Would your reading of Iha Yoneko’s death differ if you thought of her hometown, Okinawa, as part of the Japanese nation-state vs if you thought of it as a colonial space? If yes, in what ways Think about Yoneko’s life and death through Dionne Brand’s blue clerk. What new questions does Brand’s text force us to ask? In contrast to the right-hand pages that are made visible to the reader, Brand writes, “I have withheld…Nine left-hand pages [that] have already written their own left-hand pages…” those things that are “too delicate and beautiful for the present world.” How does your understanding of Yoneko’s life and death change if you think about what we know to also be the result of the withholding of records/the keeping of secrets?
My thought on the Iha Yoneko’s death would definitely differ if I thought of her hometown, Okinawa, as part of the Japanese nation-state or as a colonial space. The identity of Okinawa, whether it is a nation-state of Japan or a colonial space, can change many situations which we use to infer the life and death of Yoneko. As we mentioned in the class, the Okinawan people was disproportionately recruited to the Mandate Island as workers. They were pay less than other Japanese workers and their standard of living is low. If she was a worker from Okinawa as a nation-state of Japan, I would only consider her death as a natural or normal death, or maybe it was due to the discrimination on her gender or her social status as a worker. However, if she was a worker from Okinawa as a colonial place, more things should be taken into considerations. She might face the problem of economic factors and difficulties on living. She might be suffered from discrimination not only on her genders and her social status, but also her hometown and her identity as a person from a colonial place. She might also be suffered from the sadness of losing her culture and hometown as Okinawa became a colonial place. There are many factors which we should consider as the reasons of her death. However, our conjectures are hard to be proved since there are so many missing information and data. Yoneko is a representative of thousands of Okinawan people. Their stories have never been noticed, explored, studied, and discussed. Those lives are no more than those numbers on ledgers right now. This is heart-breaking since their stories have been covered and forgotten.
