find the material of resistance. You read with what you need now.

In many ways, we are in this dumpster fire of situation, because of a narrative crisis. Part of the reason why Donald Trump garnered 63 million votes is because 63 million, mostly white people, mostly white men, have accepted without critique or question or thought a particular narrative of America, one in which a secure, well-paying job came from just playing by the rules, in which they receive respect without having to give respect, and in which their preferences are treated like policies. As the world slowly revealed the narrative to be a delusion propped and propagated by their powerful brethren they were utterly unprepared, incapable, and/or unwilling to write a new one for themselves. A white man at the end of a narrative arc that includes genocide, slavery, misogyny, imperialism, Jim Crow, and other forms of exploitation is a very different person than a white man at the end of a narrative arc that includes hard work, independence, and the pioneer spirit and frontier ethic. How could transitioning from the later to the former not hurt? And there was Donald Trump; a true believer only too happy to prostrate himself before dead gods and shout their fear into the only emotion their white dads let them feel: anger. There is a way to bring those two arcs together but most of us can't or won't do it. White men could not tell a new story of themselves in this world and so they chose to destroy the world.

The supreme irony of this narrative crisis is that, until very recently, white men were the only people allowed to have responsibility over their own narrative. Their heroes were enshrined as national heroes, the character traits they valued (and/or imagined) in themselves were considered the fundamental values of our society, the ideas they thought were most important were the ideas most celebrated and most taught in our education system. White men should have no problem helping redefine “America” for our new world because they were the ones who defined “America,” in the first place. On the other hand, this fundamental inability to create a narrative makes perfect sense, because they never believed in created narratives. To the white men writing it and the white men today believing it, “American History,” was not, “A narrative created by those in power to reflect and serve their interests,” but American History. No quotations marks. No questions. An objective entity of knowledge like the laws of thermodynamics.

Though she never says it in this way, when reading in our current environment, Letters to Memory is a call to a very personal, but still very powerful activism. “America” is a desperately imprecise concept and many people have extorted a lot of money and killed many others through how they have manipulated it. All of us, in one form or another and in varying potencies, carry those poisonous Americas within us. But “America,” is the shingling, not the house, it is the tent, not the people beneath it, the poster for the carnival, not the carnival. What Yamishita does in Letters to Memory is construct, on her own terms, the personal history usually obscured by the drapery of “America.” And what she has done, you can do. You might not have the archives that Yamashita has, but you must have something. There's a drawer in your parents' house. There's a chest in the attic. There's the local library. There's your own memory.

And what you can do, you can share. Listen, you and I both know the white men who are the problem aren't going to read Letters to Memory. Pretty much every aspect of why they are the problem can be extended into a reason why they aren't going to read Letters to Memory. But some of them might know you and might stumble into the idea of conversing with your history to build a new personal narrative by reading or conversing with you. Every honestly created new personal narrative creates language that other people can apply to their own lives, which could eventually spread to the men who are the problem. Or to men who are leaning either into the problem or away from the problem and just need the right push to be not part of the problem. And then, of course, there will be future generations of white men, and though they continue to diminish in terms of demographic power, the rise of the “alt-right,” shows we can't just assume the passage of time will guarantee more just white men. Or, as Yamashita herself says (emphasis in original):

I have asked myself why the family saved these letters. You might say that they were historians, that they knew the value of their stories, this proof of their thoughts and actions in unjust and difficult times. History is proffered to the future. This is what we did. Do not forget us. Please forgive us.

Listen, I don't know what's going to save us from descending into fascism. I have no fucking idea what I'm going to do if Congress doesn't flip in 2018. Honestly, once climate change really gets going (if it hasn't already) and we start experiencing actual material scarcity, I don't know if anything can save us from descending into some form of nationalist fascism. But I do know I love to read and write and I do know that Letters to Memory is a work of genius (like watching a Polaroid develop so slowly you start remembering lines of poetry while figures solidify), a groundbreaking exploration and example of how we can build a sense of self through interaction with our pasts and I do know that you should read it even if you're not intending to extract material for resistance from it. And I also know that, in the absence of certainty it is still better to try than to do nothing and there is always value in creating something even if that value is only felt when you are creating and even if the only person it changes in the process is you. If nothing else, when future generations ask if you fought, you'll have a receipt. Or,

You may wonder at the obvious, but I have had no normal definition for this project except an intuition that you would listen and be attentive and somehow understand.