Song of the Exile

by Kiana Davenport

  Q: The reach and limits of wordless expression appears as a motif of Song of the Exile. Did you wittingly present characters who turn to something other than words to communicate?

  KD: I did not consciously approach the novel that way. But I realize now—at this very moment—it must have been in my subconscious. Most of the characters in Song of the Exile are not particularly verbal. Keo is uneducated. He speaks through his horn. Sunny is essentially mute after her experiences as a “comfort woman.” Her life is one of silence. Malia expresses her rage through her sewing machine. Lt. Matsuharu is traumatized, half-insane. Somehow, though, it all works. As in life, folks often communicate without words.

  Q: I’m reminded of a scene early in the novel in which Malia encourages Keo to take up the trumpet, to acknowledge the need to scream. To what extent has writing enabled you to scream—if that verb is the apt one?

  KD: Yes, yes. I think for me, writing is a way of screaming. I have a lot of rage inside. Probably, if I weren’t writing, I’d be a very dangerous woman. I felt this especially while researching and writing this novel, because of the unspeakable things that happened to these women. There were days I could not walk out on the street, afraid I would attack someone. I think most women harbor a certain amount of rage, with good reason when you look at history. Thank God we find ways to channel it.

  Q: Among the more emotive, colorful passage of the novel, are some rather tragic scenes rendered in a sparse, quiet prose.

  KD: I knew when discussing the women in the camp that the writing had to be as simple and as pure as possible. It was very difficult. The first drafts were an absolute assault on the reader! I wanted to tell everything, hit the reader over the head with every atrocity committed on these women. Thank God for good editors.

  The first draft of Song of the Exile was something like fifteen hundred pages. It was overblown and gory. By the twenty-fourth draft, I was very conscious of how every word counted. Still I never got it down to that diamond point perfection. What writer ever does? I am learning book by book that what you don’t say has the most impact, what you let the reader imagine.

  Q: At what point did your undertaking seem most daunting?

  KD: The book became complicated in ways I never imagined. First of all, it seemed too ambitious—the whole World War II background, the years covered, the distances traveled. I didn’t want to write a novel of that scope. And the more research I did, the more emotionally involved I became with these women and what happened to them. There were times when I thought I could not write the book. I hadn’t been imprisoned as they had, I didn’t have the right. But they encouraged me, even begged me, to write it. Most are now in their late seventies and eighties, and are so psychologically scarred they will never write their own stories.

  Q: How have they responded to the novel?

  KD: I have been humbled by their approval, and their gratitude. Some of them have bad eyesight now, so my book has been read to them. Their letters mean more to me than anything. They write to thank me for the novel; whereas I should be on my knees thanking them, for their strength, their courage. One woman wrote that—I’m not sure I can get this out—that by telling their stories, I had given her back a measure of her dignity, that I had given her back her life. A book is so small. It fits in your hand. You don’t think of it as giving someone back their life.

  Q: In what ways have these women remained in your life?

  KD: People ask me how can I write a book like this and just walk away? What does one do after writing such a book? I’m reminded of William Styron and his novel, Sophie’s Choice. I remember thinking “How could he write such a book, then walk away from the Holocaust.” The answer is, you don’t. I think all the years Styron was writing that book, and the inability to let go of the horrors, contributed to the massive depression he experienced and chronicled in Darkness Visible.

  I had a lot of dark nights, periods of depression while writing this novel. I do believe there is such a thing as too much knowledge, too much research into horror. You should stop at the point where it begins to damage you. I still have dark nights, a part of me will always be haunted by these women sacrificed in World War II.

  I’m also asked what more I will do for these women. I don’t know. I go on lecture tours. I talk about the few other books written on the subject of “comfort women.” I make donations to their cause. Organizations, such as the Asian Pacific Women in Solidarity for Human Rights, Justice, and Peace, are fighting for legislation that will give these women some kind of financial reparation.

  Whatever we do will not be enough. How do you compensate a woman who was kidnapped at the age of ten, or twelve, raped day and night through all the years of the war? What is the reparation for someone so physically and psychologically damaged that, fifty years later, she still cannot function without five medications?

  I’d like to remind readers that it was not only Asian and Pacific women who were used as “sex slaves” by the Japanese. There were also white women—Dutch, English, Americans—who were students, nurses, wives of missionaries. Imprisoned and raped when Japanese armies invaded Indonesia and China. I have met some of these women. Most wish to remain anonymous.

  Q: What role, if any, can fiction play in the face of such trial?

  KD: Often I’m asked what the novel is essentially about. It’s about many things, but ultimately it’s about survival. That heroic drive in each of us, the human will to go on. And, I believe that art, music, literature help play a role in our survival.

  May I share with you one of my favorite passages of writing? It’s from John Gardner’s The Art of Fiction. He writes, “To write with taste in the highest sense is to write with the assumption that one out of a hundred people who read one’s work may be dying or have some loved one dying. To write so that no one commits suicide, no one despairs. To write as Shakespeare wrote, so that people understand, sympathize, see the universality of pain, and feel strengthened if not directly encouraged to move on.”

  Isn’t that beautiful? That’s the level of writing I want to achieve, one book at a time.

  Reading Group Topics and Questions for Discussion

  1. Keo’s jazz mentor emphasizes the importance of knowing a tradition before experimenting with it. To what traditions is Song of the Exile indebted? How does Kiana Davenport borrow and blend various narrative traditions—Greek mythology, Hawaiian folklore, chronicles of war—to create her own?

  2. Discuss how the structure of the novel mirrors the workings of memory. What does the novel show us about the past’s place in the present?

  3. A number of landscapes are traversed throughout the course of the novel’s action; some seem to exert a greater influence on character than others. What do we learn about the extent to which place shapes character? And how can character shape place? Also, how does the novel challenge or uphold traditional notions of home?

  4. Much of Song of the Exile chronicles characters’ attempts to bring their interior lives into some sort of harmony with the exterior world, the world of others. What sort of obstacles most often appear between the two? Which prove the most formidable, and why? What resources do Keo, Sunny, or Malia find or find lacking when confronted with trial?

  5. What was your understanding of the term “comfort women” before reading this novel? From where did you derive your knowledge? What notions were undermined or supported? To what extent can a work of fiction color one’s consciousness or effect social change, however modestly?

  6. Kiana Davenport has spoken of the importance of resisting the temptation to depict the Japanese lieutenants as utter villains, noting the inherent humanity each of us possesses—however damaged it may be. Does she succeed in avoiding caricatures of evil? What light does Song of the Exile shed on the nature of cruelty and violence, particularly during wartime?

  7. The novel is replete with exiles. What are the various songs of each one, and what is the significance of singing or at least making the attempt? What are the peri
ls of silence?

  8. Threats to freedom appear throughout the novel, some more conspicuous than others. Provide examples of the way notions of freedom differ from character to character. What restraints are imposed internally, and externally? How? Which prove most difficult to break?

  9. Follow the shifting role of music in Keo’s life, and explain the ways in which it opens up or limits his character. How does his means of expression compare to Malia’s or Sunny’s? What might Davenport be proffering about the role of creative self-expression in one’s life? Or the extent to which one person can comprehend another?

  10. How pointed are the politics in Song of the Exile? Do you see this as a novel with an agenda? If yes, what? Does a novelist have a responsibility to engage the politics of the time he or she chronicles? Why?

  11. Hawaii itself emerges as a character in the novel. What sort of transformation does it undergo? How does its evolution compare to that of the central characters? What forces are at work on each? Which are unique to place?

  12. Kiana Davenport has said that the writers she admires most get at the truly difficult themes through the subject of family. What is the role of family in Song of the Exile? How do abstractions such as freedom, happiness, and meaning find expression in the author’s handling of family?

  13. What is the dominant tone of the novel?

  14. Samuel Johnson famously remarked that “the only end of writing is to enable the reader better to enjoy life or better to endure it.” How does Song of the Exile measure up to his criteria?

  15. At the novel’s close, Oogh reminds Keo of the many voices we never hear, the “many meanings we never get.” He then adds, “Perhaps we are all lost, and found, and lost again. Perhaps only amazement keeps us alive.” Look at Song of the Exile through the lens of Oogh’s wisdom.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Of Native Hawaiian and Anglo-American descent, KIANA DAVENPORT was raised and educated in Hawaii. She is the author of four previous novels, including the internationally acclaimed Shark Dialogues, a multi-generational saga set in Hawaii from the nineteenth century to the present. Her short stories have been included in the Pushcart Prize collection in 1998, and the O. Henry Awards Anthologies in 1997, 1998, and 2000. Recipient of a fiction grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, she was also a 1992–93 Bunting Fellow at Harvard-Radcliffe, and the 1997–98 Visiting Writer at Wesleyan University.

  Davenport has traveled extensively throughout the Pacific and Asia researching her novels and short stories. Song of the Exile, based mostly on fact, took five years of research. Her travels were a very personal journey as well as fodder for her writing: “As I traveled throughout the Pacific and the Pacific Rim, interviewing World War II survivors, I began to understand what my father had experienced fighting at Midway and Guadacanal. I also saw how war damages humans irreparably. During interviews, men and women broke down and sobbed even after fifty years.”

  ALSO BY KIANA DAVENPORT

  House of Many Gods

  Footnotes

  *Haole—meaning “white, Caucasian”—is pronounced how-lee. A Hawai‘ian-English glossary is provided in the back of the book.

  Return to text.

  A Ballantine Book

  Published by The Random House Publishing Group

  Copyright © 1999 by Kiana Davenport

  Reader’s Guide copyright © 2000 by Kiana Davenport and

  The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc.

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  Ballantine and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Ballantine Reader’s Circle and colophon are

  trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  www.ballantinebooks.com

  Library of Congress Card Number: 00-190616

  eISBN: 978-0-345-51544-5

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