Manoa: a Pacific Journal of International Writing – serie

One of the most significant plays of post-Independence India, Dharamvir Bharati’s Andha Yug takes place on the last day of the Great Mahabharata War. The once-beautiful city of Hastinapur is burning, the battlefield beyond the walls is piled with corpses, and the few survivors huddle together in grief and rage, blaming the destruction on their adversaries, divine capriciousness—anyone or anything except their own moral choices. Andha Yug explores our capacity for moral action, reconciliation, and goodness in times of atrocity and reveals what happens when individuals succumb to the cruelty and cynicism of a blind, dispirited age. Andha Yug is illustrated with paintings from a rare, single manuscript of the Razmnama (Book of War), dated to 1598–1599. Created during the reign (1556–1605) of the great Mughal emperor Akbar, the Razmnama is written in Persian, yet it is a translation of the Mahabharata, one of the great Indian epics of Hinduism. An essay by Yael Rice reveals the Indian, Persian, and European elements within the translations, as well as the diverse cultural character of the Mughal court of Akbar.

In extraordinary prose and poetry by international writers, Wild Hearts presents the diversity in the meaning of “wildness.” Stories from the edges of dreams reimagine the underside of the wildness in the human heart; fresh ecological perspectives explore humanity’s relationships to nature and to the true myths of ancestral people; poetry, performance, and memoir express internal human struggles in a time of crisis. These new and compelling works from Japan, China, South Asia, Australia, and North America include a memoir by Donald Richie, fiction by Barry Lopez, natural history by Deborah Bird Rose, an essay on the Native peoples and languages of the Pacific Northwest by Robert Bringhurst, translations by Andrew Schelling of ecstatic bhakti poetry, and more. Japanese woodblock prints of kabuki actors by artist Utagawa Kuniyoshi appear throughout.

A collection of six plays by award-winning playwright Catherine Filloux: Eyes of the Heart; Kidnap Road; Lemkin’s House; Mary and Myra; Selma ’65; and Silence of God. National and international settings. Subjects include key figures in the history of human and civil rights; genocide; crimes against women during armed conflicts; international human rights law; U.S. Civil Rights Movement; and Woman’s Suffrage.Several real-life figures appear in Filloux’s plays: Ingrid Betancourt, a woman politician in Colombia who campaigned for presidency and was kidnapped by FARC revolutionary forces in 2002; Myra Bradwell, first US woman lawyer; political activist, instrumental in getting Mary Todd Lincoln released from an insane asylum and her inheritance restored; Raphael Lemkin, originator of the term genocide, activist lawyer against international war crimes; nominee for the Nobel Peace Prize; Mary Todd Lincoln, widow of President Abraham Lincoln; Viola Liuzzo, civil rights activist murdered by the KKK; only white woman killed during the 1960s Civil Rights Movement; Pol Pot, head of the Khmer Rouge, responsible in the 1970s for the deaths of nearly two million Cambodians; William Proxmire, senator who advocated for the U.S. adoption of the International Convention for the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.

Mountain/Home presents new translations of Japanese literature from the country’s medieval period to the present. The narrative arc of the selections follows the evolution of Japan’s national self-image. Because Mount Fuji, more than any other national symbol, has represented the soul of Japan, Mountain/Home begins with works inspired by the mountain’s presence. They include excerpts from some of the first literary works in which Mount Fuji appears: the mysterious Tale of the Bamboo Cutter, early court poetry, and the Confessions of Lady Nij?¯, among others. These works are followed by a chapter from Lady Murasaki’s brilliant novel, The Tale of Genji, and Edo-period haiku by Bash?¯ and Issa. In the twentieth century, Japan went through its darkest years. But out of the trauma of militarism, war, devastation, and defeat came outstanding fiction by Dazai Osamu and Natsume S?¯seki, as well as avant-garde poetry by Yoshioka Minoru and Ayukawa Nobuo. In recent decades, contemporary optimism has produced writing that breaks new literary ground without forgetting the past: experimental fiction by Kurahashi Yumiko and poetry about everyday life by Takahashi Mutsuo.

Elegant, exuberant, and idiosyncratic, Acting My Age is a memoir and meditation by one of America’s most playful and inventive writers. In the words of Mary Mackey (The Jaguars That Prowl Our Dreams), "in Acting My Age, Thomas Farber gives us an unflinching, luminous, cleverly conceived meditation on his own mortality as well as on the extinction of the coral reefs, snow leopards, dolphins, and, ultimately the human species. Couching his observations in a series of short, interconnected, almost-epigrammatic essays that read like prose poems, Farber creates a narrative style reminiscent of Joyce and Melville: oceanic in depth and all-encompassing in range."Gerald Fleming (The Choreographer), calls Acting My Age "a praise song, an exultation in the beauties and brutalities of being human. Though Thomas Farber is wide-eyed at the miracle of our existence, his prose details both the collapse of species and ultimate trajectory of our aging bodies. This polymathic dive into a writer’s remaining time—into the life of the earth, the sea, and meaning itself—is no mere memoir, but an elegant, instructive page-after-page of language-love."Robert Roper (Nabokov in America: On the Road to Lolita), adds: "Tom Farber is always good company, and his ‘late writings’ are more and more indispensable, full of comfort for the perplexed, rich in learning, humorous, masculine and tender, evoking large sensations and vast views; a reader thinks of Montaigne, Whitman, and other of the great truth-tellers, modest of tone, intimate in approach, friends bringing deep gifts.

Featured in this volume is The Woman Zou, the third in a series of novellas by the distinguished woman writer Zhang Yihe. Born in 1942 in Chongqing, Sichuan, Zhang Yihe was the daughter of Zhang Bojun, a high official in the Chinese Communist Party who was purged in 1957 and labeled a public enemy. By association, Zhang Yihe was convicted of counterrevolutionary activities and sentenced to twenty years in a remote prison camp. After serving ten years, she was released and allowed to return to Beijing in 1979. When she retired in 2001 from teaching at the Chinese National Opera Academy, she began writing her novellas based on the lives of her fellow women prisoners. Her nonfiction books were banned in China and she became an outspoken critic of China’s censorship laws. In 2004, she received the International PEN Award for Independent Chinese Writing. The award committee wrote thatZhang Yihe’s writing is not only an indictment of the age of darkness, but it is also an affirmation of the indefatigable human dignity and a negation of all attempts to destroy this dignity… Zhang Yihe's work illustrates the rarely seen courage among contemporary Chinese writers to defend freedom, dignity and historical memories.The other outstanding writers in this volume are Yi Zhou, whose writing awards include the first prize for novellas and short stories in the Yellow River Literature competition, the Dunhuang Literary Award, and the Lu Xun literary prize, and Zhu Wenying, who is considered one of the leading representatives of post-70s women writers and has received the Annual People’s Literature Prize, among other awards.

Here are the voices and visions from a world having need of an angel—most of all an angel of reality to help us see the Earth again, its people, and objects, to hear its tragic drone, and to recognize what it is to be human. The writing ranges from Burma/Myanmar to South Asia, China, Central America, Africa, and the U.S. From the oration of Frederick Douglass in the 1850s and the reportage of Walter F. White in the Jim Crow South during the 1920s. From the Apache genocide in the American Southwest, to the displacement of Rohingya in Burma, and the massacre of Tutsi in Rwanda. Despite the dark reality that the authors record, we recognize, as artist Claudia Bernardi says, "that life is worth living, no matter what."In the Silence is the Winter 2022 (34:2) issue of Mānoa. It features photographs of the Rohingya people by George Constantine.Alok Bhalla is a scholar, translator, and poet based in Delhi, India. He is a fellow at the Indian Institute of Advanced Study, and editor of the four-volume Stories about the Partition of India. Penny Edwards is professor of Southeast Asian studies at the University of California, Berkeley. Her books include Kingdoms of the Mind: Burma’s Fugitive Prince and the Fracturing of Empire. ko ko thett is a bilingual poet and author of collections of poetry and poetry translations in Burmese and English. Kenneth Wong teaches Burmese language at the University of California, Berkeley. His short stories, essays, and poetry translations have appeared widely. Frank Stewart is a writer, translator, and founding editor of Mānoa: A Pacific Journal of International Writing.

New CHamoru Literature highlights an intergenerational selection of eighteen emerging, mid-career, and established CHamoru authors, including an extended feature on master storyteller Peter R. Onedera. As Onedera explains in his essay, “The Dilemma of an Official Word,” Chamorro, Chamoru, CHamoru are different spellings of the same “description used in reference to Guam’s indigenous people and those in the Marianas archipelago for thousands of years.” Within the pages of this rich collection, you will find diverse genres, including poetry, chant, fiction, creative nonfiction, and playwriting. The pieces are composed predominantly in English; however, the opening chant is in the CHamoru language (with translation by the author), other pieces are multilingual, and one poem is composed in CHamoru creole English. The themes range from genealogy to identity, colonialism to cultural revitalization, ecological connection to environmental injustice, love to sexual abuse, and belonging to diaspora. This anthology will introduce readers to the Mariana archipelago and the vibrancy of CHamoru literature, culture, histories, migrations, politics, memories, traumas, and dreams.

Here Was Once the Sea features poetry, fiction, and nonfiction guest edited by Rina Garcia Chua, Esther Vincent Xueming, and Ann Ang. While many of these works are comprised mostly of anglophone texts, which reflects the aspirations of regional writers to speak across borders and to the globe at large, several native languages appear on these pages. Here, Southeast Asia refers to the constituent nations of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), namely, Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam, as well as their associated diasporas. The writers and the peoples of the region live and remember more profoundly than we know. Their work explores the ecological across a multiscalar spectrum, featuring both geological landscapes and visceral botanical or animal entanglements, inheriting histories and spiritualities that defy and disrupt modern epistemologies. Together they represent a chorus of offerings, first and foremost to the land and the sea; and secondly to you, our readers, as an invitation to attend to the urgencies and travails of our homes. These are the stories we share and the stories we carry in our pasiking (basket) as we follow movements towards our destinies. These are the stories that sing of hope—for ourselves and for our world; ones that we whisper silently to ourselves as we touch our lips to the familiar earth and wait for the incoming monsoon rain to fall gently on our backs, our fields, our rivers.

Karahee from the Cane Fields: Writing from the Coolie Diaspora unifies the literature and culture of the global South Asian Labor Diaspora and how writers live within this identity. From the history of indenture in the 1830s to the 1920s, this racialized bondage replaced the Transatlantic slave trade and branded the servants of Empire as Coolie. The word Coolie comes from the dehumanization of the people under Imperial rule, turning them into a species of Césaire’s thingification.During this period, the British displaced Indians—some by will and others by force—from the ports of Calcutta and Madras to the settlements and colonies in Fiji, Mauritius, Reunion, South Africa, Jamaica, Trinidad, Guyana, and Suriname. From these plantation communities of survival and resilience, the writers in Karahee from the Cane Fields explore their ancestral ties to land and indenture, and question what is the inheritance of the cane field, the cane-sap residue marking the descendants of this system of indenture?It is here that emerging and less-well known voices in the field of Coolie Labor Diasporic studies gather together through poetry, fiction, nonfiction, translations, song, and graphic memoir. These narratives are more than the typical authors studied and overrepresented by academics who do not read writing from the Coolie Labor Diaspora past the 1990s. Instead of the often written about concern for their origins and cultural holdovers from their ancestral India, the writers assembled in this karahee, this mehfil of flavors, ask: What now?

In Always Again: New Work from the Philippines and Philippine Diasporas, guest edited by Laurel Flores Fantauzzo, Mānoa brings together authors and visual artists in and of the Philippines and its many diasporas. The contemporary voices of the Philippines featured here pay special attention to themes specific to Philippine history and capture its cycles of historical pain and joyful resistance. Established creative practitioners join emerging writers and artists to form a powerful chorus that speaks to urgent concerns across generations and into the future.With this collection, Mānoa brings you a living record of the historical forces and contemporary concerns that have shaped the Philippines and its diasporas. An archipelagic nation at the seam of Asia and the Pacific, of a continent and an ocean, the Philippines has long been a site of literary innovation and exchange. The works gathered here bravely and creatively testify to the enduring vibrancy of its literature and art, to their power and relevance far beyond the Philippines and its diasporas.