Throughout Naomi’s childhood, her elders refuse to share the troubles facing their family, leaving young Naomi constantly confused and afraid. Father hides the extent of his illness from Naomi and Stephen, and Obasan and Uncle continue to shield the children from the truth after they are separated from him. Mother and Grandma Kato likewise insist that the children never learn how the Kato family was torn apart by the bombing of Nagasaki. Naomi follows the example of her elders and tells no one when her neighbor Old Man Gower sexually abuses her. This directly mirrors the way in which the Japanese Canadian community at large does not publicize the suffering they endure during and after World War II; both Naomi and Canada’s Japanese population implicitly free their abusers of responsibility by failing to make their transgressions known. Aunt Emily resents this silence, and much of her activism centers around documenting the government’s mistreatment of Japanese Canadians to bring that silence to an end. In Obasan, silence serves as an implicit denial of suffering and thus prevents people from healing or moving past that suffering.
Though silence can be necessary to hear those who have been rendered voiceless, embracing that silence comes at the cost of the potential to heal. When the letters from Grandma Kato reveal the true fate of the Katos and end the silence around that story, the release from that silence is cathartic, and it allows Naomi to begin to move forward. However, Mother remains permanently silenced in death, and in Naomi’s quest for closure she recognizes that she will have to attune herself to interpreting her mother’s “wordless word.” As she grieves, Naomi realizes that she has inherited her mother’s reluctance to voice her own pain. She begins to come to terms with the fact that this kind of silence brings her closer to Mother, but it also led to her and Mother’s “mutual destruction.” Naomi ends the story searching for a way to achieve personal closure while still attending to her Mother’s voiceless voice.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Speech vs. Silence ThemeTracker
Speech vs. Silence Quotes in Obasan
There is a silence that cannot speak.
There is a silence that will not speak.
Beneath the grass the speaking dreams and beneath the dreams is a sensate sea. The speech that frees comes forth from that amniotic deep. To attend its voice, I can hear it say, is to embrace its absence. But I fail the task. The word is stone.
[…] Unless the stone bursts with telling, unless the seed flowers with speech, there is in my life no living word. The sound I hear is only sound. White sound. […]
If I could follow the stream down and down to the hidden voice, would I come at last to the freeing word? I ask the night sky but the silence is steadfast. There is no reply.
Such an old woman she is. She opens her mouth to say more, but there is no further sound from her dry lips.
The language of her grief is silence. She has learned it well, its idioms, its nuances. Over the years, silence within her small body has grown large and powerful.
What will she do now? I wonder.
What choices does she have?
“What a beauty,” the RCMP officer said in 1941 when he saw it. He shouted as he sliced back through the wake, “What a beauty! What a beauty!”
That was the last Uncle saw of the boat. And shortly thereafter, Uncle too was taken away, wearing shirt, jacker, and dungarees. He had no provisions, nor did he have any idea where the gunboats were herding him and the other Japanese fishermen in the impounded fishing fleet.
The memories were drowned in a whirlpool of protective silence. Everywhere I could hear the adults whispering, “Kodomo no tame. For the sake of the children…” Calmness was maintained.
“Write the vision and make it plain. Habakkuk 2.2”
Dear Aunt Em is crusading still. […] For her, the vision is the truth as she lives it. When she is called like Habakkuk to the witness stand, her testimony is to the light that shines in the lives of the Nisei, in their desperation to prove themselves Canadian, in their tough and gentle spirit. The truth for me is more murky, shadowy and gray. But on my lap, her papers are wind and fuel nudging my early-morning thoughts to flame.
It is always so. We must always honor the wishes of others before our own. We will make the way smooth by restraining emotion. Though we might wish Grandma and Grandpa to stay, we must watch them go. To try to meet one’s own needs in spite of the wishes of others is to be “wagamama”—selfish and inconsiderate. Obasan teaches me not to be wagamama by always heeding everyone’s needs. That is why she is waiting patiently beside me at this bridge. That is why, when I am offered gifts, I must first refuse politely. It is such a tangle trying to decipher the needs and intents of others.
The Yellow Peril is a Somerville Game, Made in Canada.
It was given to Stephen at Christmas. On the red-and-blue box cover is a picture of soldiers with bayonets and fists raised high looking out over a sea full of burning ships and a sky full of planes. A game about war. Over a map of Japan are the words:
The game that shows how
a few brave defenders
can withstand a very
great number of enemies.
There are fifty small yellow pawns inside and three big blue checker kings. To be yellow in the Yellow Peril game is to be weak and small. […] I am not yellow. I will not cry however much this nurse yanks my hair.
The crowd stands aside, waving steadily, bowing, touching arms here and there, and then they are out of view and I’m clambering up the train steps again as I did three years ago.
We sit in two seats facing each other once more, exactly like the last time. Where is Father? […] Where are we going? Will it be to a city? Remember my doll? Remember Vancouver? The escalators? Electric lights? Streetcars? Will we go home again ever?
And I am tired, I suppose, because I want to get away from all this. From the past and all these papers, from the present, from the memories, from the deaths, from Aunt Emily and her heap of words. I want to break loose from the heavy identity, the evidence of rejection, the unexpressed passion, the misunderstood politeness. I am tired of living between deaths and funerals, weighted with decorum, unable to shout or sing or dance, unable to scream or swear, unable to laugh, unable to breathe out loud.
(Keep your eyes down. When you are in the city, do not look into anyone's face. That way they may not see you. That way you offend less.)
All of Aunt Emily’s words, all her papers, the telegrams and petitions, are like scratchings in the barnyard, the evidence of much activity, scaly claws hard at work. But what good they do, I do not know––those little black typewritten words––rain words, cloud droppings. They do not touch us where we are planted here in Alberta, our roots clawing the sudden prairie air. The words are not made flesh. Trains do not carry us home. Ships do not return again. All my prayers disappear into space.
Is it so bad?
Yes.
Do I really mind?
Yes, I mind. I mind everything. Even the flies. […] It’s the chicken coop “house” we live in that I mind. […] It’s the bedbugs and my having to sleep on the table to escape the nightly attack, and the welts all over our bodies. […] Or it’s standing in the beet field under the maddening sun […].
[…] I mind the harvesttime and the hands and the wrists bound in rags to keep the wrists from breaking open. […] I cannot tell about this time, Aunt Emily. The body will not tell.
[The Grand Inquisitor’s] demand to know was both a judgment and a refusal to hear. The more he questioned [Mother], the more he was her accuser and murderer. The more he killed her, the deeper her silence became. What the Grand Inquisitor has never learned is that the avenues of speech are the avenues of silence. To hear my mother, to attend her speech, to attend the sound of stone, he must first become silent. Only when he enters her abandonment will he be released from his own.
How the Grand Inquisitor gnaws at my bones. At the age of questioning my mother disappeared. Why, I have asked ever since, did she not write? Why, I ask now, must I know?
Did I doubt her love? Am I her accuser?
She and my mother, [Grandma Kato] writes, were unable to talk of all the things that happened. The horror would surely die sooner, they felt, if they refused to speak. But the silence and the constancy of the nightmare had become unbearable for Grandma and she hoped that by sharing them with her husband, she could be helped to extricate herself from the grip of the past.
Obasan is small as a child and has not learned to weep.
Back and forth, back and forth, her hands move on her knees.
She looks at me unsteadily, then hands me the ID card with Uncle’s young face. What ghostly whisperings I feel in the air as I hold the card. “Kodomo no tame—for the sake of the children––gaman shi masho––let us endure.” The voices pour down like rain but in the middle of the downpour I still feel thirst. Somewhere between speech and hearing is a transmutation of sound.
