Mother Quotes in Obasan
All Nisei are liable to imprisonment if we refuse to volunteer to leave. At least that is the likeliest interpretation of Ian Mackenzie's “Volunteer or else” statement. […] Why do they consider us to be wartime prisoners? Can you wonder that there is a deep bitterness among the Nisei who believed in democracy?
The crowd stands aside, waving steadily, bowing, touching arms here and there, and then they are out of view and I’m clambering up the train steps again as I did three years ago.
We sit in two seats facing each other once more, exactly like the last time. Where is Father? […] Where are we going? Will it be to a city? Remember my doll? Remember Vancouver? The escalators? Electric lights? Streetcars? Will we go home again ever?
[The Grand Inquisitor’s] demand to know was both a judgment and a refusal to hear. The more he questioned [Mother], the more he was her accuser and murderer. The more he killed her, the deeper her silence became. What the Grand Inquisitor has never learned is that the avenues of speech are the avenues of silence. To hear my mother, to attend her speech, to attend the sound of stone, he must first become silent. Only when he enters her abandonment will he be released from his own.
How the Grand Inquisitor gnaws at my bones. At the age of questioning my mother disappeared. Why, I have asked ever since, did she not write? Why, I ask now, must I know?
Did I doubt her love? Am I her accuser?
She and my mother, [Grandma Kato] writes, were unable to talk of all the things that happened. The horror would surely die sooner, they felt, if they refused to speak. But the silence and the constancy of the nightmare had become unbearable for Grandma and she hoped that by sharing them with her husband, she could be helped to extricate herself from the grip of the past.
This body of grief is not fit for human habitation. Let there be flesh. The song of mourning is not a lifelong song.
Father, Mother, my relatives, my ancestors, we have come to the forest tonight, to the place where the colors all meet––red and yellow and blue. We have turned and returned to your arms as you turn to earth and form the forest floor.
Tonight we picked berries with the help of your sighted hands. […] See how our stained fingers have read the seasons, and how our serving hands serve you still.
My loved ones, rest in your world of stone. Around you flows the underground stream.
Mother Quotes in Obasan
All Nisei are liable to imprisonment if we refuse to volunteer to leave. At least that is the likeliest interpretation of Ian Mackenzie's “Volunteer or else” statement. […] Why do they consider us to be wartime prisoners? Can you wonder that there is a deep bitterness among the Nisei who believed in democracy?
The crowd stands aside, waving steadily, bowing, touching arms here and there, and then they are out of view and I’m clambering up the train steps again as I did three years ago.
We sit in two seats facing each other once more, exactly like the last time. Where is Father? […] Where are we going? Will it be to a city? Remember my doll? Remember Vancouver? The escalators? Electric lights? Streetcars? Will we go home again ever?
[The Grand Inquisitor’s] demand to know was both a judgment and a refusal to hear. The more he questioned [Mother], the more he was her accuser and murderer. The more he killed her, the deeper her silence became. What the Grand Inquisitor has never learned is that the avenues of speech are the avenues of silence. To hear my mother, to attend her speech, to attend the sound of stone, he must first become silent. Only when he enters her abandonment will he be released from his own.
How the Grand Inquisitor gnaws at my bones. At the age of questioning my mother disappeared. Why, I have asked ever since, did she not write? Why, I ask now, must I know?
Did I doubt her love? Am I her accuser?
She and my mother, [Grandma Kato] writes, were unable to talk of all the things that happened. The horror would surely die sooner, they felt, if they refused to speak. But the silence and the constancy of the nightmare had become unbearable for Grandma and she hoped that by sharing them with her husband, she could be helped to extricate herself from the grip of the past.
This body of grief is not fit for human habitation. Let there be flesh. The song of mourning is not a lifelong song.
Father, Mother, my relatives, my ancestors, we have come to the forest tonight, to the place where the colors all meet––red and yellow and blue. We have turned and returned to your arms as you turn to earth and form the forest floor.
Tonight we picked berries with the help of your sighted hands. […] See how our stained fingers have read the seasons, and how our serving hands serve you still.
My loved ones, rest in your world of stone. Around you flows the underground stream.
