Abstract
Abstract In literary and historical writings, “trauma” has always been an important issue. Obasan and My Sixty Years of Bitterness, for example, are two postwar narratives concerning history, memory, and traumatic experiences. The author of Obasan, Joy Kogawa, was born into a Japanese family in Vancouver. In 1942, the Canadian government ordered the exile of 22,000 Japanese-Canadians living near the Pacific Coast. This order forced the Japanese-Canadians to leave their homes. In 1982, the Japanese-Canadians solicited compensation from their government for internment during the Second World War. Not only did Kogawa participate in this campaign by means of writing a stunning novel named Obasan, but she also exposed the truth of the internment. My Sixty Years of Bitterness can be read as a living remembrance of the February 28 massacre in Taiwan. Its author, Chung I-jen, a leader of the Twenty-Seven Militia Corps, describes his personal experiences in the novel. The novel also represents an effort of thousands of people to speak out against political, social and economic oppression. My thesis is intended to show how memory is employed in these two narratives as a means to expose trauma and repressed history through an analysis of their similarities and differences in form, content, and narrative techniques as well as strategies. These two novels treat personal trauma and reveal injustice as well as oppression in history. As a contrast to official historical records, they present another version of history. In them, memory is an important key to events and hidden history. It sometimes turns out to be a means of recovery from pain. The relationship among memory, history, and narrative is intriguing in that it shows how these two novels are set up as a criterion for the collective memory of a society. My thesis will be divided into five chapters. The first explains the purposes, directions, and approach of the topic. The second discusses the theories of history, memory, and narrative and their interrelationship. The third examines the importance of history, memory, and trauma in Obasan. It includes an introduction to the background of the Japanese-Canadian internment during the Second World War and an analysis of Obasan in terms of history, memory, and trauma. The fourth has two sections. The first section scrutinizes My Sixty Years of Bitterness. It deals with how the author integrates trauma with memory so as to reconstruct the repressed history and how this narrative serves as historical testimony. The second section involves a comparison of the narrative techniques used Obasan and My Sixty Years of Bitterness. The fifth chapter summarizes my observation on the relationship of history, memory, and trauma in these two narratives. Finally, in conclusion, memory is usually employed to reveal the repressed history in narratives of holocausts or of oppression.