Siddhartha, Reincarnation, History

So far I’ve read the second half of Sonmi’s story.  Maybe I expected too much in terms of missing pieces to Zachary’s story, but I was a little disappointed that it ended where it did.  But one clue that filled in a gap in “Sloosha’s Crossing” was the arrival of Sonmi at an old abbey turned colony of stragglers who shunned “corpocracy.”  On a rock shelf across from the gulf neighboring this colony, Sonmi sees a huge engravement of a man whose name she learns is Siddhartha.  According to Hae-Joo Im, Siddhartha is a god who “offered salvation from a meaningless cycle of birth and rebirth” (328).  Somni, though, is entranced by him and the concept of rebirth and implores Abbess to ask Siddhartha to reincarnate her in this colony.  Now it makes sense to me why the Valleysmen hold reincarnation as their after-death experience.  I’m assuming Sonmi brought the story of Siddhartha Gautama–the Buddha–to Hawaii with her.  Or maybe just the idea of reincarnation, since the Buddha’s name does not make an appearance in Zachary’s story; instead, it’s Sonmi who is the deity. 

I find it easier now to see the connections between each of the stories, and the novel as a whole, to perceptions of history and civilization.  I think it becomes quite apparent that civilization is nosediving in Sonmi’s time; the Union’s ideas are legit, even though the Union itself is fake.  My thinking was behind theirs the whole time.  I’m hoping that the Abbess’ colony wasn’t fake, though.  A reader’s gotta be left with a little sliver of light sometimes.  Civilization versus the barbaric slaps you in the face in Zachary’s story.  Valleysmen are told about “the Fall,” and Zachary sees this historic event as an admonishment to future cultures and tribes against the abuse and overuse of power.  This novel is possibly one of the most cyclical in nature that I’ve read.  “Sloosha’s Crossing” reflects themes we saw in Adam Ewing’s journals, and the question of civilization is equally as obvious.  The Kona are the colonizers this time, and our point of view is from the Valleysmen, the culture that is attacked.  Instead of seeing the enslaved as savage, we see the enslavers as such.  Interesting to note, too, that the Valleysmen deem the Prescients as more civilized because of their “Smart” and technology.  Meronym and Duophysite traveled to Hawaii to avoid their sweeping plague and to ”plant more Civ’lize in Ha-Why” (295).  We see Meronym as a protagonist, but she, too, is trying to take a piece of the Valleysmen’s land to survive and breed.  Is it the Valleysmen’s saving grace that the plague is wiping the Prescients out?  Would they have been ”better” colonizers than the Kona?

Anyway, back to the birthmark thing.  Pretty clever way to highlight reincarnation.  I wondered at first why Mitchell chose this particular spiritual belief to inject into his chapters.  But following the form of the novel, it makes sense: reincarnation is cyclical, too.  And it’s a poignant way of pointing out that the postmodern, technology-obsessed individual is never just an individual; she is connected to past worlds and future ones, and inevitably attached to other people.  “But no crisis is insuperable if people cooperate” (330).

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