Canadian Literature

SESSION: CANADIAN LITERATURE

2002 TOPIC: Autobiographical Border Crossings by Canadian Women Novelists

Session Chair: Lynda Hall, Dept. of English, University of Calgary

“Between Borders: Adolescent Women in Evelyn Lau's Runaway and Maria Campbell's Halfbreed.”

Numsiri Kunakemakorn, Program in Comparative Literature, Purdue University

Instead of relying solely on the notion of borders as geographical or national, I would like to delve into the notion of manifesting border theory through an examination of adolescence as a physical borderland between childhood and adulthood. A study of adolescence identifies a necessary borderland that must be "moved through" and experienced, rather than a passive, static role that potentially creates yet another distinction between "us" and "them". The literally physical borders of adolescence seem to be the point in which social mores of gender, behaviour, and eventually society itself and the nation, make themselves deeply felt. I am curious to see how the depiction of adolescent Canadian women illustrates the threat of intrusion and, possibly, the subsequent use of oppressive powers to withhold them. To do this, I will discuss the geographical and physical borders as presented in Evelyn Lau’s Runaway and Maria Campbell’s Halfbreed. The importance of such a study lies not only in a more focused view of women's experiences, but because it would hopefully exist as a means of giving value to a borderland that has always existed but has so far been dismissed.

“Spiralling Life Stories in Dionne Brand’s At the Full and Change of the Moon.

Lynda Hall, Dept. of English, University of Calgary

Email: lhall@ucalgary.ca

Trinidad-born Canadian writer Dionne Brand’s autobiographically-inflected novel At the Full and Change of the Moon (1999) demonstrates that the quest for identity involves a profound search through memories of the past and a crucial examination of the multiple selves in the present. Imagination and reality combine to create a profound place of meaning. I will examine Brand’s map of the connections and disconnections that construct her characters’ lives in the present and the lives of their ancestors. Crossing borders of nationality, sexuality, time, and self-identity, Brand provides insight into the journeys that make up each person’s life. Brand’s characters cross the borders of life and death, the real and the unreal, the present and the past, sanity and madness, and contest the constrictions of heteronormativity, as well as journey across far-flung geographic territories, including Trinidad, New York, Amsterdam, and Toronto. Her characters refuse to be bound by artificial and culturally-produced barriers. I examine the ways in which Brand links the body with history, memory, dream, myth, spirituality, pain, and passion by representing bodies in slavery, drug addiction, prostitution, love, and birth. Her images of the fragile body are complex and seduce the reader into intimately entering her characters’ lives.

"My Own Story, In Other Words: Cultural Memory and Autobiographical Drift in Daphne Marlatt’s Fiction"

Bev Curran, Department of Creativity and Culture, Aichi Shukutoku University, Nagoya, Japan

Email: bcurran@gol.com

Daphne Marlatt’s long poem Steveston (1974) excavates the collective memory of Steveston, a Japanese fishing community near Vancouver. In a collaboration of voices, Marlatt reads from where she stands "in this body at this moment in this place marked by, bearing traces of, the places, moments and people lived with, in and through to this point" (Labyrinth 206). In writing Steveston, Marlatt employed the language of pregnancy and birth; the writer's own pregnancy was one of her "first in-body experiences of a kind of limited ecological consciousness" that raised her awareness of "the nameless interbeing we were born with" (Taken 21). A decade later, Marlatt was coming out as a lesbian in her life and in her writing, and “the interbeing we were born with” was being reconfigured in the lesbian relationship. She found her efforts to write a lesbian erotic haunted by the rhythms of Steveston, its remembered history a current in her own story; and it is this drift that informs her later autobiographical fiction, Ana Historic and Taken. I explore how the ecological and erotic poetic of Steveston become explicitly lesbian in Marlatt's later fiction and trace the oscillating subject, the i which is always a we.

“Multilingual Women: Daphne Marlatt’s Ana Historic.”

Tomoko Kuribayashi, English Department, University of Wisconsin, Stevens Point Campus

Email: tkuribay@uwsp.edu

As a young immigrant to Canada from Oceania in the 1950’s, Daphne Marlatt was keenly aware of possibilities that mastery of more than one language accords to an individual. Having grown up in a multilingual household in Penang where five languages were spoken and moving to then rather monocultural Vancouver, she struggled to assimilate into the Canadian city by trying to speak like the local anglophones. In her 1985 article Barbara Godard suggested that in Marlatt’s poetry, “there is no single speaking voice, but many voices, many languages at play.” In her autobiographical novella Ana Historic, Marlatt again explores social and spatial freedom that re-discovery of another language, more specifically a women’s language, offers to women who are emotionally and/or sexually involved with each other. This paper will discuss how Marlatt’s novel can be both liberating and limiting to women, with its examination of the relationships among the female body, language, and space as defined in patriarchal society and its essentialist albeit admiring view of what is not middle-class and white, for example, Native Canadians, the world of nature, and children.