81599 001-364.pdf_out 8/2/111:08 PM K 1 joy kogawa essays on her works 81599 001-364.pdf_out 8/2/111:08 PM K 2 writers series 32 series editors joseph pivato & antonio d’alfonso Guernica Editions Inc. acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council. The Ontario Arts Council is an agency of the Government of Ontario. 81599 001-364.pdf_out 8/2/111:08 PM K 3 joy kogawa essays on her works edited by sheena wilson guernica toronto – buffalo – lancaster (u.k.) 2011 81599 001-364.pdf_out 8/2/111:08 PM K 4 Copyright © 2011, Sheena Wilson, the Authors, and Guernica Editions Inc. All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication, reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise stored in a retrieval system, without the prior consent of the publisher is an infringement of the copyright law. Sheena Wilson, Guest editor Guernica Editions Inc. P.O. Box 117, Station P, Toronto (ON), Canada M5S 2S6 2250 Military Road, Tonawanda, N.Y. 14150-6000 U.S.A. Distributors: University of Toronto Press Distribution, 5201 Dufferin Street, Toronto (ON), Canada M3H 5T8 Gazelle Book Services, White Cross Mills, High Town, Lancaster LA1 4XS U.K. Small Press Distribution, 1341 Seventh St., Berkeley, CA 94710-1409 U.S.A First edition. Printed in Canada. Legal Deposit – Fourth Quarter Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 2011925128 Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Joy Kogawa : essays on her works / edited by Sheena Wilson. (Writers series ; 32) Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 978-1-55071-311-4 I. Wilson, Sheena II. Series: Writers series (Toronto, Ont.) ; 32 PS8521.O44Z75 2011 C813’.54 C2011-902159-5 81599 001-364.pdf_out 8/2/111:08 PM K 5 Contents Acknowledgements 7 Sheena Wilson “Introduction: The multiple voices of poiesis and praxis – the work of Joy Kogawa” 9 Glenn Deer “Revising the Activist Figure in the Novels of Joy Kogawa” 43 Julie McGonegal “The Politics of Redress in Post-9/11 Canada” 71 Tim Nieguth “‘An awfully unwieldy business’: State territoriality, power, and Joy Kogawa’s Obasan” 100 Jonathan Hart “The Poetics of Moment, Exception, and Indirection in Joy Kogawa’s Lyric Poetry” 129 Irene Sywenky “Displacement, Trauma, and the Use of Fairy Tale Motifs in Joy Kogawa’s Poetry and Prose” 159 Rocío G. Davis “Joy Kogawa’s Versions of Naomi’s Road: Rewriting the Autobiographical Story of the Japanese Canadian Uprooting for Children” 205 5 81599 001-364.pdf_out 8/2/111:08 PM K 6 Barbara Turnbull “Toronto Dollar: Currency Backed by Caring” 237 Ann-Marie Metten “The Little House that Joy Saved” 256 Sheena Wilson “Interstitiality, Integrity, and the Work of the Author: A Conversation with Joy Kogawa” 278 Sheena Wilson “Biography: A narrative of life through words and actions” 340 Sheena Wilson “Awards and Honours Garnered for Obasan and for a Lifetime of Literary Work and Community Activism” 352 Joy Kogawa Excerpt from Chapter Fourteen of Gently to Nagasaki 355 Sheena Wilson Bibliography: Works By and About Joy Kogawa 359 List of Contributors 363 81599 001-364.pdf_out 8/2/111:08 PM K 7 Acknowledgements It has been a pleasure and an honour to work with all of the people who have been directly and indi- rectly involved in this collection. I would like to thank Joy Kogawa for her par- ticipation in this project, and for openly sharing her perspective with readers in the author-inter- view. For their meaningful academic work, which made this project possible, I would like to thank all the contributing authors: Rocío G. Davis, Glenn Deer, Jonathan Hart, Ann-Marie Metten, Julie McGonegal, Tim Nieguth, Irene Sywenky, and Bar- bara Turnbull. I also very much appreciate the support that I have received from Guernica Editions and all those affiliated with Guernica Writers Series: Joseph Pivato, Antonio D’Alfonso, and Michael Mirolla. A special thank you to Ikuko Suematsu for the cover picture of Joy Kogawa; to Debbie Marshall, for her valuable comments on the biography, a genre for which she has significant expertise; to William Anselmi, for his feedback on the introduc- tion and the interview; to Rebecca Halliday, for her skilful copyediting; and to E.D. Blodgett, for his continued support of my career. I would also like to thank Dean Marc Arnal, Associate Deans of Research Donald Ipperciel and Hassan Safouhi, Research Facilitator Martine 7 81599 001-364.pdf_out 8/2/111:08 PM K 8 Desrochers, as well as my many supportive col- leagues at my academic home – Campus Saint- Jean, University of Alberta – for their consistent support of my professional pursuits. The prepara- tion of this collection for publication was made possible, in part, by funding from the University of Alberta’s Endowment Fund for the Future (EFF) and the Small Faculties Support for Advancement of Scholarship (SAS). Last, but not least, I would like to thank my close friends and family for their support, espe- cially my husband Ajay Pandhi, who looked after our sons while I worked on this collection and who is supportive in ways too numerous to list. Thank you. Sheena Wilson 8 81599 001-364.pdf_out 8/2/111:08 PM K 9 Introduction The multiple voices of poiesis and praxis – the work of Joy Kogawa Sheena Wilson When I first met with Joy Kogawa to conduct the interview to be included in this collection, I was curious to find out if she had ever felt resentful of the fact that her many literary works had been overshadowed by the popular and crit- ical attention focused on her award-winning first novel, Obasan (1981). She was quick to express only appreciation: “I am just grateful really that it is there. That it became whatever it has become. I mean, that book opens doors for me. I’m grateful for that.” Two thousand eleven marks thirty years since the book’s first publica- tion. Over the last two decades, literary critics such as Guy Beauregard, Scott McFarlane, Roy Miki, Heather Zwicker, and others – reflecting on the first ten years of criticism as well as much that has come after – have argued that the enor- mous amount of literary criticism surrounding Obasan has been both a benefit and a detriment 9 81599 001-364.pdf_out 8/2/111:08 PM K 10 to the reception of Kogawa’s larger body of work, to the reception of other Japanese Cana- dian writers and their work, and, in general, to the narration of Japanese Canadian history and identity. In fact, my motivation to create a col- lection of critical essays on Kogawa’s poetry and prose came, in large part, from a desire to draw attention to and inspire further study of her lit- erary contributions beyond Obasan: her poetry, her children’s literature, and her other novels. The contributors to this collection have added significantly and have given nuance to the criti- cism currently available on Kogawa’s body of work, including Obasan. Most importantly, however, this collection gives critical attention to Kogawa’s other published material while placing the works in their proper social contexts. We can only hope that this collection will inspire future scholarship on Joy Kogawa’s multi- dimensional literary accomplishments. Obasan’s success Obasan makes recourse to a multitude of poetic devices as it traces Naomi Nakane’s re-mem- bering: a project of memory and the reconstruc- tion of the Kato-Nakane family history that revolves around both the Japanese Canadian 10 81599 001-364.pdf_out 8/2/111:08 PM K 11 West Coast evacuation1 and the atomic bombing of Nagasaki (August 9, 1945), from the narrative vantage point of the year 1972. Obasan’s lit- erary and commercial success has been attrib- uted in part to its timely ethno-cultural story of racism and human rights abuses, to the role it was therefore able to play in the redress move- ment, to its overall adaptability and universality, and, of course, to the sheer aesthetic mastery of the narrative. Obasan was the first Japanese Canadian novel to represent the Second World War experiences of the evacuation from the West Coast, and it does so through a sophisticated polyphonic narrative that well fits Linda Hutcheon’s definition of metafiction: The narra- tive acknowledges its inherent fallibility as a tex- tual representation of history and makes blatant the imperative need to understand the hetero- geneity of Japanese Canadians, their experi- ences, and their reactions to those experiences, in order to imagine a diversity of Japanese Cana- dian identities. The amount of social dialogue and academic discourse generated by this text has been monu- mental in comparison to that sparked by any one Japanese Canadian novel or any other Canadian novel that discusses the nation’s racist history, but also notably in contrast to the scholarship generated by Kogawa’s other poetry and prose. 11 81599 001-364.pdf_out 8/2/111:08 PM K 12 By the late-1980s, Obasan was being read and studied in secondary schools and universities across Canada. According to critic Paul William Martin’s 2002 doctoral thesis “Re: Producing Culture(s),” Obasan was the seventh most pop- ular text taught in English and Comparative Literature courses on the literatures of Canada, at the postsecondary level, from a list of approximately 409 commonly taught Canadian literature texts.2 By the mid-1990s, Obasan had come to represent the Japanese Canadian voice. There have been many positive outcomes from the novel’s popularity: most significantly, Obasan focused attention on the historical injustices of the evacuation and helped narrate a specific Japanese Canadian identity, which contributed to the redress campaign.