Going to Hawaii

For anyone planning to attending the Author Lunch Talk at the Asia Society, I need to reschedule it and make a trip to Hawaii.  I am sorry for any inconvenience, and very grateful to the Asia Society for making this possible, and for welcoming me back later.  

Announcing the winner of the 2010 Grub Street Book Prize in Non-Fiction

"Grub Street is thrilled to announce that Rahna Reiko Rizzuto has won our 2010 National Book Prize in Non-Fiction for her memoir, Hiroshima in the Morning, published by The Feminist Press.

"Rizzuto will lead a class on the craft of narrative non-fiction at the Muse and the Marketplace conference April 30-May 1, 2011. She will also lead a free craft class for members in our space.

"Head juror Grace Talusan described this wonderful book in these words: 

“In her memoir Hiroshima in the Morning, Rahna Reiko Rizzuto explores what happens when a bomb finds its target. Initially, she’s in search of stories about Japanese Americans during World War II and survivors of the atomic bomb. Her husband and sons, ages 3 and 5, stay in New York as Rizzuto travels to Hiroshima, despite criticism that she’s a “bad mother” for leaving her family for months to write. She’s steeped in stories about fate and survival, about how someone survived because of a seemingly mundane and arbitrary move. She is collecting material for her second novel, including interviews with survivors of the atomic bomb named Little Boy, when a new ground zero is created in New York. The world around her as well as the world she’s created with her husband will never be the same. Her family pressures her to come home, but Rizzuto won’t leave Japan or her work. She writes, “So there is that moment, then; the last breath of before: when life is about to change, utterly and forever, into something we have no way to conceive of. When the trajectory is already being drawn and there is no way to stop it.” Using diary entries, emails, telephone transcripts, and oral histories, Rizzuto pieces together a masterful collage about Hiroshima, 9/11, ambivalent motherhood, a doomed marriage, and a writer trying to understand what narrative means amidst so many kinds of bombs hitting so many beloved targets.”"

Thank you so much to Grub Street - to the jurors and staff and the whole community of writers.  I look forward to meeting you in Boston in April.

Almost...

Please bear with me.  I know I disappeared after September 11th.  This has not been proof of post-traumatic stress, or mourning (though we should all mourn) the beginning of the Afghan war, but rather something magical.  A book is being born.  It is a gift from God knows where, and maybe I mean that literally!, but all I know for sure is that I have to show up for it. I cannot remember a race to the end of a book like this, this kind of excitement.  And we are almost there.

Come to the readings on the west coast, if you can, and I will tell you then if you ask.

Act for September 11th

Sign the Charter for Compassion.

Join me for a Facebook party celebrating the release of Hiroshima in the Morning.

When:  September 22, 2010 8:30 PM EST
Where:  Facebook.  Be sure to like Rahna Reiko Rizzuto on Facebook.
Who:  You!
What:  A Live Chat with author Rahna Reiko Rizzuto about her new book, Hiroshima in the Morning.  There will also be a chance to win a Koa carved bookmark from Hawaii and receive an entry into the grand prize.

Help us spread the word about the trailer for Hiroshima in the Morning!
Tweet a link to the trailer
Share it on Facebook
Email the trailer to your friends
Post it on your website for blog

Send an email to mypalamy@gmail.com with Hiroshima in the Morning Trailer as the subject line and everything you did to spread the word.  If you post the trailer on your blog, please include a link to the post.

You'll be entered to win a special Hawaii gift pack including: 1 package 100% Kona coffee, 1 package of Maui pure cane sugar, 1 package organic luau seasoning rub, 1 pound Alaea Red Sea Salt, and 1 box chocolate covered macadamia nuts, along with a copy of Hiroshima in the Morning.

Extreme Reading

"Extreme reading is like cannibalism.  You take a book, like a piece of food, and eat it.  For sustenance, for blood, if not to ritually ingest the soul or heart or power of your enemy or someone you loved. You take it in and chew and grind and tear it down to the smallish bits, to the things that you can swallow. You rid yourself of some of it and keep some of the rest.  Sometimes you keep what may not be the best for you. Your body knows what's good for you, but sometimes you don't listen.  The things you eat and keep become a part of you.  You re-create inside yourself, with caverns, juices, processes you can and can't control, a kind of meat."


                  - Rebecca Brown, American Romances, City Lights Books, 2009

Hiroshima: The Lesson We Never Learned

On the 65th anniversary of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, we risk losing the memories of the survivors.

I went to Hiroshima in 2001 to interview the hibakusha -- literally, the "bomb-affected people." I made this journey as a Japanese-American woman who had no knowledge of the atomic bombings -- no experience of war at all.

When I got to Hiroshima in June 2001 and began my interviews, good-hearted people shared their testimonies with me, all beginning with where they were the moment they saw the plane, where they fled to, and who among their family and friends survived. Even those stories with some gore in them -- descriptions of how the six rivers of the Hiroshima delta were so swollen with bodies that you couldn't see the water -- were curiously detached. It was not that they were afraid to offend the American interviewer. It was that they had forgotten precisely what it felt like.

The survivors recited the facts I had found in books: 100,000 dead within days, 100,000 more dying; everything within two kilometers irradiated; thirteen square kilometers burned to the ground. Drinking the water was deadly. Small fleshy body parts, like ears and noses, melted long before the people themselves died.

Often, the hibakusha ended our conversations with a speech about the need for peace and nuclear disarmament. There were even people who expressed their belief that the world was already at peace, and that, by dying spectacularly, the victims of Hiroshima had made it impossible for any sane leader to use nuclear weapons again.

I couldn't bring myself to tell them that their sacrifice was almost invisible where I came from. Photos, film, documentation of the city had been confiscated and censored almost immediately after Japan surrendered, and the only indelible image of the bombing was the power of the bomb itself: the "shock and awe" version of the mushroom cloud. John Hersey's Hiroshima, first published in 1946, remained the only "oral history" account released by a major, commercial American press. As a result, most Americans know almost nothing about nuclear fallout beyond the 1950's advice to stock your bomb shelter with canned food.

But after September 11, 2001, when terrorism exploded on television, the interviews began to change.

Witnesses recalled being trapped under beams, screaming to be saved from the tornadoes of fire that were whipped up as the shock wave advanced. One woman I spoke with, who was about eight at the time, told me about trying to fit her mother's eye back into its socket. Another remembered giving her child water and watching his lips attach and pull off onto the spout of the kettle. One man said:

They brought my sister home, lying on a door. She died the next night, calling, 'Mother, help me, please.' My sister's agony, her terrible burns, her skin slithering off... it was common at the time.

The global instability -- the terrorist attacks, the anthrax, the war in Afghanistan -- had seeped into the past and made the kind of unconscious link between inhumanities that only trauma can. The hibakusha had been stripped of their trust in the future, and they passed that insecurity to me.

In 2001, living at the world's first "ground zero" and watching on TV as my New York City home adopted that label, war seemed to be an act that could only be possible if we could fool ourselves into believing that other people's children were not as precious, or human, as our own.

Hiroshima should have taught us not to be such fools.

This article was first published by the Progressive Media Project. When I sat down to write something for this anniversary, I realized that nothing has changed, except the date. So I changed the date.  It is now also available on The Huffington Post and Discover Nikkei.

Safe

 

The two things that everyone wants to hear:

You are safe.

I see you.

It comes up in the context of children, in an article on The Huffington Post by Judith Acosta about verbal healing, but it’s what we all want, even when we have grown beyond those fragile, trusting years, even after we have been disappointed in friends, rejected in love, worn out by work, surprised and confused.  It is why we marry, why we create community and organize religion.  Why we buy things we think we will possess forever; why we think we can own anything.

And it is why, I suspect, we believe the fear-mongers when they say: “You are just like us” (I see you); “Trust us to keep the bad/different guys away from you” (You are safe).

My most vivid memories of my mother, even now that I am one, are of her assuring me that whatever the latest dishonorable, stupid thing I did was, it would pass.  I would not have to carry it forever.  Stealing candy from a store when I was in grade school.  I remember the panic, the sinking in my stomach that I could never make this right, that I could never be worthy of my parents’ love.

You are safe, she said.  I see you. 

And though that was close to forty years ago, I can still feel that gift she gave me.  I can still feel her climbing into my bed to hold me and wipe my mistakes and inadequacies away.  To thank her, I often try to give that same sense of safety and being seen to everyone I meet, even if just in a smile.  Thank you, Mom.

Can you still feel your mother?  

Caretaking

This is the first summer that my boys are going to camp.

It’s a New York thing, and I am not originally a New Yorker. Where I grew up, summer was about hanging around, making yourself useful and finding a way to entertain yourself with a paper cup and a stick. But in Brooklyn, early teenagers attend camp. Soccer camp, tech camp, baseball, math, music camp: each one offers a focused specialty, a set of skills that will give your child an edge in the competition to come. I confess that, when camp finally seemed inevitable, I, too, was eying the summer as an opportunity to introduce my younger son to a new and notable talent – digital storytelling? film? – that he might become passionate about just in time for seventh grade, when every New York child must find some way to stand out from the tens of thousands of other smart, wonderful kids who are applying to the same high schools.

Instead, my sons are attending an all-purpose “summer experience” day camp in Brooklyn, where my fourteen year old is a Counselor in Training. Which means, far from distinguishing himself as a prodigy, the bulk of his days are spent taking care of seven year olds.

“It’s awesome,” he says.

Why? I ask him. Why on earth? What person, especially a teenage boy, would look forward to spending his free time with a large group of little kids?

It just is, he says. It’s fun. They have a lot of energy. They like to hang on him, and pull on his arms, and cling to his legs so he can’t go anywhere without them.

The CITs, as they are called, do get time to play dodge ball and other games (my son tells me proudly that his group won yesterday) and they also have time off – during Arts and Crafts and Swim for example – when they can go to their own counselors and do something supervised for a half hour or so. Their counselors, I am told, are also awesome. But my son usually chooses to hang out with the kids.

There is a boy who can’t swim because of an ear infection so he and my son shoot hoops and hit baseballs. A young man who is taller than his mother and a kid half his size: “You’d never believe it, Mom. He can hit the ball up to the ceiling. He’s amazing!” Or he hangs out in art class to see what they are drawing. “That’s great. That’s a beautiful picture,” he says mimicking himself as he wanders among them.

This is his choice. This is not Facebook, or texting, or any of the things he usually likes to do. He tells me, as if it just occurred to him, that he hasn’t logged onto Facebook in the past three days.

Who knew that my son would find his best summer experience, not in soccer or tech, but in caretaking? In New York City, we are conditioned to focus on self-improvement, every child for himself, with self being the center. We are transient, high-tech; we are busy. By the time school and guitar lessons and homework are done every evening, there is not a lot of time for service, or for taking care of others, or for anything except going to sleep.

But this summer, in this camp, my son is practicing love. We didn’t plan it that way, but I am so grateful. He is finding new priorities. He is celebrating others. And he is enjoying every minute of what he discovers.

And it is awesome.

The Time of Lizards

My father recently sent me a picture of my mother playing with a lizard.  It was a Jackson’s Chameleon, green and black with three horns on its head.  You might think how cute, or that she was visiting a zoo with children, or that she is an intrepid exotic animal lover.  You might begin to question your assumptions, though, when I tell you that my mother has dementia, and the lizard was something she and her caregiver rescued from the side of the road.

Last night I had dinner with Kenny Fries, renowned disability expert and author of several books, most recently, The History of My Shoes and the Evolution of Darwin’s Theory.  We were talking about disability, and Alzheimer’s, and a Father’s Day article in the New York Times, by Katy Butler called “What Broke My Father’s Heart” about a family’s struggle with stroke, dementia, pacemakers, and aging.  We were both moved by the story.  He had some issues, however, with the disability aspects, particularly with questions about quality of life, and who decides when a life is worth living or what the experience of that life is.

Kenny is a born disability activist.  He was born missing bones in his legs.  The majority of the rest of us, the “normal” ones, do not start life thinking much about disability.  But we will all become disability activists eventually.  Because, we are all on a life path that ends in disability.  It is not other.  It is, or will be, us.

This notion of disability as both ordinary and inevitable is part of what Kenny is writing about in his next book.   Disability has entered my life in the form of my mother, just as it has for some five million people who have Alzheimer’s, and ten million unpaid caregivers who love them.  These numbers are projected to explode, and I may become one of them.  If I don’t develop Alzheimer’s, something else will happen to disable me (unless I fall off a caldera and am killed instantly).  But if I do, I have my mother to look to for my future.

She has been losing her memory for twelve years.  She can’t feed herself, dress herself, put together a sentence.  She needs full time care.  Yet she can enjoy her grandchildren, even if she doesn’t remember their names.  She laughs.  She apparently likes lizards.

Would I want this for myself in a perfect world?  Would I prefer the alternative of “assisted death” that author Terry Prachett is advocating for?

One of the strategies that Kenny Fries espouses is for our society to turn away from the “illness model” where we try to cure disability or treat it in nursing homes, and give assistance instead to families who are trying to help their loved ones live quality lives.  The strain that Katy Butler’s mother suffered, caring for her husband for seven years at the expense of her own health and life, doesn’t have to be the norm.  It is something my father would do, though we are not at that stage quite yet, but not something any of us would want for him.  For the moment, he has managed to get some help from home caregivers who amaze me with their joy and patience and competence.  They are helping my disabled mother to live a life of laughter and hugs and Jackson’s Chameleons.

A life.