Barbara
Benjamin
23 March
1994
Essay: Obasan by
Joy Kogawa
"There is a silence that cannot
speak." It is a
silence that pervades every corner of her life and magnifies every
sound. Until she was 36, Naomi's life
was lived and ruled by silence. Many
people were trapped by its spell:
Mother, father, grandmother, grandfather,
Uncle, Obasan, Stephen, and Naomi. What was it that this silence did and how did
it affect those under its spell?
Within the Japanese culture
there is a strong adherence to the belief that one must not show emotion, to
spare others from your own burdens. It
is a sort of code of silence. It is more honorable to be dignified than it is to show
emotion. Naomi relates the story that
her mother read to her as a child about a boy named Momotaro. When Momotaro must
leave home, she says:
"There
are no tears and no touch. Grandfather
and Grandmother are careful, as he goes, not to weight his pack with their
sorrow. . . . What matters in the end, what matters above all, more than their
loneliness or fear, is that Momotaro behave with honour. At all times
what matters is to act with a fine intent.
To do otherwise is shameful and brings dishonour
to all" (56).
It is this code of
silence, though, that ultimately splits the very stone upon which it rests. Its oppressive weight crushes the hearts of
those loved ones it is supposed to protect.
Uncle's life was virtually destroyed by his
silence. Although he couldn't
have much control over the forced evacuation of the Japanese, he apparently
made no effort during or after the war to protest and try to get back the
things the government took from him. For
the rest of his life, he and Obasan lived in a small,
ramshackle old house with homemade furniture, and scraps of this-and-that. Before the evacuation, they had a lovely
house, nice things, and expensive clothes.
After the evacuation, all of his tools for boat building were hung in the dark, dusty attic (24).
Because of his age after the war, I
realize it was probably difficult for him to get work again, but it doesn't appear that he tried. Rather, he seem just
to accept what happened and he preferred to forget it and live as they
were. It was more important to him that
he live with honor and not make waves.
Naomi describes him as stoic like an Indian (2). His silence caused him to give up the wish to
go back to
For Obasan, the
silence almost robbed her of human qualities.
Naomi describes her as "(living) in stone" (32). Obasan seems to just function in her life, rather than to live it. Her hands are always busy; cleaning, fussing,
serving. She
moves "about deaf and impassive. . . her land is
impenetrable, so that even the sound of mourning is swallowed up"
(224). "She
remains in a silent territory, defined by her serving hands" (226).
Naomi continually describes her mouth as
dry, "her lips . . . are flaked with dry skin . .
. . her mouth is plagued with a gummy saliva and she
drinks tea to loosen her tongue sticking to the roof of her false plate"
(12). Its like
her mouth is becoming glued shut from lack of speaking.
The most pathetic description of Obasan is the obvious internal pain she is experiencing
over the loss of Uncle. However, she has
no way of venting it. She constantly
does small insignificant chores to keep her hands busy. She kneels in her bed rubbing her hands over
her knees, her head bowed. She keeps the
ID picture of Uncle in her hand. She
seems to be totally lost. Without
emotions, she has no way out of herself, and the chasm of silence is choking
her---abandoning her.
For Stephen, the silence is
intolerable. He falls into silence to
rebel against their silence. His silence
is an escape and a cry for words:
"Stephen, unable to bear the density of her inner retreat and the
rebuke he felt in her silences, fled to the ends of the earth" (14). He ran to Aunt Emily, the "word
warrior" and other parts of the world where there were words.
For Naomi, the wordless world was
literally a nightmare. She is plagued
with nightmares that have silence as a theme.
She lived in a peculiar world of sight and sound as dark and silent as
the world of Helen Keller. She was protected from ever knowing what was happening around
her. People would leave or die, and she wouldn't be told.
Even when her father left, no one said a word and she never got to say good-bye to him.
"Then one day suddenly Father is not here again and I do not know
what is happening" (179). As she
grows up, her questions aren't answered. No matter how she persists, she is ignored: "The
greater my urgency to know, the thicker her silences have always been"
(45).
The silences to Naomi meant emptiness and
betrayal. "Up through the earth
come tiny cries of betrayal. There are
so many betrayals--departures, deaths, absences . . . . In
all our life of preparation we are unprepared for this new hour filled with
emptiness" (245).
Naomi's life lacks all emotion. Emily told her that as a child she "never
cried . . . . never spoke . . . . never
smiled . . . .(was) a serious baby" (57).
But Uncle's death and Aunt Emily's
"paper" are the keys that make her realize how empty she really is:
"I
want to get away from all this . . . . From the past . . .
from the present, from the memories, from the deaths, from Aunt Emily and her
heap of words. I
want to break loose from the heavy identity, the evidence of rejection, the
unexpressed passion, the misunderstood politeness. I am tired of living between deaths and
funerals, weighted with decorum, unable to shout or sing or dance, unable to
scream or swear, unable to laugh, unable to breathe out loud" (183).
Emily is not silent, as Naomi notes by
calling her a "word warrior."
Interestingly, Emily seems to be the only one who more or less escaped
the horrors of the relocation program.
Her persistence and her refusal to remain silent appears
to have been to her advantage in avoiding much of the hardship that the others
experienced. Even while the whole family
is questioning what she is doing, Emily insists that they cannot remain silent
and to let the world forget. "We
have to deal with all this while we remember it. If we don't we'll
pass our anger down in our genes. It's the children who'll suffer" (36).
Emily's insistency that we not forget is
the same as that of Stephen Spielburg's (his comments
at the Academy Awards). In my case, it's not even a matter of forgetting, but of a "lack of
knowing". This lack of knowing
which is so taboo to the Japanese culture is the very thing that prevents
others from seeing the injustice. I didn't know until I read this book the horrors that the
Japanese experienced in
The insidious silence that ruled over
Naomi's world locked out healing from the wounds that the silence was supposed
to protect from.
The silence was a mask over the wounds, but underneath the wounds
festered and split apart the flesh. What
Naomi could not tell her mother was the very thing that divided them. The further silence about her mother, deepen
the division. Only when Naomi learned the
truth, could she begin to deal with the emotions and to begin the healing
process. It was only
then that she could go down to that underground stream, the river that flows
through all of us:
"I
had not known that Grief had such gentle eyes---eyes reflecting my uncle's
eyes, my mother's eyes, all the familiar lost eyes of Love that are not his and
that he dons as a mask and a mockery. . . . This body of grief is not fit for
human habitation. Let there be flesh. The song of mourning is not a lifelong song .
. . . My loved ones, rest in your world of stone. Around you flows the underground stream . . .
. Above the trees, the moon is a pure white stone. The reflection is rippling
in the river---water and stone dancing" (246-7).