poets cannot be neutralized
Born in Fukuoka, Japan, Mitsuye Yamada moved to Seattle, Washington, in 1926 with her family. Her father was an interpreter for the US Immigration and Naturalization Service, and the family was taken to an internment camp in 1942 when her father was wrongfully accused of spying. Yamada and her brother were allowed to leave the camp, Minidoka Relocation Center in Idaho, when they renounced their allegiance to Japan. Yamada attended the University of Cincinnati and earned a BA from New York University and an MA from the University of Chicago.
Yamada has been an activist for women’s rights, and her poetry recounts her experience of internment, racial violence and discrimination, as well as feminist issues. She is the author of the poetry collections Camp Notes and Other Poems (1976) and Desert Run: Poems and Stories (1988). She coauthored, with Nellie Wong and Merle Woo, 3 Asian American Writers Speak Out on Feminism (2003) and has brought her activism and teaching together in Teaching Human Rights Awareness Through Poetry (1999). She also coedited Sowing Ti Leaves: Writing by Multicultural Women (1991).
Yamada has been a professor of English at Cypress College in Seattle, Washington. She is a founder of Multicultural Women Writers of Orange Country and, with Nellie Wong, is featured in the 1981 documentary Mitsuye and Nellie: Asian American Poets.
Neutralize!
by Mitsuye Yamada
poetry . . .
has been my spiritual guide
throughout my incarceration
in the darkest of times
I turn to Neruda and Hikmet
and Rukeyser and Ritsas
and Chrytos
and Whitman. . .
– U.S. Political Prisoner
They mean to kill
the sentient being in me
Neutralize!
White white
no poetry in
white floors walls ceiling white
white chairs tables sink white
only when I close my eyes do I see
beyond the white windowless walls
remembering springtime of
lacy trees lightly green against baby blue.
There is silence silence more silence
to drown out the incessant silence
I fill my inner ear with robinsongs
melodious and soothing
but how to quell deafening
nonhuman screeches and scrapes
sounds bouncing against the white walls?
Dull smells of dead air in the cell
but through the olfactory nerves
in my mind
I can tickle with the zest of lemon
and the sweetness of wildflowers.
Willfully bland diet aimed
to erase use of my tongue
Add a pinch of salt with the taste
of sweat or even of blood
anywhere on my body
Remembering the taste of cheese.
One human touch allowed
my own arms enfold me
my fingers move over my sagging breasts
my nipples and soft parts of my body
respond.
They mean to neutralize me but
poetry keeps me alive.
