Readers are usually only able to understand an author through their text alone, and other means of discovering further knowledge about the author can be unavailable to many. Our ASTU class had the opportunity to visit the Joy Kogawa fonds after reading her book, Obasan, and the fonds gave us insight into the many details and aspects of Kogawa’s life and the making of Obasan.
The box of documents that I looked at contained a typed letter from Kogawa to the owners of the house that appears in her book. Since the house played an important role in her childhood, Kogawa asks if the owners would consider selling the house to her. She talks about her family and how her mother is very alone, and expresses hope to hear back from the owners of the house; the house would eventually be turned into a writer’s home. Although Dr. Luger touched on the history of this particular house in class, I would not have been able to see it as clearly in the larger picture of the story of Obasan without having gone to the fonds and found this document.
I also discovered a couple letters that Kogawa had written to an individual by the name of “Fred” in which she talked about her depression. A letter from January 13, no year, mostly described her thought process in the midst of her depression, and in it, Kogawa also expressed her doubts about her relations with her friends, among other subjects. Such highly personal documents could allow us to gain some understanding of the author herself and how she fits into the greater narrative surrounding Obasan, in which she played a central role.
In addition, there was a letter from a “JJ” to Kogawa in which “JJ” asked the author whether she was on drugs because, and I quote loosely, poets often sound as though they are on drugs. Such morsels of humor can further add to the mosaic that these important, one-of-a-kind documents create to further our understanding of Kogawa and Obasan.
Kanon, this is an interesting blog post as I seem to have examined much different items than you when we went to the archives. I was most intrigued by the letter you wrote about, where Joy Kogawa expresses her feelings of depression to this person named “Fred”. I’m not sure if her depression was during the time of her writing Obasan, but it would make sense as the book is very sad and lacking life or humor it seems. Just as you said, looking at the archives gives the reader a lot of insight into who the author really is, which helps us appreciate the book more. Great blog post, it helped me get a better look at the other things in the archives that I wasn’t able to look at myself.
Kanon, the boxes you looked at sound so interesting! It is interesting to see how an authors personal saga can play into their writing and vice versa. Her letters to Fred reveal her unhappiness which we could question is an effect from writing about such a sad thing, or we could assume that her unhappiness translated into her writing. If her letters to Fred were written after she rose to fame, could her questioning of her friendships and relationships be because of her newfound fame? She may be questioning whether or not her friends are her friends because they want to be friends or because they want to have a piece of her fame. In terms of JJ asking her about drugs, well some of her artistic metaphors were interesting and difficult to understand so…. I guess we’ll never know.