Who Is at the Door?: On Brandon Shimoda’s Hydra Medusa
Brandon Shimoda | Hydra Medusa | Nightboat Books | June 2023 | 144 Pages
While reading Brandon Shimoda’s newest poetry collection, Hydra Medusa, I found myself returning to a memory from several years back: I had been dwelling in the library again. It was late. The lamp was playing strangely off the window, and I kept imagining bodies outside, standing in the road. At the time, I was embroiled in obsessive family research about wartime Japan; about my grandfather; about his family imprisoned in a camp seventy years prior. During one of these nights, while staring at an image of two boys with blurred faces, I received an email from a distant relative. Expecting to reach my grandfather, it read, “Your cousin has died,” and at some point within that violent coincidence, I slipped fully into him, and he into me.
As a hybrid Japanese-American text, Brandon Shimoda’s Hydra Medusa lives in this same strange light. It reads like a diary under the sun, bleeding into itself, full of holes and riddled by slippage. Poems become prose, become dreams, become memories, become the waking life pressed between your teeth. Each page is a welter of color and shadow. In simpler terms, Hydra Medusa is haunted. Sometimes by Shimoda’s grandfather, incarcerated by the United States over seventy years ago, other times by “indeterminate cities,” or the legions of bones below the scar tissue of America. The haunting is never settled. It moves in every direction, changing shape, folding inwards, transforming the living as it does the dead. All of us: diaspora of the ___.
In conversation with the Adroit Journal, Shimoda once reflected: “I’m just inherently drawn to the shadows, even to the typos or the slippages.” Hydra Medusa is beautifully frayed in this way. The moment is not a direct transmission of past and present, it is an ongoing negotiation, or translation, across a void of absence. Shimoda’s relationship with his grandfather, Midori Shimoda, rings loudly here. As he writes in “The Ghosts of Pearl Harbor,” one of the book’s many hybrid essays, “I am not here as a poet, but as the grandchild of an enemy alien.” To the same degree that Shimoda is haunted by Midori’s imprisonment—his dreams, humiliation, love, anger, unrealized citizenship—he is also, in effect, the ghost.
This reversal manifests literally in the poem, “I had a dream last night…” In one mystical stanza, Shimoda lingers in the ruins of a Japanese American incarceration camp, long wilted, the lights flipped back on. Along with other descendants, he spends his days performing internment like a flashback blurred at the margins. The cafeteria tables stretch beyond proportion; loyalty questionnaires, infamously forced upon prisoners in 1943, are transmuted into 8 1⁄2” x 11” sheets of sandpaper. Midori suddenly appears, and as if he were bearing witness to a ghost—and an intrusion upon his own memories—attacks the grandson (Shimoda), who holds in his hands the book that he wrote about him.
“The exact nature of the relationship between an ancestor and their descendant,” Shimoda writes in “The Descendant,” “is always to be determined.” To quote Mahmoud Darwish’s Mural, it is the “dialogue of dreamers:” grandfather and grandson, dreaming each other into the room, here/there, across the underworld. Sometimes, Hydra Medusa articulates this as a curse, elsewhere as a feedback loop, or an exchange of heat, blood, and shadows. What remains constant is the absence between, which burns us all, even now. I speak of bleached photographs and fragments. Of ruin, or the indistinct bleed of personal, inherited, and collective memory which crosses that hole. Here, one could even propose that Hydra Medusa’s recurring evocation of cafeteria tables embodies a warping of Midori's shadow with the deleterious “internment iconography” of American cultural consciousness, as etched into Shimoda’s fourth-generation amnesia:
When I get to the end of the hallway
and enter the cafeteria
I will lose myself
It is from this dissolution of self that Shimoda, as a diasporic writer, draws light. I don’t just implicate the effacing qualities of American memorialization. In a more profound sense, inheritance itself is to touch and be touched, to disappear in that interchange, and "become radiant to some other life." In Shimoda’s previous book, The Grave on the Wall, he tells of his grandmother’s brother who drowned in an irrigation ditch in Utah. Across time and bookends, the memory changes form in Hydra Medusa, becoming—within the junction of Shimoda and his grandmother—a moment of brief hesitation before leaping into a pond. Here and always, the fruitions of ancestry are as marked by redirection as they are by continuity, and it is this grain of chaos which allows them to grow in new and unpredictable directions. The book moves beyond linear transmissions of trauma to showcase afterlives of Incarceration that are ongoing, sticky, even oppositional. In other words, the place from which Midori could not escape is that to which Shimoda labors to return, and within this inversion, Japanese American Incarceration becomes an almost paradoxical site of desire, even worship, into which the next generation dreams.
If ancestry is to haunt and be haunted, it is also to open a window. I am reminded of one of Shimoda's earlier projects, “The Hiroshima Library,'' a conjunctive reading room sprung from the afterlives of the nuclear bombs; inspired by the study spaces of train stations in Kaohsiung, Taiwan; an ice cream vendor in Nagasaki; and vacant strip malls and gas stations throughout Japan and the United States. In Hydra Medusa, the library mirrors an expanded line of thinking, which locates inheritance not only in bloodlines, but also in a more transient mode of association, through which ghosts—stretching, technicolor—knock into vision. As Shimoda writes in “The Bell:”
Who is it
Who is at the gate
Who is at the door
This idea is most cleverly communicated across the book’s many in-between spaces: the desert, doorways, twilight, the national border (in “The Skin of the Grave," a semi-transparent bag blurs the boundary between apples and peaches). Obfuscation has a lubricating effect, opening transformative threads of ancestry linked by passing slippages of the senses. We see this in “The Ghosts of Pearl Harbor” when Shimoda, discussing a bell on the University of Arizona campus, breaks from the paragraph to describe a siren proposed to erupt before the bombing of Hiroshima, as if touched in a brief, sonic overlap.
The same can be said for entries like “The Descendant,” and “Three Men Stood on a Hill,” which juxtapose Japanese American Incarceration and the current war upon migrants at the U.S. southern border with an uncanny rhythm. Explored across thresholds of tentative recognition—fences, the edge of camp—these sections are less about historical reality than they are about the tiny, incandescent cracks in perception through which past lives and alternate selves continue to convene; have already convened, somewhere outside of space and time.
In 1942, Toshio Kobata and Hirota Isomura are shot dead at the edge of camp by Private First Class Clarence Burleson. Almost exactly seventy years later, Jose Antonio Elena Rodriguez suffers the same fate at the hands of US Border Patrol Agent Lonnie Swartz, who shoots him sixteen times through the fence separating the twin cities of Nogales, Arizona and Nogales, Sonora. Burleson alleged the men were attempting to escape under the cover of darkness. Swartz claimed that Rodriguez was throwing rocks over the fence, and heard gunfire.
I return once more to the interjection, “Who is it,” meaning, within the collection, What is this presence before me? This is the cadence of ambiguity, tension, and release that Hydra Medusa articulates so well. Yes—in the osmoses of everyday life, but also in the scattered seances of poetry itself, through which we are constantly touched in and out of fruition, from just below (or before) the sight line. Language is key here. “Flowers,” “fruit,” “orange,” “birds,” “cinnamon”—the book operates from a mode of narrative and linguistic recall that is always yet to be determined. One poem's conceit is the afterimage of another's allusion (itself, the before-image of an entry yet to come, or one that has stretched in from the fringes of memory). It is through this collapse of poetic constraints that Hydra Medusa facilitates the call-and-response-like dialogue of a mutual dream. “Remember?” Asks Shimoda's three-year-old daughter, as a distant siren opens a gash between “The Ghosts of Pearl Harbor” and her own poem about the sights and sounds of the neighborhood, “We're almost closer.” “Remember?” We ask, as Shimoda mistakes a fallen pear for a grapefruit in the poem “Abundance”—the syntactic slip, elsewhere, feeding a neighbor's tree in “Death of the Flower:” “I raise my hand to pull a grapefruit off.” Within each knock at the door is a corresponding window of emotional, aesthetic, and imaginative rendezvous held in the precise moment of dissolution and recognition. Sometimes across a page gutter, and other times across a bookend. Small, iridescent wisps of Etel Adnan's Time:
time speeds up the appearance
of flowers...
... for which they
burned us, in burning themselves
Shimoda's hallucinatory blurring of antecedents and referents is meaningful here. Does Adnan, having come before, having passed, having in some cases reached in—“Etel was on the ladder, touching my foot”—play the role of the ghost? Or is Hydra Medusa the specter? Haunting backwards into Time, like in the aptly named poem, “World Parallel:”
a flower do you know it?
burns my nose
The rearrangement of literary language is a constant practice in this book. We find burned shadows of Mahmoud Darwish's poem “Mural”—“rain on a mountain that has cracked”—as early on as Shimoda's opening crescendo: “mountain cutting through… flooded by rain.” Even the literal act of translation—as a “carrying over” across a void—takes on a meta-textual significance. A translation by Sarah Riggs; a translation by Fady Joudah; a poem by Mahmoud Darwish, translated by Sinan Antoon, as found in Jackie Wang's Carceral Capitalism, now entangled in Hydra Medusa's “The Descendant”—the thread is almost inscrutable, and in Hydra Medusa, it forms the underside of a collection that is always drawing a gaze to the continuum of literature from which it springs, and back into which it dreams. As Shimoda writes in “The Bookstore:”
Books
disintegrating
at the base of trees,
emitting the smoke of spores
to see? Can I live here?
The aesthetic and emotional mycelia are transformative, like when Shimoda—in “The Skin of the Grave”—re-inhabits the body of Federico García Lorca's poem “Ruina," which was left incomplete, its sixth stanza etched out, a month before his execution by right-wing militia in the summer of 1936. “Who are you here for?” Asks a woman to Shimoda, and perhaps to us, as we wander towards a grave. The “dark apples” of “Ruina's” second verse become a watering hole of the spirit, linking the cellophane bag of a grocer in Tucson with a memory of Shimoda and his aunt riding bicycles years ago. His fluidity is breathtaking in this form, teetering on an overabundance that always threatens to pull apart, but instead, blooms.
As Shimoda declares in “Death of the Flower,” “(the feeling) remains.” We sense it everywhere: in the canopy of a tree just outside the public library, where Hoa Nguyen's “Sacred Ficus Sonnet”—“Do homeless ancestors live inside the tree?”—seems to coalesce with words by an unattributed Japanese-American fifty pages earlier: “I like to hope that we are the stalks on branches reaching from them towards the end.” We feel it on a narrow street in Beirut, where an otherwise singular poem (“I had a dream last night…”) is enkindled by never-mentioned ghosts: the city of Adnan's birth, and also of Darwish's exile from Palestine, which he recalls in his seminal 1986 novel, Memory for Forgetfulness—”Does it often happen that I am awakened from one dream by another, itself the interpretation of the dream?” Looking up in the final moments of the stanza, Shimoda disappears into and from all of it—that radiant abyss: “Hanging colors.”
I read Hydra Medusa on bright afternoons, between phone calls with family and friends, near a buzzer in my apartment. The intercom is long defunct with corrosion and dust, but every once in a while—in very brief intervals—I can hear the faint, distorted sound of the line clicking open. It’s the kind of banal phenomenon that would usually slip by unrequited, but in this case, became the seed of a feeling.
It developed slowly at first. The collection would mention a text I had read a week prior, and then evoke "broth" and “the smell of salt” as I simmered chicken bones on the stove. I would turn a page only to find my partner and aunt, whose names are identical to Shimoda's partner and his daughter, looking back at me in ink, along with my grandmother, Midori, who will turn ninety-four this June. “Do homeless ancestors live inside the tree?” She tells a similar story about her mother: how she used to walk into the house, mystified, and say there was an old relative from Tokyo hiding up in the branches. This was a ghost story, I thought, and then the book would breathe into my living room again like it was dreaming of me, dreaming of it.
I recall one instance with particular clarity: I had just woken up from my own dream—a sliding hallucination about grandparents, a siren, and a grapefruit—which left me feeling like I had, at some point throughout the night, convened with Hydra Medusa unknowingly. I went flipping through the text to try and locate the exact point of impact, but stopped at the single image nested in the center of the book: a “burial” of a children's story by Shimoda's mother. From its collaged cracks sprouted eight glowing words:
And when I looked, the ghost was go—