In Memoriam: Roy Miki, professor emeritus

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.

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)

Roy rocks. I miss him dearly. I first met Roy at the Appropriate Voice, a conference sponsored by the Writers Union in 1992, led by writers like Lenore Keeshig-Tobias, Daniel David Moses and more. And then of course at Writing Thru Race in 1994. In refusing internalized and externalized systemic racism, Roy made space for us to live truthfully, to become our full selves, and through that grounded subjectivity, to have the capacity to also think collectively and to live, work and play in coalition and kinship with one another. Through his lived example, Roy showed us we can become good relatives to one another and respect each other’s lives; we do not have to resign ourselves to repeating the injustices  that his community suffered, survived, and attained some form of redress for.  

Co-editing the conference proceedings for Across Currents: Canada-Japan Minority Forum (2001) with Roy taught me so much about how previous generations of racialized people from all four directions have struggled for justice, and how this struggle, painful though it may be, is a profound labour of love.  

I do not think I would have completed my dissertation if Roy had not been there, for me to study with and care about Asian North American literature and communities with. He was a wonderful PhD supervisor, making this work imaginable and possible for me and for so many more people. As he joins other beloved poets in the spirit world like Shirley Bear, Lee Maracle, Connie Fife, and many more we have lost in recent years, I remain grateful for his many gifts. Like the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, he reminds us in his own ways to persevere in caring for one another, in refusing to abandon those who’ve been dehumanized and brutalized by colonial forces. I wish I could have a conversation with Roy about sumud, about how to keep going as we witness unbearable violence repeated day after horrific day against our relatives, the countless poets, teachers, and care workers who have been killed over this past year in Palestine. I do not know how, but I do know from Roy’s example, that what we cannot achieve alone, we must find ways to do together, to stay soft yet strong.

(Rita Wong, Associate Professor, Emily Carr University of Art and Design)

For Roy

I met Roy Miki at a time when I was barely a writer, hardly an editor, and certainly not a scholar–yet my first encounter with Roy was as a student. In the fall of 1993, while drifting through SFU’s Communications program, I took Roy’s seminar on race and US literature. We read, among other things, John Okada’s No-No Boy and James Baldwin’s Go Tell it on the Mountain, Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior, selections from Gloria Anzaldua’s anthology Making Face, Making Soul and from Frank Chin’s Aieeee! At that time in Vancouver, very few instructors were teaching such texts; fewer still taught them with Roy’s remarkable and revelatory pedagogy.  

Roy’s readings showed us how to decode the organization of race, gender, nationalism, and social power in literature at a line level. He taught us how to think about the work of writers of color (they were writers of color then, not “BIPOC” writers), through the architecture of narrative and poetics, and against the flattening, imprisoning registers of identity and sociology. Roy demonstrated how to wrench social and political depth out of close reading. He helped us think through the relationship of radical writing to radical politics. And he did all of this while extolling the powerful, emotive beauty of writing. I will always remember Roy looking up from reading Sandra Cisernos’ poem “A Women Cutting Celery,” or, especially, Morrison’s Beloved, his face a mask of astonishment, wonder, and almost emotional exhaustion.

Writing, of course, was politics for Roy and I’ve often felt that if one had but a handful of poems or the fragment of a story or an introduction to an essay, Roy immediately accepted you into a community of writers and, hence, a political community. Certainly, this was my experience in the fall of 93. I had just published the first issue of a “little” magazine called diaspora: A magazine of Black consciousness when I met Roy. He was immediately supportive of the project and the community it was trying to imagine. Not only was Roy one of a handful of subscribers (he may have even been the first subscriber) but he believed enough in me to invite me to join the coordinating committee of the conference, “Writing Thru Race” and to guest edit a special issue on new Black writing in Canada for his journal, West Coast Line.  

Regarding “Writing Thru Race,” my memory is slightly different from Larissa Lai’s. I thought that the poet Raj Pannu and myself had pushed for the “writers of color only” policy, a position that I had learned from working with local organizations like Roots of Resistance and Third World Alliance. In any case, whether Roy agreed with such an assertion of autonomy, it was a difficult position for him given not only the terrible national backlash, but his own ties of friendship to many white writers within the Writers Union of Canada. Many of these ties were undermined by the awakening of a dormant white racism, many tested by a condescending white liberalism. Yet Roy stood firm by our decision as if it was his own, at an emotional and psychological sacrifice that few of us, myself included, recognized or acknowledged at the time.

When news of Roy’s passing spread, Rinaldo Walcott tweeted, “RIP Roy Miki. RIP (you could gather us).” It’s true. Only Roy could have convened such a gathering as “Writing Thru Race,” a gathering that has not been seen since and may not be possible now, but whose resonances and reverberations continue to sound across Canadian art and literature today. Importantly, Roy’s gatherings had a special but perhaps unacknowledged impact on Black writing in this country. This impact was not only via “Writing Thru Race,” where Dionne Brand gave an immortal keynote lecture, later published in Bread out of Stone, and where, in Vancouver of all places, many Black writers and editors first forged many early and now long standing friendships and networks. West Coast Line was also seminal in this respect with Roy using the journal as a venue for not only the publication of Black writers, but for the discussion of the politics of Black writing and Black history. Look, for instance, at the contributions and the list of contributors to West Coast Line special issues such as “Colour: An Issue,” The “Site Lines” issue, and “North: New African Canadian Writing.” These issues are a remarkable archive of a specific cultural and political matrix of the 1990s, while also representing many of the terms of engagement of Black Canadian writing in the present. Roy generously provided the space.

It has been years, perhaps decades, since I last spoke to Roy. I think the last time I heard from him was when he sent me an email, an email sent to perhaps thousands of others, acknowledging, in the most humble and graceful way, my note congratulating him on his induction into the Order of Canada. Although we lost touch, I can honestly say that, whatever work I have done as a writer, an editor, a scholar, and a teacher, bears his imprint. I can only hope that Roy recognized how much his impact meant to me and to so many others, and that with his passing we will not only mourn, but gather.  

Thank you, Roy.

(Peter James Hudson, Associate Professor of Geography, University of British Columbia)

Roy,

My heart is broken. “God it all slips away / so briefly” (bpNichol). Rest in Peace, poet.

(Carl Peters, Film/Liberal Studies, BCIT)