Digging through old things is always interesting. When someone has produced something like a book, an album of music or some other work, it is always fascinating to see what sorts of things are behind it. While exploring the Joy Kogawa Fonds, I happened across a series of letters between Joy Kogawa and someone named Michico, who after a few letters I realized was her sister. The letters discussed the children’s adaptation of Kogawa’s book “Obasan,” entitled “Naomi’s Road.” With the business talk, some personal, family issues were included in the letters as well. Kogawa had sent her sister the draft for the children’s book, leaving all editing and decision making about what to keep and what to discard from the book up to her sister and the editor. It didn’t sound like Kogawa was very invested in the book. This made me question her motives behind writing this book. Why would she even spend the time to made a children’s edition if she didn’t even really care how the final product came out?
I was surprised at how much of a role the editor played in shaping the book, and this made me wonder if the editor had as much of a role in the direction Kogawa’s more famous work Obasan went. It made me realize that these books, albums of music, and other works that I so love are so often polished to the point where they are no longer really a true representation of their creator. This plays into the whole concept of memory that we have been discussing so extensively in our ASTU class for the past semester. Even Obasan is not just one person’s memory; it is a collection of people’s interpretations of these memories and events. Though Obasan gives you many different primary sources in the way of letters and documents that allow you to draw your own conclusions, the book is still in no way raw. It has been processed by editors and peers to Kogawa who all have different opinions about how the story of the book should go. There is not only the bias and perspective of Kogawa in the book, but that of the editor and Kogawa’s sister, and probably that of many others as well. Memories are passed down, going through many sources, like the game telephone. And like in the game of telephone, they often do not come out very accurately on the other side. In saying this, I am not doubting the story that Kogawa tells in her books, but rather am suggesting that as readers, we need to be aware that this phenomenon exists. We need to read responsibly, not immediately accepting all that we read as the truth or as the only truth.
This is a really cool discussion! We only really talked briefly in class about Obasan as a piece of collective memory, containing elements of both personal and historical recollections–and as you point out, editors’ perspectives. While we were going through the fonds I looked briefly at some editor-noted versions of Obasan and it was interesting to see many pieces of the original story that had been taken out by the time it reached the reader. This is a process obviously also existent in other forms of media such as film and music. The fact that a popular box office film will have 5-10 minutes of credits at the end is pretty remarkable in saying how many people actually contributed to the piece. Alike, I’m sure if you picked up the new Taylor Swift album there would be an extensive list of producers, instrumentalists, and sound engineers that contributed to that. It is interesting that with a strong and powerful piece of artistic work, although there may have been many contributors, societally we usually choose to highlight only one name, such as Joy Kogawa or Taylor Swift going on with my previous example. Although yes, Joy Kogawa did contribute the most to her book, it is very interesting that the mainstream does not often recognize the other voices that played a part in creating the novel.
What you found is so interesting and you raise a very interesting point. How much of what a writer writes is their own? In a way, Kogawa’s disconnect with Naomi’s Road makes sense. She wrote something (Obasan) that was very near to her heart. It was probably an emotional thing and by the end of writing it she needed to move on. As the book was so successful she was maybe urged by her publishers, family, friends to write another version that was more accessible to younger people as to make a larger profit. If that was the case I could understand her issues with it. I saw something similar when I looked at a draft sent to Kogawa by a playright who was doing a stage version of Naomi’s Road. Despite the eagerness of the writer, I saw very little investment and enthusiasm from Kogawa. That being said there could have been more letters of correspondence in another box that I didn’t have the chance to look at. Yet this still brings me to question whether or not having something so personal taken out of Kogawa’s control made her feel disconnected from her story. In the end, the publishers have the final say and it is what they want that ends up in the book, hopefully this was not the case with Obasan.