Photographs ~ KAVYA KRISHNAMURTHY

Photographs

KAVYA KRISHNAMURTHY

There’s that photograph, the one of the sailor kissing that lady in the street. I remember the toe of her white shoe pointed down, his hand around her waist, her arm dangling by her side, and her, pleasantly disoriented by such an intimate, sudden celebration. I remember the men and women behind them, exhilarated by this day of romantic whims and victory. “VJ Day in Times Square.” Japan surrendered. Americans were heroes. It was in a slideshow for my seventh grade American Studies class. I remember a lot of things from that class: one boy of German descent saying he got a sick feeling when he saw that he looked like the soldiers in the videos. I remember wondering what mortification I might have if my ancestors inflicted such pain. I remember a debate about Hiroshima and Nagasaki and whether that was a moral choice or unnecessary violence. I remember saying it was for the best. I remember my history teacher asking me if the slides on Japanese internment made me feel uncomfortable, but I felt nothing. After all, I’m American. My mom’s name is Mary. Mari. Mariko. I’m not close with her parents: I thought they didn’t speak English for the longest time–strange considering that my mom’s father was a professor here for thirty years. He’s brilliant, actually. When he was in middle school in Japan, he worked at a factory, building Kamikaze planes. My mom’s mother went to school with Korean girls who were living in Japan during occupation. She made fun of them for the shape of their eyes, their bad teeth. When my mom told me this, I accepted it as history, someone else’s history. My mom never made fun of Korean girls for their bad teeth. I once read in a book that Americans had pretty teeth, like large loaves of white bread. My mom has monolid eyes, but she also has pretty teeth. I have pretty teeth.

I have pretty teeth, but I don’t photograph well. Nobody in my Japanese family does, but that’s because they all smile with their mouths closed. My family photographs are cold, dead almost. They’re not like the kinds of photographs that you can look at and know that everything was romantic, and that beautiful strangers kissed in the streets, and that people were alive and in love. I know that white people have photographs of their grandparents from the fifties, from weddings, dinners, graduation ceremonies. I know, even though they don’t share them with me–there’s no reason to. But in my own life of wood-framed pictures of stoic ancestors with narrow eyes, I somehow seem to be bombarded with other people’s photographs, beautiful photographs, that I can never have. I am bombarded with photographs of unfamiliar lips meeting and white shoes on lovely white people and American heroes with big white teeth. I don’t see myself in them. I don’t see my grandparents. But I don’t see my grandparents in images of Pearl Harbor either. My grandparents aren’t violent. They’re barely people. They’re always afraid. They’re quiet. I see my grandparents in photographs of nothing but broken wooden planks, burnt jagged obscure things that may have been beautiful once. Photographs of the clamor of death, the noise of heat and corpses and nothing. Here, I see my grandparents. I don’t see any American heroes. I don’t see Kamikaze planes. I see destruction, pain. A barefoot woman on her hands and knees, crawling in the remains of her city. A dead baby’s charred face. A man whose back looks like ripped up raw meat, even in black and white.

Jemma Siegel