The use of the discursive personae may allow a poet to grapple with the enormity of human tragedy and folly. Such is the case for two new collections whose visionary narratives add depth to the stories behind historic figures and events. Lee Ann Roripaugh’s inventive Tsunami vs. the Fukushima 50 illuminates the aftermath of the 2011 Tohoku earthquake. The tsunami that followed caused a system failure at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, exposing hundreds of Japanese citizens to radiation. LeAnne Howe’s Savage Conversations is a daring verse play that deals with the madness of Mary Todd Lincoln, committed to a psychiatric ward one decade after President Lincoln’s assassination in 1865.
Kaiju, the monster movie genre, became an instant sensation with the worldwide release of Godzilla in 1954. Film scholars note how the appeal to the Japanese public in particular was found in the film’s connection to atomic weaponry, a painful reminder of the nation’s inevitable surrender in 1945 after the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Godzilla and the series of mutant antagonists that followed embodied an anxiety triggered by the atomic age. Roripaugh invokes a few of these unlikely matinee idols (besides Godzilla, Mothra and Gidora make brief appearances), but it’s the Tsunami herself who gets introduced by a finger-snapping, quick-witted speaker: “she goes by no name// call her annihilatrix // call her tabula rasa // she’s the magic slate’s / crackling cellophane page.”
Tsunami is all-consuming and cannot be restrained, but the speaker’s humorous and spirited language allows the tidal wave to fall under creative control on the page, if only temporarily, just as the movie monsters were dramatized and directed for the screen. To that end, the speaker describes Tsunami as an emo, Kwannon (Revanche) the X-Men character, and a narcissist:
she’s a mega-tsunami of pure hubris
cross-dressed in high femme
splashy / shiny / crystalline
all liquid curve and fluid light
with her Hello Kitty barrettes
pink glitter ribbons furbelowing
all that snaky girlzilla hair
bored now, she pouts in her little girl voice
before it all goes to shit
Tsunami’s beguiling representations and theatrical entrances (at one point she “grrlsplains allergies”) serve to cushion the gravity of the testimonies of those affected by the natural and atomic disasters. The poem “radioactive man” relates the tale of a man who heroically “stayed behind / to care for the abandoned animals” after the forced evacuations. Awaiting for cancer to take hold, he sees “my future / in the sick animals I care for.” There is also Hisako who, like all the citizens of her vacated village, becomes a pariah – but she embraces her new social status with defiance, dyeing her hair and getting tattoos because “everything’s different now / and what can they say to me?” She finds kinship in the X-Men mutant Armor, with whom she shares a birth name. In this way, the newest outcasts harvest strength by adopting or relating to those who are also misjudged and the misunderstood. Antiheroes of the Kaiju for the new millennium, they challenge and complicate Roripaugh’s epigraph that quotes the conceptual artist Barbara Bloom, who asserts that the Japanese believe “that when something’s suffered damage and has a history it becomes more beautiful.”
Roripaugh concludes the book with “origami of tsunami: a technical manual and glossary,” a culmination of the humor and sorrow that has been interweaving throughout the book. An s-wave is defined as “tsunami’s gangsta name,” evacuation zones as “you you and you”; yet the blank entries, or rather those left empty, are the ones that gesture toward the hard reality of what has perished or has gone missing.
Tsunami vs. the Fukushima 50 excites with its rich pop culture references in service to the poignant lessons about fear and the various human responses to vulnerability: we either flee or banish what scares us, depending on which gesture wields the most power. Roripaugh does her part in leveling that imbalance: Tsunami becomes more flawed and more human, and the disaster victims become extraordinary examples of courage, strength, and insight.
LeAnne Howe combines her skills as poet and playwright in Savage Conversations, her provocative representation of Mary Todd Lincoln’s personal demons. Grief-stricken and lonely, the former First Lady begins to suffer laudanum-induced hallucinations, claiming that a “savage Indian” visits her each night and “takes the smallest sharp flint from his leather pouch, slits the soft skin above each eyelid, sews it firmly open with a thread of silver filigree, then cuts out her left cheekbone.”
Howe, a Native American scholar, makes a startling connection between these alleged encounters and President Lincoln’s executive order for the execution of 38 Dakota American Indians in 1862 as retribution for the Dakota War against white settlers. This grim event is still considered the largest mass execution in U.S. history. But Howe investigates further, moving beyond a story about Mrs. Lincoln’s contrition for a crime committed by her husband.
Savage Indian, the play’s second protagonist, steps in as her conscience but also her confidante, and a surprising portrait of Mary Todd Lincoln surfaces — that of a woman burning with both guilt and desire:
At some point in your life, you realize that no one will ever touch you again
Or hold you in that special way your finest lover once held you — fingering the
Swollen flower between your legs, gently forcing it open; and you respond to the
Gesture so willingly wet, squeezing the third finger again and again; your breath
Entering a hungry, unrefined mouth.
Since Savage Indian also yearns for his beloved’s affections, the dynamic of their nightly exchanges takes on a decidedly sexual connotation, a sadomasochistic relationship that disguises the forbidden intimacy between a white woman and an American Indian. When Mary Todd Lincoln whimpers, “Will no one ever touch me again?” He answers, “I will.” They eventually spend so much time together, that he entertains himself by trying on her clothes, but when he starts quoting Shakespeare and passages from the Bible, Mrs. Lincoln protests vehemently, reminding him of his station. He in turn reminds her that it was she who conjured him to punish her. Mrs. Lincoln’s wrestling with the notion of seeking forgiveness from a “savage” ultimately makes redemption impossible, since she is unwilling to recognize him as an equal. Thus, the emotional torture must continue — and Savage Indian becomes entwined in another of Mrs. Lincoln’s traumas: the untimely deaths of two of her children.
Besides Savage Indian and Mrs. Lincoln, the third player in this verse drama is The Rope, who spends most of the time onstage simply seething. He describes himself as “a collar, / A strangler, / I float in the wind like a flag on holidays, // I inspire national pride.” Throughout the play he keeps count of his hanging victims. The Rope is then replaced by The Gun. Abraham Lincoln himself delivers the news to his wife:
My husband’s spirit tells me that in the future,
Metropolitan police of the district
Will shoot black men
And black children on
The streets of Washington like moving targets.
A homeless beggar with a dog is shot dead.
A black man named Gurley will be shot dead
In a dark stairwell of New York City public housing.
Who says Northern abolitionists accept Negros?
Savage Conversations invokes our own racial conflict and probes America’s psyche, its struggle to reconcile its colonialist values, indeed its white supremacy, with its multi-ethnic cultures and populations. Even after her release from the asylum, Mary Todd Lincoln continues to be haunted. Through the masterly dramatic management of Mrs. Lincoln’s disturbing and chilling obsessions, Howe shows that there is no escape from the yesterday’s paradigms of power without a true reckoning with the injustices that set the stage for our troubled social landscape.
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Tsunami vs The Fukushima 50 – published March 12, 2019 by Milkweed Editions, 120 pages, $16.00 paperback
Savage Conversations – published February 5, 2019 by Coffee House Press, 144 pages, $15.95 paperback