Ghostly Matters -reflection

Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination

Avery F. Gordon

http://www.amazon.com/Ghostly-Matters-Haunting-Sociological-Imagination/dp/081662089X

While I was reading Ghostly Matters, I was thinking of who my ghost(s) would be and what kind of social figure they are representing. My primary ghost would be my grandmother, who experienced the brutality of the Japanese colonial rule and lived her life as a colonial subject. She is representing the Japanese Colonialism, which was never vanished even after the Japanese occupation of the Korean peninsula officially ended in 1945, similarly to the Slavery in the United States as Gordon states that “the enslavement or domination that persists and that often masquerades as emancipation or freedom (187).” As a third generation ethnic Korean born and raised in the former colonial country, I have to admit the frightening level of internalization of the Japanese Colonialism and self-hate as a colonized. My dialogue with Grandmother started on the day she physically passed away and when her oldest son shared the stories about her, which I had never cared to know for the fifteen years I lived with her. I began to develop interests in documenting her story, a personal story and one of many stories of Koreans in Japan, who have been disappeared and told, “Since we disappeared you, you’re nothing. Anyway, nobody remembers you. You don’t exist (78).” Who told them so? The Japanese? It was not only the Japanese. It included us, who internalized and were practicing the Japanese Colonialism toward ourselves and our people. I needed to “recognize just where we are in this story, even if we do not want to be there (188)” and to confront myself being denial to myself and Grandmother –encounter.

As I dealt with the wolf in me and engaged in dialogues with Grandmother, a colonial subject, I started to realize that I myself am a subject of the Japanese Colonialism, that intends to perpetuate “the condition that produced disappearance (115).” When they started to “revise” history textbooks and deny the existence of the “comfort women,” their ultimate purpose was not to alter the understanding of the past, but rather to assert and perpetuate their Colonial ideology in the present through controlling the past, as Gordon describes that “it [history] is always a site of struggle” (184). When they are determined to disappear those who threaten the legitimacy of their ideology and to control the past as well as the present, it is our responsibility exerting the aptitude of ghosts to fight for changes, transformations, and justice.