Mourning / is a practical matter,” Brandon Shimoda writes in Hydra Medusa. What he means is that we are defined (how could it be otherwise?) by loss. For Shimoda, that loss is rooted equally in the personal and the political, the present and the past. “I am not here as a poet,” he insists in this book of verse and essays, “but as the grandchild of an enemy alien.” Shimoda is referring to his grandfather Midori, born around 1910 in Hiroshima and later interned in a U.S. government concentration camp during World War II. “To be the ghost of my grandfather’s struggle,” the author continues, “is to define citizenship as reincarnation arrested. It is purgatorial. It takes two generations, often fewer, for the government to go from combing lasciviously through your entrails to holding you in complete disregard.”
If you’re unfamiliar with Shimoda’s work, you’ll want to fix that. His 2019 memoir, The Grave on the Wall, is an astonishment. “My grandfather had one memory of his childhood in Hiroshima: washing the feet of his grandfather’s corpse,” the narrative begins. “He was six or five or four.” There you have it, in two succinct sentences, the essence of Shimoda’s corpus—the necessity, and the impossibility, of heritage; what we owe the generations that precede us; and the complications of memory, individual or otherwise. Who are we? How do we define our place here? Such questions are particularly loaded if your family has come to the United States from elsewhere, leaving so much information, both documentary and emotional, behind.
For that reason, Hydra Medusa functions as something of a daybook, interweaving reflections on, and quotations from, writers including Etel Adnan and Mahmoud Darwish as well as Shimoda’s young daughter Yumi while moving fluidly between politics and more elusive, even spiritual, concerns. The effect is not so much of a work in progress as of a work as process: the inquiry inherent in the living line. This is not the first of Shimoda’s books to operate in such a fashion; 2018’s The Desert and 2015’s Evening Oracle rely on similar strategies. In that sense, Hydra Medusa may be read as the third volume in a loose trilogy, although it’s also the case that all of Shimoda’s writing exists in a kind of polyphonic conversation with itself. “The Grave on the Wall,” as an example, is the title of more than one poem in his 2013 collection, Portuguese.
Shimoda double-titles in Hydra Medusa also; there are back-to-back poems named “Operation Crossroads” and a dyad called “Death of the Flower.” The function (if you’ll pardon the pun) is twofold—to highlight the conditional nature of both content and point of view. I don’t want to overlook the historical component: Operation Crossroads is the name of the pair of nuclear bomb tests conducted during July 1946 at Bikini Atoll. This is the lens through which I read these poems, one per mushroom cloud explosion, as it were. Equally important, however, is Shimoda’s relentless self-examination. “Why do people ask if I like living in the desert?” he wonders in the second “Death of the Flower.” “It is not the desert I like or dislike, / but living // like an angel on fire?”
Such a question is as pragmatic as it is philosophical; Shimoda is seeking a way to live. To achieve that, he must face both his dreams and his ancestors, not to mollify or represent them so much as to listen and to follow where they lead. In “The Descendant,” one of the book’s prose sections, he offers an account of eight Japanese or Japanese American men (one named Shimoda) shot by military police or guards “inside, outside, and on the perimeters of WWII prisons and concentration camps.” These killings, he elaborates, “exist on and resonate through the continuum of the murder of people of color by state operatives/law enforcement in the United States. The void (shadow) is earth, sky, everywhere in between.”
What Shimoda is tracing is a praxis of political violence. He makes the idea explicit by shifting from the murdered internees to a consideration of these men as ancestors, incorporating the language of other “descendants of Japanese American incarceration.” This, it’s useful to observe, is not appropriation; the intervention of voices throughout Hydra Medusa is, rather, a way to honor and incorporate the tapestry of texts that infuse Shimoda’s imagination. “So I feel they are with me and precede me… I believe we’re feedback loops,” one correspondent offers, while another takes this a little further: “In any case, for me it feels less like something supernatural, and more like a way of living in narrative.”
And what is narrative if not another intervention? The concept sits at the center of Hydra Medusa, which is a book in active contemplation of itself. In Shimoda’s view, there is only a difference of degree between the violence directed at the Japanese and that played out along the border south of Tucson, the city where he wrote most of this material. There is only a difference of degree between Private First Class Clarence Burleson, who shot Toshio Kobata and Hirota Isomura nine times each “outside the prison camp in Lordsburg, New Mexico,” and Border Patrol Agent Lonnie Swartz, who, 70 years later, fired 16 times at “Jose Antonio Elena Rodríguez, a Mexican teenager.” One of the things I admire most about this book is that Shimoda names the names in full, but this is not about vengeance. Instead, he posits a cosmology in which the killers become responsible for those whose lives they’ve claimed. “I have come to believe something,” Shimoda concludes. “That life is preparation for the possibility of becoming an ancestor. The possibility materializes through vigilance, responsibility, love. Life only matters insofar as it contributes to this possibility. Have we even begun to get angry?”
That this is exciting should go without saying—it’s almost like reading in a nascent form. It makes Hydra Medusa not only unexpected but also wholly fresh, not least because it is inchoate and difficult to pin down. Poems yield to essays and vice versa; voices overlap and interject. The book is constantly seeking out its own ley lines, its own points of intersection. It is constantly teaching us the ways it means to be read.
“I had a dream last night,” Shimoda writes, “that I wrote a book about my grandfather. Upset with the book, he attacked me. He had the fortification and the force of all our dead behind him, and they too were upset with the book I had written, so his attack was their attack. I should have given into it, because if their attack was sincere, and if it satisfied the extent of their being upset, then I would soon be joining them, and become part of that force. And yet I tried to escape.”
In Hydra Medusa, then, reality is its own sort of dreamscape, in which time and space are less important than our connection and responsibility to one another, even across the great divide of death.•
