The two young women in this video by Yellow Rage have some of the sharpest tounges I have ever heard. Their words have your mind running a race, chasing and trying to hold onto every last word. Three minutes of poetry open your eyes to a world of people that are often left unseen and masked behind stereotypes, in the United States.
If you have read my BIO, you will know that I have some Asian ancestry. My grandmother was a Japanese orphaned woman who was forced to work in the Japanese steel yards of WWII; that is…if she wanted to eat. She married a man who was a member of the Yakuza–the Japanese Mafia, and they soon had a baby girl. My grandmother later divorced this mafioso, fearing all the illegal goings ons and violence surrounding her and their baby. A divorce in 1940′s Japan was not a common thing and only a strong woman could have come out of it on the right side.
She later went on to remarry to my grandfather, an American soldier, in the navy, overseas in Japan during the Korean War. Together they had two sons, one of which is my father. This is only a short history of the amazing woman whom is my grandmother. May she rest in peace.
When the young lady on the right, in the video below, states that it took her twenty years to perfect the language of her mother and grandmother, I can only stop to think of the lost language and attached culture that is a part of me. Recently I got in touch with my estranged aunt, my grandmother’s first born, who is the only full Japanese member in my family now, in an attempt to regain a bit of the culture that was lost with my grandmother’s death.
As I learn Spanish and Portuguese and the cultures of Latin America, I get a strange twinge that causes me to remember my own language–Japanese. This is the only language that can connect me directly to my ancestral roots. It is not a European language learned through the process of colonization, nor is it a language abolished in slavery like that of my African ancestors. It is whole, it is mine, and it is completely foreign to me. I hope, one day, to travel to Japan and East Asia, and visit my Grandmother’s birth town, with the language of her mother on my tongue.
Enjoy.
