Through her personal journal entries and poetry, the author AnnMarie L. Bonasera speaks through the narrator, Ann, who informs the reader about Japan's culture and the bombing of Hiroshima on August 6, 1945. Bonasera provides insight into the experiences of the Japanese and American people who were in a war that brought mental and physical devastation that not only affected their lives but the lives of their offspring. In addition, Bonasera communicates the feeling of internal pain and conflict, and the dilemma of finding oneself lost in a place that is somewhere else. In Between the Spaces of Time, Bonasera tries to make sense of the senselessness of war and its atrocities.
Between the Spaces of Time
A Poetic Exploration of the Effects of War and the Journey of HealingBy Ann Marie L. BonaseraiUniverse, Inc.
Copyright © 2012 Ann Marie L. Bonasera
All right reserved.ISBN: 978-1-4620-5931-7Contents
Acknowledgments...............................................ixThe Angel of Death............................................xiI. My Mind is Full of Memories................................1II. The Day in Hell...........................................14III. Life in a Dream World....................................18IV. Lost in a Place called Somewhere Else.....................26V. Hello is the Beginning of Goodbye..........................31VI. Chidori-ga-fuchi..........................................35VII. High Technology..........................................53VIII. Centered................................................59IX. Silent Suffering..........................................68X. Enemy, Friend..............................................75XI. Who am I?.................................................77XII. The Dark Night of the Soul...............................80XIII. The Passing.............................................82Between the Spaces of Time....................................88
Chapter One
I. My Mind is Full of Memories
Images Like a movie That plays out its reruns Over and over And we relive those Episodes Within our fantasies Bringing to the past A new interpretation In the present Reinforcing a future With blown-out-of-proportion Memories. It takes a hurricane To blow it away And send it back to its Miniscule place in its life span; To diminish it And clear the way To embrace this life We now have.
4/17
I met Jessie for lunch today. We ate in the Lotus Restaurant on East 86th Street. It's been about two years now since she came back to New York City, and here we were again as if no time had passed. It was a great treat for me to see my dear friend again. My mother used to call her "Christmas Tree Face" because when she smiled and laughed her whole face would light up and her eyes twinkled in a way that made it seem like the lights blinking on a Christmas tree. We hadn't seen each other since she volunteered in the Navy right after high school graduation. I can remember that day as if it were yesterday. It was such a sad day for me. She met me in front of my building and she told me that her mother had signed the permission papers so she could enlist in the Navy and that she would be leaving the next month. So she left and traveled around the United States and I went off to college and my life in New York City's boroughs evolved. She wrote to me and sent post cards from all the places she visited, so in those days I traveled vicariously. Today we were celebrating my birthday. She remembered. We always celebrated our birthdays in high school. Halfway through lunch she handed me a package. It was wrapped so pretty I almost hesitated to open it. I always felt that a gift was so much more meaningful if someone took the time to wrap it up. To me it meant that the person was thinking of you in a good way when they were wrapping it. The wrapping paper is like the "canvas" of their loving thoughts about you. A card read "To my best friend, Ann-when I saw this picture I immediately thought of you. I think she looks like you." The first gift was a picture of a girl sitting at a table with psychology books and a candle. She looked like a beatnik. She had long hair and a long, pensive face, with thoughtful eyes, framed by big black rimmed glasses. Wearing black tights and red boots, pencil in hand, she seemed ready to take notes. I guess it was the long hair and the big eyes, or maybe it was the pencil and the books. I always had a pencil in my hand. Jessie said I was a born psychologist, maybe because back in high school I used to be the one that everyone told their problems to, and I was the one who had all the answers. How ironic, since I have more questions now than answers. I guess I worked my way backwards. The other gift was this journal.
She said I needed a place to collect my thoughts because they were like shooting fireworks that splattered across a dark sky. I needed a place to contain them.
This is a very royal looking journal and the pages have beautiful silver edges. What a change in me, that I would like the silver edges. Silver had a sad meaning for me. So here I am, back with silver. When I was 5 years old my Uncle Frank asked me and this other girl, Susan, to be his flower girls. We had very fancy pink gowns and our mothers decided that gold shoes would look nice. Susan went to the shoe store with her mother and got the gold shoes, but when I went to the store they didn't have any gold shoes left, so they gave me silver. My mother agreed that silver would look good, but all I could think about was that Susan got gold shoes and I didn't. For some reason I felt that what Susan got was better. I realized now that even at the young age of 5 Susan gave me an inferiority complex. She was so talented and could sing and dance on stage without fear. Everyone thought she was so adorable and enjoyed her performances. She was even the lead singer in our school choir. I, on the other hand, was very shy. I knew that I was very talented too, but it was all locked up inside of me then, and I could only imagine in my dreams that I was a "star" like she was. So when she got the gold shoes and I got the silver, I took it to heart. I took it to mean that I was getting the left over's or just not the best. I never gave it a thought that maybe silver did look better. Silver was bad. Then years later my father asked me what I would like for Christmas and I asked for a gold cross. I wanted to wear something gold, shining on my chest. When I opened my gift on Christmas morning, there it was—a silver cross. How could I not love it? My father gave it to me. He said that gold was too expensive. It was very pretty, and this journal is pretty too. Sometimes we just don't get what we want. Sometimes it's just not ours to have. We are meant for other things.
4/24
My father was a Sicilian G.I. during W.W. II and my mother was a Geisha living in Kyoto. My father never talked about his experiences in the war. Anything I learned was from the stories my mother told me and from two old letters that my grandmother kept. Apparently he was engaged to a woman named Lucy before he went overseas and Lucy shared those letters with his mother. One was written by a nurse in a hospital in Ethiopia when he suffered from malaria and was delirious with high fever. She wrote to his fiancé and told her that Eddie was not able to write. He had been through a bad ordeal in combat. He killed a man and then started to run towards the enemy but a buddy soldier grabbed him and was able to get him back to safety. He suffered a nervous breakdown and his hands were too shaky to write. On top of that he had contracted malaria.
The other letter was about being in Italy. There he was, the son of natural born Italian parents, fighting the Italians. Gesualdo Bonasera ... That was his birth name. Eddie was his American name. I still have that old article about when he was interviewed and asked how he felt about fighting the people from his homeland. He said he was a Yankee, through and through, and that he was born in America and he was an American.
My mother told me a story about my father being in a fox hole for a very long time. There were four soldiers, huddled together in a hole. They were on the lookout for the enemy. They took...
