Kartika_Issue15

ISSUE 15 | SPRING 2013
how Japan became a cryogenic prison of history (a tourniquet of melancholia)
once my grandmother passed the international timeline.
15.
To me, my grandfather had always been a ghost, a toxic presence
symbolizing a life vacated from within. But in fact, he was once all flesh
and booze, moving from Pennsylvania military base to German military base
like a picaresque war antihero. He was alive just long enough to earn a
Purple Heart, become an alcoholic, create a family from mud and then
abandon it once he became weary (sober). When I was an adult, my mom
confessed to me that he had molested her too, usually when he was drunk
enough to be a Molotov cocktail. For the second time in my life, I felt a hot
anger rising inside of me like a projectile. This is the story of a war criminal
decorated for his battle wounds, which resonated through every one of us
after his fatal battle with the bottle.
16.
An implicit assumption in both the medical and the etymological definitions
of dementia is this notion that what we lose was mnemonically worth
keeping. But what if that’s wrong? What if selective memory is both a
manifestation of trauma and pain, and also the psychic recreation of it, an
emotional salve to the military science of trauma, a bandage for the teeth
marks of history? What if dementia proves that the entangled strands of
culture, narrative, psychology and memory, are actually knotted and tripletied?
What if dementia proves that all human beings are actually
multiplicities (mirrors) of themselves? This is the story of how delirium and
conflation become a joint project of self-multiplication, especially when
reality (promiscuous, subjective, impossible to locate reality) murders the
songs of your childhood.
17.
Language is a blurry photograph: in grad school, my desire to learn
Japanese was related to my desire to freeze American time and thaw
Japanese time. Speaking nihongo was an ekphrastic gesture, my way of
painting (resurrecting) Japan using unfaithful honorifics, crooked kana, giant
kanji and broken copulas, a gift just for her on the phone. My secret hope
was that Japan would thaw in her heart and stay frozen in mine. Speaking
nihongo was my way of holding on to my sobo, the way I choose to
remember our culture before the details became thin and too focused. This is
67