Bøker av Sophia Terazawa

Tetra Nova tells the story of Lua Mater, an obscure Roman goddess who re-imagines herself as an assassin coming to terms with an emerging performance artist identity in the late-20th century. The operatic text begins in Saigon, where she meets a little girl named Emi, an American of Vietnamese-Japanese descent visiting her mother's country for the first time since the war's end. As the voices of Lua and Emi blend into one dissociated narration, the stories accelerate out of sequence, mapping upon the globe a series of collective memories and traumas passed from one generation to the next. Darting between the temples of Nagasaki, the mountains of Tucson, and an island refugee camp off the coast of Malaysia, Lua and Emi in one embodied memory travel across the English language itself to make sense of a history neither wanted. When a tiny Panda named Panda suddenly arrives, fate intervenes, and the work acts as a larger historical document, unpacking legacies of genocide and the radical modes of resistance that follow. At the heart of this production lies a postcolonial identity in exile, and the performers must come to terms with who may or may not carry their stories forward: Emi or Lua. Part dreamscape, part investigative poetics, multiple fragmenting identities traverse across time and space, the mythic and the profane, toward an understanding of humanity beyond those temple chamber doors.

A collection of love poems addressed to an adverb, Anon meditates on the temporal phrase akin to the feeling of two people, two languages, two migratory histories meeting “at once” between desire and exile. From the playful verses of Tomaž Šalamun to the brushstrokes of “Two Gibbons Reaching for the Moon” by Itō Jakuchū, the arriving form of a winged Beloved unfurls a tapestry of longing despite our borders. In Anon, the voices reflect on linguistic possibilities of resilience against the silence of ecocide. Beauty becomes a source of touch and healing. The Mekong delta in Vietnam responds to the book's crystallizing force of Eros. Endangered gibbons swing from the ruins of colonial memory, and each image―rose, ape, and river―weaves into this current of music.

A book of testimonies in verse, Winter Phoenix is a collection of poems written loosely after the form of an international war crimes tribunal. The poet, a daughter of a Vietnamese refugee, navigates the epigenetics of trauma passed down, and across, the archives of war, dislocation, and witness, as she repeatedly asks, "e;Why did you just stand there and say nothing?"e; Here, the space of accusation becomes both lyric and machine, an "e;investigation"e; which takes place in the margins of martial law, the source material being soldiers' testimonies given during three internationally publicized events, in this order-The Incident on Hill 192 (1966, Phu My District, Vietnam); The Winter Soldier Investigation (1971, Detroit, USA); and The Russell Tribunal (1966, Stockholm, Sweden; 1967, Roskilde, Denmark). Ultimately, however, Winter Phoenix is a document of resilience. Language decays. A ceremony eclipses its trial, and the radical possibilities of a single scream rises from annihilation.