These are some of the topics that Poet David Mura addressed in his performance/ reading during a two-day visit to campus Feb. 20-21 as part of the Creative Writing Program Reading Series. A sansei, or third-generation Japanese American, Mura is the author of Turning Japanese: Memoirs of a Sansei, which won a 1991 Josephine Miles Book Award from the Oakland PEN. His first book of poetry, After We Lost Our Way, won the 1989 National Poetry Series Contest, and his second book of poetry, The Colors of Desire, was published in October 1994. He has also written A Male Grief: Notes on Pornography and Addiction. In addition to reading from these books, Mura also presented two performance pieces, adopting the persona of a black girl shot in the back by a Korean grocer and an Asian American disc jockey.
Much of the work that Mura presented addressed the development of his own sexual and cultural identity, especially in the context of familial relationships. The title poem Colors of Desire tracks the racial identity of the Japanese American from the 1940s post-internment camp era. The internment camp experience during World War II determined the nature of Japanese American identity in many ways. In the poem, he used the image of an Asian getting on a segregated bus in the 1940s. The Asian man strikes the bargain of becoming an honorary white and taking a seat in the front of the bus by agreeing to claim no relationship with the people at the back of the bus. A black character in the poem calls out to the Asian man, "us colored folks got to stick together."
During a colloquium the following day, Mura talked about his life as a Japanese Ameri-can growing up in a mainly white midwestern suburb and his decision to become a writer. "I grew up in the assimilationist model of the Asian family. My parents were forming that model based on the messages they received from the Japanese internment camps," he said. "The implicit message [from the shame of internment] was that you don't call attention to the fact that you are Asian or Japanese, so I grew up not reading any writers of color and also not knowing anything about Japanese history and never thinking deeply about the issuse of race."
He explained that only after he dropped out of graduate school did he begin to rethink his own racial identity. "I proclaimed myself a writer steeped in the white middle class tradition because I believed that to declare myself a Japanese American writer would be to relegate myself to some sort of literary ghetto," he said.
Mura believes that his role as a writer of color is to respond to the existing literature so that new readers will reconsider their notions of racial images. He reflected on the feelings he developed based on the literature that he had read during his education. "I had no language to talk about all of the feelings I had about being different until I started to read works by people of color. I began to unlock parts of myself."
--Matt Montgomery