“Aunt Muriel, when will this funeral be over, when will the coffin be buried, when will the grass grow over the graves and the children dance? When will the wounds close and scabs drop off the healing skin?” (exp: Kogawa, quoted in Lefebvre, p.159). I think Kogawa’s answer to this question, is that the trauma is never completely resolved; we never completely recover. Even when the funeral is over and everything is laid to rest, there is a residuality to grief and trauma. The scabs fall off, but evidence of the wound remains. The new pink skin, growth out of injury, glows brightly. I don’t think that healing is impossible, but some of the scars we carry forever. These battle wounds are not necessarily negative however; it’s possible to wear one’s scars proudly- evidence of life experience, resiliency, and growth. A “red badge of courage,” our scars can give us strength.

“To every story there is an after-story, and to every life an afterwards. Beyond each punctuation point, each period, are further questionings and more bends in the road ahead that we can imagine” (exp: Kogawa, quoted in Lefebvre, p.156). I love this quote by Kagawa. I think it suggests an underlying hopefulness in our life experiences. It seems that Kogawa is arguing that, like our traumas, our lives are always subject to re-narration. This is hopeful in that it creates a space for us to renegotiate our experience and to grow out of adversity. It also implies that what we can see at any given moment is not the whole story, and in this way suggests traumatic periods in our lives are not necessarily the end of the road, or the end of the our story. I recently ran across a quote that said, “In the end everything will be okay. If it’s not okay, it’s not yet the end.” Kogawa allows for a re-imagining of our futures.

One of my favorite lines in Lefebvre’s article regards the reference to one of Kogawa’s characters, Naomi. In a dream Naomi hears her mother’s voice say, “Find your road Naomi. I will wait for you on your road” (exp: Kogawa, quoted in Lefebvre, p.162). Even though Lefebvre doesn’t give a lot of context, I feel like Kogawa suggests that in taking a journey back to self, we can find inner truth and healing. And that in “finding our road” we can find ourselves and hopefully, a place of resilience and healing.

Lefebvre ends the article with the following: “Kogawa’s larger body of work is not resolutionary…it does not, in fact, “resolve” the traumas…these traumas are unconcludable. Instead, what can be achieved are the steps towards peace that can be found gradually in the gap between speech and silence, between memory and forgetting” (Lefebvre, p.166). If our traumas cannot be resolved- it they are inconcludable, can we still heal? Does this mean that our healing is also inconcludable or simply ever evolving? Is there a difference? Perhaps inner peace is not a destination on our road, but a journey- open to further questioning and future bends; something we constantly grow into and rearticulate…