Recently our ASTU class was reading a book titled Obasan, the author of this book is a Vancouver local, Joy Kogawa. Obasan is a story about the Japanese persecution in Canada during WW2. The story is told from a child’s perspective, borrowing from the real-life experiences of Joy Kogawa. The novel gained historical importance in the Canadian society because the writing done by Kogawa reflected on the social condition at the time by telling the story of one family.
The story of the novel borrows events took place 30 years before its publication, during Kogawa’s childhood. For Joy Kogawa to write about such events, even as fiction, it required a tremendous amount of remembering and emotional burden. Having a better understanding of Joy Kogawa’s creative process would have allowed a better insight of the novel. Luckily, we had the chance.
Last week, the class took a trip to the RBSC(Rare book and special collection) branch of the UBC libraries. We were given difference folders containing materials related to the book. Contained in the folder assigned to our group is scripts and note of Joy Kogawa. The notes and the scripts are created during when she wrote the book and gave us a glimpse of her thought process.
One particular piece of script stood out to me. It was when Joy Kogawa struggled to put any words down; she writes “I can’t seem to get started, so I’m into vomit syndrome.”(Joy Kogawa) By vomit syndrome, Kogawa means simply typing down any thought that comes to her mind. Not only did she describe the difficulty of the creative process, but she also described the burdens of remembering the past in her book. She says “I’m frankly mind blown exhausted now by this remembering that is required of me.” This ties to one of the main themes of the book, silence, and remembering. In the book, the struggle is between Obasan and Aunt Emily, where Obasan chooses to endure her trauma by staying silent, unwilling to speak out, and Aunt Emily when facing injustice, will not bear to be silent. For Joy Kogawa, the act of speaking out and writing the book Obasan closely resembled the same, as she eventually tried to clear her thought process and to continue with the book, admitting that “There was no escape.”
The script demonstrated the experience with memory Joy Kogawa had while writing the book by providing a path to her mind. It showed how the childhood experiences of Joy Kogawa shaped her as a person, and as a writer. It showed us what Joy Kogawa believed about the importance of remembering.