Canadian Race and Racism Pt 2.

Part One:

We will begin this evening with our presentations.

• Presentation 1 (Suggested: 10 minutes)

• Class Conversation (Suggested: 5 minutes)

• Presentation 2 (Suggested: 10 minutes)

• Class Conversation (Suggested: 5 minutes)

• Presentation 3 (Suggested: 10 minutes)

Discussion of Short Paper Proposals and research.

How is it going? (Suggested: 5-7 minutes)

If Time Permits:

• Describe One photograph in your house.

What is it of? What does it show? Where is it kept? How long has it been where it is?

• Describe one dream you have had that you remember. What was remarkable about it?
  

Break

Part two: Joy Kogawa’s Obasan

We will be breaking our consideration of Obasan up into four stages this evening: Experience, Analysis, Evaluation, and Synthesis

Stage One: Experience: What is our “gut” reaction to the text

In-Class Writing: (Suggested: 10 minutes)

• Generally, how would you describe the experience of reading Obasan? What are some details or events in the story that have “stuck with you?” Is this novel what you expected? Is anything about Kogawa’s writing style either exciting or challenging?

Group Discussion: (Suggested: 5-7 minutes)

• Share your findings with each other, and come up with a summarized account of your observations. Different opinions will surely emerge, please make sure they are represented.

Group Presentation/Class Discussion: (5-7 minutes)

Stage Two: Analysis: What are the notable literary elements of this novel: characters, settings — specific details that stand out, perhaps thematic, symbolic, or relating to motif?

In-class Writing: (Suggested: 5-7 minutes)

• Identify the major characters, events and, if possible any emerging themes or motifs that are becoming apparent in the text. Make as comprehensive a list as you can.

Group Discussion: ()Suggested: 4-7 minutes)

• Compile your findings, highlighting what strikes you as being the most important elements of the story so far.

Group Presentation/Class Discussion: (5-7 minutes)

Evaluation: Consideration of the novel and its various elements against our established literary theories: Garrison Mentality, Survival, Nationalism, Postcolonial Theory, ect.

In-Class Writing:  (Suggested: 15 minutes)

• I want you to relate what you are finding in the novel to one of the theories we have considered this semester. How does the theory account for what you are finding? Are there any apparent limitations to the theory? Where is the theory of use, and where it is insufficient?

Group Discussion: (Suggested 5-10 minutes)

• Compare your notes, and then one person will come up with a statement that will be turned in.

Group Presentations: (5-7 minutes)

• Groups Present findings

Class Discussion: (5-7 minutes)

Synthesis: Consideration of current scholarship of the novel: What are people “in the field” saying about Obasan, and does it make any sense?

Now that we have developed out collective understanding of the novel, let’s compare it to what other people in the “real world” are arguing. We will be reflecting and writing on each.

Marie Lo argues:

• In Obasan, Aunt Emily’s words—her activism, petitions, and archival collections on internment and injustice—”do not touch” Naomi and the rest of the family in Alberta because they “are not made flesh” (226)

Meredit Shoenut argues

• Obasan, the first fictional (and canonized) work about the internment of Japanese Canadians,[ 6] recognizes that, after war, the story of the victors is told, silencing the stories of the victims. However, Naomi, a Sansei (third generation Japanese Canadian), discovers another difficulty in conveying the trauma of a people such as the Nisei (second generation, but the first generation born in Canada). Words, as she states in the proem before Chapter 1, are stone; they represent a barrier to the understanding of another’s pain. Both Kogawa and Naomi recognize that the words they search for are “so old they cannot be understood” (29-30). Japanese Canadians have been silent, like stone, for many years, and Naomi, through Kogawa, acknowledges their “wordlessness” (28).

Yaying Zhang argues:

• The novel begins with three openings, three distinct, yet interrelated genres—a poetic biblical quotation, a proem that lingers between prose and poem, and a fictionalized or novelistic representation of a personal memoir—but with the linkage Postcolonial Canada and Its Postcolonial “Other” between the three genres not fully articulated for the reader. The first and shortest opening is a quotation taken from the Book of Revelation:

To him that overcometh
will I give to eat
of the hidden manna
and will give him
a white stone
and in the stone
a new name written….
The Bible

• This biblical message of hope is contrasted with the anguish and despair of the proem, the second opening, where the unidentified “I” feels oppressed by the silence of the landscape:

There is a silence that cannot speak.
There is a silence that will not speak.
Beneath the grass the speaking dreams and beneath the dreams is
a sensate sea. The speech that frees comes forth from that amniotic
deep. To attend its voice, I can hear it say, is to embrace its absence.
But I fail the task. The word is stone.
….

• The third opening of the novel is the realistic presentation of a natural setting in a Canadian landscape, which reminds the reader of fiction, while the time and date in the first line suggest that the writing is a diary entry:

9:05 p.m. August 9, 1972.
The coulee is so still right now that if a match were to be lit, the
flame would not waver. The tall grasses stand without quivering. The
top flops this way and that. The whole dark sky is bright with stars and
only the new moon moves. We come here once every year around this time, Uncle and I. This
spot is half a mile from the Barkers’ farm and seven miles from the village
of Granton where we finally moved in 1951.

• By this time, a puzzling question has emerged in the reader’s mind: “What amI reading?” If the first opening appears in the form of poetry, and the second wavers between prose and poetry, the third opening, with the form of diary entry and the conventional technique of introducing a setting, suggests that the narrator is offering a fictionalized or novelistic representation of a diary or a personal memoir.

• To make matters more complicated, even if the reader has recognized the first opening as a quotation and not raised any question about the first person pronoun “I” in it, the frequent use of  “I” in the proem and the use of “we”and “I” in the third opening arouse the reader’s curiosity as to who this unnamed “I” is. Is this “I” Kogawa or the narrator? If it is Kogawa, could it be an autobiog-raphy that the reader has in front of her? The reader probably cannot answer these questions yet, but she might be able to get the sense that the narrator’s quest for the “the speech that frees,” and her use of different styles for the first few pages of her work bespeak an effort at the activity of speech and writing. Meanwhile, since the connection between the different openings remains opaque to the reader, what is also reflected on these pages is the activity of reading.

• What meets our eye obviously demands our immediate participation in constructing a meaningful text out of what seems a collection of different genres of writing. Thus, language in

• Obasan is no longer monolithic, but is located in the dialogic interaction between text and reader, so the reader can participate in the process of producing the meaning of a text.

Homework: Finish Obasan and your papers for next time.

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