Mother Tongue: An Interpretation of Yamanaka's Blu's Hanging
Kendra D-G
“Linguistic identity and cultural identity are skin and flesh. When you sever one from the other, you make it not okay to be who you are.” --Lois Ann Yamanaka
Yamanaka writes with audacious physicality and a fascination for flesh. In her novel Blu’s Hanging, she depicts the physical world through the eyes of three motherless children as they struggle to decode the threatening and misguided messages of the male body. Throughout the novel, Ivah, Blu, and Maise try to escape physical victimization from a high school drop out’s “big purple (penis) full of red road mappings” (10) and spiritual harm from the “blue eyes, flushed cheeks ... tight Levis and huge pink hands” (214) of a summer missionary. Ivah, Blu, and Maise must find a language, a mother tongue, to protect them from the physical and spiritual dangers of patriarchy. As they mature and come to terms with the loss of their mother, the children reclaim and redefine their Japanese Hawaiian identity through song, prayer, written standard English, and spoken pidgin English in order to achieve cultural survival.
After their mother’s death, the children must become surrogate mothers for each other to protect themselves from the often violent sexuality of disempowered men. The children’s first encounter with male sexual violence is at Kingdom Hall, a place that throughout the novel connotes the violence of colonization/christianization in Hawaii of which results a social order marred by confusion, violence, and loss. In the parking lot of Kingdom Hall, a high school drop out masturbates in the front seat of his car and offers any of the children ten dollars to “know what this is” (10). The children’s encounter with the high schooler is their initiation into what feminist theorists like Cixous and Clement refer to as phallocentric culture (Eagleton 111). Within phallocentric culture, the phallus becomes the symbol of power in human discourse. The innocent children are silenced and confused when confronted with this phallic desire. “ ‘I like your bradda first. The fat kine feel like girls where I going. Call your bradda so I can practice’” (11). The children are paralyzed by the threat of male violence which is significantly directed at Blu. Blu and Maise are “stuck in the middle of dust and flying gravel” (11) as the drop out again asserts his symbolic masculine power by spinning donuts around them in the parking lot. The children’s dead mother can’t protect them and their father “has gone to work in the pineapple fields” (11).
In the sexual threats that follow, the children, Blu in particular, begin to explore the meaning of male sexual power--the dangers and pleasures. Blu is especially afraid of Kuro-chan, a black man who his mother has warned him of before her death. “Mama used to tell Blu never to be bad...or she’d call Kuro-chan to take him away forever to his house... ‘and what the Kuro-chan does to little boys like you Blu...’ ” (14). Blu’s mother only alludes to a sexual threat to discipline Blu, but her rather racist suggestions only pique her son’s curiosity. He asks Ivah if it has “something to do with my dick and his dick” (15). Ivah, like her mother, chooses to protect Blu with her silence on male sexual violence. “My Mama told me about sodomy between men and boys, but I don’t tell Blu. The words wouldn’t leave my mouth” (15). However, the children eventually learn that it is this silence that makes them sexual prey. Mr. Iwasaki is another male threat that the children’s mother has tried to protect them from. When Ivah and Maise find Blu in Mr. Iwasaki’s back yard with his pants down and chocolates in his hand, Mr. Iwasaki’s male body replaces the language of confrontation. “Mr. Iwasaki squeezes his grey rubbery penis and wags it at me. He doesn’t speak English” (20). Yamanaka emphasizes this lack of words between Ivah and the old man to convey that this lack of language is lack of power. Mr. Iwsaki must bang pan lids in his back yard and bribe boys with candy to communicate his diminished male power, and Ivah allows the old man’s penis to threaten and invade her own silence. Ivah’s incapacity to verbally address either Mr. Iwasaki or Blu translates into a purely physical response. “I have no words for Blu, no words, but I feel it all behind my eyes burning. A stream of urine comes down my legs as I drag him quickly across the sidewalk” (20). Ivah’s physical response reveals her shame and fear, but her lack of words for Blu reinforce a destructive pattern of violence. In response to her emotion, Ivah “smack(s) Blu so hard across the head that money and candy fly across the hot road” (20). Ivah lacks the maternal language to instruct Blu, and instead reprimands him with a physical blow. At this point, her entirely physical response mimics phallocentric behavior and her father’s means of discipline. The children need to create a new language to respond to and allow them to escape from male violence.
In order to insure their survival, each child must come to master a maternal and healing language to combat their weakness and fear. Blu’s role in this is pivotal. Unlike Ivah, who must enter the academic realm and Maise who must find a voice, Blu must master a spiritual language. Early in the novel, Blu’s body is feminized. Through Blu, Yamanaka unites male and female aspects as well as physical and verbal forces. After his mother’s death, Blu’s body metamorphoses. His body is burdened with “so much fat that his nipples go in and look like two sad brown eyes pulling down on his fleshy breasts” (11). In Blu’s physical description, Yamanaka emphasizes the sadness and the emotional weight of the feminine experience. As a result of Blu’s physical transformation into the feminine, Blu experiences a feminized socialization. “The boys at school call him Cross-Your-Heart, 18-Hour-Bra-Boy, Totoy Boy, Boy-with-Breats, and Tit-man” (11). Blu’s physical body is mocked by his peers and defines him as both male and female. His body becomes a metaphor for suffering and loss which gives him access to a spiritual realm that is intimately tied to the figure of his mother.
Blu becomes a sort of messenger for the spirit and body of his mother. It is Blu’s father that first recognizes this. “ ‘And your bradda’s voice--thass your Mama singing right out his throat’” (140). Both Blu’s feminized body and his voice are associated with the maternal. Blu’s poetry unit for his teacher Mrs. Ota suggests both Blu’s alignment with semiotic language and his ability to communicate in the Symbolic realm. Judith Butler writes, “...Poetic language is the recovery of the maternal body within the terms of language, one that has the potential to disrupt, subvert, and displace the paternal law” (Butler 80). Blu’s poetry reflects a link to the maternal body and the “tones, rhythms, and sensations” typical of semiotic language (Eagleton 228). In his poem, Blu speaks directly to his dead mother and recreates the colors of his mother’s “red dress,” the smell of wild violets, and the taste of “long eggplants” in his mother’s garden. He creates a written manifestation of his longing to revive his mother’s body from death by recounting sensory details linked to his mother in poetic verse.
But even before his mother’s death, Blu attempts to record bits and pieces of maternal wisdom that his mother hands down to Ivah. “ ‘I write um all down in my tablet for help Ivah rememba, you like Mama? What you said, Mama? Again? C’mon, you guys. Okay, tell me what to write, Mama. Tell me what I gotta do. We can write um all down. Thass how you remember important things, right, Ivah?’” (44). Rather than accept the oral transmission of his mother’s words to his sister, Blu attempts to transcribe maternal knowledge into a written form. In doing so, Blu becomes a translator for the feminine experience. Ivah affirms Blu’s desire to assume this role to record her mother’s words as she “rub(s) cocoa butter into the shiny rivers of scars across (her) Mama’s belly and back. They would map (her) way home to (her mother’s) body, (she) was sure, should (she) ever get lost” (44). By linking Blu’s written words to the scars on the mother’s body, Yamanka creates a bridge between verbal and physical language. It is through their mother’s scars that both Ivah and Blu will find their “way home”. The link between the language of the mother’s scars and the oral/written transmission of feminine knowledge is suffering. Both the mother’s death, like Christ’s crucifixion, are body sacrifices that empower both Hawaiian and Christian religious thought.
In order to further transform Blu into a unifying spiritual force, Yamanaka depicts Blu as both the embodiment of Christ and negation of Christian doctrine. When Ivah, Blu, and Maise first go to attend Bible study at the Baptist church, Blu asks, “ ‘How come now we coming Baptists? You Buddhist like me, yeah, Maise? ‘Cause Mama was Buddhist, you know” (211). Blu constantly refers back to his maternal knowledge for self definition. Maise agrees by affirming their racial heritage, “Japanee” (211). Ivah, however, contradicts this notion by telling Blu not to worry because they are “nothing” (211). It is precisely this cultural and maternal void that Blu seeks to fill in his attempt to find a spiritual language. When Blu captures the lead role in the Baptist youth group production of “He is Alive!”, he identifies so strongly with Jesus Christ that he becomes Christ and feels his suffering. “ ‘...when Jim told us close our eyes last Sunday and see Jesus on the cross and feel the nails go inside yo’ hand and yo’ feet, and feel the crown of thorns on yo’ head, I felt um, you know’” (217). Blu can connect to the spiritual representation of Christ’s bodily suffering and he feels the physical pain. He also feels the emotional pain, “I know what Jesus feel like hanging there all sore and thirsty” (217). Blu translates his story into Jesus’ story to emphasize the pain of loss. Throughout the novel, Blu, like Christ, is described as “hanging”. First Blu plays cowboy with a noose that Uncle Paulo has made and accidentally hangs himself from a mango tree branch. Later, Uncle Paulo ties Blu up and hangs him from the clothesline. In the last of Blu’s hanging(s), after he his raped by Uncle Paulo, he “is hanging, hanging on” (249) to his mother’s spirit. In the repeated hangings, Blu suffers physically and emotionally from wounds inflicted by male violence, and he is not allowed redemption from pain until he clings to the spirit of his
mother.
Blu identifies the importance of spiritual matriarchy when he reflects on Jesus’ suffering. He understands how Jesus would “like go see his fadda ‘cause he miss um so much” (217). But in order for a religious transcendence from the body to occur, in order to experience redemption, Jesus’ father, God, must be replaced with a mother figure. Blu questions, “Was it Jim or Jesus who said that Buddhists cannot go heaven? Ivah, Mama ain’t with Jesus--” (218). Blu disagrees with the exclusivity of patriarchal Christian doctrine. For Blu, spirituality must be not only maternal and inclusive, but it must speak to his painful experience as a motherless Japanese Hawaiian boy.
During the youth group performance, Blu calls attention to the physical suffering of both Jesus and Judas, and finds his own suffering somewhere between the two figures. “His head bowed, he looks slowly up at Jesus...he feels the nails in his own hands as he turns his palms upward, fingers trembling. He looks at Judas, touches the rope around his neck, shivers slightly as he holds his throat” (220). For Blu, it is the physical manifestation of pain that transcends the role of either of these two Christian figures--Jesus as redeemer and Judas as traitor. Blu is “a cross” he becomes the suffering of both men. Later, the branch holding Judas to the tree comes tumbling down which echoes Blu’s first hanging and the broken mango branch attached to his neck. Although Blu feels Christ’s pain, he must deny the Christian faith because the maternal spirit is secondary to God the Father in Christian doctrine. Thus Blu’s character is also closely aligned with Judas who betrays Christ. Blu “moves to the feet of Christ Jesus and falls there weeping for himself, for my mother, for a place for all of us in heaven” (220). Blu must transform spirituality from a religion that signifies his loss to one that signifies his salvation and the salvation of his family.
Ivah’s salvation is knowledge. It is her growing awareness that maternal wisdom alone cannot save her and her family, but rather maternal wisdom united with her academic knowledge that can elevate her fate and her brother’s and sister’s futures. Ivah recognizes the power inherent within academic institutions. She observes the teachers’ power over her brother and sister, “(Blu’s) got his teacher ingrained in his head, Miss Torres, who makes every student write the same last line of every writing assignment. I had her in the fourth grade too. Curse on him. Now she’s part of his talking” (6). Ivah targets the destructive aspect of academic education how a teacher’s negative influence can shape her brother’s thoughts. Ivah confesses, “I figured Miss Torres out a long time ago. Tell her what you crave three times and she knows how to pull your strings” (12). Ivah sees academic institutions not as a way towards self empowerment, but a place where power is wielded over the island natives, particularly in relation to haole teachers. “Kind of like a haole from Bloomingdale teaching Hawaiian Studies. If you close your ears, you won’t hear her mispronounce Kamehameha and Kaunakakai wrong every time she uses it in a sentence” (63). Ivah rightly criticizes an education which deforms and misrepresents her experience as a Hawaiian.
Disillusioned with academic institutions and forced into a parental role with her siblings after her mother’s death, Ivah constantly seeks maternal knowledge. She continually runs through lists of dos and don’ts that her mother reinforced while she was alive, but Ivah laments the fact that the lists fail to reveal with clarity her role as a woman which she assumes is the role of motherhood. “Good night, Mama. Mama, you died and didn’t leave me a damn clue. Teach me how to be a mama too” (37). Ivah searches for self definition through a maternal language. “Among other things, Mama left us a few words” (38). Ivah uses these words as a reference to define everything from male and female anatomy to her concept of familial love. While searching through boxes of her mother’s memorabilia, Ivah finds a photograph of her mother that links language to the feminine body. “A picture of Mama and me as a baby and written on the back in her script: ‘This I made with my body’” (184). This image of Ivah as a baby with her mother, together with her mother’s written script become a symbol for a procreative feminine force, a force aligned with the maternal body. This knowledge of the body is a constructive force that Ivah chooses to identify with over formal academic knowledge.
Both Ivah’s cousin, Big Sis, who becomes a teacher at Ivah’s school and Maise’s teacher, Miss Ito, bridge the distance between feminine constructivity and the destructive abuse of power within the academic institution. Both women provide Ivah with a series of written transcriptions (letters and notes in Maise’s school notebook), that suggest a feminized and native way to teach and learn. Both women encourage Ivah to attend Mid-Pacific Institute in Honolulu as a way to her own personal and academic success and as a way to best assist her siblings. It is only after Blu’s rape, that Ivah finds the courage to replace her struggle for maternal knowledge with the pursuit of academic knowledge. “I don’t know what to do. Never was a Mama. Never will be. How to save myself. I have to save myself. Me” (249). Ivah realizes that she must save herself in order to save her brother and sister. And the key to Ivah’s salvation rather than empowerment through her mother’s spirit is empowerment through her own spirit and her academic strength. Unlike Blu’s spiritual quest, Ivah seeks betterment by reclaiming society’s offerings on her own terms. “ ‘We nothing,’ (Ivah) say(s) to Blu and Maise, ‘Nothing, but us’” (226). Ivah attempts to extend her sense of self validation to her siblings.
Maise, the youngest of the siblings, is robbed of her voice when her mother dies. “Since Mama died, Maisie said about five things: I scared. Sleep with me. More. There she is. Mama” (14). Maisie’s words are indicative of her fear, vulnerability, and loss. Of all the children, she is most vulnerable to teacher’s misuse of power when she leaves the security of home. Yamanaka uses Maise’s character to explore the inguistic/cultural conflict between pidgin English and standard English and to exemplify the difference between teaching from love and teaching from a desire for power. Both of these linguistic and teaching issues have effected Yamanaka in her past as a teacher and now as a writer. “As a teacher of “at risk” students in the tough Kalihi neighborhood in Honolulu, (Yamanaka) was admonished against using (pidgin) in the classroom. And when she based her 1993 poetry collection, “Saturday Night at the Pahala Theatre,” on pidgin, she found the book banned at schools and herself “uninvited” from readings. It’s only recently, after a mainstream publisher, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, brought out her first novel-written partly in pidgin-that she has earned a measure of respect for revealing the power and poetry of the language (Takahama 1).
Yamanaka was encouraged by a writing teacher of her own to begin writing her stories in pidgin. Yamanaka addresses how important it was to validate “her voice” by writing in her native language, “That’s when I came to terms that pidgin was not an ignorant language, that I was speaking a dialect and that my feelings and thoughts were so connected to the language that in order for me to write truthfully, I needed to connect to that voice. But it was very hard. Very, very hard” (Takahama 1).
Tammy Owens, Maise’s haole kindergarten teacher, has demoralized her by punishing her silence rather than helping her find a voice. Maise is forced into the language of her body. By urinating, Maise communicates her fear, and is treated, not with her teacher’s sympathy, but her teacher’s disgust. In a conference with Ivah, Tammy Owens continues to express her disgust and lack of understanding. “...we need to speak to each other in standard English for the duration of this conference. I find the pidgin English you children speak to be so limited in its ability to express fully what we need to cover. Am I clear?” (59). Tammy Owens intends to exert her power over Ivah by taking away Ivah’s voice as well, but Ivah continues to speak in pidgin.
Again Yamanaka links the children to semiotic language when Ivah and Tammy Owens discuss Maise’s behavior at school. Although Ivah wards off Tammy Owen’s demands that she speak in standard English, Ivah suffers a psychological blow when Miss Owen’s forces her to express her motherless status in symbolic terms. Miss Owens attacks Ivah, “Well, Ivah? What have you got to say? These are incredibly sociopathic behaviors we’re seeing exhibited in a very young child. Do you have a mother?” (61). Ivah responds with a simple, no, and she wonders if the teacher is “playing with (her) head” (61). Miss Owens continues to hound Ivah until she must express her mother’s death symbolically. “No. Mother. Dead. Just. Us, ” Ivah says (61). Yamanaka emphasizes the weight of Ivah’s response by punctuating the sentence with a period after each word. Ivah recognizes Miss Owen’s assertion for power in the symbolic realm. “She wanted me to say the word.
Dead” (61).
When Maise begins Special Education with Miss Ito who is Japanese Hawaiian, she begins to communicate through the written word. Yamanaka stresses the desire and the necessity of writing for all three children: Ivah, Blu, and Maise. All the children place importance on written exchanges that express and reaffirm their identity and their personal struggles. The value the children place on the written word is a reflection on the value Yamanaka herself places on the written word to give her experience a voice. A voice in her own native language, pidgin English. As Maise learns to speak and write with Miss Ito, she is encouraged to communicate as an expression of love. On her birthday she writes, “Ivah is Ma who put me sleep. Blu the one who sing till my eyes close. Ka-san is her. Hoppy is lucky. Poppy is far. I love everybody. Love, Maisie O” (132). Ivah emphasizes the new found power of expression Maise has discovered, “She’s got words, just words on hers” Blu and Ivah reinforce what Maise has learned with games like ‘Happiness is...’ and singing the lyrics to her favorite songs like “Beautiful Girl”. After Blu’s rape, Maise learns to express herself in anger and outside the confines of her private notebook. She writes on the walls of Uncle Paulo’s house, “Malester Hang I Kill You Human Rat” (251). Maise’s move from notebook to wall and most importantly from passivity to anger reflects her growing ability to express and protect herself from the exploitation of a haole and male dominated society.
Blu’s rape serves as a catalyst for change in all three children and culminates in the “second coming” of the children’s mother’s spirit. Blu serves as the physical sacrifice necessary for spiritual transformation--whether this sacrifice echoes the Hawaiian transfer of power from the people back to Ku the War God (Dening 162), or the Christian transfer of power from flesh to spirit. When Maise and Ivah find Blu tied and gagged in Uncle Paulo’s truck in the parking lot of Kingdom Hall, they see their brother’s face “neon white in the light of Jesus Coming Soon” (247). Once the threat of male violence becomes a reality, Ivah is able to replace motherhood with academic pursuit, Maise is able to defend herself and her brother, and Blu has discovered his own form of spirituality. When the mother’s spirit comes to the children, it is Blu that convinces her to leave earth and ascend to “the light of Buddah, the light of Jesus” (249). Blu’s prayers after the rape, reflect his new creation of a personal, inclusive, maternal religion. He prays to his spirit mother, “Dear Heavenly Mama, hallow be thy name” and “Dearest Mama on earth as it tis in Heaven” (251-52) and within the language of prayer Blu is able to express his physical and emotional pain. When Ivah tells Blu and Maise, “Us all can be Mama” (259). Blu responds with the spiritual knowledge that “Us three always was” (259). The three children become a new sort of holy trinity that empowers them with the language of self, a spiritual identity, and a voice. Referring to her own literary work and works by other native Hawaiians Yamanaka has said, “It’s nice now that we (Hawaiians) have ownership of our own stories” (Takahama 1). Yamanaka has given Ivah, Blu, and Maise, ownership of their own lives.
Works Cited
Butler, Judith. Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York:
Routledge, Chapman, and Hall, 1990.
Dening, Greg. Mr. Bligh’s Bad Language. New York: Cambridge UP, 1992. Eagleton, Mary ed. Feminist Literary Criticism. New York: Longman, 1991. Takahama, Valerie. “Controversial Adventures in ‘Paradise’: Bully Burgers and Pidgin.”
The Orange County Register 15 Feb. 1996: E01
Yamanaka, Lois-Ann. Blu’s Hanging. New York: Avon, 1997.