A/CONF.213/18 entre ellos la Convención sobre los Derechos del Niño 20 Los oradores también

In arguing for productive melancholia, hybridisation acts as a vital process in addressing the multiple subjectivities of Chinese American identity. A process that marks the history of survival in relationships of unequal domination, hybridisation represents the empowered means of coming to terms with America’s uneven power

relations (Lowe 67).This is best exemplified in The Woman Warrior in the scene in

which Maxine confronts ‘the [Chinese] girl who does not speak’ (WW 156). While it reveals Maxine’s acting out the simultaneous pressures of conforming to American assertive ways of speaking up and the Chinese axiom that ‘a ready tongue is an evil’ (WW 148), this scene also elicits a productive moment of racial melancholia in that the examined bodies of Chinese American girls throws up the intricate connection between race, nationality and gender in articulating hybridised Chinese, American, and female identity which unfolds within the space of the ‘girls-only’ lavatory. This scene in which a Chinese American girl bullies another, by demanding that the other girl responds to the question ‘What is your name?’ (WW 159), conveys the

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Maxine’s frustrated impatience. The importance of hybridity is further instantiated in the fact that both girls attend an American and Chinese school, suggesting thus the complementary side-by-side existence of the girls’ Chinese and American selves.

The depathologising of melancholy, that is, the shifting away from the view of melancholia as irredeemably pathological and solely associated with the negative experience of loss and injury--is thus subverted and challenged in the Asian

American topos of compound or hybridised identities. In particular, the complexities lying within the notion of a hybridised identity are manifested in the multiple kinds of subjectivity which are palpable within the interplay of femaleness, nationhood and

ethnic background.19 The demands of these three attributes, operating in a dialogic

interplay which stresses the existence of Chinese-ness, American-ness, and female- ness alongside one another, are negotiated to augment Maxine’s sense of self and to point to the multiple subjectivities which inform an understanding of her identity. It follows that while Maxine identifies with her Chinese ethnicity by employing the first-person plural ‘we’ in using the collective phrasal noun ‘we Chinese girls’ (WW 25), she is also quick to embrace an ‘American-feminine’ self (WW 155). Maxine demonstrates a love-hate relationship with these modes of identification as she ratifies and refutes, extols and vilifies, the different components of her Chinese, American and female traits, which provide her with a sense of who she is.

19 _{In addressing the multiple subjectivities of Chinese Americans, various Asian American theorists}

point out the distinctions between ‘hybridisation’ and ‘hyphenation’ of identity. David Palumbo-Liu, Frank Chin and Jeffrey Paul Chan warn against the use of the hyphen. Palumbo Liu argues that creative schizziness of ‘Chinese Americans’ (without the use of the hyphen) is a sign of health compared to the pathological schizoid personality of ‘Chinese(-)Americans’. Liu Asian/American 302-4, 295-336; Chin and Chan 65-79.

84 Conclusion

Central to my project is the movement away from victim consciousness and psychic internalisation to a socially-defined space of intergenerational

enfranchisement, where the boundaries between mourning and melancholia, voices and silences, memory and history are blurred. These reach a point of fluidity to enable transformative agencies to be reworked into the Asian American agenda of decolonising the mind and body. Such a project of decolonisation is heavily aligned with the purposes of depathologising melancholia to encapsulate the daily modes of survival and the possibility for a healthy psychic state.

As a means of survival, depathologised melancholia’s transformative potential and positive agency are empowering channels in the reclamation of the denied legitimacy of minority subject’s identities and histories within the national fabric of America. The sense of lost histories and histories of loss mediated across generations from mother to daughter, yet suspended too in the processes of

displacement and immigration, delineate the ways in which these origins of loss exist as transmitted memory. It is this transmission of memory which enables Asian American women to free themselves from restrictive interpretative enclosures determined by cultural, social and white patriarchy.

Hence, the transformative forces in depathologised melancholia provide active forms of agencies that facilitate the employing of alternative strategies in order to manage loss within social, political and national realities. Racist ideology that is culturally indoctrinated and yet culturally subverted is legislated within America’s institutions and constitutional practices. By creating an open channel to transcend categorical borders of fixity, transformative melancholia collapses

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previously impervious boundaries to signal the healthy intermingling of multiple realms which provide a sense of legitimate existence in Asian American hybridised identity. Through the intergenerational voices of memory between mother and daughter, the further intersubjective contact established through this means provides the social support for the transformation of racial melancholia from pathologised losses to a healthy sense of gains. More than just a simple reframing of perspective, transformative racial melancholia signals not just a positive mental approach and attitude to losses, but it also describes an actual mechanism deployed within social circles to empower both the individual and community who are defined by white America as racialised other.

86 CHAPTER 2

History, Loss, and Homecoming in Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictee (1981) and Joy Kogawa’s Obasan (1982).

The pain inherent within the process of articulation, and by extension its associated process of reclamation to recover what Frantz Fanon in The Wretched of the Earth calls the loss of ‘local cultural originality’ (18), can be closely linked to what Nancy Peterson has labeled ‘history as wound’ (1). In other words, memory, which is employed in the cultural act of story-telling, constructs self-identity as well as history through narrative masking and revelation of physical and psychic wounds suffered by melancholic bodies of racialisation. Given that painful memories are dealt with and physical injuries are addressed, the narrative construction of history through the telling and sharing of stories enacts a process of identity reclamation. In this process of identity construction, the tangible and psychic pain inherent in an obfuscated history as well as a history of loss signal the way history inflicts and redresses wounds. Historical wounds are dressed and acknowledged in the

communal act of shared story-telling which works the literary construction of self- identity in articulate voices –in both words and silences. By applying Nancy Peterson’s concept of a ‘double burden’ (1) to Asian American literary works – a term which she coins to encompass how writers are handed the dual task of writing both literature and history – we can see how the role played by Asian American

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writers like Hak Kyung Cha and Kogawa involves witnessing painful moments of history as well as documenting the silences, gaps and absences in history within their narratives. From the vantage point of novels allowing for ‘imaginative speculation’ (Peterson 9), these writers are able to deconstruct as well as (re)construct the past in the present, and thus use their narrative flexibility to create a potential community where their readers play a crucial part in nurturing a collective memory that was previously lost/erased in America’s larger national history.

In Loss, David L. Eng and David Kazanjian point out that melancholia’s inability to ‘get over’ the lost object and ‘continuous engagement with loss and its remains’ provides the creative ability to ‘generate sites for memory and history, for the rewriting of the past and the reimagining of the future’ (4). This facilitating role of melancholia is indicative of the positive transformative energies available within various losses sustained, whether these losses are a result of dominant oppressive forces or a delayed transmission of stories between generations. By examining the melancholic losses suffered in a number of traumatic events such as the Korean War and the Japanese internment experience, Dictee and Obasan rewrite the historic past by revisiting memory. These texts’ introspective interrogation on what exactly is lost explores how the ‘lost object’ comprises both a lost history and a history of loss. The project of recuperation in the telling of stories picks up these remains of loss and works in producing creative sites for the redemption of history, and the projection and representation of history via psychical containers of memory. By putting forward counter-hegemonic discourses that foreground specific periods of historical injustice, Cha and Kogawa’s texts are preoccupied with rewriting the past to transform and transcend traditional notions of authoritative history, thereby their novels point to the dual effects of the past on the present and future.

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Both Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictee (1982) and Joy Kogawa’s Obasan (1981) are engaged in a transformational dialogue through their transactional interchanges on the themes of history, trauma, and witnessing as these texts deal with the trope of female subjectivity and the concept of home. I have paired an Asian American text together with an Asian Canadian text in order to engender readings that will highlight and complement their similarities as well as differences in treating these issues, which contribute significantly to the process of depathologising racial identity within the collective environment of female communality. At the time in which both texts were published, i.e. in the period of the 1980s, ethnic female autobiographies within minority literature were increasing in prominence (Schneider). In Dictee, the women from Cha’s family background as well as successful female figures in history are placed centre stage, in order to articulate their real-life experiences of pain and the transcendence of suffering. In Obasan, the women who feature formidably in the life of the protagonist, like the figures of Aunt Emily, Aya Obasan and Mother, speak of the trauma and rich history of the past which inform Naomi’s indelible memory of them. Furthermore, Kogawa’s text is interested in presenting an alternative or counter-hegemonic history to work against, as well as alongside, official versions of the past. Employing an array of writing styles and narrative techniques, from Dictee’s experimental, non-linear, and fragmented style to Obasan’s conventional novelistic form with its numbered chapters and first-person narrator, these novels also incorporate auto/biographical

impulses within their empowering modes of narrative.1

1 _{Lisa Lowe in ‘Decolonization, Displacement and Disidentification’ avers that the stylistics of}

fragmentation and non-linearity signify more than just the refraining from the style of transparent transmission, as it connotes a kind of writing she calls ‘decolonizing’. In this regard, Dictee may be interpreted as operating on a metacritical level. It should also be noted that the narrative technique of using flashbacks which Obasan employs further testifies to ‘decolonizing writing’ which serves as an

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The term ‘auto/biographical’ which I use to describe the narrative texts of Dictee and Obasan employs the solidus ‘/’ to suggest the fluidity and permeability between the autobiographical and biographical literary modes. Critics have been quick to identify the way Dictee and Obasan are often read as autobiographies (Grice 86; Lowe 129). However, given the self-referential and second-hand narrative accounts of additional women supplementing the autobiographical voice of the author-cum-narrator, these texts destabilise the genre of Asian American autobiographies in their inclusion of further autobiographical and biographical

voices of women within the narrator’s realm of influence. Hence, both first-hand and

second-hand accounts of the life-stories of mothers, aunties, and other female historical figures add to Cha’s autobiographical voice in Dictee and to the narrative voice of protagonist Naomi who acts as Kogawa’s fictive biographer in her novel Obasan.

Using David Goellnicht’s terminology ‘theoretico-narratives’ (351) helps us understand the way Dictee and Obasan destabilise genre expectations and genre. Although Goellnicht distinguishes between autobiographical fiction and theoretical fictions or fictionalised theory, I see the two literary forms as operating in

conjunction with each other in Dictee and Obasan. Theoretico-narrative refers to the way in which the historical and remembered past is recounted in narratives, and yet a revision in the strategies of representing past is also subscribed. In other words, Cha and Kogawa’s texts operate as more than autobiographical narratives as they engage in and challenge the various historical and memory discourses that exist outside the confines of the narrative text. The incorporation of alternative strategies within these texts constitutes a slippage of genre boundaries that signals the way fiction operates anti-normative, anti-representational strategy characterising counter-narratives’ working displacing ‘official’ accounts of narratives as well as histories.

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as theoretical discourse. Dictee’s and Obasan’s eclectic narrative style and

multivocal perspectives serve to complement the narrator’s act of self-representation of both historical past and personalised memory. Their narrative texts challenge generic categories, hence the use of the solidus (/) to indicate such a slippage. Female subjectivity is forged through the many layers of female voices, thereby challenging phallocentric laws of genre as well as androcentric discourses of identity. By their auto/biographical mode, Dictee and Obasan create new identities by using textual spaces to facilitate dialogic interaction amongst women brought together by common suffering and loss. Anderson points out the connection between writing and identity when she states the need to ‘create a space for the yet to be written feminine self’ (13).In Dictee and Obasan, while narrators speak to and about the problem of identity, narratorial voice is supplemented by the voices of other women. I argue that this biographical aspect of auto/biography constitutes a form of theoretico-fiction which is at work when narrative texts present both personal and historical discourses within remembered accounts of the past.

Dictee and Obasan effect a testimonial narrative of history by exploring the powers of expression in both the tropes of silence and speech. By translating the silence of historical experience into literary forms, Cha and Kogawa bear witness to the traumas of Korean Americans and Japanese Americans as a result of the racial loss suffered in moments of historical crises such as the Korean War, Japanese relocation, and the internment experience in North America. Historicising these experiences entails the tracing of these moments not only as past events but also as present effects or what I shall refer to as the ‘traumatic presence of the past’. Literary theorists have pointed to how the past cannot be made inseparable from the present,

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as past instances feed into the present via sharing a mobile, fluid relationship.2 Ideas of submission, obedient acquiescence, and reticent fortitude attached to Korean American and Japanese Canadian female identity are reworked as historical events are told using counter-hegemonic voices of women united in their experience of loss. Hence, Dictee and Obasan records past pain as historical fact, and voicing serves as the critical tool in literature to bear witness to the racial loss encountered in lived experiential history.

The animated eloquence with which Cha and Kogawa articulate and embody the diffused voices point to the multiple and collective body of testimonial truths tapped within the writing and speaking of history. In their ‘anti-documentary document’ (Cheng 145), Cha and Kogawa present personal history as an additional force to contend with officially-sanctioned history. This presentation of personal history is done through an eclectic and esoteric writing style. In other words, experientially based histories are mediated and represented through an eclectic mix of written forms, pictorial images, and diversified voices, which all posit the narratives as a counter-tactic to the hidden loss and buried occlusion of historical discourses on Asian American subjectivity and identity. By presenting and proffering ‘another way of seeing’ (Mulvey 28), history is written and narrated in such a way as to pose a different perspective that marks the expanding realms of historical culture and historical representation. In this regard, these narratives

exemplify what Nancy Harstock terms a ‘standpoint epistemology’3 (283) in which

2 _{Walter Benjamin, amongst others, elucidates on this reciprocal relationship shared between past and}

present. See Benjamin. Benjamin famously comments on the blurring of past and present when writing that ‘the angel of history’ appears in the present ‘moment of

danger’.<http://www.sfu.ca/~andrewf/CONCEPT2.html>

3 _{Harstock’s coinage of a feminist or women’s ‘standpoint epistemology’ takes women's experiences,}

instead of men's, to be the point of departure. In other words, ‘women’s experience’ is the starting point from which to construct knowledge. By uniting several feminist epistemologies, standpoint feminism criticises the dominant conventional epistemologies of hegemonic rules and systems of

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countervalorisation provided by women’s experiences brings forth unsanctioned historical narratives, which are treated as primary accounts of the world seen from the margins.

Cha’s experimental narrative and Kogawa’s novel place the concerns of a loss of history, an erasure of identity, and the immediate presence of trauma at the centre of their narrative works. In their engagement with ‘self life-writing’, these auto/biographical texts point towards the shared processes of self-formation, self-

representation and self-presentation within America’s socio-historical literary space.4

Put simply, Dictee and Obasan both forge a cultural map which plots the

heterogeneous voices of non-subjects of history that have been officially subjugated and repressed by a white patriarchal dominant culture. In placing the periphery at the centre, these texts accentuate and demonstrate how contradictions within the

recording, mediation, and production of history provide grounds for antagonism to the unjust demands made upon deracinated racialised groups to remain in complicit silence and quiet acquiescence to heteronormative mainstream history. In this light, I argue that Cha and Kogawa’s texts bring awareness to the way literature functions as counter-histories, counter-narratives, and counter-discourses that open further

possibilities for subverting patriarchal, androcentric, and heteronormative limits imposed on raciliased subjects within Asian American literary texts.

powers. Contemporary standpoint feminism acknowledges the multiple differences dividing women that make it impossible to claim a single or universal ‘women’s experience’. See Hartsock; and Clough.

4 _{For more on autobiographical novels functioning in restorative ways, see Minh-ha; and Grice. Grice}

writes, “The autobiographical form functions as a kind of ‘talking cure’, as autobiographical discourse offers a way of bearing testimony as well as extending its authority as a discourse of ‘truth’ to these women’s stories.’ (p. 159) Here, given that Grice’s use of ‘talking cure’ refers to Freudian collapsing of melancholia into mourning, I would like to point out that my argument contrarily emphasises the productive management of loss in the concept of transformative melancholia which depathologises melancholia but stops short of reversing or converting it into mourning. Whilst mourning does away with loss in its firm avowal of loss, transformative melancholia uses loss for ego formation in individuals and communities.

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In this chapter, I examine the ways Dictee and Obasan continue the progression of the mother-daughter dyadic relationship which characterise many Asian American literary narratives (Grice 35-75). As interventions and additions in the ongoing debate on identity politics and feminist culture, Asian American novels position themselves within theoretical and analytical discussions in which

psychoanalytical thinking and contemporary feminist thought open new ways of