AlliterAsian (10 page)

“Death … the opposite is desire,” says Blanche in Tennessee Williams' 1947 masterwork
A Streetcar Named Desire
—a startlingly prophetic précis of the late twentieth-century gay male experience, defined as it was by the polarities of erotic fulfillment and deadly disease. Physical love, in the face of sordid, mythopoeic-laden fatality, became even more intense, more transcendent—an act of ecstatic defiance against the ever-present threat of death.

Indeed, early death is the final italicization of gay-icon status. Callas died at age fifty-three in her Paris apartment,
sola, perduta, abbandonata
. Onassis, the love of her life, had left her for Jackie Kennedy, and Callas's final world tour betrayed a voice in irrevocable ruins. From
la dolce vita
and unprecedented heights of operatic artistry she had come to this: a recluse wasting away on Quaaludes and memories of a once-glorious voice. Apparently, on her deathbed she had never looked lovelier or more immaculate: undimmed beauty even in her darkest moment. As it was will that allowed her to achieve artistic greatness and physical beauty, it was will that propelled her to her early, quiet death—if not technically a suicide, then a perfectly paced winding down. To die beautiful and young is in concord with gaydom's cult of youth, with that familiar refrain of the vain club bunny, “Who wants to die an old queen?”

La grande vociaccia. The ugly voice became the instrument of the century's most sublime operatic expression. To mould beauty out of ugliness is the queerest of acts. From the channelling of deviancy into the creation of polychrome frescoes, to the transmuting of HIV-positive statuses into marks of desirability, gay men are often expert alchemists, reliant on magic to survive. In the magic of Callas's music, we see the sanctioned version of our own all-too-private narratives,
our own tortuous, ferociously willed ascents to greatness. Whether these ascents are actualized or merely dreamt of is moot; Callas reminds us that, no matter how brilliant we make ourselves or how accessible become the corridors of power, disaster is always just a stone's throw away.

Alas, these are only notes towards an essay. To actually write one would be to regress completely to an age of masks, when passion was sublimated, when brilliance was borne of suffering. When we revered the likes of Callas because there was no out-and-proud icon to revere. When we fed off heteronormativity and built a parasitic culture out of parody and pastiche.

To align with Callas is to align with pre-Stonewall gays, the closet-dwelling, aesthetic types gays my age were supposed to have left behind. But I am attracted to the closet; cannot and will not leave it completely. For in it survive narratives whose universality not even postmodernism, with its rejection of the universal, can wish away. Narratives that will remain relevant as long as gays are a numerical anomaly. A space of shared experiences from which emerges the beautiful.

These love notes to Callas, then, are love notes to the closet, a place that inhibited action but that ignited imagination. Where unassuaged pain and suffering were catalysts for great art. Where a voice as queer as Maria Callas's could be called beautiful.

“Notes Towards an Essay About Maria Callas” is part of a book-in-progress about literature, art, popular culture, and gay male sensibility
.

       
A
UTHOR
C
OMMENTARY

Maria Callas was, arguably, the greatest opera singer of the twentieth century. Her narrative was of particular interest to pre-Stonewall gay men—she was, as I call her in this essay, “the gay cultural intelligentsia's Judy Garland.” My own attraction to her as a post-Stonewall queer preceded any real knowledge of her status as a gay icon, so I began to wonder what continues to make her such a magnet for gay men. As I progressed through the essay, it became as much an exploration—and celebration—of pre-Stonewall gay male culture as a tribute to Callas and her enduring art.
—C. E. Gatchalian, 2015

       
A
BOUT THE
A
UTHOR

Born, raised, and based in Vancouver, Filipino-Canadian author C. E. Gatchalian writes drama, poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. An alumnus of the University of British Columbia's creative writing program (BFA, 1996; MFA, 2002), his plays, which include
Broken, Crossing, Claire
, and
Motifs & Repetitions
, have appeared on stages nationally and internationally, as well as on radio and television. He is the 2013 recipient of the prestigious Dayne Ogilvie Prize, awarded annually by The Writers' Trust of Canada to an LGBT writer of merit. He is currently artistic producer of frank theatre company and an adjunct professor at the University of British Columbia.

Gently to Nagasaki

Ricepaper
19, no. 2 (2014)

Joy Kogawa

For well over a decade,
Gently to Nagasaki
was a title without a book, tenacious and puzzling, a peg on the bathroom door with no garment hanging from it. In the past, it was the other way around. Books were finished, handed over, and still—no title.

Why
Gently
? Why
Nagasaki
?

In the late 1970s, I finished a draft of a semi-autobiographical novel. The book had no title, and in the end the title used was not one I thought up.
Obasan
.

For the most part, what happened to the fictional family was what happened to mine. We ended up on the prairies. But throughout the story was a mystery. A young mother had gone to Japan before the war and disappeared there. This was entirely fictional. My real mother never left.

“What happened to the mother?” the publisher who finally accepted the book asked.

“I don't know. I think she vanished,” I said. “Isn't life like that? People disappear. Isn't that what happens in real life?”

“The reader has to know, Joy,” the publisher said.

I took the book back into myself. The answer to the mystery arrived, mysteriously enough, and inserted itself as a clue at the beginning.

August 9.

That is the day the atom bomb was dropped on Nagasaki. That is where the missing young mother was in 1945. But where that answer
came from, I have no idea. It was not a city about which I knew anything, except that it had been bombed.

On my way, these many years later,
Gently to Nagasaki
, I have come to understand that there is a specific lesson I am to learn. The lesson is this: every enemy is a beloved friend.

That treasure is in the midst of the devastation known as Nagasaki. An incomprehensible joy existed in Dr Takashi Nagai, Dean of Radiology at the University of Nagasaki. His story came to me via a thin paperback,
A Song for Nagasaki
by Paul Glynn given to me by a stranger, decades ago in Tokyo.

The book remained untouched in one bookshelf after another following many moves. When I finally did read it, I came to a swamp fire in the firmament, an inverted sky.

For many, the shape of the mushroom cloud over Nagasaki was a grotesque question mark. For Dr Takashi Nagai, it was a hell full of holiness and hope, of immense challenge and immense faithfulness.

What struck me with some fascination was the significance for Christians of August 6 and August 9, the two dates the atom bombs fell on Japan. The first, Hiroshima Day, was called in Christian calendars the Day of Transfiguration. On that day, Jesus went up a mountain with his three closest disciples, Peter, James, and John. While the three looked up in fear, Elijah and Moses, the prophet and the lawgiver, appeared on either side of Jesus, whose form had become “exceeding white.” Mark 9:3 …
and his garments became glistering, exceeding white
… The man who healed the sick, restored the sight of the blind, and made the deaf to hear, the man from Galilee, was “transfigured.” The light within him was, for a moment, made visible on the outside.

So it was that on the day commemorating Christ's transfiguration, the city and citizens of Hiroshima were obliterated. A little boy
looked up and saw a white parachute against the sky. “Look at the parachute!” he cried just before a bright “glistering” light of death like no other flashed upon the world and changed us forever.

My brother, a retired Episcopalian priest in Seattle, told me that the word “transfiguration” in Japanese,
hen-yo-bo
, also meant “disfiguration.” The Day of Transfiguration became then, on August 6, 1945, the Day of Disfiguration. This one word with two meanings and the two events on the same day merged in my mind. The transfigured one was disfigured. The disfigured one was transfigured.

For centuries, until about forty years ago, the story of the transfiguration was read on a Sunday that was followed three days after by Ash Wednesday, a day of fasting and penitence. The Day of Trans/Disfiguration in 1945 was followed, three days later, by an unparalleled day of ashes. The second bomb fell on August 9 with pinpoint precision, directly over the pre-eminent spot of Christianity in all of East Asia.

If ever the Christian west had friends in Japan, it was there, in a valley between mountains. That sacred place, the Urakami neighbourhood in Nagasaki, was home to Japan's Hidden Christians, a people who had survived the most grotesque tortures and martyrdoms. The surviving remnant had come home from exile at last, to safety, to their neighbourhood, and to the finally tolerated practice of their faith. There they worked in the fields as farmers and re-built their lives. The Christians that Japan failed to annihilate after two-and-a-half centuries of unimaginable cruelty, the Christian west managed to do in an instant.

“Were not these the most holy, the most tested of God's children?” Dr. Nagai asked.

An anthropologist friend, Stuart Philpott, told me that what makes humans unique is not that we use tools—other animals do
that—nor that we have language—that too is an attribute of other animals—but that we are creatures who seek meaning. For many people, particularly following the Holocaust in Europe, the search for meaning is heinous. The answer to the question of meaning is that there is no meaning.

But I cannot accept meaninglessness as an answer to Nagasaki. For me, that incomprehensible event on August 9, 1945, the immolation by the Christian west of its best friends in Asia, means that a certain truth has been made starkly visible. It provides the moment for recognizing what lies behind the words of Jesus Christ. At Nagasaki, the impossible proscription, “Love your enemy” is transformed into a description, “You love your enemy.” We no longer have to love the enemy. All we have to do is to realize that we already do.

The task for me then, the arduous but happy task, is to recognize this. For the rest of my life, what is required is to discover the ways in which this is true. If I move by thought or word or deed to defeat or deface an enemy, I am acting to harm a beloved friend, one who is of greatest value and to whom I owe deep loyalty. I am enjoined to go to my inner Nagasaki, by foot, by train, by air, by sea, by thought, by word, and by deed.

The Goddess of Mercy is there in Japan the beautiful, Japan the terrible, Japan the country of my ancestors. Although I fail Her lessons again and again, She teaches me patiently that the enemy is not an enemy. It is Her presence I attend as She leads the way gently, to the place where the sacred children of the Hidden Christians died begging for water.

Water, my Goddess.
Omizu kudasai
!

Dear Hiroshima Maidens disfigured on August 6, dear nuns at prayer in Urakami Cathedral on the day of ash, dear Friend who granted living water and who died saying, “I thirst,” assist, I pray, the
faltering feet of an old woman on her way to Mercy's throne.

The following two excerpts are published here for the first time.

Water (Prologue from
Gently to Nagasaki
, a work-in-progress)

If I could follow the stream down and down to the hidden voice, would I come at last to the freeing word?
—from the prologue to
Obasan

It is through water that the freeing word arrives. In the darkest light before dawn, the hidden voice comes to us, in the deepest light before dawn. God, Goddess, named and nameless, Avalokitesvera, Kwan Yin, Kannon, the Compassionate One, She who heeds the wailing in a world of weeping, comes to us.

Dancing the transition between moon and morning, and robed in the whiteness of clouds, She comes to us, a rider of the vast turtle that roams the eastern depths. Down and down She swims in our small sacs of fluid to the breath surrounding this blue-green planet. We hear her song as sunlight in the new day rising, in the first call of the first creatures, the orchestrators of waking.

I am with you, She sings. I am with you through the water, under the water, in the birthing, in the forgetting, in the terror and at the heart of what you most fear, I am with you. Through the long dark night of every absence, I am with you, therefore fear not.

Chapter Twenty-Seven

My mother, profoundly deaf and senile, died in 1987, aged ninety. Her last years were hallowed. People came as pilgrims to drink in the light.

Dad wrote
A Flower in the Shade—Memoir of Lois Masui Nakayama
, as his act of ongoing devotion to the woman he esteemed and in the end served. I wrote, in the preface, of my reverence for them both. I feel it still.

But it was not always so. My mother, the one who could do no wrong, had her limits. She was trapped in a vortex of anguish. In Coaldale I struggled to escape the unrelenting severity, the interminable lectures. I sat at the piano weeping, as practice became punishment. In the battle of wills, she was immoveable. I didn't know I was being required to carry a load she could not carry alone.

As an adolescent in the flat lands, I believed we were all nobodies. Less than nobodies. Especially my mother. I was wrong. We were not nobodies. Especially my mother. But thanks to her excessive humility, I never knew how exceptional she was.

She arrived in Canada, aged twenty-six, after years as Director of Kindergartens and had been honoured for her work by the premier of the prefecture. This is in Dad's one-page “Brief Biography” of her, my not-nobody Mama.

Her childhood was traumatic. Her parents separated. At age four, she was in an orphanage, which led to life-long loneliness, years of bed-wetting, and an inability to receive gifts.

Her mother came to her in the orphanage with a gift. This embodiment of love was torn from her the next day by her enraged father. Loss entered her as a permanent marker, and gifts thereafter became too terrible to receive.

She carried her parents' pain faithfully for the rest of her life.
Children do this for their parents. In Coaldale, I bought her a cheap unpainted chest of drawers with my first pay-cheque as a teacher. After they moved back to Vancouver, she, who rarely spoke, who asked for nothing, said,
Hoshi
. I want. She wanted that nondescript chest of drawers back. That one. Not the others. Not another new one. That one.

Oh take not from me what Love has given me
.

She asked for it over and over and over. A water-drip torture.

She attended a special school for exceptionally intelligent children. She lived in a hostel run by English missionaries and was the only one rewarded with higher education. This, she believed, was because she spoke truth, this most vaunted of western values. The moral trajectory of her life was set by missionaries of the Church of England. She became truthful in the samurai way, unto death, without wavering. She had the determination and fortitude of magma.

“
Wherefore putting away lying, speak every man truth with his neighbour
…” This quote from Ephesians was underlined in red in her big print Bible.

Another of her underlinings from Philippians … “
in lowliness of mind
(she underscored this phrase twice)
let each esteem others better than themselves.”

Oh that weighty
lowliness of mind
. I'd come home from school to find her at the kitchen table, Bible open. In silence. In prayer. I did not want any of this. I sought a house of laughter. I longed for my vibrant father who was away and away.

She must have struggled to esteem others better than herself. She dunned it into me. She praised me for nothing.

Except for Sundays, she had stopped caring what she wore and
she was, to my eyes, not in the least attractive, apart from lovely fair skin, which she patted with powder. I was startled one day when I overheard a Caucasian woman say, “Oh, but isn't she beautiful!”

What? My mother was beautiful?

They were opposites, Mom and Dad. He was sunshine and rain. She was rock. In the torment of our family's shame, she went underground. She took me with her.

For the rest of her life, I could not bear her density. But after her death, in the winter of 2009 in Marpole, I returned to her. The mother of my childhood.