Multidimensional Silence, Spirituality, and the Japanese American Art of Gardening

Japanese American Artworks, such as origami, sculpture, painting, poetry, and music, are riddled with complex silences. Many Japanese American artists create silences to express experiences of being silenced by various forms of marginalization. In order to exercise agency within contexts of racism, some immerse themselves in an internal silence that allows them to focus on crafting the art. They also create art that communicates cultural and religious ways of being silent. As I discovered in interviews and site visits, these layers of silence are essential to Japanese American gardeners and the gardens they design.

This article examines three generations of Japanese American gardeners in the Central Coast of California. Political, discursive, and religious silences have been infused into this lineage’s silent practices of art as they negotiated economic marginalization and American Orientalism. A primary strategy to negotiate racism—called outward assimilation—was to transform religious resources within gardening to appear nonreligious; in recent decades, Asian Americans often accomplish this by identifying as “spiritual but not religious.” Together, multidimensional silence and spirituality are strategies of resistance that have sustained Japanese American gardeners through cycles of racism.

Introduction to Multidimensional Silence and a Lineage of Gardeners

Political, discursive, religious, and artistic silences fused within gardening to create multidimensional silences in response to a history of anti-Japanese racism. In order to understand multidimensional silence, it is helpful to compare it to common conceptions of silence. Silence according to a Western definition is the absence of sound, and in this sense is negative, deep, and dark. Asian American studies has typically utilized this definition because it matches the experience of having one’s political and subjective voice muffled and distorted; this applies to all Asian Americans and involves more layers for women and those of nonnormative sexualities. The preference for this definition can be traced to the historical roots of the Asian American movement in “breaking the silence” and “speaking truth to power” and the theoretical roots of Asian American studies in Marxist class analysis. Similarly, Asian American studies has addressed cultural tendencies to avoid discussing issues of sexuality and not to seek counseling and other mental health services.¹ Other Asian American silences have been traced to the legacy of colonialism—two exemplars of this critique are Gayatri Spivak’s essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?” and Edward Said’s Orientalism.² Generally, in this line of analysis, Asians are colonial subjects, and their voices are transformed through epistemic violence into colonial discourse, information to be ignored, or affirmations of the colonialist assumption that Asians have nothing to contribute to Western civilization. As Said expresses, “[I]n discussions of the Orient, the Orient is all absence.”³ In these ways, the definition of silence as the absence of speech has been useful to illustrate the lack of full civic inclusion and the muffled presence of Asian American voices, and to contest the stereotype of Asians as passive, inactive, diminutive, and (feebly) feminine—or in other words without power.

While this definition provides strong analyses of discourse and society, it tends to overlook other forms of silence that Asian Americans engage, and this has the potential to skew the image of Asian Americans toward the perfectly silent victim or the perpetually shouting protester. Literary scholar King-Kok Cheung articulated this dilemma in Articulate Silences, where she argued that “monocultural criteria of competence and even feminist antipathy toward silence may run roughshod over the sensibilities of some ethnic groups. While the importance of voice is indisputable, pronouncing silence as the converse of speech or as its subordinate can also be oppressively univocal.”⁴ To be clear, this is not to assert that Asian Americans are not silenced and that Asian Americans should not speak out regarding their oppression, but that focusing on either side of the binary of speaking or voicelessness overlooks many silences that Asian Americans utilize. For example, Asian Americans have cultural silences for deference and respect, and religious silences of meditation and of awe in the presence of the divine; these silences may be used to oppress, but not always.

In order...