love bends / the mover: The Roy Miki Issue will not still the life and work of the poet, photographer, activist, scholar, editor, and beloved teacher. In circling the too-many possible places from which to “begin” this note, we have often returned to the words of so many others who are forever moved and changed by Roy Miki. Phinder Dulai has called Miki “a movement artist”; Kyo Maclear has described him as “a scene,” explaining that “the scenius of roy was to show us we were better when we gathered, wrote, celebrated, organized together”; and Smaro Kamboureli speaks to “the enabling role his work and life have played” for generations of people.¹ In over twenty new works, we are honoured to continue some of these conversations here.

“be leaf me,” Roy writes, grounding readers of his award-winning Surrender in the sugar beet farm where his life began in Francophone Ste. Agathe, Manitoba, 1942, the same year as his family’s deportation from Haney, BC.² In so-called Canada, the suspension of civil liberties for families like Miki’s during World War II – involving internment, dispersal, dispossession, and, ultimately, the incubation of a racialized Japanese Canadian identity – would only reach some resolution in 1988, when the federal government issued an apology and financial settlement at the signing of the Redress Agreement between the National Association of Japanese Canadians (NAJC) and the minister of multiculturalism. Roy and his brother Art Miki have been at the heart of decades of organizing efforts in and beyond the NAJC, before and after Redress.

The texts and artworks in this issue come together within and across many of Roy’s varied communities: artistic, activist, academic, and Asian Canadian among all of these, considering subjects like asiancy, archives, and, crucially, Roy’s imperative to action as a few more principles within his astonishingly imaginative praxis.³ The alliterative synchronicity here all the while attempts to return readers to the materiality of language that roots Roy’s work. As Michael Barnholden, editor of Miki’s Flow: Poems Collected and New, affirms: “Roy’s first language was language.”

Several contributors take up these lines of linguistic query in Miki’s expanded cultural field, recognizing that language, in his own forceful words, “the vehicle of power, is a contaminated site.”⁴ “哎呀, why can’t i write in Chinglish?” poses poet and translator Yilin Wang. Khashayar “Kess” Mohammadi reads “Gulshan-i-Raz” (گلشن راز) among their diasporic Iranian peers, and Carolyn Nakagawa and Yoriko Gillard reflect poetry across archives. Artist Sena Cleave reverberates in the imaginative integers left by Miki’s open-ended parentheses to consider forms of repetition and meditation. Wayde Compton’s long poem retells The Argonautika as an eighteenth-century slave narrative, moving “to the edge of an ocean mockingly larger / than the last, to a fort shaped, hopelessly, / like summation,” near here, this west coast of what we call North America.

Like Compton, more than half of the contributors to this issue encountered Dr. Miki in the classroom, during his five decades in the Department of English at Simon Fraser University. Tiziana La Melia and Echo Quan return to the biotextual⁵ assignments and imperatives posed by Prof. Miki in his final undergraduate seminar in Spring 2006, “Getting Personal: The Autobiographic Impulse in Contemporary Literature.” Cindy Mochizuki, whose immersive text-image 流れ revisits two internment sites in Sandon and New Denver, BC, threads memory, story, and inheritance. Gloriah Amondi and Vivek Sharma meanwhile remind us of Roy’s fierce advocacy for his students – in fiction that brings to focus the scholarship program founded by Kenyan President Tom Mboya in the 1960s (Amondi) and in poems tracing the current context of “this replaceable little town in the Okanagan” with precision and humour (Sharma) – calling upon us to fight the failures of the federal government and public postsecondary institutions to support international students at a moment of crisis and attacks on immigration worldwide.

The revolution in the opening stanzas of Miki’s early version of “Pre-face to Saving Face” – included in its original form in Barnholden’s essay – are wrapped and rapt in ways that work against any easy excerpt. Nonetheless, our issue title is one echo, here, in tempo: “in disarray / love bends / the mover / by will alone / along the center / so far / from which we / want an end / of all speechlessness.”⁶

“anyone who moves / away from the center” might take some time with the first few lines here. For now, “the sun slides over” some of these suspended stanzas; blinking, we might also offer a few additional notes from which to begin.⁷ Miki dedicates this “Pre-face” to his father, Kazuo Miki; later the opening words for his “sansei poem” begin, “it is a long line – so it is said.” We want to write now to Roy and Slavia Miki and their families, in gratitude and admiration, and to thank the readers and writers here and “so far,” and all who will.

1. 
   Dulai writes, “Roy Miki is a movement artist who builds from the outside in, upward from the bottom, and from within to the outside” in “Asiancy: Mapping the Literary,” Tracing the Lines: Reflections on Contemporary Poetics and Cultural Politics in Honour of Roy Miki (Vancouver: Talonbooks, 2011), 80; Kyo Maclear via Instagram, October 2024; Kamboureli, “‘i have altered my tactics to reflect the new era’: Public Intellectuals and Community,” Tracing the Lines, 182.
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2. 
   Roy Miki, “knocks at the door,” Surrender (Toronto: Mercury Press, 2001), 26.
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3. 
   See Roy Miki, “Asiancy: Making Space for Asian Canadian Writing,” Broken Entries (Toronto: Mercury Press, 1988). Pauline Butling first suggested that Roy could move any “idea, theory, or conversation into action”; see also Fred Wah’s “Miki—A Glossary” in this issue where he offers “Let’s do it” as vocabulary.
   
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4. 
   Miki, Broken Entries, 117.
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5. 
   George Bowering, Errata (Red Deer: Red Deer College Press, 1988), 34.
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6. 
   Roy Miki, “Pre-face to Saving Face,” Inalienable Rice: A Chinese & Japanese Canadian Anthology (Vancouver: Powell Street Revue and the Chinese Canadian Writers Workshop, 1979), 73-5, https://archive.org/details/cca_ inalienablerice/page/72/mode/2up.
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7. 
   “My grandfather and grandmother are primary. / Two photographs. Miniatures,” Miki continues, studying the composition of the identity documents deployed by the Canadian government to strip his grandparents of their rights at the time of internment. For further discussion, see Miki and Barnholden, “Inter View,” in Flow; Kirsten McCallister and Roy Miki in West Coast Line 57 (Spring/Summer 2008); and McCallister and Miki in Tracing the Lines. ↩︎