The horrors of Canada’s internment of Japanese residents in Kogawa’s Obasan.

During World War II, when the Nazis were busy rounding up the Jewish population, the North Americans were also doing the same to their Japanese and German residents, seeing them as a national threat. Surprisingly, in act of extremism, the Canadians outdid the Americans in terms of the brutality to its Japanese residents (here’s a Wikipedia article on this ugly chapter of Canada’s history). The Americans put their Japanese in camps, sure, but the Canadians also confiscated the belongings, leaving two generations of Japanese migrants with naught.

Short of putting the Japanese into ovens, the Allies were really not much better. There had been reparation in 1988, for the twenty thousand odd Japanese Canadian persons affected by the ordeal. But the fact that not many have talked about it, that the story is readily available everywhere, yet not many know about this — is a more worrying sign. We only see facts and numbers in the news articles, but to experience what it was like to lose you possessions, your livelihood and your loved ones, fiction is the better medium.

Obasan falls into the realm of fiction, but like the most poignant fiction, it comes from a deeply personal place: Kogawa was part of this internment starting from 1941, relocated to Slocan as the Nakane family did. Like Nomi, Kogawa was born in 1935 thus being around five or six when Pearl Harbour hit. Coincidentally, this was also the age when my grandmother was born. The memories for these women during the epoch remain vivid, and have effectively tarnished their childhoods.

Canada’s own stolen generation, a story we really should talk about

We meet Nomi-san as a thirty-six year old, accompanying her uncle for a walk. A month later, her uncle would pass away to leave his wife and Nomi ruminating over the past. About this time, Nomi had also received a package from her Aunt Emily, her mother’s sister, who had been a proponent of reparation for the Japanese internment. It was here that we discover that the family had been victims of this chapter of history, that after decades past, they are still picking up the pieces.

The past would weave in and out as Nomi reads the contents of the folder: the letters of her Aunt Emily to her sister, Nomi’s mother, describing in detail the experiences of how their freedom decayed bit by bit. At some point, the perspective changes to Nomi’s memories: her mother’s departure to Japan with her grandmother, being shipped to the middle of nowhere to live in a small hut, the carefree and idle days in the camp, before being moved again.

When the dust settled, she was ordained to become farm labourers with her brother, aunt and uncle. The conditions in the farm was considerably worse than it had been in the camps:

“It’s the chicken coop “house” we live in that I mind. The uninsulated unbelievable thin-as-cotton-dress hovel never before inhabited by human beings. In summer it’s a heat trap, an incubator, a dry sauna from which there is no relief. In winter the icicles drip down inside of the windows and the ice is think than bricks at the ledge. The only place that is warm is by the coal stove, where we rotate like chickens on a spit, and the feet are so cold they stop registering. We eat cloves of roasted garlic on winter nights to warm up.

And mind you, this was about 1948. Years after the war had already ended. Years after the last Jewish prisoners have been freed from concentration camp. Yet, the Japanese-Canadians were still treated like slave labour.

But there was that other big question that had haunted Nomi after all these years — what happened to her mother? Though her family seemed to know, they’ve kept it a secret away from Nomi and her brother. When we discover what happened to her mother at the end of the book, we unpeel yet another layer of tribulation.

The silence of suffering

The titular character, Nomi’s aunt Obasan, is a floating presence in the book. Though there were multiple voices: Aunt Emily, Nomi and at the end, Nomi’s grandmother, Obasan was a hidden constant throughout the events unfolded. She was the silent witness. But still waters run deep and in the gap that is her silence, there is great sorrow.

At the end of the book, Obasan would pick up her magnifying glass to read the documents in that grey folder, she would meticulously study every word, line by line, like a slow typewriter. Yet, we know little of what she was looking for. In a way, we can assume that in telling her story, Nomi was also looking for the same thing, and by that stretch, her aunt Emily and perhaps Kogawa herself.

The events that transcended was ripped out of a dystopian novel, and in any dystopian world, the role of the reader is to make sense of it. In their own ways, the characters are attempting to extract an ounce of meaning out of their experience: Aunt Emily with her activism, Nomi with her storytelling and Obasan, by searching through the lines of the documents may perhaps find a modicum of meaning. Or they may not.

But Kogawa’s intentions, I believe, was not to reach postmodern absurdist heights. It is to educate on the events that has long since past, and at the time of the publication, was still left unresolved (meaning that apology and reparation has not yet landed on the runway, seven years after the book’s publication). It is to express beautifully the resilience of humanity, the unbreachable bond of family and the essential anchor to one’s roots.

One’s own, one’s native land

Many Japanese migrants arrived to North America via Hawaii. Many of them were first generation migrants who had arrived on the shores at the turn of the century like other migrants from Europe, to look for better opportunities. The Japanese arrived as sugar cane labourers in Hawaii before moving on Eastwards to settle in America. Looking into history, race has always been precarious in North America (or any Asian migrants moving into well, anywhere), as migrants were stigmatised in the early days.

For second generation Japanese Canadians, the question of roots had always been a source of inner and outer conflict — untethered to Japanese land and customs, learning it only through their parents and being equally proud of being Canadian. When the government decree forced them into internment, they would naturally feel a profound betrayal.

For some, like Nomi’s aunt Emily, the Canadian identity is entrenched into their personal identity. She was sure of this at the age of twelve after having studied Walter Scott’s “The Lay of the Minstrel”, which repeats the lines “This is my own, my native land”. But she introspected the betrayal of her native land in her notebooks of meditations, ultimately asking: Is this my own, my native land? The response is sobering.

“The answer cannot be changed. Yes. It is. For better or worse, I am Canadian.”

The poetry in the prose

Kogawa is perhaps, more of a poet than a novelist, as her poetry books suggest. This is reflected in her long, ethereal but oblique sentences. There is a mixture between simplicity and complexity, which is appropriate given the nature of Kogawa’s characters. The details are important, and in these details do we find the most eloquent poetry. On her father’s “homecoming” to the internment camp:

“The laughter in my arm is as quiet as the moon, quiet as the snow falling, quiet as the white light from the stars. Into this, I fall and fall, swaying safe as a feather through all my waiting hours and silent nights watching…”

Though much of the prose relies on stream-of-consciousness, as we get vignettes of memories jumping from the present to the past, much of it back to Nomi’s earlier childhood and her experiences with racism, the novel is laden with rich symbolism. In the book, the forest is often cited, here as a space of disillusionment, but also a place of comfort.

“In the forest, the trees close in around us like bars on a cage. The sunlight barely filters through the dense canopy, casting long shadows over our camp. The air is thick with the smell of pine and damp earth, a constant reminder of our exile from the world we once knew.”

We can liken Kogawa’s forests to Monica Ali’s bricks in Brick Lane. Both were symbolism for entrapment, but at the same time, comfort. Both books deal with the alienation of migrants, even in Naomi’s case, being a second generation migrant. It is a divisive rift between the two, but giving the readers a sense of foreboding, that things just don’t quite fit.

In a world where the question of immigration and otherisation is increasingly becoming more prominent, Obasan is a landmark document. It comes from a personal place, which seems like a place of absurdity and silent hell, but of which plenty of beauty is found in abundance.