Writer Joy Kogawa in her Toronto home on Feb. 22, 2019.The Canadian Press
Before all of Joy Kogawa’s successes – before she wrote Obasan, her semi-autobiographical novel chronicling the forced relocation and incarceration of Japanese Canadians during the Second World War; before she was a pivotal figure in the Redress Movement, which demanded that the federal government apologize and compensate those Japanese Canadians; before she was an outspoken advocate, raising awareness around the atrocities Imperial Japan afflicted in the Pacific War – before all that, Kogawa was a poet.
As a six-year-old in an internment camp in Slocan, B.C., Kogawa wrote little songs. One was about Jack Frost. At 24, as an unfulfilled housewife, she wrote her first verses. And now, at 88, Kogawa has released From the Lost and Found Department, an expansive collection of new and selected poetry from her more than five-decade career.
Her new poems are sparse yet visceral, recalling memories or making quiet observations. They evoke images of nature – cherry blossoms, mountains, stones, trees and ponds – and her life in Toronto, where she’s lived since 1979. Many of the poems are dedicated to friends, family and public figures: her daughter Deidre, late poet Roy Kiyooka, Olivia Chow and Jack Layton.
“I’m not a very conscious writer,” says Kogawa, over e-mail. “I don’t think of themes or ideas. It’s more like being a water heater along the wall with a valve that lets out steam. The valve is pen in hand. An emotional force builds up either through relationships, or the lack or loss or absence of relationships. Words erupt or ooze or steam through.”
Yet in all of her novels, poems and children’s books, Kogawa’s writing is filtered through the identity of a nisei – second-generation Canadian – and that of a poet. The result is an oeuvre that has left an indelible mark on Japanese writers in North America. “Her work is so voluminous, it’s so virtuosic,” says Brandon Shimoda, an American-Japanese poet, who wrote the introduction for From the Lost and Found Department. “I think for me as a reader, I see that she is returning to certain questions and frustrations, and certain loves and certain losses repeatedly in all these different genres.”
Kogawa published her first poem in 1959 in the Toronto-based church magazine Presbyterian Record. By the 1960s, Kogawa and her husband, David Kogawa, and their two children moved from Grand Forks, B.C., to Moose Jaw, Sask., where writing became a lifeline. “I was a stay-at-home mother and hungry for more life,” says Kogawa.
From 1967 to 1977, Kogawa released three poetry collections: The Splintered Moon, A Choice of Dreams and Jericho Road. Her breakthrough came in 1981, when she published Obasan, the story of a family forcibly removed from their home in Vancouver after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, and the haunting ripple effects of that displacement.
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Inspired by Kogawa’s own family’s experience, Obasan was the first Canadian novel to detail the incarceration of Japanese Canadians. All people of Japanese descent were declared enemy aliens under the War Measures Act in 1942, stripped of their homes and businesses, and sent to live in internment camps. In all, 27,000 people were detained without charge or trial. Others were deported to Japan.
Obasan became a galvanizing political force and Kogawa herself became an early activist in the Redress Movement. Lawmakers read passages from the novel in Parliament during the official Redress settlement and apology in 1988.
For Canadian author Kerri Sakamoto, discovering Kogawa’s writing was a revelation. Her 2018 novel, Floating City, was inspired by Obasan and explored the legacy of internment. “Like most sansei – third generation Japanese Canadians – I grew up in the shadow of internment and its unspoken legacy. With the first words of Obasan – ‘There is a silence that cannot speak’ – she shattered that silence,” says Sakamoto. “It helped form a foundation on which other stories, including mine, could be told.”
Kogawa’s work has also examined the difficult realities of her own life. Her third novel, The Rain Ascends, published in 1995, tells the story of a daughter who learns that her father is a pedophile. The plot mirrors the same revelation about her own father, a beloved Anglican priest who confessed to the church that he was a serial abuser of young boys. She later wrote more explicitly about her father’s abuse in her 2016 memoir, Gently to Nagasaki.
She also used her memoir to write honestly about the atrocities committed by Imperial Japan, including the mass killing and rape of Chinese citizens by Japanese soldiers in Nanjing, China in 1937. She argued that Japan had not yet fully reckoned with its wartime past and later successfully petitioned the Ontario government to mark Dec. 13 as Nanjing Massacre Commemorative Day.
Truth-telling is paramount to Kogawa, a value she learned from her mother.
“It feels safer to run headlong into the fire of difficult truths and to get to the safe place of ashes where the fire is spent,” says Kogawa. “If we acknowledge our wrongs, if we publicly embrace what we would rather people didn’t know, I think we make the world safer.”
“She has a very powerful moral core that radiates out in her writing and in her thinking,” says Lynne Kutsukake, a Japanese-Canadian writer based in Toronto.
This can make a memorable impression. Kutsukake remembers a moment at the Vancouver Writers Fest in 2016 that exemplified the power of Kogawa’s poetry. “She quoted the opening lines from Obasan and it was quite astonishing because the audience started reciting with her. Nobody had the book. It was like at a rock concert, where somebody starts singing that song everybody knows.”
Kogawa is giddy about the 'miracle' of technology allowing people to learn about Canada's racist past that forced thousands of citizens like her out of their homes and into internment camps during the Second World War.Handout
She adds, “It exemplified the power that language has and why it’s so important to publish literature,” says Kutsukake. “It can grab you by the heart and stay with you.”
Revisiting and compiling the poems for From the Lost and Found Department, Kogawa says she didn’t dwell too much on her old work. “They came from whoever I was at the time,” says Kogawa. “What I wonder these days is where was Joy Kogawa in her role as a mother? My poor orphaned kids! Both my parents were hungry, were lonely and so was I. Lonely and scared of being abandoned, so I was always in flight. Both my kids are hugely more grounded than I ever was. Hallelujah for that.”
These days, Kogawa lives on her own in a downtown Toronto studio apartment. Her days are mostly quiet: going for walks, reading, FaceTiming with friends and family. She tries to write every day.
“I think the most important thing is just to show up. That is, to sit there, sit there with pen and paper, or in front of the computer. If I do that, and nothing comes, well, at least I showed up.”
Samantha Edwards