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.
Miranda,
You have brought up many good questions, some of which I wondered myself after visiting the fonds. I was especially curious about the one regarding the ability to archive the impact of Kogawa’s workI see that Kogawa’s novel is used as a technology of memory for the world to learn about the internment of Japanese Canadians. It has become very famous around the world and I do not think the full impact of any novel like this can be documented. When looking at the fan letters and reviews I thought about the limitations of her novel. The letters from the students, to me, lacked authenticity and were all very similar in their unspecific praise. This makes me wonder if her book works more as a technology for learning or more just as a novel. I personally think her decision for it not to be a narrative, or her personal story, may take away from its authority. I do not think Kogawa’s impact can be archived, and with our limited time at the library, I felt the fonds did not do it justice. Her impact goes far beyond what grade 6 children are learning in school. It goes far deeper when thinking about the reaction of other Japanese Canadians to the novel.
This is a very interesting idea that I hadn’t thought about while browsing the fonds. Many of the questions you’ve presented are very difficult if not impossible to answer. However, I think in this context I think that the fonds serve more practically when you look at Obasan simply as a novel with cultural implementations rather than a culture on its own. As much as Obasan can be looked at as a part of Canadian culture, at the end of the day it is simply a book that has influenced a large amount of peoples’ perceptions of a historical event. I personally found that the fonds gave a variety of information, tracking these influences, that helped me understand the book more in the context of Canadian culture. I do wish we could’ve spent more than 50 minutes in the Fonds though and some more direction would’ve helped, but nonetheless I think the resources made available did a good job at tracking Obasan and its implications on Canadian culture.