Conflict of (Self) Identity

             During the summer I had some ink done of a rendition of the California Flag; a banner that reads “California Republic” with a grizzly, some oak leaves, and the star. At first I was very reluctant to get it done because I thought the image of California’s been over marketed by skateboard companies to the point that now it’s just cliché. But my reasoning to get it was solid: my birthmother was raised in San Diego, I was born in Truckee, then I was adopted and raised in the Bay Area, and now I live in Chico. My life and families’ histories have all been rooted in very different areas of California and it’s something I more than identify with, something that is a permanent part of me.

                In September my little sister died right outside her home town in Chappell, Nebraska. Now, you’re probably wondering why my little sister’s hometown is in Nebraska after that long shpeel about my family being from California. Well, my birthfather is from Nebraska and Whitley was his daughter, my half (not that it matters that she was only half) sister. Anyways, I went out for her funeral and it was my first time out there, and first time meeting that side of the family. Everyone in the town wore cowboy boots, a cowboy hat, an oversized belt buckle, cowboy cut wranglers (commonly known as “nut huggers”), and drove a pick-up (you don’t call it a truck because a truck is a semi, not a pick-up). The land wasn’t unlike local farm land near here, though. In fact, it was quite like the farm land on Highway 99, south of Chico. So it was strange when all my newfound relatives were commenting about how much of a culture shock it must have been for me to be in Nebraska. I remember thinking that, sure the dress was a bit different but the territory was pretty much the same.

                Well Kazuo Ishiguro’s change of territory was a bit more drastic and inevitably was a culture shock for him, coming from Japan to live in London.  Can you imagine the massive differences? They would be all-encompassing, enveloping every aspect of his life!  Not only would he stick out physically, with noticeable racial traits, but also cultural/behavioral traits and ideologies. One way he has dealt with these opposing identities is writing novels with characters who deal with similar issues. As Rob Burton put it in his book, Artists of the Floating World, Ishiguro is “…sensitive to and aware of the fragility, hybridity, and evanescence of the floating world” (54) and writes “dialogical narratives” that reflect that idea. I really appreciate that term, dialogical because it’s not only two tracks of logic but the term implies a split or a breaking point, a conflict of identity.

                This is easily seen in Ono’s narrative, from Ishiguro’s An Artist of the Floating World. As I’ve explored in my two previous posts, Ono is constantly editing his narrative to take the focus away from the present to put it on the past, to times that he believed wholeheartedly in. His art reflected it, his teaching reflected it. But after Japan lost the war he couldn’t deal with the fact that he was so wrong and because of his own piety, he betrayed one of his own pupils and so he spends the rest of his life reflecting on his identity of the past rather than adapt to a new one suitable for dealing with the present. Is Ono Ishiguro’s way of questioning his own questions of identity? Perhaps Ishiguro’s problem’s doesn’t pertain to time but instead it’s about location and/or nationalism and Ono is his analysis of the potential self-destruction of holding solely onto his Japanese heritage. “As Stuart Hall argues, it is ‘partly through memory’ and ‘partly through narrative’ that we explore and recover our ethnic identities” (53).

                And it’s this idea of memory and narrative that we explore our identities that brings me back to my visit to Nebraska. I remember standing next to my birthfather and having a beer with him (the first and only time we’ve done so) in his garage, the sun sinking into the horizon, and hearing the thirty-some voices of relatives telling stories about their childhoods and about their separate lives. See, there were very few people in that garage that were actually from that small town of Nebraska since many of us had come from as far west as California and as east as Philadelphia. Sure my roots were in Chapell Nebraska but over the years, the family has split and gone different directions. While everyone seemed to fit together in their native territory in Nebraska, they also had adapted their lives to other and definitely different parts of the country.