Hello Astu Class,
Since our last blog, we focused on Obasan which is a novel by the Japanese-Canadian author Joy Kogawa. We talked about how Obasan is a record of historical trauma. Joy Kogawa combines the literary form and historical form to tell a really tristful story about a historical scene. In our Astu Class, we all went to the RBSC library on the 31 st October and everyone wrote about this field trip on their blogs. I really enjoyed reading all the blogs because they were reflecting different ideas that unite together about the book.

Jordan and Wamaitha both talks about the Fan letter genre. Jordan compares her personal experience about sending tweets to celebrities, artists etc with social media with Joy Kogawa’s well-written fan mails.She realizes that she doesn’t put that much effort to what she wrote on the social media as she does for letters. Wamaitha and her both mention the rapid change in communication.
Lilly explains how she was surprised by all the rejection letters. Also, she talks about how she is amazed to see the amount of work Joy Kogawa did to write the book just like Julia. Julia also explains how she felt before seeing all the work that Kogawa was done before writing by the sentence ” I always imagined a sort of magic pen that authors used, that made words glide and assemble perfectly in a paper” which I personally loved.

Kaspar talks about ” How Obasan is not a story about an individual but rather than the collective memory of a generation”. He says this after seeing all the documents which were written by different people to the government about the Japanese Canadians leaving the country by force.
Ayşe and Oliver were really interested in the rejection letters which came to Joy Kogawa. Oliver thinks how powerful Joy Kogawa is because she continues despite all the bad comments. Ayşe justifies the book by saying ” Creating perfect characters and a storyline is not the purpose of the writer. She wants to write about the internment, not about Naomi”. I made a connection between Kaspar mentioning Obasan is not being an individual memory with this sentences.

Personally, I was too, really interested in the rejection letters as well. It was really shocking how the publishers didn’t understand what she was trying to do and the way she combines literature with a historical trauma to educate people was the thing that made her a really famous writer.

Eun Ho talks about how he was interested how Kogawa chooses her title for the book. He says that the title ” The colors of the rain” interested him the most. I found really interesting how he thinks what the title means. As the class blogger, I’m encouraging you to go and check it out 🙂

The main thing that approximately everyone talked about was the rejection letters of Joy Kogawa and how she worked really hard to write the book. I loved everyone’s blog and had a great time reading each of it.Thank you so much for the beautiful work! Have a great week everyone.