Nora Hikari (she/her), a Chinese and Japanese transgender poet and artist based in Philadelphia, spoke with Sundress intern Isabeau J Belisle Dempsey about her latest collection, Still My Father’s Son. A 2022 Lambda Literary fellow, Nora is the author of GIRL 2.0 and The Small Lights of Her Heart, with her work appearing in publications like Ploughshares and Palette Poetry. Her poetry explores themes of gender, family, trauma, and fragmentation, offering a deeply personal and multifaceted view of identity. Nora’s experience influences her creative process and the unique way she navigates the complexities of language and voice in her writing.
Author’s Note: As discussed in Still My Father’s Son, “I” am a plural system, a single physical body which houses multiple personalities/personhoods/personas. For the sake of convenience, we will fluidly switch through the first-person pronouns “I” and “we,” as contextually relevant, for the duration of this interview, just as we do in our private life.
Isabeau J Belisle Dempsey: I’m interested in the formatting choice for “Notes on a Poem:” To me, it called back to childhood school days, the child self. Can you tell me about the importance of the format for this particular poem?
Nora Hikari: I was nine years old when I was first taught how to write outline notes by My Father, indeed as part of a school assignment. He illustrated the process by walking me through His own outlining of His Sunday sermons as a chaplain. The memory is, like many others, a bright spot of great tension for me—a locus of innocence lit by the wonder and awe of being His student, twisted through the years by the increasing context of His mounting cruelties and abuses. Like many things My Father did to me, or even for me, this moment was likely inconsequential to Him but would go on to develop into a powerful nexus of captured psychic energies within my own private mythology. The memory is still vivid to me, if distorted (or perhaps clarified?) through the fracturing lens of trauma. To this day, my preferred note taking style is still outline notes, and every time I start a new outline, I still have a moment where I think of that afternoon with My Father in Yokota Air Force Base.
It felt fitting to delve into such a charged format for the design of this poem. The poem—and certainly, the book overall—is highly concerned with breakages—with fractures, splinters, fragmentations. I’ve always been fascinated by lineation in poetry—the structural and poetic role, certainly, but also by the political and social implications of the conventions of breakage, where breakages are considered acceptable, what kinds of breakages are considered effective, and indeed, what kind of breakages are considered abominable, pathological, maleficent.
The outline note format provided a very flexible avenue into a nuanced exploration of breakage. Implicit to the structure of the outline note format are hierarchies to lineations and breakages— relationships are illustrated between subsequent and preceding lines in stark ways. Beyond utilizing negative space for the visual impact, the outline note structure has an extremely clear, metric, definitional logic of connecting concepts and captured lines. Each subsequent indent communicates something clear and specific about the relationship between the concept in the parent entry and the child entry. To me, this provides a new axis entirely to play with on the page, a third dimension of meaning-space where conceptual marriages and divorces, conceptions and births, could be illustrated, instantly and intuitively. It allows for the fluid and unobtrusive implementation of a number of tools which I needed to tell this particular story in this way.
In particular, the child-parent structure allowed the format for call-and-response, a way of dialoguing with a single voice. Of course, there is also the matter of voice itself. We, as a plural system, are a collective who speaks with a single voice, and yet many voices. These voices can be cacophonous or harmonious, and the tensions which are illustrated by that reality afford an avenue of insight into our intrapersonal relation. Each indent offers an ambiguous avenue into distinguishing each voice of the Greek chorus—and while we are shown the reality of “there is a breakage in voice here,” we are not shown anything more specific than that—we are not offered the name of the voice, the cadence of the voice, her timbre or color. All we receive is the information that the voice is possibly different where there is a break, or perhaps it is the same voice with a different internality. We can know there is a difference from how the poem breaks, but we can only know how they are different by what the line says.
IJBD: The complex nature of gender is threaded throughout the collection and is reflected in the title—Still My Father’s Son has a feeling of frustration at the seeming inescapability of family and their expectations, a sentiment expressed in “My Father Comes Back from The War.” Can you say more about how gender and family interact for you, and how this might feed into the collection’s theme of fragmentation?
NH: I have a very particular understanding of gender, one which is informed by my
experiences as well as my theoretical grounding and analysis. My understanding of gender splits it into two parts—once again, fragmenting something “cohesive” into dynamically opposed parts via the necessity of their difference in character. On the one hand, there is Gender as the internal experience, the subjectivity, the expression of agency, the “individual.” This gender is concerned with autonomy, with recognition, with acknowledgement, and expression. Interwoven with this Gender, the weft to the warp, is Gender as the social experience, the political dimension of gender—gender as a regime, gender as a force of power and subjugation and violence, gender as a system which is embodied through domination, and proliferated/perpetuated through brutalization and suppression. We can call this construct by any number of names or faces— “patriarchy,” “gender hegemony,” “The Family,” “misogyny,” “transphobia,” “the oppression of children…” It is gender as ideology and gender as class system, with all of the implicit burden that entails.
My experience with gender is one where I have been subject to a peculiar gendered violence, wherein my “deviance,” or rather my defiance, have been punished by the forcible ejection from the realm of Legitimate Genders into the punitive class of the third gender—the faggotized-subalternized gender, the gender-class of Tranny. This is a violence which has been inscribed in my body by the whirlwind of social forces which saturate our human world, but which starts first at the smallest unit of political control that Gender can exert—The Family. The Family is the basic unit of gender control. It is the locus of the control of reproductive labor, it is the locus of social-ideological indoctrination, the locus of gender-enlistment and gender-punishment. The Family teaches us what kinds of embodiments and existences are acceptable, and which are not, through the ever-articulate but non-lexical and ineffable language of violence and harm, of policings and subjugations of will, both extravagant and surreptitious. At the head of The Family is The Patriarch, and the head of the Nuclear Family in particular is The Father. The Family is a little universe, and The Father is God. By merit of His ability to wield the greatest structural gendered violence, The Father is kinged and granted apotheosis. One of the core tenets of this book is that violence and power are two sides of the same blade—that power requires violence to make itself physical. Absolute power requires absolute violence. In this way, The Father is to The Family as Patriarchy is to Gender Hegemony.
In turn, the implications for fragmentation are simple: the separation of things requires them to be cut apart by a blade, and the fracturing of things requires them to be struck with a force.
IJBD: A lot of grief is held at the core of the violence in this book—a throughline of regret and hesitance, despite the violence ultimately always being carried out. I’m thinking of the lines “I killed things because I could” and “I come into this world / ready to do horrible things / for the sake of my life,” among others. What is the importance of violence, and the reactions around violence, in the construction of the collection’s narrative?
NH: I touched on this briefly in the last question, so I’ll build on that foundation: to our eye, violence is simply “power” which goes by another name. Or rather, “Power” is what “Violence” becomes when enacted successfully. Power and Violence are the opposite sides of the same edge, the mathematical consequences of each other in a balanced equation. The book is concerned with power, and as such, it must be concerned with violence. It is concerned, in particular, with the structural disempowerment of children. Childhood is a peculiar form of existence—an identity which is undeniably a systematically oppressed class, but one which literally everyone occupies at some point, and one which everyone will one day leave, if they manage to survive it. A child is powerless insofar as they have a significant structural disadvantage in the ability to enact violence. An adult can do almost anything to a child, with relatively little recourse, especially if that child belongs to that adult. Incest, psychological trauma, and child abuse are not aberrations of a healthy system concerned with a healthy society, but rather the primary functions of a violent system concerned primarily with the enclosure of power within certain classes. The child knows this, in their heart, in their gut. They know this in a way that transcends language, through the fact of their scars and their bodies. And a child who has been subject to the extremes of violence understands that they have been put through this by the merit of their own powerlessness.
I knew this as a child. I knew that the reason I was subject to psychological and physical torments at the hands of My Father was because I did not have the sufficient capacity for violence. Surely, I had at some point in my adolescence the physical capacity to overpower My Father, at least in a somewhat trivial sense, in that anyone with a knife technically has some kind of physical capacity to overpower someone who is unarmed—but what happens then? The societal structures in place privilege the authority of The Father over the child in a comprehensive manner—legal institutions, social mores, and so on. My Father could wrap His hands around my throat and squeeze until I faint, and I would have no path towards recourse, because, as His child, I am His property, and it is His purview to discipline me how He sees fit. On the contrary, what happens when I attempt to fight back against My Father? I know in my gut as a child that there is nothing I can do. I have no power, because I do not have the capacity for violence. So, in turn, out of a desperate need to feel heard, to feel like I have any kind of capacity for autonomy in the midst of systematic violations of autonomy, I turn to whatever violence I can find. The brutalization of insects and other small animals. The torments of bickering with younger siblings. The careful dissection of beautiful plants that have no ability to respond or resist, the slicing of flower stems and the peeling apart of the roots of weeds. The catching of fish. The grinding of worms under stones, or their cooking under the concentrated light of the sun.
And yet, there is also a desperate grief behind these acts, that both animates and haunts them, a curse upon those who choose to take up the mantle of Blade in service of the act of Cutting. I am another one, the child thinks. I am one more Father waiting to happen. I am another act of brutality waiting to be born, pregnant with cruelty, waiting to birth another chance at subjugation. There is a grief and a shame in that. The fear that I am just like Him. That tension fascinates me and horrifies me. It is, perhaps, the only fear that matters to me at this point: the fear that I will become Him.
IJBD: I was struck by “The Lessons,” the triptych of poems that use religious figures Uriel and God to form a narrative thread about a sort of “coming of age” tale. I was especially struck by the casually violent language that also contains threads of sensuality. Can you tell me more about the significance of religion in this collection?
NH: My Father is a pastor. He was also, pointedly, my Pastor. In this way, and the ways that I elucidated above, My Father was, to me, The Voice Of God On Earth—The final Authority, the It Doesn’t Go Higher Than This, It Stops At Me. My Father was not just the owner of my body and my life, He was also the authority over my immortal soul.
As a studious daughter of a pastor, I learned much about Christianity and The Bible from a young age. In my studies, I beheld an entire network of connections between cruelties and violences and religious supplication. The body of the book in its entirety is an exploration and explication of my findings from these studies.
To note on sensuality: I believe that violence is a sensual act, regardless of the moral valence of that thing. It is profoundly physical and intimate and, frequently, profoundly violating. When experiencing psychological, physical, emotional, or sexual violence at the hands of a family member, that violence carries with it additional implications with its sensuality.
IJBD: Poems often deal with the emotional and the spiritual, and many of yours do, too—but there is also an emphasis on the physical. Can you speak on your relationship with the physical, with the body as both a concept and a personal object, such as in “The Body Answers?”
NH: Part of my repudiation of the violence of the Church involved, for me, a repudiation of mind-body dualism. To accept the Church was wrong about the world, and to be able to accept that My Father was wrong about me, I had to accept that, likewise, they were wrong about The Soul. I am not a body riddled with a captured soul, seeking to claw its way back to Heaven, desperate to avoid the torments of Hell. On the contrary: I am my body, and my body is me. As a trans woman, I have a predictably complicated relationship with my body. I have, over the years, been indifferent to my body, hated my body, loved my body, rejected my body, harmed my body, cared for my body, transformed my body, molded my body, and so on. What the progression of ideas about The Body in this book articulates, briefly, is the coming to terms I had to do with my body to survive the ordeal of contending with trauma. I do not hate or love my body. I am my body. And so, as my body, I will love myself, despite all the forces that would attempt to stop me.
IJBD: I loved how “Anti-Ode to Wholeness” is juxtaposed against the running theme of fragmentation as a state to avoid. Instead, it shows the positives of embracing our fractures—our kintsugi. Can you say a little more about your perspective on the socialized pursuit of “wholeness?”
NH: I really appreciate you asking this question—I think that fragmentation is an extremely complex thing. On the one hand, it is frequently the consequence of violence—glass shatters, bones break, skin splits, plates crash and scatter. In this way, it is almost that the fragmentation and the violence itself are one and the same. And yet, there are also forms of fragmentation and fracture which are not only positive, but valuable, necessary even, beautiful even. At the core of our plural existence is an overwhelming commitment to survival and a profound self-love. In the sense that “wholeness” is the inverse of “fragmentation” on some level, “wholeness” to us is synonymous with the things that fragmentation saved us from— the torment of loneliness and isolation, the bitter cold of being unloved and unheard, the ache of being without gentleness or care. “Fragmentation,” or “fracture,” on the other hand, are a path towards liberation from these things. For us, fragmentation meant community. It afforded us the opportunity to experience being loved for the first time in our life. As we wrote in “Fragments I,” “Love was the first technology created, even before / light. It was invented out of desperation. It was hopeless.” Fragmentation was a psychic technology we innovated to survive, and it was the only thing that allowed us survival. I do not hesitate to say that, without the adaptive trauma of psychic fragmentation, we likely would have died many years ago. It is through the strength of our community, our intertwining love, our collective support of each other’s weaknesses with our respective strengths, that we have managed to survive this long. “Technologies designed to withstand force / will develop crumple zones. To protect what matters.”
IJBD: As you mention in your “Note on Authorship,” being a plural system is integral to your (collective and individual) lived experience/s and intimately informs your writing. I really liked seeing who contributed to which pieces. How was the experience of working together on a project like this?
NH: The prospect of writing a book, collectively, was always kind of both a trivially simple task for us—we do everything we do together, collectively, on some level—and yet simultaneously incredibly daunting—we all have distinct voices, perspectives, memories, and experiences, and these necessarily beget distinct styles in writing. To write poems together, and to stitch them together into a single manuscript, meant having to work extremely delicately to find the seams in our styles and merge them together, the points of similarity and inflection that allowed them to rejoin after having been split through our plurality. It allowed us to play to our strengths—Mal’s more aggressive, emotionally weighty style; Hikari’s lighter, brighter, more lilting voice; Wires’ balanced, more mythic voice—which in turn allowed a particular kind of development and progression of thematic and tonal structure. Relatedly—we have another full-length coming out this coming winter with Game Over Books—titled THE MOST HOLY DAY OF THE TRANSSEXUAL CALENDAR, which still features work from all three poets and the editor in our system, but shifts the balances of whose voices are more prominent, in this way profoundly changing the stylistic character of our second collection compared to our first. The opportunity for us to work as a collaborative team in varying expressions and emphases provides us with really fun avenues to discover things about ourselves and, in turn, our relationships with each other. Mal and Hikari, for example, think of themselves as significantly distinct from each other—rightfully so, as they both fulfill extremely contradictory roles in our system. And so, moments where Mal and Hikari had to intimately collaborate—whether on a particular piece, or simply across the manuscript—afforded us an avenue for really interesting investigation into where they could connect, where they could relate and intertwine. The process was not without its frustrations—the writing of this book took a number of years and extremely frequent iteration in vision before we could settle on something that we all collectively found satisfying. Yet we believe ourselves bettered by it, and, hopefully, the work as well, although we leave that assessment up to the reader.
IJBD: Nora, as the within-system editor of this collection, did you find yourself delighted, surprised, interested in what you read between the different contributed works? Did you learn anything new about anyone in the group?
NH: Oh, it was absolutely a delight to work with the rest of ourselves on this as the editor of the book. As the self primarily entrusted with providing a coherent vision for the whole text, I was afforded the unique opportunity to challenge each of ourselves to stretch beyond our previously understood roles and stylistic comfort zones. For Hikari, who is so eager to expound on love and joy—what would it mean for her to express the grief and pain she finds impossible to face? For Mal, whose righteous fury and anger protect our system and keep us grounded in our principles—what would it mean for her to admit to her greater tendernesses, the implicit love behind that blaze? For Wires, who frequently maintains the integrity of her control over her self and selves—what would it mean to allow others to steer a piece alongside her? Each of these questions, when answered, offered us a greater and more intimate understanding of ourselves and each other. And while the work is, of course, for the reader—it is more primarily for ourselves. The poem saves my life. Is saving my life. Will one day save my life.
IJBD: Finally, are there any particular pieces that you really love or feel are core to the collection’s narrative?
NH: Despite Mal’s (relatively) constrained contributions to this particular book in terms of sheer poem count, her perspective and experiences really ground the narrative. In this way, her poem—the only poem in this book that is entirely her own personal work, that is to say, Monologue for Five Selves—acts as the heart of the book, the beating core from which the book moves and breathes. It was an immense exercise in both stylistic and emotional vulnerability from her, to allow her anger and grief and rage to fall away to reveal their inner animating force, the love she holds for our smallest self, the soft child interior of our system who she is uniquely charged with protecting, and in this way, it is also the most profoundly honest piece in the whole text. When she spoke in this book, she spoke briefly and succinctly: this book is about love. And so, the book begins with the dedication that she selected, a dedication which we all share but which is profoundly and uniquely her heart: for Rina.
Still My Father’s Son is available now!
Nora Hikari (she/her) is a disabled Chinese and Japanese transgender poet and artist based in NYC. She was a 2022 Lambda Literary fellow, and her work has been published in Ploughshares, Palette Poetry, Foglifter, The Journal, The Washington Square Review, and others. Her hybrid fiction, KISS ME FAST, was featured in Wigleaf’s Top 50 for 2023. She was a reader at the 2022 Dodge Poetry Festival. Still My Father’s Son is her first book. Nora Hikari can be found on Twitter and Instagram at @system_wires.
Isabeau J. Belisle Dempsey (they/them) is a proud Chicagoan, Belizean, Lesbian, and Capricorn. They hold a BA in International Studies and Spanish and are currently earning an MA in English Literature and Publishing, and they hope to eventually put their obsession with commas to good use as an in-house editor. History book co-author, amateur poet, freelance copyeditor, and generally just along for the ride, you can find Isabeau in your local bookstore surreptitiously fixing the shelves—they were once a bookseller and never quite broke the habit.
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