As much as we admire the finished product that lay before us, what’s to stop us from wondering what goes on behind the scenes? Is the information fed to us actually primary, or was interpreted by somebody else through their own interpretations and their own lenses? My experience looking through the Kogawa Fonds in the rare books library opened me to a whole new perspective into Obasan.

The novel itself is the finished product, and in it lay Kogawa’s own literary style of jumping back and forth between the 1940s and 1970s. Although the novel’s public praise in the 1980s was noted by the prime minister when issuing a formal apology, how do we know that that was the whole story? The book’s eye-opener on the “truth” into Canadian treatment of Japanese immigrants could have caused great controversy, with people ignoring it and critics using all the methods in the book to avoid a direct analysis on the Japanese-Canadian population. Of course, this might not be to the scale of the 1950s social backlash against the then-radical Awakening novel from Kate Chopin, but with Canada emphasizing multiculturality to its fullest and subduing its inconsistent past, evidences may be hard to find.

The artifacts are in no particular order and seems to be given to the rare books library without being screened or filtered in its content order or organization. Nevertheless, to do so might rob away the essence of the “rare books” and “primary” aspect of the content. A group of students spotted intense writing in mandarin talking about how the 1970s government wanted to push forward a program to educate Canadians of a third language. Although we can only speculate about Chinese language being the possibility, nothing was ever confirmed. Nor was there historical evidence of Joy Kogawa understanding this language in the first place, and a flip over the same piece of paper reveals countless scrap papers where Kogawa wrote down ideas for her novel. Another group saw Obasan’s countless drafting processes of the novel, yet all of them does not seem to stray too far from the finished product itself. A group even saw private letters between her and her alleged affair, which really encouraged us to think why does she even put this into a public library.

Another interesting question to ask is; what’s not being given to this library? We saw what was given, but we will never see what was not given, nor can we ever know if there was anything left that Kogawa decided not to give to this rare books library. Was there a criteria for Kogawa when she decides to donate these items? This is one of the beauty of primary sources; they are in their original form and SHOWS us something instead of TELLS it. We don’t know why they are in the library, but we won’t know is that the whole story or not, nor what’s left out and what’s missing. This goes in line with Kogawa’s decision not to make Obasan an official historical discourse itself, where it is a piece of primary experience to a historical event, but not intending to be an actual piece of the history books? Still, who’s to say that this makes it less important or less accurate than history books? If anything, history books rarely dig far into the content of any event, and is a second-hand account that has already been analyzed through one’s mind.