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09-N2739 5/21/03 9:31 AM Page 134 Ethnic Reproduction and the Amniotic Deep Joy Kogawa’s Obasan christina tourino The speech that frees comes forth from that amniotic deep Joy Kogawa, Obasan Combining prose, poetry, and documentary, Obasan records the struggle of the Japanese Canadian community against a hostility that takes many forms — long standing racial prejudice, wartime internment, and double dispersal and exile — all perpetrated by Canadians against Canadian citizens of Japanese de- scent. Kogawa’s national and political story is also an intricate tale of intimacy and loss between Japanese mothers, daughters, grandmothers, and aunts. At the intersection between the story of ethnic suffering and that of women’s lives is the question of how an ethnic community can survive and reproduce, a project that takes on special urgency when an ethnic community is under at- tack. In the epigraph above, Kogawa asserts that the amniotic deep is the source of freeing speech. I would add that the amniotic is also crucial to her ex- tended meditation about ethnic mothering in desperate circumstances. In what follows, I will argue that the amniotic space occupies the literal and figu- rative center of Kogawa’s novel — not simply as the source
Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies – University of Nebraska Press
Published: Jun 16, 2003
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