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Diaspora, Imagination, Image

Reflections on hair and memory loss
Ella Shohat City University of New York

Abstract: This article deals with racial misrepresentation and displacement. The author analyzes U.S. racial discourses as they affect cartographies of memory and narratives of displacements, pointing out that what might seem "irrelevant" to American racialized identities in fact evokes deep historical affinities and structural analogies. Visions and meanings of memory are discussed, and various art forms considered as a means of reconstructing the contours of a history.

Sommaire

Redrawing American Cartographies of Asia
Processed Memories
Hairy Visions

Redrawing American Cartographies of Asia

In a 1995 "New York Times" article, a reviewer wrote of the Asian-American artist, Lynne Yamamoto, that she "inscribes the biography of her Chinese grandmother, a laundress, on nails hammered into the wall..." The black and white xerox of the article that Lynne sent includes her handwritten correction with a red pencil; "Chinese" is crossed out to read "Japanese." How often, Lynne, have you had to correct that Asian-confusion syndrome of "they're all the same?" As I was looking into your work on the drudge labor of a laundress, I was wondering about our own work, yours and mine, both granddaughters of dislocated domestic laborers-- how long can we go on rinsing, cleaning, and scrubbing our misrepresentations?

I am not concerned here simply with everyday orientalism. But in the context of multiple displacements-- in Lynne's case, Japan, Hawai'i, continental U.S., and in my case, Iraq-Israel/Palestine, U.S.-- what does it mean to be or not to be labelled as "Asian-American"? The diverse cultures of Asia are condensed into a homogenizing label that erases their difference and complexity, whence the typical conflation of Japanese with Chinese. At the same time, some parts of Asia, namely West Asia (i.e. the Middle East), are simply dropped out of the continent, leaving these immigrants to America standing on insecure grounds with regards to the continents on both sides of the hyphen. "East" and "West," after all, are relational terms. In Arabic, the word for West (Maghreb) refers to North Africa, the westernmost part of the Arab world, in contrast to the Mashreq, the Eastern part. And what the West calls the "Middle East" is from a Chinese perspective "Western Asia."1

As an immigrant from Asia to the U.S. I have often been quite bewildered to learn that despite my Iraqiness I am not an Asian. And as someone who had grown up in Israel/Palestine, and who had been called black there, I have also learned that I am expected to leave behind this conjunctural definition of blackness. The "shock of arrival," to borrow Meena Alexander's phrase2, begins when one runs into the border patrols of new world naming. My family, like most Jewish -Arab families after the colonial partition of Palestine, became refugees from Iraq in the 1950s, and ended up in Israel, due to what was styled a "population exchange," whereby Palestinians and Jewish-Arabs were massively swapped across borders. Once in Israel we became the schwartzes (blacks in Yiddish) of Euro-Israelis. Our Asianess, in Israel, was bureaucratically defined. In a highly centralized state, Israel, every aspect of our lives, whether at school, work, or hospital, was determined by checking that fatal box on official documents: "Of Asiatic/African origins."

But in the U.S. I quickly learned that my previous scars of partition and the traumatic memories of crossing the borders from Iraq to Israel/Palestine, have little resonance, or are simply censored. I also learned that not all hyphenated identities are permitted entry into America's official lexicon of ethnicities and races. I could see in their faces how this corporeally inscribed hyphen, Iraq-Israel, produced ontological vertigo, and the hyphen immediately disappeared into an assimilable identity: "Ah, so you're Israeli!" Only one geography is allowed prior to embarking; the made-in-U.S.A. predicament of the single hyphen. Although in Israel we were not exactly "from here," in the U.S., we are only "from there." While "there" we are "immigrants from Asian and African countries," here, in the U.S., we are not; in fact we disappear, subsumed under the dominant Eurocentric definition of Jewishness (equated with Europe) and Arabness (equated with Islam) as antonyms. Suddenly millennia of existence in Iraq is erased in the name of a mere three decades in Israel. I remember during the Gulf War reading a "New York Times" book section article where the Euro-American Jewish reviewer suggested that something was as "rare as a synagogue in Baghdad." He was obviously unaware that Baghdad as late as the 1950s was 40% Jewish, and that it was crowded with well-attended synagogues. (Where did he imagine the major Judaic text, "The Babylonian Talmud" was written?)

Our historical intra-continental and watery routes from West Asia to East Asia come up against the terra firma of Eurocentric charting of regions and populations. The "East" is divided into "Near," "Middle," and "Far", making Europe/U.S. the arbiter of spatial evaluation, just as the establishment of Greenwich Mean Time produces England as the regulating center of temporal measurement. Since when, then, did the vast continent of Asia shrink so incredibly that the face of the land is now superimposed on a stereotypically "yellow" physiognomy? Even "Asian looks" can be deceiving about one's "Americaness", leading East Asians who have been here for generations to be perceived as "always foreign". But speaking accented English also marks the immigrant body as a mysterious or menacing geography. Even as my body crossed the Atlantic, my accent has remained. That is what distinguishes the Asian immigrant from the native born Asian-American in the public sphere, after all. Yet for people of my ancestry, perhaps being suddenly dropped out of the Asian and African maps, after having them inscribed on us in a racist manner, brings, along with the frustration, a measure of relief for not so easily being boxed in one of the familiar corrals for "the other." Perhaps I am seduced by the possibility of a new, ethnically chaotic, Babel, here in the land that the Rastafaris also call Babylon.

When I come to write about the work of an "Asian-American" artist, then, I am here echoing all the voices, memories, and narratives associated with the very word "Asian." I oscillate between accepting U.S. racial discourses as they affect cartographies of memory and narratives of displacements, on the one hand, and feeling obliged to narrate them within their "Asian" contexts. I first have to pierce the veil of secrecy enveloping the racism toward Asian and African Jews in Israel, in hopes of invoking a multifaceted transnational dialogue among many racialized experiences. For what might seem "irrelevant" to American racialized identities in fact evokes deep historical affinities and structural analogies. If the Palestinians figure in official Euro-Israeli discourse as the Indians, we, Asian and African Israelis are on some levels the blacks. Not coincidentally, our major movement of resistance in the seventies was called "The Black Panthers" in homage to the American movement, while today we have adopted the name "Mizrahim" ("Orientals"), which despite its orientalist lineage, for us has carried an affirmation of our positive relation to the "East," in the context of a state which proudly proclaims its Westerness, while choking off our "Eastern" cultural expression.

Apart from trying to put West Asia "back" on the U.S. world map, I ask myself, why am I willing to participate in this project? And what do a Japanese-Hawaiian-American and an Iraqi-Israeli-American have to do with each other, apart from sharing residency in the U.S.?

Processed Memories

As a kind of homage, Lynne Yamamoto narrates her grandmother's life through the very act of producing the material of her installation. "Ten in One Hour" reflexively alludes to the artist's own rate of production of the soap objects. Reenacting her grandmother's intensive labor, Yamamoto creates a parallel rhythm between her repetitive artistic work and her grandmothers' repetitive movements of washing, wringing, hanging, folding. But this analogy also calls attention to class dissonance. While Lynne's images, like my texts, are currently produced and consumed within cultural institutions inseparable from late global capitalism, we, the granddaughters of diasporic domestic workers, have traveled a long road to join another class of cultural workers. Our art or cultural production places us now in a different category than that of our grandmothers and parents. In my writings I have often felt a survivor's desire to tell again and again about the "hidden injuries" of translocated class, race, gender and sexuality.

Our grandmothers worked as domestic servants in new countries, unfamiliar with new cultural and linguistic terrains: Hebrew-speaking Israel for my Arabic-speaking grandmother and English-speaking Hawai'i for Lynne's Japanese-speaking grandmother. In her installations "Night Waters" and "They All Fall Down", Yamamoto uses archival photographs of Japanese women working as domestics for haole (Euro-American) families in Hawai'i. "They Fall Down" uses a continuous video loop of Yamamoto's aunt's hands, polishing a silver tea bell. "The installation," writes Yamamoto, "is based on stories my aunts told me about working as domestics for haole families, and particular memories of how they were called in to change dishes for the next course."

If Lynne's grandmother came as a "picture bride" to Hawai'i, my seta (Arabic for grandmother), Gurgeia, left Baghdad as a widower. My grandfather, Ya'aqub abu-Sasson, was buried in the 1930s in the Baghdadi Jewish cemetery in Sheikh Omar st., which in the 1960s was itself apparently buried under the new national television station. Our millennia traces erased. I often thought about the irony that I became a professor of media studies, engaged in unearthing the deeper strata of the visual text.

I moved "Ila Amareeka," as my family would say in Arabic, in 1981. I did not come to America as a picture bride, but pictures of America made me come. I remember, as we were growing up, we loved watching American TV series-- "Hawaii Five-O" was one of our favorites-- as though we were dreaming about a new world, while our old world of the Euphrates and Tigris, was a forbidden memory in the state of Israel. Indeed the global flow of American images and sounds gave me the feeling of a terra cognita, even prior to my voyage to the island of Manhattan. Here, in the Gramercy Park apartment I was cleaning, I could repeat seta's rate of production, fighting that my life too won't go down the drain.

Soap to wash the dirt off the shirt. To wash the dirt off your body. Soap, cleaning for others, while being called dirty yourself. My dark friend Na'eema used to frantically scrub off her "dirty skin" in a violent cleansing ritual that never reached that promised hidden layer of white skin she painfully desired; but it did leave her bleeding. In Israel we were called "dirty Iraqis." I can still hear the Hebrew words: "Erakit Masriha!" ("Stinky Iraqi"), shouted at me by a blond boy whose relatives in Europe were themselves turned into "sabonim"-- soaps-- by the Nazis.

My seta who died last year, in her mid nineties, enjoyed cursing back. She washed their dirty laundry as she joyfully rolled out her Arabic obscenities. She never learned the language of the "al beitheen" (Arabic for " the whites"). As she put several layers of shaqsa (Iraqi for female head wear) to wrap her dwindling graying braids, she was amused by my sister's efforts to bleach her hair, as the stubborn roots refused to fully erase their black past. And like many women of her class, my grandmother did not wash out of her dictionary dirty words reserved for those whose houses emitted unpleasant smells in the absence of her ever bleaching hand.

Some of Lynne Yamamoto's work features old photos of Asian laborers in Hawai'i. I wondered how many of the photos actually belong to Lynne's family album? Images of immigrant and refugee laborers are often only distilled in the colonial visual archives. A few years ago, around the Quincentinnary for the Expulsion of Muslim and Jews from Spain, I was desperately looking for images of Jews in the Islamic world to accompany an essay I wrote for "Middle East Report" on the subject. The editor and I approached the Yeshiva University Museum in NY, directed by Euro-American Jews, then sponsoring a photographic exhibition on the subject. Aware of my critical stance, they refused to lend such images without first reviewing the political content of my essay, thereby barring access to my own community history. I have visited Jewish museums in the U.S. or in Israel, only to see nightmarish reincarnations on display. Precious objects that belonged to our community, or to its individual members, ranging from religious artifacts to "oriental" jewelry and dresses, are all exhibited in a way that fetishistically detached them from their social context and cultural history within the world of Islam, of Asia and Africa. In the Gothic building of the Jewish Museum in NY, for example, "exotic Jews" are quite profitable.

I flip through British collections of photos of Baghdad in an attempt to visualize my grandmother in the streets, houses, markets, carrying her beqcha (bundle) on her head. These processed images have become processed memories. Could it be that my endlessly deconstructed colonial images are now invading my own familial memories? I see the work of people like Lynne and myself as an effort to bring to life a frozen past captured in the colonial visual archive. We kidnap orientalist images of "the exotic" and renarrate them for our private/public memories. But that sense of the elusive homelands of Asia persists even after moving to a new continent.

In the aftermath of Pearl harbor many Japanese-Americans were forced to burn precious family possessions, eliminating any links to Japan. Similarly, Iraqi, Egyptian, Yemeni Jews, after the establishment of Israel, were caught in the vice of two bloody nationalisms: Arab and Jewish. While Euro-Israel, in its need to secure bodies to perform "black labor," had an interest in creating the terrorizing political climate that led to our mass exodus, Arab authorities added their own share of terror by suspecting us a priori of being traitors. At the same time, the two governments, under the orchestration of Britain, secretly collaborated on lifting us overnight from millennia in Mesopotamia. Although Arab-Jews were culturally, racially, and linguistically closer to the Muslim-Arabs than to the European Jews who founded the state of Israel, their identity was seen as on trial by both national projects. Even anti-Zionist Arab-Jews ended up in Israel, for in the bloody context of a nationalist conflict, they could no longer enjoy the luxury of a hyphenated identity. My parents had to burn our photos, leaving little photographic inheritance from Iraq. As refugees, we left everything behind. I cling to the handful of photos of my family in Baghdad, the city we still cannot go back to after four decades of traumatic separation.

When I was a child I pored over the few photos in half-filled family album in order to discern the contours of a history, a lineage. I remember inverting the traditional biblical verse (taken up again in the Jimmie Cliff Reggae song); Instead of weeping by the waters of Babylon, it was by the waters of Zion that we laid down and wept when we remembered Babylon. Iraq under Saddam Hussein has featured its annual Babylonian Festival, even as devastating sanctions continue to "sanction" the death of many Iraqis. The staging of ancient "Babylon" boosts Iraqi national moral, but for displaced Iraqis, it is yesterday's Iraq that we cry over, as its images flicker across the television screen. In exile, Iraqi images, music, stories, and dishes are all digested in a kind of wake for what was lost. Wherever they go, London, New York, or Rio de Janeiro, my parents immediately reproduce the aromas of Baghdad, in their pots and in their tears as they listen to the sounds frozen in time of old Iraqi and Egyptian music: Nathum as-Ghazali, Salima Pasha, Um Kulthum, Muhamad Abdul-Wahab. I got them a tape of a new Iraqi singer, Qathum al-Sahir. They didn't enjoy it. Perhaps it was too painful to admit that after their departure life didn't stop "there." Perhaps that's why I have become obsessed with taking photos. It is as if I wanted to fill out the half-empty albums.

Hairy Visions

In Lynne Yamamoto's "Wrung", a long strand of artificial black hair hangs from a wringer, taken from an old-fashioned clothes washer. Displaced from their original context, seemingly unrelated objects are brought together, evoking a process, a narrative, and an action: something is being wrung. The clamp-like wringer, and the disembodied hair, highlight the potentially violent overtones of quotidian materials. But the very image of wringing long-hair stands out with a nightmarish beauty. For one thing, the long black silky hair of Asian women has often metaphorized the fragile and docile "orient." But here the image of the hair goes against the grain, intimating the pain and hardship of servitude, conjuring up the slow death of the female domestic laborer. The old wringer processes the hair like a meat grinder, as though devouring the woman whose body and face have been slowly consumed and worked over, as though the viewer is catching the last glimpses of her disappearance. The washing cycle evoked by Yamamoto's work becomes a synecdoche and a metaphor for the life cycle itself as experienced by a dislocated domestic laborer: Arrive, marry, cook, clean, boil, scrub, wash, starch, bleach, iron, clean, hope, wash, starch, cook, boil, scrub, clean, wring, starch, fear, iron, fold, bleach, cook, iron, hope, rinse, whisper, boil...love, fear, weep, rinse, starch, fold, drown. (In Lynne Yamamoto's "Untitled", from her installation "Wash Closet", the narrative unfolds through a sequence of these words inscribed on heads of 280 nails, ending with "drown," a reference to Lynne's grandmother, Chiyo, who committed suicide ten months after the bombing of Pearl Harbor by drowning herself in an ofuro, a Japanese bathtub.) Playing off the visible hair against the invisible body, "Wrung" chronicles the bitter disappearance of an alienated Japanese laborer on the "picturesque" island of Kohala, Hawai'i.

The black and white photos on our roof in Baghdad gaze at me in my New York livingroom. My mother wears my father's suit. ("Just for the photos," she tells me smiling, blithely unaware of recent performance theories about crossdressing). Elegantly she projects authority, as she stands there, her long, thick and curly black hair flowing gently. She lost much of it, after they became refugees, since there wasn't enough food in the transient camps in Israel. She fell seriously ill, as the cold wind and rainy winter in the tent inflicted her with crippling rheumatoid arthritis. I often remember how I tried to reconcile these two mothers, the one in the photos in Baghdad, and the other one that I knew, the one courageously fighting economic and social degradation with a weakened, broken body.

In "Wrung" plentiful hair is attached to no- body. The pleasure and pain of looking at "Wrung" has to do with the subliminal specter of disembodied hair. The visual archive is abundant with traumatic memories of hair loss, yet somehow we find it easy to lose the memory of such ghastly catastrophes. In recent years interesting work has been done on fashioning hair and diasporic identity,3 but "Wrung"'s disembodied hair has also to be placed within a completely different tradition. The aestheticized quality of the flowing silk hair, often appearing in the orientalist erotic dream-- from "The World of Suzie Wong" to Peter Greenaway "Pillowbook" -- in "Wrung" becomes nightmarish in the context of a different kind of visual archive.

Disembodied hair in this sense evokes American frontier imagery of scalping-- whether in the popular Western genre depiction of "Indian savagery," or in the critical Native American representation of European settler cruelty. In 1744, for example, the Massachusetts General Court declared a general bounty on Indian scalps: 250 pounds; and in 1757 it was raised to 300, higher than an annual pay for many educated colonists.4 A century later, the American west witnessed the horror of another wave of detached hair, in yet another twentieth-century scientific spirit of experimentation: civilian accounts of hair loss by unsuspecting onlookers on nuclear testing in Nevada, Arizona, or farther west in the "oriental" Pacific Islands. How can we, to paraphrase Mitzy Gaynor in "South Pacific", wash that memory outta our hair?

I remember watching "Hiroshima Mon Amour" for the first time: black and white images of the Hiroshima museum displaying piles of hair, remnants of the modern American anhiliation of two cities in Japan. The film links two victims through the motif of hair: French women scapegoated for a more general collaboration with the Nazis have their hair cut at the end of the war, tonsured during the liberation in France. World War II also witnessed yet other mounted piles of hair in the concentration camps of Auschwitz, Dachau, Treblinka, and Bergen-Belzen, recycled for productive purposes. Nazi archival footage documents pyramids of watches, glasses, hair-- visual evidence to the work of an "orderly regime."

Iraqi, Yemeni, and Moroccan refugees Israel in the 1950s were welcomed to Israel with white DDT dust, to cleanse them, as the official Euro-Israeli discourse suggested, of their "tropical diseases". In the transient camps their hair was shaved off, to rid them of lice. Children, some of them healthy, were suspected of ringworm, and therefore were treated with massive doses of radiation. You could tell those who had been treated by the wraps covering their heads, covering the shame of hair loss. The Euro-Israeli authorities, wrapped in the aura of science, marched on us to eradicate our Asian and African underdevelopment. Decades later, as the children became adults, they again experienced hair loss; now they wore fashionable wigs or hats to cover a second hair loss, this time due to radiation treatment for cancerous brain tumors, caused initially by their childhood early "treatment" for a simple skin disease that sometimes they did not actually have.

Can memory exist apart from the desire to memorialize? Perhaps my writings, like Lynne's images, are no more than a monument to our parents and grandparents generations who performed "hairy" escapes across hostile borders, muted by the everyday burden of hyphenated realities, their dreams mutilated. And so we weave hair into our images and texts as a kind of a memorial, a portable shrine for those who faded away. Mastering the language of Prospero, we curse back, Calibana-like, in the various babylons that form our homes.

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