Betrayed by History: Redressing a Wounded Community in Kerri Sakamoto’s the Electrical Field

• Authors: Alina Anton
• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

What does it take to heal the scars of a traumatic experience? And is any kind of restoration even possible when the wound is larger than the single individual, afflicting an entire community? The now well-documented experience of internment that marred the cultural memory of the Japanese Canadian community is one such trauma still bidding for redress. The present paper therefore proposes to revisit this painful wound caused by history at both the personal and the community level, as it is reflected through the fictional lens of award-winning Japanese Canadian author Kerri Sakamoto, in her dark lyrical debut novel The Electrical Field (1998). Following the thread of possible alleviation, we will analyze the effect of war and injustice on the individual mind and heart, and look at how difficult to obtain is love, the only redress available to those betrayed by history.

Keywords

EN

trauma; memory; Japanese Canadian community; internment; intertextuality

• Publisher: Sciendo
• Journal: Linguaculture
• Year: 2013
• Volume: 2013
• Issue: 1
• Pages: 39-46

Dates

published

2013-06-01

online

2015-04-18

Contributors

author

Alina Anton

• Alexandru Ioan Cuza University of Iasi, Romania

References

• Chua, Lawrence. Book blurb for The Electrical Field. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1998. Print.
• Kirmayer, Laurence J., Robert Lemelson, Mark Barad. Understanding Trauma. Integrating Biological, Clinical, and Cultural Perspectives. Cambridge: University Press, 2007. Google Books. http://books.google.ro/books?id=DXvpbu0tusMC&printsec=frontcover#v=onepa ge&q&f=false. Web. 25 March 2011.
• Kogawa, Joy. Obasan. New York: Anchor Books, 1994 (1981). Print.
• Sakamoto, Kerri. The Electrical Field. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1998. Print.
• Visvis, Vikki. “Trauma Remembered and Forgotten: The Figure of the Hysteric in Kerri Sakamoto’s The Electrical Field.” Mosaic (September 1, 2007). Web. 4 April 2011.
• Van der Hart, Onno, and Danny Brom. “When the Victim Forgets. Trauma-Induced Amnesia and Its Assessment in Holocaust Survivors.” International Handbook of Human Response to Trauma. Eds. Arieh Y. Shalev, Rachel Yehuda, & Alexander C. McFarlane. New York: Plenum Press, 2000. 223-48. Web. 2 April 2011.

Identifiers

DOI

10.1515/lincu-2015-0006