Ronald Takaki - A Larger Memory
“History has generally been written by the victors”, Ronald Takaki expresses in his book, and he hopes to bring about another form of telling history - through the stories of individuals who have lived and experienced life in a past time. In this book, Takaki gathered stories that are connected in themes and brought them together through written essays in between the testimonies.
In these essay introductions, Takaki writes a different version of history that isn’t the same traditional history taught in our public schools. Reading it blithely, some would say that Takaki doesn’t bring in anything new - “yeah they screwed over the Natives” or “yeah, slavery was horrible” and etc. These things aren’t new revelations, but there is more to the book than these perspectives that entertain our emotion of pity and morality.
The book talks about how history shapes the identity of a culture, and in a nation of immigrants, our identity has been very static and linear. For a country that is so diverse, we have still clung to the divisions of yesterday. Takaki says that who we are as a collective and as an individual are redefinable, and new associations beyond ethnic and biological ties can liberate people from keeping confined to divisions.
In one of the essays, he wrote about Palolo Island as an example of how people of different cultures came together and formed a new culture in Hawaii. They created a hybrid language, celebrated diverse holidays, and shared recipes. Because Takaki also included the stories told by the individuals, we can take from it what we want. We can find whatever connection between people, or themes from the story, and use them as examples to analyze other experiences in modern life.
This book is an easy read, and is pretty engaging for its ideas and themes. I give it a 3.7 out of 5 stars.
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