The Search for Decolonizing Subjects in Nora Okja Keller’s Comfort Woman
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This paper examines Keller’s Comfort Woman, focusing on how Keller characterizes two main characters Akiko and Beccah’s search for their decolonizing subjects out of their postcolonial condition. The postcolonial condition of their present life is characterized by the effects of Akiko’s past colonial experience as a sex slave on Akiko and Beccah. This makes them endlessly ‘displaced’ and ‘haunted,’ even to the extent that their relationship as a mother and a daughter is so ruined that it remains detached and unbridgeable. Keller shows two individual stories that go parallel in the novel, and these alternate stories—Akiko and Beccah stories—finally converge at the point when Beccah begins to make sense of her mother’s hidden traumatic life story of the past. On the one hand, this characterization reveals how hard it is to restore the broken relationship between Beccah and Akiko. On the other hand, however, in those individual stories, Keller shows how they desperately manage to overcome adverse situations to which they are often forced; in the end, Keller represents their stories as stories of survival. It is significant that they develop their agency as decolonizing subjects against colonizing forces in such process. More importantly, what makes Keller’s oppositional cultural politics notable is that the way of Keller’s appropriating comfort women’s traumatic history in Asian American studies serves to decolonize Asian American subjectivities by enabling us to envision possibilities beyond the hyphen: a way of forging a connection between Asia and Asian America.
Abstract
This paper examines Keller’s Comfort Woman, focusing on how Keller characterizes two main characters Akiko and Beccah’s search for their decolonizing subjects out of their postcolonial condition. The postcolonial condition of their present life is characterized by the effects of Akiko’s past colonial experience as a sex slave on Akiko and Beccah. This makes them endlessly ‘displaced’ and ‘haunted,’ even to the extent that their relationship as a mother and a daughter is so ruined that it remains detached and unbridgeable. Keller shows two individual stories that go parallel in the novel, and these alternate stories—Akiko and Beccah stories—finally converge at the point when Beccah begins to make sense of her mother’s hidden traumatic life story of the past. On the one hand, this characterization reveals how hard it is to restore the broken relationship between Beccah and Akiko. On the other hand, however, in those individual stories, Keller shows how they desperately manage to overcome adverse situations to which they are often forced; in the end, Keller represents their stories as stories of survival. It is significant that they develop their agency as decolonizing subjects against colonizing forces in such process. More importantly, what makes Keller’s oppositional cultural politics notable is that the way of Keller’s appropriating comfort women’s traumatic history in Asian American studies serves to decolonize Asian American subjectivities by enabling us to envision possibilities beyond the hyphen: a way of forging a connection between Asia and Asian America.
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