Our class has just finished reading Obasan, a novel written by Joy Kogawa based on real-life events, chronicling the Canadian internment and persecution of Japanese during the WW2. In ASTU and in other literature classes, we are preoccupied with what’s written inside the book exclusively, the plot, themes, characters, imagery, etc. However, when we visited the Kogawa Funds at the Rare Books and Special Collections Library inside IBLC at UBC, we delved into Kogawa, the real people, and events surrounding the publishing of her book.

I looked particularly at the rejection letters Joy Kogawa received when attempting to publish Obasan. Many of the publishing companies felt that the book wouldn’t have a market and critiqued the overwhelming focus on history the novel seemed to possess. The Oberon Press, on the 31^st of October, writes, “you’re using the book more as a vehicle to describe that period of history than to tell a story”. This prompted me to question what history’s place in fiction is?

Arguably Kogawa is using the book as a vehicle, she’s using the book as an advocacy tool. To accomplish this, she has to include historical events and a voice through which advocacy expressed, Aunt Emily. Aunt Emily is the Trojan horse through which the message of the Redress movement is carried through; that is, the efforts by Japanese in Canada to obtain an apology, monetary compensation, and the restoration of civil rights. Her contribution to the movement was through the genre of testimony, through the sharing of Naomi’s experience embodying her own. In reference to the fan letters, the novel did resonate with a multitude of people whose family members or themselves experienced internment or discrimination during this time as Kogawa did.

Obasan not only includes history as the basis and purpose for the novel, after visiting the achieves, I now see the history of Obasan as fluid, instead of a neat, completed, finished object. Through the documents Joy Kogawa kept, I see the fluidity of the process she went through to mold historical events, testimony, advocacy, position, and culture into what we now refer to as Obasan. I connect this to what Matthew Bolton says in his article ‘Michael Ondaatje’s “Well-Told Lie”’, that Kogawa participates in “blurring the lines between recorded history and imagined narrative” (224). She writes a fiction based on real events in recorded history and personal history but instead of focusing on the genre we are interested in what she’s conveying from inside it and how the novel has represented and resonated with so many people and the place for it in contemporary society.

Bolton, Michael. “Michael Ondaatje’s Well-Told Lie.” Prose Studies, 30.3 (2008): 221-242. Web. Taylor & Francis.16 Aug. 2016