Kogawa, World Literatures in English Course 2000

Different views about silence:
1. Emily: Denial is Gangrene.
2. Obasan: steadfast silence. inviolate (225).   "Kodomo no tame"
3. Naomi: end of chap 35: "Her tale is a rose with a tangled stem.  All this questioning, this clawing at her grave, is an unseemly thing."

 
4. Grandma Kato: -- "however much the effort to forget, there is no forgetfulness"(281)--release the burden of memory with writing
• Different descriptions/images of the mother
1. in the dream: a rose with a tangle stem
2. chap 38:
• tide rushing away from the shore,
• Canadian maple tree
• long black hair falling  --> Maypole Mother;
• tree trunk, --> dead tree
• chap 39 p. 244: a light piece of music, more sad than happy, but quiet and dignified, a gentle tune, hiding the cacophony life wrote in their bones.
• scarecrow Grief with gentle eyes pp. 245-46


Reconciliation and Survival: "The song of mourning is not a lifelong song."

• remembering--personal memorial service to the dead (Mother, Father, Uncle--all the "absences")

re-membering--two ideographs for love--愛 戀--系--kei as in nikkei--family lineage--a symbolic act to reweave the family unravel by the war and to weave nikkei into the tapestry of Canadian history (King-Kok Cheung)
• confirming two kinds of love and two languages
• accepting the mother's quiet tune
• Fill the emptiness of Grief with "flesh": the forest where colours meet, where there are berries, the coulie where there are roses and wildflowers.

 
• Naomi in Aunt Emily's clothes.