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.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:QMM.27936 |
| Date | January 1997 |
| Creators | Denomy, Jennifer. |
| Contributors | Cooke, Nathalie (advisor) |
| Publisher | McGill University |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Coverage | Master of Arts (Department of English.) |
| Rights | All items in eScholarship@McGill are protected by copyright with all rights reserved unless otherwise indicated. |
| Relation | alephsysno: 001618747, proquestno: MQ37199, Theses scanned by UMI/ProQuest. |
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