Abstrakt: | On the basis of Joy Kogawa’s Obasan, the main objective of this paper is to take
under the scrutinizing eye how the central protagonist retrieves a selective portion of her
childhood memories during the Second World War in an effort to reshape her fragmented
identity as a Japanese‑Canadian
and to deal with the feeling of displacement. Analyzing essential
memories, conversations, and stories within the plotline, the aim is to demonstrate that
Naomi, in order to fight her identity crisis and feeling of displacement — due to the Japanese
community’s sense of belonging in Canada being shuttered by the Canadian government —
recasts her personal experiences to her own needs for the identity refashioning in‑between
cultures, therefore, in Homi Bhabha’s terms, giving life to a sort of “Third Space.” This paper
will therefore demonstrate numerous ways in terms of which the protagonist intrudes upon
iconic wilderness and rural landscapes in Canada — hitherto emptied of the indigenous and
minorities and thus functioning as a sort of privileged sites of national identity — so as to
transform them into heterogeneous and more inclusive spaces, breaking the binary opposition
between away and home, a newcomer and native. Significantly, the protagonist’s storytelling
may be distinguished by great attention to nature, botanical imagery, and landscapes shaped
by experiences of displacement, and it may be argued that the novel is targeted at re‑visiting
traditional sites of identity construction as well as bringing into tensions historicizing and
idealizing visions of the natural environment to challenge the myths of Japanese‑Canadians’
identity that these sites were hitherto created to support. It brings into life a “Third Space”
in the form of a personal island which will neither float to the Japanese Archipelago nor
towards Canada, but it will be a separate entity including both. Hence, the dialogic relation
between identity and rural and wilderness landscapes provides alternative forms of meaningful
emplacement for the self — a personal “floating homeland” anchored in‑between
the two
cultures. |