Words Matter

Janice Mirikitani: Interview by Grace Kyungwon Hong

I first met Janice Mirikitani fifteen minutes before one of Glide Church’s Sunday Celebrations. Earlier that morning, the church’s choir director, who had been a close friend of Mirikitani and her husband, the Reverend Cecil Williams, had died of a sudden heart attack. Despite the terrible loss, Mirikitani graciously consented to do the interview as planned. She spoke candidly about her poetry, her activism, and how both contribute to her coming to terms with the sexual abuse she experienced as a child. An acclaimed poet, activist, and choreographer, president of the Glide Foundation and the director of programs at Glide Church/Urban, Mirikitani is known both for her gripping , politically charged poetry and for her activism in communities all over the Bay Area. She has published three books of poetry: Awake in the River (1978), Shedding Silence (1987), and We the Dangerous (1995). She has also been anthologized extensively. I was interested in interviewing Mirikitani because of the unique trajectory of her activism—from her involvement with the San Francisco State Third World 7 Janice Mirikitani Interview by G R A C E K Y U N G W O N H O N G Students’ Strike in 1968–1969 to her current work with Glide Church—which has informed her poetry. G K H Earlier, you showed me an article that dealt with the themes of sex and violence in your work. How does it affect you when a literary scholar writes on your poetry? J M It is very interesting to see somebody else’s impression of sex and violence as themes because you don’t know what the effect of your poetry is. Being a woman, and being a sexually abused woman in childhood, I think the issue of sexuality and the abuse of women sexually is an unspoken, uncharted area in many ways, especially among Asian Americans; it is a taboo issue. I was brought up to believe that, whenever you bring disgrace upon yourself, you disgrace your family. And so it’s kind of a triple, quadruple burden. For me as an Asian American woman, sexuality has been that arena in which we have been exploited. Whether it’s my own personal experience with my own sexuality as a young female being exploited by the adult males in my family, or whether it’s the (s)exploitation of women, specifically the exoticized stereotypes of Asian women in film and media, I would have to struggle against them all. That has been very much a part of my struggling to come to some form of authenticity and healing . That’s why sex and violence have such linkage in my poetry and my work. G K H Could you talk about how Glide affects your work, about how your role as an activist influences your role as a poet? J M Because I’m dealing with my own recovery issues related to sexual abuse in childhood, when I helped create the recovery programs for women, the emotional and transformational effect it had on me was quite phenomenal. No matter how much I tried, I could not escape behind the arrogance and the 124 Words Matter position of supremacy that we all at some time or another put ourselves into because we think that’s the way to escape our pain. And I couldn’t escape the pain. All my life, I’ve been trying to escape the pain, and I’ve found superficial ways to do it—building walls, going to school and being perfect and excelling in grades, and being the typical Asian model minority person, yet feeling terribly inauthentic, terribly unacceptable , terribly ugly, and not worthy at all. So half of my life, which was spent trying to be white and be accepted by white society, was such a futile act. I went through my revolt period, which was the affirmation of myself as an Asian American, and that was a landmark situation for me. But, in the last three to five years, I’ve been dealing with my own recovery. When I say recovery, I’m not talking about substances or chemicals as much as I am talking about that addiction to my pain and to my powerlessness and my search constantly to control those factors that would not allow me to experience life fully. Cecil started the recovery programs five years ago for men and...