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Obasan QUOTES

Obasan QUOTES

1 " In a time like this, let us trust in God even more. To trust when life is easy is no trust. "

― Joy Kogawa , Obasan

2 " From my years of teaching I know it's the children who say nothing who are in trouble more than the ones who complain. "

― Joy Kogawa , Obasan

3 " Where do any of us come from in this cold country? Oh Canada, whether you admitted it or not, we come from you we come from you. From the same soil, the slugs and slime and bogs and twigs and roots. We come from the country that plucks its people out like weeds and flings them into the roadside. We grow in ditches and sloughs, untended and spindly. We erupt in the valleys and mountainsides, in small towns and back alleys, sprouting upside-down on the prairies, our hair wild as spiders' legs, our feet rooted nowhere. We grow where we are not seen, we flourish where we are not heard, the thick undergrowth of an unlikely planting. Where do we come from Obasan? We come from cemetaries full of skeletons with wild roses in their grinning teeth. We come from our untold tales that wait for their telling. We come from Canada, this land that is like every land, filled with the wise, the fearful, the compassionate, the corrupt. "

― Joy Kogawa , Obasan

4 " Some people," Aunt Emily answered sharply, "are so busy seeing all sides of every issue that they neutralize concern and prevent necessary action. There's no strength in seeing all sides unless you can act where real measurable injustice exists. A lot of academic talk just immobilizes the oppressed and maintains oppressors in their positions of power. "

― Joy Kogawa , Obasan

5 " Elsewhere, people like Aunt Emily clack away at their typewriters, spreading words like buckshot, aiming at the shadow in the sky. "

― Joy Kogawa , Obasan

6 " I hate to admit it," she said, "but for all we hear about the States, Canada's capacity for racism seems even worse." "Worse?" "The American Japanese were interned as we were in Canada, and sent off to concentration camps, but their property wasn't liquidated as ours was. And look how quickly the communities reestablished themselves in Los Angeles and San Francisco. We weren't allowed to return to the West Coast like that. We've never recovered from the dispersal policy. But of course that was the government's whole idea—to make sure we'd never be visible again. Official racism was blatant in Canada. "

― Joy Kogawa , Obasan

7 " we're a "lower order of people" in one breath we are damned for being "unassailable" and the next there is fear that we'll assimilate. ... If we are educated, the complaint is that we will cease being the "ideal servant". "

― Joy Kogawa , Obasan

8 " some memories, too, might better be forgotten. didn't Obasan once say, "it is better to forget"? what purpose is served by hauling forth the jar of inedible food? if it is not seen, it does not horrify. what is past recall is past pain. "

― Joy Kogawa , Obasan

9 " Gentle Mother, we were lost together in our silences. Our wordlessness was our mutual destruction. "

― Joy Kogawa , Obasan

10 " Life is so short," I said sighing, "the past so long. Shouldn't we turn the page and move on?"

"The past is the future," Aunt Emily shot back "

― Joy Kogawa , Obasan