Monthly Archives: November 2015

Last week we ventured into the UBC Library archives to take a closer look at Joy Kogawa’s Obasan and the variety of processes that were behind its creation and continue to surround the book. The Fonds contained everything from publisher rejections and newspaper articles about Japanese internment to fan mail with pastel rainbows from school children. One piece I found of particular interest was a letter written in the form of a poem to Kogawa from one of her readers. As I read it the first time, I had no idea what on earth the poem was getting at…. but the words stressed me out! They made my body ache and tense. So I took a quick picture (making sure to put that little legalistic “for research purposes only” slip in the shot) and put it in the back of my mind for later pondering on the bus ride home.

Although it somewhat defeats the purpose of poetry, I’ll give my best shot at the gist: why and how do we measure division how does one respond to the scarcity of those who seek the fullness of unity? These were spoken of in terms of warmth. It brought up images of fire and flames as divided warmth, and the sun as the togetherness of warmth, unreachable in the vastness of space and beyond understanding. There was an air of desperation, of waiting, of hope in clinging to the warmth of fleeting fire and light on earth. Why did these words and themes hit me like a large school bus and why did I feel that they were so relevant to Obasan, to the world?

Obasan delves into these themes of division and unity with people (albeit fictional), not warmth. What does it mean to be both Japanese and Canadian? Why do people insist on putting up walls amongst themselves? This is the division that the characters in Obasan are at odds with. But there is that desperation and clinging onto the hope for a better future, that clinging to the fleeting warmth and vision for unity that so scarcely appears amongst the division. These themes are a big deal in this world. While the sun and fire are arguably more poetic and drive the feelings home with great force… we see how the themes are relevant and ridden with controversy on the ground in Obasan. This raises some interesting questions about the place of these literary genres as technologies of memory. With the poem and Obasan getting at similar themes but one having a more profound effect on me than the other, what does this say about the subjectivity of technology of memory? What does it say about the need for diversity in what we draw upon for memory?

Works Cited

Kogawa, Joy. Obasan. Toronto, Ontario, Canada: Penguin, 1981. Print.

Joy Kogawa Fonds,UBC Library Archives,

There’s been a lot of discussion in ASTU about humanizing our perceptions of foreign conflicts, starting with Persepolis and continued with Joe Sacco’s Safe Area Gorazde. We’ve been asking ourselves again and again how we can understand the people behind the numbers, what enables us to do this, the implications of this in memory, and whether or not we are entitled to this kind of knowing. On the political stage these conflicts are often reduced to statistics. X amount of people were killed. There are X amount of Syrian refugees. There are X amount of missing and murdered Indigenous women. While this without question adds gravity to the issues, why is it that we likely wouldn’t be bothered were these issues scaled down to only a handful of people, or even just one person? What is it about numbers that calls for our attention?

There is so much emphasis on the worth of being able to measure things empirically, giving things a scientific face, defining things. It’s built in. I consider myself a relatively empathetic person, but I often tend not to be able to take things seriously without numerical relevance. I get frustrated in class when people share very loosely related anecdotes, because it’s just a stupid little story and I’d rather get to the tried and tested material. I think it’s thoroughly uncool that I end up feeling that way.

In one of my other classes today the prof began the hour by asking if anyone had any feelings to share. We hadn’t even began talking about anything yet. I had to stifle the urge to laugh, roll my eyes, whatever. Then I asked myself, why do I think that that is an invalid way to begin a class? I looked up synonyms for invalid. Google gave me unscientific. Go figure. Forget trying to humanize the people behind the statistics in foreign conflicts. I had to remind myself that the people in the room right beside me weren’t just UBC student numbers.
So what’s the fascination with numbers? I want to be able to know people deeply, and if that means knowing only one person well then so be it, but I’d rather be able to extend it to everyone. I guess as humans we’re limited in how much empathy and understanding we can handle. Does that mean we have to choose who and what to invest in? I suppose. But we can in a way fight our own nature of exclusion by sharing our own and other people’s stories like those in Persepolis and Safe Area Gorazde. How else can we humanize the numbers? How can we understand more deeply what humanizing someone looks like?