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.
Hi, Kelvin! I liked how you were able to parallel and contrast the “silence” that is portrayed in Obasan to the “silence” in Safe Area Gorazde. While both silences are uniquely different , you bring up good points about how silence is used for emphasis in their respective narratives. Your post made me think about how silence can be harmful, especially in regards to your examples of Naomi’s silence in regard to Old Man Gower or even the silence of the international media in Gorazde. Is Aunt Emily in Obasan correct in that we need to speak out for justice? What about the cultural differences toward silence and speaking out? Food for thought!
Yes hello, well I wrote my paper on Naomi’s silence and although silence could be a typical behavior in Japan, the general conclusion I came to was that her silence was a way to cope with all the negative experiences from her childhood. Her grief and sadness are justifiable by the horror she has been through and faced. She was outrightly discriminated against, restricted of most freedoms, and watched as her community and family were sent away one by one. With such a negative past, she is somewhat forced to dwell on her thoughts and subconsciously causing herself to silence so although it may be a culture behavior, I also believe that it was one (if not the only) of the ways she could come and come to terms with herself and her life.