Writing the Outsider Within: Interned Language in Kerri Sakamoto’s The Electrical Field
The author Kerri Sakamoto can be placed in a literary genealogy of Japanese- Canadian writers who have fictionally treated the theme of the Canadian internment of Canadians of Japanese origin during the Second World War. Rather like Joy Kogawa’s Obasan, The Electrical Field gives us what has been as...
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| Publicado no: | URI:https://journals.openedition.org/ces, |
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| Autor principal: | |
| Formato: | Article ou chapitre numérique |
| Idioma: | Anglais |
| Publicado em: |
Commonwealth Essays and Studies
2022
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| Acesso em linha: | Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM |
| Resumo: | The author Kerri Sakamoto can be placed in a literary genealogy of Japanese- Canadian writers who have fictionally treated the theme of the Canadian internment of Canadians of Japanese origin during the Second World War. Rather like Joy Kogawa’s Obasan, The Electrical Field gives us what has been assimilated to a language of trauma: a narrative texture seemingly embroidered around the concept of loss itself. In this article I will attempt to foreground the ways in which an attentive reading of the novel can take us from the theme of the traumatised Japanese community constrained by their memories, to the constraints imposed on the narrative form and texture themselves: from a novel about internment to a narrative of internment. In the final analysis The Electrical Field fits into the category of those Japanese-Canadian novels which the critic Gerry Turcotte has perceptively qualified as “uncanny”, in that they enable “an emblematic articulation of [Canada’s] fears about settlement, dispossession, miscegenation, and contamination”, (Turcotte 124), thus expressing Canada’s ‘foreignness’ to its own self-image. |
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