At the Crossroads : Of Tradition and Change
The Sacrificial Egg
Chinua Achebe
Julius Obi sat gazing at his typewriter. The fat Chief Clerk, his boss, was snoring at his table. Outside, the gatekeeper in his green uniform was sleeping at his post. You couldn’t blame him; no customer had passed through the gate for nearly a week. There was an empty basket on the giant weighing machine. A few palm-kernels lay desolately in the dust around the machine. Only the flies remained in strength.
Julius went to the window that overlooked the great market on the bank of the river Niger. This market, though still called Nkwo, had long spilled over into Eke, Oye, and Afo with the coming of civilization and the growth of the town into a big palm-oil port. In spite of this encroachment, however, it was still busiest on its original Nkwo day, because the deity who had presided over it from antiquity still cast her spell only on her own day- let men in their greed spill over themselves. It was said that she appeared in the form of an old woman in the centre of the market just before cock-crow and waved her magic fan in the four directions of the earth- in front of her , behind her, to the right and to the left- to draw the market men and women from distant places. And they came bringing the produce of their lands- palm-oil and kernels, kola nuts, cassava, mats, baskets and earthen ware pots; and took home many –coloured cloths, smoked fish, iron pots and plates. These were the forest peoples. The other half of the world who lived by the great rivers came down also – by canoe with a dozen or more people in it; sometimes it was a lone fisherman and his wife in a small vessel from the swift – flowing Anambara. They moored their canoe on the bank and sold their fish, after much haggling. The woman then walked up the steep banks of the river to the heart of the market to buy salt and oil and, if the sales had been very good, even a length of cloth. And for her children at home she bought bean cakes and mai-mai, which the Igara women cooked. As evening approached , they took up their paddles again and paddled away, the water shimmering in the sunset and their canoe becoming smaller and smaller in the distance until it was just a dark crescent on the water’s face and two dark bodies swaying forward and backward in it. Umuru then was the meeting place of the forest people who were called Igbo and the alien riverain folk whom the Igbo called Olu and beyond whom the world stretched in indefiniteness.
Julius Obi was not a native of Umuru. He had come like countless others from some bush village inland. Having passed his Standard Six in a mission school he had come to Umuru to work as a clerk in the offices of the all-powerful European trading company which bought palm-kernels at its own price and sold cloth and metalare , also at its own price. The offices were situated beside the famous market so that in his first or two weeks Julius had to learn to work within its huge enveloping hum. Sometimes when the Chief Clerk was away he walked to the window and looked down on the vast ant-hill activity. Most of these people were not there yesterday, he thought, and yet the market had been just as full. There must be many, many people in the world to be able to fill the market day after day like this. Of course they say not all who came to the great market were real people. Janet’s mother,Ma, had said so.
“Some of the beautiful young women you see squeezing through the crowds are not pople like you or me but mammy-wota who have their town in the depths of the river,” she said. “You can always tell them, because they are beautiful with a beauty that is too perfect and tool cold. You catch a glimpse of her with the tail of your eye, then you blink and look properly, but she has already vanished in the crowd.”
Julius thought about these things as he now stood at the window looking down on the silent , empty market. Who would have believed that the great boisterous market could ever be quenched like this? But such was the strength of Kitikpa, the incarnate power of smallpox. Only he could drive away all those people and leave the market to the flies.
When Umuru was a little village, there was an age-grade who swept its market square every Nkwo day. But progress had turned it into a busy, sprawling, crowded and dirty river port, a no-man’s land where strangers outnumbered by far the sons of the soil, who could do nothing about it except shake their heads at this gross perversion of their prayer. For indeed they had prayed – who will blame them- for their town to grow and prosper. And it had grown. But there is good growth and there is bad growth. The belly does not bulge out only with food and drink; it might be the abominable disease, which could end by sending its sufferer out of the house even before he was fully dead.
The strangers who came to Umuru came for trade and money, not in search of duties to perform, for they had those in plenty back home in their village which was real home.
And as if this did not suffice, the young sons and daughters of Umuru soil, encouraged by schools and churches were behaving no better than the strangers. They neglected all their old tasks and kept only the revelries.
Such was the state of the town when Kitikpa came to see it and to demand the sacrifice the inhabitants owed the gods of the soil. He came in confident knowledge of the terror he held over the people. He was an evil deity, and boasted it. Lest he be offended those he killed were not killed but decorated, and no one dared weep for them. He put an end to the coming and going between neighbors and villages. They said, “Kitikpa is in that village,” and immediately it was cut off by its neighbours.
Julius was sad and worried because it was almost a week since he had seen Janet, the girl he was going to marry. Ma had explained to him very gently that he should no longer go to see them” until this thing is over, by the power of Jehovah.”(Ma was a very devout Christian convert and one reason why she approved of Julius for her only daughter was that he sang in the choir of the CMS church.)
“You must keep to your rooms,” she had said in hushed tones, for Kitikpa strictly forbade any noise or boisterousness. “You never know whom you might meet on the streets. That family has got it.” She lowers her voice even more and pointed surreptitiously at the house across the road whose doorway was barred with a yellow palm-frond.” He has decorated one of them already and the rest were moved away today in a big government lorry.”
Janet walked a short way with Julius and stopped; so he stopped too. They seemed to have nothing to say to each other yet they lingered on. The she said goodnight and he said goodnight. And they shook hands, which was very odd, as though parting for the night were something new and grave.
He did not go straight home, because he wanted desperately to cling, even alone, to this strange parting. Being educated he was not afraid of whom he might meet, so he went to the bank of the river and just walked up and down it. He must have been there a long time because he was still there when the wooden gong of the night-mask sounded. He immediately set out for home, half- walking and half-running, for night-masks were not a matter of superstition; they were real. They chose the night for their revelry because like the bat’s their ugliness was great.
In his hurry he stepped on something that broke with a slight liquid explosion. He stopped and peeped down at the footpath. The moon was not up yet but there was a faint light in the sky which showed that it would not be long delayed. In this half- lighthe saw that he had stepped on an egg offered in sacrifice. Someone oppressed by misfortune had brought the offering to the crossroads in the dusk. And he had stepped on it. There were the usual young palm-fronds around it. But Julius saw it differently as a house where the terrible artist was at work. He wiped the sole of his foot on the sandy path and hurried away, carrying another vague worry in his mind. But hurrying was no use now; the fleet-footed mask was already abroad. Perhaps he was impelled to hurry by the threatening imminence of the moon. Its voice rose high and clear in the still night air like a flaming sword . it was yet a long way away, but Julius knew that distances vanished before it. So he made straight for the cocoyam farm beside the road and threw himself on his belly, in the shelter of the broad leaves. He had hardly done this when he heard the rattling staff of the spirit and a thundering stream of esoteric speech. He shook all over. The sounds came bearing down on him, almost pressing his face into the moist earth. And now he could hear the footsteps. It was as if twenty evil men were running together. Panic sweat broke all over him and he was nearly impelled to get up and run. Fortunately he kept a firm hold on himself…In no time at all the commotion in the air and on the earth - the thunder and torrential rain, the earthquake and flood- passed and disappeared in the distance on the other side of the road.
The next morning, at the office of Chief Clerk, a son of the soil spoke bitterly about last night’s provocation of Kitikpa by the headstrong youngsters who had launched the noisy fleet-footed mask in defiance of their elders who knew that Kitikpa would be enraged and then…
The trouble was that the disobedient youths had never yet experienced the power of Kitikpa themselves; they had only heard of it. But soon they would learn.
As Julius stood at the window looking out on the emptied market he lived through the terror of that night again. It was barely a week ago but already it seemed like another life, separated from the present by a vast emptiness. This emptiness deepened with every passing day. On this side of it stood Julius, and on the other Ma and Janet whom the dread artist decorated.
Chignon
Chi Chun
When Mother was young, she would weave her tresses in to a long thick braid. During the day she wound it in to a shell-like spiral and piled it high on the back of her head. Evenings she undid it and let it hang down her back. When I slept I would snuggle up close to Mother's shoulder and playfully wrap my fingers around the tip of her braid. My nose was continuously assailed by whiffs of "Twin Sister" hair oil mingled with the smell of her hair. Though the odor was rather unpleasant, it was part of the security I felt in lying by Mother's side, and I would fall quickly off to sleep.
Once a year, on the seventh day of the seventh lunar month, Mother would thoroughly wash her hair. According to rural custom, hair could never be washed on ordinary days as the dirty water would flow down to where the king of the underworld would store it up to make one drink after death. Only if the hair was washed on the seventh day of the seventh lunar month could the dirty water pass harmlessly out to the Eastern Sea.
So on that day, all the women in the village let their hair hang loose to dry over their shoulders. Some of the women with flowering hair were as beautiful as vineyard fairies, others as hideous as monsters. Take my fifth uncle's wife for example-a squat, withered old hag. On her nearly-bald head she used black ash to draw in square hairline, and then painted her scalp pitch black. Thus when shampooing her hair, the charcoal was completely washed away, and out shone the half-bald, shiny crown of her head, fringed with thin wisps of hair fluttering down her back. She would hobble to and fro helping my mother fix dinner. I never dared glance her way.
But Mother's raven hair was like a length of satin falling over her shoulders. When a breeze blew, locks of shorter hair would sometimes sweep against her soft white cheeks. She would squint, gather the hair in her hand, and smooth it back, but soon another puff of wind would pass by. Mother was near-sighted, and when she narrowed her eyes in a squint, she was remarkably beautiful. I thought, if only Father were at home to see Mother's glossy black hair, he certainly would go out and buy a pair of sparkling diamond hair clips for her to wear. Mother probably would have worn them a while, then, embarrassed, have taken them out. That pair of diamond clips would then become part of my headdress when I played bride.
Father returned home soon afterward, bringing not the diamond clips, but a concubine. Her skin was white and delicate, her head of soft cloud-like hair even blacker, shinier than Mother's. The hair on her temples seemed like folded cicada wings half-concealing her ears. Her hair, brushed back and knotted in a horizontal "S" chignon, covered the back of her head like a huge bat. She presented Mother with a pair of emerald earrings, but Mother just let me play with them, though. I thought she was probably saving them because they were too nice.
After the family moved to Hangchow, Mother didn't have to work in the kitchen anymore. Frequently Father would want her to come out and entertain guests. Her sever hairstyle really seemed out of place, so Father insisted that she change. Mother asked her friend Aunt Chang to style an "Abalone Fish" for her. At that time, the "Abalone Fish" was the style old ladies wore. Mother had just turned thirty, yet she wanted to look like an old lady. When the concubine saw it, she would only smirk, while Father would constantly wrinkle his brow. Once when we were alone, I quietly implored, "Mother, why don't you also do your hair into an 'S' twist and wear the emerald earrings that Auntie gave you?" Mother replied solemnly, "Your mother is a country woman, unsuited for that kind of modern fashion. How can I wear such fancy earrings?"
When "Auntie" washed her hair, she would never select the seventh day or the seventh lunar month. Within one month she washed her hair many times. After washing, a maidservant standing to one side would lightly swing a large pink feather fan to and fro. Her soft hair would float out making me feel light and dizzy. Father would sit on a sandalwood lounge chair puffing away on his water pipe. He often turned around to look at her and his eyes sparkled with laughter. "Auntie" dressed her hair with "Three Flowers" oil, and the perfume floated in all directions. Then she sat straight up facing the mirror, and entwined a glossy "S" chignon around her head. I stood to one side, entranced. She handed me a bottle of the "Three Flower" oil and asked me to take it to Mother. But Mother just put it in the back of the closet saying, "The smell of this new hair oil turns my stomach."
Mother couldn't always trouble Aunt Chang, so she styled a taut “Abalone Fish" herself. It turned out about the same as her first twist. Father didn't like it; even I thought it was awful.
At that time, "Auntie" had already hired a Mrs. Liu to dress her hair. Mrs. Liu wore a huge red bamboo pin in her hair and puffed and panted as her large duck feet carried her short plump body along. She came every morning at ten to fashion all different kinds of coiffures for "Auntie"-the "Phoenix," "Feather Fan," "Entwined Heart Twist," "Shallow Tail," etc. She was always changing the style. The coiffures accentuated "Auntie's" delicate skin and willowy waist, which more and more drew delightful smiles from Father. Mrs. Liu advised Mother, "Madam, why don't you dress your hair a little more fashionably?" But Mother, shaking her head, pursed her thick lips, and walked away without saying a word.
Soon afterward Aunt Chang brought a regular hair dresser, a Mrs. Chen, to Mother. She was older than Mrs. Liu, and had a huge flat yellowish face with two protruding shiny gold teeth. At a glance one could tell she was the kind of woman who liked to gossip. She would ramble on about people from old Mr. Chao's elder daughter-in-law down to General Li's third concubine, all while dressing Mother's hair. Mother sat wilted on her chair, not uttering a single word, but I listened with great relish. Sometimes Mrs. Liu and Mrs. Chen came together. Mother and the concubine would sit back to back in front of the breeze way and have their hair dressed. One could hear "Auntie" and Mrs. Liu talking and laughing; on our side. Mother just sat resting with her eyes closed. Mrs. Chen brushed and combed with less and less vigor, and soon quit altogether. I distinctly heard her tell Mrs. Liu, "This antique of a country hick-she still wants her hair combed and dressed." I was so angry that I cried, but didn't dare tell Mother.
From then on, I stood on a low stool and brushed Mother's hair into the simplest "Abalone Fish." I would stand on tiptoe and watch Mother in the mirror. Her face was already not as plump and radiant as when we lived in the country and she hurried about in the kitchen. Her eyes fixed on the mirror, she gazed at herself absent-mindedly, never again squinting and smiling. I gather Mother's hair a lock at a time and brushed, but I already knew that one little yellow willow comb couldn't brush away Mother's heartsickness-because from the other side of the breezeway came floating across the occasional tinkling sound of Father's and "Auntie's" laughter.
After I grew up I left home to pursue my studies. When I returned home for summer and winter vacations, I would sometimes dress Mother's hair. I gathered her hair together in the palm of my hand and felt it becoming sparser and sparser. I remembered back in my childhood when on the seventh day of the seventh lunar month I saw Mother's soft raven tresses flowing over her shoulders, her face filled with joy, and I couldn't help but feel heartbroken. When Mother saw me return home, her distressed look occasionally gave way to smiles. No matter what, the happiest time was when Mother and daughter were together.
When I was studying in Shanghai, Mother wrote to say she had rheumatism and couldn't lift her arms. Even the simplest twist came out all wrong so she just cut her sparse locks off. I clutched her letter in my hands, and as I sat bathed in desolate moonlight beside the dormitory window, I cried in loneliness. The late autumn night breeze blew over me and I felt cold. I draped the soft sweater that Mother had knit for me over my shoulders and warmth crept over me from head to toe. But Mother was old now; I couldn't always be at her side. She has cut off her thinning hair, but how could she trim away a heart full of sorrows?
Soon afterward, "Auntie" came to Shanghai on business and brought me a picture of Mother, I hadn't seen her for three years-her hair had already turned silvery white. Saddened, I stared dumbly at the picture, yet had no way of pouring out my feelings to "Auntie," who stood before me. Almost as if sympathizing with my thoughts of Mother, she rambled on and on about Mother's present condition, saying her heart was weak and she was troubled again with rheumatism, so she was not as strong as before. I bowed my head and listened in silence, thinking that it was she who had made my mother unhappy all her life. But I didn't hate her anymore, not even a little bit, because since Father's death, Mother and "Auntie" had unpredictably become friends in their mutual suffering. Mother had stopped thing her long ago.
I looked at her closely. She wore a gray padded cloth gown, with a white flower tucked in her hair. Her nape no longer was draped with the rich and versatile "Phoenix" or "Entwined Heart" twists of days past, but was covered by a very simple "Banana Roll." She didn't apply makeup, and appeared sad and lonely. I couldn't help feeling unlimited pity for her, because she wasn't a woman like Mother, contenting herself with a tranquil life. Having followed Father close to twenty years, she had enjoyed honor and wealth, but once her support was gone, her feeling of emptiness and loss was even greater than Mother's.
After coming to Taiwan, "Auntie" became my only relative, and we lived together for many years. In the breezeway of our Japanese-style house I watched her sit by the window brushing her hair. She occasionally pounded her shoulder blade with her fist saying, "My hands are really stiff. I'm truly old now." Old-she too was old. Her black hair, like a silken cloud in those days, had now gradually thinned out, only a wisp remained, and that was speckled with gray. I remembered the days of their rivalry in Hang chow, when she and Mother sat back to back in the corridor, having their hair coiffure, not exchanging a word. In a flash all that was past. In the human world, what then is love and hate? Old decrepit "Auntie" had finally started on a vague journey in an unknown direction. Her life at this time was lonelier than anyone else's.
Startled, I stared at her, and remembering her lovely horizontal "S" chignon, said, "Let me brush it into a new style, all right?" But she gave a nervous little laugh saying, "What do I still want to wear fancy styles for? That's for you young people."
Can I stay forever young? What she had said is already more than ten years past. I'm far from being young anymore, already callous and wooden toward love, hate, greed, and foolishness in this world. The days with Mother slip farther and farther behind me. "Auntie's ashes," too, are deposited in a lonely temple somewhere. What, after all, is eternal in this world, and what is worth being serious about?
Ah Mah
Shirley Geok-Lin Lim
Grandmother was smaller than
Me at eight. Had she
Been child forever?
Helpless, hopeless, chin sharp
As a knuckle, fan face
Hardly half-opened, not a scrap
Of fat anywhere: she tottered
In black silk, leaning on
Handmaids on two tortured
Fins. At sixty, his sons all
Married, grandfather bought her.
Soochow flower song girl.
Every bone in her feet
Had been broken, bound tighter
Than any neighbor’s sweet
Daughter’s. ten toes and instep
Curled inwards, yellow petals
Of chrysanthemum, wrapped
In gold cloth. he bought the young
Face, small knobby breasts
He swore he’d not dress in sarong
Of maternity. Each night
He held her feet in his palms
Like lotus in the tight
Hollow of celestial lakes.
In his calloused flesh, her
Weightless soles, cool and slack.
Clenched in his stranger’s lever.
Mexican Masks
Octavio Paz
The Mexican, whether young or old, criollo or mestizo, general or laborer or lawyer, seems to me to be a person who shuts himself away to protect himself: his face is a mask and so is his smile. In his harsh solitude, which is both barbed and courteous, everything serves him as a defense: silence and words, politeness and disdain, irony and resignation. He is jealous of his own privacy and that of others, and he is afraid even to glance at his neighbor, because a mere glance can trigger the rage of these electrically charged spirits. He passes through life like a man who has been flayed; everything can hurt him, including words and the very suspicion of words. His language is full of reticences, of metaphors and allusions, of unfinished phrases, while his silence is full of tints, folds, thunderheads, sudden rainbows, indecipherable threats. Even in a quarrel he prefers veiled expressions to outright insults: “A word to the wise is sufficient.” He builds a wall of indifference and remoteness between reality and himself, a wall that is no less impenetrable for being invisible. The Mexican is always remote, from the world and from other people. And also from himself.
The speech of our people reflects the extent to which we protect ourselves from the outside world: the ideal of manliness is never to “crack,” never to back down. Those who “open themselves up” are cowards. Unlike other people, we believe that opening oneself up is a weakness or a betrayal. The Mexican can bend, can bow humbly, can even stoop, but he cannot back down, that is, he cannot allow the outside world to penetrate his privacy. The man who backs down is not to be trusted, is a traitor or a person of doubtful loyalty; he babbles secrets and is incapable of confronting a dangerous situation. Women are inferior beings because, in submitting, they open themselves up. Their inferiority is constitutional and resides in their sex, their submissiveness, which is a wound that never heals.
Hermeticism is one of the several recourses of our suspicion and distrust. It shows that we instinctively regard the world around us to be dangerous. This reaction is justifiable if one considers what our history has been and the kind of society we have created. The harshness and hostility of our environment, and the hidden, indefinable threat that is always afloat in the air, oblige us to close ourselves in, like those plants that survive by storing up liquid within their spiny exteriors. But this attitude, legitimate enough in its origins, has become a mechanism that functions automatically. Our response to sympathy and tenderness is reserve, since we cannot tell whether those feelings are genuine or simulated. In addition, our masculine integrity is as much endangered by kindness as it is by hostility. Any opening in our defenses is a lessening of our manliness.
Our relationships with other men are always tinged with suspicion. Every time a Mexican confides in a friend or acquaintance, every time he opens himself up, it is an abdication. He dreads that the person in whom he has confided will scorn him. Therefore confidences result in dishonor, and they are as dangerous for the person to whom theya re made as they are for the person who makes them. We do not drown ourselves, like Narcissus, in the pool that reflects us; we try to stop it up instead. Our anger is prompted not only by the fear of being used by our confidants – that fear is common to everyone – but also by the shame of having renounced our solitude. To confide in others is to disposses oneself; when we have confided in someone who is not worthy of it, we say, “I sold myself to So-and-so.” That is, we have “cracked,” have let someone into our fortress. The distance between one man and another, which creates mutual respect and mutual security, has disappeared. We are at the mercy of the intruder. What is worse, we have actually abdicated.
All these expressions reveal that the Mexican views life as combat. This attitude does not make him any different from anyone else in the modern world. For other people, however, the manly ideal consists in an open and aggressive fondness for combat, whereas we emphasize defensiveness, the readiness to repel any attack. The Mexican macho, -- the male – is a hermetic being, closed up in himself, capable of guarding both himself and whatever has been confided to him. Manliness is judged according to one’s invulnerability to enemy arms or the impacts of the outside world. Stoicism is the most exalted of our military and political attributes. Our history is full of expressions and incidents that demonstrate the indifference of our heroes toward suffering or danger. We are taught from childhood to accept defeat with dignity, a conception that is certainly not ignoble. And if we are not all good stoics like Juarez and Cuauhtemoc, at least we can be resigned and patient and long-suffering. Resignation is one of our most popular virtues. We admire fortitude in the face of adversity more than the most brilliant triumph.
This predominance of the closed over the open manifests itself not only as impassivity and distrust, irony and suspicion, but also as love for Form. Form surrounds and sets bounds to our privacy, limiting its excesses, curbing its explosions, isolating and preserving it. Both our Spanish and Indian heritages have influenced our fondness for ceremony, formulas, and order. A superficial examination of our history might suggest otherwise, but actually the Mexican aspires to create an orderly world regulated by clearly stated principles. The turbulence and rancor of our political struggles prove that juridical ideas play an important role in our public life, and his formalities are very apt to become formulas. This is not difficult to understand. Order – juridical, social, religious or artistic – brings security and stability, and a person has only to adjust to the models and principles that regulate life; he can express himself without resorting to the perpetual inventiveness demanded by a free society. Perhaps our traditionalism, which is one of the constants of our national character, giving coherence to our people and our history, results from our professed love for Form.
The ritual complications of our courtesy, the persistence of classical Humanism, our fondness for closed poetic forms (the sonnet and the decima, for example), our love for geometry in the decorative arts and for design and composition in paining, the poverty of our Romantic art compared with the excellence of our Baroque art, the formalism of our political institutions, and, finally, our dangerous inclination toward formalism, whether social, moral or bureaucratic, are further expressions of that tendency in our character. The Mexican not only does not open himself up to the outside world, he also refuses to emerge from himself, to “let himself go.”
Sometimes Form chokes us. During the past century the liberals tried vainly to force the realities of the country into the strait jacket of the Constitution of 1857. The results were the dictatorship of Porifirio Diaz and the Revolution of 1910. In a certain sense the history of Mexico, like that of every Mexican, is a struggle between the forms and formulas that have been imposed on us and the explosions with which our individuality avenges itself. Form has rarely been an original creation, an equilibrium arrived at through our instincts and desires rather than at their expense. On the contrary, our moral and juridical forms often conflict with our nature, preventing us from expressing ourselves and frustrating our true wishes.
Our devotion to Form, even when empty, can be seen throughout the history of Mexican art from pre-Conquest times to the present. Antonio Castro Leal, in his excellent study of Juan Ruiz de Alarcon, shows how our reserved attitude toward Romanticism – which by definition is expansive and open – revealed itself as early as the seventeenth century, that is, before we were even aware of ourselves as a nation. Alarcon’s contemporaries were right in accusing him of being an interloper, although they were referring more to his physical characteristics that to the singularity of his work. In effect, the most typical portions of his plays deny the values expressed by his Spanish contemporaries. And his negation contains in brief what Mexico has always opposed to Spain. His plays were an answer to Spanish vitality, which was affirmative and splendid in that epoch, expressing itself in great Yes! to history and the passions. Lope de Vega exalted love, heroism, the superhuman, the incredible; Alarcon favored other virtues, more subtle and bourgeois: dignity, courtesy, a melancholy stoicism, a smiling modesty. Lope was very little interested in moral problems: he loved action, like all his contemporaries. Later, Calderon showed the same contempt for psychology. Moral conflicts and the hesitations and changes of the human soul were only metaphors in a theological drama whose two personae were Original Sin and Divine Grace. In Alarcon’s most representative plays, on the other hand, Heaven counts for little, as little as the passionate wind that sweeps away Lope’s characters. The Mexican tells us that human beings are a mixture, that good and evil are subtly blended in their souls. He uses analysis rather than synthesis: the hero becomes a problem. In several of his comedies he takes up the question of lying. To what extent does a liar really lie? Is he really trying to deceive others? Is he not the first victim of his deceit, and the first to be deceived? The liar lies to himself, because he is afraid of himself. By discussing the problem of authenticity, Alarcon anticipated one of the constant themes of Mexican thinking, later taken up by Rodolfo Usigli in his play The Gesticulator.
Neither passion nor Grace triumph in Alarcon’s world. Everything is subordinated to reason, or to reasonableness, and his archetypes are those of a morality that smiles and forgives. When he replaces the vital, Romantic values of Lope with the abstract values of a universal and reasonable morality, is he not evading us, tricking us? His negation, like that of his homeland, does not affirm our individuality vis-à-vis that of the Spaniards. The values that Alarcon postulates belong to all men and are a Greco-Roman inheritance as well as a prophecy of the bourgeois code. They do not express our nature or resolve our conflicts: they are Forms we have neither created nor suffered, are mere masks. Only in our own day have we been able to answer the Spanish Yes with a Mexican Yes rather than with an intellectual affirmation containing nothing of our individual selves. The Revolution, by discovering popular art, originated modern Mexican painting, and by discovering the Mexican language it created a new poetry.
While the Mexican tries to create closed worlds in his politics and in the arts, he wants modesty, prudence, and a ceremonious reserve to rule over his everyday life. Modesty results from shame at one’s own or another’s nakedness, and with us it is an almost physical reflex. Nothing could be further from this attitude than that fear of the body which is characteristic of North American life. We are not afraid or ashamed of our bodies; we accept them as completely natural and we live physically with considerable gusto. It is the opposite of Puritanism. The body exists, and gives weight and shape to our existence. It causes us pain and it gives us pleasure; it is not a suit of clothes we are in the habit of wearing, not something apart from us: we are our bodies. But we are frightened by other people’s glances, because the body reveals rather than hides our private selves. Therefore our modesty is a defense, like our courtesy’s Great Wall of China or like the fences of organ-pipe cactus that separate the huts of our country people. This explains why prudence is the virtue we most admire in women, just as reserve is in men. Women too should defend their privacy.
No doubt an element of masculine vanity, the vanity of the “senor,” of the lord or chieftain (it is an inheritance from both our Indian and Spanish ancestors), enters into our conception of feminine modesty. Like almost all other people, the Mexican considers woman to be an instrument, sometimes of masculine desires, sometimes of the ends assigned to her by morality, society and law. It mist be admitted that she has never been asked to consent to these ends and that she participates in their realization only passively, as a “repository” for certain values. Whether as prostitute, goddess, grande dame or mistress, woman transmits or preserves – but does not believe in – the values and energies entrusted to her by nature or society. In a world made in man’s image, woman is only a reflection of masculine will and desire. When passive, she becomes a goddess, a beloved one, a being who embodies the ancient, stable elements of the universe: the earth, motherhood, virginity. When active, she is always function and means, a receptacle and a channel. Womanhood, unlike manhood, is never an end in itself.
In other countries these functions are realized in public, often with something of a flair. There are countries that revere prostitutes or virgins, and countries that worship mothers; the grande dame is praised and respected almost everywhere. In contrast, we prefer these graces and virtues to be hidden. Woman should be secretive. She should confront the world with and impassive smile. She should be “decent” in the face of erotic excitements and “long suffering” in the face of adversity. In either event her response is neither instinctive nor personal: it conforms to a general model, and it is the defensive and passive aspects of this model, as in the case of the macho, that are emphasized, in a gamut ranging from modesty and “decency” to stoicism, resignation and impassivity.
Our Spanish-Arabic inheritance is only a partial explanation of this conduct. The Spanish attitude toward women is very simple. It is expressed quite brutally and concisely in these two sayings: “A woman’s place is in the home, with a broken leg” and “Between a female saint and a male saint, a wall of mortared stone.” Woman is a domesticated wild animal, lecherous and sinful from birth, who must be subdued with a stick and guided by the “reins of religion.” Therefore Spaniards consider other women – especially those of a race or religion different from their own – to be easy game. The Mexican considers woman to be a dark, secret and passive being. He does not attribute evil instincts to her; he even pretends that she does not have any. Or, to put it more exactly, her instincts are not her own but those of the species, because she is an incarnation of the life force, which is essentially impersonal. Thus it is impossible for her to have a personal, private life, for if she were to be herself – if she were to be mistress of her own wishes, passions or whims – she would be unfaithful to herself. The Mexican, heir to the great pre-Columbian religions based on nature, is a good deal more pagan than the Spaniard, and does not condemn the natural world. Sexual love is not tinged with grief and horror in Mexico as it is in Spain. Instincts themselves are not dangerous; the danger lies ion any personal, individual expression of them. And this brings us back to the idea of passivity: woman is never herself, whether lying stretched out or standing up straight, whether naked or fully clothed. She is an undifferentiated manifestation of life, a channel for the universal appetite. In this sense she has no desires of her own.
North Americans also claim that instincts and desires do not exist, but the basis of their pretense is different from ours, even the opposite of it. The North American hides or denies certain parts of his body and, more often, of his psyche: they are immoral, ergo they do not exist. By denying them he inhibits his spontaneity. The Mexican woman quite simply has no will of her own. Her body is asleep and only comes really alive when someone awakens her. She is an answer rather than a question, a vibrant and easily worked material that is shaped by the imagination and sensuality of the male. In other countries women are active, attempting to attract men through the agility of their minds or the seductivity of their bodies, but the Mexican woman has a sort of hieratic calm, a tranquility made up of both hope and contempt. The man circles around her, courts her, sings to her, sets his horse (or his imagination) to performing caracoles for her pleasure. Meanwhile she remains behind the veil of her modesty and immobility. She is an idol, and like all idols she is mistress of magnetic forces whose efficacy increases as their source of transmission become more and more passive and secretive. There is a cosmic analogy here: woman does not seek, she attracts, and the center of attraction is her hidden, passive sexuality. It is a secret and immobile sun.
The falsity of this conception is obvious enough when one considers the Mexican woman’s sensitivity and restlessness, but at least it does not turn her into an object, a mere thing. She is a symbol, like all women, of the stability and continuity of the race. In addition to her cosmic significance she has an important social role, which is to see to it that law and order, piety and tenderness are predominant in everyday life. We will not allow anyone to be disrespectful to women, and although this is doubtless a universal notion, the Mexican carries it to its ultimate consequences. Thanks to woman, many of the asperities of “man-to-man” relationships are softened. Of course we should ask the Mexican woman for her own opinion, because this “respect” is often a hypocritical way of subjecting her and preventing her from expressing herself. Perhaps she would usually prefer to be treated with less “respect” (which anyway is granted to her only in public) and with greater freedom and truthfulness; that is, to be treated as a human being rather than as a symbol or function. But how can we agree to let her express herself when our whole way of life is a mask designed to hide our intimate feelings?
Despite her modesty and the vigilance of society, woman is always vulnerable. Her social situation – as the repository of honor, in the Spanish sense – and the misfortune of her “open” anatomy expose her to all kinds of dangers, against which neither personal morality nor masculine protection is sufficient. She is submissive and open by nature. But, through a compensation-mechanism that is easily explained, her natural frailty is made a virtue and the myth of the “long-suffering Mexican woman” is created. The idol – always vulnerable, always vulnerable, always in process of transforming itself into a human being – becomes a victim, but a victim hardened and insensible to suffering, bearing her tribulations in silence. (A “long-suffering” person is less sensitive to pain than a person whom adversity has hardly touched.) Through suffering, our women become like our men: invulnerable, impassive, and stoic.
It might be said that by turning what ought to be a cause for shame into a virtue, we are only trying to relieve our guilt feelings and cover up a cruel reality. This is true, but it is also true that in attributing to her the same invulnerability that we strive to achieve ourselves, we provide her with a moral immunity to shield her unfortunate anatomical openness. Thanks to suffering and her ability to endure it without protest, she transcends her condition and acquires the same attributes as men.
It is interesting to note that the image of the mala mujer – the “bad woman” – is almost always accompanied by the idea of aggressive activity. She is not passive like the “self-denying mother,” the “waiting sweetheart,” the hermetic idol: she comes and goes, she looks for men and then leaves them. Her extreme mobility, through a mechanism similar to that described above, renders her invulnerable. Activity and immodesty unite to petrify her soul. The mala is hard and impious and independent like the macho. In her own way she also transcends her physiological weakness and closes herself off from the world.
It is likewise significant that masculine homosexuality is regarded with a certain indulgence insofar as the active agent is concerned. The passive agent is an abject, degraded being. This ambiguous conception is made very clear in the word games or battles – full of obscene allusions and double meanings – that are so popular in Mexico City. Each of the speakers tries to humiliate his adversary with verbal traps and ingenious linguistic combinations, and the loser is the person who cannot think of a comeback, who has to swallow his opponent’s jibes. These jibes are full of aggressive sexual allusions; the loser is possessed, is violated, by the winner and the spectators laugh and sneer at him. Masculine homosexuality is tolerated, then, on condition that it consists in violating a passive agent. As with heterosexual relationships, the important thing is not to open oneself up and at the same time to break open one’s opponent.
It seems to me that all of these attitudes, however different their sources, testify to the “closed” nature of our reactions to the world around us or to our fellows. But our mechanisms of defense and self-preservation are not enough, and therefore we make use of dissimulation, which is almost habitual with us. It does not increase our passivity; on the contrary, it demands an active inventiveness and must reshape itself from one moment to another. We tell lies for the mere pleasure of it, like all imaginative peoples, but we also ell lies to hide ourselves and to protect ourselves from intruders. Lying plays a decisive role in our daily lives, our politics, our love-affairs and our friendships, and since we attempt to deceive ourselves as well as others, our lies are brilliant and fertile, not like the gross inventions of other peoples. Lying a tragic game in which we risk a part of our very selves. Hence it is pointless to denounce it.
The dissembler pretends to be someone he is not. His role requires constant improvisation, a steady forward progress across shifting sands. Every moment he must remake, re-crated, modify the personage he is playing, until at last the moment arrives when reality and appearance, the lie and the truth, are one. At first the pretense is only a fabric of inventions intended to baffle our neighbors, but eventually it becomes a superior – because more artistic – form of reality. Our lies reflect both what we lack and what we desire, both what we are not and what we would like to be. Through dissimulation we come closer to our model, and sometimes the gesticulator, as Usigli saw so profoundly, becomes one with his gestures and thus makes them authentic. The death of Professor Rubio changed him into what he wanted to be: General Rubio, a sincere revolutionary and a man capable of giving the stagnating Revolution a fresh impetus and purity. In the Usigli play Professor Rubio invents a new self and becomes a general, and his lie is so truthlike that the corrupt Navarro has no other course than to murder him, as if he were murdering his old commander, General Rubio, all over again. By killing him he kills the truth of the Revolution.
If we can arrive at authenticity by means of lies, an excess of sincerity can bring us to refined forms of lying. When we fall in love we open ourselves up and reveal our intimate feelings, because an ancient tradition requires that the man suffering from love display his wounds to the loved one. But in displaying them the lover transforms himself into an image, an object he presents for the loved one’s – and his own – contemplation. He asks her to regard him with the same worshipful eyes with which he regards himself. And now the looks of others do not strip him naked; instead, they clothe him in piety. He has offered himself as a spectacle, asking the spectators to see him as he sees himself, and in so doing he has escaped from the game of love, has saved his true self by replacing it with an image.
Human relationships run the risk, in all lands and ages, of becoming equivocal. This is especially true of love. Narcissism and masochism are not exclusively Mexican traits, but it is notable how often our popular songs and sayings and our everyday behavior treat love as falsehood and betrayal. We almost always evade the perils of a naked relationship be exaggerating our feelings. At the same time, the combative nature of our eroticism is emphasized and aggravated. Love is an attempt to penetrate another human being, but it can only be realized if the surrender is mutual. It is always difficult to give oneself up; few persons anywhere ever succeed in doing so, and even fewer transcend the possessive stage to know love for what it actually is: a perpetual discovery, an immersion in he waters of reality, and an unending re-creation. The Mexican conceives of love as combat and conquest. It is not so much an attempt to penetrate reality by means of the body as it is to violate it. Therefore the image of the fortunate lover – derived, perhaps, from the Spanish Don Juan – is confused with that of the man who deliberately makes use of his feelings, real or invented, to win possession of a woman.
Dissimulation is an activity very much like that of actors in the theater, but the true actor surrenders himself to the role he is playing and embodies it fully, even though he sloughs it off again, like a snake its skin, when the final curtain comes down. The dissembler never surrenders or forgets himself, because he would no longer be dissembling if he became one with his image. But this fiction becomes an inseparable – and spurious – part of his nature. He is condemned to play his role throughout life, since the pact between himself and his impersonation cannot be broken except by death or sacrifice. The lie takes command of him and becomes the very foundation of his personality.
To simulate is to invent, or rather to counterfeit, and thus to evade our condition. Dissimulation requires greater subtlety: the person who dissimulates is not counterfeiting but attempting to become invisible, to pass unnoticed without renouncing his individuality. The Mexican excels at the dissimulation of his passions and himself. He is afraid of others’ looks and therefore he withdraws, contracts, becomes a shadow, a phantasm, an echo. Instead of walking, he glides; instead of stating, he hints; instead of replying, he mumbles; instead of complaining, he smiles. Even when he sings he does so – unless he explodes, ripping open his breast – between clenched teeth and in a lowered voice, dissimulating his song:
And so great is the tyranny
of this dissimulation
that although my heart swells
with profoundest longing,
there is challenge in my eyes
and resignation in my voice.
Perhaps our habit of dissimulating originated in colonial times. The Indians and mestizos had to sing in a low voice, as in the poem by Alfonso Reyes, because “words of rebellion cannot be heard well from between clenched teeth.” The colonial world has disappeared, but not the fear, the mistrust, the suspicion. And now we disguise not only our anger but also our tenderness. When our country people beg one’s pardon, they say: “Pretend it never happened, senor.” And we pretend. We dissimulate so eagerly that we almost cease to exist.
In its most radical forms dissimulation become mimicry. The Indian blends into the landscape until he is an indistinguishable part of the white wall against which he leans at twilight, of the dark earth on which he stretches out to rest at midday, of the silence that surrounds him. He disguises his human singularity to such an extent that he finally annihilates it and turns into a stone, a tree, a wall, silence, and space. I am not saying that he communes with the All like a pantheist, or that he sees an individual tree as an archetype of all trees, what I am saying is that he actually blends into specific objects in a concrete and particular way.
Mimicry is a change of appearance rather than of nature, and it is significant that the chosen representation is either of death or of inert space. The act of spreading oneself out, of blending with space, of becoming space, is a way of rejecting appearances, but it is also a way of being nothing except Appearance. The Mexican is horrified by appearances, although his leaders profess to love them, and therefore he disguises himself to the point of blending into the objects that surround him. That is, he becomes mere Appearance because of his fear of appearances. He seems to be something other than what he is, and he even prefers to appear dead or nonexistent rather than to change, to open up his privacy. Dissimulation as mimicry, then, is one of the numerous manifestations of our hermeticism. The gesticulator resorts to a mask, and the rest of us wish to pass unnoticed. In either case we hide our true selves, and sometimes deny them. I remember the afternoon I heard a noise in the room next to mine, and asked loudly: "Who is in there?" I was answered by the voice of a servant who had recently come to us from her village: "No one, Señor. I am."
We dissimulate in order to deceive ourselves, and turn transparent and phantasmal. But that is not the end of it: we also pretend that our fellow-man does not exist. This is not to say that we deliberately ignore or discount him. Our dissimulation here is a great deal more radical: we change him from somebody into nobody, into nothingness. And this nothingness takes on its own individuality, with a recognizable face and figure, and suddenly becomes Nobody.
Don No One, who is Nobody's Spanish father, is able, well fed, well respected; he has a bank account, and speaks in a loud, self-assured voice. Don No One fills the world with his empty, garrulous presence. He is everywhere, and has friends everywhere. He is a banker, an ambassador, a businessman. He can be seen in all the salons, and is honored in Jamaica and Stockholm and London. He either holds office or wields influence, and his manner of not-being is aggressive and conceited. On the other hand, Nobody is quiet, timid, and resigned. He is also intelligent and sensitive. He always smiles. He always waits. When he wants to say something, he meets a wall of silence; when he greets someone, he meets a cold shoulder; when he pleads or weeps or cries out, his gestures and cries are lost in the emptiness created by Don No One's interminable chatter. Nobody is afraid not to exist: he vacillates, attempting now and then to become Somebody. Finally, in the midst of his useless gestures, he disappears into the limbo from which he emerged.
It would be a mistake to believe that others prevent him from existing. They simply dissimulate his existence and behave as if he did not exist. They nullify him, cancel him out, turn him to nothingness. It is futile for Nobody to talk, to publish books, to paint pictures, to stand on his head. Nobody is the blankness in our looks, the pauses in our conversations, the reserve in our silences. He is the name we always and inevitably forget, the eternal absentee, the guest we never invite, the emptiness we can never fill. He is an omission, and yet he is forever present. He is our secret, our crime, and our remorse. Thus the person who creates Nobody, by denying Somebody's existence, is also changed into Nobody. And if we are all Nobody, then none of us exists. The circle is closed and the shadow of Nobody spreads out over our land, choking the Gesticulator and covering everything. Silence-the prehistoric silence, stronger than all the pyramids and sacrifices, all the churches and uprisings and popular songs-comes back to rule over Mexico.
From Itsuka
by Joy Kogawa
The year that Obasan dies, 1975, I look in the mirror and see an old-maid orphan, a barren speck of dust. Aunt Emily’s bimonthly phone call is the kite string, the long-distance umbilical cord that keeps me connected to a mothering earth. “We’re going on a trip, Nomi me gnome,” she announces at Christmas. “Put in your notice. You’re quitting last week in June.”
“But…”
“No ‘buts.’ You’re quitting. That’s it.” I can see her flying down to tie me up and cart me off. In the end it isn’t so much her vehemence that uproots me from my flowerpots as my own drooping limbs. She has everything planned. A job – a room in her apartment where she intends me to live. “But first,” she says, “we’re going to Japan. We’ll visit your mother’s grave. We owe that to her. After that we’ll spend a week in the one place in the world that feels the way home ought to feel. You’ll love Hawaii.”
She arrives before the school term is over, sends a heap of my stuff to the Salvation Army, and the afternoon that school is out, we set off in a rented car. A teary goodbye from Alex and his mother, ten-minute stops at the Makinos’ and the Regehrs’, one last wave to Granton’s Main Street and we’re on our way, over the prairies, and through the Rockies on the highways that Uncle and Father built. Aunt Emily points out a spot near Revelstoke where a friend died in a road-building accident. After two days we enter the magic of Vancouver, the lost city of my childhood with its wonderful Stanley Park.
Then the next morning, I’m giddy with excitement as we board on a plane. It’s my first flight – my first time out of Canada.
A swift streak of rain and we enter a vast nothingness. The world outside is a blank sheet paper – not a cloud lump, not a star. It’s white and deeper white from every angle. After a few moments, except for the buzzing of the plane, I’d swear we’re not moving at all, suspended like a giant hummingbird. Or is it a giant mosquito? Any moment a flyswatter could swipe through the clouds.
Aunt Emily is scribbling notes. She’s writing an article for Bridge. The Multicultural Voice from St. John’s College. Bridge, according to Aunt Emily, is a verb, “taking you from one side to otherness.” “We were flung to the winds, not to disappear, but to learn about injustice,’ she says. “Injustice is the chasm Bridge has to cross.” Every time she speaks I have to release my ears from the squealing symphonic music coming through the plastic stethoscope plugged into the armrest.
We’re sifting through the white mist now and come into a bright world, Mother’s deep royal blue, while far below, between clouds that lie thick as meringue, is the blue-white speckled expanse of the Pacific Ocean. “Whether we like it or not, Nomi,” she says, “Japanese Canadians are east-west bridges. We span the gap. It’s our fate and our calling-to be hyphens--to be diplomats.” “Diplomats, eh” I say noncommittally. It’s hardly a category that fits either of us.
Aunt Emily says that on this trip, she intends to look for some of the four thousand that Canada exiled to Japan in a final rampage at the end of the war. She wants to find Min Kawai. “Our Michelangelo-ko,” she says softly and there’s a desperate look of tenderness in her eyes as she stares into space. “You wouldn’t believe what a spectacular artist he was, Nomi.”
From her description it seems Min Kawai may have always been unstable – a bit too bright, a bit too sensitive. His mother indulged him, she says. It isn’t likely that he emerged from the womb round and brown and placid. Even when he was a small child his drawings were odd and arresting. She remembers one he gave her of a translucent bird. “Birds, birds, birds,” she says. “His notebooks were full of birds with Japanese eyes.”
He was barely twenty when the police caught him leaving Sandon, the sunless ghost-town internment camp. He was imprisoned for a year. His family couldn’t stand the shame. Like most Japanese Canadians, they might be somewhere on the prairies. And Min, she heard, had suffered a breakdown. As far as she knows all Japanese Canadian mental patients were shipped en bloe to Japan.
After a scrunched-up day/night of small-tray eating and fitful dozing we descend and land with a bump and an alarming roar. Thank heavens, the earth once more. Mr. and Mrs. Omoto, friends of Aunt Emily are at the airport. “My sister’s daughter,” Aunt Emily says, introducing me. “Ah, Ah. How do you do?” They bow, smile, nod and simultaneously organize a handshake, their precise hands neatly slicing the air.
All around the crowded bustling airport are clusters of black-haired neatly dressed Japanese – the men in dark, business suits, some children in navy-blue school uniforms, pigeon-toed, bobbing like gophers, breathless, polite.
Everything surprises me, especially the smallness of everyone. I’m so used to looking up at the world that now I feel I’m suddenly in a world of midgets. But very alert midgets. There’s an antlike kind of electricity. A skinny man close by is saying, “Nh, nh, aha aha aha,” in quick little attentive gasps and nodding with each eager sound. I think of the phrase I used to give my grade three class when they were practicing their penmanship. “The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog.’
There’s an odd sense of having flown backward into a Lilliputian dream world. Images from infancy come filtering through channels of memory – a gently angled head denoting playfulness to a small child, the instant-as-thought hands and the ready offer to carry things.
There’s an attention to detail. Emotional detail. This is the country of my ancestors, where tenderness and toughness coexist in the same instant and sensitivity is an institution.
The air is full of paradox. The female announcer is speaking over the loudspeaker in the completely non-aggressive voice of a child and I remember the studied humility of the issei, every breeze bending them along the necessary paths of protocol and propriety.
Aunt Emily in Japan, this land of silk, is an eastern version of English tweed. She’s more eccentric than diplomatic. I wonder if we Canadian cousins will be accepted here. Mr. Omoto produces the week’s itinerary and Aunt Emily immediately starts making changes, pouring sand into the well-oiled Japanese world of schedules. As usual, Aunt Emily is no Emily Post. “We must visit my sister’s grave first.’ “Ah, ah,” Mr. and Mrs. Omoto say in unison, nodding urgent agreement. “But first,” Aunt Emily says, lifting her finger, “western-style toiletto, please.” Mr. and Mrs. Omoto direct us, walking in front and behind, smiling all the way to an airport washroom, then out to a perfectly polished car with white doilies on the headrests. We drive down the crowded highway in the steamy haze and maze, and enter the bustling Tokyo trot - a never-ending race of small cars, small trucks, bicycles, carts. From the slow clanking cowbells of southern Alberta to Japan’s crawling, zapping traffic in one fell swoop.
It’s a dizzying distance. We spend our first night in a ryokan where the toilet is flat on the floor and separate plastic bathroom slippers are kept inside the sliding bathroom door. Our plain lows, futons and sheets that I feel like a cardboard.
Before supper, Aunt Emily and I sink into a deep hot bath and I am taking Japan in through my nostrils – the fragrance of the tatami, the pungent odor of latrines, and the moist wood and water smells of the bath.
The next day we come to the halls of the private hospital in mountains south of Tokyo, Miss Best’s once-upon-a-time orphanage. My mother’s secret place. This is where I yearned to be through all the days of my searching childhood, a place of bamboo trees and tea bushes where Mother and Grandma ended their days in hiding, hoarding to themselves the story of hibakusha, the survivors of the atom bomb. Here on this time-heavy soil, they breathed and died, concerned to us by dream alone. I’m sleepwalking as we turn off the crowded street and enter a densely treed yard with a white stuccoes building at the back. The doors are open. We remove shoes, put on slippers. At the end of a short hall, above the archway to a chapel, is stern-faced Naomi Best in a photograph identical to the one I have. So this is where she lived and toiled and loved and died – this English Canadian foreigner in a foreign land.
In a group portrait hanging in the hall, she is seated on a bench in front of her orphanage, leaning forward on a cane. I have an urge to stand at attention and salute her. This regal austere woman was my mother’s collaborator in silence. Is it the rock that compels the rain? Is it inviolacy that births the rage to know? Aunt Emily pursued her sister with a torrent of letters. She spent hours feverishly fitting together the patchwork picture, seeking clues, seeking the person-to-person word. After the war, in 1949, Nakayama-sensei visited Japan. The only news he brought back was that Miss Best, now feeble, and her orphanage had survived. The house where Mother had stayed had been destroyed in the B-29 bombings. Obasan and Uncle were shocked to see from the slides how old and bent “Besto-sensei” had become. I remember our sending parcels and parcels of food to the orphanage that year. But as for Mother and Grandma, it was only a picture of shadows that finally emerged.
Aunt Emily sifted through the rubble heap of postwar Japan and came to the silence that was Mother’s final will. Mother covered her trail with leaves and commanded the mist. She would not be followed. Yet not all footprints disappeared. A letter from Grandma said they were in Nagasaki when the bomb fell. Mother was disfigured. The flesh melted from her beautiful face. She preferred to have her children think she had perished.
One of the Miss Best’s helpers wrote of the arrival at the orphanage late one night of two Japanese Canadian women from Nagasaki. One was English-speaking. Her head was covered in shawl. They would not give their names. Aunt Emily immediately cabled for more information, sent pictures and simultaneously applied to the Canadian government for help. All fruitless efforts. The next communication said the women were no longer there. Not long after, a barely legible letter from Miss Best came saying the women had recently died.
Finally there was word from a missionary couple that their names had been found in the graveyard where Miss best was buried. We know so little of their last days, except that they lived within a wall of silence, a grave before the grave. A haunted place. Mother hid herself from the view. She scuttled though the night. By not communicating, she believed, she spared her children pain. A strange faith. There is in life, I have learned, a speech that will not be hidden, a word that will be heard.
This day in Japan, I hear Mother in the sounds of footsteps, in the swishing of the broom outside, in the light laugh of a little boy. I sense her in the touch of my hand as I lean against the wall and in the sudden twirl of a cool breeze in the stifling hall and in one perfectly round white stone on the stand where the visitor’s book lies.
When I pick up the pen to sign my name, my hand shakes so much that the N ends up looking like a V. I can’t finish my signature. That’s Mama’s fault. Mr. Omoto notices but looks away quickly so I will not be embarrassed and walks outside with his hands behind his back.
At the high hillside grave overlooking a highway, Mr. and Mrs. Omoto and Aunt Emily talk softly. They tell me to take my time while I wander among the broken headstones. I lean against a maple tree which I’m told must have been planted in 1954 by a young Canadian missionary couple. Perhaps it’s weight of centuries of belief that descends upon me in the late morning mist. I kneel by the maple tree and know. We’re, all of us, dead and alive. We dead and we the living, are here among the trees, the colored snails, the moss, the singing insects. We’re everywhere here in the sound of distant traffic, in the long-haired grass, in the filtered sunlit haze. In this short visit, on this hot muggy day, within this one hour at Mama’s grave, I meet the one I need to meet.
Nakayama-sensei has often said that it is not necessary for people to clamor and shout for their voices to be heard. He says there is time enough and listening enough. “We will all hear what must be heard.’
I think of his words from time to time throughout the rest of our whirlwind two weeks in Japan, and then as we go on to Hawaii. “Too much the world intrudes upon our listening. But patience,” Nakayama-sensei used to say. “You will be told what you are made ready to hear.”
