Hey Readers!
Just this past week in my ASTU 100A class, myself along with my other classmates had the unique opportunity to visit then rare books collection in archives of one of the libraries at UBC. We were given a short presentation by a librarian concerning some basic information about how the archives work and what we will expect to see. All of the folders we were given to look at were the fonds of Joy Kogawa, who is the author of Obasan. Obasan is a novel that we have recently finished reading in our ASTU class, the novel is written about a young girl and her experience as a Japanese Canadian living in Vancouver during the time of Japanese Internment. As time does not prevail for me to give a long winded summary of Obasan, looking at the some of the blogs from last week should help to give a clear idea of what the novel focuses on.
During my brief visit at the UBC archives I managed to take in and observe a lot of interesting subject matter regarding the material that our class was provided. We were provided with a lot of original untouched work of Joy Kogawa in her fonds, including many of her original drafts, letters of acceptance along with letters of rejection, and just a lot of interesting things regarding her novel. Many of the folders I did not get a chance to really look through, but the ones that I did contained some really interesting things. I primarily looked at some of her original drafts, comparing them to things in the final published copy of Obabsan. She has written draft upon draft, upon draft because they obviously did not have laptops or printers when the book was being written so all of Joy Kogawa’s drafts had to be done by typewriter. I had to stop and think about this for a minute because this must have been a very lengthy process! I could not possibly imagine writing draft upon draft on a type writer, let alone on a computer!
Another thing that caught my attention was the hidden treasures that were inside some of the folders. All of the folders had written of the side what was contained in them, but if you went through it page by page it was easy to find something completely unrelated to what was said to be in that folder. In one folder I recovered a drawing on a scrap piece of paper, I was not sure but I assumed that this was a picture of what can be seen on the front cover of Obasan, there is something about uncovering little things like this that were very exciting and interesting! As I was rifling through one of the folders that contained Kogawa’s second draft, I uncovered what was a title page with an different title to Obasan. The title I found read “If I must Remember,” but was then scratched out and changed to Obasan. I definitely thought that this was a cool thing to find, and by the end of the trip I was definitely encouraged to go back again.
Overall I had a great experience, exploring the fond’s of Joy Kogawa. I found some interesting little treasures amoung some of the folders, and I definitely thought it was valuable after reading Obasan to see where Joy Kogawa’s inspiration came from to write the novel. I will also add that through reading some of her rejection letters from publishers really made it real for me that before you see the finished product of a book, you don’t necessarily think about how much work goes into it of that it was not always what everyone wanted to see or read- judging by some of her rejection letters. I will probably go back to the archives at some point next year to see what else I can find.
Until next time,
Magda