📁 RETURN TO FIRST IMPRESSIONS
📁 RETURN TO CHA REVIEW OF BOOKS AND FILMS

Erin Suzuki, Ocean Passages: Navigating Pacific Islander and Asian American Literatures, Temple University Press, 2021. 269 pgs.

When the territories between land seem easier to define, the territories that separate ocean and islands are harder to distinguish and define. There are always complexities and ambiguities between islands and ocean, as there are with the identities of Asians and Pacific Islanders in the context of the United States. I am always reminded by social media that May is Asian & Pacific American Heritage Month in the US, where these communities celebrate their cultures and uniqueness together. But back to square one—why are these communities placed together? Perhaps their connection with the ocean is the thread that pulls them together? I was reading the book Ocean Passages: Navigating Pacific Islander and Asian American Literatures, by Erin Suzuki, with the hope of knowing this inexplicable connection better. I was given something more than that, although my initial enquiry has not still been answered properly.

Coming from a harbour city, I have now moved to a city that is next to an enormous lake with buried rivers. From time to time, I am told that there are rivers and ravines beneath the streets and highways. We are more connected to the diverse bodies of water than we can think of. Suzuki, an Assistant Professor of Literature at the University of California, San Diego, herself has a personal history of looking at the land she was raised with a fresh perspective. As mentioned in the conclusion, Suzuki, a fourth-generation Japanese American who grew up on Hawaiian land, sees herself in between “the violent history of extraction and development that created the conditions that made it possible for me” and “an invitation to reconsider my surroundings along a different historical and affective axis” (197). I appreciate Suzuki’s reflexivity about her identities with the land and the ocean she locates; I also find her motivation to explore her surroundings with a new angle interesting because this gives people the autonomy to (re)claim the land and the ocean in their own ways.

In Suzuki’s book, she guides the reader to return and rethink our relationships with the mass bodies of water by zooming into the portrayal of the people and the ocean they have been living with in literature. Among the passages, Suzuki centres her analysis on the emphasis of transoceanic connection, regardless of where we live. From her literature picks, she stresses that we are more interconnected than isolated. The concept of “a sea of islands” embodies Suzuki’s monograph:

Epeli Hau‘ofa’s call to reconceptualise Oceania as “a sea of islands” rather than “islands in a far sea” helped to articulate an important paradigm shift in Oceanic and transpacific studies, so have activist movements around water foregrounded the need for communities to radically reconceptualize themselves as part of and connected to the ecosystem, rather than simply living off of it. (200-201)

With a distinct focus on the post-war era, Suzuki lays out her book in five sections: from how the sea has been militarised; how refugees are linked to wars and displacement; how people and goods circulate in the ocean in the form of capitalism; the conflict of embodiment between “locals” and settlers; and how the Pacific is reimagined in the digital age. Suzuki has made a good attempt to connect across eras the seemingly conflicting Asian Americanness with the Pacific diasporic communities. Her selection of literature expands from a specific community to a wider variety of Asian American and Indigenous Pacific identities. To respond to her analysis, I would like to start off this review with the parts I like about this book, then follow with what I wish to see more from the author’s perspectives in this book. In closing, I will end with some thoughts on how Asian American and Pacific Islander literature can be better represented and archived in the future.

Some Asian Americans may find themselves fighting off the “model minority” label and resisting being complicit in the settler colonialism that separates them from other diasporic communities. In light of this, Suzuki selects the literature for her book intentionally to connect the seemingly conflicting Asian American and Pacific diasporic communities. Despite the geographical distance, these communities find themselves in a complicated situation where they are still under the arm’s length of the former settlers’ looming domination. For nations such as the Federated States of Micronesia (FSM), it is among one of the “associate states” (10). It is “neither a direct ‘part’ of the United States nor entirely independently of it” (177). With regard to close ties to the US, many Micronesians voluntarily enlist in the US Armed Forces for a stable living. The enlistment creates a large influx of changing population in this “associate state” of the US. The impact is more than changing the population, but also changing these peoples’ cultural identities. In Chapters 4 and 5, Suzuki adopts the approaches of embodiment and digitalisation to extrapolate evidence from the art and literary works that investigate how Pacific Islanders’ cultural identities have been borrowed, commodified and idealised. The similar parallel can be extended to Asian Americanness when the mass media and popular culture only extract part of their identities to commodify. These commodified identities have created misrepresentations of these communities and even impacted the next generations’ interpretations with an untruthful image.

Along the line of embodiment, Suzuki makes use of the masculine images projected onto Barack Obama and Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson in the context their respective times living in Hawaii. In Chapter 4, Suzuki moves on from the text-only literature to images, news headlines and film synopses and characterisation to analyse how the Hawaii native ancestry concepts have been embodied as a “harmless” and neutralised male embodiment. For Obama and The Rock, whose ties to Hawaii were for a short period of time, their projected images have replaced the original Hawaii ancestry to falsely create the “innocent” images of peace-making. On the other hand, Suzuki spends an equal amount of her work to explain how feminine embodiment is often exploited. Oftentimes, the discussion of embodiment may be limited to a single piece of work. However, it is great to see how Suzuki connects sensory details depicted in different medium of artwork with the discussion of exploitation. As senses are one of the recurring elements in literary works, a comprehensive analysis on sensory details can make the discussion of embodiment more convincing.

Speaking of a comprehensive analysis, Suzuki has made an effort in collecting new forms of literary works. She begins her book with some fictions and printed poems, but she does not stop there. She has an ambition to include works that are created across media. The hybrid form of literature pulls the past (e.g. genealogies) closer to the present and future (with tweets, text messages, symbols, video art, etc). To navigate the changing times and tides of people and place, Suzuki has taken the readers to open their eyes to see more possibility in literature, as well as modern communication means that bring these separate communities together to look at the future of “a sea of islands”.

Sharing the similarity of being diasporic, as Suzuki juxtaposes literature from and on these communities, these communities can find that they share more similarities than they have imagined. One pertinent similarity is the struggle for the loss of self among these communities. From literature, both Asian and Pacific Islanders are dealing with the battle between homogeneity and heterogeneity; the aftermath of settler colonialism; the wars and climate changes, and even the fluctuating trading relationships that impact their economies and population flows.

Despite the differences in ethnicity, the communities living next to and depending on the ocean have another similarity: the shared responsibilities of restoring a harmonious relationship with the ocean we live with. While the dangers of a changing climate and unpredictable ocean are taking toll on the minoritised communities, all oceanic communities shall come as one and be cautious about their relationship with the ocean. From Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner’s poem “The Butterfly Thief”, the lines repeat thrice on “I’m taking you with me” (66), this is an in-your-face reminder: are we too exploitative and asking too much from the ocean? We, a part of the oceanic communities, are witnessing the growing number of mass climate refugees and how climate change has become a new form of settler colonialism. This new portrayal from the recent literary works reminds us once again that the aftermath of climate change burdens the whole oceanic communities. And we cannot escape from being a part of that.

Moving on, I would like to review the parts that I would wish to see the author elaborate further. Continuing the call of “I’m taking you with me” in Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner’s poem “The Butterfly Thief”, I was expecting Suzuki to give a more thorough analysis on the power of the ocean. I would like to see Suzuki’s take on the shared criticisms on the common banality of humankind who sees ocean as a place to be exploited. I would also want to know her train of thought on the natural disasters which many Asian and Pacific Islander communities have been prone to. When the tsunamis, storms and flooding do not just happen because of the climate change, I would like to know how the literary works have depicted the relationship between the ever-changing ocean and the people who rely on it for a living and for survival.

On the other hand, the waters running along the ocean and islands seem clearly defined in Suzuki’s book, but among the literary works, there are always imaginations of the boundaries between the charted and uncharted waters. As Suzuki argues that the ocean currents have their own principle in Chapter 5, it is worth discussing how the currents, waters and territories are defined by human that surpass the power of nations and states. While there have been political debates and disputes over how the ocean is divided, I hope Suzuki could give us more insights into how contemporary literary works have addressed this issue that intersects between personal, political and historical perspectives.

This missing part of bringing contemporary voices into (re)defining the boundaries between waters have led to my final point, which is the islands that are forgotten from the current literary narrative. When I read the book, I was checking off a list of oceanic territories in my mind: the Philippines, Guam, Hawaii, Fiji, New Zealand, to name just a few, but I expected to read something about Taiwan (where it is categorised into the first island chain in the Pacific regions), Okinawa (the long debates about the closure of the US military bases since the locals at Okinawa have been fighting against the Americans’ exploitation of the land, the rapes of Okinawan girls and women, crime committed by US soldiers). I believe there are further discussions on these controversial issues between the ocean, islands and their people with the former and hidden settler-colonisers. Literary works have been written and published in languages other than English, discussing the fate and fury of the people on these islands. Why are they excluded? Is it because of their sensitivity? Is it because they are likely out-of-reach (the availability of the translated works)? These are the questions that worth following up.

One of the limitations of Suzuki’s book is that it only analyses the works that are written, translated and published by the English-centric authors and translators. These authors’ works disseminate more frequently because they are written in the same language, despite there are occasional inclusion of other languages, such as the concept of “vā” in Chapter 3 by Tongan scholars to emphasise “the materiality and mediative capacity of a ‘space in between’ two or more points” (115). The understanding and the spread of these concepts depend on the collective effort of multilingual scholars and writers who make these concepts translatable for a wider audience. How can the literature of the unreached islands such as Taiwan and Okinawa be brought to the centre of discussions of oceanic literary works and analysis? These Asian and Pacific Islanders’ works should be on an equal footing with English-only works to better represent the reality that connects in “a sea of islands”. Hopefully this will be the next tide of the Pacific Islander and Asian American literatures that I would see in the coming future.

How to cite: Tam, Tin Yuet. “Connecting in a Sea of Islands: Erin Suzuki’s Ocean Passages.” Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, 2 Oct. 2024, chajournal.blog/2024/10/02/ocean-passages.

Tin Yuet Tam is a Hongkonger who writes about arts and culture. She has written critiques on performing arts in Chinese, for example, her theatre critiques can be found in Hong Kong Repertory Theatre’s Repazine. She has also been writing poetry, reviews, interviews, and essays in English. Tin Yuet’s poetry has been featured in Canto Cutie and Voice & Verse Poetry Magazine. When she is not writing, you might find her strolling along the streets for hours just to immerse herself in cities. She currently resides in Toronto, Canada. Find her work on Instagram: @walk_talk_chalk [All contributions by Tin Yuet Tam.]

---