The Book as (Anti)National Heroine: Trauma and Witnessing in Joy Kogawa’s Obasan

Joy Kogawa's Obasan has enjoyed a status unprecedented for a book written by a non-white Canadian. The novel has been credited with changing the Canadian literary canon, facilitating a practice of multicultural pedagogy, and bridging the gap between writing and political activism. The phenomenon of Obasan has consequences far beyond literature and pedagogy, and can be seen as symptomatic of larger shifts that an integrative analysis of gender, race, class, and sexuality has brought about in Canadian constructions of national identity. Kogawa's text addresses the relationship between narrative and history by forcing Canada to undergo a radical change in its communal knowledge of itself as a nation. Obasan thus succeeds in mediating the relationship between narrative and history, and makes it possible to rethink and transform history by bearing literary witness to trauma.