Notes of Today Reading

Memories of Internment: Narrating Japanese-Canadian Women’s Life Stories, By Pamela Sugiman in Diaspora, Memory, and Identity, A search for Home, edited by Vijay Agnew, University of Toronto Press (2005)

Past events after all are very much situated and represented in present-day society. As such they cannot be accessed in “unmediated form”.

These personal testimonies present memory as a meaningful sociological concept. Tima and temporality are essential to the telling of stories.

Memory is always already secondary revision. It is neither pure experience nor pure event. Memory reflects personal and historical transformations, ideological shifts, changing relations of power, strategy and struggle.
As a social process, memory then is selective. We remember what we need to remember, what is safe to remember, what we have the cultural tools to express. Memory is shaped by its audience (Tokin 1992:9, see also Sugiman 2005: 51)
The author highlights the ways in which Nisei women’s memories bring together biography, history and sociology. These memories are the products of intermingling of past and present lives, the creation of a complex dynamic between the individual and the collective, recalling and forgetting, trauma and nostalgia (Hirsch and Smith, 2002, 4, see also Sugiman 2005: 52)
As the author notes “The fluidity of these memories may also linked to my implicit feminist approach”
- placing emphasis on private experiences – experiences that may have been located in family households, in school play-grounds, in circles of friends.
- What is seemly small and everyday can be of political significance.
To some extent, the narrators’ identification of meaningful events in their lives, their presentation and interpretation of these events, were no doubt shaped by the researcher own academic relationship to time and sense of history. (53)

Questions:
what are the differences between a piece of memory and that of a narrative? Do we decode them in the same ways?
Think about women’s construction of memory in relation to their mothers (and less often their fathers)?
In sharing their memories how do they compare their personal experiences to those of others in the community?

Nostalgia

In Halbwachs’s view, nostalgia permits a transcendence of the irreversibility of time, thus enable us to selectively emphasize positive experiences and aspects of the past (Spitzer 1999, 91-91. see also 64). In this sense, nostalgia has a librating potential; it permits both au understanding of the past that may not have been originally possible, and allows for an escape from coercive social bonds and from the trials of the present (Vromen 1994: 76 see also 64).
Acording to Vromen, nostalgia offers a world in which pain and suffering have been removed. It permits a selective emphasis on the positive, and thereby has important implications for individual as well as collective identity. (64)

Judy Giles (2002), while nostalgia can function as a repudiation of an escape from “the modern”, it also has the potential to serve as a means of critiquing it. The figure of one’s mother, for example, can offer ‘not only psychic regression to maternal plenitude, but also a temporal and spatial return to the secure past of childhood and to the private world of home. (28 see also 64).
While it is not specific to women, nostalgic memory does have different meanings for women and men. It may serve as one way in which a woman actively attempts to make herself at home in a world that continues to deny women like herself power and dignity (Giles 2002:30, also 65).

Questions:
If nostalgic memory allows an escape from “the modern” to many women, who have experienced difficulty in integrating into a new life in Canada such as economic insecurity, language barrier, cold climate and Canadian social norms to name a few, longing for an idealized past seems to be appropriate. However, incase of the Vietnamese diaspora community, the past was also associated with traumas of wars and loss. This is especially true for boat people, whose homeland was severely devastated by wars and political turmoil, let alone offered them a secure ‘home’.

How an idealized past is constructed by the Vietnamese diaspora in general and by Vietnamese women in particularly?