Reviewed by Ona Gritz
At the start of the new millennium, author Suzanne Kamata, along with the other members of a mother’s support group at the Tokushima School for the Deaf in Japan, was handed a piece of paper and asked to write down her wishes for her infant daughter’s future. Her first impulse was to write that she wanted Lilia, who has cerebral palsy and is non-ambulatory in addition to being deaf, to “speak as well as a hearing person” and have a ‘normal life’.” But Kamata, who had read up on Deaf culture, recognized her own wishes as a form of prejudice.
“I needed to pry my heart open wider,” she tells us. I want her to be happy, she finally wrote down that long ago January day, adding curiosity and the confidence to try whatever she wants to do.
When we meet Lilia at twelve years old, it is clear that her mother’s wishes have come true. Her daughter is happy—Lilia is the sunnier, more optimistic of my twins—and curious—Lilia gazes in wonder at the bats, the fireflies, the stars—and brave—Ikkitai! I want to go! Where she wants to go is Paris, 6,000 miles and as different as possible from the small conservative community where the family lives.
Happily, wanderlust is something mother and daughter have in common. Kamata, born in Michigan, always loved to travel and met her husband while teaching English in Japan. To help nurture their shared passion, she buys Lilia a suitcase as a birthday present. And while saving and planning for a trip to Paris, she takes her daughter on other journeys—family vacations to the states, and less ambitious trips closer to home, sometimes with family and friends but often on their own. Wherever they go, Lilia, an aspiring manga artist, brings along a camera and a notebook so that she can capture their adventures in photos, drawings, and words.
Art is deeply important to both mother and daughter, as is history, and Kamata writes about both with beauty and acuity. In our journeys with the duo to Washington D.C., Mount Fuji, Tokyo Disneyland, Osaka, and finally Paris, we discover new artists and learn surprising bits of history regarding figures we may have thought we knew well. As with all good travel writing, we get a visceral sense of place and are privy not just to the wonders of landscape, architecture, cuisine, and art, but also the difficulties that come with finding one’s way in foreign and culturally unfamiliar terrain. But what sets Squeaky Wheels apart from other works in the genre is that it is about much more than a single narrator exploring a part of the world. It is about a mother whose raison d’être is expanding the world that is available to her child.
With great candor, Kamata confides her insecurities about parenting Lilia. She also lets us in on her fears for her daughter’s future, especially given that in Tokushima Prefecture, where they live, it seems the most that’s expected of someone with Lilia’s disabilities is piecework in a sheltered workshop. Lilia reads below grade level and Kamata blames herself for this, worrying that because she is not a native Japanese speaker, she’s held her daughter back. But Kamata is also the most fluent in Japanese Sign Language in their family, thus the person with whom Lilia is best able to converse. While helping her daughter up the steps in her inaccessible school, she walks with her own legs bent like Lilia’s so as to experience the arduous climb similarly. Through her tremendous love and compassion, she is, in essence, the person most conversant in who her daughter is. “I want [people] to see Lilia, not as a deaf girl in a wheelchair, not as my inescapable burden, but as a well-rounded individual with a place in the world. She has a rich interior life. She has ideas and opinions. She is aware…”
Naturally, issues of accessibility are paramount to their experience of traveling together, thus also a vital theme in the book. Kamata tells us that she has been conditioned through her years in Japan, where “people abhor making a fuss,” to avoid asking for help. Likewise, the Japanese rarely offer assistance “because it creates a never-ending chain of obligation.” But given the narrow winding Parisian streets and the many steps in supposedly accessible galleries and tourist sights, Kamata finds that she has no choice but to accept the help that the French insist upon giving. Though it crosses her mind that this special treatment is making her soft, she discovers the positive aspects as well. For one, there’s the sense of camaraderie that can only come from working together.
“For a few heartbeats, at least, it seems that we are all brothers and sisters, that there are allies everywhere.”
Also, letting their needs be known is, in fact, a form of activism.
“If people like us don’t go out and show others how hard it is to get around, if we don’t make ourselves a burden, they will continue in oblivion.”
This, ultimately, is the wonder of Suzanne Kamata’s memoir. While she and Lilia move through the world and are changed by their experiences, we—and the very world around us—are changed in turn.
Title: Squeaky Wheels
Author: Suzanne Kamata
Publisher: Wyatt-Mackenzie
Publication Date: 2019
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About the Reviewer
Ona Gritz is the author of two collections of poetry, two children’s books, and a memoir. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, the Guardian, The Utne Reader, Ploughshares and elsewhere. For twelve years Gritz was a columnist for Literary Mama. She also served, along with her husband Daniel Simpson, as poetry editor for Referential Magazine. Gritz and Simpson’s joint poetry collection, Border Songs: A Conversation in Poems, appeared last year from Finishing Line Press. They are also co-editors of More Challenges for the Delusional: Peter Murphy’s Prompts and the Writing They Inspired.