I think about how we become aware of things about the world in our childhood a lot. Think back to how you learned about various things in the world. When did you find out about slavery, and how? What about the Holocaust? Or great wars?
In this book, we find our narrator rediscovering and putting name to the trauma she and her family went through during WWII as political prisoners in internment camps in Canada.
I didn’t really know that Canada also interned its Japanese citizens in concentration camps the way we did in the US. For me, I tend to view Japan’s role as enemy in WWII as an American problem (and that’s of course my American-centric chauvinism coming though). This of course is wrong and wrong-headed because it ignores the UK’s (and their previous colonies’) role in fighting Japan through India and China, as well as the danger that Japan posed to Australia and New Zealand.
So then this novel caught me off guard in that way. We find our narrator, now in the late 1970s thinking back on vague memories she had, but more specifically discussing these memories with her family, especially her grandmother, and understanding more and more about them through oral and written family histories.
There’s a anger that gives way to sadness in this book that is really affecting. It’s a soberly written and sobering book to read.
The longest and much interesting sections comes in the early parts when we read a series of diary entries and letters capturing the sense of betrayal the family feels and how, this many decades removed, the narrator is asked to revisit and add to her sense of the world.
(Photo: https://www.amazon.com/Obasan-Joy-Kogawa/dp/0385468865/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1550584870&sr=8-1&keywords=obasan)
