Joy Kogawa
Joy Kogawa nació en Vancouver en 1935 de padres japonés-canadienses. Durante la Segunda Guerra Mundial, Joy y su familia se vieron obligados a mudarse a Slocan, Columbia Británica, una injusticia que la Sra. Kogawa aborda en su novela Obasan de 1981. Ha trabajado para educar a los canadienses sobre la historia de los canadienses japoneses y participó activamente en la lucha por una reparación gubernamental oficial. La Sra. Kogawa estudió en la Universidad de Alberta y en la Universidad de Saskatchewan. Su publicación poética más reciente es Un jardín de anclas . El largo poema Una canción de Lilith , publicado en 2000 con arte de Lilian Broca, vuelve a contar la historia de Lilith, la mítica primera pareja de Adán. En 1986, la Sra. Kogawa fue nombrada Miembro de la Orden de Canadá y en 2006 fue nombrada Miembro de la Orden de Columbia Británica. En 2010, el gobierno japonés honró a la Sra. Kogawa con la Orden del Sol Naciente "por su contribución a la comprensión y preservación de la historia canadiense japonesa". La Sra. Kogawa vive actualmente en Toronto.
Actualizado en julio de 2013
Historias de Este Autor
Excerpt from "Gently to Nagasaki" (a work in progress) - Chapter 46
10 de septiembre 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 septiembre 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 enero 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 enero 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 enero 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 …
