Hello my dear readers,

this blog will be different than my blogs before because we went to the UBC archives with my ASTU class and I will tell you a bit about my experiences there. The fonds in archives are collected in the natural order of the activities of for example authors like Joy Kogawa. Collections are artificial. They are often created by individuals or organizations and most of the time focused on a certain topic, person, event etc.

I have never been thinking about the fact that libraries and archives could be organized differently and how thought through the system behind this organization is.

Seeing the documents Joy Kogawa used to write the book Obasan, the rejections from publishers, the letters of good friends or just the letters from elementary school kids talking about their impressions of her book made me think about where a book actually begins and if it ever ends.

Examining the different folders on the tables in front of us it became obvious how much work the research for Obasan must have been. Various articles about the fate of the Japanese Canadians in the times of the second World war and documents about the deportation of Japanese Canadians  make the deep wounds visible those times have left. I can not imagine how difficult the process of writing the book must have been for Kogawa.

I came to the conclusion that the story of Naomi and her family did not start on page one of the book Obasan. It started with the first document Kogawa read for her research, with the hundreds of notes she took and the letters she wrote and received. And the last page of the book is also not the end of the story as the end of the second world war wasn’t the end of the japanese-canadian misery. The story continues though teachers and professors reading her book with their students and every document that is added to Kogawa’s fond in the UBC archives.

I realized that the book Obasan is way more than just a book but actually shaped and influenced peoples lives.

This gave me a new perspective on the book’s place in the Canadian history. I already knew that it had an important part in the Redress Settlement Agreement in 1988 but seeing the letters Kogawa received after people have read her book, agreeing or disagreeing with her, writing poems and just expressing their emotions the book had released in them made me realize the impact she had on the population of Canada. Not only the Japanese Canadians but people who for example have never really heard of the tragedy thad happened in the last century responded to her book.

The book addresses the issues of the struggle if one should speak about trauma or just remain in silence. A book is not loud, it does not make noise itself. But it touched thousands of peoples’ hearts and made or makes them speak up. It keeps a country from forgetting a traumatic event and makes it remediate and learn from it. Seeing the resonance Kogawa created with her book impressed me a lot and made me overthink my view on how history is actually created and remembered.

Does Obasan influence how we see and remember history? Does it create biased memory which becomes collective? Or are books like Obasan about reminding people to not forget rather than reproduce history?