In preparation for a volume of essays and images I was working on several years ago, the artist Lynne Yamamoto sent me Xeroxed reviews of her work. In a 1995 New York Times article, one of the reviewers wrote, »Yamamoto inscribes the biography of her Chinese grandmother, a laundress, on nails hammered into the wall.« The Xerox sent to me included Yamamoto's handwritten correction with a red pencil: »Chinese« is crossed out to read »Japanese.« How often, I wondered, had Lynne needed to correct that Asian-confusion syndrome of »they're all the same«? Of course, »we/they« are not all the same. At the same time, however, it is important to look at commonalties among the experiences of immigrant women of color, especially vis-à-vis institutionalized mapping of identities. Here I want to argue for a multi-cultural feminist reflection on the analogies that link these diverse experiences. Throughout this essay, I will come back to looking at these personal histories from East and West Asia: histories that culturally have apparently little to do with each other, but which, in the context of multiple displacements - in Lynne Yamamoto's case, Japan, Hawai'i, the continental United States, and in my case, Iraq, Israel/Palestine, the United States - strangely echo each other. In interweaving these disparate narratives, I want to illuminate, through associative juxtapositions, the role of memory in the making of hyphenated identities. By placing my journey in relation to that of Yamamoto's, I want to create a contrapuntal dialogue between usually separate geographies and histories.

As an immigrant from the continent of Asia I have often been quite bewildered to learn that, despite Iraq and Mesopotamia being my family's geography of origins, I am not an Asian. And as someone who grew up in Israel/Palestine, and who was called Black there, I soon learned that few understand this conjunctural definition of Blackness. The »shock of arrival,« to borrow Meena Alexander's phrase,¹ begins when one runs into the border patrols of New World naming. The diverse cultures of Asia are condensed into a homogenizing label that erases their difference and complexity: hence the typical conflation of Japanese with Chinese.

My family, like most Jewish-Arab families after the colonial partition of Palestine, became refugees from Iraq in the 1950s and ended up in Israel, due to what was styled a »population exchange,« whereby Palestinians and Jewish-Arabs were massively swapped across borders. Once in Israel we became the schwartzes (»Blacks« in Yiddish) of Euro-Israelis. Our Asian-ness in Israel was bureaucratically defined. In the highly centralized Israeli state, every aspect of our lives, whether at school, work, or hospital, was determined by checking that fatal box on official documents: »Of Asiatic/African origins.«

In the United States I quickly learned that my previous scars of partition and the traumatic memories of crossing the borders from Iraq to Israel/Palestine have little resonance, or else are simply censored.² I also learned that not all hyphenated identities are permitted entry into America's official lexicon of ethnicities and races. I could see in people's faces how this corporeally inscribed hyphen, Iraq-Israel, produced a kind of classificatory vertigo, with the result that the hyphen immediately disappeared into an assimilable identity: »Ah, so you're Israeli!« Only one geography is allowed prior to embarking: this is the made-in-U.S.A. predicament of the single hyphen. Although in Israel we were not exactly »from here,« in the United States we are only »from there.« While »there« we are »immigrants from Asian and African countries,« here, in the United States, we are not; in fact, our Asianness disappears, subsumed under the dominant Eurocentric definition of Jewishness (equated with Europe) and Arabness (equated with Islam) as antonyms. Millennia of existence in Iraq are erased in the name of a mere three decades in Israel. I remember, during the Gulf War, reading a New York Times book section article in which the Euro-American Jewish reviewer suggested that something was as »rare as a synagogue in Baghdad.« He was obviously unaware that Baghdad, as late as the 1950s, was forty percent Jewish and that it was crowded with well-attended synagogues. (And where did he imagine the major Judaic text, »The Babylonian Talmud« was written?)

The term »Asian-American« echoes for me with the voices, memories, and narratives associated with the very word »Asian.« I oscillate between accepting United States racial discourses as they affect cartographies of memory and narratives of displacements, and feeling obliged to narrate them within their »Asian« contexts. I first have to pierce the veil of secrecy enveloping the racism toward Asian and African Jews in Israel, in hopes of invoking a multifaceted transnational dialogue among many racialized experiences. For what might seem »irrelevant« to American racialized identities, in fact, evokes deep historical affinities and structural analogies. If the Palestinians figure in official Euro-Israeli discourse as the Indians, associated in colonial discourse with nomadism and savagery, Asian and African Israelis are, on some levels, the Blacks. Not coincidentally, our major movement of resistance in the seventies was called »The Black Panthers,« in homage to the American movement, while today we have adopted the name »Mizrahim« (»Orientals«). Despite its Orientalist lineage, this latter name carries an affirmation of our positive relation to the »East,« within the context of a state that proudly proclaims its Western-ness while choking off our »Eastern« cultural expression.

[b]Processed Memories[/b]

In a kind of homage, Lynne Yamamoto narrates her grandmother's life through the very act of producing the material of her installation. Her installation Ten in One Hour reflexively alludes to the artist's own rate of production of the soap objects. Reenacting her grandmother's intensive labor, Yamamoto creates a parallel rhythm between her repetitive artistic work and her grandmother's repetitive movements of washing, wringing, hanging, folding. But this analogy also calls attention to class dissonance. While Lynne Yamamoto's images, like my texts, are currently produced and consumed within cultural institutions inseparable from late global capitalism, we, the granddaughters of diasporic domestic workers, have traveled a long road to join another class of cultural workers. Our art or cultural production places us now in a different category than that of our grandmothers and parents. In my writings, I have often felt a survivor's desire to tell again and again about the »hidden injuries« of translocated class, race, gender, and sexuality.

As I was looking into her work on the drudge labor of a laundress, I was wondering about our own work, hers and mine, as granddaughters of dislocated domestic laborers; a critic and artist, in our new class spaces we continue rinsing, cleaning, and scrubbing, as it were, the misrepresentations that surround our hyphenated identity. Our grandmothers worked as domestic servants in new countries, unfamiliar with their new cultural and linguistic terrains: Hebrew-speaking Israel for my Arabic-speaking grandmother and English-speaking Hawai'i for Lynne's Japanese-speaking grandmother. In her installations Night Waters and They All Fall Down, Yamamoto uses archival photographs of Japanese women working as domestics for haole (Euro-American) families in Hawai'i. They All Fall Down uses a continuous video loop of Yamamoto's aunt's hands polishing a silver tea bell. »The installation,« writes Yamamoto, »is based on stories my aunts told me about working as domestics for haole families, and particular memories of how they were called in to change dishes for the next course.«

If Yamamoto's grandmother came as a »picture bride« to Hawai'i, my seta (Arabic for grandmother), Gurgeia, left Baghdad as a widower. My grandfather, Ya'aqub abu-Sasson, was buried in the 1930s in the Baghdadi Jewish cemetery on Sheikh Omar Street, which in the 1960s was itself apparently buried under the new national television station: our millennia traces were thus erased. I have often thought it ironic, in light of this fact, that I became a professor of media studies, engaged in unearthing the deeper strata of the visual text.

I moved »Ila Amareeka,« as my family would say in Arabic, in 1981. I did not come to America as a picture bride, but pictures of America made me come. I remember that as we were growing up, we loved watching American television series. Hawaii Five-O was one of our favorites. The Hula dancer in the opening credit sequence seemed by far more exotic than our local belly dancers. Perhaps the hip movements of the Hula dancer were familiar to us, but somehow we did not see this dance as part of the »East,« for we only learned to recognize it as »American« and therefore as »Western.« We were dreaming about a new world, even as our old world of the Euphrates and Tigris was a forbidden memory in the state of Israel. Indeed, the global flow of American images and sounds gave me the feeling of a terra cognita even prior to my voyage to the island of Manhattan. Here, in the Gramercy Park apartment I was cleaning, I could repeat seta's rate of production, fighting so that my life, too, wouldn't go down the drain.

Soap to wash the dirt off the shirt. To wash the dirt off your body. Cleaning for others while being called dirty yourself. My dark friend Na'eema used to frantically scrub her »dirty skin« in a violent cleansing ritual that never reached the promised hidden layer of White skin she so painfully desired, but that did leave her bleeding. In Israel we were called »dirty Iraqis.« I can still hear the Hebrew words »Erakit Masriha!« (»Stinky Iraqi«) shouted at me by a blond boy whose relatives in Europe were themselves turned into »sabonim« - soaps - by the Nazis.

My seta, who died last year in her mid-nineties, enjoyed cursing back. She washed their dirty laundry as she joyfully rolled out her Arabic obscenities. She never learned the language of al beitheen (Arabic for »the Whites«). As she used several layers of shaqsa (Iraqi for female head wear) to wrap her dwindling graying braids, she was amused by my sister's efforts to bleach her hair, the stubborn roots refusing to fully erase their black past. And like many women of her class, my grandmother did not wash out of her dictionary the dirty words reserved for those whose houses emitted unpleasant smells in the absence of her ever-bleaching hand.

Some of Lynne Yamamoto's work features old photos of Asian laborers in Hawai'i. I wondered how many of the photos actually belong to Lynne's family album. Images of immigrant and refugee laborers are often only distilled in the colonial visual archives. A few years ago, around the Quincentenary for the Expulsion of Muslim and Jews from Spain, I was desperately looking for images of Jews in the Islamic world to accompany an essay I wrote for Middle East Report on the subject. The editor and I approached the Yeshiva University Museum in New York (directed by Euro-American Jews), then sponsoring a photographic exhibition on the subject. Aware of my critical stance, the Museum refused to lend such images without first reviewing the political content of my essay, thereby barring access to my own community history. I have visited Jewish museums in the United States or in Israel, only to see nightmarish reincarnations on display. Precious objects that belonged to our community or to its individual members, ranging from religious artifacts to »Oriental« jewelry and dresses, are all exhibited in a way that fetishistically detaches them from their social context and cultural history within the worlds of Islam, of Asia, and of Africa. In places such as the Gothic building of the Jewish Museum in New York, »exotic Jews« are still silenced.

I flip through British collections of photos of Baghdad in an attempt to visualize my grandmother in the streets, houses, markets, carrying her beqcha (bundle) on her head. These processed images have become processed memories. Could it be that my endlessly deconstructed colonial images are now invading my own familial memories? I see the work of people like Lynne Yamamoto and myself as an effort to bring to life a frozen past captured in the colonial visual archive. We kidnap Orientalist images of »the exotic« and re-narrate them for our private/public memories. But that sense of the elusive homelands of Asia persists even after moving to a new continent.

In the aftermath of Pearl Harbor, many Japanese-Americans were forced to burn precious family possessions, eliminating any links to Japan. Similarly, Iraqi, Egyptian, Yemeni Jews, after the establishment of Israel, were caught in the vice of two bloody nationalisms: Arab and Jewish. While Euro-Israel, in its need to secure bodies to perform »Black labor,« had an interest in creating the terrorizing political climate that led to our mass exodus, Arab authorities added their own share of terror by suspecting us a priori of being traitors. At the same time, the two governments, under the orchestration of Britain, secretly collaborated in lifting us overnight from millennia in Mesopotamia. Although Arab-Jews were culturally closer to Muslim-Arabs than to the European Jews who founded the state of Israel, their identity was seen as being on trial by both national projects. Even anti-Zionist Arab-Jews ended up in Israel, for in the bloody context of a nationalist conflict, they could no longer enjoy the luxury of a hyphenated identity. My parents had to burn our photos, leaving little photographic inheritance from Iraq. As refugees, we left everything behind. I cling to the handful of photos of my family in Baghdad, the city we still cannot go back to after four decades of traumatic separation.

I used to pore over the few photos in a half-filled family album in order to discern the contours of a history, a lineage. I remember inverting the traditional biblical verse (taken up again in the Jimmie Cliff Reggae song); instead of weeping by the waters of Babylon, it was by the waters of Zion that we lay down and wept when we remembered Babylon. Iraq, under Saddam Hussein, has featured its annual Babylonian Festival, even as devastating sanctions continue to »sanction« the death of many Iraqis. The staging of ancient »Babylon« boosts Iraqi national moral, but for displaced Iraqis, it is yesterday's Iraq that we cry over, as its images flicker across the television screen. In exile, Iraqi images, music, stories, and dishes are all digested in a kind of wake for what was lost.

Wherever they go, London, New York, or Rio de Janeiro, my parents immediately reproduce the aromas of Baghdad, in their pots and in their tears, as they listen to the sounds of old Iraqi and Egyptian music frozen in time: Nathum al-Ghazali, Salima Pasha, Um Kulthum, and Muhamad Abdul-Wahab. I got my parents a tape of a new Iraqi singer, Qathum al-Sahir. They didn't enjoy it. Perhaps it was too painful to admit that, after their departure, life didn't stop »there.« Perhaps that's why I have become obsessed with taking photos. It is as if I wanted to fill out the half-empty albums.

[b]Hairy Visions[/b]

In Lynne Yamamoto's Wrung, a long strand of artificial black hair hangs from a wringer, taken from an old-fashioned clothes washer. Displaced from their original context, seemingly unrelated objects are brought together, evoking a process, a narrative, and an action: something is being wrung. The clamp-like wringer and the disembodied hair highlight the potentially violent overtones of quotidian materials. But the very image of wringing long hair stands out with a nightmarish beauty. For one thing, the long black silky hair of Asian women has often stood as a metaphor for the fragile and docile »Orient.« But here the image of the hair goes against the grain, intimating the pain and hardship of servitude, conjuring up the slow death of the female domestic laborer. The old wringer processes the hair like a meat grinder, as though devouring the woman whose body and face have been slowly consumed and worked over, as though the viewer is catching the last glimpses of her disappearance. The washing cycle evoked by Yamamoto's work becomes a synecdoche and a metaphor for the life cycle itself as experienced by a dislocated domestic laborer: Arrive, marry, cook, clean, boil, scrub, wash, starch, bleach, iron, clean, hope, wash, starch, cook, boil, scrub, clean, wring, starch, fear, iron, fold, bleach, cook, iron, hope, rinse, whisper, boil ... love, fear, weep, rinse, starch, fold, drown. (In Lynne Yamamoto's Untitled, from her installation Wash Closet, the narrative unfolds through a sequence of these words inscribed on heads of 280 nails, ending with »drown,« a reference to Lynne's grandmother, Chiyo, who committed suicide ten months after the bombing of Pearl Harbor by drowning herself in an ofuro, a Japanese bathtub.) Playing the visible hair off against the invisible body, Wrung chronicles the bitter disappearance of an alienated Japanese laborer on the »picturesque« island of Kohala, Hawai'i.

The Black and White photos on our roof in Baghdad gaze at me in my New York living room. My mother wears my father's suit. (»Just for the photos,« she tells me smiling, blithely unaware of recent performance theories about cross-dressing). Elegantly she projects authority, as she stands there, her long, thick and curly black hair flowing gently. She lost much of that hair after they became refugees, in an epoch of food rationing in the transient camps in Israel. She fell seriously ill, as the cold wind and rainy winter in the tent inflicted her with crippling rheumatoid arthritis. I often remember how I tried to reconcile these two mothers, the one in the photos in Baghdad, and the other one that I knew, the one courageously fighting economic and social degradation with a weakened, broken body.

In Wrung, plentiful hair is attached to no-body. The pleasure and pain of looking at Wrung has to do with the subliminal specter of disembodied hair. The visual archive is abundant with traumatic memories of hair loss, yet somehow we find it easy to lose the memory of such ghastly catastrophes. In recent years, interesting work has been done on fashioning hair and diasporic identity,³ but Wrung's disembodied hair has also to be placed within a different tradition. The aestheticized quality of the flowing silk hair, often appearing in the Orientalist erotic dream - from The World of Suzie Wong to Peter Greenaway's Pillowbook - in Wrung becomes nightmarish, in the context of a different kind of visual archive.

Disembodied hair, in this sense, evokes American frontier imagery of scalping - whether in the popular Western genre depiction of »Indian savagery,« or in the critical Native American representation of European settler cruelty. In 1744, for example, the Massachusetts General Court declared a general bounty on Indian scalps: 250 pounds; and in 1757 it was raised to 300, higher than the annual pay for many educated colonists.⁴ A century later, the American West witnessed the horror of another wave of detached hair, in yet another twentieth-century scientific spirit of experimentation: civilian accounts of hair loss by unsuspecting onlookers on nuclear testing in Nevada, Arizona, or farther west in the »Oriental« Pacific Islands. How can we, to paraphrase Mitzy Gaynor in South Pacific, wash that memory outta our hair?

I remember watching Alain Resnais?s film Hiroshima Mon Amour for the first time: Black and White images of the Hiroshima museum displaying piles of hair, remnants of the modern American annihilation of two cities in Japan. The film links two victims through the motif of hair: French women scapegoated for a more general collaboration with the Nazis have their hair cut at the end of the war, tonsured during the liberation in France. World War II also witnessed yet other mounted piles of hair in the concentration camps of Auschwitz, Dachau, Treblinka, and Bergen-Belzen, recycled for productive purposes. Nazi archival footage documents pyramids of watches, glasses, hair - visual evidence to the work of an »orderly regime.«

Iraqi, Yemeni, and Moroccan refugees Israel in the 1950s were welcomed to Israel with white DDT dust, to cleanse them, as the official Euro-Israeli discourse suggested, of their »tropical diseases.« In the transient camps, their hair was shaved off, to rid them of lice. Children, some of them healthy, were suspected of ringworm, and were, therefore, treated with massive doses of radiation. You could tell those who had been treated by the wraps covering their heads, covering the shame of hair loss. The Euro-Israeli authorities, wrapped in the aura of science, marched on us to eradicate our Asian and African underdevelopment. Decades later, as the children became adults, they again experienced hair loss; now they wore fashionable wigs or hats to cover a second hair loss, this time due to radiation treatment for cancerous brain tumors, caused initially by their childhood early »treatment« for a simple skin disease that sometimes they did not actually have.

Can memory exist apart from the desire to memorialize? Perhaps our United States immigration narratives are no more than a monument to our parents' and grandparents' generations (some of whom performed »hairy« escapes across hostile borders); generations muted by the everyday burden of hyphenated realities, their dreams mutilated. And so we weave these narratives into our images and texts as a kind of a memorial, a portable shrine for those whom we fear have faded away.

 

 

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