Departing from Jacques Derridaâs appropriations of cinders as a trope of war atrocity aftermath, this book will examine writings that deal with war trauma memories in Asian-American communities. Seeing war experiences and their associative diasporas and affects as the core and axis, this book hopes to address the multifarious poetics and politics of minority trauma writings, and posit a possible interpretive framework for contemporary Asian-American writings, including those written by Julie Otsuka, Joseph Craig Danner, Monique Truong, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Janice Lowe Shinebourne, and Andre Lamontagne. As the writings in questions contain works regarding Japanese-American, Indo-Chinese Guyanese, Chinese Quebeçois, Vietnamese exiles/refugees, and Vietnam-American experiences, this book is expected to present a broader view on migration and minority issues triggered by wars and precarious conditions, as the diversified experiences examined here epitomize an intricate historical intimacy across four continents: Asia, the Americas, Africa, and Europe, as proposed by Lisa Lowe.
This bookâs primary research concern is to examine how Asian communities deal with war and precarious experiences, how they negotiate and reconcile with trauma and war memories. The term and connotations of âcindersâ originate from Jacque Derridaâs Cinders (Feu la Cendre), in which Derrida uses cinders to explain how ashes and cinders represent the total dismantling of an object, the ultimate embodiment of deconstruction. That being said, quite ironically, ashes and cinders signify the âreste,â âremains,â âremnants,â and ârelicsâ after the intervention of something. Ashes and cinders indicate that something has existed; something âwas thereâ; âwas present.â Hence, ashes and cinders are never ânothingâ or âabsence,â and in fact they are âsomethingâ and âpresence.â More specifically, a trace or incidence of negation (the ambiguity is thought-provoking). Cinders are the best examples of traces, the intervention of something.
A cinder is a fragile entity that falls into dust, that crumbles and disperses. But cinder also names resilience and intractability of what is most delicate and most vulnerableâŠ. As for me, I had at first imagined that cinders were there, not here but there, as a story to be told: cinder, this old gray word, this dusty theme of humanity, the immemorial image had decomposed from within, a metaphor or metonymy of itself, such is the destiny of every cinder, separated, consumed like a cinder of cinders. (Derrida 31)
In other words, cinders are traces of what is and what has been, an interplay of presence and absence. Cinders are the outcome of a deliberate elimination of something, and yet they signify a stubborn existence. Cinders are signs of resistance; cinders alone resist any form of assimilation or negation. Cinders are by essence paradoxical; overruled but irreducible; transmuted but irrevocable and irrecoverable. According to Derrida, ashes and cinders are the best examples of traces, the inscribed residue of an event. âCinders are there, there, not hereâ; both metaphor and metonymy, cinders are tokens of unrevealed stories and the masking of hidden secrets.
Not so much the remains of an act of burning and forgetting, cinders remember and ostensibly reinforce the remembering through their resilience: silence under protest. A subtle and brittle disappearance reveals the desire to be seen, to be heard, be felt, and most of all, the struggle for the last stroke to the last moments.
In terms of the metaphor of ashes and cinders, Derrida refers explicitly to the holocaust, during which some 6 million Europeâs Jews were targeted for extermination and sent to gas chambers and other horrifying annihilation. During the burning of the bodies, the smoke of which was visible for miles around, the bodies were destroyed, but the cinders, in a âfragile and resilientâ gesture, remembered the event as photos in a ghostly archive. During the burning in the holocaust, when each being was exterminated, one perspective for viewing the truth was forever and irretrievably lostâbut also retained, as we have seen. Writing of such ghostly moments gives one a chance to breathe into life the glowing embers, which relentlessly bespeak individual anguish and sufferings. All by themselves, embers speak of this horror, reminding us of their tragic underpinnings of how a species should be needed to be sacrificed to fulfill the sublime and utopian purpose of warped modernity. When something is burned deliberately, the traces of the burning manifest as an archival witness of collective trauma, and inscribe historical melancholia.
This book, taking as a metaphor the traces of burning as remnants of a warâs aftermath, intends to map out the memory trajectory of Asian minorities faced with exclusion, violence, and confrontation. The texts in question, written by writers of Asian backgrounds who share experiences of marginalization and âothering,â deal with the theme of trauma generated by various wars. A thorough reading of these texts opens a window onto how these Asians remember wars and traumatic experiences, how they negotiate with mainstream cultures during difficult times, how they reconcile life experiences, and themselves.
1.1 Precarity and Trauma
Contemporary research in ethnic studies has geared itself toward affective politics and ethical discriminations. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the world is plagued by cultural clashes, terrorist attacks, and military conflict. The Asian subjects can be said to have experienced a variety of losses: loss of cultural anchorage, loss of stability, loss of a sense of security. How do the liminal Asian subjects, afflicted with a fragmented consciousness, address cultural disintegration, coupled with border crossings and diasporas, in order to reconcile with the dramatic and sudden pains caused by an untold number of traumas?
The anguish of the Asian migrant experience can best be understood by way of Judith Butlerâs conception of âprecarity,â which, along with precariousness, livability, and grievability, characterizes her concerns with ethics and responsibility in her writings. Also, as we examine the issue of war trauma, Judith Butlerâs groundbreaking discussions of the precarious condition and precarity can help elucidate the core of the dilemma.
After the September 11 event, Butler discusses the vulnerability and precarity of human life, stressing that our lives and those of many others are interconnected and interdependent, which makes our lives especially vulnerable and precarious, as each one of us is liable to be exposed to unknown, unanticipated, and unspecified dangers.
Precariousness implies living socially, that is, the fact that oneâs life is always in some sense in the hands of the other. It implies exposure both to those we know and to those we do not know; a dependency on people we know, or barely know, or know not at all. Reciprocally, it implies being impinged upon by the exposure and dependency of others, most of whom remain anonymous. These are not necessarily relations of love or even of care, but constitute obligations toward others, most of whom we cannot name and do not know, and who may or may not bear traits of familiarity to an established sense of who âweâ are. (Butler Frames of War 14)
The fact that our lives are under constant threat drives us to feel fear and melancholy and be trapped in a plight of uncertainty and perplexity caused by menace and violence (Precarious xii).
As all would agree, human existence is precarious. Our lives are fragile and destined to face death, either due to willful action, as instantiated by terrorist attacks, murder and the like, or other hazards. Precariousness, according to Butler, refers to human vulnerability, specifically the frailty of life in light of its inescapable ultimate destruction. As Butler straightforwardly puts it: âLives are by definition precarious: they can be expunged at will or by accident; their persistence is in no sense guaranteedâ (Frames of War 25). Butler emphasizes the dependency of human lives, as âthere are others out there on whom my life depends, people I do not know and may never knowâ (Precarious Life xii).
Stemming from the notion of vulnerability, grief over loss is understandable. In Butlerâs words, âThat we can be injured, that others can be injured, that we are subject to death at the whim of another, are all reasons for both fear and griefâ (Precarious Life xii). Yet, what Butler alerts us to think about is the question of âselective grief.â The September 11 event (9/11) and the Paris terrorist attacks in 2015 are cases in point. The outpouring of media coverage and a rising empathy for those who suffered the loss, the feelings of shock and fear, and the ensuing massive political mobilization, were all indicative of the problematics of selective grief. As Western mainstream media continued to reveal the death toll and actual victims of the terroristsâ attacks, the scarcity of media coverage of non-Western casualties, and the issue of lack of empathy toward these victims, were addressed. Supposedly, precariousness was a âshared experience of social conditionsâ (Butler Frames of War 13), but in fact, not all lives have been recognized as precarious, inasmuch as not all casualties are grieved. Butler calls our attention to the rising grief for the loss of Western lives, and the concomitant neglect of equally vulnerable non-Western lives, whose deaths are not equally regarded as worthy of mourning and grief. Paradoxically, it is by distinguishing between those who are worthy of life and grieving over and who are worth destroying unpitiedâthat is, by maximizing the precariousness of some and minimizing the precariousness of othersâthat we violate the universally egalitarian features of the precariousness of all human lives. Precarity in this sense is ultimately political. As often found in war campaigns, when confronted with arbitrary state violence, the media often appeal to maximized precariousness. In this light, precarity characterizes the politically induced conditions under which certain populations are subjected to a heightened risk of threat and violence without protection.
If precarity is the âshared experience of social conditionsâ of a particular historical climate, it is then essential to reread the narrative of trauma, in order to make sense of the causes and effects of precariousness. Wars and traumas are characterized by the âunpresentable and unpossessable.â In a similar fashion, war and precarious experiences are shared by Asian communities. Trauma, in Greek etymology, means âwound,â an injury inflicted on the body, but in Freudian theory, trauma is a wound not only inflicted upon the body but also upon the mind; both physical and psychological. Such a wound can be both individual and collective, if trauma is understood as a symptom of injuries shared by many in society. To read trauma is to question history sanctioning erasureâvoices silenced; or one can say trauma is an alternative version of official historyâa hidden chapter, trimmed space, muted tone, suppressed desire. Perhaps, trauma is the other.
Cathy Caruth conceptualizes trauma with and beyond individual experience in Unclaimed Experience, and proposes an approach to history through the reading of trauma:
it is here, in the equally widespread and bewildering encounter with traumaâboth in its occurrence and in the attempt to understand itâthat we can begin to recognize the possibility of a history that is no longer straightforwardly referential (that is, no longer based on simple models of experience and reference). Through the notion of trauma, I will argue, we can understand that a rethinking of reference is aimed not at eliminating history but at resituating it in our understanding, that is, at precisely permitting history to arise where immediate understanding may not. (Unclaimed Experience 19)
Reading historical precarity through trauma shifts the critical attention on trauma from seeing it as individual experience to seeing the traumatic symptom as a type of social structure, prompting us to redefine history and our ethical and political relation to history. As Caruth points out:
Trauma describes an overwhelming experience of sudden or catastrophic events in which the response to the event occurs in the often delayed, uncontrolled repetitive appearance of hallucinations and other intrusive phenomena. (Unclaimed Experience 17)
According to Caruth, trauma âis experienced too soon, too unexpectedly, to be fully known and is therefore not available to consciousness until it imposes itself again, repeatedly, in the nightmares and repetitive actions of the survivorâ (19). Trauma is characterized by temporal deferral; as trauma occurs virtually in the wake of the disastrous event, fully impacting afterwards. Whatâs at work within trauma is the paradoxical nature of its âinherent latency,â due to its âpeculiar and temporal structureâ and âbelatednessâ within the traumatic experience (24). After trauma takes place, because of the time lag, the event can be âforgotten,â only to be ârememberedâ in and through the act of forgetting. The traumatic experience is to âact outâ and âlive throughâ the traumatic event again and again.
Moreover, trauma involves what Sigmund Freud calls the âpathological disposition,â entailing the emotions of sadness, frustration, and melancholia. It is a state of anxiety, anguish, and perpetual helplessness, uninvigorated by any external force. The senses of sadness and loss are derived from traumatic experiences on both individual and collective levels. The sense of loss is the core concept when Freud discusses melancholia. In his 1917 article, Sigmund Freud defines âmourningâ and âmelancholiaâ both as losses, including the loss of love, the loss of country, the loss of homeland, and the loss of freedom and ideals. Unlike âmourning,â which is the successful transference of libidinal mechanisms, implying that sorrow and grief are to be sealed, pain to be dismissed, conflicts to be settled, melancholia a prolonged, limitless state of grief. According to Caruth, because the traumatic experience cannot be fully represented in a narrative form of remembering, and trauma cannot be fully integrated or recovered from, hence a full authenticity of the traumatic state can never exist. Although the traumatized subject often cannot recognize or remember the traumatic event right after the disaster takes place, the pieces and fragments of memories will return as with whatever is repressed, haunting the traumatized subject in the form of nightmares.
As Caruth states, the traumatic experience cannot be assimilated when it occurs. Thus the writing of trauma defies and demands simultaneously our ever belated and ever repeated efforts to understand and interpret it. Based upon the conception of âtraumatic experience,â Caruth proposes that trauma in its temporal deferral gives supportive force for the traumatized subject to escape from the initial spell of shock. When we experience pain through the remembrance of an event, we are prompted to flee from the primal painful experience. The fact that traumatic experience cannot be assimilated into narrative experience, and as well its belatedness, demands the necessity of witnessing, with testimonials that often contradict what really happened. Hence, it is essential to have flashbacks of traumatic memories, the representations of hallucinations, the witness of survivors, evidence that traumatic experiences need to be told, to be heard, and to be represented.
By so doing can the traumatized recover from pain? Holocaust historians Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub argue that Shoah leads us through the exploration of historical unspeakability. Surv...