Metal Culture: In Other Words
“Kamishibai,” commissioned by Metal Culture for In Other Words, curated by Xavier De Sousa and Harold Offeh
I am three or maybe four in my grandmother’s home in Japan, and my mother tells a tragic tale of a little mermaid using kamishibai-style storyboards. This mermaid isn’t the Disnified version of happily ever after, but a beautifully illustrated rendition of the original Hans Christian Andersen narrative – the one where the mermaid who so desperately desires to be human, ultimately dissolves to seafoam. Recently, my mother recalls kamishibai from her own childhood, how she’d wait for the kamishibai man at the playground to perform stories for the children.
Kamishibai as a storytelling form was popularised in the Great Depression of the 1930’s and the aftermath of the Second World War. Travelling storytellers would cart around storyboards in portable wooden theatres and perform narratives to a traumatised and downtrodden public. When people are faced with devastation, they turn to stories to make sense of the world and rebuild from the ashes.
There is so much fighting language in our current narrative: the necessity, the urgency, the resistance, in these unprecedented times. There is no doubt in my mind that we are living in an era of dissolution – structures slipping to quicksand, drawn out and laboured like a rattling exhale. There is no guarantee that we will re-emerge on the other side.
People are afraid and I feel it. So I write new narratives, if anything, to prepare others for a radical, spiritual shift. Like the kamishibai man, I am merely a conduit.
I storyboard what I see, in fragments of a proposition. Some visions appear in flashes of piercing clarity, while others drift and settle like seafoam and ashes. Regardless, the stories I channel are never quite mine. My stories are for you. We reach out and touch each other, from time to time, and that for me is a miracle worth living for.
When the world is not made for people like us, we have to be brave, and we have to be strong. But first, we must hold space for grief.
Together, let’s grieve for what we have lost. Let’s grieve for what we are losing, and everything precious that we have yet to lose. Let’s grieve for the loss itself that makes all human and beyond-human life meaningful. We need to reconfigure our collective aversion to loss. Then, in our state of acceptance, we may realise that our impulse to fight fire with fire has been part of the problem all along. What if we learned how to die with grace, instead of grasping at solutions for happily ever after? What if the only way out is through, to seek spaces of stillness and power in the eye of the storm?
When the world is not made for people like us, we grieve deeply for what is coming and choose life anyways – with the audacity to tell new tales amid the seafoam and ashes.