Ethnic Reproduction and the Amniotic Deep: Joy Kogawa's Obasan

The speech that frees comes forth from that amniotic deep

Joy Kogawa, Obasan

Combining prose, poetry, and documentary, Obasanrecords the struggle of the Japanese Canadian community against a hostility that takes many forms—long standing racial prejudice, wartime internment, and double dispersal and exile—all perpetrated by Canadians against Canadian citizens of Japanese descent. ¹ Kogawa's national and political story is also an intricate tale of intimacy and loss between Japanese mothers, daughters, grandmothers, and aunts. At the intersection between the story of ethnic suffering and that of women's lives is the question of how an ethnic community can survive and reproduce, a project that takes on special urgency when an ethnic community is under attack. In the epigraph above, Kogawa asserts that the amniotic deep is the source of freeing speech. I would add that the amniotic is also crucial to her extended meditation about ethnic mothering in desperate circumstances. In what follows, I will argue that the amniotic space occupies the literal and figurative center of Kogawa's novel—not simply as the source of the unvoiced ethnic story, but also as a site of ethnic reproduction contested by the Canadian government and the ethnic family. I also argue that abortion of that reproduction is the novel's central metaphor.

Figurative tropes of reproduction have a long history in the literatures of immigrant and marginalized groups: the trials of being remade in the New World are written as rebirths, shedding ethnicity involves marrying "whiter," conquering a new territory is literally an insemination, the pain of outsiderhood is ethnic impotence, its dislocation is abortion, and its fantasies of success are of superpotence and fecundity. Such tropes are especially loaded in texts about outsiders who, like the Japanese Canadians in Kogawa's novel, are endangered, and are therefore, however ambivalently, invested in the survival and reproduction of their community. Ethnic men and women are vulnerable to these issues unevenly—while many ethnic male texts narrate anxiety about assimilation and its interference with ethnic patriarchy, women's texts often present female protagonists unwilling or unable to procreate. ² Indeed, it is difficult to read ethnic texts by women as a group and not be brought up short by the common appearance of penetration, rape, divorce, miscarriage, abortion, barrenness, stillbirth, celibacy, and even dead or ghostly children. ³

Contemporary ethnic women's fiction is marked not so much by a saturation of maternity, then, but by its disruption or absence. In the case of Obasan, this disruption could not be more concrete. The expressly premeditated purpose of the Canadian government's war policy against Japanese Canadians was "to prevent further propagation of the species" (116). Canada's government accomplished this though its early removal of Japanese Canadian men to work camps, followed by the double dispersal and exile of Japanese Canadian families. Canada's postwar policy of continued exile, and, in some cases, deportation to Japan, completed the total disruption of Japanese cultural and physical reproduction it had begun during the war. Furthermore, in both Canada and the United States, policies of internment and dispersal came in the context of a long history of legislated anti-Asian hatred aimed at preventing the implantation and growth of Asian immigrant communities. ⁴ Kogawa explicitly plots this historical disruption of Asian reproduction everywhere in her novel. The protagonist, Naomi, and her Aunt Emily are both childless and celibate, despite an overt Japanese cultural injunction to procreate. Naomi's Obasan (Japanese for aunt) and uncle tried twice to have a child, and both pregnancies ended in stillbirths (the first stillbirth resulted from the baby's strangulation by the umbilical cord, 22). Naomi's brother Stephen was born prematurely. Both children are essentially orphaned by their mother's death as a result of the war and their father's death by tuberculosis; Obasan becomes a surrogate mother to the children.

I do not...