During our class visit to the Rare Books and Special Collections (RBSC) branch of Irving K. Barber Library, we were allowed to pour over an astonishingly wide variety of documents that contributed to the final draft and publishing of Joy Kogawa’s Obasan. The nature of the documents varied greatly, from scribbled notes following Kogawa’s train of thought, to rejection letters from publishers, to typewritten drafts of certain chapters, to letters written from Kogawa to the Canadian prime minister – the list goes on. All of these documents contributed to a tangible way of viewing and understanding Kogawa’s process of writing Obasan, a documented journey that one could piece together (to a certain degree) on their own with the help of this collection.

The background of this process, provided by these documents, gives the book far more depth, in my opinion. However, as Dr. Luger mentioned in class recently, the advent of technology in providing us with easy-to-use word processors erases a lot of this process. Granted, it must make the editing process remarkably easier and perhaps speed up the writing process itself, but physical representations marking the author’s journey towards the final draft are lost. Current technology would likely erase in part another important aspect of Kogawa’s formulation of Obasan: physical documents of the past such as letters and telegrams. E-mails would likely replace a large portion of this correspondence, and its speed would likely change even the content of communication. With all that is erased by technology, library branches like the RBSC must be affected, and will continue to be affected, by the sheer lack of physical documents in circulation that detail an author’s process – especially in comparison to the impressive extent of Kogawa’s.

Although there’s little to be done about this trend, I find it a saddening in a way. This particular nature of documentation allows the reader to interact with the story to a further extent, and so much more goes into published product than is indicated by the final draft. It would be incredible to have a collection such as Kogawa’s to document processes of other books, like of Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis. It would conjure up even greater of an appreciation for the work, thought, and struggle that goes into the published product. There’s simply something about paper documents capable of being held that provides a level of intimacy and personal connection with the content.

For the past couple of weeks, our class has read and started to analyze Marjane Satrapi’s moving graphic narrative, Persepolis. The story is narrated by Marji, a feisty 10-year-old girl growing up in the midst of the Islamic Revolution and Iran-Iraq War. Her narrative captivated my attention immediately, and I began to wonder why this was.
Since I was in elementary school, I have always been fascinated with narratives of historical events. This early fascination began with book series like Dear Canada: a collection of fictional diaries narrated by young girls and set in historically significant – and often traumatic – settings, such as the Halifax Explosion of 1917, the Spanish flu epidemic of 1918, the Ukrainian Canadian Internment of 1914, the residential schools of 1966 and many more. As a kid, I was never taken aback by the juxtaposition of the trauma of these events and a child’s point of view. However, after delving into Satrapi’s Persepolis, it now strikes me as a more potent contrast and wrought with purpose.
Generally, authors of books are rarely children themselves – so why do some choose to speak from a child’s perspective, especially when they are narrating solemn or upsetting events? One explanation is the issue of accessibility. Complicated situations may be simplified through the eyes of a child, as their interpretations are often influenced by a lack of information or differential understanding of nuanced circumstances. This simplification has a way of inviting a larger audience, including those who may find a detailed account from a history textbook uninteresting or confusing. I encountered a lot of information about historical events through Dear Canada at a younger age than some of my peers, drawn in by the voices of young girls like me describing horrifying, yet captivating traumatic settings. In Persepolis, Marji’s perspective as a child simplifies certain aspects of the Islamic Revolution, likely extending its accessibility to the Western audience it is directed toward, as we discussed in class.
A child’s point of view may also work to humanize traumatic events that are overwhelming and hard to grasp emotionally. A general historical description of, say, World War 1 may list the number of casualties in a given battle – the Battle of the Somme resulted in one million, for example. From this information, it is difficult to comprehend statistics of this magnitude at face value to identify with the sheer devastation of this event. However, a child’s perspective – of losing a father or brother in this battle, of the grief it brought on the family, of the change that resulted from this death – provides a personal narrative that works to ground trauma and information that can otherwise be incomprehensible.
Whatever the purpose, historical narratives through the eyes of a child have proved to be a profound, even jarring, means of interacting with traumatic events.

http://www.scholastic.ca/dearcanada/books/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Somme
https://www.amazon.ca/Persepolis-Story-Childhood-Marjane-Satrapi/dp/037571457X