this blog's gonna roll

Blogger is dead to me, y'all.

done and DONE

Your friendly neighbourhood blogger PASSED her comprehensive exam with flying colours!

Stay tuned for major changes between now and October 1...

fear and loathing in freddy beach

Arg! I write my comprehensive exam in four days, sixteen hours, and ten minutes!

Help!

Does anyone have any advice for a terrified young Ph.D. candidate?

mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa

In reading "Godzilla vs. Post-Colonial" by Thomas King, I realize now that my write up of Medicine River was nothing short of ignorant. In King's words:

Associational literature, most often, describes a Native community. While it may also describe a non-Native community, it avoids centring the story on the non-Native community or on a conflict between the two cultures, concentrating instead on the daily activities and intricacies of Native life and organizing the elements of plot along a rather flat narrative line that ignores the ubiquitous climaxes and resolutions that are so valued in non-Native literature. In addition to this flat narrative line, associational literature leans towards the group rather than the single, isolated character, creating a fiction that de-values heroes and villains in favour of the members of a community, a fiction which eschews judgments and conclusions.

The purpose of this, King explains, is two-fold: it's to allow white readers the experience of Native culture free of stereotyping, glamourizing, literary tourism, or pandering; but it's also to remind Native readers of their own culture as valuable, as representable in text, and as present and active rather than archaic and dead.

I now understand better the project of Medicine River, and can genuinely say I learned something useful today.

where is here? here is queer

This book has been one I have gravitated towards, flipped through, and quoted from for many years, but until now I had not sat down to read the whole thing cover-to-cover. I feel like I should have years ago. I think this book at Atwood's Survival should have been handed to me at the start of my English degree with the words, "Read this or perish!" Seriously, how did I get this far without this book? Mysteries never cease...

Here Is Queer: Nationalisms, Sexualities, and the Literatures of Canada
by Peter Dickinson

In this book I contend that the identificatory lack upon which Canadian literary nationalism has historically been constructed -- the 'where' of Fry's 'here,' for example -- is in large part facilitated by, if not wholly dependent upon, a critical refusal to come to grips with the textual superabundance of a destabilizing and counter-normative sexuality. This counter-normative sexuality I am labeling 'queer,' a term that applies equally in this book to the erotic triangles foundin John Richardson's New World and those that resurface in Leonard Cohen's New Jerusalem; to the hyper-masculinity of Martin Allerdale Grainger's Woodsmen of the West and the feminist revisionism of Daphne Marlatt's Ana Historic, to the apparent sterility of Mrs. Bentley's prairie Horizon and the unexpected verdancy of Maude Laures's desert horizon; to the sexual dissimulation inherent in Pierre X. Magnant's admission 'une phobie d'impoussance' in Trou de mémoire and the sexual exhibitionism accompanying Claude's mantra of 'Chus t'un homme' at the end of Hosanna; to Duncan Campbell Scott's miscegenated Madonna and Tomson Highway's hybrid Trickster. This is not to say that 'here' is only or ever 'queer,' nor that resistance to a heteronormative nationalism is always or exclusively homosexual; what the range of texts discussed in this book does suggest, however, is that 'queer,' as a literary-critical category of an almost inevitable definitional elasticity, one whose inventory of sexual meanings has yet to be exhausted, challenges and upsets certain received national orthodoxies of writing in Canada.

If you want to play a really fun game, ask a first- or second- year literature student why they hate their CanLit classes. If they're feeling honest and you're not their professor, you might get what seemed to be an increasingly common complaint when I was hanging about with undergraduates at my former institution. That is, they all seem to feel CanLit is "a bit weird." Probe below that surface, with a student who is wavering between the immaturity of high school and the no-holds-barred free-for-all of residence sexuality, and you will come pretty close to the truth: "What's with all the weird sex?"

In Canadian Literature, I hold two truths to be self-evident: our protagonists fail, and our protagonists engage in alternative sexualities, both of the pro- and anti-social kinds (pro-social alternative sexuality being homosexuality, transsexuality, asexuality, and anti-social alternative sexuality involving violence, rape, and the damaging of other people). Often, the two occur together; more often, the one is a symbolic representation of the other. Off the top of my head and going through the CanLit selections of my undergraduate career, I can think of a woman having sex with a bear, about a million and a half rape scenes, hundreds of people coming of age and coming to terms with their sexuality, more weird group sex and necrophilia than one might expect, and a whole lot of transvestism as symbolic representation of self. No wonder our 19-year-old undergrads are so confused and scared.

Peter Dickinson goes beyond the surface readings of these texts to study the impact of the queer on the Canadian literary canon, and in the meantime asserts a necessity to challenge our assumptions about what national literature is. For generations we have insisted on seeing queer literature as outside Canadian experience somehow, when a quick flip through our canon shows that it has been there, ignored by critics, for ever. From the obvious triangulation of sexual desire in Wacousta (what else is it when your best friend's twin sister, the spitting image of him, is your sole sexual desire?) to the weird doubling of self in the Philip and Mrs. Bentley and their relationship with their "son" in As For Me and My House, alternative sexualities and male homosocial desire is prevalent in the literature of Canada. To argue that it is anyway outside the experience of Canada is increasingly ludicrous with ever passing year in Canadian literature -- here is, more and more as we become more aware as critics and scholars, queer.

My favourite chapter of this book is Dickinson's chapter on Tomson Highway, because I've always been intrigued by the way Highway constructs masculinity in his plays. In his first play, as Dickinson points out, the men are gone; in the second, they are immasculated. There is a level upon which colonized men are doubly colonized, because they feel that their power has first been robbed of them by the white men and then by the feminist interests of their own women. Dickinson takes on critics who have argued that Highway's plays are profoundly misogynist by pointing out that anywhere we see a trickster character, we must be careful not to take the plays at face value. Certainly, Highway attacks issues of misogyny in his theatre, but he does so without being complacent to those hurtful ideas. Furthermore, Dickinson touches on the two-spirited characters in Highway's plays, and explores the character of Big Joey as a figure of sexual attraction for both the male and female characters in the world of the Wasy Reserve. Importantly, by showing Nanabush as a campy/drag figure, Highway is making clear the place for the two-spirited, gay, or transgendered person in Aboriginal mythology, recreating the space that existed for such people before missionaries and colonizations destroyed the world on non-heteronormative sexuality.

staying with the burning rock for a little longer, here's Michael Winter

The Big Why
by Michael Winter

What is integrity anyway, except constancy in character. And what if maintaining constancy is false. What if one assumes that the soul is not thoroughly unwavering. Why honour the man who does not change his opinion. Who does not alter his course. Who is methodical and predictable. Why praise the pattern. What if there is no accurate measure of a man's behaviour. A few things: the pulse of the world is always shifting between poles. I have become attached to the ontological. I believe in atheism and the power of the ontological. The reason I do not believe in God is because I am happy with this world. I believe in slim books. I believe in the shape a boat cuts through ice. Sometimes we need God. Our hunches are not intuitive, or they are a blend of nature and the absorption of cultural ways. The third is will to know a truth. This is my book, this will to know.

God, I love Michael Winter. He has a way of looking at the world and capturing all the confusion and fear and angst and joy and excitement in one of two sentences. In The Big Why, Winter leaves aside his usual literary persona of Gabriel English to create a historical fiction. This novel tells of the American painter Rockwell Kent and his decision, in 1914, to uproot his family from their comfortable New York and to transplant them in a Newfoundland fishing community called Brigus. Kent struggles to fit in in the small community, but seems to take as many steps forwards as he does back. When the first world war erupts in earnest, Kent's passion for German culture, his vegetarianism, his socialism and his pacifism all make him the perfect target for assumed anti-British sensibilities, and he is eventually run out of the country of Newfoundland as a German spy.

Rockwell Kent is a man of great passion, both in her art and in his life, but he is not someone who can direct that passion effectively, and the result is that he is left torn between the man he believes that he is and the man he would desperately like to be. Kent is a womanizer, and his desire for women leads him to cheat constantly on his wife, Kathleen. He justifies it to himself that he forewarned Kathleen that he could never be faithful, and for the most part Kathleen tolerates the affairs. Indeed, casual sexual encounters don't really bother Kathleen, though she seems to have married Kent with the expectation that he would grown out of that behaviour. For Kathleen, though, it is emotional betrayals that leave her shocked and speechless. The first occurs when Kent gets together with the woman he loves before Kathleen, Jenny, and they have a baby while Kent is married to Kathleen. The second comes when Kent takes up with the woman who is meant to be caring for their children while Kathleen is in the hospital in St. John's with a complicated pregnancy. This woman, Emily, was a friend of Kathleen's, and the betrayal is such that, for the first time, Kathleen calls Kent a burden. This is the beginning of the end of the marriage, and they eventually divorce. (Kent's affair with Emily also produces a love child, but nothing is learnt of that for many years later, and well after Kathleen's own death.) The bizarre thing about this painful and volatile relationship is that Kent repeatedly argues that he wants to be faithful -- that if he could be any other kind of man than the man he is, he would want to be a fully domesticated sort of person. He would want to be monogamous to Kathleen. His inability to be that man is troubling for him and leads him to constantly be split between the father and husband he ought to be and the womanizing man he actually is. Negotiating the male identity has always been a motif in the writing of Michael Winter, and here he retraces that idea with the very compelling tale of a man torn between two idealized selves, never quite capable of finding the balance or middle ground.

a little sojourn in newfoundland with lisa moore

Alligator
by Lisa Moore

The brushed their teeth in filthy bathrooms with warped mirrors and naked light bulbs in mountain villages. The porcelain sinks had flares of rust and the drains went down into the earth and bubble up close by. She thought about the phrase, My husband. She said it to herself, This is my husband, Martin. She hated to say the word wife. It was not a word she could bring herself to say.

Husband, too, was questionable. It sounded stout, bifocaled, and involving of a cardigan.

There were things she would not do: she would not iron his shirts, she would not mow lawns or ever, ever, ever fake an orgasm or put her children in sailing or allow Martin to buy a motorcycle because she was afraid his head would get smashed in, though he wanted a motorcycle more than anything in the world, nor would she get fat or sleep on the couch or let the sun set on a fight or have an abortion or make meatloaf, although a recipe with orange rind and brown sugar had caught her eye.

She would not outright deny the motorcycle -- how could she -- but she would connive against it.

She would never freeze seven meals because she was going away and didn't want him to have to cook.

It frightenend her, what she had got into.

I can't lie. I really want to hang out with Lisa Moore. I have a crush on her in the grade six sense of the word, where all you want in the world is to be that person's best friend. I think we would get along well, but more than that I really want to hang out with the kind of person who can create the beauty that exists in her writing. Alligator is a triumphant novel about the
hidden connections between people and seems to suggest that the world is divided into those who follow their desires and those who do not. For the characters in Alligator, everyone is connected, from the brain-damaged side-show act who has put his head inside an alligator, to the girl in St. John's who is acting out for the love of two lost fathers, to the Russian mobster with the secret desire to go straight -- everyone is inter-related and inter-connected in intimate and important ways. As each life touches another, the text seems to ask us to consider our relationships with other people. When I first started studying English, a professor told me that the only way to make literature worth anything is to notice the hidden connections among things -- both within the world of the text and between the text and other cultural touchstones -- and Alligator is very much about the process of realizing one's place in society.

This is also a novel about roles and the parts we play. In the quote above, we see a woman struggling with the idea of being a woman with her own independent identity, and a wife as well. She fears being incapable of doing both those things successfully. In the end, feeling lost within the marriage, she divorces her husband, but when she comes to the end of her own life -- brought about through a heart condition and the stress of following her own dreams as a filmmaker in the years after her divorce -- she wants nothing more than to return to the connection she once shared with her ex-husband. For Madeline, this is the paradox that consumes her life, and in the end she dies because of an inability to find balance between the things she ought to do and the person she wants to be.

The most touching story in the novel though is the story of Colleen. Never having known her biological father, Colleen is raised by a step-father she loves unconditionally, but who dies when she is very young. Colleen begins an acting-out process of drinking, acting out, and promiscuity that places boundaries between herself and her mother than can no longer be crossed. From her mother's perspective, Beverly wants to love her daughter but fears that with all the punishing and court dates and disconnect she has forgotten how to mother. Colleen, for her part, cannot love, and she uses the love of others (like the sweet-tempered and kind-hearted Frank, who is also coping with the loss of a parent) for her own gain. When Colleen sleeps with Frank and then robs him, she changes his perception of the world and alters his life's trajectory; Frank ends up embroiled in the plot of a Russian mobster and nearly dies in a house fire. Colleen's inability to see the consequences of her actions is perhaps the greatest tragedy of the novel.

this is not a play about child abuse

All Fall Down
by Wendy Lill

Hard to say. Interrogating children is a bit like chasing the shadows of butterflies. It can be that illusive. You're trying to find out if someone has caused them pain. But we all start collecting pain the minute we're born. All the physical hurts, the pain of abandonment, the assaults of noise and darkness. That's all layered in there too, interfering with the search.

As the title indicates, this is not a play about child abuse. Instead, All Fall Down is a play about hysteria and the ramifications of incorrect allegations of child sexual abuse. In the play, a loving day care worker, Annie Boland, is accused of sexually interfering with a four-year-old boy named Chad Brewer. But we never see Annie or Chad on-stage. Instead, though their voices are heard, this is a play about Chad's mother, Molly, and the parents of Chad's friend Rory, Emma and Ewan Grady, and the social worker who whips the town into a frenzy, Dr. Connors. The thrust of the play makes it clear from the beginning that Annie is innocent -- this isn't a mystery or a courtroom drama. This play works, instead, to illustrate the effects on parents in these situations and to show just how negative the wrong answers can be.

The roles in the play are clear. Molly is the accuser, Connors is the professional man who is supposed to fix everything, Ewan is the last stand-out against hysteria, and Emma is trapped -- she wants to believe that she is above the fear-mongering, like her husband, but can't shake the nagging doubts that such accusations plant in the mind. The fore-grounding of Ewan in the beginning of play and Emma at the end seems to suggest that though all of us watching might hope we could react like Ewan, we are all more likely to end up squarely in Emma territory. The question the play poses is this: is it even possible, in our current climate, to protect both the children involved and the adults accused? Can the truth remain safe?

There is no grey-area when it comes to the truth of the accusations. We are witnesses to the collapse of Molly's sanity, and we see her fabricate the allegations in order to have someone (a) listen to her and (b) blame someone else for her atrocious parenting. If she can blame Annie's hands for the fact that he son is out-of-control, she can find a place in the community again... And she can find a way for herself to deal with the reality that her son is closer to his daycare teacher than his own mother. The lies are fabricated to cover up exquisitely painful truths about her ability to mother her son, and they are sped along by Connors and his lack of understanding of the gentleness with which children's testimony must naturally be handled. As the children become more and more outrageous in their claims of abuse -- having discovered positive reinforcement for such harrowing claims -- the audience is left chilled as Connors does nothing to intervene. Even without a sympathetic portrait of Annie, the suggestions sound like the made-up play-lies of children in a one-up-man game (at one point, a little girl accuses Annie of making her pee on a peanut butter sandwich, and instead of laughing at the suggestion as play the community struggles to corroborate it). The audience is left disgusted by the inability of so many of the characters to find truth.

In the end, Ewan and Emma's marriage is ripped apart by the crisis, and the community doesn't find peace so much as it finds more people to accuse. This is our modern-day witch trial, and just as we didn't know how to protect the chastity of young girls and so flew to accusations of witchcraft, we now holler abuse in response to abnormal childhood development. The shaky conclusion of the play leaves no doubt in the reader's mind -- there is no positive conclusion to this situation.

i flat out did not understand this one, folks

White Biting Dog
by Judith Thompson

Excuse me, could you call the projectionist, please? He's my Dad--I just have to talk to him for a second--I know--but the thing can run on its own, we both know that--besides, this is an emergency! Yeah! Thanks, thanks a lot...(peering) Dad? I can see the dustbeam but I can't see you oh there you are hi! Hi...It's me--no, no I'm not back, I'm not even in the Kirk, actually, I'm just--like this is gonna totally weird you out, but--I had to appear to you like this 'cause--in a couple of hours you're gonna hear that -- don't freak out--that I passed myself on and--like--I didn't want you to get too down about it so I thought I'd come and tell you myself that--it's not at all a bad thing. It's quite nice if you just give in to it. You know the feeling when you're falling asleep and ya jump awake 'cause you dreamt you slipped on a stair? Well it's like if you stayed in the slip--if you dove right down into it and held your breath til you came out the other end. I'm in the holding your breath part right now, so I'm not sure what's on the other end, but I feel like I'm so big I'd barely fit into the Kirk Community Centre-- it's weird, but... Dad? Dad? The main reason I came was to let you know that I didn't...kill myself 'cause I couldn't hack it or because the man I loved couldn't love me back, it was 'cause...I was invaded, Dad, Dad, filled by the worst evil...you ever imagined--I guess it happened when I fell in love, on account of I had to open my mouth so wide to let the love in that the evil came in, too...and living with it was just liked being skinned alive; worse pain even than your kidney stones, and we know how bad they were. Now the pain has stopped, and there's still the old Pony to give to my husband: 'cause he needs it, Dad, like a blood transfusion he needs it, and just like Mum would give you anything you needed, I'm gonna give myself to him. No, we didn't get papers, but he's my husband all right. His name is Cape Race, like the place, eh? Oh yeah, I told him about your mice and he was really impressed and uh--tell Wade there's a stereo store down here that's looking for someone and Mum--tell Mum not to go into the ditch about this 'cause I know they're gonna let me come visit--to--straighten her fingers and...give her alcohol rubs...Well...I have to finish my dive now...Oh Dad I'm so big now I'd never fit back on earth. Love...Pony.

Okay, I didn't get this play. Like at all. And now it's sitting on my shelf mocking me, which is totally unfair. I have reread it now way more times than I can justify with the study schedule I'm meant to be following. I just don't get it. And when I read on-line about how uproariously funny it is meant to be, I just feel more angry and confused that I started out feeling. So I kind of quit this play before I even sat down to write this blog post, which is unfair of course. I'm going to offer a plot summary and a clumsy stab at a discussion, and then I'm really going to quit this play (and pray there's no direct question about it on the exam). If you've read and loved or seen and understood White Biting Dog then please, please comment and explain it to me. Because I don't get it at all.

The basic story of the play is that a young man (named Cape Race), who has gone through a breakdown and a divorce, is in the act of attempting suicide when he sees a small white dog. The dog talks to him, and tells him that only through saving the life of his father, Glidden. Unfortunately, his father is convinced that without his wife, Lomia, he feels he has no reason to live -- but Lomia has taken off with a man named Pascal who is about Cape's age. Awkward! In the midst of all of this is a girl, Pony, who really is suicidal, but because she had a small white dog once she finds herself drawn into the plot to try and save Glidden -- in the meantime, she sort-of-but-not-really falls in love with Cape. The play ends with Glidden and Pony both dead because they loved Lomia and Cape either too much or in the wrong way or simply couldn't be loved back. (The quote above is the monologue Pony delivers before her suicide... It's perhaps better known in Canadian drama schools as 'ubiquitous monologue for young female actresses, usually delivered poorly and at an overwrought level of faux-motion.)

So that's the plot. I keep coming back to think about the fact that the protagonist changed his name to Cape Race. His mother named him Sonny at birth, which he bitterly claims shows that she hadn't thought of anything else to name him and so went for the obvious. Cape Race is the south-eastern-most point of Canada, being located at the very edge of the Avalon Peninsula in Newfoundland. It was allegedly so-named because the first visitors, the Portugese fishermen who worked seasonally in Newfoundland, were amazed by how barren it was -- Capa Raso, meaning Cape Bare. Cape choosing this for his name is interesting because he rejects the barrenness of his mother's chosen name for him and instead embraces it in its geographical form.

News telegraphed from the ocean on liners and boats to New York was transmitted with the byline "via Cape Race." (Thanks, Wikipedia!) Likewise, the character Cape Race is the vehicle by which much is transmitted in the play -- his parent rarely speak to one another, but instead communicate through him. Further, he is the conduit for the talking white dog. Cape is the means by which information is disseminated in the play.

it's a simple fact: nice girls rarely murder their parents

Blood Relations
by Sharon Pollack

Gentlemen of the Jury!! I ask you to look at the defendant, Miss Lizzie Borden. I ask you to recall the nature of the crime of which she is accused. I ask you – do you believe Miss Lizzie Borden, the youngest daughter of a scion of our community, a recipient of the fullest amenities our society can bestow upon its most fortunate members, do you believe Miss Lizzie Borden capable of wielding the murder weapon – thirty-two blows, gentlemen, thirty-two blows – fracturing Abigail Borden’s skull, leaving her bloody and broken body in an upstairs bedroom, then, Miss Borden, with no hint of frenzy, hysteria, or trace of blood upon her person, engages in casual conversation with the maid, Bridget O’Sullivan, while awaiting her father’s return home, upon which, after sending Bridget to her attic room, Miss Borden deals thirteen more blows to the head of her father, and minutes later – in a state utterly compatible with that of a loving daughter upon discovery of murder most foul – Miss Borden calls for aid! Is this the aid we give her? Accusation of the most heinous and infamous of crimes? Do you believe Miss Lizzie Borden capable of these acts? I can tell you I do not!! I can tell you these acts of violence are acts of madness!! Gentlemen! If this gentlewoman is capable of such an act – I say to you – look to your daughters.

Lizzie Borden took an axe / And gave her mother forty whacks / When the job was nicely done / She gave her father forty-one.

That was the song I skipped to as a child. Before I knew who Lizzie Borden was, before I understood the circumstances that led her to kill and the gender biases that kept her out of prison, before I ever read Blood Relations by Sharon Pollock, and before I knew that Lizzie Borden was the O.J. Simpson of the 1800s (well, likely before O.J. Simpson, for that matter). As famous murders-who-clearly-did-it-but-didn't-serve-a-lick-of-time-for-their-heinous-crimes go, Lizzie belongs in the ranks of the finest. I can't imagine many hatchet murders go unsolved. But this play is not a simple bio piece about Lizzie Borden, nor does it try to excuse her crimes in any way. Sharon Pollock's Blood Relations is primarily a play about two things: gender and memory.

To start with, the gender issue is keenly felt through this play, but not in the heavy-handed manner of a Margaret Hollingsworth. Pollock paints a Lizzie Borden who is pushed into murder by the situation of unmarried women in her time. Lizzie's mother died in childbirth, and Lizzie's father had remarried. The stepmother, Abigail, had a brother (named Harry in this play but I don't think that was his name in real life). Knowing the precarious position of widows in American society at the time, Harry is focused on ensuring that as much property as possible is transferred into the name of his sister -- after all, in the absence of a will (and Mr. Borden had no will), his estate would default to his daughters. While Harry is looking out for his sister, Lizzie sees this in no uncertain terms as the wholesale vanquishing of her security. As an unmarried woman, she would be beholden to her father's estate to see her put right. Her fear is that she will not have enough money to be independent and will have to reside with her step-mother until she dies. In Pollock's telling of the events, this is what drives Lizzie to commit murder; fear for her own future and security, coupled with her terrible relationship with her step-mother, leads Lizzie to commit murder. But if the gender situation drives a powerless Lizzie to murder, it's also what keeps her out of prison. No one believed, or wanted to believe, that women -- especially good daughters from good families with good educations -- could be capable of murder. An inability to see women as human beings, and therefore as fallible, Pollock seems to suggest, resulted in a guilty woman going free.

The other major issue of the play is memory. None of the characters are real, even in the world of the play, except for Lizzie and The Actress. (The Actress is a depiction of Nance O'Neil, who rumour has it was carrying on a lesbian relationship with Lizzie, possibly for her own financial gain.) The Actress is desperate to know if Lizzie actually committed the murder, which leads to the conjuring up of the other characters through memory. The play implicates Lizzie, but Lizzie tries to use her memory of the events to attach blame to the family that drove her to it and the sister who raised her. Memory is powerful enough to cause pain, but perhaps not powerful enough to ascertain the truth.

This is an absolutely beautiful play, and I would love one day to see it performed.

yawning my way through radical feminist drama

The Apple in the Eye
by Margaret Hollingsworth

Now you see my dear Gemma, I want you to understand that the gulf which divides us is simply due to a differing approach to the same problem. It may be solved quite simply by a slight adaptation on your part; it is a question of applying first order logic and a degree of systematization to your primary through processes, which will then reflect on...

OH MAN, I CAN'T BELIEVE HOW DIFFERENT MEN AND WOMEN ARE AND HOW MUCH MEN DON'T UNDERSTAND WOMEN. THANK GOD FOR THIS VERY EDGY PLAY. Okay, so I'm a little vehement. This, to me, though, is just a bad example of feminist literature -- where the relationship between man and women is so obviously flawed (at the fault of the male, of course) that any subtlety in the plot itself becomes impossible. In this play, we have Gemma, the stay-at-home something or other who seems to be a house wife disinterested in both house-keeping and being a wife, and Martin, a wooden and unloving professor of artificial intelligence (get it? he's smart, but he doesn't understand her, so his intelligence is artificial -- HOW REFRESHINGLY SUBTLE THAT IS). We are some how supposed to put aside the fact that she doesn't do anything all day except make the occasional pot of tea (which she moans about) to join the author in hating on Martin's desire to stay in bed on Sundays, his inability to connect with his wife, and his disinterest in her. Nevermind that she has been written as a boring, small, uninteresting character. We should side with her because she is a woman and her big bad husband occasional suggests that she might consider either cleaning the house or getting a job. What a monster.

Most infuriating is that even if Martin is a dick, he's always been a dick. Gemma repeats that marriage hasn't changed him. So she knew what she was signing up for, in other words. This isn't like 10 years down the road and the worm has turned. If she hates who he is, she always hated who he is. This begs the question: why did she marry him? If this were to open up into a greater question of people entering into marriages without understanding them or the limited options available to women at the time of the play's writing (1983), then fine. But the play instead shies away from universality or broader comment by focusing on the minutae and creating a Martin we are meant to hate (and his absense from the stage for the entire play merely strengthens the idea that we are meant to take Gemma at her word).

Part of why this play fails, in my opinion, is the heavy-handed use of symbolism. Gemma is questing after an apple for the duration of the play. Really, a play about gender relations that invokes imagery of an apple?! However did the playwright conceive of something so cutting edge and ground-breaking?!

Snore.

what do you call a sanctioned appropriation?

The Book of Jessica
by Linda Griffiths, with Maria Campbell

I know who did. The people, the mentality that drove my ancestors out of their land... the same bloody family compact runs this country now. It feels like an unbroken line sometimes. I know I'm from the underneath because of the way I feel, because of the anger I feel. I feel like I'm shaking my fist at someone on top of me, and I look... I'm from the Canadian middle classes, who the hell am I shaking my fist at? Myself? Who is it I'm so angry at, that I feel has oppressed me? All I know is I'm there with my fist in the air, feeling like most modern people, angry at shadows and ghosts. You want to make it into a clean story about conquerors and oppression, but it's not as clean or as clear a story as you seem to think. Not for me. You say that if we understood our history, everything would be stronger. But it doesn't feel like that to me. We have to see in what way we're being conquered right now.

I watch an aging pride when I go to gatherings in Toronto. There's a community of about a thousand people, artists who stayed here instead of leaving, and all of them have fought a battle to break through every kind of snotty colonialism in order to free themselves to be fascinated by their own place. They haven't left their people, you would say, and they've paid for it because their own people often despise them for it. That's my community.

The Book of Jessica is a journey into the process of creating a play as a collaborative effort. Originally envisioned as a continuation of the story of Halfbreed, the play Jessica was a collaboration of Theatre Passe Muraille's Paul Thompson, Métis activist and writer Maria Campbell, and playwright/actor Linda Griffiths. The Book of Jessica, however, walks the reader through the process, culminating in the play itself which was more fully a product of Linda Griffith with input from Maria Campbell. This is a Canadian play mired in conflict, and Linda Griffith's telling of the troubles between herself, Campbell and Thompson is at times disarmingly honest -- none of the creators spoke to one another from many years after the original production of the play, and Campbell and Griffith quarrelled over aspects of the future and publication of the play.

In the preamble to the play, many interesting issues are raised. The most obvious issue that preoccupies the women in their discussions about the play is the issue of appropriation of voice. Linda Griffiths, who played the Maria Campbell-based character of Jessica in the original run, and indeed created the character herself, has constant feelings of discomfort about playing a Métis woman, worrying constantly about her ability to portray a culture to which she doubts her ability to access. In rehearsals, we learn, she and Campbell regularly hit walls -- Griffiths incapable of accessing the necessary experience, and Campbell angry about what Griffiths represents to her personally as a white woman. But Campbell's most important assertion is what resonates with Griffiths and carries through the play -- the character of Jessica is as much a product of white society as Native, which means that Griffiths is not appropriating a voice so much as she is channeling an alternate part of herself. Furthermore, Campbell reminds Griffith, the whites who came and oppressed the Aboriginal and Métis populations did so because they were evacuated from their own homelands by similar processes. Griffiths needed to channel her inner oppresses person in order to find the reality of Jessica. Interesting, Griffiths points out that the only audiences who had problems with a white woman portraying Jessica were the white liberal theatre critics. Perhaps the anger over appropriation is sometimes merely a cover for our discomfort over how similar we really are?

The play itself carried forward more of the themes of Halfbreed, though with more magic realism. Again, for me, the most interesting idea is that of the broken male members of the community. Sam, the Aboriginal male figure in the play, feels that he has been castrated by the white oppressors, and even though he is a sympathetic character and we are encouraged to like him (played by the lovable Graeme Greene), he too resorts to violence against women when he finally feels that he has lost his power in the home. This idea is one I would love to see studied more in masculinity theory, which unfortunately tends to be quite a white-centric movement.

the only word is startling

Halfbreed
by Maria Campbell

One of these people was Eugene Steinhauer. He had nothing when he came to AA except the clothes on his back. He had lived on various skid rows and his family had given him up for a derelict. Now he was finding sobriety, as well as hope for himself, and a future as something more than just another drunken Indian. I admired him because he was the first Indian I had ever met who let white people know how he felt about them, not just by his attitude, but verbally as well. I'd hated those nameless, faceless white masses all my life, and he said all the things I had kept bottled up inside for so many years.

At this time, I felt Eugene could do no wrong. He was one of the "brothers" Cheechum had talked about. When, following his example, I too began to speak out, his attitude towards me changed. At the time I was hurt and discouraged because to me he was a special person, but it doesn't matter anymore. Since then I've met many Native leaders who have treated me the same and I've learned to accept it. I realize now that the system that fucked me up fucked up our men even worse. The missionaries had impressed upon us the feeling that women were a source of evil. This belief, combined with the ancient Indian recognition of the power of women, is still holding back the progress of our people today.

In Maria Campbell's autobiography, Halfbreed, her project is to show Métis life from the days of Riel through to the 1970s. In this striking book, Campbell forces the white reader to confront the results of cultural imperialism and policies such as the Indian Act, and demands that the reader look face-on at the resulting poverty and crisis of identity, self-hatred and pain. For Aboriginal and Métis readers, Campbell strikes out at the white structures of power, names and shames the oppressors, and puts forward a challenge to other Aboriginal and Métis women to tell their own stories. The purpose of Halfbreed, then, is twofold: white readers are shown the results of their cultural practices, and Aboriginal and Métis readers are given a literary history to write into and respond to.

The life Maria Campbell recounts in her novel is a difficult one. She moves from being a strong child swearing to her grandmother that she would never cower in front of white people, to a young teenager thrown into the role of mothering her brothers and sisters with the death of her own mother and living in constant fear that children's aid workers would separate her family, to a young wife living in a horribly violent marriage, to a prostitute and drug user living in Vancouver. When Campbell finally begins to clear her life up, she meets a man she loves, but her inability to be honest about her past and her shame at the life she has lived leads her to a mental breakdown. At the end of the novel, we are met with a politically active Maria Campbell, standing on her own two feet, raising her own children, and rebuilding a relationship with David. But we never again have the hopeful and potent Maria Campbell who opened the novel -- that wide-eyed childhood idealism is lost. That Campbell perseveres in spite of her loss of idealism is perhaps the most important lesson of the novel. To progress as a society, we must be able to see the situation as it really is but still maintain the will to try to change things anyway. That is Campbell's gift in this novel.

From the perspective of masculinity studies, this novel is an interesting one because Campbell is just as interested in Aboriginal and Métis men as she is in Aboriginal and Métis women. While the effects on women are perhaps more readily obvious through the cycle of victimhood they find themselves trapped within, the Native men who perpetrate these acts are not cast merely as one-dimensional villains. Campbell attributes her early maturation to the process of watching her father die inside as the family sank deeper and deeper into poverty. For Campbell, the real tragedy of these communities is that people have no reason to dream. A white child may grow up poor but be able to dream themselves out of it, Campbell argues, but a Métis child has had that ability to dream robbed from them. They can only imagine becoming a stereotypical 'drunken Indian,' as she terms it, or becoming the battered and abused wife of the same. With no prospects for fulfilling work and racism stopping advancement at every turn, Campbell's biggest wish for her people is to return to them the right and ability to dream of an alternate future. As one critic has dubbed it, this book is a call for an 'alterNative' approach to aboriginal identity and selfhood.

going, going, gone indian

Gone Indian
by Robert Kroetsch

You open a new notebook to the first blank page, then notice he has brought along six of same, lest the dissertation should suddenly begin to write itself. A loafer. Not the ring-giver of old, not a leader of warriors, not a sound judge of good and evil. The eternal scrounging lazy unemployed bum of a graduate student --

You find the one notebook that is not quite new nor totally empty, raise it as if to close your -- and here I quote -- eloquent breasts therein: you bend your gaze to the first paragraph of the dissertation: "Christopher Columbus, not knowing that he has not come to the Indies, named the inhabitant of that new world --"

Then you read, aloud again, my own professorial comment: "Jeremy, my boy, you have used this same opening in two other failed, futile, rejected attempts at writing a dissertation. When will you begin?"

Imagine, if you will, that you are an American graduate student. You have been writing your dissertation for a cool nine years. You're a grad student in the 1970s, so you are by default male and by default having it off with all your undergraduate pupils. You're failing at everything, even teaching composition class, and your marriage is falling apart. Your stress is being quite handily symbolized through a frustrating case of impotence. You're a failure at the definitive checking-out-of-reality profession, and your personal life is in shambles. So you run. You run for the north, determined to 'go Indian' and live like your hero, Grey Owl, emulating the people you've been floundering around writing about for the last nine years. Along the way you cheat more on your wife, piss some people off, and die or possibly fake your own death.

And the only person left to interpret your story is your advisor.

Who is totally sleeping with your wife.

Just another day in grad school, ladies and gentlemen.

This is the story Kroetsch weaves for us in his novel, Gone Indian. The novel beautifully captures the strained advisor-advisee relationships that are so archetypal of the graduate school experience, and tells us in two voices the story of the last days Jeremy Sadness spends among the Aboriginal people of Alberta. We are given the story in tapes transcribed by the professor but told in Jeremy's voice, but we are also given Dr. Madham's interpretation of the events. All of this is sent to Jill Sunderman, who Jeremy had been carrying on with in Alberta, as a means of explaining the life and "death" of this man. Obviously, names are important here. "Madham" is the force that drives Jeremy north in his madness. "Sunderman" is the woman who divides Jeremy into his failed white self and his imagined but idealized "native" / Grey Owl-esque self. And Jeremy himself is names after Jeremy Bentham and lives a life in academia surveiling the world, to an extent that he must escape and discover an alternate world of his own.

But that's the novel, really. I wanted there to be discussion of what it is to appropriate a cultural identity for no reason other than to facilitate an escape from the self. In a way, the ambivalence of the ending reflects an ambivalence about this choice, I suppose. Carol, Jeremy's wife, is certain her husband is still alive; Madham is certain he is dead. The truth, really, lies somewhere in between -- Jeremy is certainly dead, but Jeremy's inner Grey Owl may well have survived the journey.

a chapter of our history we have tried in vain to suppress

Obasan
by Joy Kogawa

What is this thing about chickens? When they are babies, they are yellow. Yellow like daffodils. Like Goldilocks' yellow hair. Like the yellow Easter chicks I lost somewhere. Yellow like the yellow pawns in the Yellow Peril game.

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 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. Yellow is to be chicken. I am not yellow. I will not cry.

When the yellow chicks grow up they turn white. Chicken Little is a large Yellow Peril puff. One time Uncle stepped on a baby chick. One time, I remember, a white hen pecked yellow chicks to death, to death in our backyard.

In Joy Kogawa's Obasan, readers read about the experiences of Kogawa and her family in the Japanese Internment in Canada during World War Two. In our history, there are many events which we would rather pretend did not exist, because it damages our image of ourselves. For a country that clings to its image as a cultural mosaic where people are free to practice their own culture while integrating into Canadian life, the hysteria and racism against Canadian citizens of Japanese descent during the Second World War is unforgivable. Little studied in Canadian history (my textbook in first-year Canadian History class gave it a full two paragraphs) and often ignored, the Japanese Internment involved the imprisonment, relocation, exile, and pillaging of an entire group based solely on race. The Japanese who were interned were largely citizens, with the rest being naturalized Canadians. Canada sent people 'back' to Japan who had never set foot on its shores (and who, upon arriving in Japan as Canadian citizens, were promptly treated as enemy aliens). Our government tried to convince them it was for their own good and their own safety -- when government itself had stirred up the racialized hysteria that made such unthinkable acts somehow a rational choice. Obasan was the first novel to talk about the Japanese Internment in Canada, and the first novel to chronicle the experiences of the victims of internment, exile, dispersal, and so on.

What is most striking about Kogawa's project is that sh has created not merely a historical document, but a beautiful work of literature as well. Obasan is not a book to read because you ought to or because it is important; Obasan is a beautiful novel in its own right, and can be studied as a work of literature separate from its social function (if one were into that sort of thing, which your friendly blogger thinks is a really good way to miss the point of literature entirely). For example, one motif Kogawa carries through the novel is the motif of birds. The chickens are important, as in the quotation above, because they represent the protagonist, Naomi, and her discomfort within her own race and her experiences of racism. When chicks mature they become white; Naomi, for a period in her childhood, seems concerned that she too should turn white to be acceptable. While Naomi eventually learns to have pride in herself and her race, her brother Stephen never does. As the recipient of the Yellow Peril board game, he internalizes the discrimination and is more fully colonized than is his sister. Stephen seeks the acceptance of the white world, eventually partnering with a white woman and moving to Toronto. Stephen wants to forget the internment desperately. But Naomi is constantly reminded by the freedom of the birds around her all the freedom she lost in the internment camps. While she to tries to forget, she is ultimately incapable of doing so, and this novel becomes her great act of remembrance and memorialization.

Aunt Emily is the member of the family actively in search of closure for the victims of interment, and it is she who keeps the memory alive even when no one else wishes to hear it. In her youth, Naomi wants to ignore Emily's pleas -- after all, internment is how Naomi lost her father, and the anti-Japanese laws are what separated Naomi from her mother. For Naomi, a mere child during the ordeal, to forget the internment is to forget the pain of being wrenched away from her parents and grandparents. But when she realizes that Emily holds these secrets for the purposes of memorializing Naomi's parents, she learns to listen. Indeed, this is the central purpose of the text for Naomi -- to learn to listen to the older generation and to learn to embrace her own history, even those parts which may seem distasteful. Suddenly, to forget the internment would be to allow her parents to have died in vain, and once Naomi realizes that she can see the value in memory, however painful it might be. In Emily's diary, we read with crushing realism her loss of faith in the Canadian government as she moves from disbelief, to a sense that everything will be okay, to the absolute despair of being separated from her family with no guarantee of who she will ever be able to see again. This is the central message for the reader -- beyond the very important purpose of the text as a remembrance of past horrors, the novel is also a caution against blind faith in anything, but especially in man-made institutions. Obasan reminds us that the institutions we have are as fallible as we are.

raging against the machine, atwood-style

Moral Disorder
by Margaret Atwood

Tess was evidently another of those unlucky pushovers, like the Last Duchess, and like Ophelia -- we'd studied Hamlet earlier. These girls were all similar. They were too trusting, they found themselves in the hands of the wrong men, they weren't up to things, they let themselves drift. They smiled too much. They were too eager to please. Then they got bumped off, one way or another. Nobody gave them any help.

Why did we have to study these hapless, annoying, dumb-bunny girls? I wondered. Who chose the books and poems that would be on the curriculum? What use would they be in our future lives? What exactly were we supposed to be learning from them? Maybe Bill was right. Maybe the whole things was a waste of time.

Upstairs, my parents were sleeping peacefully; they knew nothing of doomed love, of words spoken in anger, of fated separation. They were ignorant of the darker side of life -- of girls betrayed in forests, of girls falling into streams and singing till they drowned, or girls done away with for being too pleasant. All over the city, everyone was asleep, drifting on the vast blue sea of unconsciousness. Everyone except me.

In her most recent collection of linked short stories, Moral Disorder, Margaret Atwood develops the character of Nell. We meet Nell in girlhood as, at the age of eleven, she deals with her mother's pregnancy, and we follow Nell through schooling and romance, through raising her younger sister as her mother coped with what seems to be some sort of post-partum depression that goes on forever, through her unorthodox lifestyle that involves her with a married man, through her coping with her sister's mental illness, and finally to her dealing with the aging and death of her parents. Some of the stories are told in the first person and others in the third; frequently we are treated to the points-of-view of outside characters like a loving realtor or a confused stepchild. It takes a long time for the stories to link together, and as the collection nits and we realize 'I' and 'Nell' are one and the same, the collection begins to tell us something about identity and the ways in which we see ourselves. Interestingly, Nell is an 'I,' that is, she speaks from the first person point-of-view, only when she is in a position of care-giving. When she is her sister's caregiver, and then again later when she is caring for her parents. In those intermittent years, when Nell is involved with Tig and unsure of her place and stability and she ages alongside a married man, she is narrated for by an outside voice. The 'I' returns when the man's wife dies and Nell becomes more stable in her existence again. (What do we make of the need to kill off another woman here in order to find a place with a man?) Nell is able to tell her own story only when she is sure of her identity and comfortable with her role. Where things are shaky, she transitions to being told about rather than telling her own story.

Another motif that emerges, as discussed in the quote above, is the idea of the representation of women in literature and in public perception. Nell is, in her youth, fascinated by the way women fit or don't fit into the roles society determines. Her mother embarrasses her because she can't be bothered to knit for the new baby and because her own mental illness prevents her from carrying effectively for her new child. She becomes obsessed with the idea that with the sixties came the drop of the term 'adultery' -- but without adultery, she wonders, what is monogamy, and who is she? Nell wonders to herself, "I was haunted by a poem I read at the age of twenty, written by a well-known poet much older than myself. This poem claimed that all intellectual women had pimples on their bums. It was an absurd generalization, I realized; nevertheless, I worries about it." For Nell, more important than the truth of the poem is the perception that poem creates. It doesn't matter that she's pimple-free if everyone else believes otherwise. And fundamentally, that is what this book is about -- women, and the assumptions society (including other women) make about them.

a rollicking read, right when i needed it

Medicine River
by Thomas King

My mother died on a Tuesday in the early evening. My clearest memory of her was that day the row-boat sank in Lake Pokagon. I remember my fear of sinking into that lake. James wouldn't let go of the side of the boat. I was sure we were going to die. And then my mother snorted as her short legs found the bottom. The lake wasn't deep at all, at least not there. It hardly came above James's chest, and it was warm. My mother shook her head. "Well, we ain't going to die today." And she laughed and told us to hold on to her hands.

As Harelna and I pulled the canoe along, I could feel the large round stones under my feet, could hear the hollow roll they made as they rocked beneath me, and I thought about my mother and James and me, laughing and walking through the mud and the water to shore. James was with her when she died. I should have been there, too.

The river swirled around us, sucking at our feet, flashing at our legs as we went. Harlen began singing a forty-niner, beating out the rhythm on the gunwales. And we brought the canoe back through the dark water and into the light.

Medicine River is a novel of memory and remembrance. King's first novel is indeed quite novel in form. Each chapter is an interweaving of a present-day story about Will, a photographer living in Medicine River near his mother's home reserve, and a story of the past, either about Will's mother or brother or his past life in Toronto. In the present-day, Will has come to Medicine River following the death of his mother. The events of this time help him to become closer to his mother through reminiscence, as well as helping him to realize the inauthenticity of his life in Toronto and the power of connection he has in Medicine River. This is a novel, then, not only about memory, but about finding one's place in the world. And it's not always happy. Will is knocked for six when his "girlfriend" starts to redefine her relationship with her baby's father -- but it reifies his definition of himself as a single man. This is the life he claims makes him happy, and it parallels his romantic life in Toronto where he was the other man in a relationship with a married woman and is eventually broken-hearted. What we learn about this, and what the over-arching message of the text seems to be, is that life occurs in circles and cycles, ever repeating. Will seems to be in Medicine River as a chance to sort out his life and get things right. With his friend Harlen Bigbear as a kind of spiritual guide, Will is able to find his way forward, for better or for worse.

For fans of Thomas King's later work, this book may be a bit of a surprise. It lacks the magic realism of a novel like Green Grass, Running Water. But the sweetness and the kindness of Thomas King is here in this early novel, replete with the humour that has made him so popular. This is a warm novel about memory and experience, but I don't really have anything ground-breaking to write about it. I enjoyed it thoroughly, but it is not as layered as some of his later works.

the last play i shall write about today, praise jesus / allah / santa / marks'n'spencers

The Occupation of Heather Rose
by Wendy Lill

I would say, without a doubt, that the character of Heather Rose is the meatiest, most tantalizing, most desirable role for a young female actress working in Canada today. The Occupation of Heather Rose is a one-woman tour-de-force of voice that id demanding, draining, and one can only imagine, deeply fulfilling. The play has been remounted as a multi-person cast (and I want to say a film, but I could be fabricating that), but I can't imagine that's possible without losing the powerful sense of isolation the one-woman aspect of the play provides. In the end, that is what this play is really about -- how one deals with isolation, how one reaches their limit, and how one learns to go home again.

Heather Rose is a young white woman of middle class guilt stock who decides to pack up everything after nursing school and go to work of a reserve up norther. Heather is not prepared for anything -- not the isolation, not the health problems, not the problems with accessing resources, nor with her own resiliency (or lack thereof) in the face of trauma. For Heather, life is one big adventure and this is simply another challenge for her to overcome, like getting straight As or pleasing her parents.

Heather is isolated from the community right away when, immediately upon arriving, she expresses gratitude for the fact that this is a dry reserve. When every other white person working on the reserve is drunk most of the time, she loses friends before she even begins by being simply too sheltered to be able to view things accurately. Heather starts out full of a wide-eyed idealism, but before long she succumbs to the drink. Where at the play's opening she is disgusted by the people who have given up on the natives and refer to them as a "broken people," by the end she is one of the chorus of voices condemning them to a life of uncertainty and failure.

As Heather becomes increasingly isolated with her friends leaving and mail so slow from home, she turns more towards the bottle and to the man she previously thought of as so unsuited to herself. Hitting this 'rock bottom' allows Heather to see that she must return home. She can't understand why the natives don't want to hear about her Scottish history, and doesn't understand why no one cares about her or where she comes from. In her outburst she fails to realize how disposable her kind has been -- and in turn, how disposable she is proving herself to be. There is no point in getting to know her as experience dictates that she will be gone soon. The silence echos loudly from both sides.

queenie and mona all grown up

Drag Queens on Trial
by Sky Gilbert

Praise the unabashedly queer narrative! If you want to see edgy and exciting theatre, the only place worth going is gay and lesbian theatre, which strives to push the boundaries of acceptability and is always willing to say something -- while still having a whole lot of fun. Sky Gilbert is no exception; in fact, I think he may have written the rules of queer theatre. And we are so lucky to have him writing in Canada, proudly carrying the monicker of our edgiest playwright.

The play opens with a quote from Capote, stating that "The [female] impersonator is in fact a man (truth) until he recreates himself as a woman (illusion) and, of the two, the illusion is truer." This play is all about truth and illusion and the creation of identity. Each of the drag queens in the play are charged with being, well, drag queens, and find themselves faced with the "truths" about their existence -- tales from their lives as men that replace the narratives they have woven about themselves as women. And while these narratives may be "truth" is it's most banal sense, they fail to replicate the truth of the existence of these women in their present form: and there lies the trouble of determining or insisting on drawing a line between truth and fiction. As Marlene contemplates whether or not she has been lying to the judge, she thinks about the years she spent living as a "non-person" before she could define herself as a drag queen. The "lies," if we really have to call them that, serve only to help forge an identity for someone out of the ashes of a confused and hurt child who cannot place themself in the world. She refuses to be crushed into the cringing, helpless and confused boy she was before the "lies" began, and as such she cannot let the judge define her reality.

And that is both the beauty and the central purpose of this play. The Drag Queens may be on trial, but it is all of us who are forced to consider the premium we choose to place of a factual reality that may not match up with a spiritual one. These women are all damaged inside; they talk about craving abuse, about needing to be harmed, about troubled childhoods and too much promiscuity. The question seems to be: who are we to take away the so-called "lies" that carve out survival?

the secret life of the guy they named the hospital after

Doc
by Sharon Pollock

I drive past the Dr. Everett Chalmers Hospital in Fredericton almost every single day, and sometimes I go in to be poked or prodded or have my blood stolen from me, and every time I like to think and wonder about the man they named the hospital after. Who was he? What did he accomplish? What wonders did her perform for this community? Was he a kind man? A good man? (Was he pro-choice?) Reading Doc is an interesting experience for any resident of Fredericton because, as it turns out...

Dr. Everett Chalmers was kind of a dick.

See, Sharon Pollock was his daughter, and in this autobiographical play she tells the story of her parents' unhappy marriage, her mother's alcoholism, mental illness and infidelity, and her father's obsession with his work to the detriment of the entire family. This is a play about fathers who betray the trust of daughters, and of daughters left as the sole support for a disintegrating family unit. In this play, Pollock explores her father's addiction to work and his inability to accept his wife's alcoholism as an illness. She deals with her own feelings of betrayal and her father's feelings of alienation from her. In the play, Pollock's role is played by Catherine, who we see simultaneously as a child and as an adult. Catherine/Katie is putting together the pieces of her past from two perspectives, and looking to her father for answers.

Katie fears being like her mother, and Catherine wants to deny her connection to her father. In the end, though, both halves of this protagonist come to condemn the mother, Bob, as a weak woman who gave in to suicide and alcoholism. The central question of this play is Catherine trying to find out from her father if being worshipped by rural New Brunswick was worth the family torment -- and in the end, the answer seems to be yes, because by the end of the play Ev and Catherine are complicit in burning the suicide not of Ev's father and thereby silencing the voilce of all the troubled women around Ev. He finally supports and is supported by his daughter, and thereby seems to make some strides towards healing the familial rifts.

canada's first bilingual play

Balconville
by David Fennario

What are we to make of a play about English and French Canada, where the English Canadians can't understand a word of French and the French Canadians are just happy that there are finally some anglos slumming in the Montreal tenements? Absurd but painfully, brutally realistic, Balconville offers us a slice of life of the problems that come when we try to bridge linguistic and cultural gaps in times of need. Balconville forces you to think: what if an angle walked in on the ladies at Gabrielle Lauzon's house in Les Belles-Soeurs? Is the situation becoming more or less positive as we lean over that cultural divide?

One of the key motifs in Beaconville is an emerging understanding between the anglophone and francophone characters that they have a shared heritage. When the elderly remark to one another that children usedto behave themselves, both English and French can remark, "Yes, I remember that too." They can share troubles about working conditions at the factory and the problems with encouraging collective action. Thibault is shocked to realize that English people, just like him, often balance two girlfriends at a time.

Fennario also works to expose the racism inherent in the new emerging separatist government. Paquette blames all his troubles on "the English and the Jews," claiming that unlike them, he has had to work for a living his whole life. Johnny tries to point out that everyone of their economic class does, even the English and Jews, but Paquette tries hard to avoid listening. Paquette also voices those who wish to take away linguistic rights for anglophones, asserting that English speakers should either learn French or get out of the province. But Johnny is not without paranoid nationalism, fearing that the union is run by separatists who want to keep anglophones out of office. The effect of these discussions is to show the fear and irrationality on both sides of the debate, but also to point out that injustices can be faced by both sides. After all, both groups are living in the slums. One group may shout "Fuck the Queen!" while the other shouts "Fuck Levesque!" But for these destitute people, Fennario seems to suggest, it's really the same fight.

the underbelly of the hero, the inferiority of the colony

Billy Bishop Goes to War
by John Gray and Eric Peterson

At its heart of hearts, I don't believe that Billy Bishop Goes to War is really about Billy Bishop, or even about war, at all. Deep down at its fleshy core, this play is about Canadian inferiority and making a name for Canada on the world stage. In the end, the play's own history (the triumph of arriving on Broadway, the flop of being deeply misunderstood there) is a perfect echo of the theme of Canadian also-ran-ism that the play is really about.

When Billy arrives in England to fight, he describes his boat as filled "with dead horses and sick Canadians," looking like "a boat load of Balkan refugees." He describes the Canadians at war as "cannon fodder," and determines that it is because he is Canadian that he will never get a look in as a fighter pilot. Indeed, the recruiter agrees, asserting that "no one gets to be a pilot right away, for Christ's sake. Especially not bleeding Canadians!" The idea that we arrived in England to soak up bullets is distasteful to Billy, but he also accepts it fully because he can't imagine it any other way. Billy is a deeply colonized man. He doesn't doubt for one second that he is inferior to the British people around him, and there is certainly no sense that he could fight against the people who believe this to be true.

At war, Billy becomes increasingly homesick for Canada. In one of the songs in the play, he remembers Canada fondly, saying: "Nobody shoots no one in Canada, / Last battle was a long, long time ago. [...] Nobody starts no wars on Canada, / Where folks tend to wish each other well." He prays that when he dies he will die in Canada.

When he meets Lady St. Hellier, however, he becomes aware that his point of view is skewed. She sees that he is capable of more, and says to him that while soaking up bullets is acceptable behaviour in a Canadian, he is gifted, and therefore he "belongs to a much older and deeper tradition than Canada can ever hope to provide." She points out to him that he is hindered by his "colonial mentality," which seems determined to prove that those who think of Canadians as failures right. Because Billy has this guardian, he can move away from this point of view and become "someone" outside of the colonial context. There is a sense that Billy becomes practically British, in the end.

Through his heroic deeds, Billy becomes an inspiration to the colonial residents -- he is created to be held up as a figurehead -- and this is what gets him sent home in the end. That's the moral of the story here: we must throw off the shackles of colonial oppression, because only in so doing can we achieve real successes and, in Billy's case, survive the war.

canadian swashbuckling

Zastrozzi
by George F. Walker

The first time I came across this play was in a drama classroom about a million years ago. I certainly didn't understand it then and I fear I may not understand it now, but I'm going to give it a "stab." It seems to me that if nothing else, this is one hell of a fun play to read. (I'm sure there's more to it. Really I am. But isn't it refreshing, once in a long while, to just have fun?)

Zastrozzi is a man who believes that the world is a fundamentally negative place filled with negative people doing negative things. As a result, he sees chaos as the natural order of the world and crime as the only action worth engaging in, and the only thing with any meaning. Throughout the play we are told that Zastrozzi has no weaknesses, and that he believes that mankind is weak and the world ugly, and "the only way to save them both is to destroy them." He is out to kill Verezzi, a stupid man who is the epitome of the flaky artistic type; he believes that his art is truth without the peskiness of reality, when really it's just bad. Verezzi believes that he himself is God, which sets the play up with the battle of good and evil in Verezzi and Zastrozzi. Except that good here is deeply ironic, and Verezzi has more in common with an old shoe than with the embodiment of God.

In the end, Zastrozzi, who has set out to kill "God" and prove the lack of God at the same time, he allows Victor to find God before he dies and therefore Zastrozzi doesn't kill God but instead reifies him. When he is face to face with Veressi, in the end, Zastrozzi lets him live, saying that he needs and opponent. When the two men symbolize God and Satan, they cannot kill each other, because each defines the other in turn. There is no one without the other, and each needs the other to exist.

One disturbing character in the play is Matilda, who is only happy and sexually fulfilled when she is being abused by someone as violently as possible. She accepts that Zastrozzi is a murderer, an abuser, and a rapist -- and it is those things that attract him to her, rather than acting as a deterrent or scaring her about him. There is one other female character in the play is Julia. Unlike the damaged Matilda, Julia demands complete rationality and kindness from people with whom she interacts. At the end of the play, though, both women are dead. Does it matter which path a woman follows in life and love, then, if she ends up murdered in the end?

blood, guts, and the real black donnellys

The St. Nicholas Hotel, WM Donnelly Prop.: The Donnellys, Part II
by James Reaney

This is another chapter in the saga of the Donnellys, the family from Ireland who moved to southwestern Ontario only to be persecuted and eventually burned to death in a massive, unsolved massacre in 1880.

O, Canada!

The Donnellys are fated to death because of their stubbornness. They refused to join an anti-Protestant group. It basically burbles up from that point to a fever pitch of violence and trauma, and the legend ends in this installment with the death of Michael Donnelly which "left a stain on the floor no ordinary scrubbing brush can ever wash away." The play is a celebration of those who stand against the mass opinion; characters like Dr. Maguire, who refuses to berate the Donnellys but instead comments on their "intelligent faces" and denies the sources of prejudice. The kindness of Maguire is contrasted with the violent aspirations of Maggie's father who would rather see his daughter dead than married to the Donnelly with whom she has fallen in love.

The women of the Donnelly family are the most demonized. Because the Donnellys allow their women to develop their own identities, and because mother Donnelly really runs the family and guides the actions of her boys, the townspeople are most "afraid of an old woman." Carroll, a leader of the violent anti-Donnelly aggressors, claims, "She's a witch and we'll never get rid of any of them unless there's someone brave enough to just -- but there isn't." Anyone willing to kill her would be the St. Patrick of Biddulph, dricing the snakes out of their township.

When the Donnelly votes sway an election, the people become more obsessed with ending this troublesome family, and in the third act we have the climactic death of Mike Donnelly. But in this act we also learn why some people continue to side with the Donnellys. As farmhand Tom tells us, "Because they're brave, [...] they're handsome, [and...] when Pa here took the ax to mother and Bridget and Sarah and me who was the only family on the whole road with enough sand to take us in? So that's why I side with them." In this act the genuine fierceness, compassion, and love of the Donnellys comes through, which is what makes the conclusion so tragic.

The conclusion of the play contains its larger message:

"I told him what I tell you now -- to look straight ahead past this stupid life and death they've fastened on you -- just as long ago your father and me and out first-born walked up over the last hill in Ireland and saw what you will see now -- for the first time in our lives we saw freedom, we saw the sea."

the time we kicked political ass, and lost... but maybe in the long-run we won anyway

1837: The Farmer's Revolt
by Rick Salutin and Theatre Passe Murraille


Ok, here's the thing. I'm a big nerd. A really, really, really big nerd. And I love nothing more than Canadian history. I'm pretty much in love with the War of 1812, can't read enough about the Conquest in 1760, and the Rebellion (no... Revolution!) of 1837 has always fascinated me. So I was stoked to read this play -- and in no way did it disappoint me. What a show! I would love to one-day see a production of it, because there's nothing quite so exciting to me as good theatre and good history coming together at once.

The best part about this play was reading Rick Salutin's production diary before reading the play. Because this play was a collective, it was interesting to read about the process of creating these characters and really making history come alive. The temptation to allow the rebels to win in the theatre version was something they really struggled with -- in the end they opted to stick closer to history than that, which is a shame, but it makes even more powerful the final line of the play. In response to the assertion that they rebels had lost, one of the condemned men at the gallows responds, "No! We haven't won yet!" The idea that the rebels who were hanged went out with that sense of positivity and pride is really what underscores the main project of this play, which is to celebrate our history and to find a way to revel in the progress even where it seems progress came too slowly.

To me, what is so interesting about the process behind this play is the near gender-less-ness of the characters. It seems that all the characters had been played by either gender, which I really like. In situations like military service, there was no public opportunity for women to work, but their labours at home have traditionally been what makes war possible. It was interesting to see this group of actors mount the production without regard for gender roles; it seems to bring to the forefront the role of women in wartime, and moves them from the private sphere, politicizing their acts. Remember that the woman who fed the rebels was in as much danger of persecution as the rebel fighters themselves. This is fitting way to deal with the situation without 'faking' history -- Mackenzie is Mackenzie, whether played by a woman or a man.

In the end, the project of this play is to make Canadian history interesting, exciting, and worth watching. I would certainly have to say that the mission is accomplished.

generational conflict in toronto's ex-pat newfoundlander community

Leaving Home
by David French

Part of the Mercer cycle of plays, Leaving Home tells the story of Jacob Mercer's sons leaving home for the first time, highlighting a rift between the two men and revealing (a) Jacob's concern with his own masculinity and (b) the cultural alienation the whole family feels. The children are embarrassed that their parents speak and act differently than the parents of their friends. For Jacob and Mary and the other ex-pats in their world, the universe is divided into US and THEM -- Newfoundlanders vs. Canadians. While the children wish desperately for their parents to assimilate into the larger Toronto society, they find themselves pulled back into the cultural ghetto -- Billy has been trapped into marriage by the Jackson family women who are from the same part of Newfoundland as his parents, and is being dragged back into the same life pattern as his parents (forced to give up school, parenting at a young age, etc.). Even though it is determined that Kathy, the young lady, is not really pregnant, the marriage seems destined to go ahead.

Canada, in the play, is represented by Harold -- a mortician dressed all in grey who never speaks, never laughs, and yet seems to be in complete control. We are meant to see in him a stark contrast with Jacob and Mary -- especially Jacob -- who is boisterous, emotionally charged, and completely at a loss within his family. Because Jacob is not the head of this family. Indeed, that role belongs to Mary, and she and the boys wage war against Jacob's temper and stubbornness. In the end, it is the son Ben, not trapped by marriage and with all the opportunities of the world before him, who steps out for his independence. What are we to make of the fact that he escapes the family and becomes "Canadian" while his parents are left alone at the end of the play? We know that Ben must leave, and must find himself, but the shift that occurs is quite drastic and jarring. Ben rejects his parents. Yet we are left with them at the end of the play, and it is clear who we are supposed to side with; Jacob is not perfect, and we have seen his failures with his own sons, but we should also see our own weaknesses in him. Jacob is a man who doesn't know how to be a Newfoundlander outside of Newfoundland, and that tragedy leaves him incapable of sharing himself and his history with his boys before they walk away for good. Ben denies it all together, and Bill is forced into remaining connected to Newfoundland by his trapped marriage. The play is largely comic, but the end is anything but happy.

female community (or lack thereof) in quebec

Les Belles-Soeurs
by Michel Tremblay

Sometimes, those of us with interests in gender studies want to see every place that is coded for a specific gender as positive -- for women, we reclaim the kitchens and parlors, and for men we celebrate the male-bonding of the hunting camp or the reclusive peace of the shed or workshop. But sometimes, a space is coded for a specific gender to the detriment of that group. This is the case in Les Belles-Soeurs, where the kitchen of Germaine Lauzon's Montreal tenement is certainly a female space, but could not really be considered a space for positive consideration of gender issues. The women in Les Belles-Soeurs are not supportive members of female community; for the most part, they hate each other, and are far more interested in cutting one another down than in providing support, friendship, and compassion.

Germaine Lauzon has won a million stamps for her collection of stamp books and is busy fantasizing about what to do with them. She invits all her female friends, neighbours, and family members over to her house to help her fill her stamp books -- but she has no intention of sharing. The women, for the most part, start out generous and willing to help. But before long they are stealing from one another and fighting to possess all the stamps themselves. The women are so mired in poverty and hopelessness that they can't imagine being happy for a woman who has gained so much by no effort at all. They would rather see all of them fail together than one succeed or emerge out of the ghetto. Gabrielle dislikes her son's education because she thinks he is coming to believe himself better than his roots. The contest seems to be: who is hurting most, and who has suffered more?

The question of options for women is key to the play -- and the answer to what choices ought women have is simply this: none. Everyone hates Pierrette because she dances at a club for money. No one feels sorry for her or wonders what drove her to this point; instead they condemn her. Likewise, Lise is pregnant and abortion is offered to her. Those who know she's considering it condemn her, and even those who don't know she's pregnant, like Rose, find themselves spewing about "unwed mothers" who are "a bunch of depraved sluts," condemned because the men of the group call them "cockteasers." (Aren't they the opposite?) Only the supposedly detestable Lisette and the whore Pierrette remain open-minded at all or considerate to these women. And in the end, this is the central sadness of the text: these women are without options, but they would still rather condemn one another than support each other for a better future.

if prison break was canadian and also if it didn't suck

Fortune and Men's Eyes
by John Herbert

Fortune and Men's Eyes is one of the most important plays ever written in Canada, not only because it has been massively popular around the world, but because the play inspired the founding of the Fortune Society for Prison Reform. As far as international social impact goes, I can't imagine any Canadian play has had more. The play was inspired by Herbert's own experience in prison (he was beaten and robbed by a street gang, but when the police came the attackers told the officers that Herbert was gay and had sexually propositioned them, and Herbert was convicted of gross indecency).

Despite the import of this play for prison reformers everywhere, to me this is a play about gender. For a play from 1967, the characters here have remarkably fluid gender identities, in a way that even in 2007 we wouldn't see as acceptable in prime time. Mona and Queenie both choose to identify as female (Queenie is a more brashly drag performer, where Mona seems to embody womanliness in full as an identity), and the other prisoners accept this. The only person who insists on calling attention to genderlessness is the guard, who refers to Mona as 'it' and is disgusted by her choice to become another gender. Interestingly, the being female of Queenie and Mona is to different ends. Queenie does it for power -- she knows she can control the men in power at the prison by offering herself to them sexually. Mona, conversely, seems to be more comfortable in womanly skin than in trying to define herself as male, and though Mona finds herself regularly attacked and abused as a result, it is worth it to live her reality. All the characters in the play engage in homosexual sex -- it's the only sex on offer -- but only Mona makes it her identity, and this is why she is ultimately destroyed by the action of the play. It also seals her unhappiness, because Mona wants to be wanted for herself rather than for being the next best thing to a woman -- and within the prison walls, this ideal is basically impossible. Smitty, coming to prison from a tradition upbringing, wants Mona to be male, but eventually accepts her as a woman enough to make love to her.

Through Smitty we see the point of the play that gave the Fortune Society its inspiration -- the horrors of the prison system destroy an individual's identity in ways from which it can never be recovered. To become strong enough to survive the harsh prison world, Smitty must change from the caring man he is to a hard-nosed criminal. He is preparing for the discrimination he will receive when he tries to reintegrate into society with violence and pain. It is expected that he will reoffend. Smitty is destroyed over the course of the play, and the cruel man we see at the play's end bears no resemblance to the fearful boy we meet at the play's opening. That, in the end, is the central tragedy of Herbert's play.

ecstasy in canadian theatre

Sorry for the protracted absence, loyal readers. I have been away reading an anthology of Canadian plays, and with the pace I was going I felt really unmotivated to stop and write after each play. So I've decided to do it this way instead -- I'm spending today writing two-paragraph review / summary / thematic inspection pieces on each of the plays I have read. Then tomorrow is the dawn of contemporary Canadian literature... hallelujah!

The Ecstasy of Rita Joe
by George Ryga

Rita Joe is a native woman standing accused of the greatest crime of the 1960s -- she has not successfully assimilated herself into white culture. The white people in positions of power who are pro-assimilation (the policeman, the magistrate) mistakenly believe that the only thing standing between aboriginal segregation and assimilation is a lack of linguistic fluency. As a result, Rita's rights and obligations under the law are never explained to her fully. The magistrate asks Rita repeatedly is she wants a lawyer, but never answers her repeated question of "what for?" Rita doesn't understand what is being asked of her, yet is expected to "speak for herself" in court because she understand English. The magistrate is unwilling to accept that there may be some problems in the vein of cultural literacy that hinder Rita's ability to defend herself in a court of law. She is not of that white tradition of law and therefore she needs a guide through the system, and this is repeatedly denied to her throughout the play.

Interestingly, there are those white people who condemn Rita not for her failure to assimilate into white culture, but for her desire to leave the reservation at all. Rita's priest is chief among those who believe that the only place for aboriginal people is on government-determined reserves. While the priest is a sympathetic voice, interested in the plight of the members of his flock and genuinely believing that the best place for all of them is together in a segregated community. What is interesting about this is that it places aboriginal people in an almost completely place-less situation. They are expected to either assimilate fully into white culture or remain in their government-sanctioned ghetto-reserves. There is no space for a native person who seeks to retain their culture and community but access the opportunities of larger cities. That space, it is made clear throughout this play, does not exist yet. In the end, Ryga's message seems to be that we need such a space if Canada is ever to get along amicably with her aboriginal people.

In the end, the play is a sympathetic one, but is problematic for one key reason: even the most sympathetic portrayal of minority issues cannot be exempt from problems of appropriation of voice. This is a problem not simply because Ryga is white, but because Rita Joe was originally played by a classically-trained white actress. This play itself was radical for Canada in 1967 because it probed a question and an issue we fear to talk about -- we don't want to believe there is racism in Canada, even today. But more alarming is the fact that it took until 1981 for The Ecstasy of Rita Joe to be performed by Native actors in all the Native roles. Until 1981, we were still essentially watching a "black-face" of the 49th parallel. Perhaps what is most thought-provoking about this play is not even the content, but the circumstances of its performances.