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 1^st or 3^rd 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.