Joy Kogawa's Obasan: An Essential Asian American Text?

I first taught an Asian North American text in the mid-1980s in an "English for Engineers" course where the students were predominantly white and almost exclusively male. That text was Joy Kogawa's Obasan (1981), and I selected it for three reasons that I still remember distinctly: 1) it uncovers a part of Canadian history—the Internment of Japanese Canadians during the Second World War—that has been well documented by academic historians but that had been silenced in the Canadian public sphere and in school histories, so that Canadians are often ignorant of this significant manifestation of racism, intolerance, and human rights violations in the nation's history; 2) it tackles a number of feminist issues, including mother-daughter relationships and the theme of silence and speech, and I wanted this overwhelmingly male class to engage with issues of gender as well as race; 3) aesthetically, it's a powerful novel that blends genres—from documentary reportage, letters, and newspaper clippings to lyric poetry and adapted folklore—and employs complex narrative techniques that I wanted the students to grasp and appreciate. That an appreciation of these postmodern narrative techniques would clash with the humanist approach to history that underlay my first objective didn't register with me at the time; only later did I take up the challenging issues of the relationship between history and fiction in Kogawa's novel.

A quarter century later, I recognize that Obasan is the Asian North American text that I have taught most frequently—and that it does all the work I demanded of it in the mid-1980s and more. It has grown in richness and complexity over the years of teaching and learning (for I am constantly learning from the texts I teach) to the point where it resonates with many of the major issues and themes I consider necessary to explore in a course on Asian American literature. To that extent, it is an "essential" text. In the brief exploration that follows here, I will try to give a sense of the range of themes and issues it introduces, although I acknowledge from the outset that I cannot do justice to them in this limited space.

The internment of Japanese Americans and Canadians is one of the foundational narratives of Asian American studies, and Kogawa's was the first full-scale novel published in either the US or Canada to deal directly with the Internment by an author who had experienced those events. John Okada's No-No Boy (1957) had dealt with the traumatic aftermath of the Internment in the US but had not treated the historical events directly; Hisaye Yamamoto's short story "The Legend of Miss Sasagawara" (1950), set in an internment camp, explores the devastating physical and psychological effects of the Internment, but the story was not made widely available until King-Kok Cheung collected it in 1988; while memoirs like Monica Sone's Nisei Daughter (1953) and Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston and James Houston's Farewell to Manzanar (1972) did not employ fictional techniques in their treatment of past events. Novels about the Internment by the post-Internment generation, like Kerri Sakamoto's The Electrical Field (1998) and Julie Otsuka's When the Emperor Was Divine (2002), come much later. Sakamoto acknowledges the impact of Obasan on the writing of her own novel, stating: "I really didn't want to tell the story of internment…because I think it's been done before, very beautifully, in Joy Kogawa's book, Obasan, which is just seminal."

Kogawa's is a groundbreaking novel for Asian North American studies; given its uniqueness and power, it is no surprise that this Asian Canadian text was quickly adopted by Asian Americanists as, in the words of Guy Beauregard in"Asian American Studies, Asian Canadian Questions," "a canonical Japanese American text of internment." Obasan won the Before Columbus Foundation American Book Award (1982) and the American Library Association's Notable Book Award (1982) and quickly appeared on Asian American course lists. It is the only Canadian novel to be included in the MLA's A Resource Guide to...