The term is coming to a close and we are finally on our last book for this year. For the past two weeks or so, my ASTU class has been working through Joy Kogawa’s Obasan. On Tuesday, we went on a mini field-trip to the Rare Books Library to explore the Joy Kogowa Fonds. For those that are unfamiliar with archives and fonds, I will provide a (very) brief overview.

An archive is a collection of documents and records that serve as a resource of a great number of primary and secondary sources. In an archive you may find several fonds. A fond is more than a just collection of documents created by a person or organization; it is distinct in that it is organically accumulated materials over time by the creator. So at the Rare Books Library, we looked at Joy Kogowa’s Fonds, more specifically, at the documents and records dated around the time she was writing Obasan.

In the box that I was looking through, the files mainly consisted of drafts for Obasan. There were some pages that were typed on what looked like a typewriter and there were some that were just scribblings on practically anything that she could find. I even found a take out napkin with writing on it! It is interesting to think about how the process of writing a novel, or anything for that matter, is not always clean or organized inspiration strikes and often times there is nothing else to write on but the scraps of paper sitting before you. It felt really cool to see the materials and records that all played a role in her writing of the novel. It makes me think about all the “crap” I have sitting on my desk and how I hate throwing things away because they all have some sort of significance for me, no matter how big or small; everything has a meaning that I feel like I would be forgetting by simply throwing it away.

Anyways, after flipping through a great number of drafts for her novel, I finally stumbled upon something quite interesting. I found a page in Box 10, File 7 that looked like a university style cover page for her novel. The title “Obasan” was crossed out and there was a massive list going down the middle of alternate titles! Some of the legible ones (and slightly illegible ones) included: “A Package From Aunt Mur”, “If I Must Remember” (x2), “Death of Silence”, “The Silence Never Dies”, “Everyone Someday Dies”, “Read ______ ______ Braille”, “That We Might ____ Sight”, “Hope Amidst (?) This Mountain” and “Propagation of the Species”. After reading these alternate titles, I really got a sense of the key messages that Kogawa wanted us to take away from her novel. There is a repetition of themes of silence, death, remembering and hope which are also seen very clearly throughout Obasan. Kogawa wrote a novel about an issue that is very little talked about in Canada; the whole purpose is to talk about the experience of Japanese internment so that it is not forgotten and you can really see that in these alternate titles.

But I like that for whatever reason, she chose “Obasan” to be her title. I feel like not only does it require a little more analysis to postulate why she choose to name the novel after the quiet aunt, but it also incorporates many of the above elements in a simpler, cleaner title. I think that Kogawa chose to name her novel “Obasan” because she represents the element of silence that is so important to the theme of her book. Through Obasan’s character, the novel shows that silence is not equivalent to not caring or not hurting; it is actually quite the opposite. Silence is what hurts Japanese-Canadians and Canada as a whole because it pretends as if the suffering that they endured never happened as it was never acknowledge. It is also important to note that Obasan’s silence can have a different cultural meaning, meaning one thing in the “West” and other in the “East; silence may be her language. Obasan was a woman of few words unlike Aunt Emily, who was very vocal about the injustices their family faced. Often times, the protagonist, Naomi, would think to herself that Aunt Emily sometimes talked a little too much. She even once noted that “people who talk a lot about their victimization make me uncomfortable. It’s as if they use their suffering as weapons or badges of some kind” (41). Simply put, it is the quiet ones that are battling the most demons inside because usually the ones that announce it are only calling attention to themselves and their suffering; it is the silent ones that you should be most concerned about. Therefore, it is hard to know exactly why Kogawa decided to name her novel after the character of Obasan but there are definitely links between the traits of the quiet aunt and the silence of Japanese-Canadians and Canada as a whole.

It has been a long time since I’ve written a blog post; and in that time, we finished analyzing Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi, whizzed through Safe Area Gorazde by Joe Saco and are now currently working through Obasan, a novel by Joy Kogawa. I’ve done a lot of thinking about what I wanted to write about this week and there is one topic that is constantly comes to mind: Naomi’s sexual abuse in Obasan. This is probably because this is a topic that is very personal to me and something about the way in which Kogawa wrote about this experience really touched me.

As a little background, Obasan is a novel narrated by a woman named Naomi Nakane set in the 1970s as she recounts the events of Japanese internment in Canada. The novel jumps between the present and past and in one of these time jumps to the past, Naomi tells us about a secret she has kept from her mother all these years: the fact that Old Man Gower used to repeatedly molest her starting at the age of 4. What is very interesting about this segment of the novel is the fact that Naomi does not just tell us what happens as a grown woman, but she tells us the story from the perspective of her 4 year old self.

On page 74, Naomi says, “I am a small girl being carried away through the break in the shrubs” and similarly on page 75, she simply states, “I am four years old.” There is something about the short, direct sentences that she uses in this section that give off the impression of being emotionless and disconnected from this experience. Moreover, the way in which she describes her surroundings and mechanically describes the event as “this happened, then this happened, then this…” suggests to the reader that Naomi has not yet analyzed how this event has really impacted her. I would go so far as to say that Naomi was very confused at the time in which it was happening, and therefore she was not capable, at the age of 4, to fully comprehend the extreme impact that this event had had on her. She may have even thought that because the event was not documented or shared, that she would be able to simply forget it and act as if it never happened. She had been silent about her abuser for a very very long time and the following is her rationale for her silence: “If I speak, I will split open and spill out. To be whole and safe I must hide in the foliage, odorless as a newborn fawn” (76). So from a young age, because of this experience, Naomi was taught silence and shame. She came to understand that she had to be silent in order to be safe; she had to disappear so that no one could notice her suffering. From a young age, Naomi learned how to be afraid of her emotions.

The way in which she interpreted and understood this traumatic experience goes on to shape how she interprets and understands Japanese internment in Canada. She does not see the need in creating an uproar the way her Aunt Emily does, rather she simply wants to forget. It isn’t until she learns of her mothers death years later that she understands the importance of sharing secrets, stories and emotions. Naomi wants to remember; she wants to feel. She realizes that not talking about events or experiences doesn’t make it go away or disappear; it just makes the suffering even more unbearable.