A Survival Story?

The word ‘survival’ has a myriad of connotations in a modern, technologically advanced society; it is heard frequently, for example, in reference to individuals who have overcome a potentially fatal disease like cancer.  In this instance, as in so many others, the word paints an image of victory—of an indeterminable spirit unable to be dampered.  

By pure definition, however, the word ‘survivor’ simply indicates that something living is still in that state of existence after a particular event has come and gone.

In the case of Rosa Lublin, the main character in Cynthia Ozick’s The Shawl, her state of mental health calls into question whether or not this compilation of two short novels is actually a Holocaust survival story.  In reality, the answer to this question depends on the particular perspective of the reader.  While it is true that Rosa lived, physically, through her experience in the concentration camps, she is clearly, more than thirty years later, not thriving in her survival.

As we discussed in class on Wednesday, Rosa’s current living conditions are not indicative of her previously successful business endeavor in New York.  She has relegated herself to a life poverty and despair, symbolically representative of the conditions under which she suffered during the Holocaust.  Rosa still harbors deep bitterness for her niece, and she truly believes that her daughter Magda is still alive.  These are all signs that indicate her continuing despair, and the fact that she has been unable to function in her life in the United States.

And so we return to the first question: has she survived? Physically, she most certainly has, although her health is suffering.  Mentally, however, the impact of such an experience cannot ever be left behind.  Whether a ‘survivor’ of a disease or a grievous violation of your personal human rights, it is impossible for such an experience to not leave permanent marks on the human spirit.  The question, then, is not whether or not a story is one of survival, but the degree to which the characters can exist in their new lives. 

Parts of the Whole

In the novels that we have read this semester, there has been a pattern of stark contrasts used to illustrate, on a deep emotional level, both the gross inequities of social, economic, and educational status and humans rights abuses in the United States and other countries around the world.  Often, the literary device used to drive these points has been synecdoche, or metonymy, the use of a part to represent the whole.

            There are many ways used to illustrate how this device is used; for example, the press often uses the phrase “the White house spoke” in reference to a statement made by the executive branch of the government.  An author might also discuss ‘fifty sail,’ with ‘sail’ actually being representative of an entire ship.*

In When the Emperor Was Divine, this is used on a very human level—four characters, the mother, father, daughter, and son—are a part of the whole Japanese-American population subjected to years of torture and deprivation without any concrete evidence to justify their displacement.  The characters in Julie Otsuka’s novel are never given names, never identified by any strikingly unique characteristic.  The use of this device is most apparent in the last two chapters, which represents the loss of any individual identity through the internment process—the last chapter is written from the first person plural point of view, whereas the previous three were written in first person singular, each through the eyes of either the mother, daughter, or son.  The same phenomenon occurs during the father’s confessions at the end of the novel; it is clear that he is speaking on behalf of all the unjustly imprisoned Japanese-American men.

Cynthia Ozick does something similar in the very first pages of The Shawl, the first of two short stories in her novel of the same title.  The image that Otsuka creates early on is of just three frail girls—Rosa, Stella, and baby Magda—marching down a dusty road.  It is quite clear that these three are not walking by choice, but out of forced necessity; they have no choice but to keep moving forward.  The threatening force of which they are frightened seems almost hypothetical, a larger looming force that could be lurking around any corner.  In the third paragraph, however, Ozick writes, “Rosa, floating, dreamed of givin Magda away in one of the villages.  She could leave the line for a minute and push Magda into the hands of any woman on the side of the road.  But if she moved out of line they might shoot.  And even if she fled the line for half a second and pushed the shawl-bundle at a stranger, would the woman take it” (4)?

And so Rosa and Magda are actually representing a whole line of people being driven from their homes.  They are not, in fact alone, but two of many.  While this is not such a clear use of synecdoche as the representation of a recognizable symbol for a larger body of people, it does clearly reveal to the reader the plight of so many, on the level of an individual—this makes these stories, Otsuka’s and Ozick’s alike, so much more powerful; the readers can connect with the characters on an individual level to understand a larger injustice that, years later, it is easy to be detached from.

Enemies of the State

 While In the Time of the Butterflies, by Julia Alvarez, and When the Emperor Was Divine, by Julie Otsuka, address very different political conflicts at different points in history, there is an important similarity between the main characters—they are considered to be enemies of the state.  The circumstances of the Mirabal sisters, however, strike a deep contrast to the situation of the father in When the Emperor Was Divine. 

            In the Time of the Butterflies details the true story of Patria, Minerva, Dedé, and Maté Mirabal, four sisters who, with their husbands, were involved in the revolutionary movement to overthrow Dominican dictator el Trujillo.  When the Emperor Was Divine is a pure novel, based only on the collective experience of the thousands of Japanese-Americans who were internally displaced to internment camps in the Western United States after the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor.  There are four members of the protagonist family: the mother, the father, a young girl, and a younger boy.  The mother and the children are sent to the Nevada desert, while the father was arrested and imprisoned.  Like Minerva and Maté Mirabal, the father was tortured for information to such a severe degree that there were permanent physical scars, not to mention deep emotional wounds.

            Ultimately, these sets of characters experience disparate outcomes, for a number of reasons.  Perhaps most importantly is the difference in how the characters became involved in the respective conflicts.  The Mirabal sisters, led by Minerva and heavily influenced by Leandro, among others, chose their own paths.  While the girls certainly felt, on a moral level, that they had no choice but to act, they were still free to either actively join or avoid the resistance movement.  The Japanese-American father in Otsuka’s story, however, had no such choice.  Simple because of his ethnic heritage and upper middle class status that enabled him to work and travel, this love father and faithful husband was dragged from his home by force in the middle of the night.  Unlike Minerva and Maté, he was not in prison to take an ideological stand against gross abuse of human rights; instead, he was stripped of all dignity for no reason.  This does not in any way reduce the significance of the horrific torture that the Mirabal sisters were subjected to.  It does help to explain, however, the state of being for the dad versus the sisters after being declared enemies of the state.

            The Mirabal sisters were fighting for something that they truly believed in.  They also had each other, and their husbands.  Even in jail, Minerva and Maté were in the same cell with other women, and therefore had someone they knew and trusted to watch over them. The father, on the other hand, was completely alone.  His only connection to his previous life was the letters from his family, who had a very limited idea of what was being done to him. His torture was entirely based on falsities that he had done nothing to invoke.  Upon his return home to Berkley, the father in Otsuka’s novel was far more broken than the Mirabal sisters, who had something to keep fighting for.  Their support system had not been completely decimated, as the father’s was, and they had a place to go home to, rather than a broken memory that needed complete rebuilding. Additionally, the girls and their husbands were seen as underground heroes, not social and cultural lepers. Finally, of course, there is the way in which the stories end: the three Mirabal sisters most involved in the conflict were killed.  This is horrific by any and every standard; however, the father in When the Emperor Was Divine faces perhaps the most difficult challenge of all: returning to his life and facing the daunting task of restoring some normalcy to his existence.  Again, there is nothing good about the deaths of Las Mariposas, but these story’s endings helps to articulate the differences that defined their experience, versus the fathers, as an ‘enemy of the state.’

The Role of Water... Part II

Like Naomi Shihab Nye did in 19 Varieties of Gazelle, Julie Otsuka uses a traditional symbolic element—water—in a non-traditional capacity. 

Earlier in the semester, I wrote a blog post comparing the role of water in three different poems in Nye’s collection.  In these short pieces about life as a child of Middle Eastern immigrants, water represents both loss of and resolve in maintaining identity, distance between people and cultures, and the distances that must be traversed to feel anchored in a place.

Otsuka’s novel, When the Emperor Was Divine, addresses many of these same themes, albeit in a vastly different capacity.  The main characters of the book, despite remaining unnamed and therefore deprived of an individualistic identity in the eyes of so many, are of a foreign heritage and suffering prejudices and abuses because of it.  The author looks deeply at this idea of identity and individual humanity, and how it can be given and taken away by certain powers, particularly the government.

However, unlike the main characters in Nye’s poetry—particularly herself and her father—the family in When the Emperor Was Divine does not leave their home and life by choice.  While Nye’s father left his home to move to the United States and form a sense of self outside of his cultural capacity alone, Otsuka’s characters are very American and being stereotyped and driven away to an internment camp because of their foreign heritage.  In a sense, these are inverse experiences—one representing struggling to overcome stereotypes and understand the American ways that are so different from his culture, the other representing a truly American family that is subject to torment only because of its background, with which the members are very disconnected.

Despite the similarities and differences in the experiences written about in these two works, the role of water remains crucial.  Otsuka ultimately uses water to represent regret, desolation, illusion, and hope.  In the early chapters of the novel, there are multiple references to rain; they young boy is upset when he is unable to pack his umbrella.  Arguably, this is representative of the fact that, after leaving his home, the boy (and his family) will have no mechanism of defense against the storm ahead.  Meanwhile, however, water is noticeably absent in many situations.  For example, on the train from Tanforan to the internment camp in Utah, the train runs out of drinking water for passengers.  The train also travels by Intermittent Lake, which is full at times and empty at others.  At the camp, there is no running water, and because it is in the desert, there are no naturally occurring bodies of water nearby.  This represents water as a fantasy and symbol of hope—while the boy wishes there were oases, as he had always expected there to be, it is his dreams of water that seem to give him some hope for the future, despite the despair he often feels in their wake.  The mother’s story about her last night with her husband, before his arrest, is the best representation as water representative of regret.  He had asked her for a glass of water, and because she was so fatigued, the mother asked him to get it for himself.  There is such deep despair and regret when the mother tells her son this story; however, again, it seems to be the hope that maybe, just maybe, one day, they will be back together that keeps her going.  The mother wants only to get that cup of water for her husband; ironically, however, this also contributes to her deteriorating mental health, because she struggles to bear the grief and remorse.

The mother’s loss of identity, however, segues into Otsuka’s most non-traditional use of symbolic water.  In so many cases, water represents cleansing and new beginnings, usually in a positive light.  Here, however, that cleansing and new beginning is the opposite of positive.  The family is being cleansed of their individuality, and their new beginning is life behind a fence, monitored and restricted in every way.  And so the aforementioned absence of water from its usual places is not representative of resolve and stability but of dilution and emptiness.

As does Nye’s poetry, Otsuka’s novel never completely lets the readers feel that human resilience will fail.  However, having read up to the end of the boy’s chapter, the future for this family seems bleak.  They are less close, less well, less connected than they were initially.  It is my hope, as I continue reading, that, again, like in Nye’s poetry, the sense of identity is regained by these individuals—that their resilience is not entirely washed away.     

The Power of Fear

For so many reasons, World War II played a significant role in shaping what would become the landscape of 20^th century America. 

For obvious reasons, the tragedies and consequences of World War II must be taught. It is given high priority within American History curricula and is the subject of many written documents, fiction and non-fiction alike.

However, for (pick your adjective) reasons, there are certain parts of this conflict that are glossed over or even completely ignored.  After the bombing of Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, the U.S. government ordered that many Japanese and Japanese Americans be either arrested or sent to an internment camp.  Some families were held at these camps for several years, being told that it was “for…protection…in the interest of national security…an opportunity…to prove…loyalty” (70).  Conditions, however, were far from ideal, and all individuals living at the internment camps were trapped, fenced in, deprived of many basic freedoms.

In 2011, despite the fears and prejudices that still exist in society, it is not difficult to ask, with incredulity, why such an act was allowed to take place.  How is it that the American public did not cry out in defense of their Japanese and Japanese-American neighbors, their friends, their co-workers, many of whom were American citizens living very Americanized lives?  

In her novel When the Emperor Was Divine, Julie Otsuka addresses this very issue, early on in the book.  The mother, one of the four main characters, is trying to prepare, as much as possible, for the mandatory trip she will be taking with her children the next day.  She stops by the local hardware store, where she interacts with Joe Lundy.  From this one short scene, several things are apparent: Joe respects the woman and thinks highly of her.  He is also embarrassed; even without pictures, it is possible to imagine Joe avoiding eye contact with the woman as subtly as is possible.  This is also indicative of his shame—it is clear that Joe, in his heart, knows that it is wrong for this woman and her children to be forced from their homes, but he knows full well that he has done nothing to protest their fate.  Joe was not alone in this behavior.

However, Joe still attempts to show his solidarity with the woman; his voice and actions in the book almost imply that, because he too has no control over the situation, he just wants her to know that he does not think of her as the government has stereotyped her.  In asking about her leaky roof, talking about the weather, and identifying the pragmatism of using a bucket to collect the intruding rain water, he is conveying that he sees her as she has been—a town resident, a mother, a homeowner, or whatever other role he has known her in.

David Guterson’s novel Snow Falling On Cedars was also written to expose the cruel treatment of so many Japanese and Japanese American individuals during this time, and he too paints a picture of how the relationships between white Americans and Japanese Americans changed and were strained.  Because his book is based around so many different characters, however, and narrated from multiple perspectives simultaneously, he shows a much wider range of emotion and behavior.  There is one scene, for example, that takes place on the morning that the Japanese residents of San Piedro Island in Washington are taking a boat to the mainland to get a bus to a holding camp.  A man runs down a hill by the docks, calling out to his fiancé and hurling a bouquet of blood red roses into the steely gray, foaming ocean.  Others reacted more like Joe, pursuing ‘normal’ conversations and offering to watch out for properties while the owners were away.  But, then, there were those who reacted with violence, defacing properties owned by those singled out by the U.S. government.

And so, despite the subtle kindnesses expressed by Joe and the more overt displays of desperation displayed by the fiancé in Guterson’s novel, it is essential to note the role of fear in driving human behavior—and likely, the role of fear in the general public’s response.  With a government rhetoric encouraging the idea that any Japanese individual could be a spy or a traitor, many Americans—like the woman’s neighbors—did not actively question the internment, allowing their anxieties to be manipulated and their fears to take control.