PARTITION
The Partition of 1947 was the division of the former British colony of India into the two sovereign nations of a Muslim-majority Pakistan and a Hindu-majority India. Right after the split, “began one of the greatest migrations in human history as millions of Muslims trekked to West and East Pakistan, while millions of Hindus and Sikhs headed in the opposite direction.” Before British colonization, the Hindus and Muslims lived peacefully among each other, and coexisted for centuries. However, after and during the split of the country, religious and political differences caused widespread violence and chaos among both groups towards each other including “massacres, arson, forced conversions, mass abductions, and savage sexual violence.” After the migration ended, millions of people died, or their lives had been uprooted. The Partition of India and Pakistan is considered one of the most drastic and divisive events in South Asian history, having traumatic lasting effects not only on the area itself, but on the generations of Indians and Pakistanis that have come since. Pakistani historian Ayesha Jalal writes, “A defining moment that is neither beginning nor end, Partition continues to influence how the peoples and states of postcolonial South Asia envisage their past, present, and future.” In the years after Partition, there was a massive migration of Indians and Pakistanis to westernized countries, in order to escape the disturbing memories associated with their homeland, often considered a South Asian diaspora.
"It shares several of the characteristics of the diaspora. Yet it has not remained unaffected by the numerous other phenomena that seem to integrate with diaspora. Such integration seemingly tags the diasporic Indians as migrants and trans-nationals. However, despite such tagging, there is indeed an Indian diaspora. A community that has some members clearly lost in nostalgia and some others who find it difficult to understand the nostalgia” The latter usually undergo a journey from memory to reality. For both these categories, the reference point is ‘home’.”
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Many immigrant Indian and Pakistani communities feel as though their homeland had been ripped away from them, and forever changed. They feel as though they can never return, leading them to attempt to create a host-homeland in the area which they migrated. Regardless, the traumatic memories of Partition carried with the South Asian diaspora, continuing to influence Pakistani and Indian immigrants for generations. In the novel Schizophrene, author Bhanu Kapil expresses the unease of immigrants living in western countries and their struggle to hold on to their roots, while still assimilating to westernized culture. Furthermore, she expresses the lasting movement of painful memories resonating from Partition from a second generation immigrant point of view, and their affect on herself, as well as those around her.
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BHANU KAPIL
“These writings of the diasporic Indian writers speak volumes of their ‘life-world’. In an attempt to understand the diasporic Indian’s everyday life, one is baffled with the ambiguity of ‘home’.
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Bhanu Kapil is a British-Indian writer who was born in England to Indian immigrant parents. She grew up in a South Asian working class community in London. She later moved to the United States, and now resides in Colorado. Throughout her novel Schizophrene, Kapil gives the reader insight on her life as a second generation immigrant living in a westernized country, addressing issues of identity, race, gender, and belonging. She illustrates her personal dilemma of the meaning of “home,” and relays the many traumas of Partition through firsthand views, as well as the disturbing memories and ideas carried through migration that have been passed down for generations. Kapil’s poetry is unique, as it expresses various ideas and themes through a fragmented form, in order to mimic a mentally ill mind. However, Schizophrene is more than a book to Kapil as she explains,
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“This is my anti-colonial stance, my anti-colonial desire, in retrospect.”
The author is taking a stance against the nature of colonialism, and how it wrongfully haunts the posterity of those who were colonized, both mentally and politically.
SCHIZOPHRENE
“Schizophrene traces the intersections of migration and mental illness as they unfold in post-Partition diasporic communities. Bhanu Kapil brings forward the question of a healing narrative and explores trauma and place through a somatic, poetic and cross-cultural psychiatric enquiry. Who was here? Who will never be here? Who has not yet arrived and never will? Towards an arrival without being, this notebook-book returns a body to a site, the shards re-forming in mid-air: for an instant."
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When first reading the book, Schizophrene often feels intimidating, due to its fractured form. However, author Bhanu Kapil utilizes this form intentionally, to mimic the fragmentation of memories that occurs after a traumatic event. Kapil inserts brief graphic imagery from partition such as “row after row of women tied to the border trees. 'Their stomachs were cut out,' said my mother.” By including fragments of intense violence experienced during partition, the author gives it a diminishing effect, just as trauma victims fragment their memories to lessen the destructive events. Desi communities continue to migrate, settle, and build communities as a coping mechanism to diminish the effects of Partition. Rather than living in a life of chaos and violence, immigrants choose to migrate, create new opportunities, and find cultural unity, in order to create a more stable life for future generations, in which the trauma of Partition can become a distant memory. Initially, the form of the book feels random, however; as the book progresses, Kapil creates a sense of familiarity by repeating words such as “grid,” “map,” and “ghost” that represent themes of identity, immigration, and race. Overall, Schizophrene portrays how second generation immigrants are completely disconnected from their original homeland, and feel no ties towards it, as they become accustomed to the society and order that is indicative of Western nations. They yearn to feel a sense of belonging to the place they live in, and ultimately contribute to, but are often pushed away by the descendants of colonizers claiming that the land is their own. This creates a cycle of trauma among Indian and Pakistani communities and immigrants, as their perceived and created homelands are continuously invalidated, just as their true homeland was invalidated and abused.
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TREATMENT OF ASIAN AMERICANS
"Shimoda: Did the story about Japanese internment ever end?"
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Japanese immigrants have a long history of being discriminated against in America, that is often forgotten. In The Grave on the Wall, author Brandon Shimoda emphasizes the heinous acts and regulations the Japanese were subjected to, including the appalling treatment of early Japanese laborers, the interment of Japanese Americans, and the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Similar to the effects of Partition, the traumatic events that occurred in Japan including the atomic bombings and the exploitation of women, led to a scattering of Japanese immigrants to America. However, while in America Asians were still subjected to trauma, as they were constantly treated as inferior. Since many Japanese came to America initially as children, they felt as though America was their home, contributing to its economy and culture. Unfortunately, they were constantly faced with racism penning them as an “unassimilable alien.” Similar to South Asian immigrants, Japanese immigrants often struggled with identifying with a homeland, as they were born and brought up in America and yet not considered American enough, or Japanese enough, especially among women, who were often unwillingly shipped to America as Picture Brides.
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“The different forms of Japanese culture that Japanese Americans identify with reflect different conceptualizations of culture, as national cultural framework and as ethnic cultural center."
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Many Japanese Americans had difficulty assimilating into westernized society, while still attempting to grasp onto their distant Japanese culture. Their loyalty was constantly questioned, especially during World War II, when the internment of Japanese Americans occurred. This event forced many individuals, including Shimoda’s own grandfather Midori, to denounce their ancestral homeland saying, “ I wish that they would give me a gun to go and fight Japan.” The Grave on the Wall successfully exposes the systematic racism towards Asians throughout history, while also addressing issues of identity, gender inequality, and acceptance faced by many Japanese immigrants.
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BRANDON SHIMODA
”I’m writing a book (prose) about the ongoing afterlife/ruins of Japanese American incarceration. I’ve written several essays (some of which have been published), an introduction (which I recently dismantled), parts of several chapters, and innumerable fragments. It’s been difficult, slow-going, painful. Part of the reason is the writing keeps changing. That’s how it seems. That each time I sit down, as well as each time I stand up, the dream, the vision, of how I want the writing and the book to be, and become, changes, and that the changes are related to melancholy, mercury, indecision, depression, I keep learning new things—uncovering buried bodies, details, falling into shadows, mirages—evolution, and influence. I’m impressionable.”
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Brandon Shimoda is an award winning poet, who has written many books of poetry including The Grave on the Wall, which delves deep into his personal and family life, as he traces the existence of his late grandfather, Midori. His research led him to various towns in both Japan and the United States. Shimoda’s travels allowed him to explore the racism, gender disparities, traumatic memories, and alienation faced by Japanese Americans in both Japan and The U.S. still prevalent today, especially with America’s current administration calling the Covid-19 pandemic the “Kung Flu” or the "Chinese Virus." Because of this, Asian Americans are unable to move on from the disturbing memories plaguing their homeland and culture. However, Shimoda encourages readers to remember the actual lives and people who died, rather than the memorials they are buried under, just as he chooses to remember his grandfather through his photos, rather than a physical grave.
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THE GRAVE ON THE WALL
The book The Grave on the Wall utilizes a fragmented form similar to Schizophrene. It employs a form of literature that is confusing, using broken forms and ideas to develop a book that emulates how people fragment memories after a traumatic event. The book also mentions specific imagery throughout the it such as foxes and flowers, that create a sense of familiarity and mimic how memories relate emotions through experience, even if those encounters aren’t firsthand.
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Furthermore, the book addresses the issues of immigration, and how they affect the communities involved, and the feelings of disbelonging that arise from migrating to the United States. This is illustrated when Shimoda says,
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"My great-grandmothers, both young, twenty years younger than their husbands, immigrated to the United States as picture brides, had children, then returned with their children to Japan."
The Japanese women who immigrated to the United States felt disconnected from its culture and yearned to go back to their homeland. However, the children of Immigrants born in the United States feel a detachment from their ancestral homeland, after already assimilating to American culture.
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Additionally, the novel highlights the disparity of gender treatment in societies, and how traditional gender stereotypes and ideas also migrate to different places. Shimoda tells the story of Okiku, a woman who was thrown into a well for not reciprocating affection towards her master. The violence inflicted on women historically, has continued to resonate in immigrant communities with traditions such as unethical arranged marriage still prominent in many societies. The author showcases the clear emotional and physical distress plaguing women around the world through forms of sexual assault and physical violence which are still extremely prevalent issues in modern westernized societies.
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In essence, The Grave on the Wall portrays how health and wellness are perceived notions on how judging an immigrant's validity and privilege of being a migrant. Shimoda recounts his grandfather's immigration to America, revealing that Midori's three older brothers "failed the health exam." The American system of immigration claimed to reject Midori's brothers because of their apparent poor health, but Shimoda explains that
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"They shared the same health. It was being divided that made them unhealthy."
The alleged poor health of Midori's brothers was used as an excuse to reject them from immigrating to the United States. This creates an association of health and worthiness to migrate. The excuse of healthiness is used as a means to justify the systemic racism in place. Additionally, the author further utilizes images of health and body when describing the placement of Japanese-Americans in internment camps, stating they were "basic units of space the United States has devised for the populations it has written into its self-Image as refractory, unassimilable, alien." The tone around the word "concentration camp" is extremely cynical and gives the impression that all "unassimilable" aliens are unhealthy, and therefore unworthy of living freely in the United States.
