침묵의 이야기를 통한 단절의 해소

황남엽(Hwang Namyeob) 한국동서비교문학학회 2011 동서 비교문학저널 Vol.0 No.25

Hiromi Goto’s Chorus of Mushrooms and Joy Kogawa’s Obasan break the historical silence of the marginalized race using the speakers’ voices. Murasaki from Chorus of Mushrooms and Naomi from Obasan are the speaking agents or subjects that break the silence on racism and separation of the family. Shameful history and the trauma of racism are reshaped and recovered by Goto and Kogawa in Murasaki and Naomi’s narratives. Goto in Chorus of Mushrooms criticizes Kay’s method of assimilation and resolves family members’ sense of separation and conflict through Murasaki’s retelling. Goto gives voice to the silent and passive Naoe, through Murasaki’s fantasies and reflections on her own grandmother. In the process of Murasaki’s retelling of her grandmother, Naoe is reborn into an active, enthusiastic, and passionate woman giving challenge to the stereotypes of the Asian woman. Also, Murasaki’s sisterhood with her mother helps Kae to recover her Japanese roots and her relationship with Naoe. Finally Tonkatsu’s family members forgive and understand each other due to the bond of sisterhood. Kogawa in Obasan criticizes the treatment of Japanese Canadians during World War Ⅱ and reveals their hidden history. Kogawa intertwines history with fictional tragedy, and invokes themes of isolation and separation in Naomi Nakane’s narrative. The narrative reveals how both silence and voice can give strength and understanding, and brings together three generations within a family. In the process of retelling history, Naomi finally listens to the silence, Obasan’s voice, and understands her mother’s love for her children by engaging in silence. Naomi gives voice to Obasan, and eventually understands her mother’s silence as a protection against racism and prejudice, and in doing so, Naomi gains a greater understanding of her own mother. The loneliness of isolation and separation become more bearable, with the retelling narrative. Goto and Kogawa demonstrate that both Asian Canadians and Caucasians have responsibilities for the problem of racism. Both sides must make an effort to remove racial prejudices against one another to share a more harmonious experience for social integration. Goto and Kogawa, who lived as minorities in Canada, criticize racism as a creator of conflict and segregation within communities and families. Their narratives address racial prejudice by allowing readers to re-visit a Canadian history affected by racist and prejudiced laws and views. These narratives retell their own experiences as minorities in a whitecentered history. The retelling of these stories provide a better outcome for the families, than the true story. In short, Goto and Kogawa pursue into the tolerant world without any racial prejudices through the power of telling.

차별적 인종화와 디아스포라의 역사적 외상 ―조이 코가와의 『오바상』

김미령 ( Miryung Kim ) 21세기영어영문학회 2017 영어영문학21 Vol.30 No.1

This paper explores differential racialization, diaspora, and historical trauma in Canada in Joy Kogawa`s Obasan. Canadian multiculturalism has been an integral part of the national identity, and the Canadian government has suggested that this multiculturalism is the heritage of tolerance in Canadian history. However, Joy Kogawa, as an ethnic minority writer, rebuts the contention by rewriting the Japanese-Canadian community`s history, which had been silenced and erased in official Canadian history. Obasan presents how white-oriented society has enforced differential racialization and institutional racism. Since Japanese people first immigrated, white Canadians considered them as a `lower order of people.` However, they were also afraid of `Yellow Peril.` Their ambivalent emotion towards Japanese-Canadians took the form of evacuation. Obasan focuses on the evacuation, internment, and diaspora of Japanese-Canadians during World War II. To heal the historical and community trauma, Kogawa presents Naomi, whose hybridity allows her to understand both Canadian and Japanese culture. Obasan insists ethnic minorities have to remember and face history to overcome and heal the disasters in the past.

We Are the Country: Rethinking Race, Nation, and Multiculturalism in Canada through Joy Kogawa’s Obasan

Lee, Yoo-Hyeok 한국중앙영어영문학회 2020 영어영문학연구 Vol.62 No.1

This paper revisits some aspects of Joy Kogawa’s Obasan to discuss the cultural politics of race, nation, and multiculturalism in Canada in the context of post 9/11. Her literary representation of Japanese Canadians’ interment experiences during WWII reveals the silenced and forgotten history of racial discrimination that emerged in the form of racism masquerading as nationalism in Canadian history. Notably, Kogawa tries to do so in close relation to her own contemporary racial discrimination minorities including Japanese Canadians confront on a daily basis after WWII until she publishes her novel in 1981. Furthermore, this paper rethinks race, nation, and multiculturalism in Canada through Kogawa’s Obasan, in close relation to the cultural politics of post 9/11. It is because the cultural and political topography of racial politics in post 9/11 era in Canada can also be characterized as the return of racism masquerading as nationalism. By analyzing these two similar forms of racism, this paper questions the official, mainstream discourse of Canadian multiculturalism and argues that the ideal of what Cecil Foster calls “genuine multiculturalism,” the ideal that “all citizens are genuinely equal and share the same rights and privileges,” is often cherished and pursued by those on the margin.

We Are the Country: Rethinking Race, Nation, and Multiculturalism in Canada through Joy Kogawa’s Obasan

이유혁 한국중앙영어영문학회 2020 영어영문학연구 Vol.62 No.1

This paper revisits some aspects of Joy Kogawa’s Obasan to discuss the cultural politics of race, nation, and multiculturalism in Canada in the context of post 9/11. Her literary representation of Japanese Canadians’ interment experiences during WWII reveals the silenced and forgotten history of racial discrimination that emerged in the form of racism masquerading as nationalism in Canadian history. Notably, Kogawa tries to do so in close relation to her own contemporary racial discrimination minorities including Japanese Canadians confront on a daily basis after WWII until she publishes her novel in 1981. Furthermore, this paper rethinks race, nation, and multiculturalism in Canada through Kogawa’s Obasan, in close relation to the cultural politics of post 9/11. It is because the cultural and political topography of racial politics in post 9/11 era in Canada can also be characterized as the return of racism masquerading as nationalism. By analyzing these two similar forms of racism, this paper questions the official, mainstream discourse of Canadian multiculturalism and argues that the ideal of what Cecil Foster calls “genuine multiculturalism,” the ideal that “all citizens are genuinely equal and share the same rights and privileges,” is often cherished and pursued by those on the margin.

The Coming-of-Age Narrative of Confessional Healing in Joy Kogawa`s Obasan

( Chang Hee Kim ) 한국현대영미소설학회 2015 현대영미소설 Vol.22 No.2

Kogawa’s Obasan is a bildungsroman that portrays the narrator Naomi Nakane’s transformation in the wake of her clan’s internment during WWII. Naomi reaches adulthood, in a manner that she changes from an infantile and silent Japanese subject, traumatized by the mysterious absence of her mother as well as her wartime experiences, to a “healthy” Canadian subject. Naomi’s coming of age, as a result, is accompanied by a growing pain, a racial injury and grief that she pays for, while fleshing out a new Canadian subjectivity in exchange for the memory of her “skeleton” mother.” Indebted to Anne A. Cheng’s theory of racial melancholia, this paper shows that the first step towards curing Japanese Canadians’ racial injury is to be able to recognize that they themselves are disciplined to be invisible and silent vis-a-vis white authority, thus allowing them to regain their voice and to reclaim their national identity as Japanese CANADIANs rather than JAPANESE Canadians.

Chronotope of Congregation in Joy Kogawa’s Obasan

Kim, Dae-Joong 한국중앙영어영문학회 2013 영어영문학연구 Vol.55 No.1

In this paper, analyzing Obasan written by Joy Kogawa, a Japanese Canadian, I, as an endeavor to get over the binary system of articulation and silence, argue that Obasan dialectically goes beyond contradiction between silence and articulation. Methodologically, I use Walter Benjamin’s explanation of storyteller and storytelling as well as Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s philosophical idea of inter-subjectivity. Meanwhile, I discover that death, reminiscence, mourning and healing are central themes of the novel that constitutes a totality of the novel, the chronotope of congregation. There are four narratives in Obasan: aunt Obasan’s silence, Aunt Emily’s political articulation, Naomi’s contradictory narrative, and narrative of Naomi’s mother. In Obasan, chronotope of congregation embedding storytelling connotes complex poetic relations within the totality of commonplaces which include dialogic, heteroglossic, and intersubjective relations as well as eco-imagery and the healing ritual form. Besides, the narratives in Obasan reveal four aspects: corporeality of narratives; death as the center of the chronotope; the spider web structure within chronotope that interweaves stories (narratives) not in a harmonious but dialectical way; and discovering truth via Naomi’s active listening to her mother’s truthful stories.

Chronotope of Congregation in Joy Kogawa’s Obasan

김대중 한국중앙영어영문학회 2013 영어영문학연구 Vol.55 No.1

In this paper, analyzing Obasan written by Joy Kogawa, a Japanese Canadian, I, as an endeavor to get over the binary system of articulation and silence, argue that Obasan dialectically goes beyond contradiction between silence and articulation. Methodologically, I use Walter Benjamin’s explanation of storyteller and storytelling as well as Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s philosophical idea of inter-subjectivity. Meanwhile, I discover that death, reminiscence, mourning and healing are central themes of the novel that constitutes a totality of the novel, the chronotope of congregation. There are four narratives in Obasan: aunt Obasan’s silence, Aunt Emily’s political articulation, Naomi’s contradictory narrative, and narrative of Naomi’s mother. In Obasan, chronotope of congregation embedding storytelling connotes complex poetic relations within the totality of commonplaces which include dialogic, heteroglossic, and intersubjective relations as well as eco-imagery and the healing ritual form. Besides, the narratives in Obasan reveal four aspects: corporeality of narratives; death as the center of the chronotope; the spider web structure within chronotope that interweaves stories (narratives) not in a harmonious but dialectical way; and discovering truth via Naomi’s active listening to her mother’s truthful stories.

외상문학에 함축된 치유와 윤리 -돈 드릴로의『추락하는 남자』와 조이 코가와의 『오바상』병치 연구

김봉은 ( Bong Eun Kim ) 한국영어영문학회 2011 영어 영문학 Vol.57 No.1

Don DeLillo has shown considerable interest in terror, frequently depicting extreme dread of something terrible to happen, in his literary texts. Since more than three thousand innocent people in New York were killed by the 9-11 terrorist attack in 2001, the anticipation about what kind of fiction he would write as a New Yorker was high. DeLillo`s novel Falling Man (2007) in fragmentary detail represents the scene of the terrorism from the perspective of Keith Neudecker, a lawyer who escapes the collapsing world trader center. Neudecker`s post-traumatic stress disorder in the first chapter is followed by the free-associative portrayal of various impacts of the 9-11 terror on Neudecker`s wife Lienne in the second chapter. The random mixture of the first person narratives from such diverse view-point characters as Neudecker`s son Justin, relatives and friends, with dialogues and recollections yields a very close picture of the consequences of terrorism. Reading DeLillo`s Falling Man in juxtaposition with a Japanese Canadian novel Obasan by Joy Kogawa, reminiscences of the maltreatment of Japanese Canadians during and after the second world war, surfaces the authorial intention of the two novels. They as trauma literature emerge to aim at curing the readers and proposing post-traumatic ethics. Laurie Vickroy`s theory of trauma narrative and cure, E. Ann Kaplan`s theory of trauma witness narrative and responsibility, and Emmanuel Levinas`s theory of trauma memory and ethics offer theoretical grounds for the convincing analysis of the two texts.

The Coming-of-Age Narrative of Confessional Healing in Joy Kogawa’s Obasan

김창희 한국현대영미소설학회 2015 현대영미소설 Vol.22 No.2

Kogawa’s Obasan is a bildungsroman that portrays the narrator Naomi Nakane’s transformation in the wake of her clan’s internment during WWII. Naomi reaches adulthood, in a manner that she changes from an infantile and silent Japanese subject, traumatized by the mysterious absence of her mother as well as her wartime experiences, to a “healthy” Canadian subject. Naomi’s coming of age, as a result, is accompanied by a growing pain, a racial injury and grief that she pays for, while fleshing out a new Canadian subjectivity in exchange for the memory of her “skeleton” mother.” Indebted to Anne A. Cheng’s theory of racial melancholia, this paper shows that the first step towards curing Japanese Canadians’ racial injury is to be able to recognize that they themselves are disciplined to be invisible and silent vis-à-vis white authority, thus allowing them to regain their voice and to reclaim their national identity as Japanese CANADIANs rather than JAPANESE Canadians.

“Mother, I am listening. Assist me to hear you"

Sung Hee Yook 한국아메리카학회 2009 美國學論集 Vol.41 No.1

What does it mean for postcolonial subjects who have endured oppressive histories to remember the painful past? This paper explores this question by focusing on Joy Kogawa's Obasan which unravels the traumatic experience of Japanese Canadian internment and the ensuing dispersal policy of the internees A key part of the novel involves the psychological journey that the narrator Naomi takes in order to fill out the space of memory left empty by the collective silence of her family members Naomi is a melancholic subject who lives with unresolved losses, deaths, separations, etc all caused by the Japanese evacuation and relocation Therefore, diving into the reservoir of her traumatic experiences means confronting unmourned losses and deaths as well as previously unclaimed and unacknowledged experiences To confront her past is to salt her wounds, but that is the cost Naomi pays in order to end the silence that has been kept so long by her family-the decades long hushed secret concerning her mother's disappearance This paper examines Naomi's relationships with her family members and traces her journey out of silence, as it offers an exploration of how Naomi negotiates between the past and the present, forgetting and remembering, and verbal and nonverbal languages Naomi's traumatic past also serves as the place from which questions of her present identity arise Thus, Naomi's joruney is explored in relation to the construction of her present identity