Sophia Terazawa

A collection of love poems addressed to an adverb, Anon meditates on the temporal “at once” between desire and language. From the playful verses of Slovenia's Tomaž Šalamun to the brushstrokes of an Edo period painting, Two Gibbons Reaching for the Moon by Japan's Ito Jakuchu, a character for the displaced Beloved emerges in this tapestry of time and art across borders. In Anon, the Beloved reflects: How might translating a human experience, from one language to the next, be an act of longing for the anonymous Other? Or how might this longing for beauty, and the wordless face, heal us both? How might Eros, in exile, respond? With these questions, Vietnam's Mekong delta becomes the book's central force. Endangered gibbons swing from the ruins of ecocide, and each image-rose, ape, and river-weaves itself into an undercurrent of postcolonial time.

Tetra Nova is an operatic, polyphonic novel. At its heart lies the question of postcolonial burdens of identity, exile, narration, and history. In late-twentieth century Saigon, Lua Mater – a performance artist – meets Emi Terazawa, a child visiting her mother’s country for the first time since the end of the war. The sudden arrival of a tiny Panda prompts fate to intervene, taking Lua and Emi on a dreamlike and investigative journey into history, language, legacy and resistance. Darting between the temples of Nagasaki, the mountains of Tucson, and an island refugee camp off the coast of Malaysia, Lua and Emi become one narrator, blending their voices into a performance of intergenerational stories that reach their crescendo with a song for humanity beyond trauma.

Tetra Nova tells the story of Lua Mater, an obscure Roman goddess who re-imagines herself as an assassin coming to terms with an emerging performance artist identity in the late-20th century. The operatic text begins in Saigon, where she meets a little girl named Emi, an American of Vietnamese-Japanese descent visiting her mother’s country for the first time since the war’s end. As the voices of Lua and Emi blend into one dissociated narration, the stories accelerate out of sequence, mapping upon the globe a series of collective memories and traumas passed from one generation to the next. Darting between the temples of Nagasaki, the mountains of Tucson, and an island refugee camp off the coast of Malaysia, Lua and Emi in one embodied memory travel across the English language itself to make sense of a history neither wanted. When a tiny Panda named Panda suddenly arrives, fate intervenes, and the work acts as a larger historical document, unpacking legacies of genocide and the radical modes of resistance that follow. At the heart of this production lies a postcolonial identity in exile, and the performers must come to terms with who may or may not carry their stories forward: Emi or Lua. Part dreamscape, part investigative poetics, multiple fragmenting identities traverse across time and space, the mythic and the profane, toward an understanding of humanity beyond those temple chamber doors.

A book of testimonies in verse, Winter Phoenix is a collection of poems written loosely after the form of an international war crimes tribunal. The poet, a daughter of a Vietnamese refugee, navigates the epigenetics of trauma passed down, and across, the archives of war, dislocation, and witness, as she repeatedly asks, “Why did you just stand there and say nothing?” Here, the space of accusation becomes both lyric and machine, an “investigation" which takes place in the margins of martial law, the source material being soldiers’ testimonies given during three internationally publicized events, in this order—The Incident on Hill 192 (1966, Phù M? District, Vietnam); The Winter Soldier Investigation (1971, Detroit, USA); and The Russell Tribunal (1966, Stockholm, Sweden; 1967, Roskilde, Denmark). Ultimately, however, Winter Phoenix is a document of resilience. Language decays. A ceremony eclipses its trial, and the radical possibilities of a single scream rises from annihilation.