Discourses, Spaces and Reconciliation in Joy Kogawa‟S Obasan and Daphne Marlatt‟S Ana Historic

Home , First white child, Joy Kogawa, Obasan

Homeward “Bound” Discourses, Spaces and Reconciliation in Joy Kogawa‟s Obasan and Daphne Marlatt‟s Ana Historic

Michelle K. Damour

Thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Masters of Arts (English)

Acadia University Fall Convocation 2009

This thesis by Michelle K. Damour was defended successfully in an oral examination on August 6th, 2009.

The examining committee for the thesis was:

______Dr. Barry Moody, Chair

______Dr. Carrie Dawson, External Reader

______Dr. Herb Wyile, Internal Reader

______Dr. Kerry Vincent, Supervisor

______Dr. Jessica Slights, Acting Head

This thesis is accepted in its present form by the Division of Research and Graduate Studies as satisfying the thesis requirements for the degree Master of Arts (English)

. …………………………………………. iii

I, Michelle K. Damour, hereby grant permission to the University Librarian at Acadia University to provide copies of the thesis, upon request, on a non-profit basis.

______Michelle K. Damour, Author

______Dr. Kerry Vincent, Supervisor

______Date

Contents

Introduction Home and the Narrative of Security 1

PART ONE Discourses of Home

Chapter One Freeing Speech: Security and Home in Obasan 16

Chapter Two The Legacy of the Settler Woman: Security, Home and Sexuality in Ana Historic 40

PART TWO Incarnations of Home Spaces

Chapter Three The Home as a Stage of the Nation in Obasan 65

Chapter Four Home, Nature and the Paradoxes of White Exile in Ana Historic 85

Conclusion Contradictions and Literary Theory 108

Notes 114

Works Cited 115

Abstract

This study explores Joy Kogawa‟s Obasan and Daphne Marlatt‟s Ana Historic as narrative spaces wherein the imperfections of a fixed narrative of security is exposed, revealing the paradoxes of contaminated discourses. Using postmodern, postcolonial and feminist theories, I examine how Naomi, in Obasan, who experienced internment in Canada during her childhood in the 1940s, and Annie, in Ana Historic, who lives with the legacy of a colonial and settler enterprise, journey towards understanding their identities as necessarily paradoxical due to varying historical conditions and social contradictions. I look first at the historical documents both authors include in their novels to explore the interactions between controlling discourses and the voices they attempt to efface, and second at the home as the space wherein historical and social paradoxes play out. Ultimately, I read both novels as concluding with purposely irreconcilable narratives that illustrate the importance of witnessing contaminations and contradictions.

Introduction

The Narrative of Security and Threat

This thesis has evolved from my early readings of Linda Hutcheon and her postmodern theories on the writing of history. Hutcheon explores “historiographic metafiction,” which she defines as “fiction that is intensively self-reflexively art, but also grounded in historical, social, and political realities” (The Canadian Postmodern 13).

She asserts that “the aesthetic and the social, the present and the past, are not separable discourses in these novels”; authors of historiographic metafiction create a “dialogue between the „texts‟ of both history and art, done in such a way that it does not deny the existence or significance of either” (14). While this thesis does not focus on exploring historiographic metafiction (even though both Obasan and Ana Historic can be, and have been, defined and explored as such), I owe much of my meditation on historical texts and literature to this idea that history, in the form of primary and secondary historical documentation, and art, in the form of the novel, are in dialogue. My understanding of the dialogue between text and art has informed my interpretation of the way that Kogawa and Marlatt blur the lines of fact and fiction to open a space for the voices that “official” versions of history attempt to conceal.

Hutcheon gave me a starting point to think about the connections between fact and fiction, past and present and the way in which the process of reading and writing gives order and meaning, but throughout much of my early research I was bothered by

Hutcheon‟s argument that postmodernism and postcolonialism share the trait of being inextricably tied to what they challenge (“Circling the Downspout” 88). Hutcheon does point to the “major difference” between postcolonialism and postmodernism: 2 postcolonialism has “distinct political agendas and often a theory of agency” while the postmodern is “politically ambivalent” (72). But, in the end, she argues that the postcolonial is “as implicated in that which it challenges as the post-modern” (88). Diana

Brydon also identifies a conflict in linking the two theories in this way: Hutcheon‟s

“assertion depends on a leap from the recognition that the post-colonial is „contaminated‟ by colonialism (in the word itself and the culture it signifies) to the conclusion that such

„contamination‟ necessarily implies complicity” (“The White Inuit Speaks” 191). In other words, Hutcheon‟s identification of the postmodern and the postcolonial desire to deconstruct metanarratives assumes a linear relationship wherein the metanarrative is established first and later contested. But this is not congruent with the dialogic relationship between past and present, between aesthetic and historical, social and political realities that Hutcheon argues of historiographic metafiction. Colonialism and postcolonialism do not have a one-way relationship. The postcolonial is not only contaminated by the colonial; rather, their relationship is characterized by a non- hierarchal cross-contamination. While it is true that contestation is inextricably tied to what is being contested, “cultural dominants” are also inextricably tied to what or who is being dominated. This dialogic relationship of multiple cross-contaminations must be kept in mind when exploring the deconstruction of fixed narratives.

Hutcheon creates a similar argument to her evocation of a linear relationship between central and marginal discourses when she explores the relationship between postmodern and female subjectivities. She argues that “if women have not yet been allowed access to

(male) subjectivity, then it is very difficult for them to contest it…. Women must first define their subjectivity before they can question it; they must first assert the selfhood 3 they have been denied by the dominant culture” (The Canadian Postmodern 6).

However, as Brydon points out, this statement is problematic because it implies that there is “a norm of subjectivity” and that there is the assumption that a “unified subject” must be established before it can be questioned (“The White Inuit” 193). Hutcheon assumes that a stable identity must be established before women can deconstruct its stability. But women have always had identities infused by patriarch and broader social contradictions.

The stable (male) identity that Hutcheon identifies has also always been contaminated and plagued with paradoxes. The destabilization of fixed narratives should not be interpreted as a deconstruction of stable structures, but rather should express the illusion of that stability, thereby highlighting the continual presence of alternate narratives that exist alongside, if unrecognized, by metanarratives.

This thesis explores Joy Kogawa‟s Obasan and Daphne Marlatt‟s Ana Historic as narrative spaces wherein paradoxes of interrelated and contaminated narratives are revealed. In a recent work, “Storying Home: Power and Truth,” Brydon explores the link between home, nation and narrative. She asserts that the “home,” as represented by a white middle-class nuclear family, is “a signifier of security” (37) and this narrative of home as a secure space is “mapped” onto the nation. This “illusory” security of home and nation requires the creation of “naturalize[d] stories of threat in which anxious citizens seek security through shutting out the unfamiliar… while at the same time directing this quest for security outward into taming and conquering what lies beyond this controlled space” (35). In other words, home is bound by and within a narrative that posits a threat from an “other.” This narrative of security and threat is defined by strict categorizations that seek to separate the familiar and the unfamiliar—a division that 4

“often reinforces patriarchal as well as ethnocentric values” (36). Brydon argues that

“Postcolonial fiction and criticism have a role to play in reclaiming tropes and territory for a planetary imagination that reimagines home, releasing” it from narrow categorizations and moving the notion of home towards “a respect for different modes of belonging in the world” (36). Reimagining home involves listening to and witnessing

“different modes of belonging in the world” that have always existed alongside and been entangled with dominant modes of belonging. To do so reveals the complexity and contradictions, first, of the diversity that is hidden by singular and controlling narratives, and, second, of the way in which so-called marginal and centric narratives and spaces interact. For Brydon, “Postcolonial theorists know that how to inhabit the world as home and how to inhabit stories are related challenges. Beyond indirections of story, we may not yet have the resources to express this relation” (36). While Brydon does not expand on what she means by “indirections,” I take “indirections” to mean that fiction is a space wherein contradictions can be explored without taking an explicit direction or making an explicit argument. This thesis attempts to get inside and explore these “indirections” of fiction by examining contradictory representations of narratives of security and threat in

Obasan and Ana Historic.

In their novels, Kogawa and Marlatt open a space for understanding home and nation as necessarily contradictory and diverse by telling the stories of a woman‟s journey through historical discourse and personal memory. Kogawa‟s Naomi reads through personal and public documentation pertaining to the internment of Japanese Canadians during and after World War II, including government documentation (letters and memorandums), newspaper articles, her Aunt Emily‟s diary and, ultimately, the letters 5 her maternal grandmother sends from Japan detailing Naomi‟s mother‟s experiences during and eventual death after the nuclear bombing of Nagasaki. These readings propel

Naomi into remembering her childhood before, during and after internment—memories that highlight home as a controlled space as well as a space of resistance. Marlatt‟s

Annie also reads through personal and public documentation as she conducts research for her historian husband‟s academic work on the early settlements in Vancouver. In the course of her research, Annie reads through primary and secondary archival documents, including newspaper clippings, consensus reports, and a diary from the first female school teacher in Vancouver. This research propels Annie into childhood memories of her mother‟s domestic life in the 1950s—memories that explore home as a contradictory space that contains traditional femininity and a legacy of colonialism.

For each woman, the journey through historical documentation and memory corresponds with a process of liberation from a narrative that binds her within a controlled home and nation. Through this process Naomi and Annie recognize not only the existence of a narrative of diversity, but the persistence of this narrative throughout the history they examine in personal and public documentation; however, the recognition of persistent diversity does not enable Naomi and Annie to reconcile their painful personal experiences of being bound in a narrative of control. Through an examination of Naomi‟s and Annie‟s journey towards non-reconciliation, coupled with a study of the way in which Kogawa and Marlatt construct and ultimately leave their novels open- ended, I will explore the contradictions of living in a diverse home and nation.

In Chapter One I explore the multiple historical discourses represented in Obasan, beginning with the way Kogawa intertextually includes newspaper articles and 6 government letters to expose hidden Japanese Canadian voices of dissent. Both discourses construct a narrative of security that inscribes Japanese Canadians as alien to the national “family.” Newspaper articles appeal directly to “Canadian” (read white) citizens, invoking a “social imagination” that conceives of a Japanese Canadian threat.

Government letters also alienate, but they do so through a correspondence with

Canadians of Japanese descent which dictates the government‟s right to control the physical and social parameters of Japanese Canadian homes. However, the way in which

Kogawa includes these historical discourses into the narrative of the novel, exposes the

Japanese Canadian voices that the dominant discourse attempts to control. In The

Writing of History, Michel de Certeau explores how dominant discourses attempt to speak for and create knowledge of an “other.” The example he discusses in detail is the relationship between a possessed woman in the seventeenth century and an exorcist or judge, but he draws parallels between this relationship and the relationship between a

“mad” person and his or her doctor, an ethnographer and a “native” subject, and a historian and the past that he or she attempts to write (247-51). He argues that “There must be a gap between what the possessed woman utters and what the demonological or medical discourse makes of it” (247). In other words, there exists an unbridgeable gap between the experience of possession and the disciplinary language that describes and creates knowledge from that experience. But, as de Certeau goes on to explain, even while the dominant discourse of the exorcist attempts to objectify the possession, this discourse “will bear the trace—the „wound‟—of the alterity that knowledge claims to conceal” (250). Throughout her novel, Kogawa calls attention to how dominant language is permeated by the Japanese Canadian voices it attempts to efface. She reveals this 7

“wound” in two ways: first, she uses Emily‟s activist writing to expose how newspaper articles are used to manipulate the social imagination; second, she intertextually includes government letters that reference ongoing correspondence and resistance to official policies from Japanese Canadians to expose the way in which dominant, and dominating, language is contingent on the voice of dissent.

Of course, as Obasan illustrates, the national discourse of Japanese Canadian internment cannot be easily divided between “self”—the national “family”—and

“other”—those people and communities perceived as threats by and to the national family. The role of Aunt Emily illustrates how an individual can, with the same action, reveal a hidden voice and contribute to its concealment. Emily, through her activist research and writing, strives to uncover the “facts” on internment so as to reconcile the

Nisei community with official versions of Canadian national history. Her act of research, on the one hand, exposes hidden but present Japanese Canadian voices, as is the case when she points out the absurdity of the media‟s accusation that a Nisei boy is a spy

(Obasan 85). On the other hand, Emily‟s research also omits the story of the Japanese

Canadian workers who laboured on Alberta beet farms during the years preceding World

War II. This omission inadvertently conceals the voices of the Albertan experience of internment. In making the argument that Emily reveals and conceals a section of the

Japanese Canadian story, I am not meaning to suggest that Emily is complicit with the dominant culture‟s construction of a narrative of security. Rather, I use Emily as an example of how “voices” are not easily contained and categorized.

Kogawa represents a diverse Japanese Canadian community through Emily and

Naomi‟s different relationship to and understanding of narratives of security. Emily 8 desires to have the boundaries of the metaphoric home of the national family redrawn to include Japanese Canadians; through her writing and research she aims to reconcile her community and the national family from which their story has been erased. Conversely,

Naomi is aware that these boundaries cannot be drawn to accommodate her complex identity. From a young age she perceives that she is in the paradoxical position of being neither/both a part of the Canadian “family” nor/and a part of the Canadian “family.” I argue that Naomi is stuck in a liminal subject position from which she cannot (and should not) separate herself. This is not to say that Naomi does not desire recognition of a national history that separated Naomi from her mother when government policies would not allow her mother to return to Canada from Japan after the war, but, by exploring the tension between the desire to reconcile with her absent mother and her paradoxical subjectivity, Naomi cannot get beyond the irreconcilability of history. From the multiple voices exposed in Obasan, Naomi cannot find one that expresses her paradoxical identity; therefore, in the end, for Naomi the journey through the multiple voices of internment is about gathering the contradictions, or the “indirections,” of history and articulating them as such.

Chapter Two seeks to understand how Marlatt, in Ana Historic, represents the paradoxical role women play in constructing and deconstructing a narrative of security in the nineteenth-century Canadian settlements on the west coast, and the way in which

Annie comes to understand her own paradoxical identity within the context of this settler women‟s legacy. I continue to build on de Certeau‟s notion of the “wound” of alterity, arguing that a wound can also be seen on dominant discourses through the presence of the dominant discourse‟s omissions. The way in which Marlatt cites historic texts 9 accentuates women‟s absence from a colonial narrative that emphasizes men‟s role in building the Canadian nation. However, while Marlatt evokes a separation between male and female centred narratives by highlighting the way some histories of early Canada write women out, she does not replace androcentric with gynocentric narratives. Instead,

Marlatt, by writing an alternate narrative to the male-centred settlement, imagines a history plagued by contaminated relationships between men and women, but also between women and First Nations people. In an article on home and empire, Rosemary

Marangely George explores the freedom of the colonial woman in India. She argues that the Englishwoman first achieved “the kind of authoritative self associated with the modern female subject” thanks to her relationship to Indian natives (97). Similarly,

Marlatt constructs her narrative of settler life in Canada to include representations of

“authoritative” settler women, whose authority is highlighted through their complicity in constructing a societal structure that shuts First Nations subjects out of a newly created national “family.” In this chapter, I read Ana Historic as a narrative of paradoxical settler women who, by virtue of being women, are kept on the margins of a male-dominated settler society, but, as members of a privileged class, aid in constructing a narrative of security that inscribes the First Nations community as alien. Through this reading, I explore the legacy of settler women‟s irreconcilable identity that arises from the relationship between men and women and between women and First Nations people, and within the settler woman herself.

Ultimately Ana Historic chronicles Annie‟s desire to write herself out of a narrative that prescribes marriage and motherhood as her only option by writing a novel that proposes a lesbian relationship as an alternative for a historic settler woman, but in doing 10 so she must confront not only the restrictive narrative of marriage and motherhood but also the process of writing history. Annie has been taught to write a historical narrative by her academic husband who, Annie perceives, writes history in order to produce absolute knowledge. Despite Annie‟s desire to write a narrative that proposes a lesbian alternative for the historic settler woman, Ana, she cannot risk replacing her husband

Richard‟s historical writing with a narrative that moves towards a definitive end. To do so merely replaces one absolute with another. This becomes evident to Annie, who, in the end, writes Ana‟s alternative lesbian narrative to include the paradoxes associated with her contradictory position as a settler woman.

The movement of Ana‟s story towards a paradoxical identity as a lesbian woman of the empire cannot be separated from Annie‟s own “coming-out” narrative. By reading these two narratives in tandem, I question whether Annie‟s “coming-out” narrative can be seen as a resolution of her dissatisfaction with her personal history wherein she felt forced into marriage and motherhood by societal norms and her dissatisfaction with the broader archived history of the nation that does not acknowledge, for better or worse, women‟s role in nation-building.

In Chapter Three I move away from discourse and look at Kogawa‟s representations of home in Obasan. I not only explore how a narrative of security plays out within this intimate sphere, but I also explore the many incarnations of home that result from the experience of internment. For Brydon, “the mapping of the “threatened bourgeois” home onto the nation expands the private sphere of home onto the public sphere of the nation

(“Storying Home” 35), while for Jennifer Browdy de Hernandez the home is a “contested site on which the cultural conflicts of the larger society are played out in microcosm” 11

(20). These two perceptions of home are the reverse of each other, with one seeing the home expanding onto the nation and the other seeing the nation playing out in the smaller space of the home. By reading the tension between these two perceptions, home emerges as an irreconcilable and contradictory space.

The first incarnation of home I explore in Obasan is the home of internment. This home is characterized by what Homi K. Bhabha calls the “unhomed,” or the “shock of recognition of the world-in-the-home, the home-in-the-world” (“The World and the

Home” 445), and is not one single space but rather the multiple spaces Naomi and her family live in over the years during and after World War II. These spaces are Obasan‟s domain, wherein a paradoxical relationship between resistance and intrusion plays out as exemplified by “the-home-in-the-world, the-world-in-the-home.” Obasan transforms the home into a space of resistance through continually re-establishing the space as a

“home,” as a space of security where the family‟s possessions are housed and displayed, as well as where the family and broader Japanese Canadian community can gather. By creating a comfortable home in spite of government-ordered displacements, Obasan re- maps the controlled and alienated Japanese Canadian home back onto the nation. But the home of internment is also a haunted site, haunted by invasions, displacements, the memories of a family that has been fragmented and the memories of family members killed due to political policies and social alienations.

The second incarnation of home I explore is the home idealized by Naomi. Naomi is haunted by what she perceives as the ideal home of her childhood, where her family happily lived unfettered by influences from the broader political world. This idealized space is represented in Naomi‟s memory by an image of her idealized mother who 12 created a secure home. But a paradoxical space of the world-in-the-home, the-home-in- the-world emerges when I look into Naomi‟s remembered idealized home. Despite

Naomi‟s idealization, her childhood home is also a site of intrusions, invaded by a racist society even prior to the government policies that order the displacement of Japanese

Canadians from Canada‟s west coast. In the final pages of this chapter I argue that

Naomi‟s “unhomed shock” destabilizes her childhood ideal when she recognizes the continual presence of the world-in-the-home. This clears a space for Naomi finally to hear the story of her mother‟s death from health complications after the US bombing of

Nagasaki, but ultimately does not enable Naomi to reconcile with or recreate the security of home that she remembers from her childhood.

Chapter Four continues my exploration of the paradoxical home by looking at

Marlatt‟s representation of the many incarnations of home in Ana Historic, resulting from the cross-cultural movements that occur under colonialism and Canadian settlement.

The first incarnation is the nineteenth-century settler home. I begin my analysis of this home by looking at the way in which the settler project appropriates the Canadian wilderness as home. As Eva Mackey points out in her exploration of benevolence in

Canadian settlement, the settler subject viewed the Canadian wilderness as vast and empty, void of “signs not just of people, but of Native People” (44). The settler subject, then, having the perception of an uninhabited space, takes it upon him or herself to expand the Anglo-Protestant home onto this emptiness. By using Mackey‟s study of the relationship between the settler and the Canadian wilderness, I move into questioning the way this sense of entitlement plays out in Marlatt‟s representation of nineteenth-century domestic space, and exploring the tension between Marlatt‟s evocation of Western 13 feminists‟ desire to acknowledge women‟s “labour” and the role of settler women in nation-building. I explore how home, as a site where women give birth, transcends the private realm, but also contributes to the enterprise of empire.

The second incarnation of home in Ana Historic is the 1950s Canadian home of

Annie‟s childhood. This home is Annie‟s mother, Ina‟s domain where traditional gender roles interact with contradictory colonial and settler legacies. In this section of the chapter I explore the bourgeois home and witness the illusion of narratives of security from the site that symbolizes the creation of a narrative which posits a safe zone against the threat of a racialized other. Ina bolsters the narrative of security by attempting to shore up the domestic against threatening “others,” and by teaching her daughters to do the same. But Ina‟s home is also a haunted site, plagued by Ina‟s personal history of cross-national movements as a child and eventually wife of colonialism. Read from the perspective of Ina‟s migrations, the home is revealed as a culturally isolated and lonely location, haunted by the broader history and politics into which Ina was born. Ina‟s home is also invaded by social and political circumstances that are out of her control, thus the world enters the home. But her reaction to this invasion is to shore up and idealize her home against threatening "others," thus extending her idealized home onto the world.

In the final section of this chapter I question the effects of the legacy of the nineteenth century and the 1950s home on Annie‟s desire to write herself out of a traditional domestic space, arguing that, ultimately, for Annie, the process of writing a narrative that explores Ana and Ina‟s paradoxical homes cannot allow Annie to create a domestic space free of these contradictions.

As this thesis will illustrate, literature can provide a space wherein contradictions can be articulated. In “The World and the Home” Bhabha likens fiction to a house, and asks

“What kind of narrative can house unfree people?” (446). He answers his own question by asserting that these “unfree” find a home “in fictions that negotiate the powers of cultural difference in a range of historical conditions and social contradictions” (446).

The poetic but fragmented and open-ended narratives of Kogawa and Marlatt‟s novels become a home for these cultural differences, varied historical conditions and social contradictions. Obasan and Ana Historic marry the aesthetics of their novels with the political, social, historical and personal paradoxes they explore. This thesis attempts to explore the narrative spaces that Kogawa and Marlatt create to witness the voices repressed by social norms and look at the paradoxical relationships between these voices and the narrative that attempts to efface them.

 PART ONE Discourses of Home

Chapter One

Freeing Speech: Security and Home in Obasan

A narrative of security and threat, wherein the threatened (white) family and nation

“seek security through shutting out the unfamiliar” (Brydon “Storying Home” 35), was a seminal contributing factor to the internment of Japanese Canadians during and after

World War II. Roy Miki recognizes this in Redress: Inside the Japanese Canadian Call

For Justice in which he states that a history of discrimination against Japanese immigrants and Canadians of Japanese descent inscribed “Japanese” as “aliens who threatened to contaminate the purity of Canada” (18). Miki‟s statement points to a conceived national (white) “purity” that seeks security against a racialized “threatening” other. In her novel, Obasan, Joy Kogawa interrogates such binaries as security and threat, self and other, the familiar and the unfamiliar, which arise from the desire to maintain a socially perceived commonality in the name of security. Kogawa‟s narrative, which moves between Naomi‟s personal narration and the documents in her Aunt

Emily‟s folder, and which is overlaid by her Obasan‟s silence, Naomi‟s mother‟s absence and the historical events of Canadian internment and the US bombing of Nagasaki, illustrates the consequences of living on the margins, while within the confines, of a fixed narrative of security. Like Brydon, who identifies the relationship between the narrative of a secure “bourgeois” family and the narrative of a secure nation, Miki also employs

“family” to describe an exclusionary Canadian citizenship: “Canadian” is “a term that declared membership in a citizenry—hence a surrogate “family”—and an identity that projected an aura of sameness” (14). Obasan explores the national “family” of which

Naomi is paradoxically a member and not a member, while also exploring the narrative 17 of Naomi‟s family—a narrative that is in itself various and contradictory—as a “wound” that exposes the fixed narrative of security as an illusion. This chapter seeks to understand, by looking at the documents in Emily‟s folder, Kogawa‟s representation of the construction of a narrative of security and how this construction informs Naomi‟s journey into her childhood memory. Naomi‟s journey is plagued by a desire to return to the security of her childhood, but ultimately it becomes a journey towards recognizing and articulating the persistence of contradictory, diverse and irreconcilable narratives of history.

Many literary critics debate whether Naomi journeys towards reconciliation or towards irreconcilability. For Marilyn Russell Rose, Naomi‟s “salvation” comes from reading Grandma Kato‟s letters (224). For Erika Gottlieb, Naomi‟s return to the coulee at the end of the novel “offers resolution to her own rootlessness and homelessness” (50).

But these readings of reconciliation, as Smaro Kamboureli points out, are based on “an inner logic that affirms universal morality and law, a logic whose triumph is allegedly evidenced by Naomi‟s conversion from a silent woman into an eloquent narrator” (173).

If read through a logic that prescribes a preconceived notion of morality and law, Naomi becomes contained within a narrative that flows from conflict to resolution. Bonnie

Honig perceives that readers bring what she identifies as “romantic genre expectations to texts, often treating the narrative [for Honig, democratic theory] as a series of arguments intended to bring about reconciliation, a happy (or at least resigned) marriage between a people and their law or institutions” (9). Read romantically, Naomi‟s journey becomes a quest towards reconciliation with the law and institutions that sanction racialized internment—a reading that ultimately upholds a self/other binary structure and denies 18

Naomi‟s complex subject position. Instead of reading through a romantic gaze, Honig proposes a gothic reading in which characters (and readers) are in a state of “perpetual uncertainty” (9). Naomi‟s journey “home” defies a neat “romantic” narrative structure and is instead characterized by uncertainty about her relationship to the nation, her relationship with her Japanese and/or Canadian culture and her personal identity.

Kogawa does, however, evoke a neat narrative structure in her epigraph and her prologue. For Miki, “Within a conventional literary treatment of references, the epigraph can be read—and has been read—as a premonition that the narrative of conflict of

Obasan will be resolved” (139). Like Honig, Miki also identifies a reader‟s potential preconceptions in approaching a text—preconceptions that anticipate a narrative of conflict and resolution. Obasan‟s epigraph, taken from the Book of Revelations, reads,

“To him that overcometh / will I give to eat / of the manna / and will give him / a white stone / and in the stone / a new name written” (np). The epigraph indicates that the novel will unfold as a narrative of overcoming an obstacle and being rewarded, the implication of which, as Miki attests, is that Naomi “will emerge with a new identity after she has made her descent into her repressed history and memory” (139).

The prologue suggests the same linear narrative by evoking the epigraph‟s “hidden manna”: “The speech that frees comes forth from that amniotic deep” (np). The “hidden manna” becomes “the speech that frees.” The speech that frees, for Naomi, is her mother‟s speech. The prologue, as Naomi‟s personal statement, articulates her desire to go “home” again in the sense of returning to a safe narrative, the narrative of the

“amniotic deep,” of a home that was lost to her through internment and the absence of her mother. The speech that frees, as a public statement regarding the internment of Japanese 19

Canadians, is a mothertongue, the voice of a national “family,” and articulates the desire to secure oneself in the safety of a national womb. If these desires are read with a linear preconception of conflict and resolution then the expected outcome is not only a new, and

I would add whole and complete, identity; Naomi‟s resolution would also be a reconciliation with her nurturing, if absent, mother, and a nurturing, if exclusionary, nation. But if the prologue is read as a “key” to reading Obasan, as Paola Loreto suggests (178), then the final words of the prologue need to be examined: “If I could follow the stream down and down to the hidden voice, would I come at last to the freeing word? I ask the night sky but the silence is steadfast. There is no reply” (np). Loreto echoes these final words of the prologue when she argues that the prologue‟s obscurity is

“like the trace of a presence which is going to materialize later on, further down the path along which the reader is being taken” (180). But for Loreto the path evoked in the prologue leads to Naomi becoming “fully herself” (182), and not towards the silence that the prologue suggests. While a linear structure is conjured in Obasan‟s prologue, the novel unfolds towards “no reply,” and therefore towards perpetual uncertainty. Obasan grapples with how a narrative that excludes Japanese Canadians from the national family controls and disrupts Naomi‟s narrative of a secure home, while simultaneously illustrating the way in which narratives of security are illusory.

Along with the evocation of, and challenge to, a linear resolved narrative, Obasan also evokes and challenges the fixed narrative of security by intertextually including newspaper articles and government letters that Naomi reads from Emily‟s package. The newspaper articles represent a broader discourse of national security that constructs a binary opposition between self and other, inside and outside. In her discussion of the 20 social effects of the September 11th attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon,

Judith Butler argues that “Various terror alerts that go out over the media authorize and heighten racial hysteria in which fear is directed anywhere and nowhere, in which individuals are asked to be on guard but not told what to be on guard against; so everyone is free to imagine and identify the source of terror” (39; emphasis added). In Obasan, this social imagination is shown in Emily‟s diary when she cites a newspaper article in which “a young Nisei boy with a metal lunch box” is reported to be “a spy with a radio transmitter” (85). A correction to this article is later published, but, as Emily writes, only as “a tiny line in the classified section at the back [of the newspaper] where you couldn‟t see it unless you looked very hard” (85). This newspaper article represents the

“freedom” of the social imagination to create and perpetuate a narrative that constructs

Japanese Canadians as alien against a socially perceived ideal. The “freedom” of the social imagination enables the division of the Canadian citizenry into a self/other binary.

In her exploration of romanticized narratives, Honig asserts that a subject‟s “insistence on total identification with an idealized object—the nation, the demos” propels “the subject to split the beloved object in two (the good object and the bad) and to defend the former against the now externalized threat of the latter” (117). The media image of the Nisei boy elevates a racial hysteria among Canadian citizens (read white citizens) and causes

Canadians who are not of Japanese descent to split the citizenry into good and bad, imagining an idealized nation against a “Japanese” other. While this socially imagined division controls and transforms the image of the child walking with his lunch box,

Emily‟s articulation of the absurdity of the accusation illustrates the illusion of the 21 imagined binary. Thanks to Emily‟s words, the narrative of the young boy walking to and from school speaks through the discourse that labels him a spy.

While the article on the Nisei boy incites fear through a narrative of terror, the article titled “Find Jap Evacuees Best Beet Workers” that Naomi reads from Emily‟s package near the end of the novel has a different controlling effect: it produces a happy ending to the divisive narrative of security. The article, which is accompanied by “a photograph of one family, all smiles, standing around a pile of beets,” describes Japanese Canadian workers as “efficient,” yielding better crops “than the transient workers who cared for beets in southern Alberta before Pearl Harbour” (193-94). For Butler, “The public will be created on the condition that certain images do not appear in the media, certain names of the dead are not utterable, certain losses are not avowed as losses, and violence is derealized and diffused” (37-38). The photograph and article act as a metaphoric blanket that covers the loss and violence experienced on the Alberta beet farms. Blanketed by a happily-ever-after story, the experience is “derealized.” The narrative that is written from and over this experience attempts to justify not only the displacement of Japanese

Canadians by showing their “happiness,” but also bolsters the national narrative that labelled Japanese Canadians as a threat by illustrating how Canadian farms flourished thanks to the “happy” workers.

Opposition to injustices done to Japanese Canadians after World War II is represented by the intertextual inclusion of a Toronto Star article from 1948, but ultimately the article falls short of articulating the day-to-day reality of the beet farm experience. The article adopts a tone of dissent by commencing, “Nearly 20,000 Canadian citizens will be deprived for another year of one of the fundamental rights of citizenship, the House of 22

Commons decreed last night.” It goes on to explain that CCF members “made a vain but valiant effort to have the last restriction of the freedom of Japanese Canadians removed,” but ends with Maj. Gen. G.R. Pearkes‟s remarks that “there would be „crimes of revenge‟ if the exiles were permitted to return home now” (197-98). While sympathetic to the exiled Canadian citizens, the article is constructed of white male voices and does not offer voice to the exiles forced to work on the beet farms. Even Emily, who emphatically speaks to the injustices of expulsion, property seizure and internment, and who desires to restore Nisei voice to the discourse of internment, does not acknowledge or even show that she is aware of the hardships experienced on the farms, as evidenced by her collection of only one article in the folder that she titles “Facts about evacuees in

Alberta” (193). Not until Naomi utters the “facts” of Alberta—a deluge of words that are presented in a fragmented fit of remembrance (194-97)—is a counter-narrative told to disrupt the effaced story of the smiling beet farmers.

While newspapers aid in the construction and perpetuation of a narrative of security for the broader Canadian populace, the intertextual inclusion of government letters illustrates a discourse of control aimed directly at Japanese Canadians. The letters from the Department of Labour, British Columbia Security Commission written to Naomi‟s uncle and father during their internment in Slocan illustrate the discourse of the narrative of security. Isamu Nakane, Naomi‟s uncle, receives a letter informing him that “In accordance with the segregation programme which is now being carried out by the

Government” he will “be required to move to Kaslo” and leave the home he and Obasan had built for themselves in Slocan (173). This letter dictates where “home” will be for

Isamu Nakane (along with Obasan, Naomi and Stephen, Naomi‟s older brother), thus the 23 letter becomes a representation of how language contributes to the fragmentation of

Japanese Canadian families for the “good” of the national “family.” The letter‟s controlling language, which commands that transportation and shipment of the family‟s

“effects” will be made for them while the “beds, tables, stoves, stools, and all fixtures must be left in the house or rooms,” stifles a counter-narrative by concluding, “No extension of this order can be granted” (173). Silence enforced by this absolute language bolsters and perpetuates the self (white) and other (Japanese) binary.

The letter sent to Tadashi Nakane, Naomi‟s father, is different. The language of control is equally present in that Tadashi is told where he is permitted to live: “As you have expressed your desire to remain in Canada for various reasons you are not considered suitable for Eastern Placement, you will be required to remain in New

Denver” (173). But the letter‟s reference to a dialogue between Tadashi and the

Government in the statement, “As you have expressed your desire to remain in Canada,” hints at a counter discourse wherein Tadashi voices his right, as a citizen, to remain in

Canada. While the dialogue is terminated with the letter‟s final statement, “This [letter] is imperative and must be obeyed,” the evidence of Tadashi‟s voice remains. The suggestion of a counter discourse can be witnessed again in two government letters sent to Emily regarding Naomi‟s mother and grandmother‟s return to Canada from Japan after

World War II. The first addresses Emily‟s letter “concerning [her] application for readmission to Canada from Japan of Mrs. K. Kato” by denying Mrs. Kato the right to return to Canada because she “was born in Japan” and because “she returned to that country… it would seem evident that she has accordingly relinquished any claim to

Canadian domicile which she might have previously acquired” (212-13). The second 24 letter addresses Emily‟s letter “concerning [her] application for readmission to Canada” of Mrs. Tadashi Nakane, Naomi‟s mother. This letter also denies Mrs. Nakane‟s right to return to Canada, not because she is Japanese-born, but because the government will not allow a mysterious Japanese child to return to Canada with her. Like Emily‟s tone towards the newspaper clipping that accuses a boy of being a spy, like Naomi‟s narrative of the “facts” of Alberta and like Tadashi‟s voiced desire to remain in Canada, these two letters hint at another voice beneath the controlling language of the government or the mainstream media.

This hint of resistance against a dominant narrative exemplifies Michel de Certeau‟s

“wound.” In his exploration of the imposed language a possessed woman is forced to speak, de Certeau claims that the unavoidable dominant discourse will contain a hint, or a

“wound,” of the language it attempts to expunge (250). De Certeau perceives the presence of a suppressed discourse within a dominant discourse. In Obasan, the dominant language bears a trace of the discourse it is trying to conceal. While the discourse lying beneath the surface of the newspaper articles is revealed by Emily in her diary and by Naomi in her response to the lack of “facts” articulated about the Alberta farm experience, the language of the government letters reveals a hint of the discourse it tries to efface. The government letters must recognize Tadashi‟s desire to stay in Canada and Emily‟s inquest into the return of her mother and sister in order to suppress further dialogue. In other words, in order to maintain a narrative of security wherein Canadian

“borders” are shut to perceived “aliens,” the government must respond to, and thus recognize, Japanese Canadian discourse. 25

Recognizing the wound on these written discourses, however, does not lessen the control they have over marginalized voices. In her discussion of race in Obasan,

Kamboureli argues that the “recognition of racism is, more often than not, consistent with the fact that racist behaviour makes visible precisely what it seeks to eliminate,” but, ultimately, “even when the racialized body repudiates its racialization, it cannot relinquish what it has already absorbed: in other words, it is permeable” (185). In the same sense, while the suppressed voice is inherent in a narrative of control, the narrative of control leaves an unshakable mark upon the suppressed voice. Thus, both the discourse of security and the counter-narrative are permeated by each other.

An early example of both Kogawa and Naomi‟s awareness of the “wound” on an official discourse of history is revealed through the letter from the government official

“B. Good”:

Dear Madam

This will acknowledge your letter of the 31st ultimo.

This will also advise you that Mrs. T. Kato is a Japanese National living in

Japan at the outbreak of war, all property belonging to her in Canada vests in the

Custodian.

Yours Truly,

B. Good (37)

Kogawa, by signing the letter “B. Good,” parodies the official government letters that were sent to Japanese Canadians who inquired about their loved ones and their confiscated land. The signature “B. Good” exposes the control these letters have, as an extension of government policies, to silence dissent in a way that acknowledges but 26 subverts the letter‟s power to control by drawing attention to the condescending relationship between the government, as “father,” and Japanese Canadians, as “children,” of the national family. Kogawa bestows the power of parody onto Naomi who imaginatively expands upon the national father-child relationship exposed in the letter:

“Be good, my undesirable, my illegitimate children, be obedient, be servile, above all don‟t send me any letters of enquiry about your homes, while I stand on guard (over your) property in the free north strong, though you are not free. B. Good” (37). Naomi continues to parody the form letters, taking the parody one step further to parody the

Canadian national anthem, thereby destabilizing this symbol of national unity to expose the fallacy of freedom to citizens espoused by the anthem. Here, parody becomes the tool though which the “wound”—the marginalized voice of Japanese Canadians—is revealed. From the early pages of the novel Kogawa exposes the dialogic relationship between so-called marginal and dominant discourses, acknowledging the control of, while revealing the Japanese Canadian wound on, official discourse.

By first exposing the “wound” of marginal discourse, Kogawa clears a space to interrogate a multitudinous Japanese Canadian voice of dissent, the most obvious of which is Naomi‟s Aunt Emily. While official documents in Obasan illustrate a narrative of exclusion, Emily‟s activist writings constitute a narrative of inclusion. Emily advocates for redress from the Canadian government by fighting (through words: “Aunt

Emily, BA, MA, is a word warrior” [32]) for official recognition that the Nisei, second- generation citizens of Japanese descent, are “Canadian.” She writes a manuscript titled,

“THE STORY OF THE NISEI IN CANADA: A STRUGGLE FOR LIBERTY” in which she states, “I know the Nisei in every mood and circumstance, and because of this intimacy 27 with them, I shall discuss some of the accusations brought against us” (39). While Emily becomes a “word warrior” against the silence imposed by government policies, what strikes Naomi about Emily‟s manuscript is not her desire for acknowledgement of the wrongs done against the Nisei but her emphatic desire to belong. Flipping through the pages of the manuscript Naomi comes “across a statement underlined and circled in red: I am Canadian. The circle was drawn so hard the paper was torn” (39). For Miki, “the movement to seek redress was born out of Canadian conditions and placed us deeply inside the language of this nation‟s democratic values. The high esteem in which

„Canadian‟ citizenship was held, then, accounts for the overwhelming air of celebration that prevailed among Japanese Canadians on September 22, 1988,” the day redress was given by the Mulroney government (Redress 11). Emily holds Canadian citizenship in the high esteem that Miki identifies. She desires to be included in the national “family.”

She attacks the authority that inscribes her and the Japanese Canadian community‟s position outside of citizenship. But she does not directly attack the binary structure that posits familiarity against an alien other. Rather, she seeks to enlarge the national family‟s

“territory” to be inclusive of Canadian citizens of Japanese descent.

In other words, Emily places her hope of inclusion in the very system that sanctioned exclusion. As Kamboureli points out,

Emily dedicates her life to restoring dignity to her community, but she draws her

energy and political will from her unproblematized notion of Canada as a

democracy. Because Emily never concedes that racialization is embedded in the

foundations of the Canadian state, she unwittingly reproduces the liberal ideology

that justifies racism within a democratic framework. (188) 28

Naomi sees the problems in Emily‟s fight for the recognition of injustices: “What, I wonder, was Aunt Emily trying to accomplish through all this correspondence? She was no doubt keeping the home fires burning and shouting „Democracy‟ to keep the enemy at bay” (Obasan 43). The language that Naomi uses to describe Emily‟s writing is similar to the language that Brydon uses to describe what I have been calling a narrative of security. In Naomi‟s perception, Emily attempts to keep the “home,” the Canadian space that in the name of democracy should not be invaded or displaced, secure against an outside threat. Both the narrative of security and the narrative of inclusion project a desire to create and maintain an impenetrable safe zone. Instead of questioning the broader system of citizenship, Emily yearns for recognition from the white national family. In her exploration of how multiculturalism in Canada plays out in Kogawa‟s two novels, Obasan and Itsuka, Heather Zwicker argues that “official multiculturalism posits national history as a chronological narrative of progress directed towards future perfectibility” (149). Through her desire for inclusion, Emily seeks this “future perfectibility” where a Canadian identity is inclusive of diversity. Zwicker goes on to point out that Emily‟s writing “facilitate[s] assimilation into a multicultural nation, which can encompass large degrees of difference without fundamentally changing” (168). By working towards clearing a space in Canada for the inclusion of diversity, Emily continues to create a discourse that maintains the potential for an objectification of what it means to be “Canadian”—an identity that potentially glorifies diversity “without asking too many questions about it” (148).

Naomi‟s perspective of her own citizenship reveals a more complicated understanding of her subject position as Canadian citizen on the margins of a national family, as 29 dwelling inside Canada while being positioned outside the rights and freedoms of citizenship. Naomi is made aware of her paradoxical subject position as self and other while still in childhood. Her brother Stephen returns home from school on a day before the family was exiled and tells Naomi that a classmate ridiculed him for being a “Jap.”

Stephen tells Naomi that she too is a Jap, but, when Naomi asks her father, he tells her that they are “Canadian.” The only way that Stephen can explain the apparent discrepancy between the two answers is to tell Naomi, “It is a riddle…. We are both the enemy and not the enemy” (70). But, as Naomi reveals, “Riddles are hard to understand.

Only Stephen knows what they mean” (71). The confusion over what it means to live with a paradoxical subject position continues to occupy Naomi in adulthood.

When the novel begins, Naomi is stuck in a liminal space between self and other. She articulates her liminality when she describes an encounter she has while on a date:

„Where are you from?‟ he asked, as we sat down at a small table in a corner.

That‟s one sure-fire question I always get from strangers. People assume when

they meet me that I‟m a foreigner.

„How do you mean?‟

„How long have you been in this country?‟

„I was born here.‟

„Oh,‟ he said, and grinned. „And your parents?‟ (7)

The man‟s assumption that Naomi is not from Canada immediately objectifies Naomi as an “other.” Naomi‟s evasive response, “How do you mean?” disrupts her date‟s preconception that Naomi is foreign. When Naomi reflects on this conversation, however, she does so by describing a fixed identity: “I should have something with my 30 picture on it and a statement below that tells who I am. Megumi Naomi Nakane. Born

June 18, 1936, Vancouver, British Columbia. Marital status: Old maid. Health: Fine, I suppose. Occupation: School teacher” (7). Naomi responds to being labelled an outsider by creating a solid identification for herself as an insider by placing known “facts” about herself into neat categories. But the parodic tone with which she articulates this identity reveals her insecurity about her “insider” subject position. Homi K. Bhabha explores liminal selfhood by employing a staircase metaphor: “the temporal movement and passage that [the stairwell] allows, prevents identities at either end of it from settling into primordial polarities. This interstitial passage between fixed identifications opens up the possibility of a cultural hybridity that entertains difference without an assumed or imposed hierarchy” (4). But Bhabha‟s liminality does not quite hold when related to a settler society, like Canada, and a novel like Obasan where national borders are not traversed. Naomi‟s liminal existence does not allow for the movement Bhabha identifies.

Instead, she is stuck between an imposed identity that labels her a foreigner and a self- imposed identity that labels her an unproblematic member of the national family. Her liminal position is less like a stairwell and more like being wedged between a rock and a hard place. While Emily, as a spokesperson for the Japanese Canadian community, continues to uphold systemic binary structures, Naomi, as another Japanese Canadian voice of dissent, highlights irreconcilable contradictions of her subject position.

Naomi, in relation to dominant discourses of Canadian citizenry, is stuck in an irreconcilable liminal position, but her subjectivity could be better characterized as stuck in a multitudinous web of cultural, national and familial influences. As Eva Karpinski argues, “The „truth‟ of Naomi‟s trauma is situated at the intersection of personal memory, 31 cultural memory and official history—a site where contradictory meanings are produced and validated” (61). In order to articulate this „truth‟—the irreconcilable contradictions of her subject position—Naomi must not only navigate the discourses of “home” that are controlled by official policies and resisted by Emily and her community of social activists, but she also has to navigate the personal and familial discourses that she receives from her Aunt Emily and Obasan.

The family story Naomi receives from Emily is idyllic and linear. Emily gives it an ideal beginning: “the Nakane and Katos were intimate to the point of stickiness, like mochi” (20). Internment breaks the family‟s happiness, which, for Emily, can only be mended by gathering the “facts” of internment and campaigning for reparation:

“Reconciliation can‟t begin without mutual recognition of facts” (183). Emily desires to see the family story flow from happy beginning through conflict and ultimately towards resolution. Emily has the romantic genre expectations that I defined earlier in this chapter, which imagine a happy marriage “between people and their law or institutions”

(Honig 9). Emily‟s desired conclusion for the family storyline conceives a happy marriage between her nation and her family once all the “facts” have been gathered and mutually recognized.

But the beginning of Emily‟s narrative is not as happy and ideal as her story of the intimate relationship between the Nakanes and Katos would lead Naomi to believe.

Emily gives an account of Japanese Canadian history that contrasts with this happiness:

“the war was just an excuse for racism that was already there. We were rioted against back in 1907, for heavens sakes! We‟ve always faced prejudice” (35). Kogawa juxtaposes the history of racism in British Columbia with the story of Grandpa Nakane‟s 32 arrival and settlement in Canada in 1893. He settled on Saltspring Island, opened a

“boat-building shop” and “prospered” by bartering and selling with the “Songhies of

Esquimalt and many Japanese fishermen.” His success allowed him to bring his

“cousin‟s widowed wife, and her son, Isamu” to Canada and to start the family into which Naomi will eventually be born (18). Contrasting a violent cultural history with a successful familial history highlights the contradictions of the Nakanes and Katos‟ story.

A history of racist violence against Japanese Canadians runs alongside a history of personal and familial triumphs. Thus, the family‟s story expresses the entanglements of personal and national histories.

Emily‟s desired reconciliation for the family is also problematic. She gathers facts in order to “Write the vision and make it plain” (31), or to comprehensively articulate, and therefore reconcile, the mutually recognized facts. As I stated in my discussion of the newspaper clippings, Emily‟s articulation of the absurdity of accusing the Nisei boy of being a spy reveals the “wound” on the accusatory newspaper article, but she also unknowingly conceals the story of Japanese Canadian workers on the beet farms in

Alberta. Naomi, then, becomes a voice of the ever-present “wound” of the beet farm experience when she expresses the story of Alberta, including bed bugs, extreme temperatures and physical pain from long hours spent working the fields, in a frenzied and disjointed narrative (195-96). Her expression, which she explicitly directs towards

Emily (“It‟s hard, Aunt Emily, with my hoe and the blade getting dull and mud-caked as I slash out the Canadian thistle” [196]), underscores her distrust, firstly, of the written

“black and white” facts (33), or the process of documenting an absolute internment story, and, secondly, of the linear vision of Emily‟s facts. For Naomi, Emily‟s gathering of 33 facts exposes the impossibility of coming to a mutual understanding and writing a

“factual” account of the whole story of internment, while also exposing the shortcomings that Emily‟s desire for reparation may hold.

The family story Naomi receives from her Obasan also destabilizes the happy family image evoked by Emily. Naomi explains, “From the few things Obasan had told” her, she “wonder[s] if the Katos were ever really a happy family. When Mother was a young child Grandma Kato left Grandpa Kato, who was a medical student at the time, and returned to Japan.” Naomi does not know how many times “her grandmother went to

Japan, but each time she took Mother and left Aunt Emily and Grandpa Kato behind”

(20). Obasan‟s version of the family story offers Naomi a hint that the family was not as happy and secure as Emily‟s story leads Naomi to believe. This hint of instability calls into question Naomi‟s desired journey towards “the speech that frees” within the

“amniotic deep,” within the nurturing narrative of home. But, Naomi only gains small hints from Obasan which are not enough for Naomi to articulate the irreconcilability of the family story: “I do not have, I have never had, the key to the vault of [Obasan‟s] thoughts” (26). Naomi does not have access to the language that would enable an understanding of Obasan‟s intermittent telling of her version of the family story.

Obasan‟s voice destabilizes Emily‟s imagined familial story, but Naomi is unable to decipher and articulate the labyrinth of Obasan‟s silences.

Ultimately, Naomi cannot ascertain a stable identity for herself when she navigates the web of entangled familial and national discourses. Gerry Turcotte points out, “If Naomi proves unsuccessful in defining herself, it is only because she has not found a language which mediates effectively between her two worlds, or one that adequately expresses her 34 situation in the world” (127). Presumably, the two worlds Turcotte identifies are the

Japanese Canadian culture of Naomi‟s family and the dominant Canadian culture that exists outside Naomi‟s Japanese home, but, as I have been illustrating, Naomi is caught in a web of multiple “worlds,” each presenting to Naomi a different interpretation of her childhood experiences. Nonetheless, what Turcotte asserts is true: from the multiple official, resistant and familial discourses Naomi confronts and is confronted by in the course of the novel, she cannot find one that adequately expresses the contradictions and contaminations within which she is situated.

If Naomi cannot derive a language with which to articulate herself from written discourse, from her ancestral language, from facts, from official discourse or from the nuances of silence, then the only language that remains from the discourses she is presented with in childhood is the language of her childhood stories: namely Humpty

Dumpty and Momotaro.1 In The Truth About Stories Thomas King discusses the way in which “Western society” brings pre-conceived notions of binaries to reading and listening to stories: “we do love our dichotomies. Rich/poor, white/black, strong/weak, right/wrong, culture/nature, male/female, written/oral, civilized/barbaric, success/failure, individual/communal. We trust easy oppositions. We are suspicious of complexities, distrustful of contradictions, fearful of enigmas” (25). The preconception of a conflict- resolution storyline that some critics bring to Obasan stems from what King sees as

Western society‟s love for easy dichotomies. But Humpty Dumpty and Momotaro, in the stories themselves and the way in which Naomi interprets them, break down the linear storyline and illustrate contradictions and complexities of Naomi‟s subject position. Humpty Dumpty, ending when all the king‟s horses and all the king‟s men 35 couldn‟t put Humpty together again, does not lead to a resolved ending. When Naomi recalls this story on the train ride from Vancouver to Slocan, she visualizes Obasan being able to stick Humpty together again with “a single grain of cooked rice” (115). Naomi‟s imagination creates a story that reflects her hybrid subject position—the story becomes western and eastern—but it also illustrates the permeability of this binary. Similarly,

Momotaro, a story about an older couple who adopt a young boy, love and nurture him, only to have him leave home and not return (55-56), does not lead to a happy ending.

Emily‟s statement, “Momotaro is a Canadian story. We‟re Canadian, aren‟t we?

Everything a Canadian does is Canadian” (57), also reflects Naomi‟s restrictive but porous subject position. Both stories also indicate Naomi‟s perception of her aunts:

Obasan is silent but active, attempting to keep the family home together; Emily is vocal, working towards recognition and inclusion in the national family. Thus, both stories, coupled with Naomi‟s reading of them, exemplify the complex intersection of nation, culture, family and individual.

Understanding this language of storytelling and its relation to Naomi‟s personal narrative of Alberta helps illustrate how Naomi‟s journey “home” cannot be fulfilled.

When Naomi ends her frenzied articulation of “facts” directed towards Emily‟s lack of

“facts” of the hardships experienced in Alberta, she says, “I cannot tell about this time”

(196). In her article “Narrative in Dark Times,” Leah Bradshaw explores narratives that are told from traumatic events, specifically, but not limited to, the holocaust. She notes that it “is notoriously difficult to tell stories about the death camps, and we know that, in fact many survivors of them resist any effort to do so” (17). Instead, many survivors use fiction to tell their stories because “By telling a story, we are actually trying to uncover a 36 truth that is of a different sort than that which merely records it” (12). In other words,

“facts” do not express hidden narratives. Facts can conceal the “wound,” while storytelling can reveal the “wound” of the other because of storytelling‟s potential for

“indirections.”

Naomi illustrates storytelling‟s potential for indirection when she turns her frenzy of

“facts” aimed at Emily into an expression of the family‟s unhappy homecoming in

Alberta. During this time Naomi receives news of her father‟s death. However, Naomi does not explicitly state the death‟s fact: “I am not sure, as I remember the scene, whether

I am told after I come in, or later at night when I am in bed, or if I am even told at all.

It‟s possible the words are never said outright” (206). Instead, she tells of the death through the story of her pet frog: “There was a fairy tale I read in Slocan about a frog who became a prince. Hah! Well, what, after all, might not be possible? Tad is a frog prince. Prince Tadashi…. He was hidden under the tree roots waiting for me, a messenger from my father” (206). Naomi finds the frog on the evening her family receives news of Tadashi‟s death and takes it home with her: “One morning the frog is on the rim of the bowl sitting there ready to leap. Another time it is on the table. Once I find it in a corner of the room covered in fluff. And then it is nowhere. The bowl is empty on the table. My last letter to Father has received no answer” (207-8). By coupling the frog‟s disappearance with receiving no response from her father, Naomi, using storytelling techniques, tells of the death of her father. The frog does not turn into a prince. The prince does not return home. By using the language of storytelling, Naomi is able to tell the story that exists hidden beneath the “facts” and articulates the irreconcilability of her family‟s story. 37

The irreconcilable ending is repeated when the letters from Grandma Kato are read at the end of the novel. Naomi does receive an answer regarding what happened to her mother in Japan: she was in Nagasaki during the bombing and was badly disfigured

(239). Nonetheless, for a few reasons, these “facts” cannot be read as reconciliation.

Firstly, the letters are written in Japanese, which Naomi cannot read. Their language is inaccessible to Naomi and she requires translation. Miki would have preferred to see the

Japanese language included within Obasan‟s text. How, he wonders, “might readers have responded to the opacity of the Japanese language had the translation not been so smoothly inserted in the narrative” (Broken Entries 144). While I agree that including the Japanese text would disrupt the preconceptions of many readers, thereby bringing them to a place of irreconcilability, the inclusion of Japanese would be inconsistent with

Naomi‟s complex subject position. Secondly, the letters are not written in the voice of

Naomi‟s mother. As readers, we receive Nesan‟s story by reading Naomi‟s interpretation of Nakayami-sensei‟s, the family‟s long-time minister, translation of the letters written by

Mrs. Kato of Nesan‟s story. Nesan‟s story filters through the many tellers, but ultimately her own voice, for us, as readers, and for Naomi, is inaccessible. Thirdly, the letters do not end with a neatly concluded telling of Nesan‟s story. Instead, at the end of the reading Naomi is left with more questions: “After this, what could have happened? Did they leave the relatives in Nagasaki? Where and when did they survive?” (239). A few other details are expressed of Nesan‟s story in the final pages of the novel, namely her death and the search for her potential grave. But pieces remain missing.

In the end, Naomi does not reach the freeing speech of the “amniotic deep” that is evoked in the prologue. In its place is an incomplete telling that begets more questions. 38

Naomi reflects on the papers she finds in Emily‟s package by stating, “The letters take months to reach Grandfather. They take years to reach me. Grandfather gives the letters to Aunt Emily. Aunt Emily sends letters to the Government. The government makes paper airplanes out of our lives and files us out the window” (242). At the end of the novel, Naomi comes to witness the persistent stories of and correspondence written by marginalized women in her family, even while these stories cannot be resolved. But she also witnesses the continuing power of the government to control and attempt to eliminate these “wounds.”

Grandma Kato‟s letters, however, do not only indicate irreconcilability for Naomi and her family; the letters can also be perceived as another wound on the national narrative that desires to keep aliens outside the national family. Perceiving Japan and its citizens as alien threats was the reason a narrative of security could be established, adopted and implemented by the dominant white culture after Pearl Harbour. The letters give a glimpse into the story of the “other,” into the violence and devastation that is created when “we” attempt to shore up our own borders. For Miki, though, the inclusion of this retelling of “the atomic blast in Nagasaki functions not only to resolve Naomi‟s narrative quest for knowledge but also to recontextualize Japanese Canadian internment in relation to an event of such horrific proportions that it flattens its enormity” (144). However, the two events are intimately related, and to ignore this connection is to miss a key element in understanding how exclusionary discourses are constructed. Japan‟s history as the site where two atomic bombs were dropped during World War II and Canada‟s internment history are interconnected and entangled with each other, and we may want to rethink how two horrific events can be discussed alongside each other without creating a 39 hierarchy of horror. This is not to say, as Turcotte does, that the two events are “equally horrific” (129). Turcotte‟s response to Miki‟s argument illustrates the recreation of a self/other binary where we both suffered the same is set against our sufferings are so vastly different they cannot be compared. As this chapter has illustrated Obasan‟s contradictory and complex discourses calls for a re-conception of binary structures as illusory without losing sight of the power that these illusory structures have over the way we think and act.

Miki is correct when he points out that Obasan, when it is read as a reconciliation narrative, “can become an object of knowledge as a Canadianized text that teaches „us‟ about racism in „our‟ past” (143). Karpinski echoes Miki when she identifies the

“tendency among the readers of Obasan to see in the text a resolution of the isolated racist „episode‟ from the nation‟s past, rather than an indictment of an ongoing problem of racism” (55). Such a reading produces a similar effect as the photograph of smiling beet farmers: it creates a happy ending that erases stories of violence and pain. This sort of conclusion brings those who had once been labelled as “other” into the “security” of a national family and does not address the constrictive binary structures that allow for the creation of exclusionary discourses. By exploring multifarious discourses and narratives that exist alongside and interact with each other, a theory of irreconcilability through diversity can be created that does not allow for the erasure that potentially occurs in a resolved conclusion.

Chapter Two

The Legacy of the Settler Woman: Security, Home and Sexuality

in Ana Historic

A narrative of security and threat that seeks to shut out the unfamiliar from the bourgeois nuclear family is also a key element of colonial expansion in the late nineteenth century. In her study Settler Feminism and Race Making in Canada, Jennifer

Henderson explores the colonial enterprise of creating a narrative of inclusion and exclusion through “nineteenth-century race making,” which “involved the work of constituting and coercively maintaining the boundaries of the „normal‟ through the inscription of differences in capacities for self-government that… could explain and justify social inequalities and political exclusions” (18). Part of the colonial project was to establish “normalcy” (read “middle-class Anglo-Protestant morality” [16]), enabling a declaration of who was deemed capable of self-government and who was not, thus dividing and containing a “self”—middle-class Anglo-Protestant—against any “other,” including Catholics and ethnic minorities, but most notably First Nations people.

However, middle-class Anglo-Protestant women are wedged between this “self” and

“other.” They are excluded from a patriarchal norm while playing a seminal role in the establishment of an Anglo-Protestant norm. In her examination of home and empire in

India, Rosemary Marangely George asserts that colonialism offered a space wherein an

Englishwoman could achieve “the kind of authoritative self associated with the modern female subject…. This authoritative self was defined against a racial Other in encounters that were located in space that was paradoxically domestic as well as public: the English home in the colonies” (97). In her novel Ana Historic, Daphne Marlatt looks at how, in 41

Canada, specifically on the West Coast in the late nineteenth century, colonialism and settlement offered the Anglo-Protestant woman a self-authoritative opportunity, enabling her to “write” her own narrative “free” from the confines of the “father”-land, but only so far as her narrative contributed to the “improvement of „inferiors‟ as an extension of her maternal role within the family” (Henderson 16). In other words, Marlatt illustrates the settler woman‟s attempt to free herself from the confinement she experienced as a woman, in England, while showing how the settler woman, paradoxically and unavoidably, reinscribed herself within another form of confinement in the “new” world and contributed to establishing a Canadian Anglo-Protestant national family.

Ana Historic explores women‟s paradoxical subject position that arises from the settler creation of a perceived commonality on the road towards nation building.

Marlatt‟s fragmented narrative, which moves between Annie‟s personal narration and the archival documents that she reads while acting as research assistant for her historian husband, Richard, and the feminist and historical documents Annie later reads when conducting research for her fictional writing, illustrates the legacy of colonial women‟s paradoxical subjectivity and interrogates the controlling but illusory binary mentality of which this legacy is an extension. Ana Historic links Mrs. Richards, who is caught between a desire for freedom in Canada and her contradictory role in creating a national narrative of security through her involvement in the colonial enterprise, and Annie, a contemporary woman who is stuck between maintaining the national “family” through her conventional marriage and her desire to reinscribe a narrative which disrupts the private and national family that is based upon a self/other split. By looking at the inclusion of archival documents within the novel, this chapter seeks to understand 42

Marlatt‟s representation of the paradoxical role women play in constructing and deconstructing a narrative of security by exploring Annie‟s journey into this paradox.

Annie attempts to write a national and personal “family,” revealing a lesbian narrative that defamiliarizes androcentric, and even gynocentric, discourses. But Annie‟s journey into documentation, like Naomi‟s in Obasan, is a journey towards the expression of a contradictory, diverse and irreconcilable narrative of history.

Annie‟s journey towards irreconcilability is also questioned and debated amongst critics. For Heather Milne, Ana Historic, as a “coming-out novel,” necessitates a

“teleological narrative that retrospectively reframes one‟s experience prior to coming out as leading up to” the declaration of a lesbian identity (94). Milne opens the possibility for an alternate construction of subjectivity, a construction that challenges notions of stable subjectivities, when she states that the construct of a lesbian identity is

“provisional,” “one whose „undoing‟ is always a possibility.” But her argument continually returns to the notion that the coming-out narrative needs, in the end, to create a stable subjectivity, “since its purpose is to consolidate the identity of the queer subject”

(94). This argument echoes Linda Hutcheon‟s claim that “Women must define their subjectivity before they can question it; they must first assert the selfhood they have been denied by the dominant culture” (The Canadian Postmodern 6). Hutcheon suggests a linear progression where a stable female subjectivity needs to be established before it can be contested. Milne too, even while acknowledging the need to make room for an expression of nuanced identities, evokes linearity for the lesbian subject. Her evocation of a provisional identity hints that instability lies beneath the surface of the

“consolidated” lesbian identity, but in stating that a coming-out narrative‟s purpose is, in 43 the end, to articulate a single and stable subjectivity she suggests that a nuanced lesbian identity will not be able to disrupt a fixed narrative that inscribes “normalcy” as heterosexual. In other words, Milne‟s contention is that only a stable alternate narrative can disrupt an existing metanarrative. However, I read Marlatt‟s fragmented composition as attempting to reformulate “normal” narrative structures that follow a traditional arc based on conflict-resolution to create an open-ended narrative that is not based on a build-up towards a definitive conclusion.1

The presumption that Ana Historic moves towards Annie‟s articulation of her

“consolidated” lesbian identity suggests the romantic genre expectations that, in Chapter

One, I argued some critics bring to Obasan. As I explained, Bonnie Honig defines these expectations, which she sees some theorists bringing to democratic theory, as an assumption that a “reconciliation, a happy (or at least resigned) marriage” will occur

“between a people and their laws or intuitions” (9). While most critics would agree that

Marlatt plays with the expression of fragmented subjectivities through her disjointed and multi-voiced narrative, some critics do not see this fragmentation through to the end of their argument. This results (perhaps unintentionally) in their imagining a reconciled “or at least resigned” ending to Annie‟s coming-out narrative.

This resolved “romantic” (as defined by Honig) reading of Annie‟s identity cannot avoid being extended onto Annie‟s quest to rewrite and alternate settler history. Annie‟s writing of the lesbian into settler history would then become a resolved historical narrative that mimics the linear historical narrative Marlatt‟s use of fragmentation attempts to destabilize. This form of linear national history, as Eva Mackey argues,

“depends upon mythological narratives of a unified nation moving progressively through 44 time—a continuum beginning with a glorious past leading to the present and then onward to an even better future” (36). A romantic understanding of Ana Historic risks misreading Annie‟s inclusion of a lesbian subjectivity into a settler history as Annie‟s desire to create a renewed progressive mythological narrative that creates an alternate glorious past in order for Annie to create an even better future for herself.

Instead of deducing a teleological narrative, Marlatt‟s epigraph offers a key to reading the multiple voices of history that are intertextually represented throughout the novel and the fictional history written by Annie. The epigraph reads: “The assemblage of facts in a tangle of hair” (np). The interrogation of Canadian history that Annie undertakes does not recreate a reconciled past or create a harmonious (or even resigned) present and future, but rather highlights the entanglement, the contradictions and uncertainties of the multiple voices and contradictory subjectivities of history. Marlatt, through Annie, writes settler women‟s irreconcilable legacy as stuck between conflicting self/other, male/female binaries.

Marlatt‟s inclusion of male-centred archival documents into the narrative of the novel evokes a division between historical representations of men and women. She quotes passages from M. Watson‟s and R.W. Young‟s 1906 A History of Geography in British

Columbia which details the uses for different wood species found on the west coast of

Canada. Douglas fir “has great strength and is largely used for shipbuilding, bridge work, fencing, railway ties, and furniture” (Ana Historic 13-14); red cedar is “unequalled as a wood for shingles” and “prized for the interior finishing of houses. As the cedar lasts well underground it is used for telegraph poles and fence posts…. Well can this wood be called the settler‟s friend, for from it he can with simple tools, such as axe and saw, build 45 his house, fence his farm, and make his furniture” (19-20). These quotations articulate a male-centred narrative wherein men literally “build” the nation. Marlatt‟s citation recontextualizes the document so as to highlight the repetitive uses of the possessive

“his”: the house, fence, farm and furniture belong to him. The emphasis on his possessions underscores the absence of her possessions. In other words, the explicit focus on men evokes the absence of women. Thus, Marlatt‟s citation draws attention to a patriarchal and colonial narrative of exclusion based on a male/female, self/other, present/absent binary.

Marlatt‟s use of citation to highlight women‟s absence exemplifies what Michel de

Certeau characterizes as a “wound” on dominant language. As I stated in Chapter One, de Certeau perceives that when a possessed woman speaks the unavoidable language of a dominant discourse, it will invariably bear a mark of the language that is effaced (250).

Similarly, when Marlatt cites this passage from A History of Geography in British

Columbia, the citation bears the trace of a female narrative that is explicitly absent.

While in Obasan Japanese Canadian discourse can be seen in government letters through references the government officials make to Tadashi‟s desire to remain in Canada and

Emily‟s request for information about her relatives in Japan, in Ana Historic the female narrative can be seen in its absence. Marlatt‟s citation makes visible the absence of a female narrative, thus illustrating that a female discourse exists alongside a male discourse, even if, as de Certeau asserts, this discourse is “attenuated” or “surreptitious”

(250), or, I would add, silent. Marlatt‟s citations recontextualize the archival document by exposing a narrative that is already there, that persists alongside the patriarchal narrative of nation-building. 46

But, while the male/female binary is clearly evoked by Marlatt, its simple division

(male as controller and therefore present/female as controlled and therefore absent) does not hold up in light of the colonial enterprise of establishing a new “home” that desires to contain Anglo-Protestant morality against any “other.” Milne argues that Marlatt‟s use of citations to recontextualize the original male-centred narrative is “driven by the desire to inscribe a space for the specificity of women‟s experiences” (90). The idea that a space needs to be cleared in order to inscribe a woman‟s experience is also argued by Caroline

Rosenthal when she states that Annie comes “to writing” in order to open a “possibility of lesbian love that would shift the frame of reference from an androcentric to a woman centred perspective” (102-3). Rosenthal‟s argument parallels Hutcheon‟s assertion that women must first assert a stable subjectivity before it can be deconstructed. But the argument that a male-centred narrative needs to be replaced with a female-centred one reinforces the binary between man/woman, self/other. This replacement, as Chandra

Talpade Mohanty argues in her exploration of the effects of “western feminisms” on

“Third World women,” is merely a “simple inversion” that is “structurally identical to the existing organization of power relations” (71). Maintaining a binary power structure is

“ineffectual in designing strategies to combat oppressions” (64). Therefore, reading Ana

Historic with a binary mentality, even while it places female narratives in a position of power, does not acknowledge the deconstruction of binaries that Marlatt attempts, and also ignores the complex and contradictory subject position of colonial women.

Marlatt plays with the notion that men are written into and women are written out of history—a binary that is evoked through the argument that androcentric narratives need to be replaced with gynocentric ones, and is also stated by Annie when she asserts that 47

“history married [Mrs. Richards] to Ben Springer and wrote her off” (134). Women do, however, appear in archival documents. Annie becomes interested in Mrs. Richards precisely because she is able to find Mrs. Richards in archival documents. While Annie perceives that Mrs. Richards‟ marriage writes her out of the history books, Zoe, Annie‟s eventual lover, states, Mrs. Richards‟ marriage “wrote her in… listed her as belonging”

(134). Mrs. Richards is simultaneously present and absent from the archives—present because “history” documented her placement as a schoolteacher as well as her marriage, and absent because “history” does not include her after she married. Her presence and absence paradoxically inscribes her into heterosexual Anglo-Protestant “normalcy” while provoking Annie (and Marlatt) to imagine an alternate narrative.

This play between presence/absence, written in/written out of history continues with

Mrs. Richards‟ diary. Marlatt explains in an interview that the diary is her fictive creation (Kossew 56), but, for Annie, the diary is an archival document. Marlatt discloses that she likes to explore the interactions between fact and fiction: “I like rubbing the edges of document and memory/fiction against one another. I like the friction that is produced between the stark reporting of document, the pseudo-factual language of journalism, and the more emotional, even poetic, language of memory” (Kossew 55).

Surveying the intersections between different forms of historical writing blurs fact and fiction, and, in doing so, blurs the presence/absence of Mrs. Richards in the archives. She is simultaneously present through her own writing—although the diary‟s “authenticity” is questioned by historians who conceive the possibility that the journal was written by Mrs.

Richards‟ daughter (Ana Historic 30-31)—and absent by being Marlatt‟s fictional alternate narrative. Fittingly, through this ambiguous diary, Annie (and we, as readers) 48 receive the paradoxical account of Mrs. Richards‟ colonial experience, an experience through which she encounters freedom and strength that she had not known in England, but also through which she contributes to the establishment of a narrative of security that inscribes Anglo-Protestant morality as normal against the threat of the First Nation

“others.”

Mrs. Richards‟ contradictory feelings of the freedom she experiences in western

Canada in the late nineteenth century illustrate how she is introduced to new freedoms while continuing to be shut out of a male-centred world. In her diary she contemplates the “freedom” she discovers in the “new world.” At one point she expresses the control she experienced in England by addressing her father: “„You would say, Father, they are a

Rough Lot and this is no place for a Gentlewoman, and you would be right, perhaps. Still

I would rather be here than cooped up there as your hand-maiden” (55). At another point she writes of her new-found freedom, “I see that I am in the midst of freedom and yet not free, and could almost think how little has changed” (54). In the former diary entry she expresses her pleasure with being beyond the reach of her father‟s control that kept her contained within his home, while in the latter she expresses her frustration with the confinement she experiences within settler culture. Henderson‟s exploration of sexual politics and legislative reforms in late nineteenth-century Canadian women‟s writing helps us to understand this inconsistency:

legislative reforms… freed daughters of empire from the status of paternal

property, and enabled them to speak, instead of being spoken for by their fathers.

By means of this liberation, however, they were inscribed in another economy as

they were now required to account for themselves. What was offered to women 49

as an alternative to the status of paternal property was a captivity within the

bounds of moral character. (114)

For Mrs. Richards, England and her father‟s house represent a narrative of exclusion wherein her legal rights and personal mode of living as her own authoritative subject are limited. Canada, on the other hand, becomes the site where Mrs. Richards can authorize her own narrative, where she can free herself from the bounds of her “father”-land.

However, a new narrative of inclusion and exclusion is “written” in colonial Canada based not on law, but on the very “freedom” that women have gained. In Canada, Mrs.

Richards is “free” to choose her own conduct, as long as her conduct conforms to the boundaries of Anglo-Protestant morality. This new freedom imagines the collapse of a male/female binary, where the latter is controlled by the former, but this imagined collapse is an illusion that reinscribes settler women back into a narrative that controls them.

Mrs. Richards‟ diary also alludes to the narrative that keeps First Nations people outside the colonial “family.” She writes:

Yesterday [Mrs. Patterson, a woman living in Vancouver with Mrs. Richards] sent

her Siwash woman, Ruth—that cannot be her real name—and the woman‟s

mother, to scrub the Schoolhouse. As I was straightening books and the

children‟s things, I observed Ruth to pass her fingers slowly over the slate, as if

the letters marked thereon might leap into her very skin. Our Magic is different

from theirs, I see—And yet it cannot capture them—the quiet with which each

seems wrapt, a Grace that—the Grace of direct perception, surely, untroubled by

letters, by mirrors, by some foolish notion of themselves such as we suffer from. 50

I cannot find the words for this the others would dismiss as Pagan—perhaps our

words cannot speak it. (69)

Ruth, as Mrs. Patterson‟s “woman,” evokes the settler women‟s task to reform natives, to appropriate them into the national “family,” not as full members but, like Naomi in

Obasan, as paradoxically members and not members. For Henderson, despite the “mixed genetic inheritance of the Dominion of Canada,” the establishment of “a pure nation could be produced through the Anglo-Protestant woman‟s concerted efforts to create morally improving social and cultural environments” (16). Ruth, who has been given a

Christian name and who will continue to be inscribed outside the “pure” national family because of her present or former Paganism, represents the settler woman‟s moral project—a project that inscribes the settler woman “in the machinery of government under the banner of racial superiority” (Henderson 18). The citation of this section of

Mrs. Richards‟ diary illustrates the placement of white settler women within the nation- building project, thus grouping men and women under the same colonial flag: “Managing a home and managing the Empire were ultimately part of the same project” (George 112).

Therefore, women as propertyless—as reinforced by Marlatt‟s focus on his possessions— are the “other” in the male/female binary, while as Anglo-Protestants they become part of the “self” in the colonizer/colonized binary. Mrs. Richards is wedged between contradictory binaries, thus exposing both binaries as illusions while, paradoxically, highlighting the power they hold over both Mrs. Richards and Ruth. When Annie embarks upon her fictional writing of Ana, the name she gives Mrs. Richards when she cannot find mention of her first name in the archival documents, she seeks to write the settler woman‟s contradictory subject position as such. 51

Exploring these contradictions inherently leads to articulating multiplicity (for example, in order to explore Mrs. Richards‟ complex subjectivity, her position as a woman and as part of the colonial enterprise must be explored simultaneously). As I discussed in the opening paragraph of this chapter, the recognition of differences enables

“race making,” which creates and maintains boundaries of “normalcy,” justifying “social inequalities and political exclusions” (Henderson 18). But, as Mackey points out, a

Canadian multiplicity myth which works towards celebrating differences and erasing exclusions continues to totalize (18), because “despite the proliferation of” celebrated differences in Canadian historical narratives “the key features of the story of settler nationhood persists, a story which can only recognize limited and unthreatening forms of difference” (86). The recognition of multiplicity, even in an attempt to celebrate differences, continues to be used to exclude those inscribed as “different,” thereby continuing to bolster a fixed “norm.”

In Ana Historic this production of diverse but, ultimately, homogenous narratives is illustrated by representations of both Native and settler women. Mrs. Richards, in the previously cited passage from her diary, is aware that she and her colonial companions inscribe Ruth outside the Anglo-Protestant circle when Mrs. Richards identifies that

“others would dismiss [Ruth‟s ways] as Pagan” and expresses that Ruth cannot be captured by English words. Instead, Mrs. Richards characterizes Ruth as possessing

“direct perception… untroubled by letters, by mirrors, by some foolish notion of themselves such as we suffer from” (69). Mrs. Richards seems to understand that she cannot objectify Ruth with the English language. She acknowledges a gap between Ruth and the language that is imposed upon her. For Mrs. Richards, Ruth, as inexplicable, 52 becomes a wound upon the stability of colonial discourse. From this acknowledgement,

Mrs. Richards gains an understanding of another point of view, or a sense of multiplicity, beyond the confines of colonialism. However, Mrs. Richards‟ description of Ruth evokes an image of Native spirituality that keeps Ruth continually ostracized. Even while Mrs.

Richards uses the words “Magic” and “Pagan” in an attempt to avoid objectifying Ruth, these words, nevertheless, impose a Eurocentric perspective of First Nation spirituality that borders on romanticism. Thus, while this citation acknowledges multiplicity, it also acknowledges that multiplicity can also be objectified. Similarly, Mrs. Richards‟ description of Mrs. Patterson as “„a soul attuned to the spirit of this place… bonnetless and ignorant of the cedar bits in her hair,‟ singing with her girls on their way home from blackberry picking, or fired with righteous anger at the consequences of another liquor brawl” (65) evokes a romanticized view of a free woman in the Canadian wilderness, then immediately confines the settler woman in morality. In this first half of this quotation, Mrs. Patterson represents the independent and free settler woman, a woman, who, as George argues, “first achieved the kind of authoritative self associated with the modern female subject” (97). Mrs. Patterson illustrates this new kind of woman, free from the confines of patriarchy. But, she also exemplifies what Henderson identifies as a tendency “to read settler women‟s writing for wilderness encounters in which the nineteenth-century woman discovers her „aboriginal‟ relation to a „dark continent‟” (4).

Mrs. Patterson, with her “soul attuned” and “bits of cedar in her hair,” conforms to this romanticized image of the free settler woman, which not only objectifies female freedom, but also appropriates and distorts First Nations culture. On the heels of this simultaneous evocation of freedom and objectification, Mrs. Richards is also shown to represent 53

Anglo-Protestant morality, as illustrated by her anger over a liquor brawl. The descriptions of Ruth and Mrs. Patterson evoke an understanding of multiplicity that destabalize dominant narratives. But, ultimately, both women are rewritten into structured narratives. Marlatt‟s representation of the simultaneity of freedom and containment exposes how diversity can be paradoxically celebrated and reinscribed into the broader vision of the settler project.

Homogenous multiplicity can also proliferate through academic writing, as Annie identifies in the work of her historian husband, Richard, and in the process of research that she performs for him. She states of her research, “i‟ve lost interest in what he is doing. that my mind will no longer come to grips with lot numbers and survey maps, will no longer painstakingly piece together the picture he wants” (79). Annie recognizes that

Richard‟s form of historical writing assembles multiple documents in order to “piece together” the image, or the argument, that he desires. This assemblage is a selective process of inclusion and exclusion that can mimic and create a narrative of security and threat that keeps “others” perpetually outside a declared “norm,” if the assemblage is used to create absolute knowledge without acknowledging any exclusions.

Writing history to produce absolute knowledge, or, as Annie describes it, the

“relentless progress towards some end” (81), is simultaneously illusory and controlling.

De Certeau addresses the fictive element of writing history by arguing that a historiographer relies on the “fact” of a historical event or person while his writing can only produce a “virtual” historical event or person. His “virtual” history, “a construct of discourse,” cannot fully articulate the “factual” event: “Never will the gap separating reality from discourse be filled; to the very degree that this discourse is rigorous, it will 54 be destined for futility” (8-9). De Certeau identifies the uselessness of attempting to reconcile the writing of history with the fact of the historical event, but he also identifies, as Annie perceives of the research she executes for Richard, the way in which historiography can deny this gap “by appropriating to the present the privilege of recapitulating the past as a form of knowledge” (5). The gap that “Western history” does acknowledge is “between the present and the past”—an acknowledgement that “forces the silent body to speak” through a historian‟s writings (2):

A structure belonging to modern Western culture can doubtless be seen in this

historiography: intelligibility is established through a relation with the other; it

moves (or “progresses”) by changing what it makes of its “other”—the Indian, the

past, the people, the mad, the child, the Third World. Through these variants that

are all heteronomous—ethnology, history, psychiatry, pedagogy, etc.—unfolds a

problematic form basing its mastery of expression upon what the other keeps

silent. (3)

In other words, the historiographer claims “mastery” over the narrative of an “other” in order to progress towards creating knowledge. Thus, while the recognition of the gap between actual event and written history reveals that assembling facts as a way to move towards a fixed knowledge is illusory, the attempt to relentlessly progress towards knowledge claims author-ity over this gap by creating a fixed narrative of the “other.”

Richard‟s historical writing represents the process of assembling “facts” that progress towards a singular argument; these facts then lead to the expression of fixed knowledge.

But Annie desires to assemble “facts” in order to create a “story” that does not progress towards an ultimate end. Annie expresses the differences between her expectations and 55

Richard‟s when approaching research and writing when she imagines what his response will be to the way she pieces together archival sources: “this doesn‟t go anywhere, you‟re just circling around the same idea…. this is nothing…. meaning unreadable. because this nothing is a place he doesn‟t recognize, cut loose from history” (81). Annie recognizes the control Richard exerts over how archival documents should be interpreted and how historical writing should be constructed. The difference between Richard‟s desire to create a linear narrative and Annie‟s desire to create cyclical fiction symbolizes Richard and Annie‟s marriage, and thus becomes an intersection for the historical and personal narratives of the novel. The “bold line” of history (25) to which Annie feels confined as

Richard‟s research assistant parallels the notion she has of the linear storyline of marriage wherein a woman becomes educated because “education [is] part of „attractiveness‟ leading to marriage” (17). The way in which Mrs. Richards is written in the archives confines her to a similar narrative of marriage: she marries Ben Springer and moves to

Moodyville where she raises a family and no more is written about her (48). She has fulfilled her “heteronormative” role in the “birth of a nation” (Lowry 30) and has been written out of the history books. Through understanding that Mrs. Richards dwells in the gap between event and historical writing, Annie desires to break “free” from Richard‟s enforced perception of the “proper” way to write history, and eventually from their relationship altogether, in order to write prose that recognizes the fictive nature of historiography.

But, even in her fictional writing of Ana, Annie is still confined to exploring the complex subject position of women‟s role in western Canadian settlement. Early in her 56 fictionalization of Mrs. Richards‟ story Annie writes of Ana‟s encounter with two Siwash men on a path through the woods just outside their town:

The tall one swayed a little. Were they drunk? „They go crazy when they drink,‟

she heard Mrs. Patterson say…. They did not look drunk. Advanced rather, with

steady tread, a sombre determination. Perhaps they were furious and meant to do

her harm. But the two men walk past, giving her as much notice as if she were a

bush. (41-42)

This story simultaneously evokes the division between men and women and between settler and Native. A woman alone in the woods is open to sexual predators—a vulnerability that is exaggerated by Ana‟s understanding of herself as an “unprotected” woman, meaning she is not under the protection of a husband (32). She becomes “other” to the men. But Ana is also responsible for adopting and perpetuating a narrative of security that creates the Siwash men as a threat. She becomes “self” by establishing the men as “other.” In both interpretations, however, Ana is bound within Anglo-Protestant morality. The evocation of the male/female binary places Ana safely within heterosexuality, with its proper codes of conduct. The evocation of the settler/native binary through Mrs. Patterson‟s connection between Native people and alcohol places the men outside Anglo-Protestant conduct; they become the “other” that the settler women are tasked to reform.

Annie writes of Ana‟s involvement in the colonial project of “teaching” First Nation people to conform to Protestant “norms” in the section titled “Naming.” Annie writes

Ana‟s experience of attempting to teach a young Siwash girl, Lily, to write the word

“angel”: “one hand on the child‟s slate, the other grasping the small brown hand with its 57 bits of chalk… forcing the child‟s hand into an ellipse, drawing the long a to match the curve of the letter” (91). Here, Annie expresses women‟s role in the western Canadian settlements as part of the regime that desires to bring “natives” into the national “family” while simultaneously creating them as “others.” Ana, as teacher, must force the child to learn to write the English language, thus imposing a colonial norm on the girl. George explores the relationship between the “native” and the Englishwoman in India: the

Englishwoman “becomes „of the master race‟ only in the presence of „the native‟ who will hail her as „memsahib‟ (literally, „Madame boss‟). The home is the primary, and often the only, site where such encounters between women and those of colonized races took place” (107). In Ana Historic, and specifically in Annie‟s writing, the schoolhouse is an extension of the home. School is another domestic space, wherein the settler woman becomes “of the master race” for the purpose of “educating” the “native.” Thus,

Annie, in her evocation of the complexity of a settler woman‟s position as part of the public realm of colonialism when dealing with the “native” and as confined to the

“private” realm both as a woman and in carrying out her colonial duties, continues to grapple with the same “freedom” that Mrs. Richards writes about in her diary. Annie‟s fiction does not remove Mrs. Richards from her complex subject position in order to give her a clear and fixed identity. Instead, Annie‟s writing explores Ana‟s contradictions without attempting to disentangle them.

Part of the complexity that Annie must struggle with when exploring the historical narrative of women and colonial domesticity, is that women are inscribed into their complex subject positions through the discourse of other settler women. In the scene with the two Siwash men Annie writes Mrs. Patterson as the perpetrator of the stereotype 58 that “native” men “go crazy when they drink,” which Ana enacts through her fear of the two Siwash men. Annie also writes Ana to enact colonial policy when forcing Lily to write English.

Hannah Moore‟s writing, that Marlatt intertextually includes in the novel, reinforces the way in which women inscribe themselves into a paradoxical role: “Women in their course of action describe a smaller circle than men, but the perfection of a circle consists not in its dimensions, but in its correctness” (72). The way in which Marlatt cites Moore highlights how Moore‟s reinscription of women into the private sphere of the home parallels what many feminists would define as the control of women under patriarchy.

But Moore‟s passage, read alongside the narrative of the colonial/settler woman, can also exemplify women‟s actions in the colonial world wherein the home becomes not only the microcosm of the empire but also the space where women give birth to settler citizens—a point I will explore in greater depth in Chapter Four—and where, in the case of both the home and the schoolroom, women teach the next generation of “citizens.” Women‟s activity, then, destabilizes the containment by patriarchal influences that are evoked by

Moore. This destabilization shows that the separation of male- and female-centred discourse is too simple: from Moore‟s voice we can hear simultaneous hints of both discourses. Of course, if settler women‟s activity is to be read into the citation from

Moore then the absence of the First Nations voice also becomes apparent through the evocation of women‟s role and the double intention of erasure and ostracization of the

First Nation subject through “citizen-making.” Thus, the settler woman‟s “voice” in Ana

Historic, and by extension the “voice” that Annie attempts to find for herself through writing a fictional story of Ana, is a contaminated voice. It illustrates the entanglement 59 of male- and female-centred narratives, highlighting the illusion of completely separate androcentric and gynocentric perspectives. This contamination is made clear, again, by the erasure of the First Nations person, whose absent narrative “wounds,” and thereby permeates, even while being controlled by the novel‟s colonial narrative.

Annie does explore how women are influenced and controlled by patriarchy by using what have become fairly well known feminist theories. As Frank Davey points out,

Annie evokes “Luce Irigaray‟s theory of the significance of the male „gaze‟ in patriarchal constitutions of the female subject”; she also expresses “the house-wife as lost and imprisoned until her children return from school…; „history‟ as a displacement of „her story‟…; Cixous‟s „ecriture feminine‟ concept of menstrual flow as a model for women‟s writing.” However, Davey interprets these evocations as “ingenuous and reductive,” and dismisses Annie “as an enthusiastic and uncritical consumer of psychological and feminist theory” (200-1). While Annie does invoke these feminist theories, Davey‟s reduction of Annie‟s use of them as only an exploration of gendered power relations ignores Ana‟s contradictory subjectivity. Mohanty argues that “Marginal or not,

[Western feminist] writing has political effects and implications beyond the immediate feminist or disciplinary audience. One such significant effect of the dominant

„representations‟ of Western feminism is its conflation with imperialism in the eyes of particular third world women” (55). While Marlatt, through Annie‟s writing as well as

Annie‟s struggle with her position as a wife and mother, explores Western feminist theories, Marlatt also evokes the implications and political effects of western feminists‟ complicity with the political and social power assumed by settlers when she cannot write

Ana out of her paradoxical subject position. Marlatt does not “give voice” to a First 60

Nations subject, and thus does not include the effaced perspective alluded to by Mohanty.

Instead, Marlatt evokes the historical relationship between women and First Nations individuals, which calls attention to the absence of the First Nations voice.

The narrative Annie writes of Ana‟s lesbian relationship with Birdie, Vancouver‟s first madam, illustrates the permeation of simultaneous discourse. For Heather Zwicker, the lesbian narrative is "a parodic rewriting of the continuist national narrative…. The proximity of this alternate imagination to conventional heterosexual, nationalist discourse is important. Because there is no uncontaminated space outside the nation, resistance to it must come from within” (“Queering the Postcolonial Nation” 167). There is no uncontaminated space within the nation, either. When Annie writes Ana‟s desire to move into Birdie‟s room, she continues to inscribe Ana into smaller, private domestic space:

“She thinks suddenly, I could not bear to lose this coming here, this room so full of ornate things that reflect the weather of her moods, this room full of her perfume and the sound of her skirt” (Ana Historic 138). Annie has written into this narrative the absence of her possessions that she found in the archival documents: the room, perfume, skirt and moods belong to Birdie, belong to her. Annie destabilizes the heterosexual narrative of inclusion that attempts to maintain morality to achieve the “birth of a nation” through marriage and procreation by expressing lesbian sexuality that exists outside Anglo-

Protestant morality, and, therefore, outside the settler marriage schema. The result is, as de Certeau states of writing history in general, a symbolic “return of the repressed, that is, a return of what, at any given moment, has become unthinkable” (4). Annie‟s writing of the return of the historically repressed lesbian subject is an expression of a radical shift from the heterosexual and settler norm through the rejection of traditional procreation and 61 nation-building. But Annie‟s writing of Ana‟s “coming-out,” read alongside the settler narrative, has a disturbing absence of a First Nations subject. This absence, coupled with

Ana‟s desire to remain enclosed in the safety of Birdie‟s room and teach piano lessons

(108), which is also disturbing in its resemblance both to the containment Ana felt before

“coming-out” and to the English lessons she enforces on Lily, illustrates how Annie, ultimately, cannot write a lesbian subject out of the paradoxical and contaminated relationships between gender and colonialism.

This paradox is strengthened by Annie and Zoe‟s relationship. For Davey, their relationship inverts while it recreates the power dynamic of Annie and Richard‟s relationship: Zoe “is portrayed as both possessing the „answers‟ Annie seeks, and withholding them so that she will discover them on her own” (203). Indeed, Zoe suggests to Annie the possibility of writing a lesbian relationship between Ana and

Birdie. Once confronted with Zoe‟s suggestion, Annie questions “what other alternative would she have had?” (Ana Historic 135). Annie‟s decision to write a lesbian relationship defamiliarizes a heterosexual historical narrative based on marriages and procreation, thereby clearing a space to rethink historical representations while voicing a lesbian alternative that was always present but not documented. However, Annie chooses a relationship disturbingly similar to the relationship she had with Richard, as represented through Annie‟s perception that no other option exists for Ana but the one that Zoe proposes. Annie‟s inability to create a completely “new” relationship for herself and her new partner informs Annie‟s writing, and she steers her fiction towards what she sees as inevitable. 62

But Annie attempts to write against this inevitability by not definitively ending Ana‟s story. This refusal continues to produce contradictions by evoking the notion of an endless narrative, while being bound by the conventions of writing: “Ana‟s pen is poised, but she has stopped writing. there seems to be nothing to write at this point but the inevitable end of the sentence moving as it does toward the period and stasis” (146). At the end of her narrative of Ana, Annie must confront an inevitable function of writing: it must end. However, by writing Ana‟s story, Annie exposes the contradictions of settler femininity and of the writing of history. Because Ana cannot be freed from a paradoxical subjectivity and because of the angst Annie has over bringing her narrative to a full stop, the conclusion to Ana‟s story is necessarily contradictory.

Marlatt confronts a similar paradox. Reading Annie‟s coming-out narrative alongside

Ana‟s coming-out narrative reveals the nuances of Annie‟s lesbian subjectivity. Just as

Annie cannot reconcile Ana‟s story, Marlatt cannot, and does not, reconcile the narrative of Annie and Zoe‟s relationship as is illustrated through the final line of the novel:

“reading us into the pages ahead” (np). The conclusion of Annie‟s story is also necessarily paradoxical.

In the end, Annie‟s quest to reconcile history in order to create for herself a new identity fails. Instead, Annie‟s journey becomes an articulation of flawed and contradictory narratives. Annie cannot escape the paradoxical legacy of women‟s role in colonialism in Canada. Glen Lowry argues that “Marlatt‟s text cannot account for the contradictory nature of cultural representations in relation to the racialized subjects invoked in it” (32) because Annie‟s “white, lesbian-feminist subject comes into being through a careful representation and re-orchestration of social norms and categories, not 63 the least of which are those infused with the „race‟ and class privileges of a subject who is gendered and sexed as a white settler woman” (34). Lowry is right in so far as he identifies contradictions that arise when articulating the relationship among gender, race and, I would add, sexuality. But he assumes that Marlatt (and Annie), through exploring this relationship, attempts to account for these contradictions. Listening to the voices that are present but remain concealed under the metanarratives of history does not imply that historical injustices can be fully healed. Instead, Marlatt, through Annie‟s exploration of archival documents and historiography, reveals the contradictions that arise when taking a closer look at the self/other binary. While recognizing contradictions between different relationships can deconstruct these binaries, ultimately their power remains, passed down from generation to generation. Even Annie‟s lesbian identity, in the end, can “never [be] entirely free of race and nation” (Zwicker, “Queering” 172). Freedom from race, nation and gender relations denies the contradictions of the past. Thus, Annie is left with a

“freedom” that is irreconcilable with a narrative of security that paradoxically inscribes settler women as belonging and as “others.”

 PART TWO Incarnations of Home Spaces

Chapter Three

The Home as a Stage of the Nation in Obasan

Actions performed within public and private spaces are explored alongside written and oral discourses in Obasan. These actions, performed by Obasan and Nesan, inside and outside the home reinforce and resist a narrative of security and threat that maps the desired, but illusory, safety of a bourgeois home onto the nation in an attempt to contain a safe zone against an alien threat. Their actions simultaneously bolster and break down the binary structure between self and other, familiar and unfamiliar, inside and outside.

For Brydon, the mapping of the “threatened bourgeois nuclear family” onto the nation expands the private sphere of the home onto the public sphere of the nation (“Storying

Home” 35). Jennifer Browdy de Hernandez, on the other hand, discusses the home as “a contested site on which the cultural conflicts of the larger society are played out in microcosm” (20). Her perception of “home” is the reverse of Brydon‟s mapping; in her account the public sphere of the nation enters the private space of the home. But “home” can be defined either way depending from whose perspective it is viewed. From the perspective of the “centre”—the “bourgeois nuclear family”—the ideal of a stable and secure space extends from the home onto the nation where this ideal is made into policies that are enacted, through war (to deal with external threats) or internment (to deal with internal threats), in order to keep safe the space and ideals of the national “family.” From the perspective of the “margins”—the perceived alien threats—the home is a space invaded by government security policies. These two perspectives on “home” run in tandem. In both, the centre‟s vision of home directly affects the marginalized home. 66

As de Hernandez goes on to state, however, while the home becomes the space wherein larger conflicts play out, the home is also “a future oriented project that seeks to establish a secure [space] where the subject may reside without fear of displacement or humiliation” (20). Those living in invaded domestic spaces harbour and act on the desire to obtain a secure home. In Obasan this process plays out through government policies that invade the Nakane and Kato homes by ordering their displacement. Obasan, while under continual threat of displacement, seeks to re-establish a “secure” home; she maintains the “future oriented project” of the home while dealing with the realities of continual displacement. But Naomi‟s childhood memories of her own secure nuclear family and her desire to return to that security are layered over Obasan‟s perseverance.

This chapter will explore how home, as a space of tension and harmony, is a desired but unattainable ideal.

In Space, Place and Gender, Doreen Massey challenges secure and stable notions of

“home”; she does so, however, by also interrogating a post-structuralist concept of deconstructed space. She argues, “Those who today worry about a sense of disorientation and loss of control” over secure spaces must have at one point known

“exactly where they were, and that they had control” (165). A narrative of security and threat is produced from the standpoint that a stable home existed, but has been disoriented or lost due to “the arrival in one form or another of the „Other‟” (166).

However, as Massey goes on to assert, from the postcolonial perspective, “there is clear recognition from the point of view of [the] colonized periphery” that the encounter with the Other “has for centuries been immediate and intense” (165). In other words, colonized people or, to speak more generally, people marginalized by being “Othered,” 67 such as Japanese Canadians in Obasan, have not had the luxury of feeling the stability and security of place.

The instability caused by being “Othered” is shown through the Nakane family story beginning with Grandpa Nakane who moved from Japan to Canada in 1893. I argued in

Chapter One that a juxtaposition arises between Grandpa Nakane‟s success in establishing a boat-building shop on Saltspring Island and a history of racism against

Japanese Canadians. This contrast exemplifies the movement between stability and instability shown in the metaphoric description of Grandpa Nakane as a “son of the sea that tossed and coddled the Nakanes for centuries” (Obasan 18). The waves of the sea represent the vicissitudes of the Nakane family story. This lineage offers an understanding that absolute control cannot be gained over space, and thus the idea of an absolute secure home becomes unattainable, or, at best, temporarily attainable.

Obasan understands these vicissitudes between stability and instability. Obasan tells

Stephen, Naomi‟s brother, “that the best samurai swords are tempered over and over again in the hottest flames and people too are made strong and excellent when they go through life‟s difficulties” (131). Obasan gains this knowledge of strength through endurance from her own story of instability. She is “the only daughter of a widowed school teacher and was brought up in private schools” (18). Obasan never knew the security of a nuclear family unit or the stability of a family home. This instability is repeated in her adulthood when both of her pregnancies result in stillbirths. Obasan endures the ups and downs of life instead of pining for an ideal home to which to return.

It is within the home that Obasan‟s endurance is fully illustrated. For Cheryl Lousley,

Obasan represents the “struggle to create a safe space for the children” within the home 68

(334). The first “safe” space that Obasan creates for Stephen and Naomi is in the small cabin in Slocan. The dark space of this cabin “rapidly become[s] less grey” thanks to

Obasan‟s placement of a bright oil cloth on the kitchen table and flowered curtains in the windows (Obasan 124). Where the possessions of the Nakane family were scattered, boxed away, given away or taken, Obasan recreates a new home from what remains of their possessions. The actions that Obasan takes in creating a home, a place of comfort, security and nourishment,1 even within instability resist the displacement and dispossession that is imposed upon Japanese Canadians.

Obasan‟s home becomes the site of simultaneous invasions and resistances. This paradox is not surprising considering, as Massey points out, that home for women has never been a stable ideal. Massey questions how often home is characterized as ideal by

“those who left”—men—“and it would be fascinating to explore how often this characterization is framed around those who—perforce—stayed behind”—women (166).

This is a complicated statement to evoke in regards to Obasan because she does not “stay behind” in the way that Massey suggests, where the wife stays contained within the home while the husband is out in the wider world. Obasan is alone in Slocan to establish a home not because of patriarchal dominance but because her husband has been forced into a work camp.2 I mention women‟s place in the home only to show that the home is a site that has always held the hardships imposed by the broader world as well as desired safety and the sense of security. The safety created by Obasan with the bright tablecloth and curtains expands beyond the home to reach back out into the world in the form of resistance. While the desire for security maps the bourgeois nuclear family onto the nation and the nation invades Japanese Canadian homes through government policies of 69 exile and internment, Obasan‟s reestablishment of comfort in the home maps a reconceived image of home back onto the nation. This image of home, however, is not the idealized home that creates and is created from a narrative of security, but an image of home that contains within it an understanding of fragility.

This fragility is exemplified through Homi K. Bhabha‟s concept of the “unhomed,” which he uses to define the disorienting liminal existence of displaced people as a result of “enforced social accommodation or historical migration and cultural relocations.” For the unhomed, the “home does not remain the domain of domestic life, nor does the world simply become its social or historical counterpart. The unhomely is the shock of recognition of the world-in-the-home, the home-in-the-world” (“The World and the

Home” 445). In other words, displacement disrupts divided categorizations of outside and inside: the public invades the private, the private invades the public. Obasan‟s home is fragile because Obasan recognizes that private and public realms are not separate, that each invades (and has always invaded) the other. Obasan responds to this “shock” by continually re-establishing the family home. She too breaks the boundaries of the private sphere by mapping her home back on the nation.

Obasan‟s unhomed condition, however, does not only elicit endurance; this condition also manifests in disoriented approaches to dominant Canadian culture. The unhomed condition can be seen in the complication of the Nakanes being interned within their own country. Naomi‟s Obasan and Uncle Sam invite symbols of domination into their home in the form of the decision not to have Naomi and Stephen attend Japanese language classes (Obasan 138), the scrapbook Obasan has Naomi make wherein Naomi pastes photos of the Royal Family,3 and “the regular appearance of the Vancouver Daily 70

Province” (160). The refusal to allow Naomi and Stephen to attend Japanese language classes speaks to the fear that Obasan and Uncle have of being labelled disloyal to

Canada by the RCMP (138), whereas the Royal Family photos are invited invasions.

While these invasions are indicative of the world-in-the-home, they also challenge the definition of the “world,” or of dominant culture. The “world,” as represented by the newspapers, the RCMP and the Royal Family is Canadian culture, but Canadian culture is also part of the Nakane family makeup. For Bhabha, displacement confuses the

“border between home and world; and the private and the public become part of each other, forcing upon us a vision that is as divided as it is disorienting” (445). This disorientation is amplified when the movement is not global, but national, when borders are not placed between nations, but built to contain a country‟s own citizens. The confusion of being the enemy and not the enemy, however, stems from the oppressive binary structure that labels Japanese Canadians as “alien” threats. The Nakane family is wedged between the Canadian culture that they are not a part of and a “Jap” culture that is created and imposed on the Japanese Canadian community by a wider white society.

Obasan and Sam must appear loyal while never being accepted as loyal to “Canada.”

This in-between existence is imposed upon the Nakanes by the domination of enacted government policies.

The unhomed condition is exemplified through the contradictory position of Japanese

Canadians during internment, but it has more extreme results when the Nakanes are relocated to the beet farm in Granton, Alberta in 1945. While Obasan creates a comfortable home in Slocan, in Granton she is unable to do so because of the manual labour she is forced to perform in the beet fields. As Naomi explains, “The boxes 71 brought from Slocan are not unpacked” (197). From the material and emotional fragments of their lives in Slocan a bare and desolate home emerges on the Albertan prairie. bell hooks, in her exploration of the African American home she grew up in, states that it “is no accident” that the home “is subject to violation and destruction. For when people no longer have the space to construct homeplace, we cannot build a meaningful community of resistance” (47). Similarly, Kogawa illustrates how Japanese

Canadians also cannot build a meaningful community due to their living conditions on the beet farms. The one-room, one-door, two-window “house” the Nakanes are given to live in is an “uninsulated unbelievable thin-as-cotton-dress hovel never before inhabited in winter by human beings. In summer it‟s a heat trap, an incubator, a dry sauna from which there is no relief. In winter the icicles drip down the inside of the windows” (194-

95). Within this inhospitable space Obasan loses her space of resistance, not only due to her exhaustion from labouring on the farm, but also because of the harsh physical realities of this domestic space. Her inability to recreate her home as a space where her family and other displaced Japanese Canadians can gather corresponds with the overall lack of community felt by Naomi in Alberta. None of the children in Slocan attend

Naomi and Stephen‟s school in Granton. The only community member from Slocan that is mentioned in the Alberta section of the novel is Nakayama-sensei, the family‟s minister. But the only time he enters the hut is when he brings news of the death of

Naomi and Stephen‟s father (207). If a home cannot be established, then no space exists for the community to gather in order to resist domination or to act as a symbol of resistance. In Granton, the “world,” as represented by Canadian government policies and 72 a white culture that enacts and creates a narrative of security and threat, dominates by suffocating the potential for the home to be a meeting-ground.

Even while this suffocation occurs, a symbol of Japanese Canadian resistance sits mute but present within the Nakane house: the household possessions that are wrapped in the Vancouver Daily Province. In the process of leaving Slocan, Obasan carefully wraps the family‟s belongings in “a piece of the Vancouver Daily Province” (174), but in

Granton these possessions “stay muffled” in the newspaper. The Vancouver Daily

Province, as a representation of a narrative of security, smothers the possessions, which are symbols of the possibility for endurance and resistance of home. The smothered possessions indicate the broader hardships that the Nakanes must endure in Alberta; they represent the voicelessness that ensues from the imposed hardships: “We hardly talk anymore,” Naomi remembers (197). On top of this, Obasan‟s act of wrapping the possessions is symbolic of enabling the suffocation of home. In this sense, she has smothered her own voice along with her family‟s and community‟s voices. But, even in their muted state, the possessions continue to represent resistance. While Obasan‟s action of wrapping the possessions symbolizes rendering one‟s community silent through inviting symbols of the dominant discourse into the home, the action of wrapping the belongings is also a movement towards keeping safe these symbols of resistance. The act of wrapping transforms the written dominant discourse into an object that will allow for the safe transport and endurance of the family‟s possessions. Thus the possessions become a symbol of how marginalized discourses and spaces remain intact, if “muffled,” beneath the surface of dominant discourses and spaces. 73

While these possessions, when they are reassembled during the Nakanes‟ move to

Slocan, represent resistance, when they are reassembled in the final Nakane home in

Granton they represent an unhomely haunting. Lousley points out that the Nakanes‟ arrival on the beet farm is not a “homecoming” but instead “a prison” (335). But this prison extends beyond the beet farm. The Granton house becomes the holding pen for internment hauntings as represented by the photo gallery Obasan keeps in her living room

(Obasan 17-19), and the documents that she keeps stowed away in the attic (24-26).

These documents act as ghosts of displacement that keep the Nakanes stuck in a displaced position. This is perhaps the reason that Stephen feels he has “got to get out of here” and runs out of the Granton house. He later admits to Naomi that his actions were set off by a dream in which an insect builds “a grid of iron bars over him” (220). The

Granton house becomes a prison for the memories of internment.

This unhomely space does not, however, undermine the reality of Naomi‟s pain in desiring to return to her remembered childhood security. Naomi continues to hang on to an ideal sense of home into adulthood due to the “shock” with which she simultaneously experiences the displacement from her family home and the separation from her mother.

Obasan‟s “shock of the world-in-the-home, the home-in-the-world” manifests in the tension between her endurance and her desire not to be labelled “disloyal,” but Naomi‟s unhomely shock crumbles the solid foundation on which she felt she was living. The violent shock that Naomi experiences disorients her sense of both her national and personal home. This shock, felt by Naomi as a child, reverberates through her memories and into her adult understanding of home. 74

Naomi‟s retelling of the Goldilocks story illustrates her paradoxical understanding of home. Naomi muses that her family must be the bear family, and she must be “Baby

Bear, whose chair Goldilocks sleeps in. Or perhaps this is not true and I am really

Goldilocks after all” (126). This story illustrates Bhabha‟s displaced disorientation of the unhomed moment. Naomi is confused about whether her home is being invaded or whether she is the invader. The invaded/invader aspect of the story exemplifies Naomi‟s complex and contradictory subject position that I discussed in Chapter One in that Naomi associates with and disassociates from Canadian culture, or, in other words, is simultaneously self and other. But, Goldilocks, as Naomi points out, is not only an invader, but also a lost girl who cannot find her way back home (126). Goldilocks, as a lost girl who finds a chair, food and bed that is “just right” in the bears‟ home, adds another complication to the invader/invaded binary. The contradictions that this story offers regarding the home as being invaded and as a place where a lost girl can find comfort and nourishment concur with Naomi‟s home as a representation of a place of intrusion and nurture.

But the care that Obasan provides for Naomi does not give Naomi the sense of comfort she had in Vancouver with her mother. As a child Naomi desires to return

“home” where her belongings are and where her mother should be. In her retelling of herself as Goldilocks she asks, “Will I not find my way out of the forest and back to my room where the picture bird sings above my bed and the real bird sings in the real peach tree by my open bedroom window in Marpole?” (126). For Judith Butler, “When we lose certain people or when we are dispossessed from a place, or a community, we may simply feel that we are undergoing something temporary, that mourning will be over and 75 some restoration of prior order will be achieved” (22). Butler‟s statement illustrates

Naomi‟s hope that she will return home to reunite with her mother and her house, and that a “prior order” will be restored.

Even as a child, however, Naomi begins to doubt the temporariness of their situation.

Naomi loses her favourite doll upon arriving in Slocan and an older man promises to find it. But after her retelling of the Goldilocks story, she laments, “No matter how I wish it, we do not go home. Ojisan does not bring my doll and I no longer ask for her” (126).

The child Naomi comprehends that their family‟s separation and internment is not temporary, but, into adulthood, Naomi still imagines that an eventual reunion will occur:

“I too stop hoping that [Mother and Grandma Kato] are alive but sometimes I find myself imagining that they are somewhere surviving somehow. I think of them in a mountain village being cared for by strangers, or in a hospital suffering from memory loss” (212).

Naomi‟s contradiction between giving up hope that her mother and grandmother are alive and imagining them as alive illustrates how Naomi is stuck between desiring the security of her home in the past and accepting the fragmented reality of her present and future.

For Naomi, the home as a secure space is characterized by the ideal actions of her mother, Nesan. These actions are exemplified in the scene where Nesan rescues the baby chicks after Naomi, who does not realize the full consequences of her own actions, places baby chicks in a hen‟s cage:

With swift deft fingers, Mother removes the live chicks first, placing them in her

apron. All the while that she acts there is calm efficiency in her face and she does

not speak. Her eyes are steady and matter of fact—the eyes of Japanese

motherhood. They do not invade and betray. They are eyes that protect, 76

shielding what is hidden most deeply in the heart of the child. She makes safe the

small stirrings underfoot and in the shadows. (59)

Smaro Kamboureli points out that this scene illustrates “a discourse of the body” between

Naomi and Nesan: “The body‟s language—steady eyes, calm face, deft fingers—is translated into silence in the realm of linguistic articulation…. [It] is through a metonymy of physicality that communication is achieved between mother‟s and daughter‟s bodies”

(179). Kamboureli expresses that communication between Naomi and her mother is not said through words but between bodies. But she does not express what Nesan communicates to Naomi. The discourse that Nesan imparts, or that Naomi remembers her imparting, articulates certainty. Nesan‟s “deft” actions protect against unseen threats both “underfoot,” the threats close to home, and “in the shadows,” the threats that exist beyond their home. Thus, to Naomi, Nesan is an ideal protector of the home.

But outside the home Nesan contributes to Naomi‟s understanding of insecurity.

Naomi remembers a man who grins and winks at her and her mother on a streetcar in

Vancouver: “I turn away instantly, startled into discomfort again by eyes. My mother‟s eyes look obliquely to the floor, declaring that on the streets at all time, in all public places, even a glance can be indiscreet. But a stare? Such a lack of decorum, it is clear, is as unthinkable as nudity” (47-48). While Nesan communicates confident certainty in the face of threats in the chicks and hen scene, here she communicates insecurity against the threat of another‟s gaze. Kamboureli uses Franz Fanon‟s writings on the effects of the gaze in her exploration of this scene. In Black Skin, White Mask Fanon describes his experience on a train when a white child exclaims, “Look, a negro!” Of this experience he says, “On that day, completely dislocated, unable to be abroad with the other, the 77 white man, who unmercifully imprisoned me, I took myself far off from my own presence, far indeed, and made myself an object. What else could it be for me but an amputation” (112). For Kamboureli, “Even before [Naomi] and her community become

„enemy aliens,‟ in public space she experiences self-alienation in terms reminiscent of

Fanon,” and through this “self-alienation” imposed by the gaze of another Naomi‟s body is made “permeable” (187). This permeation from another‟s gaze that causes Naomi‟s self-alienation, however, is communicated to Naomi through her mother‟s actions outside the home. While Fanon‟s train experience involved communication between two bodies, the child who imprisons Fanon with her gaze and Fanon who is imprisoned, Naomi‟s streetcar experience involves cross-communication among three people. Nesan‟s reaction of looking to the ground is a double imposition upon her by virtue of her being a

Japanese Canadian woman. This communication then teaches Naomi self-alienation that segregates inside and outside behaviour. However, while taught through Nesan‟s actions, the separation between inside and outside spaces is imposed upon mother and child by a patriarchal and racist culture.

For Naomi, the insecurity caused by this gaze does not remain in the outside world; this insecurity also invades the home. Naomi characterizes her family‟s Vancouver home as a space of “confidence and laughter, music and meal times, games and storytelling”

(58), but one of the few memories that Naomi conveys prior to internment shows Naomi to be a shy and reserved child who separates herself from the laughter and music that her mother, father and brother create. In this scene, Stephen sits at the piano, Tadashi,

Naomi‟s father, plays the violin, while Nesan sings. Naomi, on the other hand, sits on a chair, watches their goldfish swim and merely listens. “We three,” she says, “the 78 goldfish and I, are the listeners in the room” (51). Naomi identifies with the goldfish as passive listeners instead of with her family members, the active participants who create the “confident” music-filled atmosphere of their home. Traise Yamamoto extends King-

Kok Cheung‟s “attentive silence”4 onto this scene by arguing that when Nesan sings a kindergarten song to entice Naomi into playing along with the family and when Tadashi,

“seeing [Naomi‟s] reluctance to join in, comes and sits beside [Naomi] on the wicker chair (Obasan 51), coincides with Naomi‟s later description of the home as the space where all needs are met without having to state them (Obasan 56; Yamamoto 193).

Naomi‟s silence and “nonactive physical presence,” Yamamoto asserts, “signifies a level of emotional presence” (193). Yamamoto‟s argument is astute when extending Cheung‟s redefinition of silence outside the confines of passivity, but the scene also reveals

Naomi‟s self-alienation from her own family prior to internment. Read together with the streetcar scene, this scene reveals Naomi‟s insecurity that extends from her experience in the wider world. The private and public, for Naomi, cannot easily be separated. Naomi‟s self-alienation within the home begins to expose a hole in the security blanket with which

Naomi repeatedly attempts to cover her childhood. As Kamboureli states, by borrowing

Fanon‟s expression, “no matter what [Naomi] does, she is already an amputee” (187).

Or, in other words, Naomi‟s nuclear family as a secure unit exists only in her nostalgic recreation and not in reality. Even within the laughter and music Naomi is alienated.

Naomi‟s actions in the home are contaminated by her actions outside the home.

Naomi also has difficulty changing her sense of alienation in different public situations. Naomi has another memory of her and her mother on the streets of

Vancouver. This time, though, Nesan invites the gaze of another: “A small boy is 79 standing hugging a lamp post and is staring at us…. I turn my face away from everyone.

My mother places her cool hand on my cheek, its scent light and flowery. She whispers that the boy will laugh at me if I hide” (47). Here, Nesan invites the look and provokes

Naomi to accept it. Nesan‟s action of invitation simultaneously evokes the two descriptions of Nesan‟s body-discourse discussed above. Nesan exudes confidence and certainty, thus denying the demure modesty that is “proper” for her to adopt when outside the home. But, Nesan also asks Naomi to accept the gaze of another, thus asking her to make herself permeable to objectification from the broader patriarchal and racist culture.

The fixed polarities of inside and outside are illusory, but the effect on Naomi, from being taught these strict definitions (by Nesan who reacts to the imposition of society), remains. Consequently, Naomi is stuck between not wanting to invite the look that causes her self-alienation and not wanting the boy to laugh at her.

The liminal space between inside and outside spaces can be further examined by returning to the chicks and hen scene. This memory, for Naomi, exemplifies the certainty and idyllic behaviour of her mother, but also describes the yard, where the scene takes place, as an “infinitely unpredictable, unknown, and often dangerous world” (58). The backyard, as neither part of the intimate space of the house nor open to the broader world, is the liminal space wherein events occur that “unhome” Naomi. Nesan‟s assured actions with the chicks are frequently discussed as expressive of the relationship between white culture (represented by the hen) and the Japanese Canadian community (represented by the chicks). For Marie Vautier, “The episode of the white mother hen and the little yellow chicks is usually read as a metaphor for the treatment meted out to the Japanese

Canadians by „white‟ Canadian society and government. Naomi herself, while clearly 80 advancing this comparison, problematizes any exclusionary us/them argument” (197).

Nesan‟s reaction to the episode communicates to Naomi that “There is no blame or pity.

I am not responsible. The hen is not responsible” (Obasan 60). The recognition that the episode “was not good” (60) acknowledges the horror of the situation without the placement of blame that would immediately divide the participants into good and evil, self and other. Instead, the episode becomes an exploration of Naomi‟s complex subjectivity—a subjectivity that I argued in Chapter One wedges Naomi between an

“othered” Japanese culture to which she does not belong and a mainstream white

Canadian culture to which she also does not belong.

The personal and the national liminality Naomi lives with are represented through her encounter with Old Man Gower. The in-between space of the yard is where Old Man

Gower first approaches Naomi: “I am a small girl being carried away through the break in the shrubs where our two yards meet. Old Man Gower is taking me to the edge of his garden on the far side away from the street” (62). The yard becomes the site of Naomi‟s unhomed moment—it is the site of her (perceived) first violation of her safe home (and by extension of her body). Old Man Gower traverses the border between their houses to carry Naomi into his own yard—his own liminal territory where Old Man Gower sexually abuses her in the “farthest corner” of his backyard under “a thick arch of vines”

(62). Naomi connects the abduction and sexual abuse to the separation from her mother:

“It is around this time that mother disappears” (66). Therefore, Naomi intertwines the separation from her nuclear family and her national family, and the “shock of recognition of the home-in-the-world, the world-in-the-home” is as personal is it is public. 81

But Naomi‟s description of the feelings she has about the abuse adds a further complexity to both the national division and the rift between Naomi and Nesan:

But here in Mr. Gower‟s hand I become other—a parasite on [Nesan‟s] body, no

longer of her mind. My arms are vines that strangle the limb to which I cling. I

hold so tightly now that arms and leg become one through force. I am a growth

that attaches and digs a furrow under the bark of her skin. If I tell my mother

about Mr. Gower, the alarm will send a tremor through our bodies and I will be

torn from her. But the secret has already separated us. The secret is this: I go to

seek Old Man Gower in his hideaway. I clamber unbidden onto his lap. His

hands are frightening and pleasurable. In the centre of my body is a rift. (64-65)

Naomi‟s feeling of complicity in her own abuse signals the same confusion she feels in her retelling of the Goldilocks story where she becomes both invader and invaded. Taken as an allegory for the national treatment of Japanese Canadians, Naomi‟s abuse as an unhomed moment becomes both the shock of the recognition of the world-in-the-home, the-home-in-the world, but it also illustrates the further complexity that occurs when it is not the world that invades but the nation that invades itself. Naomi‟s feeling of complicity with Old Man Gower makes her feel like a parasite on her own mother(land), but as Kamboureli states, this description “discloses that it is Old Man Gower who engineers this transformation, who grafts her onto her mother‟s body as a foreign body”

(212). Old Man Gower becomes the metaphorical government policies and wider white society that inscribes Naomi as a foreigner to the national “family.”

A more literal interpretation of this description marks Naomi‟s confused state over the separation from her mother. She feels she is made Other from her mother not by means 82 of the abuse itself, but because she feels she obtains pleasure from this interaction. But, of course, it is Old Man Gower who, through his actions of abuse, forces Naomi into feeling this way. Naomi‟s reaction to her feeling of complicity causes her to imagine herself holding Nesan “so tightly now that arms and legs become one through force,” thus illustrating Naomi‟s desperation to maintain a sense of “oneness” with her mother through their separation. But, as I have been arguing, this oneness is an illusory ideal.

Therefore Naomi‟s desperation exemplifies her clinging to the unattainable ideal home and ideal mother. Ultimately the two interpretations cannot be separated. While Old

Man Gower causes Naomi‟s perceived rift between herself and her mother during her mother‟s presence in Vancouver, because of political and social forces in Canada

Naomi‟s separation from her mother is physical and permanent. Thus, Naomi‟s anxiety over her participation in her own abuse results in her being trapped in a liminal position where she clings to an unattainable reunion with her mother, in a physical sense, but also with herself through feeling the oneness that she remembers experiencing before the abuse and internment.

Reading the letters sent by Grandma Kato, however, opens Naomi to a perception of her mother that reveals the illusion of this ideal unity. Naomi‟s imagined ideal landscape of the intimate space of the family‟s home in Vancouver is destroyed and replaced by the desolate horror of the landscape of Nagasaki after the bombing. Not only is the ideal space transformed but so is the image of Nesan. Naomi tells the story of her mother in graphic detail:

[Grandma Kato] sat down beside a naked woman she‟d seen earlier who was

aimlessly chipping wood to make a pyre on which to cremate a dead baby. The 83

woman was utterly disfigured. Her nose and one cheek were almost gone. Great

wounds and pustules covered her entire face and body. She was completely bald.

She sat in a cloud of flies and maggots wriggled among her wounds. As Grandma

watched her, the woman gave her a vacant gaze, then let out a cry. It was my

mother. (239)

The certainty with which Nesan handles the chicks is contrasted by her aimlessness described in the letter. Her naked body haunts Naomi‟s earlier statement that to look and be looked at in public is “unthinkable as nudity on the street” (48). Here, Nesan‟s disfigured nude body demands witness from Naomi, and us, as readers. For Kamboureli,

“This disfiguration and misrecognition posits Naomi‟s hysteria as prophecy precisely because its narrativization operates diachronically and synchronically” (212). Witnessing

Nesan in this landscape reveals to Naomi the story that has been hidden beneath Nesan‟s absence and Naomi‟s longing for a reunion with an ideal mother. Here, Naomi is able to perceive the illusion of her longing.

After the reading of Grandma Kato‟s letters Naomi transforms her mother into another landscape: the ocean: “You are the tide rushing moonward pulling back from the shore….

I sit on the raft begging for a tide to land me safely on the sand but you draw me to the white distance” (Obasan 241). The image of Nesan as the ocean connects her to the image of the ocean that “tossed and coddled the Nakanes for centuries” (18), and thus connects her to endurance. Naomi observes Nesan‟s endurance through Nesan‟s actions with Cheiko, the mysterious child Naomi reads about in one of the government letters.

Naomi is able to see Nesan as a woman who is also stuck between personal and national impositions. Because of racist policies that will not allow Grandma Kato and Cheiko into 84

Canada, Nesan is forced to choose between leaving them in Japan to fend for themselves and leaving her own children, Naomi and Stephen, in the care of Obasan and Uncle Sam in Canada. An impossible choice. Naomi, through understanding this unbearable choice, recognizes the irreconcilable unhomed condition. No ideal home exists; no ideal public space exists, but the created binary structure between inside/outside, familiar/unfamiliar, self/other continues to impose itself on Naomi and her family.

Therefore, when Naomi returns to the coulee at the end of the novel she returns to understand what has always been there. Just as the Granton home becomes the site of internment hauntings, the Albertan prairie becomes the site of historical (personal, national and global) hauntings. Uncle Sam and Naomi‟s annual visit to the coulee commemorates the anniversary of the bomb in Nagasaki that leads to Nesan‟s death, unbeknownst to Naomi until after Mrs. Kato‟s letters are read. Thus, the war-torn landscape of Nagasaki hangs over the Albertan landscape, while under the Albertan landscape the bodies of Japanese Canadians relocated to Granton are buried: “Perhaps some genealogist of the future will come across this patch of bones and wonder why so many fishermen died on the prairies” (225). The Albertan prairie becomes the site of many hauntings of the Japanese Canadian experience. Therefore, when Naomi returns to the coulee in the final pages of the novel, she does not return, as Gottlieb argues, to find

“resolution to her own rootlessness and homelessness” (50). Rather, she returns to witness these hauntings. In the end, Naomi‟s shoes become “mud-clogged again” with the haunted Albertan mire. From here, it is not hard to imagine Obasan scraping the mud off Naomi‟s boots again like she does at the beginning of the novel, not as a romantic gesture, but because it is work that will have to be done. 85

Chapter Four

Nature, Home and the Paradoxes of White Exile

in Ana Historic

In Survival, Margaret Atwood identifies a legacy of Canadian writing that gives one of three characteristics to the Canadian wilderness. The first characterization posits nature as “actively hostile to men”; the second underscores “the awe of the grandeur of Nature”; whereas the third views nature as “a kind Mother or Nurse who would guide man if he would only listen to her” (49-50). The first characterization conceives nature as “other,” and in so doing creates a narrative of security and threat wherein a “norm” (generally, civilization; specifically, middle-class domesticity) is protected and controlled against the perils of “nature.” “Nature” in this instance represents not only the perils of the natural world, but also the way First Nations culture and “Mother-Earth” are perceived. The second and third characterizations conceive nature as an ideal: nature as a spectacle to behold with awe for its sublime beauty, or nature as an accessible mother figure who nurtures and guides. In Ana Historic Daphne Marlatt evokes all three modes of nature through Mrs. Richards‟ awe of nineteenth-century Vancouver‟s natural setting, Ina‟s desire to contain her 1950s domestic space against the threat of what or who lurks in

North Vancouver‟s woods, and Annie‟s desire to conceive of nature as a kind mother through descriptions of woman-centred natural spaces in her remembrance of her childhood play in the woods and through the scenes she creates of Ana‟s “freedom.”

However, while the scenes Annie writes of both Ana‟s experience of the Canadian wilderness and Ina‟s domesticity evoke idealized spaces that create binaries between inside/outside, private/public, self/other, whether in the form of middle-class domesticity 86 contained against a “threatening” other or in the form of an idealized imagined space of the “other,” ultimately Annie‟s writing envisions spaces wherein race, gender, class and sexuality interrelate and permeate each other. This chapter, by building on the paradoxical subject position of the settler woman that I examined in Chapter Two, will look at the entanglement of representations of the natural world and domesticity by exploring how “home,” for Annie, cannot free itself from the paradoxes that arise from colonialism. Therefore, like in Obasan, home is a desired but unattainable ideal.

Marlatt highlights the division between inside/outside, self/other in the opening line of the novel when Annie asks, “Who‟s there?” The question stems from Annie‟s childhood memory of being left by her parents to watch her younger sisters, during which time she would become fearful of a monstrous “Frankenstein” who could be hiding in one of the family‟s wardrobes. “Frankenstein” represents the unruly outside world that threatens

Annie‟s secure home: “What if he were hungry, starved even, and so desperately from outside he would kill to get what he wanted, as afraid even as she, to get what he needed, while she who had her needs met, secure (was she really?) in her parents‟ home” (10). A narrative of security and threat is established from the beginning pages of the novel, where an outsider (who can also represent an uncontrollable wilderness) threatens the safety of a controlled domestic space. But Marlatt does not make clear exactly who this

“other” is. Thus, the Frankenstein figure could represent any of the sexual, gendered or racial “others” evoked in the subsequent pages of the novel.

Critics commonly read Ana Historic‟s Frankenstein as representative of a fractured female or lesbian subject who attempts to deconstruct male-centred heterosexual norms.

For Caroline Rosenthal, “Frankenstein” represents Annie‟s search for feminine or lesbian 87

“other realities.” This search “does not imply that a (better) feminist ideology would be able to find coherent identities under a (bad) patriarchal surface structure but defamiliarizes what we have been trained to perceive as real or natural” (69). Rosenthal rightly interprets Marlatt‟s desire to deconstruct the binary between “good” feminism and

“bad” patriarchy, and instead favours an interpretation that Marlatt‟s use of Frankenstein challenges preconceptions of what is normal. In other words, Frankenstein, as a feminist lesbian ideology, is a monstrous “wound” upon male-centred norms, thereby revealing the “imperfections” that have perpetually existed upon male and heterosexual societal structures.

But Mary Shelley‟s original creation of Dr. Frankenstein as the creator of the monster should be read in tandem with popular culture‟s “Frankenstein” as the monster. To do so reveals a paradox wherein Frankenstein, like the settler woman, is the monster ostracized by societal norms and complicit in creating the norms. Annie recognizes this paradox:

“actually Frankenstein was the man who created him… and now we call the monster by his name. a man‟s name for man‟s fear of the wild, the uncontrolled. that‟s where she lives” (142). As Rosenthal argues, Annie recognizes that the fear she has towards

Frankenstein as a monster “is not her own but man‟s fear of the excessive and the wild, the space where „she lives.‟ „She‟ presumably is the homosexual other who would threaten the extant order” (103). Rosenthal goes on to argue that this feminine wild space, even while it is not “better” in relation to “bad” patriarchy, is an “escape route” through which Annie “leaves the patriarchal frame of reference” (103). Yet, while

Rosenthal‟s argument is an accurate interpretation of Annie‟s articulation of a female- centred “wild” space, she nevertheless does not address the colonial aspects of the novel, 88 nor does her argument address the First Nations “other” who appears throughout the novel to simultaneously reinforce and undermine the settler norm. Ultimately, the paradox of Frankenstein as creator and created, as representative of the settler female/lesbian subject on the one hand, and the First Nations subject on the other, is the

“wound” on the norm. Contradictory representations of nature and home defamilarize stable notions of space, whether these notions are male or female-centred.

Mrs. Richards‟ first impression of the B.C. wilderness evokes nature as female- centred, as the space where “she lives,” and establishes a male/female binary. Her description of the landscape begins with man-made items: “the rawness of new wood, the brashness of cleared land, of hastily built houses, outhouses, leantos” (16). But her description then moves into an expression of the grandeur of her surroundings:

And beyond… the endless green of woods, a green so green it outgreened itself,

hill after hill. When she turned she could see the mountains behind her hanging

close, close yet aloof. Beautiful, she thought, or perilous. But not pretty. Well-

versed in the Romantics, she had arrived with images of the Alps inside her eyes.

Yet she knew this was not Europe and Mary Shelley‟s monster would never speak

his loneliness here. (15-16)

Frank Davey argues that the women in Ana Historic “are constructed as representing an older, more „natural‟ culture, one eventually displaced by masculine authority, while men are associated with hunting and conquest” (204). This binary is certainly evoked in the above quotations. Colonial and settler men represent the conquest of the natural world through the descriptions of man-made buildings and the image of a clear-cut landscape.

In contrast, Mrs. Richards‟ description of a beautiful and grand wilderness that thrives 89

“beyond” the man-made town can be seen as representative of a woman-centred natural world. This interpretation is bolstered by Marlatt‟s use of Mary Shelley‟s monster which speaks to Mrs. Richards‟ desire for the “freedom” to express a wild feminine side, a monstrous femininity, in this “new” land. But alongside the evocation of the male/female binary and the desire to overturn an oppressive patriarchy is also a colonial-centred impression of nature stemming from a nineteenth-century Romantic ideology. As Eva

Mackey discusses, early British colonialists viewed Canadian wilderness through

Romantic eyes, thus imposing Eurocentric notions of the sublime and picturesque onto the Canadian wilderness (44). Thus, while Mrs. Richards‟ first impressions attempt to clear a space for the monstrous woman, her imposition of Eurocentric ideas reinforces a colonial ideology.

Inscribing the Canadian wilderness as the potential realm of women, whether as a space to recapture a matriarchal past or as a site where women can shed oppressive patriarchy in the present and future, is also problematic. The settler woman‟s acquisition of the Canadian wilderness as the site of her freedom does not recognize First Nations inhabitants. In her analysis of representations of the Canadian landscape by early

Canadian artists, Mackey moves from discussing “colonial” artists who use the sublime and picturesque when creating their images, into “settler” artists, namely the Group of

Seven, who desire to discard Eurocentric notions of art by constructing a “„Canadian‟ aesthetic based on the obliterating and overpowering sense of uncontrollable wilderness.

[But] these nationalistic northern wilderness paintings are specifically empty of signs not just of people, but of Native People” (44). This erasure of Native People is articulated by

Marlatt through Mrs. Richards‟ thoughts on her new life in Canada: “she writes as if she 90 were living alone in the woods, her vision trued to trees and birds.… she can overlook the stumps, the scarred face of the clearing that surrounds her, and see herself ab-original in the new world” (30). By imagining herself as alone in the woods, Mrs. Richards adopts the settler mentality that imagines the vast Canadian wilderness as empty, and by characterizing herself as “ab-original” she appropriates the wilderness as her own domain.

The evocation of the colonial idea of a sublime landscape and the settler idea of the

Canadian wilderness as empty could be used to criticize Marlatt‟s writing, if these two scenes are taken out of the broader context of the novel. But Marlatt seems aware of how these ideologies ignore and appropriate the site of Native culture, and how they collide with Annie‟s desire to create the Canadian wilderness as a space in which to broaden women‟s sphere, through the inclusion of the Native woman she refers to as the Virgin

Mary:

Once [Ana] had been frightened by the Indian crone they called the Virgin Mary,

who had risen like an apparition out of the bush, and joining the trail with her

basket of shoots, roots, whatever they were, had given her a singularly flat look, a

look not at her but through, as if [Ana] were a bush or a fern. (96)

The name that is imposed on the Native woman by the settler community parodies the insular concept of Canada as empty. Speaking to the settler notion that Canada is a vast

“no-man‟s-land,” Northrop Frye quotes Rupert Brooke who characterized the Canadian wilderness as “unseizable virginity” (12). The Virgin Mary‟s rise out of the landscape represents the reappearance of a Native culture and people erased by the myth of a virginal wilderness. The Virgin Mary then reverses this erasure by seeing through Ana 91

“as if she were a bush or fern.” But the Native woman‟s perspective goes only so far as to limit the broadening of the settler woman‟s sphere, and to limit the appropriation of the empty “wild” as the space to express “monstrous” settler femininity.

The name “Virgin Mary” also parodies the dichotomous Western notion of woman as old crone or as young maiden. But because this dichotomy stems from a Eurocentric perspective on femininity based on a Christian morality and because Annie‟s destabilization of this dichotomy stems from Western feminisms, the Native woman‟s cultural context is, again, erased. The Virgin Mary, as a “monstrous” woman (monstrous because she destabilizes the maiden/crone binary) evokes Annie‟s desire for a feminine space wherein women can be free to express their “monstrosity,” while exemplifying the fallacy of the settler notion of a virginal wilderness and annexation into Western notions of femininity. Thus, the Virgin Mary illustrates Marlatt‟s recognition of how settlers appropriate First Nations space, but she does not attempt to give voice to the Native woman. Instead, Annie‟s writing of Ana‟s reaction to the Virgin Mary shows the controlling, paradoxical and contaminating relationships between settlers and First

Nations people. Ultimately, Annie‟s attempt to expand women‟s space into the “outer” public world is shown to be necessarily problematic through Marlatt‟s recognition of continual collisions between different self/other binaries that prevent Annie from being able to write a utopic lesbian space for Ana and herself.

Just as Annie cannot simply claim the Canadian wilderness as the site to express the monstrous female, reclaiming the private domestic space for the same purpose proves equally problematic. The way Marlatt composes the scene of the first white child born in

Hastings Sawmill (what would later become part of Vancouver) invokes a male/female 92 binary. Marlatt intertextually includes citations from a newspaper clipping that reports a

Dominion Day boat race into her narrative of Jeannie Alexander‟s labour (120-27). The citation of the newspaper report clearly illustrates a male-centred activity taking place in a public sphere, while the birthing scene shows a female-centred activity taking place in a private sphere. The division Marlatt creates between male (outside) and female (inside) spaces highlights the importance of women‟s “labour” (“I had never before seen a woman‟s body truly at work—Not labour as we commonly use it” [125]) that is conducted in the home but is vital to the broader world. As Rosenthal argues,

“Superimposing the frame of the birth scene on that of the boat race functions to question women‟s role as passive vessels of birth” by using “the female body as an active instrument for an alternative inscription of presence” (95-96). Marlatt transforms the domestic space from a passive female-centred world into an active one: “Ana wondered at this transformation of the woman who had entertained them over tea. Her charm, the small talk of her station had disappeared, leaving an elemental creature, sweat beading her face, hair pushed back… mouth open panting with pain” (122). Jeannie‟s transformation from conventional “Victorian” decorum, where female bonding is done over tea and through “small talk,” into a “monstrous” birthing body represents the transformation of the home from the private sphere to which women are confined into the site where women have always “laboured,” and thus always contributed to the broader world. Like in Obasan wherein Naomi‟s Aunt enables the home to become a space for resistance even while being the site of Japanese Canadian imprisonment, Marlatt in her creation of the birth scene, enables the home to become a space for resistance against patriarchal effacement of the broader importance of women‟s work. 93

But the recognition of women‟s “labour” in the birth scene conflicts with settler race relations and the power of “birthing the nation” that is represented by the first white child born in the settlements on Canada‟s west coast. Rosemary Marangely George argues that the act of child-bearing for colonial women in India received stronger recognition in the colonies than it did in England because it contributed directly to the growth of imperialism:

The quality of motherhood was seen as directly affecting the quality of the

„future‟ citizen‟ (read „male children‟)—which in turn determined the vigour of

the imperial race. The establishment of English homes in the colonies increased

the avenues through which Englishwomen could directly contribute to the

national enterprise of imperialism as well as earn recognition for their labour. (98)

Marlatt expresses a similar entanglement between the recognition of women‟s labour and the birthing of a white nation in Canada when Jeannie Alexander gives birth to a baby boy. The baby‟s “equipment” startles Ana (Ana Historic 127). Marlatt‟s inclusion of

Ana‟s surprise shifts the scene away from the utopic effect of female bonding that occurs in the description of the women caring for Jeannie as she gives birth and towards illustrating home as the site where “future [white] citizens” are born. White motherhood can also be seen as populating Canada‟s perceived empty space. In this sense, the settler domestic space expands onto the settler notion of an empty wilderness, thus, again, erasing Native populations and culture. Marlatt recognizes women‟s “labour” as complicit in this erasure when Annie writes of Ana‟s desire be born into a space without history: “to be born in, enter from birth that place… with no known name… to be there from the first. indigene. ingeuus (born in), native, natural, free(born)—at home from the 94 beginning” (127). Ana desires to “return” to a space not contaminated by patriarchal control, but Marlatt recognizes how problematic this desire is when she uses the words

“indigene” and “native” to articulate a return to a desired pre-patriarchal space. These words sit like a wound upon Annie‟s desire to create this empty space.

In his article “Cultural Citizenship and Writing Post-Colonial Vancouver,” Glen

Lowry argues that the birth scene in Ana Historic is “one of the most explicitly racialized moments in the text” (32), and he is right, but he problematically interprets this scene as only representative of “women giving birth to each other,” or as illustrative of a female- centred community based on women‟s work. He argues that “Marlatt‟s novel ostensibly frees Ana and Annie from history,” and he questions the cost of this freedom: “We need to ask what privileges of class and „race‟ permit this historic outing. By what critical vigilance might we maintain the novel‟s initial power to overwrite the hegemonic narrative of a phallocentric order?” (33). But Marlatt‟s creation of home in her novel does not enable Annie and Ana‟s freedom, or the “historic outing,” that Lowry interprets.

Marlatt evokes the desire to clear a space for “women” (this desire stems from Annie‟s

“privilege of class and „race‟”), but its very evocation contradicts itself because it too is hegemonic. Marlatt risks the possibility of a counter-hegemony where matriarchy replaces patriarchy, but through the representation of private and public settler spaces as sites of contamination, where the desire to establish an ideal is met with contradictions that highlight the power inherent in this desire, the novel averts the re-establishment of a counter-hegemony. Still, the novel does not give voice to Native culture and space.

Marlatt does not simply invert patriarchal or colonial control by giving every marginalized group a voice. Instead, she demonstrates the past and present complexities 95 of continually entangled gender, sexual and racial relations. This very entanglement in nineteenth-century settler spaces calls into question stable self/other binaries, thereby deconstructing the “hegemonic narratives of a phallocentric order.”

While Ana‟s story illustrates paradoxical gender and race relations in private and public spaces in late-nineteenth-century Canada, Ina‟s story explores the home as a site where traditional gender roles interact with contradictory colonial and settler legacies.

Late in the novel Annie contrasts Ina‟s childhood and early adult colonial home in “the tropics” with the home Ina later moves to in Canada: “for it was the walls that close in on you, picture windows that never opened, doors that stayed shut against the cold. none of the openness of that stone house in the tropics with its verandas and archways through which people came and went” (136). Ina‟s colonial home, through its characterization as open to the elements and the comings and goings of people, is reminiscent of the freedom of colonial women in India explored by Rosemary George. As she asserts, and as I have explored throughout my discussion of Ana Historic, the colonies offered English women the space in which to achieve an independent self not accessible to women in England

(97). While Annie later contradicts this freedom (a point that I will return to later in this chapter), her evocation of an open colonial home gives the sense that Ina experienced, either through nostalgia or in actuality, a certain feeling of freedom in her past. This freedom is heavily contrasted with the closed space of her Canadian home, which during much of the novel is exemplary of a narrative of security and threat that fears penetration from a threatening “other.”

Throughout this thesis I have been exploring (by borrowing from Diana Brydon‟s discussion in “Storying Home: Power and Truth” [35]) a narrative of security and threat 96 wherein a desire for security maps the bourgeois nuclear family onto the nation in order to keep any threatening “other” from disturbing the ideal (typically white) home and nation; I have also explored, especially in the two chapters on Obasan, how this ideal is an illusion. In Ana Historic, we enter this middle-class domestic space through Ina‟s story and witness the illusion of the idealized bourgeois home. Annie‟s memories of her childhood home portray Ina as complicit in establishing a narrative of security. Ina is fearful of the woods outside their North Vancouver house: she tells Annie, “Never go into the woods with a man… and don‟t go into the woods alone” (18). To Annie, Ina is afraid of the “monster” lurking outside her secure domestic space. Ina‟s containment in the home is shown again when Annie remembers her mother painting their house‟s interior: “Ina, i remember you with flecks of paint…. arm in the air for hours, to paint a ceiling, paint a face, paint over the cracks of the whole setup” (26). Ina‟s desire to cover the cracks on the wall represents, firstly, her desire to shore up her home, and, secondly, her desire to erase her house‟s imperfections. These physical cracks are symbolic of the metaphoric cracks in Ina‟s ideal home. In Chapter Three I argue that Obasan resists the control of internment by continually re-establishing a home for her family even while being forced to move from place to place. Obasan‟s endurance maps a reconceived image of home with an understanding of fragility back onto the nation, replacing a domestic space that pilfers freedom from others in the name of security. Conversely,

Ina‟s establishment of her home exemplifies the middle-class desire for an ideal space.

But, ultimately, the home‟s fragility is illustrated in the lack of freedom Ina has as a woman in the 1950s, as well as through the complexities of Ina‟s colonial legacy that pushes Ina to create her home as a site of endurance against the status quo in Canada. In 97 order to understand the illusion of Ina‟s bourgeois security, gender and cultural migrations must be explored together.

Many critics reading from a “feminist” perspective perceive Ina as stuck in a traditional female role. This feminist perspective is seen explicitly in critics‟ interpretation of Annie‟s memory of watching her mother put on her “Garbo face” before attending her husband‟s office party (Ana Historic 56-58). For Rosenthal, when Ina looks into the mirror to apply her makeup she “does not search the mirror for her self- reflection but rather looks into the looking glass of patriarchy and constructs her image according to the male gaze she has internalized” (83-84). Annie clearly evokes the notion of “othering” through the male gaze in her remembrance of this scene: “making up someone who was not you but someone you might be. a desperate attempt to make up for the gap—between the way you actually looked in your blue dressing gown… and how you meant to look, how you ought to look” (56). Annie blames Ina for teaching her to

“cover up” imperfections and hide the “you that was you,” or the “other potential identities that are lost and suppressed by one imperative image” (Rosenthal 83), underneath a flawless outward appearance (Ana Historic 58): “pride on the outside, and on the inside—shame. the taste of it in my mouth, musty as dirty linen and just as familial” (61). Throughout the “Garbo face” scene and through much of the novel Annie sees Ina as a passive female “other” contained within patriarchal forces. Ina‟s cosmetic treatment of her body, as representative of the male gaze, reinforces the male/female binary; the exterior of the body is shaped by patriarchal forces and offered to men, while

Ina‟s “other potential identities” remain contained and silent. 98

But Ina‟s desire for a “Garbo face” begins to reveal, when read along with the information we are given of Ina‟s personal history, an understanding of Ina based not only on gender but also on the complexities of Ina‟s movement from her colonial home to her 1950s Canadian home. Annie points out in her remembrance of watching her mother apply cosmetics, “looking smart was part of [Ina‟s] identity” (57). This identity is contrasted by Ina‟s perception of “Canadian women” who “look such frights on the street with their hair up in curlers” (57). One reason Ina takes such care in her appearance is to differentiate herself from the Canadian women she sees around her. While Annie evokes the male/female binary in her perception of her mother and in her own desire for male attention, Ina‟s self-perception is based on resisting a female community and a broader

Canadian culture. Edward Said, in his exploration of exile (a term he uses to define the

“touch of solitude and spirituality” in both “refugee” and “expatriate” cross-cultural movements), asserts that “exiles are always eccentrics who feel that difference (even as they frequently exploit it) as a kind of orphanhood,” and they seize their differences “like a weapon to be used with stiffened will, the exile jealously insists on his or her right to refuse to belong” (182). Throughout the novel Ina maintains her right to retain her

“English” qualities, such as when she laments her daughter‟s use of the common word

“sweater” instead of “woolly” or “cardigan” (Ana Historic 23). The Garbo face, however, highlights Ina‟s refusal to belong while also exemplifying Ina‟s paradoxical identity. Ina‟s gaze into the mirror provokes the question “Who‟s there”? The image looking back represents both a 1950s American Hollywood ideal of beauty and an

English woman who uses this image to resist assimilation into the status quo of Canadian culture. 99

Ina‟s application of the Garbo face is also reminiscent of her painting the interior of her house: in both cases Ina conceals imperfections to create for herself an ideal alternate image. Said discusses an exile‟s desire for this containment when he stresses that a great amount “of the exile‟s life is taken up with compensating for disorienting loss by creating a new world to rule” (181). Ina‟s physical environment and image illustrate this desire to have control over her own world, which Annie expresses when she states, “impossible to exit. dead end. when the walls close down; the public/private wall. defined the world you lived inside, the world you brought with you, transposed onto a Salish mountainside, and never questioned its terms. „lady.‟ never questioned its values. English gentility in a rain forest?” (23-24). Ina‟s creation of metaphoric walls, through the application of cosmetics to her body and paint to her house, contains her own world against the wilds of

North Vancouver. While this containment can represent middle-class domesticity that attempts to keep out threatening “others” and a patriarchal societal structure that keeps women contained within a domestic sphere, Ina‟s self-containment also represents her desire to control her own space for her “English gentility.”

Ina‟s home, as a result of her desire to contain her “English gentility,” becomes a culturally isolated and lonely location. At the end of the novel, Annie, in coming to terms with her mother‟s life and death, begins to understand the complexity of Ina‟s life as a 1950s housewife and as a product of colonialism:

your voice, Ina, lucid and critical, seeing through the conventions that surrounded

you. and though you saw through them, you still didn‟t know what to do with the

fear that found you alone on the far side of where you were „supposed‟ to be.

Wrong, therefore. guilty of „going to far.‟ (in the woods alone.) (135) 100

Here, Annie recognizes that Ina resists the conventions of Canadian society, but this very resistance is supported by the fear of a threatening outside world. Ina‟s “lucidity” in understanding the value of not conforming to the status quo, along with her desire for a controlled space and her fear of an “other,” results in her isolation. Exile, as Said goes on to argue, can result in a “kind of narcissistic masochism that resists all efforts of amelioration, acculturation, and community” due to “the sheer fact of isolation and displacement” (183). When the walls that Ina creates are removed Ina‟s isolated and complex world is revealed.

This isolation exemplifies Ina‟s “unhomed” condition. In Chapter Three I use Homi

K. Bhabha‟s definition of the “unhomed” to explore the tension between Obasan‟s resistance and conformity. Obasan and Ina‟s unhomed experiences are obviously different. Obasan and her family, because they are forcibly removed from their home, experience an explicit and literal invasion and domination. Conversely, Ina is a member of a white ruling elite; but she is, nonetheless, a victim of cultural migrations. Bhabha asserts, in “the stirrings of the unhomely, another world becomes visible. It has less to do with forcible eviction and more to do with the uncanny literary and social effects of enforced social accommodation or historical migrations and cultural relocations” (445).

From an early age Ina is continually relocated around the world. She moves from her parents “colonial home,” to a boarding school in England, back to her parent‟s home, then into marriage with her husband in “the tropics” and finally to Canada (Ana Historic

137). The private and public realms for Ina have never been separate. On the one hand,

Ina‟s colonial past actively places her home into the world. This position of her “home- in-the-world” equips her with the lucidity that enables her to see through the social 101 conventions that surround her. On the other hand, Ina‟s colonial past acts upon her, due to her social position first as a child and second as a woman. The conditions of a colonial and patriarchal world dictate conditions of her home and create the fear of the outside world. The division between private and public that Ina constructs from her privileged and “settled” home in Canada simultaneously reflects the lucidity and fear Ina holds of broader social, cultural and historical conditions. But this simultaneity also ruptures Ina‟s ideally created space and self. Ultimately, Ina cannot contain her “imperfections,” and they manifest in her depression.

Annie‟s recognition of this rupture offers a glimpse into what Bhabha calls the other world created by “unhomely stirrings.” She implies that Ina‟s depression is caused by not being able to articulate the contradictory and traumatic state of her unhomed conditions: “you needed someone to knock holes in the walls instead of showing you, calmly, how the doors worked if only you would oil them properly” (136). The origin of

Bhabha‟s definition of the unhomed illustrates the two different modes of revealing Ina‟s

“other world.” For Freud, Bhabha quotes, “the unheimlich is „the name for everything that ought to have remained… secret and hidden but has come to light” (The Location of

Culture 10). Freud‟s notion of the unheimlich identifies the existence of another world lurking below social conventions, but this world “ought” not to rear its head. Ina constructs her home with the same philosophy in mind; she creates her home to “repress” imperfections that “ought” to remain hidden. This etiquette is reflected in Annie‟s option to reveal Ina‟s physical and metaphoric domestic world by opening well-oiled doors, or, in other words, to act within convention. Freud‟s notion of unheimlich is seemingly repeated by Hannah Arendt. As Bhabha states, Arendt‟s “description of public and 102 private realms is a profoundly unhomely one: „it is the distinction between things that should be hidden and things that should be shown,‟ she writes, which through their inversion in the modern age „discovers how rich and manifold the hidden can be under conditions of intimacy‟” (10). While Freud‟s statement, with its use of “ought,” displays decorum, Arendt‟s statement “things that should be shown” conveys ambiguity: what are the things that should be shown? The breaking down of decorum is reflected in Annie‟s interpretation of Ina‟s need to have holes knocked in the walls to enable Ina‟s other world to be seen.

What Annie finds through these holes is precisely the “social contradictions” that

Bhabha identifies as inherent in the unhomely condition (“The Home in the World” 446).

In the pages that follow Annie‟s recognition of the need to break holes in the walls in order to view Ina‟s other world, she writes the story of Ina‟s domestic space in the tropics and in Canada, and she expresses the paradoxes she finds there. The colonial home, as I stated earlier, is characterized as open, thus representing a freedom that Ina does not have in Canada. But the characterization of this space does not end here. Annie goes on to express the control that Ina and her children hold over the native servants who seem, to

Annie (and presumably Ina), like children (Ana Historic 136); however, Annie ends this section with Ina questioning her place in this world (137). The tropical home is the site of Ina‟s paradoxical subject position as a woman whose “freedom” collides with the freedom of her servants, and as a woman who, while experiencing a certain amount of freedom, does not feel at home in her surroundings, “which was not truly [hers] and where [she] had no rightful place” (136). The Canadian home is the site of Ina‟s loneliness wherein we witness Ina in “a frenzy of activity” getting housework done while 103 singing black slave songs about how “there is no one there to witness [her] accomplishment” (137). When Annie knocks holes into Ina‟s walls and writes the story of Ina‟s home in the tropics and in Canada, she writes of spaces haunted by the social contradictions of colonial and settler societies and Ina‟s identity as a woman within them.

While the “you that was you,” or the other potential identities that Annie wishes Ina would uncover from underneath her Garbo face, has a certain utopic quality to it, as if these other potentialities will set Ina “free” from the patriarchal forces under which Annie perceives her living, here, at the end of the novel, Ina‟s hidden identities are wrapped in the experiences and contradictions that have travelled with her throughout her life.

Ultimately, Annie does not find a “free” woman when she breaks through her mother‟s metaphoric walls, but rather uncovers Ina‟s unhomely condition, a condition that “relates the traumatic ambivalences of a personal, psychic history to the wider disjunctions of political experience” (Bhabha, The Location of Culture 11). Annie finds not what Ina could potentially be, but what Ina is. She is a woman who is stuck in a traditional female role, while simultaneously reinforcing a narrative of security and resisting the status quo; she is a woman who experienced a certain amount of freedom in the tropics, while being in a position of power. Witnessing Ina‟s story as a whole reveals a woman haunted by historical conditions and paradoxes of femininity, colonialism and cultural migrations.

Annie too becomes unhomed through writing the spaces that Ana and Ina inhabit; she experiences the illusion of her own idealizations and realizes she cannot completely break free from the legacy of paradoxical domestic space. But to understand Annie‟s unhomely condition her original desire for reconciliation should be explored. At the beginning of the novel, Annie‟s grief over the recent death of her mother evokes a desire to re- 104 experience her mother‟s presence in her childhood home: “soft breast under blue wool dressing gown, tea breath, warm touch… gone I-na (the long drawn calling out at night for a drink of water, one more story, one last hug” (10-11). As M. Carmen Costas

Malvar asserts, “Annie longs for a maternal fusion.… She comes close to retrieving the primal oneness that defines the early stages of the mother-child relationship” (33). The desire for reconciliation with the absent mother echoes in Annie‟s discontent with her own domestically contained life. From inside her and her husband‟s house, Annie laments her wasted days when she realizes it is, again, time for her two children to return from school: “what will i have done with my day, this endless day that unites and separates us? it is the kind of waiting you knew” (25). Just like Ina, Annie becomes domestically isolated. This condition makes her idealize her “free” childhood days in the woods of North Vancouver: “i was native, i was the child who grew up with the wolves, original lost girl, elusive, vanished from the world of men” (18). In a state of (self) confinement, Annie imagines an alternate freedom that she remembers in her childhood.

She then inscribes this desire for a utopic wilderness in which to achieve this freedom onto the story she writes of Ana in which Annie conceives of Ana‟s desire for the same

“freedom.” In conflating her own longing for freedom with Mrs. Richards‟ immigration to Canada, Annie invokes what Malvar defines as a “spiritual union,” or a fusion between the two women (34). But, even in Annie‟s description of her idealized childhood “wild” space, the conflict among colonialism, settler society and First Nations people is present in the use of “native” and in the notion that she could be original in Canadian wilderness.

Ultimately, Annie becomes aware of the world-in-the-home, the home-in-the-world when she writes the fictional account of Mrs. Alexander‟s birthing of the first white baby. 105

Annie also gains an unhomely awareness when she writes the history of Ina‟s colonial home. Her description of this home as open and free contrasts with her description of

Ina‟s paradoxical position:

colonial children holding power over adults who were our servants but seemed

more like us, wily as us at circumventing rules…. while you negotiated the cross-

currents of Mother and Mem, organizing a world around the Tuan who entered

tired from the heat and the office this sanctuary of flowers, of polished mahogany,

of grateful light shinning along the stone tile…. hours of music and drinks,

watching the sun set in the strait. „this magic world‟. (136-37)

Annie‟s narrative moves back and forth between different modes (and moods) of living in this world. As I mentioned earlier, she describes the colonial child who identifies with the servants; she also shows Ina as the colonial head of the household, contributing to the prosperity of the empire—a position that Ina enjoys because she experiences the “magic” of being in an elite position within this world, while paradoxical despising it, “wishing

[she] had more time to spend with the children, suspecting Amah of undermining [her] position” (137). The continual movement between these different modes of the colonial experience illustrates Annie‟s recognition of the paradoxes inherent in the white woman‟s position. Annie‟s account of the colonial home also blurs the identities of herself and

Ina. When Annie uses “colonial children” she evokes the remembrance that Ina too was a child of this world. Again, when Annie states “this sanctuary of flowers,” she brings the colonial context to the present tense, blurring her and her mother‟s realities. Marlatt uses this technique of blurring between Annie, Ina and Ana throughout the novel: “a- historic / she who is you / or me / „i‟ / address this to” (129). This blurring, however, 106 often centres on domestic containment and patriarchal control, but here near the end of the novel we see Annie blurring her identity with Ina‟s in a colonial context, illustrating not only Ina‟s paradoxical subjectivity but the paradoxical identity that Annie inherits from her. In the end, Annie knocks on the door of Ana‟s and Ina‟s life and asks, who‟s there? The answer she receives in both cases is the “monstrous” paradoxes of Ana‟s and

Ina‟s complex identities as women who are part of the British Empire. Annie cannot write herself out of paradoxical subjectivities and into an ideal space because of the many personal, political and social entanglements of cross cultural movements and interactions.

Zoe‟s home, then, becomes the site of Annie‟s unhomed condition. For Davey, the novel reaches the conclusion that “the „home‟ of woman is yet another utopian plenitude, eternal, natural, before (or at least aside from) the symbolic realm of language and thus apart from the social and political clashes and negations that the symbolic enables” (208).

He goes on to argue, “beyond Annie‟s narrow vision, beyond Zoe‟s room… other huge conflicts continue” (209). But, by recognizing the way that public and private spaces interact through writing the stories of Ana and Ina, Annie enters Zoe‟s home with an understanding of the need to knock holes in the walls that attempt to contain ideals.

Annie shows this recognition through renaming herself, Annie “Torrent” (Ana Historic

152). The word “torrent” also appears in the novel when Annie remembers the anger Ina would direct towards her husband: “it wasn‟t what you said but the fury of your speech, it wasn‟t speech but pure venting. a torrent repeated over and over” (135-36). Rosenthal argues that “by renaming herself, Annie releases the torrent of speech that her mother Ina kept dammed up inside” (80). But Ina did not keep herself “dammed up” in the way that

Rosenthal identifies. Instead, by renaming herself, Annie releases the torrent of speech 107 that Ina kept locked between the walls of her home. By breaking through these walls, and renaming herself “Torrent,” Annie clears a space for the home to become “the home- in-the-world” where she can express “monstrous” irrationality and contradictions. In the end, Annie discards both her desire for the utopic spaces she attempts to write into Ana‟s story as well as her perception of Ina‟s contained domesticity by revealing a torrent of social interactions and entanglements.

108

Conclusion

Contradictions and Literary Theory

This thesis has explored how Kogawa and Marlatt‟s representations of home ask us to witness the discourses and spaces repressed by fixed narratives of history, and has attempted to reveal the entangled discourses that occur in the home constructed on a foundation of displacements and exile. I have argued that listening to Kogawa‟s entangled narrative and witnessing her representations of the Nakanes and Katos‟ entangled home reveals the wounds that so-called marginal discourses have continually made on dominant discourses, while not undermining the power that dominant Canadian culture had on internment, and continues to have on the stories of internment. Listening to Marlatt‟s entangled narrative and witnessing Ina‟s paradoxical home reveals the paradoxical subjectivities and spaces that arise from gender and privilege extending from a legacy of colonialism and settlement in Canada. Both Obasan and Ana Historic expose the contradictions of living with porous discourses and in porous spaces, and, in the end, do not reconcile what they reveal.

Witnessing, however, is only effective if it helps to free a subject from an inevitable conclusion or an objectification. For Smaro Kamboureli, Naomi‟s narrative, while asking us to witness, “also reminds us that a witness is an observer whose gaze is, more often than not, trained to objectify, to implement the logic of visibility. Witnesses who do not resist what they see, who do not shift from their position of observation, perpetuate the very ideology that discriminates against Naomi and others like her” (219). Just as official multiculturalism in Canada (Zwicker, “Multiculturalism” 148-49) and “Canadian historical narratives” (Mackey 86) can celebrate, and therefore objectify, diversity, 109 witnessing the multiple voices and spaces presented in each novel can glorify and objectify multiplicity by confusing the multiple perspectives given by Kogawa and

Marlatt for the whole story, negating any other possible perspectives.

Kogawa‟s evocation of irreconcilability when Naomi does not find the harmony she seeks in understanding the absence of her mother is consistent with the contradictions of the multiple narratives and physical positions represented in the novel. This continuity of contradictions teaches us to understand that complete resolution cannot, and should not, stem from the paradoxes of historical injustices. Ato Quayson, in his article on what he calls the “enchantment of a false freedom” after the Truth and Reconciliation

Commission in South Africa, asserts that “Hope lies in an awareness of the temporary nature of the statement of absolute victimhood… perpetrators of apartheid violence must properly acknowledge what they did,” not as blame, but “to recognize the task of working and living together that lies ahead” (337). Quayson, here, opens an opportunity to look at reconciliation differently. He observes that the reconciliation that stemmed from South

Africa‟s Truth and Reconciliation Commission was not absolute. Kogawa provokes a similar reading of reconciliation with the reading of Grandma Kato‟s letters. While

Naomi does not receive the resolution she desires, the letters provide a space to listen to the irreconcilable voices of history and get on with task of living with irreconcilability.

Marlatt‟s open-ended narrative also provokes a space to consider the irreconcilability of historical voices and get on with living. She evokes historical injustices through exposing women‟s role in the settlement of Canada‟s west coast, not as a way to induce settler guilt, but as way to rethink history as a contaminated narrative. Read as an extension of the settler narrative, Annie‟s “coming-out” narrative cannot be thought of as 110 a resolution to women‟s historic and traditional role. Instead, Annie‟s lesbian identity will continue a dialogue with the past and continue to transform in the future.

But where does witnessing the irreconcilability leave the literary critic at the end of the novel? Is witnessing and articulating these necessary contradictions enough? Linda

Hutcheon argues that part of the postmodern mandate is to expose the fallacy of metanarratives without re-establishing a new “truth” to replace the indeterminacy that arises from such incredulity. Feminism, Hutcheon goes on to argue, while also deconstructing fixed narratives, is not satisfied with indeterminacy, and instead desires to re-establish a “truth”: “Both enterprises work toward an awareness of the social nature of cultural activity, but feminisms are not content with exposition: art forms cannot change until social practices do. Exposition may be the first step, but it cannot be the last”

(“Incredulity Towards Metanarratives” 188). For Hutcheon, singular narratives are either deconstructed to reveal indeterminacy or deconstructed in order to instate a new fixed narrative. Is there a way to get beyond this either/or situation? Is there not a way to theorize the exposure of contradictions that is not indeterminate, not as a way to move towards articulating a mandate, but as a way to expose contradictions as meaningful in and of themselves?

Many critics seem to be questioning literary criticism‟s purpose. In a recent article on postcolonial approaches to reading literature, Laura Moss identifies two potential and interrelated problems in current approaches to postcolonial literature and theory. Firstly, she perceives that some critics bring assumptions “based on authorial identity”

(specifically an author‟s race) to texts, expecting these authors to deliver a “socially transformative outcome” (26). Secondly, she perceives that some critics adopt the 111 assumptions that they make about the literature they study and desire to write transformative literary criticism—“literary study as social activism” (17). Although I do not specifically discuss “authorial identity” in this thesis, I do address the expectations that some critics bring to Obasan and Ana Historic. The expectations that Naomi and

Annie are reconciled with their personal, familial and national histories assume that these novels desire to achieve a definitive social transformation. Obasan, by being read as resolved, can become objectified history, teaching “us” about “our” racist past (Miki,

Broken Entries 39), or can be seen as a resolution to “our” racist past (Kamboureli 55).

Ana Historic, by being read as resolved, can be viewed as a narrative that is able to get beyond the complexities of the past and find a utopic feminine or lesbian space. For

Moss, these expectations of a specific social mandate miss a “multiplicity of truths” that can be found in stories and storytelling (29). I agree with Moss‟s desire to look to the multiplicity found in storytelling; however, she envisions that we may have to “take the political imperative off the table for a short while” in order to move towards re- recognizing the multiplicity of storytelling and away from social transformation expectations (28). I understand that Moss desires to take away political imperatives because they tend to mimic the metanarratives that postcolonial theories want to deconstruct. But taking away political imperatives leaves a gap in our understanding of literature like Obasan and Ana Historic that explore the desire for social transformation inclusive of irreconcilable contradictions. In the end, I am left with a many questions regarding the movement towards justice and social agency. Do we still like fixed narratives to dictate our political imperatives? How do we infuse political imperatives 112 and social transformations with paradoxes and a notion of irreconcilability? Stories like

Obasan and Ana Historic manage to do this, so how do we as critics do so as well?

Brydon also identifies the shift in literary criticism towards a specific mandate. She argues that “literary criticism‟s twentieth-century aspirations” desire to achieve

“scientific authority.” This desire “undervalued the genuine links between science and art that are forged not through categorization but through the imagination” (“Storying

Home” 46). Brydon and Moss discuss two different disciplines that contemporary literary criticism desires to emulate: social activism and scientific conviction. The common thread between both discussions of literary theory is the desire for a socially validated authority. I agree with Brydon on the need for imagination to overcome this desire. Perhaps the lost literary critics that Brydon and Moss identify can turn away from the desire to become an “authoritative” voice and find their own way in imaginative indirections of the stories they study. Kamboureli articulates her personal struggle with what she sees as a “gap that separates academic discourse from social reality, government and institutional policies from practice, the intricacies of academic argument from the heat and pressures of personal emotions and engagement” (2). Kamboureli identifies a web of different contexts: social reality, government policy, academic theory and personal emotion. Storytelling can imaginatively link this web of simultaneously occurring perspectives and explore the contradictions that occur between them. In

Obasan and Ana Historic, Kogawa and Marlatt include and navigate through this web of interacting realities and present the complexity of irreconcilable subject positions and contradictory spaces. But how does the critic utilize the imaginative web that links context, theory and emotion into his or her work? Is it possible to utilize the 113

“indirections” of imagination in critical theory to destabilize the academic writing that progresses towards an unavoidable end? And if it is possible, where do I begin?

114

Notes

Chapter One – Freeing Speech: Security and Home in Obasan 1 This argument was derived from Marie Vautier‟s assertion “that the very lack of cohesion in Rough Lock Bills‟ tale encourages Naomi to eventually accept fragmentation, writing, and open-ended „story‟” (180).

Chapter Two – The Legacy of the Settler Woman: Security, Home and Sexuality in Ana Historic 1 My argument is derived from Tiffany Potter‟s identification of feminine forms of narrative structures in regards to Eliza Haywood‟s 18th-century amatory fiction. She asserts that the reason Haywood‟s work is often overlooked in the study of the rise of the novel is because Haywood‟s work invents its own narrative structure which departs from a single climax structure—“introduction-conflict-suspense-climax- denouement”—that emulates the male sex act in favour of a “feminized structure of multiple climaxes” (175).

Chapter Three – The Home as a Stage for the Nation in Obasan 1 Food is central to Obasan‟s home, and nourishing bodies is central to Obasan‟s role within the home. When Sam, her husband, arrives at the cabin in Slocan from a work camp, Obasan prepares a full meal in anticipation of his return (133). When Tadashi, Naomi‟s father, visits from the work camps, Obasan offers her present family members—Naomi, Stephen, Sam and Tadashi—a piece of toast upon his arrival (171). 2 Mona Oikawa provides a compelling discussion of how “white men were entitled to family, [but] Japanese Canadian men were not, a distinction that helped to convey their lack of status as men. Put another way, men denied access to their families were emasculated, unable to exercise that most basic of patriarchal functions as head of the family” (84). 3 Using the symbol of England and empire as an educational tool exemplifies the cross confusion of contaminations by simultaneously evoking (former) imperialism within Canada and the invasion of white Canada into Obasan‟s home. 4 Cheung points out that “In the United States silence is generally looked upon as passive; in China and Japan it traditionally signals pensiveness, vigilance, or grace” (127) and reads Obasan from the perspective that silence can be attentive.

115

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ARIEL 30.2 (1999): 161-75.

———. “Multiculturalism: Pied Piper of Canadian Nationalism (And Joy Kogawa‟s

Ambivalent Antiphony).” ARIEL 32.4 (2001): 147-75.

This thesis by Michelle K. Damour was defended successfully in an oral examination on August 6th, 2009.

The examining committee for the thesis was:

Dr. Barry Moody, Chair

Dr. Carrie Dawson, External Reader

Dr. Herb Wyile, Internal Reader

Dr. Kerry Vincent, Supervisor

Dr. Jessica Slights, Acting Head

This thesis is accepted in its present form by the Division of Research and Graduate Studies as satisfying the thesis requirements for the degree Master of Arts (English).