Japanese-Canadian writer Kerri Sakamoto is the author of two novels. The Electrical Field (1998) won the Commonwealth Writers Prize Best First Book award and the Canada-Japan Literary Award. One Hundred Million Hearts followed in 2003. In this interview she talks to Pilar Cuder-Domínguez about how she started writing and about her current projects. She discusses the topics and issues she is most concerned with–particularly the internment of Japanese Canadians during World War II and its lasting consequences, and how they came together in the two novels she has published to date. Sakamoto mentions those writers whose work has most influenced her own and describes what it means to be a Japanese-Canadian Sansei writer.

No abstract

Territory stands out as one of the major constituting elements of national identity, and it has been remarkably so in the twentieth century. One need only remember Rupert Brooke's famous sonnet 5, whose initial argument ('If I should die, think only this of me:/ That there's some corner of a foreign field/ That is forever England') established an intimate connection between self and soil, individual and nation'. Similarly, after examining the lack of status of English women in society Virginia Woolf concluded that they had very little to thank England for, and that they could not lay claim to any nation at all as long as they remained generally deprived of property, jobs, and other citizen rights^. George Orwell looked into the character of his nation too. His famous essay 'England Your England' denounced his countrymen's insularity and xenophobia, marvelling that after spending four years in France during the Great War, 'they did not even acquire a liking for wine'^.Post-Second World War developments (especially the related phenomena of de-colonisation and immigration), as Roger Bromley suggests, have 'helped to pull "Englishness" out of shape, and to push it in new directions, clearly differentiated formations"*. A brief survey of recent fiction releases might show a range new approaches vying for public attention. Kazuo Ishiguro's celebrated The Remains of the Day (1989) surely pioneered the Correspondence: Pilar Cuder-Dominguez, Dpto. Filologia Inglesa, Campus del Carmen pabell6n 11, Universidad de Hueiva, Hueiva 21071 (Spain), phone: +34/(0)959/019-139, fax: +34/(0)959/019-143,

The first novels published by Helen Oyeyemi and Diana Evans feature twins of mixedrace parentage-a Nigerian mother and an English father-, growing up in Britain. Eightyear-old Jessamy in Oyeyemi's The Icarus Girl is unaware that she was born a twin, but on travelling to Nigeria she encounters a troublesome girl she seems unable to shake off, TillyTilly. Georgia and Bessi in Evans's 26a are identical twins who share all their experiences until a visit to their mother's homeland of Nigeria opens a breach in their perfect union. Both novels were published in 2005 and display a number of commonalities in plot, characterization, locations, and stylistic choices. In them Oyeyemi and Evans explore the Yoruba beliefs surrounding the special nature of twins, half way between the world of humans and gods. If one twin dies, parents commission a carving called "ibeji" to honour the deceased and to provide a location for his/her soul. The specialness attributed to twins by the Yoruba is compounded in both novels by the fact that they are mixed-race and by the diverging locations, cultures, and languages of their parents. Thus, this paper addresses how the two writers deploy Yoruba belief in order to raise questions about the cultural grounding of their characters' identity, and how being twins becomes a metaphor for the "double consciousness" of being black and British.

No abstract