JSalter PhD Final Thesis Submission.pdf - University of Guelph

edefine gendered roles and expectations of old Japanese women, and how this
redistribution of power dynamics creates intergenerational cross-cultural tensions within
the family. In this reciprocal storytelling engagement, both characters perform a double
role as listener-tellers, through which they discover agency to reconfigure and self-define
their personal identities, not only within the family, but within the larger context of
community, nation, and diaspora.
Chapter 3 begins with an investigation of the complex modalities of silence
present in Kogawa’s Obasan in order to provide a historical context for Tamayose’s
Odori, which asserts that self-narration is a necessary strategy for working through the
immobilization of trauma. These two novels reveal juxtaposing perspectives on
interfamily communication when dealing with familial losses and trauma, yet both
equally emphasize the importance of listening (whether to communicative silences in
Obasan or to diverse expressive modes of storytelling in Odori.) This chapter attempts to
provide some answers to Anne Whitehead’s query about how trauma can be narrativized,
if it inherently resists language or representation. In Tamayose’s novel, the narrative
structure reproduces and re-enacts dislocation and the belatedness of trauma as conditions
of experience, which helps situate the reader in a dissociated subject position. The old
woman character Basan teaches her great-granddaughter Mai about reciprocal
storytelling as a key discursive strategy for coping with trauma, and her lessons on the
practices of storytelling include numerous examples of non-verbal modes of expression.
Mai learns she must begin to articulate the past, and drawing becomes her means.
Chapters 4 and 5 focus on two Caribbean Canadian novels, Shani Mootoo’s
Cereus Blooms at Night and David Chariandy’s Soucouyant, in which the
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