Hey There Readers!
After reading and analyzing Joy Kogawa’s historical fiction novel Obasan, my class had the unique opportunity to visit her fond in the archives at UBC. Her fond is a collection of papers that were collected throughout Kogawa‘s life, and especially all papers accumulated in the writing process of Obasan. For anyone who hasn’t read the novel, it is a semi-autobiographical look at a young Japanese-Canadian girl’s life growing up through the internment camps that the Japanese-Canadians were forced into during and following World War Two. One of the things that struck me about looking through these original documents in her fond was the idea of authenticity. This is an idea that her book deals with frequently, as she mixes history, testimony, and fiction. In looking at these archives, you get to see all the pieces of paper that made up her adult life. The fond contained drafts, correspondence, jotted down notes, applications for publication, newspaper clippings, and more. These were all authentic, unique pieces of her life, some of which directly led to her completed work of Obasan. We discovered her work in the opposite direction as she did: we read her book, and then were able to see all that was mixed together in order to make it. For her, she had the responsibility of coalescing all these memories and facts and words into just the right story that could let the largely untold story of Japanese Canadian internment be heard by a larger audience.
In searching throughout the collection, I stumbled across something absolutely striking, to me at least. It was a rough, handwritten plot line summary. She had numbered off plot points down the page, her cursive was scrawled and the paper was stained. It carried such a sense of the process of writing. It‘s the same type of story writing organization students are taught in language arts in elementary school, and there it was: so simply being used by an author whose work I found to be unfathomably impressive. Somehow I couldn’t believe that she had used the same simple technique for writing a story, but her product was Obasan. As I looked at the plot line and at some of her typewritten drafts, I realized how easily Obasan could have been something else. When we read a book like that, we look at it like this confirmed, unchangeable finished product. As for me, I had always left unconsidered all the drafts that were different, all the little sentence changes, all the events that could have been written differently. Looking at the fond gave me this unexplored appreciation for every sentence that she kept, and left me wondering about the sentences (which I noticed in the drafts I read) which she edited out. It left me wondering about what exactly the message was that Kogawa wanted her readers to hear when she wrote. Another idea the fond had me thinking about was the idea of completeness. I read some drafts, I noticed differences; I read sentences which I thought were beautiful and impactful, which were cut out. When did Kogawa realize her work was done? What was the final piece that she tweaked, and why did that make her work complete? After looking at her process, it is difficult for me to define ‘complete‘ for a work like this. I say this in reference to Obasan being an object for remembering, and an object for education, and also an object of creativity. Is Obasan the complete telling of what happened in the Japanese internment camps? No. Is it even a complete telling of what happened to one girl? No. A key aspect of the book being complete is, I think, incompleteness. The story is not finished, the events the book addresses are not fully in the open. Where does the complete story end? Where does the message that Obasan delivers stop developing? There is so much more to tell and to feel and to make known about the themes addressed. The way the public receives, talks and acts around the novel’s testimony is still changing and developing.
Worth noting is that in my english class, we have talked about the fact that Obasan is only one part of a greater story, one thread of (what we accept as) truth in the net of history. It encapsulates one personal through-line which seeks not to complete, but to open the conversation.
See You Next Semester!
Nicola Cox
