Joy Kogawa
Joy Kogawa nasceu em Vancouver em 1935, filha de pais nipo-canadenses. Durante a Segunda Guerra Mundial, Joy e sua família foram forçadas a se mudar para Slocan, na Colúmbia Britânica, uma injustiça que a Sra. Kogawa aborda em seu romance de 1981, Obasan . Ela trabalhou para educar os canadenses sobre a história dos nipo-canadenses e foi ativa na luta por reparação governamental oficial. A Sra. Kogawa estudou na Universidade de Alberta e na Universidade de Saskatchewan. Sua publicação poética mais recente é A Garden of Anchors . O longo poema A Song of Lilith , publicado em 2000 com arte de Lilian Broca, reconta a história de Lilith, a mítica primeira parceira de Adão. Em 1986, a Sra. Kogawa foi nomeada Membro da Ordem do Canadá e, em 2006, foi nomeada Membro da Ordem da Colúmbia Britânica. Em 2010, o governo japonês homenageou a Sra. Kogawa com a Ordem do Sol Nascente "por sua contribuição para a compreensão e preservação da história nipo-canadense". A Sra. Kogawa atualmente mora em Toronto.
Atualizado em julho de 2013
Stories from This Author
Excerpt from "Gently to Nagasaki" (a work in progress) - Chapter 46
10 de Setembro de 2013 • Joy Kogawa
It was a quirky millisecond contact of eyes in the city of angels, city of strangers. In 2011, I was in Los Angeles, attending an Asian American symposium. During a break before supper, Ray Hsu, a poet from Vancouver and I were exploring an area called Japan town. My first time there. Gift shops, restaurants, tourists milling about. We were wandering back out of the plaza when from out of nowhere a voice called, “Joy!” I turned, looked up. “It’s …
Excerpt from "Gently to Nagasaki" (a work in progress) - Chapter 42
5 de Setembro de 2013 • Joy Kogawa
My brother said the actions by a church that did not want us back were deliberate and intentional and had been concealed by a “code of silence” until Greg revealed them. The contrast between the companion churches in Vancouver and Seattle is a tale of two bishops, a good shepherd and a wolf in sheep’s clothing. Bishop Huston tends his flock. Bishop Heathcotte rends them. Love was alive in the Seattle church. The personal belongings of his exiled parishioners were …
From Gently to Nagasaki - Part 3
23 de Janeiro de 2011 • Joy Kogawa
Read Part 2 >> The word “rape,” the word “murder,” the word “horror,” the word “atrocity,” the word “massacre,” none can adequately describe ‘that for which there is no word.’ Minnie Vautrin and Iris Chang were both, in the end, swallowed up in the quick sand. Iris Chang, a young woman of thirty-six committed suicide in 2004, driving away from home at 3:00 a.m. with a revolver, leaving a two-year-old son and a husband. I am told by a friend …
From Gently to Nagasaki - Part 2
16 de Janeiro de 2011 • Joy Kogawa
Read Part 1 >>Where, dear Goddess, on the arid landscape of the battle of words, does caring lurk? How, dear Cherry Tree, can we come to the place of caring? Is it in the flight of the wisp through curtains of stone words? It is, she tells me in the spaces between words and stones, in the spaces within sound and no sound. Caring comes to walk with us in the cracks of the day and the night, as we …
From Gently to Nagasaki - Part 1
9 de Janeiro de 2011 • Joy Kogawa
Marjorie Chan and I sat in the teal blue armchairs in my apartment nibbling rice crackers and sipping green tea. I’d seen her harrowing play, A Nanking Winter, a few months earlier. It addressed one of the roots of the ongoing animosity between China and Japan—the deep historical traumas of Nanking, 1937. When we began the conversation, we were simply two writers, one young, one old, one of Chinese ancestry, one of Japanese, and from our great distance of time …
