Hello fellow classmates, this week’s blogs are all about Obasan and the RBSC, and it’s quite fascinating what you all have to say. Kaveel immediately brought to my attention that first and foremost our interaction with the primary sources at the the RBSC is the first time most of us have had the opportunity to engage primary sources. We live in a very well informed age with lots and lots of secondary sources, but primary sources are still hard to find, and the knowledge we gain from them is quite amazing. Kaveel showed many examples of the Kogawa fond, but perhaps the most fascinating of them was a paper titled “SOME RANDOM THOUGHTS FROM A NOVEL IN PROGRESS.” This was fascinating to me and Kaveel because as Kaveel put it “this artifact shower Kogawa’s train of thought especially the argument she hopes to portray through her novel” which in essence is what the novel is boiled down. This paper showed Kogawa’s message and purpose in regards to the novel, and that is something truly amazing that we have the opportunity to peer into the purpose of the novel. Additionally it’s fascinating to actually look at the physical properties of what would become Obasan because for me personally I often struggle with the idea that anyone can create an actual book in stages, and that it in a sense doesn’t always exist. As Kihan put it “I was able to understand Obasan as a work fabricated out of someone’s subjectivity – a work that had to be physically created by a real, breathing, complex, thinking human being – and not just as a work that has always existed in its heralded and canonized form,” which is something I and I’m assuming others struggle with. Everyone acknowledged how going to the RBSC extends the works of Obasan past what we perceive it to be as a book. We see it’s roots and the many different directions it might take but doesn’t, we see why Kogawa made the decisions she made, if reading Obasan is a conversation with Kogawa then we are extending that conversation into the heart and soul of what Kogawa is trying to tell us. Many people, including Jennifer, noted how different the reality of writing and archiving is now to how it was, and how seemingly unimportant things are actually quite enlightening. Jennifer put perfectly when she said “I did not realize how every little piece of object/paper can be important,” and it’s true every single piece of material that influenced and led Kogawa to the final product of Obasan is incredibly important from a literary sense, a historical one, and a sociological perspective. Seeing these fonds helped the class see how the works of an author are living breathing pieces of literature, even if they aren’t the finished product. The fonds showed the class how much work truly goes into the production of a book such as Obasan, especially when it comes to creation of the characters in the book. In Obasan the story is not a traditional character-plot story, but a collage of news, letters, moments of trauma, conversations with the self and with others. Through this collage you see a diverse group of people with extremely authentic characteristics, and through the fonds we got to see how Kogawa formed this intricately complex individuals. Nicola notes the authenticity that Kogawa has throughout the book and throughout the fond, everything about the story and her life is authentic. In fact the collage of different mediums which make up the book, whether real or not, are incredibly authentic and create a real sense of the situation back in the 1940’s. Kogawa, as our class has noted, took the responsibility of giving voice to the silent suffering of Japanese Canadians and did it expertly, she wrote empathetically about those who would wish to silently get over the trauma and those that wish to scream and shout about the injustice. She doesn’t act as arbiter over all Japanese Canadians, but as one of the thousands that suffered, giving voice to those that couldn’t speak. I hope you enjoyed this, because I enjoyed your blogs, until next time.