This past week my ASTU class visited the Archive of Rare Books and Special Collections in UBC. The purpose of this outing was to examine the “Kogawa Fond”, a special collection donated by Joy Kogawa, the author of one of Canada’s most treasured novels: Obasan. This was a unique experience; being able to see such exclusive and rare artifacts, as well as being able to follow in Kogawa’s footsteps before, during, and after she wrote the novel was incredibly powerful. Reading all the personal and raw material that surrounds the novel allowed myself and the rest of the class to peek into Kogawa’s mind and immerse ourselves in her creative process. This furthered my understanding of the literary work and author, because we could see far more than the finished print. Her creative process, as I mentioned earlier, spans far beyond just comments on drafts. The Fond is a collective of letters of reference, rejection letters, reviews, and include pieces as fascinating and historical as a comment from former PM Pierre Trudeau. Personally, I found the rejections exceptionally interesting because they showed Kogawa’s creation of as an authentic success story, with struggles and failures along way.
As I was reading through a jumble of reviews sent by an elementary school class it made me think about the importance of the novel as one of Shahzad’s “technology of memory”(Shahzad, 2015, pg. 303). Which she defines as resources like books, documents, media that human beings use to “interpret, relate, select, record, share, and tell their memories.” Despite the novel’s fictional nature, the story of Naomi and her family is highly informative and provides the reader with a detailed view of what life was like for Japanese-Canadians during that time period. I found her approach to the novel highly unorthodox as she uses silence, a main theme in the novel, as a powerful method to portray a story and impact the reader’s memory.
Works Cited
Kogawa, Joy. Obasan. New York: Anchor, 1994. Print.
Shahzad, Farhat. “The Role of Interpretive Communities in Remembering and Learning.” Canadian Journal of Education 34.3 (2011): 301-316. Web. ProQuest. 1 Sept. 2014.