The Trauma not Owned, but Inheritable

In “The Generation of Postmemory,” Marianne Hirsch delineates the psychical aftereffect of traumatic events that pass down to the postgeneration. These generations

are haunted by the traumas of their family or ancestors, though they do not involve in the past events. Oftentimes, they are stuck in the shadow of the past vicariously. The shadow will relentlessly return in the repressed psyche of future generations in the form of nightmares or mental torments. The psychical phenomenon inherent in one’s body relates to Hirsch’s concept of postmemory. Postmemory, as the prefix post suggests, is far from the same as memory. As Hirsch indicates, the psychic structure of postmemory reveals the rupture caused by historical traumas so as to “reactivate and reembody” the more far-reached distance of historical and cultural memorial framework in corresponding forms of individuality and family (111; italics original).

The embodied connection to the past would become alive. The site which transmits the past would be in the family with the appearance of symptoms which render postgeneration victimized. As Hirsch claims, “postmemory is not an identity position but a generational structure of transmission deeply embedded in such forms of mediation” (114; italics original). I would like to demonstrate that the concept of postmemory helps Miranda find identity and belonging, both of which are clandestinely forgotten and effaced in multicultural Canada. The notion of

transgenerational haunting in Miranda’s family stems from the assimilation into the brave new world through the mechanism of repression of ethnic memory and history of gender exploitation. As Schwab shrewdly states,

Family legacies of transgenerational haunting often operate though (sic) family secrets and other forms of silencing. Such silences and secrets inevitably affect aesthetic forms and modes of production and

representation in second-generation narratives about the legacies of violent histories. (13)

Thus, the transgenerational haunting is propelled by the residues of trauma that result from the silencing of the past and would be passed down through such mediums of

transmission as photographs or intergenerational dialogues. While those who have undergone the violent histories are left with the lacunae on the basis of meaning and understanding of trauma, the future generations may construe traumas from a different angle. The receivers will be indirectly affected by the repercussions of traumas that are not fully known in victims of violent histories. In a mediated form, they still harbor the same traumatic responses as their parental generation, such as intrusive flashbacks or repetitive thoughts, but in a vicarious way. In the process of exploring such mediated forms as historical records or photography, the future generations have the responsibility to stitch the shreds of traumatic history into a more understandable tapestry to further articulate their shared sense of ethnic identity. As Lai claims, “an exercise in nostalgia”―one that attempts to weave a “consciously artificial history for those . . . who come from histories that are broken, fragmented and discontinuous, histories that exist in multiple languages and that have survived multiple traumas and multiple acts of forgetting” (“Afterword” 257).

However, contrary to the physical trauma, the psychical one cannot be healed by the passing of time, and would be beleaguered by bouts of haunted returns. As

Schwab metaphorically avers, “[t]he damages of violent histories can hibernate in the unconscious, only to be transmitted to the next generation like an undetected disease”

(3; emphasis mine). Schwab’s choice of the word―“hibernate” resonates with the influence of traumatic events that is too profound to digest. To dilute the traumatic impact, the defense mechanism in the human psyche would begin to operate. In the process, those atrocities would be repressed in the recesses of the human mind, where the unconscious is responsible for the storage of such repressed stuff as compulsive thoughts or painful memories. More concretely, the way the unconscious deals with the influence of traumatic events is exactly like the state of a dormant volcano that would begin to erupt once being active. Intriguingly, in the context of Salt Fish Girl,

the afflicted with the influence of traumatic events are not the ones who are on the scene as those events take place, but are the ones who are born after them. As Schwab has keenly shown, the traumatic influence would be passed on to the following generations in the form of “undetected disease”; in so doing, the postgeneration will catch the disease that is not their own, but has become inherent in their blood of ancestors. They are haunted in the materialized form of psychical and physical illnesses by the specter of the traumatic events, even though they are not on the spot.

Despite “a new and undocumented one” (71), the mysterious disease officially named as the dreaming disease runs rampant in Salt Fish Girl. To claim the order and

regulation of corporate regimes and accordingly exclude the unknown, threatening disease, “[n]one of the corporations want to acknowledge it. But some call it the dreaming disease, or the drowning disease” (100). And those with the dreaming disease present various symptoms with “foul odours of various sorts that follow the person without actually emanating from the body, psoriasis, sleep apnea, terrible dreams usually with historical content, and a compulsive drive to commit suicide by drowning” (100). In Schwab’s account, she thinks that the transmission of the disease is induced by the traumatic events in history. Therefore, the afflicted get traumatized and cannot help but bear the intolerable pain on their own. The traumatized will be dissociated from the lived condition with the intensification of numb emotions; also, they will be beset by repetitive traumatic thoughts or images. As Schwab claims,

“[t]rauma disrupts relationality or is . . . an attack on thought itself” (2). In other words, the temporality is no longer linear, but is ruptured in the scraps of historical time. The more successfully we eradicate the unwanted thoughts, the more painful our bodies would become. In the psychiatric term, this bodily phenomenon manifests somatic symptoms that reflect psychological tortures in a bodily manner. In Salt Fish

Girl, the afflicted cannot help drowning themselves to avoid psychic torments;

otherwise, they have no panacea to ease the pain that is hardly accounted for, and the real cause and treatment cannot be found. Hence, the afflicted characters’ stories, overall, are replete with the dreaming disease, a kind of mysterious illness that would emanate rancid odor and enigmatically remember such traumatic events as wars and famines.⁹ As the scene vividly shows,

the barefoot terminally unemployed . . . roamed the streets with glazed eyes and scaly skin, or sat on street corners spewing memories of genocide and smallpox, smart bombs and slow starvation. The odours that accompanied these memories . . . The destitute wandered shoeless and hungry and dreaming with an intensity that only the destitute can dream. (230-31) The dreaming disease as the predictor of misery and illness aptly shows the haunted return of the memories in which the traumatized are forced to face the repressed and ruptured the official version of multiculturalism has clandestinely attempted to efface.¹⁰ With the quality of life deprived greatly and loss of job, though those histories are not their own, they compulsively ponder over the violent histories, suffering from the memory disease that is mixed with the disgusting odors. As it turns out, the multicultural promise of making money and then enjoying the comfort of middle-class life has been disillusioned. Instead, the post-apocalyptic scene reveals the malfunction and malaise of global capitalism with the phenomenon of

increasingly widening wealth gap, and the enigmatically rampant disease undoes the corporate control over the effacement of ethnic history and memory owing to the fact

9 In running store business in the unregulated zone, Miranda has heard those who are incessantly traumatized by the disease: “We heard from our customers of a girl who smelled of cooking oil, who remembered all the wars ever fought. She could recall and recount every death, every rape, every wound, every moment of suffering that had ever been inflicted by a member of her ancestral lineage”

(85). The girl’s experience is that of “collective memory,” from which she can only escape in water (85).

10 Another instance is as follows: “I met a man who smelled of milk and could remember all the famines that had ever been caused by war. I met a girl who smelled of stainless steel and could recite the lives of everyone who had ever died of tuberculosis” (101-02).

that the pervasive disease is outside and thus disrupts any attempted containment of corporate control.