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Racialized Diasporas, Entangled Postmemories, and Kyo Maclear’s The Letter Opener
- Wilfrid Laurier University Press
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171 kyo maclear’s the letter opener (2007) begins with the disappearance of Andrei, a recent Jewish refugee to Canada from Romania, and the sense of loss felt by his friend and colleague Naiko, the Canadian narrator of Japanese and Scottish ancestry. Andrei and Naiko met as co-workers in the Undeliverable Mail Office (UMO) in Toronto, a setting that introduces the notion of vulnerable circulation and movement of memory that is woven throughout the text.1 The fragility of memory is taken up most explicitly in two of the novel’s narrative threads: the first reconstructs Andrei’s story, which includes his flight from Ceausescu’s Romania and the loss of his lover Nicolae, and the second explores Japanese Canadian social memory through Naiko’s mother, Ayumi, and her struggle with Alzheimer’s, and through the personal connections Ayumi’s neighbours have to Japanese Canadian internment during the Second World War. The UMO workers use their detection skills to return lost packages, often sorting through piles of vaguely labelled correspondence and tracking down addressees in order to deliver long-lost messages and objects. As the employees sift through items such as a package of cake mix and birthday candles sent by a young child to his father, it becomes clear that their true task is to restore misplaced attachments. The irony that neither she nor any of her colleagues can locate one of their missing co-workers is not lost on Naiko. And it is while repatriating objects to lost owners that Naiko becomes a collector herself, unable to relinquish the memories and narratives invoked by an object long after she has either returned or given up on returning it to the intended recipient. Racialized Diasporas, Entangled Postmemories, and Kyo Maclear’s The Letter Opener Christine Kim 172 christine kim Andrei’s disappearance sets into motion the central dynamic of the novel, a dialectical play between the memorializing of loss and an unravelling of the process of loss itself. Naiko’s uneasy and, from the perspective of her colleagues and boyfriend, obsessive attachment to Andrei’s disappearance eventually drives her lover, Paolo, to ask why she can’t be like “Other people. The ones who stick to their own business.” He continues by noting, “It’s strange. It’s almost as though you take pleasure from it” (161). He points out that Andrei abandoned her without a word of explanation and suggests that what she considers loyalty is actually a degree of attachment bordering on lunacy (160–61). This moment in the novel is provocative not least because of how it approaches relations between multiple diasporas—represented through, for instance, Paolo, who grew up in Argentina and moved to Canada as a young man; Baba, a Lebanese Canadian co-worker at the UMO; the senior citizens who populate Sakura (the Japanese Canadian retirement home where Ayumi lives); the group of men with whom Andrei shares a settlement house when he first immigrates to Canada; and, of course, Naiko and Andrei—and imagines both the difficulties and possibilities produced through social intimacy. Paolo’s comments echo views promulgated by Naiko’s co-workers and her sister , Kana, all of whom seem to advocate placing strict temporal and emotional parameters around mourning in an attempt to suture together wounds in the most expedient fashion possible. Anger, acceptance, and disavowal are held up as appropriate responses to loss and abandonment, whereas the seemingly unending morass of grieving that Naiko enters into is perceived as pure folly.2 Naiko’s refusal to relinquish her attachment to this loss, one that, to paraphrase Paolo, is tedious and much too intense, simultaneously gestures toward the significance of this friendship and signals resistance to the belief that people should limit their entanglements in each other’s lives (14). Mourning occurs most obviously for Andrei, the missing confidant, but is also undertaken in response to the apparent ease with which people are able to let go of those around them and move into a space of indifference. But this selfimposed emotional burden is complicated by the fact that Naiko is mourning the loss of a friend who seems not to want to be remembered or found. The desire to remember Andrei and understand the subsequent wound she is left bearing are irrational and perhaps even intrusive tasks, but nonetheless ones that drive both Naiko and the narrative. For much of the novel, Naiko is unable to let go of Andrei; indeed, doing so would constitute another kind...