Obasan by Joy Kogawa

Where do any of us come from in this cold country?  Oh, Canada, whether it is admitted or not, we come from you we come from you.  From the same soil, the slugs and slime and bogs and twigs and roots.  We come from the country that plucks its people out like weeds and flings them into the roadside.  We grow in ditches and sloughs, untended and spindly.  We erupt in the valleys and mountainsides, in small towns and back alleys, sprouting upside down on the prairies, our hair as wild as spider's legs, our feet rooted nowhere.  We grow where we are not seen, we flourish where we are not heard, the thick undergrowth of an unlikely planting.  Where do we come from, Obasan?  We come from cemeteries full of skeletons with wild roses in their grinning teeth.  We come rom our untold tales that wait for their telling.  We come from Canada, this land that is like every land, filled with the wise, the fearful, the compassionate, the corrupt.

Naomi Nakane is a schoolteacher in rural Alberta, where her Japanese ancestry makes her--well, not unique, exactly, but it provokes comments from her students, largely the children of white farmers.  Naomi is prickly with her students, resentful toward their ignorance and prying.  Behind the discomfort--behind the central fact of her life in Alberta--is a history that Naomi wants to move past, unlike her Aunt Emily, including her own childhood in Canada's Japanese internment camps and her own separation from her mother and father.  When her great-uncle--Obasan's husband--dies suddenly, she's forced to confront the truth of her internment and the Japanese-Canadian experience as a whole.

Obasan's dive into Naomi's memories is often impressionistic, and though chronological, can be difficult to arrange into a coherent narrative that helps the reader understand exactly where the Japanese were sent and why.  She relies on overheard conversations between adults to fill in the gaps, but the method makes sense--what can a child understand of the reasons that she has been taken from her mother and sent to the British Columbia mountains?  Kogawa renders these scenes with an eye for strong detail, like the orange that Obasan, her aunt, presents to a destitute and desperate mother on the train toward internment, or the treasured doll that gets left behind.  A deep dive through a set of documents provided by her Aunt Emily helps Naomi discover at last what happened to her mother, who returned to Japan instead of being sent to the camps, and Kogawa's description of the destruction by atomic bomb of Nagasaki is an unflinching portrait of pure and honest horror that few real horror books could ever match.

There are few books that are set in Alberta, where I recently went.  At least half of Obasan actually takes place in British Columbia.  But what I didn't expect was that Obasan would feel so relevant and fresh to my own place and time.  It is, at its heart, a story of what happens when you separate families in the name of abstract notions of national security.  What happens is you fuck them up forever.  Naomi's separation from her family--even though much of Obasan is a story of perseverance and strength in the face of adversity--has provided her with nearly insoluble trauma.  Facing it, as her aunt encourages, can bring her to a kind of detente with it, but it is ineradicable.  And as Aunt Emily reminds us, about a different country but not less true: "What this country did to us, it did to itself."  The trauma we inflict on those seeking asylum at our own southern border we inflict on ourselves, and sooner our later, it will come back around to us.