CAP – ASTU

For the past few weeks, our ASTU class has continued to focus on Obasan by Joy Kogawa for analysis regarding trauma and forgetting as common themes. However, on Thursday, Nov. 19, our ASTU class took a much more interactive approach to the work of Kogawa by going to the Rare Books and Special Collections at UBC.

First, just some thoughts about the rare books archives first:

The archives were a lot more modern than I thought, and it looks just like a regular library. For some reason, I kept on thinking it was going to be more like a dudgeon or something, but what I thought was really interesting was that our UBC location holds some of the original manuscripts from the biblical era (I think?) and to know that those artifacts are the only existing versions of it in the whole world really emphasizes the importance of the artifacts. To know that you are in a place where you can view the items created by people thousands of years ago is really amazing.

Another perspective of the archives that I never really considered are online archives. It’s just strange to think that anything considered to be rare exists in an online form, with technology only growing within the last century. This, compared to thousands of years of using paper or animal skins to document human thoughts is quite strange when you think about it.

Anyways, moving onto the Kogawa fonds. These collections held Kogawa’s process of writing her fictional novel, with a huge part of the collection consisted of factual items, such as newspaper articles, letters, government documents, etc. There were also reviews of the novel, personal letters reaching out to the author and historical articles regarding the Japanese Internment in Canada.

What I found that was similar to my initial reaction of the book were how so many people were related to what I was feeling – that unexpected connection with the novel because of simple details or relatable incidents. I think Kogawa’s close narration of Obasan touched a lot of people, because she played a very familiar role of an aging grandmother/aunt taking care of you (or should I say Naomi). Some of the letters were from Japanese – Canadian children, who I think really connected with the book because often times, it is an older female member (like the grandmother or aunt) of the Japanese family that takes care of the household.

It was Kogawa’s ability to reach out to her readers in Obasan and the fonds expressing that process and its end results that made me really see her as a fellow human being (same as me except an author!). Seeing physical drafts, brainstorms, reviews, and personal response letters created the atmosphere that these were all the collections and artifacts directed at a very real living person. The emotions she expressed in her novel and felt the readers were from a very real living person. The facts and fiction on her work were based on very real situations.

That is to say, by visiting the Joy Kogawa fonds, it bridged the missing connection between the final production of the work Obasan and the author who created it. But would my experience with the fonds be different if Kogawa was not able to initially “hook” me through my personal experience of my grandmother? If I were not really interested, would I have looked into as much as I did?