Joy Kogawa: Obasan

[bibliogramma]

The Internet informs me that Joy Kogawa's novel Obasan is the first piece of Canadian fiction to deal with the experience of Japanese-Canadians in the internment camps during and after WWII. It's certainly the first book I've read that deals with this dark and painful period of Canadian history.

It is necessarily a dark and painful book, about silence and loss. The protagonist is Naomi Nakane, a middle-aged Alberta schoolteacher who has, like her Uncle and his wife, whom Naomi calls Obasan, tried to put her war experiences behind them, but who, like them, is indelibly marked by those experiences. At first, Naomi's family narrative has large holes: she speaks of her Uncle, his wife, and an aunt Emily, but no one else. The reader imagines that the internment camps are somehow responsible for these lacunae, but does not know how.

But then, when Uncle dies, Naomi returns to the home where she spent her adolescence, cared for by the childless Uncle and Obasan. While she is there, she begins to unravel her family's history, uncover the truth behind long-unmentioned secrets, and break the silence. A family photograph from before the war, taken on the occasion of her brother's birth, shows us the shape of her family before the war, before confiscation, before internment, before relocation: grandparents, the Nakane and Kato families; her grandfather Nakane's older son, Uncle, and his wife Obasan; her father; her mother; her mother's sister, Emily Kato; her brother Stephen. Prosperous people, the Nakanes are shipbuilders, the sea and ships are in their souls.

Aunt Emily, the unmarried sister of Naomi's absent mother, is the only member if the family who speaks of the past. In fact, she is an agitator, an activist, who attends conferences and tries to tell the world what was done to her people. Naomi recalls Aunt Emily talking to her about the vicious racism endured by Japanese-Canadians during and after the war with Imperial Japan.

"The American Japanese were interned as we were in Canada, and sent off to concentration camps, but their property wasn’t liquidated as ours was. And look how quickly the communities reestablished themselves in Los Angeles and San Francisco. We weren’t allowed to return to the West Coast like that. We’ve never recovered from the dispersal policy. But of course that was the government’s whole idea—to make sure we’d never be visible again. Official racism was blatant in Canada. The Americans have a Bill of Rights, right? We don’t.”

And again, "...They took away the land, the stores, the businesses, the boats, the houses—everything. Broke up our families, told us who we could see, where we could live, what we could do, what time we could leave our houses, censored our letters, exiled us for no crime. They took our livelihood—”

Emily is the lightning rod, while Naomi, Uncle and Obasan are silent. The key to unraveling one part of the past, for Naomi and for the reader, lies in Emily's collection of documents, and a journal, given to Naomi to read. In the journal, begun in 1941, Emily records the path of destruction of West Coast Japanese communities from month to month, as first unnaturalised Japanese men are rounded up and sent to work camps, cars and boats and radios are confiscated, and on and on until all those of Japanese heritage, even those full citizens born in Canada, are forced to relocate away from the coast.

In flashbacks, Naomi remembers as a child remembers, her comfortable home and close-knit family taken from her step by step. Her mother travels to Japan to see her ailing mother and is caught there by the outbreak of war; she will never see her mother again, and for decades, Naomi will know nothing of her fate. Grandparents, summering on the coast, are swept up into a filthy internment camp. Cousins, uncles, fathers, family friends are taken away to work camps as far off as Ontario, leaving only women, children, and a few old men, most 'relocated' away from the coast, to camps and 'ghost towns', some lucky enough to find refuge with friends in other provinces. Naomi, her brother Stephen, and Obasan are sent to live in a decrepit shack in Slocum. After the war ends, Uncle, freed from the labour camps, and her father, debilitated by tuberculosis, join them. But then the family is torn apart once more as 'suitable' Japanese survivors of the camps and ghost towns are sent further from the coast - "eastern relocation" as agricultural workers and other labourers - while "unsuitable" survivors like her father are held where they are to await their fate. Uncle, Obasan and Naomi are relocated, forced labourers on a Alberta beet farm; she will never see her father again.

But Obasan is not just about the injustices visited on a people, and the silence that has surrounded those injustices in the national narrative. It is about trauma, both personal and institutional, and how we deal - or don't deal - with it. In Naomi's life, abuse comes in different forms, and abusers are also both personal and institutional. In the end, Obasan is a wrenching novel about a family torn apart by war, politics and racism, the terrible cost in lives, and the price paid by the survivors.