ancestral wishes stretch further than this individual life
Ayumi Goto
ancestral wishes stretch further than this individual life will be taking place in February 2023 in Ino, Shikoku-prefecture, Japan.
"France Trepanier’s generous invitation to participate in the Dreaming the Land residency has led to the following explorations. For this, present-day Ayu is very grateful.
I will be travelling to my maternal ancestral territory in southern Shikoku, Japan. My Great-Grandparents owned a kozo (mulberry) farm in Kochi Prefecture. Kozo is one of the key raw materials for making washi in Japan. Kiyokawa Kouma and Sato sold their farm in Kouma’s attempt to expand his business in the southern island of Kyushu.
Great-Grandmother, Sato-obaasama left her ancestral land against her wishes in order to dutifully follow her husband’s dreams. In her latter years, Kouma and Sato’s daughter - my Grandmother, Naoe - often mistook me to be her mother. At the time, I pretended to be Sato-obaasama to comfort and reassure my Grandmother as she prepared to pass through.
Seven years after Grandmother passed, and during a particularly gruelling durational performance in 2013, an unusual voice and way of speaking emerged from deep within my belly and streamed into conscious speech. With such old phrasing and colloquial wording, it was not Ayumi’s regular way of speaking Japanese. From this emergence, it would seem that at times the Ayumi body was/is an organic casing to carry Sato-obaasama’s heart wish.
The title of this piece emerges from the inversion of dream and wake life. It could be argued that our physical existence is the distillation and outcropping of ancestral dreams. Just as an idea can take physical shape through the gathering and organization of otherwise scattered parts, perhaps it takes multiple generations within a spiritual nebulus to coagulate into the next physical manifestation of emotion, life wishes, knowledge development, the possible overturning of accumulated bad habits, and the uptake of collective responsibilities.
But the messiness of being alive and travelling in this body-iteration doesn’t go unnoticed. It would be pretty damn naive to over-assume this physical presence to be my Great-Grandmother’s existence, cell-per-cell, part-for-part. Ayumi is a person with strong cultural ties to Japan, but has grown up diasporic, within this lifetime having accrued a body habit of impermanence of place. To those in Kochi, they are an outsider, foreigner, someone who speaks with a strange accent. In the past, Ayumi-travelling-in-Japan has been mistaken as Chinese, Korean, Filipina, Taiwanese…much like they are mistaken in Canada, with a different set of discriminations that accompany this inaccurate assessment. It’s all good! In my linguistic frustrations, it is humbling to struggle with Japanese kanji. It helps me to better appreciate how my parents have navigated through English, and how for most of their lives in Canada, they would have been considered barely literate.
The intention to fulfill Sato-obaasama’s deepest desire might be the catalyst for this performance, but the outcome is sure to be far beyond my own limited expectations and understanding.
This is all an experiment. The actions for the performance will develop as a result of harvesting kozo day in and day out from Dec. 2022-end of Feb. 2023. The experiment is in part in response to a question raised by the late, gifted Macuxi artist and dear friend, Jaider Esbell (d. 2021). I have been meditating for quite some time on his painting: de onde vêm os sonhos//where do dreams come from? Mulling over this, my response to Jaider’s query has been to somehow convolute and invert expected causal relations between material and spiritual realms. Could it be that the physical world exists within the imagination of our past and future ancestors? When does dream life existence materialize into physical presence? These are some of the things that will be considered while working in the fields, stripping kouzo, bundling and carrying it for safe-keeping. Hopefully, these efforts will habituate body movements that reverberate with my Great-Grandmother’s activities on the very lands upon which the kozo farm once existed.
The making of washi is a cultural treasure. Across Japan, it has been in practice since 600 AD, when Buddhist monks learned the trade from Chinese artisans. Nowadays, the art of washi is quickly becoming lost due to mass mechanical production, the ageing population, and climate change.
We just harvested here for the past two days. The grandma, Sadamisan is 83 years old. She had a bad reaction to her covid shot so was unable to harvest this year. As my boss, Hamada Ayumi says, the kozo farmers are ageing out so there aren’t enough people to harvest. Ayumi’s company used to only produce washi from harvested and processed kozo but 4 years ago, they had to make a decision to either fold the company, Kashiki Seishi, or to help the elders harvest. Ayumi, who is fearless, leapt into harvesting for others. She says that washi-making has continued for this long because of community spirit and collective care. She has taken up a leadership role to ensure that the tradition of washi making lives on. I respect her and the whole Hamada family tremendously.
This performance is an ancestral, tactilo-kinetic, and diasporic projection of dreamlife.
It is an homage to all of those engaged in making paper in collaboration with the land.
And it is an embodied pursuit of fulfilling my Great-Grandmother’s heart wish.
マグピイと尾長鶏の出合い
日本に近付いてくるほど曽祖母の声がはっきりに来こいて来て居ます。彼女と私の間柄は何でしょうか？夢は自分て言う物では無いでしょうか？この頃歌が急に頭の中に弾いて来ます。新しい歌を書いて見たいと思ってます。もし貸したら、これが曾祖母の本心の夢。カナダ生まれでも何年もこの土地の上に歩きましててもこの風土の心動き空気、音はっきり言うと合計の意味が分かりません。これ程ひいばあが図うっと自分の土地に帰りたいですか。外から見ていると前線意味が無いでしょうか？
in flight, travelling toward returns. how many generations must pass for the fulfillment of a singular wish? Great-Grandmother, さとひいばあちゃん was born upon the lands to which i now travel anew. Great-Grandfather, 紅魔じhad owned a 楮paper tree farm in Agawa-gun (吾川郡), Shikoku-prefecture (被告県) before embarking on a journey from which there was no return. it was against my Great-Grandmother’s heart wish. Great-Grandpa moved the family, which at the time included my Grandmother, 直恵 to 宮崎県 in the hopes of expanding his 楮 farm business. they fell to immediate misfortune. unbeknownst to Great-Grandpa the massive tract of land that he purchased had been occupied by two warring factions. intergenerational enmity gave way to alliance when an outsider, Great-Grandpa dared to grab the property rights from right under their noses. under the guise of throwing him a lavish welcoming party, the village folks had written out the deeds to the newly acquired property. as Great-Grandpa became heavily inebriated with drink and jubilation, the villagers had him stamp away all his rights to the land. overnight, my great-grandparents were left in near destitution.
Great-Grandmother never returned to her homeland again. this was the starting point of diaspora of women on my mother’s side. this was the beginning of wandering without returns. this is the life of salmon who lurch toward unchartered waters. i am this salmon.
子供の時からなかなか声が出て来ません。喉に引っ付いて言いたい事を全部飲み込んでて我慢だけしかありません。親戚の土地に近付いてくるほど歌を歌いたくなりますは。鳥の歌が光って来ています。すうっと喉から飛んで行って来ます。
お婆ちゃんlived a life beyond her own intentions. born in Agawa-Gun, she was uprooted at age 4 or 5. she returned only once to her birthplace when as an adult, when she took her infant daughter, my mother 京子 to introduce her to extended family relations. this momentary return amidst 直恵’s residence in China for 11 years. like her own mother, 直恵accompanied her husband to unexpected lands. in her case, she would never understand how her life was incorporated into the nationalistic machinations of Japanese Imperial colonization.
like her mother and Grandmother before, my mother, 京子also uprooted from Japan to go even further afield to accompany my father, 虎信 to Canada. then Grandmother followed to abide by her daughter, where she died after decades of hard labour.
my mother still carries my father and Grandmother’s ashes wherever she moves. currently they dwell atop a dresser next to her bed. this is the continuation of diaspora past breath.
for many years, i had a recurring dream that i was alone wading the pacific ocean. the sky was blanketed with the most oppressive indigo with only the brightest stars glimmering quietly to accompany the errant lapping of water surrounding my restive form. facing japan i wailed and wailed looking towards islands that were no longer reachable. could it be that all along, this was my Great-Grandmother, trying to flounder home, only to find that after so many divergences, she could no longer find her way?
to be continued…"
Written by Ayumi Goto
My hands are identical to my Mother's hands, which are identical to my Grandmother's hands. I can only surmise then that my hands are nearly identical to my Great-Grandmother's. After my daily labours are completed, I spend time with kozo-senpai (senpai means boss or superior in a mentoring relationship) as I am the student-kohai. Following the kozo movements as the bundles swing with the wind, I meditate on the notion of refinement of actions...how to distill manual labour and kozo-human co-habitation into dance, gesture, concept?
We would like to thank the following people for their support in this project:
Ashok Mathur - Artistic collaborator, photographer and videographer