Hi readers!
Last week on Tuesday, our ASTU class had a fun and novel experience in the Rare Books and Special Collections Library in the Irving K. Barber building. The librarian went through a little introduction of the special collections, how they are qualified to be stored in this library, and archival science. Later, we worked in pairs, examining the documents in front of us. Wamaitha and I read through a few fan mails, and were surprised by the date of the mails being written. Majority of them were written in 1982, a year after Obasan was first published. Our table started the conversation on how Obasan was instantly famous during that time. Controversy of the book is definitely one major factor of the public attention received by the book. Joy Kogawa acted as the pioneer of the discourse of the treatments of Japanese Canadian in this particular period of history.
As we looked into the fan mails, we found that the mails are really personal. One fan mail was sent from a highschool student taking Canadian History course, asking for Kogawa’s advice on her assigned essay on the topic of the government oppressing Japanese Canadian after World War Two. Another one was attached with a verse written by the fan, who is supposedly a young generation of white Canadian. The person suggested that he shared this verse, which he wrote for a sansei friend, to show his compassion and apologetic spirit toward his fellow citizens of Japanese Canadians. These fan mails indicate how much impact Obasan has on the audiences. Readers are not reading the book simply as a novel but as a social and historical trauma that they can build connections with as they emerge themselves into the storyline.
During the discussion after we examined these documents, one group brought up the analogy of Obasan as vomit of Joy Kogawa. On Tuesday, Dr. Lugar suggested in class discussion that by vomiting the story, Kogawa was in fact healing from the trauma, and her vomit has obviously brought her plenty of positive responses and reactions from her audiences. Nevertheless, Kogawa had faced some barriers on the path of publication of Obasan. In one of the document form another group, the publisher read through the first twenty pages “cleaning them up” and gave her some suggestions on how the publisher imagined Kogawa’s work should be like. From my interpretation of this letter, the publisher was asking Kogawa to swallow back her vomit. Imagine how hurtful she felt when her book was to be edited by people who were money driven and didn’t understand the historical trauma of her community, while the main purpose of her writing this book is to convey the messages to the masses. Contrary to the readers reactions, the publisher neglected, or even denied, the value of the historical trauma transmitted in Obasan.
