"Symbolizing Obasan"

Symbolizing Obasan A KPU Literary/Ceramics Study at Historic Joy Kogawa House

Symbolizing Obasan

Symbolizing Obasan A KPU Literary/Ceramics Study at Historic Joy Kogawa House

Edited by Greg Chan

Copyright © 2021 by Kwantlen Polytechnic University Individual texts © Greg Chan, Kassidy Kaszonyi, Sean Kirk, Joy Kogawa, Molly Livingston, Dewina Luechtefeld, Jaskaran Mahil, Ann-Marie Metten, David Suzuki All rights reserved.

Published in conjunction with the “Symbolizing Obasan” exhibition at Historic Joy Kogawa House, curated by Greg Chan and Ying-Yueh Chuang.

Historic Joy Kogawa House 1450 West 64th Avenue Vancouver, BC V6P 2N4 www.kogawahouse.com Kwantlen Polytechnic University 12666 72nd Avenue Surrey, BC V3W 2M8 www.kpu.ca/joy-kogawa-house-exhibit Edited by Greg Chan Design by Patrick Tambogon Photography by Ksenia Makagonova Cover Photograph by Mak on Unsplash Printed and bound by Lulu Press The editor gratefully acknowledges the financial support of the 0.6% PD fund at KPU, which made the publication of this book possible.

Dedicated to the Japanese Canadian community and its Obasans

One of the terrible dilemmas of democracy is that only under conditions of duress or crisis do those cherished rights even matter, but that’s when they are often rescinded in the name of national security. What good are high ideals if we guarantee them only when times are good? We now know there was not a single recorded case of treachery among Japanese Canadians during the war, despite the conditions to which they were subjected.

—David Suzuki We are the scholarly and the illiterate, the envied and the ugly, the fierce and the docile. We are those pioneers who cleared the bush and the forest with our hands, the gardeners tending and attending the soil with our tenderness, the fishermen who are flung from the sea to flounder in the dust of the prairies.

We are the Issei and the Nisei and the Sansei, the Japanese Canadians. We disappear into the future undemanding as dew.

—Joy Kogawa

Historic Joy Kogawa House in Marpole

SUN ROOM FOYER

LIVING ROOM

DINING ROOM BEDROOM

KITCHEN BATHROOM BEDROOM

DECK

Contents Preface by Ann-Marie Metten....................................................... xiii Introduction by Greg Chan and Ying-Yueh Chuang...................xv Silent Treatment.............................................................................. 1 Kodomo No Tame...............................................................................7 Stony Lives...................................................................................... 13 It Is Better to Forget......................................................................19 Trembling Bodies...........................................................................25 Afterword by Joy Kogawa...............................................................32 Acknowledgments..........................................................................34 Quotations......................................................................................36 Contributors...................................................................................38

Preface As I readied Historic Joy Kogawa House for a tour that late September 2019 morning, a buzz of excitement filled the air. Sixteen students would be arriving soon to do a field study of the author’s childhood home. Students from Kwantlen Polytechnic University had visited the house before with their English literature instructor, Greg Chan, but not for some years; we had since restored two front rooms and now could host the large student group more comfortably. I knew our tour leader Joan Shigeko Young, a founding director, would do a fantastic job relating the story of the house a place of memory and the inspiration for Joy Kogawa and her writing.

Another reason for excitement that particular autumn day: author Diana Morita Cole would join us from her home in Nelson, BC. In Vancouver to attend the annual LiterASIAN festival, Diana would share her experience as a Japanese American born at Minidoka, the Idaho internment camp where she and her family had been forced to live during World War II. With Diana’s first-person account adding depth to video animations and exhibit objects, the educational tour would offer powerful testament to the potential for writing to transform lived experience.

The tour went well, with plenty of questions and interest from students. Little did I know how rewarding the outcome would be for Kogawa House.

Greg Chan had partnered with KPU Fine Arts instructor Ying-Yueh Chuang to bring together students from two disciplines. Ceramics students would work with English literature students to interpret into art pieces their readings of the written work of Joy Kogawa.

I was eager to see the artwork produced and later that year gladly accepted an invitation to attend the end-ofterm exhibition launch at KPU Library. With each pair of students standing next to their created piece, I had the opportunity to chat about ways the ceramic pieces make tangible the poetic descriptions in Joy Kogawa’s novel Obasan. Rendered into clay were a hen and her chicks, Uncle’s stone bread, silence, silence again, and more silence, each ceramic piece speaking clearly to the source text Obasan and its meaning.

Thanks to Greg Chan and Kwantlen Polytechnic University, these ceramic pieces have since found their way home to Historic Joy Kogawa House. It is a pleasure to host them as a visual art exhibit and as part of our permanent collection.

Feel welcome to take time to study each ceramic piece and artist’s statement. Then carry this book away to browse at your leisure. “Symbolizing Obasan” serves first as a guide for visitors touring the exhibit and then conveys the artists’ work out into the world. The art pieces themselves carry forward Joy Kogawa’s themes: that silence must be broken to share with others the personal experience of being treated as an enemy alien in one’s own country, to write through that trauma to find forgiveness. Collective remembering leads to healing.

These ceramic pieces help us remember the past and to learn from it. We are grateful to the artists, students, instructors, and administrators at Kwantlen Polytechnic University for gifting their work to us.

—Ann-Marie Metten, Executive Director, Historic Joy Kogawa House

Co-curators Greg Chan and Ying-Yueh Chuang

Introduction “Symbolizing Obasan” began two years ago as an optional assignment in an English (Canadian Literature) class at KPU. Rather than write an essay for a traditional final exam, students were invited to partner with a student from Fine Arts (Ceramics/Open Studio) to explore the theme of Canadian identity from the perspective and lived experience of the cultural other. Working with the course texts—Joy Kogawa’s Obasan, Lawrence Hill’s The Book of Negroes, Sharon Pollack’s The Komagata Maru Incident, and Wayson Choy’s The Jade Peony—the English students chose a key symbol from one of the texts and wrote a literary analysis of its broader significance. The Fine Arts students then interpreted the symbol and brought it to life as a physical object.

As their outward-facing final exam, the participating students created an installment in the atrium of the KPU Library called Maple-Washing: A Disruption, which was launched on December 19, 2019 and ran until January 24, 2020. The exhibition, an integration of ceramics and literary analysis, articulated select parts of Canadian colonial history that resist the myth of multicultural Canada: its involvement in the Atlantic slave trade; its refusal of migrant South Asians aboard the Komagata Maru; its internment of Japanese Canadians during World War II; and its discriminatory laws—Chinese Immigration Act and its head tax—that racially profiled Chinese Canadians.

The 16 displays contested the sanitization or complete erasure of narratives that document these “maple-washed” incidents in Canadian history.

One of the event’s special guests was Ann-Marie Metten, who had previously hosted the KPU students on their field study at Historic Joy Kogawa House. Conversations began about sharing the five Obasan ceramics with a community beyond the KPU campus. In 2020, “Symbolizing Obasan” was endowed by KPU to Historic Joy Kogawa House, where it is now a permanent installation. Throughout the rooms of Joy Kogawa’s childhood home in Marpole and across the pages of this companion book, you will witness Uncle Isamu’s stone bread, Japanese Canadian fishermen, the white hen and yellow chicks, and three degrees of silence.

We are deeply grateful to Ann-Marie and our sponsors— KPU President and Vice-Chancellor Alan Davis, KPU Dean of Arts Diane Purvey, and KPU English Department Chair Robert Dearle—for giving our students’ work a second life that pays tribute to Japanese Canadian decency and resilience. On behalf of our students, sponsors, and university, we hope that this exhibit deepens your appreciation of Joy Kogawa’s iconic novel, Obasan, and the chapter of Canadian history it represents. Please enjoy your reflective tour of the exhibit and Historic Joy Kogawa House.

—Co-curators Greg Chan (KPU English) and Ying-Yueh Chuang (KPU Fine Arts)

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The words are not made flesh. Trains do not carry us home. Ships do not return again. All my prayers disappear into space.

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Silent Treatment Inspired by Joy Kogawa’s Obasan, Silent Treatment attempts to contextualize the novel’s predominant themes around silence and stoicism. Obasan holds cultural significance as one of the first literary works to depict the treatment of Japanese Canadians during World War II, breaking a decades long silence and one-sided narrative around their internment.

Attempting to arouse feelings of discomfort, unease or confusion within the audience, viewers are placed in the position of being silenced themselves when shown their reflection in relation to the ceramic pieces—which are designed to mimic the gesture of quieting being performed by a human hand. When one interacts with the work, they are placed within a thematic experience echoing that of the novel’s protagonist, Naomi Nakane, as well as the experiences of her family and of many Japanese Canadians during the internment.

Within Obasan, the act of remaining quiet versus speaking out is a point of tension and thematic importance: Naomi’s personal struggle to discover what happened to her mother, and the overarching theme of cultural silence surrounding the internment form one of the novel’s core conflicts. Silent Treatment confronts viewers with the notion of being forcibly silenced, the gesture of the form conveying ideas around personal shame, inherited cultural baggage, or a greater system of oppression.

—Ceramics by Kacey Hughes (Fine Arts) and text by Sean Kirk (English)

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The language of [Obasan’s] grief is silence.

She has learned it well, its idioms, its nuances.

Over the years, silence within her small body has grown large and powerful.

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Kodomo No Tame We collaborated to put together a literary analysis sculpture in response to Joy Kogawa’s novel, Obasan. The symbol that we decided to focus on is eyes and how they represent honourable silence throughout the novel. By taking a closer look at eyes, what they see and what they neglect to see, it became apparent that the eyes portrayed in the novel represented a rather different and somewhat unexpected set of eyes: the eyes of the Canadian government. A recurring phrase in the novel is Kodomo No Tame, which translates to “for the sake of the children.” We decided to name our piece after this phrase due to its significance throughout the novel and how the sculpture itself captures its meaning.

While creating the vessel, Leah wanted to make a piece that is uncomfortable for the viewer to look at, as it is a visual representation of a horrific part of Canadian history, when Japanese Canadians were forced into internment camps.

By putting averted eyes on the vessel, we represent the traumatic events that were witnessed over the years by Japanese Canadians during their time of exile. In pottery, the vessel represents a body, and the “mouth” of the body is the rim, by pinching it closed the artist has reinforced the notion of honourable silence and not talking about trauma. By leaving the eyes open and looking in different directions around the piece, we achieve a visual representation of the Japanese Canadians always being under surveillance by the government and their non-Japanese neighbours. Leah also incorporated vines on the sculpture to represent the passing of time, and intergenerational trauma.

—Ceramics by Leah Rosehill (Fine Arts) and text by Molly Livingston (English)

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Honest, Nesan, I wonder if the whites think we are a special kind of low animal able to live on next to nothing—able to survive without clothing, shoes, medicine, decent food.

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Stony Lives This symbolic bread from the novel Obasan, by Joy Kogawa, is made by the protagonist, Naomi’s uncle Isamu. Stone bread is about pleasureless survival for the Japanese Canadians during World War II, with the bread just keeping them nourished and nothing else in the internment camps.

The bread is stiff and hard. The children in the family refuse to eat it, but Uncle and Uncle’s wife, Obasan, accept and eat it.

Uncle’s stone bread represents Canadian colonialism.

It shows that settlers did not have an easy life. They had to restart, build, and adapt to Canada. Settlers had to learn to adapt to the new land full of new and different people. They had to learn and persevere in order to succeed in Canada.

Also, the stone bread symbolizes Uncle’s and his generation’s traditional Japanese approach to hardship.

He is an Issei—Japan-born emigrants living in Canada.. His generation understood stoic acceptance. His generation faced racism throughout their hard lives. They had to come to Canada, a new country, and face new people.

The bread also symbolizes Uncle. He alone makes the stone bread. It represents his optimism because even though his bread is considered horrible by Naomi, he insists on making it over the years thinking he can make it better.

The children are represented by this bread as well.

The children refuse to eat this, whereas Obasan does not.

The hard bread symbolizes the children and family’s hard lives. Obasan eating it and not refusing the bread displays her similarity to Uncle. The children deny it and therefore, have not accepted their hard lives.

This ceramic piece is named Stony Lives and we chose this name because of how hard the lives of the Japanese Canadians and settlers were. The many loaves of bread in the piece the many lives that endured adversity in Canada.

—Ceramics by Charayah Romo (Fine Arts) and text

by Jaskaran Mahil (English)

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We are leaving the B.C. coast—rain, cloud, mist—an air overladen with weeping. Behind us lies a salty sea within which swim our drowning specks of memory—our small waterlogged eulogies. We are going down to the middle of the earth with pick-axe eyes, tunnelling by train to the Interior, carried along by the momentum of the expulsion into the waiting wilderness.

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It Is Better to Forget This ceramics piece depicts themes from the novel Obasan by Joy Kogawa. It describes the desperate situation of Japanese Canadians during World War II from the perspective of child protagonist Naomi. After Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, Japanese Canadians were gradually dispossessed and relocated to internment camps in the interior of British Columbia and to sugar beet farms in adjacent provinces.

The reason was the government’s fear of Japanese “spies” communicating with Japan from the coast. Japanese Canadians were not allowed to return until 1949.

When you look at this ceramics piece from above, you can see the head of a dead goldfish. We chose a goldfish as the main symbol as many Japanese people were traditionally fishermen, and the goldfish plays a significant part in Japanese culture. The dead fish stands for the choice of many Japanese Canadian survivors to remain silent about their painful past experiences. Naomi’s aunt Obasan represents this attitude of forced forgetfulness in the novel.

The rotten colour of the fish head symbolizes the suppressed memories rotting within the survivors. Ultimately, these memories will die with them. When turned to the side, the viewer recognizes a birdhouse in the ceramics piece. It symbolizes liberty, truth, and justice for which Naomi’s aunt Emily strives. The ceramics piece is predominantly painted in a rotten green and partly in gold. The remaining gold colour stands for the hesitant willingness to learn about and overcome the past, as it is reflected in the protagonist. Naomi is influenced by the opposing attitudes of her two aunts—one suffering in silence, the other shouting out in protest—and Naomi needs to find her way through to deal with the trauma of her experience.

—Ceramic by Murasaki Lau (Fine Arts) and text by Dewina Luechtefeld (English)

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If there is not carefulness, there is danger.

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Trembling Bodies Our collaboration combines two symbols from Joy Kogawa’s Obasan: yellow chicks, representing Japanese Canadians, displayed in a traditional Japanese bath, and a white hen, portraying the Canadian government. The symbols represent an abusive adult figure, the Canadian government, and two trusted adults, a neighbour and Naomi’s beloved grandmother—towards Japanese Canadians and an innocent child. Bathing is sacred in Japanese culture and Naomi, the protagonist, is molested by Old Man Gower in a bathroom at a young age – defiling a sacred place of cleansing. Together, the symbols illustrate the Japanese tradition of silence in the wake of horrific events. Naomi notes that “speech hides within” her (Kogawa 52). She becomes as silent about her past as her traditional Japanese Obasan is about the internment.

The title is a quote describing the chicks as they are being attacked by the white hen, while also representing Naomi’s fear of Old Man Gower. On a wider level, the title is a reference to Japanese Canadians and their helplessness against the Canadian government and internment.

We designed the ceramics display itself to be movable.

This has two effects: the first is that the ceramics tell a story. Depending on placement, there is a different sense of the scene; there are many different accounts of Japanese internment, and the movability of the piece shows that. The second effect is that the movable pieces create distance and perspective. For most viwers, there is a physical, cultural, and historical distance between us and Japanese internment.

Works of art such as our piece or Kogawa’s Obasan strive to eliminate this distance and provide a new perspective.

—Ceramics by Leila Nicar (Fine Arts) and text by Kassidy Kaszonyi (English)

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Afterword Art transforms us, moves through us, takes us out of one dimension into another. So with ceramic art. As we touch the texture in our hands, on our cheeks, as we breathe it into us, the object insinuates the hand, the mind, the smoothness, the roughness, the nobby love that formed it. A tactile, visceral whisper of our uniqueness and oneness, of the lovely paradox of being.

—Joy Kogawa

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Acknowledgments “Symbolizing Obasan” is an extraordinary collaboration between departments, between students, and between disciplines. It exemplifies the best of KPU and re-imagines our tag line “where thought meets action”. In so doing, this project expands our understanding of some of the darker moments in Canadian history, which is so important to creating a just and equitable future for our society. From everyone at KPU our thanks go to our colleagues Greg Chan and to Ying-Yueh Chuang for their inspiration and dedication, and for bringing this project to fruition. The project lives on, and our association with Historic Joy Kogawa House is a great honour for KPU. We hope many will enjoy, and be enriched by, the contributions of our wonderful students.

—Alan Davis, KPU President and Vice-Chancellor When Joy Kogawa’s Obasan was first published in 1981 it shook Canadians’ understandings of themselves and their country. With themes of identity, memory and forgetting, and racism and inclusion, Kogawa’s representation of the internment of Japanese-Canadians in the 1940s and its aftermath propelled larger debates on the reconstruction of history and the knowability of the past. “Symbolizing Obasan” furthers this discussion of Canadian identity and history by asking students to reimagine the key symbols in Obasan and create ceramic representations of these symbols. This project involves an ambitious interdisciplinary collaboration between Historic Joy Kogawa House and KPU faculty Greg Chan and Ying-Yueh Chuang and students in their classes. It represents remarkable community-engaged learning and conversation. The Faculty of Arts at KPU couldn’t be more proud to support this exhibit!

—Diane Purvey, KPU Dean of Art

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In this extraordinary exhibit, we see not only the power of conversation and collaboration between students in different disciplines, but a story about the interplay of objects, experience, memory, and words. The internment of Japanese Canadians was a lived event, one recalled by survivors and powerfully shared in stories like Obasan.

Words are powerful carriers of thought, memory, and emotion, but words can only convey part of the story.

This is why we find in places like New Denver, Slocan, Steveston, and here at Historic Joy Kogawa House, objects that deepen our emotional connection to fellow Canadians who suffered at the hands of their own government but also persevered and survived. These collaborative works of art show that stories can inspire objects and objects can, in turn, engender new experiences and new stories.

—Robert Dearle, KPU Department of English Chair

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Quotations All quotations are from the Modern Classics edition of Joy Kogawa’s Obasan published by Penguin Random House Canada in 2017, first published by Lester & Orpen Dennys in 1981.

“We are the scholarly …” Obasan, 96 “The words are not made flesh.” Obasan, 169 “The language of [Obasan’s] grief …” Obasan, 14 “Honest, Nesan, I wonder …” Obasan, 91 “We are leaving the B.C. coast …” Obasan, 96 “If there is not carefulness …” Obasan, 54 The first epigraph is taken from “My Happy Childhood in Racist British Columbia” in the Greystone edition of David Suzuki: The Autobiography, 15.

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Contributors Kodomo No Tame Leah Rosehill (Fine Arts) and Molly Livingston (English) Silent Treatment Kacey Hughes (Fine Arts) and Sean Kirk (English) Trembling Bodies Leila Nicar (Fine Arts) and Kassidy Kaszonyi (English) Stony Lives Charayah Romo (Fine Arts) and Jaskaran Mahil (English) It Is Better to Forget Murasaki Lau (Fine Arts) and Dewina Luechtefeld (English)

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KPU English and Fine Arts students at the launch of “Maple-Washing: A Disruption”

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Field trip to Historic Joy Kogawa House

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Hanging messages of hope on the cherry blossom tree

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In the ceramics studio with the English and Fine Arts students

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Leah Rosehill and Molly Livingston

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“Maple-Washing: A Disruption” launch at the KPU Library, December 19, 2019

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Special guests at the KPU Library launch

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Ann-Marie, Ying-Yueh, and Leah discuss the installation

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Installation day with Greg and Ying-Yueh

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