Circle K Cycles drifts chapter by chapter from journal entries to short stories to recipes to advice. These collected bits feel like a selection of writing written over a several years span and later strung together to form this necklace of thoughts and reflections. Yamashita weaves together her experiences in 3 different 'home' lands: Brazil, the US, and Japan with a blend of languages and cultural expressions. She does a beautiful job of lifting the stories of these immigrant workers from the crowded streets of Brazil and Japan up into our laps where we can consider the relationship between these two distant nations.
The graphics in Circle K Cycles are erratic and small. These grainy, photo-copy style blips of images have nothing, necessarily, to do with the text on the same page. They push amusingly against the context of the paragraphs they are sandwiched between and offer a backdrop for the text to snuggle up with, like lobsters displayed in a deli case surrounded by leaves of kale. Decorative. It does seem odd to have photo portraits embedded in the text with no information offered. I wanted to connect the two things, but came up short every time. The book has the playful feel of a graphic novel, where the images inform the mood in which the reader absorbs the text, but offered no literal function.
I found the content of this book fascinating. Because humans love to categorize things, we often view people's cultural experience as being defined by their original nationality. I was delighted with the books ability to draw a much more abstract border around this group of people so far from their 'original' homeland and yet so distinctly together. Her ability to name and difine these people's common experiences was as delightfully written and fun to stubmle on as when I first read Gary De Soto as a young person and met in its pages, a realistic portrait of the complexities of California's mixed cultural identity.
Interestingly, this woman is not from Brazil, but the US. I wonder if her ability to see and describe this community comes from having an outsider perspective? In my Dance Cultures class, we've been talking a lot about what makes a reproduction of a folk dance authentic. Can a Hawaiian perform a sacred hula dance on a stage and be authentic? Or are things only 'real' in the context they were meant to inhabit? It seems like the writer or artist or whoever is depicting a culture can be seen as authentic if they have lived in the culture they are describing, if they have an emic understanding of it, if they are saturated through and through. How long does that take? A life time? A decade? It seems like what Yamashita is dishing up is authentic, in her voice, and true to the community, but how can we tell? She is, after all, a transplant. But, one thing we can be sure of, is that her experience is real for her and we can assume she has at least describes her own experience faithfully.
What was going on with the nightmare murder story in the middle of the book? I went from cruising through the world she is presented to tripping over the violent, sloppy murder mystery... What happened to the little girl who we had come to like over the previous few stories? Her fate is never mentioned and the murder, after all that sweat! is never resolved. I wondered what this story was doing in this book? To me it felt like an unfinished foray that took me far away from the original questions of the text. I just wanted her to keep emphasizing things like, 'what is home?', 'how are we and how are we not the sum of our cultural parts', and et cetera.
"Because humans love to categorize things, we often view people's cultural experience as being defined by their original nationality."
ReplyDeleteI too was delighted by the framework of cultures. I was talking about this work with students in another class and everyone was amazed by this idea of a Brazilian population in Japan. It is so easy for me to think that America is the only melting pot out there, so it is great to be forced to recognize these aspects in other countries and cultures.