Book #27: Better Than Therapy

“The butcher had come out and smacked his hands together and rubbed them back and forth, and he’d laid a steak on the stainless steel cutting board and turned on the saw, and he’d cubed it for her. Little stiff cubes with frost fibres in the purplish flesh, and this, Helen realizes now, is herself, her own heart, sliding back and forth under the blade.” -Lisa Moore, February

Life is a veil of tears for Helen O’Mara, when she loses her husband in the sinking of the oil rig Ocean Ranger during a storm off the coast of Newfoundland. Lisa Moore’s latest novel February gives a masterly glimpse of her struggle to hold together some semblance of normal life – taking care of her four kids, cooking fish sticks, trying to make ends meet by taking a crappy job as a cocktail waitress (and being mistaken as a prostitute on her walk home at four in the morning). These ordinary yet absurd moments underscore for Helen that her life will never be the same. For much of the novel, she is emotionally paralyzed just letting this fact sink in.

The tragedy of her husband’s death and its endless ripple effects replay in her mind with an immediacy that doesn’t allow her to assign the disaster to the past. Surely, this is why Moore chooses to narrate many of these memories in the present tense; they are all too vivid at the forefront of Helen’s mind to be told as flashbacks. The most mundane activities, like going to the butcher, risk overwhelming her, flooding her with raw emotion. Yet these moments are strangely beautiful because we see Helen standing outside herself and slowly, painstakingly, finding the resources to heal herself and move on.

Isn’t this the great thing about literature? The novels that I love reading over and over again – Toni Morrison’s Sula, Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth – have this deeply therapeutic effect. Although I could never have admitted this in my former life as a lit prof (my colleagues in the English department would have scoffed), the truth is that I’ve never been drawn to literature because I wanted to learn more about a certain period of history, philosophy or theory of any kind. Literature offers a much more primitive kind of experience that consoles and helps me relive the moments when I was so depressed my whole body felt laden with weights.

I remember all too clearly, for instance, my ballet teacher putting her hands on my eleven-year-old hips. Monique her name was. She pushed and prodded my hips into an awkward position and I toppled over, but not before she had felt the imbalance, my imbalance. She told my mother that my spine curves like an S and my mother took me to see the doctor and he referred me to an orthopedic surgeon and thus began a surreal phase of passing from x-ray machines to a fiberglass brace to operating table…. I think I just sort of curled into myself and hid in a closet in my head for those three years…. I recall the struggle to get up and get dressed in the morning, the numb, disjointed feeling as if my body were a marionette puppet, hands and feet hanging limp in midair.

It must have been during this time that I developed a penchant for sadness and sad literature. To identify through reading with another’s grief and triumph over that grief can be a very consoling, beautiful thing. February brought all those extreme emotions back and I fell in love with the journey all over again.

Photo from: here

Book #26: Outlaw Women

"My children were of me alone, of the wild blood boiling along the earth, of me and all that lived; of none and of all.  Then I found I had Jewel."   -William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying

I've been sleepless thinking about who my grandmother really was.  You see, I've been toying with writing a section of my novel in her voice.  Over the weekend, I had brunch with my dad and we listened to a tape recording of her talking about her childhood, the war, falling in love in an internment camp....  My dad made the tape during a trip to Cape Cod a few years ago, shortly before her Parkinson's got bad.  The tape intrigues yet frustrates me, because all the while I feel that my grandmother is trying to say what's expected of her.  She's trying to preserve for posterity an image of herself as the good daughter, the self-suffering wife, the devoted mother.

I long to gain access to the other side of her identity - the secrets and unspoken truths she harboured all her life.  The moments when she surprised herself by acting out of character.  What she would say, if she could speak from beyond the grave.

This is the kernel imbedded in Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, which I was reading over the weekend for the first time (even ex English profs haven't read everything by Faulkner).  It's the story of Addie Bundren on her deathbed and into the afterlife, told from the perspectives of fifteen different narrators, including her four legitimate children and one love child, Jewel.  Before dying, she expresses her wish to be buried in her hometown, Jefferson, Mississippi, and the novel chronicles her family's efforts to honour that wish, dragging her homemade casket by horse and carriage across the brutal landscape.  While all the narrators have their own unique ways of seeing Addie, the section where she reflects upon her life from beyond the grave makes all the other sections pale.  What we get is Addie's scathing denunciation of her marriage (which seems hardly more than a random occurence) and her ambivalent meditation on motherhood.  Motherhood seems to draw out her sadistic streak, and although she is possessive of her children, she is no less repulsed by them, a steady flow of babies who arrive without rhyme or reason.  Ironically, Jewel is closest to her heart, perhaps because he is the only one born of desire.  All these taboos are laid bare - with poignancy and beauty - in Addie's monologue.

I'm reminded of something Toni Morrison once said in an interview: "Outlaw women who don't follow the rules are always interesting to me, because they push themselves, and us, to the edge.  The women who step outside the borders, or who think other thoughts, define the limits of civilization, but also challenge it."  (No coincidence that Morrison wrote her master's thesis on Faulkner).

Listening to the tape of my grandmother, I find myself listening not so much to what she's saying as much as to her stammers, repetitions and evasions and I wonder what repressed "outlaw" possibilities they mask over.

Photo from: here

Book #25: That Accident Which Pricks Me....

"This second element which will disturb the studium I shall therefore call punctum; for punctum is also: sting, speck, cut, little hole - and also a cast of the dice.  A photograph's punctum is that accident which pricks me (but also bruises me, is poignant to me)."   -Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida

Since my father retired, he has been digging into family history.  The other day while I was at work, he sent me the above photo, which he found upon googling "Minidoka" - the camp where my grandmother was interned during the Second World War.  "I think your grandmother is in this photo," his email read.  "Third girl from the right, in profile.  Zoom in."

And there she is. 

A whoosh of gratitude came over me - had the camera caught her a moment before or after, her face might have been obscured, like the girl on the far right.  Quelle chance!  Then weird thoughts started rushing through my mind.  I found myself looking at the styling of her hair and wondering how, while living in an internment camp, she could manage to keep it freshly curled and glossy (while I, from the comfort of home, can barely make the effort to blow dry).  But imprisoned and made to rake mud, my grandmother would not let herself go and, though I knew that should make me happy, it made me feel sad.  Her dress remains smartly pressed, despite everything.  And while the other girls are working, she appears to me to be only pretending to work - something about the whimsical tilt of her head.  She's caught in a moment of fantasy or denial, her mind a thousand miles away.

The frailties and defenses of her personality seem to be encapsulated in that image....  For the grandmother I knew some fifty years later was a complex, cryptic woman.  She was often cool and remote in person, but had a penchant for florid language (I recall receiving a postcard that said "the stars are like chrysanthemums" and thinking, Huh?).  She shied away from talking about the past, even when my father would press her, until the very final days of her life when she began to give in.  She was a woman who seemed ill prepared to be a mother or grandmother, preferring to play the role of a younger aunt, dressing half her age.

It was as if she always wanted to remain a girl - as if some beautiful moment in her adolescence had been stolen away.

Looking at this photo makes me think of Roland Barthes' Camera Lucida, which I read years ago (back in my geeky, academic days).  At the time, I thought I understood what Barthes meant in coining the terms punctum and studium to describe two different and opposed kinds of experience upon looking at photographs.  By studium, he means the cultural and political dimensions of a photograph, all the ways in which it can be rationally discussed and made comprehensible to an audience.  By sharp contrast, punctum refers to a viewer's private experience of a photo - a purely subjective response.  To experience punctum is to feel idiosyncratic details jump out and grab you with such emotional force that you feel pierced, wounded. 

At the time of reading Camera Lucida, I had been deeply moved by certain photos which I'd viewed in various museums, galleries and books.  But I cannot say that I'd felt pierced.  Until now.


Photo from: here

Book #24: Impounded Images

Over the past few weeks, I’ve had archive fever. I’ve been reading a pile of history books on the Japanese Internment. I’m looking to gain insight into what my grandparents experienced as internees as part of my attempt to write an historical novel, centred on a secret romance in one of the camps. The idea is loosely based on snippets of stories and half-disclosures that my grandmother let slip over the years, giving me certain ideas (fantasies, really) about how she met my grandfather. The beginning of their strange, turbulent marriage.

But the problem with reading history books, I’ve come to realize, is that “facts” only get you so far as a writer. They’re full of quotations by politicians and statistical data, whereas I’m interested in accessing the taste (or lack of taste) of the camp food, the sounds and smells of the barracks, the feel of the floorboards against our heroine’s bare feet as she sneaks out at night.

So I decided to read something different. Or not read at all. The other day, I came across a collection of photographs by Dorothea Lange, who is best known for her portraits of U.S. migrant farmworkers and sharecroppers during the Depression. What is not so well known about Lange’s career is that she was commissioned by the U.S. government to document the Japanese Internment. She toured many camps in California and took a slew of stunning photographs: bewildered, beautiful girls clinging to the slip of shade outside a mess hall; the Inyo Mountains rising pale and ghostly behind the camp at Manzanar, barely visible through the dust haze; and internees gardening with the materials at hand – to describe just a few of Lange’s moving images.

More than simply documenting the group’s degraded condition, Lange’s photos distill a timeless, universal sadness to their plight. There appears something almost mythic about their suffering. Since these images were seen as so obviously sympathetic to the internees’ perspective, they were impounded by the U.S. government and not published until recently.

These photos are a wonderful source of inspiration. Looking at them, I’m able to imagine how the dust would feel sticking to my skin and mixing with my sweat and from there … the thoughts of my heroine start to come alive in my head. I can feel her yearning for some escape and becoming susceptible to the advances of a certain stranger who pushed his way into her life.

Photo from: here

Book #23: Decaying Family Ties

“Kiyo and I were too young to run around, but often we would eat in gangs with other kids, while the grownups sat at another table. I confess I enjoyed this part of it at the time.” -Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston and James D. Houston, Farewell to Manzanar

It’s a story that’s both familiar and strange to me. It might have been my mother’s story if she’d been born ten years earlier or my grandmother’s story if she hadn’t been embarrassed to tell all.

Farewell to Manzanar is Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston’s fascinating memoir about coming of age in an internment camp during the Second World War. The camp, situated in Manzanar, California, housed over 110,000 Japanese Americans in 36 blocks of hastily constructed barracks on 540 acres of sultry desert land. Jeanne goes overnight from being a carefree seven-year-old to an internee. Her father, a fisherman, is seized one day by the FBI under suspicion that his radio is being used to transmit information to Japan. By the time her father is released, her mother and the rest of the family have been forcibly relocated to cramped, dirty quarters at Manzanar, where the communal toilets are not even partitioned and the food is so terrible that most everyone falls ill.

I wonder to what extent my own family members suffered such indignities upon being interned at camps in Minadoka, Idaho, and Sandon and Kaslo, BC.

But what I find most interesting and unsettling about the tale is the erosion of communal family life. We hear of children and teenagers left to their own devices, allowed to eat in the mess hall with their friends everyday - running from one mess hall to the next in search of more palatable food - and all the while their parents are either absent (interned elsewhere) or languishing in depression and alcoholism. Gangs form, governed by violence and their own secret hierarchies. And covert romances, too (one might speculate). Although the author only touches on these aspects (as a child, she was too young to be sucked into the group dynamics that led to the infamous Manzanar Riot), she is clear about the fallout – the loss of parental authority. It was in this kind of no man’s land that my own grandparents fell in love against their elders’ wishes and ran away after the war.

Photo from: here

Book #22: Racy Regionalism

"The xylophone player!  The xylophone player to marry her!  Yonder he is!"  -Eudora Welty, "Lily Daw and the Three Ladies"

Not so long ago, I spent four years of my life writing a dissertation whose key insight can be summed up by these two sentences: "It is by nature itself that fiction is all bound up in the local.  The internal reason for that is surely that feelings are bound up in place."  The citation is from Eudora Welty's 1956 essay, "Place in Fiction," which I stumbled across online.  A pang of sadness came over me - this essay would have been a goldmine back in the days when I was "dissertating"!  At the time, I had become obsessed with regional literature and was trying to show how all modernist art is in fact regionalist in its basis.  But now I saw that I could have saved myself three hundred pages.  Welty said it perfectly in two lines. 

(And yes, there was a touch of nostalgia for my old academic self: cuticle chewing, sleep deprived, masochistic, high on literary theory....) 

Indulging in a blue, second-guessing-the-past moment (the crappy weather wasn't helping my mood), I dug up from a storage box Welty's first collection, A Curtain of Green and Other Stories. I'd read a few of the stories back in grad school, but hardly remembered a thing about them.  Now, as I began reading the first story, "Lily Daw and the Three Ladies," I found myself thinking about the way Welty uses dialect and delightful references to local institutions - like "Ellisville Institute for the Feeble Minded of Mississippi" - to create her signature sense of "place."  But it takes more than just that. 

Her real speciality, it dawned on me, is sexual deviance.  A group of gossipy southern ladies are bound together around the scandal of the idiot girl's sexual initiation.  On the verge of being institutionalized, Lily Daw announces that she is going to marry a xylophone player, who has charmed and possibly seduced or molested her, throwing all the ladies into a tizzy.  Their shock and prurient curiosity charge the story with feelings that are tied to the specific locale. 

This is the kind of racy regionalism that fascinates me.

As I kept reading, I began thinking about my own grandmother, Kayaco, and how much she reminds me of a character from a Welty story.  By contrast to my other grandmother (about whom I was blogging in my last entry), Kayaco is a no-nonsense kind of woman, named after Kayaks River in BC, where her father first lived upon immigrating from Japan.  She is a woman who knows her roots and what she stands for.  But to return to my point, she has a keen eye for sexual impropriety and seems to take a good deal of pleasure in rooting it out.  I remember when I was ten, she told me that her mother-in-law had long had designs on my grandfather.  Incest, you say?  Not quite.  You see, her mother-in-law was actually my grandfather's stepmother, but for decades, she had lived in their house.  The family dynamics were fraught, to say the least.

Hmmm....  I got out my notebook and began taking notes. 


Photo from: here 

Book #21: History or Love Story?

“This is a story of how I fell in love with a woman who read me a specific story from Herodotus. I heard the words she spoke across the fire, never looking up, even when she teased her husband.” -Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient

Last night, I was thinking about the historical novel and how its claim to being “historical” is a bit of a sham. A love story, tragically thwarted. This is what most historical novels boil down to. Or at least the ones I adore.

I was thinking about this as I was rereading The English Patient, which is no doubt at the top of my list, along with a few others like Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! History looms large in these novels – war history, to be precise. You learn a lot about bomb disposal during the Second World War by reading Ondaatje, just as you can pick up some interesting facts about southern Confederate history through Faulkner. But what ignites these novels on an emotional level is the love plot, wrapped around the secret of one lover’s mysterious identity. The English patient is burned beyond recognition. Charles Bon’s sophisticated, urbane appearance masks over a past that turns out to be far more southern and primal.

These lovers are lost souls caught in the revolving blades of historical change. While it would be nice to think that love provides salvation, just the opposite is true. Their passion for certain women turns into full-blown obsession, which in the end proves destructive and violent. Yet, as the reader, I always feel some inexplicable hope, some utopian horizon just around the corner….

I was mulling this over while thinking about my grandfather’s life. Kaz. He died in the 1960s, following a mental breakdown, long before I was born. I don’t know why, but for some reason I’ve got it in my head that his unraveling began during the Second World War, when the Japanese-Canadians were interned. I never met Kaz. But I can picture him in the midst of the dusty barracks, falling in love with my grandmother in those cramped quarters, the fury in his hot-tempered brain finding its only outlet in her seduction.  Her violent seduction?  Kaz, from all accounts, was a man who took what he wanted. 

The way that Kaz met my grandmother, Masako, was strange to say the least. Unlike most Japanese immigrants, Kaz wasn't forced into internment, because his father (my great grandfather) was a well known doctor who was put in charge of providing medical services at the camps. Yet, ironically, for reasons that remain fuzzy, Kaz chose captivity. He was free - on a road trip touring the West Coast -when he met Masako. She was a beauty queen who’d won a competition for Japanese-American girls, so perhaps Kaz saw her at a pageant, as she was walking on stage and slowly turning in her rented kimono. In any case, she must have made quite the impression. He became obsessed with her and after the war’s outbreak, followed her to the internment camp.

I will never know my grandfather, yet a vestige of him grows in my imagination every time I read….

Photo from: here