Extreme Domesticity: A View From the Margins by Susan Fraiman

Extreme Domesticity: A View From the Margins by Susan Fraiman

Author:Susan Fraiman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Literary Criticism, American, General, Comparative Literature, European, Feminist
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2017-01-10T01:15:08.469000+00:00


BLU’S HANGING: DOMESTICITY UNDER THE HOUSE

Blu’s Hanging is the story of a working-class Japanese American family on the Hawaiian island of Molokai. Unlike our previous two texts, it opens not with an arrival but with two departures: the death of a mother and the emotional withdrawal of a father. Three children are left to drift alone with their grief, daily needs, and challenges ranging from homework and puberty to racist teachers and sexual predators. The initial burden of homemaking falls to thirteen-year-old Ivah, the conscientious oldest child as well as Yamanaka’s narrator. A key turning point involves the youngest, five-year-old Maisie, who has stopped talking since her mother’s death. Increasingly, however, the book’s search for a safe and caring domestic space comes to focus on the conflicted, precarious, middle child and eponymous character Blu. As I hope to show, it is finally this queer, eight-year-old boy who becomes the agent of a redemptive domesticity swerving away from normative views of family roles and values.

The Ogata parents were born in Hawaii, making their offspring at least sansei (third generation); but the children’s parentless home feels like a foreign country, and their need to reconcile with the old while inventing a new domesticity is no less pressing than Lucy’s. As with Lucy and Esperanza, moreover, the Ogatas’ struggle to be at home is informed by the historical struggle of a particular immigrant group to be at home in the United States. The most scarring domestic trauma suffered en masse by Japanese Americans was, of course, the forcible dislocation and internment of 120,000 women, men, and children during World War II. Recalling the 1930s “repatriation” of a million Mexicans, around 60 percent of those herded into “relocation” camps were American citizens. Japanese aliens and nonaliens alike were ordered to evacuate their homes by noon of May 7, 1942. Almost all were residents of the West Coast. By contrast, the 158,000 Japanese living in Hawaii were deemed so crucial to the economy that, after much high-level debate, they were spared mass incarceration. Significantly for our purposes, however, Navy Secretary Frank Knox had initially argued for a Hawaiian internment camp to be located on a remote island.48

Critics have commented heatedly on Blu’s Hanging’s racial politics (more on which soon), yet no one appears to have noticed the specific reference to internment at the heart of Yamanaka’s novel, the scarcely hidden secret within the secret of the Ogata family’s shameful past.49 About halfway through the book, Poppy finally reveals to us as well as to Ivah the story behind his mysterious scars. In the Hawaiian pidgin spoken by most of Blu’s characters, he confesses: “Me and your madda, us had leprosy. I like your promise that you neva call us lepers. Don’t eva define us again by that disease.”50 Diagnosed as children, both parents were “yank from the world” (142) at a young age and quarantined in the Kalihi Receiving Station in Honolulu before being further exiled to the Kalaupapa “lepers colony” on Molokai. As Poppy



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