Obasan
by Joy Kogawa
Canada interned its Japanese citizens. One woman breaks the silence.
For you if
you want to understand how a democratic country interns its own citizens and then teaches its children that it didn't happen
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During WWII the Canadian government forcibly relocated and interned Japanese Canadians — took their homes, their businesses, their boats, dispersed their communities. Kogawa was a child in the camps. This novel — written thirty years later — is the dispatch from inside that experience and inside the silence that followed it. The Japanese Canadian community's response to what happened was silence — Kogawa calls it the stone that swallows its pain. The novel broke that silence open.
Where This Book Lives
- Setting
- Canada • North America
- Voice
- Written by a Canadian author
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