Ikuko Mizunoe

Coming through Geographical and Spiritual Deserts:
Canada's Margaret Laurence and Japan's Minako Oba

Look ahead into the past, and back into the future, until the silence.(D 477, NCL)

Thus Morag, the protagonist of Margaret Laurence's preeminent novel, The Diviners, contemplates, looking at the river in front of her house that seemed to be flowing both ways, because of the wind ruffling the water in the opposite direction and making 'this apparently impossible contradiction' apparent and possible. She has now gained a kind of equilibrium through accepting all the contradictions and ambiguities of her life and writing. Her tenacious explorations into the past -- 'the meaning of the ancesters, both the long-ago ones and those in remembered history'(HS 237, Seal)--have returned her to her origin to know the place of her own belonging for the first time.
Once Morag thought to herself.

A popular misconception is that we can't change the past-- everyone is constantly changing their own past, recalling it, revising it. What really happened? A meaningless question. But I keep trying to answer, knowing there is no answer.(D 70)

By recalling and revising it, she has tried to reconstruct her past with the help of imagination, and has managed to free herself from its bondage, establishing a different relation to it. Margaret Laurence called The Diviners 'a spiritual autobiography' in the posthumous memoir, Dance on the Earth, and therefore Morag's concept of time, as just revealed, may be considered as that of the author. The cyclic pattern that suggests the continuity of life--one of Laurence's deep- est and most fundamental concerns--reminds us that Laurence was much influenced by T.S. Eliot.
Her contemporary, the Japanese woman writer, Minako Oba, was also strongly influenced by Eliot, since she studied English literature at university as her major. Not only because of that, however, but also from a number of different points of view, Oba's works, or words seem to help us to appreciate and assimilate Laurence's works, and the reverse is true as well. There are strikingly similar veins which these unique and imaginative writers share.
Biographically they are not unlike each other. Each was born into a fairly wealthy and intellectual family in a materially poor and spiritually futile society. Margaret Laurence's father was a lawyer and Minako Oba's a doctor, and both of their mothers were teachers, although Margaret's was in fact her step-mother as her natural mother died young. Scots-Presbyterian society in a small Canadian prairie town is undoubtedly miles apart from a pre-war Japanese provincial background. But they had at least one thing in common--stern patri- archy or male chauvinism, against which young Margaret and Minako respectively rebelled. Support came from their mothers who loved read- ing. Margaret's mother was one of the founders of the town's first library and one of its volunteer librarians. Minako tended to stay home owing to her physical weakness, and was tacitly permitted to read almost any book at home whereas outside all the books from the West were strictly prohibited because of nationalism just before and during the war. Furthermore, they had been writing ever since they could remember, writing for a long time without any prospect of publication. They wrote 'as if impelled by some transcendental power,' in Oba's words, and Laurence confessed to her friend, "If I don't get started soon, I will no doubt end up in a mental hospital." In 1964, at the age of thirty-eight, The Stone Angel established Margaret Laurence as a leading Canadian writer and two years later her second novel, A Jest of God was awarded the Governor-General's Medal for fiction. In 1968, Minako Oba at the same age emerged as a new Japanese writer with The Three Crabs, which was awarded the Akutagawa Prize, Japan's most prestigious literary prize, for that year.
First of all, the war drastically affected their adolescence. Laurence writes:

I was sixteen that year, and for the first time I knew, really knew, what war meant. It meant that young men from your own town, your friends or brothers of your friends, boys only a couple of years older than yourself, had been mutilated or killed. . . .I think it was through that knowledge that all the other dead and suffering people from all the wars became finally and forever real to me.(Dance 83)

Her outrage at wars--'the recurring assaults upon the human flesh, mind, and spirit'--runs through her whole life and writing. In The Diviners Morag reads the casualty lists covering page after page.

The newspapers for days are full of stories of bravery, courage, camaraderie, initiative, heroism, gallantry, and determination in the face of heavy enemy fire. Are any of the stories true? Probably it does not matter. They may console some.
What is a true story? Is there any such thing? The only truth at the moment seems to be in the long long lists of the dead. The only certainty is that they are dead. Forever and ever and ever.(159)

In a short story, "To Set Our House in Order", included in A Bird in the House, Ewen wrote to his mother from the Somme, saying how gallantly his brother Rod died, but long afterwards he has to confess to his wife that he wrote that letter as he had to, but 'men don't really die like that. It wasn't that way at all.'(59, NCL)
Over and over Laurence referred to Hiroshima in her lectures or essays, especially after she had stopped writing fiction except for some stories for children, and said, "My generation was the first in human history to come into young adulthood knowing that the human race now had the dreadful ability to destroy all life on earth and possibly the earth itself."(My Final Hour) Innocence, then, was no longer a possibility. It could not be romanticized, but rather should be regarded as 'the eighth deadly sin'(D 244), as she once put it in the novel.
Minako Oba was actually sent to Hiroshima just after the bombing as a member of a rescue party. There she saw the worst-ever human situation, from whose influence, she said, she would never be free. Since then, she has been haunted by its appalling images which un- consciously and repeatedly loom up. It took her more than thirty years to bring out a novel directly related to her Hiroshima experience. Urashimaso, however, is anything but a propagandist novel. In it she dealt with complicated and contradictory human relationships between family members and their ancestry in terms of human desire, or lust. Here again, such questions as 'what really happened?' or 'what is happening to someone is not what someone else thinks is happening, is it?' are often inspired in the reader, presenting multiple viewpoints of the characters. Nevertheless, Hiroshima seems to exist in the core of their lives, even for those who do not know it personally. Reiko, one of the main female characters and the only person who was in Hiroshima at the time, says:

The atomic bomb . . . it is human lust itself, murdering all the people except yourself, and supposing only you can survive. As a result, you also perish. My life is its evidence, isn't it? (Works V 124)

It is precisely what Laurence called the failure of the imagination-- 'the failure to visualize what a nuclear holocaust would mean'.(MFH) Lust here can be compared to the original sin, as it is insinuated that living cannot be immune from lust. Natsuo, Reiko's lover's adopted daughter, compares the memory of Hiroshima in herself to that of her mother who died giving birth to her.

I don't remember my mother, and yet I definitely know her. Perhaps one is born into this world with some unconscious memory.(Works V 58)

In spite of such inheritance given to the younger generation, a kind of acceptance and forgiveness seems to seep through in the novel, although with unfathomable sadness and regret. In her reflection on the novel, Oba wrote that her generation who experienced the war and the atomic bomb must think of 'nation' or 'race' in other ways than before and that they could not be indifferent to the cries or screams even from a far-away country(Works X 103). On another occasion, she wrote with regard to her Hiroshima experience that to have despaired of human beings paradoxically gave her a hope--a means to survive in such a world. And that immediately reminds us of Laurence's often- quoted words:

The theme of survival--not just physical survival, but the preservation of some human dignity and in the end some human warmth and ability to reach out and touch others--this is, I have come to think, an almost inevitable theme for a writer such as I, who came from a Scots-Irish background of stern values and hard work and puritanism, and who grew up during the drought and depression of the thirties and then the war. (HS 6)

 

In any case, both Laurence and Oba are acutely conscious of their generation, and concerned with their ancestry, with the world to come. According to Laurence, 'the possesion of a history, after all, is like the recognition of another person's common humanity.'(HS 28) Conse- quently they make use of history, or history in its guise as myth or legend, and of fairly tales or nursery rhymes as shared experiences. On the other hand, their concerns are materialized in the characters and their relationships--particularly those between woman and man as sexual beings, or mother and daughter in terms of femininity and maternality. The theme of incest is often included in Oba, and even Laurence tackles it in one of her short stories, "A Queen of Thebes", leaving a frightening and yet impressive vision behind. In both authors, several of the same characters appear in different works, in which the protagonist changes and so does the author's focus, which seems to suggest the interrelatedness of human existence. Plants, trees, or birds and animals are frequently and vividly used in their metaphors or similes. Oba at times goes close to animism, in which Laurence had a great interest when she was in Africa. Thus the comparable aspects of Laurence and Oba can be indicated one after another.
One aspect that stands above all, however, is also biographical, in a sense, from which minor resemblances seem to evolve. That is a celebration of life coincided with their awareness of multiplicity, cultivated through a good many years of their adult lives 'as a stranger in strange lands'. Margaret Laurence spent two years from 1950 in the British Protectorate of Somaliland and the next five years on the Gold Coast just before its independence as Ghana, because of her husband's job constructing dams in the desert. Minako Oba went to Alaska with her engineer husband in 1959, and was subsequently to spend eleven years there. Both, exposed to completely different cultures, came to a more mature and profound understanding of them- selves and of others. Just as Africa was catalyst for Laurence's work, so was Alaska for Oba's work.
On the way to Africa, Laurence happened to read the five books of Moses to pass the tedium of a long journey, but in fact they impressed her very much, for the children of Israel like the Somalis were people of the desert. The verse from Exodus(chapter 23) especially remained in her mind for a long time until, twenty-six years later, she used it as the epigraph to a collection of essays whose title, Heart of a Stranger, was also taken from it.

Thou shalt not oppress a stranger, for ye know the heart of a stranger, seeing ye were strangers in the land of Egypt.

Young and friendly, she was ready to be nice to Africans. Surely, they would see it, she thought. Moreover, having grown up in a country that once was a colony, she was definitely against imperialism. To her disappointment, however, her conscientious liberalism, her idea of treating all people the same, was turned down by the Somalis. She realized that they looked at her from their own eyes, not hers, and that they looked at the whole of life through different eyes. In short, there was an undeniable world of others there. This realization spurred her to discover 'everything about Somali beliefs, customs, traditions,' and to learn their language and, in fact, she brought out a translation of their oral literature.
Laurence felt that she had to accept or respect, for instance, their intense fatalism, which 'prevented them from wasting themselves in fury and desperation.'(PCB 64) She also felt her own helplessness, when she encountered a woman with a dying child in the desert, or a child prostitute, 'whose half-wild half-timid face with its ancient eyes will remain with me always, a reproach and a question'(PCB 158), she wrote. Her sympathy with such plights of women, or of outcasts, or of the marginalized, has been consistently conspicuous in all of her works.
The fictional world of Manawaka, created afterwards out of her native prairie experience, is populated by racially and culturally different people--multiple layers consisted not only of Scots, Irish, English and French, but of Indians, Metis, Ukrainians, Germans and Jews. They do not mix easily, and there are covert, or sometimes overt discriminations between them. Describing the growth of her female protagonists against such a multiracial, multicultural background, Laurence seems to maintain that in order to acquire self-definition, to become an independent person spiritually as well as externally, they have to understand the validity of others. Rachel in A Jest of God is always nervous because of her Scottish pride coincided with fear. She envies her Ukrainian lover, Nick, who seems to be 'more resistant, more free . . . not so boxed-in, more outspoken.' Hagar in The Stone Angel is attracted to Bram who looks 'a bearded Indian' with his lack of a Calvinist sense of propriety, but comes to detest this Indian quality soon after their marriage. The problems presented by these protagonists elucidate the fact that self-definition, after all, can be established in relation to others. And that requires affirming the irreplaceable uniqueness of each individual at the same time with common humanity. In other words, survival with some human dignity is possible only when the reality of others is respected.
It will be evident that her attitude towards the nuclear issues is supported by such respect for other people, other cultures, or other value systems. In the film of the National Film Board, talking of what she can do as a writer, Laurence says that in all her writing,< a very strong kind of celebration of life itself comes through.(quoted in Canadian Woman StudiesFall 1987, 22) Or on another occasion, she insists:

If freedom is, in part, the ability to act out of one's self-definition, . . . uncompelled by fear or by the authority of others, it is also a celebration of life and of the mystery at life's core. (Ivory Tower)

Near the end of The Diviners, Morag, who can now accept herself, helps Pique, her daughter, go her own way. Pique tries to embrace both sides of her ancestry. Uniting the myth of Scottish clans and that of Metis lineage which gave life respectively to her mother and father, she may create a new myth for the future. Jules Tonnerre, her father, is one of the Metis who have been despised and expelled to the out- skirts of the town but who have their own way of life, detached from social codes and conventions. In one of her letters to Al Purdy pub- lished in Margaret Laurence-Al Purdy: A Friendship in Letters(1993), Laurence refers to it while writing on his poem:

One thing I have always loved in your poetry is the recur- ring themes of the connectedness of life--which is why, in your poems, deeply out of Canada, you can make reference to the Greeks(ancient,i.e.) and the old Egyptians, etc etc etc, with perfect ease and naturalness, because it fits and we are not isolated nor ever have been, if only we can see it that way. I guess in The Diviners a lot of the same ancestral feeling comes across(I hope), and the sense that in some ways, after a certain time, the ancesters are everyone's ancesters--mine, in some ways, are not only the Scotts but also the M tis; I was born in a land which they had inhabited, shaped and invested with their ghosts.(317)

While in Alaska, Minako Oba traveled extensively in the United States, which was then at the height of political and economic power, but was starting to see moral and cultural decadence. Situated on the periphery of such a super power, Alaska had a complicated social structure, still retaining some colonial traits and inhabited mostly by outsiders, who were there not of their own choice but because of some unavoidable circumstances. Even Americans seemed to feel like expatriates there. The atmosphere of its society, therefore, in- cluded cosmopolitan openness and alienated anxiety. It was symbolic of the age as well.
In Oba's work, people of any nationality may appear, to say no- thing of native Alaskan Indians or Inuits, with ease and naturalness. At the end of The Three Crabs, it is hinted at that Yuri, a middle- aged Japanese housewife, is to have an affair in an inn on the beach with a man she has just met on the spot. The man thus introduces himself and his ancestry:

I am a quarter Eskimo, a quarter Tlingid, a quarter Swedish, and a quarter Pole. (Works I 38)

In response to that, she says that she has nothing but Japanese blood in her veins, not even one sixteenth, but that long long ago there might have been Eskimo blood mixed in her ancestry. Her frustration and loneliness, crossing the barriers of race and culture, finds sympathy in this man, and there is a kind of warmth generated between them.
Oba strongly resists institutional system, and tries to keep a stranger's mind wherever she may be. When she came back to Japan, she decided not to settle down in a Japanese society but to live freely like a stranger even in her native country. Behind that determination, there is an idea of seeing human beings among all creatures on earth, as part of Nature--or, a vast, wild Alaskan nature. All her female protagonists try to define themselves in relation to other individ- uals, living in life's entanglement as in the wilderness, but not tied to any external restriction. Such fragmentary phrases as "Somehow, everything is related," "Nothing is irrelevant in the world," or "Ir- regular, infinite chains of being,"(Works IX 185, 192) in another of Oba's major works, A Bird Singing , suggest that to exist, or to live, means to make relationships with others who are not only the living but also the dead. Although much influenced by Taoism as she herself admits, it seems beyond doubt that it is Alaska Å\its people and cul- ture inseparable from nature and in contrast to the materialistic mainstreamÅ\which cultivated this lifeview of hers. It will be maintained, therefore, that the continuity of life Oba wrote about is both different and the same, compared with Laurence's idea, which is ultimately Christian, though probably not in an orthodox way. In the lecture given to Trent Philosophy Society, entitled "My Final Hour", Laurence encourages the audience to strive to extend the boundaries of their understanding, their knowledge and their compassion, while bearing in mind human limitation. This is what both Laurence and Oba have been doing all through their lives, partic- ularly through the encounters with each 'living, suffering, and sometimes joyful' individual in Africa or in Alaska. Laurence and Oba, constantly altering such personal experiences by the vigorous power of their imaginations, wrote them down. Despite the accusations made against Laurence's work by the censors, or the distaste felt for Oba's work by conventional readers, their works are moral in the deepest sense, because they seek to 'clarify and proclaim and enhance life, not to obscure and demean and destroy it.' (MFH)