Histories reclaimed and borders transgressed: the narratives of Michael Ondaatje and Joy Kogawa in postcolonial and multicultural Canada

Canada as an officially bi-cultural nation has over time become transformed into its present and officially multicultural state. Arguably, it dates back, even before the 1988 Canadian Multiculturalism Act, to late 1960s when writers such as Michael Ondaatje, naturalized Canadian, and Joy Kogawa, Canadian-born of Japanese origin, appear on the Canadian literary scene as fledgling poets, only later to establish themselves as prominent writers of fiction. While Ondaatje is considered to be more experimental in the transgression of generic boundaries by suturing historical, biographical, autobiographical or poetic texts into “real life” and art combined, Kogawa, on the other hand, transgresses the borders of a fictive narrative to enhance fragments of documented facts masterfully woven into a communal historical story. This thesis explores Ondaatje and Kogawa‟s major preoccupations: their concept of truth and fiction in history as a literary artifact; the peripherality from which both writers portray non-official history such as the Japanese-Canadians‟ before, during and after the World War II period in the case of Kogawa, and in Ondaatje‟s unhistorical narratives of immigrants excluded from the official history of Canada; their narrative aesthetics in the Canadian post(-)colonial and postmodernist context; and their contribution to Canadian literary history. Included in the discussion are the following aspects which may be considered original: a comparative analysis of Ondaatje‟s works with those of other (non-) Canadian writers; the Hisroshima/Nagasaki bombings in The English Patient and Obasan revisited from a racialized perspective; Hayden White‟s notion of the historical text as literary artifact applied to both Ondaatje and Kogawa‟s works; Julia Kristeva‟s psycholinguistic theory and Obasan; and an analysis of Ondaatje‟s latest work Divisadero. The recognition of “other solitudes” by literary critics such as Hutcheon and Richmond is a call to reincorporate the once marginally-relegated discourse of the „other‟ into the traditional monocentric concerns. The metaphoricity of early as well as contemporary Canadian writers, peoples of imagined communities in general, requires a kind of doubleness in writing; a temporality of representation that moves between cultural formations and social processes without causal logic (Bhabha). Michael Ondaatje and Joy Kogawa fit well within Canada‟s “sense of being marginal” (Elspeth Cameron) as a multicultural nation which, arguably, has driven Canadians to seek a discourse to locate a tradition of their own. While Ondaatje‟s situation is that of a transplanted/transcultural artist, Kogawa‟s is the marginalized voice in search of a liminal space to represent the sameness and difference in her (Japanese-Canadian) identity. A condition such as theirs gestures inevitably towards the marginal since both writers are products of hybridity: in-between the postcolonial and the new world. The accompanying doubleness perhaps marks the transgression and blending (read: uprootedness and assimilation) which characterize their works.

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