Memory and Mourning in the Black Pacific
ブラック・パシフィックの記憶と嘆き
"Fredrick Cloyd reaches deep into violent pasts, encounters, and experiences and digs up memories of the American occupation of Japan, even when doing so hurts. These memories have shaping power beyond the era of occupation; they are intergenerational and transnational. Dream of the Water Children is an enactment of such irresolution - multi-layered, jarring, shattering, and often elegiac. Its narrative lets loose an aesthetic authority punctuated by vivid remembrances and dream-like sequences, dialogues with himself and with his Japanese mother that appear at once near and far. The narrator is a mixed-race Black Japanese, an Amerasian fathered by an African American serviceman and raised in Japan and the United States. One would not find solace where it is expected. A chronicler of his own and mother’s life and times, Cloyd sets in motion the pulsating pursuit of “unbelonging”; to take this Afro-Amerasian journey demands the refusal of normative thinking and historicity. The reader must be prepared to unlearn."
Yuichiro Onishi
Associate Professor
Director of Undergraduate Studies
African American & African Studies
Core Faculty, Asian American Studies
University of Minnesota, Twin Cities
Author of Transpacific Antiracism (NYU Press, 2013)
Testimonials
"This is a mature book that moves fluidly, as the mind moves, untroubled by traditional distinctions between writing considered to be academic vs. creative, memoir vs. personal essay, sure-footed in unexpected ways. This genre-bending book is not “experimental writing.” The author knows what he wants to say and he knows how he wants to say it, seeking, in his own words, “restoration and reclamation” for silenced voices and histories never erased because they have not yet been written. 'Dream of the Water Children' demands that its reader rigorously consider the constructed nature of memory, identities, and historical narrative. And it is also an enormously kind and passionate chronicle of a son’'s long journey with his mother. To read it is to marvel, to learn, and to discover anew what surrealist poet Paul Éluard said: “There is another world, but it is in this one.”
Patricia Mushim Ikeda
Buddhist teacher / activist
Oakland, California
"Like a swimmer who has made it through the break, Fredrick Cloyd looks back at the far shore of his war-touched past with fresh eyes. Eloquent, passionate and continually surprising, his meditation on history and the individual provokes and tantalizes the reader through a shared process of remembering. This is an ocean of a book."
Walter Hamilton, author of Children of the Occupation: Japan's Untold Story (Rutgers University Press, 2013)
"Can be read as a ghost story, a meditation on how to disassemble the heartbreak machines; a catalog of copious tears and small comforts. This is a challenging example of personal bravery and filial love. It puts the “more” in memory."
Leonard Rifas, Ph.D
Communications, University of Washington
"Part memoir, part postcolonial scholarly examination, Fredrick Cloyd's *Dream of the Water Children* beckons us to walk with him through encounters with ghosts while knitting historical memory out of dreams and roots and interrogations of what has come to be, through excavations of what has been. I laughed, and I cried, and I didn't want to put it down. As Cloyd weaves in and between time and place, through his own life and what came before him, we are called to mourn the brutal effects of colonization and empire's global reach, and all its tiny, invisibilized and silenced violations with their vast and heavy implications ---on society, family, identity, language, imagination, the body, belonging, resistance, and possibilities for life itself. This work is a song of sorrow, and a celebration of survival. It is heartbreak rendered into word. It is a weapon for memory with which we might fight the all-too American plague of forgetting."
Heidi Andrea Restrepo Rhodes, M. A.
Photographer & writer, New York City
“To become aware of how unaware we are is sometimes painful.”
Dream of the Water Children is an examination into the fallacy and for some, ignorance, of taking our own identities as-is. Fredrick D. Kakinami Cloyd provides the reader with an eye-opening and soul-searching collective of experiences he and Others faced due to assimilation, racism and the stigma of growing up in post-war Japan, colonized Pacific nations and America.
Just as the dominant group in Japan and America was unprepared for heterogeneity of the Other, so was the author as he becomes victimized, marginalized and subsequently wise in navigating the various hierarchies in his native Japan and an often un-United States of America.
Cloyd passionately provides the reader with a very rare insight into the relationship between U.S. military personnel and their Asian spouses, Black-American occupation forces and the Japanese (who were seen as having shared a similar experience), postwar Amerasian children and those that did not love them, and the tortuous relationship between the victor and victims –both foreign and domestic.
Dream of the Water Children will tug at your heart, open your mind and lead you to reexamine a consciousness often ignored, denied or distorted."
Eric L. Robinson
BlackTokyo.com
"About simultaneously remembering and forgetting, Fredrick D. Kakinami Cloyd, in Dream of the Water Children, wrestles with his “occupied” subjectivity as a post-WWII Afro-Asian “Amerasian” child of a Japanese national mother and an African American military father who met while his father was stationed in Japan in the 1950s. Weaving together ghostly dreamscapes and poet fragments that chart “collective memory in story,” Cloyd reflects on childhood narratives of growing up in Japan with his single mother as he reveals the stark realities of prejudice his brown body engenders in his present day home of San Francisco and raises larger questions about the geopolitical forces that produced his very existence."
Laura Kina, artist and associate professor Art, Media, & Design DePaul University
Coauthor of War Baby/Love Child: Mixed Race Asian American Art (University of Washington Press, 2013).
"Fredrick Douglas Kakinami Cloyd has written a profoundly moving and thought-provoking book. He courageously challenges our neat categories of identity, going beyond broadening our understanding of mixed race to touch what is human in all of us. This book will shift readers’ perceptions and assumptions and may change many lives. Above all, Cloyd is a master story-teller who honors and respects memory."
Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
historian and writer
I would like to acknowledge the following people in their assistance in creating this website:
Linda Austin, Mushim Ikeda Nash, Leonard Rifas, Mauro Osborne, Heidi Andrea Restrepo Rhodes, Pei Wu, Richard Clark.