Obasan

Image Source: Joy Kogawa page

 Kogawa: Bio and Work

 Interview with Kogawa

 Obasan: Chronology and Time Line 

 Obasan:  Characters

 Obasan: Central Issues 

                   A. Examples of Racism

                   B. Imagery: Stone (and Silence), etc.

                   C. Gender and Japanese Immigrant Identities

                   D. Silence

                   E. Memory and Different Attitudes towards the past

                   F. The Children's Fragmentary Identities: Stephen, Naomi and the other boys

                   G. Survival

                   H. Articulating the Silence and Survival

-- born in Vancouver, B.C. in 1935

-- relocated to Slocan and Coaldale, Alberta during and after WWII

Selected Publications:
Obasan. 1983.
Woman in the Woods. 1985.
Naomi's Road. 1986.
Itsuka. 1993.
The Rain Ascends. 1995. 

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A. Her writing and Ethnic identity  20

. . .in the very first years when I was publishing [1960s] I was like the other people of my generation--I had virtually no consciousness, except in a negative sense, of Japaneseness. I would see myself as white. I wrote as a white person. I wrote, in fact, in a male voice initially. In that sense I was a mimic, I read and I wrote what I read.

p. 21--her poetry

the struggles that I had were struggles with questions of love and evil and death, and those are universal questions, so I didn't have any particular consciousness, again then, of race. I didn't associate my suffering as the suffering of a person who was a minority human being. I simply attached it to all suffering.

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B. the writing of Obasan

But even at that point, I was not thinking particularly of writing about Japanese-Canadians, I was simply writing out of my own life and writing it in some of the way I wrote poetry. . . . When I was at the Archives, though, in Ottawa, that's when I became aware of another voice that I was not conscious of being within me--Muriel Kitagawa's voice. To me, it was a voice from the outside, one that I had never encountered, and one that I could only report on. So Aunt Emily's voice was always outside of me throughout the entire writing of Obasan.

p.26
. . . In what I'm writing now the greyness and the fog and the confusion of not knowing very clearly can be a way to survive within a situation where the pain is too great, where the denial is necessary in order not to be blinded by the truth of the sun. So these days I'm doing a much more in-depth exploration of the fog, the mist, the confusion. I've discovered a lot of things. One of the things, I guess, is (laughter) --it's an old adage--but ignorance can be bliss. Not knowing can be a way in which one not just survives but thrives.

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C. the two novels and two voices 30-31

. . . after writing Obasan and in a way being forced into public situations, the Naomi character that was within me, who basically could not talk, and which is really the way I used to be, got more and more transformed, and the Aunt Emily voice came out. I found myself being more like Aunt Emily. And I think in Itsuka I was much more like Emily, but since I was writing in Naomi's voice, I had a problem because I didn't want Naomi to be transformed too suddenly. I ddin't know how to do that anyway because she didn't have a parallel experience to mine. I had had a public kind of attention that helped me to change and Naomi didn't have that. So Naomi had to remain the way that she was, more or less, although she could be changed a little bit through the redress activity. . . It was just that there was a stroy I had lived through, and I couldn't write about it while I was living through it.

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D. knowledge and ignorance 38

...when you don't know what you don't know, it's not so bad. When you're in denial you can go on with your life--it's a great survival tactic, . . .And I look back and i see that I have lived my life in denial and that's what I write about. It enables me to thrive to the extent that I did.

But the fog is denial, the fog is surviving.. . .it keeps us safe, it keeps the sun from coming through and destroying us. The sun is like the truth. I mean the truth is waht enables things to grow.

But too much of it kills us. And so although one wants the sun, one also--...--puts up the show that protects us, that's denial. . . .You have to tear it away and that's the hard part. It means going in directly to the sun and/or into the flame and surviving that. . . .So that's what you do when you're no longer in denial: you go rushing into the thing, you get to the safe place.

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• With her limited understanding of the adult and outside world, Naomi cannot understand how other people can force her to do things.  She defends herself by not moving and not speaking, wanting to keep herself "whole" but in vain.
• This is an experience of sexual initiation, though Naomi is forced into it unknowingly. 

• Shame (regarding herself as a parasite over her mother; thinking that she is the cause of her mother's departure.)

• Old Man Gower, ironically, is the one to take over Nakane's properties.
• Similar incidents happen to Naomi.  Chap 12 

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B. Imagery: Stone (and Silence), etc.

Discuss other images in the novel: 

• the Uncle, associated with the coulee,  the ocean and Chief Sitting Bull
• the family as a knit blanket (24-25)
• Fairy-Tale Images
• Images of Insects and Animals; of broken things

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C. Gender and Japanese Immigrant Identities

• How does Naomi describe herself and the two aunts and why?
• Naomi--sansei--spinster, tense (9), numb (41)
• Obasan--issei--ancient (14, 18-19), language of grief--silence (17)
• Emily--nisei-- energetic, visionary (38),  "word warrior" (39), "white blood cells" (41)/ Canadian identity--"This is my own, my native land"
• Mother--kibei--born in Canada, raised in Japan-- "yasashi kokro" (56) 

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D. Silence

• two kinds of silence: 
  • a silence that will not speak (protective silence) 
  • a silence that can not speak (silence about repressed memory and the unknown past.

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E. Memory and Different Attitudes towards the past

1. Obasan: ancient woman who stays in history 
   --can be consumed, 
   --can make use of the leftovers
   2. Emily: "The past is the future"  p. 42
   3. Naomi: "Crimes of history . . . can stay in history"  p. 41

• Stimulated by Aunt Emily, who says "Denial is Gangrene."
• Given a photo of the past by Obasan. 
   
• The past told in the present tense.
• Chap 9: from Photograph to Naomi's awareness of two languages and 
  two spaces -- home and outside
   
• the house in Vancouver: associated with bathing, and Naomi's contented body and silent self
  • bathing -- burning ("liguid furnace") but relaxing water; Grandma's resourcefulness in using the cloth; 
  • the house as a collage of images
  • Mother, father and Stephen   vs.       Naomi and goldfish

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F. The Children's Fragmentary Identities: Stephen, Naomi and the other boys

1. As kids, failure to understand why they are both enemy and Canadian: A riddle: end of Chap 12;
2. As kids, fear Chap 13; 
3. As a kid, Naomi: sense of guilt; end of Chap 11; As an adult and a teacher, she has the social grace of a housefly chap 2.
4. Naomi's nightmares, which she still has as an adult
   • chap 6: dream of the general situation of oppression of Japanese men and women (--persecution by the state machine; --silence as a forgotten language).
   • chap11: the solder's killing the seductive Oriental women (--persecution and mutilation
     --shame and self-contempt of the victim); related to her experience of sexual molestation, 
   • chap 24: between waking and sleep; feeling "something" and dreaming about mother.
   • chap 35 (pp. 227-39; 272-273): dream elements--the place of the dead, soldiers, flower ceremony, the Grand Inquisitor
     --Who is the Grand Inquisitor?  --the victimizer, the oppressor
     --Naomi with her questions (p. 228; 274)
     --Emily with her insistence on speech (pp. 232-233)
      
5. As a kid, Stephen has unexpressed anger and violence
   • butterfly: end of chap 16--pp.122-23
   • chap 18: refusing to go to Grandma Nakane's wake p. 129
   • chap 33:
     • his identity as an adult  214-15; less surly, still irritable, non-communicative with Obasan; 
     • uncomfortable with anything too Japanese p. 217; 
     • "Sonuva bitch" mixed language, mixed identity p. 218
     • his nightmare pp. 219-20
   • chap 34: Stephen with Claudine p. 223

1. Stephen (and the butterflies):  end of Chaps 15 & 16
2. Kenji, his raft and his glasses: he is incapable of saving Naomi?  Or he does not care?
3. The boys' (Stephen, Sho and the other boys)violence against the white Chicken Chap 22 
4. The school's ceremony afterwards becomes ironic
   • national anthem: O Canada, our home and native land. 
   • the teacher is like a hen.. 

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G. Survival

1. Rough Lock Bill Chap 21 slow can go p. 146
2. The uncle's garden Chap 20
3. Local community in Slocan:  Chap 23: stores, public bathhouse "like a hazy happy dream" (internal discrimination)
4. The return of the father 

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H. Articulating the Silence and Survival

Different views about silence:
1. Emily: Denial is Gangrene.
2. Obasan: steadfast silence. inviolate (225).   "Kodomo no tame"
3. Naomi: end of chap 35: "Her tale is a rose with a tangled stem.  All this questioning, this clawing at her grave, is an unseemly thing."
    
4. Grandma Kato: -- "however much the effort to forget, there is no forgetfulness"(281)--release the burden of memory with writing
• Different descriptions/images of the mother
  1. in the dream: a rose with a tangle stem
  2. chap 38:
     • tide rushing away from the shore,
     • Canadian maple tree
     • long black hair falling  --> Maypole Mother;
     • tree trunk, --> dead tree
     • chap 39 p. 244: a light piece of music, more sad than happy, but quiet and dignified, a gentle tune, hiding the cacophony life wrote in their bones.
     • scarecrow Grief with gentle eyes pp. 245-46

  
  Reconciliation and Survival: "The song of mourning is not a lifelong song."

  • remembering--personal memorial service to the dead (Mother, Father, Uncle--all the "absences")
    re-membering--two ideographs for love--愛戀--系--kei as in nikkei--family lineage--a symbolic act to reweave the family unravel by the war and to weave nikkei into the tapestry of Canadian history (King-Kok Cheung)
  • confirming two kinds of love and two languages
  • accepting the mother's quiet tune
  • Fill the emptiness of Grief with "flesh": the forest where colours meet, where there are berries, the coulie where there are roses and wildflowers.
     
  • Naomi in Aunt Emily's clothes.

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I. Others: Fairy Tales

• Cultural integration:  Momotaro as a Canadian story
• quiet departure from the parents, keeping honor
• Momotaro-- not born of biological parents. 

• Snow White: end of Chap 11 -- Naomi as Snow White and Old Man Gower as the forest with all eyes.
• Humpty Dumpty end of Chap 15; fragments which cannot be put back together. 
• Goldilock end of chap 17: Is Naomi Goldilock whose house gets occupied by others or the little bear?
• All revisions of the fairy-tales show the child¡¦s way of apprehending racism and displacement

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J. Others: Insects and Animals

1. the chicken episode Chap 11
   • It shows the mother quiet and sure way of solving the problem, not betraying Naomi nor blaming her directly. 
   • The white hen vs. yellow chicken -- will become symbolic of the positions of white oppressor and the Japanese under oppression.
   • It is Naomi that tries to put the chicks into the hen's cage, thinking (maybe?) that the formers should be the latter's kids.
2. Naomi as a victim,
   • treated like an animal by Old Man Gower, 
   • drowned like a red insect chap 21,p. 140, 142  vs.  King bird
   • ill in the hospital and feels like a little chicken chap 22 (will grow white)
3. Naomi's experience of death
   • Besides the drowning experience, she witnesses and killing of a white hen and the slow death of a kitten.
   • Later, she will have to face the death of first her father, and then her mother.

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