Maw Shein Win on Jennifer Hasegawa's La Chica’s Field Guide to Banzai Living

(Guest post by Maw Shein Win)

In the fall of 2019, I met poet Jennifer Hasegawa at Moe’s Books in Berkeley for a reading hosted by Omnidawn (our shared publisher). Months later and at the beginning of shelter-in-place, I ordered La Chica’s Field Guide to Banzai Living, her marvelous full-length poetry collection. I was immediately attracted to her interest in “paranormal phenomena, including alien encounters” (as stated in her bio) as well as her background in performance art and poetry films. Here’s what author Mary Burger writes in her endorsement: “Many poems reveal Hasegawa’s tender attachment to family in her native Hawai’i, to the sagas of daily life and natural beauty there, which bow but don’t break under the ongoing pressures of colonization. This may be the key to Hasegawa’s poetics: the resilience, the fierce intelligence, the banzai resolve to ‘live for ten thousand years,’ not as a war cry but as a love letter To Anyone Who Can’t Get Home.”  

I’d like to share some thoughts on the poem entitled To Anyone Who Can’t Get Home, Including Natives, Immigrants, and Extraterrestrials. When I initially read the title, I interpreted it as referring to an inability to move, to return home; an interesting thing because the poem uses many verbs and action words. Movement is important in this poem. It is as if the state of not being able to “get home” is like a psychic paralysis; a state of constant thwarted desire that informs every aspect of life.

The first part of the poem is about movement; travel, finding a place to call home.

The false harbor of home:
washed ashore and alien
again.

This belongs to you.
It does not belong to me.

Before: the steamship
That delivered great-grandX. 

Before: the brigantine
that brought coffee and the first Bible.

Before: the double-hulled canoe
that arrived to find it was not the first.

Slice the water:
the instinct to take up space.

Trace the trajectory:
the instinct to connect points.

Hasegawa uses both the descriptive and the imperative, as if the speaker or the voice of the poem may be acknowledging their complex place in the narrative that came before them that led up to their existence.  

In this part of the piece there are a number of verbs: “delivered/brought/ arrived/slice/trace.“ This implies both action and urgency; the repetition is almost relentless in its force and drives the narrative. Even the false harbor of home has been “washed ashore” (notice the passive voice, as if it had no control of its own). 

The next part of the poem switches from describing tangible actions (travel on a ship) to something more esoteric like language. Hasegawa describes how “the tower was built by people speaking a common language” illustrating how having something in common can bring people together. This is a powerful point because people from different ethnic or racial backgrounds can come together with a shared language, or be categorized in the same way.  

The second section is brief, and then it goes back into more frequent use of verbs to describe the potentially violent act of colonization:

Every birth
is an act of colonization:
mongoose born to mouse
born to grain.

These lines intrigue me because the action seems to be removed from the actors: the implication seems to be that neither mother nor child can control the outcome.

Reading the last section of the poem, I interpreted this as an attempt to make peace with that which we cannot control, but which we will always have to live with. The last stanza, in particular, is a gorgeous description of living well with relinquishing control of that which we may not ever be able to change:

and return again
to these places
only to find ghosts
clicking keys,
touching bones,
and inhaling the last traces
of home.

The “clicking keys” and “touching bones” are ghostly memories of a home left behind. The poem poses the question: Can we ever truly find “home” whether physical or emotional? I appreciate the way Hasegawa’s poem moves from an almost terror of abject helplessness, to harnessing what we can control, perhaps through the use of a shared cultural tool such as language, then arriving at the foregone conclusion that we must find whatever peace we can in our everyday lives.

The false harbor of home:
washed ashore and alien
again.

In my poem “Water Space (two)” from Storage Unit for the Spirit House, I envision an escape from one “home” in search for another.  

The first stanza of “Water Space (two)” reads as follows:

blood hyacinth
evidence of
a past event

Upon reading Hasegawa’s collection, I recognized a kinship in thematic and stylistic sensibilities. In one stanza she writes:

… when we mistake the red fur of the tree fern
for a wild boar.

As I love the image of “red fur of the tree fern,” there is a surrealist similarity in my use of “blood hyacinth.” In my second stanza, I describe childhood as “a burning kingdom.”

In the third and final stanza, I reference the struggles of immigrant and refugee journeys:

pearled lantern
bruised hands
clung to rowboat

Narratives of histories, both personal and global, emerge throughout our collections. As a daughter of Burmese immigrants, I moved with my family from Massachusetts to New York to Pennsylvania to Colorado to Nevada to California. Growing up in multiple cities and towns, I longed for a stable sense of home. In my spirit house poems, I address familial, social, and spiritual histories. Likewise, Hasegawa’s poems traverse physical and emotional landscapes that linger in poetic memory.

Photo credit: Annabelle Port

Maw Shein Win is a poet, editor, and educator who lives and teaches in the Bay Area. Her poetry chapbooks are Ruins of a glittering palace (SPA/Commonwealth Projects) and Score and Bone (Nomadic Press). Invisible Gifts: Poems was published by Manic D Press in 2018. She was a 2019 Visiting Scholar in the Department of English at UC Berkeley. Win is the first poet laureate of El Cerrito, California (2016 - 2018), and her new full-length poetry collection is Storage Unit for the Spirit House on Omnidawn. She often collaborates with visual artists, musicians, and other writers. mawsheinwin.com