This week in class, we started reading Joy Kogawa’s novel Obasan. The novel portrays a fictional story of a girl living through the discrimination against Japanese-Canadians during WWII and her experience in the intern camps. The idea of silence was prevalent throughout the whole novel; Naomi used her silence to cope with many traumas that she experienced in the story. In Japanese culture, silence is interpreted differently from that of Western cultures.
In Robert N. St. Clair’s essay The Social and Cultural Construction of Silence, Clair argues that silence has a vastly differently meaning in Japanese culture then it does in Western culture. Firstly, the act of being silence, unlike in the US, is institutionalized into a cultural behavior and not a social one. Silence is a form of non-verbal communication, in which people communicate through observing body language. So when reading Obasan, we should not only pay focus on the reasons why she is silent, but also focus on the situation in which she is being silent. Kogawa has great imagery and description in her novel, helping convey the silent message without needing the character to speak.
Unlike in Obasan, Safe Zone Gorzarde emphasizes its silence not in the people living in Gorzarde but on the silence of the Western media. The graphic narrative portrays how the Western media intentionally keeping what’s happening in Bosnia silent in hopes that they will swiftly go away.
In chapter 11 of Obasan, Naomi portrays her trauma of being sexually abused by Old man Gower and how she used her silence to protect herself. She felt that if she spoke, she would “split open and spill open”. In our group, we interpreted her silence as a way to protect herself from shame.