Obasan (3): From Second Relocation, Alienation to Reconstruction

1
Obasan (3) From Second Relocation, Alienation
to Reconstruction
2
Outline

• Fragmentation Alienation
• Naomi, the community
• -- Stephen
• --the Barkers
• Reconstruction
• Naomis education
• Accepting Silence
• Facing the truths
• Constructing the Community
• Speech and Silence and Ns Movement towards
  speech

3
Second Relocation

• Pp. 180 chap 26 --fragmentation
• Told by Naomi while she reads Emilys documents
  (newspaper clips) and remembers what she said
  about the Japanese deprivation and fights.
  (e.g. chap 27)
• Chap 28
• Lethbridge in the restaurant
• -- their hut
• Chap 29 (newspaper clips vs. the real experience)
• Chap 30 loss of parents experience of school
  children rejecting their Japanese names

4
Alienation Naomi in Alberta

• Chap 31 Naomi near the swamp taking care of
  her frog (Tad, Tadpole and Tadashi)
• The fathers death ? 1949 last letter ?
  awareness to knowledge and expression in 1951
  (chap 32 pp. 209 211)

5
Alienation from his own culture Stephen

• Has wanted to get away from G p. 219 (Obasans
  response praying)
• -- Momotaro going off to conquer the world (?
  Toronto ? Europe) (Obasans response standing
  where he was for a long time)
• Used to departure p. 15 (O keepning his letters)
  
• --uncomfortable with anything too Japanese
  (chap 33 p. 217)
• --ready to run out the moment he is back (chap
  36 231)

6
Alienation from his own culture Stephen

• Mixture in his language p. 218
• With Claudine (chap 34 223)
• --noncommunicative with Obasan chap 36 p. 231
  (Obasans reaction--mending and cooking something
  that he would not touch)

7
Alienation

• the Barkers--enemy aliens--foreign odor (chap
  34 p 224) icebreaker questions that create an
  awareness of ice
• The Japanese-Canadians chap 34 p. 226
• like weeds--uprooted but survived
• -- Obasans silent territory

8
Naimis Education

• How does Naomi respond the Aunt Emilys
  documents?
• Some memories . . .might better be forgotten
  (45)
• chap 27 tired from the heavy identity need
  to be educated (183-188) not touched(189)
• Chap 7 p. 50
• Chap 29 p. 194

9
Dreams and Nightmares

• There are some nightmares from which there is no
  waking, only deeper and deeper sleep. (232)The
  Dream of the Grand Inquisitor
• third dream (chap 35)
• How will you interpret the dream?
• --dream elements--the place of the dead,
  soldiers, flower ceremony, the Grand Inquisitor

10
Nightmare in chap 35

• --What are the recurring elements in her dreams?
  Who is the Grand Inquisitor?
• --the victimizer, the oppressor
• --Naomi with her questions (274)
• --Emily with her insistence on speech (232-233)

11
Trauma and Memory

• What are the functions of the two letters?
• How does Noami respond to them?
• What do you think of these imagery--the child
  with the double wound (243) the letters as
  skeletons and bones of the past (38 243)?

12
Trauma and Memory

• --for Grandma Kato--however much the effort to
  forget, there is no forgetfulness (281)--release
  the burden of memory with writing (283)--the
  reader as burden sharer
• --for Naomi--attending the voice of the
  voicelessness--an eulogy of Mother

13
Naomis responses

• In chap 38
• listen to mother 240
• speak to mother 241
• asserting her Canadian identity
• sympathizing with her
• last community 246 ?

14
Atomic bombs dropped in Japan

• l "Little Boy" --the atomic bomb dropped on
  Hiroshima on August 6, 1945.
• "Fat Man" --dropped on Nagasaki August 9, 1945.
• l Causes of damage air pressure (wind), heat,
  radiation

15
Damages

• A. Hiroshima
• 1. wind destroyed most of the houses and
  buildings within a 1.5 miles radius.
• --- 2.       death more than 140,000 people
  died by the end of the year (including students,
  soldiers and Koreans who worked in factories
  within the city.) The total number of people who
  have died due to the bomb is estimated to be
  200,000.
• B.        Nagasaki--70,000 people died by the end
  of the year
• l         1945, Aug. 15, Japan surrendered
  (treaty signed on Sept. 2). Taken over by the
  U.S.

16
The Ending

• Why does Naomi visit the coulee again at the end
  of the novel?
• remembering--personal memorial service to the
  dead (Mother, Father, Uncle--all the absences)
• re-membering--two ideographs for love--?
  ?--?--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)

17
The Ending

• Why does Kogawa end the novel with an official
  document?
• What kind of language is it written in, as
  opposed to Naomis?

18
Silence (1) a means of communication in the
family

• e.g. the mothers response in Naomis chicken
  episode
• Care taking in the family (chap 10)
• ? Naomis lack of resistance to Old Man Gower
• ? learns of danger only as whispers and frowns
  and too much gentleness (13 73)
• father's illness, his coming back, and departure
  166, 171, 179

19
Silence (2) for the sake of children

• Obasan's silence
• Live in stone (p. 32) turns to stone (198)
• Endurance chap 34 -- 224 (inviolate) 226
• ? Trapped in her memory

20
Silence (3) no more inquisition

• mother's silence the avenues of silence are the
  avenues of speech 228 233
• silence and forbearance of the atomic bomb
  victims 236
• ? lost together in our silences 243
• ? silent communion with the dead unity and
  distance at the end 246-47

21
Language lies and expressions of racism

• official rhetoric and order
• --Nisei as "enemy aliens" prison camps "Interior
  Housing Projects
• Order in council (end of chap 27) hawk
• "With language like that you can disguise any
  crime." (34)
• Old Man Gowers

22
Language (2) Aunt Emilys

• write the vision and make it plain
• Her documents as the minds meal (chap 27) her
  words not made flesh, not touch N in Alberta
  (end of chap 27)
• Pushing Naomi to talk about facts chap 27 pp.
  183 -

23
Imagery of Stone Sea

• What is the significance of the stone imagery?
• The bible--a white stone--a new name written
• epigraph--The word is stone.
• Uncles stone bread
• Emily's parcel sound and stone (32)
• the coulee/ the ocean/ uncle and Chief Sitting
  Bull/ the family as a knit blanket (24-25)

24
Kogawas own experience

• 1. 1960s -- Not asserting her Japanese identity
  first 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.

25
Kogawas own experience

• 2. 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. .
  . .
• 3. 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, . . .. So Aunt Emily's
  voice was always outside of me throughout the
  entire writing of Obasan.

26
Kogawas own experience

• 4. after writing Obasan writing Itsuka
• the Naomi character -- 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 though still writing in Naomis
  perspective. . .

27
Reference

• Joy Kogawa Talks to Karlyn Koh The
  Heart-of-the-Matter Questions." The Other Woman
  Women of Colour in Contemporary Canadian
  Literature. Ed. Makeda Silvera. Toronto Black
  Women and Women of Colour P, 1995. 19-41.