Post Project: Reflections by Gregory Wada

Group: Eating Bitter, Tasting Sweet, facilitated by Tiffany Tamaribuchi
By: Gregory Wada - Davis, California, U.S.A.

Close your eyes and imagine: the first experience you had with racism and the most recent one. Tiffany sensei asked us to reflect on this, and we shared our stories before she asked us to stand and focus our mind inward to the places in the body where we carried that pain. The stomach? Chest? Shoulders? Head? For a medium of music and movement, could we play from the places where these embodied memories flow? How, as artists and performers, could we access these places? As we grounded our energy and moved as if to strike the drum, I felt a thread of a story weaving through my memories and connecting me to the present.  

 Take that pain, wherever you have found it, and release from your body. Like molecules emitting from you out into the air. Let it flow from where it is trapped and built up and out into the world. 

 I look beyond the mountains to the east of the valley, just a bit beyond my childhood home in Utah. I imagine a dark cloud that has been inside me floating away, out beyond the baby blue horizon and the peaks of last refuge for spring snow. The sight of those mountains always brought me joy and relief. It was in those foothills and canyons where I would rush off to after school, often by myself, much to my mother’s worry. “It would be safer if you went with someone.” But sometimes that’s precisely where I would want to be, away from everyone. Besides, I suffered more by the hands of humans than the claws of the mountain lion or the fang of the rattlesnake. And at least, perhaps, there would be some sort of sense in that sort of violence.  

 “Stop it right now! Or. Or. I’ll tell the bishop!” The fistfuls of icy snow stopped hammering into my face and the weight came off my chest. The older boys had run off by the time I could see. The rescuers were two friends in my grade. Like them, there were plenty of good people back home and I remember them much more than the bad, but even so it was clear to me that I existed outside their jurisprudence. Their path took them to the same congregation, to receive promises of the same salvation and have their conflicts resolved by their elders. In fact, these same good people would try to convert me at various times, firm in their belief that my only chance was to see things their way. But my path went home alone, red dots speckled in the white snow.

 Often, the bits and pieces of the puzzle are too zoomed in to attribute to the bigger picture. Yeah, it could be about race or religion, or it could be a bird or an elephant. The rock to our window, the smashed mailbox. “That’s just teenagers,” Dad said when he fixed it. But on holidays, the Boy Scouts put American flags in everyone’s lawn but ours, at least at first, until Mom paid for their fundraiser. 

 Other times, the picture is a bit clearer. It’s not always overtly malicious, and it’s usually disguised as humor. It’s the stuff of sitcoms with all white writers. I can look back and laugh a bit at the antics, though maybe for different reasons than the audience, and still cry a bit inside.  

Scene: cluttered file cases and loose papers fill the high school debate room.
Chad: “Hey, do you, like, know martial arts?”
Hiro (overtly sarcastic): “Of course, this move is Copy the Papers -”
Chad kicks Hiro square in the chest, sending him flying out the door and papers everywhere.
Chad: “Thank you for the lesson, sifu.”
Chad puts his hands together and bows from the waist. 

Looking back, I think it was my high school debate team that harbored the type of racism that affected me the most. It was an ironic kind of racism, but one that ultimately had the same effect. Comments like “how are the rice paddies doing?” or “can you fix my camera?” were intended, I think, to poke fun of racism itself. I think it was always in quotation marks. Like they were acting out a caricature of a racist to make some performative critique about structural inequality. But I think we were all kids, and we got bested by racism itself. The debate club was both much more diverse than the student body and intellectually grounded in critical theory. But we were somehow corrupted just the same, and our knives were just a bit sharper. Many of the students of color even joined in the self-deprecating humor, referring to themselves as “terrorists” at least in character, acting out some voice that we were just expected to know in the post nine-eleven American ethos. And though they made fun of the voice, they still spoke for it, furthering its ever-presence in our lives. Everyone was a Steven Colbert, and their names and characters became synonymous.

 It's terrifying how this voice gets inside. I think this is something we do naturally as humans. (I should mention that my journey has taken me to study anthropology, and as such I am obligated to preface the following as conjecture, not grounded study.) I wonder if the evolutionary basis for hearing the voices of the dominant culture lies in the human adaptation for extreme sociality, which is perhaps the principal architect of human cognition. The problem of managing social capital is one which grows exponentially with nodes in a network. We must be aware of our relationship to others and others’ relationship to others. We may need to hold a plurality of views at once to be aware of the dynamics of our social environment. We may be predisposed to hear voices that are not necessarily our own, be it the voice of our compatriots, rivals, group consensus, or gods.

 I don’t talk about this part of my history much, but I struggled with these voices when I was young. The voices of other kids tormenting me became my own, a private one-person show that I couldn’t escape. “You’re going to hell” it would mock. “There’s not a hell!” I would argue. “With the devil,” it would say. “There is no devil! That’s stupid.” I argued. “No, you are the devil,” it said. I didn’t know how to answer that one. But one time I just started hitting my head trying to get it to stop. My parents must have heard, and came to stop me. This is one of my most traumatic memories, of my own fists, not in fact the fists of the older boys. When the world as-it-is gets enculturated into the minds of children, they began to enact old violence on each other and on themselves. That voice didn’t come from nowhere, it traveled like electricity through the network of relationships that govern our social reality. To someone, I was less than human or a soul on a separate track headed to an unworthy hereafter. The violence embedded in those ideas, institutionalized over the course of our history, hurt so many people in so many ways. 

 Our political discourse is so steeped in hyperbole that it’s easy to not give a second thought to many of the things people say. For example, after the election of Barack Obama, elements of the religious right would refer to him as the antichrist. Is it intended hyperbole? Metaphor? A joke? Perhaps it doesn’t make a difference; they are fruit of the same seed. They draw their power from a promise of white, Christian hegemony; their voices terse and urgent as a dictator who fears the slightest question of their limitless power. And yet these are not monarchs. Many of them barely eke out a living in the economic backwaters of a changing world, but yet they are perfectly functioning parts in the mechanism of institutionalized hierarchy. To some degree, willing or not, we are all spun about by and as gears of this mechanism. The question we come to reflect on in this time is just how willing we are to be spun about, and if we’re willing to work together to stop its motion, bit by bit, until we can dismantle the machinery altogether. 

 As I grew, I learned to stop enacting physical violence on myself. I switched from hitting to quietly biting a finger, where large composite scars still exist today. And from there, visualization; I would imagine all the negative energy leaving my body like a great cloud blowing away beyond the mountains. In time, even that exercise became more subtle, autonomic, until it was something of the past. I think, though the circumstances may be different, this is something to which many of us who carry pain can relate. Through our journey we learn to become comfortable in our own bodies. 

 And from there, after stopping our own violence against ourselves, it seems a natural next step to seek to end it for others and the world around us. For me, I think it may be the same journey. In my final years in Utah, I led two protests against the high school administration, one about the racist portrayal of Native Americans in a school assembly and the other about a detention policy that was disproportionately effecting Latinx students. The organizing was unrefined at best and without a model for self-organizing (there were not ethnic affiliation clubs at my high school), but I think the need to do something came from an intimacy with my own pain.

 In college, I found a strange world where I wasn’t perpetually perceived as an outsider. I started playing taiko and was involved with our campus’s Nikkei organization, which got me involved with the community organizers in the Sacramento Area, which led us to play taiko more venues and get involved with more community work. We drummed, but we also did event setup and takedown, worked food booths and kitchen lines, listened to speakers and talked with people in the community. We started turning down some gigs when we felt our display would be more problematic than good. We started our own festival to share the taiko we wanted to with our community, feature other artists from diverse communities, and raise money and awareness for social justice causes that are important to us. And there was something about the ethos of taiko that resonated deep within me in a way that I can’t really distinguish from activism – you drum until you don’t have anything left and then you just keep drumming! Our friendships and experiences were even stronger through the shared suffering of being student performers, student activists. It was eating bitter and tasting sweet.

 Find that pain in your body, and release it into the world. Fill the space with it. Find the power in it. Know that it also makes you who you are, strong and beautiful. 

 You know, I wouldn’t change my past. To trade in that desert exile for something more comfortable. I sometimes yearn for the rugged mountains of Utah. Looking back is actually a fond memory, the pain and the pleasure, and I find strength in it. Whatever power might lie in this story or the lessons it has taught me, I hope I can make the world better for those who walk it next. And, similarly, how can I look back fondly at the suffering of yesterday and not see parallel lessons for today? 

 I think this quiet of the COVID summer, as our community pulls together to reflect and support, challenge and heal, we can find strength in our shared suffering, too. This was not apparent to me at first. I was in a place where taiko had been constant action – practice, performance, fixing equipment, making drums. But COVID wiped our calendar of our festival, two separate Manzanar trips, a remembrance for the 75thanniversary of the atomic bombs, and the Obon season. Just a bit before the pandemic, we had performed in protest of ICE detention and we were gearing up for more direct action. This was the taiko I wanted to be playing! Fearsome in the face of obstacles, the scowling form of a Bodhisattva. 

 Just when it seems we’d found the rhythm, we have to begin and learn again. We won’t be back again in the Fall. Online organizing has its limitations, and I think our members are burnt out from video calls. The pacing is all off time – conversation, practice, performance, movement, connection, context. But in this new time signature, we’ve also become accustomed to virtual events, and we’re able to come together as a larger community in new ways and learn from each other. In this new light, we might not recognize ourselves or our community, even. But perhaps taiko has already given us a tool for this – a beginner’s mind and the will to drum until you can’t and then just keep drumming. 

 I think we will rise to meet this challenge. I think this is our moment to think critically and specifically about the features of our artistry, practices, and communities that can be vehicles for antiracist transformations. I think we can evaluate the context in which we play and why we play taiko. I think at the heart of this may be some difficult conversations. In collegiate taiko, but beyond as well, there is some level of evangelicalism for taiko as just something you should do and know about because it is cool and fun. “Try out taiko! No experience necessary!” There is probably also a market incentive for this attitude as well as some externalities, positive or negative, for workers who rely on taiko for income in some form. But is there something about playing taiko in the U.S. or in other contexts that is itself a performed act of resistance, embodied memory, or inalienable heritage? Are we trying to awaken to become the Ben and Jerry’s of percussion, or is there something else about taiko that we are trying to understand, something that ties us inextricably to the struggle for Black liberation? 

 Tiffany-sensei’s workshop and the whole Re-imagining series was inspirational. And I’m not someone who really professes things to be great or amazing or inspirational, especially right away. But I know this workshop was something meaningful because I find myself thinking of it a lot, a reference point for moving forward. Perhaps it was even a bit of encouragement or inspiration to sit down and write something that’s been stirring inside for a while but I didn’t know how to get out. A week or so after the series, it crystalized and I composed a new piece, Shishiku (Lion Roar), a reflection on Buddhist themes and a call for action for the liberation of all beings. 

 Our workshop group focused on artistic development from introspection of our personal experiences, but it also promoted discourse and sharing of our experiences with each other, which is not so different from what we try to do with art. For me, it was a very useful merger between learning and talking about injustice and thinking about how we might employ that as artists. I am deeply grateful for Tiffany-sensei’s time, Unit Souzou, and all the organizers, presenters, and attendees for making this event possible. I look forward to the world we can build together.