Hey bloggers!
It is finally my turn to write a class blog and the pleasure reading and enjoying your blogs far more exceeds my expectation. It’s been a long time since the last time we wrote our blogs. We went through a lot recently including Safe Area Gorazde and Obasan. To keep things simple, I choose to focus on Obasan and memory in this blog.
Elizabeth and Clara connect Obasan, a fiction written by Joy Kogawa basically depicts the life of a Japanese-Canadian child in a period when Japanese-Canadian are suffered from racialism due to WW2, with their personal experience. Clara comes up with a very interesting point which is “force versus control”. “Force and control”, initially used to depict the motion of push and pull in crafting boat, actually symbolizes and epitomizes the difference between Japanese and western culture. Obasan, to me, is typical to Japanese culture. When faced with impoundment in camp and confiscation of her possession, what she do is to be obedient and accepting the discrimination imposed by Canadian government. So to the question brought up by Clara “Will there be a dominant culture?”, in my perspective, on one hand, the silence remained by this woman is another way of being “strong”(brings up by Melissa), on the other hand, this immense endurance advocated and rooted in Japanese is not a way of evade culture conflict but a better way to bend those two cultures, protect memory and avoid forgetting.
Obasan triggers the thinking of forgetting and remembering, which is talked about in the blogs of Clara, Elizabeth, Therese, Erin. As Clara mentions in her blog, as a Canadian citizen she barely knows about this tragic event. This gives me a sense that this history is selected to be forgotten purposely. But is it a right thing to do so?
Elizabeth acclaims that the impression people hold on Canada as a multicultural, friendly country is actually the result of remembering certain things and filtering out those traumas. Thus it is unfair, both to those innocent people suffer from it and people receive this collected information. And this remind me of Erin’s blog in which she states that in her high school the information she received on transatlantic slave trade and American booming was all taught in high school courses, which means that the education system is doing the remediation of memory. The school system is also mentioned in our politics class when we came to the concept “political culture” indicating the configuration of particular people’s political orientation. To form this “political culture”, people are socialized in agency such as family and school where they receive indoctrination at the will of states. This is very similar to the way memory are passed on. Then continue as Erin thinks it results in nation memory.
To remember this event, as Paolina points out, Obasan serves as narratives that is the first books tackles with Japanese-Canadian internment, and plays a huge role in conveying and creating memory.
Thank you for reading!
-Grace