by Andrew Geoffrey Kwabena Moss (Author)
Japanabandon - Travels in Japan is a collection of autoethnographic poems that explore the poet's experiences and reflections of teaching in Japan in the late 1990s. These poems investigate the themes of dislocation in migration and home as both an imagined and remembered place.
Japan is part of a wider challenge for this Anglo-Ghanaian poet to find Zion. Moss navigates an unfamiliar culture with an already developed outsider's perspective and double consciousness. The poet inhabits a privileged vantage point of being able to see in both directions and now a third is added.
Moss's writing about Japan considers the interplay between Occidental views of the Orient and Oriental views of the Occident, journeying through the topography of Edward Said's 'imaginative geographies and histories.' The poems in Japanabandon chart initial culture shocks, their tremors and aftershocks.