"powerful" examination of Joy Kogawa's Obasan

Joy Kogawa’s Obasan is a dramatically powerful examination of the interpelative possibilities of textual discourse. The text quite pointedly interrogates the cultural and historical assumptions of the reader in order to emphasize its attempts to give voice to those who were denied even the citizenship required to do so. As the protagonist of the text in an endeavour to localize her identity invokes her own past, I would like to begin by quotation. A fragment of the archive, from page 256: “There are incebreaker questions that create an awareness of ice”. So my icebreaker is as follows: Can we examine the conceptualization of remembrance in Obasan as a reinscription of original trauma onto a new space of subjectivity occupied by the reader? This is not done in any negative sense in terms of the value of pleasure within the text, for indeed in many respects pleasure lies at the heart of the narrative. To my eyes this formulation of using history, of refracting the past into and through the present, reflects Josef Hayim Yerushalmi’s statement / question, “Is it possible that the antonym of ‘forgetting’ is not ‘remembering’, but justice?” Certainly such seems to be Kogawa’s project with Obasan as objet sui-même in the archive of cultural memory.

Like Proust’s madelaine, Naomi’s walk to the coulee opens the seal covering her memories. It also serves to bookend the narrative, structurally and thematically enclosing histories and events which the reader ostensibly pieces together by the final chapters. In a similar manner, Obasan’s statement “Everybody someday dies” serves this function, although I will reflect her Zen-lie reticence by dealing with it latter, and not here. Before the reader can properly situate itself in the present of 1972, Kogawa uses the somewhat uncontrollable entrance into Naomi’s past as a strategic differal which serves to dislocate the normative subjectivity associated with reading historical prose as ‘of the past’. 1972 contains few narrative events and captures about a month of time, yet nearly three dozen chapters of extra-temporal narrative are required to resolve the present. This dislocation of reader’s subjective sense of the present in the text reflects the similarly fractured notion of identity that Naomi has herself experienced. The present is used as an ordering device for the past, as various traumatic events are examined and ‘unforgotten’: sexual abuse by a neighbour; the fracturing of Naomi’s family, perhaps best demonstrated by her increasing distance from her brother, Steven, who seems particularly comfortable in his conformance to Canadian racism; and the maggots, abused animals, and nightmare dream sequences which seem structurally informed by the horrors of the description of the bombing of Nagasaki, to which they lead in the text.

This connection between past and present is made most elaborate by the ‘walk to the coulee’ sequence. The first, which opens chapter one, seems innocuous enough, and indeed the reader is soon made aware that Naomi and her Uncle have been performing this ritual, repeating this journey, for years. It is not until the end of the text that the significance of this walk becomes apparent, as then it is evident that the trips to the coulee began shortly after Uncle and Obasan learned of the death of Naomi’s mother. The journey at the end of the text also stands as Naomi’s eulogy for the passing of her Uncle. Consequently, the walk prefigures a recurrence of the moment of trauma transposed into another subjective temporality through repressed and projected remembrance. This can be understood as certain obsessive routines demonstrated by Freud to be the repetition of the moment of traumatic immanence displaced into a more controllable action to allow the conscious mind to legitimate the trauma (trauma as not-negating-the-self) while simultaneously rejecting it (trauma as the non-self which needs to be overcome). For Naomi’s uncle, this differal is the acceptance of fate: “what will be will be”, as he says on page 220. And yet with his death, Naomi comes to understand the duplicity – in the sense not just of falseness, but of doubleness – of the pain experienced by herself and her family. To remain silent on the matter is to underline, to repeat, the violence against the self which was the initial trauma.

That for Naomi this rejection of self-violence occurs as an unveiling, a flood of memories and traumas unearthed, is within Derrida’s sense of the archive as elaborated in Archive Fever, the pleasure of censorship enacted by the guardians of history. It is the re-subjectification of the initial trauma to a present always-already in crisis, which for the Naomi of 1972 is the simultaneous death of her Uncle and the realization through external sources – letters, government documents, etc, in Aunt Emily’s package – of her “true” history. This realization itself requires a death, but I must differ the death of hermy mother for the present, as any good Derridean should.

The invocation of a “true” self, one with which to ‘come to terms’, is of course emblematic of the more broad concerns that Canada, and indeed in even broader terms the historical archive itself, must negotiate with the fascist control of the undesirable Other, which manifests most prominently during times of war, despite any claims the Other might make to have / perform citizenship. That the book ends with a memorandum from the Committee on Japanese Canadians to the senate and legislature of Canada is Kogawa’s gesture to the archive itself, in terms of both its responsibilities and its silences. Importantly, most of the historical documents come from Aunt Emily who, in opposition to the rest of the family, loudly challenges the silences and differals which constitute “respect through suffering” which characterises some forms of traditional Japanese culture as remnants of Buddhist and Shinto principles. In a very real sense, it is Aunt Emily who is the voice of the archive, her activism signifying the repressed guilt felt by the historical record (or by the archon s themselves, to humanize the concept). The historical notes contained in her package serve as a ghost structure, an homunculus summoned by the projected psychological trauma felt by the collective population and inscribed – or marked as in Cain, instances of stigmata, and other manifestations of psychophysiological trauma – on the archive proper, here in the form of news media. Unlike in Stalinist Russia, for example, such traumas are not ‘forgotten’ by the media in Canada. There is no conspicuous censorship which denies even the archive a voice to speak. Consequently, the media can properly act as Marshall MacLuen’s extension of the human nervous system into the public sphere. That an otherwise dusty collection of old papers is anthropomorphized to the degree stated above is made clear by its importance (in the sense of biopower espoused by Negri and others) to Naomi for the ordering of her memory and the realization of a sense of identity. Her memories and the historical documents enter the same subjective space, a region where silences speak and voices are muted.

There is a difference among the silences in the text, however. Initially, Naomi seems to think that Obasan’s silence represents a strategic forgetfulness: “Some memories, too, might be better forgotten. Didn’t Obasan once say ‘Is it better to forget?... If it is not seen it does not horrify. What is past recall is past pain” (45). While this curvival strategy does indeed work for both Obasan and Uncle, it should be noted that they were already of middle-age during the war, and thus were consequently, as my father will attest, more stubbornly set in their ways and resistant to change. Their silence is not forgetfulness, but rather the mantra kodomo no tane – for the sake of the children – explains their lack of communication. For this older generation, silence is a manner in which racism and other traumas are sidestepped. Obasan, for example, does not wish to provoke the men in the restaurant in chapter twenty-eight by acknowledging them or defending Naomi from their sexual advances. Much like the silence concerning the fate of Naomi’s mother, this is a self-imposed silence, and not an unconsciously unwilling forgetfulness or physical damage in the sense of amnesia. Indeed, Obasan seems to be quite specific in her collection of domestic objects, and taken as a whole they can be interpreted as material signifiers for memory, they are the textural artefacts of a lost temporality. Much as Aunt Emily kept the ‘public’ record intact, likewise Obasan retains the personal archive of the family. In this capacity, both Emily and Obasan represents in a sense the inversion of Derrida’s use of Freud’s pleasure principle in relation to the historical archive. Together Emily and Obasan can be pictorialized as a Janus figure, creating a present by looking simultaneously to the past and to the future. The violence done to them – and of course to Japanese Canadians as a whole – was itself the jouissance of exclusion and purposeful omission, of white (empowered) Canada restoring a sense of order and security to their formulation of self and citizen by promoting disorder and fear amongst a minority Other. Both Obasan and Aunt Emily are figurations of the unconscious guilt experienced by white Canada and marked into the archive as a silence, a negation which realizes a physical presence by degree of negative dialectics. The pretense of war in the 1940s may have alleviated such feelings to a degree, yet those who experienced those years had their sentiments recontextualized and dislocated, made non-immanent, by the passing of the ‘yellow-threat’ into memory after 1945. The speaking-silence of Obasan and the overt political activism of Aunt Emily signals the archive re-inscribing trauma back to its proper location: within the general body politic of the country (and to the reader by extension, or in a more precise sense by an implosion, as it becomes the site for archival conflict). It is for this reason that the book focusses on the historical documents, and indeed quite rightly ends with one. The outrage felt by many Canadians when the novel was initially published in 1982, and the subsequent movement to formally redress financial losses and otherwise give justice to Japanese Canadians who suffered from officially sanctioned racist policies is reflective of the re-infliction of the initial scar fundamental to the healing process. To use an anatomical metaphor, when scar tissue remains around certain internal mechanisms it frequently damages the organism; surgery, the calculated infliction of new wounds over old ones, must be performed in order to properly heal the patient.

Perhaps the most interesting point Kogawa’s text makes is in regard to the importance of silence, and indeed the agency which can be found within such a unique space of what I hesitatingly refer to as negative discourse (a term used partially to reflect Adorno’s elaboration of negative dialectics). On a more general level, Obasan’s speech-through-silence is analogous to the archive displacing itself, its previous ontological function, in order to create one anew. The previous jouissance was realized by the mark upon the space of archivization (here, as mentioned above, a people as well as a physical database cataloguing a history, for Kogawa does not delineate the two – again, this is affirmed by Naomi’s continual re-subjection of her identity to the historical process). As de Sade most famously wrote, there is little to differentiate pain from pleasure as distinctly opposing categorical imperatives, and thus the realization of pain, the vocalization of trauma, itself becomes the pleasure used to inscribe itself into the ‘new’ archive, which for Naomi is 1972 and for the reader is an always 1982. Naomi’s search for her mother is emblematic of this process, and is of course at the heart of the narrative. Like many other traumatic events in the text, this quest is relayed largely by differal, in particular by metaphoric means:

The dance ceremony of the dead was a slow courtly telling, the heart declaring a long thread knotted to Obasan’s twine, knotted to Aunt Emily’s package. Why I wonder as she danced her love should I find myself unable to breathe? The Grand Inquisitor was carnivorous and full of murder. His demand to know was both a judgement and a refusal to hear. The more he questioned her, the more he was her accuser and murderer. The more he killed her, the deeper her silence became. What the Grand Inquisitor has never learned is that the avenues of speech are the avenues of silence. To hear my mother, to attend her speech, to attend the sound of stone, he must first become silent. Only when he enters her abandonment will he be released from his own.
(228)

The Grand Inquisitor alludes to Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov to be sure – an intertextual discourse above the scope of this present examination – but also figures Naomi’s own psychological defences. The reader does not have to wait long for Naomi to be silenced and for her mother to speak; there are six pages between this narration and the exposition of the two letters describing the atomic blast at Nagasaki. These letters signal the jouissance of the archive destroying its past and (by) creating its present, for the extreme violence and traumatic consequences of Canadian racial oppression reach their most logical extension in the brutal description of the bombing and destruction of a city and its inhabitants. The utter dehumanization required to carry out this act transfers metaphorically to the atomization of many of those present and subjected to ground zero.

And yet even the dead speak as witnesses to the beautiful and sublime atrocity which is warfare; this is especially true when those alive remain silent. Metonymically, this is reflected by the author’s repeated use throughout the text of imagery concerning eyes and the process of sight, with descriptions of looking and not looking frequent in the narrative. Importantly, Naomi herself sees these instances and remembers them, even over other details. If we are to believe that the eyes mirror the ‘soul’ of individuals, then it is obvious that while Naomi “cannot tell about this time ... the body will not tell” (196), then the eyes speak with their silence in the most profound manner. One of the most striking details in Grandma Kato’s description of this horrific event is also the first given to the reader, and outside of the temporality and subjective space produced by the full description proper: “Like in a dream, I can still see the maggots crawling in the sockets of my niece’s eyes.... There is no forgetfulness” (234). In dreams as in life, eyes usually have sexual connotations, and the maggots here described are certainly feeding on the generative function of dead flesh. Thus the productive healing provided by speaking what was once seen, of reinstating the children of traumatic memory to historical (and in a sense ontological) legitimacy.

To return to the act of jouissance inherent in the process of archivization, Kogawa’s novel is successful precisely because this horror which ends both the novel and Naomi’s quest for self identity is the fate of her mother. Simultaneous to this is her arrival in chapter thirty-nine to the coulee that she had always traversed with her uncle. With the termination of the narrative at this point, Kogawa underlines the cyclical nature of memory and identity (a designation perhaps more aptly termed as fluid, to use the sea metaphor which the author herself does). In this context, the archive, be it personal, communal, or historical, must like every good compost be continually turned in order to keep it generative. In symbolic – and carbonc-cycle – terms, we must all return to our mothers in order to achieve meaning with this, the present, identity. Thus the past, and ostensibly the future, remain insurmountably tied to the present, and indeed give it the (tragic) immanence required for the recognition of meaning.