Blu's Hanging
Lois-Ann Yamanaka
1997, Avon Books, $12.00 USA, Soft Cover, 260 pages
I've been so lucky to encounter a good book on the tale-end of another. Recommended by a friend, this book introduces me to Lois-Ann Yamanaka, an incredible writer whose frank, unflinching description of growing up in Hawaii is validated by my own experiences.
This novel is a breath taking rendering of Hawaiian life which completely captivates the reader from beginning to end. I've been disappointed in Hawaiian books before, but this story is compellingly truthful about Japanese Hawaiian life in the lower socio-economic areas of Molokai. Yamanaka is a poet, utilizing Hawaiian pidgin in a lyrical, legible story of a young girl who must make a choice between her past and her future, and whether or not to sever the family ties that bind and may possibly strangle her.
After their mother's death, Ivah and her younger brother, Blu, and their youngest sister, Maisie, do their best to survive the emptiness which was left in their mother's place. Their father becomes increasingly distant, hostile, oftentimes sorrowing for their loss as well as resenting the choices he had made in his life. Ivah, as children often are, frequently is the victim of his misplaced bitter mourning, experiencing a range of emotions, including confusion, anger, dismay, guilt, surprise. Being the eldest, Ivah is the new maternal figure, and she quickly is the protector of her siblings. I particularly enjoyed the comic interplays of younger brother to older sister, which deepened the reader's connection to the characters, serving to ultimately heighten the tension at the book's conclusion. Helping with homework, employed at various odd jobs to bring in additional income, defending her family against pedophiles, Ivah's thirteen year old voice depicts a raw, gritty story of a child entering into adulthood on a razor's edge. The title refers to either an actual hanging of the brother Blu's spirit or may possibly refer to the colloquial term "hanging", meaning to "survive, or exist".
There are many forms of symbolism throughout the book, beginning with a dreamed-remembered banquet of mother's cooking and ending with a brother's desperate but generous purchase of similar food to regain the loss of comfort and heart; also the deaths of three kittens by hanging which may be the souls of the three children. I wondered about the picture of raw eggs stirred into rice, by the loss of its potential life had nourished the opportunity for another to live. The practiced reader will enjoy the myriad connections between image and story employed by Yamanaka. Like all great novels, there are "under-stories", like an undertow, which sweeps the reader out to deeper, richer, ambient waters.
The details about Hawaiian food, incorporation of Japanese cultural mythology, depictions of racial prejudices, the eye-rolling umbrage of relatives with slightly more money, and a long running battle with malevolent neighbors creates a magnetic mixture, compelling the reader to head pell-mell to its cathartic end. On the heat scale, White Hot.
2 comments:
Lois-Ann Yamanaka’s raison d'être in her novel Blu’s Hanging shines through in her countless references to “hanging,” especially in the case of Blu Ogata, the middle child and only boy of the 3 Ogata children. This “middle child” status suggests, right from the get-go, that Blu will be our hanger, suspended between two females, one a child whom he treats as such: his sister Maise, the other quickly on her way to becoming a woman: his sister Ivah, whom he also treats as such. The reader gets bombarded with references to hanging as Blu accidentally hangs himself at the beginning of the novel and imagery of cats hanging from trees decorate our Hawaiian paradise by the third chapter. The children hang in a situation in which they live on what is considered, by mainlanders, the quintessential ‘island paradise,’ and yet look to “the mainland” as a multiculturalist utopia, a goal or out-of-reach progression. Specifically, Blu is eight years old, placed in a situation in which he hangs between child (Maise) and mother (Ivah), and between being, himself, a toddler and a teen, which leaves the reader uncertain about how much responsibility to give him. However, Blu also hovers in his self-made realm, vibrating between compassion and cruelty, maturity and foolishness, comprehension and ignorance. Blu is seasoned, and green, flaky and considerate, displaying polar opposite aspects of his personality at different points in the novel. He plays both hero and villain when role-playing, he hovers between Buddhism and Christianity, confused about where his mother’s soul exists. He knows about sex, but not enough. Finally at the end of the novel, “Blu’s hanging, hanging on, locked in a cloudy embrace with all of [the children], and for a moment it feels like lost forever in [the children’s] mother’s arms.” In this moment the children see their mother’s spirit, and Blu clings to his mother’s ghost legs, begging her not to leave and go to heaven. It becomes most evident at this moment that Blu has been unable to let go of his mother up until this point (we have only peeked at this through Blu’s recent excessive eating habits), and this has been Blu’s biggest struggle. Blu is hanging on, struggling with the loss of his mother, school, friends, money, sexuality, and most importantly coming of age, and he will either hang on or hang himself.
Insightful. Thank you.
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