Reconstruction 11.1 (2011)
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Impossible Returns Through Joy Kogawa’s Novel Obasan / Catalina Florina Florescu
Abstract:
This essay uses Joy Kogawa’s novel Obasan as a means to reflect upon the relationship between cultural assimilation and return. The novel dramatizes how we carry within ourselves remnants of the past, as inherited through family history and memories. It appears that for those who leave their place of birth, a constant nostalgia without cure creates a new geography that has little to do with concrete landscapes, and more to do with affective reconstructions.
Keywords: Assimilation, geography, identity, ritual, language, symbolic return, translation studies
<1> Narrated in first person singular, and interspersed with autobiographical notes—as the author herself experienced feelings of entrapping cultural anxieties—Obasan is dedicated to the Issei, the Japanese people who immigrated to different parts of the globe during the first decades of the 20th century. Naomi Nakame, a school teacher and the novel’s main character, attempts to unveil the history of her family that moved from Japan to Canada and has ever since experienced fluctuating feelings ranging from nostalgia to an acute self-awareness of their new citizenship. Describing herself, Naomi admits: “Personality. Tense. Is that past or present tense? It’s perpetual tense” (7). Being a second generation Canadian, or a Nisei, she was supposed to have been born without any inferior complex about her identity, since second generation immigrants are expected to have assimilated enough to feel a secure belonging to the country of their birth. But that is not her case. She carries within herself multiple fragmented stories, each with its own sad overtones.
<2> Naomi’s mother left her when she was a kid, and a mother-daughter relationship never fully developed. Estranged from her mother, Naomi is raised by her aunt Obasan, who has no connection to the present time or space. She has, instead, boxes full with memorabilia of a life once lived in Japan. Naomi’s uncle, too, dreams of the return, of a day when they will again be in their native land. As he says, “Itsuka, mata itsuka,” which, translated, means “Someday again.” As all immigrants are aware, fragile, oftentimes deferred, codes of ambiguity are a part of the adverb “someday.” The only one who lives in the present is Naomi’s aunt Emily, who believes in her equal rights as a Canadian citizen, even when the disaster of Pearl Harbor comes into their lives and makes people deepen their fear and disgust for “the other.” She misses her older sister, Naomi’s mother, and wonders if her sister has had a better life in their parents’ native country, since she did not confront herself with issues of assimilation.
<3> Nostalgia for a native place does not, then, seem to belong exclusively to the foreign-born generation any longer; instead, it is inherited by the generation that follows. Nostalgia, I suggest, becomes the blood with which immigrants and their children trans-act the new world. The circulation of blood, in other words, becomes an analogy for the circulation of a longing for the past. Its temporary relief is, ironically, “homeopathic,” since Kogawa’s characters justify their lives by performing their native language, preparing traditional dishes, wearing Japanese garments, as well as keeping other rituals alive—thus recreating the emotional map of their beloved Japan. During this journey, she encounters and enriches her “topophilia” or “felicitous space images,” which “seek to determine the human value of the sorts of space that may be grasped, that may be defended against adverse forces, the space we love,” the space that ultimately “has been lived in, not in its possibility, but with all the partiality of the imagination” (Bachelard xxxi-xxxii). Consequently, Naomi’s return relies not on motion, but on soul searching to her felicitous space images of the self that are freer than any geographical divide.
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<4> The novel is preceded by a motto taken from the Bible: “To him that overcometh/Will I give to eat/Of the hidden manna/And will give him/A white stone/And in the stone/A new name written” (v). The passage is part of “Revelation 2:19” and could be best described as a holy promise of eternal gratitude for those who live an honest life. As promised, a new name will be written in stone for believers—unbreakable and unshakable. It appears that for those who live in between worlds and cultures, there is always the promise, or at least the hope, of finding a “new name” or a “new destiny” that could sooth their search for a “new identity” in a place that was not, but has become, their own over the years. And just as it is challenging to live a life as honest as possible, to achieve a new identity that truly fits a person’s personality is another major quest and trail for both immigrants and their children.
<5> But there is this intriguing, quite contradictory dialogue between finding the “new name” and the “new identity” because, as the author also admits in the prologue, “Unless the stone bursts with telling, unless the seed flowers with speech, there is in my life no living word. If I could follow the stream down and down to the hidden voice, would I come at last to the freeing word?” (vi). In other words, her investigation into her dual identity promises eventually to free her. The author becomes her own project, where she unmasks, glues together and recreates parts from her past so that she may be able to reassemble and give meaning to her origin, Japanese, and her citizenship, Canadian.
<6> Not having been born Japanese, only inheriting its dimension, like blood circulates in family generation after generation, the author-narrator-protagonist will eventually relapse into the literal meaning of the word “return.” Naomi positions herself between retrieving the memories of an unknown land, on the one hand, and defining her identity as a woman of Asian parentage, on the other. She seems to be chasing butterflies, all beautifully, yet vaguely colored, since her relatives—without exception—are an unstable, shadowy presence in her life. In their book, Metaphors We Live By, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson write that “in performing rituals, we give structure and significance to our activities, minimizing chaos and disparity in our actions. In our terms, a ritual is one kind of experiential gestalt” (234). Starting from the assumption that words are symbols, then, Kogawa situates her return within this gentle verbal context. She encounters a return in every family member she lives with, is visited by, or dreams about meeting again, and thus becomes accustomed to per-form a ritual of the return.
<7> However, this ever repeating return is fragmented. According to Gestalt law, “When a thing is represented fragmented, one can substitute its missing parts” (Arnheim 61). What happens when someone is presented fragmented? Can a piece from her identity be replaced or substituted? We exist only as fragmented creatures: in- and exhaling, dreaming and living, speaking and being silent. Dan Mellamphy believes that “to think fragment is to think the eternal return of a rupture, to get the drift of a fundamental fissure” (83). Naomi attempts to remedy this fissure by substituting its missing parts only to discover that the past of others is not easily or faithfully traceable.
<8> It helps to notice that by the mid-19th century, Friedrich Nietzsche spoke of the “eternal return” as our desire to define existence as worth living, and thus repeatable. I think that this is not exactly a repetition per se, but a cyclical realization of both time and being/becoming. When the madman in Nietzsche’s The Gay Science (1882) shouts “We have killed God, you and I,” what he evokes is more than the symbolic act of having killed God. What his assertion means is that for too many centuries human beings tried to follow God’s commandments without paying attention to their flesh of desires. This is the reason why Nietzsche, the modern prophet, advises humans to start loving their bodies, as the incarnation of their desires, as well as the embodiment of their understanding of life.
<9> Martin Heidegger continues on Nietzsche’s theory of the eternal return by saying that Dasein is in-der Welt-sein, or “being-in-the-world.” For Harrison Hall, “the hyphens are indicative of the fact that, as Dasein, self and world are a unity. The world is not something external but is constitutive of Dasein. We are born into a world whose history and culture help us make who we are” (155). However, neither history nor culture can define who we are with certainty, only death restores our “oneness.” As a consequence, lacking consciously this fundamental moment, while we are alive, we are incomplete, fragmented. To complicate this idea even more, there is something irreducible in both things and beings, something which is beyond our capacity to translate perceptions and feelings into words, and which may correspond with or start from the unbreakable nature of our name. Or, returning to the novel, as Naomi’s Uncle declares with undeniable self-assurance, “this world is brokenness. But within brokenness is the unbreakable name” (240). We grow up, we change professional goals, we move from one place to another; however, if there is something that appears to remain unaltered, that is our name.
<10> Along abstract names like “love”, “justice”, “sacrifice”—to name only a few—there are the names that we receive at birth and that remain unchanged throughout our lives. Over the years, we become a Mary, a Peter, a John resonating the sound of each letter. We are mesmerized by our name’s phonemes. We are identified by others by our posture, verbal and nonverbal language, qualities and possessions, including our name. Naomi is aware of the intricacies of her dual identity, so that we get the feeling of her existential angst. She lives in Southern Alberta, in the town of Cecil. She is a school teacher and thirty-six years old. Even after sixteen years of teaching, her name is still difficult to pronounce: “’Miss Nah Canny’, [a student] says. ‘Not Nah Canny.’ I tell him, printing my name on the blackboard. NAKANE. ‘The a’s are short as in ‘among’- Na Ka Neh- and not as in ‘apron’ or ‘hat’” (6). Furthermore, parents usually commit the indiscretion of confusing her with a foreigner: “’How long have you been in this country?’ ‘I was born here’” (7). Her Asian appearance makes people mistake her identity, which, ironically, becomes misleading for Naomi herself. Or, as she admits, “The only thing that I carry in my wallet is my driver’s license. I should have something with my picture on it and a statement below that tells who I am” (7). She has to carry with her permanently a legal identity card to prove her citizenship.
<11> But who is she? The question becomes more intriguing when Uncle, who is one of the persons raising her, dies. When he is in the hospital, close to dying, Naomi feels that “everything was reversing rapidly and he was tunneling backwards top to bottom, his feet in an upstairs attic of humus and memory, his hands groping down through the cracks and walls to the damp cellar, to the water, down to the underground sea.…In the end, did he manage to swim full circle back to that other shore”? (14, emphasis added). Structurally, the death of her Uncle is strategically annexed after Naomi presents herself. We may imply that a person leaves behind him a sea of memories. But what does he take with him? What is the significance of death for a family whose origins are elsewhere? Before we answer these questions, we realize that, perhaps, such a death is especially tragic, since it may impoverish and unbalance a family’s traditions, language, and rituals. The blood is at risk of wearing itself dry, and nostalgia, as an inevitable side-effect of “inadaptability,” would only make things worse. Nostalgia keeps people rooted in their past, holding them narcissistically attached to their gradually impoverishing memories. Nostalgia is like a potent drug with probably damaging self-effacing consequences.
<12> For Naomi, Uncle is just as flowing as the sea and as profound as its depths. On his deathbed, he sings “’Nen nen korori—lullaby, lullaby…’ Uncle was a child of the waves” (14). This type of child inherits the disposition of the sea: fluctuating, moving, in perpetual motion. His recurrent dream of returning to his native Japan unfortunately does not become reality. In the end, he will not reach the Japanese shore to walk along it and to breath in its salty particles of air. As a “child of the waves,” Naomi’s Uncle partakes in the miracle of the universe, tasting its immensity. For Gaston Bachelard, “Immensity is within ourselves. It is attached to a sort of expansion of being that life curbs and caution arrests, but which starts again when we are alone. …Immensity is the movement of the motionless man” (184). Facing the waves or simply contemplating them, Uncle deposits within himself their tumultuous refrain as they slowly but surely break down and form the elusive foam at seashore. Upon touching it, the waves dissipate and then magically return to the sea, washing the land sensuously and then returning to their labyrinth of waters.
<13> Uncle is a dreamer who imagines water to have one blessing quality everywhere. He thinks that his once touching the water in a place named Canada will somehow communicate his longing for Japan in an unspoken, exclusively felt communication. Close to dying, “Uncle was wearily wiping his forehead with the palm of his hand….He was waiting for that ‘someday’ when he could go back to the boats. But he never did” (22). After he dies, he will return to his bank of watery memories that will sing him uninterrupted lullabies of longing and departure and postponed arrival.
<14> Unlike Uncle, whose destiny is fluid and encompassing, Naomi’s mother is dense like the earth. Once she makes the decision to go to Japan to take care of a sick relative, she never comes back to Canada, leaving her children there. She is an enigmatic, desiccated land. When she leaves Canada, Naomi is only five years old. And from that moment, mother and daughter no longer have any contact. Naomi recreates her mother’s image and voice, but “only fragments relate [her] to…this young woman, [her] mother, and [her], her infant daughter. Fragments of fragments. Parts of a house. Segments of stories” (53). During this fragile developmental phase in her life, she faces the emptying sensation of missing someone, and, to a certain extent, missing a part of herself. Naomi gets acquainted with the very challenging task of waiting, and, as a child, she fails at performing it. It is inhumane for a child to wait without any sign from her mother: “I am thinking that for a child there is no presence without flesh” (243).
<15> When she is an adult, Naomi is mature enough to realize the different stages of waiting, where abandonment does not translate as “ending” but as “opening” to a another path of self-discovery. Whenever she recollects her mother, Naomi is in a lurking tunnel of hope and despair, where she feels that she is “clinging to [her] mother’s leg, a flesh shaft that grows from the ground….Her blood is whispering through my veins. The shaft of her leg is the shaft of my body and [Naomi is] her thoughts” (64). Naomi envisions Japan as a magical place that keeps her mother captive, and thus her return ironically transforms into Naomi’s departure toward a borrowed homeland of dreams and partly retrieved memories. Put differently, her mother’s decision initiates Naomi’s quest for finding another part of her identity, this time of an umbilical nature, since she searches for a reunion with her mother: “Silent mother, you do not speak or write. You do not reach through the night to enter morning, but remain in the voicelessness. From the extremity of much dying, the only sound that reaches me now is the sigh of your remembered breath, a wordless word” (241). Naomi is undoubtedly traumatized by this prolonged silence, by this unjust departure. Her mother has become a hallow space that does not offer any comfort, but, instead, induces a state of fear and emotional instability.
<16> There are two other women who substitute for her mother, Emily and Obasan; Naomi describes them bluntly: “How different my two aunts are. One lives in sound, the other in stone” (32). One fights for her rights as a Canadian, the other dreams of her native Japan. Obasan does not belong to the present. She grows older, as this process is irreversible and inevitable, but mentally she is totally submersed in the past and, hence, forever young, untouched by the passing of time. In other words, time has stopped for her once she left her Japan. She “has preserved in shelves, in cupboards, under beds—a box of marbles, half-filled coloring books…The items are endless. Every short stub pencil, every cornflakes box stuffed with paper bags and old letters is of her ordering. They rest in the corners like parts of her body, hair cells, skin tissues, tiny specks of memory. This house is now her blood and bones” (16). Her body has become an architectural dome of despair, angular and stiff like cemented bricks. Interestingly, corners create a sensation of immobility and “every inch of secluded space in which we like to hide, or withdraw into ourselves, is a symbol of solitude for the imagination” (Bachelard 136). Corners speak of issues related to intimacy, since two walls intersect with one another in a common point, but the outcome is always whispered. There is finally one suggestive element that needs to be added: Obasan’s clustered memory collection may be compared with “mochi,” a traditional Japanese dish, which she and her dear ones frequently eat. As Naomi recollects, “Sometimes, instead of buying mochi ready-made in white balls, we cook the special dense mocha rice, then pound it with a small wooden bat over and over till it is stickier than glue” (20).
<17> Because Obasan has dismissed the present, “she is the bearer of keys to unknown doorways and to a network of astonishing tunnels. She’s the possessor of life’s infinite personal details” (16). Obasan converses only in her native language, which Naomi learns, too. This is how she discovers a beautiful concept, “wagamama,” or being selfish and inconsiderate, more specifically, a way of “meeting [our] needs in spite of the wishes of others” (128). Obasan wears exclusively traditional garments and teaches her niece about the significance of the continuity of national fabrics and patterns as another unspoken yet durable sign to preserve a country’s tradition and history. Naomi frequently wears a “nemaki,” which is a “sleeping garment of purple and white cotton which Grandma has sewn by hand. It has a rectangular envelope-shaped sleeve with openings at the armpits and two ties meeting in a bow at the back” (49, emphasis added). Without being aware of the phenomenological theory of the human body as possessing zones of envelopment and overlapping with other bodies, Naomi’s grandma and aunt anticipate the comfort that we give to the human body when it feels the dedication of a manually made fabric and embroidery. Consequently, as Noami declares with gratitude, “I am supremely safe in my nemaki” (49).
<18> While Obasan keeps Naomi rooted in the past, her other aunt, Emily, educates her about her rights as a Canadian citizen, and, by extension, about her rights in spite of an inherited physical appearance, about working for justice beyond a certain color of skin and a particular configuration of the eyes. Once Naomi’s mother leaves Japan, Emily starts writing her letters, which she never mails. They are not exactly lost, since Naomi finds them, and thereby discovers the truth behind political discourses. In a letter dating after the Pearl Harbor tragedy, Emily writes: “Strange how these protesters are so much more vehement about Canadian-born Japanese than they are about German-born Germans. I guess it’s because we look different. What it boils down to is an undemocratic racial antagonism” (82). In another epistle, she is outraged that “the papers say that in order to preserve the ‘British way of life’, they [Canadian officials] should send us all away. We’re a ‘lower order of people.’ In one breath we are damned for being ‘inassimilable’ and the next there’s fear that we’ll assimilate” (87). Emily portrays an insecure, although civilized, society with the primitive, needy suspicion of fully embracing strangers. This becomes Naomi’s fear, too, as long as she cannot possibly change her appearance and people continue to confuse her with, and treat her as, an alien. After Pearl Harbor, she has vivid memories of humiliation: “After our former homes had been sold over our vigorous protests, after having been re-registered, finger-printed, card-indexed, ropes and restricted, I cry out the question: Is this my own, my native land?…For better or worse, I am Canadian” (40).
<19> Published in 1981, when theories of globalization were not as vast and versatile as they are now, this novel digs even deeper, namely to Pearl Harbor and World War II, when a concept such as “naturalization” was still ambiguous and problematic. Naomi is part of a misreading, if you will, since she is by birth Canadian, but by looks, blood, garments Japanese. Still, she cannot naturalize or assimilate herself in a culture that is her own, so she lives with a permanent undeserved stigma and prefers the quietude of a life at the margin, that is, intimately secluded. At thirty six, she is still single and without children: “Why indeed are there two of us unmarried in our small family? Must be something in the blood. A crone-prone syndrome” (8). The implication is that there is an emotional deficiency/anomaly beyond her control. Like her aunt Emily, Naomi does not want to procreate either, which may be interpreted as an irrational, self-imposed bodily exile that limits her genealogically.
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<20> If so far we have listened to Naomi’s intricate story, her relatives’ insecure lives and her mother’s final decision never to return to her children, it is now worth reflecting on responsibility. The question of having one citizenship, one race, one gender implies how much we are responsible for what we have been given and how we make our possessions fit into the larger picture and scope of a given community. As Ann Weinstone reminds us, “Derrida’s ethical thinking also relies on concepts of the singular and the unalterably other, where the other is… constitutive of the self, of experience itself: an always unassimilable exterior-interior"(23). We cannot but differ from “the other,” be he or she a family member or someone from our community. This argument has been part of ample discussions when the structure of the DNA-helix, with its trademark dual characteristic, was discovered in the 1950s. What matters for the argument of this essay is yet of a distinct nature. Naomi belongs to two cultures and will always be situated at midpoint, which, despite her insecurities and many obstacles, represents something to be proud of because this inheritance is her destiny. Her responsibility is not to be ashamed of her roots, but to embrace and promote them further. Naomi secures her authenticity by continuing this symbolic return to a place that she may one day actually visit.
<21> It appears that there is not a better verb to express the uninterrupted flame of one’s searching one’s dual identity than “to return.” Naomi is the result of a household of ghosts, who hold on tight to their longing for Japan. Over the years, they enrich their adoptive community with different rituals; for example, the “flower ritual” performed during ceremonies dedicated to the dead. Still, the most durable achievement is what a character calls “the transmutation of sound,” when one speaks Japanese in what seems at first a vacuum space, namely a space that does not recognize Japanese as an official language. Parents, who left their native country, shout: “Kodomo no tame—for the sake of the children—gaman shi masho—let us endure” (245). To feel this uttering, let us remember the naïve rain dance ritual, an ancient ceremonial performance. The same ritualistic pattern seems to work with the Issei, as they continue to speak their own language in a foreign country, not only to communicate with one another, but also to anchor it deeply in a different place.
<22> This transmutation of sound, and, by extension, of destinies affects Naomi so profoundly that she becomes increasingly aware of her role in continuing the family’s symbolic return. Without this return, it seems, an immigrant is not caught between worlds but has deliberately abandoned her history and essence. On the other hand, what is accomplished through a symbolic return is the retrieve of a country’s imaginary map, just as, comparatively, an hourglass—when shaken—deposits uninterruptedly its tiny speckles of sand. Obasan, Uncle, Emily, even her absent mother, have all contributed to weaving Naomi’s identity “topophilia,” where, by the end of the novel, she is content to return.
Works Cited
Arnheim, Rudolph. The Power of the Center: A Study of Composition in the Visual Arts. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982.
Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space. Trans. Maria Jolas. Boston: Beacon Press, 1969.
Hall, Harrison. “Intentionality and World: Division I of Being and Time.” The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger. Ed. Charles Guignon. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993. 122-141.
Kogowa, Joy. Obasan. Boston: D.R. Godine, 1981.
Lakoff, George and Mark Johnson. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980.
Mellamphy, Dan. “Fragmentality: Thinking the Fragment.” Dalhousie French Studies. 45 (1998): 83-98.
Weinstone, Ann. Avatar Bodies: A Tantra for Posthumanism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004.
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