Racial and Ethnic Semiosis in Mitsuye Yamada's "Mrs. Higashi Is Dead"

Abstract

At a time when affirmative action and immigration are under attack, how do we as teachers and critics acknowledge the viciousness of our society while also professing the possibility of change? The writings of Mitsuye Yamada offer one way of engaging the issues raised in an ethnically diverse society while sidestepping platitudes about multiculturalism. Yamada promotes understanding between various segments of the population, but her optimism differs markedly from the images used in advertising, presidential races, or campaigns for charities, where music erupts, faces glow, and viewers' eyes mist as people of assorted heritages unite. In Yamada's poems and stories, brief meetings between persons of different racial or ethnic backgrounds are unexpectedly productive, revealing both similarities and differences among those who have experienced oppression. Such moments force individuals to reinterpret the past and to make their histories known. As an especially intricate example of this process, Yamada's short story Mrs. is Dead portrays a woman for whom a cross-racial encounter reveals her own subordinate and dominate roles in a system of multiple oppressions. The story presents a multicultural America more complicated than the media's portrayals of easy equality or absolute division along racial lines. Although Mrs. Higashi belongs most obviously to a growing body of literature about mothers and daughters, theories of both ethnic and racial semiosis also explain the dynamics at work within the story. Born in 1923, Yamada grew up in Seattle and was interned during World War II in Minidoka Relocation Center. She examines these experiences and the politics of everyday conflicts in Camp Notes and Other Poems (1976) and Desert Run: Poems and Stories (1988).1 The confrontations Yamada describes serve as an antidote to the multiculturalism that, according to some observers, has replaced struggles for justice with slogans and festivals. As Richard Rodriguez points out,