Review by Mira Shimabukuro, with Laura Kina, Momi Cummings, Cassie Miura, Bean Yogi, and Jami Nakamura Lin
“shima, n.: 1. a village; a community. 2. one’s home village. 3.one’s fief. 4. an island.”
I’m finding it harder and harder to review creative writing for publications. Especially in any kind of feigned, objective manner. Either the work is meaningful to a reader, or it is not. Either it resonates, or it doesn’t. Either it opens hidden doors you didn’t know you needed to find, or it remains one book among many that you will never read.
The best I can do is offer what a book means to me, and in this case, what it means to others with whom I share an ancestral set of islands and with whom I see myself in an emerging, diasporic community.
Shima is a 2024 collection of poems by sho yamagushiku, an Okinawan-American writer and researcher currently based in the ancestral lands of the Lekwungen and WSÁNEC peoples (Victoria B.C.). Yamagushiku, or sho, and I have never met face-to-face, but we have had several exchanges, both in real time and asynchronously, by phone, text, and email. And given the depth and warmth of these conversations, I’ve started to consider him part of my chosen, creative and cultural family, or perhaps, my chosen village.
On the one hand, this is a disclaimer. On the other, this relationship is entwined with my reading of the book.
Living in a diaspora a few generations removed, trying to decolonize our understanding of both ancestral land and our relationship to that land, and each other, can feel, at times, a lonely project.
As sho writes, some have said that “a house of diasporic okinawans is an impossible condition.”
And yet, sho takes us on an open-ended journey of diasporic longing, one that is both profoundly intimate and fully open to fellow travelers. In the Okinawan/Ryukyuan diaspora settings where I’ve been and Shima is discussed, I’m struck by the shared recognition of the book’s emotional weight and resonance.
Kinship can deepen in a shared reading. In literacy studies, one aspect of my scholarly training, we call this, a “community of readers.” We commune in conversation, call forth the selves we want to connect.
Which is why, when I offered to review the book, I didn’t want to be the only Okinawan/Ryukyuan/Uchinanchu/Shimanchu voice occupying the word space allotted to us in Examiner.
So I present to you some flash reviews of shima, offerings from an emerging, chosen shima, a village of fellow, diasporic travelers:
Shima is a simmering spiral of decolonial Okinawan diasporic visual poetry that is as familiar as it is disorienting. Ancestral melancholy has “fermented and fomented” into plucked notes of fighter jets, osprey, Henoko, dugong, coral reefs, and too many graves. Histories of labor migration, World War II, Japanese occupation, and US military occupation of Okinawa are the backdrop for relational meditations that drift between familial, oceanic, and celestial lines.
– Laura Kina
Shima orients us in four directions: amerika-yuu, yamatu-yuu, and uchinaa-yuu reference shared histories with turning points in 1879, 1945, and 1972, while yanbaru-yuu, invokes a deeply personal collective imagining of memory and creation. Shō Yamagushiku balances abstract spaciousness with visceral specificity when invoking bodies, nature, and movement. Shima offers shimanchu in diaspora the gift of conversation about queer desire, gender(ed violence), flags, compasses, explosions, brutality/brutalism, and the transformative/liminal spaces through which we enter/exit.
– Momi Cummings
I received Shima as part of a fundraiser to support Palestinian student and freelance journalist Hamza Salha. I mention this because Yamagushiku excavates Okinawan diasporic experience while also speaking to the broader pain of separation from one’s homeland. I read this collection before my first trip to Okinawa and saw myself in Yamagushiku’s speaker “looking to buy an ancestor” with “eyes like cameras.” When I visited Henoko Bay, I recalled his “dugong’s ghost” and the threat of “a devouring radiated genocide.” Melancholy longing pervades the text, but the author confronts his own limitless desire and ours with metaphors of impossibility.
–Cassie Miura
shima is a swirling, dream-like collection that traces the razor-sharp paths that diasporic longing can cut through us as we chase homeland and cultural reclamation. The form of these poems contend with American military concrete, water, and tradition; they ask us to trouble the kind of nostalgia that leaves violence, patriarchy, and oppressive power intact within our sense of Shimānchu indigeneity.
– Bean Yogi
When I read Shima, I am propelled through time. sho yamagushiku’s work frustrates me because I cannot know it– and yet reminds me that sometimes our desire to know something completely is the same as the desire to own what cannot, should not, be owned. “I am a compass…” sho writes, “greeting that gaping ocean, trawling, sifting for that rock of an island, as if through a searching explosion, it might be mine” Reading sho’s work, I also trawl. We may never find the exact thing we are seeking, but sho’s words surround us, like flotsam and jetsam, telling us that we are not alone in this longing.
– Jami Nakamura Lin
Reading shima through my own decolonial desire, I too am left in awe. While the book is a search for lost culture and ancestors, as my chodee note above, it is more than a reclamation of fixed practices and “closed rituals.” sho offers us a poetic transcription of a journey to “listen intently,” not only to the “lilting rhythms” of experiences endured by one’s ancestors, but also to the dangers of an unconditional, “sun-soaked,” nostalgia that can mask ongoing violence. In many ways, shima feels like an act of catch-and-release from the “confines of lineage,” even as it continues to search for what may be impossible to find. Amidst this impossibility, I am breathless as I read. For I too am searching through “every forest” and “through the watery shrine” across the pages of shima. But by the end, I feel permission to not only sit down and listen to “a worn three-stringed instrument,” but also, to just let go.
So sho, thank you for this intersecting journey where “roots” become “roads,” for resisting the ways impossibility might encourage us to stop searching, for catching and holding words on the page, for releasing us into the waters so we can swim alongside you, for this communion “circling the brackish bay,” for this “makeshift ceremony,” for this shima.
