Sumários
Class on Move - discussion of Alice Munro's short story "Passion"
25 Março 2020, 14:00 • Cecília Maria Beecher Martins
Alice Munro’s “Passion”
Before we start discussing the questions, I presented to you in the last class we need to think about Alice Munro’s work within the context and continuum of Canadian literature and culture.
We started our classes looking at how Canadians see themselves and how the world sees Canadians. Then we looked very briefly at how the Americas were initially settled by the First Nations tribes and later by the Inuit and we also looked at how some of their traditions have been maintained. Then we looked at how New France was discovered and gradually moved to becoming the Dominion of Canada in 1867. So we looked at its aboriginal settling, French roots, the establishment of the Métis and finally the dominance the Anglo-Saxon culture and settlers. We looked at literary theories like those established by Margaret Atwood in Survival and the concepts of Canadian culture as presented by Elspath Cameron and Eva-Marie Kroller. We also looked at how the “declamatory” poetry tradition of the First Nations and Inuit seemed to lay a foundation for the Canadian long poem, which was very important in establishing/creating a sense of national identity for the new Dominion of Canada. The Confederacy poets were highly significant and also interesting because of the unifying capacity they say in Canada’s natural world. I would like to draw attention to Emily Carr here, as she not only highlighted nature in her writing and painting, she also referred to the traditions and culture of the First Nations in her work. As we entered the earlier decades of the 20th century, the long poem moved from offering a representation of nation identity to being a vehicle of personal questioning (Birney etc). Writers from all the immigrant communities picked up on this trend – enter biotext.
As Atwood pointed out in Survival, When Munro was growing up in the 1930s and 40s, the idea of a person from Canada - but especially one from small-town south-western Ontario - thinking she could be a writer to be taken seriously in the world at large was laughable. The two notable exceptions to this suggestion Martha Ostenso (we read a extract from her Wild Geese), and Mazo de la Roche’s best-selling Jalna series (1927–60). Even by the 50s and 60s there were very few publishers in Canada, and these were mostly textbook publishers that imported whatever so-called literature was to be had from Britain and the United States. There might have been some amateur theatre - high-school performances, Little Theatre groups. There was, however, the radio, and in the 60s Munro got her start through a CBC programme called Anthology, produced by Robert Weaver.
Alice Munro’s work, even though much of it was written when bio-text was also being written is nothing like biotext. It offers readers Munro’ unique view of her world, with no moral compass or questioning of personal identity. Through an “apparently” simple literary form – her stories are easy to read – Munro allows her readers to engage with the different layers of human existence, as this is lived in suburban Ontario. There is nothing “sexed up” in her work, it is life as she sees it and represents it using the most complex literary devices unobtrusively – she is not only genius, she is also generous with her readers. There is no pompous fanfare in her work, anyone can read Munro. Moreover, everyone who looks a little deeper than the surface becomes like a fly trapped in spider’s web – immobilizes, but this time not in fear, rather in awe.
Munro appears to convey no moral compass in her criticism as she draws her characters in the cold light of day. However, as Margaret Atwood pointed out when reflecting on Alice Munro and her writing in the Guardian article I sent you:
Munro's acute consciousness of social class, and of the minutiae and sneers separating one level from the next, is honestly come by, as is - from the Presbyterians - her characters' habit of rigorously examining their own deeds, emotions, motives and consciences, and finding them wanting. In a traditional Protestant culture, such as that of small-town Sowesto, forgiveness is not easily come by, punishments are frequent and harsh, potential humiliation and shame lurk around every corner, and nobody gets away with much.
But Munro presents community in her writing. Some of her work also reflects social and cultural changes in Canadian life as is the case of “Passion” whose action covers several decades as the narrators tells her story in flashbacks.
Looking specifically at this story I want you to consider:
1) The relevance of the introductory sections
The narrator, now an older woman, returns to a place where she used to live. This return journey is used as a framing story and serves to introduce the reader into main story which happened many decades before when the protagonist, Grace, was a young woman. Curiously, Grace is not looking for people initially, she is looking for a house, and this search allows Munro to introduce the people who built the house, Mr and Mrs Travers. This story starts even before the house is built, with Mrs Travers’ first husband and earlier dwellings.
The story uses the technique of tense switching to introduce layers of time. It opens with the present tense. ‘When Grace goes looking…’ This continues into the second paragraph: ‘Now there is a village’. This lends a timelessness to the place, which changes, but still exists. This is also a reflection of the changes in the Canadian landscape and way of life. As we saw in Wild Geese, in the first half of the twentieth century, the land and agriculture were vitally important, but today the structures that supported these industries, for example the grain elevators are not abandoned and have even become fire hazards, see The Guardian article in the manual “The last piece of the skyline': the battle to save Canada's ‘prairie castles’ Canada”. There are new hierarchies and power structures in this new Canada.
“Passion” opens the story with an establishing shot which zooms in slowly until we get to the level of the individual character. First, we start following a map, then we are asked to conjure up a large area: “the Canadian Shield” reduce to > lakes > lakes too small to fit on a map > the roads into the village > the village/suburb > the octagonal house > details of the materials used to build the house.
Apart from this kind of zooming in, we have a zooming in of time. Our focal character, elderly Grace, describes this lake house scene and constantly juxtaposes the modern reality against her memory of 40 years prior. By meshing time and space in this way, the reader receives an expansive sense of setting. This is partly why Alice Munro’s short stories are said to be ‘novelistic’. You feel like you really know a place, but in so few words. The house is also a great example of how a house can align with character. We could say that Grace is using the house as a proxy for her younger self:
Perhaps the worst thing would have been to find exactly what she thought she was after—the sheltering roof, the screened windows, the lake in front, the stand of maple and cedar and balm-of-Gilead trees behind. Perfect preservation, the past intact, when nothing of the kind could be said of herself. To find something so diminished, still existing but made irrelevant—as the Travers house now seems to be, with its added dormer windows, its startling blue paint—might be less hurtful in the long run.
In terms of literary writing in the story the switch to past tense is achieved smoothly using interim modals and auxiliaries. The third paragraph opens with: ‘Grace would have turned back’. After that, take note of how Munro switches from the present perfect (She has always remembered) to the present tense. Finally, the simple past and we know that the story will now unfold in the past. This all happens so seamlessly we don’t notice but takes a high-level skill.
2) Crossroads come up a lot in the text- where and why?
The symbolism of crossroads – the story opens up with Grace on the road, and she has to chose one road from “the too many” that are available. – choices.
Later, when she decides to not only go with Neil to the hospital, but to stay with him after, her cut foot has been bandaged, she makes another choice, she is at another cross roads,
— how when looking back hindsight reveals the moment everything changed: ‘Describing this passage, this change in her life, later on, Grace might say—she did say—that it was as if a gate had clanged shut behind her.’ (p15) There’s direct mention of crossroads, and emphasis on roads in general: ‘He must have got his feeling of direction back when they came to a crossroads some miles on… (p19)’
The story as an entire unit is itself a crossroad — if she had never met Maury she’d never have met Neil, and so on.
3) What is the relevance of the title?
There is not a lot of passion where it would be expected – in the relationship between Grace and Maury. Contrasting against the title of the work, their relationship is not passionate. They are both doing as expected. The climax – “passion” of the story are the choices she makes, the roads she chooses to go down – to go out with Maury – to stay with Neil when Maury goes to the hospital to pick her up – to take the money. While there are three choices, one is central and decides the rest – she turns her back on a safe, financially secure marriage to live her own life
4) What stands out to you about the relationships of Grace and Maury (childhood passion – they both thought they would meet someone, in Grace’s case (we don’t know about Maury, but the story leads us to assume), even though no one had ever dated her, she just assumed that this would happen and that she would be swept off her feet and there would be passion – there was not in the real relationship; Grace and Mrs Travers – a true meeting of souls, Mrs Travers has a passionate nature like Grace, Mr and Mrs Travers – a cautionary tale; what happens when someone with a passionate nature (Mrs T) settles for a relationship with someone, who has no stories to tell and who sees in their spouse someone they have rescued, someone who places their spouse in this type of dependency situation. A cautionary tale for Grace because Maury is like his father and their relationship could become similar.
5) What is Neil’s role in the story? Another cautionary tale – what happens when passion is not tempered with moderation.
ALICE MUNRO AND FEMINISM this can be seen in how she describes a young man and woman’s different response to the same movie, which touches not just on gender issues but also on economic realities: He did take her to the movies. They saw “Father of the Bride.” Grace hated it because she hated the representation of an acceptable female role.
Distance class - responding to students' questions related to the preparation of their abstracts for the research paper
23 Março 2020, 14:00 • Cecília Maria Beecher Martins
According to the established course calendar students should have submitted the abstracts for their research paper today, but because of the difficulties inherent in distance working (despite the fact that I have been answering individual e-malis, there has still been a lack of individual contact time and/or access to library resources), this class was dedicated to giving students individual time to ask questions about the projects they were preparing to work on.
Distance lesson - Analysis of Mordecai Richler's short story "The Summer My Grandmother was Suppose to Die" and discussion of structure of abstracts for essay
18 Março 2020, 14:00 • Cecília Maria Beecher Martins
The research paper is to be based on your own analysis of any Canadian film or book. These do not have to be set in Canada, but they should have a Canadian director or author. You can analyse these using any one or combination of the theoretical approaches presented in the texts in the manual ("The People and their Social Habits; Elspeth Cameron "Canadian Culture: An Introduction; Eva-Marie Kroller "Introduction"; Margaret Atwood Survival; Joanne Saul, Biotext) or Post-Colonial theory.
You can work with the authors we have analysed in class, but obviously you cannot work with the texts we have analysed as the work has been done. You can also choose other films or books. The essay plan is that presented on page 2 of the manual.
If you wish to work with film and have not selected one yet, you should look at the Film Board of Canada’s webpage, https://www.nfb.ca/. You will find many films that you can watch free-of-charge there.
The abstract to be submitted by 24th March is a short (200-250 word) text where present what you are going to do and how you are going to do it. A pdf with a sample abstract and that also shows you an example of a good and a bad abstract has been sent to your email.
Questions students answered online
I want you to look at it from the perspective of how Canadian literature presents: 1) community 2) heroes
Analysis of "The Summer my Grandmother was Suppose to Die"
General Introduction to Richler’s literary style and comparison to look for with Alice Munro, who will be the author we will look at next: The short story “The Summer my Grandmother was Supposed to Die” like much of Richler’s work brings together elements of classic realism with varying degrees of humour (comic-realism, comic-satire, outright satire). Moreover, as many of you mentioned in your analysis it also conveys implicit and explicit moral stances.
I want you to pay particular attention to this element as of social and moral criticism and keep this in mind when you read Munro’s “Passion” because one of the outstanding features of Munro’s work is this absence of an explicit moral stance.
Community in “The Summer my Grandmother was Supposed to Die: There is a strong presence of community in this story. The family’s standing in the community in introduced through religious references: the grandfather had been a Zaddik (a Hasidic Jewish spiritual leader, literal translation – a righteous one) and his memory is revered in the community (p31 & 32 – funeral, p 37 & 38 the Holy Shakers). However, there is no mention of younger Jewish Rabbis or scholars visiting – not even the younger son who is a rabbi in Boston. Thus, this family story is a testimony of the fact that there has been a readjustment of power hierarchies within the Jewish community: the professions are surpassing the religious “callings”. The family had a long history of rabbis, but this will die with the younger son, (perhaps because the traditional means of supporting the Jewish religious leaders had meant the family had not been well provided for by the Zaddik, requiring his wife’s many trips to the pawnbrokers p 32-33, perhaps in keeping with the times and the desire to be a part of a greater community, perhaps the sense of sacrifice required to be a religious leader is no longer deemed admirable because it requires sacrifice on the part of the family – this physical sacrifice been seen worthwhile because of the spiritual/moralistic rewards, perhaps a blend of all). Curiously, the protagonist’s mother’s self-sacrifice for a “higher” cause could be seen as an analogy for this, because not everyone appreciates how she sacrifices her own family (Sam, his friends and family, Cousin Lucy) and some of the family members justify their absence because they consider she has alternatives (the nursing home) and doesn’t take them, merely because she is stubborn.
The other members of the family have chosen different paths (lawyer, theatre director). Being Jewish is still important but it seems to be taking a new secular route. In the story the senior member of the community who conveys the Jewish tradition is the professional, Dr Katzman. He does this in a secular fashion visiting regularly but dispensing medical aid and advise, rather than spiritual and he refers to Yiddish literature, rather than the Torah. Also, in the conversations within the family and among the protagonist’s group of friends we see many Yiddish expressions. These act to produce a communal sense of belonging to a group. Other references like the move to the professions and inclusion in Canadian life (p. 41 “ Kiss my Royal Canadian…) and activities (e.g. p 38 initial pride that a Jew, Kermit Kitman, was on the Montreal Royals baseball team, disappointment that he wasn’t so good) also indicate a shifting social hierarchy. Traditional knowledge is enriched with ideas that come from outside the Jewish community, whether these are accurate or not depends on the source – p 30 Duddy’s reference to Perry Mason (fictional criminal defence lawyer in books and TV series), or Gill University (but here disparaged because delivered by girl – see below)
Still when trying to explain, that which cannot be explained – the grandmother’s sudden stroke and capacity to stay alive for seven long years – the community is willing to return to a form of religious mysticism to explain this: p 42. So, the new open-cultural approach is only a thin surface layer, the religious heritage is still there. Here we also see social criticism because this also allows the reader to think that this new open approach is more about securing wealth and financial security than anything else. This is what Richler criticises in his humous story while also examining how this community supports suffers with typical Canadian heroes and that will be presented below.
There is however definite criticism of this community in the story, because the greater Jewish community and even the family itself leaves the care of the elderly parent to one individual – the protagonist’s mother. But there is still a strong sense of community, is the medical support, the protagonist’s group of friends, and the unnamed aunts and uncles on Sam (the protagonist’s father’s side) who take care of him – provide him with meals etc., in that summer when he is rarely at home.
Heroes in “The Summer my Grandmother was Supposed to Die: As mentioned above the heroes in the story, are the typical heroes of Canadian literature – the ordinary people. A daughter who takes care of her mother willingly out of love, not only duty. But she is no saint and we see her frustration at the careless attitude of her siblings – a true Canadian everyman hero.
Other heroes are unknown family members who look after a brother’s children, even though they may not agree with why this is necessary. The general community consensus is that the grandmother should be taken care of in a home – sounds familiar.
About heroes, I also think it’s interesting to look at the characters Richler actually names: all of the protagonist’s friends – community collective and individual; Sam – the father; Rifka – the fearless and savvy sister. Both understand the importance of silent ethnocentric discourse and knows immediately that when her grandmother is sent to the home, reference must never be made to the empty bedroom even if she must be just as keen as the protagonist to have a room to herself.
The role of gender in terms of the power relations interconnected with cultural identity is also interesting. Even in good times, the protagonist’s mother (whose name we are not told in this story; but he is revealed as Jake in other stories in the collection. In the immediate family we are just told his sister’s name: Rifka and father’s: Sam) is assigned to being wife and mother; housekeeper and cook. Moreover and cousin Libby, who must be in her late teens/early twenties as she is studying at university, is “shut up” by Sam when she suggests (we must be honest in an uppity manner) that growing up with a dying person in the house is probably not good for the children, with a typical masochist put-down “What you need is a boyfriend … and How!!” (p35).
Still, even though she is stricken throughout the entire story, the grandmother dominates family interactions and embodies cultural enunciations, preserving culture through a silent ethnocentric discourse. Curiously, Rifka also seems to have picked up on the importance of silent ethnocentric discourse – she knows immediately that when her grandmother is sent to the home, reference must never be made to the empty bedroom even if she must be just as keen as the protagonist to have a room to herself.
Mordecai Richler and “the street”: All the characters in the story live in the Jewish neighbourhood of Montreal in the 1950s (the 5 streets around Urbain St.). Richler grew up in 5257 St. Urbain St. In the Foreword to The Street, Richler writes about what it was like to live in this street – the push by Jewish mothers to make sure they “got a head start” meant they enrolled them in pre-school at 4 rather than the mandatory 6 years of age, giving all sorts of reasons. The holy grail was to get into Medical School and if all else failed at least Dentistry. Richler writes, in a humorous but realistic fashion, about the rivalry between these mothers appears to have been literally vicious – these are the aspects that Richler highlights in his text. You could say the streets were filled with working class Jewish kids dreaming ways to make it big while their parents yelled and pleaded with them to go make it big. Richler’s own house was far from luxurious. He lived in a typical Montreal cold water flat with two bedrooms. His parents separated after he was born, and it is said that his father took a place nearby so that they could keep an eye on each other. He went to the local primary pre-school, parochial primary school and because of parents’ urging like most of his “gang of friends” got into one of the best secondary schools in Montreal, despite belonging to a Jewish working-class family.
This desire to push their children forward, despite having been brought up to consider traditional family and religious values, perhaps explains why other family members felt that it was ok to leave the one sucker, who was willing to care of the old lady – the protagonist’s mother – take care of the situation on her; despite the fact that this old lady had given everything for them, pawning her jewelry and personal possessions when that was needed, and that the solution given at the end for her resistance and longevity comes from a religious tradition.
We could say that Richler both admires and challenges the spirit of those families who pushed their children to be better, even if this meant turning their back on their commitments and past – but in a slightly hypocritical fashion they also fall back on these when things happen they cannot explain.
Distance learning class - analysis of the opening sections of Joy Kogawa's Obasan
16 Março 2020, 14:00 • Cecília Maria Beecher Martins
Next class we will be looking at Mordecai Richler's humorous short story "The Summer my Grandmother was Supposed to Die" taken from his collection
The Street. The name is not accidental - it refers to the street that Ritchler grew up on "St Urbain St." which was part of the Jewish neighbourhood of Montreal. I am sending you a little background information on Richler and the Jewish community in Canada, as well as the analysis of the segment from
Obasan.
Ritchler lived and worked in London and Paris, and even though he was from Quebec always wrote in English. He was criticised by his fellow Jews, for drawing a caricature of this community; but he defended his work saying that it was a love song to his roots - he wanted to honour the unique place that had raised him.
When you read "The Summer my Grandmother was Supposed to Die", I want you to look at it from the perspective of how Canadian literature presents:1)community 2)heroes
Send you answers to my email on the morning of 18th March or during class time. I will being your answer together and send you the conclusions during class time. - Keep up the good work.
Below are the conclusion of the work on
Obasan.
Questions answered by students:
1) your impressions of the text
2) how you feel it relates the Japanese experience in Canada
3) how it compares with biotext
Preparation for your reading of the opening chapters of Joy Kogawa’s Obasan
As we have already discussed in class Joy Kogawa’s Obasan (1981) was very important for Canadian society because it was the first book that told the story of Canada’s treatment of the Japanese-Canadian community during World War II and afterwards.
Many critics consider one of the main reasons this story of wartime internment and subsequent shoddy treatment of this community spoke so directly to Canadian readers was because it was told in a non-accusatory fashion through the childhood eyes of the protagonist and first-person narrator, Naomi Nakane, as she grew up during this period. It is related in a series of flashbacks initiated when Naomi is called back to help her aunt (Obasan is the Japanese word for aunt) in the aftermath of her uncle’s death. This aunt and uncle were very important to Naomi and her brother, Stephen, because they raised them when they were separated from their parents.
The section of the book we are reading introduces us to Naomi as an adult. She is a primary school teacher and we see some of the problems she still faces as a Japanese Canadian citizen, even though she herself had been born in Canada. The prelude is a beautiful prose-poem on silence and silence is a very important theme in this novel. The story is fictional, though it does bear strong parallels with Kogawa’s own life and the original Vancouver Nakane family home was based on Kogawa’s own home. As a fictional story, it cannot be considered a biotext, but there are definitely some biotext elements associated with it. What do you think these are?
How/if Joy Kogawa’s Obasan fits into the concept of biotext.
Remember biotext is a hybrid writing, it flows between different forms and raises different questions – and these questions were not necessarily answered in the text, but rather in the reading of the text their significance would become apparent.
Biotext often contains:
1. Short segment, which while they are independent, they are joined intimately to the next one. Because the idea is not finished in the first, it flows into the following one. We don’t have the classical narrative structure of orientation, conflict, resolution – rather (half-formed) ideas are placed Out there for the reader to engage with and help the writer make sense of
2. The title flows into the text, so no title as such, just a beginning of a question
3. Mixed formats – here prose flows into poetry and back into prose, but also including historic records and newspaper articles
4. The moving “I” can be related in a 1st or 3rd person narrator
5. Moreover, there is a poetry/musicality in this prose writing (that is not found in their other literary texts)
Obasan, classified as docufiction or semiautobiographical historical fiction which strictly speaking is not a biotext, has biotext elements.
First, while it does not have the mixed formats mentioned in (3), we see the musicality and lyrical (prose poetry) structure of the prelude which presents the central issues of the book – memory and silences.
Moreover, the opening page of each chapter is presented in a different format, not only is the texts spaced in a different manner, in the first chapters, this pages appears like a dated entry in a diary with indications of the time and place. Then the text flows out of this.
Furthermore, the “I” can be mobile as one moves between different periods.
Literary Analyses of Obasan
The opening page of Joy Kogawa’s Obasan introduces us to two of the central themes of the novel: memory and silence. Memory is often connected to speech and silence in the novel. For example, Aunt Emily (who is introduced in the section that you have read, but you do not have an idea of her importance in the novel, but perhaps you get the notion that she is the opposite of Obasan because she has a voice and she lives her life as she wishes, without deference – she has been educated in a different manner) believes that it is important to remember the past and works hard not to let anyone, including her family, community, and the Canadian government, forget traumatic historical events. If she were a real-life character, she would have been on one of the committees that fought for recognition and redress from the Canadian government. To have an idea of the history of the Canadian government’s apology to the Japanese-Canadians who were interned and the role the Japanese-Canadian community played in this watch the following video. Curiously you will also see how important Obasan had been in opening the minds and hearts of the general Canadian population to what happened at the time as it is read in the Canadian parliament https://www.cbc.ca/archives/entry/1988-government-apologizes-to-japanese-canadians
Getting back to silence, the first two lines in the italicized passage in Kogawa’s novel, about the “silence that cannot speak” and the “silence that will not speak,” (n. pag., emphasis in original) suggest that while some individuals cannot speak about the past because it is too painful to recall, some choose not to speak about it for other reasons. Obasan – like most Japanese – does not want to actively remember the past and tries to protect her niece and nephew from it by refusing to speak about it. Even in her personal grief at Uncle’s death, the language of her grief is silence, as she and Naomi “sit in silence” (14). To Naomi, Obasan has become an icon of Japanese womanhood, "defined by her serving hands" (226). She lives "in a silent territory" (226); and her silence "has turned to stone" (198). Obasan silence is one that will not speak, even though Canadian culture would permit her to speak, even expect her to speak at a time of personal bereavement. She is influenced by her traditional Japanese education which would instruct her that she cannot speak.
Without giving the story away for the students who have not read the whole book – we have “silences” that are perhaps the result of traits and characteristics of the Japanese community that can inform this silence that cannot speak. Naomi had a very happy, nearly idyllic childhood, yet something happens to her (completely unrelated to the later war and internment) that send her into total silence – and she stops speaking. Unable to understand what has happened and to eradicate the feelings of guilt she attaches to herself because of this incident; Naomi punishes herself and commits herself to total silence despite the support of a loving extended family that want to help here. I consider Naomi’s physical silences is a metaphor for the self-silencing the Japanese (characterised by Obasan – who is never given a name, but a position in Japanese family hierarchy and social order) place upon themselves, as a consequence of their treatment by the Canadian government during WWII – as Naomi makes herself physically silence, so too do they render themselves in a position of a silence that cannot speak.
Obasan is Issei or first-generation; Aunt Emily is Nisei or second-generation; Naomi is Sansei or third-generation Japanese Canadian. Obasan is fifty years old when the persecution begins, Emily twenty-five; each is fully grown with fully formed values. But Naomi is a child of five, not told what is happening, and too young to fully understand in any case: her perception of the persecution is bound to be quite different from that of either aunt – here she too has a silence that cannot speak because it cannot understand. To say that Naomi converts from Obasan's view that silence (that will not speak) is best to Aunt Emily's view that one has to speak out is, finally, to oversimplify. It is true that Naomi comes to an understanding that Aunt Emily's words of protest have not been futile, perhaps in Obasan it can be considered that Naomi moves from the child who cannot speak, to the adult who will not speak and on to the adult who sees the advantage of speaking.
Through the differing responses of the different characters to the trauma of being treated as enemy aliens in their own country, Kogawa draws attention to issues of individual and collective remembering. What are the histories and legacies that Kogawa wants her readers to understand and remember?
In the Kogawa introduces many elements related to the Japanese Canadian collective silencing – forgetting.
In the opening scene of Obasan, Naomi and her uncle are on their annual pilgrimage to a coulee. Uncle goes there with Naomi each year on (or around) August 9, the day that the US dropped the atomic bomb on Nagasaki. As members of the Japanese Canadian community – this issue of the dropping of the atomic bomb was hugely complicated. As happened in “Obasan” many had families who were killed or maimed in the attack, but they could not mourn them, especially under the circumstances of being regarded as enemy aliens. This grief was certainly expressed is a space of a “silence that cannot speak”. Joy Kagawa spoke about the effect of the bomb dropped on Nagasaki in the following interview with George Stroumboulopoulos https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H_i7UojtS5g
This subtle reference to Uncle’s annual return to a form of his life before internment – this fabricated sea with the first lines of Chapter 1 showing how this part of the prairie could seem like the sea he had left behind in British Columbia: “The coulee is so still right now that if a match were to be lit, the flame would not waver. The tall grasses stand without quivering. The tops flop this way and that” (Kogawa 1). When Uncle points to the grass, “[t]he hill surface, as if responding to a command from [his] outstretched hand, undulates suddenly in a breeze, with ripple after ripple of grass shadows, rhythmical as ocean waves” (2). This description of the grass shadows indicates how, for Uncle, the coulee is “like the sea” (2).
Like many of the Japanese immigrants in British Columbia, Uncle had been a fisherman, and a skilled carpenter before the war-time internment and the subsequent forced relocation by the Canadian government. Remember Obasan is set in the prairie province of Alberta because the fictional Nakane family, like real-life Japanese families had never been able to return to British Columbia.
Uncle feels close to the ocean while on the coulee. When Naomi and her uncle reach the top of the slope, they “find the dip in the ground where he usually rests” and his “root-like fingers [poke] the grass flat in front of him” (2). Uncle’s comfort in this place, the way it responds to him, the way his body, even, seems a part of the coulee, highlights his connection to the land. We can read this scene as an assertion of Japanese Canadian presence in Canada, and a reminder of the long history of Japanese Canadians here.
In describing her uncle and the land around them, Naomi also gestures towards the history of Indigenous peoples on the land. For example, she mentions an “Indian buffalo jump” that was previously there and notes that Uncle could be Chief Sitting Bull, as he “has the same prairie-baked skin, the deep brown furrows like dry river beds creasing his cheeks” (2). She also mentions the likenesses between some of the Japanese and Indigenous students in her classroom (3).
These parallels allow Kogawa to acknowledge the original inhabitants of the land alongside her point about the long history of Japanese Canadians in Canada; however, these parallels may also be problematic. We can think about how these specific descriptions—of Uncle, of Naomi’s Indigenous students—may draw on and reinforce stereotypes of Indigenous peoples.
Chapters 3 & 4 inform us about Naomi’s family – how and when they arrived in Canada, as well as the circumstances of Uncle and Obasan’s life. The reference to the stone bread is not a passing reference – bread of course is one of the basic forms of sustenance – something the family often lacked. But bread can also be a metaphor for life – spiritual life – Jesus was referred to as the bread of life.
Moreover, throughout the book that to "live in stone," Kogawa makes clear, is to live in silence--that is, to live without expressing in words one's deepest thoughts and feelings. When the persecution of Japanese Canadians begins in 1941, Obasan and her husband, Isamu or Uncle Sam, say nothing of it to Naomi, so that Naomi learns of the "danger" only through "whispers and frowns and too much gentleness"
As part of the Canadian Government’s Reconciliation movement, many pieces of art were commissioned that honoured the contribution of the Japanese and other communities to the development of modern-day Canada. “Celebrating Community” is just such a piece. It features fishing boats representative of the Japanese Canadians who lived in the Powell St neighbourhood of Vancouver pre-WWII. Part of the mural replicates an iconic photograph of boats confiscated from Japanese Canadian fishermen in Steveston, BC. It also shows shells that are representative of a First Nations site at what is now CRAB Park.
General Instructions on class procedures + Analysis of Diamond Grill
11 Março 2020, 14:00 • Cecília Maria Beecher Martins
We will continue to work on the three Canadian-immigrant minority community texts that we had started to look at and even though most of you have copies of these already, I have also sent them to the group email that I set up.
We will work on "Diamond Grill" on (11th). Then "Obasan" on (16th) and "The Summer my Grandmother was Supposed to have died" on (18th). So please read the texts before class.
I will send some preparatory notes and questions to the group email before class and I will be online at class times (2.00-4.00 p.m. Mondays and Weds) to answer your questions and send a final analysis of the text reviewed.
Also, the submission of the abstract for your essay is still 23rd March, but of course you can submit this by email. You can also send questions about your essay to my email (cbeecher@campus.ul.pt) during class time or at any other time. I will either answer them then or later, but please stick to this time to ask your questions so that we can keep some order to the work.
Questions discussed on Diamond Grill
While the " Canadian long poem" is often associated with the "Confederacy Poets" from 1860s to 1900s and the later poetry of Anglo-Saxon origin (in particular Pratt and Birney); this form of long poetry actually had its origins in the declamatory long poems of the First Nation tradition (p 35 your manual).
As we saw in the last class - this declamatory poetry served 4 main functions:
1) the presentation of concerns/grievances
2) the understanding of belonging to a long tradition - where the "I" as a person is rarely referred to, rather the voice of the first person is the collective "We of the tribe"
3) the awareness that this "We" exists as part of a natural environment - is a product and protector of that environment and tradition
4) When grievance is expressed, solutions can be found - these poems normally ended with recognition and hope.
Biotext shares many of these characteristics, born as it was from the long poems of •Michael Ondaajte (Ceylon & Britain), Daphne Marlatt (Australia & Malaysia), Roy Kiyooka (Japan) and Fred Wah (China & Sweden & Sctos/Irish)
It too asks the 4 questions above, even if it does this in a slightly different fashion. For instance (3) above becomes "I" not we and is asked in relationship with a questioning of how this hybrid being, who is the author, fits into his/her many cultural backgrounds and Canada as well.
(5) They also use different formats, moving between prose, poetry and even historic/newspaper entries
(6) The "I" can be variable
Questions for today (please send these to my email cbeecher@campus.ul.pt before or during class time 2.00-4.00 p.m. when I will reply)
1. What did you like/dislike about the Diamond Grill text?
2. Do you see traces of points 1 to 6 in it?
Analysis of extract from Diamond Grill
All of your readings offered interesting insight and I enjoyed the exchange greatly. Thank you all for your contribution.
There are just a few things that I have to say about biotext before we look at the extract.
When Michael Ondaajte, Daphne Marlatt, Roy Kiyooka and Fred Wah started to write in this way, they wrote in such a way that at least one other of the group read their text and discussed it with them because it would be in the encounter of the writer/reader that the meaning would be fully revealed. This kind of writing took place in a specific window of time 1970s- early 2000s as the children of pre-multiculturalism tried to figure out what it meant to be hybrid in Canada – it was the literature of the “-“ Chinese-Canadian, Japanese-Canadian.
As it was a hybrid writing, it flowed between different forms and raised different questions – and these questions were not necessarily answered in the text, but rather in the reading of the text their significance would become apparent.
However, either because most of these writers were also poets there is a poetry/musicality in this prose writing (that is not found in their other literary texts)
Obasan, which strictly speaking is not a biotext, even though it has biotext elements also has sections with this musicality – does identity exploration lead to this form?
Looking at specific sections, we see traces of this
p12-14
p12Four of the features of biotext are here in this opening section:
1. Short segment which while they are independent they are joined intimately to the next one. Because the idea is not finished in the first, it flows into the following one. We don’t have the classical narrative structure of orientation, conflict, resolution – rather (half-formed) ideas are placed Out there for the reader to engage with and help the writer make sense of
2. The title flows into the text, so no title as such, just a beginning of a question
3. Mixed formats – here prose flows into poetry and back into prose
4. The moving “I” from Fred Wah to his father (p12 “I” became him, 1st person narrator but the voice of Fred Wah, however p13&14 “they wouldn’t…” section FW’s mother’s voice”, p39 FW (or someone else as 3rd person narrator”)
Then we have the contemplation of existence within the context of this new world – the bear represents Canada, but also remember that the bear is a symbol of harmony in Chinese tradition – is Wah referring to this/aware of this? We don’t know. This is one of the issues of biotext – we are not always sure of all of the references – one of the central ideas is that the writer’s identity is constructed as the reader reflects on and discusses the work with the writer. The original biotext long poems were written and read by the authors and there was some degree of collaboration as the writers saw their readers could see things in their texts that the writers had not seen themselves.
p13 – discussion of painful rejection because of race; but finally acceptance because of positive behaviour
p15 – we are introduced to the plight of the greater Chinese immigrant community introduced through the character of Shu – that fact that we are intruded to Shu as the Diamond Grill prepares for Christmas is no coincidence.
p22-23 Wah uses a mixed prose/poetry text to explore the difficulties faced by the first Chinese in Canada and connects his own experience to this
p29-31 the Chinese diner part of Canadian life and there to “serve” the locals at all times – hence the anger (p31) – accepted when necessary, but always an outsider and expected to do more difficult and more dangerous work (throw back to construction of the railway).
p38-39 personal reflection on a similar theme
p68-75 grandfather, as already discussed ambiguous relationship here, but he (and the food he eats) is the only truly, genuine connection to this Chinese past, but even this Chinese past is somehow adulterated in Canada – “high muckamuck” his identifying phrase is not Chinese but Canadian.