by Joy Kogawa
After wandering for some time, she found a wooden water pipe dribbling a steady stream. She held Tomio's mouth to it and allowed him to drink as much as he wished though she had heard that too much water was not good. She unstrapped the still unconscious baby from her back. Exhausted, she drank from the pipe, and gathering the two children in her arms, she looked out at the burning city and lapsed into a sleep so deep
she believed she was unconscious.
When she awakened, she was in the home of her niece's relatives and the baby was being fed barley water. The little boy was nowhere.
Almost immediately, Grandma set off to look for the child. Next day she returned to the area of her niece's home and every day thereafter she looked for Mother and the lost boy, checking the lists of the dead, looking over the unclaimed corpses. She discovered that her niece's husband was among the dead.
One evening when she had given up the search for the day, she 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 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.
The little boy was never found. Mother was taken to a hospital and was expected to die, but she survived. During one night she vomited yellow fluid and passed a great deal of blood. For a long time—Grandma does not say how long—Mother wore bandages on her face. When they were removed, Mother felt her face with her fingers, then asked for a cloth mask. Thereafter she would not take off her mask from morning to night.
"At this moment," Grandma writes, "we are preparing to visit Chieko-chan in the hospital." Chieko, four years old in 1949, waited daily for their visit, standing in the hospital corridor, tubes from her wrist attached to a bottle that was hung above her. A small bald-headed girl. She was dying of leukemia.
"There may not be many more days," Grandma concludes.
After this, what could have happened? Did they leave the relatives in Nagasaki? Where and how did they survive?
When Sensei is finished reading, he folds and unfolds the letter, nodding his head slowly.
I put my hands around the teapot, feeling its round warmth against my palms. My skin feels hungry for warmth, for flesh. Grandma mentioned in her letter that she saw one woman cradling a hot-water bottle as if it were a baby.
Sensei places the letter back in the cardboard folder and closes it with the short red string around the tab.
"That there is brokenness," he says quietly. "That this world is brokenness. But within brokenness is the unbreakable name. How the whole earth groans till Love returns."
I stand up abruptly and leave the room, going into the kitchen for some more hot water. When I return, Sensei is sitting with his face in his hands.
Stephen is staring at the floor, his body hunched forward motionless. He glances up at me then looks away swiftly. I sit on a stool beside him and try to concentrate on what is being said. I can hear Aunt Emily telling us about Mother's grave. Then Nakayama-sensei stands and begins to say the Lord's Prayer under his breath. "And forgive us our trespasses—forgive us our trespasses—" he repeats, sighing deeply, "as we forgive others.... " He lifts his head, looking upwards. "We are powerless to forgive unless we first are forgiven. It is a high calling my friends—the calling to forgive. But no person, no people is innocent. Therefore must we forgive one another."
I am not thinking of forgiveness. The sound of Sensei's voice grows as indistinct as the hum of distant traffic. Gradually the room grows still and it is as if I am back with Uncle again, listening and listening to the silent earth and the silent sky as I have done all my life.
I close my eyes.
Mother. I am listening. Assist me to hear you.
thirty-eight
Silent Mother, you do not speak or write. You do not reach through the night to enter morning, but remain in the voicelessness. From the extremity of much dying, the only sound that reaches me now is the sigh of your remembered breath, a wordless word. How shall I attend that speech, Mother, how shall I trace that wave?
You are tide rushing moonward pulling back from the shore. A raft rocks on the surface bobbing in the dark. The water fills with flailing arms that beckon like seaweed on the prow. I sit on the raft begging for a tide to land me safely on the sand but you draw me to the white distance, skyward and away from this blood-drugged earth.
By the time this country opened its pale arms to you, it was too late. First, you could not, then you chose not to come. Now you are gone. Tonight, Aunt Emily has said a missionary found your name on a plaque of the dead. A Canadian maple tree grows there where your name stands. The tree utters its scarlet voice in the air. Prayers bleeding. Its rustling leaves are fingers scratching an empty sky.
There is no date on the memorial stone. There are no photographs ever again. "Do not tell Stephen and Naomi," you say. "I am praying that they may never know."
Martyr Mother, you pilot your powerful voicelessness over the ocean and across the mountain, straight as a missile to our hut on the edge of a sugar-beet field. You wish to protect us with lies, but the camouflage does not hide your cries. Beneath the hiding I am there with you. Silent Mother, lost in the abandoning, you do not share the horror. At first, stumbling and unaware of pain, you open your eyes in the red mist and sheltering
a dead child, you flee through the flames. Young Mother at Nagasaki, am I not also there?
In the dark Slocan night, the bright light flares in my dreaming. I hear the screams and feel the mountain breaking. Your long black hair falls and falls into the chasm. My legs are sawn in half. The skin on your face bubbles like lava and melts from your bones. Mother, I see your face. Do not turn aside.
Mother, in my dreams you are a maypole. I dance with a long paper streamer in my hand. But the words of the May Day song are words of distress. The unknown is a hook that pierces the bone. Thongs hang down in the hot prairie air. Silence attends the long sun dance.
Grandma sits at a low table in a bombed country writing words she does not intend me to hear. "The child," she writes, "is not well." She does not declare her own state of health. 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 windows. Some people return home. Some do not. War, they all say, is war, and some people survive.
No one knows the exact day that you die. Aunt Emily writes and receives no replies. All that is left is your word, "Do not tell...."
Obasan and Uncle hear your request. They give me no words from you. They hand me old photographs.
You stand on a street corner in Vancouver in a straight silky dress and a light grey coat. On your head is a wide-brimmed hat with a feather and your black shoes have one strap and a buckle at the side. I stand leaning into you, my dress bulging over my round baby belly. My fat arm clings to your leg. Your skirt hides half my face. Your leg is a tree trunk and I am branch, vine, butterfly. I am joined to your limbs by right of birth, child of your flesh, leaf of your bough.
The tree is a dead tree in the middle of the prairies. I sit on its roots still as a stone. In my dreams, a small child sits with a wound on her knee. The wound on her knee is on the back of her skull, large and moist. A double wound. The child is forever unable to speak. The child forever fears to tell. I apply a thick bandage but nothing can soak up the seepage. I beg that the woundedness may be healed and that the limbs may learn to dance. But you stay in a black and white photograph, smiling your yasashi smile.
Gentle Mother, we were lost together in our silences. Our wordlessness was our mutual destruction.
Nakayama-sensei is still praying softly, a long long prayer. "Father, if your suffering is greater than ours, how great
that suffering must be," he is saying. "How great the helplessness. How we dare not abandon the ones who suffer, lest we again abandon You." His voice rises and falls as it did when he was praying at Grandma Nakane's funeral in Slocan. "We are abandoned yet we are not abandoned. You are present in every hell. Teach us to see Love's presence in our abandonment. Teach us to forgive."
Obasan's eyes are closed and her hands are moving back and forth across the grey cardboard folder—to erase, to soothe.
I am thinking that for a child there is no presence without flesh. But perhaps it is because I am no longer a child I can know your presence though you are not here. The letters tonight are skeletons. Bones only. But the earth still stirs with dormant blooms. Love flows through the roots of the trees by our graves.
thirty-nine
Five-thirty a.m. A hollow night's watching. I have lain awake on a mat beside Obasan, listening to the sounds of fitful sleeping in the house. Aunt Emily is in my room and Stephen is on the living-room couch. Obasan has been sitting up most of the night. She is kneeling on her bed rubbing her hands over her knees, her nemaki half open.
By her pillow is her chocolate box of photographs. Uncle's ID card sits on top of the pile. She is shining her flashlight and looking at the pictures one by one—the photograph of Mother and me, Stephen with Claudine and Aunt Emily, Father and Uncle as young men, a picnic in Slocan.
"Samishi, Obasan?" I ask. "Lonely?"
She does not hear me.
Outside the heavily curtained window, the sky is flooded with night. There are no stars.
I am remembering a fugue Uncle used to love—a melody Father composed in New Denver which Stephen developed—a quiet light staccato, clear and precise with long pauses between the notes of the melody. Each time it was played it sounded almost as if it were being practiced for the first time. A light piece, more sad than happy, but quiet and dignified, as Uncle was, as Mother was. A gentle tune. How well they both hid the cacophony life wrote in their bones.
After the rotting of the flesh, what is the song that is left? Is it the strange gnashing sound of insects with their mandibles moving through the bone marrow? Up through the earth come tiny cries of betrayal. There are so many betrayals—departures, deaths, absences—there are all the many absences within which we who live are left.
Is it enough that we were once together briefly in our early Vancouver days? Is it enough that Obasan shared her lifetime with Uncle, and all these Granton years, through the long winters in the hut that could not be warmed, in the summer heat, her skin becoming the colour of earth, through spring wind and chinook, through sleet and hail? They were constant together in all that shifting weather. They attended one another.
But now? Dead hands can no longer touch our outstretched hands or move to heal.
Obasan is small as a child and has not learned to weep. Back and forth, back and forth, her hands move on her knees. She looks at me unsteadily, then hands me the ID card with Uncle's young face. What ghostly whisperings I feel in the air as I hold the card. "Kodomo no tame—for the sake of the children —gaman
shi masho—let us endure." The voices pour down like rain but in the middle of the downpour I still feel thirst.
Somewhere between speech and hearing is a transmutation of sound. The rainlight drops to earth as salt. Obasan rubs her eyes and tries to speak but the thick saliva coats her throat and she does not have the strength to cough. Her round dry mouth is open. A small accepting ‘o’.
What stillness in this pre-dawn hour. The air is cold. In all our life of preparation we are unprepared for this new hour filled with emptiness. How thick the darkness behind which hides the animal cry. I know what is there, hidden from my stare. Grief's weeping. Deeper emptiness.
Grief wails like a scarecrow in the wild night, beckoning the wind to clothe his gaunt shell. With his outstretched arms he is gathering eyes for his disguise. I had not known that Grief had such gentle eyes—eyes reflecting my uncle's eyes, my mother's eyes, all the familiar lost eyes of Love that are not his and that he dons as a mask and a mockery.
This body of grief is not fit for human habitation. Let there be flesh. The song of mourning is not a lifelong song.
Father, Mother, my relatives, my ancestors, we have come to the forest tonight, to the place where the colours all meet—red and yellow and blue. We have turned and returned to your arms as you turn to earth and form the forest floor. Tonight we picked berries with the help of your sighted hands. Tonight we read the forest braille. See how our stained fingers have read the seasons, and how our serving hands serve you still.
My loved ones, rest in your world of stone. Around you flows the underground stream. How bright in the darkness the brooding light. How gentle the colours of rain.
Obasan's eyes are closed as she continues kneeling on the bed, her head bowed. In the palm of her open hand is Uncle's ID card. Her lips move imperceptibly as she breathes her prayers.
Through the open doorway I can see the faint shaft of light from the kitchen across the living-room floor, straight as a knife cutting light from shadow, the living from the dead.
I tiptoe out to the kitchen and put on my cleanly scraped shoes. Aunt Emily's coat is warmer than my jacket. I slip it on over my pyjamas and step out to the car. The engine sounds loud in the predawn stillness. As I drive, the drops of moisture on the windshield skitter to the sides of the glass and disappear.
By the time I reach the coulee, the sky has changed from a steel grey to a faint teal blue. I park the car at the side of the road in its usual spot and wade through the coulee grass as I did with Uncle just a month ago. The stalks are wet with dew and the late night rain. My pyjamas and shoes and the bottom of Aunt Emily's coat are soaked before I reach the slope.
I inch my way down the steep path that skirts the wild rose bushes, down slipping along the wet grass where the underground stream seeps through the earth. My shoes are mud-clogged again. At the very bottom, I come to the bank. Above the trees, the moon is a pure white stone. The reflection is rippling in the river—water and stone dancing. It's a quiet ballet, soundless as breath.
Up at the top of the slope, I can see the spot where Uncle sat last month looking out over the landscape.
"Umi no yo," he always said. "It's like the sea."
Between the river and Uncle's spot are the wild roses and the tiny wildflowers that grow along the trickling stream. The perfume in the air is sweet and faint. If I hold my head a certain way, I can smell them from where I am.
Excerpt from the Memorandum sent by the Co-operative Committee on Japanese Canadians to the House and the Senate of Canada, April 1946
It is urgently submitted that the Orders-in-Council [for the deportation of Canadians of Japanese racial origin] are wrong and indefensible and constitute a grave threat to the rights and liberties of Canadian citizens, and that Parliament as guardian of these rights and the representative of the people, should assert its powers and require the Governor-in-Council to withdraw the Orders, for the following reasons.
1. The Orders-in-Council provide for the exile of Canadian citizens.
The power of exile has not been employed by civilized countries since the days of the Stuarts in England. So seriously was it then viewed that the Habeas Corpus Act makes it a serious offense for any official to exile a British subject.
2. The Orders and the proposed exile of Canadian citizens constitute a violation of International Law and as Mr. Justice Kellock and Rand have stated, involves invasion of another's territory, and the violation of sovereign rights.
The Congress of the United States has no power to exile citizens, and the British Parliament has not, even in the gravest emergency, found it necessary to assume such a power.
3. The Orders-in-Council put the value of Canadian citizenship into contempt. They cancel naturalization in a wholesale manner, and without any reason.
At this time when the Parliament of Canada will be considering legislation designed to enhance the value and
dignity of Canadian citizenship, these Orders will have precisely the opposite effect.
4. The Orders-in-Council are based upon racial discrimination. Deportation on racial grounds has been defined as a crime against humanity, and the war criminals of Germany and Japan are being tried for precisely this offense, amongst others.
5. The proposed deportations are in no way related to any war emergency.
The necessity of removing persons of Japanese origin from the coastal regions during the war, was referrable to the emergency, but now that hostilities have ceased for some time, it cannot possibly be suggested that the safety of Canada requires the injustice of treating Canadian citizens in the manner proposed.
The Prime Minister has himself made it clear that no instances of sabotage can be laid at the door of Japanese Canadians.
If any of those concerned have been disloyal, there is ample power under the Immigration and Naturalization Acts for their deportation after proper inquiry into individual cases.
Many Japanese Canadians have already settled in the Prairie Provinces and in Eastern Canada and have no desire to return to B.C. There is therefore no need for fear of concentration on the Pacific Coast as in the past.
6. The Orders for deportation purport to be based on alleged requests to be sent to Japan. It is suggested that the signing of these requests indicated disloyalty. This is far from the truth. The signing of the forms was encouraged as an act of co-operation with the Government of Canada. The very form used, implied that the Government approved and sought the signing of these forms. Those who refused to sign were described as uncooperative, and denied privileges accorded to those who did sign. For the Government, which through its agents obtained and sought the signing of these forms, to claim now that they indicated disloyalty, would be to implicate the Government itself in the encouragement of a disloyal attitude.