{"id":61111,"date":"2021-07-17T00:10:29","date_gmt":"2021-07-17T00:10:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=61111"},"modified":"2022-12-16T03:28:31","modified_gmt":"2022-12-16T03:28:31","slug":"elizabeth-miki-brina-the-historical-and-the-personal-are-intertwined","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=61111","title":{"rendered":"Elizabeth Miki Brina: \u201cThe historical and the personal are intertwined.\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"

Elizabeth Miki Brina: \u201cThe historical and the personal are intertwined.\u201d<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

Guernica<\/a>
\n2021-05-10<\/p>\n

Elizabeth Lothian<\/strong><\/a>, Digital Director<\/p>\n

<\/a>
\nPhoto credit: Thad Lee<\/em><\/small><\/p>\n

The author of <\/em>Speak, Okinawa talks about learning her family history, writing from guilt, and questioning her father\u2019s values.<\/em><\/p>\n

Elizabeth Miki Brina\u2019s debut memoir Speak, Okinawa<\/em><\/a> is a nuanced investigation of self, lineage, and inheritance. Born in the 1980s to an Okinawan mother and a white, American, ex-military father, Brina struggled with the duality of her identity. She connected more with her father\u2014the dominant force in her family triad\u2014often in an attempt to fit in with the 99 percent white suburb in which she grew up, and this made her feel distant from her already isolated mother.<\/p>\n

It is only years later, after moving out of her parents\u2019 enveloping orbit, that Brina comes to question why she feels so disconnected from her mother and Okinawan ancestry. She then sets out to explore her heritage\u2014half that of the colonized and half that of the colonizer. We take this journey with her as she recounts the history of Okinawa<\/a>. These chapters, voiced brilliantly in the first person plural \u201cwe,\u201d tells the reader of Okinawa\u2019s conquest by China<\/a> and Japan<\/a>, the horrors it faced in World War II<\/a>\u2014nearly a third of its population was killed in one battle alone\u2014and the subsequent US military occupation of the island, which continues to this day.<\/p>\n

As Brina learns the history of her maternal lineage, she comes to better understand not just her mother but herself. She is then forced to reckon with the role her father played in dictating her worldview and to try and unknot how America<\/a>, as both a political entity and a cluster of ideals, has marginalized other ways of being…<\/p>\n

Read the entire article here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The author of “Speak, Okinawa” talks about learning her family history, writing from guilt, and questioning her father\u2019s values.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,16,395,1245,13743,8,20],"tags":[31640,31580,24114,1793,5098],"class_list":["post-61111","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-asia","category-autobiography","category-biography","category-interviews","category-media-archive","category-usa","tag-elizabeth-lothian","tag-elizabeth-miki-brina","tag-guernica","tag-japan","tag-okinawa"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61111","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=61111"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61111\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":64072,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61111\/revisions\/64072"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=61111"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=61111"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=61111"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}