Analysis Of An Excerpt From Obasan By Joy Kogawa

The excerpt from Obasan is loaded with images and emotions of poverty and weariness. Kogawa uses strategies as shifts in point of view to convey her theme to her audience. She skillfully uses language, tone, and images. Furthermore, she appropriately throws in Japanese words to highlight the values of Japanese culture. In the first paragraph, Kogawa’s point of view reflects the general experience of all the mistreated Japanese-Canadians during WWII. Her descriptions and omniscient point of view, (beginning with “We”) pass on a sense of overall suffering, endurance, and unity in culture. Her images can be felt since she uses the words “rain, cloud, mist” to describe moisture. She also describes the “air overladen with weeping”

Due to this, Kogawa gives life to her story and obtains the sympathy of her audience. The structure of these descriptions is loaded with long sentences that describe the experiences of being in a large group. Her language is sensitive, incisive, and melancholy. Kogawa chooses details that talk in images as well as emotions, comparing the wronged subjects to “fragments of fragments” and the “silences that speak from stone”. Despite the fact Kogawa explains they are “the despised rendered voiceless”, we realize that stories such as hers give these survivors and deceased a voice. Her nostalgia displays helplessness and misery; however, the overriding theme insists that the strong will conquer to keep the culture and its memories alive. Kogawa also throws in various forms of figurative language such as metaphors (“We are hammers and chisels”), allusions (“We are the man in the Gospel of John”) to Christian Suffering, and personification (“the sleeping mountain”) in order to pass on a story and vast expanse of suffering noticeable by all creatures and all of nature. Back to her omniscient point of view, she uses that technique in order to create details about the experience of the Japanese-Canadians without