Inciting the past: Okinawan literature and the decolonising turn

Abstract

This article reads contemporary Okinawan literature in relation to the increasingly urgent question of decolonisation, focusing on the writing of Sakiyama Tami. Sakiyama’s texts are radically playful, inciting the materiality of Japanese orthographies to create a literary language of difference. These strategies are both deconstructive and destructive in their efforts to express the multilingual reality of contemporary Okinawa against a history of war and oppression. However, Sakiyama’s writing shows how such strategies are necessary to give authentic voice to Okinawa’s experiences of violent military occupation and resist the appropriation of those narratives by national Japanese literary or linguistic standards. The urgency of this project emanates from the context of historical revisionism against which these texts were written, and a contemporary political climate in which Okinawans and their efforts to speak out against their ongoing colonisation have been being framed in terms of terrorism or erased. In Sakiyama’s texts, questions of language, memory, history and violence abound, and suggest links between her work and a wider project of decolonisation that has only just begun in East Asia. This article seeks to trace the strategies with which Sakiyama incites these questions through her 2002 essay Shimakotoba de kachāshī and a short story Night Flight on Pingihira Hill, first published in 2007. Since both texts remain untranslated into English, and even challenge the act of translation by celebrating linguistic distinctions, this essay seeks to forge a productive encounter to enliven both studies of Okinawan fiction and broader decolonising approaches to literature envisaged therein.