TAKE HOME DIEM PERDIDI

UFPB – CCHLA – DLEM                                                                            

NORTH AMERICAN LITERATURE III

Ingrid Neves

TAKE-HOME

“Diem Perdidi”, by Julie Otsuka

• What does the title mean? How significant is it to the story?

      “Diem perdidi” is a Latin phrase that means “I have lost a day” or “another day wasted.” The mother character in “Diem Perdidi” involuntarily forgets things in her present day life. She remembers almost everything about her husband and her daughter from the past, before her short term memory begins to erode in ability. She doesn’t remember much about events in real time. She remembers the big picture and important moments in her life, but cannot remember things that will enable her to continue living.

     By repeated use of those two phrases - “she remembers” and “she does not remember,” Otsuka is able draw the reader into the narrator’s grief at her mother’s slow passing. While physically she remains in good shape, the essence of who she is fading away. “She remembers” and “she does not remember” serve to point out the slipping away of this woman, contrasting what is known to what is forgotten, and how what is own is continually slipping away, until “she does not remember” will become more frequent than “she remembers.”

• Who might be the narrator? To whom is the narrator speaking? Why does he/she know details about the main character’s remembrances?

     Julie Otsuka’s first-person narrator is speaking to the daughter of a woman who suffers from a degenerative condition such as dementia or Alzheimer’s disease. (The effect is much the same as that of a second person story.) The narrator utilizes vignettes to describe her mother’s loss of memory and increasing disconnection from reality. The story is driven by a constant refrain. Otsuka begins most of her sentences with some variation of “she remembers” or “she does not remember.” Otsuka’s structure, however, gets right to the heart of the drama. The narrator is indeed focused on what her mother does and doesn’t remember. Some memories are sad, some gaps in memory are painful to consider.

• How important is memory to the building up of the story? How is this theme treated in the story?

      In her short story, Otsuka juxtaposes humor and tragedy (“She remembers that she is forgetting. She remembers less and less every day”), present and past, what is remembered and what is forgotten, while filling in where this family has come from as she moves forward in time, the progression marked most dramatically by such mundane things as the President’s dog, red dust, and the long nose of a baby daughter long dead.

     But the story is not composed just of random things that the woman remembers or does not remember; they are specific to her as an individual and as a member of her culture - for example, the loss of a daughter or her incarceration in an interment camp during 2nd World War. And even though most of the sentences begin with “She remembers” or “She does not remember,” they are routinely repetitive; the length of sentences varies, and the subject matter continually and meaningfully changes. Frequently, the repetitive sentences are interspersed with brief statements by the woman herself in italics, e.g., “I shouldn’t have talked so much,” “I didn’t know what else to do.”

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