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 pahllocentric 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.