From the Literature Institute 2002
By Cathy Ikeda
Hilo High School
Saturday mornings with mom
Manoa Library.
Used book smell
Like Grandma’s house, dust, hint of mold and teremites.
I find
snippets of other people’s lives on the pages of forgotten books.
“My world is a shard of blue-green emptiness”
written on the other side of a Safeway receipt for bread,
seltzer water and a pack of cards.
Mom let me wander the shelves
Searching for hidden notes, forgotten bookmarks,
Eventually finding myself engulfed in books
my borrowing stack taller than my arms can grasp.
Mom indulged
My own love affair with used treasures,
an alternative world for a silent child.
But one day at 16
A crackled raisin of a white woman
Stood in front of her classroom
Grendel in one hand, the finely honed pencil in the other.
“What is the symbolism?” she stabbed.
The silence was deafening,
No hands shot up—
but I had looked closely at the monster,
I understood Grendel, knew him by heart.
I had seen the monster in my mirror.
So I cleared my throat of its rustiness
offered up my interpretation –
but the silence was still deafening,
beady rat-eyes glaring a jaundiced yellow.
“Wrong.”
I slinked off, realizing I did not understand the monster
like she did.
I vowed to remain silent.
I read in dark closets, flashlight in hand,
not wanting to be wrong.
At 17, my boyfriend and I took turns reading,
A common practice on our time between classes.
It was Louis Lamour again,
our rhythm as familiar as the genre,
then he got to the line he read slowly.
He must have practiced it before.
“He left knowing there were other worlds to discover.”
And then I knew
The power of words, army ants on white canvas.
I stopped reading,
became “alliterate.”
At 25, Summer Institute changed me
I found a path, a focus.
Writing, revision, recursive, process, pointing.
Still frustration gnawed at my belly,
something was missing.
They couldn’t write unless they read as writers.
Reading as writers - reading,
response,
making thinking visible.
Seven years of “aha moments” –
Opening texts, reading reminders.
Finally able to come to Lit Institute
I arrived with a large empty suitcase
Packing a few of my tools
Expectant to find more,
getting what I didn’t expect.
Efferent roots in philosophy
and an aesthetic hunger for books.
Reawakening of the little girl in Manoa library
touchy for books,
my need to breathe them in like air
after hanging out on the bottom mute and deaf,
look at the covers like a mother with a newborn
full of expectation and promise.
Savor the words,
smooth and urgent as truffles,
read passages to my husband over the phone,
give a book I’ve finished to my mother
and be ready to share
real reading again
for no other purpose than
because.
