This week, our ASTU 100 class visited the Kogawa Fonds, to discover more about Joy Kogawa, and her novel Obasan. Obasan is a semi-autobiographical novel, which explores the experience of Japanese Canadians during the Second World War. The class split off to explore around 12 boxes, each containing around 5 folders of archived material. These included letters, book reviews, potential drafts, and much more.

As my partner and I impatiently sorted through a seemingly endless folder of letters from young fans, I wondered if what our chances were of coming across anything that may actually spark our interest. Of course, there were some novelties here and there, a child with a funny drawing, or a potential connection to the novel. For the most part, the letters and reviews to us seemed irrelevant. At the end of the session, we discussed a few interesting things we had found, but none of the groups really discovered anything groundbreaking or terribly memorable.

This is not to say this experience was not helpful or worthwhile. But the sheer amount of information available made it impossible even for a group of 20 to shift through and really understand and interpret the importance and meaning behind each individual document. The Kogawa Fonds is the collection of one author, what would it look like for an entire culture’s details to be archived in boxes? Even with the intense wealth of information, is it possible to document or archive Joy Kogawa’s impact on Canadian culture?

To extend this idea, how does a culture then attempt to explain an entire history in a documented form? When you consider the number of individuals that have existed in a society, can this massive amount of information be accurately summarized? And yet, this is what our society does so often with other cultures, or even our own. Exhibits in museums are held claiming to demonstrate English life in the 1800s, or explain ancient Egypt from the mask of King Tut. In reality, we are shown an extraordinary small sample from a massive collection of material, both discovered and undiscovered.

However, archival material and its presentation are still greatly important. But it is imperative to understand and realize its limitations, its inability to truly demonstrate an accurate depiction, purely due to the complex relationship between human existence and documentation.

It is possible that the most innocent and impressionable human beings written about in literature are children.  With so little life experience and limited understanding, children may perhaps be overly honest and receptive.  In ASTU 100, we have read Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi and Obasan by Joy Kogawa. Both works of literature are told through the perspective of a young girl.  Additionally, they both offer a seemingly new or emerging perspective on events that already have an established history. For example, Obasan is the tale of the Japanese experience in British Columbia during the Second World War. World War Two narratives are commonplace in our culture, but before Obasan, the tale of Japanese Canadians was largely ignored.  The same can be said for Satrapi’s recount of the turmoil in Iran during the 70s and 80s.

So why are youthful narrators so useful? Children have little analytical experience, and they largely lack a holistic understanding of even their own experiences.  However, these traits create a unique narration. A young child’s inability to process their experiences can allow readers to do so for themselves.  Further, children are often unable to change or alter their situation.  When introducing a possibly entirely unique storyline into an overwhelming precedence of accepted history, child narration is a tool an author can use to find a place within the accepted history. A child’s perpsective highlights the lack of control the victims had over their circumstance. It is much more difficult for a reader to blame a child for their experiences, amplifying the tragedy of the event.  Further, a child’s ability to retell an event is often limited in bias.  It allows the author to chronicle events simply by what happened, giving the reader room to draw their own conclusions.

I would argue that child narration is an effective tool for authors to further their exploration of the singular Real Truth.  The nature of the stories told by Satrapi and Kogawa demand some level of witnessing, as (at the time of their publication) their stories had yet to be integrated into the mainstream narrative.  Telling their stories from the perspective of a young girl grants both authors a sense of accountability.  The child has yet to form a bias, but is able to understand and recount the events occurring around them. In this way, a young child is the ideal witness, and therefore narrator.

Kogawa, Joy. Obasan. New York: Anchor, 1994. Print

Satrapi, Marjane. Persepolis. New York, NY Pantheon, 2003. print