NAOMI CARR
Late-Spring-Dying
It started with the war…
No, no, that’s too precise.
* * *
I. Shame (noun):
the moment of awareness that you are part of a nation’s history
* * *
The last time I went to Lahaina was to confess I like my English tongue. I was condemned to three generations of illiteracy in my family’s temple.
* * *
Child
of the child
of locals, of the children of
plantation laborers. I’ve never met another like
me. Who does not know how to cut a pineapple correctly,
to salvage every part of a yellow mother tongue
my mother does not speak.
* * *
Lahaina, Maui: Tourist hellscape. Capitalist paradise. Paradox. More homeland than the mainland. Than Japan.
* * *
Inheritance is complicated on the tongue. Unrequited love tastes bittersweet when generations have sown both pineapple and sugar cane into the ground that shuns us.
* * *
At the temple, I read with my hands. Fingers flirt with stone’s judgment. Cropped nails caress the trenches of Japanese inscriptions. Something sacred, spoiled under mainland hapa hands.
* * *
Last night, my mother admitted for the first time that there’s a reason my family doesn’t speak Japanese.
* * *
The war, right?
* * *
My grandma taught me to play koi-koi with imported hanafuda cards the day after her brother’s funeral. A post-cremation matching game.
Flowers don’t wither with the deceased when printed on card tiles. Old traditions die hard.
* * *
An abandoned Lahaina home both presents and works against
grief.
Ruptured water heater, rusted shower pipes, undusted silverware, soggy ceiling. Why do I grieve the ceiling most of all.
* * *
Hanafuda: 花札, flower cards, cultural surrogate. How pathetic it is to call these cards culture.
* * *
It was the—yes.
* * *
II. Shame (solitary):
your silence when asked to translate something to Japanese
* * *
Maybe I should not expect familiarity with the waves of Japanese migration, as if the push and pull factors of relocation were innate like the predictability of the tide. Consider, for a moment, the Meiji Restoration as the moon, great conductor of pacific movement.
But white tourists’ selfies with Buddha at the temple tell me I’m a fool for expecting anything at all. What did my family finance if not an exotic background for Instagram stories.
* * *
If these cards were less fragile,
I’d build a house of Hanafuda,
eat blossoms for breakfast, sip
nectar from the bathroom sink. Watch walls
plastered with mountainside
move in moonlight.
Dance and dance despite nothing
* * *
This isn’t a poem about cards.
* * *
Did you know the exact amount of time it takes for someone to realize you’re illiterate Slash
Entirely White (Washed) is about five point four seconds?
* * *
An immigrant story is an imperialism story is an American story is a war story is a love story is a loss story is a bomb story is a hate story is a resilience story is a Japanese dash Hawaiian slash plantation dash era story.
* * *
What do you mean no? You don’t speak any at a—
No. No I don’t.
* * *
There must have been a moment, at the beginning, where we could have said—no.1 Where we could have dug our feet into the dirt and clung to the roots of our heritage. Could have caught their words between our teeth, spit them back at the Americanizers. What a beautiful would-be pidgin retort.
But somehow, we missed it.
* * *
III. Shame (ineffable):
the inability to escape the consequences of choices you didn’t make.
* * *
How many times must I apologize at the island cemetery, to unmake myself your collateral damage, pink carnations in hand
* * *
Often, I wonder what
my family would think
of me. Short hair stained red,
illiterate. Atheist.
Hapa too mixed to be halves.
Hula dancer.
* * *
I want to crack open sugar cane with my teeth to taste the sweetness of urban sprawl. I have not my mother’s teeth, nor the tongue she does not speak. I’ve never liked sugar cane anyway.
* * *
If these cards were less fragile, I’d teach my children
their language. Raise them between beaches
in a Lahaina home, Watch a mother tongue
bloom from the windowsill
For just five seconds
* * *
How can I console your ashes for never retrieving what you cast off
* * *
If this feeling were tangible,
I’d translate it to Japanese—
But I can’t, not yet. Because
I’m alone tonight,
throwing cards at the ceiling,
trying to trace the origin of loss
between the act of falling
and the floor.
1 From Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, Tom Stoppard
Steps to Deriving Human Nature
1. I put a cat in a box once. But only once. It was my cat, and it was already dead by the time I put it in the box. I know that much.
2. Thomas Hobbes defined the state of nature, or man’s state preceding government, as “nasty, brutish, and short.” Or rather, a sad title for a sex tape.
3. I developed an allergy to cats shortly after my cat died. It took six months for swollen hives to replace grief. Sometimes, loss is uncomplicated. It was alive, then it was in a box—dead.
4. I imagine Hobbes at a wooden desk by candlelight writing Leviathan, jaded after years around political power. Not one of the nobility, but close enough.
5. My cat lived for approximately seven years—five with me, two as a shelter cat. I cannot draw conclusions about my cat’s life before I adopted it.
6. After Hobbes comes Locke—the worst of all. Ethnocentric hypocrite with the inability to construct a cohesive argument. I bet it’d blow his mind to know not all revolutions were like 1689.
7. The thing about cats is that they’re not always there, even if they are. Curled in the kitchen sink, perched on a dining room chair, asleep on the bed—out of sight, out of mind.
8. Locke said we should tolerate everyone except for atheists and Catholics. To them, the best we could afford was silent disapproval and condemnation if they ever asserted their beliefs.
9. I don’t have conclusive evidence that my cat existed before death. It had a name and a color. But Rawls says none of those are qualifications for existence.
10. An open letter to atheists: stay in the Closet. Love, John Locke
11. The thing about cats is that they’re never there, until they are. Rummaging through the house at an ungodly hour, running up the chimney at the first sight of company, out the door into the pouring rain to play among leeches and mud. Seven-pound house cat or sleeping beast. Sexuality sometimes feels like this.
12. Some say I’m too floaty, that I only talk about politics and philosophy apart from real life. Maybe they’re right. I like to think that political power is consent—not money or military force or Machiavellian virtù.
13. If my cat died, its existence must have preceded death. I watched my cat die, so my cat must have existed.
14. Perhaps there are as many ways to die as there are to live.
15. In his 1765 Commentaries on the Laws of England, William Blackstone affirmed Locke’s idea of civil death. If a monk cuts ties with all social institutions, if he abandons association with others and heads for the mountains, he is dead to society. Death without death.
16. This is all to say that my cat wasn’t Schrödinger’s Cat. My cat actually had a name, and people knew it. My cat had already died of cancer and a euthanasia cocktail by the time I put her in a box. Therefore, I can know for certain the state of my cat in the box. Maybe this is the only thing I can be certain of.
17. Rousseau defined the state of nature as the Garden of Eden. He said humans once lived in a perfect state of solitary authenticity, away from the corruption of society. Because we left that ideal state, there’s no going back.
18. The thing about cats is that they’re different from humans. They’re willfully independent, gracefully self-sufficient. Perhaps we need them more than they need us.
19. Like Paine, Rousseau saw government as a necessary evil. How do we make the best out of a shitty situation? Construct a government based on consent and the general will. The social contract is our only option. What else is there to do?
20. Cats live in a perfect state of freedom.
21. Philosophy will always be a mistranslation of real life. The jump between theoretical and practical is too large for the confines of language.
22. Any syllogism to derive human nature is ultimately fallible.
Major premise: Humans are not like cats.
Minor premise: Cats are in a perfect state of freedom.
Conclusion: Humans are not in a perfect state of freedom. Therefore, Locke’s conclusion
in Second Treatise is false.
23. In any natural rights version of the social contract, man trades unlimited freedom for the protection of his rights under a government. Without any laws, man’s liberty in the state of nature is only unlimited until somebody kills him. Life is no guarantee.
24. In Philosophy of History, Hegel reasoned that human nature is what it has always been. The state of nature is just a methodological abstraction, a pure hypothetical—not historical fact.
25. Sometimes, there’s no use in being poetic about philosophy’s imperfect applications. Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau—they were all wrong.
26. The state of nature is like Schrödinger’s Cat. Without the experience of living outside society and government—without opening the box to see the state of the cat for ourselves—the state of nature can be anything. It could be Hobbes’s warlike state, Rousseau’s paradise, or Locke’s version of something inconvenient but tolerable. It’s nothing more than a construct of our minds.
27. Humans are different from house cats in that our sociality is inevitable. Hooker, Hume, Plato, Aristotle—they all said this. I’m not sure why natural rights philosophers didn’t listen.
28. I’ve tried to be a cat for most of my life. My inhuman insistence on independence tells me I would have thrived in Rousseau’s state of nature.
29. According to Michael J. Sandel, the problem with Kantian liberalism is this: nobody is a perfect end in herself. At some point, I will become a means to an end. This is inevitable.
30. My go-to case law citation is Bowers v. Hardwick (1986). It’s about a Georgia anti-sodomy law that was upheld in a 5-4 decision. (I maintain that caring about your neighbor’s sex life is a little gay.)
31. To avoid being a means to an end, I’d have to forge a family by choice rather than by blood. I think about this often.
32. My dad’s perception of me is the Rousseauian state of nature: attractive for intelligence—not looks,—prude, straight, abstinent until marriage, mother of his biological grandchildren.
33. In his Bowers concurrence, Chief Justice Warren Burger cited Chapter 15 of Blackstone’s Commentaries. As the most egregious crime against nature, homosexual sodomy was punishable by death under English common law. Because America is founded on this common law tradition, the Georgia statute should be upheld.
34. If the Closet is a Hobbesian “war of all against all,” do I have to fight all of you?
35. The judiciary has two jobs. It’s supposed to be a reactionary branch, and as Hamilton claims in Federalist 78, the Court’s supposed to uphold minority rights.
36. Allow me to simplify Justice Burger’s argument: anti-gay sentiment is “deeply rooted in our nation’s history and traditions,” so out of respect for our nation’s history, gay people shouldn’t have rights.
37. My dad has a theory about the unmarried women in my family being secretly gay. I see little difference between his hypotheticals and Locke’s ruminations on the state of nature. It’s all a mental exercise without evidence. He’ll never really know.
38. Bowers is fascinating because the Court was neither reactionary nor the protector of minority rights. We had outgrown English common law. Our conceptions of acceptable human behavior had changed. But history never changes. This is the flaw of judging the ever-changing present by a stagnant past.
39. I was fourteen the first time I realized I wouldn’t be able to come out to my dad. I was dating a boy at the time. There was no possibility of me being gay, but I learned I couldn’t be gay before the possibility of being gay dawned on me.
40. Call it stare decisis, call it homophobia, call it whatever you want.
41. My second-favorite court case is Boy Scouts v. Dale (2000), in which the Court upheld an assistant Scoutmaster expulsion for being gay. I referenced this case the last time I tried to come out to my dad.
42. My dad uses an imperfect syllogism to define the cause of homosexuality:
Major premise: Anastasia’s dad was negligent. (I fear I may be a bad dad.)
Minor premise: Anastasia is an unmarried woman in her fifties, and therefore, is gay.
(Your lack of boyfriends is worrisome. I hope you are not gay.)
Conclusion: Bad parenting causes homosexuality. (If you are gay, it’s because I am a bad dad.)
43. I don’t know how many times I’ve tried to derive gay rights. Sure, there are amendments and court precedents. But if, like Locke and Hobbes say, the commonwealth is founded for self-preservation and societal reproduction, gay people are antithetical to the common good.
44. Rousseau is the least wrong about the state of nature. Coming out is a necessary evil. Being out will be less perfect than the Closet, but it’s the only way to have any sort of freedom.
45. I wonder if this is how Schrödinger’s Cat felt—to know everyone on the outside is making assumptions about your existence, to know only you can provide the answer.
46. The Closet is like Blackstone’s civil death—you aren’t technically dead, but you can’t fully associate with others. Is that not the point of society?
47. “Gay people are allowed in Boy Scouts now, right?”
“I’m sure they’ve always been in it but weren’t open about it. They were probably the ones molesting kids.”
48. The Closet is like Schrödinger’s Cat, which is like the state of nature. The nature of man can be good or evil, the cat can be alive or dead. I can be straight, I can be straight-passing, I don’t have to be a molester. I can be whatever I wish to be. I don’t have to exist as I am.
49. My dad is more optimistic about the future of gay rights than I am. This should not be surprising.
50. If leaving the Closet is inevitable, a social contract is the best I can do.
51. I didn’t come out to my dad when I asked about gay people in Boy Scouts. I cried in the kitchen for an hour instead, trying to trace the scientific basis of homosexuality.
52. To my dad, gay marriage is a parasite we can’t seem to shake. It’s a construct of modern society. There’s no scientific basis to it, and it shouldn’t exist, but it’s here to stay.
53. The thing about queer people is that we probably shouldn’t exist. By most facts of science, we wouldn’t survive in the state of nature. But by most facts of history, if we accept Rousseau’s state of nature as a misappropriation of indigenous life, at least we were loved in the state of nature.
54. The thing about the Closet is that nobody can truly know me. I am only a construct of people’s minds, a subject of speculation. I am whatever I wish to be, but I also become whatever others wish I be.
55. Perhaps the most defining characteristic of humans is that we’re social. I’ve thought and thought and thought again about how to unmake myself my father’s daughter. But sometimes, despite my critics, I am a practical person. I need my dad, even if he disapproves of my being gay or wishes to change it.
56. In my version of the social contract, I relinquish my existence as Schrodinger’s Cat. I give up my dad’s idealistic version of me, so he can see me as an anomaly of science, a potential molester, a result of his bad parenting, a human being with the capacity to love. In exchange, I gain the freedom to define myself. To associate with others. To own as many hairless cats as I want with my partner of my choosing. To know for certain that I exist.
Naomi Carr is a high school senior and an alumna of the Kenyon Review Young Writers Workshop. She has found a home in creative nonfiction although she dabbles in poetry. Her work has been recognized by Ringling College, Columbia College Chicago, Susquehanna University, the Alliance for Young Artists & Writers, and the Bay Area Creative Foundation. You can read her work in Blue Marble Review, Sepia, National Poetry Quarterly, Vagabond City, and elsewhere.