Ouch.

Kala: Captain of the Volleyball Team

     Here are the notes I had made for the class discussion last tuesday. They don't address the whole of the poem, I sort of fizzle out towards the end, but they do address the issues, cursory though this address may be, I was hoping to.

     As though we are entering the poem as it is being told to someone else, it begins with, “Then he tell me, When you going kiss me?” The reader enters into the poem as though being privy to a candid dialogue. This is not a story told to the audiance as told to the audience but as told to someone else, it is not structured by the speaker for us. By the poet, yes, but that is another matter. The other part of understanding the tone is that it exists in a series. We talked about the eventual rape that ends this series in our last class.

     The speaker goes on to say that they were standing by the portables. I am thinking that these are either portable classrooms, as in trailer class rooms, or porta-potties. Either way, what is certain is that they are cheap pre-fabricated structures useful to people who do not have the wealth to build the substantial structures needed. 

     They are having this interaction near these buildings either because this setting purposely suggests the “artificial”, external and temporary forces that seem to invasively invest the moment with the simulation of meaning, or! or, because the forces that lead to there being portables are simply also the forces that have shaped the potentials Jimmy Boy is capable of acting out. 

     The portables are not from the place where they are, they are not what they seem but mimic substantial buildings, and they are not permanent. Likewise, Jimmy Boy is invading the space of the Kala, although to some degree is welcome in this because Jimmy Boy is similar to the substantiality actually wanted (insubstantial), and Jimmy is not acting out a potential which dignifies the place of his origin but is some sad mimicry of it--his misogynistic arrogance a telling echo of the dignity lost before his time, so the (artificial)--and augmented by imported elements of culture (not from here). He watches porn. Films of haole women being sexualized.

The poem goes on, “The other hand start rubbing my ass part / and I trying pull away / but he pull me closer to him.” This is not consensual. This is not love. This is not dignified. This is a person reduced to a hunger which reduces all others to its food. Jimmy Boy’s advances are coercive when not outright forceful. “When you gonna kiss me? he asks again. / C’mon, I like kiss you. What.” 

This latent rape scene is interrupted by a teacher shining a flashlight on the two. Mr. Shimayama, who does not intervene much. Instead, there is a terribly embarrassing interaction wherein Jimmy Boy crudely sexualizes Kala in front of the teacher. Mr. Shimayama says, “Be good, eh, Jimmy boy.” and laughs, “one funny kine laugh”. Kala is not the only one uncomfortable, but Shimayama’s discomfort is more a guilty and shamefully complicit awareness of the missing dignity.

     This scene is a shame to all members in the community that care about it as a community. This is the vagary of a society destitute of power, not even confident enough to stop that which destroys one of its most primordially cohesive elements, not confident enough to stop what would destroy amorous togetherness, not confident enough to stop rape. There is no self-respect for the self is a construct only possible by togetherness, by community, and as a destroyer of community Jimmy is destroying himself. Likewise, the teacher does not care enough about himself to stop the situation. At most he tries to instruct. This is what it is to be a teacher there, ashamed and embarrassed for the base degradation, and trying to change this, but insignificantly powerful. 

Once she gets home she is abused by her uncle. All of the male bodied people in this poem are disempowered, and two of them (and in a way three) attempt to compensate for that weakness by physically overpowering the female bodied person. From the later poems we know that Kala will eventually be raped by Jimmy boy.

     These properties of being disempowered, of being hungry, of being violated, of being ashamed, of not belonging in your own home, of being portable, these are qualities of colonial trauma. They are played out across the bodies of the community: the rape, the hunger. They constitute the nature of the available potential: the portables, the imitations. They are fragmented, seen in the lack of successful communication between the members of the community, of being seen as a resource rather than a person--as in labor, or labor as the sexualization of the female body, or the sexualization of the female body itself, these are all ways of not seeing the community as people by only recognizing parts of their being.

     I know this poetic novella was an emotionally difficult read for some of us, myself included, and I keep thinking to myself: I like being happy, and I also like remembering stories like these so that I have the emotional impetus to step into situations and be like Bernie (Patient, safe, thoughtful). That the two, happiness and being like Bernie, seem opposed in my mind is not totally correct. Being like Bernie and being happy are inextricable for me--that happiness is only possible with that accompanying empathy. Ouch, you know what I mean? I mean life.

-Joseph Watkins