National Sun Yat-sen University Institutional Repository:Item 987654321/28066

行政院國家科學委員會專題研究計畫 成果報告

族裔美國文學和後精神分析學：性別 / 種族(II-II)

中 華 民 國 92 年 10 月 16 日

Between Visualization and Verbalization:

The Traumatic Thing in Asian-American Children’s Literature and Picture Books

Fu-jen Chen Su-lin Yu

Though the United States and Canada are both nations of immigrants as well as multiracial societies, their history of interment camps during World War II puts into question their often-stated commitment to a multicultural society--America as

“melting pot” and Canada as “cultural mosaic.” Until a movement toward redress in the 1980s, people in both nations had been unwilling to face the existence of

“concentration camps” in their own lands. Even Japanese internees lulled

themselves into believing the propaganda of the 1940’s in order to sustain an idealized image of a benevolent and protective nation. Both consciously and unconsciously, people either witnesses or targets of the historical catastrophe all refused to be reminded of the trauma so that they might continue to regard their nations as likable, realizing their idealized form, as worthy of admiration. Indeed, it is such repressed traumas of American and Canadian culture and history that maintain the ontological consistency of these and others as democratic nations. It is a phenomenon such as slavery or internment camps that creates the traumatic Thing and shapes a national unconsciousness. Slavoj Zizek argues that “National identification is by definition sustained by a relationship toward the Nation qua Thing.” But he says, “This Nation-Thing is determined by a series of contradictory properties.”i For Zizek, what unites a nation is not simply a shared set of values or beliefs but “a shared relationship toward a Thing.”ii Just as every culture can be seen as a collective forming or giving of the traumatic Thing, the nucleus of our being is this traumatic Thing. In Lacanian theory, we all start with a structurally caused trauma because of the very nature of our own drive, and, says Paul Verhaeghe, “the way in which this trauma becomes

elaborated through the relationship with the Other determines our identity.”iii Verhaeghe explains that “[b]esides this structurally determined trauma [. . .], there might be an accidental real trauma as well, caused by an external agency. This trauma will inevitably come into interaction with the structural trauma caused by the subject’s own drive.”iv The interaction between external traumas and internal conflicts complicates the process of our subjective construction.

An identity constructed by the intervention of an external and real trauma on top of the structural and internal trauma is explicitly shown in Japanese-American

literature and picture books. Many stories on the internment including children’s picture books can be read as an insistent desire to verbalize or visualize an impossible relation toward the traumatic Thing, a relation both internal and external, individual and national, structural and accidental, domestic and social. Not simply two different stylistic representations, the linguistic representations of writers and the perceptual ones of illustrators express two modalities of psychical function to

approach the traumatic Thing. The unstable juncture of, as well as interplay between, narrative and image, word and picture, to ground our perception of the traumatic

Thing, is vividly demonstrated in children’s literature and picture books representing

the Japanese-American and Japanese-Canadian internment.

Dealing with the similar traumatic experience of the internment either in the United States or Canada during World War II, Allen Say’s Home of the Brave, Eve Bunting’s So Far from the Sea, Shichan Takashima’s A Child in Prison Camp,

Yoshiko Uchida’s Journey to Topaz, and Joy Kogawa’s Naomi’s Road and Obasan all demonstrate an insistent desire to narrate and picture the historical catastrophe. These works approach the historical trauma differently, some with particular emphasis on visual, some on verbal representation, some using watercolor or black-and-white paintings, others realistic reproduction or poetic elaboration of traumatic scenes. Moreover, they target different ages of readers (ranging from kindergartners to adults) and narrate the story in the voice of a child, a teenager, an adult, or one, male or female, American or Canadian, middle-class or working-class.

I shall pair these six texts according to the age of readers they target. Frst, I shall examine Home of the Brave and So Far from the Sea (for children of four to eight), next A Child in Prison Camp and Journey to Topaz (for children of nine to twelve), and finally Naomi’s Road and Obasan (for, respectively, teenagers and adults). Apart from their differences in gender, class, and nationality, I focus not only on their stylistic shift from verbalization to visualization as targeted ages of readers increase, but also on the effects, both historical and personal, social and domestic, on children of their perception of the traumatic Thing. Finally, I propose an answer to essential questions: How can we survive the horrifying trauma? How can we deal with the dark page in human history and overcome its haunting memories? Because “the effect of massive trauma can be passed to the next generation by means of a form of cultural inheritance [. . .] children of survivors of the Holocaust will not uncommonly incorporate their parents’ experiences as if such events were part of their own past,”v how can we share the tales of terror with younger generations? These questions will be approached in the light of Lacan’s assumption of the aim of psychoanalytic treatment.

Visualization of the Traumatic Thing

The psychic life of preschool children is predominantly imagistic. Since traumatic experiences, to traumatized preschool children, involve intense visual, spatial, and somatic elements, their traumatic memories appear more as iconic images than descriptive narratives. In Lacan, the Imaginary register is rooted in images and in the visual/spatial orientation in relation to the bodily ego. It is the imagistic memory through the introjection of the externalized image around

Bracher explains that the imaginary-order identity constituted at the level of the body ego is “a function of a specific imaging process that produces experiences of

self-agency, self-coherence, self-affectivity, and continuity in time.”vi Lacan rejects the formation of ego as a moment in the life of the infant, but sees it as a permanent structure of subjectivity in which one is endlessly caught and captivated by one’s own image in psychical, visual, and spatial surroundings throughout life.

In the light of Lacanian theory, traumatic memories for preschool children tend to be stored in a perceptual field as a picture is how little children experience and organize traumatic events. For preschool children, traumatic stories are made more accessible not by episodic narratives but iconic images. In a child’s book on a traumatic phenomenon, pictures capture the mind of child, audiences in a perceptual process that incorporates the images in the book and children’s own traumas into a subtle modification in hopes that a visual gestalt is established. That is, haunting traumatic phenomena, once retained in a spotty incomplete manner, are better located in space and visualized as a whole, as a unity that contains the flux of the traumatic

Thing and helps facilitate self-agency, self-coherence, and self-integrity.

Both books appealing to audiences under eight, Home of the Brave and So Far from the Sea center on children (many children appear in both stories and a child narrator in the latter). Besides, because they feature dialogues between father and daughter, man and child, both stories favor children reading in a pair or groups (teachers with children or parents with children). Most important, these two stories as picture books offer comparatively few narratives but present large and eye-catching paintings. In Home of the Brave, Allen Say, renowned author and illustrator,

presents a dreamlike journey through which the central character, a man of Japanese ancestry, symbolically confronts the trauma of his family’s incarceration in a

Japanese-American internment camp during World War II.vii The son of a Korean father and Japanese American mother, Say explains in an epilogue what motivated him to work on this book:viii

During the retrospective show of my work at the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles, I had the opportunity to see its exhibition of the World War II internment camps in the United States. Some facts and numbers were familiar to me—more than 120,000 Japanese Americans interned in ten camps in six western states—but the statistics took on a

human face and voice. I stared and listened. And what I saw and heard

turned into yet another personal journey. This is that story.

(emphasis mine) Indeed, this is a story of “a human face and voice,” turning historical facts or statistics of the traumatic event into visual images in the perceptual field.

Predominating over verbal “illustrations,” the series of visual representation shows a psychological and symbolic journey to confront the trauma of the internment experience that affected thousands of Japanese-American adults and children. With a few descriptive narratives on the left of each page of the text, Home of the Brave contains fourteen large, surrealistic watercolors bordered in white on the right. Unlike the narratives employed by other picture books to document the lives of the internees and focus on such historical specificity as the names of the camps and the process of the evacuation, the artwork of Home of the Brave takes on a dreamlike quality. The dreamlike flashbacks create a surrealistic and imagistic world through a constant contrast of light and shadow. This style effectively evokes the setting, and calls forth the inner feelings of the subject. For instance, a single shaft of light leads a lost man to climb out of a dark cave, symbolizing his unconscious mind, to confront the past. Like two swords, the searchlights from a guard tower cruelly slash at homeless children running in a dark desert. Say’s use of dark and lonely vistas in this story of a man’s journey also has haunting effect. The desert scenes are rendered in gray and sepia tones that aptly convey the starkness of the landscape and the camp.

Throughout the book, it is the watercolor “illustrations,” rather than descriptive narratives, that function as anchoring points to quilt a “picture” of trauma, the realm of physical-visual-spatial orientation closely related to our sense of bodily coherence and identity in space. In the picture on the front cover (which appears again in page nineteen), we first encounter a man and two interned children, or rather, two small “dark figures,” at a far distance from a row of identical wooden houses against a stormy-looking sky. The overwhelming background constitutes a threat to ones’ (especially children’s) sense of bodily coherence and unity. Even as early as the front cover, the traumatic effect is visually presented in spatial and physical terms. Indeed, an overwhelming and threatening setting dominates space in virtually every painting throughout the book: one shows a man at the edge of a shore with great craggy cliffs behind, another a snapshot of a small image of the man hurtling down a huge waterfall, and another a head half submerged in underground water in a cave. Again, on page thirteen, the illustration shows two little children sitting against an adobe ruin and appearing isolated and lost. In the next spread, a close-up picture of the two homeless children--their dark clothes, name tags, and more important, their facial expressions--intensifies a sense of desolation, confusion, and disorientation. It thus jeopardizes the ego’s sense of bodily, visual, and spatial integrity and unity. It deepens a sense of fragmentation and helplessness not only by the ominous and threatening landscape but also by body gestures: for example, many children, like “one large body with many eyes,” are chanting with their mouths open and rounded--“Take us home!”ix

The sense of self-disorientation is not restored until the last two paintings. In the next to last painting, the sky suddenly lightens with tints of blue, the hills stand out in sharp relief against the morning sky, and another group of children dressed in color express curiosity. In the last painting, a change of visual and spatial orientation to affirm a sense of integrity and self-agency is more obvious: there is a broader expanse of the azure sky and the children, as well as the man, stand with feet wide apart and face upward. Like birds magically swirling into the air, “name tags” amplify a sense f agility f bodily movement. As hundreds of “birds” flying upward to the sky manifest bodily mastery, identification with the movement enhances the ego’s sense of visual and spatial integrity and body unity. Although the “story” ends with a restore of self-agency and self-coherence visually presented in the last two paintings, there is yet one more picture before our reading of the book reaches a stop—the back cover painting. There, we encounter again a row of identical wooden houses set against a stormy-looking sky such as the front cover displays, but it is a setting without the man and the two children. From cover to cover, the book directs one to a traumatic image, a sky threatening and intimidating to our sense of bodily ego. Nevertheless, the missing man and two children in the back cover remove the contrast between an overwhelming background and tiny human figures in the front cover. The absence of the contrast in the back cover may suggest a purpose of the book. Reading this picture book, one hopes, helps ground the relative stability of the haunting Thing within a fixed visual-spatial field. And since we have fixed the

Thing in space, we no longer need to be “present” in the time when we kept reliving it

in thoughts, feelings, or actions.

Like Home of the Brave, Eve Bunting’s So Far from the Sea, centering either on young children figures or a child narrator, appeals to audiences under eight.

Moreover, So Far from the Sea features dialogues between father and daughter, a strategy that encourages readership in a pair or in a group (teachers with students; parents or caregivers with children). Like Home of the Brave as a picture book, So Far from the Sea provides large and eye-catching paintings. Nevertheless, unlike Say’s enigmatic story and symbolic images, Bunting’s So Far from the Sea, illustrated by Chris Soentpiet, is much more descriptive and historical. Based on an actual memoir, it depicts a seven-year-old girl named Laura, who with her younger bother and parents visited Grandfather’s grave at the Manzanar War Relocation Center. There, her father had been interned at her age and her grandfather had died there in 1942, so far from the sea. Set thirty years later, the story, on the one hand, describes the family’s last visit to the site: in chilly winter they walk through the camp to the grave in the empty landscape on the bleak mountainside. In honor of her grandfather, a tuna fisherman once having a boat of his own, the girl leaves behind a special

symbol--a neckerchief in a shape of a sailboat. On the other hand, as the girl

describes their walk to the grave, her narrative is constantly interrupted and paralleled by scenes from her father’s traumatic memory. These include the bombing of Pearl Harbor, her father in scout uniform before being taken away by soldiers, the

evacuation bus that took the family away, her father, as a boy, standing with his parents behind barbed wire, watchtowers with search lights, her father dining with his parents in the camp, and finally the father with other children in a crowded

schoolroom.

As Say, an American of Asian ancestry, ambitiously verbalizes and visualizes the traumatic Thing beyond a historical sense with a surreal story and poignant paintings, Eve Bunting, an Irish immigrant, depicts this past trauma in a more historical context. As Say interweaves fact and fiction, the past and the present, Bunting narrates two time frames separately. Typically, the girl’s present narrative is usually followed by the father’s past traumatic accounts of the past on the next page; moreover, while the present is illustrated in color and the past is tinted in black and white. The switch between the past and the present, along with the change in color, characterizes this picture book as two documentaries of disparate times and spaces. In contrast Say’s account, which remains enigmatic and abstract to both adult and child audiences, Bunting’s is much more descriptive and direct. Indeed, the differences in style between Say and Bunting can be easily observed even in their titles, cover paintings, and historical background. Say’s title, Home of the Brave, is abstract and

symbolic--Whose home? Where? The brave? Even a key term--“camp”--appears on several occasions but each occurrence is ambiguous and may suggest either “the Japanese American internment,” “the Native American reservation,” or “the

children’s summer camp.” In contrast, Bunting’s title is taken from a phrase, “so far from the sea,” used in the narrative on page twenty-two and whose context in relation to the grandfather is clearly explained. In addition, while Say introduces no

historical background in the story, Bunting specifies the setting as well the time, brings up the name of the camp “Manzanar War Relocation Center,” and introduces people’s names, even including the deceased grandfather’s, and their background. Perhaps identity of politics limits and at the same time broadens their approaches to the historical trauma.

Further, whereas Say tries to create a new metaphor in the course of verbalization and visualization of the traumatic Thing, Bunting focuses on a

metonymic connection within the same signifying chain. Say’s final symbolic image of the flying name tags and his use of ambiguous referents--“camp,” “home,” or “brave,” “name tags”--function to give rise to new meaning, to a new signification. Moreover, Say arranges the front and back cover paintings (because of the absence of

figures in the latter, the human figures in the former are displaced by “audiences” outside the text) to invite them to create a new metaphor. Such an act will perhaps bring new meaning into the world and alters the subject as meaning. By contrast, in So Far from the Sea the design of the front and back cover paintings, paralleling of narratives and illustrations, and the ending symbol of a neckerchief in a shape of boat--all offer a metonymical relationship in spatial and time contiguity. For example, in the back cover painting, a black-and-while picture of the father as a boy standing with his parents behind barbed wire is framed by an image in the present of mountains in color. Further, a neckerchief in a shape of a sailboat may suggest “a boat, moving on,”xa movement that implies freedom. Whether the boat or the concept of freedom is just a metonymic variation already prescribed in a familiar signification.

Because of their inadequate strategy for integrating various moments of a traumatic experience, the traumatic narratives of preschool children rely on co-construction with parents or caregivers. Adult guides on story narratives are necessary if preschool children are to identify how Bunting’s two narrative lines parallel each other and how to fill the gaps and indeterminacies of Say’s abstract text. Whereas with the help of adults, preschool children may grasp the

metonymic—associative—link Bunting provides through physical contiguity, they simply will not comprehend Say’s metaphoric play on words or the abstractions in his cover paintings. Lacan insists that young children are unable to understand

metaphor:xi

We are told that children understand surrealist and abstract poetry, which would be a return to children. This is stupid—children detest surrealist poetry and find repugnant certain stages in Picasso’s painting. Why? Because they’re not yet to metaphor, but only metonymy. And when they do appreciate certain things in Picasso’s paintings it’s because metonymy is involved.

Toward Verbalization of the Traumatic Thing

Unlike the two picture books of Say and Bunting, Shizuye Takashima’s A Child in Prison Camp and Yoshiko Uchida’s Journey to Topaz are based on the authors’ first-hand experiences. A Child in Prison Camp describes a Japanese-Canadian girl at the age of eleven sent with her sister and her parents to a Canadian internment camp in a remote British Columbia settlement from 1942 to 1945. Likewise, Journey to Topaz also involves an eleven-year-old girl, uprooted from her secure home and transported with her family first to Tanforan and then to a desert

stories show how the writers attempt to verbalize the traumatic Thing, historical, communal, and personal. Targeting children of the narrator’s age and up, neither story highlights visual illustrations: A Child in Prison Camp contains almost one hundred pages but only eight small watercolor paintings arranged in four pages in the middle of the bookxiiiand Journey to Topaz holds eight sketchy paintings of oriental ink and wash with one hundred and fifty pages of narratives. Rather than using visual images, both stories tend to unfold the traumatic memory through descriptive narratives in chronological order. Including ten chapters, in addition to an epilogue and an afterword, A Child in Prison Camp is clearly dated, beginning with the first chapter on March 1942, going through the last chapter, dated September 1945, an epilogue dated June 7, 1964, and, finally, an afterword dated 1989. Not only does it chronicle the traumatic memory, but A Child in Prison Camp verbalizes the drastic event in haikus, a traditional Japanese poetic pattern, appealing to children verbally more competent than ones the two picture books targeted by Say and Bunting. Likewise, Journey to Topaz contains a prologue dated in 1984 and seventeen chapters, detailing “one long dreary year” in the campxiv; with its content and 150 page of narratives, Journey to Topaz is read by juveniles as biographical writing.

Moving away from an imagistic appearance in the perceptual field toward a linguistic domain, Takashima and Uchida adopt another means of organization and direction of the self. By narrating their own life stories, they circle around the nucleus of their being--the traumatic Thing. Their narratives of the traumatic Thing, however, cannot be identical because of their different relations toward Symbolic master signifiers such as “Nation,” “Class,” or “Ethnicity”—toward which their defensive or aggressive attitudes are further complicated by their personal traumatic experiences. In fact, their distinction can be immediately told by a glance at the titles of two books: A Child in Prison Camp and Journey to Topaz. The former suggests an accusation that the Canadian government cast “children” into “camp,” or rather, “prison camp.” But the latter merely suggests a trip to a place (especially if readers don’t know about the historical background of the Japanese American

internment). In addition to the titles, the scene beginning each book also shows their different approaches to the traumatic Thing. A Child in Prison Camp opens with the intense emotions of a violent scene of the evacuation of Japanese Americans to internment camps:xv

An empty bottle is tossed in the air. I stand away, hold my mother’s hand.

Angry, dark curses, a scream. A train window is broken.

An angry man is shouting.

The men are dragged violently into the trains.

In contrast, Journey to Topaz begins with a depiction of a happy American family life on a Sunday, in December, a time when the child narrator feels “the tingling

excitement of Christmas in the air.”xvi Father, Mother, Son, Daughter, and two pets comprise a picture of an ideal American family: Father is working in the garden, Mother is preparing a Sunday dinner, Son is studying in the University library, and Daughter is playing around with her pets, named Salt and Pepper. The entire picture of a harmonious life is presented in Journey to Topaz before the trip to camp.

Clearly, the titles and the opening scenes immediately reveal how disparate are the personal and social relations toward verbalizing the Traumatic Thing. First, the Takashima family of working-class background in A Child in Prison Camp is a striking contrast to the Sakane family of middle-class background. Whereas Mr. Takashima works as a farmer and is later called a trouble maker in the intern camp, Mr. Sakane is employed by one of Japan’s largest business firms and later works with the Caucasian administrative staff in the camp. Their professions indicate just how different are the political positions held, on the one hand, by the Japanese nationalists and, on the other, by the assimilationists. In A Child in Prison Camp, the conflict between them is shown by name-calling: those who choose to return to Japan after the war are called “fools” and those who decide to stay in Canada are “dogs” or “traitor.”xvii Likewise, in Journey to Topaz people are divided into groups, either those who choose to forgive and keep hopeful and those who choose to fight and feel bitter. When some of the former work with the Caucasians in the camp, they are beaten by some of the latter, “a small group of bitter, frustrated, and fanatical men,” called “agitators” or “trouble makers.”xviii Whereas A Child in Prison Camp expresses more sympathy with the Japanese nationalists’ action and feeling, Journey to Topaz identifies more with social integration and assimilation. Thus, it is not surprising that Journey to Topaz ends with another “journey,” one back to the happier world outside the camp. Nor is it surprising that, in an epilogue and an afterword, A

Child in Prison Camp ends with the speech in 1964 in which Prime Minister Lester

first admitted that the Japanese Canadian internment was “a black mark,”xixand with the official apology in 1988 in which Prime Minister Brian Mulroney mentions financial redress.

In both stories, the trauma is multiplayered, a historical trauma interwoven with personal traumatic events, including child sexual abuse, a fire scene, deaths of animals and people, life-threatening illness, and so on. In the stories, people are exposed to intrafamilial, interpersonal and community violence, political violence, natural and human-made disasters. To cope with the traumatic Thing, personal as

well as historical, people adopt their particular self-protective mechanisms to maintain certain ego functions and control autonomic arousal and anxiety. As Mother culture (Japanese culture, which values endurance, duty, loyalty, and preserve) as a whole is also traumatized and can no longer provide support, individuals are left unprotected and left to their own devices. On the failure of culture, Marten W. deVries asserts that “The avenues of vulnerability resulting from trauma follow the routes vacated by culture: Paranoia substitutes for trust; aggression replaces nurturance and support; identity confusion or a negative identity substitutes for a positive identity. Social bonding becomes a regression to nationalism and tribalism.”xx Thus, both Issei and Nissei, both adults and children, both the repatriate and the assimilationist, and both the working class and the middle class are all victimized under the untenable

circumstance that demonstrate why we should not turn against one another, should not shut out an understanding of the other’s choice.

In the face of the traumatic Thing, little children, still unable to employ language, need to establish a visual gestalt of the haunting and terrifying Thing by visualizing and locating it in space. As the Thing is primarily processed in the perceptual field, no matter how morbid and grotesque the image, children at least gain a sense of mastery--drawing, finger painting, or acting out with puppet, blocks, or games all can help children visualize the Thing as a whole in a controllable dimension. To further “master” the Thing, older children move on to the linguistic field. There, language provides a “proper” context to turn the Thing into a “meaningful” narrative. As the

Thing becomes meaningful, it becomes bearable. Even so, verbalization of the

traumatic Thing is subject to the Symbolic Other. Interestingly, as the cover paintings in A Child in Prison Camp and Journey to Topaz illustrate, we are always already gazed at by the Other from a point we cannot see, a point represented by the unseen Red Cross people in the former and by a guard in the latter. In short, one’s verbalization of the traumatic Thing, an act either for or against the Other, hardly escapes the meaning imposed by the Other. A Child in Prison Camp and Journey to Topaz are texts from the Other, about the Other and for the Other and to the Other.

Beyond Visualization and Verbalization of the Traumatic Thing

How can we survive the horrifying trauma and overcome its haunting memories? As the ghost of the traumatic Thing reproduces itself and all unresolved issues related to the Thing are passed down to the next generation, how can we share the tales of terror with the hereditary victim, especially children? Visualization and

verbalization of the Traumatic Thing help locate the traumatic experiences in pictorial space and narrative time, the process that gives a sense of mastery. We can do more than reproducing original or authentic photographical images of traumatic scenes or

seeking after reference, objectivity, or empirical proof to turn a historical trauma into compilations of facts. Yet, we must not only overcome the overwhelming

experience but also mobilize the meaning of the Thing, not only gain a sense of mastery, but further “own” and “enjoy” our feelings. Lacan’s assumption of the aim of psychoanalytic treatment may shed light on the way beyond visualization and verbalization of the Traumatic Thing.

In later Lacanian theory, the goal of psychoanalytic treatment is to bring into

existence the subject who does not live up to the demands of the Other and is no longer subjected to the Other. It is the subject of jouissance who has traversed his or her most basic fantasy and is “living out the drive.”xxi

The new Lacanian subject is the enjoying subject or the “posttraditional subject” who is oriented to jouissance and “den[ies] constraints of castration and aim[s] beyond the pleasure principle.”xxii

The subject of jouissance goes after what brings satisfaction--the partial object--object a--that is derived from the Thing and becomes a significant idea in Lacan’s later works. As the subject of jouissance is able to recognize the existence of the fundamental lack in the Symbolic as the necessary primal condition for the existence of the subject, so this subject is no longer fascinated with the deficiency of the Other by trying to answer, fulfill, repress, or avoid it. This recognition of the lack is the first step the subject must take to remain psychologically mobile without remaining stuck in the Other’s desire or demand. It thus opens the possibility for the subject to take a new position relative to the Thing. The subject of jouissance is able to subjectify the traumatic Thing, take the traumatic event upon himself or herself, gain access to the truth of his or her desire, and ultimately assume responsibility for that jouissance the Thing evokes. The subject of jouissance enjoys his or her desire and frees himself or herself from the gaze of the Other. The subject of jouissance is defined by his or her capacity to speak and look as a subject--"I"--rather than an object--"me"--under the dominance of the gaze of the Other. He or she may be still victimized, but he or she is no longer a victim. The subject of jouissance is able to say "I was," "I did," "I will," or "I want to" instead of blaming others or excusing himself or herself by saying "It just happened to me," "who did this to me?" or "That is my fate."xxiii In this sense, a transformation into the subject of jouissance suggests not only the goal of Lacanian psychoanalysis but also the way to survive from the trauma, either personal or social, and to deal with it together with younger generations.

Joy Kogawa’s Obasan records its protagonist’s journey of potential transformation into a subject of jouissance. In the voice of a girl or an adult woman with a child’s consciousness, Obasan unfolds Naomi’s experiences of internment, concomitant with other traumatic accidents in childhood through adult Naomi’s disjointed memories. Presently a thirty-six-year-old schoolteacher, Naomi tells the forced fragmentation of a Japanese Canadian family resulting from anti-Japanese racism during World War II. As her

mother was prevented from returning to Canada after the outbreak of the Pacific War, and her father was interned elsewhere to work on road gangs, Naomi with her brother,

respectively at age five and eight, were separated from the parents and had to follow their aunt Aysa Obasan to the ghost town of Slocan. Early in the novel, called by her

nickname, “Nomi,” Naomi is first introduced as one with no self, as one like the homophone for her nickname--“no me.”xxiv

She is first depicted as one who never minds, never emotionally invests herself in anyThing, and never embraces the present world and the traumatic past. As her aunt Emily is eager to cram her with a great deal of documents or manuscripts about the historical fact of the internment, Naomi confesses that her aunt like Cupid “aimed for the heart, [b]ut the heart was not there.”xxv

Undergoing a long progress of subjective transformation, Naomi is gradually able to face the traumatic fact. Not until three fourths of the way through the novel does Naomi begin to “mind.” She claims, “Yes, I mind. I mind everything”xxvi

: she minds “the chicken coop house” in which she once lived, she minds “the flies from the cows in the barns,” she “mind[s] growing ugly,” and she “mind[s] the harvest time and the hands and the wrists bound in rags to keep the wrists from breaking open.”xxvii

As she minds, she sees the traumatic past not just as “a fact” but as her own personal and communal experiences.

Facing three choices offered in the novel--burying onself in blaming the Other (as Emily does), repressing the traumatic experiences via the practice of conscious as well as unconscious amnesia (as Obasan does), or rationalizing the trauma in the eye of the Other (as Stephen does), Naomi starts to fully deal with the remainder of her individual history that once couldn’t be completely remembered and at the same time couldn’t be completely forgotten. Her mind strives to forget, but her body resists. Not until the end of the novel does Naomi finally discover through a letter that her mother had been totally disfigured during the bombing of Nagasaki and died a few years later. From a silent victim, a mere observer of fact, and finally to the subject of jouissance, Naomi not only faces and listens but also embraces the maternal as well as traumatic Thing: Naomi says, “Mother, I am listening. Assist me to hear you”xxviii and “Mother, in my dreams you are a maypole. I dance around you with a long paper streamer in my hand,”xxix

and, further, “Your leg is a tree trunk and I am branch, vine, butterfly. I am joined to your limbs by right of birth, child of your flesh, leaf of your bough.”xxx

Naomi’s ultimate union with her mother indicates her repositioning toward the Thing and, moreover, her assumption of the traumatic experiences as the nucleus of her being.

Published during a redress movement during the 1980s and “in the wake of inauguration of multiculturalism as an official state policy in Canada,”xxxi

Obasan (1981) achieved an immediate success and was rapidly canonized as a classic in Canadian

literature. Because of its success, Obasan was rewritten for children audiences of eight to eleven and appeared as Naomi Road five year later. As a picture book illustrated by Matt

Gould, Naomi Road contains nearly twenty drawings, as scratchy as ones by children’s hands. The reading and writing experience of from Naomi Road to Obasan (though actually in reverse order in terms of the year of publication) indicates not only a shift of emphasis from visualization to verbalization of the traumatic Thing but an attempt to go beyond—to subjectify trauma and further alter the subject as meaning. The progress from visualization through verbalization to subjectification of trauma suggests a turn of one’s quest for from a visual gestalt ( a fantasy of imaginary identity) through master signifiers (for or against the Symbolic Other) and to a reposition according to jouissance the Thing evokes. Finally we may assume the traumatic Thing as a nucleus of our being and identify the particular form of this jouissance and enjoy our own symptoms. Thus, we no longer keep reliving the traumatic past in thoughts, feelings, actions, or images. As we no longer racializes or traumatize everything, our desire can move on and ultimately we may transform the memory of suffering into life-affirming actions.

Notes

i

Slavoj Zizek, Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of Ideology (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), 201.

ii

Zizek, 201.

iii

Paul Verhaeghe, Beyond Gender: From Subject to Drive (New York: Other Press, 2001), 8.

iv

Verhaeghe, 58.

v

Arnold H. Modell, “Psychic Death and the Generation of Meaning,” in The Subject and the Self: Lacan and American Psychoanalysis, edited by Judith Feher Gurewich and Michel Tort, (London: Jason Aronson INC., 1996), 192.

vi

Mark Bracher, The Writing Cure (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1999), 36.

vii

It opens with a man at the edge of a shore ready to embark on a kayak trip, then immediately thrust into rapids, next swept into an underground river, and enclosed in the dark cave without his vessel, paddle, helmet, or life vest but a ladder leading to light. As he climbs, he unexpectedly emerges in a desert where he encounters two girls in a distance sitting against a wall. Around their necks, the two girls wear tags with names Japanese Americans and explain to the man that they are from the “camp” and “Waiting to go home” (14). They three struggle through a dust storm to the “camp,” a row of abandoned identical wooden houses, in one of which the man is dismayed at finding a tag with his name on it; at the same time, outside a large group of children, like “one large body with many eyes” (22), are chanting with their mouths open and rounded: “Take us home!” (22) Suddenly, searchlights from watchtowers chase the children to scatter into darkness. The horrified man is left alone and he found another name tag bearing the name of his mother through which he

into the cave and falls asleep. He awakens to find himself in another “camp,” stared by another ground of children. The final painting pictures a symbolic act: they together release “name tags” magically like birds swirling into the air.

“They went home,” said a child.

“Yes, they went home,” the man said. And the children nodded.

The story ends with an understanding between characters but many remain mysterious to the reader.

viii

Allen Say, Home of the Brave (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2002).

ix

Say, 22.

x

Eve Bunting, So Far from the Sea (New York: Clarion Books, 1998), 30.

xi

Quoted in Richard Booth, Freud Philosopher: Metapsychology After Lacan (New York: Routledge, 2001), 129. For a further discussion on metonymy and metaphor, see Boothby.

xii

Takashima was actually thirteen year old when entering the camp, two years older than the one she pictures herself in the story. A Berkeley graduate, Uchida received her university diploma in 1942, the year when she was interned in the horse stall that served as temporary barracks for the evacuees.

xiii

A Child in Prison Camp first appeared in 1971 as a picture book, but the edition I examine appeared in 1990 for children of ten and up.

xiv

Yoshiko Uchida, Journey to Topaz (Berkeley: Creative Arts Book Company, 1985), 149.

xv

Shizuye Takashima, A Child in Prison Camp(New York: Tundra Books, 1971), 149. xvi Uchida, 1. xvii Takashima, 74. xviii Uchida, 144 and 145. xix Takashima, 96. xx

Marten W. deVries, “Trauma in Cultural Perspective,” in Traumatic Stress, edited by Bessel A. van der Kolk, Alexander C. McFarlane, and Lars Weisaeth, (New York, The Guilford Press, 1996), 408.

xxi

Jacques, Lacan. The Seminar. Book XI. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, translated by Alan Sheridan, (London: The Hogarth Press, 1977), 46.

xxii

James, Mellard, “Lacan and the New Lacanians: Josephine Hart’s Damage, Lacanian Tragedy, and the Ethics of Jouissance,” PMLA 113 (1998): 396.

xxiii

Bruce Fink, The Lacanian Subject, (New Jersey: Princeton University Press), 62.

Likewise, Paul Verhaeghe argues that it is very important to consider one as a subject with “at least a minimal element of freedom and choice” because “[I]f one sticks to the victimization, then one has to end with a complete determinism and thus with

therapeutic pessimism” (50). The stress on the minimal element of freedom and choice is clearly shown by Lacan’s own claim: “I will be what I am now through my choice” (qtd. in Verhaeghe 51).

xxiv

Cheng Lok Chua, “Witnessing the Japanese Canadian Experience in World War II:

Processual Structure, Symbolism, and Irony in Joy Kogawa’s Obasan” in Reading the Literature of Asian America, edited by Shirley Geok-lin Lim and Amy Ling,

(Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992), 104.

xxv

Joy Kogawa, Obasan, (New York: Anchor Books, 1981), 49.

xxvi Kogawa, Obasan, 233. xxvii Kogawa, Obasan, 233-35. xxviii Kogawa, Obasan, 288. xxix Kogawa, Obasan, 290. xxx Kogawa, Obasan, 291. xxxi

Apollo Amoko, “Resilient ImagiNations: No-No Boy, Obasan and the Limits of Minority Discourse,” Mosaic 33.3 (2000): 41.