News
In Memoriam: Roy Miki, professor emeritus
It is with great sadness that we note the passing of Roy Miki, professor emeritus in Simon Fraser University's Department of English. Professor Clint Burnham offers an overview of Roy Miki’s life and career:
Roy was a tremendous force and will be remembered in so many ways. I last saw him at a literary magazine launch (Rob Manery’s Some) in spring 2019, at a now-shuttered venue on Cambie Street. But I first met him in 1987, when he was external reader for my MA thesis (for Stephen Scobie) on the poets Robert Kroetsch and bpNichol when I was at UVic. (Roy published a chapter in his edited collection on Nichol’s Martyrology). Roy founded and edited Line magazine (in the “Pound-Williams tradition” was, I believe, its motto), later merged with Fred Candelaria’s West Coast Review to become West Coast Line. These were vital sites for poetics and poetry in the 1980s and 90s and beyond. And Roy also compiled and edited a massive bibliography of George Bowering’s work. Already his contributions to Canadian and contemporary writing were significant. But at the same time, Roy was a key figure, alongside his brother Art Miki, in the redress movement - with Japanese-Canadians who had been interned in World War II, their property shamefully stolen, receiving compensation (or at least the beginning of the process) in 1988 - under Brian Mulroney’s government, no less. Perhaps the first form of reparations in Canadian history? There are others who know this part of Roy’s activism better than me. And his activism and critical work also extended to the literary and scholarly communities as part of the Writing Thru Race gathering in 1992, which helped to create important spaces and conversations for BIPOC (as we now say) writers in this country. Not without controversy. Add onto that his poetry, which sought to fuse these disparate tendencies into a post-lyric still beholding to the “Pound-Williams” aesthetic – five books of poetry including the Governor-General’s award-winning Surrender (2001); all of these were collected in Talonbooks Flow (2018). Too, a late career in visual art and collage. A gentle soul but also fierce, funny, kind - and unrelenting. (A funny story, perhaps apocryphal, is that when he was doing his PhD at UBC he lost his only copy of the dissertation when a briefcase was stolen from his car. True? Who knows.) We will miss his presence, and we need public scholars of his ilk today even more than ever.
Professor Roy Miki is fondly remembered by his current and past colleagues, former students, and friends. If you would like to add a note of condolence, please email englcmns@sfu.ca.
When I joined SFU’s English department in 2007, it was to fill Roy Miki’s line as he had retired earlier that year. Although I was never lucky enough to be Roy’s colleague, I benefitted enormously from the space he had opened up for Asian Canadian studies, both in the department and in the field. There are so many ways, big and small, that Roy has influenced me, but I’ll share just two. The first is that as a teacher, I learned a lot about my goals in the classroom, the materials I wanted students to read and watch, and the kinds of conversations I wanted to have with them, by teaching the third and fourth-year seminars on Asian diasporic literatures and Asian North American literatures. None of that could have happened if Roy hadn’t ensured that those courses existed in the department. He did a lot of important work at SFU and elsewhere in the city and across the country to advocate for the importance of Asian Canadian studies as a field, and to put into practice the kinds of institutional critiques he often wrote about. Second, as a scholar, his collection of essays Broken Entries has had a profound influence in how I have come to think about identity formation and racialization. It’s both part of the critical lens through which I read and a model for bringing together theory, community, and literature.
(Christine Kim, Professor, UBC's Department of English Languages and Literatures)
Roy’s passing is very hard for me to grasp. His work survives through his selfless mentoring of students, his spearheading of anti-racism in Canadian writing, his co-establishing of Asian Canadian studies, and his own celebrated poetry and art practice. He was both gentle and fierce, performing work within the academy that was essential yet not always institutionally legible. He encouraged a generation of BIPOC writers and intellectuals to persist. He remains an inspiration.
(David Chariandy, Professor, SFU's Department of English)
I can't really overstate how important Roy was to my life and writing. I would have left the English department at SFU for History if it hadn't been for Roy. Not that he talked me out of it, but he showed me an example through the work he was doing. He modelled what it is to be a mentor, to be a radical and responsible political thinker, and to envision more when more seems impossible. I can't imagine the person I would have been without Roy as one of my early teachers and guides.
(Wayde Compton, Professor, University of Victoria's Department of Writing)
I was so sad to hear this news. Roy Miki was an inspiring mentor, a tireless organizer, and maker of change in CanLit studies. As soon as I joined the department Roy Miki welcomed me warmly and immediately connected me with other scholars, including the newly restored writer in residence committee, with Steve Collis, Jeff Derksen, and David Chariandy initially, later Clint Burnham and Christine Kim. He truly inspired me to think of ways of doing my work with a commitment to changing not only the "what" but the "how" - the forms of knowledge from teaching to writing to conference organizing. With Smaro Kamboureli and Kathy Mezei he was the centrifugal force that brought us together to organize the first TransCanadas conference held at SFU's Centre for Dialogue downtown - my first and so far last opportunity to use those little mics in that UN-inspired amphitheatre space. Later he became the subject and the reason for another incredible gathering, "Tracing the Lines: A Workshop and Festival to honour and celebrate the outstanding creative, scholarly, and political work of Roy Miki on his retirement from Simon Fraser University," co-organized by a large and eclectic group of scholars, poets, artists, and activists at the Firehall Arts Centre. What an incredible intergenerational group who gathered there, including Michael Barnholden, Shirley Bear, Pauline Butling, Louis Cabri, Susan Crean, Wayde Compton, Jeff Derksen, Phinder Dulai, Marwan Hassan, Smaro Kamboureli, Robert Kroetsch, Larissa Lai, Chris Lee, Tara Lee, Monika Kin Gagnon, Jacqueline Larsen, Walter Lew, Ashok Mathur, Cindy Mochizuki, Erin Mouré, Bacco Ohama, Grace Eiko Thomson, Kirsten Emiko McAllister, Scott Toguri McFarlane, Harryette Mullen, Fred Wah, and Rita Wong.
One small conversation that has stuck with me was when he said to me he wished that the SFU courses were not just 4 but 5 hours a week ! I didn't agree with him then and still don't but it certainly speaks to his love of teaching and his commitment to his students.
(Sophie McCall, Professor, SFU's Department of English)
My first conference in Canada was Transcanada 3, so I'd be remiss if I didn't add that with Smaro Kamboureli, Roy coedited Trans.Can.Lit, essays from the first Transcanada conference in 2000 and a volume to which Peter Dickinson contributed. Others can speak better to how those conferences redirected and reimagined Canadian literature, but I can say how welcome it was for this newly-arrived Americanist to encounter so many Canadianists doing the kind of transnational and multiethnic work Roy championed. He retired before I arrived, but I still remember him with gratitude and a touch of awe.
(Jon Smith, Professor, SFU's Department of English)
I knew Roy first in the 1990s, when I was a graduate student, and then as a colleague, when I took up my position at SFU in 2000. We worked closely on the Writer in Residence program, but what I will remember best was how every conversation with Roy was a lesson in passionate engagement. He has remained a key example of a scholar-poet-activist, conveying William Blake’s “voice of honest indignation.” He also set an incredible example of “late style,” with his later work, gathered in Flow (2018), including his completely moving digital photo-collages, which along with his beautiful poetry was engaged in deep recovery work in the Japanese-Canadian experience.
(Stephen Collis, Professor, SFU's Department of English)
I first met Roy in the ferment of feminist and anti-racist politics in Vancouver in the early 1990s. There were a series of events that took place in quick succession: West Coast Women and Words, the In Visible Colours Film and Video Festival, and Yellow Peril: Reconsidered. The Powell Street Festival was hopping, the Asian Canadian Writers Workshop was going through a bit of a renaissance, and there were many literary readings as well at places like La Quena on Commercial Drive, Octopus Books, and Spartacus Books. Video Inn, the grunt gallery and the Western Front were incredible artist-run spaces where writers, artists and cultural workers shared work, talked, laughed, drank and fought. For me, it was a fabulous second education, after completing my undergraduate degree and UBC without really having found a place to hang my hat. It was in the midst of all of this that I first met Roy, though I got to know him much better when I joined the organizing committee for the BIPOC literary conference Writing Thru Race. Though the conference was organized under the auspices of the Writers Union of Canada, the organizing committee were mostly non-members in their twenties and thirties. I think it was C. Allyson Lee and myself who first came up with the idea that it should be a conference for BIPOC writers only. Roy was puzzled by this idea at first but then fully committed to it and took the blows for it too, which came fast and furious from the Globe and Mail, and later the Reform Party and the Department of Canadian Heritage. I was all brat in those days; I had no idea how to fight effectively and productively. I learned so much about how to make real change from Roy. At that time, fresh from the success of the Japanese Canadian Redress Movement, he was sharp, critical and politically astute. He returned the crass, racist volley of white supremacist columnists and politicians with a steady, well-argued grace. However, all of the public contention, strife between the Equity Committee of Writers' Union and the conference organizers, and tension within the organizing committee itself sent everyone spiralling into deep burnout, and some never returned. But Roy and I rekindled our friendship a year later, and became the best of buddies after that. I took part in events he organized, and we often found ourselves hanging out after events, debriefing, analyzing and re-imagining, along with a wide crew of movers and shakers including people like Rita Wong, Scott Toguri McFarlane, Monika Kin Gagnon, Smaro Kamboureli, Fred Wah, Wayde Compton, Mark Nakada, Charmaine Perkins, Karlyn Koh, Hiromi Goto, Tamai Kobayashi, Mona Oikawa, Kirsten Emiko McAllister, Ashok Mathur, Aruna Srivastava, Glenn Lowry and many others. Later, various iterations of this crew travelled together to Australia, Taiwan and Japan, and often to conferences and festivals in Canada as well. One or the other a tight knit circle of friends and allies would put together a panel and we would all go together, and support one another's often unconventional methods, practices and contents. It was an entry into a modicum of power that five minutes earlier none of us would have been able to access. I learned so much from Roy through these travels about how to experiment with language, and how to attend to the turns and moods of race and racialization. I learned how tricky memory is too, but also how we can grasp it through writing and social practice. He was one of the great movers and shakers in agitating for Asian Canadian Studies-- not a data driven, sociological one, but one with the specificity of a flickering subjectivity guiding it, informed by experience and the fact of living both in and out of language, ever evolving, though sometimes also collapsing into silence and despair. He was a key thinker and writer in an ongoing conversation about Asianness, subjectivity, movement, poetry and the imagination, a conversation I feel I'm still in the thick of. I'm heartbroken to have lost the guy who was, in many ways, our leader, though he would have balked if anyone called him that to his face. The last time I saw him might have been at a lunch with Rita Wong and jam ismail and that little Japanese restaurant at the Roundhouse, downstairs from his Yaletown condo. But I also remember running into him at the Powell Street Festival, relatively recently, long after I had moved away from Vancouver. We spent the afternoon hanging out at the festival and later ran into Kirsten McAllister and her mom, and went out to eat sushi. Food was so important to Roy. For him it was, along with poetry and ideas of course, the substance through which community was built. If the food was bad, the work would be bad too. But if it was good, then we were sure to have whatever positive outcome we were seeking. It occurs to me now that the work was a necessary extension of the cooking. We did it for both sustenance and joy. These last few days, going through photos I'd taken of our times together, I came across one of him and Rita in Taipei, sitting in front of brazier on top of which two enormous steaks are sizzling. We must have just arrived. They look exhausted but they are grinning in anticipation of the coming feast.
(Larissa Lai, Professor & Richard Charles Lee Chair in Chinese Canadian Studies University College, University of Toronto)