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  • Saying “Yes”Textual Traumas in Octavia Butler’s Kindred*
  • Marisa Parham (bio)

Like other kinds of pain, phantom pain is a phenomenon known but not understood by medical professionals. Unlike other types of pain, no body part need be present for it to occur. Felt by amputees, it is an apparition, a ghost thought to exist only in the mind, as a memory unforgotten. But then, the problem with pain altogether is its invisibility. Maybe most pain is phantom pain. . . . its existence does not always rely on a light spot, a shadow on an X-ray, or the frank evidence of blood. It belongs to the world hidden inside a boot, to secret histories of inner worlds, to beds where the sick are unseen, beds where human mystery, wounding, and love occur.

Linda Hogan

I remember the first time I taught Joy Kogawa’s Obasan. It was an introductory literature course, one of those survey classes many college students take. It was our first day back after Spring Break, and in a class of nearly forty students, maybe ten had read the book. Determined to have a productive class, I put them into groups, where they had to come up with one example of an aspect of American history that had been excluded from the national narratives they had learned in high school. It was an incredibly diverse class, and I figured that each group would find it a challenge to agree on which story “deserved” to be told. The idea was that 1) it was a backdoor way to get them thinking about history, memory, and counter-memory, and 2) the diverse investments of each group member would make it difficult for the groups to themselves agree on a single example, thus illustrating some of the political relations between community memory, national history, and individual identity.

The groups were chugging along, and what I must admit began as a somewhat punitive exercise had become quite exciting and productive—though one of the groups was having more fun than group-work should ever produce. Two of the group’s members were in the midst of one of their elaborate comedy routines, this time reproducing their own version of the then oft-run television commercials for Colonial Williamsburg. Every commercial follows the same format: some child from the present meets some child from Colonial Williamsburg, who is always playing with some sort of eighteenth-century hoop and [End Page 1315] stick-type toy. Colonial girl says, in her vaguely accented English from the past, “Would you like to play with my hoop?” The two children are matched in age, gender, race, and appearance, the only difference being their styles of dress, and of course, the lame toy. Suddenly, twentieth-century child, ready to conquer the alien object, takes the hoop, and (gasp) hula-hoops! The Williamsburg child is shocked and amazed, for of course we are supposed to believe that she is not a fictional character, and that Colonial Williamsburg is not merely a museum, but in fact a journey back through time. My local comedians had latched onto this last point and, departing from the notion that this could really be an encounter between children from different centuries, explored a simple proposition: what if the children were black? “Hello. Would you like to go pick some cotton with me?”; “Hey! You dere wanna play wit my shackles?”—and so on the shtick went. I am sure you can imagine. But with that simple joke, they had exposed the myth of Colonial Williamsburg, or perhaps more specifically, had reminded their classmates of the whitewashing necessary to making history commercially viable, commodifiable, in the present.

We laughed long and hard that day, indulging fully in the wry, almost tearful laughter that only a contest between insight and bitterness can bring. At the end of the day laughter usually chases such bitterness away, but I cannot help but wonder if any of us could have really identified the bitter root, despite the efficacy of our ritual expiation. Did it come from the fact that something akin to my students’ version of history would never be included in a national narrative? Or from the...

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