Both Joy Kogawa's Naomi Nakane and Sky Lee's Kae Ying Woo attempt to overcome silence and secrecy in order to reconstruct their families' histories, particularly their matrilinear histories. Their task is problematic: Naomi has no mother, and Kae has too many maternal figures battling for control. Both narrators approach their texts (and their searches for identity) with a degree of ambivalence. In Obasan, Naomi's uncertainty over the family identity she attempts to uncover manifests itself in the silences which pervade the text. Over the course of the novel, she pushes aside silence, in the process giving rise to two problematic issues at the work's centre: first, the adult Naomi who narrates must re-enter the experiences of her younger, silenced self; secondly, Naomi must overcome an oppressive silence in order to tell a story both centred around and driven by silence. / Whereas Naomi is reluctant to delve into her history, Kae is eager to recover what has been hidden from her. Instead of the numerous silences which pervade Obasan, Kae's growing ambivalence surfaces as narrative unreliability. Disappearing Moon Cafe is strongly mediated by Kae, who acknowledges the extent to which her authority is problematic; in reconstructing her past, she often reinvents it as well. / This paper explores the parallels between Naomi's and Kae's searches for family, and the ways in which similar journeys find radically different narrative expression. While the text of Obasan resists the tendency to inscribe the silences of its family narrative, Disappearing Moon Cafe battles its desire to fill in the blanks, to romanticize and invent.

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Diss. Ph. D.--English--Uppsala university, 2000. / Bibliogr. p. 243-253. Index.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Illinois State University, 2005. / Title from title page screen, viewed on April 16, 2007. Dissertation Committee: Robert McLaughlin (chair), Lynn Worsham, Sally Parry. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 312-331) and abstract. Also available in print.

The narrators of Roughing It in the Bush and Obasan struggle with the notion of home and how to reinvent it in situations of exile. Moodie is estranged when she emmigrates from Britain to Canada to find her role compromised by the rigors of the pioneering experience. Naomi, a Japanese Canadian is estranged when she and her family are expelled from their home, relocated in internment camps, and dispersed across the country during the Second World War. I argue that reinventing home requires both questioning and claiming material and discursive spaces. / Moodie reinvents home by negotiating Old and New World spaces of gender, class and culture. Naomi reinvents home by questioning official, exclusionary discourse and testifying to the Japanese Canadian history of internment and dispersal. Both narrators negotiate borders between private experience and public discourse and in the process, explore the question: "What is the meaning of home?"

Thesis (Ph.D.)--McMaster University, 2005. / Advisor: R. Hyman. Includes bibliographical references (p. 241-245). Also available via World Wide Web.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--McMaster University, 2004. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 142-154). Also available via World Wide Web.

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