Last week, Arts@Carleton hosted renowned author Karen Tei Yamashita ’73 on campus. Her visit was sponsored by the Light Lectureship in the Arts and the English and American Studies Departments.
In addition to being the author of nine acclaimed novels, she is a professor emerita of literature and creative writing at UC Santa Cruz.
At Carleton, Yamashita gave a talk on Oct. 8 about her first novel, “Through the Arc of the Rain Forest,” and had a conversation about the role of storytelling on Oct. 10, moderated by Nancy Cho, the class of 1941 professor of English and the liberal arts.
This term, Cho is teaching a five-week American Studies course titled “Asian American Reckonings” which focuses on understanding the complexities of being Asian American and studies them through literary and artistic expressions.
Yamashita’s work contends with these ideas, and during her Tuesday talk, she recounted her literary beginnings. As a student at Carleton, she studied Anthropology. After graduating, she received a Watson fellowship to study the lives of Japanese immigrants in Brazil. At the time, she intended to become an anthropologist or journalist.
On writing, Yamashita said that one of her greatest challenges was learning that “getting a book published is next to impossible.” But her solution was to move back to her hometown of Los Angeles with her husband and write another novel.
In her research, Yamashita became interested in the notion of binaries. At a bathhouse in São Paulo, she recounted listening to an elderly man’s life and stories for seven days. Yet, upon entering another community, she was informed that that man’s stories were all lies.
The answer to the honesty of the man’s stories, she said, was both “yes and no.” And this “is why I didn’t go into anthropology,” she said.
In the opening epigraph of “Through the Arc of the Rain Forest” Yamashita asks her readers: “I have heard Brazilian children say that whatever passes through the arc of a rainbow becomes its opposite. But what is the opposite of a bird? Or for that matter, a human being? And what then, in the great rain forest, where, in its season, the rain never ceases and the rainbows are myriad?”
Bringing the patterns of her epigraph into her talk, Yamashita suggested that things aren’t quite as simple as “yes and no, dead and alive, good and evil.” She went on to discuss the rainforest and climate change. Rain forests are “unlike deciduous ones,” she said. “All decay is consumed by insects.” As a result, she said, therefore, once destroyed, there isn’t much that can be done to restore a rainforest.
Throughout her speech, Yamashita talked about a number of complex ideas inspired by her own Japanese heritage and experience living in Brazil, from ecocriticism to the Brazilian idea of saudade – nostalgia or melancholy — to finding something familiar in the completely unknown.
Along with the talk and moderated conversation, Yamashita visited classes to speak with students. “Having her visit our class was great, especially because we’ve spent a while discussing literary theory,” said Mal Atack ’27, a student in English Critical Methods (Atack is also a Carletonian News Editor). “Particularly the role of authors in how theorists interpret their work, so talking to an acclaimed novelist about her perspective on the act of writing and how people read her work was really interesting.”
“I thought her talk was fascinating,” Atack said. “It got a bit bizarre at times, in a fun way, but overall it just made me want to read “Through the Arc of the Rain Forest” so I could understand more of what she was talking about. As a student with Japanese heritage, I also loved seeing how Japanese culture has influenced her writing.”
During the talk, Yamashita talked about how three generations of her family were imprisoned in the Japanese internment camps of World War II, pulling up images of the torn-down remains in Utah. From those images, she zoomed out to a satellite view, showing the stretch of white land that made up the Salt Lake Basin of Utah, where the present-day Salt Lake was once an inland sea.
Amidst this sea of vast, dry, white land, she remarked, used to be a two mile stretch of concrete that marked an incredible period of suffering in Japanese American history. The interconnectedness of the past and present and nature with human nature are ideas that have influenced her writing over the years.
On this influence, Atack commented: “The unlikely intersection of Japan and Brazil in “Through the Arc of the Rain Forest” is really cool, so I loved hearing more about her own experience in both countries during her talk.”
One of Yamashita’s novels “I Hotel” was a finalist for the National Book Awards in 2010. In their biography, they highlight that “[h]er body of work has been credited with transforming the approach toward Asian American literary and cultural studies from one that is U.S.-centric to one that is hemispheric and transnational.”
Throughout her works, and in her talk, Yamashita connects ideas to one another that may seem initially unlikely. But for students of Carleton and for readers of her novels, these connections are deeply thought-provoking and promote a different way of viewing the world.
