Roland Barthes, by Roland Barthes

Here Barthes anticipates queer theory before the word “queer theory” ever came into existence. 

高橋睦郎の英訳の表紙（近刊）
ミネソタ大学出版部（2012年秋予定）

In fall 2012, University of Minnesota Press will be publishing two books by one of Japan’s most important poets, TAKAHASHI Mutsuo 高橋睦郎.  One is my translation of Twelve Views from the Distance 『十二の遠景』, a sumptuously beautiful book first published in 1970.  This book describes Takahashi’s troubled, impoverished early life in rural, southern Japan and the ways that his family’s fortunes intersected with the rise of the Japanese empire and World War II. Takahashi’s friend, the novelist MISHIMA Yukio 三島由紀夫, lauded the book with these words.  

It is magnificent that in this book, Twelve Views from the Distance, the poet Mutsuo Takahashi has managed to achieve firm prose that, while unmistakably the work of a poet, shines with a black luster much like a set of drawers crafted by a master of old. This book is a magnificent collection of sensations and of memories, much like the toys we might find in a dark closet.

The other forthcoming book by Takahashi is a reissue of Hiroaki Sato’s translation Poems of a Penisist, which brings together much of Takahashi’s most important early poetry, much of which deals with existentialist themes and homoerotic material.  This collection includes the long poem Ode (頌 Homeuta), which the publisher Winston Leyland has called “the great gay poem of the 20th century.” It is said that Allen Ginsberg was so impressed by this collection of poetry that he personally lobbied Lawrence Ferlinghetti at City Lights Books to publish more of Takahashi’s work. 

Gay rights are human rights!

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s Human Rights Day speech in Geneva left me with tears in my eyes.  Never have I heard such a strong official statement from the U.S. government about this issue.  I cannot help but feel like a new day is dawning on this critical struggle for dignity, a fight against ignorance, intolerance (often in the name of religion), and inequality.  Please watch this amazing speech. 

Here are some of the most powerful points. 

I want to talk about the work we have left to do to protect one group of people whose human rights are still denied in too many parts of the world today. In many ways, they are an invisible minority. They are arrested, beaten, terrorized, even executed. Many are treated with contempt and violence by their fellow citizens while authorities empowered to protect them look the other way or, too often, even join in the abuse. They are denied opportunities to work and learn, driven from their homes and countries, and forced to suppress or deny who they are to protect themselves from harm.

I am talking about gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people, human beings born free and given bestowed equality and dignity, who have a right to claim that, which is now one of the remaining human rights challenges of our time…

Some seem to believe it is a Western phenomenon, and therefore people outside the West have grounds to reject it. Well, in reality, gay people are born into and belong to every society in the world. They are all ages, all races, all faiths; they are doctors and teachers, farmers and bankers, soldiers and athletes; and whether we know it, or whether we acknowledge it, they are our family, our friends, and our neighbors.  Being gay is not a Western invention; it is a human reality…

Acting alone, minorities can never achieve the majorities necessary for political change. So when any part of humanity is sidelined, the rest of us cannot sit on the sidelines. Every time a barrier to progress has fallen, it has taken a cooperative effort from those on both sides of the barrier. In the fight for women’s rights, the support of men remains crucial. The fight for racial equality has relied on contributions from people of all races. Combating Islamaphobia or anti-Semitism is a task for people of all faiths. And the same is true with this struggle for equality…

And to people of all nations, I say supporting human rights is your responsibility too. The lives of gay people are shaped not only by laws, but by the treatment they receive every day from their families, from their neighbors. Eleanor Roosevelt, who did so much to advance human rights worldwide, said that these rights begin in the small places close to home – the streets where people live, the schools they attend, the factories, farms, and offices where they work. These places are your domain. The actions you take, the ideals that you advocate, can determine whether human rights flourish where you are.

And finally, to LGBT men and women worldwide, let me say this: Wherever you live and whatever the circumstances of your life, whether you are connected to a network of support or feel isolated and vulnerable, please know that you are not alone. People around the globe are working hard to support you and to bring an end to the injustices and dangers you face. That is certainly true for my country. And you have an ally in the United States of America and you have millions of friends among the American people.

XXY (2007)

This Argentine film, written and directed by Lucía Puenzo, is one of the most sensitive and lovely explorations of the intersex experience I have seen. This film does a beautiful job of showing the tremendous pressures and tensions that gender-related expectations place on people who do not fit ordinary categories of “male” and “female,” as well as their families.  At the same time, it also explores the power and drama of waking up to one’s own sexual desires, especially in non-heteronormative situations.

Incidentally, one out of 650 people usually classified as male at birth has “XXY syndrome” (also called Klinefelter’s syndrome), in which a person has chromosomes of both genders and may develop some secondary sexual characteristics usually associated with women.  (Consider those odds!  Most of us know enough people that the odds are we DO know someone in this situation, whether they have chosen to share this with us or not.)  Clearly, gender is not binary—i.e. we are not just male or female.  Society ought to challenge the assumptions, so prevalent in our language and our society, that there are only two, and those determine the ways that we should live and act.  Why do we need gender categories anyway? 

A few days ago, the blog Truck included two of my newest translations from Japanese, one by the female writer HIRATA Toshiko 平田俊子 and the other by the queer male writer TANAKA Atsusuke 田中宏輔.  This blog was started by Kate Schapira as a project to explore new contemporary poetry.  Each day, she included the writing of a contemporary poet whom she had not known when she started the project. 

The poems she selected to include on the blog are a super juxtposition, one wistful, one erotic, both full of longing and a desire to step away from daily experience. 

For the two poems, click here.
For more of my translations by Hirata Toshiko, click here.
For a video of Tanaka reading his work, click here.

Here is the contemporary queer poet TANAKA Atsusuke 田中宏輔 reading my translation of one of his poems, “Like a Fruit Floating on Water ” 「水面に浮かぶ果実のように」, which will soon be published in Collective Brightness: LGBTIQ Poets on Faith, Religion & Spirituality (Sibling Rivalry Press). The original Japanese poem appeared in Tanaka’s debut collection of poetry Pastiche (Kashinsha, 1993). 

Tanaka was born and raised in Kyoto, where he still lives and works as a high school mathematics teacher. In 1991, the prominent poet Ōoka Makoto 大岡信identified him in the journal Yuriika ユリイカas one of the important new poetic voices of his generation. Since then, Tanaka has published seven volumes of poetry in Japanese, including five volumes of his “The Wasteless Land” series.  

Click here for Tanaka’s Japanese-language webpage.

ISHIGURO Kenichirō 石黒賢一郎 (1967- )
For Ishiguro’s website and galleries, click here.

Ishiguro is a contemporary artist who works largely in large-scale paintings and pastels.  I first heard his name recently at an exhibition called “The Aesthetics of Existence” ｢存在の美学｣ at the Osaka branch of the Takashimaya Department Store.  Although some time has passed since the exhibition, his drawings have continued to haunt me. 

His paintings and drawings are lifelike to the point of being photographic, and since they are usually life size, they have a powerful sense of presence.  Among his most striking images are portraits of people wearing gas masks, some of whom are naked women.  In these images, he takes a symbol of modern murderous excess—an image that has special resonance in our era of fear of chemical weapons—into something fetishistic that incites curiosity, interest, and perhaps even desire on the part of the viewers. 

This is especially clear in the pastel drawing Sexual State Experiment 「性態実験」 which shows a nude woman standing in front of a gynological table and a board covered with gags, handcuffs, ropes, a flogger, and other SM gear.  While ostensibly, the painting depicts an experiments to test the naked woman in the image, it also tests us, as we gauge our reaction to the provocative image before us. 

At the same time, the people in the gas masks are also hiding, as if keeping safe from us and our scopophilic gaze by a barrier of anonymity.  What does it mean to have a self-portrait concealed in a gas mask as at the top of this posting?  The subject is reduced to a body that is seemingly vulnerable and endangered, yet its interiority is put off limits, resistant to interpretation and identification. 

Ultimately, I wonder if what we see in Ishiguro’s work isn’t really ourselves.  At the same time we gaze at the mask from the outside, we find ourselves imagining ourselves donning it from inside it as well.  At the same time we look, we are visually cut off from the face of the person inside, and that interruption just makes us think all the more about our own act of looking.