To confront her past is to salt her wounds, but that is the cost Naomi pays in order to end the silence that has been kept so long by her family-the decades long hushed secret concerning her mother’s disappearance. Therefore, diving into the reservoir of her traumatic experiences means confronting unmourned losses and deaths as well as previously unclaimed and unacknowledged experiences. all caused by the Japanese evacuation and relocation. Naomi is a melancholic subject who lives with unresolved losses, deaths, separations, etc. A key part of the novel involves the psychological journey that the narrator Naomi takes in order to fill out the space of memory left empty by the collective silence of her family members. What does it mean for postcolonial subjects who have endured oppressive histories to remember the painful past? This paper explores this question by focusing on Joy Kogawa’s Obasan which unravels the traumatic experience of Japanese Canadian internment and the ensuing dispersal policy of the internees.
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