Freeman's

by John Freeman

  My body sinking into the waiting-room chair at St. Luke’s Hospital and my palms sweating in a familiar way, I hesitated in front of the question for a while, traveling up and down the ladder of choices with the tip of my pencil: White, Black, Hispanic, Asian, Native American, Other. Then, possibly driven by my high fever, I decided to exteriorize my discomfort. I walked over to the receptionist and, in a voice that came out more meager and modest than what I’d aimed for, I asked:

  “Sir, which box do I check here, sir?”

  He scanned me from the depths of his ennui, saying nothing. Slightly emboldened by what I interpreted as now my right to feel offended by his indifference, I raised my voice a bit and explained:

  “Hispanic is not a race, sir! Right?”

  He raised his eyebrows, still said nothing, and went back to his task. So I walked back to my seat, defiantly put my feet up on the chair next to mine, and checked “Other.” Next to my answer, I wrote, in small but clear handwriting: “And fuck you.” Then, thoroughly satisfied with myself, I walked over to him again and placed the questionnaire down on his desk.

  I was twenty-four, so the self-righteous little scene I was acting out before the eyes of an overworked, underpaid and of course unimpressed receptionist was not entirely in keeping with my age. I suppose I still had more stances than ideas, though I wouldn’t have known the difference at the time. I was full of causes, and was convinced that my individual resistance to any manifestations of the status quo embodied a kind of heroism and an advancement of global justice. I had just graduated from the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México with a thesis in political philosophy. It was an ambitious but not very well-written critique of John Rawls’s Theory of Justice from the point of view of “illegal” immigration. As Borges used to say about someone he despised, it was more complicated than complex.

  The main argument in the thesis, more or less, was that the kind of contractualism underlying Rawls’s theory encompassed a solely domestic conception of justice and did not address the most pressing contemporary problems of global justice. The critique I attempted, if I remember accurately, drew on ideas developed by several cosmopolitanist philosophers, Martha Nussbaum, Thomas Nagel, and, especially, one of Rawls’s star pupils, who later distanced himself from Rawls and formulated critiques of some aspects of his theories. I interviewed this political philosophy professor in his Manhattanville apartment in the summer of 2007, exactly one year before I moved to New York. He offered me a glass of apple juice when I walked into his apartment, and then showed me into his living room. I noticed his wiry, bright red hair, and observed, my jaw probably dropping a bit, how he kneaded his head as he talked, as if he was squeezing truth out of his scalp. I fell in love with him, completely and ephemerally, the way philosophy students fall in love with anything or anyone eccentric; the way rocks might fall in love with passing birds. I asked him winding, circular, ungrammatical questions about the philosophical soundness of contractualism vis-à-vis contemporary immigration patterns. I think I had just learned the phrase “philosophical soundness” and probably overused it.

  One year later, I was living in a student housing apartment in Manhattanville. I never saw the political philosophy professor again (though I later read he had been involved in a sexual harassment scandal). I had become one of the philosophy dropouts I had once scorned, abandoning a serious professional path in political philosophy to pursue a PhD in comparative literature (the second-most useless specialization, after non-comparative literature). My monthly rent was as high as my graduate student stipend was low, so I had to hunt down any paid gig that did not violate the rules of my F1 student visa.

  Sometime later I got an e-mail from an editor. He offered decent payment for a weekly column in a terrible magazine. When I dialed the number he gave in the e-mail, he specified that the column had to be about dating in New York “as a woman of color.” Never having encountered the term, I consulted several friends about the exact meaning of “of color.” Thanks to one of my closest friends—by far my most intelligent friend, a brilliant writer and scholar specializing in the black diaspora, and also a professional satirist—I learned that this magazine editor was in fact quite right in assigning that precise term to me. In the politics of exclusion and inclusion in America—and the language that goes with it—I was, by all means, a woman of color. However, despite this, and despite my very real need for the extra cash, I decided to turn down the offer. I essayed many possible opening lines for my e-mail. Some were intended to sound prophetic but read like cryptic Chinese fortune cookies: “Generational dating paradigms will soon shift.” Others tried way too hard to sound sarcastic: “I am a woman of greenish color.” I finally settled for a one-line lie, because I remembered my mother always said that if you’re going to lie you must keep it short: “I’m married.”

  I think, for the few months that followed, I still tried to make sure my ego—which was swiftly thinning into bare self-esteem—received a daily, though more and more homeopathic, dose of a delusion of otherness. I told myself that I would never reduce my identity to the incorrect racial categories of medical questionnaires; that I would never allow preconceived notions of what I was in the eyes of others to define who I was. (Had someone back then given me “intersectionality” as a conceptual weapon, I would have misused it with pathological debauchery).

  Having to sit through endless lit theory classes did not help temper my growing confusion and resentment. What I had first considered as a kind of taxonomic violence circumscribed within only certain institutional practices—airport customs, hospital questionnaires and fashion magazines—extended, I now discovered, to other spaces. The readings we were assigned in our seminars, it seemed to me, all neatly packed entire literary traditions, such as the Latin American one, into boxes labeled with concepts like “third world” and “marginal.” The writers I had read all my life up until then, and had always conceived as the almost mythical titans of a rich and robust canon—Rulfo, García Márquez, Lispector—were suddenly thrown together in the pile of marginality. I felt that comparative literature, at least in American universities, was nothing but a constant effort to reduce other literatures to categories of readability that I found humiliating.

  If my first months of graduate school were confusing, the ones that followed were enraging. I was on the defensive, and my professors, brilliant people with good intentions, were unknowingly feeding the little paranoid monster inside me. (Now, almost ten years later, as a university professor myself, I often wonder what kind of misunderstandings I may be fueling.) I started getting everything all wrong. I read Gayatri Spivak, who was then the director of my program, and thought that her seminal essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?” was a demonstration of hypocrisy. How did her interventions in the field give voice to young Caribbean women who swept and mopped the corridors of our university every night, or to the lives of the Yemeni men in the nearby delis, or the destinies of the Mexican deliverymen who pedaled through the city no matter the weather? I thought that categories such as “margin” and “subaltern” were, in the mouths of all those privileged and prestigious academics and writers, an enormous hoax and a cynical act of appropriation. How was their work at all relevant to the people to whom they purportedly gave a voice? Weren’t they stealing or simply using other people’s voices and identities to their advantage? In my indignation, I spared no one and nuanced nothing. One day, for example, I was asked to write a critique of Toni Morrison. I read her novels and essays, falling in love with some, resisting others. But I ended up writing an imbecilic rant.

  My views about the United States were still monolithic, lacking nuance, and full of contrived animosity. I read all American writers, like Morrison, through eyes foreign and angry, conceiving of them solely as privileged Anglo-Saxon writers, the intellectual elite of the world’s leading cultural, economic and military power. (I had no idea of what it takes, precisely in America, for a woman of color to even be published.) The way I saw it, Ameri
can writers did not have to go through the trial of either cultural or linguistic translation—the trial, that is, in which “the accused” first has to demonstrate that he or she is readable, in the exact terms of readability that are expected, and only then will be given the chance to speak in English; but even so, will never be given equal treatment with respect to his or her Anglo-American counterparts. I was not so wrong about the politics of translation, but how wrong I was about Morrison, and about Spivak, and about so many other things. I had no idea that even the smartest and most original thinkers living in this country—like Spivak and Morrison, two figures that I now can understand with more clarity and therefore highly respect—must comply with the categories under which they are expected to subsume their creative and intellectual production because they are women of color (much like translated authors, by the way).

  I still had not seen the much more sinister side of America and the power dynamics of its society, though it had always been right there in front of my face. I did not know there was simply no choice in the matter, that nobody is free to choose the very rigid categories that make up social identities here. You are a woman of color, you are an immigrant, you are an alien, you are a minority. No questions asked. (But who even came up with these terms? I suspect it was not a person who later wore them.) And, if you don’t speak from your assigned minority niche, no one even cares to listen. Despite all this, having the apparatus of a minority discourse is better than not having it, because before it existed there were fewer ways, fewer words to name and denounce the daily atrocities that took place under everyone’s eyes.

  The one question that still drives me crazy today, and still makes me irreparably angry at myself, is why as a young woman I directed all my rage and confusion toward female giants like Morrison and Spivak, and not toward my many mediocre—at least by comparison—male professors and mentors. Why did I grin and sigh at every one of the many philosophy professors who passed through my life, while raising a defensive wall against the women whom I listened to and read? Young women beware! Even more dangerous than philosophy professors who turn out to be sexual predators is the silent, surreptitious, autoimmune emotional disorder that drives young women to spare everyone except the female figures whom they could look up to, and aspire to one day resemble.

  In A Season in Hell, Rimbaud wrote the oft-quoted line: “I is another.” When you’re very young and moving around from place to place, trying to find a life for yourself, and have perhaps just moved to a new city or a new country, and hospital rooms still seem more like literary metaphors than concrete places, and philosophy professors still seem sexy instead of scary, it’s fairly easy to navigate through life carrying the Rimbaudian flag: “I is another.” That is, it is tempting to hold on to the belief that you can be anything and anyone, and will not allow others to incarcerate you in a single category of identity. Cultural assimilation, especially in a country like the United States, requires compliance with a single form of being “other.” Being assigned a fixed, ready-made identity and forced to accept it is perplexing and frustrating. For me, at least, it was a slow, painful process. But there really is no way out of the American identities labyrinth, so it is best to learn to find your way around all the dead ends inside it. Slowly, during the process of assimilation, I moved beyond my initial frustration and anger—or did I just learn to live with them?—and chose to fully embrace the identity I was handed, understanding it as a potentially emancipating political instrument instead of a muzzle. Not that I’m proud of all the implications of assimilation: now, at the doctor’s office, I sit up straight in waiting-room chairs, like the well-behaved schoolgirl I never was; offer a wide, docile smile to the receptionists; and check “Hispanic.”

  Mieko Kawakami has published numerous books including novels, short stories, essays, and prose poems. Her second novella, Breasts and Eggs (2008), won the Akutagawa Prize and was translated into Norwegian, Spanish, French, Chinese, Korean, and other languages. In 2016, Granta selected her for its Best of Young Japanese Novelists volume, which included her story “Marie’s Proof of Love.”

  Hitomi Yoshio is an Associate Professor of Japanese literature at Waseda University. Her translations of Mieko Kawakami’s works have appeared in Granta, Words Without Borders, Denver Quarterly, Pleiades, Electric Literature, and Monkey Business: New Writing from Japan.

  The Flower Garden

  MIEKO KAWAKAMI

  TRANSLATED FROM THE JAPANESE BY HITOMI YOSHIO

  It happened at three o’clock in the afternoon on a sunny spring day, three months ago exactly.

  There she was, standing on the terra-cotta tiles of the entryway to my house, next to my collection of colorful Repetto ballerina flats and my husband’s polished shoes. I had carefully chosen those tiles considering the balance of colors and the overall nuanced effect.

  Just then, I heard a voice.

  The woman’s lips remained still as she stared into my face. I heard the voice again. I listened, but couldn’t decipher the words. I knew, intuitively, that they were directed toward me. I held my breath and focused on the voice. It was solid, a distinct alto. What was it saying? I couldn’t tell. All I knew was that it was speaking to me. I stood there, staring silently at the woman who had appeared before me.

  She was petite and demure looking, not the type of beauty that immediately attracted attention. But her long eyelashes, especially when she averted her gaze, left an impression that they were meant to attract the opposite sex. I felt strangely irritated by her plump lips and perfectly straight teeth. Her parents must have paid a fortune to fix them when she was young. Everything about her seemed calculated, from the way she moved her eyes to the way she held her head, from her perfect posture to the tone of her voice. You could see the marks of effort that you often see in women who are neither beautiful nor unattractive. These women surround themselves with cheerful colors and objects of the finest quality, pretending to enjoy them. They perfect the charade for so long that they convince themselves, and those around them, that their cheerfulness is the natural result of their inner confidence. That was the kind of woman that appeared before me. She was accompanied by the real estate agent whose voice I could barely stand to hear, who, for several months now, had brought strangers to my house, day in and day out, to leave their ugly footprints in every corner. In short, the woman was a potential buyer.

  “This is it. I had a vague sense of what I wanted, but I didn’t know exactly. Oh, this front porch! It’s perfect.”

  Bowing her head slightly, the woman looked into my eyes with a smile. The real estate agent was nodding vigorously next to her. “I’m glad the house pleases you. It’s quite different from what you had requested, but I see you rather like these charming types of homes. Well, this really expands our choices.” With a smile flashing across his face, he introduced me as the owner’s wife. I bowed in return and, offering each a pair of slippers, walked toward the living room.

  I never volunteered any information unless they asked me a specific question. You can learn all you need to know about a house by walking around. If I were eager to sell, I would have said all kinds of things—for instance, how the house was designed by the British architectural firm that undertook the famous restaurant and garden in Gaienmae, or how we used the finest stucco for the walls and ceilings, even inside the closets. I could have told them how the light filled the rooms according to the season, how serene the neighborhood was, or how the dishwasher was top of the line, made by the German manufacturer Miele. But I said nothing. I didn’t have the slightest desire to tell a random stranger how I had groomed and loved the house, or how much time and care I had devoted to perfecting it. The fact was that I was being driven away from my own home.

  “Just look at the door, the color of the walls, these bay windows . . . everything is perfect. And with such a spacious dining room, you could put a sizable table there. It’s always been my dream to have a solid wood dining table.” Peering into the dining room and the kitch
en, the woman sighed and exclaimed in an exaggerated fashion. Of course everything is perfect. What could you possibly know about it? I scoffed inwardly, trailing a few steps behind her.

  Who was this woman anyway? Her bag and shoes were not expensive looking—it was hard to gauge how old she was. Plus, it was rare for a woman to come to a viewing alone. Since it was a Saturday, her husband should have come with her if she were married, and if not, she would have been accompanied by a parent or some other relative. (I gained all sorts of useless knowledge like this in the past few months.) Yes, it was indeed unusual that a woman would come to a viewing alone. She didn’t seem like the type that would buy a house all on her own, and was definitely too young to buy one worth well over a hundred million yen, even with a mortgage. Who knows, perhaps her husband was buying the house for her, and he happened to be busy. That’s how it was for me after all. Or could it be a gift from her parents? Yes, that must be it. But if so, wouldn’t they want to come see the house for themselves?