Hey everybody!
As you all know, for the past few weeks our ASTU class have been discussing the novel Obasan by Joy Kogawa. These discussions brought up new ideas such as forgetting and silence and also how one chooses to remember their pasts. On November 19th, we went on a mini field trip to UBC’s Rare Books and Special Collections Library and we explored a part of the Joy Kogawa Fond. This Fond comprised of drafts of Obasan, correspondence with editors and publishers regarding the book, letters from readers expressing their thoughts and most interestingly of all a letter from Prime Minister Trudeau himself.
It’s quite awesome being the class blogger this week as I got to have the chance to understand what all of you thought about our outing to look at the Kogawa Fond! When I read Amy’s post, she talked about how she was taken by a letter to Kogawa due to the reader feeling “emotionally immobilized” when they read Obasan. I too was taken by this. Due to the knowledge of Japanese-Canadian internment is not common knowledge in today’s society and given Canada’s reputation of being welcoming to all cultures, reading Obasan gives its readers a shock and most don’t know how to feel or think about this historic event. Even for some people who do have some prior knowledge of the internment camps, reading Obasan came as a shock, but not to such an extreme. My Social Studies and Geography teacher in high school was a child when he was sent to an internment camp (just like Naomi). During his classes, he would sometimes bring up this subject but he would always refuse to tell us of his feelings about that time. This could go back to him not wanting to talk about the trauma that has been done to him so many years ago.
When I read Ben’s blog, I found it interesting that a lot of the adult readers’ letters to Kogawa expressed a sense of gratitude for the book. Here Ben shows that Obasan has “broke the almost forty year silence that Japanese-Canadians experienced since the brutal actions committed by their own government”. This leads me to believe that the silence portrayed in Obasan through Obasan and Naomi gave people who experienced the camps first-hand something to relate to and hopefully will help them to start talking about this “silenced” topic.
Have a great day everyone!
Fiona Tse