a crack in the pavement
i often find
the beautiful
to be ugly
and the ugly
to be even
more ugly
it’s a sickness
i’m sure
but just like a
flower growing
in a crack in
the pavement
i’m sure there’s
one such person
out there for me
unless i look a
little closer and
realize that flower
is a fucking weed
Chosen
noun: immigrant; plural noun: immigrants
a person who comes to live permanently in a foreign country. (Google dictionary)
“Most don’t think of adoptees as immigrants. They don’t arrive by what we have come to believe are the current means of immigration. They are, after all, chosen.” –Sheryl J. Bize-Boutte
I vividly remember when I first saw her. I was seven and she was eight. Her yellow petticoated dress glowed amber in the sunlight behind her as though she had arrived on a sunbeam. Although the almost blinding light obscured her facial features, I could see that her dark straight hair was neatly parted down the middle, providing a pathway for the two thick long braids that lightly brushed her waist. But it was her welcoming smile that broke through all of that with a singular brightness of its own and captivated me immediately.
It was her first day in America. The unwanted child of a Japanese woman and an African American soldier, she had been among the countless babies who had been abandoned at orphanages in Japan after the war. Having no children of their own, my career Army godfather and godmother had adopted her on one of their many trips to Japan. By the time she and I would meet for the first time, her Japanese name had been erased and replaced with the name Cassandra.
As I moved closer to her to get a better look, her smile never wavered. She spoke little English at the time, but we did not need words. My godmother stepped in between us and handed each of us a small jewelry box. We simultaneously opened them to find matching rings she had purchased on a recent trip to Istanbul. Grinning, we each put on our rings and in that sunbathed impromptu ceremony we became sisters for life. On that day, it never occurred to me that this meeting and the rings had been in the planning stages for some time.
We spent our childhoods playing together whenever our parents visited each other. We missed each other when we were apart but had no control over our meeting frequency. Cassandra remained very much Japanese, quietly keeping her own counsel, while she slowly explored her African American heritage. Sometimes she would show me her photo album from the orphanage, full of the mixed race children that Japanese mothers did not want or could not keep. My godparents had chosen her out of all of those unwanted Amerasian children looking expectantly into the camera lens, with eyes full of hope and longing. I often found myself looking more at the beautiful Japanese clothing they wore to avoid those eyes. With the exception of showing me the album once in a while, Cassandra rarely spoke of her time in the orphanage or of her biological parents.
Much later I would learn that Cassandra had been born in Gifu City, Japan, known as the “crossroads of Japan” due to its location in the center of the country. It would be this central location that would cause Gifu City to be the target of relentless and heavy bombing during World War II. During the American “occupation” and reconstruction of Japan from1947 to 1952, thousands of mixed race children were born to U. S. servicemen and Japanese women. Cassandra was one of these children.
Some of the Japanese mothers simply left their mixed race, mainly African American-Japanese, or as they were called “hofu” children on the street. Many were taken to the Elizabeth Saunders Home, a Christian orphanage founded in 1948 by Miki Sawada and named for her major benefactor, Elizabeth Saunders. This orphanage specialized in the placement of unwanted African American-Japanese children with American families. The thought at the time was there was no possible way to assimilate these “hofu” children into Japanese society; they were simply not wanted. For Miki Sawada, that meant they had to be rescued and returned to their native land in America.
Although I don’t know whether Cassandra was a resident of the Elizabeth Saunders Home, I now think it is very likely she was, and I may have been looking at an album of pictures from that very orphanage on my visits with her. In that sea of smiling and longing faces, I may have been looking at a little girl who was then known by her Japanese name, Masako.
As we grew, we became solid “God sisters,” and as budding teenagers, spent countless hours steaming our faces with hot washcloths to banish breakouts. We used gallons of Noxzema and thought of it as a miracle cure. Even though I don’t remember it really doing much to banish the bumps, we reveled in the routine and the promises made on the jar. We always swore we looked better after one of our “treatments.” We had many sleepovers at her house; I don’t remember her ever coming to mine. That was fine with me. I did not want to share her with my four younger sisters anyway and besides, I got to be the little sister when I was with her.
We both met the loves of our lives in our late teens and made our entries into early womanhood during the Black Power movement of the 1970’s. Under strict parental orders to shun militancy, we were simultaneously frightened and enthralled by changes taking place and wore dashikis and black leather jackets to support the cause. With the danger infected courage of the Black Panthers, Angela Davis and Huey P. Newton in our surrounding atmosphere, I served as her matron of honor while my new husband played the conga drums at her African themed wedding.
She was the first to have a child and would have four to my one. We both would get college degrees: mine in English and hers in Child Development. With her degree in hand she started a daycare business called San’s Childcare. My then baby daughter would be among the first to receive the benefits of her loving care. She became my daughter’s second mother and instilled many valuable traits from infancy through early teenage years. When I was climbing the work ladder, it was Cassandra who supported me in teaching my daughter many things woman and many things strong. When I could not be there, Cassandra made sure that all was well at school, the homework was done, the scratched knee was bandaged and the meals were healthy. She was a precious gift sent to accompany me on that vital part of my motherhood journey. My daughter was a part of her family and we both knew we were blessed to be in her presence.
All too soon the children would grow up and Cassandra would decide to retire from the childcare business. The children she had taken under her wing had all arrived as infants and reached their preteen years at the same time. The time had come for them to leave the nest and fly on their own.
On one of my last trips to pick up my daughter, I encountered Cassandra and her husband on the sidewalk in front of their house. She was again back-lit by the bright sun and I could only see her outline, moving toward me with a slow and unfamiliar gait. As they got closer and her face came into view, I asked how they were doing. “OK, she said. I just have a little cancer.”
Matter of fact.
Just like that.
Everything stopped: The cars on the street were no longer moving; Charlie across the way was suspended halfway up his front stairs; the dogs next door ceased their incessant barking; everything but Cassandra fell away. She had to go in to the house and tell her children. I had to tell my daughter. I told her she would be all right and that I was there to do anything she wanted. She hugged me and without looking back, walked up the steps and through her front door. She and my unknowing daughter passed each other at the threshold and hugged each other tight as they said their goodbyes. I held my tears until I arrived at home.
Cassandra fought her disease with all of her might. When we would visit her in the hospital during and after her treatments, I would try my best to make her laugh. But soon it became clear that the treatments were not having the desired effect.
And so, in an effort to save her, her husband moved Cassandra and their family to his hometown of Nashville, Tennessee where the world-renowned cancer specialists at Vanderbilt University could treat her. Things would go from good to bad again and back for some time until bad stayed much too long.
In what would be my last conversation with her, with the sounds of her children in the background, and barely able to speak, she told me there had to be something she could do. That she did not want to just lie there and die. I told her how much she meant and would always mean to me, from the day I saw her in the sunlight with the long braids and the smile. Then we laughed and talked about Noxzema and dashikis and how we both still had our rings and about being true sisters. I thanked her for sharing her light and helping to make my daughter the beautiful loving person she had become. I told her I would always be there for her children as she had always been there for my child. She took a breath and I could hear through my own tears that she was crying as well. Then she said, “Thank you so much. You don’t know how much your words mean to me. I love you.” “I love you too, Cassandra, I said, and I will see you later.” Her last words before we hung up the phone, were, “I will see you later, too.”
Two days later, I received a tearful call from her youngest daughter. All she said was, “Mommy didn’t make it.” At the young age of 44, a loving wife, devoted mother and my treasured sister was gone.
As her children began to re-group and return to California, I have kept my promise to always be here for them. Although they are all grown up now with children of their own, and I don’t see them much, the bonds are strong and deeply rooted.
I think of my chosen sister often and miss her still. And each day, with the rising sun, little Masako continues to share her light with us all.
Copyright©2018 by Sheryl J. Bize-Boutte
Tire Pile
You really shouldn’t be a fledgling anything
after sixty, but you pass a burning tire pile
and that is it
late to the party is better than never
except there is no party
and many say there is no such thing
as Time either
which makes late as tough a sell
as early
while the schemers
scheme
and the hippies of Redwood
breastfeed Mars out
of war
and later at my place
you are no longer there,
not even in my thoughts:
one woman, eight candles, six bottles,
two glasses…
I am counting.
Are you going to have the bathroom?
I slur.
I’m going to the bathroom,
she says.
I don’t know if anyone can
have it.
ARDOR
A review by Christopher Bernard
Ava/Ada
Manual Cinema
Zellerbach Playhouse
March 16–18, 2018
Manual Cinema performs Ada/Ava Friday–Sunday, March 16–18, 2018 in the Zellerbach Playhouse. (Photo credit: Yi Zhao)
Chicago’s audacious theater company Manual Cinema has brought its hour of magic to Berkeley just past the ides of March this year, and if you have a theatrical bone in your body, you owe it to yourself to hie thee thither posthaste ere its pixie dust evaporates away into the memories of its enthusiasts.
The form Manual Cinema has created is as simple as it is imaginative: a hybrid of simple animation, Balinese shadow puppet play and live performance (including sound effects and music), using two screens and four overhead projectors, much like those many of us have all suffered through in high school classrooms and musty lecture halls, but with imagination and heart attached, like the balloon that haunts the show throughout.
The live performances make each performance unique and provide the same tension one feels watching a high-wire act: of course they won’t fall, but what if they do?
The story is of an admirable simplicity and originality: two ageing sisters, Ada and Ava—identical twins, as an array of old-fashioned oval-framed silhouettes adorning the walls of their home let us know in no uncertain terms—keep a lighthouse on a stormy coast, and one of them dies (no spoiler here, as the death occurs in the very opening).
The remaining sister has not only lost her oldest and closest companion, but in a sense has also lost her other self, and the rest of the story is what happens to her in her long journey to try to rejoin her sister, through memories of their growing up together, dream and nightmare, an unfinished chess game, and the haunting presence of a tall pier mirror that taunts the surviving sister with the image of her dead twin, which is, of course, her own.
We are told the story in a series of acetate and paper projections, thrown against a small screen at the back of the stage, as the performers work the models in full view of the audience onstage, with their backs to us.
The performers portraying the two sisters act out their scenes in front of that first screen. The shadows on the screen are then thrown onto a considerably larger one hanging high above the stage, and in mirror-reverse from the action seen on the first. That second screen, combining the projected images into one commanding image is what rivets the audience’s attention from first to last, though one can, at any moment, glance down to watch the “kitchen” where the febrile stew is being concocted.
The strongly convincing performers included Vanessa Valliere as Ada and Kara Davidson as Ava, as well as puppeteers Dru Dir (who directed and first explored the ideas that eventuated in the show), Sam Deutsch and Charlotte Long. The musicians, whose music subtly shaped the show’s emotional cast, were Michael Hilger, Kyle Verger and Quinn Tsan, who also performed the colorful and clever sound effects.
One thing about the names: one might be forgiven for thinking of the heroine of Vladimir Nabokov’s longest novel for “Ada,” or Ava Gardner for her twin. One might also think of “avian” for Ava, as in at least one scene, a bird appears above Ava’s grave. And of course, there are only two letters to add or change to go from either Ava or Ada to “alma,” the soul.
The show’s only weakness is its conclusion, where the authors are clearly unable to figure out how to end their story. The story’s logic sternly leads in one direction only, but they can’t quite muster the courage to go there, and so equivocate, sweetly enough if not entirely convincingly. But forgivably.
To say too much would be to spoil a show of such fine delicacy of spirit and subtle strength. Leave it at this: stormy nights and threatening seas, beautiful dreams and fearful nightmares, gaiety and deviltry, mischievous teapots and nagging clocks (one of them advertising the “Menaechmi Bros.”—from the Roman Plautus’s comedy about twins), fights between the sisters and a near drowning, a visit to a carnival and a visit to the regions of death, chess games and halls of mirrors, a lost balloon and a forever kept shell, skeletons and graveyards and spiral staircases, and the looming light of the lighthouse, twisting like an owl’s eye and forever threatening to go out for good, and the mystery of who one is, and the mystery of death, and the mystery of reconciling ourselves to the mysteries of life.
_____
Christopher Bernard is co-editor of the webzine Caveat Lector. His novel Voyage to a Phantom City came out in 2016; his second collection of poetry, Chien Lunatique, came out in 2017. His new novel (currently being serialized in Synchronized Chaos) will appear later this year.
Welcome to March 2018’s issue of Synchronized Chaos! In the tradition of Tolkien’s hobbits, we are reflecting upon journeys, heading ‘out there,’ observing and contemplating, then coming back again.
Patxi Perier contributes a photo essay cataloging various Basque deities and statuary that represents them, and Michael Onofrey shares an excerpt from his upcoming novel Bewilderment where travelers on bicycles first hear, then see, women in colorful saris working hard to beat rocks down to the correct size for construction. Michael Brownstein’s poetry provides glimpses of colorful landscapes, lush with food and color – but also a treacherous volcanic eruption. Joan Beebe evokes the majesty of a thunderstorm while John Chisoba Vincent creates a landscape of grief, poverty and violence set within Nigeria’s inner cities. Michael Robinson also shows the violence of African-American inner city life, yet illustrates his survival through the grace he found from the love of those, especially women, who gave him comfort.
Some pieces reflect states of being, slices of life, more so than actual physical places. Ryan Quinn Flanagan sent us vignettes with a bit of dry humor, into which he inserts the names of famous historical artists. Elizabeth Hughes, in her monthly Book Periscope column, reviews poet Linda Mangram’s title Poems for All Occasions, a collection of gentle, uplifting pieces, along with a dramatic horror piece, A Night’s Tale, by the author known as Coulter. And Michael Lee Johnson contributes quirky observations on life – character sketches of people and a horsefly who’s made his way into his room – through a variety of media.
Cattail Jester’s poetry deals with getting lost and finding one’s destination, while Mahbub probes the unseen frontier: near death experiences, as-yet-uncolonized Mars, the home of a nearby hen. Sravani reflects upon familial love, grief, and recovery, while Mary Burford laments the loss of trees cut for lumber. Jeff Bagato also describes reconnecting with nature in a tough-minded way, with the help of a few pirates who also uncover the wildness within our own natures.
Some writers work to intellectually make sense of life’s journeys. Chimezie Ihekuna, known as Mr. Ben in his homeland of Nigeria, compares the spread of ideas throughout societies to the motion predicted by Newton’s physical laws. Christopher Bernard provides a fresh installment of his serialized novella Amor I Kaos, which explores our human tendencies both towards connection, represented by romantic love, and towards isolating philosophical uncertainty.
Some authors probe the inherent tensions in our life’s travels and travails. Chimezie Ihekuna contributes poetry about our inertia as individuals and as a group, and the difficulty of changing ourselves, much less others. J.J. Campbell’s poems reveal his speakers’ cynicism, full of dark humor and religious doubt. J.D. DeHart offers up only one, tenuous piece on struggling with writers’ block and rejection, yet the poem gives us an unexpected creative twist at the end. Others find hope despite the confusion of our existence as well. Vijay Nair reviews Chimezie Ihekuna’s works in many genres, taking away that Chimezie believes that while we will experience hardship and failure, our lives are worth living anyway. J.D. DeHart also reviews Chimezie Ihekuna’s novella Santa in Two Worlds, and celebrates the poetic language and turns of phrase in this tale of crime, gang violence, and redemption.
THE GREAT GREEN TREES
Long lay the shadows
Beneath the greatest trees
Until a woodsman laid them low.
And oh, the years they had felt the sleet,
The bitter cold and the summers’ heat,
Had sheltered fowl, and man, and beast
Until the woodsman’s fatal blow!
Then, the earth reached out
and seemed to cry,
“Cover here, and hide the wounds
of the once great trees
That were sadly doomed.”
The rains fell, and the river flowed.
But oh, the years that it took to grow
The great green trees the axe laid low.
The birds, the wind, then did sow
Tiny seeds of other trees.
The rains fell, and the river flowed.
The sun shone, and the moon glowed.
But oh, the years that it takes to grow
More great trees for an axeman’s blow!
—MARY BURFORD