Caring for People, Caring for Nature: A Deconstructive Ecofeminist Reading of Sylvia Wantanabe’s Fiction

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Notes

¹ The title story, “Talking to the Dead,” was awarded the 1991 PEN/O. Henry Prize, while the collection was a finalist for the 1993 PEN/Faulkner Award and won a PEN/Oakland Josephine Miles Award for fiction in 1993.

² Lum co-founded with Eric Chock Bamboo Ridge: The Hawaii Writers’ Quarterly in 1978, and its associated literary press, Bamboo Ridge Press. Both were committed to fostering Hawai’i’s multi-ethnic literary tradition. Coinciding with the so-called Hawaiian Renaissance, a movement aimed at restoring and making Hawaiian local culture visible, the journal and press became major forums for Hawaiian authors.

³ The largest immigrant groups in Hawai’i came from Japan, Korea, and China.

⁴ I am well aware of the vast number of approaches developed by care ethics theorists over the last three decades, which have yielded increasingly varied and multivalent definitions since the publication of its foundational books: Carol Gilligan’s In a Different Voice (1982) and Nel Noddings’s Caring: A Feminine Approach to Ethics and Moral Education (1984). From the first work, two important conclusions can be drawn forth: (1) Interpersonal relationships and care should be implemented and prioritized over the notion of universal rights, consequently emphasizing the issue of response rather than the political construction of justice developed by a given country/society. (2) Compassion and empathy should be considered as important tools in moral action, rather than rationalism and moral standards. Parting from Noddings’s work I highlight the idea that caring—as a natural human response—must be enhanced over other notions such as justice or rights because these are culturally and politically determined constructions. A person’s impulse to care, on the contrary, does not depend on external factors since it is a trait inherent to our human nature. My understanding of the ethics of care throughout this essay is based on this allegedly brief synopsis that I have derived from Gilligan’s and Nodding’s works. However, for a more updated debate I recommend the following titles: Rianne Mahon and Fiona Robinson, eds., Feminist Ethics and Social Policy: Towards a New Global Political Economy of Care (Vancouver: U of British Columbia P, 2011), Michael Slote, The Impossibility of Perfection: Aristotle, Feminism, and the Complexity of Ethics (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2011), and Virginia Held, The Ethics of Care: Personal, Political, and Global. (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2006).

⁵ Henceforth, I will use relational-self and mutual-self interchangeably.

⁶ Maruyama owes the term “deconstructive ecofeminism” to Dobson’s Green Political Thought, a discussion on the relationships between ecologism, socialism, and feminism. In this work, Dobson points out that “‘Deconstructive’ ecofeminists will argue that the Enlightenment rigidified a set of dualisms that were in place long before the Enlightenment period began, and which need to be transcended rather than re-evaluated” (195). The aim of deconstructive eco-feminists would be to call into question the centrality of dichotomies such as man-woman, culture-nature, reason-feeling, among others, in mainstream philosophical thinking since the eighteenth century. By using deconstruction as a methodological strategy, they manage to reveal the oppressive and essentialist undertones these dualisms have achieved throughout Western modern culture, at least until the second half of the twentieth century.

⁷ On the island of Maui, where Watanabe’s stories are set, agriculture was the major economic activity. Nowadays, tourism has become crucial. These two systems are in a difficult equilibrium where the former represents the attachment to the land, and the latter a radical re-adaptation of the landscape to touristic speculation.

⁸ “Kahuna” is a Hawaiian word that comprises the term “Kahu,” which originally meant to cook or take care of the cooking. The term has evolved and achieved the more general meaning of “to take care of.” On the other hand, “na” is a particle that turns words into nouns. Thus, the word may basically mean a “caretaker.” The meaning of the word fits well into the overall ethics of care at the core of my analysis of Watanabe’s stories. Nowadays, the word may be translated as priest, shaman, healer, or sorceress (http://www.huna.org/html/kahuna.html; retrieved 4 May 2017).

⁹ As Lum explains, in Hawaiian culture the term “Aunty” is used to refer to “all the older females, whether they are related or not” (11), as a sign of respect and affection for older people. In this story, the kahuna lady’s real name is unknown, and she is called just “Aunty.”

¹⁰ Watanabe confers a comical tone to the story in the depiction of Yuri’s failure to attract a husband because she was too big: “my mother’s attempts at marrying me off inevitably failed when I stood to shake hand with a prospective bridegroom and ended up towering a foot above him” (Watanabe, Talking 105). For this reason, the mother made Yuri dress in navy blue, “on the theory that dark colors make things look less conspicuous” (105).

¹¹ The familiarity between the two women increases throughout the narrative, making Yuri look up to Aunty as someone with both competence and caring, as she suggests in the following lines: “Everything changed for me after Clinton’s visit. I stopped going into the village and began spending all my time with Aunty Talking to the Dead. I followed her everywhere, carried her loads without complaint, memorized remedies, and mixed potions till my head spun and I went near blind. I wanted to know what she knew.” (Watanabe, Talking 112).

¹² In this respect, Held argues that the ethics of care “has the potential of being based on the truly universal experience of care. Every human being has been cared for as a child or would not be alive” (3). More importantly, she also remarks that “Understanding the values involved in care, and how its standards reject violence and domination, are possible with the ethics of care” (3). Held’s standpoint constitutes an effective alternative for tackling worldwide problems that conventional Western moral theories based on standardized reason have been unable to solve.

¹³ As a matter of fact, Slote acknowledges that he uses “the notion of caring and the ethics of care or caring to argue against Enlightenment thinking and in favor of a positive ethical view that treats emotion and feeling as having a central place in human life and human thought” (Enlightenment 7). For a more detailed account of his treatment of receptivity, see From Enlightenment to Receptivity: Rethinking Our Values.

¹⁴ The second-largest of the Hawaiian islands (1,884 km²), Maui used to have an economy based on sugar cane cultivation. Nowadays it receives around 2,700,000 tourists every year.

¹⁵ As told in the story: “Little Grandma was always having dreams. She said the spirits of our kin watched from the shrine on her bedroom dresser and spoke to her while she was sleeping.” (Watanabe, Talking 1).

¹⁶ Wilson has analyzed this situation remarkably well when he explains that “Since achieving America’s statehood in 1959 has aggravated the impact of technological modernity and installed a large-scale and globalized tourist-driven economy of high-rises, urban sprawl, and cash nexus on the Hawaiian islands, ‘Hawaii’ has become a place/sign up for grabs within the literary and filmic capitals: something Hollywood (or agents such as Tom Selleck, Al Masini, and David Hasselhoff) could inject as azure backdrop of local color for a detective or beach-blanket drama to work …” (131).

¹⁷ In this respect, Wilson points out that “It is no wonder locals in Hawai’i still insist on calling Hollywood the land of ‘Haole-wood’ (haole is the Hawaiian word for Caucasian foreigner to the islands and can be an insult depending on tone and context) for its ongoing racial obtuseness to local culture, Asian locals, and (above all) the indigenous Hawaiian plight.” (ix).

¹⁸ Wilson also interestingly argues: “… geopolitical dislocation remains a plight of local identity, audience, and community for writers in Hawai’i as they still in the 1990s try to figure forth, in literatures in other cultural-political genres, their (unrepresented or underrepresented) place, literally, on or off the global map, as well as their token exclusion/token inclusion within the multicultural canons of national representation as liberal pluralism …” (128). We could indeed imagine the character of Aunty, in “Talking to the Dead,” grieving for the islands having turned into a fake paradise for tourists who seek the authentic, but irremediably lost, Hawaiian culture.

¹⁹ The bon festival is a ritual custom carried out by Japanese Buddhists in order to honor the memory and/or spirits of the deceased, be it of ancestors, relatives, or friends. During this festival, which runs for three days, the dead spirits are supposedly allowed to come from the other side and get together with the living, so food is offered for the ghosts, lanterns are lighted and music and songs are deployed in the context of a family reunion. In Watanabe’s story the narrator describes it in the following way: “In late summer, when the spirits of the dead returned to eat with the living and to walk under the sky again, the villagers in the Japanese plantation camp put food out for the hungry ghosts and celebrated their coming with dance” (Talking 119).

²⁰ In this regard, the Prayer Lady’s statement on page 126 resonates with the phenomenon that Rob Wilson calls “haolification.” Since “haole” is the Hawaiian word for white people, this process refers to the way everything native and local on Hawai’i disappears and gives rise in its stead to a uniform acculturation and assimilation of Western white values.