Artist traci kato-kiriyama reflects on trauma, healing and collective care during U of I residency

A few years ago, traci kato-kiriyama found herself in an exchange with an online seller, trying to recover a trunk that belonged to their family. 

The trunk was property of kato-kiriyama’s grandfather, a Japanese incarceree of World War II American concentration camps. After a year-and-a-half of back-and-forth, she and the seller came to an agreement for her to pick it up, but issues with her mother’s health prevented her from going right away. 

By the time kato-kiriyama was ready to retrieve the trunk, the seller had already sold the unit it was in and said he didn’t know where it went. 

Despite that loss, kato-kiriyama continues the search for the trunk.

"I think a lot about my grandfather,” kato-kiriyama said during a recent visit to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. “When I think about his experience, his fire, and how that relates to my fire, I do a lot of work to sort of bring him into the room.”

This story is just one part of kato-kiriyama’s larger life journey, which she shared as a George A. Miller visiting artist at a MillerCOMM talk on Thursday, Sept. 23. 

Their grandfather, who died in 1978, never saw the fruition of the redress and reparation movements for Japanese incarcerees, as they described in a poem she read to the audience: "Grandpa / never got to / stand in line / at the bank / three inches / taller / with Redress check / in hand / one foot in front / of the other / feeling / grounded again / never got to deposit / an apology / in / his savings account."

kato-kiriyama, a multidisciplinary artist based out of Los Angeles, shared their experiences with transgenerational trauma and delight, collective self-care, queerness and creative self-determination. 

They participated in several residency events open to students and the public, including classroom engagements at UIUC and University Laboratory High School. 

“Art is a critical way for me to process, reveal information, reckon with history and engage in some kind of healing and strengthening my own spirit in this work," kato-kiriyama said.

As a published author, performer, writer, actor, poet and speaker, kato-kiriyama is not a stranger to different mediums. They wrote a play, “Tales of Clamor,” and published a book, “Navigating With(out) Instruments.” They are also a co-founder of Tuesday Night Project, an Asian American grassroots organization dedicated to creating spaces for people to connect through artistic expression and community. 

During her MillerCOMM presentation, kato-kiriyama detailed how she was shaped by her experience as a descendant of Japanese American WWII incarcerees, and by the community of activists and artists who raised her. 

The core themes included visibility, belonging and the shared responsibility of storytelling in the pursuit of liberation.

“Protest. / Your Grandpa said he didn’t need to be pretty in camp. / Said he’d keep his beard as long as they were keeping him. / These words rooted in me / like the / hands of a cosmic god… like, I know it all along, / fire in the blood is / genetic,” kato-kiriyama said as she read from her book. 

Hannah Charity, a first-year Ph.D. student in the English department at the U of I, attended kato-kiriyama’s talk and said many things have stuck with her.

“My biggest takeaway would be the importance of kinship in community and advocating and speaking about Asian American issues and histories,” Charity said. “Another takeaway would be the power of art, whether it's in the form of a play or a poem, and how we can continue to honor the memory of those who came before us.”

Jason Finkelman, director of Global Arts Performance Initiatives at Krannert Center, helped facilitate kato-kiriyama’s residency. He first heard of her through an online forum for Japanese American and Asian American artists, and eventually began organizing her residency after further discovering “Tales of Clamor.”

“Having an artist as dynamic as traci in our community for a week... somebody might just catch one reading, might even catch just a part of one reading, and could be transformed for life,” Finkelman said. 

During her residency, kato-kiryama led workshops with members of Allen Hall and participated in a Food for Thought event at the Asian American Cultural Center. She shared a favorite moment about a participant in her nocturnal writing and zine-making hour in Allen Hall.

“This father and son came into the writing workshop, and the father was definitely enthusiastic… his son, he was sort of sitting slouched back in his chair. I was like, ‘Okay, we got to really try to engage with this person,’” kato-kiriyama said.

She then asked the participants to engage in a short writing exercise, and asked people to share their writing afterwards.

“I look over to [the son] and he's like sitting up in his chair forward. He shared and you could hear like a song, and he had this rhythm pattern and he was so happy,” said kato-kiriyama. “That's one of my favorite things, is when someone walks into a room, and they may be ambivalent or not even wanting to be in a writing space. And then all of a sudden, they surprise themselves.”

kato-kiriyama said she wanted their shared journey and stories to leave the audience with more, and the enthusiastic conversation and Q&A session after her MillerCOMM talk suggests that she made a profound impact.

Tesfaye Woldeme, an audience member at kato-kiriyama’s talk, said her words made him appreciate the force and effectiveness of the arts to promote healing from trauma – and wonder how it might apply to his home country.

“Throughout the presentation, I was thinking of my country,” Woldeme said. “I'm from Ethiopia. The rest of Africa – the trauma, the tragedy, is so pervasive, so systemic, so unrelenting, so persistent, that there's no condition of possibility to deploy this technique… Would it be even possible?” 

kato-kiriyama describes themselves as a “walking waterfall,” unafraid of emotion, and says it’s important to share our stories and not hold back tears.

“I'm always like, ‘This is the day I'm letting you release that. I give you permission to cry and never say sorry again. Those are pieces of truth surfacing for air,’” she said. “That's something that is important to me… I'm baring myself. It's a cathartic experience. Yes. I'm crying but I'm also releasing. Crying is releasing and it's communicating and it's honest. It's just how I feel. This is who I am. I accept who I am.”