Wild Words
Performed by Lena Chan, Harrington Fan, Elizabeth Fair, and Evan Sakuma
Wild Words is a site-specific performance using light, sound, and movement to illuminate the Chinese poetry and images carved by detainees into the detention barracks’ walls. In 1970, ranger Alexander Weiss shone his flashlight along the walls and rediscovered the carvings, which helped start the movement to save the building from destruction.
By striking obscured markings at the angle that just brings them into view, beams of light ask for our careful attention and draw our gaze back to the wall, and to the world these poets and carvers imagined. Each image is associated with its own score, which is created from a palimpsest of sounds recorded from Angel Island.
As one moves through the barracks, the evolving soundscape mixes and overlaps to represent the polyphony of lives that passed through this space, vibrating with connections and reverberations. One image marks out a large altar for the Qingming Festival 清明節 (“Tomb-Sweeping Day”), likely carved so that detainees could engage in ancestral veneration practices far from home
When I began reflecting, I became sad and composed a poem.
It was because my family was poor that I left for the country of the Flowery Flag.
I only hoped that when I arrived it would be easy to go ashore.
Who was to know the barbarians would change the regulations?
They stab the ear to test the blood, and in addition they examine the excrement,
If there is even a shadow of hookworms, one must be transferred to undergo a cure.
They took several dozen foreign dollars.
Imprisoned in the hospital, I was miserable with grief and sorrow.
I do not know when I will be cured.
If I should escape one day, I need to return to my aspirations.
I will leave this place once and for all and not depend on it,
Thus avoiding humiliation and oppression by the devils.
My fellow villagers seeing this should take heed and remember;
I write my wild words to let those after me know.
Photos by Katherine Nagasawa