Prose/Poetry Award—2011

Floyd Cheung (Chair), Sue Kim, Purvi Shah

Lee A. Tonouchi—Significant Moments in da Life of Oriental Faddah and Son: One Hawai’i Okinawan Journal. (Bess Press)

Tonouchi’s Significant Moments is a book of revelations. Here you will find historical lessons in slant—a common alienation from the ‘mainland’ for Okinawans and Hawaiians, internalized oppression of Okinawan women who no longer tattoo, the bias of school systems not educated to attend to and support the non-majority. Pitched against this expansive landscape, Tonouchi delves into the stories of his own family. In poems that take life’s tiny moments and thread the topography of history, politics, and cultures, Tonouchi not only offers us new possibilities for understanding human experience but expands the power of language through a breath-taking use of pidgin and marvelous narrative arc. The humor of Tonouchi’s pieces pulls you in—including his use of “Oriental” to describe his own father. But it is the poems’ evocations of poignant loss and heartbreak that keeps you reading—the passing of a beloved mother in a car crash, the heartbreak of not being close to one’s own father or fatherland and its history. Without you knowing it, these poems thread the space between what we laugh at and what we rue as well as what is and what is missing, making each crossing an act of knowing and unknowing, of being and non-being. In so doing, these poems add powerfully to the understanding of our Asian American communities and histories. But they do more: they contribute to our faith in the power of language to reveal new knowledge, to excavate histories and emotions so that we can better understand and navigate our present. After reading Tonouchi’s book, you will want others to chart such terrain too, see the expanse in and beyond this amazing work. For all these reasons, and more, Lee A. Tonouchi’s Significant Moments in da Life of Oriental Faddah and Son is the selection for this year’s AAAS poetry/prose book award.