Powell Street Festival back for a 41st year
Celebration of Japanese culture will include a performance and panel featuring B.C. author Joy Kogawa
The Powell Street Festival is returning for its 41st year with another selection of Japanese arts programming.
The festival, which is the longest running community arts festival in the city, will host over a dozen local and international performers at various parks and venues in downtown Vancouver.
Heading the out-of-town talent on the music side of things is musical duo George & Noriko, a blues-playing cowboy and a Tsugaru player from Melbourne, Australia, Japan’s traditional wind and string group Ensemble Liberta and the taiko drum group Jodaiko from the University of California, Irvine.
Another highlight of the festival will be a performance by Soramaru Takayama and Joy Kogawa. Yes, you read that right: Acclaimed author of the much-loved novel about Japanese internment Obasan, Kogawa will be taking to the stage for A Suitcase Full of Memories, a theatrical live poetry performance inspired by her latest novel, Gently to Nagasaki.
Kogawa will also be part of the Internment as Art panel along with Jay Rubin, Yoshie Bancroft, Matt Miwa and host Sally Ito. Now 75 years since the internment of ethnic Japanese in North America, the question put forth to the panel is how that event may have shaped the artists looking at this time in history.
We talked to Kogawa and asked the member of the Order of Canada a few questions:
Q: At the Powell Street Festival, you are doing something called a live theatrical poetry performance. What is that?
A: What happened was Soramaru Takayama put together a kind of skit, a little play, around my words. It’s a lot of fun. I’d rather do this than write. It is so much easier. Not that I’m a performer — I’m not — but talking is fairly natural. Readings can be extremely boring. This gives another dimension to it and this makes it a little bit more theatrical, I think. Getting an idea across visually and theatrically is a lot more fun than just listening to a boring reading, I feel.
Takayama was inspired to create the live performance based on your latest novel. Your children’s book Naomi’s Road was turned into an opera and toured North America successfully. Poems have become songs. Do you have any concerns when it comes to interpretations of your work?
I don’t care. I feel ownership … I really don’t think much of ownership altogether. I wish we didn’t have this system where we had to get paid for things. I wish we could just do things because we want to do them, whatever they are. I think we would be a lot happier if we could do that. So I feel extremely lucky that people want to do different things. Do you separate the poem writing from the prose writing when working?
I am not conscious of doing anything in particular. If a phrase comes, it comes. If it doesn’t, it doesn’t. It just goes back and forth. Whatever it is, it is. Whatever it gets called, it gets called.
You wrote Obasan 36 years ago. Does it surprise you that it still resonates with people and is taught in schools?
I am very happy it is like that. I find it hard to believe sometimes. It continually surprises me that people have that reaction to it.
It’s been 75 years since the Japanese internment. How do you feel today?
I have thought in many ways that I have got over it and moved on with my life, but I think it is all still there, all the feelings. There are so many of them — so many incidents, so many moments during childhood and the formation of identity where there was such condescension, scorn and so on and so on, and all those things build up. I think racism is a deeply damaging thing to people.
How do you feel about the shift toward populism and nativism that seems to be happening in some parts of Europe and right next door to us?
It astonishes me how soon we are able to forget and how our hearts are so uneducated by the unbelievable things we’ve been through in the last century, how people’s self-interest is so powerful, and I dread the kind of climate change issues that are on the way and the amount of suffering there will be from that and the amount of xenophobia that will be arising.
I have been thinking about philoxenia — it’s a Greek word that means love of strangers. I think we need that more than we need the word xenophobia. We’ve got so much of that. We need to counteract that in whatever ways we can.
How does it feel to be at the Powell Street Festival and be feted as a famous Japanese artist?
I think I will be standing beside myself a lot. When people don’t know you and only know you publicly and they talk about you, well, I’m there going, ‘Who is that?’ So yes, I feel I will be standing beside myself.
Your family home in Marpole (Kogawa and family lived in the house until 1942, when they were sent to an internment camp with thousands of other Japanese-Canadians) is now known as Kogawa House and is preserved and used for author residencies and literary events. What does that mean to you?
I’m very grateful for that. I am grateful for the people that run it and make it alive and that it’s there. My life is one of huge gratitude these days.