The idea of redress is not unique to Joy Kagawa’s Obasan. Of course, her redress is incredibly effective. She writes the story of the lives of a Japanese-Canadian family broken by the Canadian government during World War II. Kagawa herself believes that she reflects more upon the character of Aunt Emily, a political hawk, searching for change and acknowledgement. Obasan became an immediate hit, making many changes in Canadian society. She yearned for the redress of her people, and so achieved it.
The notion of redress through the medium of a novel caught my attention. I searched the library of my mind for a book that I had once read that had desired for redress, for acknowledgement, for it all to be set right. After days of thinking about it, I finally had remembered what novel I was thinking of! I had Sarah’s Key by Tatiana de Rosnay over the summer, a historical fiction book I picked up in a discount bookstore in the Dallas/Fort Worth airport. I hadn’t expected much from it, just a quick read, but I was wildly surprised. It contained depth, historical accuracy, and (most importantly) and an apparent cry for redress.
Sarah’s Key is the intertwined stories of a young jewish girl in Paris during WWII and then of a journalist in the early 1990’s. It describes the hardship of the young girl, Sarah, (the loss of her family, her innocence) and then how the journalist searches for more clues on Sarah, including her whereabouts today.
Redress comes into the picture with the deportation of the Jewish families from Paris during the Vel’ d’Hive Roundup on July 16 and 17 of the year 1942. This roundup accounted for sending 6,300 men, women, and children to Auschwitz, out of the 42,000 sent all together. Out of that 42,000, only 811 French returned home from the war. Sarah’s Key addresses these facts, but calls for redress not just for the loss of lives and for the families of the victims, but also for redress on the facts — none are clear. For decades following the war, the French government denied the claim that French police were involved in the Vel’ d’Hive. That’s right. The law enforcers of a country was sending his/her own people to their deaths.
The journalist within Sarah’s Key finds obtaining information on the Vel’ d’Hive very difficult, and makes it her mission to do more thorough investigation. Newspaper articles, letters, and textbooks regarding the incident don’t exist. Locals who live near the holding zone for the victims do not speak of it. The journalist’s own daughter, French-born and schooled, has never even of heard of it. The plot goes to prove the redress Tatiana de Rosnay is searching for.
Reading more into the Vel’ d’Hiv, I learn that the French government finally made an apology in 1995, specifically for the part that the French police played in the murder of thousands of innocent people.
Whether or not this apology was put forth because of Rosnay’s novel, Sarah’s Key is another great example of redress in the form of a novel, just like that of Obasan.
Hi Emilia,
Your blog posting this week is really interesting. Using an alternative example to the concept of “redress” is very refreshing. In particular I was drawn to the manner in which the French government dealt with the treatment of the Jewish population during the war, with it stated that they denied any wrongdoing and did not apologize until 1995. As I have found to be true in examples I looked at, governments are often reluctant to admit a mistake within their past in fear of opening-up old wounds and negative national sentiments. In Canada, the writing of ‘Obasan’ proved to be a real catalyst in gaining an apology and some sort of compensation for those who had suffered during World War Two. It would be interesting to see what sparked the French government to finally accept the need to apologise to Jewish civilians within the country during the war – maybe the text you have discussed had a major role in this…? Lastly, I find it somewhat frustrating that most governments do not lead any sort of reconciliation until pressed by the public (Canada’s attempt at the TRC i one notable exception that is encouraging to see). This means that atrocities that occurred in the distant history of a country are not noted to be categorically wrong, as they are no longer in living memory. However, those for which the public feel guilty frequently result in some sort of apology, which, possibly, could be used as a political tool for the government of the time (to increase support).