Hello readers,
Last week my ASTU class went to visit the Joy Kogawa fonds held by the Rare Books and Special Collections Library at UBC. We did this as a part of our unit exploring Kogawa’s celebrated novel Obasan, which tells the story of Naomi and her Vancouver based Japanese-Canadian family’s experience of internment – the government mandated relocation of Japanese-Canadians away from the West Coast during the Second World War – and all of its later repercussions.
Seeing the trace of Joy Kogawa through her archive – seeing her annotated drafts of Obasan, her handwriting, her deeply felt intelligence captured unpretentiously on pieces of scrap paper, her philosophical riffs typed up for work that was perhaps never fully realized – was an incredible experience. I think it’s easy to forget the earnest effort of what it takes to create a novel when reading a work as seminal as Obasan. By seeing Kogawa’s archives however, I was able to understand Obasan as a work fabricated out of someone’s subjectivity – a work that had to be physically created by a real, breathing, complex, thinking human being – and not just as a work that has always existed in its heralded and canonized form.
Visiting the Kogawa fonds therefore extended my awareness of what a novel can be – Obasan is more than just a literary masterpiece that has been printed thousands of times over, it is also a material meeting place of reader and author. When reading Obasan one is privileged with the incredible opportunity of encountering Joy Kogawa on the pages of Naomi’s story; one is connected to Kogawa through the words that she so carefully crafted, and this was made apparent to me after seeing Kogawa’s writing process captured in her archives. Obasan, this physical book which has sat casually in my bag next to my daily clutter, which I have read on the bus, at the beach and in bed, contains the exteriorized thoughts of Kogawa, in a wild way it is a rare glimpse of another person’s (brilliant) mind. Maybe I’m just a total nerd, but to me that’s pretty cool. It’s something we take for granted all the time, that we meet this author – this thinking human being – in the words we read.
What is really interesting is that after being so inspired by witnessing these material traces of Joy Kogawa through her archive, I actually encountered her legacy again later that week. On Saturday I participated in a historical walk at Hastings Park – a site of internment for 8,000 Japanese-Canadians in 1942 – led by Nichola Ogiwara, the museum programmer of the Neikkei National Museum and Cultural Centre. Before the walk Ogiwara gave a presentation on internment camps in B.C., which included her showing archival photographs of the Bayfarm internment camp in Slocan. This is the community that Naomi describes being a part of in Obasan. As I found out in Ogiwara’s presentation, Bayfarm was also the camp in which Kogawa herself was interned.
Nevertheless, even though one can see traces of Kogawa in-between the lines of Obasan, the novel remains a fictional telling of Naomi’s life and is not autobiographical. Yet – and even more so after visiting her fonds – it seems that this novel is replete with the life and spirit of Joy Kogawa on its pages. How would the novel change if Kogawa hadn’t been a victim of interment herself? Would the authority of her storytelling change, or is her highly rich prose powerful enough in itself to carry the story? These questions of Kogawa’s biographical influence on Obasan aside, visiting the fonds reminded me that there is something truly beautiful about being able to see the trace of the writer at work.
In our last ASTU class we were discussing this topic – the creation of fonds and the writing process in relation to our global citizens program. The question was asked: how has your understanding of the writing process changed throughout the semester? By visiting the RBSC library I definitely gained a greater understanding of an author’s writing process. The outlines, drafts, research is not all that unlike my own, just with a longer writing process spread out over time. I think what we talked about in class connects really well to the ideas that you bring up in your blog, Kihan. It does seem to me, that although Joy Kogawa’s work is fictional, we can see aspects of her life scattered throughout the pages. After reading your blog, I reflected on something I saw at the RBSC library that made me think more in depth about this idea. One of the fonds that I was looking at showed a rejection letter by Oberon press. The letter was writing to Joy Kogawa, informing her, that they thought she was using her book more “As a vehicle to describe that period of history than to tell a story”, “the reader isn’t really ever aware of a story” and that “there is not enough emphasis on key elements that constitute a novel”. While this may be true in a way, (she does include several historical texts showing the role of the Canadian government in the Japanese peoples oppression) her novel, as you mention in your blog is reminiscent of her own life. As such I would disagree with the people at Oberon press. Since the book is about opening up the conversation on Japanese oppression in Canada, it must have a historical element to be able to create conversation. That being said, her novel also connects to her own life in many ways (like the example you give) through this historical content. The addition of Joy Kogawa’s imagination in creating a work of fiction (as we see in the fonds) shows that her book is more than historical. It embodies her own experience as well, forming a narrative of memory that is fictional, but that deals with important historical issues. To answer to your question, Kihan, as to whether her authority would change if she had not been a victim herself, I would say yes. Not only that, but her whole writing process would have changed, and the fonds she would have collected would have been totally different, resulting In a book (as you put it) that would offer a different glimpse into a different mind.