Canadian Cultural Exchange Echanges culturels au Canada: Translation and Transculturation traduction et transculturation (Cultural Studies)

Canadian Cultural Exchange Échanges culturels au Canada

Cultural Studies Series Cultural Studies is the multi- and interdisciplinary study of culture, defined anthropologically as a “way of life,” performatively as symbolic practice, and ideologically as the collective product of media and cultural industries, i.e., pop culture. Although Cultural Studies is a relative newcomer to the humanities and social sciences, in less than half a century it has taken interdisciplinary scholarship to a new level of sophistication, reinvigorating the liberal arts curriculum with new theories, new topics, and new forms of intellectual partnership. The Cultural Studies series includes topics such as construction of identities, regionalism/nationalism, cultural citizenship, migration, popular culture, consumer cultures, media and film, the body, postcolonial criticism, cultural policy, sexualities, cultural theory, youth culture, class relations, and gender. The Cultural Studies series from Wilfrid Laurier University Press invites submission of manuscripts concerned with critical discussions on power relations concerning gender, class, sexual preference, ethnicity, and other macro and micro sites of political struggle. For further information, please contact the Series Editor: Jodey Castricano Department of Critical Studies University of British Columbia Okanagan 3333 University Way Kelowna, bc v1v 1v7

Canadian Cultural Exchange Translation and Transculturation Échanges culturels au Canada Traduction et transculturation Edited by / Sous la direction de

norman cheadle lucien pelletier

We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program for our publishing activities.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Canadian cultural exchange : translation and transculturation / edited by Norman Cheadle, Lucien Pelletier = Échanges culturels au Canada : traduction et transculturation / sous la direction de Norman Cheadle, Lucien Pelletier. (Cultural studies series) Texts in English and French. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-0-88920-519-2 1. Translating and interpreting—Canada. 2. Canadian literature—Translations—History and criticism. 3. Literature—Translations—History and criticism. 4. Multiculturalism— Canada. 5. Cross-cultural studies—Canada. i. Cheadle, Norman, 1953– ii. Pelletier, Lucien, 1958– iii. Title: Échanges culturels au Canada. iv. Title: Translation and transculturation. v. Title: Traduction et transculturation. vi. Series: Cultural studies series (Waterloo, Ont.) fc95.c339 2007

418'.020971

c2007-902336-3e

Cover art: ¡Bailamos! by Michel Galipeau (1953–2006). An important participant in the cultural movement of Nouvel-Ontario since the 1970s, Galipeau and his work ceaselessly evolved across artistic and cultural boundaries. His works are found in collections throughout Canada, Great Britain, Spain, and Côte d’Ivoire. ¡Bailamos! now forms part of the Shriver-King collection in Sudbury. Illustration de la page couverture : ¡Bailamos!, par Michel Galipeau (1953–2006). Michel Galipeau a été un important acteur dans le mouvement culturel du Nouvel-Ontario dès les années 1970. Sa production a sans cesse évolué à la croisée des arts et des cultures. Ses œuvres font partie de collections au Canada, en Grande-Bretagne, en Espagne et en Côte-d’Ivoire. ¡Bailamos! fait maintenant partie de la collection Shriver-King à Sudbury. Cover design by P.J. Woodland. Text design by Catharine Bonas-Taylor. © 2007 Wilfrid Laurier University Press, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, www.wlupress.wlu.ca “Repatriating Arthur Nortje” © 2007 George Elliott Clarke

This book is printed on Ancient Forest Friendly paper (100% post-consumer recycled). Printed in Canada Every reasonable effort has been made to acquire permission for copyright material used in this text, and to acknowledge all such indebtedness accurately. Any errors and omissions called to the publisher’s attention will be corrected in future printings. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written consent of the publisher or a licence from The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). For an Access Copyright licence, visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call toll free to 1-800-893-5777.

Table of Contents / Table des matières

Acknowledgements/Remerciements vii Introduction by Norman Cheadle ix I TRANSITIVE CANADA (1): From where to here? / UN CANADA TRANSITIF (1). En amont La voix de l’Autre dans certains récits de voyages de l’Ouest canadien au temps de la Nouvelle-France par Alexandra Kinge et Alan MacDonell 3 The Creative Translator: Textual Additions and Deletions in A Martyr’s Folly by Albert Braz 15 “I am become Aaron”: George Elliott Clarke’s Execution Poems and William Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus by Susan Knutson 29 II CULTURAL APPROPRIATION REVISITED / L’APPROPRIATION CULTURELLE RECONSIDÉRÉE Latin-Americanizing Canada by José Antonio Giménez Micó 59 Transculturation and Cultural Exchange in Jane Urquhart’s Away and Eden Robinson’s Monkey Beach by Shelley Kulperger 75 Transculturation in George Elliott Clarke’s Whylah Falls: or, When Is It Appropriate to Appropriate? by Laurence Steven 99 Repatriating Arthur Nortje by George Elliott Clarke 121

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III THE TRANSCULTURAL BODY / LE CORPS TRANSCULTUREL I Write My Self: The Female Body as a Site of Transculturation in the Short Stories of Carmen Rodríguez by Carol Stos 141 Cantique du corps métis. La critique du mythe colonial dans Cantique des plaines de Nancy Huston par Jimmy Thibeault 159 IV RECONFIGURING THE SOLITUDES: Two plus other(s) / DEUX SOLITUDES ET QUELQUES AUTRES La migration culturelle de Robert Dickson Propos recueillis par Lucien Pelletier 177 A Reduced Solitude: Eugen Giurgiu’s Ewoclem sau întortocheatele ca ra ri [Ewoclem, or The Twisted Paths] as Romanian-Canadian Literature by Stephen Henighan 203 Polylingual Identities: Writing in Multiple Languages by Hugh Hazelton 225 La « latinité » des Québécois à l’épreuve par Victor Armony 247 Canadian Counterpoint: Don Latino and Doña Canadiense in José Leandro Urbina’s Collect Call (1992) and Ann Ireland’s Exile (2002) by Norman Cheadle 269 Appendix: The Uninvited Guest by Ann Ireland 297 V TRANSITIVE CANADA (2): From here to where? / UN CANADA TRANSITIF (2). En aval Translating North and South: Elizabeth Bishop, Biography, and Brazil by Neil Besner 307 Dry Lips Moves to Tokyo: Does Indigenous Drama Translate? by Beverley Curran 323 Out of the Shadows: Translators Take Centre Stage by Judith Woodsworth 341 Postface. Transculturation et mémoire par Lucien Pelletier 363 List of Contributors / Liste des collaborateurs 379 Name Index / Index onomastique 385 Subject Index / Index des matières 391

Acknowledgements / Remerciements

es directeurs de cet ouvrage remercient le Fonds de recherche de l’Université Laurentienne et le programme de maîtrise interdisciplinaire en humanités de l’Université Laurentienne pour leur appui pécuniaire. Norman Cheadle gratefully acknowledges the support of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Special thanks are extended to the following individuals: Laurence Steven and Carol Stos of Laurentian University, for their valuable participation in the editorial discussions that gave birth to this project; Jacqueline Larson at Wilfrid Laurier University Press, for her vision and skill at navigating the pitfalls involved in publishing a work of this nature; Rob Kohlmeier and Leslie Macredie for their savoir-faire in book production; copy editors Karen Rolfe and Anne Deraspe; and indexers Cheryl Lemmens and Louise Saint-André. Merci aux nombreux savants canadiens et québécois qui ont généreusement accepté d’évaluer de manière anonyme les textes du présent ouvrage. Thanks as well to those readers at Wilfrid Laurier who made helpful comments on the manuscript as a whole. Finally, special thanks to Meredith Eles, whose sharp eye, critical acumen, and unstinting hard work were indispensable to the production of this book. Permission has been granted by the copyright holders to reproduce excerpts from the following texts:

L

Neil Besner, translator. Rare and Commonplace Flowers: The Story of Elizabeth Bishop and Lota de Macedo Soares, by Carmen M. Oliveira (Rutgers UP, 2002), by permission of the translator.

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Dionne Brand. Poem xxii in Thirsty (M&S, 2002), by permission of McClelland & Stewart. George Elliott Clarke. Executions Poems: The Black Acadian Tragedy of “George and Rue” (Gaspereau, 2001); Québécité: A Jazz Fantasia in Three Cantos (Gaspereau, 2003); Whylah Falls (Polestar, 2000), by permission of the author. Robert Dickson. Or«é»alité (Prise de parole, 1978); Abris Nocturnes (Prise de parole, 1986); Grand ciel bleu par ici (Prise de parole, 1997); poème « And Even Earlier » dans Northern Prospects: An Anthology of Northeastern Ontario Poetry (Your Scrivener Press, 1998); Humains paysages en temps de paix relative (Prise de parole, 2002). Passages reproduits avec la permission des éditeurs. Blanca Espinoza Cáceres. “Tango” (Ed. Cielo Raso, 2001), by permission of the author. Jorge Etcheverry. Tánger (Ed. Cordillera, 1990) and Tangier (Ed. Cordillera, 1997), by permission of the author. Margarita Feliciano. “Océano Pacífico/Pacific Ocean” (Latin American Literary Review, 1981), by permission of the author. Nancy Huston. Cantique des plaines (Actes Sud, 1993). Passages reproduits avec la permission de l’éditeur. Arturo Kurapel. Prométhée enchaîné selon Alberto Kurapel/Prometeo encadenado según Alberto Kurapel (Humanitas, 1989), by permission of the publisher. Ann Ireland. Exile (Dundurn, 2002), by permission of the author. Alfredo Lavergne. “La conocí” (unpublished poem), by permission of the author. Arthur Nortje. Poems from Dead Roots (Heinemann, 1973), by permission of the Unisa Library of the University of South Africa. F.R. Scott. “On Saying Good-bye to My Room in Chancellor Day Hall” (Oxford UP, 1982), by permission of William Toye for the literary estate of the author. Carol Shields. Unless (Vintage Canada, 2003), by permission of Random House Canada. Luis Torres. El exilio y las ruinas (Ril, 2002), by permission of the author. Julio Torres-Recinos. Una tierra extraña (Split Quotation, 2004), by permission of the author.

norman cheadle

Introduction

i nombre es Ana … y cuando sea grande voy a ser intérprete,” announces the Latina-Canadian protagonist in the last sentence of Camila Reimers’s 2005 prize-winning short story (Reimers n.p.). Under questioning in English in an Ottawa courtroom, Ana knows that she is being asked her name, but literally cannot say it until the interpreter, her new friend Nawal, intervenes and talks with Ana in Spanish—kindly, somatically even—and thus lays the bridge that enables the little girl to not only cross from one culture to another, but also reinvent who she will be when she grows up: a Canadian and an interpreter. Little Ana, as she makes the difficult transition from her unnamed Spanish-American country of origin to Canada, has learned that translation is a key gateway to citizenship, as Sherry Simon recently remarked in a plenary address. Perhaps nowhere is this truer than in bilingual, multicultural Canada. Furthermore, Ana’s story clearly illustrates that translation and transculturation, though analytically distinguishable terms, are nevertheless processes that in practice overlap. Just as the act of translation willy-nilly adds layers of meaning, so does the process of transculturation: A does not merely pass over and disappear into B; rather, the two interact in complex and unpredictable ways to produce something new, say A1 and C, to cite the variables beautifully conjugated by Alejandro Saravia in a passage from his novel quoted by José Antonio Giménez Micó.* In a word, the peculiarly Canadian inflections of this unpredictable complexity constitute the overarching theme of this volume of essays.

“M

* Highlighted names indicate contributors to this volume.

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The idea for our book stems from two seminal contributions by Neil Besner and George Elliott Clarke, both of whom had been invited to Laurentian University1 to address the issue of “cultural appropriation,” a subject of hot debate in Canada in recent years, especially in relation to Aboriginal issues.2 Besner chose to speak about the difficulties and joys of translating, from Brazilian Portuguese into Canadian English, Carmen Oliveira’s best-selling biography Rare and Commonplace Flowers (1995), a novelized version of the lives of Canadian-born poet Elizabeth Bishop and the avant-garde Brazilian architect Lota de Macedo Soares. The story recounts the passionate encounter between those two women; its translation entails a cultural encounter in several dimensions—nationality, gender, sexual orientation, class, ethnicity, as well as langue and its many registers. If Besner frames all this under the geopolitical axis running between north and south, he does so not to reduce the complexity of his account but rather as a point of departure from which to begin to unravel the multiple mediations among those dimensions that complicate any consideration of the ethics of translational appropriation. George Elliott Clarke spoke about his bold project to “reappropriate” the poet Arthur Nortje (born in South Africa) for the Afro-Canadian canon. Clarke not only extended the debate into the area of canon formation, but also inverted the negative sign under which the term “appropriation” has normally been understood. With one bold rhetorical stroke, Clarke thus shows that appropriation is not necessarily a form of theft, but also can be a legitimate gesture of creative empowerment. It also forces us to think again about Northrop Frye’s famous question. If Nortje “comes home” to Canada and “Dry Lips Moves to Tokyo,” as Beverley Curran aptly titles her article on Tomson Highway’s play, then where is here now? Besner’s paper nudged the discussion about intercultural negotiations toward the sphere of translation, an activity that in Canada takes place daily, at every discursive level, on the two-way street between French and English. But we are not simply a bilingual and bicultural country; we are also engaged in an ongoing experiment in which multiple cultures interact within the formally defined geographical and political space called Canada. Translation must take place not only between English and French, but also between either or both these languages and Spanish, Italian, Greek, Chinese, and a host of others. If multiculturalism is to be anything more than an ideological mask donned by the liberal State to dissimulate its appropriation of the Other into the One,3 that is, if multiculturalism is to be a truly creative and empowering exchange among cultures, then surely this will have been made possible, in large part, by the activity of translators.

Introduction

On the other hand, Clarke’s gesture convinced us of the need to alter the terms of the inquiry and to allow it to develop within a rhetorically more open-ended framework. This conviction was subsequently strengthened when Ann Ireland submitted “The Uninvited Guest” (included as an appendix to Cheadle’s “Canadian Counterpoint”), part of which recounts how she overcame the publishing industry’s hypocritical dread of “voice appropriation” in order to get her novel Exile into print. Rather than focus exclusively on the twin positions of bad conscience and victimhood that tend to fuel post-colonialist discourse on cultural appropriation, we have opted for Fernando Ortiz’s notion of transculturation, the turbulent and unpredictable process resulting from the interaction among cultures in contact and which potentiates, in spite of unequal power relations, the emergence of new cultural forms. Transculturation, too, has come to be a contested term (see Cheadle). It has been denounced in terms similar to those used against official multiculturalism— i.e., as an ideologeme that ultimately serves a hegemonic power. However, the similar term “transculturalism” has been advocated by Indo-Canadian writer Ven Begamudré (Coleman 36) and is now common currency among scholars in Quebec.4 As one Canadian Studies scholar has put it, transculturation can still be used as “a critical paradigm enabling us to trace the ways that transmission occurs within and between different cultures” in order to account for the interplay between sameness and difference (Walter 27).5 Hence, we propose the notion of a Canadian cultural exchange as a conceptual frame for transitive cultural movement as it takes place in the political entity called Canada. However, as the concept is deployed in relation to Canada by this volume’s contributors (all of them Canadian but one), transculturation, too, inevitably becomes more than a descriptive sociological or ethnographic term, and shades over into an instrument of critical intervention and/or utopian projection. Thus, under the rubric “Cultural Appropriation Revisited,” José Antonio Giménez Micó makes a strong case for rehabilitating the move of appropriation as reterritorialization, which in turn becomes a vehicle for his case for “Latin-Americanizing Canada.” Shelley Kulperger reads both negative and productive instances of transcultural exchange in Jane Urquhart’s Away (1990) and Eden Robinson’s Monkey Beach (2000). Laurence Steven reads Whylah Falls to find an appropriate form of appropriation, a creative forging of identity that results from transcultural exchange between the novel’s characters. And George Elliott Clarke—with no apologies, just powerful arguments—performs appropriation on Arthur Nortje, the “Black/African, Dutch/Boer, Jewish, British, and landed immigrant/Anglo-Canadian” whose “[p]oems caught

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between revelation and revulsion” anticipate the work of luminaries such as Caribbean-Canadian Dionne Brand. This collection’s two editors, Norman Cheadle and Lucien Pelletier, have worked both separately and collaboratively. In principle, the articles written in English have fallen under Cheadle’s editorial purview, while Pelletier has vetted and edited those written in French. In practice, however, we have consulted one another continually. Generally our views have found common ground, but not always; hence, our decision that this book should be framed twice, once in English (by Cheadle’s Introduction) and again in French (by Pelletier’s Postface), expressing two editorial overviews that partially overlap but do not entirely coincide. We feel that this double framing is entirely appropriate, given the nature of the Canadian federation with its official bilingual and bicultural composition. This historical structure is not likely to change soon. Indeed, our basic hypothesis is that this non-coincident double framing replicates the structural feature that has made it possible for Canada to become a multicultural society and for that society to continue to evolve transculturally. The collection’s title itself is an instance of non-coincident doubling. The attentive reader will have noted a subtle difference between the English phrase, Canadian Cultural Exchange, and the French Échanges culturels au Canada. The singular noun “exchange” in English and the French plural form échanges are not necessarily at odds; “exchange” should be understood in a collective sense as the hypothetical set of many possible instances and modalities of exchange, and the plural échanges makes that nuance explicit, in effect explicating the English title. However, the differing syntax of the two titles does index a certain conceptual divergence. In the English title, the qualifier “Canadian” overdetermines the syntagm “cultural exchange”; not so in the French version, in which the plural échanges culturels is accompanied by an adverbial phrase. “Canadian” imposes an abstract, unifying quality upon a substantivized complex process; “au Canada” is merely circumstantial to the process. This morpho-syntactic variance, slight as may seem, signifies an ineluctable difference in perspective between English- and French-speaking Canada or, perhaps more accurately, between Quebec and the hegemonic Rest-of-Canada, a difference addressed frontally by Pelletier’s Postface. Even more disquieting, perhaps, is that the English title, unlike the French échanges culturels, carries a perverse echo of “stock exchange,” implying that Canada may be a site of cultural commodity exchange, where incommensurable cultural values will have been reduced to the colourless exchange value of money. The Anglophone editor consciously assumes this risk: cultural exchange will inevitably be caught up in the “bad infinity” or negative side of a globalization driven by

Introduction

capital’s insatiable tendency to surpass its quantitative limit. Nevertheless, the bad infinite of capital, as Marx following Hegel theorized, is inherently limited; its will to infinite self-expansion stands in dialectical counterpoint to a circular “good infinity,” in which thought develops freely through the infinite self-mediation of its very categories (Browning 908–9). Replace the term “thought” (and its categories) by “culture” (and its forms), and the Hegelian concept of the good infinity can, mutatis mutandis, characterize the utopian horizon of transformative cultural exchange as it takes place within Canada. The globalized market system may feverishly commodify cultural difference, reducing diversity to the abstract sameness of money, but the reduction never reaches completion. Cultural creativity, as Fernando Ortiz observed decades ago in his essay on Cuban cultural history, springs eternal, in spite of successive waves of imperial globalization and the reductive, exploitative economies they have imposed on the Caribbean island. An updated figuration of the good infinity can perhaps be read in a conceptual metaphor developed by Antonio Benítez-Rojo, whose interdisciplinary thinking owes a great deal to that of his compatriot Ortiz. For Benítez-Rojo, the Caribbean is an archipelago: a paradoxical formation, a “discontinuous conjunction” with neither border nor centre, a strange attractor within a shifting confluence of global currents (2–4). In the Caribbean, beginning in Cuba, the Western powers set up a vast machine for capital accumulation (5). Canada has played a similar role in the development of European capitalism, but with an obvious difference. Little wealth has remained in the Caribbean, whereas Canada’s white settler colonies and their middle-class descendants have done very nicely indeed: Canada and Cuba stand at opposite ends of the North–South geo-economic axis. Nevertheless, thanks to the world economic machine’s hydraulic pumps, the boundless Caribbean cultural archipelago pours into Canada through many valves. Thus we find the Cuban-Haligonian Pedro in George Elliott Clarke’s Whylah Falls (see Steven); Montreal’s Carifête provides the indispensable backdrop to José Leandro Urbina’s Collect Call (see Cheadle). Elsewhere, the Trinidad-born Dionne Brand has written of Toronto’s “impossible citizens,” their identity figured in a “pocked / whaleboned, autumnal arctic stone of a face” and through whom “some unproven element works … unproven, not unseen” (40). Brand’s image conflates Inuit kayakers and carvers with Benítez-Rojo’s Caribbean-planetary “Peoples of the Sea” (16), whose wisdom is proof against the destructiveness of the bad infinite of empire, though its project be called “Operation Infinite Justice.” Thanks to its porous construction, Canada is more receptive than other, more rigid national identities to the “unproven element” borne by planetary winds and

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cultural currents that permit us to glimpse the “impossible citizens” of our collective becoming.

Across cultures and disciplines When François Paré wrote his essay on Les littératures de l’exiguïté—those small literatures produced by small, marginal, resistant cultures—he drew upon a Borgesian series of examples: Basque, québécoise, Inuit, Slovenian, acadienne, franco-ontarienne, French Swiss, Walloon, Galician, Catalonian, Tyrolian, Berber, Barbadian, Mauritian, Seychellian, Navajo, Scots. It is a fractal series, without apparent conceptual design or representativity, whose random variety invokes through synecdoche a universal that, as Paré openly acknowledges, exceeds his (or anyone’s) comprehension. “J’aurais voulu … que ce livre soit universel, dans un tout autre sens,” Paré confesses wistfully (7). The utopian universal paradoxically finds its support in the small and the finite, the non-globalized. Nevertheless, three of those on Paré’s list of literatures/cultures are Francophone Canadian, and a fourth represents the Aboriginal peoples living in the far north of the territory claimed by Canada. Which allows one to say, through the magic of rhetorical and political synecdoche: they are, all four of them, Canadian. Canada: a federation formally presiding over a jumble of cultural identities, an aggregate whose national identity is notional—irremediably virtual, speculative, utopian. Canada: a baroque chunk of the impossible universal. Acá nada—“here, nothing”—runs the apocryphal joke in Spanish as though in oblique and untimely response to the famous question posed by our Anglo-Canadian Prospero, Northrop Frye. The Canadian here is nowhere and everywhere, an identitary topos that exemplifies Lévi-Strauss’s succinct definition of identity: “une sorte de foyer virtuel auquel il nous est indispensable de nous référer pour expliquer un certain nombre de choses, mais sans qu’il ait jamais d’existence réelle” (332). Like François Paré, we might have wished this book to be universal, somehow representing all the many cultures and their literatures that crisscross Canadian social space. In this regard, Stephen Henighan’s essay “A Reduced Solitude” begins by knowledgeably surveying Canadian minority literatures. But the volume as a whole was never meant to be representative in a descriptive sense; it does not attempt to provide anything like a systematic account of the diverse cultural productions in Canada. Thus we have deliberately eschewed the facile recourse of grouping the articles according to ethnicity or language. More interested in the cultural interactions and transactions among ethnicities, we have instead organized the book according to five thematic concerns that seem to arise from the whole set of our contributing texts.

Introduction

In Part i, the overarching concern may be summed up in the questions: whence the Canadian here? where have we come from? how has Canada come to be what it is? In Part ii, what are the various valences of “cultural appropriation” in all its propriety and impropriety? In Part iii, how is transculturation in Canada lived as embodied experience? In Part iv, what are the cultural consequences of our bilingual/binational constitution as we become multicultural? Finally, in Part v, Part i’s concern is swivelled Janus-like: whither the Canadian here? where are we going? how are we becoming who we will be? The reader will find that many of these concerns overlap in several articles, and so s/he should feel free to rearrange the articles, take eggs from one basket and put them in another. In a similarly Borgesian spirit, we have gathered an interdisciplinary series of texts written not only by academic critics and theoreticians of literature, theatre, and culture, but also by translators, creative writers, philosophers, and sociologists. A variety of discursive practices—from theoretical inquiry to close reading, from polemic (e.g., Clarke) to “notes from the front” (e.g., Ann Ireland or Pelletier’s interview-essay on Robert Dickson)—commingle in the volume as a whole and, more often than not, within individual articles. We have preferred not to divide the articles according to their discursive type, but rather to put them into dialogue with one another under the general thematic concerns outlined above. In sum, this book aims to be not only about cultural exchange, as its title indicates, but also to enact a performative exchange across cultural and discursive boundaries, all under the sign of the foyer vituel named Canada. In one case, translation too is performed: José Antonio Giménez Micó wrote his article in Spanish, but it appears here in Kate Alvo’s English translation. If the Anglophone reader is discomfited by certain “awkward” turns of phrase in this translated text, let her heed Créole writer Édouard Glissant’s plea, not just for the right to difference, but for the cultural and linguistic “right to opacity.” A certain opacity, Glissant argues, is the index of a given singularity’s irreducibility to the Transparent, the hegemonic One: “Le droit à l’opacité n’établirait pas l’autisme, il fonderait réellement la Relation, en liberté” (qtd. in Giménez Micó 62). The right to opacity may be seen as analogous, in this context, to the right to solitude, a theme to which we shall return presently.

Transitive Canada Most national identities may be compared to a virtual hearth, a retrospectively imagined historical origin serving as the singular, unitary centre of a given national community. In Canada’s case, we should translate

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Lévi-Strauss’s foyer by its less homely and more abstract meaning of focus, for two fundamental reasons. First, the Canadian constitution is predicated on not one but two “founding nations”; any notion of a unitary Canadian identity must arise from neither one nor the other but out of the differential space mediating between the two. Second, as a result of this forked foundational gesture, Canada must imagine itself prospectively, ceaselessly speculating toward, reformulating, and internally wrangling over its particular “universal”—i.e., its “moment of totalization or universalization … which is simultaneously impossible and necessary,” as Ernesto Laclau has lucidly argued with respect to identity and hegemony (84). What Laclau theorizes for community in general becomes especially transparent in the case of Canada: its formal foundation on the gap between two nations renders it proof against the ideological gesture of essentialization; hence, our notorious lack of a national epic, as both Clarke and Steven point out. This indeterminacy may have been a source of national-cultural anxiety—Where is here?—but it also makes for a unique collective experiment in which radical freedom must be framed by mutual respect, the former evoking the latter as an appropriate, and necessary, ethical response. Our famously Canadian tendency to be polite to a fault is no mere behavioural quirk; it is a collectively spontaneous response to our constitutionally pluri-cultural makeup. Canada, at its best, is a unique example of what Julia Kristeva has called the transitional nation—“the nation as a series of differences” (41; Kristeva’s emphasis)—in her utopian re-thinking of what France should offer its citizens: an “identifying (therefore reassuring) space, as transitive as it is transitory” (42). Transitive is that cultural space constitutionally mediating between the descendants of the two imperial European powers that successively colonized Canada. That transitive space necessitates the act of translation from French to English, et de l’anglais vers le français, in a ceaselessly transformative and reciprocal gesture. If Albert Braz, extrapolating from our cultural condition in 1930, protests that translation has never been properly valued in Canada, Judith Woodsworth reads in the novels of Carol Shields and Kate Taylor a new awareness of the importance of translation. If, in the early 20th century, the abyss between the two solitudes permitted anonymous and dishonest English translations of La Bourrasque, Maurice Constantin’s historical novel about Louis Riel, then at the turn of the 21st century, as Woodsworth argues, translators have come “out of the shadows” to “take centre stage.”6 From two antagonistic cultural hearths, two alienated centres of gravity, we are shifting to a new virtual identitary locus in the transitive space that mediates between, but does not totally subsume, the traditional French- and EnglishCanadian foyers.7

Introduction

The two-nation foundation, of course, is a figment fashioned by Eurocentrism. Many nations thrived on this continent before the French and then the English arrived to colonize it. Alexandra Kinge and Alan MacDonell reexamine the encounter with the non-European Other in the travel journals of French explorers of the Canadian West. Even as the French seek to appropriate the discourse of the Natives, on whom they depend for the success of their project, the “Sauvages” in turn manipulate French imperialist ideology by cleverly referring to the English as “meschants François.” Already in the 17th century, the indigenous peoples, confronted by the European conqueror, are finding wiggle room in the gap between the two prospective “founding nations.” Thus by 1971 the Aboriginal peoples, erroneously labelled Indians by colonial discourse, were able to challenge the two-founding-nations thesis by officially declaring themselves the First Nations, overlaying the latecomers’ duality with an anterior plurality; this rhetorical/political move is doubly powerful in that it weakens the Eurocentric foundational claim both numerically and temporally. The descendents of the French and the English have thus become, in one scholar’s words, this country’s “two fragile minorities” (Frideres 58), albeit large ones. Their fragility is not weakness but a relational condition: neither can dominate the totality of social-cultural space, not even within their own reduced ambits. Thus, along with the voices of the First Nations, those of Afro-Canadian culture can begin to make themselves heard, eventually finding powerful literary expression, as witnessed in the anthology Odysseys Home. Officially cast as a subaltern companion in the European colonial enterprise, the African, even in the 17th century, managed to occupy the strategic position of translator among the mercantile invaders of the Canadian East Coast, as Susan Knutson reminds us with the case of Mathieu Da Costa. Knutson goes on to show how George Elliott Clarke’s Execution Poems intertextually re-appropriate not only Shakespeare but also his classical and biblical sources, retroactively effecting a teleological realignment that helps articulate the Afro-Canadian identity—another powerful voice in the Canadian foyer.

Ce pays qui n’en est pas un Luce Irigaray argued in “Ce sexe qui n’en est pas un” that woman is not a sex because the notion of woman has been traditionally conceived, in patriarchal culture, as not-man: woman would be man manqué. At the same time, woman is not one sex (as “man” is), but a being whose sexuality is multiple and uncontainable, rather like Benítez-Rojo’s archipelago. Woman, then, is at once less than one and more than one. Similarly, Canada

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is not one nation, nor is it one-plus-one nations or deux nations. Perhaps it is, with “post-materialist” Quebec at its core, informed by a “latinité américaine du Québec [qui] est porteuse de valeurs autour desquelles peut se construire un projet collectif pluraliste et intégrateur” (Victor Armony), the potential model for a non-epic, post-heroic nation: one that exists not under the shadow of a single phallic signifier that violently imposes a homogeneous cultural unity, contained within fiercely defended borders, but rather as an archipelago of pluralities that may also be figured as a transcultural (female) body. Carol Stos theorizes woman’s body as a site of transculturation with a close reading of Carmen Rodríguez’s short stories, drawing out the Chilean-Canadian writer’s use of synecdoche to evince a new transcultural whole, in Canada, from the fragments of the female body that, physically and metaphorically, had been dispersed in the Chilean trauma and diaspora. Rodríguez’s strategy, as theorized by Stos, recalls by analogy Clarke’s move to gather up, under a new sign, the disjecta membra of Arthur Nortje’s corpus scattered by the South African native’s convulsive transcontinental career. Both cases imply the act of naming the “strange attractor” that spins virtual identity out of the boundlessly diverse and complex. Jimmy Thibeault reads the score of the “Cantique du corps métis” in the heterodox polyphony of Nancy Huston’s Cantique des plaines; it is the body of Miranda that weaves together the voices of the conqueror, of the “colonisateur de bonne volonté,” and of her Blackfoot grandmother to produce a strange new Albertan beauty. If woman is not-man, Canada can also be seen as not-USA, both negatively and positively. On the one hand, we seem to be less-than-American, either as Francophone others (“aliens” in Americanese) or as the emasculated descendents of British colonials who never realized the self-determining gesture of republican independence (Canada as “abortive America,” in Arthur Nortje’s vitriolic formulation [qtd. in Clarke]). Following Irigaray’s lead, however, we may read the same condition as more-than-American. United States frontier mythology has the monolithic, Anglo-American Daniel Boone. We have the constitutively conflicted and divisive figure of Louis Riel, whose métissage we must interpret or “translate” over and over again (see Albert Braz). Whereas the image of Daniel Boone has degenerated into a flat and silly stereotype, the figure of Riel is a site of perpetual encounter and struggle for hegemony, a locus for the democratic cultural/political exercise of re-thinking and reinventing, through discussion and debate, what Canada means—even as the volatile ménage-à-trois of Aboriginal and French and English nations gets further complicated by ever more newcomers.

Introduction

More solitudes or more social cohesion? Yes, please! It is significant that Nancy Huston places the narrator of her novel in Montreal, the city of the famous two solitudes; there, in between the two, Miranda’s lover’s granddaughter finds the narrative space she needs to re-imagine the loving wisdom of Miranda’s body. We should bear in mind (as Stephen Henighan reminds us) that Hugh MacLennan took his lapidary title from Rainer Maria Rilke’s verses: “Love consists in this, / that two solitudes protect, / and touch, and greet each other.” Political cartoonists like to portray French and English Canada not as lovers, but as a pair of fractious spouses who squabble, scratch, and bite, though they can’t face a divorce. Everyday reality, as it is lived in Montreal, falls somewhere in between the ideal evinced by MacLennan’s epigraph and its satirical cartoon version: the solitudes generally recognize and respect one another’s cultural space. The important element to be recovered from Rilke is his positive valorization of solitude, the pre-condition of love’s gestures and its (pro)creative intercourse across the space that separates individuals, genders, or cultures; Édouard Glissant (cited above) makes a similar point when he poses the axiom of irreducible singularities as the basis for a true relation. In Montreal, the space between solitudes is everywhere palpable; at every street corner they brush against and often greet one another. Adapting Edward Said (qtd. by Giménez Micó), one might say that Montreal is a foreign land to itself; its plurality of vision “makes possible originality of vision” (my emphasis). “Most people are aware of one culture,” writes Said; “exiles [and Montrealers] are aware of at least two” (my emphasis). In Montreal, perhaps more than in any other Canadian city, the condition of cultural otherness is, paradoxically, somehow naturalized, which means that any number of new cultural solitudes can and do find space there, not as barbarians in the polis, but as Montrealers. That is why Canadians should resist the false alternative between recognizing cultural singularities, on one hand, and the desideratum of social cohesion, on the other. One must resist the temptation to deny the kernel of opacity at the heart of cultural solitudes in the name of social cohesion or unity.8 Montreal may be the Canadian city par excellence, but the quasi-original two solitudes co-exist right across the so-called “Bilingual Belt” running from Moncton, New Brunswick, to Hearst, Ontario (Joy 5). In Nouvel-Ontario, for example, the poet Robert Dickson has realized his translingual “migration culturelle” (Lucien Pelletier). Grandson of a Spanish-speaking Sephardic Jew who came to Canada from Turkey (where his community had been living since their exile from Spain in 1492), Dickson grew up speaking English deep

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in Southern Ontario, but came to live in Francophone Sudbury, where he has become a leading spokesperson for Franco-Ontarian culture, as well as a literary translator between French and English in both directions—including Tomson Highway’s Kiss of the Fur Queen (1998) as Champion et Ooneemeetoo (2004). In the trajectory from the Sephardic grandfather to Robert’s transculturation, one is tempted to discern a kind of historical redemption à la Walter Benjamin. In 1492, Spain inaugurated the Western colonization of the Americas with a violent triple gesture—the consolidation of Spanish Catholic political power with the defeat of the Moors in Granada; Cristóbal Colón’s arrival in America, financed by the reyes católicos and catastrophic for the continent’s indigenous nations; and the expulsion of the Sephardim. It is remarkable that a descendent of the Sephardic diaspora should have reversed the direction of the 1492 exile by migrating to Canada and that then his grandson should have migrated, within Canada, across one cultural divide (from English to French), which in turn enabled him to negotiate another divide by translating an important Native-Canadian text written in English, Ojibwa, and Cree. It is as though Benjamin’s “weak Messianic force” (254; emphasis in original) were at work on a symbolic redemption, inverting the sign of exile and touching a radically re-imagined or translated Zion,9 a gathering in agape of those who were historically excluded (the Sephardim) and repressed (indigenous North Americans) by Western imperialism. A redemption both transitive and transitory, however, like Carmen Rodríguez’s gathering-up of the fragments of the female body, or Clarke’s re-membering of Arthur Nortje’s disjecta membra. Dickson and his work provide a fine example of how the two solitudes can be reconfigured, not by melting them down into one national/notional essence or chopping them up into a multicultural salad, but by protecting, touching, and greeting one other. These Rilkean gestures, of course, need not be circumscribed within a circle of two or three. Stephen Henighan finds Eugen Giurgiu’s Romanian-Canadian novel to be the work of a “reduced solitude”; its precarious, almost structurally impossible existence is nonetheless strengthened by Henighan’s thoughtful reading of Ewoclem, anagram of “welcome.” Hugh Hazelton considers the work of several “polylingual” writers who write in both Spanish and in Canada’s official languages and the implications for their writerly identities. Victor Armony has engaged with Latin Americans who have immigrated to Quebec in his attempt to throw new light on the notion of the “Latinos du Nord,” as Francophone Quebeckers sometimes call themselves. Norman Cheadle considers the arrival of another solitude by looking at the dialogue between Don Latino and Doña Canadiense,

Introduction

in both her Francophone and Anglophone personae, in his contrapuntal reading of two novels, Collect Call by Chilean-Canadian José Leandro Urbina and Exile by Ann Ireland. In an appendix to Cheadle’s article, Ireland recounts how she long resisted the “colonization” of her text by an imaginary Latino poet, but in the end allowed “The Uninvited Guest” to move in and totally transform her narrative. The Canadian here is in motion, being both transitive and expansive, but reciprocally so. English-Canadian poetry moves to Brazil and back (Besner); Madame Proust moves fictionally to Canada and redefines the place of translation (Woodsworth); and “Dry Lips moves to Tokyo” (Curran) so that we may think again about where Kapuskasing may be situated. The Canadian here is an aggregate of particulars tending toward a virtual universal, a figure that potentially may be drawn in countless ways, beginning from any number of points. Robert Dickson, a “nouvel-Ontarien … installé en région, dans un ici très précis,” finds that now “je suis un citoyen, de mon pays d’abord, mais aussi de la planète.” In verse, he has written ici thus: crique Bissette, rivière Pouce Coupé, rivière de la Paix, le grand fleuve Mackenzie, l’océan du grand Nord. Le monde est vaste à partir de n’importe quelle petite place. (qtd. in Pelletier 185; Dickson 48)

Robert Dickson est décédé le 19 mars 2007, quelques semaines avant la parution de cet ouvrage. Les directeurs dédient celui-ci à sa mémoire.

Notes 1 Laurentian’s Interdisciplinary MA in the Humanities hosted Besner in November 2002 and Clarke in February 2003. 2 See, for example, Ziff and Rao’s excellent volume Borrowed Power: Essays on Cultural Appropriation. 3 Even though one may not agree with his position, Alain Badiou’s polemic against the quasi-Lévinasian “ethics” prevailing in post–Cold War Europe should at least serve as a salutary note of caution: “les apôtres affichés de l’éthique et du « droit à la difference » sont visiblement horrifiés par toute différence un peu soutenue. Car pour eux, les coutumes africaines sont barbares, les islamistes affreux, les Chinois totalitaires, et ainsi de suite. En vérité, ce fameux « autre » n’est présentable que s’il est un bon autre, c’est-à-dire quoi, sinon le même que nous? [ … ] Il se pourrait bien que … l’idéologie éthique ne soit que le dernier mot du civilisé conquérant : « Deviens comme moi, et je respecterai ta différence » ” (L’éthique 41–42; Badiou’s emphasis). 4 See, for example, the Spring 2003 issue of the IJCS, Transculturalisms / Les transferts culturels (Schwartzwald). European scholars of Canadian Studies are also adopting the term; see for example Canada in the Sign of Migration and Transculturalism (Ertler and Löschnigg, 2004).

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5 The term interculturalism conveys a similar notion: “interculturalism recognizes that in a society of mixed ethnicities, cultures act in multiple directions. Host or majority cultures are influenced by immigrant or minority cultures and vice versa … interculturalism acknowledges and enables cultures to have currency, to be exchanged, to circulate, to be modified and evolve” (Powell and Size). All of this is included in the idea of transculturalism, but the prefix “trans” connotes movement and displacement, a certain dynamic breaking of boundaries that contrasts subtly with contained space implied by “inter.” 6 Unfortunately, there is recent evidence that Braz may be right after all. In spite of the recent spate of academic interest in translation—such as Katherine Faull’s Translation and Culture (2004) or Bermann and Wood’s Nation, Language, and the Ethics of Translation (2005)—there seems to have been a marked decrease in the actual amount of literary translation being published in the Anglophone world, especially in North America, in the last 10 to 15 years; this, according to Stephen Henighan’s article “The Insularity of English” (61). English Canada is not entirely immune to this insular tendency. While in the academy we celebrate Anglophone translators (as in Whitfield), Henighan cites the example of Québécoise writer Sylvie Desrosiers, whose work has been translated into Spanish, Greek, and Arabic, but not English. Indeed, Wilfrid Laurier University Press was initially hesitant to publish the mixed-language collection that the reader holds in her hands, but then made the enlightened decision to buck this parochial trend in the publishing industry. This disturbing paradox—translation as ideologeme in theoretical and literary discourse being given the lie in socioeconomic practice by a reluctance to translate—might be further fodder for Badiou’s scorn for the hypocrisy of hegemonic liberalism. 7 Doris Sommer, in her otherwise delightful book on Bilingual Aesthetics, poorly understands the potential of Canada’s bilingual, binational structure: “Canada, in my opinion, is not the best model of irritation [a positive term in Sommer’s discourse], except maybe for the big cities where multicultural immigration makes trouble [also a positive term] for official bilingualism … official bilingualism doesn’t require one lingua franca; instead it frustrates underrepresented (French) speakers [this, in a country where the Bloc Québécois leads the official parliamentary opposition!] and bothers the (Anglophone) majority that perceives no need for a second language. Debates get stuck between communitarian authenticity from the minority viewpoint and personal freedom from the majority” (96; my emphasis). Sommer reduces the complexity of Canada’s language politics to a one-sentence summary of Charles Taylor’s work. In fact, probably most Anglophone Canadians do value bilingualism, at least in principle, almost as much as Sommer does. But a more disturbing problem with Sommer’s overall argument is her sotte voce insistence on a “coordinating lingua franca” (xi; my emphasis); “I am suggesting that multilingualism demands an agile lingua franca” (94–95; my emphasis). But “lingua franca,” in Sommer’s usage, turns out to mean not an informal mélange of commonly understood vernacular languages, but rather the formal language of the state’s “administrative institutions” (96); her example is the role of English in multilingual, (post-)colonial India, though she carefully elides this language’s name.“Lingua franca,” then, no longer means a bastard vernacular as opposed to official Latin, but has drifted over to its semiotic and political opposite: the language of imperial administration. How “agile” is the singular official language of state? Sommer’s adjective is superfluous at best, if not rhetorically dishonest. She goes on to ask: “Is the majoritarian language a practical choice for the lin-

Introduction

gua franca? Then members of the majority should learn at least one more language” (95). By eliding the implicit “Yes!” that answers her rhetorical question about the lingua franca, i.e., the official state language, Sommer effectively elides the contradiction at the heart of her argument. Finally, her prescription that the majority should learn another language is, ironically, the norm in Canada, whose bilingual model she dismisses as inadequate.  zek, who 8 The subtitle of this section is an homage to a favourite rhetorical ploy of Zi has continually played off the Marx Brothers’ joke—“Tea or coffee?”“Yes, please!”— to argue against accepting false alternatives (e.g., his intervention titled “Class Struggle or Postmodernism? Yes, please!”). In the present context, I am thinking of Neil Bissoondath’s critique of Canadian multiculturalism: “[H]ow far do we go as a country in encouraging and promoting cultural difference? … Is there a point at which diversity begins to threaten social cohesion? The document [the Act for the Preservation and Enhancement of Multiculturalism in Canada] is striking in its lack of any mention of unity or oneness of vision” (43). Rather than pose a continuum between opposing poles of diversity and cohesion, I would argue that recognition of diversity does not somehow weaken harmonious social cohesion; on the contrary, such recognition is the very condition of possibility for the latter. 9 On the notion of translation as “touching” (as opposed to “taking possession”), see Samuel Weber’s luminous commentary on Benjamin’s abstruse essay on “The Task of the Translator.” Likewise, “touching” is one of the Rilkean gestures of love, a traslatio between solitudes.

Works Cited Badiou, Alain. L’Éthique: Essai sur la conscience du mal. Caen: Nous, 2003. Benítez-Rojo, Antonio. The Repeating Island: The Caribbean and the Postmodern Perspective. Trans. James Meraniss. Durham: Duke University Press, 1992. Benjamin, Walter. “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” Illuminations. Ed. Hannah Arendt. Trans. Harry Zohn. Nueva York: Schocken, 1969. Bermann, Sandra and Michael Wood, eds. Nation, Language, and the Ethics of Translation. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005. Bissoondath, Neil. Selling Illusions: The Cult of Multiculturalism in Canada. Toronto: Penguin, 1994. Brand, Dionne. Thirsty. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 2002. Browning, Gary K. “‘Good and Bad Infinites in Hegel and Marx.’” Contemporary Political Studies. Conference Proceedings 1996, 907–17. 20 June 2005. http://www .psa.ac.uk/cps/1996%5cbrown.pdf Coleman, Daniel. “Writing Dislocation. Transculturalism, Gender, Immigrant Families: A Conversation with Ven Begamudré.” Canadian Literature 149 (1996): 36–51. Dickson, Robert. Abris Nocturnes. Sudbury: Prise de Parole, 1986. Ertler, Klaus-Dieter and Martin Löschnigg, eds. Canada in the Sign of Migration and Trans-Culturalism: From Multi- to Trans-Culturalism / Le Canada sous le signe de la migration et du transculturalisme: Du multiculturalisme au transculturalisme. Frankfurt: Oxford, 2004.

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Faull, Katherine M., ed. Translation and Culture. Lewisburg: Bucknell UP, 2004. Frideres, J.S. “Ethnogensis: Immigrants to Ethnics and the Development of a Rainbow Class Structure.” Immigration and the Intersections of Diversity. Spec. issue of Canadian Issues Spring 2005: 58–60. Henighan, Stephen. “The Insularity of English.” Geist 61 Summer 2006: 61–62. Irigaray, Luce. “Ce sexe qui n’en est pas un.” Ce sexe qui n’en est pas un. Paris: Éditions de minuit, 1977. 23–32. Joy, Richard J. Languages in Conflict: The Canadian Experience. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1972. Kristeva, Julia. Nations Without Nationalisms. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press, 1993. Laclau, Ernesto. “Identity and Hegemony: The Role of Universality in the Consti zek. Contution of Political Logics.” Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau, and Slavoj Zi tingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left. London: Verso, 2000. 44–89. Lévi-Strauss, Claude. L’Identité: Séminaire interdisciplinaire. Paris: Grasset, 1977. Ortiz, Fernanado. Contrapunteo cubano del tabaco y el azúcar: Advertencia de sus contrastes agrarios, económicos, históricos y sociales, su etnografía y su transculturación. Madrid: Cuba España, 1999. Paré, François. Les Littératures de l’exiguïté. Hearst: Éditions du Nordir, 1994. Powell, Diane and Fiona Size. “Introduction.” Interculturalism: Exploring Critical Issues. Oxford, UK: Inter-Disciplinary Press, 2004. 5 July 2005. http://www .inter-disciplinary.net/publishing/idp/eBooks/Interculturalism.pdf Reimers, Camila. “Ana.” Tendiendo Puentes: La Participación Cívica y Política de los Latinoamericanos en Canadá. Lared (Latin American Research, Education and Development). August 2005. 7 June 2006. http://fcis.oise.utoronto.ca/~lared/ Ganadores.htm Schwartzwald, Robert, ed. Transculturalisms / Les transferts culturels. Spec. issue of International Journal of Canadian Studies / Revue internationale d’études canadiennes 27 (Spring 2003). Simon, Sherry. “Translating Across the Multilingual City: Montreal as a City of the Americas.” A Plenary Address to the Canadian Association for Translation Studies. Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences. York University, Toronto. 28 May 2006. Sommer, Doris. Bilingual Aesthetics: A New Sentimental Education. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2004. Walter, Roland. “Between Canada and the Caribbean: Transcultural Contact Zones in the Works of Dionne Brand.” In Schwartzwald. 23–41. Weber, Samuel. “A Touch of Translation: On Walter Benjamin’s ‘Task of the Translator.’” In Bermann. 65–78. Whitfield, Agnes, ed. Writing Between the Lines: Portraits of Canadian Anglophone Translators. Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2006.

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Ziff, Bruce and Pratima V. Rao, eds. Borrowed Power: Essays on Cultural Appropriation. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1997.  zek, Slavoj. “Class Struggle or Postmodernism? Yes, please!” Judith Butler, Ernesto Zi  zek. Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Laclau, and Slavoj Zi Dialogues on the Left. London and New York: Verso, 2000. 90–135.

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I transitive canada (1): from where to here? / un canada transitif (1). en amont

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alexandra kinge et alan macdonell

La voix de l’Autre dans certains récits de voyages de l’Ouest canadien au temps de la Nouvelle-France

a mentalité des explorateurs de l’Ouest canadien n’est sans doute pas celle des premiers découvreurs du 1 Canada . Leur perception de l’Autre, de l’Autochtone, manifeste une certaine familiarité – l’Autochtone est pour eux connu – mais en même temps une reconnaissance du pouvoir de l’Autre : il n’est ni le « sauvage » des Jésuites à convertir, ni le fournisseur de fourrures à exploiter, ni même le guerrier redoutable qui menace la survie de la colonie. Les explorateurs de l’Ouest voient l’Autochtone selon deux optiques : celle des voyageurs qui ne peuvent se passer des indigènes pour les guider et leur donner les moyens de parvenir à destination; et celle des capitalistes qui doivent financer leurs découvertes et qui, par conséquent, comptent sur l’Autochtone pour la traite des fourrures – une traite qui leur sert non pas à s’enrichir, mais plutôt à payer les frais de leurs voyages car, ironie capitaliste par excellence, ceux-ci étaient rendus plus coûteux précisément à cause de la nécessité de faire de la traite. Dans ces conditions, les discours des explorateurs rapportés dans des journaux et récits de voyage doivent tenir compte de la parole de l’Autre : pour la traite, pour les conseils de guerre, pour la récolte du riz sauvage, pour la chasse, pour les cartes, si fantaisistes soient-elles, les explorateurs de l’Ouest n’ont d’autre choix que de se fier aux Autochtones et de traiter avec eux d’égal à égal. Ces explorateurs ont donc une manière particulière de rapporter la parole de l’Autre : car même en déformant celle-ci pour essayer de la rendre conforme à leur vision du monde et à leur désir de découverte, ils ne peuvent taire son potentiel de vérité, vérité des Autochtones d’une part, et vérité des explorateurs d’autre part.

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Transitive Canada (1) / Un Canada transitif (1)

Le récit de voyage qui parle du Nouveau Monde présente, en tant que genre, un intérêt tout particulier parce qu’il se situe au croisement de différents récits. Souvent, en effet, il est à la fois récit littéraire, anthropologique, économique et historique. En cela, il est souvent malaisé de le définir. Notre analyse ne prétend d’ailleurs pas examiner tous ces types de récits. Nous examinerons plutôt la question de l’appréhension d’autrui à travers la parole qu’il prononce. Car si l’explorateur témoigne de ce qu’il a vu d’autrui, il l’a aussi entendu. Or, la vue de l’Autre constitue la matière même des récits d’exploration, tandis que la parole de l’Autre est assez rarement entendue et souvent mal comprise. Le découvreur transcrit méthodiquement ce qu’il observe chez ceux qu’il rencontre; ce faisant, il va parfois jusqu’à rapporter leurs mots. L’Autre devient ainsi partie intégrante du discours de l’explorateur, participant de façon indirecte ou directe au récit. En donnant la parole aux Autochtones, les explorateurs, marchands ou missionnaires venus en mission dans l’Ouest canadien nous offrent un aperçu différent de l’étranger qu’ils rencontrent sur leur chemin ou avec lequel ils vivent. Ainsi, leur discours n’est plus univoque, car même s’il encadre le discours de l’Autre de multiples précautions oratoires, politiques et autres, l’Européen inclut ce discours dans le sien propre. Ce discours de l’Autre est présent sous plusieurs formes dans le récit : il peut être repris simplement de façon indirecte et donc porté au compte du narrateur ou bien, et c’est là le sujet de notre recherche, il peut être transcrit de façon directe. On peut alors s’interroger sur la portée d’un tel discours. Cette prise de parole est-elle « naïvement » transcrite par le narrateur, ou est-elle plutôt utilisée à des fins idéologiques ou politiques? Nous nous proposerons dans cette analyse de montrer comment l’auteur du récit cherche à maîtriser la parole directe de l’Autre pour remplir sa mission impérialiste qui vise à contrôler et à assimiler l’étranger, et comment cette démarche est souvent trahie par les paroles de l’Autre qui ne se laissent pas apprivoiser par le discours européen et arrivent même à leur tour à encadrer celui-ci, subordonnant les visées européennes à une intentionnalité autochtone. Avant de passer à des exemples concrets de la parole de l’Autre, précisons que l’intérêt de notre discussion est théorique aussi bien que pragmatique. En effet, si nous acceptons dans ses grandes lignes l’observation de Todorov sur la parole de l’Autre et sur l’expérience de l’altérité, nous croyons possible d’y apporter des nuances en vertu des rapports uniques établis avec les Autochtones par les explorateurs et colonisateurs français dans l’Ouest canadien. Todorov conclut à la dichotomie fondamentale établie par l’Européen entre sa propre parole et celle de l’Autre :

La voix de l’Autre dans certains récits de voyages / Kinge et MacDonell

Colon méconnaît … la diversité des langues, ce qui ne lui laisse, face à une langue étrangère, que deux comportements possibles, et complémentaires : reconnaître que c’est une langue mais refuser de croire qu’elle est différente; ou reconnaître sa différence mais refuser d’admettre que c’est une langue. (43)

Cette observation, généralisée peut-être à outrance, conduit à distinguer deux composantes essentielles dans le comportement de tout explorateur et colonisateur face à l’Autre : Ou bien il pense les Indiens (sans pour autant se servir de ces termes) comme des êtres humains à part entière, ayant les mêmes droits que lui, mais alors il les voit comme non seulement égaux mais aussi identiques, et ce comportement aboutit à l’assimilationnisme, à la projection de ses propres valeurs sur les autres. Ou bien il part de la différence; mais celle-ci est immédiatement traduite en termes de supériorité et d’infériorité. Ces deux figures élémentaires de l’expérience de l’altérité reposent toutes deux sur l’égocentrisme, sur l’identification de ses valeurs propres avec les valeurs en général, de son je avec l’univers; sur la conviction que le monde est un. (58)

Cette vision dualiste de la perception d’autrui convient mieux à la colonisation du Mexique par les Conquistadors qu’à l’exploration de l’Ouest canadien par les explorateurs français. Un exemple tiré des journaux et lettres de La Vérendrye montre ce pouvoir du discours de l’Autre qui oblige l’Européen à se remettre en question. Après le massacre de son fils aîné, du Père Aulneau et de vingt voyageurs sur une île du lac des Bois, le premier mouvement de La Vérendrye est de chercher à se venger. Le gouverneur Beauharnois à Québec et le ministre de la Marine Vaudreuil à Versailles s’y opposent farouchement : il faut maintenir à tout prix la politique française et apporter la paix aux nations autochtones afin de favoriser la traite et l’exploration. La Vérendrye doit donc « se faire une raison », accepter de refouler le désir, naturel chez un père qui a perdu son enfant, de se venger. Mais la situation se corse, car La Colle, grand chef monsoni de l’époque, suivant en cela une politique de guerre contre les Sioux vieille d’un siècle, veut aider La Vérendrye à se venger contre les auteurs du massacre. Celui-ci est donc confronté à un dilemme angoissant : non seulement est-il déchiré entre le désir de vengeance et la nécessité de respecter la politique de Versailles, mais il se voit aussi remis en question en tant qu’homme : pourquoi refuse-t-il de suivre le penchant naturel de tout guerrier valeureux? Il faut en effet souligner que, si La Vérendrye est respecté des Autochtones, c’est en grande partie pour son courage dont témoignent les blessures reçues à Malplaquet et dont il exhibe les cicatrices aux Autochtones afin de prouver sa bravoure. Cela n’empêche pas La Colle, en fin stratège et

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grand chef, de s’étonner de la conduite paradoxale de La Vérendrye dans le but d’engager les Français comme alliés contre les Sioux. Le discours de l’Autochtone ne présente pas toujours ce genre de drame à la fois existentiel et politique. Mais il conteste le discours européen et va parfois jusqu’à faire intrusion dans la conscience européenne. Laisser parler l’Autre, c’est jusqu’à un certain point le reconnaître et l’accepter. À partir du moment où il y a un dialogue, il y a reconnaissance d’autrui. En cela, le discours direct des récits de voyage est une manière de rendre à l’Autre sa parole. Mais peut-on avancer pour autant que l’on est en présence d’un véritable échange? Dans le discours direct, transcrit avec l’usage de guillemets et sans commentaires, un dialogue se forme entre les Autochtones et le narrateur. L’Autre se fait alors interlocuteur direct du narrateur et, par l’intermédiaire de ce dernier, du lecteur. La transcription directe donne la parole à un peuple chez qui la tradition discursive est orale, et marque alors la reconnaissance d’une langue (parfois parlée par le narrateur ou comprise par le truchement d’interprètes), mais aussi d’un mode de pensée qui diffèrent de ceux des Européens. La parole dénote une façon particulière d’appréhender l’altérité. Par la parole, l’Autochtone prend visage humain; à travers ses mots, le lecteur est à même de reconnaître un esprit, une façon de penser et de raisonner différents. Ce statut privilégié accordé à la parole autochtone est particulièrement frappant chez l’explorateur La Vérendrye. D’un point de vue historique, cette nouvelle perspective dans le récit est le résultat de l’évolution des rapports avec les Autochtones. Dans le cas de La Vérendrye, il devient vital de s’entendre et de chercher à se comprendre pour pouvoir rester dans la région, y continuer la traite et surtout progresser dans la découverte de la mer de l’Ouest, passage mythique qui donnerait accès au Pacifique. Car si la connaissance passe par le langage, il en va de même pour la conscience de l’Autre. Dans les récits de La Vérendrye, l’Autre parle et prend un nouveau visage. On découvre un être qui n’est pas simple présence physique, mais est capable de paroles et de pensées. Si l’explorateur a choisi de transcrire de façon directe le discours des Autochtones, c’est sans doute par souci de faire comprendre leur volonté, dans le but d’améliorer les relations avec eux et de renforcer les alliances. En effet, dans ces récits, le « Sauvage » parle et donne son avis. Sa parole est rapportée souvent sous la forme d’une harangue tenue par les Autochtones. La Vérendrye ponctue son récit de dialogues qu’il a eus avec des chefs de nations : la harangue se présente comme un cérémonial très étudié et ritualisé dans lequel l’explorateur ou un chef prend la parole pour exposer ses doléances. En voici un exemple :

La voix de l’Autre dans certains récits de voyages / Kinge et MacDonell

J’adressai ensuite la parole au chef cri qui m’avait accompagné, et lui dis de parler au nom de sa nation et de faire connaître ses sentiments à toute l’assemblée. Il se leva, présenta une brasse de tabac … et adressant la parole à tous, il dit : « Mes frères, pensez-vous à ce que vous allez faire? Les Sauteux et Sioux sont nos alliés, et enfants du même Père. Pourquoi un tel, en parlant au chef de guerre, as-tu le coeur si mauvais, que de vouloir tuer tes parents? Songe aux paroles que nous avons envoyées à notre Père et ne nous fais pas mentir … Je te dis au nom de notre nation que tu aies à écouter la parole de notre Père qui nous donne de l’esprit … » (La Mer de l’Ouest 54, 56)

Comme le montre toutefois ce passage, la parole directe s’insère dans le récit de l’explorateur et permet à l’Autre de prendre la parole, mais cette parole n’est pas toujours transcrite innocemment. Elle est en effet utilisée à des fins idéologiques précises; dans cet exemple, on y recourt dans le but de renforcer les paroles du gouverneur de la NouvelleFrance, sans doute transmises par La Vérendrye aux Autochtones. Elle sert en l’occurrence les intérêts idéologiques de l’exploration. Ce discours est efficace dans la mesure où il ne fait que valoriser et renforcer les idées de l’Européen. Ainsi, le dialogue est manipulé par le narrateur, alors même qu’il se présente comme direct. Le discours de l’Autre peut donc être utilisé pour satisfaire les attentes du lecteur officiel, ministre de France ou gouverneur de la NouvelleFrance. Il est d’ailleurs assez difficile de faire la part de ce qui est l’expression du point de vue des Autochtones et de ce qui est dit pour plaire, ou parfois pour déplaire. Comme l’affirme Todorov, « le destinataire est aussi responsable du contenu que son auteur » (232). Ainsi, les paroles des Autochtones sont le plus souvent utilisées à propos, dans la mesure où elles servent les intérêts de l’exploration et de la colonisation. Même si le discours de l’Autre lui confère un rôle dynamique en tant que personnage, comme l’explique Gilles Thérien (355), dans ce dialogue, le discours est finalement toujours entre les mains du Blanc. Le narrateur cherche toujours à maîtriser le discours, tout comme il cherche à maîtriser la situation décrite. En comprenant la langue et en la traduisant pour la transcrire, l’explorateur cherche aussi à assimiler autrui et à convaincre du bien-fondé de ses propres entreprises. Le discours de l’Autre rend plus crédible le récit, mais il est utilisé à des fins rhétoriques pour convaincre, pour confirmer la réussite des explorations, de la traite et de la colonisation françaises, sans doute pour masquer tant bien que mal une réalité politique évidente : l’échec des ententes et alliances avec les Autochtones. Mais l’idéologisation du discours de l’Autre est souvent trahie par l’intrusion de ce discours dans celui de l’explorateur.

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Idéologisation du discours de l’Autre Le « je » du discours de l’explorateur l’emporte souvent sur le « ils » des Autochtones, non seulement dans le discours direct, mais aussi dans la reprise du discours de l’Autre ou dans l’insertion de commentaires et de précisions. Au-delà du discours propre, l’agencement des mots ou des idées effectue une véritable mainmise idéologique sur le discours d’autrui. La rhétorique est soigneusement utilisée au profit de l’emprise idéologique de l’Ancien Monde. À tel point que ce discours proclame un préjugé fondamental propre à la colonisation en général, et bien exprimé par Albert Memmi : « Les Européens ont conquis le monde parce que leur nature les y prédisposait, les non-Européens furent colonisés parce que leur nature les y condamnait » (132). C’est la supériorité de l’Europe qui est exprimée dans le discours direct des Autochtones. La rencontre entre deux cultures différentes, l’une ne pouvant s’empêcher d’exprimer son emprise sur l’autre, se trouve parfaitement illustrée dans ce discours. Si bien qu’à travers les paroles des Autochtones, ce que les Français expriment est ce qui est bon pour eux-mêmes. Edward Saïd explique cela à propos de la domination anglaise en Égypte. Se mettant dans la position du dominateur anglais, il écrit : he does speak for them in the sense that what they might have to say, were they to be asked and might they be able to answer, would somewhat uselessly confirm what is already evident : that they are a subject race, dominated by a race that knows them and what is good for them better than they could possibly know themselves. (35)

Il s’agit en fait de convertir à l’idéologie et aux intérêts de la France par le discours, même si ce discours est celui qu’on tient soi-même. On fait donc dire aux Autochtones qu’ils ont besoin que les Français prennent soin d’eux. Il n’est pas rare, dans les harangues transcrites par La Vérendrye, qu’un chef indien commence par remercier La Vérendrye de leur apporter ce dont les Autochtones ont besoin : « Mon Père, nous te remercions de ce que tu as bien parlé là-bas à notre Père pour nous. Nous connaissons aujourd’hui qu’il a pitié de nous en nous envoyant des Français sur nos terres pour nous apporter nos besoins … » (Mer de l’Ouest 96) lui dit un chef monsoni. Que ces paroles aient été véritablement prononcées ou non importe peu. Il s’agit de voir qu’elles sont utilisées dans un but précis et qu’elles véhiculent un message qui pose l’Européen comme le bienfaiteur des Autochtones. Dans L’Empire des signes, Roland Barthes recourt à une analogie on ne peut plus pertinente pour notre propos entre l’idéologisation du langage et le baptême forcé des populations autochtones : « L’Occident humecte toute chose de sens, à la manière d’une religion autoritaire qui impose le baptême par populations; les objets

La voix de l’Autre dans certains récits de voyages / Kinge et MacDonell

de langage (faits avec la parole) sont évidemment des convertis de droit » (92–93). La parole attribuée aux Autochtones est modifiée pour servir les intérêts idéologiques et culturels des Français. Ainsi, les Anglais, ennemis des Français pour la traite des fourrures dans la région, deviennent également ennemis dans le discours de l’Autre. La parole des Autochtones exprime une opinion qui est surtout celle des Français. Lorsque le Père Silvy, alors en mission avec d’Iberville dans la baie d’Hudson, relate dans son Journal du Père Silvy Depuis Bell’Isle jusqu’à PortNelson qu’il a été informé par les Autochtones d’une présence anglaise dans la région, les mots des « Sauvages » qu’il rapporte pour parler des Anglais sont loin d’être innocents. Dans les deux occurrences suivantes, les Anglais sont des « meschants François » : « … on revint avec deux canots de sauvages qui avoient traitté avec nos François, et qui n’alloient point aux Anglois qu’ils appellent avec raison meschants François » (xlvi). Il renchérit plus loin dans son récit, cette fois en transcrivant directement des paroles d’Autochtones : « Quelques sauvages qui ne faisoient que d’en venir, vinrent me dire tout emûs. Viens voir, viens voir les meschants François qui traversent et qui vont piller les François » (lv). De même, dans Relation du détroit et de la baie d’Hudson de Monsieur Jérémie, lorsqu’il s’agit de décrire le pillage d’un fort par des Autochtones affamés, ceux-ci deviennent naturellement des cannibales, mais comble d’ironie, même dans la description de leur cannibalisme le narrateur trouve le moyen de promouvoir une certaine forme de morale chrétienne par laquelle le Sauvage cannibale reconnaît sa propre culpabilité. Or, Monsieur Jérémie présente ce passage comme la simple transcription de ce que lui aurait expliqué un père de famille présenté comme un cannibale; il se dissocie de l’explication de ce dernier par l’introduction d’italiques : “J’en ai vû un qui, après avoir dévoré sa femme & six enfans qu’ils avoient, disoit n’avoir été attendri qu’au dernier qu’il avoit mangé parce qu’il l’aimoit plus que les autres, & qu’en ouvrant la tête pour en manger la cervelle, il s’étoit senti touché du naturel qu’un père doit avoir pour ses enfants, & qu’il n’avoit pas û la force de lui casser les os pour en sucer la moëlle.” (36)

Dans la recherche de la maîtrise du terrain, on peut noter cette même volonté de toujours maîtriser le discours de l’Autre. On connaît l’importance du rôle des Autochtones dans l’orientation topographique des explorateurs. Bien évidemment, lorsqu’il est nécessaire de reconnaître le terrain, les Autochtones ont leur mot à dire, mais le narrateur ne peut pas leur donner la parole sans prendre part lui aussi au récit en précisant les informations reçues, comme le montre cet extrait du journal de Monsieur Jérémie :

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Les Sauvages disent, qu’après avoir marché plusieurs mois à l’Oüest-Sudoüest, ils ont trouvé la Mer sur laquelle ils ont vu de grands Canots (ce sont des Navires) avec des hommes qui ont de la barbe et des bonnets, qui ramassent de l’Or sur le bord de la Mer (c’est-à-dire, à l’embouchure des Rivières). (12)

Le narrateur inclut ses commentaires sous la forme de parenthèses qui renferment l’information réelle, par comparaison avec celle énoncée par les Autochtones. Là encore, ce discours témoigne du conflit de deux cultures aux référents distincts. Les parenthèses viennent rappeler qu’il y a un seul discours compréhensible et accessible, le discours dominateur des Français. La reprise du discours de l’Autre semble dans ce cas ne pas pouvoir se passer d’un commentaire de l’auteur qui viendrait corriger les informations pour certifier leur authenticité et en reprendre à son compte les paroles. Car il s’agit bel et bien de maîtriser la parole de l’Autre, au même titre que les explorateurs tentent de maîtriser le pays et ses habitants. Comme l’explique Todorov à propos des textes qui expriment le point de vue des Autochtones, il ne faut pas les lire « comme des énoncés transparents, mais [il s’agit] d’essayer en même temps de tenir compte de l’acte et des circonstances de leur énonciation » (59). L’explorateur, par exemple, exprime sa supériorité en faisant siennes les découvertes faites par les Autochtones. Il faut convaincre de l’intérêt des explorations, de l’installation de postes de traite, mais aussi de la maîtrise du pays par ceux qui s’y sont nouvellement installés. Pour faire plus vraisemblable, on se sert donc des paroles des Autochtones que l’on transcrit, mais toujours dans le sens de l’exploration, de la traite ou de l’évangélisation. Cette parole sert à assimiler en faisant proférer aux Autochtones des paroles qui pourraient être celles d’un explorateur ou d’un missionnaire. La parole est un outil idéologique qui concerne ce qui ne peut être dit et pourtant transparaît dans le récit : l’échec croissant des missions, du maintien du commerce, des alliances, et les rapports avec les Anglais et les Autochtones. On fait dire ce qu’on veut aux Autochtones pour se dispenser d’avouer l’échec. Le discours de l’Autre est codifié et utilisé pour justifier et légitimer. Les Anglais sont méchants, les Autochtones qui ne prennent pas part à la traite des fourrures sont des cannibales, ceux qui au contraire y participent ont « de l’esprit » et deviennent les «enfants » de la France; les Autochtones non convertis sont de mauvais chrétiens et des barbares; à l’inverse, ceux qui acceptent les lois morales sont de bonnes âmes. Au sein même du discours de l’Autre, on retrouve un dualisme dans l’image des Autochtones qui alimente le récit de voyage. Le « Sauvage » est bon ou mauvais, mais il n’est jamais tout à fait ce que l’explorateur voudrait qu’il soit.

La voix de l’Autre dans certains récits de voyages / Kinge et MacDonell

Retour de l’Autre Impossible donc de limiter notre analyse du discours de l’Autre à une simple considération de l’emprise idéologique de l’explorateur européen. Les textes d’explorateurs montrent aussi que la parole ne peut pas être systématiquement contrôlée par le narrateur. Parfois, en transcrivant le discours des Autochtones, l’explorateur laisse percevoir sa perte de contrôle du discours de l’Autre et, par extension, de l’Autre lui-même. Ainsi, l’Autre peut prendre la parole au sens littéral du terme, plutôt que de se la faire donner par le narrateur. En effet, le discours, même s’il reste entre les mains du narrateur, peut parfois lui échapper. On peut trouver un exemple frappant de cela dans un journal de La Vérendrye daté de 1734. Alors que la situation des alliances se dégrade entre les Français et certaines nations autochtones, un chef monsoni vient rencontrer La Vérendrye pour exprimer son opinion sur la guerre : « Mon Père, nous sommes venus te trouver, espérant que tu auras pitié de nous, puisque nous obéissons à ta parole. Nous voilà rendus chez toi, sur qui frapperons-nous? » Et avant ma réponse il continua : « Si tu veux je dirai la pensée de nos guerriers, je suis chef, il est vrai, mais je ne suis pas toujours maître de leur volonté. Si tu veux nous accorder ton fils pour venir avec nous, nous irons droit où tu nous as dit d’aller, mais si tu nous refuses, je ne saurais répondre du coup qui va se faire. Je ne doute pas que tu ne saches la pensée de nos parents les Cris, mais je ne te cache pas, mon Père, qu’il y a plusieurs chefs parmi nous qui ont le coeur mal fait contre le Sioux et le Sauteux … Pense à ce que tu as à faire. » (Mer de l’Ouest 56)

Alors que le discours commence par la reconnaissance du rapport de soumission qui existe entre l’explorateur et les Monsonis, comme l’expriment les mots « puisque nous obéissons à ta parole », la suite du discours montre l’absence de pouvoir du chef et, par extension, de l’explorateur. Le discours transcrit montre que le narrateur n’arrive pas à prendre la parole lors du discours du chef monsoni. La Vérendrye écrit, d’ailleurs : « Et avant ma réponse il continua ». Dans cet exemple, c’est le chef qui prend le dessus dans le discours et il le termine même par un impératif : « Pense à ce que tu as à faire », qui peut être compris comme un ultimatum. Pourquoi l’explorateur a-t-il choisi de transcrire un discours qui exprime une menace du chef monsoni, introduite par des « si » contre le pouvoir français? Pourquoi l’explorateur a-t-il tenu à garder ce discours dans sa narration dans laquelle il n’exprime en rien son point de vue sur le problème soulevé par le chef monsoni et où il ne cherche pas à prendre le dessus sur le discours de l’Autre? Est-ce pour montrer la mauvaise volonté des Autochtones et leur soif de guerre? Ce genre de

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prise de parole manifeste la complexité des alliances qui réglaient les rapports intertribaux, de même que les rapports entre Français et Autochtones. On pourrait alors avancer que l’explorateur cherche à rejeter la faute sur les Autochtones pour les échecs qui s’annoncent; il s’agirait de montrer que les guerres prennent des proportions incontrôlables certes, mais que la responsabilité en revient aux Autochtones. D’un point de vue historique, cette perte de contrôle met très bien en relief la perte de pouvoir des explorateurs français sur les Autochtones et l’échec des ententes et de la présence française dans la région. Le discours utilisé dans une optique idéologique de démonstration de supériorité ne semble pas pouvoir masquer ce qui ne peut se dire, mais qui transparaît clairement à travers l’utilisation du discours de l’Autre : l’emprise que ce discours exerce sur le discours européen. En reconnaissant la pertinence des opinions des Autochtones, qui peuvent parfois aller à l’encontre de celles de l’explorateur et, à plus grande échelle, de celles du gouvernement de la Nouvelle-France, un dialogue certain est créé dans lequel les deux parties ont leur mot à dire. En cela, les textes de La Vérendrye sont remarquables puisqu’ils montrent toutes les complexités de l’appréhension d’autrui et de son acceptation. La conquête matérielle n’explique qu’à moitié l’expérience de l’explorateur, car la face cachée des transformations qu’il impose aux nations et aux territoires conquis, c’est le contact opiniâtre des Autochtones. La meilleure illustration de cela est sans doute la suite et fin de cette requête faite à La Vérendrye par le chef cri. L’explorateur nous dit : J’étais agité, il faut l’avouer, de différentes pensées qui me tourmentaient cruellement, mais je faisais le brave et ne m’en vantais pas. D’un côté, comment mettre mon fils aîné entre les mains des barbares que je ne connais pas et dont à peine sais-je le nom, pour aller en guerre contre d’autres barbares dont je ne connais ni le nom ni les forces. Qui sait si mon fils en reviendra, et s’il ne tombera pas entre les mains des Maskoutins Pouanes ou Pouannes, ennemis jurés des Cris et Monsonis qui me le demandent? D’un autre côté, si je leur refuse, je crains avec fondement qu’ils n’attribuent mon refus à la peur, qu’ils ne prennent les Français pour des lâches, et qu’ils ne secouent le joug français … (Mer de l’Ouest 58)

Les conséquences de la décision de La Vérendrye de permettre à son fils de partir en guerre avec les Cris se font sentir à long terme. Par la suite, en 1736, des guerriers sioux, évoquant parmi d’autres griefs la présence du fils de La Vérendrye dans un parti de guerre qui les avait attaqués, massacrent ce fils, le Père Aulneaux et des voyageurs sur le lac des Bois. Pendant toute l’année 1737, La Vérendrye, suivant en cela la politique de Versailles et de Québec, essaie

La voix de l’Autre dans certains récits de voyages / Kinge et MacDonell

de calmer le désir de vengeance de ses alliés cris et assiniboines. On peut donc dire que cette perte humaine représente aussi une remise en question pour plusieurs années de la mission de découverte de La Vérendrye. Mais l’analyse de la parole de l’Autochtone ne devrait pas s’arrêter à ces conséquences humaines et politiques. N’oublions pas que l’aventure de la découverte chez La Vérendrye commence par la parole de l’Autochtone, telle qu’interprétée par l’explorateur et le Père Gonnor, et que cette entreprise a donc des origines ambiguës. En effet, La Vérendrye est simple traiteur sur le lac Nipigon quand lui et le Père Gonnor font la rencontre de Pako, un Autochtone qui leur parle d’un grand fleuve qui va droit vers le couchant et qui débouche sur une mer ayant un flux et reflux et dont l’eau n’est pas bonne à boire : Ce n’est pas qu’il n’y ait toujours à se défier des Sauvages qui, étant fort oisifs et ne sachant à quoi passer le temps, l’emploient assez souvent à inventer des faussetés qu’ils racontent ensuite comme les plus grandes vérités avec la dernière effronterie. On les écoute et on ne leur dit jamais non, parce qu’on serait méprisé si on le faisait et on passerait pour n’avoir point d’esprit, mais on ne les croit pas pour cela. On a raison en bien des rencontres, mais aussi quelquefois on a tort, parce que les Sauvages, même les plus grands menteurs, disent vrai quelquefois. Or, il semble que ce soit ici une de ces occasions où on ne puisse les soupçonner de tromper sans se faire soupçonner soi-même d’incrédulité excessive et d’aveuglement outré. (Mer de l’Ouest 34)

Aux origines de la découverte de l’Ouest se trouve donc un quiproquo fondé sur la dépendance envers la parole de l’Autre, sur une tendance irrésistible à l’interpréter selon les nécessités de l’exploration (dans ce cas, le besoin impérieux de voir dans le lac Winnipeg la mer de l’Ouest) et les vingt années de travail et de sacrifices qui ont mené, malgré tout, à la découverte de l’Ouest canadien. L’étude du discours de l’Autre révèle donc des changements subis par l’explorateur à son insu. Il semble que La Vérendrye, qui dépend de la traite et donc des Autochtones pour mener à bien ses explorations, n’ait d’autre choix que de dialoguer avec eux pour assurer la poursuite de la découverte de la mer de l’Ouest. À la lecture de récits d’explorateurs, on est sensible d’abord à la tentative de masquer la découverte de l’altérité par le discours dominateur du colonisateur. Pourtant, comme nous avons tenté de le montrer, le dialogue avec l’Autre peut être présent, et la situation de domination par le discours européen peut même s’inverser. L’expérience de l’altérité se révèle par le langage, car, lorsqu’il prend la parole, l’Autre est reconnu par l’effet que cela produit sur l’Européen. Il ne s’agit plus alors pour le narrateur de relater

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uniquement ce qui lui convient, mais aussi ce qui lui déplaît ou ce qui le compromet dans ses certitudes. Les textes de La Vérendrye en particulier nous présentent cette remise en question de l’idéologie dominatrice de la colonisation, ne serait-ce que par ces failles du discours où perce le discours de l’Autre.

Note 1 Olive Dickason (The Myth of the Savage) soulève le problème de la véracité des premiers rapports du discours autochtone. Elle cite entre autres l’exemple du cosmographe Thevet : « Thevet’s version of his first visit to New France was a compound of fact and fancy : “On my first voyage, returning from the southern lands, we had difficulty meeting barbarians. A kinglet in animal skins, accompanied by several persons, thinking that we were worried and that we feared them, spoke to us in a friendly manner in his language … ‘Come, come my brothers and friends. Come and drink of what we have. We swear to you by the heavens, by the earth, by the moon and by the stars, that you will suffer no more harm than we ourselves.’ Seeing the goodwill and the affection of this old man, we stayed with him the whole day, and the next took the route of the Gulf of Canada.” On the other hand one could also wonder if this was Donnacona’s version of his first encounter with Cartier. Thevet met Donnacona in France; it could well be that the cosmographer could not tell the chief’s own story as his own » (176–77).

Bibliographie À la recherche de la mer de l’Ouest/In Search of the Western Sea, dir. Denis Combet, Winnipeg, Éditions du blé/Great Plains Publications, 2001. Barthes, Roland. L’Empire des signes, Genève, Albert Skira Éditeur, 1970. Dickason, Olive P. The Myth of the Savage, Edmonton, University of Alberta Press, 1997. Memmi, Albert. Portrait du colonisé, Paris, Gallimard, 1957. Monsieur Jérémie. « Relation du détroit et de la baie d’Hudson à Monsieur ** », dans Recueil d’arrests et autres pièces pour l’établissement de la Compagnie d’Occident, Amsterdam, 1720. Père Silvy. « Journal du Père Silvy depuis Bell’Isle jusqu’à Port Nelson, 1685 ». Documents Relating to the Early History of Hudson Bay, éd. par J.B. Tyrell, Toronto, Champlain History Publication xviii, 1930. Saïd, Edward. Orientalism, New York, Vintage Books, 1979. Thérien, Gilles. « L’Indien du discours », dans Figures de l’Indien, dir. par Gilles Thérien, Montréal, Université du Québec à Montréal, 1988. Todorov, Tzvetan. La Conquête de l’Amérique : la question de l’autre, Paris, Seuil, 1982.

albert braz

The Creative Translator: Textual Additions and Deletions in A Martyr’s Folly

[I]t is impossible to do a good translation unless there is creative intervention by the translator. (Iren Kiss)

ne of the most common refrains in the discourse on translation is the lament about the invisibility of the individual who makes the enterprise possible, the translator. Newspaper critics are particularly notorious for reviewing translations as if they were source texts. However, critics are often abetted in their practice by publishers, who deliberately camouflage the fact a given work appears in a language other than the one in which it was first written. The English version of Anne Hébert’s celebrated 1970 novel Kamouraska is a case in point, as only the most recent edition (2000) openly acknowledges that there is a linguistic mediator between Hébert’s words and the reader.1 Although far more rare, the reverse has also been known to occur. Because of national chauvinism, the local celebrity of the translator, or perhaps in an attempt to avoid paying royalties, texts sometimes bear only the translator’s name. An example of this phenomenon is the first New Canadian Library edition of Canadians of Old, whose cover presents Charles G.D. Roberts as the work’s author, not the translator of Philippe Aubert de Gaspé’s Les anciens Canadiens, as the title page indicates (Aubert de Gaspé n.p.). Since its translator’s name does not appear anywhere in the text, A Martyr’s Folly would seem to fall into the first tradition, that of deliberately effacing the translator. Yet, despite his or her ostensible absence, the anonymous

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scribe transforms the work in fundamental ways. A Martyr’s Folly is the Canadian translation of Maurice Constantin-Weyer’s La bourrasque, a 1925 French historical novel very loosely modelled on Louis Riel. It was published in Toronto in 1930, the same year that another edition appeared in New York bearing the title The Half-breed. The two works are remarkably similar, conveying the impression that they are (largely) the labour of the same individual. The notable exceptions are scenes involving Riel’s still controversial trial, where the U.S. version tends to be faithful to the French original but the Canadian one does not. As well, the Canadian text deletes two sections of Constantin-Weyer’s novel on the politics of the trial and replaces them with two new ones. Indeed, as I will contend in my essay, so creative a translation is A Martyr’s Folly that, at times, it becomes completely distinct from its putative source. La bourrasque remains a polemical text, one that elicits rather conflicting assessments. Some critics consider it a “mediocre work and, except as archival material, deservedly forgotten today” (Knutson 257). Others, in contrast, claim the novel is full of insights and the only reason there have been such “cris de protestation” against it in Canada is that “elle choque le bon goût” (Motut 136). The same divided response has greeted the work’s Canadian English translation. Around the time of its publication, A Martyr’s Folly was given a generally positive reception. For example, an anonymous critic for The Canadian Historical Review praises it for containing “an excellent picture of the Métis and of the wilds of the Canadian north west” (Anonymous 227). In his introduction to the novel, Pelham Edgar is even more complimentary, describing it as “an admirable study of honest and ignorant ineffectiveness at grips with a somewhat blundering efficiency” (vi).2 But the situation has changed dramatically in the last few decades. Constantin-Weyer’s sardonic treatment of Riel and his people has become especially problematic, since it “se situe aux antipodes de l’image que veut projeter la nation métisse” (Saint-Pierre 11). In fact, so widely condemned is the novel that the city of Winnipeg banned it from its public libraries in the 1970s and the author’s own daughter refuses to allow its republication (Frémont 58–59; Saint-Pierre 12). Whatever its literary merits or failings, though, A Martyr’s Folly does exemplify some of the most critical problems in the contemporary theory of translation, notably those reflecting the anxiety about the status of the translator. For theorists like Alexis Nouss and Lawrence Venuti, the factor most responsible for “the current marginality of translation is its offense against the prevailing concept of authorship,” in which a translation is seen as “derivative,” an imitation of another text (Venuti 31). Nouss finds the poststructuralist con-

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cept of the death of the author liberating precisely because it “authorizes” the birth of the translator, who becomes equal to the author. In his words, “[t]he disappearance of the authorial burden, the move from work (l’oeuvre) to text (texte) both gives the translator the freedom of creativity and legitimizes his/her status, as no longer secondary but on par with that of the author” (1352). However, in terms of both translation and transculturation, there seems to be a major contradiction in the argument that the translator is really an author. If one accepts that a text can become part of world literature only when it enters a culture other than the one that produced it, then, unless it is written in an imperial language, it must be translated (Damrosch 4–6). In order for this linguistic metamorphosis to be possible, of course, the text must exist prior to the act of translation. Similarly, transculturation can occur only if different cultures come into contact with each other and undergo some “disadjustment and readjustment” in the process (Ortiz 98). That is, for linguistic as well as cultural reasons, there appear to be concrete limits to the freedom of the translator. As Frank Scott asserts in his famous dialogue with Hébert, “the translator is given an external criterion of the appropriateness of his writing, in the poem to be translated. He writes, as it were, to order, yet must create while obeying the order” (Hébert and Scott 56). Therefore, if the translator becomes creative to the point of ignoring the original work, no cultural exchange—that is, no translation—can take place. Or, to phrase it differently, on a profound level, translation precludes authorship. This is likely what leads Isaac D’Israeli to maintain that a translator must only copy, “not compose. Whenever he trespasses on his limits, he ceases to be a Translator, and becomes an Author” (228). But such intrusion into authorship is what happens frequently in A Martyr’s Folly, which stops being the translation of a text from another linguistic and cultural tradition and becomes a new, domestic creation. As mentioned above, A Martyr’s Folly is the Canadian translation of La bourrasque, by Maurice Constantin-Weyer (1881–1964). Since the author has fallen out of fashion these days, it may be useful to provide a brief introduction to him before proceeding to analyze the translation. Constantin-Weyer3 was a Frenchman who farmed in southern Manitoba for about ten years in the early part of the 20th century. Following the outbreak of the First World War, he returned to France, where he was later joined by his children but not by their Métis mother, whom he allegedly abandoned (Frémont 32). Constantin-Weyer is now best known for his Canadian writings, which are credited with having introduced the Canadian West into French literature. Known collectively as “l’Epopée canadienne,” his “fifteen historical and adventure novels” were instrumental in helping to transform the European image of Canada from a

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country of “snow and ice” into that of “an exotic and beautiful land” (Knutson 260). They were also extremely well received in France, one being awarded the Prix Goncourt in 1928, and led to his being known as the French Jack London (Motut 98–100). Still, even though Constantin-Weyer is considered a great champion of Canada, driven by a desire to expose France to what he called a “véritable pays d’Epopée” (quoted in Motut 92), he was given a rather different treatment in his adoptive land. This is particularly true of La bourrasque, a novel that many Métis and French-speaking Canadians have deemed irreverent to the point of being racist. The main explanation usually offered for the Métis and French-Canadian antagonism toward La bourrasque is the author’s cavalier attitude toward “la vérité historique” (Motut 106), a charge that is difficult to dispute. Constantin-Weyer’s casualness about history is particularly conspicuous in his decision to portray Riel as a lover. The Métis leader is often seen as the Prophet of the New World and a founding father of Manitoba, but not exactly its Golden Boy, a Prairie Don Juan. As several scholars have remarked, when it comes to “women, not even his enemies could make out a case against him” (Howard 147; Motut 123). Yet for Constantin-Weyer, Riel is first and foremost a frontier bon-vivant, a good old boy more interested in romantic conquests than in the welfare of his people. While the Riel of La bourrasque has sexual liaisons with a large segment of Red River’s female populace, his great love is a certain (and fictitious) Mrs. Hamarstyne.4 The mixed-race wife of a prominent white merchant, Mrs. Hamarstyne is a pious Presbyterian who considers her dalliance with an ungodly Catholic “une grande honte” that is bound to bring about her eternal damnation (Bourrasque 71). But so intense is their sexual relationship that the two lovers are willing to risk anything over it, including her marriage and the Métis cause (Bourrasque 183). There are other reasons, though, why Constantin-Weyer’s novel has so deeply offended some people in Canada. In addition to presenting Riel as an inveterate womanizer controlled by his libido, the novelist depicts his protagonist as being threatened not only by English Canadians but also by Catholic priests and French Canadians. According to Constantin-Weyer, most Métis are descended from Aboriginal mothers and French, not French-Canadian, fathers. As he describes the genesis of Riel’s people, with his typical nonchalance, it is not clear if the French monopoly that controlled the fur trade in Canada in the early part of the eighteenth century “vendit ses employés à la Compagnie anglaise, ou si elle les oublia, en s’en allant.” In any case, those “abandonnés” married Aboriginal women and from those unions emerged the Métis, who “furent pétris des défauts des deux races, mais ils joignirent sou-

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vent à la fougue française toute l’énergique endurance indienne” (Bourrasque 16–17). Constantin-Weyer clearly betrays considerable ambivalence about both the French and the Métis. As he writes, for the Anglo-Protestant halfbreeds, “les métis français étaient issus de deux races vaincues.” Or, “chez le métis, ce n’est pas le sang indien qui fait le sauvage, mais bien le sang français” (168–69). No less significant, in order to link the Métis to the French, Constantin-Weyer has to dissociate them from the French Canadians. He does so by stressing Quebec’s reputed antagonism toward the Métis. Thus, in the first North-West conflict in 1869–70, he shows French Canadians as either patronizing toward the Métis or self-involved, as Riel discovers when he meets with the Archbishop of Saint Boniface in an office filled with nothing but “ouvrages de théologie, ou des monographies de familles catholiques du Bas-Canada” (87). In the second conflict in 1885, he has them playing an even more nefarious role. The “curés du Bas-Canada” preach across “Québec la croisade contre l’hérésiarque Riel” and the province itself sends a “bataillon de Canadiens-Français” to Red River, not to fight alongside the Métis, but against them (226). One last factor that may account for the resentment by the Métis and French-speaking Canadians toward Constantin-Weyer is his celebration of Anglo-Protestant achievement, what he terms “l’étonnant poème de la réussite anglo-saxonne” (193). Insofar as La bourrasque has a character who is portrayed favourably throughout the text, it is not a Métis, French Canadian, or Frenchman but Donald A. Smith, the Scottish-born industrialist who became the head of the Hudson’s Bay Company and the future Lord Strathcona (Braz 126–28). As the French expatriate historian Auguste-Henri de Trémaudan bemoans, the author “reserves the whole of his admiration for the conqueror” (258). But, like his anti-clericalism, Constantin-Weyer’s exaltation of AngloProtestant culture is more complex than his critics care to acknowledge, again underscoring the utter Frenchness of his novel. As one reads La bourrasque, one cannot help but notice that it is always addressed to the people of France. The novelist seems especially determined to remind his compatriots why they have squandered North America. Constantin-Weyer asserts that at one point France controlled much of the continent, from Quebec to Louisiana, with the mighty Mississippi being a “fleuve au cours tout entier français” (Bourrasque 16). But France has lost most of its possessions in North America, and the author places the blame squarely on its culture. More specifically, he faults the country’s Catholicism, which he tends to equate with the New Testament, with its puerile love-thy-brother fantasies, as opposed to the Old Testament’s “enseignements virils” favoured by the British (149).

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Constantin-Weyer’s Anglophilia, “his apparent Orange bias” (Edgar vi), would seem to reflect his desire to prove to the people of France that they had to emulate the British if they were ever again to become a dominant culture. But his frequent praises of the Protestant ethic also make it puzzling why his English-Canadian translator and/or publisher felt compelled to change the text so radically. Trémaudan, for one, was so disgusted by the novelist’s “disparagement of the true character” of Riel (257) that he was certain or perhaps hopeful that a sophisticated people such as English Canadians would never wish to have works like La bourrasque rendered into their own language. As he mused,“who would take the trouble of translating them for the English reader, knowing how little he is interested by gossip and tittle-tattle?” (259). Needless to say, like other commentators before him, Trémaudan seriously misjudged the magnitude of the appetite for the scurrilous. In 1930, there appeared not one but two English translations of Constantin-Weyer’s novel: A Martyr’s Folly in Toronto and The Half-breed, in New York. The translations, both of which are anonymous, are similar but not identical.5 The U.S. version, The Half-breed, is generally faithful to the source text. A Martyr’s Folly also tends to be close to the original, except at critical points, usually dealing with political figures or institutions. For instance, one of the highlights in Constantin-Weyer’s novel occurs when Riel’s lover Mrs. Hamarstyne publicly horsewhips the Ontario poet Charles Mair (Bourrasque 32; Martyr’s Folly 32). The episode is based on a historical incident involving Mair and a prominent English-speaking Métis woman named Annie Bannatyne— not Hamarstyne—who had felt slighted by some comments Mair had written for eastern newspapers about the rivalries between mixed-race and white women at Red River (Braz 124–25). But probably because the event had become such a source of humiliation for Mair, who was still a respected figure in both literary and political circles, the translator alters his name to Blair (Bourrasque 21ff; Martyr’s Folly 17ff.). To be fair to the Canadian translator, ConstantinWeyer had provided a precedent with his rather casual attitude about names; the novelist changes not only Annie Bannatyne’s surname to Hamarstyne but also the first name of Riel’s nemesis Tom Scott to “Billy” (Bourrasque 124), and General Frederick Middleton’s surname to “Littletown” (227, 228). Incidentally, both translators reinsert Middleton’s real name (Martyr’s Folly 282, 283; Half-breed 282, 283). Also, when Constantin-Weyer suddenly refers to Scott by his real first name, “Thomas” (Bourrasque 179), the two translators opt for English consistency and call him “William” (Martyr’s Folly 225; Half-breed 225). Other major differences between A Martyr’s Folly and La bourrasque—as well as The Half-breed—pertain to legal terms. For example, the Canadian

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translation renders Constantin-Weyer’s “le mannequin-chef ” (Bourrasque 236) as “the stipendiary magistrate-judge” (Martyr’s Folly 294) and “les mannequins judiciaires” (Bourrasque 240) as “the court” (Martyr’s Folly 299).6 But the most blatant discrepancy between A Martyr’s Folly and La bourrasque concerns the deletion of whole paragraphs and the insertion of new ones. Toward the end of his novel, Constantin-Weyer relates what happens when Riel finally appears before what the author obviously considers some kind of kangaroo court. The now traumatized prisoner is visited by a Catholic priest named Father Ernest who assures him that his “souffrances étaient agréables au Seigneur qui les réservait à ses élus de choix” (Bourrasque 240). The intervention by the Machiavellian if not evil clergyman7 does not exactly help Riel to attain peace of mind, and I will reproduce the entire section to give a sense of why it might have been excised from A Martyr’s Folly: Cette consolation n’avait pas empêché Riel d’avoir, pendant deux ou trois jours de la semaine précédente, manifesté une agitation telle, que ses défenseurs, Greenshields, Lemieux et Fritz Patrick avaient jugé habile de le faire examiner par les médecins légistes. Malheureusement, ceux-ci, au nombre de deux, appartenaient l’un et l’autre à la loge orangiste de Régina, et leurs conclusions mettaient à néant ce suprême espoir de la défense … 8 On savait, en effet, que les noms des témoins à charge remplissaient une longue liste, dans laquelle les militaires se trouvaient en nombre imposant. Christophe Robinson, l’avocat de la Couronne, était un psychologue averti, et il savait qu’un militaire de carrière hésite rarement à mettre en évidence les périls et les difficultés des opérations auxquelles il a pris part. Il s’agissait pour le général Littletown et pour ses subordonnés, de croix, d’avancement, d’honneurs, de gloire même, tous avantages appréciables et qu’il est inhumain de dédaigner.

As the author concludes, “Riel était trop intelligent pour ne pas comprendre que la sentence était rendue d’avance, et qu’il était inutile de chicaner sa vie” (Bourrasque 240–41). Another segment not included in A Martyr’s Folly, a rather lengthy one at some five pages, deals with what Constantin-Weyer calls “l’ère des pétitions” (Bourrasque 242). Even though Riel’s sentence is not unexpected, it still unleashes a passionate campaign on his behalf. From across Canada and the United States, people of all sorts of ethnic backgrounds bombard the Governor General with petitions demanding that the Marquis of Lansdowne spare the Métis leader’s life. Lansdowne is sympathetic to the grievances. However, Orange lodges, especially those from Ontario, promptly begin to remind Canadians of Riel’s role in the death of the Tom Scott at Red River in which the Métis

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government not only executed the Orangeman for tenuous reasons but also never returned his body for proper burial (Bumsted 3–4, 10). The lodges warn the country that if the sentence against Riel is not carried out, there will be “catastrophes impériales” (Bourrasque 243), and Lansdowne eventually agrees that Riel must be sacrificed. Considering Constantin-Weyer’s view of the legal system that tries and judges Riel, and his perception of the forces at play, it is not surprising that the passages just discussed would be removed from a translation aimed at an English-Canadian audience.9 But what is perplexing is why the people responsible for A Martyr’s Folly would include new incidents, especially when they do not seem to erase any of the questions about the fairness of the trial. The first episode is quite interesting in that it focuses on Riel’s own testimony at Regina, underlining his desire to prove that he is not insane but rather under divine guidance: I believed that I had a mission, I believe that I have a mission at this very moment … I say that I have been blessed by God and I hope that you will not take that as a presumptuous assertion. It has been a great success for me to come through all the dangers I have in that fifteen years. If I have not succeeded in wearing a fine coat myself I have at the same time the great consolation of seeing that God has maintained my views; that he has maintained my health sufficiently to go through the world, and that he has kept me from bullets when bullets marked my hat. I am blessed by God.… (Martyr’s Folly 300)10

As Riel adds, the reason his “good lawyers” have been so determined to prove he is mentally unstable is that they realize his “condition is helpless.” He stresses that it should be evident to everyone in the court that there is much sanity in his mission, which is concerned only with “[p]ractical results.” Besides, if any more proof of his mental health were needed, he has been “acknowledged as a prophet by the half-breeds” (Martyr’s Folly 301), and not all Métis can be considered crazy. The additions to A Martyr’s Folly are clearly designed to accent the humanity of those responsible for Riel’s fate. Intentionally or not, they also reflect the tremendous anxieties about the potential ramifications of his trial and death. The narrator, for instance, informs us that the lawyers representing the government are driven by a desire not for revenge but for justice. As he describes the aristocratic Christopher Robinson, “[n]o sign surely in him of the ogre replete and satisfied with his victim’s blood, but a certain quivering sensitiveness of feature, the alert brow, the delicate nostril forbade one to associate his delicacy with any hint of weakness” (Martyr’s Folly 302–3). The text also dwells

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at length on the Crown counsel’s journey by train home to Toronto. The two lawyers, whom the narrator overhears, are very distressed about “the political consequences” of Riel’s trial and subsequent execution (303). One of them fears that the Liberal opposition in Ottawa will exploit the suspicions alive in the land that the process is not constitutional, particularly “the notion of a mere stipendiary magistrate trying a case of such nation-wide importance.” The other is more worried that the future prime minister Wilfrid Laurier will “appeal to race prejudice” (304). As he tells his colleague, Can you not see how it will work out? The Government are confronted with the jury’s recommendation to mercy. Whether that was by reason of alleged insanity or because the offence was a political crime, the result will be the same. If Riel hangs both cudgels will be used to beat the Government, and I can see the capital the honey-tongued Laurier will make out of it. He will cite all the Revolutions that history has justified, and in the same breath with which he tells us that he is a loyal British subject he will sanctify rebellion. I know his game and the dog will be eloquent about it. (304)

Laurier, the second lawyer prophesies, will lose the vote but win the debate, by accusing the Government of negligence in addressing Métis grievances. He parodies Laurier’s famous speech about his affinities with Riel: “He was a loyal British subject, he’d say, but had he been born on the banks of the Saskatchewan he would have shouldered his musket. I know his little game” (305).11 The first lawyer, however, counters that Riel was “a kind of Joan of Arc in a mild way” and that the Canadian Government is lucky since the Catholic Church is not going to support him in light of his schismatic ideas. He then proposes that the reason Riel is going to die is not because of anything that transpired in Saskatchewan but because of the murder of Tom Scott at Red River. He says: “the Orangemen won’t let us forget Scott. It is that folly that will hang him in the end, though it can never be brought forward as the prime reason” (305). In short, contrary to what he and his colleague have been saying, Riel’s trial is one of political revenge. The Métis leader is ultimately judged not for his part in the North-West Rebellion of 1885 but for that in the Red River Resistance 15 years earlier, particularly his involvement in the death of Scott. A Martyr’s Folly raises a series of issues about the nature and, possibly, the ethics of translation. In an essay on the canon of Quebec literature in English translation, Jane Koustas expresses unease about the way in which the selection of texts rendered into English has “limited anglophone Canadian readers’ understanding of Quebec culture” (43). Her concern is twofold. On the one hand, Koustas is troubled that, by focusing on a handful of writers, EnglishCanadian translators have produced their “own, somewhat off-sighted canon

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of francophone literature” (51). On the other hand, she is disturbed by the number of seminal texts that are not deemed significant enough to be translated, by what is “left out” (47). But the problem may be even more extensive than Koustas suggests. As A Martyr’s Folly illustrates, a source text can be “left out” even when it is ostensibly translated. The case of A Martyr’s Folly also shows, of course, the marginal place that translation has occupied in a country like Canada. Although the situation has changed much since 1977, when Philip Stratford could state unequivocally that “Canada has as yet no tradition in literary translation” (ii), translated works are still not given the attention that they merit by either translators or critics. John O’Connor, for instance, laments the semantic “inexactness [that] is all too commonplace in Canadian translations, and must prompt headshaking confusion in their readers” (120). His solution to the problem is for critics to make “a complete juxtaposition of the original and the translation,” which he sees as “the sine qua non of the reviewer’s task” (122). Needless to say, such a step was never taken with A Martyr’s Folly. In his previously mentioned introduction to the novel, Pelham Edgar concludes that the “translator is to be commended for his reproductive skill,” for “he has succeeded admirably in rendering the many descriptive passages which so subtly and poetically convey the atmospheric tones of the waste lands in all their seasonal changes.” Edgar, who was a professor of both French and English at the University of Toronto and one of Canada’s most influential early 20th-century intellectuals,12 also praises the author for his “cunning” portrayal of the Crown counsel’s journey back to Ontario. His only regret, he says, is that “men of such unique quality should have been brought into the book as an apparent afterthought” (vii). Given that the train trip occurs only in A Martyr’s Folly, not La bourrasque, it is obvious that Edgar never compared the translation to the original. In other words, if the ideal goal of a translation is to produce “a parallel text” that will convey the source “text across that indefinite space that separates one world from another” (Atwood 154), then Constantin-Weyer’s novel lacks such a counterpart. Ultimately, though, the most significant aspect of A Martyr’s Folly is what it says about authorship. Translation, as Iren Kiss states in the quotation that serves as the epigraph to this essay, requires a “creative intervention by the translator” (Kiss 19). However, there appear to be limits to this creativity, notably because the authorship of a translation is radically different from that of a source text. Forgetting for a moment the special case when someone writes fiction about real people, as often happens with the historical novel, fiction writers usually have the power to become makers, inventors of worlds.

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But that is not quite what occurs with translation, where one is attempting to reproduce in another language a text that already exists. For linguistic as well as cultural reasons, it would seem that if one is to transfer a cultural artefact from one language to another, one must somehow find the means to transform it, not create a new one. I have no wish to challenge the idea that any translation “entails the creative reproduction of values” and “inevitably perform[s] a work of domestication” (Venutti 1, 5). As other scholars have noted, there is much “violence” in translation and one should be aware of the extent to which any such linguistic and cultural exchange can be “tainted by power, time, and the vagaries of different cultural needs” (Dingwaney 6). A translation is also always “a critical reading of a text” and thus “approximate,” like “all readings” (Atwood 154). That said, it appears self-evident that a translation cannot be the form of authorship so many theorists claim, and desire. As Anuradha Dingwaney asserts, “the translating subject” cannot return “to the center he or she has implicitly occupied in the past,” but must always be engaged in “a subtly dialectical interaction with the ‘source,’ through which ‘difference’ is both mediated and recorded, not sacrificed or appropriated” (10). Or, to use the language of transculturalism, a translation requires “the transformation of elements from foreign cultures,” not the production of domestic ones under the guise of otherness. That is, “[w]ithout the initial ‘point,’ there is no counterpoint” (Pérez Firmat 60). However, this cultural and linguistic exchange is precisely what does not occur in pivotal sections of A Martyr’s Folly in which the purported translator assumes the function of author of the text by adding extraneous episodes to the narrative and excising others from it.

Notes This essay was partly written with the support of a Standard Research Grant by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (sshrc), to which I would like to express my gratitude. 1 Both English versions of Kamouraska were translated by Norman Shapiro. However, Shapiro’s name appears nowhere in the 1994 Stoddart/New Press edition, except in a list of New Press Canadian Classics, facing the title page. 2 An anonymous reviewer for the New York Herald Tribune is equally effusive in his assessment of the U.S. translation, describing The Half-breed as “a good book on three counts. It is interesting.” It is “the work of an intelligent man,” rather than “one of those silly fairy-tales about the noble woodsman.” And it is “so refreshingly masculine.” The novel, concludes the reviewer, is “like shaking a big man’s hand and squatting down with him beside a campfire to listen to a good story well told” (qtd. in Motut 136). 3 Born Maurice Constantin, he changed his surname to Constantin-Weyer upon marrying his second wife, Germaine Weyer (Motut 16).

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4 As I explain below, although the name Mrs. Hamarstyne is the invention of Constantin-Weyer, the character is based on a Red River woman named Annie Bannatyne. 5 There are indications that the U.S. edition appeared first and that the main translator was American. For example, while The Half-breed refers to the monopoly that controlled much of the North-West as “the Hudson Bay Company” (11 ff.), A Martyr’s Folly calls it (correctly) “the Hudson’s Bay Company” (8 ff.) Unfortunately, one may never be able to identify the person(s) responsible for either translation, especially the Canadian one. An archivist at McMaster University, in whose archives the Macmillan Canada papers are housed, has informed me that there is no correspondence concerning the translation of A Martyr’s Folly (Spadoni). 6 In contrast, The Half-breed provides much closer translations: “the puppet chief ” (295) and “the legal puppets” (299). 7 While Constantin-Weyer names the priest Father Ernest, he is clearly modelled on Father Alexis André, the Breton-born missionary who last ministered to Riel (Braz 156–58). 8 This ellipsis is Constantin-Weyer’s. 9 But not from The Half-breed, where they appear on pages 299–300. 10 Both ellipses in this passage appear in the text. The whole paragraph has strong echoes of Riel’s testimony at his trial in 1885. See Queen 314–15. 11 At the time of Riel’s trial, Laurier addressed a political rally in Montreal’s Champs de Mars with the following words: “Had I been born on the banks of the Saskatchewan …, I would myself have shouldered a musket to fight against the neglect of governments and the shameless greed of speculators” (qtd. in Skelton 314). Riel of course was not born on the banks of the South Saskatchewan River but on those of the Red. 12 Edgar was the mentor of such prominent literary scholars as E.K. Brown, Douglas Bush, Kathleen Coburn, and Northrop Frye (Frye 169).

Works Cited Anonymous. Rev. of A Martyr’s Folly, by Maurice Constantin-Weyer. Canadian Historical Review 12.2 (1931): 226–27. Atwood, Margaret.“Translation: Three Small Entries.” Literary Imagination 1.1 (1999): 154–55. Aubert de Gaspé, Philippe-Joseph. Canadians of Old. 1863. Trans. Charles G.D. Roberts. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1974. Braz, Albert. The False Traitor: Louis Riel in Canadian Culture. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003. Bumsted, J.M.“Thomas Scott’s Body.” Thomas Scott’s Body and Other Essays on Early Manitoba History. Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2000: 3–10. Constantin-Weyer, Maurice. La Bourrasque. Paris: Rieder, 1925. ———. The Half-breed. No trans. New York: Macaulay, 1930. ———. A Martyr’s Folly. No trans. Toronto: Macmillan, 1930. Damrosch, David. What Is World Literature? Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003.

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Dingwaney, Anuradha. “Introduction: Translating ‘Third World’ Cultures.” Between Languages and Cultures: Translation and Cross-Cultural Texts. Ed. Anuradha Dingwaney and Carol Maier. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1995. 3–15. D’Israeli, Isaac.“Translation.” 1791. Curiosities of Literature. Vol. 1. New York: Garland, 1971. 226–28. Edgar, Pelham. “Introduction.” A Martyr’s Folly. By Constantin-Weyer. Toronto: Macmillan, 1930. v–vii. Frémont, Donatien. Sur le ranch de Constantin-Weyer. Winnipeg: Liberté, 1932. Frye, Northrop. “Dean of Critics.” Canadian Forum Nov. 1948. 169–70. Hébert, Anne. Kamouraska. Trans. Norman Shapiro. Toronto: Stoddart, 1994. ———. Kamouraska. Trans. Norman Shapiro. Toronto: Anansi, 2000. Hébert, Anne and Frank Scott. Dialogue sur la traduction à propos du Tombeau des rois. Montreal: HMH, 1970. Howard, Joseph Kinsey. Strange Empire: Louis Riel and the Métis People. 1952. Toronto: James Lewis and Samuel, 1974. Kiss, Iren, et al. “The Writer as Translator/The Translator as Writer.” Mapping Literature: The Art and Politics of Translation. Ed. David Homel and Sherry Simon. Montreal: Véhicule, 1988. 15–27. Knutson, Simone. “Constantin-Weyer’s La bourrasque: A Process in Mythification.” Images of Louis Riel in Canadian Culture. Ed. Ramon Hathorn and Patrick Holland. Lewisport, NY: Edwin Mellen, 1992. 257–78. Koustas, Jane. “Quebec Literature in Translation: Loaded Canons.” Québec Studies 23 (1997): 43–53. Motut, Roger. Maurice Constantin-Weyer: écrivain de l’Ouest et du Grand-Nord. Saint-Boniface, MB: Éditions des Plaines, 1982. Nouss, Alexis. “Structuralism and Post-structuralism and Literary Translation.” Encyclopedia of Literary Translation into English. Vol 2. Ed. Olive Classe. London: Fitzroy Dearborn, 2000. 1351–55. O’Connor, John. “Violets in a Crucible: The Translation, Editing, and Reviewing of Canadian Books.” Canadian Literature 117 (1988): 114–25. Ortiz, Fernando. Cuban Counterpoint: Tobacco and Sugar. 1940. Trans. Harriet de Onís. Durham: Duke University Press, 1995. Pérez Firmat, Gustavo. The Cuban Condition: Translation and Identity in Modern Cuban Literature. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1989. The Queen v Louis Riel. Ed. Desmond Morton. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1974. Saint-Pierre, Annette. “Préface.” L’Ouest littéraire: visions d’ici et d’ailleurs. By Robert Viau. Montreal: Méridien, 1992. 11–14. Skelton, Oscar Douglas. Life and Letters of Sir Wilfrid Laurier. Vol. I. Toronto: S.B. Gundy/ Oxford University Press, 1921. Spadoni, Carl. Email to the author. 29 May 2003.

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Stratford, Philip. Bibliography of Canadian Books in Translation: French to English and English to French/Bibliographie de livres canadiens traduits de l’anglais au français et du français à l’anglais. Ottawa: HRCC/CCRH, 1977. Trémaudan, Auguste-Henri de. Rev. of Manitoba and La bourrasque, by Maurice Constantin-Weyer. Canadian Historical Review 7.3 (1926): 256–59. Venuti, Lawrence. The Scandals of Translation: Towards an Ethics of Difference. London: Routledge, 1998.

susan knutson

“I am become Aaron”: George Elliott Clarke’s Execution Poems and William Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus

Part I: The Black Acadian Tragedy of “George and Rue” Our children will be every colour eyes can know, and free. (George Elliott Clarke, Québécité 92) We live not in three worlds, but in one. (Aijaz Ahmad 80)

n “Trial I,” nearing the close of George Elliott Clarke’s Execution Poems: The Black Acadian Tragedy of “George 1 and Rue,” George Hamilton, the milder of the two brothers who are about to be condemned to hang for murder, hazards a balance sheet of his own and his people’s lives in Canada:

I

Geo: This is a good apple country. Right so. I would like to get on the Dominion Atlantic Railway drivin an engine. If I could go to Africa, to a coloured country, or to Haiti, or even to Cuba, I would go. I would like to get away. On a no-moon night when the only eyes that got vision are God’s. Oh, if I could get away, I would do away with sickness and not get away with murder. Who can do more and more and more injustice? (36)

George is a generous man, and he begins his enumeration with the positive: Nova Scotian orchards produce wonderful apples, the fruit of our earthly paradise, celebrated here and elsewhere in Clarke’s poetry. Also to be considered an asset is the hope that one might land a job working on the railway—an

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enterprise that in fact employed significant numbers of African Canadians in the early years of the 20th century, although more often as porters than as engineers. On the other hand, there is injustice and injustice and more injustice. George’s wish to “get away … [o]n a no-moon night when the only eyes that got vision are God’s” evokes the Underground Railroad, which (ironically, in this context) allowed many persecuted people to flee to Canada, seeking freedom in the darkest of nights.2 His words also recall the momentous decision of close to 1200 people, who represented nearly a third of the recently arrived Black Loyalist population and the great majority of its leadership and intellectual elite, to leave Nova Scotia for Sierra Leone in 1792, “in quest of a more genuine liberty,” as George Elliott Clarke puts it in Odysseys Home (110). Those who remained struggled with poverty, lack of human and material resources, and persistent discrimination. George Hamilton’s perception of injustice was accurate in the 1940s, when the historical events recounted in these poems unfolded, as it still would be today, when Black men, in particular, remain disadvantaged with respect to the rest of Canada, as was reported in the spring of 2004 by the Conference Board of Canada.3 A high human cost is paid for the racialized inequities embedded in our social fabric, and problems with official Canadian multiculturalism linked to this persistent racism have been articulated eloquently by Himani Banerjee, M. NourbeSe Philip, and others. Yet the work of scholars and artists such as John Reid, Tomson Highway, and George Elliott Clarke seems to suggest that both the past and the future construction of Canadian cultural identities relies upon cultural exchange between peoples in a process that is essentially creative. The dynamic portrait of Africadian cultural identity in Clarke’s Execution Poems, while hardly rose coloured, can serve as a case study for the construction of one such creative mix-up in the Canadian multicultural landscape. This paper explores Africadian cultural identity, represented by George and Rufus Hamilton, as the complex product of cultural exchange or transculturation, privileging as a key technology of this cultural exchange the process of literary textual transference, or intertextuality. The concept of transculturation comes from the work of Cuban ethnologist Fernando Ortiz, who, in Cuban Counterpoint, developed the term as a non-Eurocentric alternative term to acculturation, to express the complex processes of intercultural contact, conflict, loss, and acquisition without universalizing the acquisition of Western European culture as human evolution.4 The concept of intertextuality derives from the humanities, and specifically, from the post-structuralist discourses of the early 1980s, where it was developed in order to better under-

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stand how all the various processes of textual transference, including citation, quotation, allusion, and influence, contribute to the manufacture of meaning.5 Together, the two methodologies allow us to focus on literature and books as agents of transculturation, and on the special status of literary experience in the formation of personal and cultural identity.6 William Shakespeare’s early revenge tragedy, Titus Andronicus, is the primary literary text that is transferred into Clarke’s Execution Poems. One reason for this is historical: Titus Andronicus is a work to which the real Hamilton brothers almost certainly had access, for where the British Empire went, there went books, including The King James Bible and The Works of Shakespeare.7 The role of both of these books in the work of colonization is well known; as Michael Neill puts it,“Shakespeare’s writing was entangled from the beginning with the projects of nation-building, Empire and colonization; … Shakespeare was simultaneously invented as the ‘National Bard’ and promoted as a repository of ‘universal’ human values [and] … the canon became an instrument of imperial authority as important and powerful in its way as the Bible and the gun” (168–69). Looked at from another point of view, this phenomenon explains why one of the rich threads making up the cultural tapestry that is Africadian cultural identity is Shakespeare and, via Shakespeare, the Latin Classical culture to which the early modern Europeans laid claim. Having said this, however, I must first delineate, albeit inadequately, the vivid Africadian colours that are Africa, Acadie, and Indigenous North American, without which there is no Africadian identity to explore. Nova Scotia, Canada, is the birthplace of George Elliott Clarke and of the Africadian culture and literature that his scholarship and poetry make known and promote.8 The cultural history of Nova Scotia offers striking illustrations of the complex transitions between cultures, and their “manifold social repercussions,” which compose transculturation (Cuban Counterpoint 98). Ortiz’s argument that such complex cultural intertwinings characterize our world dovetails with the influential arguments (and language) of Edward Said and other post-colonial theorists, who teach “that the best way forward now is a mode of cultural criticism which reflects, indeed espouses, the hybridity engendered by the ever more intertwined histories of the modern world, and which eschews conceptions of identity which are based in fixed ontological categories, whether of race, ethnicity or national identity” (Moore-Gilbert 65). This does not mean that we should deny our distinct stories; histories; familial, regional, and national groupings; and the sometimes momentous specificity of movements of people and things; in fact, as George Elliott Clarke has often said, these need more than ever to be researched, learned, told, and respected.

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The Africadian story, then, begins with symbolic significance, some 400 years ago, during a period of intense transculturation initiated in what is now Nova Scotia by first permanent French settlement in Mi’kma’ki and Wulstukwick, the territories of the Mi’kmaq and the Maliseet peoples (Odysseys Home 18n3; Reid 22). Although Europeans had been visiting Eastern North America since at least the late tenth century, when the Vikings stayed for a while at L’Anse aux Meadows, in what is now Newfoundland, intercultural relations entered a new phase in 1604, when an expedition led by Pierre Dugua de Mons and Samuel de Champlain explored the coastline and built the first French habitations, first at Île Sainte-Croix, where they lost almost half the crew to scurvy and starvation, and then at Port Royal, where they stayed more comfortably until 1607. Acadian culture was born in the fertile matrix of this transculturation, which continues to unfold. And here we should emphasize, with historian John Reid, that the 17th-century history of the Maritimes is primarily Aboriginal history, because not only were most of the people aboriginal, but also it was the aboriginal leaders who had the power to make the most fateful decisions of that era (11). It is widely understood today that the early Acadians survived in their new environment with the help of the Abenaqui, Malecite, Souriquois (ancestors of the Mik’maq), and Passamaquoddy peoples who, from positions of relative power, chose to befriend or at least to tolerate them, and to teach them the use of the fishing weir, the snowshoe, the canoe, the traditional medicines, and a host of other useful and necessary things. Less well known is the extent to which the early Acadian colonists also adopted significant elements of First Nations’ governance and leadership traditions, as Maurice Basque has recently established (170), and possibly of their cultural traditions as well, as the Mi’kmaq were known for their skill at music and oration.9 The significance of the transcultural exchange between the aboriginal and French cultures cannot be reduced to the genocide and acculturation experienced by the aboriginal populations, numerous abuses notwithstanding. The eventual dominance of the European-based cultures does not change the fact that during the 17th century, in northeastern North America, aboriginal and French cultures met and intertwined in a process characterized by the freedom of choice and the relative strength and dominance of the First Nations and their political leaders. Neither is it a denial of the French heritage of the French Acadians to say that Canadians have yet to fully appreciate the extent to which our national identity, and certainly its Acadian “part,” was forged in the 17th and 18th centuries in a powerful and relatively respectful transculturation or métissage.

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Africadian cultural identity was first formed or performed in the same polyglot womb, and it shares with French Acadian identity a longstanding interchange with Mi’kmaq culture, which Clarke does not overlook: the Hamilton brothers, to cite just one example, are initially described as “clear Negro, and semi-Micmac” (12). History has recorded the presence of several persons of African origin in the Atlantic region in the first decades of the 17th century; as Elizabeth Jones puts it, “there was certainly a black presence in those early years” (261). One was the unfortunate whom Marc Lescarbot reports to have died on the Jonas while en route to Port Royal in 1606. Another was Jan Rodriguez, who worked as a translator or interpreter in the Dutch colony along the Hudson River, in what is now New York State, in 1613–14 (Johnston 14). It is a third man, however, for whom Clarke claims the title of the first Africadian: Mathieu Da Costa, a member of the De Mons–Champlain expedition, who lived at Port Royal, and who worked as an interpreter between the French and the First Nations. A.B.J. Johnston, in a monograph for Parks Canada, Mathieu Da Costa and Early Canada: Possibilities and Probabilities, attempts to answer the question of how and why a person of African origin came to be skilled enough in North American aboriginal languages and customs to become a very highly paid translator on a French ship in the first decade of the 17th century. He turns to the colonial exploitation of West Africa by the Portuguese who “reached the Gold Coast (today’s Ghana) in 1470. Initially the Portuguese were seeking to trade for gold with the Africans, and later for pepper and other commodities. A trade in slaves also developed early on, with consequences that became increasingly tragic as the centuries wore on” (Johnston 3). Also early on, the Portuguese involvement in West Africa led to the creation of a distinct identity for a population of African people who worked as intermediaries and translators: The Portuguese dependence on African interpreters led first to the emergence of specialized and highly valued individuals called grumetes. They carried out translation work and were often active in the trading process itself, assisting with and even carrying out barters and exchanges. Grumetes also sometimes helped with the navigation along the coast of western Africa. (6)

Jones conjectures that the grumetes, like the stonemasons of England or the glass blowers of Venice, developed matrimonial and other strategies so that they could keep the valuable secrets of their specialized occupation within the family unit. Another group of people who worked as trade interpreters and who were “regarded as indispensable to the inter-cultural process” (Johnston 6) were

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the Creole descendants of the Portuguese lançados, men who went ashore and who lived with the Africans, and their African wives and mistresses. These Creoles were men and women of African birth but shared African and European parentage, whose combination of swarthy skin, European dress and deportment, knowledge of local customs, and multilingualism gave them an inside understanding of both African and European ways while denying them full acceptance in either culture. (Berlin 257; my emphasis)

Johnston notes that this profile would fit what we know of Mathieu Da Costa, who was a Christian, described as naigre, and who worked as a trade interpreter for the De Mons expedition (7). Whether Da Costa’s heritage was grumete, Creole, or other, by the time history catches sight of him in the New World, he was, as Jones reports, a highly skilled individual, commanding an annual salary of 180 Livres a year, whereas the best-paid artisan in Port Royal received 150 Livres and Louis Hébert, the apothecary, received only 100 (260). We know too that Da Costa was a proud person, jailed at one point for “insolences” (Jones 260). Given the expansion of the trade in humans out of Africa at this time, one can only wonder what he might have said. Johnston notes numerous links between sea-going Dutch, Portuguese, and French ships with both Africa and the New World, and identifies a numbers of ways in which an enterprising and intelligent professional translator and interpreter might have learned the languages and customs of the indigenous North Americans. There were, he argues, plausible chances for a person such as Da Costa to travel to North America to study aboriginal languages and customs, for instance with one of hundreds of vessels that regularly visited the coasts to take marine resources, such as cod and whales, and furs. Generally speaking, the 1500s witnessed far more European voyages to harvest cod or whales or to trade with Amerindians than it did attempts at founding year-round colonies. One short-lived colonizing initiative in Atlantic waters was a Portuguese venture. Joao Alvares de Fagundes established, or tried to establish, a colony on Cape Breton Island in 1521. Such an undertaking, especially given its Portuguese context, could have offered opportunities for an interpreter—say a relative of Da Costa’s—to gain experience with the Mi’kmaq. Then again, there is no reason why a Euro-African interpreter could not have come across the Atlantic on a French, Dutch, Spanish, Basque or English ship. Like free agent sports stars today, skilled ship captains, pilots, navigators, and crewmembers often changed the flags under which they sailed. Interpreters would have been no different. (11)

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Johnston also argues that it would have been possible for a professional interpreter to study aboriginal North American languages in Europe, where hundreds of aboriginal individuals were taken in the 1500s. Although most of these people were kidnapped, and taken against their will, others travelled to Europe freely, including the son of a St. Lawrence Iroquoian chief, who travelled with Jacques Cartier, and the Mi’kmaq chief Messamouet, who chose to travel to France (Bakker 120).10 It is interesting and reassuring to learn of such proud and independent figures as Chief Messamouet and Mathieu Da Costa, who were not subaltern, nor abject, but highly educated, courageous and skilled individuals, whose knowledge of the world and of the people in it was clearly vast. They stand at the first beginnings of what is now Canada, choosing freely to enter into relationship with people from other cultures, here in this place. The fluently multicultural Mathieu Da Costa points to the importance of the African diaspora to any real understanding of world cultures today, for the enormous disruption of peoples caused by the slave trade has had the long-term effect of placing people originally of African origin around the world, where they have made innumerable and essential cultural contributions. It is in relation to this same potent period in our collective history that the motif of the “pleasant place,” or locus amoenus, must first be noted, for the names of these two Canadian cultural identities—Acadian and Africadian— preserve in their etymology the name of Arcadia, the idyllic pastoral country first celebrated by Greek poet Theocritus of Syracuse in the first half of the third century bce. Ernst Robert Curtius, in European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, comments that “of all the antique poetic genres,” pastoral poetry has had, “after the epic, the greatest influence”: Arcadia was forever being rediscovered … It found its way into the Greek romance (Longus) and from thence into the Renaissance. From the romance, pastoral poetry could return to the eclogue or pass to the drama (Tasso’s Aminta; Guarini’s Pastor Fido.) The pastoral world is as extensive as the knightly world. In the medieval pastourelle the two worlds meet. Yes, in the pastoral world all worlds “embrace one another.” (187)

Curtius traces Arcadia’s path from the pastures of Sicily, where Theocritus located it, to the idealized and faraway landscape of Virgil’s eclogues, to its transculturation in Goethe’s Faust where it takes its place in the “restitution of all things” (Acts 3:21; qtd. in Curtius 189). Curtius notes that at a critical point in its history, Arcadia is identified with Virgil’s Elysium (Aeneid VI, 638 ff.), with the effect that it evolves into the rhetorical and poetical trope of the locus amoenus or “pleasant place”:

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[F]rom the [Roman] Empire to the sixteenth century, it [the locus amoenus] forms the principal motif of all nature description … It is a beautiful, shaded natural site. Its minimum ingredients comprise a tree (or several trees), a meadow, and a spring or brook. Birdsong and flowers may be added. The most elaborate examples also add a breeze. (195)

It was perhaps because of the beautiful trees and rivers, natural meadows, and abundant wildlife, that explorer Giovanni da Verrazzano, whose 1524 voyage to map the east coast of North America was supported by French King François I, gave to the country the ancient name of Arcadia. The aboriginal North American coast would have fit well, after all, with Ovid’s vision of the Golden Age: The tall pines grew undisturbed: no shipwrights came to cut and hew them into masts for ships to plow the distant and treacherous seas (Metamorphoses 3)

The lack of apparent state and justice buildings and institutions (“Plaques of bronze with formal legal phrases were as yet unimagined. / There were no benches with judges glaring”), and the natural abundance of food must also have seemed to be evidence of the fact that the new world was related somehow to the Golden Age. Yet, even if the foregoing is accurate, Acadie from the beginning also had North American aboriginal roots, equally signified in the name. Historians Sally Ross and Alphonse Deveau follow Andrew Hill Clark, in suggesting that the name Acadie has a double derivation, both to Arcadia and to -cadie, the indigenous North American Mi’kmaq word that has survived in place names such as Shubenacadie, Tracadie, and Passamaquoddy (Ross and Deveau 8). If so, the name of Africadia weaves Africa together with Mi’kma’ki, France, and the mythological country of a long-imagined Earthly Paradise, Eden, or Golden Age. The literary motif of the “pleasant place,” or locus amoenus, is the sign for this meaningful topos in the literary and philosophical tradition, as Jonathan Bate demonstrates; it is identified equally with the enduring myth of the Golden Age, storied in Hesiod’s Theogony and Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and with the Christian Eden.11 Thus not only are all loci amoeni alike, they may all be read as vestiges of the classical Golden Age, which, according to the syncretic way of thinking so much favoured in the Renaissance, is itself equivalent to Eden before the Fall. (Shakespeare 11)

This Christian and classical tradition would have been part of the cultural heritage of the Black Loyalists, the ancestors of the great majority of Africa-

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dians, who trace their arrival in Canada to one of two waves of immigration: the first when the “nearly 3,400 African Americans who supported the Crown during the Revolutionary War were exiled post-bellum to Nova Scotia in 1783,” and the second when nearly 2000 Black Refugees from the War of 1812 arrived in Nova Scotia between 1813 and 1815 (Clarke, Odysseys Home 107–8). In elaborating his theory of transculturation, Ortiz remarks that the “real history of Cuba is the history of its intermeshed transculturations”; in other words: the highly varied phenomena that have come about … as a result of the extremely complex transmutations of culture that have taken place here, and without a knowledge of which it is impossible to understand the evolution of the … folk, either in the economic or in the institutional, legal, ethical, religious, artistic, linguistic, psychological, sexual, or other aspects of its life. (98)

The same is surely true of Canada. Although one encounters the view that Canada is a young country—as young as Confederation, or even the repatriation of the constitution—many Canadian cultural identities have deep roots in this early and intense period of transculturation involving the First Nations, the French, the Africans, the English, the Scots, the Basque, the Bretons, the Spanish, the Portuguese, and all the many others. Clarke celebrates the complex cultural multiplicity that brought Africadia into being in the poem “Haligonian Market Cry,” where food, sexuality, literatures, and languages swirl about in an heady and reproductive mix, an amoral and delicious banquet of promiscuous words and polyglot pleasures.

Part II: Rue opens Shakespeare, and discovers … L: Your metaphors, monsieur, are pure European. O: Laxmi, I’m 100% humanist Aquarian! (Québécité 60) “Ain’t we such stuff as humus is made of?” (Execution Poems 21)

Part I of this paper offers a partial reading of Clarke’s expression “Black Acadian,” with its etymologically encrypted mytheme of the Earthly Paradise; Part II returns to Execution Poems’ subtitle—“The Black Acadian Tragedy of George and Rue”—to focus on what takes place when Rue opens Shakespeare’s first tragedy. “Reading Titus Andronicus in Three Mile Plains, N.S.” presents the resonant image of Rufus, the angrier and more intellectually gifted of the two brothers, reading Shakespeare, literally opening the book, to discover Aaron the Moor, villain and hero:

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I opened Shakespeare And discovered a scarepriest, shaking in violent winds, Some hallowed, heartless man, his brain boiling blood, Aaron, seething, demanding, “Is black so base a hue?” (25)

Opening Shakespeare is life changing for Rufus Hamilton, because his reading exposes him to a series of subject positions with which he can identify in relation to his own tragic story. These moments of identification are written into Execution Poems as a series of Shakespearean allusions and borrowings, transferred intertextually to become articulations of Rufus’s Africadian world. Meanings are densely layered, especially since several of these borrowings are borrowed themselves from Shakespeare’s sources, for Titus Andronicus looks back repeatedly not only to Ovid’s Metamorphoses, but also to Horace and to the tragedy of Hippolytus as it was penned by the Roman tragedian and philosopher, Seneca the Younger.12 The intertextual weave of Clarke’s poems forms a matrix for the literary construction of Rufus’s cultural identity; to use a different metaphor, the Shakespearean passages linking Aaron, Rufus, and Nat Turner, thread together in emergent narrative coherence. All kinds of formal, literary strategies are used by Clarke to build the Shakespearean intertext in Execution Poems. Rufus’s act of reading and citation is itself a purposeful allusion, bringing Titus Andronicus into play, as Bate reminds us when he specifies that allusion, from Latin al-ludo “to play with,” is what occurs when a “source text is brought into play” (Shakespeare 10). Direct quotation, both of Aaron’s speech and of the Latin spoken by Chiron and Demetrius, is another straightforward method for constructing intertext. In addition, Clarke practises the classical rhetorical technique of imitatio, or stylistic imitation and amplification, as he also deploys a very wide range of rhetorical figures and tropes. A just reading of the insistent hammer imagery in the murder scene depends upon our recognition of an imitatio, and may serve to remind us that the technique was and is practised as a kind of homage; so, with one exception, Rufus’ imitations are of Shakespeare’s Aaron. The hyperbolic pretension of Clarke’s implied author to “go out shining” is an imitatio of a daring claim made by Shakespeare’s Aaron. Clarke also composes a locus amoenus, which is by definition an imitatio. Finally, and arguably, we can trace in Execution Poems the kind of imitatio that Bate refers to as the “submerged source” (Shakespeare 10), one that fulfills Petrarch’s poetic ideal: “the similarity [between the two texts is] planted so deep that it can only be extricated by quiet meditation. The quality is to be felt rather than defined” (88).13 Submerged sourcing of the Hippolytus may underpin representations of horses, sexuality, rape and incest, in “Love Wars,”“Original Pain” and “Identity II,” where these images serve to connote the degradations of the Age of Iron.

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The scene of reading, purposeful allusion, and direct quotation of “Reading Titus Andronicus in Three Mile Plains, N.S.” locate the narrative “through line” of the book and build the case for Rufus’s interpretation of murder as righteous revenge. Aaron is quoted: Aaron, seething, demanding, “Is black so base a hue?” And shouting, “Coal-black refutes and foils any other hue In that it scorns to bear another hue.” O! Listen at that! I listen, flummoxed, for language cometh volatile, Each line burning, and unslaked Vengeance reddens rivers. (25)

Shakespeare’s Aaron shouts to counter the nurse’s racialist attack on his newborn son, whom she calls a “devil” (4.2.66), and a “joyless, dismal, black and sorrowful issue / … as loathsome as a toad / Amongst the fair-faced breeders of our clime” (4.2.68–70). The Moor’s famous rhetorical response—“Is black so base a hue?” (4.2.71)—is backed up fatally by his sword. Rufus’s surprised “O! Listen at that!” expresses in domestic, Black Nova Scotian English, an immediate, gut-response identification with Aaron. Rufus’s positive response to Aaron has a striking correlative in the reception of Aaron by Black audiences in post-apartheid South Africa. Anthony Sher and Gregory Doran have documented how black audiences identified so powerfully with Aaron that they “cheer him right the way through the plot to rape Lavinia,” backing off only when he hacks off Titus’s hand. When Aaron defies Tamora’s order to kill their black child, saying “Tell the empress from me, I am of age / To keep mine own, excuse it how she can” (4.2.1–33–4), the entire house erupted: “Yebo!” the audience shriek out, “Yebo!” yelling their approval and solidarity. A memorable show … (Woza Shakespeare! 213)

Commenting on this production, Ania Loomba, in Shakespeare, Race, and Colonialism, rehearses the contradictions of a character who is “a textbook illustration for early modern stereotypes of blackness” (75), yet who is humanized by his defence of his child, which expresses simultaneously his “pride in his colour” (90). It is not surprising, she argues, that black South Africans, who had long been struggling to affirm that they were of age and competence to govern themselves, “to keep their own,” would forge emotional bonds with Aaron (75). Greg Doran puts it from a director’s point of view: Titus Andronicus has “Shakespeare’s other great black part” (5). Both in Shakespeare’s play and in Clarke’s book of poems, Aaron is implicated in the thematic exploration of the place and function of language and, particularly, of poetry. Aaron is well read: when Titus communicates with

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Tamara’s sons by sending them a quotation from Horace, it is Aaron who decodes the literary sign and who understands and acts on the message of the text. Aaron’s bloody vengeance at a more abstract level models the counterdiscourse of the post-colonial writer, as Clarke suggests: The smartest, wiliest character in TA is black Aaron, and his malice toward Titus and the whole Roman power structure is driven in part by his lust for revenge against a civilization that considers him barbarous. Aaron is the model of the frustrated and embittered black (minority) intellectual who uses his mastery of the codes of the opposing civilization to wreak endless havoc within it—with a smile … He is Othello as if played by Iago. (Email interview)

In Clarke’s poem, Rufus’s spontaneous identification with Aaron metamorphoses in the following line into something even more powerful: “language cometh volatile / Each line burning.” This is what Clarke describes elsewhere as the awakening of “the link between being and language, between empowerment and articulation” (Odysseys Home 276). Aaron signifies the forging of this critical link. Scholars and writers such as Derek Walcott, NourbeSe Philip and Homi Bhabha point to the paradox that, for the colonized, the language of the colonizers is a double-edged sword, for while it displaces indigenous languages and cultures, and so is an agent of colonization, it is also a weapon that must be seized upon and used. For Rufus, “school was violent improvement” (25)—offering language and the possibility of a job and a better life, reminding us of Black families’ long, hard struggle for education. Clarke economically evokes the ambivalence surrounding the acquisition of the English language and literary heritage when, in “Childhood I,” Rue remembers his mother teaching him to read from a polluted source: “her preacher-lover-dad’s secondhand Shakespeare and tattered scripture” (Execution Poems 16). Empowerment, including a subjective identification with the English language, is one of the prizes Rufus takes away from his encounter with Aaron, which is also what the Black South African response to Aaron is largely about. That, and vengeance. The archaic grammar (“cometh”), the Latinate diction (“volatile”), and the invocation of Vengeance further link the advent of language to the King James Bible and thus to the role of Christian religion and Biblical text in the African–North American experience of resistance and rebellion. Rufus himself contextualizes the scene of his encounter with Shakespeare as that period when the Bible was the alimentation offered to the starving bodies and souls of the violently displaced and dispossessed: Rue: When Witnesses sat before Bibles open like plates And spat sour sermons of interposition and nullification,

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While burr-orchards vomited bushels of thorns, and leaves Rattled like uprooted skull-teeth across rough highways, And stars ejected brutal, serrated, heart-shredding light, And dark brothers lied down, quiet, in government graves, Their white skulls jabbering amid farmer’s dead flowers— The junked geraniums and broken truths of car engines, And History snapped its whip and bankrupted scholars, School was violent improvement. I opened Shakespeare And discovered … (25)

“Witnesses” and “Bibles open like plates” are details that identify Africadia as a “community of believers” (Odysseys Home 155) and point to the centrality of the Church throughout African North America. Rufus’s reading is thus located after the religious revival known as the Great Awakening, which swept over New England in the 1830s and 40s, and during which African Americans, encouraged by a doctrine promising the grace of God to all persons, regardless of race, embraced Christianity in large numbers (Lambert 188). The Loyalist immigrants to Canada would have been caught up in this movement, due to the many ties and continuities linking African Americans and African Canadians during this formative period.14 The time of Rufus’s reading,“while burrorchards vomited bushels of thorns,” suggests the thorns and burrs of Genesis 3:18: “Thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee.” The “dark brothers” lying down “quiet in government graves,” recall “Original Pain” and “George & Rue: Pure Virtuous Killers,” alluding to the fact that the brothers apparently helped to convict each other in court: “They had face-to-face trials in May 1949 and backed each other’s guilt” (Execution Poems 12). The images framing the scene of Rufus’s reading speak of death, exile, slavery and its consequences, and align symbolically with the Iron Age, when “brothers … were at their brother’s throats” (Ovid 4), and when Cain slew Abel. There is not room to rehearse the endless associations of fratricide and brotherhood, but we must note that brotherhood is an important leitmotif in Titus Andronicus, with five pairs of brothers, Lucius’s demand that Alarbus be sacrificed Ad manes fratrum “to the shades of our brothers” (1.1.101), Titus’s repetition of the word,15 and the captured Tamora’s unsuccessful appeal for her son’s life, which, by addressing her conquerors as “Roman brethren” (1.1.107), attempts to assert a brotherhood of man between the aristocratic Andronici and the Goths (and Moors), cultural “others” of the Roman empire. The scene compares with an extraordinary challenge to slaveholders recounted by William Parker in “The Freedman’s Story,” published in the Atlantic Monthly in 1866, and discussed by Ella Forbes in “‘By My Own Right Arm’: Redemptive Violence and the 1851 Christiana, Pennsylvania Resistance”:

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[William] Parker engaged the slaveholder [Gorsuch] in a biblical debate … Gorsuch said to Parker,“does not the Bible say,‘Servants, obey your masters’? Parker replied that “the same Bible said, ‘Give unto your servants that which is just and equal.’” He went on to ask the slaveholder, “Where do you see it in the Scripture, that a man should traffic in his brother’s blood?” Enraged, Gorsuch said, “Do you call a nigger my brother?” “Yes” was Parker’s simple reply. Challenging Gorsuch’s denial of the African’s humanity, he then went on to say, prophetically, to Gorsuch in the biblical admonishment, “If a brother see a sword coming, and he warn not his brother, then the brother’s blood is required at his hands; but if the brother see the sword coming, and warn his brother, and his brother flee not, then his brother’s blood is required at his own hand. I see the sword coming, and, old man, I warn you to flee. (165)

The existence of such a superb discourse in the background (or unconscious) of the brotherhood theme in the African-American context necessarily enriches Clarke’s referencing of it, both in this deployment of two characters who are brothers, and in his key phrase, “fratricidal damnation” (25).16 The book of Genesis is a deep source here and elsewhere, for example, in the soon-to-berecounted soaking of the taxi driver’s car seat with his blood: 8 And Cain talked with Abel his brother: and it came to pass, when they were in the field, that Cain rose up against Abel his brother, and slew him. 9 And the LORD said until Cain, Where is Abel, thy brother? And he said, I know not: am I my brother’s keeper? 10 And he said, What hast thou done? The voice of thy brother’s blood crieth unto me from the ground. 11 And now thou art cursed from the earth, which hath opened her mouth to receive thy brother’s blood from thy hand. (Genesis 4.8–11)

Biblical exegesis teaches that “the theme of brotherhood, a metonymy for the bond that links humanity, is handled with growing complexity from the beginning of Genesis to the end” (Fokkelman 53). If the complex relations between Joseph and his brothers signify social progress and the evolution of the rule of law, Execution Poems recalls Cain and Abel to defy complacency on the subject. Also rooted in the Old Testament is the concept of righteous revenge or redemptive violence, which deeply informed the American slave rebellions, including that of Nat Turner, with whom Rufus explicitly expresses solidarity. Nat Turner, who was born into slavery on October 2, 1800, in Southampton County, Virginia, was executed on November 11, 1831, for his role as leader of one of the most destructive slave insurrections in the history of the United States of America. He believed himself to be a Christian prophet, and his rebel-

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lion has been described as “the most significant early example of organized black religious nationalism” (Ogbar 51). Nat Turner is known to have been a man of “extraordinary intelligence” (Greenberg 1): From his early childhood until his execution by the state of Virginia, Turner had found in his life and in the natural world a series of signs to be interpreted. The comments that he would become a prophet or that he was unfit for slavery, the marks on his head and chest, his ability to read without being taught, and finally the revelation instructing him to seek the kingdom of Heaven—these signs all seemed to point in a single direction: God had commanded him to lead his people in a great battle against slavery. Nat Turner was a “semiotic” rebel—a man moved to action by reading and interpreting the signs of heaven and earth. (Greenberg 2)

Like Aaron, Nat was a villain or a hero, depending on one’s point of view; he was also a community leader and, like many other African-American and African-Canadian community leaders of his time, he was a preacher. Rufus describes Nat Turner as “Aaron’s heir,” and since he also identifies with Aaron, he in effect proposes that both Turner and himself, independently, identify with Shakespeare’s character: Like drastic Aaron’s heir, Nat Turner, I’s natural homicidal: My pages blaze, my lines pall, crying fratricidal damnation. (25)

This is a literary genealogy, as the images of pages and lines (of poetry) confirm, and it highlights the value placed on literacy in certain African–North American cultural traditions. In “‘I Saw the Book Talk’: Slave Readings of the First Great Awakening,” Frank Lambert explains that although the spoken word and its performance at revivalist meetings played an important role in the conversion of the poor and enslaved, many of whom would have been illiterate, the Great Awakening also promoted literacy.17 First-hand readings of Biblical text were a crucial element of black religious nationalism from its beginnings, as African Americans “demonstrated great interest in becoming literate,” “responded to the chance to read with courage and diligence,” and “demonstrated desire and ability” (187). One of the surprises contained within the rich writings of Africans who testify to their experiences of eighteenth-century revivalism is the importance of reading … [B]y examining how slaves related to the printed word, we see a much more active, intellectual effort by individuals who, as readers, not only consumed texts but produced their own meetings, often reaching conclusions very different from those intended. (186)

Nat Turner was evidently one such reader; Rufus Hamilton, another.

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The scene of Rufus reading Shakespeare frames the only instance of direct and fully acknowledged quotation from Titus Andronicus. A second passage of direct quotation, the Latin phrase in the following passage, is unmarked: Sit fas aut nefas, I am become Aaron, desiring poisoned lilies and burning, staggered air, A King James God, spitting fire, brimstone, leprosy, cancers, Dreaming of tearing down stars and letting grass incinerate Pale citizens’ prized bones. What should they mean to me? A plough rots, returns to ore; weeds snatch it back to earth; The stones of the sanctuaries pour out onto every street. (25)

The symbolism remains largely Biblical: poisoned lilies mock Easter (Matthew 6:28); ploughshares dissolve back into earth to become weapons again (Isaiah 2:4; Joel 3:10); and a King James God spits apocalyptic fire and brimstone, tearing down stars in an eternal hell of righteous revenge (Revelations 6.13; 19.20). “What should they mean to me?” recasts Cain’s famous—and damning—question. But here the intertext turns strongly toward Shakespeare as well, and the Latin passage Sit fas aut nefas cites not only Titus Andronicus, but also Shakespeare’s Latin sources. It means, “be it right or wrong,” so what Rufus is saying is: Be it right or wrong, I am become Aaron. The phrase occurs in Titus Andronicus when Tamora’s two surviving sons, Chiron and Demetrius, in an act of revenge against Titus Andronicus, who has conquered their country and sacrificed their brother, decide to rape Lavinia, Andronicus’ daughter. Demetrius says: Sit fas aut nefas, till I find the stream To cool this heat, a charm to calm these fits, Per Stygia, per manes vehor. (1.1.632–63)

The Latin phrases together mean: “Be it right, or wrong, I am carried through the Stygian regions, the realm of shades,” and Execution Poems references the complete sentence, since Per Stygia, per manes vehor is an epigraph to the book. Bate explains that the first phrase, Sit fas aut nefas, “perhaps adapts ‘a verse in Horace’ (see [Titus Adronicus] 4.2.22): ‘cum fas atque nefas exiguo fine libidinum / discernunt avidi’—‘when, under the influence of ardent sexual desire, they scarcely distinguish between right and wrong’ (Odes, 1.18.10–11)”; as well, the language recalls Procne’s confounding of right and wrong in Philomela’s story, when she decides to kill her innocent son, and feed him to his father, in revenge for her sister’s rape “‘fasque nefasque / confusura ruit’ (Ovid, Met. 6.585–56)” (Shakespeare and Ovid 165–66). The second part of the sentence, Per Stygia, per manes vehor, is an adaptation from Hippolytus: “Per

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Styga, per amnes igneos amens sequar” (“I [Phaedra] will madly follow you [Hippolytus] through Styx and through fiery rivers” (180). The revision of the Latin suggests “purposeful adaptation of the original,” Bate argues, citing Robert Miola’s argument that “Phaedra’s expression of frustrated love becomes here an expression of personal abandonment to evil. Styx flows within the human soul” (Shakespeare and Classical Tragedy 14; Titus Adronicus 166). Shakespeare, it appears, judiciously selected and fit together bits of his Latin readings in order to focus on the ambiguous moral framing of desire and of revenge.18 An extreme emotional state in which right and wrong cannot be distinguished from each other is followed by a descent into hell. The whole passage is reminiscent of Rufus’s claim: “We’re damned because desire is not damned” (37). The intertext here supports the idea that Rufus—like Nat Turner, Procne, Aaron, Chiron, and Demetrius—chooses to do evil in order to have revenge against evil, thus interpreting (or misinterpreting) revenge as “good.”19 Rufus is redefined as a “Public Enemy” (Execution Poems 32), defying damnation: as he says of Fredericton, “I want to muck up their little white paradise here” (32). He tells his more pragmatic brother, “Here’s how I justify my error: / The blow that slew Silver came from two centuries back. / It took that much time and agony to turn a white man’s whip / into a black man’s hammer” (35). Like Nat Turner, and like the participants in suicide slave rebellions such as the one represented in Dionne Brand’s At the Full and Change of the Moon, Rufus gives up his life in an act of rebellion against slavery, at least according to his own interpretation. He compares his sacrifice to that of Christ on the cross: “we’ll hang like Christ hanged” (41); as did Nat Turner, who saw himself as consciously taking up Christ’s yoke, and who launched his rebellion with a “last supper” (Greenberg 3). Rufus’s act of revenge, the murder of the Fredericton taxi driver, is described in a series of passages that illustrate rhetorical imitatio, in that they constitute an imitation and expansion of one of Aaron’s phrases, spoken to Tamora as he refuses and turns away from her lovemaking to focus on the impending murder of Bassanius and the rape and mutilation of Lavinia: Vengeance is in my heart, death in my hand, Blood and revenge are hammering in my head. (Titus Adronicus 2.2.38–39)

“The Killing” reiterates, expands, and offers variations: Rue: I ingratiated the grinning hammer with Silver’s not friendless, not unfriendly skull. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Rue: Iron smell of the hammer mingled with iron smell of blood and chrome smell of snow and moonlight. Geo: He had two hundred dollars on him; bootleg in him. We had a hammer on us, a spoonful of cold beer in us. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Rue: Twitchy, my hand was twitchy, inside my jacket. The hammer was gravity: everything else was jumpy. I wondered if Silver could hear his own blood thundering, vermilion, in his temples, quickened, twitchy, because of beer; The hammer went in so far that there was no sound— just the slight mushy squeak of bone. (34–35)

These passages play out the identification with Aaron, which Rufus has already affirmed, through the formal elaboration of the words that describe the act of murder, mediating and metamorphosing the component elements of the crime as only language can do. There is at least one other instance of formal imitatio in Execution Poems, and that is the creation of a locus amoenus, “pleasant place” or “pleasance.” Bate notes that in Titus Andronicus, the lovemaking of Tamora and Aaron is set in a formally invoked locus amoenus reminiscent of a passage in Seneca’s Hippolytus that describes a Golden Age landscape: the lofty grove’s deep places, where cool Lerna is transparent with its crystal shoals, and the silent forest-depths, wherein the complaining birds make music, and the ash-trees and ancient beeches quiver, moving gently in the breeze. Sweet it is to lie on the bank … (lines 505–10)

Tamora echoes these words thus: My lovely Aaron, wherefore look’st though sad When everything doth make a gleeful boast? The birds chant melody on every bush, The snakes lies rolled in the cheerful sun, The green leaves quiver with the cooling wind And make a chequered shadow on the ground. (2.2.10–15)

In Shakespeare’s play, very shortly, the same site will be transformed into the dark forest and gaping pit wherein evil will have its day, and the motif of “the pleasant place” of course also disappears. Bate notes that this reversal corresponds to the important narrative and mythological event, linked to a wellknown Ovidian phrase, spoken by Titus and also quoted (twice) in Thomas Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy, which was one of Shakespeare’s sources: “Terras Astraea reliquit ‘Astraea [goddess of Justice] has left the earth’” (Ovid 1.150). When

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Justice or Astraea flees the earth, the Iron Age begins, and pleasant places are no more. Clarke’s poems evoke a similarly emblematic set of two scenes in “Trial II”: Rue: This courtroom’s a parliament of jackals—– see Hitler faces front dark robes. Unsullied, though, a wafer of light slivers water; unspoiled, the wind rattles alders. I would like very much to sing— in a new life, a new world, some April song— “A slight dusting of snow, the indigo dawn hovers— and we sweeten in our love,” yes, something like that, but blood must expunge, sponge up, blood. (37)

Clarke’s beautiful locus amoenus—“Unsullied, though, a wafer of light slivers water; / unspoiled, the wind rattles alders”—compactly evokes each of the essential elements of the classical topos: water, trees, shade, a breeze. As in the Shakespearean text, it contrasts with a signification of human barbarity telegraphically, if enigmatically, communicated by the lines “This courtroom’s a parliament of jackals—/ see Hitler faces front dark robes.” As well, it is not difficult to see that Justice is absent in the Iron Age kind of world described in these poems, where boys abused and starved grow into very dangerous men. So, in the passage quoted above, Rufus, like Aaron, turns away from love to take up revenge. Rufus falls out of love, yet a certain delicacy characterizes his imitatio of Lavinia’s rape. Clarke introduces a trope that recollects Shakespeare’s language but erases the criminal violation. Aaron says There speak and strike, brave boys, and take your turns; There serve your lust, shadowed from heaven’s eye, And revel in Lavinia’s treasury. (1.1.630–31)

In Clarke’s poem Rue says Open your gold mine—suave dark shaft cream wet with jewelled love—beneath me, so I’ll mine and mine, staking fierce claim, your kisses puttering rapturous about my face. (29)

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The language of “mining” and “staking a claim” reiterates Shakespeare’s diction of “striking” and “treasury,” and clearly enough evokes woman as property, or colony; Clarke’s text actually develops this aspect by referencing the woman as “India” (26) and by the using the phrase “to rape money” (13). Clarke figures sexual and colonial violence and commodified sexuality, but his characters celebrate sex, and commit murder, but not rape. I am convinced that Seneca’s Hippolytus, which was one of Shakespeare’s sources for Titus Andronicus, is, via Shakespeare, what Bate calls a “submerged source” in Execution Poems. The Hippolytus story, told by Seneca and before him, Euripides, is archaic, preserving mythological fragments relating to horses (etymologically preserved in Hippolytus’ name, and mode of death), sexuality and sexual passion (everywhere in this story), rape (and not rape, as in the story of Potiphar’s wife), incest (the sexual passion of Phaedra, the mother, for her stepson), bestiality (Phaedra’s mother and the Bull of the Sun), and betrayal (the boy is falsely accused and is killed by his father). Several of these elements turn up in Clarke’s poems, some without much realistic motivation; for instance, the imagery linking horses to sexuality in “Love Wars” and “Original Pain,” and of incest (and horses) in “Identity II.” Hippolytus is a palette for these darkest colours. The final intertextual path this paper will trace begins, like the others, with the words of Clarke’s text, and concludes in the contemplation of artistic expression—poetry—as a response to the world’s evils. I have shown that Clarke constructs a literary genealogy whereby both Rufus and Nat Turner inherit from Aaron: Like drastic Aaron’s heir, Nat Turner, I’s natural homicidal: My pages blaze, my lines pall, crying fratricidal damnation. (25)

We must look again at these lines, which point both to poetry and to murder. Who is the “I” who speaks in this evocative blend of African Nova Scotian and Shakespearean English? Rufus loved literature (see “Childhood II” in Execution Poems 17), and spoke “almost perfect English” as Clarke notes in “Malignant English,” building details from the trial transcripts into the poems—but Rufus was a murderer, not a writer.20 Clarke, too, is bidialectal, fluent both in African Nova Scotian and Shakespearean English varieties.21 The pronoun “I” may be ambidextrous, but it seems clear that this literary genealogy does not end with Rufus, or with Nat Turner, but is carried forward to the page of Execution Poems and thus to George Elliott Clarke, who constructs a literary genealogy of revenge, of which he himself is the heir. Curiously, the issue of poetry as a response to violence is one that Shakespeare references in Titus Andronicus. Scholars have puzzled over the formal

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speech that Marcus unrealistically pronounces upon seeing his niece, Lavinia, after she has been violently raped and had her tongue and hands cut out: Alas, a crimson river of warm blood, Like to a bubbling fountain stirred with wind, Doth rise and fall between they rosed lips. Coming and going with thy honey breath. But sure some Tereus hath deflowered thee. (2.3.22–26)

Bate suggests that language is the issue here: Shakespeare, he argues, learned from Seneca, and from Kyd (who learned it from Seneca), the art of portraying a linguistically complex formal lamentation in the face of terrible loss. Titus Andronicus does the same thing, citing the Hippolytus when he learns from Lavinia that Chiron and Demetrius are responsible for her rape and mutilation. Bate comments that his words are taken from a moment of appalling sexual knowledge in the Hippolytus (671–72), but the speech points to absence of justice in the world: “‘Magni dominator poli, / Tam lentus audis scelera, tam lentus vides?’ [‘Ruler of the great heavens, are you so slow to hear crimes, so slow to see?’]” (Bate, Introduction 30). Clarke, in the murder scene, portrays his Africadian brothers reworking their phrases to find just the right metaphor to describe the way that Silver’s blood issues from his lips: Rue: His soul leaked from him in a Red Sea, a Dead Sea, churning his clothes to lava. Geo: No, it didn’t look like real blood, but something more like coal, that inched from his mouth. (34)

The brothers are generating dark variations on Shakespeare’s “crimson river of warm blood” (2.3.22). At the same time, Clarke is referencing and performing within the African–North American tradition of virtuosity, orature, music, blues and jazz—a vibrant heritage of turning to artistic expression in the face of violent loss and despair. Literary experience is at issue both in Shakespeare’s play and in Execution Poems. Curtius pointed out over 50 years ago that literature as such is an important theme in Titus Andronicus, where the characters not only re-enact Ovid’s tale of Procne, Philomel, Tereas, and Itys, and read the Metamorphoses in order to communicate with each other, but also write epistles quoting classical text that are shot through the sky as prayers attached to arrows, so that, in the end,“there is not a god left unsolicited” (4.3.61; Curtius 332–34). Clarke’s poem “Original Pain” also figures an appeal for justice, which like Titus’s epistles arcs—a rearing horse—from earth into the heavens: “Tall Screams reared

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out of Three Mile Plains” (15). Rufus, for better or for worse, discovers a way to navigate through the violence of his childhood world by identifying with Shakespeare’s Aaron. Clarke points to the importance of poetry in “Negation,” which introduces the figure of the author in terms that recall Aaron’s determination to act on his own behalf: Away with slavish weeds and servile thoughts! I will be bright, and shine in pearl and gold. (2.1.18–19)

Clarke writes I mean To go out shining instead of tarnished, To take apart poetry like a heart. (11)

Aaron memorably voices “the venomous malice of his swelling heart,” (5.3.11–13): “Ah, why should wrath be mute and fury dumb?” (5.3.183). His sentiments could be shared by Rufus, or by Rufus’s poet cousin, George Elliott Clarke, who, like Shakespeare, employs his rhetorical virtuosity in the service of such expression. Titus Andronicus and Execution Poems are both explicitly concerned with the place of literature and especially poetry in relation to the struggle for social justice. The relationship between the two texts affords insight into how books and literary texts, moving between cultures, provide contexts and language with which to “speak truth to power,” to borrow Edward Said’s potent phrase (63). Literature’s endurance across generations has meant that it has been used to articulate significant continuities and transformations. Execution Poems follows one such winding and intertextual passage from Seneca, through Kyd, to Shakespeare to re-enact a tradition of eloquence as a response to terrible loss; and from Theocritus to Ovid, Seneca and Shakespeare to reinscribe a vision of the “pleasant place.” From Seneca via Shakespeare, Marlowe, and Nat Turner, Clarke picks up the bloody thread of the revenge tragedy; and from Horace, Ovid, and Shakespeare, desperation when right and wrong are indistinguishable. And perhaps, from the Hippolytus, a barbarity at the edges of written, Western civilization. My paper traces the ways that Clarke’s intertextual, consciously literary, and rhetorical suite of poems re-contextualizes and transforms such passages and images, and so carries them forward into the new contexts and different meanings of Canadian literature. I align my efforts here with the work of African-Canadian scholar David Sealy, who notes the “diverse ways in which Black diasporic subjects have selectively appropriated, incorporated, European ideologies, culture, and institutions, alongside an ‘African’ heritage” (91). Clarke’s poems image the reality that the narratives and the

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language of Shakespeare and of the King James Bible, accessed by orature and by reading, are and have been elements in the transcultural construction of Africadian identity. Which is, we remember, a Canadian identity, a point Clarke worries, and affirms, throughout Odysseys Home.

Notes 1 Execution Poems was awarded the Governor General’s Literary Award for Poetry in English in 2001. The poems are based on true stories of George and Rufus Hamilton, who were hanged for the murder of a Fredericton taxi driver in July 1949. The two men were George Elliott Clarke’s cousins. 2 See Adrienne Shadd, “‘The Lord Seemed to Say “Go”’: Women and the Underground Railroad Movement”; Robin Winks, The Blacks in Canada: A History; and Walker, James W. St. G., The Black Loyalists: The Search for a Promised Land in Nova Scotia and Sierra Leone 1783–1870. 3 The April 2004 Conference Board of Canada briefing by Pedro Antunes et al. notes that average wages for visible minorities were 14.5 percent lower than the Canadian average in 2000, and the gap is growing. “[W]ith few exceptions, second-generation visible minorities earn wages that are similar to those of other Canadians. The exceptions to this rule are Black men, who remain disadvantaged with respect to the rest of Canada, even past second generation, and Chinese men who tend to earn more than the average Canadian” (5). See also Will Kymlicka’s discussion of the “particularly harsh prejudice” experienced by Blacks in Canada, 80–89. 4 Bronislaw Malinowski acknowledges the “moral, normative and evaluative” baggage inherent in the word acculturation, in his introduction to the 1947 first edition of Ortiz’s important book (lviii). More recently, Sherry Simon has reiterated the need for a term such as transculturation. She observes, “[a]cculturation and assimilation are mirror images (negative and positive) of the same process: the loss of distinctive cultural traits to a host culture which is assumed to remain intact and stable. Hybridity, créolité, métissage refer to forms of mixing, each recalling a vexed history, where cultural mixing has been associated with a legacy of violence and racism.… these terms are also unsatisfactory for the way in which they conflate process and result” (117). The alternative term, transculturation, refers to complex cultural transitions, ranging from the collision of the indigenous Taino culture of Cuba with that of Europe—described by Ortiz as “a transculturation that failed, as far as the natives were concerned,” for their people perished (100)—to the dominant cultural phenomenon that is today’s technological and industrial complex, itself the product of ongoing transculturations that have interwoven and transformed innumerable contributions from cultural “others”; Ortiz points to the European diet, which includes New World foods such as chocolate, corn, tomatoes, potatoes, papayas, peanuts, sweet potatoes, cashews, and pineapples (110). 5 Julia Kristeva, in La revolution du langage poétique (1974), first argued that the transference of text between signifying systems complements displacement and condensation as fundamental signifying processes in the unconscious; so, she wrote, the trope of intertextuality must stand alongside metaphor and metonymy, as defined by structural linguistics, as essential elements in the manufacture of meaning (59).

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6 My focus on the agency of the literary in cultural transfer is distinct from that of Józef Kwaterko, who in a recent issue of The Journal of Canadian Studies “advanc[es] an argument for the special pertinence of literary texts in assessing the work of cultural transfer” (Schwartzwald 7); neither am I proposing a study of fictional representations of cultural liminality such as that of Roland Walter, who (in the same issue of IJCS) masterfully reviews Dionne Brand’s representations of transcultural contact zones between Canada and the Caribbean. For an ethnographic treatment of intertextuality and cultural exchange, see Bauman. 7 Ortiz includes books in the “hurricane” of culture that came aground in Cuba from Europe, along with “iron, gunpowder, the horse, the wheel, the sail, the compass, money, wages, writing, the printing-press,… the master, the King, the Church, [and] the banker” (99). 8 Clarke coined the term Africadian, as he writes: “I coined the term in response to my perception of similarities of experience and community between these two distinct, small, but historical Maritime populations. At the same time, there are major differences, of course. First, Acadian settlements are far more contiguous geographically, richer economically, and respected politically (especially in New Brunswick). Too, for those who sought assimilation, it was easier to accomplish via language, while much less possible, racially, for ‘Africadians.’ Still, both communities have had to endure grave injustices at the hands of majority populations—linguistic in one case, racial in the other—and both have a pastoral-religious relationship to land/territory, and, for that matter, language use” (Clarke, email interview). See “The Birth and Rebirth of Africadian Literature,” and the “Select Bibliography of Literature by AfricanCanadian Authors,” in Odysseys Home: Mapping African-Canadian Literature. 9 “The Mi’kmaq is a poetic child. His distances are measured in rainbows. His words sound the sense. His fancy is illimitable. He is a born orator.” “Souvenir of the Micmac Tercentenary Celebration, 1610–1910” (Restigouche, NB: Frères Mineurs Capuchins, 1910, 50–51); cited in Daniel Paul, 35. 10 “According to several European sources, Basques (but also Bretons) sometimes (most often temporarily) took natives to their home county. The Micmac chief Messamouet was the houseguest of the mayor of the French Basque city Baiona (Bayonne)” (Bakker 120). 11 For example, discussing the interpretive technique demonstrated in Sir John Harington’s 1591 reading of the slaying of Medusa, Bate concludes: “Harington’s interpretive strategy is premised on the conviction that allegory shadows forth a universal interconnectedness; this enables him to pull together the pagan narrative and divine revelation, and thus to defend poetry from the strictures of puritans … Ultimately, both the practice of humanist imitation and Renaissance hermeneutics more generally draw strength from a belief in the readability of the world: myths, classical texts, nature itself, are books in which moral truths may be read” (Shakespeare 11). 12 The relationship between Titus Andronicus and Ovid’s Metamorphoses has been discussed by many scholars, and recently by Jonathan Bate (Introduction). 13 I draw here on Bate’s theorization of Petrarch. In Shakespeare and Ovid he quotes from Letters from Petrarch, Comp. and trans. Morris Bishop, Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1966. 14 Clarke signifies this cultural continuity in Québécité when he describes Malcolm States, “a Montréalais jazz saxophonist of African-American and Mi’kmaq Nova Scotian heritage, debuted in Halifax: An Africadian (15).”

“I am become Aaron” / Knutson

15 “Patient yourself, madam, and pardon me. / These are their brethren whom your Goths beheld / Alive and dead, and for their brethren slain” (1.1.125–26). 16 On the intertext as unconscious, Michael Riffaterre writes, “the intertext of the narrative acts as the unconscious of fiction and … readers recover or discover that intertext because the narrative itself contains clues leading back to it” (91). 17 The movement used the printed word and promoted literacy and the reading of the Bible, raising money in Europe to found “Negroe School[s]” (Lambert 186). 18 Bate directs his readers to passages where Shakespeare writes in relation to the Latin authors; for example, Act 1, scene 1, lines 153–59, where the words Titus speaks at his sons’ interment are a formal imitation of a passage in Seneca’s Agamemnon, reminding us of the pedagogical practice of writing imitations, whether copying word for word, or producing formal variants, repetitions, or imitations of a theme. For a possible link between formal study of rhetoric and this period in Shakespeare’s life, see Bate’s “Introduction” 78. 19 As I write this article, I chance on an article in the Halifax Chronicle Herald that quotes Dr. Michael McCullough, a psychologist at the University of Miami, saying that revenge is a “deeply human and sometimes very functional behavior … which … can bring feelings of completeness and fulfillment”; and further reports that brainwave technology has permitted neuroscientist Dr. Eddie Narmon-Jones, of the University of Wisconsin, to demonstrate that the expression of revenge is “all pleasure” (Benedict Carey, “Sweet Revenge,” July 31, 2004, D10). 20 To turn to Rufus in Execution Poems … his English is “concocted” but it is also meant to correspond deliberately to a beautiful “oddity” in both his and general Afro-North American experience: the tendency of Black autodidacts to compose/speak either an extremely “correct”/poised English, or to deconstruct the hell out of it! The “real” Rufus spoke well enough that his prosecutor, unable to “shake” or “flap” him, commented, during the trial, on his excellent command of English (Clarke, Email interview). 21 “In our home, when my bothers and I were growing up in the 1960s, my father forced us constantly to ‘enunciate’ and to pronounce words correctly. (I can still hear him saying, ‘Enunciate! Enunciate!’) But, in the playgrounds, we spoke Black English with our schoolmates. There was one kind of English at home—and another on the street. Whatever strength my poetry may have comes from that dual inheritance. “Then again, I shan’t leave out the church leaders and members, who were also pretty big on ‘elocution’ and recitals, where standard English—at hyper-levels—was the norm, and the serious church singers were always expected to be able to sing according to European ‘art song’ standards—but then to also be able to ‘cut loose’ when doing something soulful” (Clarke, email interview).

Works Cited Ahmad, Aijaz. “Jameson’s Rhetoric of Otherness and the ‘National Allegory.’” The Post-Colonial Studies Reader. Ed. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, Helen Tiffin. London: Routledge, 1995. 77–82. Antunes, Pedro, Judith L. MacBride-King, and Julie Swettenham. Making a Visible Difference: The Contribution of Visible Minorities to Canadian Economic Growth. Briefing. April 2004. Conference Board of Canada. August 4, 2004. http://www .conferenceboard.ca

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Bakker, Peter. “‘The Language of the Coast Tribes is Half Basque’: A Basque-American Pidgin, 1540–1640.” Anthropological Linguistics 31.3–4 (Fall and Winter 1989): 117–47. Bannerji, Himani. The Dark Side of Nation: Essays on Multiculturalism, Nationalism and Gender. Toronto: Canadian Scholars’ Press, 2000. Basque, Maurice. “The Third Acadia: Political Adaptation and Societal Change.” The ‘Conquest’ of Acadia: Imperial, Colonial and Aboriginal Constructions. Ed. John G. Reid et al. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004. 155–77. Bate, Jonathan. “Introduction.” Titus Andronicus. By William Shakespeare. London: The Arden Shakespeare, 1995. 1–121. ———. Shakespeare and Ovid. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. Bauman, Richard. A World of Others’ Words: Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Intertextuality. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2004. Berlin, Ira. “From Creole to African: Atlantic Creoles and the Origins of AfricanAmerican Society in Mainland North America.” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser. 53.2 (April 1996): 251–88. Brand, Dionne. At the Full and Change of the Moon. Toronto: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999. Bristow, Peggy, et al. We’re Rooted Here and They Can’t Pull Us Up: Essays in African Canadian Women’s History. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994. Clark, Andrew Hill. Acadia: The Geography of Early Nova Scotia to 1760. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1968. Clarke, George Elliott. Execution Poems: The Black Acadian Tragedy of “George and Rue.” Wolfville: Gaspereau Press, 2001. ———. Odysseys Home: Mapping African-Canadian Literature. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002. ———. Email interview with Susan Knutson. 12 Jan.–3 May 2002. ———. Québécité: A Jazz Fantasia in Three Cantos. Wolfville: Gaspereau Press, 2003. Curtius, Ernst Robert. European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages. Trans. Willard R. Trask. Bollingen Series xxxvi. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973. Fokkelman, J. P. “Genesis.” The Literary Guide to the Bible. Ed. Robert Alter and Frank Kermode. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987. 36–55. Forbes, Ella. “‘By My Own Right Arm’: Redemptive Violence and the 1851 Christiana, Pennsylvania Resistance.” Journal of Negro History 83.3 (1998): 159–67. Greenberg, Kenneth S.“Introduction.” The Confessions of Nat Turner, and Related Documents. Ed. Kenneth Greenberg. Boston and New York: Bedford Books of St. Martin’s Press, 1996. 1–35. Johnston, A.J.B. “Mathieu Da Costa and Early Canada: Possibilities and Probabilities.” Parks Canada, Halifax. 4 Aug. 2004. http://www.pc.gc.ca/lhn-nhs/ns/ portroyal /natcul/dacosta_e.pdf Jones, Elizabeth. Gentlemen and Jesuits: Quests for Glory and Adventure in the Early Days of New France. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1986.

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Kristeva, Julia. Revolution in Poetic Language. Trans. Margaret Waller. New York: Columbia University Press, 1984. Kymlicka, Will. Finding Our Way: Rethinking Ethnocultural Relations in Canada. Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1998. Lambert, Frank. “‘I Saw the Book Talk’: Slave Readings of the First Great Awakening.” Journal of Negro History 77.4 (1992): 185–98. Loomba, Ania. Shakespeare, Race, and Colonialism. London: Oxford University Press, 2002. Malinowski, Bronislaw. “Introduction.” Cuban Counterpoint: Tobacco and Sugar. 1947. By Fernando Ortiz. 1947. lvii–lxiv. Miola, Robert. Shakespeare and Classical Tragedy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992. Moore-Gilbert, Bart. Postcolonial Theory: Contexts, Practices, Politics. London: Verso, 1997. Neill, Michael. “Post-colonial Shakespeare? Writing away from the Centre.” PostColonial Shakespeares. Ed. Ania Loomba and Martin Orkin. London: Routledge, 1998. 164–85. Ogbar, Jeffery Ogbonna Green.“Prophet Nat and God’s Children of Darkness: Black Religious Nationalism.” Journal of Religious Thought 53.2–54.1 (1997): 51–71. Ortiz, Fernando. Cuban Counterpoint: Tobacco and Sugar. 1947. Trans. Harriet de Onís. Intro. Herminio Portell Vilà. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1995. Ovid (Publius Ovidius Naso). The Metamorphoses. Translated freely into verse by David Slavitt. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994. Paul, Daniel N. We Were Not the Savages: A Mi’kmaq Perspective on the Collision between European and Native America Civilizations. 2nd ed. Black Point, NS: Fernwood Books, 2000. Philip, M. NourbeSe.“The Multicultural Whitewash: Racism in Ontario’s Arts Funding System.” Frontiers: Essays and Writings on Racism and Culture. Stratford, ON: Mercury Press, 1982. 110–33. ———. “Why Multiculturalism Can’t End Racism.” Frontiers: Essays and Writings on Racism and Culture. Stratford, ON: Mercury Press, 1982. 181–86. Reid, John G. “Réflexions actuelles sur l’Acadie du XVIIe siècle.” Port Acadie: Revue interdisciplinaire en études acadiennes / An Interdisciplinary Review in Acadian Studies 5 (2004): 11–24. Reid, John G., Maurice Basque, Elizabeth Mancke, et al. The “Conquest” of Acadia, 1710: Imperial, Colonial, and Aboriginal Constructions. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004. Riffaterre, Michael. Fictional Truth. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990. Ross, Sally and Alphonse Deveau. The Acadians of Nova Scotia: Past and Present. Halifax: Nimbus, 1992. Said, Edward. Representations of the Intellectual: The 1993 Reith Lectures. New York: Random House, 1994.

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Sealy, David. “‘Canadianizing’ Blackness: Resisting the Political.” Rude: Contemporary Black Canadian Cultural Criticism. Ed. Rinaldo Walcott. Toronto: Insomniac Press, 2000. 87–108. Seneca. “Hippolytus.” Seneca in Nine Volumes, Vol. 8. With an English translation by Frank Justus Miller. London: William Heinemann; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968. 508–10. Shadd, Adrienne. “‘The Lord Seemed to Say “Go”’: Women and the Underground Railroad Movement.” Peggy Bristow et al., We’re Rooted Here and They Can’t Pull Us Up: Essays in African Canadian Women’s History. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994. 41–68. Shakespeare, William. Titus Andronicus. Ed. and Intro. Jonathan Bate. London: The Arden Shakespeare, 1995. Sher, Anthony and Gregory Doran. Woza Shakespeare!: Titus Andronicus in South Africa. London: Methuen, 1996. Simon, Sherry. “Hybridity Revisited: St. Michael’s of Mile End.” International Journal of Canadian Studies / Revue internationale d’études canadiennes 27 (2003): 107–20. Walker, James W. St. G., The Black Loyalists: The Search for a Promised Land in Nova Scotia and Sierra Leone 1783–1870. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992. Walter, Roland. “Between Canada and the Carribbean: Transcultural Contact Zones in the Works of Dionne Brand.” Robert Schwartzwald, ed., Transculturalisms/Les transferts culturels. Spec. issue of International Journal of Canadian Studies/Revue internationale d’études canadiennes 27 (Spring 2003): 23–41. Winks, Robin. The Blacks in Canada: A History. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1971.

II cultural appropriation revisited / l’appropriation culturelle reconsidérée

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josé antonio giménez micó

Latin-Americanizing Canada

Culture is never just a matter of ownership, of borrowing and lending with absolute debtors and creditors, but rather of appropriations, common experiences, and interdependencies of all kinds. (Edward Said, Culture 217)

his chapter explores the current Latin-Americanization of Canada: that is, the process of transculturation that occurs through the inclusion of Latin American identities into Canadian culture, and the consequent transformation of the latter. In order to do so, I will examine one of the most conspicuous manifestations of this incorporation: the writings of Latin American exiles who have settled in Canada and contributed to the reshaping of a Canadian identity that is more aware of its own diversity. This active incorporation is far from being easy, since it requires that the exiles overcome both their past trauma and present subaltern condition. I use the phrase “active incorporation” in order to avoid terms such as “integration” and “assimilation,” both of which may imply a higher, if not absolute, level of passivity on the part of the subaltern. Until recently, it was thought that the only path for a newcomer was simply to assimilate the values, languages, and cultures of the adopted country—which would imply that these languages, cultures, and values were there, immovable and immune to social transformations. Canada’s official policy (or should I say rhetoric?) of multiculturalism includes the preservation of the culture of origin within this integration; thus the identity of the “new Canadian” is not selective and

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exclusive, but rather cumulative and inclusive. If we look at this idea of multiculturalism in terms of linguistics, we can see that bi- or multilingualism is what is valued: French and/or English plus the language(s) of the newcomer. In sociolinguistic terms, what is thus produced is the phenomenon of diglossia (Ferguson), in which the language of origin tends to be restricted to orality and the spheres of the private (family) or semi-private (community groups), while writing in languages other than English and French is confined to more or less marginal publications. This article is an example; originally written in Spanish, it had to be translated into English for publication, in order to reach to a wider audience. Diglossia and translation into the hegemonic language are linguistic symptoms of a larger cultural phenomenon: the constantly and necessarily conflictive dialogue between hegemonic and secondary cultures. Even when the mainstream is particularly receptive to minorities, as is the case in Canada, it tends to neutralize any element it sees as “different,” not necessarily by excluding or ignoring it, but often by absorbing, diluting, or giving it a folksy character: that is, “appropriating” it in the common, in this term’s negative sense of “pillaging.” Let us keep in mind, however, that “appropriation,” in hermeneutical terms, is not only positive but necessary: appropriation is the very condition of possibility of culture, any culture (Said, Culture 217). As will become clear in my conclusion, it is this meaning of “appropriation” that is central to this article. Latin American writers, like other exiles and refugees who settle in Canada, undoubtedly go through an extremely painful and difficult process of adaptation and appropriation in their new country, and this theme is manifest in their writings. That is why, instead of considering their writings as the peripheral and more or less nostalgic work of a group of exiles who are incapable of being “fully” incorporated into its adopted country—as is often more or less explicitly thematized in the literature—I look at them as symbols, symptoms, or agents of the transformation of the mainstream. The literary work of Latin American exiles indeed constitutes a means of sharing the experience of trauma with their Canadian readers, thus reshaping and broadening Canadian identity. In this article, I will discuss El exilio y las ruinas (2002) by Chilean Canadian poet and academic Luis Torres, in light of the questions addressed in this book; in addition, I will refer to the novels of Bolivian Canadian Alejandro Saravia, which also relate to the theme of exile. I would like to begin, however, by discussing the notions of translation and transculturation and identifying their uncertain and problematic meanings.

Latin-Americanizing Canada / Giménez Micó

Translation and Transculturation: Preliminary Observations Les migrations de toute espèce propagent civilisations et cultures. J’entends par le premier de ces termes un ensemble de traits caractérisant un mode général de vie, de production, de relations entre les hommes; par le second, les systèmes de compréhension et d’interprétation permettant à un groupe humain de maintenir les contacts entre ses membres, et entre ceux-ci et le monde. Les migrations assurent le rayonnement de toutes ces formes de socialité et tendent à en esquisser des modèles plus larges, virtuellement (mensongèrement) universels. (Paul Zumthor 143)

The sociocultural fabric of Western societies, particularly in urban centres, has become considerably diverse. This is especially evident in Canada, a country that over the last few decades has received a large contingent of immigrants, exiles, and refugees from all latitudes, attracted by its low population density, as well as its multicultural policy and ideology. Everything relating to cultural diversity has taken on a fundamental importance that has obliged analysts and institutions to search for “de nouvelles formes de gestion de la diversité, de la coexistence, de l’hétérogène” (Robin 187), in a society that “est de plus en plus conduite à se penser et à se vivre comme une et comme plurielle à la fois” (Vignaux 26). Cultural relations as they are considered today, that is, based on diversity, heterogeneity, and plurality, certainly cannot be understood from the point of view of a transcendental knower who would consider him- or herself “exempt” from or “above” such interactions. We must challenge a universal pattern or model that, though complex and nuanced, would necessarily continue to be a generalization and would consequently bring about an undesirable process of homogenization of cultural differences. The ideologem of “cultural differences,” like any other ideologem, is double-edged. It can simply communicate the continuous process of cultural hybridization in which “the meaning and symbols of culture have no primordial unity of fixity; … even the same signs can be appropriated, translated, rehistoricized, and read anew” (Bhabha 208). Conversely, this ideologem can just as easily be used to advocate the most harmful cultural relativism, since it assumes a “radical rhetoric of the separation of totalized cultures … safe in the Utopianism of a mythic memory of a unique collective identity” (206)—a rhetoric that is all the more detrimental since it brings about the

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ghettoization of society. The notion of cultural difference is therefore acceptable only if it begets an understanding of identities as singular phenomena because they are dialogic and changing, and not because they carry any kind of “essence” or “authenticity.” To seek “transparence” at any cost, even if it is done with the laudable intention of understanding and entering into dialogue with the other, can lead only to the reduction of the other to our own discursive models, to make “transparent” something that is not; hence the importance of assuming cultural uncertainty or, to use Édouard Glissant’s term, “opacity”: La théorie de la différence est précieuse. Elle a permis de … recevoir, sinon l’existence, du moins la reconnaissance en droit des minorités qui essaiment dans la totalité du monde, et de défendre leur statut … Mais la différence elle-même peut encore ménager une réduction au Transparent. … Non pas seulement consentir au droit à la différence mais, plus avant, au droit à l’opacité, qui n’est pas l’enfermement dans une autarcie impénétrable, mais la subsistance dans une singularité non réductible … Pensée de soi et pensée de l’autre y deviennent caduques dans leur dualité … Le droit à l’opacité n’établirait pas l’autisme, il fonderait réellement la Relation, en libertés. (Poétique 203, 206)

In the glossary of Glissant’s novel La case du commandeur, several Creole words, phrases, and expressions are carefully translated into standard French and presented in alphabetical order; these are what we might call “faithful,” “transparent” translations of the “original.” But there is one non-Creole phrase that inspires the following comment: “Ni tamanan dji konon, etc.: traces d’une des langues du pays africain, probablement déformées, dont il ne vaut pas d’éclairer le sens.” But let us be careful: the fact that it is useless to elucidate the meaning of these words that supposedly belong to an African language, that it may be impossible for the reader to understand them, does not necessarily mean that these “traces” are not significant. Glissant has often reflected on the dichotomy of transparency and opacity in relation to his use of the word comprendre. In fact, he creates what we might call a Heideggerian play on words out of the term: “Il y a dans ce verbe com-prendre le mouvement des mains qui prennent l’entour et le ramènent à soi. Geste d’enfermement sinon d’appropriation. Préférons-lui le geste du donner-avec” (Poétique 206).1 This “donner-avec” is associated with what Glissant calls the “droit à l’opacité,” while com-prendre is nothing but the harmful “réduction au Transparent.” Referring to the West’s imperial adventure, Glissant remarks that “nous retrouvons à son principe l’exigence de cette transparence. Pour pouvoir te ‘comprendre’ et donc t’accepter, il me faut

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ramener ton épaisseur à ce barème idéel qui me fournit motif à comparaisons et peut-être à jugements. Il me faut réduire” (206). Translation, the fundamental instrument that makes comprehension equal to the reduction of alterities, along with concepts such as transculturation, multiculturalism, syncretism or—in the Latin American sociocultural environment—mestizaje, are too often part of a paradigm that, while claiming to account for the cultural heterogeneity of a society, in fact reinforces the unifying will of the dominant group—the one that “naturally” possesses the cultural hegemony and, with it, the legitimizing elements of the status quo: the normative language, knowledge, control of enunciation, etc. This paradigm can be seen as a sort of conciliatory synthesis in which certain elements of the dominated cultures, once stripped of all cohesive power, would find their place (which we might call “folkloric”) within the dominant Western culture—Hispanic in Latin America, wasp (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant) in the United States, French or English in Africa and in the West Indies, etc. Should the practice of translation and the paradigm of transculturation therefore be branded as mere instruments of the reduction of alterities to hegemonic sameness? Such an attitude would not only be irresponsible, but also as plainly absurd and impossible as wanting to eliminate air or breathing because they perpetuate the pollution of our industrial society! It is true that contact between cultures is rarely euphoric, in part because the events that provoke it are often unhappy (wars, invasions, exiles), and in part because of the conflictive reality of any contemporary society, in which hegemonic and marginal forces constantly confront each other. To speak of fusion, synthesis, syncretism, or even transculturation is, in a certain way, equivalent to concealing inequalities. The consequence of this is the perpetuation of the current hegemony, which leads to the misconception that only the dominant culture influences, but is never influenced in return. We cannot, however, deny the existence of these contacts from either side, though they are obviously unequal, conflictive, and telling of the cacophonic nature of any discursive universe. It may be senseless to speak of the success or failure of transculturation, as did Ángel Rama and, years later Alberto Moreiras, respectively (Cheadle). Perhaps we should stop judging transculturation as good or bad, positive or negative, liberating or oppressive, susceptible to optimism or pessimism: perhaps transculturation—like the air, like breathing—simply is, as all culture is. All culture is in a constant process of transculture. That is why it makes little sense to speak of the “end” of transculturation, as the title of Moreiras’s article suggests (except in the extreme case of the extinction of an entire culture).

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Maybe transculturation should not be understood as a “project,” but rather as a cause (or result) of the ever-problematic “cultural exchange” (or cultural struggle) that faces the various groups that make up a society. Or, to use the words of Canadian researcher Roland Walter, transculturation constitutes “a multivalent mode encompassing an uneasy dialogue between hegemonic and counter-hegemonic forces” (27).

“… y las praderas nos recibían llamándonos …” The Reterritorialization Movement in the Writings of the Latin-Canadian Exile … porque no se puede volver, / aunque lo intentes, / ni aquí, ni allá … [… because one cannot go back, / try as you might / neither here, nor there …] (Julio Torres-Recinos 23) It is part of morality not to be at home in one’s home. (Theodor Adorno 39) To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul. (Simone Weil 42)

There is a clear relation between transculture and exile; both phenomena imply going from point A to point B: that is, travel, cultural exchange and struggle, feelings of deterritorialization or longing for reterritorialization, of belonging in many places (the other side of this last sentiment is the feeling of not really belonging anywhere): Ir del punto A al punto B: sencillo ejercicio de distancia y geometría. … Un día, el tiempo, a quien le gusta imaginar toda suerte de distancias, indica que ya es momento de desandar la primera distancia que separa a A de B. Durante todas estas estaciones, el viajero que un día llegó a B desde la lejana A prepara con una suerte de feliz urgencia un par de maletas con fotos y calcetines y algún libro en una extraña lengua para retornar a su añorada A (que en todo este tiempo fue A1, una memoria cultivada con el esmero de un bonsái en manos de un jardinero ciego). … Nada sabe (y mejor no decirle) que no vuelve al punto de partida, que es imposible el retorno a A (que en todo este tiempo fue un A1 intangible, inasible) porque desde hace mucho A dejó de ser A para convertirse en un desconocido C. (Saravia, Habitante 94) [To go from point A to point B: a simple exercise in distance and geometry.

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… One day, Time, who likes to imagine all kinds of distances, indicates that it is time to retrace the steps taken across the first distance that separates A from B. During all these seasons, the traveller, who one day arrived at B from the distant A, with a kind of happy urgency, packs a pair of suitcases with photographs and socks and some book written in a foreign language, to return to his yearned-for A (which all this time was really A1, a memory cultivated with the care of a bonsai in the hands of a blind gardener). … He doesn’t know anything (and it is better not to tell him) that he is not going back to his point of departure, that the return to A is impossible (that all this time A was really an intangible, unreachable A1) because since long ago, A ceased to be A and became an unknown C.]2

If there is one constant in the writings of the exile, it is the theme of the return home; of the real, imagined, and imaginary return to the point of departure; and, mostly, of its impossibility. There is a multiple and ever-problematic tension between here and there, today and yesterday and—why not say it— between life and death. All these elements constitute what Luis Torres calls the “chronotope of exile”: The instability of the space/time dimensions, or what could be called the chronotope of exile, is, in the case of the exile, intrinsically related to problems of personal and collective identity in the context of individual and social disintegration. (“Writings” 183)

Thus, we must not let ourselves be fooled by the illusory dichotomy of conceptual binaries such as here/there, now/before, or even individual/collective. In my opinion, what we must retain from the chronotope of exile is precisely the “instability,” the “disintegration”: the deterritorialization of any kind of personal, social, temporal, or spatial identity. The impossible, inevitable, and vital connection between past and present, here and there, being and nothingness, would be established thanks to (and because of) memory. Memory is what would allow the exile to refugiarse de nuevo en las aguas negras del río que separan el pasado del presente, implacablemente condenado a jugar el rol del barquero entre dos orillas que jamás se tocarían, sin más muertos que transportar que las tantas muertes que le había tocado morir. En 1980, él había muerto dos veces, cien veces, mil veces y desde entonces y quién sabe si desde mucho antes, Alfredo no había dejado de morir incesantemente, infatigablemente … (Saravia, Rojo 73) [once again take refuge in the black waters of the river that separates the past from the present, implacably condemned to play the role of the boatman

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between two shores that would never touch, with no more dead to transport than the many deaths that he had died. In 1980, he had died twice, a hundred times, a thousand times and since then, and who knows if since long before that, Alfredo hadn’t stopped dying, incessantly, tirelessly … ]

This novel by Alejandro Saravia, Rojo, amarillo y verde, recounts the anguish of Bolivian Canadian author and resident of Montreal Alfredo Cutipa: his struggle with and against the trauma caused by the Bolivian coup d’état of 1980, for which he was drafted as a soldier. “Así, / para matarme me dejaron vivo” [Thus, / to kill me they let me live] (Torres, El exilio 75). Memory equals trauma; trauma equals memory. The wound in memory is the trauma, i.e., that which unceasingly, tirelessly causes the exile to die; and yet, the exile continues to live, thanks to the traumatic memory. The exile is, by definition, a painful memory, a fractured being. Like any person, the exile is due to his or her memory, but this memory is pure trauma: an open wound that seemingly cannot heal; a wound in the memory that the exile cannot relinquish, since doing so would also mean renouncing his or her memory, that is, his or her very being. That is why it might be possible to generalize what Luis Torres points out in reference to the main character in Cobro revertido (Urbina) and assert that the exile, any exile, is a “subject unable (and unwilling, it seems) to escape the past that haunts its present” (“Writings” 190). Saravia’s “return,” cited above, explicitly illustrates the impossibility of the return “to A”; that is, the inanity of eliminating “difference,” as described by Luis Torres: “being other, the process of decentring, the tension between temporalities and spaces, the breaking of the ‘natural’ relation to signs” (“Writings” 190). One of the poems from Torres’s El exilio y las ruinas reminds us in its very title,“No hay olvido” [There is no Forgetting] (32), that memory and therefore trauma, like the crime against humanity that provoked it, do not have a statute of limitations. But El exilio y las ruinas goes beyond simply asserting the impossibility—and ethical irrelevance—of “overcoming” the trauma. In fact, it supposes a renewal of the trauma in which the “difference,” the “otherness,” is revealed to be more absolute; in which any hope of returning to “A” is dispelled: “nosotros exiliados también en el retorno” [we {are} exiled also when we return], Torres writes in the poem “Otredad” [Otherness] (26). This, in fact, seems to be the central theme of the book: the testimony of a failed attempt at returning and the philosophical reflections provoked by the confirmation of this failure: La vuelta es un modo de rehacer la extrañeza que separa al ser de sí mismo. Encontrar al otro en los signos del mundo es ponerse frente a las imágenes

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de la separación. Ante ese gesto congelado, sabemos que las huellas que dejamos, que la mirada y nuestro paso, el pasar inmerso en ese tiempo, ya nada de lo nuestro calza allí. (28) [Returning is a way of reconstructing the foreignness that separates the being from itself. To find the other in the signs of the world is to face the images of separation. Before this frozen gesture, we know that the traces we leave—the gaze and our step, the passing immersed in that time—nothing of ours fits there anymore.]

Why does the return appear to be impossible? Why do the feelings of foreignness, of difference, of “being other” persist? In my opinion, it is mostly because “El [anhelado] encuentro” [The {longed-for} Encounter] (the book’s opening poem), almost immediately gives way to a series of “Desencuentros”3 (the title of a subsequent poem). In order for the return to have been truly effective, for the “other being,” exiled from itself, to have been able to “deexile,” to have been capable of recovering his or her pre-trauma self, the exile would have had to be recognized by the community. But what happens is just the opposite: “Y nunca nadie los reconoció” [And no one ever recognized them] (9). Nadie clamaba por nosotros en esos sitios, nadie nos esperó con su brazo en alto, para decir, has vuelto, hermano, hermana mía, ven, abrázame y llora (24–25). [Nobody cried out for us in those places, nobody waited for us with arms raised, to say, you’ve returned, my brother, my sister, come, embrace me and cry.]

This impossible brotherhood confirms that the possibility of reconstituting the community is ruled out forever. In “those places,” the exile does not even find people with whom to talk, to communicate, and so the longed-for community fades away: Y aquellos que volvían, nos dijimos, –porque ya nadie nos hablaba en esa tierra– eran las sombras que salían de nosotros … (17–19)

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[And those who were returning, we told each other, –because no one spoke to us anymore in this land– were the shadows emerging from us … ]

There is a clear link between this shortened communication and the feeling that the word has become impotent, that “el que retorna vuelve a la lectura de un texto trastocado, / palabras que ya no corresponden al objeto” [he who returns goes back to reading a transformed text, / words that no longer correspond to the object] (55). Maybe that is why several poems from Exilio y las ruinas include, in the style of an exergue, quotes from the dictionary that correspond to different meanings of the verb volver ‘to return.’ The poem “La vuelta imaginada” (60–62) opens with a citation from the Diccionario Real de la Academia Española: “Volver: / ‘aunar los hilos de una historia interrumpida’ (DRAE)”; [To return: / ‘to join the threads of an interrupted history’]. Similarly, in “Por ustedes también volvían” (63–65): “Volver: / ‘poner nuevamente a una persona o cosa en el estado que antes tenía’ (DRAE)”; [To return: / ‘to put a person or thing back in the state it was in before’]. And again in “El inconsciente” (66–69): “Volver: / ‘restituirse a su sentido o acuerdo el que lo ha perdido por un accidente o letargo’ (DRAE)”; [To return: / ‘to come back to one’s senses or understanding after having lost it by accident or lethargy’]. Is this an attempt to restore the broken link between the sign and the referent, between the word and reality? Of course. But above all, set against abstract definitions that do not fit with the exile’s reality, it is a rebellion against the very notion of “returning”: Volver, para negar lo nuevo que sostienes y saber que la historia que pensabas ya no te pertenece. . . . . . . . . . Volver al origen no es más que el retorno a una simulación del lugar: lo que suponíamos la verdad en cuanto a lo que fuimos. Y la verdad es la novedad y no lo viejo que dejamos. Había que olvidar los hilos de la historia interrumpida y aunar los hilos en la tierra del asilo. Ésta era la verdad, era el encuentro y no el abandono, era abrazarnos a quien también nos abrazaba (60–62; my emphasis)

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[To return, to deny everything that is new to you and to know that the history that you thought up no longer belongs to you. . . . . . . . . . . . . Returning to the origin is no more than the return to a simulation of the place: what we thought was true about what we were. And the truth is what is new, and not the old life we left behind. We had to forget the threads of the interrupted history and join the threads in the land of asylum. This was the truth, it was encounter and not abandonment, it was embracing those who embraced us in return.] (my emphasis)

According to my reading, this poem implies an upset: a “(re)turn” of the screw in the book’s theme, but also a change of perspective. Without renouncing the South of his memories, and with it the desencuentros, the trauma, and the suffering, the poet has found the North of his present and future; or, in any case, he has decided to look for it. If the rest of the book favours the meticulous exploration of deterritorialization, what emerges in “La vuelta imaginada” is reterritorialization, or the act of resisting appropriation in the land of asylum. My reading of Luis Torres’s poem compels me to disagree profoundly with a statement from an article on the writing of the exile by … Luis Torres. According to him, in the writing of the exile, the past and the signs of the other space (the one left behind) tend to come to the surface in order to unsettle the relationship of the subject with itself and the world … Thus, on the surface, the writing of the exile might give a sense of progression from trauma and suffering to healing and integration, but this movement toward is nothing but an illusion. (“Writings” 187; my emphasis)

I, on the other hand, believe that his poem does suggest a genuine, and not merely superficial, step toward integration. It is true that there is no movement “toward”; that is, an illusory progression in which the exile abandons “A” and is integrated into “B.” No, much as we may want,“lo viejo que dejamos” [the old {life, things} we left behind] never really leaves us: the memory, and with it the trauma and the suffering, persist and will always persist. Moreover, if the exiled writer successfully integrates into the land of asylum, makes it his or her own, it is precisely because he or she has not forgotten the trauma.

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The novelty lies in the fact that the writer has not only not forgotten the trauma, but is able to transmit or communicate it. I believe it is no coincidence that the poem ends with these words: “allí donde escribíamos / la vuelta / imaginada” [there where we used to write the imagined return]. Noteworthy is the use of the verb “to write” and the pronoun “we.” The exile is no longer just a reader absorbed in his or her past. The simple fact of exposing the trauma to others is indicative of the absolute necessity to “abrazarnos a quien nos abraza,” to actively build a collectivity between the writer and the community of readers. This is precisely the contribution (or, in any case, the most obvious one) of Latin-Canadian identities to the mainstream: through this laborious construction of a community, the writings of the Latin-Canadian exile take part in the constant reinvention of this imagined community that is Canada. Let us return, for a moment, to the protagonist of Rojo, amarillo y verde, the exiled Bolivian author Alfredo Cutipa: En 1980, él había muerto dos veces, cien veces, mil veces y desde entonces y quién sabe si desde mucho antes, Alfredo no había dejado de morir incesantemente, infatigablemente, y pese a ello cada mañana se tenía de pie frente a sus papelotes, vigorizado, lleno de palabras. (Saravia, Rojo 73; my emphasis) [In 1980, he had died twice, a hundred times, a thousand times and since then, and who knows if since long before that, Alfredo hadn’t stopped dying, incessantly, tirelessly, and in spite of this, every morning he would stand in front of his scribblings, revitalized, filled with words.] (My emphasis)

Though no one but Alfredo may ever read his papelotes, their words are like the cliché of the message in a bottle: the fact of writing them, their potential for communication, to become common and therefore social, is undeniable. Through the possibility, however slight, to build an audience and thus to be part of a group, the exiled writer is revitalized. The writer—with difficulty, gropingly, blindly—reconstructs his or her injured identity thanks to this power to transmit to others his or her pain. Luis Torres eloquently expresses this idea in his article: Trauma is the reason why the writing of the exile is in many ways a form of therapeutic writing, a release of the self in the projections of the text, which leads to anagnorisis, an instance when the reader recognizes in representation his or her own experience of the world. It is in this recognition that the pathos of exile crosses the personal boundaries of subjectivity to become a work of the imagination to be shared with the others. (“Writings” 183)

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Any writing of the exile presents the reader with the painful world of the exiled person: the constant “return to A,” to use a symbol that is simple, abstract, straightforward, and therefore so efficient in its universality in Saravia’s poem. In this sense, the anagnorisis that Luis Torres talks about has a therapeutic value, perhaps because, in this transferral of experience to the reader, the exiled writer achieves a certain distance: it is no longer simply a question of the “cognition” of the trauma, but of its “re-cognition.” As painful as the exercise of recalling may be, it is no longer only about suffering the trauma, but also talking about, and referring to that suffering. To use linguistic terms, in the act of “writing about,” the exiled writer no longer simply uses the trauma (or the trauma no longer uses him or her); instead, the trauma is as though bracketed between quotation marks: the distancing effect of writing enables the writer to think of the trauma, at least partially, as an object, as something that is somehow outside his or her being. I stress that the exercise of remembering is, without a doubt, extremely painful. But the distance allowed by the process of writing about the trauma, the mere opportunity to communicate, to pass on, even slightly, this agonizing memory to others who may or may not have suffered similar circumstances, constitutes—like the message in a bottle—the exile’s fragile last resort. Incidentally, the exile’s writing also enriches his or her readers with an inkling of the agonizing memory. As a reader, I can testify to the fact that Torres’s book and, by extension, the literature of the exile in general, has fulfilled the therapeutic and, I would add, social (therapeutic because it is social) function that Torres associates with it: that of going beyond the personal boundaries of subjectivity and, thus, of sharing with people like myself experiences that I have made my own, even though they will obviously continue to be foreign to me. To use Edward Said’s musical metaphor, reading El exilio y las ruinas has thus helped me to achieve a more “contrapuntal” view of the world—and, primarily, of Canada: Seeing “the entire world as a foreign land” makes possible originality of vision. Most people are principally aware of one culture, one setting, one home; exiles are aware of at least two, and this plurality of vision gives rise to an awareness of simultaneous dimensions, an awareness that—to borrow a phrase from music—is contrapuntal. (Said, Reflections 186)

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Conclusion Alfredo caminaba rumbo al mercado de vegetales de Jean Talón donde, de una manera callada, los inmigrantes llegados de todas las lenguas y latitudes se daban el trabajo de integrar poco a poco a los nativos canadienses al espontáneo cosmopolitismo montrealense. (Alejandro Saravia, Rojo, amarillo y verde 129)

In this chapter, by interpreting Luis Torres’s El exilio y las ruinas, I, being neither writer, nor exile, nor Latin American, have “appropriated” it, in the good, hermeneutical, sense of the word. I have attempted to convey how reading this work has helped me understand—and reshape—my own experience of the world as proposed by Torres. This process of reading has allowed me to make this world my own and, thus, has given me a sense of belonging to the Latin Canadian community that I consider not only Luis’s and Alejandro’s, but also mine. And, perhaps, yours.4 By way of an epilogue—an opening rather than a closing—I recall Luis Torres’s moving poetry recital on the occasion of the 40th conference of the Canadian Association of Hispanists (Winnipeg, May 29–June 1, 2004). Torres, a professor at the University of Calgary, disclosed to his colleagues and to the rest of the audience that his second book of poetry, already well on its way, and would certainly be much more optimistic than his first. This new book is written entirely in English. Why? Not for commercial reasons, and certainly not out of snobbery, but simply out of necessity. And it is very important to note that the new book is not in translation; the poems emerge in this language that Luis has made entirely his own—or, if you prefer, the language has made Luis entirely its own. This new movement from “A to B”—to use Alejandro Saravia’s very simple and effective symbol—should not be seen as a total abandonment, and even less as a repudiation of Hispanic culture. Instead, it should be seen simply as a symptom of consolidation: Luis Torres and other Latin Canadians are appropriating and broadening the Canadian sociocultural environment; they are actively incorporating themselves into the mainstream, just as the Chicanos and other Latinos have already done in the United States. This active incorporation, even though it is—let us not forget—traumatic, difficult, and unequal, is undoubtedly good news for the transculturating evolution of the Canadian mainstream.

Notes The author recognizes the generous support of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (sshrc). In addition, he thanks Kate Alvo for translating this text.

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1 Translator’s note: The French word comprendre, meaning to understand, or to comprehend, is divided here into two parts: com-prendre. Glissant’s play on words emphasizes the second part of the word—prendre—which means to take, hence his description of the hands taking the surroundings and bringing them toward the self. 2 I have chosen to use the most literal translation possible for the quotes from the writings of the Latin Canadian exile. This translation is in no way intended to be “transparent”: recall that this article adheres to the principle of opacity (Glissant) discussed in the previous section, that appears to be inextricably connected to “cultural difference” which, according to Homi Bhabha, renders impossible the perfect “translation” (that is, “comprehension,” in the Glissantine sense of the word comprendre) of alterities; an untranslatability that, paradoxically, favours intercultural dialogue: “Cultural difference marks the establishment of new forms of meaning, and strategies of identification, through processes of negotiation where no discursive authority can be established without revealing the difference of itself … Cultural difference emerges from the borderline moment of translation that Benjamin describes as the “foreignness of languages” … The ‘foreignness’ of language is the nucleus of the untranslatable that goes beyond the transparency of subject matter” (Bhabha 313–14). 3 Translator’s note: There is no direct translation for the word desencuentro in English. It means the opposite of “encounter.” For simplicity, I will use the Spanish word throughout this article. 4 “ … when the reader recognizes in representation his or her own experience of the world. It is in this recognition that the pathos of exile crosses the personal boundaries of subjectivity to become a work of the imagination to be shared with the others”; “we see the importance of exploring exile as a site of struggle for new forms of creativity, belonging and identity in the context of cultural and territorial displacement” (Torres, “Writings” 186 and 196 respectively). For the hermeneutical concept of appropriation, see Ricœur.

Works Cited Adorno, Theodor. Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life. London: New Left Books, 1974. Bhabha, Homi. “Cultural Diversity and Cultural Differences.” The Post-Colonial Studies Reader. Ed. B. Ashcroft, G. Griffiths, and H. Tiffin. London/New York: Routledge, 1995. 206–9. Cheadle, Norman. “Contrapunteo de don Latino y doña Canadiense: transculturación narrativa en Cobro revertido (1992) de José Leandro Urbina y Exile (2002) de Ann Ireland.” Congreso abierto. Publicación en la Red de las actas del 40 Congreso de la ACH, 2004, http://artsandscience.concordia.ca/cmll/spanish/ ach/Congreso_abierto/2004/Norman_Cheadle.htm Ferguson, Charles A. “Diglossia.” Word 15 (1959): 325–40. Glissant, Édouard. La Case du commandeur. Paris: Seuil, 1981. ———. Poétique de la Relation. Paris: Gallimard, 1990. Moreiras, Alberto. “José María Arguedas y el fin de la transculturación.” Ángel Rama y los estudios latinoamericanos. Ed. Mabel Moraña. Pittsburgh: Instituto Internacional de Literatura Iberoamericana, 1997. 213–31.

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Rama, Ángel. Transculturación narrativa en América Latina. México: Siglo xxi, 1982. Ricœur, Paul. “Appropriation.” A Ricœur Reader: Reflection and Imagination. Ed. M.J. Valdés. New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991. 182–93. Robin, Régine. “Citoyenneté culturaliste, citoyenneté civique.” Mots Représentations. Ed. K. Fall, D. Simeoni, and G. Vignaux. Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 1994. 179–200. Said, Edward. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993. ———. Reflections on Exile and Other Essays. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001. Saravia, Alejandro. Habitante del décimo territorio. Montreal/Toronto: Artifact, 2000. ———. Rojo, amarillo y verde. Toronto/Montreal: Artifact/La Enana Blanca, 2003. Torres, Luis. El exilio y las ruinas. Santiago/Buenos Aires: Ril, 2002. ———. “Writings of the Latin-Canadian Exile.” Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispánicos 26.1–2 (2001–02): 179–97. Torres-Recinos, Julio. Una tierra extraña. Preface by Jorge Etcheverry. Ottawa: Split Quotation, 2004. Urbina, José Leandro. Cobro revertido. Santiago: Planeta, 1992 Vignaux, Georges.“Problématiques et analyses interculturelles.” Mots Représentations. Ed. K. Fall, D. Simeoni, and G. Vignaux. Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 1994. 3–29. Walter, Roland. “Between Canada and the Caribbean: Transcultural Contact Zones in the Works of Dionne Brand.” Transculturalisms/Les transferts culturels. Ed. R. Schwartzwald. Special issue of International Journal of Canadian Studies/Revue internationale d’études canadiennes 27 (2003): 23–41. Weil, Simon. The Need for Roots: Prelude to a Declaration of Duties towards Mankind. New York: Harper Colophon Books, 1971. Zumthor, Paul. Babel ou l’inachèvement. Paris: Seuil, 1997.

shelley kulperger

Transculturation and Cultural Exchange in Jane Urquhart’s Away and Eden Robinson’s Monkey Beach

t is tempting to read Haisla author Eden Robinson’s first novel, the haunting and darkly comic Monkey Beach (2000), as talking back to the widely read Away (1993), by established white author Jane Urquhart. In many respects, Monkey Beach, set on present-day Princess Royal Island and offering the perspective of the colonized, challenges Away’s primary focus on white settlers of the remote past of Upper Canada. However, while I acknowledge the counter-discursive potential of Robinson’s text, I would also emphasize how each text, and in different ways, constructs its own intercultural dialogue. Robinson is a writer in her own right, not merely one who fulfills the categorical imperatives of “First Nations,” “postcolonial” writers.1 On the other hand, Urquhart’s version of the colonial contact narrative from the perspective of white femininity deserves to be taken seriously. Spanning a decade marked by crises in the politics of representation, these texts are salient examples of Canadian literary culture’s engagement with the issue of cross-cultural representation; both imagine productive dialogues between First Nations and white cultures. Besides intercultural dialogue, the theme of female intergenerational haunting, threaded throughout both novels, serves as an imaginative vehicle for an ethical form of contact and exchange between white and First Nations cultures since colonization. Against a perceived “insurmountability of cultural differences,” both texts affirm a complex form of dialogue between what have been viewed as incommensurate and irreconcilable speaking positions (Balibar and Wallerstein 21).

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Before comparing the intercultural dialogue enacted within and between these texts, I want to pursue a seemingly random but telling image that occurs both in Monkey Beach and in Urquhart’s earlier novel, The Whirlpool (1986) to suggest the ways in which Robinson works against the Urquhart canon. In Monkey Beach, the central protagonist Lisa (Lisamarie) is on a mission to find her brother Jimmy who is missing at sea and feared dead. This quest, and the mystery surrounding the disappearance of Jimmy, is central to the text as a whole. During her coastal journey to find her brother, Lisa keeps “catching snatches of green plaid through the trees” (370). This striking image echoes a similar one in The Whirlpool, when Patrick, the poet-bureaucrat seeking his object of obsession, spots “a portion of her blue dress, barely visible through the trees” and a “piece of fabric of a tartan-like nature” (38). Within Urquhart’s narrative of gendered belongings and cultural geography, this fragment is a symbol of a rare female specimen in the forest. What are we to make of these glimpses of Celtic culture in the most quintessential of Canadian spaces, the forest? As a metonymic symbol of Scottish clans, fragments of Celtic culture, and of the archetypal Canadian lumberjack, this seemingly insignificant and serendipitous detail yields some productive points of comparison. The “snatches” of tartan in the trees—as remnants of the colonizing culture— clearly signify vastly different things to each author and to their respective narratives. Such a loaded symbol can be seen as evidence that Robinson pointedly speaks back to Urquhart, specifically, and to the dominant white Canadian culture, more generally. She does so through details of the material vestiges and detritus of colonial Canadian culture within First Nations culture, and the traffic of material culture between these two realms. What appears to be an innocuous detail becomes something dangerous in Robinson’s text: the fragment of tartan belongs to a menacing and leprechaun-like monster-figure who frequently appears to Lisa as a portent of doom. Robinson’s fabric performs quite a different metonymic function from that of Urquhart. It manifests in an unwanted relationship between a spirited female protagonist and a malevolent visitant. This relationship departs from the Urquhartian motif of haunting as it occurs in Away, with its similar narrative of female intergenerational haunting and depiction of a haunted female protagonist. Whereas Lisa’s visitant is a parasitic being that “wraps” its “pale body” around her to feed (Monkey Beach 371), Away’s central protagonist, Mary, is visited on the shores of an Irish island by a Romantic form of the ghost as a “demon-lover”/“revenant” who is lovingly remembered with typically Urquhartian obsessive overtones

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reminiscent of Wuthering Heights.2 Described by its “pale” body and “shock of bright red hair” (27), Robinson’s clearly racialized and parasitic supernatural figure suggests that her tale of postcolonial haunting pointedly updates the largely abstract and Romantic visions of metaphysical haunting imagined in Urquhart’s oeuvre. For Robinson’s Haisla heroine, to be haunted by a relic of Irish culture is not something to be cherished, as it undeniably is in Urquhart’s text. If these texts differ in their appreciations of the presence of long-standing Irish culture and heritage in Canada, I want nonetheless to underscore the dialogic and shared aspects in Robinson’s Monkey Beach and Urquhart’s Away. Despite the disparities in references, images, and motifs, for both writers the Gothic and the supernatural operate as a sign of faith in the possibility of communication between mediums, across times and worlds, between the living and the dead, and, ultimately, between cultures; they subsequently share a belief in the necessity of a meaningful form of communication between colonizers and the colonized. A close reading of the two texts will show how they effectively speak to each other, even if Robinson’s text reflects a largely responsive and necessarily corrective antidote to the more Romantic elements in Away. Both texts, coming from different authorial locations and contexts in Canadian literature, open up for discussion the difficulties, limitations, and ethical necessity of communication between white and First Nations identities in Canada. Urquhart’s germinal narrative demands a consideration of white Anglo-Canadian belongings and inheritance within a “settler” nation, and as such can be read as a kind of self-aware “beneficiary narrative” along the lines of autobiographical texts such as Victoria Freeman’s Distant Relations: How My Ancestors Colonized North America. Monkey Beach, in its frequent address to a non-Haisla readership, demands that, in order for transcultural communication to be productive and even transformative, the conversation must include an understanding of the material effects of damaging “exchanges” since colonization. Appealing to the urge to listen, respond, and even feel, these novels generate understanding of and responsibility for the ongoing processes of colonization. Valorization of exchange and translation of culture by no means ignores violent acts of assimilation, appropriation, genocide, abjection or erasure. Rather, it entails a careful contextualizing of particular acts of exchange in order to provide tentative models for building bridges, respecting difference, and cultivating understanding: both of these texts unambiguously demand that justice be done, and responsibility be assumed, for buried national traumas.

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Away from home In the case of Jane Urquhart’s Away, acts of assimilation, dispossession, erasure, and forgetting can be distinguished from those of a collaborative exchange and remembrance of histories. The text effectively encourages an understanding of those differences and, more importantly, impels an engagement that makes it difficult to altogether distance the self from a colonial past. At the centre of the text, and crucial to this activity of engagement and exchange, is a narrative of contact between an Ojibwa man, Exodus Crow, and the Irish-Catholic Mary, a white settler woman “gone native.” This central relationship has been seen as an example of a monstrously unethical and “compromised” textualization, a reading that is persuasively argued by Cynthia Sugars.3 Admittedly, this contact narrative is problematic for its occasionally hackneyed representation of Exodus Crow. Despite this tendency, Away also offers opportunities to reflect on issues such as remembrance, crosscultural translation, and belonging. In an attempt to theorize the possibility of reconciliation and representation without appropriation, I want to read Urquhart’s imagining of cultural exchange as built upon a Lévinasian “ethics of alterity.” As the novel opens, the present-day narrator Esther O’Malley Robertson, looking out her window on the shores of a lake ravaged by industry, is engaged in the work of remembrance. She tracks her family’s history within the particular location of Southern Ontario, their role in the industrial development that she sees before her, and reflects on their place within the larger context of a post-colonial nation. Within her family’s story, Esther is in a line of women who “leaned towards extremes” (3): they are haunted, restless, nostalgic, passionate and compassionate women. This line of extreme women begins on Rathlin Island in Ireland with Mary. After local villagers find her asleep on the beach in the arms of a dying, shipwrecked man, Mary is considered to be “away,” marked as such by the unknown man’s last word,“Moira.” Surviving the transatlantic journey and their quarantine on Grosse Île, Mary, her husband Brian, and infant son Liam settle in a bequeathed plot of land in Upper Canada. After giving birth to her second child, Eileen, Mary mysteriously abandons her home and children to live her days in the backwoods with an Ojibwa community, on the shores of Moira Lake. The next female in this line of extreme women is Mary’s daughter, Eileen, who follows Mary’s transgressive path by leaving the family home to join a band of Irish-Canadian radicals with her lover, the traitorous rebel leader Aidan Lanighan. By contrast with his sister, Liam sets out to make his fortune in the New World after selling his land back to his parents’ Irish landlord. Through an inter-

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woven narrative of a family’s genealogy and migration from Ireland to Upper Canada, the novel traces the ancestry, legacy and indebtedness of white Canadians and contests the Canadian narrative of innocent settlement. It is significant that this history emerges from the perspective of these women who are ambivalent and resistant to their place both in the New World and in the domestic. “What happens when the ideal woman leaves her role as tender of the hearth [ … ] and becomes the wandering womb come unhooked?” asks Elisabeth Bronfen (138), in attempting to determine the significance of bourgeois hysteria. Bronfen’s question is pertinent to Urquhart’s novel. What happens when the ideal white settler woman becomes unhooked and “goes native”? What does it mean when she abandons her duty as moral monitress, Angel in the Bush, upholder of the white race and civilizer of the New World, and betrays the “imperial panacea” (Perry 139)? Colonization demanded that she set up home, a task no less important than setting up the public, administrative institutions of colonialism and which played a complementary, albeit insidious, role in the subjugation and dispossession of Native peoples and spaces. In 19th-century Canada, the despotic force of white angels in the home was also felt in the bush: any student of Canadian literature will allow that Susanna Moodie’s settler narratives are a testament to the resources and power (however effaced and contingent) available to the settler woman in establishing the Canadian state. The wandering, un-homed white woman in the space of settlement therefore suggests a mode of being that disrupts the performance of innocent, vulnerable, and morally superior white womanhood that was so central to the shaping of Canadian identity, and to the ideological tenets of colonial settlement. Most pointedly, Urquhart dramatically inverts the colonial captivity narrative that imagined Native men’s savage and unsettling ability to captivate susceptible white women: in Away, captivity is linked instead to the confining roles and spaces of the domestic sphere. It is within the long-held captivity narrative of white female endangerment that the son, Liam, frames his mother’s despised “savagery.” Replaying Mary’s departure, he constructs a scene of endangered and passive white femininity that confirms the prevalence of discourses that insist on white women’s exclusive safety and belonging in the home, and their corresponding danger outside it:4 Occasionally, in his mind, he made his mother fall awkwardly to the ground and push herself slowly to her feet, twisting her neck and looking back to the place where she had left her children. She was staggering along the dark ribbon of water that threaded itself through forests and swamps. (186)

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Clearly, Liam’s fantasy is meant to punish the departing mother-figure. Despite his desire to see his mother’s abandonment of home as unwilling, Mary’s departure is certain and clear; without hesitation or looking back she rejects the erasure and absorption of maternal identity in the domestic, along with her role in colonialism. In “going native,” Mary abandons a socially sanctified role and takes up the outlawed identity and responsibilities of another. Her “going native” therefore operates as a feminist and anti-imperialist resistance to the cult of white female domesticity; and it substantially destabilizes the two fundamental axes—the public/private and the wild/domestic—upon which the New World narrative was constructed.

Exchanging histories Crucially, it is only beyond the confines of her proper place within the domestic sphere that Mary can be brought “face to face with the Other,” a contact that requires her to bear witness to the genocide of indigenous peoples in Canada, as well as to testify to Irish suffering under British rule. Mary draws connections between the history, suffering, and belief systems of her own people, on one hand, and those of Exodus Crow, on the other. Cynthia Sugars sees this exchange of histories as most disconcerting; for her, it is an act of appropriation that mixes contexts “in such a way that Native oppression within Canada becomes obliterated” (“Settler” 111). Yet, such a bridging of Irish and Native histories of oppression can also provide a heightened awareness of Native oppression and generate empathy rather than a competition for victim status. In examining the complexities of remembrance, nostalgia, shared and disparate histories, Urquhart exposes instances of oppression against Natives—as well as their resistance and survival—that surface into settler (and post-settler) consciousness only through the fluid and generous exchange of histories. Another Canadian example of such sharing is the collaboration of Métis writer/activist Maria Campbell with White actor/playwright Linda Griffiths on the making of The Book of Jessica, despite their enormous difficulties and well-publicized fallout.5 Campbell urges Griffiths to mine her own past (and her people’s past) for their histories of oppression: While you were being overwhelmed with my history and my oppression, you were making me feel like it was exclusively mine. I couldn’t understand why you didn’t know your own history, never mind the magic and power stuff. My great-grandfather was a Scot, hundreds of thousand of his people starved in Scotland, Ireland and Wales, not even six hundred years ago. Their land had been taken away, given to the sheep. They starved to death, and when

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they left they died in masses on the ships coming over, many of them had been burned as witches, tortured. I couldn’t understand why you didn’t know that [ … ] the history of your pain and all the things that happened to your people was exactly the same as our history. I couldn’t understand why you refused to look at that. It seemed that that would be a meeting place for us. (35)

Campbell here challenges Griffiths’s abstract construction of the Métis as an exotically spiritual yet dying race that legitimizes her acts of voyeurism and helpless white guilt. More significantly, in refusing to look at her own history—and identify with it on some level—Griffiths continues blatantly to appropriate and encroach upon the Métis, since she sees herself as a victim of what she calls a “paler” genocide (94): hers is a people without culture and stories of their own. In effect, Campbell urges her to consider the practice of power and its historical effects. She sees this as a way to meet, to come to feel an empathy grounded in an understanding of the reformation of imperialism across times and places. More importantly, such acts of communication and openness enable—and insist upon—a united recognition and response to present-day dominant racial and gender ideologies. The Book of Jessica provides a potent intertext to Away; Campbell’s thinking mirrors Urquhart’s. Both encourage an understanding of these “meetings” with the cultural Other as bound to listening and sharing of common and divergent pasts and presents. Both underscore the possibility of a productive and ethical encounter. Listening, belief, and respect mark the dialogic nature of the exchange between Exodus and Mary, allowing them to develop an understanding and empathy based on those shared experiences. In Totality and Infinity, Lévinas proposes an “ethics of alterity” built around a face-toface meeting with the Other, a kind of contact that does not subsume the Other as the Same or reduce its alterity. For Lévinas, ethical contact constitutes a form of justice (62). Such an “ethics of alterity,” Tina Chanter suggests, presupposes “the face-to-face relation, as ethical relation, the I experiences an infinite obligation to the [O]ther” (183). For Campbell, as for Urquhart, it is through “face-to-face meeting” and cross-cultural and historical dialogue that justice can develop. This Lévinasian ethics guides the various contact and conciliation narratives in Away. Just as Mary cryptically declares that she would and would not be Brian’s wife (57), Exodus warns “[t]here is a fierce love in all of us for that which we cannot fully own” (183). Both enunciations loosen the concept of love from acts of possession and domination, which characterize Liam’s relationship to his Ojibwa-Irish wife, Molly. By contrast, Exodus and Mary avoid

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patriarchal marriage, romantic idealization, commodification, or subsumption of the Other. There is no conflation of the beloved with the commodity, no merger that subsumes, dominates, and romanticizes the Other.

Forms of remembrance Both in Urquhart’s Away and Robinson’s Monkey Beach, the female modes of cultural memory are privileged. Through a productive form of nostalgia, Away’s female protagonists are able to identify with other times and places, and so the theme of “haunting,” signalled metonymically by the name “Moira,” comes powerfully into play. Monkey Beach, too, is concerned with cultural memory and its transmission across space and time. Robinson works the vein of shape-shifters and prophetic insight, capacities that in her culture are an exclusively female inheritance. In both novels, openness to alterity potentiates the work of memory as a form of ethical cultural exchange. In Away, two contrasting forms of nostalgia are fictionally developed. To delineate them, Svetlana Boym’s differentiation between “restorative” and “reflective” nostalgia will be helpful. The former, argues Boym, “protects the absolute truth,” while the latter “calls it into doubt” (xviii). Restorative nostalgia is “at the core of recent national and religious revivals; it knows two main plots—the return to origins and the conspiracy” (xviii). Reflective nostalgia, on the other hand, “does not follow a single plot but explores ways of inhabiting many places at once and imagining different time zones”; it loves “details not symbols” and “can present an ethical and creative challenge, not merely a pretext for midnight melancholias” (xviii; my emphasis). Undeniably, Urquhart is alert to the conservative force of melancholic nostalgia, as is revealed by her representation in Away of the Anglo-Irish gentry’s elegy for every dying object (including the Irish peasants) on the island. The portion of the narrative devoted to Brian, Liam and Mary’s life in Ireland before migration explores in detail the technologies of remembrance and preservation practised by their landlords, Osbert and Granville. While their tenants are dying in the thousands, Osbert and Granville occupy themselves with collecting biological specimens for classification and writing laments for posterity. These practices are clearly performative of their status as landed gentry and participants in the construction of what Thomas Richards calls the “imperial archive.” As Michael Bravo notes, “[c]uriosity was a gentlemanly virtue to be displayed in the natural history cabinets of collectors and in the salons of Royal Society gentlemen” (164). More importantly, the landlords’ inability to empathize with their starving Irish tenants squares with such “gentlemanly” displays and nostalgic practices. They engage in a distancing aesthet-

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ics of fixing—behind glass, in diaries, and in sketchbooks—every living thing around them, from anemones and puffins to Irish folk songs and Irish folk. Clearly, these nostalgic forms of memorialization work towards fixity and render lifeless the object of lament. For James E. Young, such concrete acts of memorialization “divest” the subject of “the obligation to remember” (5). Moreover, they function precisely as a form of “imperialist nostalgia,” which Renato Rosaldo so usefully defines as the dynamic whereby we destroy an object (nature, the “primitive,” traditional culture) only to nostalgically mourn its loss and to eliminate our own role in “the original destructive impulse” (qtd. in Kaplan 34). Alongside this masculinist, conservative, and imperialist nostalgia, the female protagonists engage in Boym’s “reflective” nostalgia, which bridges cultural difference. While Esther, Eileen, and Mary indeed remember the trauma of colonial experience, it is not a self-indulgent remembrance; it allows them to feel for Others. This empathy is apparent in contrast to the behaviour of Eileen’s brother Liam, who is totally immersed in the “here and now.” Forgetting the past, he becomes the self-made man, a master in the New World.6 Fernando Ortiz’s reflections on the Cuban colonial context are pertinent here; white men, he points out, “left their native lands ragged and penniless and arrived as lords and masters; from the lowly in their own country, they became converted into the mighty in that of others” (100). This process of empowerment is clearly outlined in Away; Liam must forget where he came from if he is to occupy both the New World and the subjectivity of white lord and master. Only his sister Eileen is able to remember; only she can remind him that his act of colonization and settlement merely replicates what the English landlords inflicted upon him and his parents in Ireland. She names his violent act of dispossession and displacement: “now you’re going to evict some people from land you never would have had in the first place if the English hadn’t stolen it … and if they hadn’t stolen Ireland” (279). Eileen appeals to her family’s own history to push Liam to a higher consciousness. Urquhart thus shows colonizers to be cut from the same cloth—regardless of whether they are Irish or English—while the bonds and antagonisms of First Nations and Irish relations in Canada are set out in a chain of events related to the movement of capital and the occupation of “new” lands. Against such blatant and aggressive acts of colonial violence, the women of Away reflect both nostalgically and self-reflexively on histories of colonization, and are spurred toward actions—however modest, contained, and contingent—that might disrupt their pristine and privileged place. Reflective nostalgia compels Mary and her female descendents to a memorialization of

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the dead, and not just the Irish who died in the thousands en route and in settlement in Canada, but also the indigenous inhabitants. This understanding is encoded in the name “Moira,” a word that is rich in meaning and has precise material relevance in the book. Once the word is uttered by the dying man on the beach of Rathlin Island, Mary is henceforth haunted by the name, and the dying man becomes her ghostly visitant: “Moira,” he calls (her). Etymologically, the Irish-Gaelic woman’s name means both “bitter” and “great,” but also, from the Greek, it suggests the return of the past. The name shows up insistently in her life. It is the name of the boat from Belfast that has brought her revenant/demon-lover to shore, along with a magic-realist cargo of teapots, whiskey, and cabbages. Moira is also the name of the body of water closest to Mary’s cabin in Upper Canada. It is as though the name of the lake beckons her to leave the settler home in search of her revenant, where instead she meets Exodus Crow and bears witness to the suffering of his people. Mary, like her descendants, is engaged, as Jacques Derrida would put it, in the “companionship” and “upkeep” of the ghosts of the past (xix). As Jodey Castricano argues, “[h]aunting always implies a debt,” as well as guilt “through a certain form of inheritance—whether reincarnation or karma, destiny, moira”; to be haunted is to be called upon to take responsibility (11). This seems to be the sense of “moira” that Urquhart weaves into the narrative, and this ephemeral sense is tied to the material world: it is a boat, a lake, and a woman’s name. “Moira” also had the everyday meaning of “portion,” “lot,” or “inheritance.” One’s “moira” was one’s fate but also one’s share, the plot of land inherited from one’s father when the farm was divided and passed down to the offspring; or one’s share of the wartime booty; or one’s division in a political party.“Moira” is thus grounded and given political and economic contexts. The word denotes not only metaphysical haunting, but also the physical spaces divided, stolen, and passed down amongst colonizers. It suggests both the settling of colonial space in terms of “wartime booty,” as well as its “inheritance,” the karma and debt accruing to that act of dispossession. The theme of the revenant in Away ties the ethical remembrance of the past to the issue of responsibility and indebtedness in the present; the women are “[p]lagued by revenants” in the shape of “men, landscapes, states of mind,” as Esther describes it (3). As Castricano elaborates, for Derrida, the revenant contains both the concept of the ghost and the debt. This understanding is “best appreciated in the English word revenant and in the French revenance” containing both revenir (to return) and revenue (the debt) (Castricano 9). “Bad spirits cannot be supposed to linger near a place where crime has never been committed,” Susanna Moodie writes in 1852, adding that “[t]he belief in ghosts

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so prevalent in old countries must first have had its foundations in the consciousness of guilt” (Roughing It 268). But Urquhart is all too attuned to the ghosts that haunt post-colonial space, and her deliberate telling of ghost stories within the same space where the Moodies settled is an important intertextual strategy. Urquhart demonstrates that the chain of land exchanges between Irish settlers and British imperialists, as well as the consequent establishment of gold mines in Ontario, incurs an (as yet unpaid) environmental debt. The present-day narrator, Esther, reflects on her family’s role in the establishment of the mercury-polluting gold mines that have turned Ontario lakes toxic. Noting that the “traces of wounds left behind by industry are permanent” (11), her family’s legacy is the “threat of machinery” and industry (10). The violent displacement and dispossession of the aboriginal inhabitants also creates a haunting, and an ample “consciousness of guilt” should no doubt correspond to a ghost story that arises from a massacre at Moira Lake. Eileen and Liam learn from Exodus Crow that Moira Lake was not a lake in which people fished because a great number of Iroquois had been slaughtered nearby and their bodies thrown into the lake, producing, it was rumoured, flesh-eating fish so fierce that they ripped out the throats of those who attempted to capture them. (177)

For Exodus Crow, these Iroquoian bodies, like the traces of arsenic from longabandoned gold mines, poison the fish and haunt the lake; he tells Liam and Eileen that, for his people, it is “custom to fish elsewhere” (178). The story Exodus Crow tells is not public testimony or memorialization, but still it remains to haunt; his people incorporate the trauma of another people, the Iroquois, into a daily and lived practice. The ethics of alterity inform this practice that encrypts a cross-cultural remembrance of the victims of colonial violence. The massacre of Moira Lake recalls another haunted space that appears in the novel: the watery mass grave uncovered at Point St. Charles during the construction of the Pont Victoria in Montreal. From her lover, the rebel dancer Aidan Lanighan, Eileen learns that “[e]veryone working on the bridge was Irish, so it was their own brothers and children and wives they were uncovering. They wouldn’t go on with it” (314). Memorialized by “one great Jesus rock and six thousand Irish under it” (314), the history of the 1859 Black Rock Memorial is just one narrative of cultural haunting that Urquhart develops in tracing the history of Irish settlement in Canada. Although it resonates with the Iroquois massacre at Moira Lake, the notable difference is its presence in public record. In juxtaposition to the memorials and testaments to Irish victims in colonial and present-day Canada, Exodus Crow’s ghost story—

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“disremembered and unaccounted for,” to use Toni Morrison’s potent phrase (Beloved 274)—remains as the trace of an atrocity that still remains untold, unmourned, and requires testimony.7 The ghost stories that Esther and Exodus Crow live with and live to tell involve a careful accounting of this difference, as well as a differentiating of accountability. Derrida’s insistence that “no justice seems possible” for those ghosts and “victims of the oppressions of capitalist imperialism” (xix) without a process of mourning, and recognition of and accountability for the traces that haunt, applies to those enshrined spaces of Canadian identity/history. While Moodie deems Upper Canadian settlement to be innocent, and constantly seeks to displace and efface violence within its space, Urquhart challenges such canonical Canadian understandings. Similarly, when Moodie enthuses that “[o]ur own Moira is of a silvery or leaden hue” (Life 292), Urquhart imaginatively traces histories of both genocide and ecocide that haunt present-day Moira. Eden Robinson’s Monkey Beach is also very much concerned with the way the past haunts, and her novel suggests a model of transculturation that is likewise built upon sorting out the disparities between productive exchanges and violations of Native voice and body, with the aim of working toward a collective remembrance. Robinson activates a similar ethics of alterity in Monkey Beach, although with different objectives. Her text carefully elaborates an opposition between the appropriation of monstrous Native figures by nonNative Canadian culture, on one hand, and the appropriation of Western items by First Nations cultures, on the other. If the latter seems “inappropriate,” it is because stereotypical images of the “authentic Indian”—one fixed in a “traditional” past, dead or dying—are “still perceived as real by many people because of the enormous body of texts and images that still support the notion” (Crosby 90). Robinson’s text explores the traffic in material culture between White and First Nations Canadian cultures, highlighting the asymmetry of this exchange and focusing, ultimately, on the material transformations wrought by colonial practices on the present-day Haisla community. The goal of cross-cultural remembrance and exchange is encoded in several ways in Monkey Beach. Robinson uses a number of formal and generic strategies to suggest that the text functions as a kind of appeal or intermediary between Haisla and non-Haisla audiences. The young narrator and protagonist, Lisamarie Michelle Hill, translates a host of local knowledges, ranging from Haisla words, recipes, and traditions, to the geography and coastal ecology of Princess Royal Island. These many narrative acts of translation enable Lisa to uphold the valuable cultural traditions that her grandmother Ma-ma-

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oo teaches her. They indicate, like the lessons transmitted from grandmother to granddaughter in Away, the importance of transferring knowledge across generations. The communication in Monkey Beach between Ma-ma-oo and her granddaughter Lisa are mirrored, on another level, in the “face-to-face” dialogues that the narrator stages between herself and the extratextual reader. Frequently using sentences in the imperative mood, the novel functions as a direct appeal, from a Haisla narrator to an assumed outside audience, to listen and learn.8 This explicit form of address works not only to transfer local knowledges and perspectives, but also to transmit issues of great political and material urgency and to elicit an ethical response to them. Thus knowledge is shared not only across time, intergenerationally, but also across cultures. Robinson accomplishes this knowledge sharing by taking European genres, such as the Gothic and the bildungsroman, and weaving them through with Haisla perspectives, voice, traditions, and histories. If Urquhart strategically uses Gothic elements in Away, with that novel’s revenant and haunted/ spirited females, Robinson merges the Gothic theme of haunting with the Haisla shape-shifter motif in her character Lisa. Her final spectral apparition takes the shape of her beloved brother Jimmy, who proffers the simple imperative: “Tell her” (374). The injunction is to tell of local traumas, to remember, to testify. The bildungsroman is similarly deployed in a strategy of productive crosscultural exchange. Traditionally, the bildungsroman brings the reader into sympathetic identification with a young protagonist—often the embodiment of the liberal humanist subject—whose struggles to achieve autonomy and selfhood are narrated in the first person. At first glance, Monkey Beach seems no different in this regard. Robinson’s young protagonist is, on a number of levels, like any other rebellious adolescent girl kicking at the constraints of gender. Robinson’s ability to capture gendered adolescent angst is seemingly universal. However, the narrative perspective continually shifts between local and global, so that Robinson’s use of the bildungsoman ultimately deflates that genre’s universalizing human liberal tenets. Instead of the emergence of the autonomous liberal individual, we are shown instead that the Haisla girl’s passage to adulthood is conditioned locally, socially and racially, and that it is as communal and political as it is personal. Robinson’s strategic use of the Western canon and its genres might easily be read as part of a postcolonial counter-discursive strategy. And yet, as Helen Hoy has suggested, the complexity of Robinson’s writing makes it hard to categorize her as a “postcolonial” or exemplary “First Nations woman” writer, whatever that might be. If Jennifer Andrews recognizes that Robinson’s text

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“explor[es] the increasing presence of Western mass cultural items in tribal communities” (21), thus allowing us to consider the threat of cultural imperialism, Robinson challenges these neat categories, complicates assumptions surrounding the presumed threat of “Western” cultural material to “tribal” identities, and questions the notion that, by digesting or incorporating nonNative objects, First Nations identity ceases to exist in a pure or true form. The novel’s assurance of a Haisla voice within Western narrative forms is a testament to this. Rather than seeing aboriginal culture as completely overwhelmed by Western culture, Robinson at once underscores and performs their intertwining, thereby refusing the simplistic split between the modern Western and the pre-modern tribal. In asymmetrical counterpoint to the notion of the impure, Westernized Native stands that of the culturally enriched non-Native Canadian, who considers him- or herself entitled simply to appropriate Native material (and complex cultural cosmologies). (Maria Campbell has taken issue with this attitude in The Book of Jessica.) The traffic in Native and non-Native objects and narratives is overdetermined by the power relations installed by colonialism. In their unevenness, they require close attention to both the intentions and effects of each exchange. Robinson’s novel works in two complementary directions: on the one hand, to disturb a number of foundational binaries— Native versus Western, traditional versus non-Western, authentic versus inauthentic; on the other hand, as in the case of Urquhart, to make careful distinctions between processes of fair exchange and unjust appropriation. Disrupting romantic stereotypes of Native identity frozen in a tribal past, Monkey Beach is saturated with references to popular white North American culture and objects, from Spam and Jell-O and Twinkies, to the 1980s soap opera Dynasty, to Elvis Presley; these reside comfortably alongside Haisla traditions. For a novel seemingly positioned as an intermediary between Native and non-Native audiences, this assertion of a contemporary First Nations self and community is a crucial first step in exposing the long-standing racist assumptions that underlie myths of the authentic or dying Native. Robinson assures Native voice, investing her characters with authority and the gaze of knowledge. They continually take elements of the dominant culture in order to repackage and re-present them for their specific meaning within a specific location and cultural context. Ma-ma-oo, for example, enjoys talking back to the characters in the soap opera Dynasty. However, details of material culture are not always entirely innocent, as is demonstrated by the ephemeral sighting of the green plaid in the forest (alluded to above). Lisa remembers one incident in particular that crystallizes the way hegemonic

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appropriation and representation of the Haisla turn the very spaces and bodies of her world into spectacle and object: Once, while we were sitting there, a blue bmw slowly drove past us, with three little blonde kids pressing their faces against the windows, their eyes round as they stared at us as if we were dangerous animals in a zoo. The adults excitedly pointed at us. (218)

The Haisla children wonder if they should “moon them,” but decide against it: “Our asses might end up on a post-card,” Lisa remarks sardonically (218). Instead, her friend Pooch “flipped them the bird,” prompting Lisa to muse that the postcard will read: “Indian boy gives ancient Haisla greeting” (218). Whereas Urquhart reveals the obscenity of the Irish landlords who objectify “their peasants,” Robinson renders ludicrous the spectators in the bmw via the subversive humour of Lisa, Pooch and Frank. They understand the power of the gaze and that they can reverse that gaze. bell hooks’s explication of the “oppositional gaze” offers us insight into the way the gaze is read and seized by these Haisla children.“Spaces of agency,” hooks argues, open up when those subjected to the gaze and denied humanity and subjectivity “can both interrogate the gaze of the Other but also look back and at one another, naming what we see” (116). At school, too, Lisa is able to identify the way that institutionalized knowledges are constructed and disseminated to maintain white supremacy over a “savage” Native Other. Her school’s textbook “said the Indians on the northwest of British Columbia had killed and eaten people as religious sacrifices” (68). Forced to read the paragraph out loud, Lisa “sat there shaking furiously” (68) and, when prompted by her teacher, retaliates: “‘[b]ut it’s all lies’ [ … ] ‘Ma-ma-oo told me it was just pretend, the eating people, like drinking Christ’s blood at Communion’”(69). Robinson problematizes the notion of the savage Indian, insisting it be treated on the same footing as Christian transubstantiation, thus placing Native and Christian religious narratives side by side. Affording equal respect and reverence for Native culture (while understanding its allegorical function), her revision of the narrative of cannibalism is a reminder of the way in which fables have been selected and literalized to dehumanize Native subjectivity, with little attention paid to their correspondence to Western models.

De-commodifying the monster Lisa’s penchant for speaking out and hitting back earns her the name “Little Monster,” after her beloved aim-activist, Uncle Mick,

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who in his youth was also called “Monster.” By exploiting long-standing Canadian imaginings of an avenging and savage Indianness, Robinson’s alternative teratology subverts the traditional notion of the monster and reminds us of the shared etymological root between “demonstrate” and “monster”—monstere means to “show” or “point out”—thus linking the monstrous Lisa and Mick to vocal dissent and political demonstration,9 and reclaiming their identities as a valued alternative to the strong and silent “Noble Savage.” The inclusion of the Sasquatch legend in Monkey Beach provides an avenue to examine how the dominant culture can forcefully appropriate, commercialize, and colonize Native traditions to establish a universal Canadian identity. As Lisa derisively notes B’gwus is famous because of his wide range of homes. In some places, he’s called Bigfoot. In other places, he’s Yeti, or the Abominable Snowman, or Sasquatch. To most people he is the equivalent of the Loch Ness monster, something silly to bring the tourists in. His image is even used to sell beer, and he is portrayed as a laid-back kind of guy, lounging on mountaintops in patio chairs, cracking open a frosty one. B’gwus is the focus of countless papers, debates and conferences. His website is at http://www.sasquatch.com. Grainy pictures, embarrassed witnesses and the muddy impressions of very large feet keep B’gwus on the front page of tabloids and the covers of books. (317)

Marcia Crosby’s point is pertinent here: for “the First Nations reader, there is the uncomfortable recognition of the dominant culture once again engaged in a conversation with itself, to define who it is or is not” (90). B’gwus merely becomes the screen onto which fantasies of belonging and being are projected. The commodified cult of Sasquatch stands out especially in relation to the forgotten elements of Native society, suggesting that the elements taken up by non-Natives are those that accord strongly with and define hegemonic ideals. Freed from the bonds of domesticity, femininity and civilization, Sasquatch is held up as the epitome of exclusive male sociability in the wild, endorsing the colonial narrative of “going native.” Whereas Urquhart’s Away speaks to the theme of females “going native,” Robinson’s novel interrogates the cult of a masculine “going native.” And yet, as in Urquhart’s text, careful distinctions are drawn with respect to the difference of gender in these colonialist fantasies. When Lisa decides to go back to school, her final project is dedicated to the forgotten legend of T’sonoqua, a wild woman. Lisa explains that T’sonoqua

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is not as famous as B’gwus. She covers herself in a cloak and pretends to be an old woman. She will ask you for help, feigning a helpless shake in her hands as she leans on her cane. If you are moved to go close enough for her to see you with her poor vision, she will straighten to her true height, and the hands that grip you will be as strong as a man’s. She is an ogress, and she won’t let go because, to her, human flesh is especially sweet. But discredited scientists and amateur sleuths aren’t hunting her. There are no conferences debating her existence. She doesn’t have her own beer commercials. (337)

In her attempt to locate the T’sonoqua myth, Lisa looks around her community and can only think only of an old homeless woman called Screwy Ruby, believed to be a witch (337). There are other figures of powerful and outcast women, in particular, her grandmother Ma-ma-oo, whose house is said to be haunted; Lisa thinks she is “cool” for being the only grandmother who still carries a machete with her on walks. This feminine figure of monstrosity, a model of cultural outsiderness, subverts the notion of elderly female dependence and weakness. Its European correlative is the figure of the beguiling old woman who eats the flesh of children in the Brothers Grimm’s tale “Hansel and Gretel.” And yet, the figure of monstrous femininity—the woman who lives outside the home and nurtures herself by eating children rather than nurturing them—is so threatening that it cannot be incorporated into Canadian mythology and dominant culture. The subjugation of powerful and “wild” Native women is not, however, merely symbolic. Julia Emberley reveals that women’s integral role in First Nations societies diminished as a result of the imposition of European family models: The eventual exclusion of indigenous women from the network of power relations extending throughout Canada in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries became a necessary precondition to the expansion of colonial rule. Whereas colonial and indigenous men received benefits accruing from the historical or economic forces that connected them, indigenous women were placed firmly outside this system of male relations of governance, a system secured through the imposition of a model of the bourgeois family with economic rules and a mode of governance characterized by hierarchical domestic/civil relations and separate spheres of private and public activity. (61)

Perhaps the greatest disempowerment of Native women has been the eradication of their role as matriarchs, which followed from the institutionalization and subsequent abuse of First Nations children within state- and church-run residential schools. In Monkey Beach, this history is shown to have

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irrevocable effects, disintegrating family ties and severing, in particular, the bonds between Ma-ma-oo and her daughter Trudy. In the Hill family, Mama-oo’s decision to send her eldest children, Trudy and Mick, to the notorious residential school at Port Alberni, sows the seeds of bitterness, creates rifts between family members, and exposes her children to the trauma of sexual abuse, the legacy of which is shown to have long-lasting and widespread impact. Residential schools represent a dilution of matriarchal power, and the conditions leading to Ma-ma-oo’s decision are a consequence of the oppressive force of the paternalistic colonial nation-state. Trudy’s daughter, Tab, explains to Lisa that the reason her mother no longer speaks to Ma-ma-oo is because “Ba-ba-oo was an asshole. He beat Gran. Instead of sending him away, she sent Mick and Mom to residential schools” (59). But even this explanation is complicated when Lisa learns of the coercive state policies that affect the family: Ba-ba-oo had lost his arm in the Second World War, at Verrières Ridge. When he came home, he couldn’t get a job or get the money he thought he should get from Veterans Affairs because they said Indian Affairs was taking care of him. Indian Affairs said if he wanted the same benefits as a white vet, he should move off reserve and give up his status. If he did that, they’d lose their house and by this time, they had three children and my dad, Albert, was on the way. (81)

Patriarchal institutions shape the family, aggravating domestic violence and the violence of the domestic: state and home are intertwined. As First Nations Chief Justice Mary Turpel puts it: to “First Nations people, the expressions ‘culture of violence’ and ‘domestic violence’ not only have their customary connotation of violence by men against women but also mean domestic (that is, Canadian state) violence against the First Nations” (183). Domestic violence cannot be viewed as an individual and easily escapable pathology. In a similar vein, Robinson highlights the interaction of symbolic and concrete acts of violence against First Nations peoples. Lisa’s unexpected encounter with a white boy on Monkey Beach reveals the uneven effects of some of the gifts and asymmetrical exchanges that have marked the relations between First Nations and white Canada. When Lisa asks for a cigarette, the boy gives her a whole pack of Marlboros. This seemingly benign and ritualized exchange opens up a number of historical traces that allow us to note the intertwining of material and symbolic economies. As a traditional Native substance, tobacco, through a long history of slave economies, colonial administration, and the commercializing and marketing energies of capitalism, has become, in Ortiz’s terms, a purely “economic product,” removed from its orig-

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inal symbolic meaning in First Nations’ ceremonial cultures (Ortiz 186); and, of course, one of the largest causes of disease and death.10 The cultivation and marketing of tobacco has an integral place in the long history and establishment of white colonial capitalism, so it seems notable that this is the “gift” offered by the boy. Similarly, we cannot fail to recognize the significance of the iconography of Marlboro cigarettes, namely that of the Marlboro man and the type of exchange between white and First Nations he represents. The heroic cowboy figure and the legend of American civilization is central in the “natural replacement” of the vanquished Indian with a prototypical figure of “white indigeneity” (Lawson 27). Lisa is understandably uncomfortable with the gift, doubly so since she knows that the boy’s largesse makes her beholden, the first gesture in an (unequal) exchange of goods or services: “Oh my God. The last thing I expected was to have some guy try to pick me up” (216). If asking a male for a cigarette invites an unwanted transaction in which the female body is viewed as a commodity of exchange, this scene, occurring on the eponymous Monkey Beach, is marked also by the historical relations between white men and Native women. The entire encounter is charged with colonial metaphors that continue to conflate First Nations space and female bodies. In their conversation, the boy says that “he hadn’t realized it would be so empty in the wilderness” and observes “how beautiful it is, how spiritual it is getting back to nature” (216). His remarks reconfirm the schism that allows the white perspective to both erase and exoticize the Other. It is as though Lisa were no longer the occupant of her home and the Canadian landscape were emptied of people and rendered as an abstract space.11 Both Lisa and Nature are distant, exotic objects to be colonized, explored, and exploited. These details continually foster an appreciation of the relationship between the discursive and material levels. What happens in the novel to the bodies and families subjected to the colonial exercise of power directly relates to contemporary discourse that renders invisible the place of First Nations in Canada. The text explores a range of coercive governmental, industrial, and commercial practices, especially through their material effects. The concrete details surrounding a myriad of health issues—Ma-ma-oo’s heart condition, community members’ tobacco and alcohol addiction, youth suicide, Mick’s “craziness”—operate both within and well beyond accepted scientific medical discourse, and point to a number of causal factors. Lisa turns to medical discourse to understand Ma-ma-oo’s heart condition, but ultimately none of these can satisfactorily explain what may well be a broken heart (275). The traffic between discursive and material effects reroutes any discussion of an “authentic” First Nations identity that has supposedly been “contaminated”

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by improper cultural products, away from cultural essentialism and into the “gray area of blurred biology” and the “material constraints of the body” (Wicke 392). This focus on biological materialism does not work to “reinstall an essence,” but rather serves to “emphasize the importance of the body” (Wicke 392). If the forbears of Urquhart’s protagonists have left a legacy of threatening machinery and industry, Robinson’s First Nations characters have inherited that legacy’s ongoing negative effects, to which their abject bodies in pain testify.

Conclusion The haunting traces from the past in Monkey Beach are quite different from the largely metaphysical inheritances in Away. Urquhart’s novel insists that the dominant white culture consider its place within the nation, and how it has ultimately benefited from colonization and its effective dispossession of First Nations. Monkey Beach responds by investigating the ongoing effects of that divestment within a surviving, multifaceted Haisla community. Despite the intertextual relationship between these texts, one that is often characterized in Robinson’s case by a necessary resistant and counteractive energy, both novels nonetheless offer the distinct hope of crosscultural understanding, without which the capacity for redressing injustice seems beyond reach. Monkey Beach and Away reveal the impossibility of divorcing or distancing the self, geographically or temporally, from what is too often considered a remote colonial past. The female protagonists of both novels, through their modes of belonging, speaking, and remembering, engage in cross-cultural communication, exchange and remembrance. More importantly, they, as well as the feminist conceptualizations they represent, allow us to “try to understand,” as Urquhart’s narrator suggests, different perspectives (12). Finally, they offer the possibility of reader identification and empathy across and between white and First Nations cultures, a possibility that takes into account the complexity of ethnicity and culture in Canada. Feminists such as Kathleen B. Jones suggest that it is important that we bring a generous (and often risky) dose of compassion to our authoritative reading practices (120). It seems just as important that our reading practices be able to discern between narratives that are fuelled by compassion and an ethics of alterity, on one hand, and those that shore up the centrality and authority of the dominant culture, on the other. Twenty-five years after the publication of Orientalism, Edward Said articulates such an imperative:

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[t]here is a difference between knowledge of other peoples and other times that is the result of understanding, compassion, careful study and analysis for their own sakes; and on the other hand knowledge that is part of an overall campaign of self-affirmation. There is, after all, a profound difference between the will to understand for purposes of co-existence and enlargement of horizons, and the will to dominate for the purposes of control. (par. 6)

Given the ongoing preoccupation with the important issues of appropriation, which has far too often had the unfortunate effect of a retreat from intercultural dialogue, a disengagement from what has been deemed too hard, and an excuse not to bother with the politics of race, especially for white critics and authors who can afford not to, it is vital that our reading practices continue to make these fine distinctions. Both Urquhart and Robinson point to these differences and present the “will to understand” for the purposes of ethical coexistence.

Notes 1 This approach follows and is usefully outlined by Helen Hoy in How Should I Read These?: Native Women Writers in Canada. 2 On the influence of Emily Brontë on Urquhart, see Russell J. Perkin’s “Inhabiting Wuthering Heights: Jane Urquhart’s rewriting of Emily Brontë.” Victorian Review. 21.2 (1995): 115–28. 3 Cynthia Sugars has written two essays on the “compromised postcolonialism” or “settler nationalism” of Urquhart’s Away. See “Haunted by (a Lack of) Postcolonial Ghosts: Settler Nationalism in Jane Urquhart’s Away.” and “Settler Fantasies, Postcolonial Guilt: The Compromised Postcolonialism of Jane Urquhart’s Away.” 4 Annette Kolodny’s influential study Lay of the Land: Metaphor as Experience and History in American Life and Letters sets out the crucial elements of these constructions of colonial space as feminine. The relationship between women and the wilderness was therefore always one of alienation and vulnerability. These understandings of colonial space as gendered female are somewhat overdetermined, given that both English men and the land required domestication and settlement, suggesting an equally strong masculine gendering of colonial space. In different contexts, Ann McClintock and Laura Mulvey also make this argument. 5 Both Helen Hoy’s essay “‘When You Admit You’re a Thief, Then You Can Be Honourable’: Native/Non-Native Collaboration in The Book of Jessica” and Jeanne Perreault’s “Writing Whiteness: Linda Griffiths’s Raced Subjectivity in The Book of Jessica” provide good accounts of the ensuing issues and debates. 6 A similar character appears in Urquhart’s The Whirlpool and his farm is called a “miniature Empire” (68), giving some indication of the critique Urquhart provides of White settlement. 7 The Grosse Île Irish Memorial National Historic Site of Canada, opened in 1997 by Member of Parliament Sheila Copps, is the largest memorialization of the Famine outside Ireland. See http://www.pc.gc.ca/lhn-nhs/qc/grosseile/index_e.asp.

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8 An example of this form of address occurs in the opening pages of the novel when the narrator tells the reader to “[f]ind a map of British Columbia. Point to the middle of the coast. Beneath Alaska, find the Queen Charlotte Islands. Drag your finger across the map, across the Hecate Strait to the coast and you should be able to see a large island hugging the coast. This is Princess Royal Island … ” (4) 9 See, for example, Donna Haraway’s “The Promise of Monsters: A Regenerative Politics for Inappropriate/d Others” for a discussion of the repatriation and reclamation of monstrosity. 10 See, for example, “Tobacco Information” found at the First Nations and Inuit Health page at http://www.hc-sc.gc.ca/fnihb-dgspni/fnihb/index.htm. 11 See Richard Cavell’s “Where Is Frye? Or, Theorizing Postcolonial Space” for a theory of the abstract production of space in Canada.

Works Cited Andrews, Jennifer. “Native Canadian Gothic Refigured: Reading Eden Robinson’s Monkey Beach.” Essays on Canadian Writing 73 (Spring 2001): 1–24. Balibar, Etienne and Immanuel Wallerstein. Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities. London: Verso, 1991. Boym, Svetlana. The Future of Nostalgia. New York: Basic Books, 2001. Bravo, Michael T. “Precision and Curiosity in Scientific Travel: James Rennell and the Orientalist Geography of the New Imperial Age (1760–1830).” Voyages and Visions: Towards a Cultural History of Travel. Ed. Jás Elsner and Joan-Pau Rubíes. London: Reaktion, 1999. 162–83. Bronfen, Elisabeth. The Knotted Subject: Hysteria and Its Discontents. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998. Castricano, Jodey. Cryptomimesis: The Gothic and Jacques Derrida’s Ghost Writing. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2001. Cavell, Richard.“Where Is Frye? Or, Theorizing Postcolonial Space.” Essays on Canadian Writing 56 (1995): 110–34. Chanter, Tina. Ethics of Eros: Irigaray’s Rewriting of the Philosophers. New York: Routledge, 1995. Crosby, Marcia. “Construction of the Imaginary Indian.” By, For and About: Feminist Identity Politics. Ed. Wendy Waring. Toronto: Women’s Press, 1994. 86–103. Derrida, Jacques. Specters of Marx: the State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International. Trans. Peggy Kamuf. New York: Routledge, 1994. Emberley, Julia V. “The Bourgeois Family, Aboriginal Women, and Colonial Governance in Canada: A Study in Feminist Historical and Cultural Materialism.” Signs 27.1 (2001): 59–85. Freeman, Victoria. Distant Relations: How My Ancestors Colonized North America. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 2000. Goldie, Terry. Fear and Temptation: The Image of the Indigene in Canadian, Australian and New Zealand Literatures. Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1989.

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Griffiths, Linda and Maria Campbell. The Book of Jessica: A Theatrical Transformation. Toronto: Coach House, 1989. “Grosse Île and the Irish Memorial National Historic Site of Canada.” 6 March 2004. http://www.pc.gc.ca/lhn-nhs/qc/grosseile/index_e.asp Haraway, Donna. J. “The Promise of Monsters: A Regenerative Politics for Inappropriate/d Others.” Cultural Studies. Ed. Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, and Paula Treichler. New York: Routledge, 1992. 295–337. hooks, bell. Black Looks: Race and Representation. Boston: South End, 1992. Hoy, Helen. How Should I Read These?: Native Women Writers in Canada. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001. ———. “‘When You Admit You’re a Thief, Then You Can Be Honourable’: Native/Non-Native Collaboration in The Book of Jessica.” Canadian Literature 136 (1993): 24–39. Jones, Kathleen B.“On Authority: Or, Why Women Are Not Entitled to Speak.” Feminism and Foucault: Reflections on Resistance. Ed. Irene Diamond and Lee Quinby. Boston: Northeastern Press, 1988. 119–33. Kaplan, Caren. Questions of Travel: Postmodern Discourses of Displacement. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996. Kolodny, Annette. Lay of the Land: Metaphor as Experience and History in American Life and Letters. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1975. Lawson, Alan. “Postcolonial Theory and the ‘Settler’ Subject.” Essays on Canadian Writing 56 (1995): 20–36. Lévinas, Emmanuel. Totality and Infinity. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1961. McClintock, Ann. Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Conquest. New York: Routledge, 1995. Moodie, Susanna. Roughing It in the Bush. 1852. Toronto: New Canadian LibraryMcClelland and Stewart, 1989. ———. Life in the Clearings versus the Bush. 1853. Toronto: New Canadian LibraryMcClelland and Stewart, 1989. Morrison, Toni. Beloved. New York: Plume, 1987. Mulvey, Laura. “Topographies of the Mask and Curiosity.” Sexuality and Space. Ed. Beatriz Colomina. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1992. 53–71. Ortiz, Fernando. Cuban Counterpoint: Tobacco and Sugar. 1947. Trans. Harriet de Onís. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995. Perkin, Russell J. “Inhabiting Wuthering Heights: Jane Urquhart’s rewriting of Emily Brontë.” Victorian Review 21.2 (1995): 115–28. Perreault, Jeanne “Writing Whiteness: Linda Griffiths’s Raced Subjectivity in The Book of Jessica.” Essays on Canadian Writing 60 (1996): 14–31. Perry, Adele. On the Edge of Empire: Gender, Race and the Making of British Columbia, 1849–1871. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001. Richards, Thomas. The Imperial Archive: Knowledge and the Fantasy of Empire. London: Routledge, 1993.

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Robinson, Eden. Monkey Beach. Toronto: Knopf, 2000. Said, Edward W. “Orientalism 25 Years Later: Worldly Humanism vs. the EmpireBuilders.” Counterpunch. 4 August 2003. 25 pars. http://www.ccmep.org/2003 _articles/Palestine/080403_orientalism_25_years_later.htm Sugars, Cynthia. “Settler Fantasies, Postcolonial Guilt: The Compromised Postcolonialism of Jane Urquhart’s Away.” Australian Canadian Studies 19.2 (2001): 101–18. ———. “Haunted by (a Lack of) Postcolonial Ghosts: Settler Nationalism in Jane Urquhart’s Away.” Essays on Canadian Writing 79 (Spring 2003): 1–32. “Tobacco Information.” First Nations and Inuit Health. 24 January 2005. http://www .hc-sc.gc.ca/fnihb-dgspni/fnihb/index.htm Turpel, Mary Ellen. “Patriarchy and Paternalism: The Legacy of the Canadian State for First-Nations Women.” Canadian Journal of Women and the Law 6.1 (1993): 174–92. Urquhart, Jane. The Whirlpool. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1986. ———. Away. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1993. Young, James E. The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorial and Meaning. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993.

laurence steven

Transculturation in George Elliott Clarke’s Whylah Falls: or, When Is It Appropriate to Appropriate?

The individual is the rhythm of his styles. (Ian Robinson) We must, more of us, learn to write like this. (Travis Lane) Either I am Canadian, or the word means nothing. (George Elliott Clarke, Odysseys Home)

n his magisterial 2002 volume Odysseys Home: Mapping African-Canadian Literature, George Elliott Clarke at one point erects a “here be dragons” sign to warn foolish missionary/explorers either to turn back or tread lightly:

I

There is something of the missionary position inherent in the posture [of the literary theorist hoping to do socio-political good by overcoming marginality and dispelling illiberal ignorance], especially when an exuberant idealism leads one to champion communities to which one is merely an observer, or a guest, or, perhaps, an interloper, or even, charitably, a missionary. The risk of this seductive address is that one’s own thrusting of theory, of notions of interpretation, upon the Other (that obscure object of desire), may render mute the screams, laughter, and shouts of that supposedly beloved other, that darling community with which the critic-as-missionary conducts intercourse. (253)

As a white Canadian academic drawing the African-Canadian Clarke’s work heuristically into a confluence of hermeneutical, rhetorical, and stylistic inquiry, I expect I run the risk Clarke warns of above. While I of course

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believe my work helps Clarke’s text to speak, or helps position us appropriately to hear it, which amounts to the same thing, I see no alternative to taking the risk of failure. In fact, though, I am reassured in my critical deliberateness by Clarke himself, who both as poet and literary/cultural critic, despite his caveat against the missionary position, engages in brazen appropriations, territorial claims, and canon formation and reclamation—making rhetorical gestures and flourishes that buck the trend of the postmodern and/or cultural materialist and/or new historicist critiques of identity, ideology, narrative, and representation. As a poet Clarke unabashedly seeks Beauty with a capital B, like a “magnet hounding iron” (Whylah Falls 75) or a “bee hunting nectar” (Whylah Falls 50). Doing so “he uses the full range of the cultural resources available to him as a Canadian, a Maritimer, a descendant of the Black Refugees of 1812. The art, music, literature, religion, and history of Europe, North America, and Africa are native to him” (Lane 47). In Whylah Falls specifically: Both the Renaissance lyric sequence and the pastoral traditions … provide Clarke with themes, formal structures, and sources of imagery which he translates, transforms, and transplants into a Nova Scotia setting, evoking a celebratory attitude toward the natural world and toward the rural lifestyle of Nova Scotian Blacks in the nineteen-thirties. (Wells 72)

But some questions arise. How does Clarke’s willingness to range over the cultural traditions of half the world (or more), appropriating, claiming, and using these resources to body forth his world jive with the contemporary cultural theory so chary of such moves? Is it enough for Lane to say Clarke is “native” to all these traditions? How can that word retain or make sense when used thus? We find a hint to Clarke’s culturally polyglot nativeness in his “viewing ‘Canadianité’ as an identity of identities” (Clarke, page 134 in this volume). Tim Wynne-Jones once observed that as “an immigrant nation … Canada, itself, is a threshold. Having crossed a threshold is an integral part of our collective consciousness” (55). Such a Janus-faced national characteristic offers us insight into the appropriateness to/of Canada of/to Clarke’s distinctive style. Though his family’s roots in Nova Scotia—largely as refugees from slavery, but with a strand of Mi’kmaq—predate Canada itself, they have not been recognized as Canadian by the dominant Anglo-Saxon and Francophone cultures, which in their turn have suffered the identity-angst of colonies gaining (or losing) independence. While Margaret Atwood diagnosed Canada’s identity issue most famously in her wry 1970 observation that “if the national mental illness of the United States is megalomania, that of Canada is paranoid schizophrenia” (62), when we read Whylah Falls we might be forgiven for

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thinking we aren’t in Atwood’s Canada anymore. Despite the tangible poverty, marginality, and violence of the world we enter, there is also a definite atmosphere of joy, of health, of wholeness in the work. We find a hint to how this can be so in Wells’s alliterative triptych “translates, transforms, and transplants.” Clarke’s way of working—both critically and poetically—is a transcultural activity in which [His] poet’s eye, in a fine frenzy rolling, Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven; And as imagination bodies forth The forms of things unknown, [his] poet’s pen Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing A local habitation and a name. (A Midsummer Night’s Dream, v.i.12–17)

While this passage from Shakespeare may initially suggest not transcultural activity but rather the demiurgic act of a god who creates ex nihilo and not from already existing rhetorics embedded in historically existing cultures, the challenge for us is exactly here. Whylah Falls challenges us to see that Clarke fulfills Shakespeare’s profile of the inspired poet who does body forth a new thing, while simultaneously showing us that the poet (including Shakespeare, as he well knew) never creates the new thing ex nihilo but out of a “world … so full of a number of things” (Robert Louis Stevenson, qtd. in Whylah Falls 150), including styles and rhetorics and models, historical circumstances and inheritances, and cultural identifications. Clarke’s Whylah Falls emerges as an index of an increasingly visible transcultural Canadian identity, and in so doing participates in a larger humanistic turn emerging in the wake of postmodernism. In this essay I will address both emergences, exploring (a) how Clarke develops the improvisational, appropriative style of his extended lyric sequence as a tragicomic response to the death of epic, a genre conventionally associated with strong national or cultural identities; and (b) how this development parallels a relatively recent reconsideration, reframing, and reclaiming of humanist values of identity, meaning, and wholeness in postcolonial theory, as a way out of the cul de sac of postmodernism’s hermeneutics of suspicion. In a Books in Canada review, Phil Hall gingerly offered “a sneaking suspicion that Whylah Falls might be— dare I say so?—a great book.”1 Hall is shackled by his postmodern moral censors, but he at least rattles the chains. This essay, responding to the call of Clarke’s poetic narrative, contributes to a current in cultural thinking that breaks the chains, freeing us to reclaim and reinvigorate our critical vocabulary and so our cultural heritage/s. Can I get a witness?

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I Lamenting the death of the epic, the poetic form that “unified the values and experience of each linguistic civilization for its own time and for posterity” (xv), George Elliott Clarke, in Whylah Falls, turned to the “extended lyric sequence” in which “a memory of [the epic’s] grandeur and power persists in our era” (xvi). He laments the passing of epic because with it has gone the “unity of vision, that is to say the faith, which it required to be born” (xv). This lack of a “womb of commonly held beliefs” (xv), and so of epic, he suggests, may be “akin to the impossibility of the continued state of Canada as a sovereign state” (xv). He quotes George Grant to the effect that the “element necessary to [Canada’s] existence has passed away” (xvi). Clarke’s recognition of the significance the lack of epic, of a national narrative, had for his poetry surfaced only later in the process of writing the poems that would become Whylah Falls. He had set out with two separate goals: to “find the emotion of song, to rediscover the Four Muses—Eros, Death, Intellect and Spirit”; and “to improvise a myth” (xi). Improvisation was his method: “You see, you have to understand improvisation, how a standard reference can become something else. The text is context for what erupts like a solo … Against this background, anything can happen … the narrative emerges from the lyrical” (xi). He strove to “honour the era of boxcars stuffed with apples,” to “resurrect that lost time” (xi) in a mid–20th century “Afro-Canadian village in southwestern Nova Scotia (or Acadia)” (xvi). “In truth,” he avows, “I was trying to remember, I was trying to remember” (xii). His mind and imagination were filled with souvenirs from his past, whether experienced or heard. As he turned these treasures over and over they began to accrue others, new/old memories emerged from somewhere. He felt his lines were haunted. For him, therefore, “Whylah Falls is the Apocalypse—the way the world looks when the Beloved is absent” (xiii). The extended lyric sequence, in its ability to “limn cosmoses of human relationships” (xvi), was the appropriate form for the “rogue collection of poems and prose” (x) that was transforming itself into a “recognizable whole” (xvi). The absence of the Beloved, the Other that memory longs to resurrect, could be adequately housed in the momentariness and discontinuity of the extended lyric sequence. Here, where the lineaments of narrative emerged “from the lyrical,” there would be less pressure to impose the epic unity whose time had passed. Canada tried the national epic, in the work of E.J. Pratt. Its limitations were immortalized in F.R. Scott’s pithy question about Pratt’s “Towards the Last

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Spike” (1952): “Where are the coolies in your poem, Ned?” Perhaps Scott, the chairman of the CCF from 1942 to 1950, had a better intuition than Pratt about the totalizing moves of epic. Yet of Scott’s confidently left-politicized modernist lyric “Laurentian Shield” (1954) we could as easily ask, “Where are the Indians in your poem, Frank?” A generation later, upon retiring, Scott is far more self-reflexive. In “On Saying Goodbye to My Room in Chancellor Day Hall” (1973), he meditates in a combination of histrionics and genuine emotion upon the removal of the contents of his long-occupied office at McGill, poignantly recognizing how the flotsam and jetsam he’s accumulated from around the world and throughout the years are actually a good part of his constitution: These cry out my history. These are all cells to my brain, a part of my total. Each filament thought feeds them into the process By which we pursue the absolute truth that eludes us. They shared my decisions. Now they are going, and I stand again on new frontiers. (33–38)

While the references to “absolute truth that eludes us” and “new frontiers” indicate Scott’s modernist provenance (The Waste Land’s “fragments I have shored against my ruins” juxtaposed with “Marina’s”“the hope, the new ships” are the touchstones), the recognition of what we might call his own intertextuality signals that Scott as modernist “work” was on the cusp of becoming Scott as postmodernist “text.” (Barthes wrote “From Work to Text” in 1971.) What Clarke, writing another generation further on (Whylah Falls first appeared in 1990), strives to grasp in his extended lyric sequence, is both the modernist lament for the lost epic vision (Scott’s elusive absolute truth; Clarke’s absent “Beloved”), and the postmodern recognition of identity formation as bricolage, métissage, improvisation, jazz, or gumbo. Crucially, however, where the postmodern recognition of bricolage tends to become a critique of essentialist identity that goes all the way down in a mirroring essentialism,2 Clarke shares with certain postcolonial writers a resurgent understanding—a faith— that meaning, identity, place, space, the integuments of culture, are things we make, the result of work that results in works. According to Diana Brydon, for example, postcolonial studies are searching “for a way out of the impasse of the endless play of post-modernist difference that mirrors liberalism’s cultural pluralism” (141). She calls for recognition that in a postcolonial, globalized world we are all “Creole” (141), or in the words of E.F. Dyck, “virtual Metis.” Literary critic Françoise Lionnet, to take another example, has her

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version of transcultural hybridity—the métissage found in novelists of the porous cross-cultural border zones—“point the way back to a new/old concept: humanism” (109). The characters in the novels she studies “live, love, and die … as humans do everywhere” (112); they “are human beings whose cultural production and consumption defy the West’s attempts to exoticize them” (113); they have “control over their sense of personal identity” (115). The way the authors of such works “portray characters transforms the way that they themselves see the realities of their worlds, as well as the way we—readers who are outsiders to the region or culture—will in turn perceive” such cultures (109). In fact Clarke’s deliberation about culture-making has only become clearer in the 14 years since Whylah Falls first was published. In his 500-page tour de force entitled Odysseys Home: Mapping African-Canadian Literature (2002), he claims “the right to comment on anybody’s literature,” despite being “a nominal African Baptist from a marginal black community” (6). And in the present volume, for example, he brazenly appropriates the South Africanborn Arthur Nortje into the African-Canadian literary canon. Listen to him justify the grab: Clearly, Nortje, with his to-and-fro movements between blackness and whiteness, past and present, Canada and England, Eliot/Plath modernist discombobulation and Fanon/Neruda politicized imagism, emerges as a ripe candidate for inclusion in a national canon torn between “a strong Tory strain of continuity” (Surette 29) and disruptive, ‘make-it-new’ poetics. (Clarke, page 133 in this volume)

While, after postmodernism, we have learned to be wary of such moves, knowing the tendency of meanings to totalize, a more pressing need—especially in a country of thresholds like Canada—is for an understanding of appropriate appropriation. Otherwise we live a performative contradiction— living in (and out of) certain meanings, as we must, while resisting the places those meanings open to us for fear of committing cultural theft. Clarke diagnoses this attitude simply and accurately: “Postmodernism is the guilty conscience of modernism” (Whylah Falls, xxiv). What, after the turbulence of postmodernism, needs stressing, and is beginning to be stressed, is that while meaning is something we make through appropriation from the various contributing circumstances—personal, social, environmental, political, and cultural—within which we find ourselves, and is not something we discover lying ready-to-hand, it is not ours as a possession is. An emerging understanding of representation-as-reality involves us in a reinvigorated ethical realm of responsibility (re-sponse ability) and respect

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(re-spect; looking again) for something beyond ourselves.3 Appropriation is inevitably part of meaning making, but we do well to remember with Paul Ricoeur (and Kierkegaard before him) that “[r]elinquishment is a fundamental moment of appropriation and distinguishes it from any form of ‘taking possession’” (191). We need to recognize (re-cognize) that if meaning is a making, it is therefore a matter of moving back from text to “work,” to a whole that represents what we see as being so, while any whole we make, by virtue of its being a “work,” re-pre-sents—brings before our senses again—in its very manifestation before us, its inevitable partiality because of its being situated in time.4 As Clarke’s Shelley says to her poet/suitor X at the end of Whylah Falls: “Every word, every word, / is a lie. But sometimes the lie / tells the truth” (179).

II Culture is a construct, a “work” that grows out of many seeds and is watered and fertilized from many sources. Culture is a continual representation of only partially calculable contributions. While the “work” can honour those sources, or dishonour them for that matter, it becomes a slave to them at its peril. Slavish conformity to cultural prescriptions manifests itself in many ways: in genre program fiction, in mindless parroting of received patterns, and in self-censorship to meet dictates of officialdom or fashion or even pragmatic politics. Saying culture is a “work” that “grows” may seem a contradiction, but the words are deliberate, reflecting the way an artist (and we are all, says Nietzsche, “artistically creative subjects” [880]) works, makes choices, and constructs her work. If not in a slavish relationship with her culture she knows at the same time that the creativity taking shape under her fingers is not hers, that she is in some sense a fertilized patch of ground, but one who must be responsible for what grows into recognition, into our worlds of meaning.5 Here is a pointer to how the new enters a tradition, enabling us (but with no guarantees) not to become slaves within our culture-prison, or corpses within our cultural columbarium. Art is an acknowledged way the new enters culture generally, but within the art culture itself, artists speak of the entering as inspiration, gift, grace, vision, “Pentecostal fire” (Whylah Falls, 129). All are religious, spiritual terms. But all are also hybrid terms, words that do work in a number of worlds—art and religion to be sure, but also bodily health, popular culture, etiquette, alchemy, metallurgy; add your own worlds—and so render these heterogeneous worlds part of one represented world. Such words contour our world, shape it to themselves, make it “true” in the way art and religion are true: as transformation, or as aletheia—re-membering. As the

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narrator says in the “Argument” to Chapter i: “The Adoration of Shelley”: “everyone uses words to create a truth he or she can trust and live within” (4). Watch (listen) as Clarke’s words show Missy joining her stepbrothers Pushkin and Othello, and her sister Amarantha’s lover Pablo as they jam, a one-of-akind form that is only itself out of many, often culturally heterogeneous, strands and filiations:6 Missy barges in, panting, yammers, “Quit the gentle mercies and the delicate fears! God expects truth, not entertainment!” She unfolds a dark mandolin, rich, smelling of drenched forests, then jumbles the room into shape around her, juggling it so it becomes circular, curling around her curves. (108–09)

What becomes easier to realize when we read Clarke’s work is the warp and weft of his world; while his improvisational style is a whole, it is also clearly a cultural quilt bringing heterogeneous items and qualities and moral judgements together in meaning. His description of Missy improvising is not at a remove from her doing it; his style is the creating. When she “unfolds a dark mandolin, rich, smelling of drenched forests” Missy/Clarke (they can’t be separated. Am I lyin’?) quilts a tactile, visual, aural, olfactory, gustatory, musical, natural, metaphoric-metonymic-synecdochic-ironic7 image-cluster that acts—it is purposive rhythmic movement—to shape a world into being for Missy, for Clarke, for us. As the postcolonial theorists and literary critics inch their way back/forward to a “new/old humanism” via métissage, the world-making power of poetry and narrative and drama again becomes available for reframing, reappropriating. In fact the very act of inching back/forward is the reappropriation. The reframing also enables us to see prescience in “Christian-humanist” critics from a generation or two ago, or more properly to see that the “humanism” they were tarred with was a metonymic reduction enabling us to dismiss their complexity.8 Listen to Ian Robinson helping us find an appropriate critical language with which to enter Clarke’s world: It is not always fully realized how the development and imitation of a style commits a writer and makes a world. Our world is limited by our styles of making sense, as well as created by them. The individual is the rhythm of his styles. There is a necessary and useful paradox: we make sense individually or not at all; on the other hand the styles in which we make sense are not the creation of any individual. (269)

Clarke, as “the rhythm of his styles,” is committed to no less than the redemption of his heritage/s. The narrative voice in the prefatory poem “Look Homeward, Exile,” while arguably that of an older and wiser X, is also arguably

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that of an older and wiser Clarke, inhabiting the paradoxical position of the poet (and of us all as far as we are “artistically creating subjects”) who looks back from a long distance in time and space on the world he remembers while simultaneously creating it. In this threshold poem he remembers his “Creator in the old ways,” saying “I sit in taverns and stare at my fists; / I knead earth into bread, spell water into wine” (xxxi). In effect “Look Homeward, Exile” invites us to recognize the same paradox within ourselves, to recognize remembering as re-membering, calling together into a rhythmic, decorous, dramatic dance a world whose tangible past wholeness is always out of literal reach, whose literal past is always fragments, shards crying out to us for repair,9 for meaning and beauty. “Look Homeward, Exile” opens up a moral environment and ushers us into it. We are situated, given a space/time vantage both inside and outside. Then we move into Chapter i, where we encounter the youthful poet Xavier adoring the youthful Shelley who doesn’t trust poetry. Clarke frames Whylah Falls with two chapters called “The Adoration of Shelley,” where the first focuses on X’s adoration of Shelley, and the final focuses on Shelley’s adoration of X. While these characters are not from different national or ethnic cultures, they are definitely different identities, and through X’s five-year “exile” have come to travel in different worlds. The transcultural dimension of their relationship reveals itself in their gradual mutual appropriation. Watching Clarke develop them is a wonderful illustration of Naomi Shihab Nye’s observation that “[l]ove means you breathe in two countries” (“Two Countries”10). Clarke’s “work” draws us into an awareness that our selves, finally, are the places where cultures interpenetrate, if we relinquish our epic hold on essentialist identity/nationality. In the interim chapters between these frame sections, Clarke develops other characters and relationships that function like classical fugues, or perhaps jazz or blues solos, each tangentially related to the Shelley/X C-major melody line, but having a distinct tone of its own. Each takes its place in Clarke’s rhetorical performance, dramatically offering implicit, free-contrapuntal commentary on the melody line. Given the constraints of space, in addition to the framing X/Shelley chapters, I’ll focus on Chapter ii: “The Trial of Saul,” Chapter iv: “The Passion of Pablo and Amarantha,” and Chapter v: “The Martyrdom of Othello Clemence.” The vantage provided by the prefatory poem “Look Homeward, Exile” enables us to see the limits and the beauty of both X’s poetic romanticism and Shelley’s suspicious practical reason. While his unchecked tendency is toward poetic debauchery in an orgy of words, hers is toward the “chastity of numbers” (7), culturally prescribed rational reflexes that underwrite dailiness and curb imagination. Each needs to move toward the other, balance the other.

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They will have to discover the keys to salvation: that “Love is death’s counterpoint” (135), but further that unless we “are responsible / for Beauty” (179), love and death can shape our lives into “tombs we build around ourselves” (50; emphasis in original). X is a returning exile, coming back after five years to court Shelley with the power of poetry. She, though, is suspicious of his “words, words, words,” which to her have no integral connection with her world: You bust in our door, talkin’ April and snow and rain, litterin’ the table with poems— as if we could trust them! (24)

And her intuition is sound. Poetry’s power is something X wields recklessly at this stage: “For there’s nothing I will not force language / To do to make us one” (12). X and Shelley both need something of the other’s perspective, and by the final chapter, again called “The Adoration of Shelley,” they have made the initial steps, relinquishing something of self in order to appropriate (in Ricoeur’s sense) the other. Clarke’s style shows it happening. He has fully imbibed his Shakespeare, for whom transcultural “metaphorical complexity, by means of which a new meaning emerges from many tensions … [depends] on the maximum range of sensitive awareness,” where there is “vivid feeling for both sides of the analogy” (Knights 101–2). Can we say who is tenor and who vehicle in X and Shelley’s transforming move into each other’s perspective? X comes to recognize how “literature” and language are not resources we deploy, but acts we inhabit. He moves back into Shelley’s world, one he had left five years earlier, with a new/old awareness that Clarke renders with a wonderfully concise poetic ambiguity: “So what if you drop the final ‘g’ in ‘ing’ and use the affirmative ‘be’ as essence? Literature be the tongue you do your lovin’ in” (176; emphasis in original). The old (though chronologically more recent) awareness for X is that literature is something he has accrued in his peregrinations; Shelley rightly mistrusts his use of it as a version of the missionary position Clarke warned us against in the passage I quoted in my introduction. Read through this frame, literature is a canon—Yeats’s “monuments of unaging intellect”— enabling us to love at the cost of discarding our provincial ways and regional dialects. Speaking the civilized tongue of the metropolis will educate our emotions, freeing us from slavery to them. Simultaneously, though, X’s new (though chronologically older) awareness is the language he grew up in, the rooted, bawdy, proverbial, community-wise tongue that grows in, and grows, a specific place and people. Through this frame the tongue one loves in constitutes

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literature, as act rather than monument. Like any good ambiguity (as opposed to obscurity), X’s sentence reads both ways at once, and they can’t be separated. As I.A. Richards said, ambiguities are “the very hinges of all thought” (qtd. in Berthoff “Reclaiming” 678). Shelley moves toward X as well. After a summer away working on the Yarmouth-Boston steamers she too is an exile returning. In the poem “Absolution” she offers her love tentatively to X, and as she appropriates him— makes him part of herself—she relinquishes something of herself. Her poetry—and it is hers; notice in the passage below the way “My words shy, my words shy” enacts her skittishness about him that we’ve seen from the outset—is illuminated by his love for Yeats, Carmen, Longfellow: My words shy, my words shy into this last, majestic commencement … Let us rise and go to Grand Pré and loll beneath apple blossoms and cantillate Longfellow’s ballad about exiled Évangéline, the pastured scene of her mourning spread out lushly before our gaze. (179)

Shelley is no Eliza Dolittle here, leaving behind her organic community for the abstract world of literature; nor is X a latter-day Gauguin or Rousseau looking for a pristine, primitive Eden—Clarke is no simple dualist. What they both are doing is growing, metamorphosing, developing the wisdom that comes as we gain awareness that our self is a gumbo, an improvisation, a quilt, a concordia discors of selves-acting-with-others, no one of which can claim final authority. And yet our self is ours, is distinctive, like our face, which is more than the sum of its parts. In Chapter ii: “The Trial of Saul,” we see worked out the social/moral/political dynamic that led Shelley initially to deflect X’s overtures with the words “Roses / got thorns. / And words / do lie. // I’ve seen love / die” (25). The portrayal of Saul—father of Shelley, Amarantha, Selah, Othello, and Pushkin; husband (and abuser) of Cora; and stepfather (and “incestuous” lover) of Missy—is disturbing. While the youthfully “wise” Shelley dismisses her father and his violating love as immoral, Clarke won’t let us join her in easy judgement. In the prose “Argument” to this section Clarke gives a social/political/ economic context that incriminates us in the wreckage of Saul’s life. Our imaginative scope, our power to make a world, separated from appropriate appropriation, helped create Saul: “fifty years is too long to spend, a hunchback, stooped in a damp vicious cave, dark with smoke and tuberculosis, shoveling

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gypsum just for the pennies to fix one’s shoes. So folks, our hands are dirty” (33). While Clarke allows that we are not solely responsible—that Saul’s “sins are [his] own” (33)—we can’t help recognizing that in response to the call that our act of world-making made to him, as effect to cause, a warped Saul warps and fractures love and beauty. Most difficult, perhaps, is that Clarke’s tenderly tentative lyrical depiction of Saul and Missy’s initial encounter reveals that these warped qualities are still love and beauty: Foot was killin’ me. Ripped off the bleedin’ shoe; the friggin’ spike had drove clean through. Pain was fire, salt, needles, sour water. A good daughter, Missy come, comfortin,’ tender, bound my tore foot with her shirt. She ripped her shirt and I eye her maple treats. That was that. My love come down like sweet water. (40–41)

The delicately balanced structure (ripped shoe/ripped shirt, sour water/sweet water), the lineation and stress so sensitive to emotion and breath, and the allusions hinting at a martyred Christ and the women at the cross, attract us powerfully at the same time as the social/moral action repels us. As Dorothy Wells rightly says, “[t]he text is troubling. It makes problematic and provisional any desire on the reader’s part for order (whether deriving from a sense of sympathy and reparation, or from a sense of moral judgement against Saul), or even any desire for the ‘truth’ of the matter” (63). Clarke’s poetic text redeems Saul from the columbarium of moral order and historical truth that allows us to resolve moral and social/political dilemmas by keeping the Other and the past external to us and at our disposal. As

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Clarke’s transcultural, creatively ambiguous style works on us, we represent Saul to ourselves, appropriating him by relinquishing some of our distance from him. He wavers there before us, and in us, as even “Missy ’mits, ‘I don’t love ya no mo’” (45), and as he swallows iodine, attempting “[a] final lunge at light” (45). How else but in poetry can we understand that we be Saul (using the affirmative “be” as essence)? “These poems are fact presented as fiction. There was no other way to tell the truth save to disguise it as a story” (xxviii). Transculturation in Clarke is an experience that stimulates and reinforces our awareness that meaning itself is less a theory that we apply than a perspective we inhabit; that meaning is therefore cultural, and so inevitably transcultural: a matter of ongoing, recursive ethical/aesthetic, and personal, judgement about cultural appropriateness, cultural value. Our lives, as Kenneth Burke would affirm, are language as symbolic action, since to understand them as lives is to understand them as meaningful within the “common set of assumptions and values” that “the common language embodies in all its speakers” (Robinson 222). Clarke’s style, his language as symbolic action, is inevitably an appropriation, a drawing together of heterogeneous things into meaning, for us and by us, even if the meaning we recognize is one we detest. In Chapter iv: “The Passion of Pablo and Amarantha,” Clarke quilts a transcultural relationship most explicitly, working swatches of history, politics, economics, religion, and race into his poetic realism. The relationship of the “indigo” African-Canadian fish-plant worker Am and the “orange” Cuban pedlar Pablo (and their chapter placed at the centre of the book), is a haven of joyful passion as the world darkens toward the Second World War, and toward the murder of Othello in Chapter v. Amarantha, like Clarke the poet, is also a quilter, making meaning through transcultural appropriation rather than forensic instrumentality. In response to the newspaper “with its gossip of Mussolini and the dead of Ethiopia,” and the radio that “mutters of Spain and bullets,” she concludes that “[o]nly the Devil ain’t tired of history” (92). In the face of the “latest reports from Germany [that] are all bad” Am quilts, “planting sunflower patches in a pleasance of thick cotton … weav[ing] a blanket against this world’s freezing cruelty” (92). Just as Amarantha’s people had come to Canada to escape slavery, Pablo comes to Canada to escape American imperialism: Hating Teddy Roosevelt and his gangster Rough Riders, Pablo Gabriel fell to earth in Cuba. He sought a gentler imperialism, a haven for imagination. At thirty, he spied Canada in a fragment of newspaper and realized it could be cañada.… He caught a steamer to Halifax and drifted, discovering Beauty in the secret heart of the Sixhiboux Delta. (77)

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He and Am fashion a cultural, ethnic quilt, a métissage: Pablo Gabriel, thirtyish, a flamenco poet and art pedlar, sports a slanted beret and wears rainbow cottons. His guitar is a crescent moon. His muscular skin is orange. Amarantha Clemence, twenty, a contemporary quilter, wears apple blossoms in her silky, sable hair that spills—pagan-like—down her back to her thighs. Her skin is indigo accented by white silk. The music of Pablo and Am segues from the Moorish mood of Duke Ellington’s “Dusk on the Desert,” with its Arabic saxophone, sobbing through oases for want of love, to the soul cry of Bessie Smith, wailing in Churrigueresque temples of ecstasy. These lovers depict the struggle between desire and despair. (75)

The first paragraph presents each in his/her racial and cultural distinctiveness; the second “segues” them through music. The movement of music here is representative of how music works in both the lives of the characters and in the work of Whylah Falls as a whole. The movement is improvisational, finding in the heterogeneity and unlikeliness of an occasion the appropriate opportunity that, once seized, reveals connection. Whereas the postmodern mood metonymically reduces appropriation simply to its verbal sense as a power grab,11 literary criticism has traditionally recognized the appropriation of something (in the verbal sense) to be simultaneously (in its adjectival sense) a judgement of value (albeit often implicit): of its appropriateness, or fitness, or rightness. Coleridge provides the criterion in his famous definition of a symbol: A Symbol … is characterized by a translucence of the Special in the Individual or of the General in the Especial or of the Universal in the Temporal. It always partakes of the Reality which it renders intelligible; and while it enunciates the whole, abides itself as a living part in that Unity, of which it is the representative. (673)

Pablo and Am surely each partake of the reality which they together render intelligible, yet each just as surely abides her or himself as a living part in that unity. Clarke refers to their marriage as “pure Beauty” but immediately qualifies the purity by saying they form a “binary star” (76). Prosaically we can say they are symbolic of transculturation, but this would risk reducing them to counters in a forensic discourse. We need to take Clarke at his word when he says “speech or rhetoric is the true base of poetry. Tropology is signification” (xxiii). “I chose to write poetry, not sociology” (xvii). Clarke’s words here should go some way toward assuaging the worries of the postmodern theorist/critic that my mention of Coleridge implies an incipient totalization. I need to stress that meaning is not the same as totalization,

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that Clarke’s representation-as-reality is kinetic rather than static, a lyric sequence rather than an epic. Pablo, for example, had previously had a liaison with an “ex-Queen Annapolisa” in the days when he “was searching for Beauty awarded final form” (78). Those days are past; the beauty he finds so fulfilling in Am is neither formal nor final but flowing, like the ubiquitous Sixhiboux River. Clarke repeatedly depicts her, and their lovemaking, through water imagery: Pablo wants to plumb her placid, still unfathomed kiss, Her river mouth, winding and wet, to wade Her waters until I start to shiver— So much milk and honey on the other side. (79)

The interpolation of passionate and religious meanings in the water imagery here—baptism as the dying to the old life; sexual fulfillment as the “little death”—presages Clarke’s use of water imagery in the generic sea-change so crucial to both Othello Clemence’s death and to Clarke’s “work.” Chapter v: “The Martyrdom of Othello Clemence” dramatizes the death of epic at the hands of history, the world shaped by enlightenment modernity. But by doing so through a lyric sequence embodying transcultural métissage, Clarke enables his poetry to redeem the time, enact a vision of justice without reinscribing the totalizing epic metanarrative. Thus comic and tragic visions exist simultaneously in Whylah Falls, refracted through the lyric kaleidoscope. Appropriation entails relinquishment. Just as Saul Clemence “aged a labourer in a century that hates work” (33), so his son Othello is an epic hero out of his time. Where the epic hero discovers or establishes a home and shapes a world around it, Othello has little influence beyond his home. From the perspective of history—just the facts, as interpreted by the courts and the newspapers—he is an “evil drunk” (118). In a drunken lampoon of epic/heroic chivalry he threatens to “bash” the “false face[s]” (94) of his sisters’ unwanted suitors, whether X before Shelley acknowledges her affection, or Jack Aurelius Thomson whose advances Amarantha detests. But in his home he is still king—the king of music, catalyst for the life around him. In this realm of significance, Othello exists outside the world of “getting and spending”; he lives for the moment: Othello practices White Rum, his scale of just music, and clears the love song of muddying his morals. He sets his glass down lovingly, a whole chorus of molecules sloshing in harmony. He vows he will not, he will not be a dead hero, no way, suffering a beautiful sleep, trimmed with ochre, hazelnut, dressed in mahogany, smelling of last-minute honey and tears, regrets rained upon him too late in the guise of wilted, frail flowers. Instead, he will

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sleep right now, while he still can, up to his thighs in thighs, gnaw dried, salty smelts, and water song with rum. (26)

He is the centre of most of the jam sessions that occur in Cora’s living room, and is usually depicted in a state that blurs sleep, intoxication, and music: Groggy, Othello sits up, draws himself into a Buddha pose. He seems halfasleep. Suddenly, he jumps as if ice has plopped into his lap, but it’s just Pablo, sliding Pushkin’s acoustic guitar—an abandoned child—across his thin thighs. Othello picks it up, cradles it, and coos, filling that strung wood with a separate life. (15)

Here again, Clarke’s style enacts the meaning: the metaphorical guitar-child comes to life under Othello’s ministrations only as we negotiate the metaphoric riff, come up close to it, let it work us, move us. This is a meaning that the discursive and empirical meaning-making of modernity and history can’t fathom. As X pleads with Shelley during her “chastity of numbers” phase: “Lovely Shelley, / I have no use for measured, cadenced verse / If you won’t read. Icaruslike, I’ll fall …” (23). The “fall” of Othello is the “fall” of epic into history; it’s the apocalyptic fall of Whylah Falls out of meaning—“Beauty Town” (26),“Sunflower County” (27)—into a “traumatized landscape” where “a train lopes / Like a loup-garou, baying at the moon” (115). “Only the Devil ain’t tired of history” Am had said (92), and if S. Scratch Seville represents the devil (the sss of the snake; “Old Scratch” as a traditional name for the devil), Jack Aurelius Thomson is the representative of modern history that Scratch ain’t tired of. Jack is the ex-mp, aspiring Liberal candidate, fish plant boss, power broker, oily wordsmith, and unwanted suitor of Amarantha whose modern liberal values run into the wall of Othello’s unambiguous refusal to countenance the courtship. Taking the role of a modern-day Iago, Thomson incites Seville to murder Othello out of jealousy. Upon being acquitted, Seville—a “nightmare cartoon”—“dissolves to flowers” (102). In modernity, the Devil has no real power, but is only symbolic shorthand (and sleight-of-hand) for it. Jack has the power; Jack rules history. But history, Clarke suggests, silences meaning. As Othello dies on Seville’s driveway, His history, Giddying through a gyre, a puckered hole In his stomach, stops on bloodied gravel While silence whines in the legislature. (114)

And for Cora, “Her first-born son is lost. Now, there’s nothing. / There’s nothing left but life insurance” (116). Policy replaces life.

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But Clarke’s story—his narrative emerging from the lyric sequence—does not end there. Simultaneously with the fall, there is a continual rising, a building up—in the language, the figures, and the rhythms of Clarke’s poetry. Within the epic, the hero sits at the centre of, and provides the impetus for, mythic history; after the death of epic, the hero appears tragic—powerless and even ridiculous, like Lear on the heath, or the sloshed Othello Clemence— unless he undergoes a sea-change into the romantic/lyric hero, who exists significantly in the kairos moment if and when we seize the opportunity for meaning (the truth-telling of poetry), but who has no instrumental extension into history-as-chronology (where poetry is understood as lies). Seen from the kairos perspective, what happens is that the epic hero sacrifices himself—is martyred—to redeem the time by bestowing meaning upon it. And the dynamic is the same in our reading. Again, appropriation entails relinquishment. To participate in meaning, to accept the bestowal that meaning is, we must relinquish—to some degree at any rate—our prior knowing, our “epic.” In a rich gumbo of styles, references, and allusions, Clarke simultaneously depicts Othello undergoing this transformation/martyrdom, and enmeshes us in it. As well as having obvious affinities with Shakespeare’s Othello, the black general betrayed by jealousy, he is also the “Lear of Whylah Falls” who,“Imbalanced by illicit, bitter ale,” vows he’ll slog to the cold Atlantic To sound the wrinkling and remorseless deep That shut over the head of Lycidas, To aquarium his queer brain in brine Under the tumult and racket of gulls. (93)

The references and allusions here to Shakespeare, Milton, and Eliot’s Phlebas (The Waste Land, part iv: “Death by Water”)—tragedy, pastoral elegy, and modernist lyric sequence—draw us into the role of generic quilters, piecing the swatches together to make the new out of the remnants of the old. If we don’t accept the role—if we, like Shelley, won’t read—then Othello’s postepic, post-murder trajectory remains a downward spiral into empirical history: a collapse onto Seville’s gravel driveway, which Clarke has perversely encumbered with metaphors: Othello tries the air with patchwork wings, Plummets through vast nightmare, then smacks the chill Channel of black, thrashes in amnesia, Flounders, encumbered by eels and current. Adreynten, he becomes our Icarus … (103)

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But as we do read, Clarke involves us in a sea-change; Othello/Icarus drowns, but poetry transforms him, “[i]nto something rich and strange” (The Tempest I.ii): When Pablo fishes our king from the ooze, His bones will be chalk, his skull, gypsum, His eyes, amethyst isled in ambergris. We’ll comb periwinkles from his bleached hair, And pick the early pearls from his bared ribs. (103)

The richness and strangeness of the transformed Othello only heightens the sense of loss; we are simultaneously gifted and bereft. What grows out of this combination is a sharp sense of injustice, and an awareness of the prophetic power of language to resurrect. Clarke depicts the murdered Othello as both the crucified Christ— The wind swoops low to kiss and sponge his brow And haul a fiery quilt of stars over His weary head; crows shred their wings in thorns; He sips vinegar-tears. (114)—

and the buried Christ ministered to by the women at the tomb: She [Cora] yearns to soak O’s limbs in gold perfumes Of myrrh and frankincense to erase death— The dark, earth odour of potato peels And damp, moldy leaves. She wants him to rise, Gilt and garlanded. She wants him to rise. (116)

And Othello does rise—not in any empirical sense, but through Clarke’s poetic métissage. Through his improvisational juxtaposition of eulogy, elegy, blackhumorous newspaper report, ballad, metafictional personal testimony from the dead Othello, and apocalyptic vision, Clarke shows us just how risen Othello is—not as the triumphant epic hero, but as our burgeoning consciousness that “[t]here’s a change that’s gonna have to come” (124). Transculturation in Clarke is culture as “work,” a re-membering that simultaneously responds to and reveals a vision of justice, of appropriateness. In Whylah Falls Language has become volatile liquor, Firewater, that lovers pour for prophets Who haul, from air, tongues of Pentecostal fire— Poetry come among us. (129)

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Notes 1 Blurb for 2000 Polestar edition of Whylah Falls. 2 See Paula M.L. Moya’s “Reclaiming Identity” for a good review of the identity critique. See also Christopher Norris’s critique of plural communitarianism as ethnocentric in Truth and the Ethics of Criticism, 29–30, and Amselle’s similar critique of multiculturalism in Logiques métisses, 35. 3 Four perspectives that in their very different ways share this stress are post-positivist realism (see Moya); Berthoff ’s thirdness (“Rhetoric”); Mousley’s new humanism; and Hauerwas’s and Ochs’ post-critical theology. 4 For development of the notion of “seeing as” see Berthoff ’s introduction to Richards on Rhetoric, p. xii; see also Burke’s “Four Master Tropes.” 5 The idea here is developed by Derek Attridge in his discussion of the squinting phrase “the creation of the other” on pages 20–21 of his essay “Innovation, Literature, Ethics: Relating to the Other.” See also F.R. Leavis’s reflection on Blake’s reference to his paintings: “though I call them mine, I know they are not mine” (“Justifying One’s Valuation of Blake” 59). 6 In this sense Clarke’s work, as a representation of the improvisational power of the jam, has affinities with both the Victorian Robert Browning’s dramatic monologue about the extemporizing “Abt Vogler” and the contemporary trends in world music to meld or juxtapose musical traditions and instruments. In Canada I think of the Celtic rock of Ashley MacIsaac or Rawlins Cross, or the klezmer rock of Finjan. 7 See Burke’s “Four Master Tropes.” 8 Here is Andy Mousley: “In an attempt, then, to ‘humanise’ contemporary theory, I shall include, under the category of historicist humanism, those modern day forms of historicist criticism, like cultural materialism and new historicism, which in distancing themselves from one kind of humanism (essentialist humanism), may have made the mistake of distancing themselves from all versions of humanism” (“Humanising Contemporary Theory, Re-humanising Literature,” para. 6). Barry Brummett articulates the ploy: “If an entire group is metonymized with a negative image, the public is left with few symbolic resources for localizing the damage—that is, for understanding that the group is actually complex and that only one aspect of it is represented by the present image” (176–77). 9 Interestingly, apropos of Clarke, one meaning of repair is “go in numbers to,” with the etymology re patriare (patria ‘native land’), as in “they repaired home.” 10 You can read Nye’s poem “Two Countries” on the Academy of American Poets website: http://www.poets.org/poets. 11 Craig Owens spelled out postmodernism’s linking of “Representation, Appropriation, and Power” in his 1982 essay of the same name.

Works Cited Amselle, Jean-Loup. Logiques métisses: Anthropologie de l’identité en Afrique et ailleurs. Paris: Payot, 1990. Attridge, Derek. “Innovation, Literature, Ethics: Relating to the Other.” PMLA 114. 1 (January 1999): 20–31. Atwood, Margaret. The Journals of Susanna Moodie. Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1970.

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Berthoff, Ann E. “Rhetoric as Hermeneutic.” College Composition and Communication 42 (1991): 279–87. ———. “Introduction.” Richards on Rhetoric. Ed. Ann E. Berthoff. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991. ix–xiii. ———. “Reclaiming the Active Mind.” College English 61. 6 (July 1999): 671–80. Brummett, Barry. Rhetoric in Popular Culture. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994. Brydon, Diana. “The White Inuit Speaks: Contamination as Literary Strategy.” The Post Colonial Studies Reader. Ed. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin. London: Routledge, 1995. 136–42. Burke, Kenneth. Language as Symbolic Action: Essays on Life, Literature, and Method. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966. ———. “Four Master Tropes.” A Grammar of Motives. 1945. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969. 503–17. Clarke, George Elliott. Whylah Falls. 1990. Vancouver: Polestar, 2000. ———. Odysseys Home: Mapping African-Canadian Literature. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002. ———. “Repatriating Arthur Nortje.” present volume. 121–38. Coleridge, Samuel T. “From The Statesman’s Manual.” The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Ed. Vincent B. Leitch et al. New York: Norton, 2001. 672–74. Dyck, E.F. (Ted). “The Places of Aboriginal Writing 2000 in Canada: The Novel.” 11 January 2005. http://www.wtc.ab.ca/tedyck/abor.00.htm Hauerwas, Stanley and Peter Ochs. Series Editors’ Preface. Remembering the End: Dostoevsky as Prophet to Modernity. P. Travis Kroeker and Bruce K. Ward. Boulder: Westview Press, 2001. iii. Knights, Lionel Charles. Explorations. London: Chatto and Windus, 1946. Lane, Travis.“An Unimpoverished Style: The Poetry of George Elliott Clarke.” Canadian Poetry: Studies, Documents, and Reviews 16 (Spring/Summer 1985): 47–54. 11 January 2005. http://www.uwo.ca/english/canadianpoetry/cpjrn/vol16/lane.htm Leavis, Frank Raymond. “Justifying One’s Valuation of Blake.” The Human World 7 (May 1972): 42–64. Lionnet, Françoise. “‘Logiques métisses’: Cultural Appropriation and Postcolonial Representations.” College Literature 20.1 (February 1993): 100–20. Mousley, Andy. “Humanising Contemporary Theory, Re-humanising Literature.” Working Papers on the Web. Nov. 2001. Literature and Value Issue home page. Sheffield Hallam University. 11 January 2005. http://www.shu.ac.uk/wpw/value/ mousley.htm Moya, Paula M.L. “Reclaiming Identity.” Reclaiming Identity: Realist Theory and the Predicament of Postmodernism. Ed. Paula M.L. Moya and Michael R. HamesGarcia. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. 1–28. Nietzsche, Friedrich.“On Truth and Lying in a Non-Moral Sense.” The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Ed. Vincent B. Leitch et al. New York: Norton, 2001. 874–84.

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Norris, Christopher. Truth and the Ethics of Criticism. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1994. Nye, Naomi Shihab. “Two Countries.” Words Under the Words: Selected Poems. Portland, OR: Far Corner, 1995. The Academy of American Poets. 11 Jan. 2005. http:// www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15681 Owens, Craig. Beyond Recognition: Representation, Power, and Culture. Ed. Scott Bryson et al. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992. Ricoeur, Paul. Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1981. Robinson, Ian. “Prose and the Dissociation of Sensibility.” The New Pelican Guide to English Literature #3: From Donne to Marvell. Ed. Boris Ford. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982. 260–72. Scott, Francis Reginald.“On Saying Good-bye to My Room in Chancellor Day Hall.” An Anthology of Canadian Literature in English. Vol. 1. Ed. Russell Brown and Donna Bennett. Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1982. 357–58. Wells, Dorothy. “A Rose Grows in Whylah Falls: Transplanted Traditions in George Elliot Clarke’s ‘Africadia.’” Canadian Literature 155 (Winter 1997): 56–73. Wynne-Jones, Tim. “An Eye for Thresholds.” Only Connect. Ed. Sheila Egoff et al. 3rd ed. Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1996. 48–61.

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george elliott clarke

Repatriating Arthur Nortje

À Arthur Nortje (1942–1970)1 Nay, if there be no remedy for it, but that you will need buy and sell men and women like beasts, we shall have all the world breed brown and white bastard. (Shakespeare, Measure for Measure) I swill the golden, muddy lees of your poetics— That poisonous lava, that sulphurous spewing, Standard for mixed-race mix-ups, snafus, Who distill piss-yellow acid from brown sugar: And very toxic vintners some of them are. Your sulky vernacular decants black ink, Blots bleached speech, Caucasian canons, Like blood stammered out a smashed mouth. Your genealogy parses apartheid holocaust— The melting flesh around the smoking brand, The ice-feel of chains like intimate jewellery, One’s forced hosting of maladroit maggots. Like Osip Mandelstam, acrimonious soul-mate, You flit from gulags of oblivion and limbo, A brown vampire sucking white and black teats. In exile, you wax anorexic and wan, but tan. Bohemian Mulatto, brown-skinned Negro, Tropical Canadian, your metaphors are razors

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To open eyes; and you rain down bullet-words: Poems caught between revelation and revulsion.

Departure Incontestable is the national and canonical provenance of Arthur Nortje. Born in 1942 in Oudtshoorn in South Africa, raised during the apartheid period, educated at Paterson High School (where he was taught by fellow South African poet Dennis Brutus), in Port Elizabeth, and a graduate of the then-segregated University College of the Western Cape, Nortje is as South African as the veldt itself. Moreover, with Brutus, Nortje was co-winner of South Africa’s 1962 Mbari poetry competition.2 Too, his poetry collections, Dead Roots (1973)3 and Lonely Against the Light (1973), emit a corrosive nostalgia for his “beloved country” (to use a phrase popularized by Alan Paton4), all blood and bullets and so, so beautiful. In addition, Nortje’s individually issued poems appeared in the South African journal Sechaba and in Seven South African Poets, edited by Cosmo Pieterse (1971).5 Executed by a suicidal dosage of barbiturates, in December 1970, in Oxford, England, his abrupt death, at age 28, as he faced imminent deportation to South Africa,6 seals off, hermetically and unambiguously, his oeuvre and his history. Thus, in canonical criticism, as that of Charles Dameron exemplifies, Nortje is settled as a poet “preoccupied with experiences of alienation and fragmentation,” “introspection,” and “exile … the guiding metaphor of [his] themes of homelessness and marginality” (“Nortje” 180). Dameron insists, “[t]he bulk of [Nortje’s] later work reflects his deep concerns as an exile and wanderer: with the turmoil in his distant homeland, with his experiences in new environments, and with the introspective demands of his poetic craft” (155). Dameron concludes that Nortje’s verse “records the disintegration process of a gifted, despairing young African exile” (162). Yes, as a title like Dead Roots indicates, Nortje’s very nativity announces his innate disconnection and discontentment. One anonymous reader confirms, “[c]lassification as ‘coloured’ (mixed race) in apartheid South Africa eroded Nortje’s selfhood” (“Nortje” 180). States Jacques Alvarez-Pereyre, Nortje suffered an “ambivalence of feelings” for South Africa that “was to follow [him] throughout his exile”: he both desired “this beautiful land” and rejected “this implacable country” (160). The duality is the allegiance. Thus, the elegiac back cover matter of Dead Roots feels, “[Nortje’s] tragically early death removed a poet who had every promise of becoming one of the leading South African poets” (my emphasis). Yet, even though the poet had to “abandon South Africa” (Dameron 157), though

Repatriating Arthur Nortje / Clarke

“[h]is ties of love with his homeland … frayed, … they still exist” (156). Indeed, the perished poet is cradled, reverently, in the South African literary pantheon. It has successfully reclaimed his corpus, the disjecta membra of his lyrics, some “submitted to Heinemann by the author, and … under consideration at the time of his death,” others “obtained from various individuals after his death,” and multiple copies of still others whose “texts vary [so that] it is hard to tell which is the definitive version” (Publisher’s Note [xiii]). As long-distance victim of apartheid, as voice of oppositional exile, Nortje rests securely in his birth nation’s libraries.

Virage Yet, Nortje’s entombment as “South African poet” is not as final as his compatriots think. There exists the disconcerting (because disinterring) reality that he is also an African-Canadian poet, perhaps the first to hail from South Africa. This claim rests on several supports: (a) Nortje was “coloured”—and a mixed-race identity always posits multiple, potential, national allegiances; (b) he chose exile; (c) he emigrated to Canada and lived in Hope, British Columbia, and Toronto, Ontario, between 1967 and 1970, and authored approximately one-quarter of the poems in Dead Roots in Canada; (d) his Canadian residency coaxed a shift in his poetic style, one that may have influenced later African-Canadian poets; and (e) he was identified as a Black Canadian poet in a pioneering anthology and bibliography in his adoptive literature. Furthermore, all “national” canons are more cosmopolitan and diverse than their framers ever intend. Finally, we must acknowledge that, in the case of African writers, their often short-term residencies in a host of nations allows them the elastic luxury of multiple “belongings” and “claimings.”

Port I The primary point that allows African-Canadian literature to repatriate Arthur Nortje is his once-status as “Coloured”—brown—in a nation that insisted on a partition between the black, indigenous African peoples and the colonizing Dutch and British-descended white minority. In Canadian terms, Nortje was biracial, a Métis. In Midfielder’s Moment: Coloured Literature and Culture in Contemporary South Africa (2000), Grant Farred notes that Nortje’s poetry “compels us to attend seriously to the designation ‘coloured’”:

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The product of a brief liaison between a coloured working class woman, Cecilia Potgeiter, and a Jewish man, Nortje felt his colouredness with a keenness unrivaled … A racial hybrid with access to only his mother’s (coloured) culture, Nortje’s family origins—or the lack of them—deeply affected his poetry. (56)

His psychological division regarding his mixed-race heritage resembles that of Canada, itself a mongrel state, the “bastard” creation of Great Britain and France. To cite André Siegfried’s monumental if antiquated study, The Race Question in Canada (1906), “Canadian politics is a tilting-ground for impassioned rivalries. An immemorial struggle exists between French and English … In the first place … it is a racial problem” (14). Nortje’s dilemmas over race are not unknown in Canada—even among white Canadians. Obsessed with “the condition of colouredness” (56), and the unchurched coupling that brought it about, Nortje jets an almost monomanic theme of bastardy. In “Hangover,” his persona smiles, “No lice, I’m a bastard” (Dead 9); in “Pornography: Campus,” a sexual-political allegory disrupts the urbane surface of the poem: “Continually life / is a hunt below the tousled surface / of pubic’s hair blond shock, or jet: / we are bastards of debauchery” (17). For Nortje, the biological instruments of genitals and “race” become the sources of the immoral, the illegitimate, and the criminal. Problematically, as Farred notes, Nortje’s “bastardization” taints his vision of women—especially “coloured” women (56).7 His work resolves into “an intensely misogynistic disdain” (56), at times, a blunt aspect of his semi-autobiographical lyric, “Casualty,” where the speaker snarls, “My devil is the bastard of desires” (34), and spits I shall be true eternally towards My father Jew, who forked the war-time virgins: I shall die at war with women. (35)

This theme, so prominent in the South African poems of 1963–65, returns archly in “Dogsbody half-breed.” Because biraciality equals, for Nortje, bastardy and alienation or exile, it is apt that “Dogsbody half-breed” was inked on Balsam Street in Toronto, the bastard offspring—like Pretoria—of London. Here a recollected South Africa is imagined as the matrix of race mixing, that is, political pollution: “Maternal muscle of my mixed-blood life / with child were you heavy, with discontent rife” (Dead 104). The abandoned land of “abandoned” morality spawns “bastardies, abortions, sins of silence” (105), all because, centuries ago,“blond settlers … / … oxdrawn, ammunitioned” enacted “a covenant against the Zulu” (104). Of course, this “covenant” was more honoured, as his-

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tory and bloodlines prove, in the breach—and breeches—than in the observance. Farred reads the poem’s third and concluding section as a mildly disparaging comment on the supposed “lasciviousness” of coloured women (57), whose “delicate nooks and moments noble-gentle / bud-open to both blond and black” (105). Yet, the “you” in the poem is likely South Africa, and the speaker, though set, remembering, in Toronto, promulgates an Ezra Pound–like “Pact”8 with his ex-natal state: and I hybrid, after Mendel, growing between the wire and the wall, being dogsbody, being me, buffer you still. (105)

As a “Heinz 57” mongrel or “dogsbody”9 (an identity the speaker here accepts), but also being, himself, “bud-open to blond and black,” his buff-coloured, off-colour “race” allows him to blossom as an intercessor between black and white peoples. Farred affirms mulattoes’ bodies are “a reminder of the historic sexual links between European colonialists and the indigenous population” (57) and that Nortje’s poetry speaks, thus, from “a precarious social position and … a racially ambiguous position” (56).10 To be coloured is to be a bastard is to be alone is to be an exile is, then, to be an exilic immigrant (in Nortje’s case, to a cold, unwelcoming Canada), and is, lastly, to claim the solitary home of the grave.11 Crucially, for a native South African under apartheid, to be Coloured is to be divided at the root, torn in at least two directions, and driven, branded like Cain and crazed like Lear, across the face of the earth in search of a fresh, unbesmirched—and unbesmirching—nativity.12 Yet, Nortje is a “blood” infant of Africa, the Netherlands, and Israel; linguistically, of Britain; and, politically, of South Africa and Canada. Thus, his poetry always announces his provisional status as “Coloured/South African: and his incipient identities as “Black”/African, Dutch/Boer, Jewish, British, and landed immigrant/Anglo-Canadian.13 Then again, every mixed-race person is ordained to experience dislocation, and only outright political repression need make an organic exile a physical one. Consequently, Nortje’s life and work act out a destiny that another tireless wanderer, African American writer James Baldwin witnesses, the recognition “I was a kind of bastard of the West” (6). The latter’s separation from white-faced civilization, a status branded by his fairly unadulterated black physiognomy, is intellectual and, simultaneously, moral. To be a raced bastard—even a purebred one—is as much a matter of culture as it is of breeding, of genius as it is of genealogy. The fate is estrangement, as the Europe-stranded Baldwin attests: “I was an interloper; this was not my heritage” (7). The reaction to this fate is expropriation via exile: “I would have to

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appropriate these white centuries, I would have to make them mine … otherwise I would have no place in any scheme” (7). A like reckoning occurs in Nortje’s reactions to South Africa, Britain, and Canada. In “Athol Fugard’s invitation,” one of Nortje’s last South African–authored poems (penned in 1965), his persona cites “cobbled multi-racial pavements / White rain beats in torrents” (Dead 27). Following this superb intuition, Nortje casts off the land that has “type-caste” his like and, now, as an “out-caste,” as a mother-/father-land-less being, seeks to establish a new, accommodating South Africa. Yet, he also seeks to appropriate a new domicile—either in the “maternal” kingdom of Britain or the “sister” Commonwealth state of Canada.

Port II Like many African-Canadian writers, Nortje accepted expatriation, or exile, or emigration, because post-colonial (and mixed-race) identity demands a constant shuttling among potential objectives, possible “homes.” Therefore, as the diary-like,14 travelogue,“fugitive” lyrics of Dead Roots underline, Nortje left South Africa in 1965 to attend Jesus College in Oxford, England. Though his official purpose for departure was study,15 his travels became exile, but one replicating a form of quasi-post-Imperial Federation, so that Canada and England play as equal partners, with South Africa, in his poetry. Still, the direct spur for Nortje’s exodus is his perception, pronounced in his work of 1960–65, that South Africa, with its racial repression, “soured” heterosexual amours (also poisoned by “race” laws), is one more desert of the soul. If lonely, coloured bastardy is the plangent theme of Dead Roots, its sound is a bluesy fusion of pathological, suicidal Sylvia Plath and hateful, specious T.S. Eliot. The imagery speaks for itself—a fugue of Ariel and “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”: Liberal girl among magnolias born was set to clipping dahlias in the prison yard, her blonde locks shorn. Winter is in the shining grass. (“Preventive detention,” Dead 7)

The lyrics mine a rich rhetoric of ruin: “the heart is not a void / but barren ground / where roots have struggled and died” (“Absence of love,” Dead 20); “I stand self-empty, ascetic” (“Transition,” Dead 31). As in early Eliot or late, late Plath,16 one finds,“The soul has left / its slim volume / of acrid poems only” and “Stench leaks from the gloomy tomb of treasure” (“The long silence,” Dead 24).17 South Africa itself, in 1965’s “Windscape,” is some “wild slut [that] howls for rain / to soothe her caked and aching hollows” (21). The inhos-

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pitable pass laws (“identity is / 268430: kleurling [coloured]/ Pretoria register, male 1960” [“Hangover,” Dead 10]), the decay of love into lust (“Bleak times I breathe like this / face smothered in your shoulder” [“Act” 16]), and the decline of protest to furtive graffiti (“Who fouled the wall O people? / free the detainees someone wrote there” [“At Landsdowne Bridge,” Dead 12]), inspire the sere style of Eliot and the searing style of Plath. Here is the poetry of selfexpulsion, “carrying with it melancholy, but also irony—two chords … found everywhere in Nortje’s work …” (Alvarez-Pereyre 154). Nortje became a Commonwealth cosmopolitan, writing in three countries. Even so, his South African critics downgrade Canada as an abode of Nortje’s creativity. Dameron tells us the years 1965–70 represent, in Nortje, “self-imposed exile” (155). Fleeing “the shackles on free speech that bind the outraged black dissident” (155), Nortje “chooses the rest of the world over South Africa” (156). For Alvarez-Pereyre, this choice means that Nortje decides “to take on the world” and, first, suffers “the wrench of the Great Separation” in London and Oxford, “the heartbreak of exile” (155), then “departure for the Great North” (155), Canada. Here he seeks the literary reputation he had won “without trying in England,” but seems sunk in “work as a teacher, a deep disappointment in love,” and, for two years, 1968–1969, a despairing hiatus in productivity that saw only the writing of “a mere four poems” (155). Although the last year of work, “a period of feverish travels—London, Canada, back to London, Oxford” (155), is fecund with new lyrics, Nortje’s prime, poetic period, wagers Alvarez-Pereyre, is 1961–65 (156). It is Nortje’s semi-cryptic, antiapartheid poetry at home that appeals to Alvarez-Pereyre, not the exilic lyrics, nor those drafted in Canada.18 Alvarez-Pereyre opines that “[t]he turningpoint in Nortje’s life occurs in 1966–7” when, while in England, “the profound disappointment in love he experienced then” served to undermine his selfconfidence, while turning his poetic into its confessional “echo, its tormented reflection” (162). But Nortje’s experience of lost love in England mirrors principally his loss of moorings. London and Oxford were not as repressive as South Africa, racially, but the imperial capital still constituted, for him, a centre of moral depravity, social ugliness, and emotional sterility. If South Africa elicited, from Nortje, an Eliot–Plath poetic, London, that oasis of miasma, is the original locale of Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922) and the remembered demesne where Plath, American expatriate, gassed herself to death in 1963.19 Nortje’s persona remarks, “I am saying I am sorry / I spilled across your borders” (“Spring feeling,” Dead 37). To emphasize his displeasure with England, Nortje dedicates two poems “For Sylvia Plath” (Dead 46–47, 47–48). In the first poem, Nortje repeats the Plath persona’s “Hate for the father,”20 purely because “His blood

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confuses mine” (46). While the speaker recalls sterility—“my seeds have fallen in absences … // lack of belonging was the root of hurt” (“Affinity to maggie” [Dead 62]), his Oxfordian present is no less a Purgatory, a purgation: “Alone I have seen / gutterwater bear away white petals” (“Winter: Oxford,” Dead 66). In the Plath-like “Autopsy,” Nortje’s persona refers to South Africa as a “blond / colossus” vomiting “its indigestible / black stepchildren like autotoxins” (Dead 52).21 But he also sees that “The world receives / them, Canada, England now that the laager / masters recline in a gold inertia / behind the arsenal of Sten guns” (53). In England, then, “roots are severed” and “your wrists can stain razors” (“The Near-mad,” Dead 69) and the poet’s “wrought sentences / [fall] dead as the thin conversation of evenings” (“Episodes with unusables,” Dead 80)—an echo of Eliot’s “Prufrock.”22 Sex, too, comes to nothing. Though a woman’s “aching beauty” (vaginal) has “held me rooted” (in copulation), she is “fearing / the third growth, the fruit of nature” (“Episodes with unusables” 80). England, like South Africa, is a site of blight: “severed roots” equalling exile, dead roots signalling abortion. On the eve of his departure for Canada, then, Nortje’s painful solitude— his South African heritage—waxes with added pangs of exile and sterility, his English culture. Having chosen exile, and its lexicon of “bitter” and “empty,” he is no more merely South African, but a being in flux, mobile, his roots “severed,” his seed “scattered” (though not to bear fruit), his identity fusing lsd flashbacks and Vietnam news flashes,“Mod” English and pied noir African. Like Eliot and Plath, two famous, previous usa poet-exiles in the marble heart of the old Anglo-Saxon “Empire,” Nortje arrived, a poet-exile from another usa— the Union of South Africa—to remake himself and his poetry, rebuffing modernism for the “Mod.” Like the Americo-Anglo modernist poets of yore, he, too, felt his identity mutate in England. His “Canadian” verse proves less bleak, but not yet “black” in consciousness.

Port III In shuttling to Canada, Nortje undertook not just another migration, but immigration. Between leaving South Africa in summer 1965 and dying in England in fall 1970, Nortje spent 66 percent of that five-year-period, from September 1967 to summer 1970, in Canada (excepting a short sortie to England). In addition, of the 104 poems in Dead Roots, some 26, or one-quarter, were written in Canada. Although Nortje wrote fewer poems in Canada than he did in South Africa (30) and in England (48), Canada was the only country besides his native one where he tried, consciously, to make a home. England was always just a transit point.23

Repatriating Arthur Nortje / Clarke

The first poem of Nortje’s Canadian expedition, “Conversation at Mathilda’s,” written in British Columbia in September 1967, is wondrously domestic after the acerbic satires on pop life in “swinging” London: Veils drift over the mountains: their faces and backs are forested. The rain seethes with eyes over the river: it is a strong and silent grey colour. (Dead 84)

Mathilda’s own thoughts “reach back to Cape Breton Island’s // lobster and cognac” (84), a moment of plenitude. Even so, the speaker remains aloof, listening to Mathilda’s “voluble words” and “weighing moments, waiting to write up results” (85). Given now, as he is rarely given previously, to sexual pleasure, Nortje’s persona celebrates, in “Joy cry,” a reinvigorated “virility” while “snowmelt waters roar down the mountain” (Dead 87). Although Canada offers a greater sense of being “grounded,” of being landed, than he has known in London, Nortje’s persona declares, “The isolation of exile is a gutted / warehouse at the back of pleasure streets” (“Waiting,” Dead 90). Moreover, the frontier— or “bulldozer”—civilization of Northwestern Canada seems a mishmash: “I have Oxford poetry in the satchel / … as I consider Western Arrow’s / pumpkin pancake buttered peas and chicken canadian [sic] style” (“Immigrant,” Dead 92). In “Immigrant,” Nortje’s persona bears “a maple leaf in my pocket” (92), but also a sense of division from his South African past: “Where are the mineworkers, the compound Africans, / your Zulu ancestors … ?” (93). After landing near “Vancouver bay” [sic], the persona notes, with sly irony, “As we taxi in / I find I can read the road signs” (94). Nortje’s speaker is a South African immigrant to Canada, but he is also representative of what Paul Gilroy calls “the rhizomorphic, fractal structure of the transcultural, international formation” (Gilroy 4). Yet, where Gilroy drafts a “black Atlantic” of Americanized and Afro-Caribbeanized, European, intellectual “currents,” Nortje maps a “coloured” Anglo-Saxon Atlantic. His is one where South Africa, England, and Canada still constitute, imaginably, the resurrected axis of the Imperial Federation League, founded in London in 1884, and the British Empire League,“which succeeded it in 1896” (Berger 5). Importantly, both groups sought to revivify declining British imperialism by making the white-governed, former colonies of Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa equal partners in the running of the Empire.24 While Nortje’s transatlantic interests trace those of Canadian Imperial Federationists, he shares with them, to cite Carl Berger, only a proto-nationalist “yearning for significance and a desire to obliterate the stigma of colonialism” (259). Nortje also seeks to end the hurt of apartheid. Berger observes in The Sense of Power:

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Studies in the Ideas of Canadian Imperialism, 1867–1914 (1970), Canadian novelist—and “progressive” conservative—Stephen Leacock could state, “I … am an imperialist because I will not be a Colonial” (259). Contrastingly, Nortje’s attitude, in his work, seems to be,“I … am a Commonwealth cum Third World internationalist, because I will not be a provincial, ‘coloured bastard.’” Hence, Nortje also echoes the Imperial Federationists’s waffling sentiment toward England, voicing, “a curious mixture of affection and anxiety, resentment and solicitude” (Berger 260). Like Canadian imperialist George Taylor Denison, then, Nortje goes to England (in 1970) “to warn of degeneracy and collapse, not to pay homage” (260). Following the classic Anglo-Canadian imperialists, Nortje may have viewed London as “the Mecca of the [Anglo-Saxon] race,” but he was also, like them, “repelled by her materialism and parochialism” (261). Every constitutive part of Nortje’s putative “Anglo-Saxon Union” proves repulsive. In Canada, too, despite “lush woods [that] luminesce in green explosions, “rivers bring “pesticides from upland farms” and “the rain-forest still … breathes though / the chimneys of the pulp mills belch sulphur” (“Hope hotel,” Dead 97). If British Columbia is a self-polluting ex-paradise, Toronto is a place merely of “rotten bonanza” (“Quiet desperation,” Dead 100). Briefly back in London in March 1970, Nortje’s persona reflects on Canada as “abortive America” and cites the English metropole as the city that “suckled my exile” (“Return to the city of the heart,” Dead 102–03). Canada is the failed dreamland of immigration, but London, England, becomes, again, Nortje’s favoured citadel of separation. Nevertheless, in just two next-to-last months in Toronto, April–May 1970, Nortje’s poetics metamorphose again, becoming looser. The late poems of Nortje’s career—from his Canadian twilight and his London night—forego the tightly structured, Eliot–Plath stanzas of the previous work, to allow lines to move according to the rhythms of thought. In “Poem: South African,” then, Nortje conjures up the memory of repression: “the man with the whip … beats my / emaciated words back” (Dead 114), as well his status as witness of racial union: “take me as evidence” (114). In “A house on Roncesvalles, Toronto 222,” Nortje’s lines employ shifting margins to relate sociological satire: “a secular poem will note / unpalatable truths: / city of judges with Kapuskasing faces” (Dead 120). These poems prepare the way for the even freer, final poems of London and Oxford.

Port IV Abroad again, no longer a “Canadian,” he eschews the song of the unsettled and the frontier, and, newly returned to the white citadel of

Repatriating Arthur Nortje / Clarke

the ex-empire, begins to articulate, ferociously, an openly race-conscious and political verse. Now, he reconsiders London as a transmission site of reconstituted African/Asian/Arab voices. Consult the extraordinary poem, “Nasser is dead,” of September 1970, which is unlike anything Nortje had written before. His tone recalls the Martinican-born, decolonization theorist Frantz Fanon; his persona supports the black and brown wretched of the earth;25 his politics is direct and progressive; his language is shorn of ornament: I think of the sons of Africa sometimes and my heart bursts. When I think of Chaka or Christ the rebel My heart bursts. (Dead 131)

Like the Chilean Marxist poet Pablo Neruda, Nortje concentrates on the elemental and the immediately physical image: Rusting tanks are the last monuments. Millions mourn a train longer than the Nile: their flood of tears cannot be beaten back, and the rich silt is the salt on women’s cheeks, sweat on the brows of men. (132)

This vivid taxonomy of crucial things—tears, silt, salt, sweat—may descend from Neruda,26 but it foreshadows the similar poetic of Trinidadian-Canadian poet Dionne Brand. Arguably, Nortje’s “Canadian experience,” then, served to hone the poet’s sensibilities and to clarify his interests. “Nasser is dead” became possible only after his composition of “Poem: South African,” the lyric inking his “blackening” in Toronto. By passing through the arboreal limbo of the last of his White dominions, Nortje was prepared to cast his eyes back, hotly, tearfully, on the whole “coloured” world, so that, now, “brown” accommodated “black” and “yellow” (but no longer “white”). In “Natural Sinner,” a London poem of September 1970, Nortje’s persona foregoes speaking “belletristically” (Dead 137), cancelling wasteful or obscurantist “dark romanticism.” Addressing other blacks, Nortje hopes,“For your sake … / invisible has become … the stamp / of birth, of blackness, criminality” (137). Such an evolution is accomplished liberation: “I speak this from experience …” (137). Then, like Fanon, he commands, “speak from me”27 (137), a summons to present and future “decolonizing” readers to take up his “cross” of crossed-race and “criminality,” to use his poetry and poetics as their bullhorn. It is perhaps this summons to which contemporary African-Canadian poets react later in the 1970s and early 1980s when their first volumes of verse appear. Assuredly, lines from Brand’s early poem, “Lament” (1976)—“My country is

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dying, / The land lies fallow. / My children are fading into forced senility, / their minds have been scraped into empty calabash bowls” (20)—recall Nortje’s “Nasser is dead”: “And all over Africa the gourds are broken, / the calabashes empty at one time or another” (Dead 132).28 By leaving Canada for London and by abandoning sob-story obscurity for confrontational “cool,” Nortje becomes both “blacker” and a “prophet” of African-Canadian poetry. Once a coloured bastard, then an exile, then an immigrant, Nortje re-adopts exile in England, but not without having laid the groundwork for his reclamation, long after he would perish and be published, as an African-Canadian poet.

Port V Another South African exile and African-Canadian writer spearheaded the initial Canadianization of Nortje. A “transplanted South African” (Head Canada 142) and author of one of the first African-AfricanCanadian poetry collections, Bushman’s Brew (1974), Harold Head edited the pioneering Canada In Us Now: The First Anthology of Black Poetry and Prose in Canada (1976).29 Here, Head includes three of Nortje’s “Canadian” poems— “Immigrant,”“Hope hotel,” and “A house on Roncesvalles, Toronto 222”—in the anthology, thus presenting Nortje as a writer invested in a—Black—Canadian discourse (111–16).30 Believing that it is his mission to assemble voices to reaffirm “the world-wide commitment of the Black artist as liberator” (“We” 8), and that “this poetry is a return, in spirit, to origins, to Africa where the work of the artist is even today at one with his community” (“We” 8), Head expresses a Marxist Pan-Africanism. Necessarily, then, he “disappears” national boundaries. Decisively, he acclaims Nortje as a “Black” Canadian poet, well before anyone else, and does so explicitly on the basis of only a few of the “Canadian” poems. As a consequence of Head’s willy-nilly repatriation of Nortje, BarbadianCanadian scholar Lorris Elliott, assembling his groundbreaking Bibliography of Literary Writings by Blacks in Canada (1986), includes Nortje in the poetry section, listing both Dead Roots and the three poems published in Canada in Us Now (43). The inclusion of Nortje in Elliott’s bibliography further incarnates the poet’s once-spectral identity as an African-Canadian author, whether or not he desired (or merited) the designation.31

Exit Although Nortje’s work has not been included in any national, African-Canadian anthology since Head’s appeared, its position

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there—and in Elliott’s checklist of extant, “Blacks in Canada” poetry as well as in Afro-British Columbian poet and scholar Wayde Compton’s anthology, Bluesprint: Black British Columbian Literature and Orature (2002)32—means scholars must address Nortje’s position in the African-Canadian canon. To begin, Nortje’s identity as a South African poet is unstable: his Coloured and bastard status, exile experience, immigration to Canada, and the alterations of his poetic there, all set Nortje in a triangular transatlantic orbit, uniting Johannesburg, London, and Toronto. However, his adoption by African-Canadian scholars and poets lodges him firmly within Canadian jurisdiction. The debate over Nortje’s nationality is political. Admittedly, as Robert Lecker says, “the evolution of canonical value projects a displaced expression of nationalist ideology” (Introduction 9). From this perspective, “[t]o find the literature [is] to find the country, and to find successive works of literature that embod[y] the nationalist ideal [is], in effect, to discover the nation’s solidity in time” (Lecker 9). Since every anthology or bibliographical compilation is an exercise in canon formation, Head and Elliott (and Compton, regarding Afro-British Columbian literature), guided by Pan-Africanism in their initial apprehensions of an incipient African-Canadian literature, include Nortje as well as several other only tangential or provisional authors.33 Their selection of Nortje is authoritative, for they read him as an archetypal, AfricanCanadian writer, one whose works replicate the stresses and strains of immigration, racism, exilic angst, nostalgic yearning, and, really, a cold, hard existentialism. Thus, Nortje’s supposedly “un-African,”“hyperintrospective” style (Dameron 160) makes him suitable for a canon—that of African Canada—that exhibits a supposedly “provincial” tendency to be insular. According to Leon Surette, canonical Canadian texts “internalize … cultural stresses” between maintaining “old-country” ties and celebrating the liberatory mysticism of the “new” soil (25). Clearly, Nortje, with his to-and-fro movements between blackness and whiteness, past and present, Canada and England, Eliot/Plath Modernist discombobulation and Fanon/Neruda politicized imagism, emerges as a ripe candidate for inclusion in a national canon torn between “a strong Tory strain of continuity” (Surette 29) and disruptive, “make-it-new” poetics. Yet, all canons are open to challenge. As Dermot McCarthy claims vis-àvis the Canadian version, “[p]erhaps there will never be a Canadian canon but only a tradition of canonic anxiety” (45).34 More to the point, the Englishand French-Canadian canons already enfold texts and writers of questionable “fit.” For example, Louis Hémon, a French writer who immigrated to Canada in 1911 and died there in 1913, was surely more French than he was French-Canadian. Nevertheless, his Maria Chapdelaine: récit du Canada

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français, written in Canada and first published, posthumously, in 1914, achieved canonical status because it was adopted as a celebration of French-Canadian loyalty to the land and to “the Faith.” The example is instructive: Arthur Nortje is the African-Canadian Hémon and Dead Roots the Maria Chapdelaine of African-Canadian literature. Finally, if we exclude Nortje from the African-Canadian literary canon on the grounds that his main concern was South Africa and that he wrote most of his extant poetry in England, we must, to be consistent, ban many other African (and Caribbean) authors from our assembly, especially South African natives. For instance, the now-Canadian Archie Crail and Rozena Maart, once active in anti-apartheid struggles, continue to write solely about South Africa. In contrast, African writers like Paul Tiyambe Zeleza and David Odhiambo, for some years resident in Canada, have moved, at least temporarily, to the United States. Strict citizenship rules for African-African-Canadian writers, in particular, would have the effect of erasing their presence. Rather, our inspiration should be a liberal catholicity. By taking Nortje at his word, reading him as a Canada-oriented settler/immigrant, we induct him into the African-Canadian canon. By viewing ‘Canadianité’ as an identity of identities, we are empowered, to paraphrase the conclusion of Paul de Man’s 1969 essay, “Lyric and Modernity,” to make Nortje—and all other fugitive minority and immigrant poets—into truly Canadian ones.

Notes 1 Versions of this paper were first presented at the Transculturalisms Canada Symposium at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, British Columbia, on February 23, 2002, and at the 2002–03 Colloquium Series exploring “Cultural Appropriation” at Laurentian University, Sudbury, Ontario, on February 28, 2003. I am grateful to the audiences at these venues for their questions and suggestions for improvements. Of course, as the poem’s title hints, the paper is dedicated to Arthur Nortje. 2 This biographical information is drawn from “Nortje, Arthur,” an entry in The Companion to African Literatures (2000), ed. Douglas Killam and Ruth Rowe (180). 3 Although Dead Roots is the text upon which this essay focuses, it is vital to recognize the existence of Anatomy of Dark: Collected Poems of Arthur Nortje (2000), edited by Dirk Klopper. I will take up this authoritative volume of Nortje’s verse in a later version of this paper. 4 I refer to Alan Paton’s novel, Cry, the Beloved Country (1948). 5 The list of these lyrics is found in the Acknowledgements in Nortje’s Dead Roots [xi]. 6 See Charles Dameron (155). 7 One must note here that, whatever his negative emotions toward women and, perhaps, his own mother, it is she, Cecilia Potgeiter, who holds the copyright for Dead Roots [vi] and who, thus, presumably, ensured the posthumous publication of her son’s work.

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8 See Pound’s “A Pact”: “We have one sap and one root— / Let there be commerce between us” (27). 9 For Farred, “dogbodies” represent the “politically insignificant” (57). 10 Significantly too, Nortje is speaking from a geographically ambiguous position, as an unhappy immigrant in a “sister”/”daughter” of the British Empire (or Union of Anglo-Saxon States). 11 This condition begins early in Nortje’s decade-long oeuvre. In the 1964 poem “Separation,” which deals ostensibly with a heterosexual divorce, a racial apartness is intimated: … The darkness surrounds, a black stance at a distance. All life too the inner circle’s apart, further than I can reach at once with the heart. Separation seems all … Only that inward poignance craves nearness and meaning, totally lonely.” (Dead 18) While Nortje’s metaphysical poetic tends to obscurity, the lyric permits a reading of resonant and trenchant racial and emotional exile. 12 In his 1963 poem,“Synopsis,” written in South Africa, Nortje asks two prime questions reflective of his dun and thus “done-in” status: Is the heart’s country all this loneliness? . . . . . . . . . Where have the men gone who fought colour theories, cracked spectrums— back to the prisms?” (Dead 4) 13 In “Song for a Passport” (1965), the poet sings, “O ask me all but do not ask allegiance!” (Dead 30). 14 According to Jacques Alvarez-Pereyre, “Nortje’s poems read like a story: the story of the 1960s, his own story. A story in the form … of fragments of a diary, of letters. Poems in the form of a malaise, of ‘ill-being’” (154). Oui, but what is vital here is the situation of Dead Roots as a temporal travelogue, of dated and post-dated confession(alism). 15 Alvarez-Pereyre observes that Nortje “took the road of exile. Legally, as a student, but it was exile all the same …” (154). 16 Fascinatingly, both T.S. Eliot and Sylvia Plath are American poets who “passed” as British, though only Eliot has been adopted officially into the English-English canon. 17 Alvarez-Pereyre acknowledges that “Like visible signs on the pages of the poems written between 1963 and 1965, these chilling words are constantly repeated: ‘lonely,’‘alien,’ ‘alone,’ ‘silent’ …” (156). 18 To eye Nortje only as a “poet of exile” is to marginalize the half of his corpus written outside of South Africa, for critics like Alvarez-Pereyre either focus on the native Nortje or, in reading the travel lyrics, glean their commentary only on the poet’s roots, that is to say, on race. Thus, Nortje’s oeuvre splits into a pre-lapsarian, semimystical diatribe against tribalism and a post-lapsarian, Beatles cum beatnik odyssey.

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19 20

21

22

23

24

25 26

27

28 29 30

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32

Pre-Highway 61 Revisited, so to speak, Nortje addresses politicized biological—race/sex conundrums; post-Rubber Soul, he turns scatological, speaking of posting notes “from underground urinals” and asking, “Who can distinguish / the dialogue from the graffiti?” (“Message from an LSD eater,” Dead 78). Perhaps the exemplary, English suicide of the U.S. ex-pat Plath influenced the S.A. expat Nortje to die just as narcotically in ‘the Old Country’ .… Plath’s poetry is full of love-hate tensions for a father figure. See “Daddy” (54–56): “There’s a stake in your fat black heart / And the villagers never liked you. / They are dancing and stepping on you. / They always knew it was you. / Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m through” (56). Nortje’s poem, with its air of Nazi brutality and Inquisition torture, and with its mortician’s vocabulary, appears a pastiche of the Plath manner. Compare Nortje’s lines on apartheid South Africa’s rejection of its black children with these lines from Plath’s “Lady Lazarus” (16–19): “I am your opus, / I am your valuable, / The pure gold baby // That melts to a shriek” (18). Nortje’s lines conjure up this moment from Eliot’s “Prufrock”: “No! I am not Prince Hamlet … ; / Am an attendant lord … / Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse …” (14). In his tramps around London’s Trafalgar Square, Nortje would surely have noticed that Canada House and South Africa House—the two nations’ embassies—flank this centre of the old Empire. However, Imperial Federation was not everyone’s “cup of tea” in post-Confederation Canada. In his classic text, The Race Question in Canada (1906), André Siegfried notes that, thanks to the unsatisfactory British handling of the Alaska Boundary dispute in 1903, “Imperialistic dithyrambs were now no longer to be heard in Canada … Canadian imperialism has ceased to be what it was. If no one, absolutely no one, wishes to break the bonds that attach the colony to the mother country, those who seriously wish to draw them closer are few indeed” (218–19). I refer here to the English title of Fanon’s Les Damnées de la terre (1961). Neruda’s “El Canto” is a good example of his commitment to catalogues of elements: “hay que amasar / el barro / hasta que cante, / ensuciarlo con lagrimas, / lavarlo con sangre … (28). This line carries the resonance of Fanon’s conclusion to the English translation of Peau noire, masques blanches (1952), or Black Skin, White Masks (1965): “O my body, make of me always a man who questions!” (232) In a fascinating, chronological coincidence, Nortje abandoned Canada in the same year that Brand arrived: 1970. Head’s anthology was actually the third to appear. See my Introduction to Eyeing the North Star: Directions in African-Canadian Literature (xxvi, note 13). Head’s anthologizing instincts are cosmopolitan. Canada in Us Now includes two Indo-Caribbean writers—Daryl Dean and Harold Sonny Ladoo–and an “Arawak” Guyanese writer—David Campbell—all under the rubric “Black.” Thus, in 1997, introducing my own anthology, Eyeing the North Star: Directions in African-Canadian Literature, I state that I would have included Nortje (along with several other writers), had I “space enough and cash” (xxv). Compton utilizes three poems: “Waiting,”“Immigrant,” and “Hope hotel [sic]” (147– 52). This trio bespeaks Nortje’s experience of British Columbia.

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33 In his Foreword to Bluesprint, Compton avers, “Another reason for this project is to ‘rescue,’ so to speak, some of the texts herein, meaning, at the very least, to bring them into the public consciousness, and into the Canadian and African-Canadian literary canons” (14; my emphasis). 34 McCarthy argues that “Canadian literary history is doomed to remain a prisoner of its founding monomania, endlessly repeating the same story to itself, moving the same or similar canonic units like chess pieces in an irresolvable stalemate” (45). We may anticipate that disputes regarding “African-Canadian” texts and writers will evolve similarly. Some will endorse Nortje, others will not.

Works Cited Acknowledgements. In Nortje, Dead, xi. Alvarez-Pereyre, Jacques. The Poetry of Commitment in South Africa. Trans. Clive Wake. London: Heinemann, 1984. Trans. of Les Guetteurs de L’Aube: Poésie et Apartheid. Grenoble FR: Universitaires de Grenoble, 1979. Baldwin, James. Notes of a Native Son. 1955. New York: Beacon, 1984. The Beatles. Rubber Soul. LP. EMI/Parlophone, 1965. Berger, Carl. The Sense of Power: Studies in the Ideas of Canadian Imperialism, 1867–1914. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1970. Brand, Dionne. “Lament.” In Head, Canada, 20. Clarke, George Elliott. Introduction. Eyeing the North Star: Directions in AfricanCanadian Literature. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1997. xi–xxviii. Compton, Wayde, ed. Bluesprint: Black British Columbian Literature and Orature. Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2002. ———. Foreword. In Compton, Bluesprint, 13–15. Dameron, Charles.“Arthur Nortje: Craftsman for His Muse.” Aspects of South African Literature. Ed. Christopher Heywood. London: Heinemann, 1976. 155–62. De Man, Paul. “Lyric and Modernity.” 1969. Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism. 1971. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983. 166–86. Dylan, Bob. Highway 61 Revisited. LP. Columbia, 1965. Eliot, T.S. “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” 1917. The Waste Land and Other Poems. London: Faber & Faber, 1972. 9–14. ———.“The Waste Land.” 1922. The Waste Land and Other Poems. London: Faber & Faber, 1972. 25–51. Elliott, Lorris. Bibliography of Literary Writings by Blacks in Canada. Toronto: Williams-Wallace, 1986. Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. 1965. Trans. Charles Lam Markmann. New York: Grove, 1967. ———. Les Damnés de la terre. Paris: François Maspero éditeur, 1961. ———. Peau noire, masques blancs. 1952. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1971. Farred, Grant. Midfielder’s Moment: Coloured Literature and Culture in Contemporary South Africa. Boulder CO: Westview Press, 2000.

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Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1993. Head, Harold. Bushman’s Brew. Toronto: Goathair Press, 1974. Head, Harold, ed. Canada in Us Now: The First Anthology of Black Poetry and Prose in Canada. Toronto: NC Press, 1976. ———. “We Have Come.” Introduction. In Head, Canada, 7–12. Hémon, Louis. Maria Chapdelaine: récit du Canada français. 1914. Lausanne: Guilde du livre, 1916. Lecker, Robert. Introduction. Canadian Canons: Essays in Literary Value. Ed. Robert Lecker. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991. 3–16. Lecker, Robert, ed. Canadian Canons: Essays in Literary Value. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991. McCarthy, Dermot.“Early Canadian Literary Histories and the Function of a Canon.” In Lecker, Canadian, 30–45. Neruda, Pablo. New Poems (1968–1970). Ed. and Trans. Ben Belitt. New York: Grove Press, 1972. Nortje, Arthur. Dead Roots. London: Heinemann, 1973. ———. Lonely Against the Light. Grahamstown, South Africa: New Coin, 1973. ———. Anatomy of Dark: Collected Poems of Arthur Nortje. Ed. Dirk Klopper. Pretoria: University of South Africa, 2000. “Nortje, Arthur.” Entry. The Companion to African Literatures. Ed. Douglas Killam and Ruth Rowe. Oxford: James Currey, 2000. 180. Paton, Alan. Cry, the Beloved Country. San Francisco: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1948. Pieterse, Cosmo, ed. Seven South African Poets. London: Heinemann, 1971. Plath, Sylvia. Ariel. London: Faber & Faber, 1965. Pound, Ezra. “A Pact.” Selected Poems of Ezra Pound. New York: New Directions, 1957. 27. Publisher’s Note. In Nortje, Dead, xiii. Sechaba. v.1 (1967)–v. 24 (1990). Dar es Salaam: African National Congress of South Africa. Shakespeare, William. Measure for Measure. 1604. Ed. S. Nagarajan. New York: Signet, 1964. Siegfried, André. The Race Question in Canada. 1907. Toronto: Macmillan Company of Canada, 1978. Trans. of La Canada, les deux races: problèmes politiques contemporains. Paris: Librairie Armand Colin, 1906. Surette, Leon. “Creating the Canadian Canon.” In Lecker, Canadian, 17–29.

III the transcultural body / le corps transculturel

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carol stos

I Write My Self: The Female Body as a Site of Transculturation in the Short Stories of Carmen Rodríguez

When she realized that she was surrounded by nothingness, she wanted to hug her own body, only now she realized that her body was the hole and the hole was her. The only clear thing in the midst of total darkness was her voice, trapped in her throat, trying to remember how to cry out for help … but, in what language? (Rodríguez 35)

n his work Cuban Counterpoint: Tobacco and Sugar (1947) ethnographer Fernando Ortiz coined the technical term “transculturation” to describe more accurately, as he perceived it, the processes that had led to new cultural realities in Cuba. Previous expressions in use such as “cultural exchange,” “acculturation,” “diffusion,” “migration or osmosis of culture,” and other similar ones he deemed inadequate to the task of explaining the rich and vital complexity of contemporary Cuban culture (Malinowski vii). Transculturation does imply an active, reciprocal, mutual exchange between cultures, a process of integration and give and take that generates yet another process that Ortiz calls “neoculturation.” Nevertheless, he clearly recognizes the darker elements in what he acknowledges as the “painful process of transculturation.”

I

I am of the opinion that the word transculturation better expresses the different phases of the process of transition from one culture to another because this does not consist merely in acquiring another culture, which is what the English word acculturation really implies, but the process also necessarily

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involves the loss or uprooting of a previous culture, which could be defined as deculturation. (Ortiz 102)

Ortiz introduces and explains his neologism in the section of Cuban Counterpoint in which he briefly describes the historical trajectory of the intricacies of Cuban culture. It is the description of a cruel and violent process: one indigenous group suffered the destruction of its way of life and disappeared because of an inability to acculturate, Spaniards “torn loose” from the Peninsula collided with a new cultural situation, Africans brought as slaves saw their “own cultures destroyed and crushed” (98). The layering of so many different peoples and cultures on the island “at times [gave] rise to the most terrible clashes” (99) and resulted in all those arriving on Cuban soil, by design or against their will, experiencing and living “in the same state of dissociation” (102). It is in this state of dissociation, which both defines and is defined by transculturation, that the exile, the refugee, the immigrant inevitably finds herself— if she can be said to find herself at all. As the result of the union of two cultures, she is, as Ortiz says, the offspring that “always has something of both parents but is always different from each of them” (103). Dissociation and difference: these are the conditions and results of a never-ending process of transculturation, the lived reality of many of the protagonists in Carmen Rodríguez’s short stories. Carmen Rodríguez describes herself as a Chilean-Canadian writer. A political and social activist in Chile, forced to flee after the 11 September 1973 coup, she has intimately experienced the painful process of transculturation, first as an exile, then as an immigrant. A Canadian citizen since 1979, her short fiction is informed by a wealth of personal experience. Memory, often seduced by nostalgia or sharpened by the need to bear witness and testify, is a constant and often implacable companion. Physical, emotional, and linguistic estrangement, distance, and struggle are the tensions that resonate in her narrative as they resonate for every displaced, deracinated person. They define the existence of everyone in that state of dissociation of being in and between two cultures, acted upon by the persistence of the past within the hegemony of the present. The fact that Rodríguez has transformed her private narrative into the public narrative of her collection of short stories is the act that both grounds her and gives her agency. Through the process of writing her stories (her story) she has, indeed, as Hélène Cixous exhorted, written her self and, in so doing, become subject as well as object, writing herself into the fabric of each of her cultures as both thread and weaver, putting herself “into the text— as into the world and into history—by her own movement” (196).

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Translation/transcreation De Cuerpo Entero and and a body to remember with are the similar but not identical collections of almost the same stories in Spanish and in English, both published in 1997, one in Chile, the other in Canada.1 In both collections Rodríguez explores the political and personal dimensions of exile and immigration. Specifically, she writes the female experience of resistance, exile and immigration, situating her accounts of the difficult process of transculturation on the body, each story adding another woman’s body, another woman’s voice to the tale. The duality of these two editions, one for Chileans and the other for Canadians, creates a bridge between the two countries and two cultures, but while the same protagonists may cross that bridge, their experiences and their stories cannot be said to be perceived in precisely the same manner on both sides, nor, it can be argued, are Rodríguez’s objectives entirely the same in either publication. The title of each edition comes from the same sentence in the same story. The title of the English-language Canadian edition is taken, word for word, from a sentence in the story “a balanced diet”: “I do have a mind and a body to remember with” (my emphasis 159). In the Chilean edition, the sentence from “una dieta balanceada” is essentially the same—“Tengo una mente y un cuerpo entero con los cuales recordar” (my emphasis 23)—but the phrase in the title has been altered to “de cuerpo entero,” an expression that means “full-length,” as in a portrait or in a mirror. In both titles the body is the focal point, and the cover illustrations of each edition further emphasize that it is the female body in particular. In the Canadian edition, additionally, memory is named a function of the body, and the force of memory (that which one cannot, will not, or must not forget) becomes an integral factor in the process of transculturation that most of Rodríguez’s characters experience. The Canadian title tells us in no uncertain terms that the body will remember; memory will manifest itself in the flesh. It is as though the title in English evokes the physical reality of the immigrant, who, after all, is here with her memories and not there among the artefacts of her past. The Spanish title initially directs our gaze at the image, the reflection of the body; the suggestion of a duplication or a specular image contributes to the particular sense of otherness experienced by the exile or immigrant. However memory, while not a part of the title, is no less a powerful presence in the Chilean edition as well, although its function is distinct. In De Cuerpo Entero, as we shall see, remembrance as the conscious and willed activity of not-forgetting is a political act that Rodríguez uses to focus her Chilean readers’ attention.2 The phrase “de cuerpo entero” has another meaning as well; applied to

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a person it signifies “fully” or “without reserve.” This meaning is suggestive of the fervour of the Chilean political and social activists who were forced into exile because of their commitment to the resistance movement against Pinochet and responds to Rodríguez’s particular objectives for the Chilean edition of her narratives. This subtle difference between the two titles is even more evident in the respective cover illustrations. Both feature the image of a female body, but in dramatically different visual representations. The covers exemplify the differences in the representation of reality experienced by Chilean exiles, refugees, and immigrants in Canada as it is perceived by readers in each of the two cultures: the corporeality of the illustration on the Canadian edition contrasts with the insubstantiality of the images on the Chilean collection. Each features the body of a woman, but in the Canadian version it is a richly coloured illustration, in the Chilean, a black-and-white photograph. In the photo we are presented with a doubly mediated image: a slender young woman stands with her bared back to us, solemnly looking at her reflection in a large cheval-glass, clasping to her chest a long, dark swath of cloth wrapped loosely around her body. She is engaged—or immobilized—in her own reciprocal gaze. There is the suggestion of a certain vulnerability or incompleteness because she is not dressed. Who is it that she sees in the mirror? As she gazes at her reflection, is she—the exile, the refugee, the immigrant—transfixed, in the Lacanian sense, in the specular stage of méconnaissance? Which one of her selves is looking at whom? Which image is the most true? Where does her reality begin, to what culture does she belong, is the image she sees a reflection of what she only believes to be real? This photo, of a real woman, albeit unknown,3 serves to embody the disquiet, dislocation, and disorientation of the protagonists of De Cuerpo Entero and emphasizes, for the Chilean reader, the effects of the deculturation that is an inevitable part of the process of transculturation. In the Canadian edition, however, the woman in the illustration is a very substantial figure in a snug, white sundress that reveals her wide bronzed shoulders. Barefoot, on one knee, with downcast eyes, she has strong, almost muscular arms and legs; her breasts, belly, and thighs are undeniably female. She is connected to the earth in the act of planting or pulling up a row of small green plants. Is she tearing loose her roots or transplanting tender new shoots? Is it her past life she is pulling out or her present that she is nurturing? The ambiguity of her gesture reflects the experiences of an exile or immigrant, but this act of cultivation—in contrast to the stillness of the woman in the photo on the Chilean cover—implies that she has become part of a new, transcultured reality, one in which she is engaged, and where she is an agent,

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as opposed to the spectral alienation of the Chilean image. She is a visual metaphor for every strong, resilient woman who has managed to survive and endure in no matter what circumstances. How is it that such divergent presentations resulted from what one supposes to be one text? As Rodríguez explains in the Foreword to and a body to remember with, most of the stories, or most parts of them, were originally written in Spanish, and she relied on translators to help her with the English versions. Eventually, she began the process of translating them herself, but quickly realized that she was (re)creating the text: “Back and forth I went, many times,” she writes, “until I felt that both tips of my tongue and my two sets of ears were satisfied with the final product” (13–14).4 What she has done, in effect, is to transcreate her work, to use Hiromi Goto’s apt term.5 Carmen Rodríguez discovered that self-translation is a transformative experience. The result is not a copy, but rather an other work. Christine Roulston has observed that “[t]he paradox of translation is that it can efface otherness or difference, presenting itself as if it were the original”; she goes on to ask: “How, then, can a translated text be read to include both languages or at least the echo of the language that is not there? Is reading a translated text necessarily a reductive experience, one that never quite captures the original, one that is always in the position of copying or mimicking?” (39). Rodríguez’s Chilean and Canadian editions of her stories demonstrate that neither is a copy of the other. Goto’s idea of “transcreation” succinctly captures all facets of this particular process that, of necessity, includes the essence of the three meanings of the Latin noun translatio (f.)—a transferring or transporting; a metaphor or trope; a shifting, diversion, exchange (Roulston 39)—along with the dynamic and original act of creation. It is an even more profoundly descriptive term when considered within the context of transculturation. Unlike Marjorie Agosín, for whom “existing in two languages means ‘being split in half and belonging to no one’” (qtd. in Courtivron 5), Rodríguez embraces her duality, the “hyphenated existence” in which she lives and works “on a teeter-totter, moving back and forth between two cultures and languages” (14). She has realized, as does Sylvia Molloy,“the impossibility of being in only one space, only one language” (69). In addition, Rodríguez has determined that it is precisely this duality which validates both her existence and her agency in her personal process of transculturation: it “is important to use the hyphen of my bilingualism, my biculturalism, the hyphen of my double identity as a bridge, so at least I can invite other Canadians to read my work … what I have to tell is not only in the content of the stories themselves, but also in the process of their bilingual, bicultural creation” (14).6 What she has to

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tell is not an easy story, and while both her Chilean and her Canadian reader will find names, places, feelings, and people with whom she can identify or, at the very least, recognize, neither will feel completely at ease.7 As the transcreated products of Rodríguez’s experience of transculturation, these two editions are—to paraphrase Ortiz—creations that have something of both her cultures but are inevitably different from each of them and, perforce, each other. Apart from the obvious differences between the titles and the cover illustrations, there are other textual and organizational differences as well. De Cuerpo Entero lacks the Foreword of the English edition and has only 13 short stories, while and a body to remember with has 14. In the Foreword, Rodríguez briefly explains the creative process she experiences as a self-translator, an explanation undoubtedly more relevant and meaningful to her English-language readers, since she originally wrote in Spanish, but which, by its absence in the Chilean edition, has the curious effect of making De Cuerpo Entero less obviously a product of her bicultural and transnational inspiration, despite the Canadian content and context of the majority of the stories. Both editions are prefaced with a quotation from Lydia Kwa’s The Colours of Heroines8 and another from Pablo Neruda’s Canto general.9 Kwa’s words summon the presence of memory and Neruda’s demand that memory always be activated against past injustice. Rodríguez will frame her protagonists’ bodily experiences of resistance, exile, immigration, and transculturation in both editions from within the memories of the past. But for the Chilean reader, the evocation of the 11 September 1973 coup, including its prelude and aftermath, will no doubt resonate more strongly as the stories’ thematic centre, their traumatic core. That, after all, is one of Rodríguez’s implicit purposes as writer and activist. The political connotations of the Spanish title—the full and unreserved engagement of “de cuerpo entero”—become even more significant within this context. The short story excluded from the Chilean edition exemplifies this difference of national focus and perception. “accented living” is, perhaps, the most conventional story: a straightforward narrative of loss, nostalgia, the difficulties of starting anew. For the Canadian reader, in an officially bilingual, multicultural nation built on family histories of immigration, the very title suggests the issues faced by those whose original culture and language interfere with the shaping of their imagined sense of belonging and their day-to-day participation in Canadian society. For the Chilean, perhaps rooted in a more essentialized national identity, this story would have no such personal connotations, nor pluricultural significance. No doubt this is why “accented living” was excluded from the Chilean edition.10

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The order of the stories differs in each edition as well, responding to the different target audiences. The most significant change, it seems to me, is in the different choices for the first and last stories in each edition. In the Chilean edition, “una dieta balanceada: risas y llanto en la casa en el aire” is the first story. The same story, “a balanced diet: laughing and crying in the house in the air,” is the last in the Canadian collection. The storyline recounts a first return to Chile, some 20 years after the coup, by a woman who had fled with her family to Canada. How the story is received, however, will depend on the cultural background of the readers. For Chileans, “una dieta balanceada,” as the first story of the collection, locates them squarely in the Chile that has not only endured and survived but remade itself despite the years under Pinochet. The political dimensions of the past, with all the violence, terror, torture, disappearances, and assassinations that characterized the brutality of the military regime, are omnipresent in the letters and memories of the two protagonists, Laura and Mireya, as is the resistance movement. It is obvious that they always will be; as Laura states unequivocally: “Forgetting is not an option” (159), recalling Neruda’s exhortation to arm oneself with memory against injustice. However, it is just as obvious that there have been many changes for the better in Chile: formerly blacklisted exiles can indeed now safely return to the country (Laura and her family among them); the economic situation has improved; freedom of association and the right to organize and to protest are now possible. Despite the ominous continuing presence of Pinochet as commander of the armed forces two decades after the coup, Chile is on the path to democratic political, economic, and social reform. But what is most significant for Laura and Mireya, as survivors of Pinochet’s brutality, is the victory of resilient human spirit “because obviously the military did not count on this good memory, this love: they did not count on this immense desire to live, this propensity to laughter” (165). Laura’s memories also encompass her experiences in Canada, and it is the story of her life, first as a refugee, then as an immigrant, that introduces the Chilean reader to the fragmented experiences of exile in Canada. Laura’s life in Canada, by contrast, seems far more insubstantial, far less immediate than the reality of the past and present Chile to which she has been able to return. The Chilean reader will undoubtedly relate more closely to this story’s remembrance of social and political activism and resistance to terror than to Laura’s account of her experiences in exile in Canada. The Canadian edition, on the other hand, begins with “black hole,” a story that plunges the English-language reader into the alarming state of disorientation and dissociation experienced by immigrants. It is a necessary shock.

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Rodríguez must create, for her Canadian reader, this feeling of complete and utter dislocation. Clearly, Rodríguez’s main focus in this first story of the Canadian edition is the immigrant experience in Canada, not the political reasons that inspired the exodus from Chile. Even before leaving for Canada, Estela de Ramírez is lost: when she tries to visualize Canada there is simply nothing there, her head is “filled with a hole called Canada” (20). On one level, as a woman thrown into exile, Estela’s inability to visualize her destination powerfully dramatizes the uncertainty and fear created by her forced relocation. On another level, the description of “a black hole called Canada” is a powerful metaphor of exile as abyss, but more specifically in the context of this story, it evokes a country whose name calls up no image, whose geography resists identification, whose existence cannot be imagined. Although Estela and her family do succeed in remaking their life in Canada, the deculturation she must embrace in order to function successfully in her new society is only superficially balanced by her apparent acculturation. The mutual cultural exchange that ideally should take place at some vital and life-affirming level does not succeed in her case. In the end, faced by the prospect of finally being able to return to Chile, Estela finds that she simply does not exist. She is someone who can find her self in neither place: her body has become that black hole, the endless abyss that claims the exile invisibly suspended between her past and her present realities. Although each collection ends with a different story, both seem to close on a positive note, even though the effect is not precisely the same. The final story of each edition is set in Canada, with the focus on the immigrant experience. In one, however, the process of cultural transition seems more or less successful and complete; in the other, it is still open-ended and tentative. In the final story of the Chilean edition, the memories of the coup, as well as the subsequent hardships of immigration and exile, are still in evidence, but they are subsumed by the more immediate issues and personal problems of quotidian reality. “rompiendo el hielo” (“breaking the ice”) is a very Canadian story: three immigrant women, one from Chile, one from the Azores, and one from Italy, talk about their lives in Canada. It is a story that evokes the nature of Canadian multiculturalism, the difficult process of adopting, adapting to, or even just tolerating new and different cultural and societal mores. Silvia, Rosa, and signorina Carmella, each at a different stage of personal transition, must learn to be flexible about long-held ideals and cultural beliefs. In this process, they come to redefine their subjectivity and to reconstruct a new sense of community. For the Chilean reader, “rompiendo el hielo” indicates that it is possible to make a new life elsewhere, that the transformative cultural exchange that every immigrant must suffer can be a self-affirming experi-

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ence, but also an ongoing process with no clear point of completion. The positive effect is thus nuanced by a hint of uncertainty about the future. The English-language edition, on the other hand, ends with “a balanced diet,” a story that suggests a sense of equilibrium. For Canadians, the horror of the Pinochet regime is foreign history, the resistance movement perhaps scarcely known, all of it far removed from any personal reality. Although the protagonist Laura relives her deeply painful memories, the greater effect on the Canadian reader, I believe, will be the impression that she looks to her past only in order to make sense of her future; Laura learns that life does continue elsewhere. She and her family have learned to live and love again; they have adapted successfully to a new and different existence in Canada. For Canadian readers, Laura’s personal triumphs underline the positive aspects of her experiences in exile. There is a sense of completion, a sense that the process of transculturation has “worked” since Laura appears equally at ease in both her cultures. Hers is, indeed, “a balanced diet.” In sum, the two parts of Rodríguez’s “bilingual, bicultural creation” have dual foci and elicit different responses from Chilean and Canadian readers. De Cuerpo Entero, using the memories of resistance from within the experiences of exile and immigration, urges the Chilean reader to participate in the political act of not-forgetting. In and a body to remember with those same memories are what colour and shape the experiences of exile, immigration and, ultimately, the degree of transculturation suffered or embraced by the protagonists.

Writing the body Carmen Rodríguez’s protagonists are all women. In some of these short stories we are given many intimate details about their thoughts and feelings, their lives, and personal histories; in others, we never hear their name or learn their fate. What is common to each story is Rodríguez’s experiential use of the female body—the fullness of the body, its terrible fragmentation, or the body as void—to express the traumatic experiences of resistance, exile, immigration, and transculturation. Traditionally, woman has been rendered, eroticized, and immobilized in bodily fragments as an object of male desire through the use of synecdoche or metonymy. Rodríguez’s appropriation of synechdoche is a technique used by many other 20th-century Latin American women writers who fragment the female body in an effort to repossess it, to free it (and themselves), and to open it up, as Sylvia Molloy notes, to “a plurality of readings” (117). In “Female Textual Identities: The Strategies of Self-Figuration” Molloy points out that

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[t]urn-of-the-century representation of woman, in Latin America and elsewhere, is haunted by dismemberment. In a frenzy of synechdoque, (male) poets will exalt a woman’s hair, her eyes, her feet, one foot, a glove, a stocking, as loci of desire. Only through the mediation of the fragment can the female body be apprehended and coveted in its plenitude. (116)

But, she argues, writers like Delmira Agustini, Gabriela Mistral, Alfonsina Storni, and Cristina Peri Rossi, among many others, deliberately fragment the female body and shatter woman’s voice in an act of reappropriation, not only to resist the recomposition of “the fetishized fragments according to one, central interpretation, that of woman as vehicle of male desire” (117) but also to involve the female body “in a textual transaction where mutilations and fragmentation are cleverly used not to subdue the other but to portray the self ” (117). Vicky Unruh, for example, discusses Norah Lange’s “inventive art of anatomy” (91) in her discursos, a technique through which “Lange casts the clinical eye of the performative synechodoque to ostend a select physical detail … or a psychological one … as the point of departure for a more profound character inquest” (83). In Carmen Rodríguez’s work, the fragmentation of these women’s bodies creates an awareness of the female body, not as object or abstraction but as a physical presence through which the transformative forces of culture manifest themselves. I would argue that this dismemberment does not signify mutilation; rather it is a particular and creative use of synecdoche through which the fragments of a woman’s body become a means of representing the self and inscribing a powerful, plural female corporeality in these narratives of resistance, exile, and transculturation. Rodríguez rarely describes her protagonists fully, most often revealing them in bits and pieces. Cristina, for example, in “the mirror,” takes mute shape as “fragile form, Cristina, faltering breath, Cristina, child’s face with huge frightened eyes” (39); “a silhouette, wrapped in a too-big coat, feet dragging between Juanita and Miguel” (41), she exists only as “punished skin,” eyes, sores, “ [a] dry, clenched mouth” (41). She has been tortured by the military to the brink of that crucial moment “when the spirit separates from the body and floats away” (39). This fragmentary description of Cristina’s body— the remains of an otherwise almost lost or destroyed whole—mimetically reproduces the damage she has suffered through torture while simultaneously alluding to and reclaiming, through the synecdoche, the wholeness of the fragmented body. Because it is textually dismembered, we are made more intensely aware of both its fragility and its recuperative powers. In other stories the deliberate physical fragmentation of the female body foregrounds the cultural and psychic dislocation and dissociation experi-

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enced by displaced and dispossessed persons. In the most extreme example, Estela de Ramírez loses herself bit by bit, her body finally imploding into a black nothingness that first began when she had to leave Chile and discovered that she was incapable of imagining Canada. The impossibility of being in only one space and one language, as Molloy describes it, becomes unbearable once she and her family are permitted to return to Chile. Her fragmentation is, ironically, complete: her body becomes the void, the space between her two cultures. Estela’s crisis and consequent loss of her transcultured self—physically as well as psychically—dramatically exemplify, as Shirley Geok-lin Lim explains, “this loss of traditional social identity … anomie, the condition in which individuals lose their traditional points of references and do not know who they are, where they belong, what their position and role in life are” (qtd. in Ty 95). In other instances, the deliberate absenting of self from the physicality of the body is the ultimate form of resistance and survival. The protagonist of “i sing, therefore i am,” so entirely physically present at the beginning of the story as she births her son,11 escapes from torture by leaving her body: “She opened her eyes and from the ceiling she saw a naked woman, sitting astride a uniformed man’s legs; the man’s fly was open. His hands were kneading the woman’s butt and his mouth was biting her nipples. The woman looked familiar, but she was missing her right leg” (55). By splitting herself apart, she is able to rescue her self. She does not escape entirely intact, for her right leg has been amputated, and thus the body that goes into exile in Canada is already literally dismembered in part, even before she begins the process of transculturation that will culturally take still more away from her. But, on the plane, she begins to knit the sleeves missing from a sweater she had been making before her capture. Now, adding the sleeves/arms to the sweater, she regains her agency and metaphorically makes a body—if not hers—whole once more. This intentional, self-imposed fragmentation followed by the re-creation of the body/sweater emphasizes the resilience of the protagonist and her power to repossess her body and her self. In “3 d,” however, the fragmentation is irrevocable: the protagonist chooses to commit suicide after she sees her torturer on a Vancouver city street and knows that he recognizes her. She removes her self completely, abandoning her body in order to reclaim her autonomy. It is significant that only in this story does Rodríguez give us a more complete detailed physical description of the protagonist rather than evoking her through the synecdoche technique she uses in other stories.12 It is as if the moment of death fixes her image; she will suffer no more change, there will be no further transformation.

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In some of these short stories, it is not only the body that is fragmented; several of the protagonists lose their voice or can speak only with difficulty. Estela de Ramírez opens her mouth to speak when she arrives in Canada but “nothing would come out” (21). At the end, her voice is all that remains of her, but it is trapped and confused, inarticulate because it does not know what language to use to call for help (35). Her daughters too are rendered speechless, since they have forgotten how to speak Spanish; the shock of exile and the effects of transculturation have stolen their speech. The Ramírez women are the worst case; others manage despite the problems. The young woman of “3 d,” who cannot even scream when she sees her torturer in Vancouver, does not speak, although her wrists, which “opened up like gaping mouths spewing forth a red liquid” (97), do so metaphorically and defiantly. The protagonist of “i sing, therefore i am” never utters a sound except to sing, “with all her soul,” a single line from Violeta Parra—“Gracias a la vida que me ha dado tanto” [Thanks to life that has given me so much]—on two occasions: once for courage in the mountains (53) and again to resist against informing on her compañeros (55). The protagonist of “trespass,” a member of the Chilean resistance necessarily silenced by the danger implicit in her activities, communicates voicelessly in her mind with her comadre in Vancouver (79). The trauma of torture, exile, alienation, and fear for one’s life can make speech difficult, dangerous, or impossible at times, but also, as Rodríguez shows, fiercely defiant. By deliberately shattering these women’s voices, as she fragments the female body, Rodríguez makes them even more powerful and effective. They are charged with an even greater urgency because they are not whole, because they are lost and must be recovered (though not always), because they can sound their presence silently or only in the most abbreviated fashion. The reader hears much more than what these characters actually say: their voices— or lack of them—resound in the silences created by time and distance, by the twin realities of the forces of the past and the present, by the slip and slide of cultural difference and otherness. It is through Rodríguez’s technique of focusing on a part rather than the whole that she creates a more profound awareness of presence through absence. Physical absence and presence—the loss of the body and its recovery—are combined in other stories as a means of communicating the effects of immigration and transculturation. In “the labyrinths of love,” the narrator returns to Chile to nurse her terminally ill elderly mother. Separated by the geographical and personal distances of 20 years of exile in Canada, the narrator reconnects with her mother through the intense physical intimacy of caring for her, being able, as she explains,

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to wash the folds of skin, the nooks of flesh, the secret darkness of a body that she surrendered to me with no hesitation. She let me look at her, smell her, touch her, turn her over, unfold her, open her, feel her warmth on the tip of my fingers, wash away her odours with my soapy hands, moisten her with tears, know that she was soft, fallible, vulnerable, mortal. (139)

This very tactile description calls to mind the way a mother would bathe a child and the profound trust that connects the care-giver and the one cared for. It can be read as a metaphor for the rediscovery of oneself, the physical oneness with the other, unique to a woman who bears a child. That the narrator reconnects with her mother—her origin—in this very physical and intimate way is symbolic of reintegrating herself bodily in her roots, her culture. More profoundly painful than the immediacy of death are the two decades the children and grandchildren have spent living in another country, speaking another language, learning other values (143). The sorrow of exile and emigration invades and eats away at those family members who, left behind, experience their own particular cultural dislocation because of the absence of the next generations. It is now, paradoxically, through the fullness of the body and its presence that the protagonists most acutely experience loss and longing, the pain of absence and exclusion, as well as the final opportunities to renew connections and relationships, even if those too are to be imminently severed again by death. Rodríguez’s protagonists most dramatically communicate the pain and disorientation of exile and transculturation through the intense awareness of the body, all the parts and sensations of its female physicality. Yolanda of “bodily yearnings”13 literally remembers with her body. The physical memory of an illicitly terminated pregnancy when she was still a student in Chile seems to be a metaphor of the immigrant journey and experience: She washes her face with cold water and sits on the toilet sighing and humming, her hands extended over her womb, as if wanting to protect a wound, contain a pain. As if her whole memory were hidden in that warm and dark cavity, home to old mysterious inhabitants, spirits that cross borders, travel through entire continents, learn other languages. (122–23)

As Yolanda’s memories resound through her body, her memories of Chile are inextricably mixed with her physical memories of past love affairs, the discovery of her pregnancy, and the terrible pain of her abortion. Through the memory of the abortion, and with this image of the womb as locus of pain and trauma, Rodríguez metaphorically evokes the turmoil of Chile’s recent past and the termination of future hopes and dreams.

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In Vancouver, Yolanda enters a love affair with a man who describes himself as “Canadian to the marrow” (121), John McDonald, whose name evokes that of the first Prime Minister of Canada. It is as though, through their physical closeness, she wishes to become tangibly part of his Canadian cultural reality. Yet their first intimate encounter is inextricably connected to her past and her bodily sense of loss and betrayal. Both the abortion in Chile and the consummation of the affair take place on kitchen tables. Thus Rodríguez links the trauma of the first event, when “[her] back recoiled like a snail on the humid, cold surface” (124), to Yolanda’s yearning for security and sanctuary through John: “The surface of the table welcomes her back. Her mind gets ready to resist but her body surrenders to the embrace of this Canadian …” (128). Yolanda seeks to physically recuperate her past in her present through her love affair with John. My beloved John: I recognize my mother in that long, dark, hollow of your back. Let me wrap myself in the quiet of your skin and rest. The world is so big, it’s so cold out there. Carry me inside your house of murmurs and bones, the only one I have. My country existed such a long time ago; the blue of the ocean, the height of the snow, so far away. Southern rain, Macul in the fall, Valdivia river pushing life towards Niebla, Mancera. My love, I have wanted you for so long, searched for you for so long. Now I’m here, in your corridor, in you. Don’t let me leave. (128–29)

Yolanda’s letter to John seems metaphorically to recreate the geography of Chile “in that long, dark, hollow of [his] back,” the “corridor” that Yolanda does not want to leave, the image of mother/land that she recognizes and longs for. It is only through the fullness of her body that Yolanda can re/imagine her self and her place. The problem is that her body resists locating that act of redemption in Canada. Yolanda and John marry and, for a while, the act of love saves her. It seems that she is no longer in unfamiliar territory: her husband’s body, that human geography so different from her own, becomes known to her, and she becomes part of it, as “[t]he rhythm of love takes her to explosions of happiness, even peace” (134). But it is only a temporary respite. This description of Yolanda’s yearning to claim her transcultured identity through inhabiting the only house she can imagine calls to mind Luce Irigaray’s meditations on sexual identity and the man/woman relationship in Elemental Passions: In excess, that is where I become you, and excess never belongs to itself. It vanishes as soon as there is any thought of seizing it, circumscribing it, understanding it. Your body is never mine,…

I Write My Self / Stos

In any case, how could it be mine? Only by giving up my own. Appropriating the body of the other means being deprived of one’s own. If your body is mine, I can no longer take pleasure in it—in not having a body. (59)

Yolanda cannot give up her body, her self. All that she is and that which she may be is communicated through her body, and her body can not forget or set aside its past. When she remembers—and she always remembers—“[s]he submerges her whole body in this yearning for the past” (134). Yolanda has successfully accomplished everything that one would think an immigrant must, in order to make a new life, to fit in, to become part of a new culture— found a job, learned to speak English, made friends in Vancouver, fallen in love with and married a Canadian. And yet, her body never completely lets her live in Canada; it always remembers Chile and serves as the conduit for the “wandering, transgressing phantoms”—other lovers, people, places, and things from her Chilean past—who will insist on invading her present existence. Her bodily yearnings can be satisfied only by returning to Chile. Describing Yolanda’s struggle to come to terms with the duality of the past and present of her two cultures through the fullness of all her bodily experiences, Rodríguez creates an intense awareness of the female body as a site of the painful experiences of transculturation. Carmen Rodríguez’s short stories explore the themes familiar to the literature of immigration and exile: fear, grief, and confusion, dislocation, alienation, the loss of identity, the conflict between the past and the present. What differentiates her work from others in the same genre is that her protagonists literally embody the process. Through the themes of the fullness of the female body, the body as absence or void, or the fragmentation of the bodies of her female characters, their past experiences, along with the daily exigencies of the transcultured present, are vividly and powerfully re-membered.

Notes 1 The English version was nominated for the City of Vancouver Book Award in 1998 and the Spanish edition was awarded an Honorary Mention in the City of Santiago Literary Awards, Chile’s most prestigious awards for a single publication. 2 Rodríguez’s political frustrations and activist literary agenda are clear: “‘To this day Chileans are suffering from collective amnesia. The country is now a model of how things can change and they don’t want to remember how it happened. They don’t want any rocking of the boat’” (“Carmen Rodríguez”). 3 In the Agradecimientos Rodríguez thanks Carmen Aguirre for posing for the photo and Alejandra Aguirre for taking it. Only in the Acknowledgements of the English edition does she explain that Carmen and Alejandra are her daughters. 4 Isabelle de Courtivron cogently frames the dilemma bilingual writers face each time they write: “Being bilingual. What does it mean? Living in two languages, between two

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languages, or in the overlap of two languages? What is it like to write in a language that is not the language in which you were raised? To create in words other than those of your earliest memories, so far from the sounds of home and childhood and origin? To speak and write in a language other than the one you once believed held the seamless connection between words and things? Do you constantly translate yourself, constantly switch, shift, alternate not just vocabulary and syntax but consciousness and feelings?” (1) In a review cited by the Canadian editors, Goto refers to Rodríguez’s “finely transcreated stories” (Rodríguez, and a body [1]). It has been suggested that Rodríguez’s ability to accept her duality, in contrast to Agosín’s conflictive relationship with her two languages, could be a response to Canadian multiculturalism, which acknowledges and welcomes difference as opposed to the U.S. “melting pot” where Agosín’s work has developed. Before one even begins to read, the complacency of each reader’s linguistic and cultural expectations is initially disrupted and subverted by the same technique of “breaking the rules” of capitalization according to the conventions of each language. In Spanish, one capitalizes only the first letter of the first word in the title (with the exception of proper nouns), but Rodríguez has chosen to capitalize the first letter of all the words in the title of De Cuerpo Entero. In the index and on the first page of each story, all titles are written entirely in capital letters. Conversely, in the English version, the title of the collection and all other story titles, wherever they appear, are written entirely in lower case. While these departures from the typographical norm are not unique or unusual among either Canadian or Latin-American authors, I would argue that here they have a subtly unsettling effect that both anticipates the anxiety of difference and exercises the power to resist or subvert a status quo. “Fragments of memory. But the brevity, / like a gasp of air quickly held, the / body slow to let go” (qtd. in a body to remember with 7). The lengthy Neruda epigraph includes these key lines, first in Spanish, then in English in a body to remember with: “Por eso te hablaré de estos dolores que quisiera apartar, / te obligaré a vivir una vez más entre sus quemaduras” (9). “That’s why I will speak to you about those pains that I would like to push aside, / I will force you to live once again in their burning wounds” (10). A query to the author about why this particular story was not included in the Chilean edition prompted the explanation that the Chilean editor felt that it was a rather “sentimental” story that did not add anything new to the collection, especially if one considered a Spanish-speaking reading public (email June 29, 2004). “She pushed with everything: skin, teeth, fingernails. Soaked in ocean water, she felt a tidal wave open at her roots and fall loose, head down. Her voice called for her mother, but she was answered by the bloodstained cry of her son, dark and perfect roundness” (53). “Between the desk and the bed lies the body of a young woman. Her hair is long, silky, black; her skin is pale, her eyes are green, barely open. Her thin lips are twisted into a faint grimace. She is wearing jeans, a sky-blue hand-knitted sweater, and black leather boots. Her hands are like a child’s, from the bitten nails down to the tiny wrists” (97). In its original Spanish, “bodily yearnings” is titled “fantasmas trashumantes,” which literally means “migrating phantoms/ghosts.” I think it is significant that in

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the Spanish edition the focus is on those ghosts of Yolanda’s past who accompany her to Canada and force her to decide to return to Chile, whereas in the Canadian edition the title shifts the focus to Yolanda’s physical craving to belong to that familiar and safe place that is “home.”

Works Cited “Carmen Rodríguez. and a body to remember with.” Arsenal Pulp Press. 25 May 2004. http://www.arsenalpulp.com/select_author.php?author=99 Cixous, Hélène. “The Laugh of the Medusa.” Modern Feminisms:Political, Literary, Cultural. Ed. Maggie Humme. New York: Columbia University Press, 1992. 196–202. Courtivron, Isabelle de. Introduction. Lives in Translation: Bilingual Writers on Identity and Creativity. Ed. Isabelle de Courtivron. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. 1–9. Irigaray, Luce. Elemental Passions. Trans. Joanne Collins and Judith Still. New York: Routledge, 1992. Malinowski, Bronislaw. Introduction. Cuban Counterpoint: Tobacco and Sugar. By Fernando Ortiz. Trans. Harriet de Onís. New York: Vintage Books, 1970. vii–xiv. Molloy, Sylvia. Introduction. “Female Textual Identities: The Strategies of Self-Figuration.” Women’s Writing in Latin America: An Anthology. Ed. Sara Castro-Klarén, Sylvia Molloy, and Beatriz Sarlo. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1991. 107–24. ———. “Bilingualism, Writing, and the Feeling of Not Quite Being There.” Lives in Translation: Bilingual Writers on Identity and Creativity. Ed. Isabelle de Courtivron. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. 69–77. Ortiz, Fernando. Cuban Counterpoint: Tobacco and Sugar. Trans. Harriet de Onís. New York: Vintage Books, 1970. Rodríguez, Carmen. and a body to remember with. Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 1997. ———. De Cuerpo Entero. Santiago de Chile: Editorial Los Andes, 1997. Roulston, Christine. “Translating Gender: Teaching Translation in Women’s Studies Courses.” ADFL Bulletin 33.1 (Fall 2001): 39–41. Ty, Eleanor. The Politics of the Visible in Asian North American Narratives. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004. Unruh, Vicky. Performing Women and Modern Literary Culture in Latin America. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2006.

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jimmy thibeault

Cantique du corps métis. La critique du mythe colonial dans Cantique des plaines de Nancy Huston

lbert Memmi, dans son Portrait du colonisateur (1957), signale que le colonisateur de bonne volonté – lui qui malgré son origine prend conscience de la situation sociale des colonisés qui l’entourent et la dénonce – est confronté à un dilemme : ou bien s’adapter à la situation et entrer dans le « jeu » colonial, ou bien refuser d’y participer, auquel cas il devra « soit se soustraire physiquement à ces situations, soit demeurer sur place à lutter pour les transformer » (45). Dans ce dernier cas, le colonisateur doit surmonter une difficulté de taille : assumer sa révolte visà-vis de la métropole ou, plus exactement, vis-à-vis des institutions colonisatrices auxquelles il appartient par son origine. Certes, la révolte ne sera pas nécessairement de l’ordre d’une rupture violente, mais davantage d’une opposition de principe, d’une protestation ou d’une affirmation favorable au colonisé. Malgré cela, il se rend bien compte que le malaise et les dificultés persistent, qu’« [i]l n’est pas facile de s’évader, par l’esprit, d’une situation concrète, d’en refuser l’idéologie tout en continuant à en vivre les relations objectives » (48). Il tombe alors dans une contradiction qui imprégnera sa vie jusqu’à lui faire perdre toute cohérence et toute quiétude, car au bout du compte refuser le discours dans lequel il vit, c’est refuser une partie de l’histoire qui constitue son identité de colonisateur, une identité qui, quelle que soit sa position, ne basculera jamais totalement du côté des colonisés : « la situation coloniale est relation de peuple à peuple. Or, [le colonisateur de bonne volonté] fait partie du peuple oppresseur et sera, qu’il le veuille ou non, condamné à partager son destin, comme il en a partagé la fortune » (64). En fait, le colonisateur de

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bonne volonté, le transfuge, n’est lui-même pas dupe de sa conversion et demeure parfaitement conscient qu’il se trouve, par sa double position idéologique, prisonnier d’un entre-deux identitaire puisque même s’il rompt avec les institutions de sa nation, « il soupçonne, ne serait-il aucunement coupable comme individu, qu’il participe d’une responsabilité collective, en tant que membre d’un groupe national oppresseur » (65). Cette conception du « colonisateur de bonne volonté » que présente Memmi correspond à plusieurs égards au discours que met en scène Nancy Huston au sujet de la représentation ambiguë que se fait la population blanche de la nation autochtone dans l’Ouest canadien : « Quand je dis “nous”, je parle, bien sûr, des Blancs; je parle de l’histoire européenne en Alberta. Comme la plupart des Blancs ayant grandi en Amérique du Nord, j’ai appris très tôt à éprouver à la fois du respect et de la culpabilité envers les populations indigènes que “nous” avions soumises, décimées et enfermées sur des réserves » (Désirs 205). Sans pouvoir totalement nier son appartenance au monde des Blancs qui ont colonisé le territoire albertain, Huston s’efforce de le dépasser. Elle exprime sa révolte et son sentiment de culpabilité à travers des écrits qui rompent clairement avec l’idéologie du discours historique officiel entourant la conquête de l’Ouest en offrant du territoire l’image d’un espace vide, figé dans le temps par des mots-objets1 : « le protestantisme, les champs de blé, les chanteurs country, les puits de pétrole, les trains de marchandises, les leçons de piano, les cousins, les pique-niques, les lacs de montagne, votre père, votre mère » (Nord perdu 20–21). C’est cependant dans son roman Cantique des plaines, comme le signale Claudine Potvin, que l’auteure recrée le plus clairement « à travers le personnage de Paddon l’histoire de sa province, l’histoire d’une dépossession individuelle et collective » (« Liaisons » 42) qui, à plusieurs égards, relève du viol et du meurtre culturel. Pour ce faire, Huston confronte la culture dominante des Blancs à celle, dominée, des Amérindiens (la première représentée par Paddon et la seconde par sa maîtresse Miranda, une Métisse), par la mise en place d’un dialogue qui, pour qu’il ait effectivement cours, se produit dans la marge, dans le lieu d’une transgression double, à l’égard du discours officiel et à l’égard du mariage. Potvin note que la parole du colonisé – et, par extension, du territoire qu’il incarne – ne pourra être entendue que dans l’intimité de la chambre de Miranda, à côté de laquelle l’auteure couche « littéralement son personnage … Dorénavant, l’exploration suppose l’horizontalité, ce qui place le voyageur au niveau de la découverte, rendant plus difficile la position de supériorité » (« Inventer » 12). C’est donc par la sexualité du couple que le dialogue entre les deux cultures est rendu possible. En fait, tout se passe comme si le rapport intime à l’Au-

Cantique du corps métis / Thibeault

tre permettait à la fois de rompre avec le discours colonial – basé sur une représentation mythique des événements historiques – et d’instaurer une certaine réciprocité entre les protagonistes; cela permet ainsi à Paddon une (ré)appropriation du territoire albertain qui passe d’abord et avant tout par l’acceptation d’une partie oubliée de sa propre histoire. Les pages qui suivent se proposent d’examiner ce discours de la marge que Huston instaure entre le Blanc et la Métisse, et de voir s’il permet de surmonter le destin du colonisateur de bonne volonté si bien décrit par Memmi.


S’il faut accorder tant d’importance à la liaison amoureuse qui lie Paddon à Miranda, c’est qu’elle se produit dans un contexte où les rapports sociaux se caractérisent d’emblée par une opposition culturelle : d’un côté, il y a les institutions (colonisatrices) au pouvoir et de l’autre, les nations autochtones exclues de ce pouvoir. Entre les deux, une frontière sociale infranchissable : une mythification de la culture dominante qui repose sur la mise à l’écart (dans des réserves fédérales) de la culture amérindienne et de tout ce qu’elle représente dans l’histoire sombre de la colonisation : assimilation, meurtre, viol et ainsi de suite. Cette exclusion n’empêche pas la différence; au contraire, le colonisé a droit à la différence pour autant qu’elle ne s’oppose pas au tout colonial. Ce principe d’exclusion rappelle ce que dit Michel Foucault du contrôle qu’opèrent les institutions dans la production du discours social, production « à la fois contrôlée, sélectionnée, organisée et redistribuée par un certain nombre de procédures qui ont pour rôle d’en conjurer les pouvoirs et les dangers, d’en maîtriser l’événement aléatoire, d’en esquiver la lourde, la redoutable matérialité » (L’Ordre 10–11). Pour Foucault, le contexte social fait en sorte « qu’on n’a pas le droit de tout dire, qu’on ne peut pas parler de tout dans n’importe quelle circonstance, que n’importe qui, enfin, ne peut pas parler de n’importe quoi. Tabou de l’objet, rituel de la circonstance, droit privilégié ou exclusif du sujet qui parle » (11). Cette censure s’exerce bel et bien dans le rapport de colonisateur à colonisé. Le contexte social et discursif dans lequel Huston insère son personnage – la fin du xixe siècle et le début du xxe en Alberta, période qui correspond à l’éclosion de la province2 – n’est pas exempt d’une telle imposition ou valorisation d’un cadre idéologique fixe. Au contraire, si l’auteure insiste pour que l’histoire de son personnage coïncide avec celle de sa province, c’est justement pour montrer l’importance du discours idéologique des instances colonisatrices dans le processus d’appropriation et d’identification territoriales :

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Lorsque les Blancs débarquèrent enfin en Alberta, la côte ouest était déjà habitée et il ne restait plus qu’à rejoindre les deux bouts : ce que les Américains appellent manifest destiny. Ce n’était plus la peine d’exterminer les Indiens; on savait qu’on en viendrait à bout plus facilement par la petite vérole, la religion, l’alcool et les fausses promesses – et qu’il y aurait, partant, moins de victimes de notre côté. (Huston, Désirs 307)

Tolérance de la différence certes, mais uniquement si cette différence ne devient pas une source d’opposition à l’autorité, à l’idéologie et aux comportements prescrits par les Blancs. De cette autorité exercée par l’homme blanc sur le territoire et par le fait même sur les Amérindiens, Paddon, dans son enfance, est un témoin privilégié à travers son expérience du premier Stampede de Calgary, célébration par excellence de la conquête de l’Ouest, de l’histoire mythique de l’Alberta : La ville était devenue folle. Un quart de million d’êtres humains déferlaient en une vague sans fin pour fêter leur bonne santé physique et financière, la force et la virilité de leur jeune pays, le fabuleux folklore de l’Ouest. Des deux côtés de la Huitième Avenue les adultes se massaient et se pressaient … pour voir défiler, tout au long de la matinée, l’histoire faramineuse de cette province qui, à peine sept ans plus tôt, n’était pas une province du tout, mais encore un simple territoire du Nord-Ouest. (Huston, Cantique 198–99)3

La nation autochtone occupe évidemment une place importante dans cette procession, mais dans une pose statique, rigide, comme figée dans le temps; c’est l’image « des chefs blood et stoney et blackfoot et sarci dans leurs plus beaux atours guerriers », des jeunes squaws et des jeunes braves brandissant toutes sortes d’armes « depuis le couteau jusqu’au tomahawk en passant par le revolver et le fusil à répétition » (199). Tout cela, signale la narratrice, n’est cependant que du faire-semblant : « tous saluaient de la main, d’un air perplexe, les foules qui les avaient vaincus hier et qui aujourd’hui, dans un état proche du délire, lançaient en l’air des milliers de stetsons blancs pour fêter leur illusoire retour » (199–200). Car on le voit bien dans la suite des événements, ce retour n’est qu’occasion de réitérer la soumission des indigènes, la victoire et la prise de possession du territoire par les Blancs. Ces événements sont symboliquement réactualisés à travers le corps des jeunes squaws : « dans les recoins plus sombres du champ de foire, sous la charrette derrière les saloons, on chevauchait aussi les jeunes squaws comme des mustangs » (202). L’acte sexuel comme prise de possession renvoie à l’imaginaire colonial où le corps de la femme est presque toujours associé à la représentation du territoire. Ania Loomba remarque à ce sujet : « in various kinds of sixteenth-century representations such as pictures, atlases, poetry and travel writing, sexual and colonial relation-

Cantique du corps métis / Thibeault

ships become analogous to each other » (151). Loomba rappelle notamment la tradition picturale qui représentait les quatre continents sous forme de femmes, nues dans le cas de l’Amérique et de l’Afrique, ce qui donnait de ces continents l’image de territoires disponibles à la découverte, à la conquête, à la possession et au pillage4 : « Thus, from the beginning of the colonial period till its end (and beyond), female bodies symbolise the conquered land5 » (152). Le retour des Amérindiens est donc bel et bien illusoire puisque non seulement il se produit dans le cadre institutionnalisé du Stampede, mais on y trouve également, en marge des activités officielles, une (re)prise de possession territoriale par l’image d’autorité du Blanc sur le corps des jeunes Amérindiennes. Paddon est certes témoin de cette « prise de possession » métaphorique du territoire, mais elle demeure dissimulée sous l’illusion de la bonne entente entre les deux cultures. Le rapport de pouvoir est transposé dans un récit où subsistent l’implicite, le non avoué, signe d’une colonisation qui perdure. L’idée que se fait Paddon du monde est contradictoire : d’une part, elle s’inscrit dans la continuité d’un passé colonial rassurant, mais dans la représentation des événements, un glissement de sens s’opère, qui laisse filtrer certains éléments de vérité. Ce que la narratrice Paula rappelle d’ailleurs à Paddon, son grand-père : … as-tu vraiment vu cela Paddon? peut-être n’as-tu fait que le pressentir tandis que l’après-midi se muait lentement en cauchemar, que la foule devenait plus dense et plus démente, que l’air s’alourdissait d’effluves de bière et de whisky et que la menace de pluie se faisait imminente, peut-être as-tu seulement deviné, alors, qu’une autre sauvagerie était en train d’être domptée, une autre beauté brisée, que d’autres corps jeunes et forts se cabraient de douleur et d’indignation en roulant des yeux terrorisés tandis que leur liberté était pulvérisée sous les poussées vigoureuses d’hommes blancs, ahanant sous les yeux d’autres hommes dont les hourras les incitaient à poursuivre jusqu’à la victoire. (Huston, Cantique 202–03)

En réaction à la situation coloniale hypocritement vécue sous ses yeux, Paddon ne pourra finalement que vomir son dégoût, son malaise physique, à la fin de la journée, alors que son père danse avec une femme inconnue : … lui écrasant les seins contre sa poitrine et bougeant comme jamais tu ne l’avais vu bouger, ton père la conduisant dans des cercles de plus en plus vastes jusqu’à ce que tu le perdes de vue, pas de Peaux-Rouges par ici, rien qu’une flopée de Blancs au visage rouge faisant la bringue, et là-dessus les nœuds dans ton ventre se défirent d’un coup et tout ce que tu t’efforçais de

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retenir fut dégorgé, tu dégobillas en te tordant, envoyant un jet de vomi jusque sur le bord de la piste, et ton père fut bien obligé de lâcher l’inconnue daredare. (205)

Ce malaise, Paddon le subit également dans ses premières expériences sexuelles, ne cédant aux exigences du corps, marginalisées par son éducation puritaine, « que lorsqu’il est ivre et, encore, seulement auprès de prostituées indiennes. L’expérience est alors vécue sur le mode d’une humiliation à subir, d’un dégoût dont il se débarrasse en vomissant le lendemain matin » (Sing, « La voix » 29). Le rejet de Paddon, son refus de commettre sans être ivre l’acte sexuel avec les jeunes Amérindiennes l’amène à reproduire – même sans se l’avouer – le discours colonial; il participe symboliquement au pouvoir colonial tout en le niant avec l’alcool. C’est dire que Paddon porte en lui les traces de cette histoire sombre qu’est la conquête; il en reproduit littéralement le comportement en oubliant ou plutôt en refusant volontairement d’assumer la réalité coloniale ou, dans le cas du Stampede, l’histoire vraie. L’adhésion de Paddon au discours institutionnel et à l’idéologie territoriale du colonisateur devient encore plus évidente lors de sa rencontre avec sa future épouse Karen, qui se voit chargée par la narratrice de la représentation du territoire géographique tel que perçu par l’institution : « tu croyais à une hallucination tant son corps ressemblait aux plaines que tu aimais, avec les larges plans inclinés du front et des joues, les angles aigus du menton et du nez » (Huston, Cantique 109). Tout, en fait, rattache Karen, cette femme économe, dévouée à sa famille et au « bon sens paralysant », à l’espace géographique et idéologique des Blancs, nouveaux maîtres du territoire albertain. Elle porte en elle tous les tabous de l’énonciation dont parle Foucault, en ce sens qu’elle accepte le discours du pouvoir colonial et se ferme d’emblée à tout comportement qui en dérogerait. Cette conscience coloniale apparaît notamment dans son attitude face aux événements d’Haïti qui lui sont rapportés dans la correspondance de la sœur de Paddon : « la loi martiale venait d’être déclarée en Haïti, la plupart des lycées étaient en grève, les États-Unis avaient envoyé des renforts militaires et quelques Marines nerveux venaient d’abattre plusieurs dizaines de paysans qu’ils avaient pris, selon Elizabeth, pour des manifestants » (Huston, Cantique 217). Mais ce qui semble plus dramatique que tout cela dans le récit que fait Elizabeth, c’est le refus par les Haïtiens du culte des Blancs, de leur manière de vivre, de leur perception du monde : « nonobstant leur misère infinie, ces gens pervers n’arrêtaient pas de danser et de sourire, de blaguer et de forniquer! Pire, il s’avérait que pour les Haïtiens, catholicisme et vaudou étaient non seulement compatibles mais confondus :

Cantique du corps métis / Thibeault

les saints chrétiens avaient été tout bonnement intégrés au panthéon barbare! » (217). Karen prend le parti des Blancs et condamne les actes sauvages des Haïtiens, ce qui empêche tout dialogue avec elle. Paddon doit taire sa révolte, incapable de fuir, d’oublier ce monde, de franchir le mur de la solitude et de se défaire des cantiques, des chants, des plaintes de femmes et de ses amies : « Au lieu de quoi tu devais rentrer chez toi et te glisser dans le lit à côté de Karen et l’écouter se demander si Ruthie allait avoir besoin d’un appareil dentaire » (220). L’arrivée de la Métisse Miranda dans la vie de Paddon permet, en quelque sorte, cette ouverture à la culture de l’Autre indigène que refoule le discours institutionnel. Cette fois, le corps de la femme agit comme médiateur et permet à Paddon d’accéder à l’histoire marginalisée du territoire, parce que sa maîtresse porte la double inscription de l’indigène et du colonisateur, du territoire sauvage et de sa conquête. Cette double inscription culturelle sur le corps de Miranda renvoie à l’utopie fondatrice du territoire américain, c’est-à-dire à une redéfinition de l’être basée sur l’harmonisation de l’homme civilisé à la sauvagerie du territoire, de la nature à la culture. Selon Jean Morency, l’union des espaces territorial et corporel, vécue sous le mode de l’accouplement ou de l’acte sexuel entre Blanc et Autochtone, répondrait à la nécessité de rompre avec le monde civilisé et puritain de l’Est, de l’Europe, afin d’atteindre la véritable richesse du nouveau continent. L’expérience est vécue sous le signe d’une initiation à subir, du passage d’un Ancien à un Nouveau Monde riche de ses expériences passées, de l’abolition de toute frontière puritaine entre le bien et le mal pour une plus grande ouverture à la nature : « le continent est porteur de promesses, surtout pour celui qui sait succomber à l’attrait du monde sauvage, pour qui ose s’arracher à l’enclos protecteur mais oppressif. Les possibilités offertes par l’Amérique cesseront à ce moment d’être purement économiques, prométhéennes, pour devenir plus ontologiques, dionysiaques » (Morency 72). De cette communication dionysiaque avec la nature doit naître le véritable Américain (au sens d’habitant du continent américain) qui se fondra dans l’esprit du territoire : « l’enfant né en Amérique … semble conserver quelque chose de la sauvagerie du continent où il a vu le jour » (74). Mais cette utopie du métissage intervient surtout, chez Huston, comme écart et distance critique, instance démystificatrice du réel. La voix de Miranda présente une version tout autre du discours national mythique, elle remet en cause la version officielle de l’histoire albertaine. En cela, l’identité métisse correspond bien à la définition qu’en propose Nicolas van Schendel, c’est-àdire qu’elle

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représente le volet périphérique ou marginal de la canadianité. Elle est son histoire oubliée, celle en particulier de l’émergence, au cours du deuxième temps de la formation identitaire canadienne, d’un peuple d’ethnicité plurielle et de nationalité singulière … l’histoire oubliée de la libre circulation des différences, de la traversée des frontières communautaires et du continuel chevauchement des cultures et des langues. (Van Schendel 103)

L’identité métisse porte en elle une vérité que l’institution marginalise et oublie au profit d’un mythe ou d’une histoire territoriale adaptée à la bonne conscience du colonisateur. Nous comprenons mieux alors l’enjeu dialogique de la relation sexuelle entre Paddon et Miranda : si Paddon est prisonnier d’une histoire albertaine fondée sur le déni de l’histoire de l’Autre, sur la production d’un imaginaire collectif subsumant la multiplicité ethnique dans un tout identitaire qui est celui du Blanc, la présence de la Métisse Miranda fait éclater cette vision réductrice, elle met à jour une vérité jusqu’alors marginalisée et qui pourtant l’habite de par sa double appartenance, soit celle du meurtre culturel de la nation autochtone et du refus subséquent de l’identité métissée : « Miranda évoquera [pour Paddon] avec frénésie cette histoire oubliée, au milieu de leurs échanges amoureux, histoire d’une dépossession systématique d’un territoire, d’une culture, d’une langue » (Potvin, « Inventer » 14). Ce qui demeurait seulement implicite dans l’expérience de Paddon au Stampede de Calgary prend donc forme à travers Miranda. Mais la vérité historique qui se trouve réactualisée par le rapport à la Métisse ne sera atteinte que par la voie qui s’ouvre alors à Paddon : celle de la découverte géographique par le corps sexuel de la Métisse. Énoncer la sexualité, le rapport au corps, comme le font la narratrice et Miranda, c’est déjà, souligne Foucault, se situer dans un ailleurs discursif, dans la marge, rompre avec le tabou du langage : Si le sexe est réprimé, c’est-à-dire voué à la prohibition, à l’inexistence et au mutisme, le seul fait d’en parler, et de parler de sa répression, a comme une allure de transgression délibérée. Qui tient ce langage se met jusqu’à un certain point hors pouvoir; il bouscule la loi; il anticipe, tant soit peu, la liberté future. (Foucault, Histoire 13)

Miranda, dans l’intimité de son lit et de sa chambre, amène donc Paddon à transgresser le discours historique officiel – que d’ailleurs il enseigne en tant que professeur d’histoire – afin qu’il puisse enfin (re)découvrir cette histoire oubliée et marginalisée de la dépossession territoriale et culturelle de l’Alberta. Si la négation lui était possible dans sa jeunesse, Paddon ne peut plus maintenant fuir les images que lui impose le récit familial de sa maîtresse. La prise de possession du territoire et le viol culturel passent ici par l’expérience per-

Cantique du corps métis / Thibeault

sonnelle de la grand-mère de Miranda pour qui le métissage fut un événement non pas consenti, mais imposé. Il s’agit en fait d’une histoire maintes fois répétée dans l’expérience traumatisante de la conquête de l’Ouest : l’histoire atroce et ordinaire d’une jeune fille indienne se faisant déflorer par l’intendant de la Compagnie de la baie d’Hudson. Cela se passait le plus souvent le dernier jour de leur scolarité, c’était presque une tradition, un passage obligé de leur initiation à la civilisation, les prêtres avaient fait de leur mieux pour leur inculquer la sagesse biblique à coups de fouet sur leur derrière païen, mais leur instruction n’était pas parachevée tant qu’un intendant de la Compagnie de la baie d’Hudson n’avait pas déchiré leur hymen et déposé dans leur ventre sauvage sa graine civilisée, c’était pour ainsi dire inévitable et les parents de la fille n’avaient plus qu’à prier pour que la graine ne germe pas; malheureusement celle qui était dans le ventre de la grand-mère de Miranda avait germé. Si c’était un garçon son père blanc le reconnaissait le plus souvent et l’élevait en vue d’une future carrière comme diplomate et interprète entre commerçants et Peaux-Rouges … mais si c’était une fille on l’abandonnait à son sort parmi les sauvages. (Huston, Cantique 229)

Cette histoire, qui renvoie à un vécu et non pas au savoir livresque, bouleverse Paddon qui « l’assimile par le corps, à travers une voix tantôt “hérissée de rires sarcastiques,” tantôt “cendreuse” » (Sing, « Pour une érotique » 90). Par l’histoire tragique de la grand-mère, Miranda dévoile l’aspect pervers du métissage canadien et ébranle l’image utopique d’un métissage censé être à la base d’une nouvelle nation en rupture avec la vieille Europe, une nation plus fraîche, plus proche de la nature, autrement dit américaine. La remémoration de l’histoire « impure » de la colonisation et des agissements des Blancs envers les nations autochtones entraîne chez Paddon tout un processus de ré-exploration et de redéfinition du territoire tel qu’il le (re)découvre sur le corps de la Métisse. Paddon, « le cartographe, l’arpenteur », voit la plaine sèche, conservatrice et puritaine qui a marqué son enfance à travers la représentation qu’en ont donnée les immigrants européens – du moins telle que présentée à travers l’éducation puritaine de sa mère – se métamorphoser dans l’acte sexuel en un territoire marqué d’une nouvelle féminité et d’une sensualité en rupture avec le monde viril du Far West, du mythe de l’Ouest. On le constate notamment lors de la première relation sexuelle entre Paddon et Miranda : Elle te conduit jusqu’à son lit … il n’y a pas d’autre endroit au monde où aller et tu n’as jamais voulu être ailleurs que là, connaître autre chose que ça, cette chaleur à l’intérieur de ses lèvres et cette humidité de son sexe sous tes doigts, ce resserrement de ses lèvres sur ta verge et cette force de ses mains

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sur tes fesses, ce parfum musqué entre ses seins et ces aisselles brunes et lisses sans poils, cette rondeur de son ventre alors qu’elle te chevauche, le visage invisible derrière ses cheveux emmêlés peinturlurés, ces plaintes basses de joie réitérées. (Huston, Cantique 69)

Commence alors, pour Paddon, une ré-exploration de ce territoire empreint de féminité aux voix multiples qu’il chantera plus tard à la jeune Paula : « Quand j’avais huit ans, tu as pris un atlas sur l’étagère du haut et, l’ouvrant à la carte de l’Alberta, tu m’as enseigné les différentes voix qui chantaient dans les noms de ton pays, cet édifice bancal qu’on avait échafaudé sur trois piliers inégaux » (17). Par-delà le savoir livresque, Paddon nomme son pays avec des mots amérindiens (Tawatinaw, Nemiskam), anglais (Belly River, Grassy Lake) et français (Lac La Nonne, Vegreville). À partir de ce moment, l’attitude générale de Paddon change du tout au tout. L’homme impatient cesse de frapper ses enfants et se remet à son projet d’écrire une histoire des conceptions du temps. En fait, tout se passe comme si, par le contact de Miranda, Paddon parvenait à ressaisir la présence du monde, l’ici et le maintenant, à atteindre un monde en marge de l’histoire officielle, un monde où le présent serait plus palpable, plus réel. Car le présent que lui offre Miranda se construit non pas par un processus d’exclusion et de censure comme c’est le cas dans le monde colonial, mais en acceptant à la fois les événements, les discours et les mythes du passé qui, dans la culture amérindienne, s’entremêlent pour rompre les frontières de l’espace-temps. Le corps et l’esprit du moment présent sont habités par la totalité du passé qui les constitue : Très vite, tu compris que le cadeau qu’elle te faisait à chaque instant était celui du présent, mais il te fallut plusieurs mois encore avant de te rendre compte que, précisément, en raison de cela, de cette manière unique dont Miranda habitait l’ici et le maintenant, tu serais peut-être capable de revenir à ton travail sur le temps. Tu lui racontas le vieux projet poussiéreux et tes rêves se ranimèrent sur ta langue. Elle hocha la tête, intéressée : elle t’entendait, elle seule pouvait t’entendre. Tu décidas de te remettre au travail – convaincu que, grâce à Miranda, ta vie allait reprendre ses couleurs. (Huston, Cantique 136)

Si, dans l’éducation puritaine de son enfance, Paddon en était arrivé à percevoir l’esprit séparément du corps et à dévaloriser ce dernier, Miranda lui enseignera que les Blackfeet ne croient pas en leur religion, qu’ils la dansent, « ce qui veut dire que le corps et l’esprit sont indivisibles, contrairement à ce qu’enseignent les missionnaires chrétiens » (Sing, « La voix » 31). Par la danse, le peuple de Miranda marque un rapport au temps qui ne correspond pas à la fuite en avant de l’homme blanc : « Mon peuple, dit-elle, baignait dans le

Cantique du corps métis / Thibeault

temps comme dans un bain chaud, notant ses rythmes et ses cycles et se berçant de l’idée que, de façon générale, tout devenait de plus en plus tard » (Huston, Cantique 180). Mais l’initiation de Paddon à la danse amérindienne sera marquée par la maladresse, la gaucherie chrétienne dont il fait preuve : Elle se pencha en avant jusqu’à ce que ses longs cheveux mouillés retombent des deux côtés de sa tête et lui cachent le visage, puis elle se mit à se balancer à droite à gauche avec de lourds pas rythmés tout en fredonnant et en tapant dans les mains. Levant les yeux vers toi, elle te fit signe de la rejoindre et, délaissant à contrecœur la chaleur douillette de ses couvertures, tu vins près d’elle, pieds nus sur le plancher, et exécutas quelques pas de danse hésitants. Elle ne rit pas … te tournant le dos … elle se remit à se laver les cheveux. Son amour pour ton corps pouvait racheter bien des choses, n’est-ce pas, mais pas ta nullité comme danseur. (178–79)

Bien que Paddon ait pu comprendre l’indivisibilité du corps et de l’esprit – nous le constatons dans ses réactions lors des soirées Haïti où sa sœur missionnaire et les autres femmes s’indignent des messes païennes que font les Haïtiens en l’honneur des saints catholiques – la maladresse dont il fait preuve met en relief la difficulté qu’il a à assimiler complètement l’enseignement de Miranda. En dépit de sa bonne volonté, Paddon reste colonisateur. La maladresse de Paddon vient, en effet, de ce qu’il n’adhère jamais totalement au discours de Miranda; qu’il n’arrive pas du moins à se l’approprier. « En dépit de ces échanges révélateurs et subversifs » qu’ont les protagonistes, souligne Potvin, « Paddon continue de donner des cours d’histoire “remplis de silences assourdissants” » (« Inventer » 14), une histoire sans passion, qui n’entraîne jamais chez ses étudiants de réaction ou de prise de position. Un jour cependant, Paddon prend lui-même position, dans le cadre de son cours d’histoire, et dénonce l’effet de la colonisation de l’Ouest sur les peuplades indiennes : « Si tu avais de l’influence quelque part, c’était vis-à-vis de tes élèves. Évidemment tu ne pouvais pas leur faire un cours sur le scandale des rejetés haïtiens, mais tu pouvais leur dire – et ce serait la vérité – qu’une chose semblable s’était produite ici même, dans le sud de l’Alberta » (Huston, Cantique 203–4). Son projet est donc de remettre en contexte la colonisation du territoire en dénonçant une violence perpétrée par les Blancs et volontairement effacée de la mémoire collective par le discours institutionnel. Paddon s’attaque alors à l’image héroïque, sacralisée par le regard d’Elizabeth et même de son père (qui en reconnaît la grandeur), du missionnaire Albert Lacombe6, qui est intervenu dans le conflit opposant la compagnie du Canadian Pacific Railway aux Blackfeet. Évidemment, la réponse au discours de Paddon ne se fait

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pas attendre et, dès le lundi suivant son cours, Paddon doit faire face aux accusations de l’institution et surtout à celles des parents qui l’accusent de mal préparer les élèves aux contrôles de fin d’année, de tenir un discours jugé non patriotique, communiste, blasphématoire, calomnieux envers « un des personnages les plus admirables de l’histoire de l’Ouest » (308). Le désir de Paddon de rétablir la vérité historique est alors ébranlé; le mythe, l’image, la représentation territoriale s’imposent à Paddon qui, malgré sa révolte, se fond dans l’univers discursif de l’Ouest par la remise en question de ses propres convictions : Peut-être t’étais-tu trompé et sérieusement trompé. Peut-être la défaite des Indiens était-elle inévitable, et les missionnaires n’avaient-ils fait qu’amortir le choc. Peut-être, sans leurs efforts infatigables comme médiateurs, le destin des Indiens eût-il été plus brutal encore. Peut-être certains hommes de dieu avaient-ils été effectivement bons et généreux. Peut-être leur savoir médical avait-il sauvé des vies. Et on ne pouvait nier qu’Albert Lacombe, surnommé Bon-Cœur par les Blackfeet, avait risqué sa vie pour faire passer son message de la paix, se jetant au milieu des échauffourées entre les Blackfeet et les Crees, indifférent aux balles qui sifflaient autour de ses oreilles, s’adressant à chacune des tribus dans sa propre langue, transcrivant méticuleusement leurs légendes et leur folklore, faisant l’impossible pour préserver leur passé. (309)

Ce que Paddon apprend dans cette tentative de faire la lumière sur l’histoire vraie, c’est que les choses ne sont jamais aussi simples qu’elles le paraissent. Miranda lui avait déjà fait voir cette nécessité de nuancer le monde; à Paddon qui, dans un élan d’admiration, affirmait qu’il aurait aimé naître Blackfoot, elle avait répondu : Si t’étais né blackfoot t’aurais pas été toi et je t’aurais pas aimé. Tu serais un guerrier. Tes bras seraient couverts de dessins au couteau et tu aurais des cicatrices sur la poitrine à force de tirer le poteau sacré avec des lanières en cuir enfilées sous tes muscles jusqu’à ce qu’ils claquent. Tu me baiserais et puis mon mari me tuerait d’avoir baisé avec toi – ou bien il me couperait le nez sous prétexte qu’il avait donné des chevaux à mes parents pour être le seul à pouvoir me baiser … j’en ai marre des Blancs qui se sentent tellement coupables de nous avoir détruits qu’ils ont besoin de se dire qu’on est parfaits. (181)

La complexité de la vérité historique empêche qu’on l’identifie à un camp plutôt qu’à l’autre. Huston la situe dans un ailleurs, dans le discours de la narratrice Paula, qui s’inscrit elle-même en marge de l’espace albertain (elle se définit comme une personne de l’Est et écrit de Montréal). Si Paddon ne peut

Cantique du corps métis / Thibeault

rien changer à la croyance des parents et des institutions albertaines en leurs mythes fondateurs, son discours donne du moins à la narratrice l’occasion d’établir les nuances nécessaires à la vérité historique, démontant systématiquement l’idéologisation qu’en opèrent les points de vue radicaux (amérindien ou institutionnel). Cette complexité du discours historique et la nécessité de nuancer les événements s’accordent bien avec la logique fort peu livresque par laquelle Miranda construit son rapport au monde. Miranda, comme Paula d’ailleurs, ne fait pas un récit continu de l’histoire de son peuple, et c’est pourtant au gré de ces récits dont la cohérence est toute subjective que Paddon peut reconstituer la carte historique albertaine et s’orienter. Au départ, la relation entre Miranda et Paddon ressemble à celle qui existe entre un guide indigène et le cartographe qui fait le relevé d’un territoire encore « inexploré ». Or, le travail du cartographe prend, à travers les paroles de la Métisse, des traits tout à fait problématiques, car dans les manuels d’histoire, donc dans le discours institutionnalisé, les guides sont exclus, eux qui sans savoir officiel parvenaient à retrouver leur chemin sur le territoire « inexploré ». Cette comparaison est d’ailleurs explicitée dans la discussion qu’ont les deux amants au sujet de la découverte du pôle Nord : Alors, qui [a découvert le pôle Nord]? Robert Peary … tu veux dire qu’il était seul? bien sûr que non. Il était avec qui? … Avec son aide de camp noir Matthew Henson, et quatre guides esquimaux. Quatre quoi? Quatre guides esquimaux. Si c’étaient des guides, c’est qu’ils y étaient déjà allés? … Tu ne connais même pas les noms de ces Esquimaux, déclara-t-elle. Peut-être qu’ils se baladaient autour du pôle depuis des années! Et sous prétexte qu’un Blanc déclare que c’est un pôle, c’est lui qui devient célèbre! Mais Miranda … il y a tout de même une différence. Malgré tout, errer à travers un territoire et en faire la carte, ce n’est pas la même chose. Raconter des histoires autour d’un feu de camp et écrire des livres, ce n’est pas la même chose. (Huston, Cantique 143–4)

Pour Paddon à ce moment, le savoir livresque doit primer sur les connaissances abstraites, non écrites, véhiculées par la parole métisse. Pourtant, lorsque Miranda tombe malade, qu’elle perd tranquillement l’usage de ses membres, le territoire se rétrécit autour de Paddon, qui, « [a]llongé près d’elle dans le lit, … l’aide à dessiner la carte de son corps » (Huston, Cantique 83). Et avec le territoire, avec le corps, c’est la mémoire que perd Miranda; Paddon se voit alors plongé dans les ténèbres, ne retrouvant plus son chemin dans le présent atemporel de la marge : « Tu avais commencé sous l’égide de Miranda à écrire des éloges du présent mais maintenant, son

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présent s’étant rétréci jusqu’à n’être plus qu’un minuscule point de lumière, les ténèbres alentour te confondaient » (147). Avec le savoir de Miranda s’effondre aussi tout le savoir livresque qu’était en train de réélaborer Paddon. On le voit, Paddon, seul, n’arrive plus à rien. Lui qui traçait la carte du corps de Miranda, qui parvenait à écrire son livre guidé par les récits aléatoires de la Métisse, n’arrive plus à se retrouver dans le passé marginalisé de l’Alberta. À l’instar du corps de Miranda, le territoire lui-même semble perdre ses contours d’origine, ceux d’une dualité historique refoulée. Sans les nuances et la complexité de cette autre vision du monde, l’identité même du territoire se dissout. L’homme blanc avait certes pu conquérir le territoire grâce au meurtre culturel presque total de ses premiers habitants, mais ce qui lui restait alors, c’était un mythe western simpliste. Hors de l’intimité, du lieu clos, la parole de Paddon, telle que la transmet la narratrice Paula, se voit renvoyée à ellemême, chargée de culpabilité, pour finalement se perdre en partie dans la fausse objectivité historique du discours institutionnel. Son histoire (celle du colonisateur de bonne volonté) demeure cependant un fait irrévocable de l’histoire de l’Ouest canadien, bien que difficilement perceptible parce que limité au domaine de l’intime, une cicatrice à peine visible à la surface du territoire institutionnalisé : Je vois une route qui traverse la plaine en une courbe infinie et le soleil qui l’écrase, qui t’écrase toi contre l’asphalte, la pierre pulvérisée et le goudron – oui désormais tu fais partie de cette route, Paddon, ce long ruban gris suggérant qu’il serait peut-être possible d’aller quelque part –, tu es aplati enfin sur cette plaine, une cicatrice à peine perceptible à sa surface. (Huston, Cantique 9)

Le discours de la marge est donc porteur d’une culture qui se donne d’entrée de jeu comme mortelle, vouée à la disparition et à l’oubli. Face à cette culture, il y a Paddon, le colonisateur de bonne volonté; au contact de la nouvelle géographie que lui ouvre le corps de Miranda, il formule un discours nouveau, dégagé des mythes coloniaux, mais c’est un discours qui demeure timide, incertain. La brèche qu’il crée dans l’espace institutionnel aura vite fait de se refermer. Hors de l’intimité de la chambre de Miranda, Paddon n’arrive pas à rompre avec le « Nouveau Monde » de ses ancêtres européens, avec ce nouveau territoire à la couleur aseptisée du blanc, du vide. Paddon, l’idéaliste, échoue donc dans sa tentative de rendre à l’histoire cette partie oubliée qui, dans le mythe américain, aurait dû servir à la constitution d’un nouveau monde fondé sur l’harmonie des peuples.

Cantique du corps métis / Thibeault

Notes 1 Sur la question de la représentation de l’espace chez Nancy Huston, voir l’article de Pamela V. Sing, « Stratégies ». 2 « Il fallait que Paddon ait vécu à peu près tout le vingtième siècle, que sa vie ait coïncidé plus ou moins avec l’histoire de sa province. Je voulais faire sentir à quel point cette histoire était courte, et dense » (Huston, Désirs 204). 3 C’est d’ailleurs à cet événement que Huston, dans Pour un patriotisme de l’ambiguïté, se réfère pour définir l’identité culturelle albertaine : « les racines [des] premiers Albertains, transplantées ici avec tant d’espoir, ont été pulvérisées en l’espace de deux petites générations; leurs origines si hautes en couleur ont été impitoyablement broyées pour produire du blanc. Mes arrière-grands-parents sont nés en Irlande (Huston), en Angleterre (Howard), en Écosse (MacDonald) et en Allemagne (Koester). Toutes ces cultures, toutes ces langues, une fois mélangées et bouillies ensemble dans le creuset canadien, se sont réduites à … “Yahoo”! Pour autant que je puisse en juger, ce mot est la seule et unique contribution distinctive de ma ville à l’histoire de l’humanité » (31–32). 4 Un discours qui est d’ailleurs présent chez Franz Fanon, par exemple, et repris au Québec par les poètes de l’Hexagone, notamment avec le thème de la « femme-pays » chez Gaston Miron. 5 Loomba souligne: « This metaphoric use of the female body varies in accordance with the exigencies and histories of particular colonial situations. For example, in comparison with the nakedness of America or Africa in early modern iconographic representations, Asia is always sumptuously clothed, usually riding on a camel and carrying an incense burner » (152). 6 Le Père Albert Lacombe, « idole et modèle » de la sœur religieuse de Paddon, est décrit par Miranda comme un ennemi de la nation amérindienne : « Ce missionnaire à la con avait déjà passé trente ans de sa vie à nous améliorer, il parlait notre langue, il avait le doigt sur notre pouls mourant, il est venu discuter avec nous en apportant deux cents livres de thé et de sucre et de farine et de tabac et, bien sûr, Crowfoot [le chef des Blackfeet] a de nouveau baissé la tête » (Huston, Cantique 75).

Bibliographie Foucault, Michel. Histoire de la sexualité, I : La volonté de savoir, Paris, Gallimard, 1976. ———. L’Ordre du discours, Paris, Gallimard, 1971. Huston, Nancy. Cantique des plaines, Arles/Actes Sud; Montréal/Leméac (coll. Babel, 1995 (2e édition). ———. Désirs et réalités, Montréal, Leméac, 1995. ———. Pour un patriotisme de l’ambiguïté : notes autour d’un voyage aux sources, Montréal, Fides/CÉTUQ, 1995. ———. Nord perdu, suivi de Douze France, Arles/Actes Sud; Montréal/Leméac, 1999. Memmi, Albert. Portrait du colonisé, précédé de Portrait du colonisateur [1957], Paris, Gallimard, 1985. Morency, Jean. Le Mythe américain dans les fictions d’Amérique : de Washington Irving à Jacques Poulin, Québec, Nuit Blanche, 1994.

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Loomba, Ania. Colonialism/Postcolonialism, New York, Routledge, 1998. Potvin, Claudine. « Inventer l’histoire : la plaine revisited », dans Francophonies d’Amérique, 7 (1997), p. 9–18. ———. « Les “liaisons dangereuses” de Nancy Huston : exil et identité, le moi et l’autre », dans Francophonies d’Amérique, 11 (2001), p. 41–48. Sing, Pamela V. « La voix métisse dans le “roman de l’infidélité” chez Jacques Ferron, Nancy Huston et Marguerite-A. Primeau », dans Francophonies d’Amérique, 8 (1998), p. 23–37. ———. « Pour une érotique de la Prairie », in Communautés francophones : espaces d’altérités, dir. Paul Dubé et Pamela Sing, Edmonton, Institut de recherche de la Faculté Saint-Jean, 2001, p. 85–100. ———. « Stratégies de spatialisation et effets d’identification ou de distanciation dans Cantique des plaines », dans Marta Dvorák et Jane Koustas, Vision/Division : l’œuvre de Nancy Huston, Ottawa, Presses de l’Université d’Ottawa, 2004, p. 63–74. Van Schendel, Nicolas. « L’identité métisse ou l’histoire oubliée de la canadianité », dans La Question identitaire au Canada francophone, dir. J. Létourneau, SainteFoy, Presses de l’Université Laval, 1994, p. 101–21.

IV reconfiguring the solitudes: two plus others(s) / deux solitudes et quelques autres

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Propos recueillis par

lucien pelletier

La migration culturelle de Robert Dickson

’il est fréquent que des écrivains issus d’une culture minoritaire choisissent la langue de la majorité pour s’exprimer, l’inverse a de quoi étonner. On a peine à comprendre qu’il soit ainsi possible d’opter pour l’exiguïté d’un public de lecteurs presque inexistant, de maisons d’édition précaires, et d’épouser les tourments d’une identité culturelle condamnée à l’incertitude1. À cet égard, le poète Robert Dickson fait figure de véritable phénomène : anglophone issu d’un petit village du sud de l’Ontario, il s’est fait au long des trois dernières décennies l’un des plus énergiques promoteurs d’une culture francophone ontarienne à laquelle son nom reste désormais associé. Ayant été moi-même amené à m’intéresser de près à son action et à son oeuvre poétique, je me suis rendu compte que très peu de textes publiés à son propos s’étonnent de l’exceptionnel parcours de Dickson. J’ai donc demandé au poète, que j’avais le privilège d’avoir pour collègue à l’Université Laurentienne de Sudbury, s’il accepterait de répondre à mes questions sur sa migration culturelle et l’effet qu’elle exerce sur son travail d’écrivain. Il s’y est prêté avec générosité et une réelle modestie, au cours de deux longs entretiens réalisés le 20 mai et le 15 juillet 2004 dans sa chaleureuse demeure de la rue Patterson, à Sudbury2. Les pages qui suivent présentent dans un ordre reconstruit la plupart des informations que m’a confiées Dickson en réponse à des questions le plus souvent tâtonnantes. Il a évidemment fallu plier des paroles empreintes de spontanéité et d’émotion aux exigences de la langue écrite. J’ai tenu, en outre, à ce que Dickson lui-même relise et, au besoin, amende une première version du texte. (Les paroles de Dickson reprises à peu près intégralement sont signalées par des caractères italiques.)

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Les lecteurs peu familiers avec l’oeuvre de Robert Dickson trouveront utile de savoir au préalable qu’au moment où les entretiens eurent lieu, le poète avait publié cinq courts recueils : Or«é»alité (1978), Une bonne trentaine (1978), Abris Nocturnes (1986), Grand ciel bleu par ici (1997) et Humains paysages en temps de paix relative (2002) (ce dernier ouvrage lui a valu le Prix du Gouverneur général du Canada)3. Il annonçait un nouveau recueil pour très bientôt4. Dickson avait aussi réalisé plusieurs traductions, de l’anglais au français et inversement, dont il sera question plus loin.

Stations Né en 1944, Robert Dickson est originaire d’Erin, un village situé sur la rivière Credit, près de Toronto. Il est issu d’une famille modeste. Il déclare, dans un de ses rares poèmes écrits en anglais : only retrospectively does it seem strange to have grown up on a river called credit merchants at the river’s mouth staking trappers to their winter needs (few wants?) [ … ] my mother paid cash when she could5.

Ses parents sont unilingues anglophones. Ses grands-parents maternels sont des immigrants : sa grand-mère est d’origine belge et parle le français; de son grand-père, Dickson rappelle, avec une admiration contenue, qu’il venait d’une communauté séfarade de Turquie et parlait, outre l’anglais, le ladino ainsi que le grec, le turc, l’arabe, le français, l’italien et l’espagnol. Dickson évoque volontiers son enfance heureuse et les longues visites chez ses grandsparents maternels : « Chaque fois que nous allions chez mes grands-parents à Toronto, c’était un grand moment car nous quittions le village pour la grande ville; c’était une maison bourgeoise. Et quand les grands-parents ne voulaient pas qu’on comprenne, ils parlaient en français ou en espagnol. » Le jeune Dickson ne parle et ne comprend que l’anglais. Il est d’une intelligence précoce : « J’étais un grand lecteur – et, comme dit Doric Germain, un grand liseux : le catalogue Eaton’s, n’importe quoi qui me tombait sous la main, et même dans les années 80 j’ai lu des romans western, de la science-fiction – j’étais un lecteur sauvage et indiscipliné, d’autres diraient catholique avec un petit “c”. Ce qui m’attirait dès le jeune âge, c’était pour une part l’humour, les jeux de mots : comment tu peux changer le sens de quelque chose. Je lisais vraiment beaucoup, des romans d’aventure comme tous les jeunes. À l’âge de 11 ans, j’ai lu le dictionnaire anglais d’un bout à l’autre pour un concours d’orthographe. » Dickson se rappelle aussi avec une légitime fierté ses exploits scolaires : « Avant d’avoir

La migration culturelle de Robert Dickson / Pelletier

22 ans, j’avais fait officiellement 18 ans de scolarité. J’avais commencé l’école à l’âge de 6 ans. » Lorsque vient le temps d’entrer à l’Université de Toronto, il choisit les études de langue et littérature modernes, anglaises et françaises en particulier (il fait aussi de l’espagnol). Il obtiendra une maîtrise en langue et littérature françaises dès 1966. Interrogé sur les raisons de son choix pour les études françaises, il déclare ne trop savoir, ne pas avoir encore entrepris de réfléchir à ces choses. « Je ne fais pas d’analyse jungienne de mes rêves ou tout ça. C’est autrement que je fais mon apprentissage de mes zones … noires! (Il rit.) Mais il est vrai que j’avais une relation particulière à la langue française dès un très jeune âge. C’est “sans mérite”, comme je dis dans un de mes textes6. On raconte dans ma famille (je n’en ai pas moi-même le souvenir) qu’un jour, à l’âge de quatre ans, je portais une robe de chambre en mousseline et un petit chapeau de papier et, semble-t-il, je disais “I am the king of France.” À quatre ans. D’où ça venait? C’est un peu mystérieux, car à l’époque je ne lisais pas, il n’y avait pas de télé, je n’étais jamais allé au cinéma, j’avais peut-être vaguement écouté la radio. Plus tard, j’ai lu toutes sortes de romans d’aventures, mais je me souviens de mon goût pour les romans français, que je lisais en traduction anglaise. Quand j’ai lu pour la première fois … je pense que c’était Les Trois mousquetaires d’Alexandre Dumas, il y avait là quelque chose qui me fascinait. Oui, c’était là et je ne sais pas pourquoi. Et puis, ma première relation amoureuse sérieuse a commencé en France, en français, avec une Française. Je changeais de monde, de langue, de culture, et tout. Tout ça m’a énormément façonné. » À la fin de ses études de maîtrise, Dickson se trouve à une croisée des chemins. Il ne sait plus trop quelle voie prendre, la carrière d’enseignant dans laquelle il aurait pu s’engager ne l’attire pas, et puis il a le goût du voyage. Averti d’un programme d’échanges entre la France et le Canada, il tente sa chance et gagne gros : dès l’automne 1966, il se retrouve professeur d’anglais dans un lycée de Suresnes, en banlieue parisienne. Il y restera un peu plus d’un an et en ramènera une forte politisation (les communistes contrôlaient cette banlieue et, ajoute-t-il, l’année suivant son départ ses étudiants, tous des anarchistes, sont entrés à Nanterre et ont fait Mai 68), et il en ramènera surtout une épouse avec laquelle il vivra huit ans et qui lui donnera ses deux premiers enfants. C’est donc en français, dit-il, qu’il a entrepris sa vie d’adulte autonome. Lorsque prend fin l’aventure française à l’automne 1967, Dickson rentre au Canada, mais à Québec, pour faire des études à l’Université Laval où l’avait attiré Luc Lacourcière, le grand animateur des études de folklore au Canada français. « Je suis allé à Québec pour faire un doctorat en folklore.

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J’avais rencontré Luc Lacourcière à Toronto : il était professeur invité et j’avais suivi un cours de maîtrise avec lui. Puis je l’avais revu à Paris. J’ai fait à peu près un an et demi en folklore et j’ai compris que ce n’était pas cela qui m’intéressait. Je me voyais plus comme un moderne. Alors je me suis en quelque sorte converti et j’ai suivi plusieurs cours de littérature québécoise, notamment contemporaine. » Installé à l’Île d’Orléans avec sa jeune famille, enthousiasmé par le bouillonnement social et le souffle de liberté qui agitent le Québec de ces années, Dickson réalise que c’est là qu’il veut vivre et il adhère résolument aux aspirations des Québécois de sa génération. Il donne des cours d’anglais à temps partiel et devient pigiste pour la chronique littéraire du journal Le Soleil afin de joindre les deux bouts. Mais surtout, il entreprend une thèse de doctorat sur l’Amérique (aussi bien le continent américain que les ÉtatsUnis) dans l’imaginaire poétique québécois. À Toronto, il n’avait lu que très peu de poésie : « Je m’étais intéressé à Leonard Cohen, aux beats américains, Ginsberg (“Howl”), e.e. cummings (que je cite dans le premier poème d’Humains paysages). Plus tard, j’avais eu un cours d’initiation à Saint-Denys Garneau, Anne Hébert, Alain Grandbois. » Mais à Québec, il se lie avec des poètes de la jeune génération et il découvre la poésie d’avant-garde : « J’avais un chum à l’Université Laval, Louis Royer – c’est le jeune frère de Jean Royer – qui a publié en 1970 un livre superbe que j’ai beaucoup aimé7. J’allais au Chantauteuil écouter les poètes de Québec : Louis Royer, Pierre Morency, Jacques Garneau. J’y ai vu Raoul Duguay. J’ai aussi rencontré Gatien Lapointe pendant la Crise d’octobre, dans le cadre de ma thèse. Moi, la poésie très contemporaine, ça m’est rentré dans le corps, autant que la musique des Stones ou les premières chansons de Bob Dylan; des choses qui me parlaient à moi en tant qu’être humain, jeune, inquiet, qui se demandait ce qu’il allait faire dans la vie. La poésie, la musique, tout ça s’est allumé, tout d’un coup, comme l’ampoule dans le cartoon. J’avais lu des romans d’aventures et tout ça, mais là j’ai pensé : christ, il y a ici une intériorité, une façon de réagir au monde, et d’être dans le monde, et dans le langage, et dans le monde du langage, tout en même temps. » Dans le prolongement de ces activités et rencontres, Dickson s’essaie lui aussi à l’écriture poétique, sans grande prétention, rien que pour ses tiroirs. Au printemps de 1972, quelques mois avant de quitter Québec pour Sudbury, il prend part à un spectacle amateur de poésie à l’Île d’Orléans. « On a publié (c’est beaucoup dire) un petit cahier, sans éditeur, sans date, sans numéros de page, sans rien, dans lequel mes trois premiers poèmes ont paru8. Ils n’ont pas été inclus dans des livres depuis. C’était très timide. » À l’été 1972, Dickson obtient un poste de professeur de littérature québécoise à l’Université Laurentienne; à partir de ce moment, sa destinée sera asso-

La migration culturelle de Robert Dickson / Pelletier

ciée à celle des francophones du nord de l’Ontario, de cette région qu’euxmêmes appellent « le Nouvel-Ontario ». « Curieusement, j’avais comme bouclé la boucle. C’est très bizarre : après cinq ou six ans, je me retrouvais de nouveau dans ma province natale, à trois cents milles de là où j’ai grandi, dans une autre langue et une autre culture. C’était un retour qui n’en était pas un. Il y a de ces figures que je trouve assez curieuses parce que rien n’a été choisi. Si on croit au hasard, c’est le hasard; si on ne croit pas au hasard, c’est le destin ou un de ces grands mots-là. » Je n’ai pas interrogé Dickson sur ses débuts à Sudbury parce qu’ils ont déjà été racontés par Gaston Tremblay, dans son ouvrage Prendre la parole; le journal de bord du Grand cano (Ottawa, Le Nordir, 1995). Notre entretien supposait connus les principaux faits de cette époque. Je me contenterai de rappeler ici qu’au moment où Dickson amorçait sa carrière de professeur à l’Université Laurentienne, un groupe d’étudiants du programme de littérature, sous l’influence combinée de l’utopie contre-culturelle nord-américaine et du nationalisme québécois, avait entrepris un véritable mouvement d’affirmation culturelle franco-ontarienne, par le théâtre, la chanson et la littérature. Déjà, ils avaient créé une maison d’édition, Prise de parole, et fondé la Coopérative des artistes du Nouvel-Ontario (cano). Le jeune leader de ce groupe était André Paiement. Dickson raconte comment il a tout de suite été happé par ce groupe. « Quand je suis arrivé à Sudbury, on m’a parlé de ces jeunes fous et cela m’intriguait. Très vite, j’ai fait leur rencontre – en fait, c’est eux qui m’ont accueilli, qui m’ont fait entrer dans leur mouvement. Le charisme d’André Paiement aurait largement suffi à en entraîner plus d’un dans ce mouvement-là. Et quand il a appris que j’écrivais, il était profondément intéressé. C’étaient aussi les débuts de Prise de parole et je me suis joint volontiers à ça. Il fallait publier des livres, ce qui supposait un travail éditorial, et je me suis rendu compte que mes connaissances en littérature pouvaient vraiment être utiles. Je pouvais apporter une contribution réelle. Au fond, j’ai été interpellé par tout ça, je suivais ça comme un somnambule. » Dickson explique son engagement résolu dans ce mouvement par une volonté radicale de prendre part au présent. « Quand j’avais entrepris ma maîtrise en littérature française à l’Université de Toronto, le directeur m’avait dit : il y a des besoins en xvie et xviiie siècles pour les années à venir – eh bien, moi, ça ne m’intéressait pas. De même quand je suis arrivé à Sudbury : je voulais vraiment vivre dans le présent. » Choix qui, se plaît-il à rappeler, s’est payé de certaines mésententes avec des collègues du département qui avaient une idée plus conventionnelle du métier de professeur de français : « Les profs de mon département se méfiaient de ces jeunes qui faisaient des erreurs d’orthographe et de ponctuation et qui n’accor-

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daient pas leurs participes passés correctement. Si je m’étais préoccupé de ma carrière, je ne me serais pas embarqué avec cette gang de jeunes fous. » Un des objectifs de tout ce mouvement, rappelle Dickson, était de « faire des oeuvres très près du peuple. On a fait ça aussi un peu partout, à cette époque. Les gens avec qui j’étais savaient de quoi ils parlaient quand il était question du peuple. Moi, j’étais de l’extérieur, mais eux, ils étaient de Sturgeon Falls, de Sudbury, de Hearst, de Timmins ou d’un petit village en Abitibi ou en Nouvelle-Écosse. Dans notre idéalisme un peu naïf, nous avions l’impression que tout pouvait changer du tout au tout. » L’engagement de Dickson dans le mouvement nouvel-ontarien s’est traduit notamment par deux actions particulièrement marquantes : le travail d’édition à Prise de parole (« la plus grande part de la production en poésie à Prise de parole a passé par mes mains ») et les spectacles de La Cuisine de la poésie qu’il a créés en collaboration avec son ami Pierre Germain. « Ma volonté était que la poésie soit sur la place publique, au même titre que la chanson et le théâtre. Rétrospectivement, je me rends compte que les spectacles de La Cuisine de la poésie étaient très politiques. Mais il ne s’agissait pas seulement de l’affirmation franco-ontarienne. Il y avait des chansons de Pierre Germain et moi, des fois avec mes paroles et des fois juste les siennes, qui étaient très à gauche. Nous mettions dans nos spectacles un peu de lyrisme, des thèmes comme l’amour, l’amitié, et puis la conscience politique, sociale, écologique; tout cela enrobé de musique, de petits sketches, de farces plates. C’était une œuvre de salubrité publique. Je crois que les Franco-Ontariens avaient été effectivement sans voix pendant longtemps. Nous parlions depuis notre position de petits marginaux issus de la classe ouvrière. Contrairement à ce que dit Gaston Tremblay dans Prendre la parole, je n’ai pas l’impression, rétrospectivement, que nous avions la prétention de participer à la construction d’une culture franco-ontarienne. Notre visée était plus modeste. Ou peut-être que Pierre Germain et moi et d’autres n’étions pas portés vers ces visions grandioses. Je faisais ce que j’aimais, j’avais de belles rencontres avec le public et j’avais des choses à dire, des fois de façon très lyrique et d’autres fois de façon plus politique. Je me développais à mesure. Ça prenait tellement de temps et d’efforts pour concevoir ces spectacles et répéter, qu’on pourrait croire que nous travaillions pour une reconnaissance symbolique (car au bout du chemin il n’y avait pas de reconnaissance pécuniaire). Mais je pense que ce n’était même pas un désir de reconnaissance : c’était simplement une question d’être actif, d’avoir beaucoup d’énergie et de participer à un mouvement, sans savoir si vingt ou trente ans plus tard il porterait des fruits. Ç’aurait pu n’être qu’un feu de paille. C’est peut-être fabuleux que tout cela soit maintenant sur la carte du monde. »

La migration culturelle de Robert Dickson / Pelletier

Les poèmes élaborés pour « La Cuisine de la poésie » ont paru en 1978 dans Or«é»alité. Le lecteur de ce recueil est frappé par la très grande simplicité, voire le simplisme de la langue. Il doit se souvenir qu’il n’a sous les yeux que le fragment d’un spectacle où, à en juger par des enregistrements audio ou audiovisuels réalisés ultérieurement par Dickson, la manière de déclamer était empreinte d’humour, d’ironie, d’un ton volontiers loufoque. « Avant Abris Nocturnes, je ne me pensais pas écrivain. Et je pense que je ne l’étais pas : j’écrivais la langue parlée. Mes premiers livres, Or«é»alité surtout, sont la trace formelle de la langue parlée; il s’agissait de communiquer quelque chose aux gens, de leur dire : nous sommes votre média local, personne d’autre ne vous dit ce que nous vous disons avec une liberté telle que la nôtre. C’était prétentieux, mais cela correspondait à ma conception de la poésie après mon passage au Québec et après mes lectures de la poésie du xxe siècle, notamment celle des “beats”. »

Travail poétique Au cours de sa première année à l’Université Laurentienne, Dickson avait emmené ses étudiants en voyage à Montréal, principalement afin de rencontrer Gaston Miron qui animait les éditions de L’Hexagone. Dickson a d’ailleurs publié par la suite un entretien avec Miron, portant sur le thème de l’assimilation linguistique9. Cela m’a donné l’idée de questionner Dickson sur les influences, littéraires ou autres, qu’il a pu recevoir, entre autres de l’auteur de L’Homme rapaillé. Or je me suis vite aperçu de la réticence qu’il éprouve à se voir associé avec Miron sur le plan poétique. S’il reconnaît volontiers son importance, c’est d’abord en tant qu’inspiration pour la maison d’édition Prise de parole. « L’Hexagone, en tant qu’idée, en tant que boîte fondée par six personnes sur les bases de la coopération, de la participation active des poètes à la préparation de leurs livres, jusqu’à la maquette de couverture, ce sont tous des principes que nous avons intégrés, ou du moins que moi j’ai intégrés dans ce que j’ai fait à Prise de parole depuis des années. Quant à Miron en tant que poète, je l’ai beaucoup aimé et je l’aime toujours; j’aime comment il intègre la langue parlée dans des textes qui sont quand même très écrits – et qui se disent à haute voix en même temps, car je joue moi aussi dans ces plates-bandes-là. J’aime sa grandeur, tout le déchirement qu’il y a chez lui entre le projet individuel et le projet collectif. Encore que je préfère Jacques Brault, le côté tragique d’au moins une partie de son oeuvre. Tandis que Miron, c’est le militant, malgré les allusions à l’amour malheureux. Chez Jacques Brault, il y a un côté élégiaque que je trouve profondément humain. Mais c’est peut-être parce que moi, et les gens avec qui j’ai travaillé ici, nous ne pouvions pas avoir une cause aussi

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bien définie que la cause de Miron, qu’elle soit bonne ou mauvaise, réalisable ou non. » Si Dickson exprime de fortes réserves quant au nationalisme québécois de Miron ou du moins à l’usage qui en a été fait, il salue toutefois l’inspiration qu’il a apportée au mouvement franco-ontarien. « J’avais voulu le faire venir ici la première année, mais il ne pouvait pas, alors j’ai amené ma gang làbas. Mais il a fini par venir plus tard. Il avait la grandeur d’âme et d’esprit d’appuyer tous les mouvements dynamiques. Il avait beau s’appeler Québécois, c’était quand même aussi un Canadien français10. » J’avais également été frappé par une déclaration faite par Dickson au cours d’un important entretien accordé à Hédi Bouraoui, et qui concernait l’influence qu’il avait reçue du poète québécois Roland Giguère : Ma conception de la poésie correspond de très près à celle de Roland Giguère : le poème est provoqué par un mot ou une phrase qui « cogne à la vitre » et qui finit par pousser naturellement, développant ses propres ramifications. [ … ] Giguère disait aussi « La poésie n’est pas évasion, elle est invasion : invasion du monde extérieur par le monde du dedans. » Cela m’avait frappé fort il y a quelque trente ans; j’en suis toujours là11.

Lorsque je lui rappelle ces lignes, Dickson commence par m’expliquer qu’il avait lu Giguère dès ses années québécoises, bien qu’il ne l’eût rencontré pour la première fois que lors du voyage de l’hiver 1973 aux éditions de L’Hexagone, où Giguère avait publié. Plus tard, celui-ci lui a rendu visite à Sudbury. Mais par-delà ces détails significatifs, c’est tout le rapport à l’automatisme qui se trouve signalé par cette influence de Roland Giguère, et qui imprègne profondément la pratique poétique de Dickson. « Quand le poème se fait, il n’y a pas de trame logique. Il n’y a jamais de message au départ. C’est un travail d’écriture dont on espère qu’à un moment donné surgira un sens quelconque. » À plusieurs reprises dans ses poèmes, Dickson exprime l’idée qu’il n’est pas le maître du poème, que c’est plutôt le poème qui s’écrit à travers lui : « le même poème m’écrit toujours »12. Le ralliement de Dickson aux principes et aux techniques de l’automatisme remonte au tout début de son travail poétique et ne s’est jamais démenti. Son option s’éclaire sans doute par les présupposés sociaux utopiques qu’elle véhicule : « Les automatistes étaient tous préoccupés par la justice et le changement social. C’était inhérent à leur conscience à la fois individuelle et de groupe. Il y a là un désir de liberté qui se manifeste par une approche plus libre du langage, opposée à la convention. » La culture occidentale, explique-t-il encore, est marquée par le primat de la conscience individuelle et par la censure que celleci opère sur ses propres sources inconscientes. L’écriture automatique s’efforce d’abolir cette censure : « Un travail mené de manière automatiste engage

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toute la personne. Là où je vais chercher mes textes, ou plutôt là où mes textes me cherchent, idéalement c’est là où je suis le plus complet ou intègre, où tout est pris ensemble. Par exemple, faire son lavage au laundromat et réfléchir à ce qu’on appelle les nettoyages ethniques, c’est naturel13. Quand je marche en ville pour aller au bureau de poste, je vois l’état des feuilles dans les jardins en même temps que je suis en train de brasser de grandes questions. Je vois l’eau, je pense qu’on est privilégiés, qu’il y a des gens qui en manquent … Tout cela se présente selon une hiérarchie très horizontale. Tout est important. Pour moi, on a ce qu’on a, dans la tête, dans le coeur comme il est convenu de dire, et tout est connecté. Raoul Duguay dit “toutédentou”. Dans un texte écrit à Pouce Coupé, je décrivais, à partir de là où j’étais, “crique Bissette, rivière Pouce Coupé, rivière de la Paix, le grand fleuve Mackenzie, l’océan du grand Nord. Le monde est vaste à partir de n’importe quelle petite place14.” Les gens vont aussi dire le contraire, ils vont parler du village global. Mais jusqu’à maintenant, c’est dans la petite place que commence le poème, dans les trois ou quatre mots qui surgissent en premier parce que le reste, c’est juste des enchaînements quasiment sans m’arrêter ou presque, avec cependant des interstices là-dedans. Mais le petit moment du début, dont tu ne sais pas où il va te mener, c’est tout un sentiment qui te passe à travers le moi : il y a les vagues, les rivières, les marécages, il y a les gratte-ciel, il y a une gare … Avec des années de travail automatiste, on en vient à des zones où, on opère instinctivement une connexion entre le sens et la forme, le mouvement, le rythme et la rondeur des mots. Ça produit des espèces de sculptures kinétiques à la Calder. » Toute l’oeuvre poétique de Dickson est placée sous le signe de l’oralité, de sa musicalité, plutôt que sous le signe du contenu. La simplicité du langage oral, pour laquelle avait consciemment opté un auteur comme Saint-Denys Garneau auquel Dickson voue une grande admiration, lui sert de constant point d’appui. « Je crois à la richesse d’un langage assez familier. On voit bien cette richesse dans la poésie française des xive, xve et xvie siècles, avant l’Académie française et la standardisation de la langue; le langage y est tellement évocateur, il est à son niveau le plus lyrique. Il y a de vieilles chansons, de vieilles ballades qui sont tout en émotion, bien plus qu’en intellect. » Son recours à un langage simple, parfois même trivial, a parfois été reproché au poète, qui réplique : « Les mots rares, je les connais. Et si je ne les connais pas, je peux aller voir dans mon “thésaurus”. Je les connais, les synonymes. J’ai du “vocabulaire”! Mais ce n’est pas ça qui m’intéresse. » Dickson reconnaît volontiers une évolution dans son travail poétique depuis les deux premiers recueils de 1978, où l’écriture était conçue surtout en fonction des spectacles de « La Cuisine de la poésie ». « L’important, dans

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Or«é»alité, ce n’était pas la lisibilité mais l’écoute : je disais des textes à haute voix pour que les gens puissent tout saisir en même temps, rien qu’avec l’oreille. J’essayais de tout intégrer en même temps. » Mais avec l’abandon des spectacles, il est passé peu à peu à une écriture plus complexe. « Au départ, j’étais une espèce d’automatiste pur et dur, si je puis dire – c’est-à-dire, le premier jet, c’est le premier jet. Avec le temps, fort heureusement, je suis devenu moins arrogant. Je m’étais mis à fignoler de petites choses et je me suis dit : pourquoi avoir une position idéologique? Certes, le poème s’écrit à travers moi et ce qui sort alors, c’est la musique de l’oralité, les rythmes confondus; quand j’y retourne, une semaine ou un mois plus tard, si je n’avais pas écrit la date sur la feuille j’aurais peine à croire que c’est moi qui l’ai écrit. Mais là, quand je vois ce texte, je suis capable de le considérer davantage comme texte et je me dis que je peux le rendre plus complexe. Mon écriture automatique est beaucoup moins pure maintenant qu’elle ne l’était à l’époque d’Or«é»alité (et déjà, j’arrangeais un peu, j’étais “le gars des vues”). Bien sûr, je suis encore appelé à lire des textes en public, mais je me préoccupe beaucoup plus de la page qu’auparavant. Si un lecteur lit un poème à plusieurs reprises et découvre quelque chose à chaque lecture, eh bien c’est là le propre de la poésie. Cela dépend évidemment du lecteur, de sa propre prise sur le langage, de sa capacité d’y entrer, mais cela dépend aussi de mon travail d’écriture – parce que, si, par exemple, les enchaînements grammaticaux sont relâchés ou manquent d’évidence, cela produit de multiples lectures possibles, plusieurs manières de découper le texte. Mes vers ne sont pas du tout classiques, et je fais cela entre ce qui est devenu un automatisme de l’écriture (car c’est ma manière d’écrire des poèmes depuis les tout débuts, depuis plus de trentecinq ans) et un travail conscient au deuxième niveau, après le premier jet. J’ai été marqué naguère par Raoul Duguay, philosophe, musicien (saxophoniste notamment : “L’Infonie”), grand flyé. Il a publié un texte dans Culture vivante (la revue du ministère des Affaires culturelles du Québec), vers 1970, qui s’intitule “Le stéréo-poème audio-visuel”15. Ce texte se retrouve en bribes et dans le désordre dans son grand livre de 333 pages Lapokalipsô de 1971. Dans ce petit essai-là, tout en faisant référence à McLuhan, à la discontinuité de la vie urbaine et tout ça, puis à la manière dont la poésie urbaine peut en faire état, il décortique le langage à tous ses niveaux. Il se sert du grasseyement, du chuintement – c’est un Abitibien, comme Richard Desjardins, et la langue rugueuse, il connaît ça. Il manie cette langue de manière très emphatique dans ses prestations publiques. Moi, je trouve que toute la gamme du langage peut être significative. À la fin du xxe siècle et au début du xxie siècle, on sait combien la poésie a changé (j’évite des mots comme “évolution” ou “progrès”) : vers libre, travail sur le vers lui-même, fractionnement, jusqu’à la confusion des genres

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(prose poétique, poésie en prose, etc.). Je suis conscient de ces phénomènes-là. Je m’efforce de jouer avec la page, avec les rythmes, je subvertis le vers, je subvertis toutes les expressions convenues et les façons convenues de voir les choses. J’abhorre le convenu, quand on n’en est pas conscient : “l’astre solaire” ou “l’astre lunaire” pour dire “le soleil” ou “la lune” – personnellement, je suis incapable de ce type de lyrisme. Par contre, je trouve significatif et parfois probant d’utiliser des expressions comme “c’est à qui le petit cœur après cinq heures” (qu’on m’a reprochée)16, et je le fais très consciemment : je fais un rythme sur cette phrase tout à fait convenue en changeant le contexte dans lequel elle est proposée, pour essayer de la faire signifier autrement, de lui donner une signification à moi, plutôt que de simplement l’éviter, l’exclure de ma palette. L’important, c’est le rythme. Il peut même y avoir plusieurs rythmes à l’intérieur d’un même texte, c’est un risque à prendre – mais s’il y a des polyrythmies en musique, pourquoi pas en poésie aussi? La poésie doit être aussi contemporaine que la musique. Le jury qui m’a décerné le Prix du Gouverneur général a reconnu dans mes poèmes une musique de jazz. Wow! Cela me fait croire qu’après toutes ces années, j’en suis arrivé à une poésie qui m’est propre, assez du moins pour que certains lecteurs y reconnaissent quelque chose d’individualisé. Je suis en dehors des modes, du Québec ou d’ailleurs. Je suis seul au monde, comme on l’est tous et, sans exagérer l’individualité, je peux dire que je commence à savoir écrire et que j’écris à partir du lieu de la confusion qui est moi. Puisque je n’écris plus pour la scène ou pour un public précis, je le fais davantage pour moi, pour tenter d’être intègre à tous les niveaux : envers la langue, envers les rythmes que je crois être les bons, envers le discours. Et tout cela n’est pas démuni d’idées, de perceptions, même de prises de position politiques, évoquées ou simplement suggérées en arrière-plan. » J’interroge Dickson sur le problème de l’articulation entre sa pratique automatiste et la critique sociale ou politique qu’expriment son action et d’emblée, mais de plus en plus, sa poésie. S’il y a bel et bien un désir de subversion dans l’automatisme, peut-il suffire à nourrir une critique sociale requérant un jugement articulé et soumise aux contraintes logiques? Dickson répond avec une désarmante honnêteté : « Il y a peut-être contradiction entre l’écriture automatique et les propos que je tiens. Mais dans ce qui surgit de moi-même, il y a beaucoup de choses que j’ai fini par intérioriser. À travers la langue et l’écriture, c’est essentiellement mon travail, ma pensée et ma vie conjugués qui s’expriment. Quoi qu’il en soit, la question que tu poses nous rappelle les limites de la poésie, de son champ d’action, de son rayonnement. De toute façon, on ne peut pas changer la politique mondiale ou même locale d’un jour à l’autre, ni même dans une seule vie. De toutes les causes que nous avions, au cours de mes

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premières années à Sudbury, de tout ce que nous pensions pouvoir accomplir, rien n’a été réussi. Alors au fond, il vaut mieux faire comme Tomson Highway et raconter des histoires. C’est là qu’intervient la littérature : elle permet de mieux comprendre et de mieux voir. On aimerait que les choses soient différentes, elles ne le sont pas. La littérature peut du moins, jouer un rôle sur ce plan, un rôle limité mais qui a son importance. »

Entre Québec et Canada … Bien que la politique canadienne ne soit que rarement à l’avant-plan dans sa poésie, on comprend qu’elle demeure pour Dickson une préoccupation constante et je lui ai également demandé d’expliquer son parcours sur ce point. Je suis parti d’une trouvaille faite en me préparant à ces entretiens. J’avais tenu à lire tous les articles de Dickson, y compris ses tout premiers textes publiés dans Le Soleil de septembre 1970 à mai 1972. Ces textes sont des comptes rendus, principalement d’oeuvres littéraires canadiennes-anglaises, que Dickson ponctue de brefs commentaires politiques. Or, on y trouve des affirmations qui, rétrospectivement, étonnent. Dans le dernier de ces articles, intitulé « Entre Québec et Washington, peut-on faire un Canada? », le jeune Dickson écrit : À plusieurs points de vue, le Canada anglophone accuse un retard de dix ans sur le Québec. C’est-à-dire, au niveau d’une identité canadienne, d’une conscience sociale, d’une politisation générale chez l’homme moyen. Le Québec a « débloqué » en 1960, avec la Révolution tranquille, et ne s’est pas arrêté là. En ce sens, la langue française, avec tous les problèmes qu’elle a pu susciter dans certains domaines, a au moins aidé à résister à l’implantation massive d’une culture (c’est beaucoup dire) américaine homogénéisée, améliorée, avec ou sans enzymes.

Plus loin dans le même texte, dans une section qui a pour sous-titre « L’avenir canadien : trop tard? » Dickson écrit : Cet avenir est problématique, pour les raisons qu’on connaît, et plus d’un auteur croit que le Canada est condamné à l’assimilation complète par les États-Unis. Le Québec a de meilleures chances de survivre que le Canada anglophone à présent, selon certains. De quoi réjouir bon nombre de Québécois peut-être, mais quelle tragédie pour des millions de Canadiens qui n’auraient jamais eu de vrai pays17.

La lecture que je fais à Dickson de ces passages, ponctuée par lui de quelques rires, l’entraîne aux réflexions suivantes : « Je n’ai jamais relu ces articles, alors ce que tu m’en lis est un peu comme une révélation; c’est comme si quelqu’un

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d’autre que moi les avait écrits … Je connaissais très peu le Canada anglais. J’avais grandi dans un petit village, puis j’étais allé à l’université, puis j’ai quitté. Je n’avais pas tellement connu la littérature canadienne-anglaise à l’université, car on ne lui accordait aucune importance … En réfléchissant à ma situation de l’époque, j’y trouve quelque chose de très curieux. Je vivais à l’Île d’Orléans, avec mon épouse bretonne et mon enfant, et je découvrais la littérature anglocanadienne actuelle. C’était une belle époque non seulement pour la littérature québécoise, mais aussi pour celle du Canada anglais. Et je m’y retrouvais beaucoup, ça me parlait haut et fort. On m’avait donné une tribune pour écrire làdessus en français, dans la ville de Québec, et il n’y avait que le journal Le Soleil, parmi les quotidiens francophones, qui faisait régulièrement une chronique sur la littérature anglo-canadienne. C’était l’idée de Florian Sauvageau qui était là à l’époque, et il avait déjà cette ouverture-là. Moi, j’étais en train de me découvrir, de faire tout un triage dans ma tête, comme dans une gare. Et je faisais des comptes rendus en français de livres en anglais, pour un public qui généralement ne les lirait pas. Mais c’était une position privilégiée : j’étais à la fois à l’intérieur et à l’extérieur, des deux côtés. À un moment donné, j’ai fait un compte rendu d’un roman fabuleux de Marian Engel18. Je suis entré en contact avec la maison d’édition parce que je voulais écrire un mot à l’auteur19. L’éditeur m’a alors dit qu’à son avis, le meilleur compte rendu à avoir été fait de ce roman, celui qui avait le mieux compris les enjeux du roman, était le mien, le seul à avoir été écrit en français. Je n’étais même pas un professionnel, j’étais un amateur! Tout le temps que je passais à lire des livres et à écrire des comptes rendus, à 20 ou 30 piastres la shot, je ne faisais pas mon doctorat, je découvrais le monde … Mais c’était important pour devenir la personne unifiée – ou non – que je suis. Dans certains de ces textes-là, sûrement, j’ai essayé de couler beaucoup de moi-même – cela m’était possible puisque ce n’étaient que des comptes rendus d’un chroniqueur, je ne faisais pas une véritable œuvre critique, je ne prétendais pas à l’objectivité. À mon insu sans doute, je faisais une espèce de comparaison de cultures, j’essayais de faire mes synthèses à moi, parce que chaque livre me faisait comprendre autrement le monde. J’étais très incertain de moimême en écrivant cette chronique, j’avais peur que mon français, ou que ma compréhension des enjeux du livre, ne soient pas à la hauteur. J’étais très jeune, je n’avais pas une grande expérience du monde, même si j’avais vécu un peu dans d’autres cultures. Donc cette chronique-là était sûrement un peu un voyage de découverte de moi-même, à mon insu … Il est certain qu’à cette époque, j’adhérais au discours politique tenu par le Québec. J’ai assisté au premier rassemblement public du Mouvement souveraineté-association, au Patro Saint-Roch à Limoilou. C’était un souper aux beans

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à une piastre, et René Lévesque avait parlé pendant une heure et demie. Moi, j’étais vendu : je n’ai pas acheté ma carte, mais … “Lévesque oui, Trudeau no”, j’en étais là, à cause de sa vision de la communauté. Trudeau et les droits individuels, pas les droits collectifs : ça me semblait à l’époque et ça me semble toujours une aberration. » À ce propos, Dickson se souvient que même au Canada anglais le mouvement social québécois a longtemps fasciné : « La première manifestation politique à laquelle j’ai participé a eu lieu à l’Université de Toronto, à l’automne 1963; c’était probablement la plus grande manifestation universitaire dans l’histoire du Canada anglais. C’était l’époque du fameux “What does Quebec want?”. Il y avait environ 8000 étudiants qui ont manifesté pour que l’Ontario soit à l’écoute du Québec. Il y va de l’avenir de notre pays, disaientils. Le Québec incarnait une espèce de rêve, que nous trouvions différent et qu’il ne s’agissait pas de seulement tolérer. » Mais la dynamique utopique québécoise a aussi inspiré le mouvement nouvel-ontarien, comme en témoigne cette autre anecdote que rapporte Dickson : « Le 15 novembre 1976, il y avait vingt ou vingt-cinq personnes réunies chez moi, à regarder les résultats de l’élection québécoise sur ma télé noir et blanc. Et lorsque Gérald Godin a défait Robert Bourassa dans sa circonscription, ça s’est adonné que c’est ça qui a donné la majorité au PQ. Nous, toute la gang de cano, on était fous! Moi, je disais : un poète peut renverser un premier ministre. Contrairement à ce que beaucoup de gens pensent, il y avait une grande admiration pour toute cette dynamique sociale au Québec. Et moi, ça m’a mauditement formé : j’ai vécu au Québec quatre ans ou quatre ans et demi, et participé à bien des choses et connu bien du monde. Je ne suis pas resté dans ma petite tour d’ivoire. J’ai manifesté, j’ai connu ça. » Sur le plan politique, Dickson n’adopte plus la même position qu’en ses années québécoises. « Je sais beaucoup moins que ce que je pensais savoir à l’époque. Grand bien me fasse, d’ailleurs. » D’une part, il continue de penser que la langue française constitue au Canada une espèce de rempart contre le nivellement culturel auquel tend le capitalisme transnational. « Mais là où j’ai changé, c’est que pour moi le Québec ne représente plus à lui seul le Canada français ou les Canada français. » Il manifeste beaucoup d’humeur contre le désintérêt des Québécois envers les autres minorités francophones au Canada, sous prétexte qu’elles seraient condamnées à l’assimilation. « J’ai tenu récemment des propos là-dessus à l’Université de Montréal, à l’occasion de la Journée internationale de la francophonie. Je leur disais : c’est une vue de l’esprit, ça n’arrive pas si facilement. On peut parler de contamination linguistique, de créolisation, etc., mais … s’il y a encore des Cajuns qui parlent français, pensez-vous qu’un demi-million de Franco-Ontariens vont disparaître avant l’an 2050? Soyez intelligents, distinguez entre votre discours intéressé et la

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vérité. Si vous avez un plan de pays, ne le justifiez pas en prédisant la disparition d’autres gens. » Dickson déplore un certain discours québécois selon lequel on ne peut être biculturel; il s’agit là, dit-il, d’une attitude à peu près équivalente à celle du fondamentalisme religieux qui fait fi des faits. Lorsque je veux suggérer qu’il y a malgré tout une ouverture à l’autre au Québec, bien que ce ne soit pas forcément l’autre Canadien anglais, mais plutôt l’américanité par exemple, il me réplique un peu sèchement : « Ce n’est pas “l’autre Canadien anglais” parce qu’on ne le nomme pas encore, on se contente de le qualifier d’“Anglais”. Je rejette l’idée selon laquelle le Canada anglais n’aurait pas de culture, qu’il n’y aurait que les États-Unis. Cela me semble aussi aberrant que lorsque des gens de Toronto disent “We have a world-class city”. » Dickson fait sienne l’idée selon laquelle les cultures coïncidant avec des espaces nationaux homogènes sont une figure du passé, qui doit faire place à des identités plus complexes. « Il n’y a pas de mythe fondateur au Canada anglais et ce n’est peut-être pas un mal. C’est peut-être l’avenir du monde, la fin de l’État-nation. Mais on n’est pas encore rendu là et pour l’instant, le vecteur qui nous conduit vers le dépassement de l’État-nation semble être le méga-capitalisme transnational, ce qui est troquer un mal pour un autre. » Lorsque, rappelant que par son travail de traducteur il s’est fait passeur entre les deux langues officielles du Canada, je lui demande s’il adhère à l’idéal canadien de biculturalisme, il apporte une réponse nuancée : « Le Canada est déjà devenu biculturel à environ 40 %. Il y a ici des enfants chinois, vietnamiens, croates, chiliens, haïtiens, etc., dont les parents sont plus ou moins unilingues alors qu’euxmêmes sont en train de vivre dans une autre langue à l’école (ç’a été le cas, auparavant, pour les Italiens, les Allemands, les Ukrainiens, les Polonais). Alors je pense que oui, le biculturalisme est une réalité. Mais si tu me demandes si je crois au biculturalisme tel que le gouvernement fédéral, surtout libéral, en parle depuis 1960 environ, je dirai qu’à mes yeux, sans avoir assez fouillé la question, la politique du biculturalisme n’a pas donné les résultats escomptés. Car si le biculturalisme ne protège pas les minorités linguistiques, et notamment la minorité francophone au Canada (car la minorité anglophone au Québec n’a pas besoin d’autant de protection, pour les raisons que l’on sait), alors c’est de la foutaise, ce n’est qu’un mot à saveur électoraliste. » Et il conclut, sur un ton narquois : « Maintenant que je suis connu, je peux exprimer mes opinions! J’en avais il y a trente ans, mais le monde s’en sacrait! » Pour conclure sur ces questions, je demande à Dickson s’il se reconnaît d’abord comme auteur canadien, ou plutôt comme auteur franco-ontarien. «Pour ce qui est de mon œuvre de poète, dit-il, j’œuvre dans le milieu francoontarien, j’ai toujours été publié en Ontario, surtout à Prise de parole, je suis

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associé au mouvement ou au moment identitaire franco-ontarien. Cela dit, au départ, je me considérais moi-même bien plus comme un Nouvel-Ontarien que comme un Franco-Ontarien. Parce que je faisais partie du groupe cano et j’étais installé en région, dans un ici très précis. Maintenant, je considère que, tout en travaillant à partir d’ici, je suis un citoyen, de mon pays d’abord, mais aussi de la planète. Mes préoccupations, notamment dans mon dernier livre, dépassent le milieu franco-ontarien ou même canadien et je pense que c’est bien ainsi. Mais au fond, comment je me considère, cela n’a pas d’importance. Ma tâche est d’essayer d’être lucide et c’est bien assez. »

Traduction Dans les dernières années, une part importante du travail de Dickson a été consacrée à la traduction. On lui doit la traduction en anglais de quatre pièces de théâtre écrites par des auteurs franco-ontariens : la pièce Strip écrite par Catherine Caron, Brigitte Haentjens et Sylvie Trudel, ainsi que trois pièces de Jean Marc Dalpé : Eddy, Trick or Treat et Lucky Lady20. Il a aussi traduit en français le roman Frog Moon de Lola Lemire Tostevin, sous le titre Kaki21, et un roman de Tomson Highway, The Kiss of the Fur Queen, sous le titre Champion et Ooneemeetoo22. « J’ai aussi fait un peu de traduction de poésie : à Paris, j’ai participé au Festival franco-anglais de poésie23, puis à un numéro de la revue Ellipse24, mais ma participation s’est limitée à reprendre quelques traductions en anglais de certains de mes poèmes que j’avais faites pour mes sœurs et ma mère, afin qu’elles comprennent un peu ce que je fais depuis trente ans. » À ma question concernant les circonstances qui l’ont amené à entreprendre ces traductions, Dickson répond qu’à l’exception de Kaki, toutes les autres traductions qu’il a réalisées viennent de demandes qui lui ont été faites. C’est Jean Marc Dalpé lui-même qui lui a demandé d’être son traducteur. « Il m’avait également sollicité pour son roman Un vent se lève qui éparpille, mais à ce moment-là j’étais déjà engagé dans la traduction du roman de Tomson, et je lui ai demandé s’il pouvait m’accorder un délai de trois ans. Il n’a pas voulu attendre. Il m’a dit : “Désormais, tu n’es plus mon traducteur, tu es mon traducteur de théâtre!” (Il rit.) » La traduction du roman de Tomson Highway lui a été demandée par la directrice de Prise de parole, denise truax. « Elle était tombée sous le charme de ce roman et un soir, comme ça, elle a dit que ça mériterait d’être traduit – et publié par Prise de parole, ajouta-t-elle en me lorgnant du coin de l’oeil. Alors, étant donné la très grande richesse de ce roman, j’ai choisi ça comme projet pour mon dernier congé sabbatique. » Dickson se défend constamment d’être un traducteur attitré. « Je me suis improvisé traducteur pour la pièce Strip, et j’ai continué à m’improviser traduc-

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teur pour les pièces de Dalpé. Mais même si je traduis, je ne suis pas un traducteur, je fais ça “à la mitaine”, comme j’ai tout fait. » Cependant, ajoute-t-il, on finit par apprendre sur le tas. J’aborde alors un problème fameux auquel se heurtent souvent les traductions anglaises d’oeuvres canadiennes-françaises, à savoir la manière de rendre les mots anglais présents dans le texte de départ. Ce problème se pose pour les passages en joual dans les oeuvres québécoises, mais il est encore plus criant dans les oeuvres franco-ontariennes où, souvent, l’anglais a une présence bien plus forte. Dans sa traduction d’Eddy, faisje remarquer à Dickson, les mots anglais du texte de départ sont maintenus en anglais dans le texte d’arrivée, et on a l’impression que de ce fait un aspect important se trouve perdu. « C’est le cas pour les trois pièces de Dalpé, me répond-il, du moins pour Eddy/In the Ring et pour Trick or Treat. Mais le problème se pose aussi, de façon inverse, pour les deux romans que j’ai traduits de l’anglais : dans le texte original de Lola, il y a des éléments en français, et dans le roman de Tomson il y a des expressions en cri. Traduire un texte qui est déjà métissé, surtout quand le métissage de l’original est déjà dans la langue d’arrivée, ça pose des problèmes très difficiles. C’est beaucoup plus difficile à résoudre en théâtre, d’ailleurs, car dans le cas d’un roman, on peut établir des conventions dans le texte : caractères italiques, notes du traducteur, etc. Pour le roman de Tomson, j’ai maintenu les passages en cri et, comme lui, établi un glossaire cri-français à la fin. Pour moi, c’est à peu près de même nature que certains jeux de mots ou mots d’esprit : s’il n’y a pas moyen de les traduire, le défi devient alors de constituer un texte parallèle où il y a autant d’interaction. Idéalement, il faut faire un jeu de mots qui se rapproche le plus possible de l’original, pour que la saveur soit là, tout en respectant le rythme qui est présent dans la littérature, en prose comme en poésie. Dans les trois textes de Dalpé, le rythme est présent : dans Eddy, c’est la boxe; dans Lucky Lady, c’est les courses de chevaux; et dans Trick or Treat, il y a vraiment un rythme du tac au tac. À un moment donné, je traduisais un long monologue du jeune personnage Cracked, dans Trick or Treat; je pensais l’avoir assez bien traduit, mais Jean Marc m’a dit : “Tu l’as traduit, mais le rythme n’est pas là. Pense hip-hop.” Il y avait beaucoup de répétitions qui, en français, coulaient de source, mais qu’on ne pouvait pas faire en anglais. Alors, Jean Marc m’a dit : “Libère-toi de ça et cherche le rythme.” Et je pense que le monologue est devenu pas mal plus court en anglais, mais c’était pour aller à l’essentiel. Pour ce qui est du mélange d’anglais et de français, on peut toujours demander : ne pourrait-on pas, en traduisant en anglais, simplement inverser? Mais ça ne marche pas; pour le roman de Lola, ça ne marchait pas … Pour la scène, il n’y a pas moyen de contourner la perte par rapport à l’original, et on ne peut

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qu’espérer que le texte soit suffisamment riche – et au théâtre, cela inclut la mise en scène, le jeu des comédiens, la direction des acteurs – et que tout cela va venir pallier un peu ce qui, sur papier, paraît une carence. » Si la traduction romanesque présente des avantages par rapport à la traduction théâtrale, elle a aussi ses difficultés propres, signale Dickson. « Quand je traduisais Frog Moon, je pensais ne pas aboutir, je ne pensais pas être capable, tellement le texte anglais était entier. Il y avait tellement de voix narratives, de lieux, de problèmes terminologiques … C’était tout un défi. Au départ, il faut traduire le texte qui est là, mais à un moment donné, il faut un texte dans la langue d’arrivée qui préserve les rythmes et le style tout en respectant l’auteur. Et pour ça, tu ne peux t’appuyer que sur ton jugement et ton intuition. C’est une aventure existentielle, parce que tu te retrouves dans l’incertitude totale. Avec le roman de Tomson aussi, ç’a été difficile, mais je me suis moins cassé la tête; c’est que la nature du projet est tellement différente. » Dickson m’explique que contrairement à ses autres traductions, celle de Frog Moon de Lola Lemire Tostevin fut son initiative propre. Dans ce roman, l’auteure raconte son enfance comme francophone à Timmins et à Sturgeon Falls, jusqu’à sa vie adulte dans le sud de l’Ontario. Parmi les thèmes qu’elle aborde, il y a celui de sa propre assimilation à la langue anglaise, des tourments de conscience que cette assimilation lui a causés, et finalement de son acceptation. Dickson décrit comment il a pris connaissance de ce texte : « Je suis tombé par hasard sur un compte rendu de Frog Moon, dans le Toronto Star ou le Globe and Mail qu’il m’arrive de lire à l’occasion. Et ça me semblait fort intéressant. Alors j’ai voulu lire ce livre et, après l’avoir lu, ma première réaction – et j’en ai parlé à denise truax – a été de dire : ça, c’est de la littérature franco-ontarienne. C’est un roman écrit en anglais; ça aborde la question de l’assimilation, question centrale dans l’existence des Franco-Ontariens. Personne n’a vraiment parlé de cela (un peu Daniel Poliquin dans L’Obomsawin). Et en plus c’est un roman féministe, et il n’y en a pas assez. Alors pour moi, ça devait appartenir au corpus, et c’est le projet où j’ai dit moi-même : je vais le traduire! Je voulais que ça appartienne au corpus franco-ontarien, pour que les gens sachent. J’ai voulu le rendre disponible à d’autres lecteurs francophones, surtout au Canada. Et peut-être que certains lecteurs (au Québec, pour ne pas le nommer) pourront, à travers une excellente oeuvre de fiction, revenir sur certaines idées arrêtées concernant l’assimilation. » Ayant été moi-même présent lors du lancement de Kaki à Sudbury, au printemps de 1997, je rappelle à Dickson une scène que j’avais alors trouvée poignante : alors que lui-même lisait à haute voix quelques extraits de sa traduction, l’auteure l’avait interrompu à un moment donné en s’exclamant :

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« C’est tellement plus beau en français! » Dickson renchérit : « C’était un des deux lancements que nous avons faits à Sudbury. Nous avons aussi passé à la radio de cbc et, après cette lecture-là, à un moment donné je me suis tourné vers Lola et elle s’est mise à brailler dans mes bras, en disant : “C’est ça, le roman que je voulais écrire!” … Quand je l’ai rencontrée pour la première fois, je ne savais même pas si elle parlait français. Nous parlons toujours français ensemble, sauf quand je la vois avec son mari qui est anglophone … Quand je me rappelle cette fois-là, je suis tenté de citer Gabrielle Roy, dans Bonheur d’occasion, lorsque Rose-Anna dit : “On ne fait pas ce qu’on veut dans la vie, Florentine, on fait ce qu’on peut.” Il n’est pas question ici d’être “traître à sa culture”, tout ce discours, au Québec, où l’on blâmait ceux qui devaient partir en NouvelleAngleterre, ou des fois dans le Haut-Canada, pour des questions d’ordre économique. On les accusait de trahir la langue et la foi … quelle merde! Lola, elle a eu le trajet qu’elle a eu. Elle a appris à écrire dans l’autre langue. Et moi, j’ai appris à écrire dans mon autre langue. »

Écrire en français J’avais été frappé, à la lecture d’Or«é»alité, par ces lignes : je sais que commencer une phrase en français et être obligé de l’achever en une autre langue parce qu’on est à bout de mots à bout de notions natales c’est la mort qui approche et ce n’est pas correct25

Or dans des textes ultérieurs, fais-je remarquer, Dickson semble trouver beaucoup moins problématique l’ouverture à l’anglais chez les Franco-Ontariens. Par exemple, dans un texte consacré à la traduction théâtrale en Ontario français, il met en valeur une « extrême perméabilité à la langue et à la culture secondes26 ». Ailleurs, lors d’une intervention faite à un colloque de 1997 consacré à la situation des arts dans la francophonie hors Québec, il déclare : « nous autres, on ne met pas nos mots en anglais entre guillemets27 ». Dickson répond d’abord que cette dernière remarque vaut beaucoup plus pour Patrice Desbiens et Jean Marc Dalpé que pour lui-même. Il ajoute : « Pour ce qui est de ce que je dis dans Or«é»alité, il s’agissait simplement de rappeler sur le mode allusif une situation de fait et sa signification. Il ne s’agit pas d’une analyse, mais ça ouvre à une analyse possible. Que je puisse constater cette perméabilité n’a rien de surprenant : j’ai fait mes gammes en France et au Québec avant de venir ici; en arrivant ici, j’avais un regard de l’extérieur et je m’étonnais d’entendre les secrétaires

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parler dans un charabia mi-anglais mi-français dans les couloirs de l’université. Je ne cherchais pas à dénoncer consciemment telle ou telle chose. Dalpé l’a fait pendant un bout de temps et c’était nécessaire. Pendant longtemps, il est vrai que je me suis refusé d’une certaine manière à l’anglais. Il y avait peut-être une censure chez moi. C’est très complexe : d’une part je suis automatiste, mais je pense que je me suis censuré. C’est très difficile d’éviter ça. Dans mes textes récents, il y a beaucoup plus d’anglais qu’avant. Il m’est arrivé, par exemple, d’écrire un poème et tout à coup, le dernier vers s’est écrit tout seul en anglais. » Dickson retrouve le passage en question dans un recueil et me le lit : ce poème estime que bien du monde a du sang indien qui dans les veines qui sur les mains this poem lies scattered like snow like friends28

« Je pense que je sais d’où ça m’est venu : c’est à cause d’une association sonore dans le texte français, qui m’a fait embarquer sur l’autre piste. Ce qui m’est venu, c’est l’allitération de “veines” et “friends” … Moi, à un moment donné, je me suis dit : je travaille en français. Mais pourtant, je peux fonctionner en anglais, tu sais. Quand je parle à ma mère et mes sœurs, je parle en anglais. Quand je vais sur la ferme, chez ma sœur et mon beau-frère, je ne dis pas un seul mot en français pendant trois semaines … Mais ce n’est pas souvent que je vis cette dualité comme une schizophrénie, comme certains ont dit, notamment André Paiement. C’est que je ne suis pas dans la même position que lui, non plus. Je ne suis pas un Franco-Ontarien de naissance, happé, comme Patrice Desbiens, par l’anglais. Pour moi, les deux langues, c’est un plus plutôt qu’un moins. Je me trouve très chanceux, je me rends compte que je suis dans une position privilégiée. » Pour terminer, j’expose à Dickson quelques idées qui me sont venues en comparant ses textes avec ceux de ses deux amis franco-ontariens Jean Marc Dalpé et Patrice Desbiens29. Le langage appauvri et hachuré de mots anglais qu’utilisent ces derniers manifeste tout un univers, il est chargé de toutes sortes de renvois implicites à un monde marqué par la misère matérielle et culturelle, ainsi que par la violence symbolique ou directe; il y a chez eux, sur le simple plan du langage, de multiples harmoniques qui plongent jusque dans l’enfance. Qu’en est-il de la langue dicksonienne, qui ne peut compter sur de telles harmoniques? On sent ici de tout autres thématiques, préoccupations esthétiques et accents. Par exemple, Dickson montre parfois un inté-

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rêt presque de linguiste pour le pittoresque de la langue française, comme s’il l’abordait du dehors. Et lorsqu’il recourt à l’anglais, c’est à titre de langue proprement littéraire plutôt qu’en référence au contexte social où elle exerce une domination. Je conclus en lui demandant de tempérer au besoin mes jugements, mais aussi en l’invitant à décrire comment sa position très particulière enrichit de manière originale la culture franco-ontarienne. Dickson me dit d’abord que, s’il lui est devenu naturel d’écrire en français, cela n’a pas toujours été le cas. « Le français m’a donné beaucoup de difficulté autrefois; j’ai hésité à faire ma maîtrise en français, tellement j’avais l’impression de ne pas connaître assez la langue. C’est un long apprentissage. Nancy Huston écrit là-dessus dans Nord perdu. Je viens de lire un texte de Marguerite Andersen dans son livre Parallèles qui vient de paraître : je suis tombé par hasard sur un passage où elle, qui est de langue maternelle allemande et est elle aussi devenue professeur de français, s’est fait dire parfois : “Ah, tu écris ta phrase de même, c’est évident que tu n’es pas une vraie francophone30.” Alors à ce niveaulà, oui, je crois que le niveau de difficulté est passablement élevé. Cela dit, j’ai eu la chance de vivre là-dedans toute ma vie d’adulte, et de vivre dans les livres, dans la littérature, au sein d’un groupe d’artistes francophones, et de vivre ma vie personnelle surtout en français, vingt-quatre heures par jour, et bien plus que bien des gens de ce milieu-ci qui, par la force des choses, soit travaillent en anglais ou sont toujours environnés par l’anglais. Alors je pense que j’ai pu approfondir ça un peu. Et de plus, l’écriture, eh bien … Patrice Desbiens écrit dans un texte : “Mon ami le poète Robert Dickson me dit / L’Écriture C’est Une Discipline31.” Cela dit, je suis tout à fait prêt à accepter que je pourrais constituer (avec quelques autres) un cas à part dans la littérature franco-ontarienne. François Paré a déjà écrit un article sur les transfuges linguistiques : nathalie stephens, Margaret Michèle Cook et moi32. Je ne peux pas faire ce que je ne peux pas faire et je pense que j’en suis conscient, de la même manière que je n’ai pas grandi à Sturgeon Falls ou à Moonbeam ou à Hawkesbury. Mon expérience des deux cultures est définitivement autre. Mais j’en ai quand même une, et je pense que quand la gang d’ici m’a accueilli, ils ont bien senti qu’il y avait cette complémentarité-là, et que je n’étais pas seulement un Anglais qui avait la prétention de leur montrer la littérature canadienne-française. Pour ce qui est de mon exploitation du pittoresque de la langue, je pense qu’elle vient du fait que j’apprends de cette culture où je suis arrivé et qui m’a adopté. Il y a des choses qui m’ont frappé ici. J’ai été frappé aussi quand je suis allé en France, et aussi au Québec. Je pense que je vais faire l’apprentissage de la langue jusqu’à ma mort. Mais ce qui importe surtout, c’est l’usage que je fais

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de telles expressions. Dans mon écriture, j’explore le langage autrement, parce que j’ai une connaissance autre du langage, j’ai une prise autre. Des fois j’ai l’impression que ça m’est plus facile d’apprécier des mots pour autre chose que le sens. Il y a des mots qui sont tellement extraordinaires, tellement magiques … Quand on est écrivain, et à plus forte raison poète, on a une relation très particulière avec le langage. En poésie, il ne s’agit pas juste de créer des messages ou de ce qu’on appelle l’expression personnelle : c’est un travail sur la langue. Et je la travaille à ma manière; je pense que je développe un langage qui est vu comme étant à moi, de la même façon que Desbiens en a un à lui. Desbiens, lui, pense par images – il ne pense pas, il montre une image après l’autre : paronomase, réversibilité, tout est dans cette espèce de choc primaire. Chez moi, c’est tissé autrement : le lien entre le rationnel et l’inconscient passe dans l’écriture automatique, je crois. Tu as parfaitement raison de signaler que c’est par la langue qu’on plonge dans un milieu. Il m’est arrivé, lors d’un séjour en Espagne, de me donner un projet d’écriture en anglais où il s’agissait de décrire la vie quotidienne du village où j’habitais alors. Et tout à coup, dans ces poèmes-là, ça basculait dans l’enfance : les parties de hockey sur la rivière, les parties de pêche, toutes sortes de choses que je n’avais pas à l’esprit depuis très longtemps33. Et dans la mesure où c’est de l’écriture automatique, il arrive qu’un mot – pour le son, pour l’harmonique comme tu disais – nous amène soudain là. Alors que quand j’écris en français, vu que ce n’est pas la langue de ce moment-là de ma vie, normalement je ne tombe pas dans ces eaux-là. C’est-à-dire que même si c’est toujours l’écriture automatique, les liens qui s’établissent se font davantage dans et par la langue que par rapport à mon autobiographie, à ma vie antérieure. La langue française ne peut pas me parler comme à quelqu’un qui l’a eue pour langue maternelle. Il faut absolument que ce soit moi qui parle, qui écrive la langue française à ma manière. Sinon, je serai un simple exécutant et je serai toujours inférieur à un francophone d’origine. Alors c’est pour cela que l’écriture automatique, qui libère des contenus et du sens, me permet de créer un langage à moi, et qui touche des gens. Je ne sais pas pourquoi telle personne est touchée par mes textes; elle peut me le dire, et je vais comprendre. Ma prise sur la langue fait en sorte que j’aborde les textes de la façon qui est la mienne. Même si je n’y pense pas à tous les jours, je sais que j’ai changé de vie et de culture vécue depuis plus de la moitié de ma vie. Ça faisait mon affaire et, si le destin existe, je sens que c’était mon destin. »

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Notes 1 Voir François Paré, Les Littératures de l’exiguïté, Ottawa, Le Nordir, 1992, et Gaston Tremblay, L’Écho de nos voix, Sudbury, Prise de parole, 2003. 2 Les deux entretiens ont été enregistrés et j’en ai réalisé une transcription. Ces documents sont maintenant déposés aux archives de l’Université Laurentienne, à Sudbury. Un troisième entretien, informel et beaucoup plus bref, eut lieu en décembre de la même année et est mis lui aussi à contribution ici même. 3 Tous ces livres ont paru aux éditions Prise de parole de Sudbury, à l’exception d’Une bonne trentaine (Erin, The Porcupine’s Quill). 4 libertés provisoires, Sudbury, Prise de parole, 2005. 5 Publié dans le recueil Northern Prospects : An Anthology of Northeastern Ontario Poetry, éd. par Roger Nash, Sudbury, Your Scrivener Press, 1998, p. 37. 6 j’ai longtemps évité le soleil je ne m’en cache pas sans succès apparent je ne pensais pas mériter sa chaleur mais j’en ai profité hâlé sans mérite (Humains paysages en temps de paix relative, p. 11.) 7 Louis Royer, Poésie O, Sillery, Éd. de l’Arc, 1970. 8 Poèmes sans suite, s.l. [St-Jean, Île d’Orléans], s.d. [1972], s.é. [Comité des fêtes du printemps de St-Jean]. 9 « Gaston Miron et le bilinguisme : “Le choc permanent d’une dévalorisation culturelle”. (Entretien présenté par Robert Dickson) », dans Revue de l’Université Laurentienne, vol. 6, n° 2 (1974), p. 11–17. 10 Un article de Dickson met en valeur la contribution active et directe des écrivains québécois, de Gaston Miron et Roland Giguère notamment, à l’émergence de la culture nouvel-ontarienne : « La “révolution culturelle” en Nouvel-Ontario et le Québec. Opération Ressources et ses conséquences », dans Andrée Fortin (dir.), Produire la culture, produire l’identité?, Sainte-Foy, Presses de l’Université Laval, 2000, p. 183–202. 11 « Hédi Bouraoui s’entretient avec Robert Dickson » (I), in Envol, n° 25 (vol. vii/1), 1999, p. 8. La citation de Giguère provient de ses « Notes sur la poésie » (publiées en 1963 et reprises par l’auteur dans son recueil forêt vierge folle, Montréal, L’Hexagone, 1978, p. 103–107). 12 Humains paysages en temps de paix relative, p. 25. 13 Ibid., p. 33–34. 14 Abris Nocturnes, p. 48. 15 Voir Culture vivante, n° 12 (1969), p. 34–41. 16 Grand ciel bleu par ici, p. 28. Voir le compte rendu très critique de ce recueil par Hugues Corriveau, dans Lettres québécoises, n° 89 (1998), p. 39–40. 17 Le Soleil, 27 mai 1972, p. 57 (compte rendu de Bryan Finnigan et Cy Gonick, Making It : The Canadian Dream, Toronto, McClelland and Stewart, 1972). 18 « Minn, une femme “ordinaire” », in Le Soleil, 27 février 1971, p. 43 (compte rendu de Marian Engel, The Honeyman Festival, Toronto, Anansi, 1970). 19 Un extrait de cette lettre a été publié par Christl Verduyn dans Lifelines : Marian Engel’s Writings, Montréal et Kingston, McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1995, p. 225, n. 38.

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20 La pièce Strip fut publiée chez Prise de parole en 1983. La création de la version anglaise eut lieu en 1982. Quant aux trois traductions des pièces de Dalpé, elles ont connu des productions professionnelles : Eddy, traduite sous le titre In the Ring, fut créée au Stratford Festival (Ontario), saison 1994; Lucky Lady, au Great Canadian Theatre Company (Ottawa), 1996, et au Chan Centre (Vancouver), 1997; Trick or Treat, au Centaur Theatre (Montréal), 2001 et au Factory Theatre (Toronto), 2001. Seule la traduction d’Eddy est parue à ce jour, sous le titre In the Ring, dans Canadian Theatre Review, n° 84 (1995), p. 40–71. Dans une note (p. 42), le traducteur explique que cette traduction a été réalisée en collaboration avec l’auteur et aussi le metteur en scène au cours de répétitions en vue de sa création. Il rapporte aussi l’anecdote suivante : « Early in the process, after what I thought was a very successful session on a scene, I returned to my desk with a well-deserved coffee to re-read, only to find I had written the scene … in French. I had translated in my head all right, but copied the original French text onto paper ». 21 Frog Moon, Dunvegan, Cormorant Books, 1994; trad. fr. : Kaki, Sudbury, Prise de parole, 1997. 22 The Kiss of the Fur Queen, Toronto, Doubleday, 1998; trad. fr. : Champion et Ooneemeetoo, Sudbury, Prise de parole, 2004. 23 Voir ses contributions dans La Traductière. Revue franco-anglaise de poésie (Paris), n° 18 (2000) et n° 22 (2004). 24 Ellipse, n° 70 (Fall/Automne 2003), p. 52–91. 25 Or«é»alité, p. [19]. Dickson remarque incidemment : « Ici, l’adjectif “natales”, ça vient de Miron. On le trouve dans les textes en prose de L’Homme rapaillé. » 26 « La traduction théâtrale en Ontario français », in Cahiers de théâtre Jeu, n° 73 (1994), p. 61. 27 Voir Robert Dickson, Annette Ribordy, Micheline Tremblay (dir.), Toutes les photos finissent-elles par se ressembler? Actes du Forum sur la situation des arts au Canada français, Sudbury, Prise de parole & Institut franco-ontarien, 1999, p. 328. 28 Grand ciel bleu par ici, p. 48. 29 En lien avec Dalpé et Desbiens, Dickson m’a fait de manière incidente la remarque suivante : « Brève parenthèse : à l’époque des trois D (Dalpé, Desbiens, Dickson) à Sudbury, Jean Marc Dalpé habitait à peu près en face d’ici et Desbiens pas loin sur la rue Elm, et nous nous échangions des livres, nous lisions souvent les mêmes choses. Notamment, nous étions pas mal fanatiques d’un poète du sud de l’Ontario qui s’appelle David McFadden, dont l’écriture donne vraiment dans la poésie narrative. Il a écrit A Trip Around Lake Ontario et A Trip Around Lake Huron, je dois avoir encore les livres dans ma bibliothèque. Je l’ai rencontré par la suite chez un chum à l’Île Manitoulin. Je sais que les questions d’influences littéraires, c’est toujours délicat, mais j’ai pensé à l’époque que chez Desbiens, qui écrit des textes en prose tout en étant poète, et chez Dalpé, avec Gens d’ici où la poésie est narrative, et même dans son roman – eh bien, cette poésie n’est pas entrée dans l’oreille d’un sourd et qu’il y a eu de ces partages-là qui sont d’une très grande richesse. » Par la suite, je me suis demandé pourquoi Dickson a pris l’initiative de me donner ces renseignements. J’ai pensé d’abord qu’il signalait ces choses à l’attention de futurs historiens de la littérature. Mais peut-être aussi était-ce une manière oblique de rappeler que les sources de la poésie franco-ontarienne, et notamment de la sienne, ne sont pas exclusivement québécoises ou francophones. 30 Cf. Parallèles, Sudbury, Prise de parole, 2004, p. 50.

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31 Patrice Desbiens, Sudbury (poèmes 1979–1985), Sudbury, Prise de parole, 2000, p. 219. 32 Voir François Paré, « Poésie des transfuges linguistiques : lecture de Robert Dickson, Margaret Michèle Cook et nathalie stephens », dans Lucie Hotte (dir.), La Littérature franco-ontarienne : voies nouvelles, nouvelles voix. Actes du colloque tenu à l’Université d’Ottawa du 3 au 5 mai 2001, Ottawa, Le Nordir, 2002, p. 129–151. 33 Ces poèmes anglais, avec leurs deux thématiques (Espagne et enfance), sont publiés dans l’anthologie Northern Prospects (voir supra, n. 5).

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stephen henighan

A Reduced Solitude: Eugen Giurgiu’s Ewoclem sau întortocheatele carari [Ewoclem, or The Twisted Paths] as Romanian-Canadian Literature

anadian writers who work in languages other than English or French experience a curtailed form of cultural exchange. Their fiction or poetry inaccessible to their Canadian contemporaries in the original language and often unavailable in English or French translation, they create in a space that could be described as a reduced solitude. If Anglophone and Francophone writers, in the popular reversal of the intended meaning of Hugh MacLennan’s citation of Rilke in his novel Two Solitudes (1945), work in separate solitudes, little aware of one another’s endeavours, the Canadian writer working in a language other than English or French exists in a space that is smaller than a solitude.1 The reduced solitude is characterized by exclusion, on the basis of the writer’s language of literary expression, from the conduits that permit writers to earn public recognition. In this environment feedback is sporadic and issues mainly from a generational cohort that has immigrated or moved into exile during the same years as the author. By the time conditions in the writer’s country of origin improve, in the form of increased prosperity or political liberalization, the author may have been resident in Canada for so many years that the vision of the homeland conveyed by his or her fiction or poetry has become dated. Alternatively, the author may have begun to write about Canada and Canadians, describing scenes and characters that readers in the country of origin will not recognize in a language that readers in the country of residence cannot read. This leads to a second potential characteristic of the literature of a reduced solitude: the creation of scenes describing central aspects of Canadian life of which Canadian readers are destined to remain unaware.

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The discussion that follows assumes that Canadian writers who express themselves in languages other than English or French are immigrants or the descendants of immigrants. Projects such as Mitiarjuk Nappaaluk’s Inuktituk-language novel Sanaaq (1969; French edition 2002) or Robert Bringhurst’s efforts to make the classical literature of the great First Nations orators available to a general Anglophone Canadian readership raise a different cluster of questions, as do the cases of second- or third-generation Canadians who use English or French to write about an immigrant milieu. The contours of immigrant writing in minority languages have been in perpetual ebb and flow over the course of Canada’s history. John Miska states of his Ethnic and Native Canadian Literature: A Bibliography, which covers the field up to the year 1990: “The bibliography of close to 5,500 references to primary and secondary material from the earliest times to the present represents 65 nationality groups in more than 70 languages” (vii). During the 19th and early 20th centuries, the dominant minority literary language in Canada was German, followed by Ukrainian, and more distantly by Polish; other languages used for literary purposes during this period included Yiddish, Icelandic, and Chinese. Yet, as continues to be the case today, these books elicited little response in the country where they were written. Michael Batts notes: “Those who have chosen to write in German have published almost exclusively in Germany and, consequently, primarily for a German audience, though with some Canadian content” (765). This illustrates the problem of the reduced solitude: the writer is a foreigner to the potential audience in the country of origin; yet, once the book’s publication has been noted in the few community newspapers published in the writer’s literary language, possibilities for attracting readers in Canada have been exhausted. The immigrant community does not possess the paraliterary infrastructure to form and sustain a literary canon. An important prototype of the Canadian writer who inhabits a reduced solitude is Stephan G. Stephansson (1853–1927), the Icelandic-born skald poet who lived most of his life as an Alberta farmer. In the evenings Stephansson wrote thousands of poems in Icelandic; his work, though little appreciated in Canada, continues to be studied in the Icelandic school system.2 In the years after 1970, writers occupying reduced solitudes were dominated by two major camps: Central and Eastern Europeans fleeing dictatorships imposed on their countries by the Soviet Union, and Latin Americans taking refuge from dictatorships imposed or supported by the United States. Some of the Central and Eastern European exiles, such as the Hungarian-born writers Stephen Vizinczey and George Jonas, and the Czech Jan Drabek, arrived in English-speaking countries (Canada in the case of Vizinczey and Jonas, the United States for

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Drabek, who later moved to Vancouver) sufficiently early in their lives to adopt English as their literary language. The most notable product of this tendency was Vizinczey’s poignant novel, In Praise of Older Women (1965). The Hungarian poet György Faludy, who arrived in Canada in 1969 at the age of 57, after many years of exile in Europe and North Africa, continued to write in Hungarian during his more than 20 years in Canada. Faludy, whose poems had been published in English translation in London (Karoton, 1966) and New York (City of Splintered Gods, 1966) prior to his arrival in Canada, published his poems with a variety of Canadian presses, culminating in the issuance of a Selected Poems, 1933–1980 (1985) by McClelland and Stewart. Faludy’s international reputation overcame the strictures of the reduced solitude. As Faludy commented in an interview: “I’m printed as widely in English as most poets these days” (d’Ambroise 44). The Canadian writer who has attained the largest national audience for work written in a language other than English or French is Josef Škvorecký, who fled to Toronto from Czechoslovakia in the wake of the 1968 Soviet invasion that put an end to the period of liberalization known as the Prague Spring. Due to a controversial and never repeated “reinterpretation” of the rules for the Governor General’s Award for Fiction in English, the 1984 Governor General’s Award was given to Škvorecký for Paul Wilson’s English translation of his novel The Engineer of Human Souls. The decision to bend the rules in order to celebrate this novel, large sections of which deride the political liberalism of middle-class Canadians, is due to its consistency with one powerful strand of the ideology of the final years of the Cold War: the creed of anti-Communism. Škvorecký built his national reputation on his acerbic criticism of “naive Canadians” and their failure to demonstrate suitable anti-Communist zeal.3 His fiction owed its success in part to the force of Paul Wilson’s colloquial renderings of the Czech originals, and in part to Škvorecký’s ubiquitous presence in the media, commenting on East-West politics in flawless English (he translated U.S. literature into Czech prior to going into exile). When the Cold War ended, Škvorecký’s popularity faded: his major novels fell out of print, his new works were issued by less prestigious publishers, and his media presence evaporated. With the tailing off of interest in writers from the Soviet Bloc, a brief, ideologically driven surge of interest in a group of Canadian writers working in neither English nor French came to an end (Faludy moved back to Hungary at this time). Writers from Central and Eastern Europe were encased once more in the reduced solitude. Writers of non-official languages whose backgrounds failed to entice the attention of the media did not enjoy the reprieve from the reduced solitude

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experienced by some Europeans. After a U.S.–orchestrated military coup overthrew Chilean president Salvador Allende on 11 September 1973, thousands of Chileans, denied entry to the United States, took refuge in Canada. This wave of immigration included some notable literary intellectuals. The poet Gonzalo Millán was later awarded Chile’s National Literature Prize for his booklength poem La Ciudad [The City] (1979), originally written and published in Spanish in Montreal. José Leandro Urbina’s novel Cobro revertido [Reversed Charges] (1992), a caustic, extravagant, yet tightly crafted novel about a refugee caught between Canada’s two linguistic solitudes, was short-listed for the prestigious Premio Planeta but received relatively little attention in Quebec and none in Anglophone Canada.4 Many Chilean writers, such as Carmen Rodríguez, Luis Torres, and Jorge Etcheverry, continue to work in Spanish in Canada (although Rodríguez, by translating her own work into English, gained a somewhat larger audience).5 Other Latin American writers followed the Chileans. More than two million Argentines fled the military regime of 1976–82; some of the exiles were writers, and a few settled in Canada. During the 1980s the civil wars in Guatemala, El Salvador, and Nicaragua generated massive emigration to Mexico, the United States and, to a lesser extent, Canada. Like the Chileans, Argentine and Central American writers have lacked access to a mainstream Canadian audience. The Argentine writers Pablo Urbanyi, a novelist, and Nela Río, a poet, both have resided in Canada since the late 1970s, yet little of their work has appeared in English. Río’s bilingual poetry collection Túnel de proa verde/Tunnel of the Green Prow was published in 1998. Urbanyi has had two books published in English, The Nowhere Idea (1982) and Sunset (2002), and two in French, L’idée fixe (1990) and Un revolver pour Mack (1992), but has not received the attention he deserves. Horacio Castellanos Moya, the most widely read Salvadoran novelist of his generation, lived in both Montreal and Toronto during the 1980s, and studied history at York University. His Canadian experience is reflected in some of his fiction, such as the novel El asco: Thomas Bernhard en San Salvador (1997); the Canadian literary world remains oblivious of Castellanos Moya’s Canadian connections. Alfonso Quijada Urias, the author of more than half a dozen books in Spanish, is recognized as an important figure in modernizing Salvadoran poetry. Quijada Urias has lived for years in obscurity in Vancouver; his short story collection, The Better to See You (1994), remains his only Canadian publication. The contrast between the relative success enjoyed by Czech or Hungarian writers and the neglect of the Spanish Americans demonstrates the unevenness of literary production for writers working in a reduced solitude. Some Central European writers were published in English translation by major

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Canadian publishers such as McClelland and Stewart (Faludy) or Lester & Orpen Dennys and Knopf Canada (Škvorecký); Spanish American writers had to resort to smaller Canadian publishers such as Lanctôt Éditeur (Urbina), Cormorant Books (Quijada Urias) or Arsenal Pulp Press (Rodríguez), or, more often, were published only within their own communities, even in English or French translation. The discrepancy in success in breaking into the English-language mainstream may be attributed to, among other causes, the prevalence of anti-Communist ideology in the media during the 1980s, the fact that Central and Eastern European writers tended to settle in Toronto, where the Anglophone Canadian media was located, and the comparatively remote position of many of the Spanish American writers in Montreal, where the Anglophone media was distant and the Francophone media, at this period, evinced little interest in Quebec’s linguistic minorities. That the Anglophone Canadian media was not innately hostile to the experiences of Spanish American exiles is evident in the success of Alberto Manguel, an Argentine writer who had learned fluent English in childhood. From the mid-1980s Manguel established himself as a frequent commentator on the arts on cbc Radio and in the pages of The Globe and Mail. His novel about the aftermath of the Dirty War in Argentina, News from a Foreign Country Came (Toronto: Random House, 1991), was widely praised. By adopting the new country’s dominant language as his means of literary expression, Manguel overcame what the Chilean-Canadian poet Luis Torres construes as the core of the experience of exile: “The ‘liminal’ conditions created by the uprooting from the familiar spaces of everyday life and by having been thrown into a time that is culturally foreign, leads to the decentring of identity and to social marginality” (Torres 183). Torres’s vigorous argument against what he terms “the appropriation of exile by postmodern discourse” (183) succeeds in reinfusing the writings of Spanish American exiles in Canada with the human pathos of their experiences. But it is important to focus also on the greatest single source of the exiled writer’s social marginality: the fact of writing in a language that only a fraction of the citizens of the adopted country can read or understand. Assessing such work from the point of view of linguistic difference, one could argue that Gilles Deleuze’s theory of littérature mineure captures some of the dynamics of the cultural position of writers employing a major world language. Deleuze stresses that “Une littérature mineure n’est pas celle d’une langue mineure, plutôt celle qu’une minorité fait dans une langue majeure” (Deleuze and Guattari 29). The three conditions defining littérature mineure, according to Deleuze, are that literary language is denuded or deterritorialized, that every enunciation bears a political

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charge, and that all statements acquire a collective value (29–32). While these conditions are present in much writing in non-official languages, probably only contemporary Canadian writing in Spanish, Chinese, or Arabic could be considered work created in a major language operating in a minority situation. Furthermore, some writing in minority languages, such as the early Italian-language poetry of Fulvio Caccia and Antonio d’Alfonso (who went on to write books in both English and French), displays only to a limited extent and in an implicit sense the political charge predicted by Deleuze. Deleuze’s theory also fails as a tool to facilitate better understanding of minority-language Canadian writing in its choice of Franz Kafka as the paradigmatic writer of littérature mineure. By selecting a writer whose minority situation does not stem from a recent experience of immigration, Deleuze makes the multicultural residue of old European empires, rather than the evolving multiculturalism of present-day immigration-driven Canada (or the United States, France, United Kingdom, or Australia), the proper focus of his theory. The differences between the multiculturalism imposed on Central Europe by the Austro-Hungarian Empire, where sedentary populations that defined themselves according to religious and linguistic oppositions faced each other over decades as power relations, administrative boundaries, and regimes shifted, and rapidly evolving Canadian multiculturalism, where successive waves of immigrants assimilate into an overwhelmingly secular environment in which the primacy of English (or French in Quebec) is generally accepted, place limitations on the applicability of Deleuze’s theory to Canadian minority-language writers. François Paré’s theories of a literature of exiguïté offer insights useful to understanding the predicament of Canadian writers working in languages other than English or French, although, as in the case of Deleuze’s ideas, significant divergences also exist. Taking Franco-Ontarian literature as his model, Paré explores the material and psychological conditions confronted by minority literatures such as the Acadian and the Occitan, and Creole literatures such as those of Jamaica and San Tomé and Principe. These examples draw Paré into a deliberately fractured, episodic discussion of colonization and the inferiority complexes with which writers belonging to long-established ethnic minorities must grapple. Neither colonization (at least within the country of residence) nor inferiority complexes are major considerations for most writers inhabiting a reduced solitude, some of whom even betray feelings of condescension towards mainstream Canadian culture. The belief that Canada is a safe haven populated by amiable philistines lacking a history, a culture, or a literature is not uncommon among writers who see themselves as bearers of older or richer literary cultures. Such feelings of cultural superiority are explicit in Škvorecký’s

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work. They may be glimpsed, also, in the work of other Central European writers and of some Spanish American writers. Where Paré’s ideas do illuminate the reduced solitude of writers in languages other than English or French is in his descriptions of the limitations of a linguistically circumscribed literary culture: Dans les petites cultures, au contraire, le seul fait de publier une oeuvre semble mériter que la rumeur publique y fasse écho; on y devient écrivain reconnu très rapidement. Mais ce qu’on apprend vite, c’est que la notoriété en question est on ne peut plus évanescente, dans la mesure où, passé le flafla des lancements de livres et de quelques articles de revue, les petites cultures sont incapables d’assurer la mémorialisation des oeuvres et des écrivains. Cette mémorialisation émanerait de l’enseignement des oeuvres et du discours critique qui en résulterait. (85)

The instant, evanescent notoriety of the writer in a small community, and the incapacity to sustain a literary canon or transmit works to future generations are dilemmas shared by Paré’s exiguïté and a reduced solitude. For an immigrant writer who continues to write in the language of origin, canonization can occur only in countries speaking the mother tongue (as in the cases of Stephan G. Stephansson and Gonzalo Millán). The present generations of immigrants are insufficiently established in Canada to pass on their literary culture; fluency in the language dwindles as their descendants assimilate and intermarry. Due to its inscription in the finest nuances of language, literature is one of the first components of an immigrant culture to be lost. The literary examples cited above, in conjunction with the ideas of Deleuze and Paré, make possible a tentative sketch of a reduced solitude. Salient characteristics of this condition would include the fact that books are published, read, and judged by friends or acquaintances; that translation into English or French is rare and serious critical attention rarer; that canonization, if it occurs, will take place in Reykjavik, Budapest, or Santiago, and not in Toronto or Montreal; that ideological trends in Canada may briefly accord mainstream attention to a writer in a reduced solitude, but will just as quickly erase the writer’s fledgling Canadian reputation; that a major language in a minority situation may tend toward denuded diction; that all statements uttered by a writer working in a minority language risk being political, at least within the boundaries of the writer’s linguistic community; and that local fame, often swiftly bestowed upon the writer, is unlikely to translate into an enduring reputation because the linguistic community that would have to transmit the writer’s work lacks the institutional apparatus to do so and, indeed, may dissolve completely as children and grandchildren fail to learn their forebears’ language.

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Most of the writers alluded to in this discussion were active during the 1970s and 1980s. The present state of Canadian writing in a reduced solitude is more difficult to fathom. Political calm in Central and Eastern Europe has meant that, even though immigrants from these countries continue to arrive in Canada, those who wish to make literary careers in their own languages are now more likely to remain connected their national literatures’ institutional apparatus, even if they leave their countries of origin.6 Canada’s Spanish-American population is growing at a furious rate; yet the Spanish-language writing community still consists of the Chileans, Argentines, and Central Americans who arrived in the 1970s and 1980s.7 Like Central and Eastern Europeans, Spanish-American writers no longer need to seek the political security Canada offers; if they leave their countries it will be for other reasons and other destinations, and their careers will be made at home or in other Spanish-speaking countries. Political events continue to accord writers in nonofficial languages occasional fleeting attention from mainstream publishers and the media. The Chinese poet Duoduo, who took refuge in Toronto after the massacre in Tiananmen Square in 1989, saw a collection of his poems published in English under the title Crossing the Sea (1998). But Duoduo remained in Canada for only a few years; by the time the Canadian edition of his poems was published, he was living in Europe. By contrast, the Bosnian poet Goran Simi c has settled in Toronto. Yet Simi c’s latest collection, Immigrant Blues (2003), contains seven poems written in English alongside translations of work written in his native language. Simi c’s future would appear to be as an English-language poet. It is possible that in a world characterized by largescale movement of people and the spread of the English language, writers in other languages may not put down roots in Canada, as they did in the past, and that nodes of literary activity in non-official languages may not form with the same frequency as was the case for the Chileans or the Czechs. Among those who do stay here, many, such as Simi c, now arrive in the country already possessing a good knowledge of English and, over the course of a few years, may become Anglophone (or Francophone) writers. The cases respectively of Ying Chen in Quebec and Yan Li in Ontario suggest that working to learn French or English well enough to appropriate it as a literary language may also be the new goal of Chinese immigrant writers.8 These comments are necessarily speculative given that if the literature of a reduced solitude is being written in Canada today, it is being written in Asian languages. In Batts’s view: Immigrants still come to Canada and may include political or economic refugees, but in the 1980s and 1990s there was, with the exception of Chinese speakers, no mass exodus such as those from Ukraine or Hungary or Chile.

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Freedom of movement between the homeland and the adopted country does offer a degree of linguistic and cultural renewal for immigrant communities, but it also removes much of the incentive for writing … Literature in Punjabi may well continue to develop because of the close political, religious, and social ties that are maintained between the Punjab and (primarily western) Canada, and the recent influx of Chinese-speaking immigrants, most of them far better educated than those who entered Canada from China in the 19th century, suggest that a Chinese Canadian literature may well develop early this century. (769)

It is possible that the occasional Eastern European or Latin American writer may choose to work in Canada for personal reasons; and steady immigration of educated speakers of Arabic, particularly to Quebec, may yield an Arabiclanguage Canadian literature. Specialists of the Chinese, Punjabi, and Arabic languages will need to investigate the conditions under which this literature is published and made available to potential readers. Overall, though, it appears that the writer immersed in a reduced solitude is now imperilled as a cultural phenomenon, in addition to being culturally imperilled as an individual writer. An impressive contemporary example of a writer working within the strictures of a reduced solitude is the Romanian-language Toronto novelist Eugen Giurgiu. Literature written in Romanian has been among the least visible minority literatures. Miska’s bibliography lists only four Romanian-Canadian writers (298–99). Two of these writers, Florica Batu and Dumitru Ichim, published poetry with what may have been the same small press in Kitchener, Ontario, during the 1970s. The authors’ publishers are recorded as Vestitorul RomânCanadian and Romanian-Canadian Herald respectively. The press would appear to be an outgrowth of the religious newspaper Vestitorul Român-Canadian, founded in Kitchener in 1969 by the Romanian orthodox theologian and literary critic George Alexe. Vestitorul Român-Canadian continued to publish until at least 2001, although no record exists of book publications associated with the newspaper after the 1970s. Florica Batu published three books of poetry in Romanian and one in a bilingual Romanian-English edition; Dumitru Ichim’s three books were all published in Romanian. The only other two Romanian-language writers unearthed by Miska barely wrote in Romanian. Thomas Pavel published two books in French. Nicholas Catanoy published four books, one in a bilingual Romanian-French edition and the others exclusively in English or French. Eugen Giurgiu was born in rural Transylvania in 1924. He belongs to a generation of Romanian writers that was crushed by the imposition of Communist rule. The promising young Romanian writers of the 1940s and

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1950s were scattered by exile or browbeaten into silence or servility.9 The samizdat culture of underground publication that helped keep literature alive in the Soviet Union and some parts of Soviet-dominated Central Europe barely existed in Romania. Nor did Romania produce a Milan Kundera: a major writer who flourished in exile.10 Giurgiu is typical of his generation in having published cautiously and intermittently during his years in Romania, where writing appears to have occupied a submerged portion of his life.11 In 1968 Giurgiu and his wife Yolanda took advantage of a tourist visa to prolong indefinitely their Canadian vacation by asking for political asylum.12 Currently the only Romanian member of the Writers’ Union of Canada (under the name “Eugene Al Giurgiu”), Giurgiu is the publisher of Litterae, an on-line magazine (http://www.litterae.net) that publishes literature in seven languages.13 After the fall of Communism, Giurgiu published two books in Romania: a short story collection, Ca frunzele în vânt [Like Leaves in the Wind] (1994), and a novella, Biserica arsa [Burnt Church] (1995). Ewoclem sau întortocheatele carari [Ewoclem, or The Twisted Paths] was published in 1996 by Humanitas in Montreal as a co-edition with the Romanian Cultural Foundation in Bucharest. The publication of Ewoclem as a novel funded by government cultural agencies in two countries (it received a special grant from the Department of Canadian Heritage) and bearing on its spine the imprint of a French-language publisher owned by Constantin Stoiciu, a Romanian-Canadian who has built part of his literary career in French, raises the usual bewildering questions about who may be construed to be this book’s audience. The high point of the novel’s notoriety appears to have been a positive review by Grete Tartler in the Romanian literary newspaper România literara . The only Canadian review, written in Romanian, appeared in the Romanian-Canadian newspaper Observatorul; in the United States Sabine Magazine ran an article on Giurgiu and Ewoclem, and published English translations of three of Giurgiu’s short stories. There was no concerted cluster of reviews, as might be received by a writer working within an institutionalized literary culture. As often occurs to writers inhabiting a reduced solitude, the literary infrastructure of neither the country of origin nor the country of residence embraced the novel as belonging to “our national culture.” Published in 1996, Ewoclem arrived too late to reap the ideological harvest of the Cold War tensions of the 1980s. It is questionable whether a Romanian writer could have benefited from this mood to attain the national literary reputation that Škvorecký and, to a lesser extent, Vizinczey, Faludy, Jonas, and Drabek, were able to achieve. While the Hungarians and Czechs respectively were associated in the public mind with the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 and the Prague Spring of 1968 (attended, in both cases, by images of Soviet

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tanks invading Central Europe), Romanian-Canadian writers could claim no such primal cataclysm meriting axiomatic public sympathy. Indeed, Nicolae Ceausescu’s wily foreign policy, which included refusing Soviet orders to commit the Romanian Army to the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, establishing diplomatic relations with Israel, flouting the Soviet boycott of the 1984 Los Angeles Olympic Games, and issuing sporadic challenges to the Kremlin over the oppression of Romanian minorities in the U.S.S.R, meant that the profile enjoyed by Romania in the Western media, although not high, was positive. Romania’s decision to purchase the candu nuclear reactor, which proved unsellable elsewhere in the world, ensured that Canada continued to support Ceausescu after other Western countries had distanced themselves from his regime.14 Canada’s connivance with Ceausescu over the candu becomes one of the themes of Ewoclem. The novel is presented as a manuscript edited by Pilu Dunca, a childhood friend of the protagonist Timotei Dumbrava, a teacher who arrives in Canada from Romania in 1970. Ewoclem is divided into 36 chapters; the novel’s action falls into three sections. The opening third concentrates on Dumbrava’s experiences as a French teacher during his first months in Canada, reserving the intrigues of the Romanian exile community for the book’s middle section. In the final section, Dumbrava’s retreat to the northern Ontario bush coincides with the culmination of the plot revolving around the candu nuclear reactor and the role of Dumbrava’s Canadian friends, the St. Georges, in rescuing Denise, Pilu’s dissident sister in Transylvania, with whom Dumbrava was in love as an adolescent. Ewoclem builds toward an integration of the protagonist’s Romanian and Canadian worlds: as Dumbrava becomes more immersed in Canada, the Canadians confront the realities of conditions in Romania. Dumbrava achieves a personal integration into Canadian society that, at a literary level, remains unattainable for Eugen Giurgiu. Dumbrava diverges from his author’s biography: he is younger than Giurgiu, single, a French teacher and less well educated than his author. But Dumbrava shares Giurgiu’s wariness of the Romanian exile community. Describing the Romanian community in Toronto at the time of his arrival, Giurgiu says: “The Romanian community in Toronto at that time was made up of former members of the [fascist] Iron Guard, former soldiers in the German Army, a few political refugees who were not very united and not highly cultured. Between 1947 and our arrival in Canada, barely three families had arrived from Communist Romania” (Olos “Interviu”).15 Giurgiu insists on his sense of himself as a Transylvanian: “In regards to the cultural context, my experience of the cohabitation with other nationalities typical of Transylvania helped me to integrate very easily into Canadian

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society” (Olos, “Interviu”).16 Traditionally, Transylvania has been defined by a robust, if troubled, multiculturalism, the Romanian majority supplemented by a large Hungarian minority, an influential German community, and smaller numbers of Roma and Jews. Mutual resentment and even violence among these groups has been balanced by intermarriage, bi- or trilingualism and cultural syncretism. Like Giurgiu, Dumbrava construes himself as a Transylvanian first and a Romanian second. The source of Dumbrava’s feelings of apartness from Romanian Toronto is his mixed Transylvanian culture. When Alec St. George asks him why he doesn’t make friends with other Romanians, Dumbrava replies: “I’m Catholic, they’re Orthodox. I’m Transylvanian, accustomed to a certain style of life, and they are from other provinces, with other customs” (Giurgiu 115).17 Dumbrava’s Catholicism is particularly crucial, as it relegates him to minority status in Romania, where the Orthodox church is dominant and the largest concentration of Catholics are the Transylvanian Hungarians.18 The Romanian-Canadian whom Dumbrava most respects is Professor Ieremia, a burly survivor of Ceausescu’s prisons; like him, Ieremia is a Transylvanian Catholic. Ieremia’s wife is an ethnic Hungarian; their intercultural marriage is portrayed as happy and healthy. This provides an example of how a writer working in a reduced solitude may project views that appear dated to readers in his country of origin. Giurgiu, as a result of his upbringing in culturally mixed 1930s Transylvania and his later experiences in Toronto, regards multiculturalism as positive. Younger Romanians, particularly those who have come of age since 1989, reflect the erosion of the multicultural ideal. Many are impatient with Romania’s ethnic minorities and treat Transylvanian Hungarians with hostility. Giurgiu’s support of multiculturalism estranges him from the Romanian present. Dumbrava soon becomes acquainted with the Canadian habit of expressing a polite superficial interest in other people’s cultures. Of his students he records: “Then I was asked many questions about Romania, but I realized that this sudden interest in my country was not exactly sincere but rather an act of politeness” (Giurgiu 95).19 Dumbrava’s initial clashes with the Canada of 1970, where the Generation Gap, flq terrorism, and militant leftist students set the political tone, rehearse the reactions of many Central and Eastern Europeans to Canadian liberalism. These scenes, recalling the work of Škvorecký and others, are the least original aspect of Ewoclem. When Dumbrava and his friend Alec St. George discuss the social upheaval wrought by student movements they sound paranoid. Alec asks Dumbrava: “Don’t you think that there are also Soviet agents hiding behind these movements?” Dumbrava replies “Very likely” (Giurgiu 98).20

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Ewoclem’s strength as a novel derives from Dumbrava’s determination to push beyond these caricatures to a more complex engagement with Canadian society. Professor Ieremia warns him: “You can’t live in two worlds at once. Sooner or later you’ll have to decide, if you can” (Giurgiu 143).21 Even though Dumbrava experiences moments of doubt, at one point wondering whether Canada is really the country for him (230), his encounter with Toronto’s Romanian community in an extended party scene percolating with political intrigues and sexual jealousies has the unanticipated result of tightening his complicity with the St. George family, particularly with Alec’s 20-year-old daughter, Roberta. With the help of the St. Georges, Dumbrava struggles to prevent Canada from compromising with the Romanian government through the proposed sale of candu nuclear reactors. Emerging from this party, which covers four chapters, Dumbrava experiences a moment of epiphany as he stares out over Lake Ontario at night: The waters of the lake were murmuring to an absent listener, recounting their geological history. The moon had fallen into the bottom of the lake from where, as if through shards of a mirror, it dispatched its cold light towards the heavens. Far off on the horizon, on the other shore, was America. Behind me the darkened fields of the Canadian north reached to the top of the earth. In my mind I rose towards the stars, from where I saw myself as if I were a speck of sand flung by waves onto the coast of a mysterious lake. What was I looking for here? Who had brought me to this strange, cold, enigmatic, terrifying world? Yet if I were obliged to leave Toronto there was no doubt that within two days I would have been unhappy. Would I never again see Roberta? (Giurgiu 199)22

This passage marks a turning point in Dumbrava’s self-definition. As the novel moves toward its dénouement, the narrator is wise enough not to flatten Roberta, the protagonist’s Canadian love-interest, into a female romanticization of national essence.23 Dumbrava’s relationship with Roberta and his growing absorption into Canadian life complement and sustain each other. During the party, in a scene that stresses Dumbrava’s immigrant sexual innocence, Roberta reproaches him for his circumspect treatment of her: “Hasn’t it entered your head for even a second that I’m twenty years old? How old are you? Thirty? Thirty-five? Tell me truly, really truly, that you haven’t been tempted for even a second to take me in your arms and kiss me?” (Giurgiu 163).24 Dumbrava, intimidated, retreats to spend the evening flirting with Marilena, an exiled Romanian actor. After an exiled journalist who sought to publish in French and English his Romanian-language manuscript detailing Ceausescu’s human rights abuses

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(compiled with information gleaned from Denise Dunca), is assassinated by officers of Ceausescu’s Securitate (this incident is based on the actual assassination of a Romanian exile in Toronto by Ceausescu’s agents), Dumbrava retreats to a beach on Georgian Bay. Here, in the fusion anticipated by his ecstatic nocturnal vision of Lake Ontario, he integrates his Romanian and Canadian selves while completing his French translation of the manuscript. The activity of translating a Canadian Romanian-language manuscript into one of Canada’s official languages may be read as a task that enables the protagonist to overcome his marginalized position; it represents a form of wishfulfillment for an author who cannot communicate directly with his Englishor French-speaking compatriots. Yet the initial description of the waterfront cabin that Dumbrava first rents and then purchases, explaining in detail what an “A-frame” is and why Canadians call it an A-frame (234), suggests an author who perceives his primary readership as being in Romania. The paradoxical drive to narrate a tale of integration into Canada in such a way that it will be accepted in the author’s country of origin shapes the novel’s tone. The A-frame ushers Dumbrava into Canadian history. Viewing the house for the first time, he says: “I had the strange sensation of ‘déjà vu.’ It seemed to me that not only had I already seen this house but that I had also lived in it” (235).25 The house is haunted by the ghost of a young woman named MaryLou, who drowned in the bay and may have been the daughter of a local Iroquois woman. Both Dumbrava and Professor Ieremia spot the ghost on various occasions. When Professor Ieremia suggests that Mary-Lou belongs to Native legends, Alec St. George corrects him, insisting that he is alluding to “a historical fact. The Hurons were exterminated in the 17th century. An Iroquois princess was tortured and hurled into the waters of the lake. From time to time the princess appears and asks for revenge” (255).26 The competing versions of Canadian history emphasize the instability of the landscape that Dumbrava is attempting to claim as his home. In a surreal scene, Dumbrava meets Mary-Lou on the path leading to the house. She addresses him as “Auguste,” strengthening the suspicion, first adumbrated in his sense of déjà vu on seeing the A-frame, that Dumbrava has slipped into the role of the reincarnation of a figure from the 17th-century past. Perplexed as to how he should respond, he asks Mary-Lou what to believe. She replies: “That which you see, that which you hear. Don’t search for explanations. We all make the same mistake at the beginning. We only believe what we know. That’s why we know so little” (265).27 Mary-Lou’s advice to adapt to a different range of perception, implying that each community’s history generates its own way of seeing, culminates in her telling Dumbrava that he can summon her by uttering the word, “Ewoclem.”

A Reduced Solitude / Henighan

When Dumbrava asks Gilbert about “Ewoclem,” the real estate agent offers two explanations of the word’s meaning. Either it is the Iroquois word MaryLou’s mother shouted when Mary-Lou was drowning, or else it is the product of a semi-literate Iroquois woman’s attempt to write the word “Welcome” backwards and inadvertently transposing the “w” and the “m.” The two interpretations serve as a warning that Canadian history and culture resist unitary interpretations. In the novel’s opening pages the purported editor, Pilu Dunca, reports having been given a third explanation by Gilbert: “Later Gilbert said that ewoclem was an Iroquois word. It means welcome, but it probably also has another sense known only to shamans” (Giurgiu 9).28 Since “Ewoclem” is based on the English word “welcome,” Gilbert appears to be pulling Dunca’s leg.“Ewoclem” incarnates the puzzle of how the immigrant is to become Canadian. Possibly one must enter Canada backwards, beginning with the history of the Native peoples, as “welcome” is written in reverse. Yet the transposed letters suggest that this sort of plumbing of Canadian chronology is destined to be thwarted; the immigrant’s version of national history can be only a misspelled approximation. The fractured word may itself reflect the immigrant’s fractured understanding of the new land and of Canada’s backhanded welcome to immigrants. The multiple meanings attributed to “Ewoclem” hint that Canadian identity, lacking a universal definition, is perceived differently by different groups; or that identity in general, and Canadian identity in particular, is a riddle to which all solutions will be warped and imperfect. As Dumbrava settles into his house, he draws explicit links between his dwelling place and Roberta, both of which symbolize his new life: “Yes, without the slightest doubt, my house resembled Roberta” (268).29 This unusually overt statement of theme is perhaps necessitated by the fact that Roberta is now far away, studying in Romania. She and her father interview Denise Dunca in the company of the Canadian Ambassador to Romania as Denise is about to go into exile. When Alec sends Dumbrava a video of their interview, Dumbrava is shocked that Denise remembers him only as a poor, frivolous boy who was a bad influence on her brother. She does not recall their puppy love, displays no interest in visiting him in Canada, and chooses France as her country of exile. By annihilating the tyranny of his past, Denise’s indifference enables Dumbrava to open the door to Roberta. Their union abolishes history: “We lived in the present. I didn’t worry about the future, while I had forgotten the past” (281).30 The landscape swallows them: they admire the bush. Dumbrava reports: “I had nothing to search for” (282).31 A final twist problematizes Dumbrava’s integration by casting doubt on the very existence of a person with this name (already called into question by the novel’s foreword and the false passport on which he entered Canada). An

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unidentified voice closes the novel by announcing: “And now, I find myself compelled to make a final confession: nor did I write this book. I only copied it” (282).32 This voice—which may be that of Dumbrava but could also belong to Pilu Dunca or conceivably to Gilbert or to another unidentified refugee— reports finding the manuscript of the novel in a packet labelled “Mary-Lou.” Ewoclem closes in a circular mode, with the voice that discovered the packet beginning to scan the opening sentence of the novel’s first chapter. The conclusion nullifies the notions of coherence that have been the basis of the protagonist’s quest by depicting immigrant experience as a mediated “copy” of “real life.” The writer inhabiting a reduced solitude yearns for integration, not only as an individual but also, more broadly, as a writer in a marginalized language. The paradox that governs Ewoclem, and which may provide enlightening readings of other novels written in equivalent circumstances, is that if the Holy Grail of integration were ever grasped, the writer and the fragile, non-institutionalized writing community that sustains the writer’s work would vanish, as Dumbrava vanishes. Integration is an unrealizable dream: its achievement implies the abandonment of the writer’s language and literary tradition, the basic tools required to be a writer. The literature of the reduced solitude can exist only as a covert, frustrated art. Giurgiu is trapped on twisted paths that he may circle again and again, but from which he will not escape. His Canadian fiction will always be written in a language few Canadians can understand. His artistic vocation is to make vital statements that his compatriots will never read. As readers we must accept what the many Canadians who do not read in both English and French already know: that some of the brightest moments of Canadian writing will remain forever indecipherable to our reading eye.

Notes 1 Rainer Maria Rilke wrote: “Love consists in this, / that two solitudes protect / and touch, and greet each other” (cited by MacLennan as the epigraph to Two Solitudes [1945]). MacLennan intended to suggest that by protecting, touching, and greeting each other, English-speaking and French-speaking Canadians could build a great nation together. The popular adoption of this phrase, however, has tended to stress the incapacity of Anglophones and Francophones to understand each other’s cultures. 2 Stephansson’s work became available in English in Canada only during the 1980s, more than 50 years after his death, with the publication of volumes such as Selected Translations from Andvökur and Stephan G. Stephansson: Selected Prose and Poetry. 3 For a more extended discussion of The Engineer of Human Souls and Škvorecký’s ideological position in the cultural climate of the 1980s, see Stephen Henighan, When Words Deny the World: The Reshaping of Canadian Writing (Porcupine’s Quill, 2002), 19–29.

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4 Cobro revertido was published in French as Longues distances. The English translation appeared as Collect Call. According to Dr. Hugh Hazelton of Concordia University, Millán’s La ciudad was published in Spanish in 1979 by Les Éditions Maison Culturelle Québec-Amérique, a small Montreal publisher that “the Chilean poet and actor Manuel Aránguiz was influential in setting up” (Hazelton, 6 July 2004). In addition to Collect Call, Split Quotation, a tiny press run by the exiled Chilean poet Jorge Etcheverry, also published the English edition of Millán’s La ciudad as part of Strange Houses, a generous anthology of Millán’s poetry translated by Annegret Nill. Split Quotation has published important work, yet it does not enjoy even the basic distribution provided by the Literary Press Group, the umbrella organization representing Canada’s literary presses. The pattern of writers working in non-official languages relying on members of their own cultural communities for publication, even in English, is another trait of the reduced solitude. 5 Rodríguez’s short story collection was published in Spanish as De Cuerpo Entero and in English as and a body to remember with. 6 A recent example of this tendency is the Romanian poet and television journalist Diana Manole, author of Dragoste printre etaje, who, in spite of immigrating to Canada for professional reasons in 2002, remains a Romanian, not a Romanian-Canadian, writer. 7 Political liberalization has eroded the community of Spanish American writers in Canada, with some writers returning to Spanish-speaking countries. Prominent examples include Gonzalo Millán and the prolific Chilean avant-garde poet, Ludwig Zeller, who settled in Oaxaca, Mexico, in 1990. In recent years Zeller’s books have been published by major Mexican presses including Fondo de Cultura Económica. A very recent phenomenon contributing to the erosion of the Hispanic-Canadian writing community is the decision of some writers who have resided in Canada for many years to begin writing in English. Examples of this tendency include the SalvadoranCanadian writer Tomás A. Martínez, author of the novel Antonio’s Quest, and the Calgary poet and academic Luis Torres, who announced in June 2004 that he was writing his next book of poems in English. 8 The case of Yan Li is particularly striking. While Ying Chen has become a purely Francophone writer, Yan Li published a Chinese-language novel in Beijing in 1999, four years after the publication of her English-language novel, Daughters of the Red Land. This oscillation between the language of origin and the adopted language may become a more widespread phenomenon in an era when most immigrants retain access to the country of origin and its cultural infrastructure. In 2002 Li was awarded the Honourable Medal for Overseas Chinese Writers. The existence of such an award is a telling comment on contemporary literary dynamics. (I am grateful to Kim Jernigan for helping me to locate this information.) 9 Virtually the entire Romanian intellectual élite was jailed during the Communist takeover, including such important figures as the philosopher Mircea Vulcanescu (1904–2004). The work of Romania’s two most respected contemporary writers, the poet Lucian Blaga and the novelist and scholar Mircea Eliade, was banned. Gheorghe Calinescu, a major literary critic who was also a significant novelist, was dismissed from his university post after the publication of his novel Bietul Ioanide [Poor Old Ioanide] (1953). Younger writers who escaped into exile prior to the 1960s, almost without exception, fell silent once they left Romania.

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10 The indomitable Marin Preda (1922–80), modern Romania’s greatest novelist, survived lacerating battles with censorship to produce enduring fiction. Yet even Preda, hounded by the government, abandoned his projected two-novel series about Romania during the Second World War after the first volume Delirul [The Frenzy] (1975) was butchered by government censors who, among other indignities, ordered Preda to insert a chapter praising the Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu. Preda’s death in mysterious circumstances did not encourage other writers to speak their minds. 11 After university studies in the Transylvanian city of Cluj-Napoca, Giurgiu moved to Bucharest to follow a career as a professional violinist. He came second in a national short story contest in 1961 and published three novels prior to emigrating to Toronto in 1968. In an email interview with Dr. Ana Olos, a scholar of Canadian literature at the University of the North in Baia Mare, Romania, Giurgiu speaks in dismissive terms of the literary quality of these novels published under a totalitarian system: “Nu am cu ce sa ma laud în privinta asta” [“I have nothing to be proud of in this regard”] (Olos, “Interviu”). Responding to a question about what his literary fate would have been had he not left Romania, Giurgiu states “As fi devenit o lichea ca prietenul meu Titus Popovici sau un martir ca Paul Goma”[“I would have become a bootlicker like my friend Titus Popovici or a martyr like Paul Goma” ] (Olos, “Interviu”). (Paul Goma (1935–) was Romania’s most outspoken dissident writer and served a prison sentence in the notorious Gherla jail. He became well known in France, where he settled in 1978. His memoir of a childhood interrupted by the Second World War, Din calidor, was written in Romanian but was first published in French in 1987. An exile edition of the Romanian text appeared in 1989; the book was published in Romania in 1990. Din calidor was published in English as My Childhood at the Gate of Unrest. ) 12 Upon settling in Canada, Giurgiu, then in his mid-40s, returned to university. He studied first in Toronto, then in New York, where he earned a Ph.D. in literature at Columbia University. After his return to Toronto, Giurgiu worked as a music teacher at the Ontario Conservatory of Music, and as a teacher and arts consultant in various Toronto school boards. 13 Giurgiu’s activity as a translator also includes translating L.M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables into Romanian; he has produced Romanian versions of shorter works by Canadian writers, including short fiction by Margaret Atwood and Mavis Gallant, and journalism by Myrna Kostash. 14 In April 1985 Ceausescu was treated to the pomp of a state visit to Ottawa. The dissident Nicholas Dima (beholden to the fascist Iron Guard and sometimes an unreliable source) maintains that the Romanian Embassy in Ottawa pressured candu to invite Ceausescu to Canada and, once the visit had been confirmed, forced candu to lean on the Progressive Conservative government of Brian Mulroney to make Ceausescu’s visit an official one: “Canada was obviously forced into the act, and it did so reluctantly” (Dima 362). Whatever the truth of this assertion, Nicolae and Elena Ceau¸sescu were hosted by Brian and Mila Mulroney at a lavish state dinner, and Elgin Street, in downtown Ottawa, was lined with Romanian and Canadian flags flying side by side. 15 My translation. In the original: “Comunitatea româneasca din Toronto în acea perioada, era formata din fosti legionari, fosti militari în armata germana, câtiva refu-

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16

17 18

19

20 21 22

23

24

25 26

27

giati politici, nu prea unitara si nici de nivel cultural apreciabil. Din 1947 si pâna la sosirea noastra în Canada, din România comunista sosisera doar trei famili.” My translation. In the original: “În privinta contextului cultural, convietuirea cu alte nationalitati caracteristica Ardealului, m-a ajutat sa ma integrez foarte usor în societatea canadiana.” My translation. In the original: “Eu sunt catolic, ei sunt ortodocsi. Eu sunt ardelean, obisnuit cu un anumit stil de viata, ei sunt din alte provinci, cu alte obiceiuri.” The Catholicism of some Transylvanian Romanians dates to the period of the region’s incorporation into the Austro-Hungarian Empire (1866–1920), when some Romanians, while maintaining Romanian as their first language, became culturally Magyarized. The Romanian-speaking Transylvanian Catholic community also includes the “Greco-Catholic” offshoot of the Romanian Orthodox Church, the result of an attempt by Transylvanian intellectuals to balance Romanian culture’s religious roots in Eastern Orthodoxy with its linguistic roots in Roman-based Latinity. Giurgiu intends his protagonist and Professor Ieremia to belong to the Greco-Catholic religion. (Giurgiu, email). (I am grateful to Dr. Ana Olos for helping me to understand the religious traditions of Transylvanian Romanians.) My translation. In the original: “Mi s-au pus apoi multe întrebari despre România, dar îmi dadeam seama ca interesul subit pentru tara mea nu era tocmai sincer ci era mai degraba un act de politete.” My translation. In the original: “Nu crezi ca si în spatele acestor miscari se ascund agenti sovietici?” Dumbrava replies “Foarte probabil.” My translation. In the original: “Nu poti trai în doua lumi în acelas timp. Mai devreme sau mai târziu trebuie sa decizi, daca poti.” My translation. In the original: “Apele lacului murmurau unui ascultator absent, povestea istoriei lor geologice. Luna cazuse în fundul lacului de unde, ca printre cioburi de oglinda, îsi trimitea spre cer lumina ei rece. La orizont, departe, pe malul celalalt, era America. In spatele meu, pâna la capatul pamântului, se întindeau câmpiile întunecate ale nordului canadian. Ma ridicasem cu gîndul printre stele, de unde ma priveam ca pe un fir de nisip aruncat de valuri pe tarmurile unui lac misterios. Ce cautam aici? Cine ma aduse în lumea asta straina, rece, enigmatica si înspaimântatoare? Totusi, daca ar fi trebuit sa plec din Toronto a doua zi as fi fost fara îndoiala nefericit. Sa n-o mai vad pe Roberta?” It is common in Romanian intellectual discourse to speak of the search for “sufletul românesc,” literally “the Romanian soul.” Giurgiu’s wisdom in refraining from transferring this essentialist language to the quest for Canadian identity is one of the novel’s most successful adaptions to Canadian culture. My translation. In the original: “Nu te-ai gândit nici o clipa ca sunt o fata de douazeci de ani. Câti ani ai tu? Treizeci? Treizeci si cinc? Spune-mi sincer, dar sincer de tot, nai fost tentat nici o clipa sa ma iei în brate si sa ma saruti?” My translation. In the original: “Aveam o ciudata senzatie de ‘déjà vu.’ Mi se parea nu numai ca mai vazusem casa aceasta dar si ca lociusem in ea.” My translation. In the original: “un fapt istoric. Huronii au fost exterminati în secolul 17. O printesa irocheza a fost torturata si aruncata în apele lacului. Din când în când printesa apare si cere razbunare.” My translation. In the original: “Ceea ce vezi, ceea ce auzi. Nu cauta explicatii. La început toti facem aceiasi gresala. Credem numai ceea ce stim. De aceea stim atât de putin.”

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28 My translation. In the original: “In cele din urma Gilbert a spus ca ewoclem e un cuvânt irochez. Inseamna bun venit, dar probabil mai are si un alt înteles cunoscut numai de samani.” 29 My translation. In the original: “Da, fara nici o îndoiala, casa mea semana cu Roberta.” 30 My translation. In the original: “Traiam în prezent. Nu ma preocupa viitorul iar trecutul îl uitasem.” 31 My translation. In the original: “[N]u aveam ce cauta.” 32 My translation. In the original: “Si acum, ma vad silit sa fac o ultima marturise: nu eu am scris cartea aceasta. Eu doar am copiat-o.”

Works Cited Batts, Michael.“Multicultural Voices.” Encyclopedia of Literature in Canada. Ed. W.H. New. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002. Bringhurst, Robert. A Story as Sharp as a Knife: The Classical Haida Mythtellers and Their World. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999. Castellanos Moya, Horacio. El asco: Thomas Bernhard en San Salvador. San Salvador, El Salavador: Arcoiris, 1997. d’Ambroise, Jacqueline. “George Faludy: An Interview.” Canadian Literature 120 (1989): 42–45. Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. Kafka, pour une littérature mineure. Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1975. Dima, Nicholas. Journey to Freedom. Washington: Selous Foundation Press, 1990. Duoduo. Crossing the Sea. Trans. Lee Robinson and Yu Li Ming. Concord, ON: Anansi, 1998. Faludy, György. City of Splintered Gods. New York: William Morrow, 1966. ———. Karoton. London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1966. ———. Selected Poems, 1933–1980. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1985. Giurgiu, Eugen. Ca frunzele în vânt. Arad, Romania: Sophia, 1994. ———. Biserica arsa. Bucharest, Romania: Editura Fundatiei Culturale Române, 1995. ———. EWOCLEM sau Întortocheatele carari. Montréal: Humanitas; Bucharest: Editura Fundatiei Culturale Române, 1996. ———. Email. 14 November 2004. Goma, Paul. Le Calidor. Paris: Albin Michel, 1987. ———. Din calidor. Bucharest, Romania: Albatros, 1990. ———. My Childhood at the Gate of Unrest. London, UK: Readers International, 1990. Hazelton, Hugh. Email, 6 July 2004. Li, Yan. Daughters of the Red Land. Toronto: Sister Vision, 1995. Manguel, Alberto. News from a Foreign Country Came. Toronto: Random House, 1991. Manole, Diana. Dragoste printre etaje. Bucharest: Editura DU Style, 1997. Martínez, Tomás A. Antonio’s Quest. Edmonton: TMART Publishing, 2004.

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Millán, Gonzalo. La ciudad. Montréal: Éditions Maison Culturelle Québec-Amérique, 1979. ———. Strange Houses. Trans. by Annegret Nill. Ottawa: Split Quotation, 1991. Miska, John. Ethnic and Native Canadian Literature: A Bibliography. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990. Nappaaluk, Mitiarjuk. Sanaaq : roman. 1969. Translittéré et traduit de l’inuktitut par Bernard Saladin d’Anglure. Montréal: Stanké, 2002. Olos, Ana. “Interviu prin e-mail cu Eugen Giurgiu, singurul scriitor de origine româna membru al Uniunii Scriitorilor Canadieni.” 10 July 2004. http://www .litterae.net/Ana%20Olos2.htm Paré, François. Les Littératures de l’exiguïté. Ottawa: Le Nordir, 2001. Quijada Urias, Alfonso. The Better to See You. Trans. Hugh Hazelton. Dunvegan, ON: Cormorant Books, 1994. Río, Nela. Túnel de proa verde/ Tunnel of the Green Prow. Fredericton: Broken Jaw, 1998. Rodríguez, Carmen. and a body to remember with. Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 1997. ———. De Cuerpo Entero. Santiago, Chile: Editorial Los Andes, 1997. Simi c, Goran. Immigrant Blues. London, ON: Brick Books, 2003. Škvorecký, Josef. The Engineer of Human Souls. Trans. Paul Wilson. Toronto: Lester & Orpen Dennys, 1984. Stephansson, Stephan. Selected Translations from Andvökur. Edmonton: Stephan G. Stephansson Homestead Restoration Committee, 1982. ———. Stephan G. Stephansson: Selected Prose and Poetry. Red Deer: Red Deer College Press, 1988. Torres, Luis. “Writings of the Latin-Canadian Exile.” Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispánicos 36.1–2 (Fall 2001/Winter 2002): 179–98. Urbanyi, Pablo. The Nowhere Idea. Trans. Nigel Dennis. Toronto: Williams-Wallace, 1982. ———. L’Idée fixe. Trans. Jean Potvin. Montréal: VLB Éditeur, 1990. ———. Un revolver pour Mack. Montréal: VLB Éditeur, 1992. ———. Sunset. Trans. Hugh Hazelton. Fredericton: Broken Jaw, 2002. Urbina, José Leandro. Cobro revertido. Santiago, Chile: Planeta, 1992. ———. Longues distances. Trans. Danièle Rudel-Tessier. Outremont, PC: Lanctôt Éditeur, 1996. ———. Collect Call. Trans. Beverly J. Delong-Tonelli. Ottawa: Split Quotation, 1999. Vizinczey, Stephen. In Praise of Older Women. Toronto: Contemporary Canada Press, 1965.

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hugh hazelton

Polylingual Identities: Writing in Multiple Languages

uthors who write in several languages are now, in an increasingly multilingual world, becoming more and more common. Travel, work in other countries, exile, economic dislocation, and immigration have combined with greater linguistic mobility to create conditions in which writers can express themselves in several different languages—and find a multilingual audience to appreciate their work. Within the field of Canadian writing, one of the most interesting groups of multilingual writers exists among the Latin American authors who have settled in English Canada and Quebec. These writers are part of multiple literary worlds: their own national literary tradition, the constellation of literatures that makes up the corpus of the Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking worlds, and either the English-Canadian or Quebec sphere of letters. An analysis of the phenomenon of multilingual writing and its place within the Latino-Canadian context and a close textual study of the multiple-language writings of several of these authors, in particular of those who write the same text in two languages, will illustrate the different verbal strategies that each has decided to adopt in their quest for a polylingual identity. It is not surprising that a number of the Latin American authors who immigrated to Canada during the last quarter of the 20th century eventually attempted to write in several languages at once. These writers were part of a diaspora of exiles and immigrants who left Latin America following the series of coups d’état and ensuing economic dislocation that took place in the region, beginning with Brazil in 1964, and including Chile in 1973 and Argentina in

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1976; the same pattern of political repression continued during the civil wars that engulfed Central America in the 1980s, as well as during the guerrilla warfare in Peru in the 1990s and in Colombia today. In the case of Chile, for instance, hundreds of thousands of Chileans, out of a 1970 population of about nine million (Nazer and Camous), eventually left the country.1 Some of the Latin American writers of the diaspora had already begun to publish before they left their native countries; others began their literary careers after their arrival in Canada. All were faced with the task of continuing their creative work in an alien land and in an unfamiliar literary and artistic tradition that was often quite at odds with their own. Most of them first published with the small Spanish-speaking presses that sprang up in urban centres such as Montreal, Ottawa, and Toronto, as well as in Hispanic newspapers and local magazines in cities as far afield as Calgary and Winnipeg. At first, virtually all of them wrote in Spanish; many were eventually translated by people who were an intimate part of their lives—wives, husbands, companions, and close friends—and then published bilingual Spanish-English or Spanish-French editions of their work. A few, after having lived a number of years in Canada and familiarized themselves with their second language, decided to create their texts in both Spanish and English or French at the same time. The bilingual editions that these polylingual writers have brought out are of great interest in that they employ a variety of linguistic strategies. The two versions may not necessarily correspond with the consistency of a translation; instead they often constitute the expression of the same text in two distinct forms, thus giving the writer greater freedom to adapt his or her work to the particularities of each language. For some authors, neither of the versions is the “original,” and neither is labelled “translated by the author” in either bilingual or unilingual editions of their work. Other polylingual writers may prefer a much higher degree of congruency between their two texts, in effect choosing to translate their own work rather than create the same text in another language. One writer in particular, the Chilean-Canadian playwright and poet Alberto Kurapel, incorporates such a high level of variance between the content of the texts in the two languages in the supposedly bilingual editions of his plays that he actually subverts their bilingualism and creates a single text by fusing the two languages. The phenomenon of multilingual writing is not, of course, something new; in fact, it has constituted a historical and literary constant since ancient times. Authors have often chosen to write much of their work in a language other than their own for a variety of reasons, and the process, like translation, has inevitably involved a certain degree of transculturation. Many authors

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have wished to gain access to a wider public or greater prestige than they would have had in their native tongue; often this process was stimulated by the long-standing tradition of translating works from older, more established literary languages by writers working in newer, less prestigious ones, a phenomenon known as “vertical” translation, in contrast to “horizontal” translation between languages of equal literary prestige. Although there are many writers who have worked in multiple languages, most have published work exclusively in one language or the other: few have chosen to create or translate their own work in several languages. Hispanic-Canadian writers have introduced some new variables into the multilingual tradition. Like other writers before them, they may be motivated to write in English or French in order to gain a wider audience; while translation would also open this door to them, translated authors are often not accepted as easily into the linguistic mainstream as are those who write (and can be interviewed) in either English or French. The relative difficulty that many less bilingual Latino-Canadian writers—even those who are well known in their native countries, such as Alfonso Quijada Urías and Pablo Urbanyi— have had in diffusing their work in English or French in Canada stands in marked contrast to the ease with which Hispanic writers who are fluent in English and write directly in the language, such as Alberto Manguel and Guillermo Verdecchia, have been able to integrate into the world of EnglishCanadian letters. Moreover, many multilingual authors have been drawn specifically to the idea of writing the same work in more than one language, and although their version in the second language might not have the fluency of a work by a professional translator, it is perhaps more profoundly “theirs,” because they are the ones who have made all the linguistic decisions. Also, of course, they are writing a version in another language rather than a close translation, and thus have far greater freedom of interpretation, allowing them to make changes and choose from a broader range of linguistic options than direct translation is able to offer. Finally, Hispanic-Canadian writers are proud of their linguistic heritage and almost invariably want to maintain their ability to write in Spanish: there is no hint of “vertical” translation here, of giving enhanced prestige to English or French, but rather of establishing a linguistic relationship of horizontality, reaching out to explore the possibilities of expression in another language of equal importance and perhaps also to understand what it is like to write in the tongue of the Other. In this way, the multilingual author will be able to inhabit multiple selves and speak and create in an adopted language in order to fully experience it as if it were his or her own, thus transpropriating linguistic access to the Other as an equal

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rather than appropriating it in a hierarchical sense. In the desire to inhabit and work within the linguistic world of the English-Canadian or Québécois Other, the Hispanic Canadian writer may in fact create a parallel identity, an alternate English or French-speaking self. Furthermore, in the interaction between the two languages that such dual creation necessarily involves, there is an interface between the author’s Spanish- and English- or French-speaking identities, as each compares the work in one language with the work in the other.2 As Octavio Paz has observed,“[t]ranslation and creation are twin operations” (23; my translation). In this sense, the author’s English- or Frenchlanguage persona becomes the doppelgänger of the Hispanic one; indeed, some writers lose track of which language the original work was composed in, thus opening the possibility that the Hispanic self may occasionally take the secondary role in the interchange. The Chilean-Canadian writer Jorge Etcheverry, for example, says that he sometimes forgets which of the versions was the original one (personal interview). Yet if the author creates his or her own bilingual strategy, either in terms of creating a text in several languages or translating or recreating it in a second one, is there in fact an audience for such multilingual writing—one that will be capable of going beyond the unilingual text, in either language, and appreciating the comparison or interplay between the two versions? For most of literary history, it was common for authors to compose in two languages, and for an elite public to be able to appreciate the finer points of each: the early Romans often wrote in Greek, which their readers also understood, and many Europeans from the Middle Ages to the 18th century were capable of writing in Latin and Greek as well as their national language, though not many wrote the same work in both at once. During the ensuing age of “national” literatures of the 19th century, writers were expected to create in one language and in the context of a single national experience, but a new, more polyphonic linguistic and literary reality has arisen in the 20th century. Through more horizontal language acquisition and increased immigration, a multilingual public now exists, particularly in bilingual centres and urban areas with high densities of linguistic diversity. Literary festivals such as Blue Metropolis/Métropolis bleu/Metrópolis Azul in Montreal feature readings, commentary, and book sales in a number of languages, often within the same event, and smaller poetry readings in the city allow writers to read in the language of their choice, with a second version in French or English.3 Poets at essentially Spanish-language venues such as the El Dorado reading series in Ottawa are encouraged to read or recite in Spanish, English, or French, with the tacit understanding that the audience will be able to appreciate their work in any or all of the three

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languages. At the same time, bilingual Spanish-English and Spanish-French editions of poetry have grown increasingly popular, giving readers the possibility of comparing the original and the translation or, in the case of multilingual writers, both versions of the same poem.4 A close textual analysis of the relative differences and similarities between the Spanish and either English or French versions of works by four Hispanic Canadian writers—one Argentine and three Chileans—will reveal the strategies that each has chosen to employ. Margarita Feliciano has written several bilingual books in which there is such a degree of variation between the texts in the two languages (Spanish and English), that each takes on a certain identity of its own. Jorge Etcheverry has also experimented with dual creations of the same basic text, though he generally prefers that the two versions correspond to one another more closely. He enjoys exploring the possibilities that both Spanish and English afford him in going beyond direct translation of his texts, yet he doesn’t go as far as Feliciano in creating two independent versions. The third author, Alberto Kurapel, constructs bilingual texts that, rather than laying out each language on a facing page, switch back and forth between paragraphs or short groups of lines in Spanish and French. The material in the two languages does not actually correspond, however: often the two texts are markedly different or include only a few elements in one language of what was said in the other, contributing directly to the forward movement of the content of the text rather than serving as a linguistic reflection. In this way, Kurapel actually transcends the bilingual text and fuses the two languages into a single metalanguage, writing his plays in Spanish and French at once. Finally, poet and translator Blanca Espinoza prefers to write closely corresponding versions of her work, in effect translating her own poetry while at the same time exploiting each language to express her work in a slightly different way. Margarita Feliciano was one of the first Latino-Canadian authors to write simultaneously in two languages. She was born in Sicily, grew up in Argentina, did her university studies in California, and has lived most of the rest of her life in Toronto. Each country and region in her trajectory has left a different mark on her life and work. Her childhood in Syracuse and her later studies at the University of Florence gave her a deep attachment to the sea, Mediterranean light, Greek mythology, and Italian poetry. However, although she lived in Argentina for only eight years, she is still most at home in the Spanish language and closely identifies with Latin American culture and literature. Her years in California, on the other hand, have left her with a love for the seascapes of the northern part of the state, which in many ways are a more rugged North American version of the Mediterranean landscape. Feliciano’s

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cultural cosmopolitanism has resulted in a peculiarly rich cross-section of influences and affinities. She has published three volumes of poetry, the first two of which, Ventana sobre el mar / Window on the Sea (1981) and Circadian Nuvolitatis (1986), were bilingual (Spanish-English for the first book and English-Spanish for the second). The English versions are by Feliciano herself and are so distinct from the Spanish that they constitute independent artistic creations. The physical setting of Ventana sobre el mar / Window on the Sea, as the book’s title suggests, is a seacoast, seemingly that of Northern California, and the constant references to the ocean are often mixed with evocations of the joy and nostalgia of love found and lost. In contrast with the rest of Feliciano’s poetry, which is almost always laid out flush with the left-hand margin and grouped into verses, there is also quite a bit of formal experimentation. Circadian Nuvolitatis has similar themes, but returns to a more European setting and context. The opening poem (2–3) of Ventana sobre el mar / Window on the Sea, “Océano Pacífico / Pacific Ocean” (Appendix 1, page 239) establishes the framework and tone of Feliciano’s experiment. Both the Spanish and English versions are laid out typographically in one long, unbroken stanza that moves diagonally toward the centre of the page, so that the two poems are not only mirror images of one another, but also flow toward one another, as to some central, interlinguistic space. The line breaks of the two poems do not correspond exactly or mechanically to one another, and yet both versions have a total of 33 lines. Certain constructions and vocabulary do not fully concur with one another either, right from the third and fourth lines, in which the sea is called “el adorno [adornment, ornament] necesario / que tuve conmigo desde siempre” in Spanish, but “the necessary item of décor / that had always been attached to me / as long as I can remember” in English. Interestingly, the speaker in Spanish uses the past tense, while the English one uses the past perfect—possibly a reflection a more relaxed attitude on the part of the poet toward writing in Spanish, and a more scrupulous (or perhaps overly correct) approach to writing in English. Immediately, however, the writer has declared her independence from standardization: not only is “décor” a surprising lexical distance from “adorno,” but the active-voiced “tuve conmigo,” or “I had or carried around with me” has an impact that is far different from the English passive “that had always been attached to me,” especially when combined with the reiterative “as long as I can remember.” The lines, however, have an intriguing originality: “décor” does correspond obliquely to “adornment,” especially in speaking of something as vast as the sea, and the extra line and introduction of “attached” give the English version an autonomous

Polylingual Identities / Hazelton

existence and more colloquial quality. Lines 10 through 13 in the Spanish version, though direct, are much more conventional (“Me agradaba mirarte / porque no había desatinos en tu ser”) than their English counterpart, which is intimate and colloquial in its conversation with the sea: “You were good to look at. / There was no nonsense about you.” Likewise, the prosaic “ni tampoco tenías / la fácil mitología mediterránea” is transformed into a surprising reference to “no ‘land of counterpane’ of the Mediterranean in your soul.” No translator would have likely come up with such a divergent interpretation. In the 13th and 14th lines, the mellifluous “Eras un mar bello y borrascoso [stormy]” with its alliterative adjectives, becomes the more abrupt “A handsome, rugged sea you were,” which implies a personal relationship with the ocean and is reinforced by “you liked to be surrounded / by jagged rocks.” These lines are, again, not only more forceful than the two suspended adjectives that refer to the sea in Spanish (“complacido” y “rodeado”), but also condense the more verbose “de escollos desiguales y afilados” down to three words. As the poem moves toward its close, the two versions draw closer together again and the Spanish becomes more intense and less formal; in the last line, the poet, who has let spontaneity trump standardization in the correspondence between line breaks, neatly wraps the final two Spanish lines into one in English, thus coming up with the same number in each poem. Overall, though the Spanish version is the more polished of the two in terms of poetic conventions, the English one often seems to have more vitality and freshness. Perhaps due to her more limited experience with writing in English, Feliciano has unconsciously followed Friedrich Schleiermacher’s advice about bringing a sense of the strangeness of the source language to the translation (47). The love poems of both Ventana sobre el mar / Window on the Sea and Circadian Nuvolitatis largely take place within the natural world of the ocean shore, yet these settings are constructs—fragile, idealized worlds in which couples meet, love, and separate, or in which the speaker later reflects nostalgically on her loss. Even in “Going Down on 280 / Bajando por la 280” (Appendix 2, page 239), in which the title (in both languages) would seem to indicate a more realistic geography, the twists and turns of the lovers’ road seem to arise as imaginary incarnations of the speaker’s feelings rather than from the topographical features of an actual coast; Californian and Mediterranean images are fused to the extent that the “glistening mirage of white / and multicoloured buildings” (54) of the distant city is more like the Bordighera of a Monet painting than any identifiable coastal town. Here, the two versions of the poem differ markedly in form, with the English version maintaining short, staccato lines that reflect the “road” quality of the poem better than the longer,

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more sedate Spanish verses; the English version has 34 lines, while the Spanish has only 27. Perhaps the poem was originally written in English; Circadian Nuvolitatis is, after all, an English-Spanish book. The relative smoothness and concision of the Spanish version, however, together with the choppiness of the English one make any assumptions as to the original language doubtful. In any case, the same pattern prevails of a more consciously “poetic” language in the Spanish version, coupled with a more spontaneous, immediate, and at times less refined version in English. The translation theorist Susan Bassnett has observed that “as Popovic points out, ‘the translator has the right to differ organically, to be independent,’ provided that independence is pursued for the sake of the original in order to reproduce it as a living work” (82). In the first five lines, for instance, the shorter lines of the English version seem much more immediate, especially for a travel poem, but the fifth line, “to let ourselves be swept into the road” is longer and more awkward and repetitious than the compact “para que nos dejemos deslizar” [so we can let ourselves slide, or glide along] in Spanish. Once again, lines 12 and 13 of the Spanish version—“esperándonos siempre, / siempre de aspecto nuevo y reluciente”— fit together more neatly and have a more conventionally poetic quality (the repetition of “siempre” and internal rhyme of “siempre” and “reluciente”) than the more direct and surprising combination of the English equivalent, “looking always fresh and newly-found.” In the ensuing lines, the English version picks up much more rhythm than the Spanish (“You and I / drive on and on, / clumps of houses / suddenly appear …”), and extra adverbs pop up that are not in the Spanish: “suddenly” (line 17) and “fearlessly” (line 26). The Spanish expressions “de soslayo” and “en las comisuras,” which avoid redundancy by using separate words, are both translated by “corner,” a repetition that the author may have wanted to include as a parallel construction, but which slows the English poem at the end. Despite the energy, confidence, and independence with which she composed the Spanish and English poems in her first two books, Feliciano eventually came to feel that writing in both languages at once involved too much focus on linguistic interplay and decided she wanted to concentrate more completely on content (personal conversation); her third book of poems, Lectura en Málaga, as well as most of her later unpublished work, has appeared almost exclusively in Spanish. Another Latino-Canadian author who works in both Spanish and English is Jorge Etcheverry, a Chilean writer, critic, and visual artist who has long been a strong proponent of avant-garde and experimental writing. Etcheverry was one of the four founding members of the “School of Santiago,” a group of young poets at the University of Chile in the late 1960s and early 1970s who

Polylingual Identities / Hazelton

believed in an intertextual, fragmentary, phantasmagorical, urbanized form of literary art, and he has continued to push the limits of writing ever since. Jorge has lived primarily in Ottawa for the past 30 years, where he works as a freelance translator and has turned out a remarkable range of work, including poetry, short stories, a novel, literary criticism, and numerous drawings and paintings. His first book, El evasionista / The Escape Artist, was a bilingual text that was translated into English by the indefatigable Cristina Shantz, who was the principal translator of numerous Chilean-Canadian writers in the 1970s and 80s. After publishing a second book of poetry, La calle, in a unilingual Spanish edition, however, Etcheverry brought out The Witch, a long poem in bilingual format, in 1985, specifying “English version by Paulette Turcotte & Jorge Etcheverry. Revision of English text by Peter Roster” on the credits page. The Witch is a highly experimental and expressionistic long poem, alternately in the form of prose poems and verse; Etcheverry evidently wanted to try his hand at writing in both languages at once, but made sure he had a second (and third) opinion on his English. Perhaps because of this, despite the exceedingly long sentences and convoluted hyperbaton, the texts in the two languages correspond as closely as a translation. At about the same time as the publication of The Witch, Etcheverry began to work as a professional translator from English to Spanish. Tánger, Etcheverry’s fourth book, was originally published in Spanish in 1990. The English edition, Tangier, was brought out by Ediciones Cordillera of Ottawa in 1997; Etcheverry is listed as the author, but on the credits page there is a note: “English version: Jorge Etcheverry and Sharon Khan.” The book consists of a collection of some 54 unnamed, unnumbered poems, the shortest of which consists of two lines and the longest of three pages; there are poems using short, abrupt lines as well as others with much longer ones or written in paragraphs. All, however, are unified by the central image of the seaport. Few specific geographical references are given beyond Valparaíso, Ottawa, and the title itself, Tangier, which is a symbol for the mixing of cultures and the interaction of peoples and literatures, as well as being a metonym for Chile, a nation that closely identifies with the sea. The port, with its vast intermingling of peoples and languages, is a dynamic, polyglot urban symbol; industrial production, however, especially in terms of capitalist exploitation, is seen as an inevitably negative phenomenon associated with the destruction of the natural world. Nowhere else in Etcheverry’s work, in fact, is nature so lyrically presented, often simply for the pleasure found in naming and describing all that comes from the sea, and sometimes in order to elaborate metaphorical comparisons between the ocean or the seaport and women.

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The emphasis on the natural world and the celebration of the sea are evident in the unnamed poem from pages 33 and 34 of the Spanish version and pages 37 and 38 of the English (Appendix 3, page 240). A comparison of the two versions reveals a certain literalness in the English one, as well as some unexpected opportunities for poetic innovation. The first line of the poem in Spanish, “Calamares & sexo,” is redolent of the eroticized blending of the forms and smells of the sea, but the English version also offers the possibility of four unforced alliterations—“Squid & Sex [oddly with a capital letter] / Sun sand”—which the author has decided to use, evidently judging that they do not sound too facile. The “marino” of the third line, which is already redundant in Spanish, sounds even more so in English (“marine wrack”): “sea wrack” would be more fluent as a compound. The most direct equivalent of “fucos marinos” would simply be “kelp,” but perhaps “wrack,” enriched with a dual meaning that is not inherent in the Spanish term, is used to increase the maritime resonance. The translation of “noctilucas” as “glow-worms” is more problematic: though possible, it seems more likely, given the context, that the relevant term is actually the same word in English, “noctilucas,” which refers not to insects but to shoals of tiny marine flagellates that turn phosphorescent when disturbed. On the other hand, though, the use of the phrase “skimming the sea (water) with her feet” to translate “pasa rozando con sus pies el agua” is striking not only for its use of “(water)” with “sea,” but also for the translation of “rozando” [brushing against] by “skimming,” which has a much higher interpretative quotient. The last two lines of the first stanza in Spanish have been set off as a separate stanza in English, and again they permit a triple alliteration with “s”: “salty sand of the seashore.” Although “waste” seems an unfortunate parallel for “de[s]perdicios,” when “garbage” would have sounded much more organic, and “Blown by a hot humid wind” does not sound very fluent, the fifth verse (“This is a village of fishermen, nestled among hot, salty rocks”) is an excellent equivalent of the Spanish. The seventh, eighth, and ninth stanzas are also worthy renderings, though in the sixth the fishermen are inexplicably converted into “sailors,” the wine jumps “in” the glasses instead of “from” them, “seaweed” is used to translate “lama” [slime] when a new, previously unused word would have been better (as in the Spanish version), and the second “she” of “She sighs, she suffocates” could easily have been left out. In short, despite some linguistic surprises and opportune turns of phrase, the English poem is slightly reluctant to take chances and affirm itself completely as a version rather than an interesting and spirited translation. Etcheverry himself has commented that he found the fine-tuning of the English version of Tánger difficult and felt that the English poems lacked some of the sparkle of the Spanish ones (personal conversation).

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Perhaps out of a desire to establish a more autonomous voice in English in his other works, Etcheverry has also created a separate English-speaking poetic persona, one Patrick Phillmore, who writes in a more laconic, documentary (and English-Canadian) style than his creator, thus fulfilling the impulse to assume another linguistic identity. Etcheverry has published a number of poems under the Phillmore pseudonym and even uses Phillmore and his sister, Patricia, as characters in his novel De chácharas y largavistas [Small Talk and Binoculars] (1993). Phillmore is the best friend of the novel’s protagonist, Pablo Jorquera, who becomes romantically involved with Patricia; the novel also includes several poems by Phillmore that Jorquera has translated into Spanish. Certainly the pleasure that Etcheverry takes in creating these multiple identities and setting up their interaction with one another is reminiscent of the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa, who created other poetic personalities, which he called “heteronyms,” each of which was endowed with a separate biography, literary tastes, and poetic style. Like the characters in Etcheverry’s novel, Pessoa’s heteronyms published in different journals, interacted with one another, and even had literary disputes and discussions in the press. Pessoa, who grew up in South Africa and did virtually all his studies exclusively in English (De Sena 14), later worked in Lisbon as a commercial translator. In fact, it was only after writing his first two chapbooks in English that he began to publish in Portuguese. Pessoa did not, however, create the same work in both English and Portuguese. The Chilean poet, dramatist, and musician Alberto Kurapel has taken a different tack in dual language creation: the simultaneous use of both Spanish and French in his plays. Like Etcheverry, Kurapel arrived in Canada shortly after the coup d’état against Salvador Allende in 1973; he settled in Montreal and immediately continued the artistic career that he had begun in his native country. During the 1970s he made seven records of poetic, politicized, nostalgic songs, which established him as a cantautor, or singer-songwriter, in Spanish in Quebec. At the same time, he continued his experimentation in the theatre, writing and directing plays that used fragmentary dialogue, multimedia, and absurdist, Brechtian techniques in order to play on perceptual ambivalencies such as intimacy and distancing with the audience, eventually founding his own theatre troupe, the Compagnie des Arts Exilio. Kurapel wrote all his songs and most of his poetry in Spanish. By the early 1980s, however, he had come up with a novel approach to writing theatre: using short, sequential segments of two or three sentences at a time, he wrote in both Spanish and French at once—always leaving enough differences and untranslated words in the two versions to keep them from merely being mirror images of one another. His plays carry no mention of either translators or revisers, and

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all follow the same basic pattern: the names of the characters are all in Spanish, and everything from the stage instructions to the dialogues and asides is written first in Spanish and then in French. The first dialogue of his fourth published play, Prométhée enchaîné selon Alberto Kurapel / Prometeo encadenado según Alberto Kurapel (50–52), in which Prometeo, Io, and the Chorus of Oceanids establish themselves as characters, offers a clear example of this multilingual technique (Appendix 4, page 242). Although the French stage instructions for Io are a straight (and rather rocky) translation of the Spanish, the actual substance of Io’s first words is strikingly different in the two languages, both in its content and its form (verse in Spanish and prose in French). Prometeo’s short speech consists of two parallel but independent versions, as do the first lines of the Chorus of Oceanids; the second speech of the Chorus, however, is much more developed in French (eight lines) than in Spanish (two lines), thus signalling the author’s somewhat cavalier or at least loose interpretation of his own bilingual strategy, and raising the question as to whether or not he is ultimately writing a unified multilingual play rather than simply conveying the same information in two languages. The arbitrariness of the technique—a whole column in one language or the other at the beginning of the play, a few lines or words in other places—combined with the openness to changes in meaning in the two languages, underscores the fact that the play is basically directed at a bilingual audience. Moreover, as can be seen in the last lines of Prometeo’s second speech, the variations in meaning actually permit the author not only to reproduce the text in French, but also to use the “translation” to add to the Spanish, thus effectively synthesizing the dual-language text into a single polylingual work. Speaking of the Tyrant’s need for reconciliation in the future, Prometeo imagines that “vendrá a empuñar mi mano” [he will come and grasp my hand], without mentioning any reciprocity in the gesture—something that is quite different from the mutuality of the concluding “sa main rencontrera la mienne” [his hand shall find my own] in the French version. The multilingual writer who composes in more than one language is an artist who wants to experience both his or her own maternal linguistic reality and transcend it by simultaneously taking on that of the Other. In fact, the act of multilingual creation reflects a desire to enter, know, and become the Other—and then share two spheres of cultural and linguistic formation through transcultural osmosis. By writing in his or her second language, the multilingual author embraces it as a first language, thinking and creating artistically in it in an effort to achieve total linguistic identification with another reality. Whether the texts involved follow the pattern of a loose translation, a

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parallel creation, or a vigorously autonomous work, they are testimony to the fact that the author wishes to be a part of two language groups and literary traditions at the same time. The poet Blanca Espinoza, who grew up in Chile, took her B.A. in French at the Université de Louvain in Belgium, and then immigrated to Canada, where she works as a professional translator from French to Spanish and vice versa, has written a series of highly sensual bilingual prose poems based on the tango. The collection was published in dual-language format in 2001 under the title Tango. The two versions differ only slightly, yet each is so carefully crafted that it can stand alone, independent of the other language and yet sharing its fluidity, energy, and fire. It is significant that the author has placed the French version first, before the Spanish. The opening poem (11–15), which has the same title as the book itself (Appendix 5, page 243), is a fitting final example of the skill with which an author can create in two languages, especially one who spans the two cultures and linguistic and literary traditions as thoroughly as Espinosa. There are differences between the two texts: the staccato, fragmentary descriptions of the Spanish text are incorporated into longer, more flowing complete sentences in the French; the “syllabic murmur” of the French becomes “un murmullo consonántico y silábico” in Spanish; and (perhaps unwittingly) the “lamento” [moaning] in Spanish becomes “lamentation,” in French. Overall, however, the high degree of correspondence between the two versions, both in tone and form, gives the impression that the author is equally skilled in both languages and has fully achieved a dual linguistic identity: her knowledge and feeling for both languages has reached the point at which she is capable of creating the same artistic work in each. In his essay “The Misery and Splendour of Translation,” José Ortega y Gasset states that Languages separate us and discommunicate, not simply because they are different languages, but because they proceed from different mental pictures, from disparate intellectual systems—in the last instance, from divergent philosophies. Not only do we speak, but we also think in a specific language, and intellectually slide along preestablished rails prescribed by our verbal destiny. (107)

The writer who works in several languages, however, attempts to bridge the divergence and isolation created by different languages not only for those who read his or her work, but also within the author’s own linguistic, psychological, and philosophical world. In so doing, the author enters the territory of the linguistic and cultural Other and incorporates it into his or her own. Translation itself reaches out to the Other in search of foreign experience and

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brings it back into the source language, but multilingual writing goes a step farther: the writer actually creates within the other language, transforming him or herself into an author in another tongue and cultural sphere, thus inventing a new and enriching polylingual identity. As Arthur Schopenhauer states in his essay “On Language and Words,” This confirms that one thinks differently in every language, that our thinking is modified and newly tinged through the learning of each foreign language, and that polyglotism is, apart from its many immediate advantages, a direct means of educating the mind by correcting and perfecting our perceptions through the emerging diversity and refinement of concepts. At the same time, polyglotism increases the flexibility of thinking since, through the learning of many languages, the concept increasingly separates itself from the word. (35)

The multilingual writer is able to create in both a linguistic homeland and an adopted linguistic region even as it is still being explored.

Polylingual Identities / Hazelton

Appendix 1: Margarita Feliciano VENTANA SOBRE EL MAR Océano Pacífico

WINDOW ON THE SEA Pacific Ocean

Cuando te vi por primera vez

When I first saw you

pensé que eras un mar como los otros,

l thought you were a sea like any other,

el adorno necesario

the necessary item of decor

que tuve conmigo desde siempre.

that had always been attached to me

Te miraba de frente

as long as I can remember.

o a veces de soslayo

I used to look at you,

al caminar por la calle,

either directly,

o a veces cuando me encontraba

or I would steal a glance

entre los eucaliptus.

from the corner of my eye,

Me agradaba mirarte

as I walked in the streets,

porque no había desatinos en tu ser,

or else, when I was standing

ni tampoco tenías

under eucalyptus trees.

la fácil mitología mediterránea.

You were good to look at.

Eras un mar bello y borrascoso,

There was no nonsense about you,

complacido y rodeado

no “land of counterpane” of the Mediterranean in your soul.

de escollos desiguales y afilados,

A handsome, rugged sea you were,

y de explosiones de color y sombra.

you liked to be surrounded

Eras un mar fuerte y poderoso,

by jagged rocks

prestabas a mi vida

and outbursts of color and shadow.

su sólida estructura.

A strong, wonderful sea you were,

Cuando me fui de allí te eché de menos.

you gave a solid structure to my life.

Mis ojos, acostumbrados a tu presencia,

When I went away I missed you

buscaban en vano tus colores

My eyes, accustomed to your presence,

y tus hondos latidos familiares,

searched in vain for your colors,

y entonces supe que te necesitaba

for your familiar, deep throbbing sounds,

para añadirme profundidades.

and I knew that I needed you,

Por eso,

I needed the daily bread of your presence to add depth to my soul.

ahora que me hallo aquí de nuevo

That is why,

te estoy mirando,

now that I am here again,

te estoy bebiendo por los poros,

I am looking at you,

te almaceno en mi cuerpo,

I am soaking you in,

porque quién sabe cuando

I am storing you in my body,

de nuevo te veré.

for who knows when I’ll ever see you again.

Appendix 2: Margarita Feliciano: Circadian Nuvolitatis GOING DOWN ON 280

BAJANDO POR LA 280

The road is bursting into bushes and flowers The sky above beckons on to let ourselves be swept into the road. On and on

La carretera estalla en arbustos y flores el cielo nos hace señas para que nos dejemos deslizar. Siempre, siempre adelante peinamos el asfalto

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we skim over the pavement barely feeling the pull of gravity, on and on we advance towards the distant city, the glistening mirage of white and multicoloured buildings waiting for us time after time, looking always fresh and newly-found. You and I drive on and on, clumps of houses suddenly appear on a hilltop, their architecture reminiscent of ancient Mediterranean fortresses. You and I feeling suspended, heady and silent in the midst of the wonder. We let our eyes roam and fearlessly explore all the paths on the hillsides. Suddenly the golden silhouette of the bridge appears ablaze in the setting sun. With the corner of my eye I spy your profile and the vague smile in the corner of your mouth.

y apenas nos sentimos gravitados. Siempre, siempre adelante avanzamos hacia la ciudad distante, brillante espejismo de blancura y de edifícios multicolores esperándonos siempre, siempre de aspecto nuevo y reluciente. Tú y yo seguimos manejando, casas arracimadas en la cima del monte su arquitectura evoca las antiguas fortalezas del Mediterráneo. Tú y yo nos sentimos suspendidos, ligeros y silentes en tanta maravilla; nuestra mirada errante explora los caminos y las cuestas. De pronto percibimos Ia bruñida silueta del puente incendiada y dorada por el sol de la tarde. Más tarde, de solayo, yo observo tu perfil y la vaga sonrisa que juega en las comisuras de tu boca.

Appendix 3: Jorge Etcheverry: Tánger Calamares & sexo Sol arena fucos marinos, noctilucas Una mujer pasa rozando con sus pies el agua Este es un pueblo de pescadores. Como tallado en las rocas de de la orilla, sobre la arena salada de la orilla Los erizos anidan en las rocas saladas. El yodo es espeso sobre las rocas saladas. Una corona de soles y el hedor de los deperdicios del pueblo de pescadores. Una voz entrecortada y desnuda, bajo el sol, entre las enumeraciones Una mujer pasa rozando sus piernas de fuego, una contra otra. Camina. No camina: está, con una maraña de algas cobrizas. No, tres marañas. Cuatro. Movidas por un viento húmedo y caliente. Labios de coral ojos de agua, entre esponjas, salpicada de espumas

Polylingual Identities / Hazelton

podridas, reflejando el sol de mil maneras turbias. Un pájaro negro tapa por un momento al sol Este es un pueblo de pescadores, anidando entre las rocas calientes, saladas. Las puertas de las casuchas destilan una obscuridad velluda. Las gaviotas se precipitan con su carga de sol Un pueblo de pescadores. El vino salta de los vasos al anochecer. Una mujer como tallada en luna con tres, no, cuatro marañas de lama roja. Suspira, se sofoca, corre por la plaza. Perseguida por el agua negra, la torva espuma caliente Un pueblo de pescadores. El vino corre dorado por las gargantas, se asoma a los ojos Brillan las cubiertas. No brillan las manos rugosas de los pescadores. Las polillas sombrías, cargadas de un calor húmedo, se abalanzan sobre la fría luz de las candelas. Un pueblo de pescadores. Ellos sueñan con divinas mujeres. Ellos duermen en el fondo de sus barcas.

Tangiers Squid & Sex Sun sand marine wrack, glow-worms A woman passes by, skimming the sea (water) with her feet This is a fishing village. As though engraved in the rocks of the seashore, over the salty sand of the seashore Sea urchins shelter in salty rocks. Iodine lies thick upon salty rocks. A crown of suns and the stench of waste from the fishing village. A bare faltering voice, beneath the sun, among the enumerations A woman passes by, rubbing her legs of fire, one against the other. Walking. Not walking: She is there, with a tangle of coppery algae. No, three tangles. Four. Blown by a hot humid wind. Lips of coral, eyes of water, among sponges, splattered with putrid foam, reflecting the sun in a thousand-and-one turbid ways. For a moment, a black bird blocks the sun This is a village of fishermen, nestled among hot, salty rocks. The doors of the huts distil a hairy darkness. Seagulls rush with their cargo of sun A village of sailors. At dusk wine jumps in glasses. A woman as if carved in rock with three, no, four, meshes of red seaweed. She sighs, she suffocates, runs by the square. Pursued by black waters, fierce hot foam A village of fishermen. Wine runs golden in their throats and is reflected in their eyes The decks shine. Not so the rough hands of the fishermen. Dark moths, filled with a humid warmth, hurl themselves against the cold light of the candles

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A village of fishermen. They dream of divine women. They sleep in the bottom of their boats

Appendix 4: Prométhée enchaîné selon Alberto Kurapel / Prometeo encadenado según Alberto Kurapel PROMETEO.¡Ay de mí ¡Ay de mí! ¡Ay de mí! Hélas! Hélas! Hélas! (Muestra las cadenas en diferentes posiciones. Il montre ses chaînes de différentes façons.) IO. (Se incorpora repentinamente en su lugar y comienza a hacer masajes a la Vestuarista quien cae rígida al suelo. Pausa. Vuelve a su área de acción. IO sentada en el suelo, en trance, hace movimientos oscilatorios de tronco. Su voz no tiene inflexiones, a veces toma el ritmo y ciertas entonaciones del corrido. Elle se dresse subitement et commence de sa place, à masser l’Habilleuse qui tombe à terre rigide. L’Habilleuse retourne à sa place. IO assise en transe, fait des mouvements oscillateurs avec le tronc. Sa voix est monocorde et prend parfois le rythme ou certaines intonations du corrido.) El que hoy gobierna el que hoy reina manda y comanda a su antojo construyendo nuevas leyes. Selon les nouvelles lois, celui qui règne aujourd’hui viole les droits et règne mettant à bas les colosses des temps anciens. Lo que ayer era grande y relucía hoy desaparece ante nuestra vista. PROMETEO.Ahora juguete de los vientos soy. Con mi padecer regocijo, de mis enemigos. Pour mon malheur, aux caprices de l’air livré; le sort qui m’est infligé fait la joie de mes ennemis. CORO DE OCEANIDAS.(Susurrando. Chuchotant.) Solamente el que gobierna no se duele de tus males. Quel Dieu aurait le coeur assez dur pour trouver en tes maux de la joie. (Prometeo levanta un brazo y comienza a golpear el grillo contra el tapabarros, estableciendo un ritmo lento y duro. El coro retrocede en tres líneas quebradas. Prométhée lève un bras et commence à frapper de ses chaînes le capot de la voiture, créant un rythme lent et un son puissant. Le Choeur recule en trois lignes brisées.) ¡Siempre temerario! Hablas imprudentemente y temo por tu suerte. Quelle audace est la tienne! L’amère adversité ne la fait pas céder. Et tes paroles s’échappent trop librement

Polylingual Identities / Hazelton

de ta bouche. Mais moi je tremble et la crainte aiguë transperce mon âme! Le sort qui t’attend me fait peur. PROMETEO.(Gritando. En criant.) ¡Tirano sangriento! Sanglant Tyran! (Pausa. Un temps.) Como todos haciendo ley de su crueldad. Comme tous il fait loi sa cruauté. Pero algún día será blando de entrañas, cuando corra la misma suerte que yo. Un jour son coeur deviendra plus doux quand il aura senti le même coup que moi. Entonces bajará la cabeza y solícito vendrá a empuñar mi mano. Alors, baissant la tête avec empressement, sa main rencontrera la mienne.

Appendix 5: Blanca Espinoza: Tango Gardel toma y olvida, alcanza a percibir a la mujer de Girondo, la alada. Justo el tiempo de sentir la mano rodeando la cintura. Cada vez más cerca los cuerpos se reconocen en un juego de pies hacia atrás, hacia adelante combinando giros con torbellinos en que el deseo se instala. Entonces las mejillas rozan la humedad de labios que endulzan, succionan las delicadas formas. Allí, donde los dioses han sido generosos. Voluptuosidad. Lenguas llevando su propia danza mezclan la saliva de rito sagrado y la respiración marca el estremecimiento. Capta el cerebro el compás y los cuerpos no responden, emergen en su proprio ritmo llevando la totalidad a las diversas formas. Se desplazan las manos espontáneas, tocan cabello, vello y piel. Dedos serpientes abren paso, sienten la humedad, la dureza, entonces la voz se quiebra en un murmullo consonántico y silábico. Lamento. Separan los rostros su contemplación, fijan las pupilas labios entreabiertos, soplo entrecortado, la espalda humedece la intensidad de un escalofrío, mientras los párpados cierran el pliegue sudoroso. Gardel entama solitario otra melodía. Lucha de cuerpos aún, roja metáfora de deseos jubilosos desciende y moja la piel, la mirada languidece, toman las manos la tela, brusquedad en el gesto, se pierde la boca en la tensión de la piel, la desnudez sorprende, invade, osa, paraliza. Pasa la unión de la violencia a la ternura, momento en que el universo se recoge en el espacio de un sentimiento desgarrador. Gardel boit et oublie, peut distinguer la femme de Girondo, l’ailée, juste le temps de sentir la main entourant la taille. Les corps, chaque fois plus proches, se reconnaissent dans un jeu de pieds vers l’arrière, vers l’avant, combinant tours et tourbillons quand le désir s’installe. Alors, les joues touchent l’humidité, des lèvres apaisantes lèchent les fragiles formes, là, où les dieux sont toujours bienveillants. Sensualité, langues qui mènent leur propre danse mêlent la salive de rite sacré et le souffle dit le frisson. Le cerveau saisit la cadence, les corps n’accordent pas leur réponse, ils émergent sous leur propre rythme, amenant le tout aux diverses formes. Les mains se déplacent spontanées, cheveux, duvet et peau sont frôlés, ces doigts serpents ouvrent des cheimins, sentent l’humidité, la dureté, alors, la voix est brisée dans son murmure syllabique. Lamentation. Les visages se séparent dans leur contemplation, les pupilles fixent les lèvres entrouvertes, souffle entrecoupé, le dos humecte l’intensité d’un tressaillement pendant que les paupières ferment le pli qui sue. Gardel projette solitaire une autre mélodie. Les corps se débattent encore,

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la rouge métaphore de désirs joyeux descend et tâte la peau, le regard languit, les mains s’ accrochent à I’étoffe, brusquerie dans le geste, la bouche perdue dans la tension. La nudité surprend, envahit, ose, paralyse. L’union des corps passe de la violence à la tendresse, moment où l’univers recueille I’espace d’un sentiment déchirant.

Notes 1 Exact figures on Chilean emigration after the coup d’état in 1973 are difficult to obtain. The Instituto Nacional de Estadísticas de Chile estimates that there were more than 200 000 Chileans living in other parts of Latin America (apart from those in Europe, Australia, and North America) in 2002 (http://www.censo2002.cl). The total Spanish-speaking population of Canada in 2001 was 245 495 individuals (http://statcan.caenglish/ pgdb/demo18a). 2 For a detailed and stimulating analysis of the interplay between the Self and the Other and the essential irreducibility of the Other by the Self, see Emmanuel Lévinas (32–39). 3 Perhaps the best-known series of multilingual readings in the last decade was that of the “Vache Enragée,” organized by Mitsiko Miller and held at Le Cheval Blanc, on Ontario Street, in Montreal during the late 1990s. Two anthologies were published of these readings, which could be in either French or English, or a third language with translation; the second collection, accompanied by a cd, was brought out by Planète Rebelle of Montreal in 1998. 4 Certain writers often create in other media as well, particularly in song and the visual arts. This is the case with the poet-singer-playwright Alberto Kurapel and the writer and painter Jorge Etcheverry, two multilingual Chilean-Canadians who are included in the appendices, as well as of Sergio Kokis, the Brazilian author and painter who has settled in Montreal and now writes exclusively in French. One of Kokis’s most intense books, La Danse macabre du Québec, is a combination of paintings and poetry in a Breughel-like meditation on the vanity of human ambition in which words and visual images are complementary and express the same vision.

Works Cited Bassnett, Susan. Translation Studies. 1980. London and New York: Routledge, 1991. De Sena, Jorge.“Introdução geral.” Poemas ingleses. By Fernando Pessoa. Trans. Jorge de Sena. Lisbon: Ática, 1987. 13–87. Espinoza, Blanca. Tango. Montreal: Cielo Raso, 2001. Etcheverry, Jorge. El evasionista / The Escape Artist: Poems 1968–1980. Ottawa: Ediciones Cordillera, 1981. ———. La calle. Santiago de Chile: Ediciones Manieristas, 1986. ———. The Witch. Ottawa: Split Quotation, 1986. ———. Tánger. Santiago: Documentas; Ottawa: Cordillera, 1990. ———. De chácharas y largavistas. Ottawa: Split Quotation, 1993. ———. Personal interview. 31 July 1996. ———. Tangier. Trans. Jorge Etcheverry and Sharon Khan. Ottawa: Ediciones Cordillera, 1997.

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———. Personal conversation. 20 February 1999. Feliciano, Margarita. Ventana sobre el mar / Window on the Sea. Pittsburgh: Latin American Literary Review, 1981. ———. Circadian Nuvolitatis. Luxembourg: Euroeditor, 1986. ———. Lectura en Málaga. Dirección General de Cultura, Universidad de Málaga: Málaga, 1995. ———. Personal conversation. 3 July 2005. Instituto Nacional de Estadísticas de Chile. Síntesis de Resultados. Santiago de Chile: Instituto Nacional de Estadísticas de Chile, marzo 2003. 12 Feb 2007. http://www .ine.cl/cd2002/ sintesiscensal.pdf Kokis, Sergio. La danse macabre du Québec. Montreal: XYZ, 1999. Kurapel, Alberto. Prométhée enchaîné selon Alberto Kurapel / Prometeo encadenado según Alberto Kurapel. Montreal: Humanitas/Nouvelle Optique, 1989. Lévinas, Emmanuel. Totalité et infini: Essai sur l’extériorité. Paris: Kluwer, 2003. Nazer A., Ricardo and Pablo Camous G.“Población de Chile: 1835–1995.” Pensamiento Crítico: Revista Electrónica de Historia. 12 June 2005.http://www.pensamientocritico .cl/index Ortega y Gasset, José. “The Misery and Splendour of Translation.” Trans. Elizabeth Gamble Miller. Theories of Translation: An Anthology of Essays from Dryden to Derrida. Ed. Rainer Schulte and John Biguenet. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992. 93–112. Paz, Octavio. Traducción: Literatura y literalidad. 1971. Barcelona: Tusquets, 1990. Schleiermacher, Friedrich. Sobre los diferentes métodos de traducir. Bilingual edition. Trans. Valentín García Yebra. Madrid: Gredos, 2000. Schopenhauer, Arthur. “On Language and Words.” Trans. Peter Mollenhauer. Theories of Translation: An Anthology of Essays from Dryden to Derrida. Ed. Rainer Schulte and John Biguenet. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992. 32–35. Statistics Canada. Population by Mother Tongue, by Province and Territory. Summary Table. Ottawa: Statistics Canada, 2001. 12 Feb 2007. http://www40.statcan.ca/l01/ cst01/demo11a.htm

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victor armony

La « latinité » des Québécois à l’épreuve

e Québec constitue à plusieurs égards un laboratoire sociologique de la transculturalité : cette société s’inscrit dans un jeu d’identification et de différenciation identitaire multiple et complexe, dont témoignent par exemple les débats récents autour de l’« américanité » du Québec (Beauchemin, Thériault). Or, dans ces débats, une question fondamentale est souvent passée sous silence : celle de la « latinité » des Québécois. La notion d’américanité est, en effet, habituellement liée à celle de nord-américanité, par contraste notamment avec l’identité européenne (Balthazar et Hero). Quoique présente dans l’imaginaire social, l’idée qu’il existe des affinités culturelles – qu’elles soient superficielles ou profondes – entre les Québécois et les Latino-Américains n’a suscité que très peu d’analyses sociologiques1. Nous croyons pourtant qu’il est intéressant d’examiner l’intuition qui la sous-tend. C’est pourquoi nous allons nous pencher ici sur l’hypothèse selon laquelle le Québec se situe culturellement entre l’Amérique du Nord – plus précisément l’Amérique de tradition anglo-saxonne – et l’Amérique latine. Saisir l’identité québécoise constitue un défi majeur. Toute identité collective est fluide et contradictoire et il est donc impossible par définition de la décrire de manière systématique et définitive. Mais l’analyse de l’identité québécoise contemporaine présente des difficultés encore plus grandes que dans d’autres cas, en ce que son objet est au centre de deux tensions extraordinairement significatives. D’une part, l’identité québécoise s’inscrit dans une relation conflictuelle de majorité/minorité; bien que non exclusive dans l’espace

L

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sociopolitique québécois où elle est majoritaire – ou en d’autres termes dominante, comme c’est le cas dans les pays latino-américains, où les identités minoritaires qui contestent l’identité nationale sont extrêmement marginalisées – elle se vit néanmoins comme minoritaire dans l’espace canadien et, de façon plus large, anglophone nord-américain. D’autre part, et ceci est peutêtre encore plus difficile à cerner d’un point de vue analytique, l’identité québécoise moderne se construit à travers une rupture, voire une négation de son antécédent, l’identité canadienne-française marquée par une « doctrine agriculturiste » et une « vocation missionnaire » (Rocher). L’existence de la communauté découle de la reconnaissance de sa continuité historique (exprimée par la devise « Je me souviens »), mais la transformation – et surtout la politisation – de son identité correspond à une remise en question des valeurs, pratiques et institutions traditionnelles. Il n’y a qu’à relire les Directives de Lionel Groulx, ainsi que « Trois dominantes de la pensée canadienne-française » de Michel Brunet, pour constater cette volonté de rupture avec « soi-même ». Ces enfants qui sont devant vous, fils trop souvent de prolétaires, se croient prédestinés à l’esclavage perpétuel. À vivre indéfiniment du sportule que leur jette le maître ou le trustard d’en face, un trop grand nombre ont fini par se résigner à cette existence comme à leur condition normale. (Groulx 174) Vaincus et conquis, séparés de leur métropole, privés d’une classe d’entrepreneurs, pauvres et isolés, ignorants, réduits en minorité dans le pays que leurs ancêtres avaient fondé, colonisés par un capitalisme absentéiste, les Canadiens français avaient absolument besoin d’une intervention vigilante de leur État provincial. (Brunet 145)

Le discours souverainiste québécois qui s’affirme depuis les années 1960 et 1970 s’inscrit précisément en faux contre cette image de docilité et d’impuissance. La césure s’est fondée, comme on le sait fort bien, sur une distanciation de la population vis-à-vis du discours clérical et de la représentation d’une « race canadienne française et catholique » (Beauchemin). Nous n’allons certes pas faire ici l’historique de cette mutation, non plus qu’analyser les enjeux de cette dynamique de transformation identitaire. Soulignons simplement qu’il paraîtrait raisonnable d’avancer la thèse d’une dé-latinisation du Québec à la faveur de sa modernisation et de sa nord-américanisation subséquente. Les parallèles entre la société canadienne-française antérieure à la Révolution tranquille et les sociétés latino-américaines sont évidents : emprise de l’Église, clientélisme politique, taux élevé de natalité, penchant collectiviste, etc. Cependant, autant l’image de la Grande Noirceur est par trop simplificatrice d’une période où se déploie la dialectique entre la tradition et la

La « latinité » des Québécois à l’épreuve / Armony

modernité, autant l’image d’une Amérique latine arriérée et repliée sur ellemême ne correspond que partiellement à la réalité de cette région au cours du xxe siècle. Dans le cas québécois, il est clair que la mise en place d’un État libéral moderne et le déploiement d’une économie de marché sont des processus dont les origines précèdent les grandes mutations politiques des années 1960 (Bourque, Duchastel et Beauchemin). L’Amérique latine, quant à elle, n’est pas « jeune » en ce qui concerne la construction politique et économique des sociétés nationales. L’indépendance des peuples latino-américains était déjà réalisée vers 1830, précédant ainsi de plus d’un siècle les mouvements anticoloniaux du Tiers-Monde. Cette rupture s’est faite à la faveur d’un discours républicain et progressiste qui est demeuré vivant dans les nombreuses expériences de mobilisation populaire et démocratique qu’a connues ce continent. En ce sens, on a tort d’associer – comme le fait un certain sens commun – la latinité au conservatisme, au fatalisme et à la soumission à l’autorité, même si certaines corrélations peuvent bel et bien être établies. La latinité est ancrée dans l’univers culturel de l’Europe méridionale (l’Espagne, le Portugal et l’Italie), un univers qui appartient nettement à l’Europe – notamment par le relais du christianisme –, mais qui se trouve aussi en contact avec le monde méditerranéen (par l’intermédiaire de la tradition gréco-romaine et les rapports avec le monde islamique). L’écrivain mexicain Carlos Fuentes définit ainsi l’identité culturelle latine en Amérique : [L]es traditions qui composent notre culture, en plus d’être indiennes et africaines, sont européennes, au-delà même de la péninsule ibérique, car c’est l’Espagne et le Portugal qui nous ont transmis l’héritage européen. L’Amérique ibérique est incompréhensible sans le droit romain, le stoïcisme de Sénèque, la philosophie ecclésiastique de saint Augustin et la philosophie politique de saint Thomas d’Aquin. (cité dans Remiche-Martynow et Valier 13)

Les élites de l’Amérique latine ont toujours manifesté une profonde ambivalence face à l’individualisme qui est au cœur de la culture anglo-saxonne. On retrouve, dans le discours politique et littéraire latino-américain de tout le xxe siècle, d’innombrables références aux deux faces de cet individualisme : d’un côté, on célèbre l’esprit industrieux et indépendant des États-Uniens et de l’autre, on décrie leur caractère matérialiste et utilitariste. Cette opposition ne manifeste pas simplement – comme le supposerait une analyse hâtive de ce type de discours – une volonté de dissociation morale entre le libéralisme politique et le libéralisme économique. Ce sont aussi, et surtout, deux conceptions de l’existence personnelle et collective qui s’affrontent dans chaque nation du Nouveau Monde, et que l’écrivain uruguayen José Enrique Rodó

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symbolisait, autour de 1900, par les figures antinomiques d’Ariel et de Caliban (inspirées des personnages shakespeariens). Ariel représente la partie noble, élevée, spirituelle et héroïque de la Raison, alors que Caliban représente l’intelligence concrète, pragmatique et égoïste qui vit dans le présent immédiat. Rodó exprime métaphoriquement la préoccupation de plusieurs de ses contemporains face à ce qu’il appelle la « nordomanie » (la fascination par l’Amérique du Nord) des jeunes générations, et le danger d’une « dé-latinisation » des sociétés du Sud. Il va de soi que cette latinité – dont la filiation laïque est celle du monde classique gréco-romain (sa filiation religieuse étant bien sûr celle du catholicisme) – est conçue comme un espace de partage de valeurs et d’allégeances. Alexis de Tocqueville avait déjà postulé l’existence d’une opposition sur ce plan entre les personnalités latine et anglo-saxonne lorsqu’il comparait les Canadiens (français) et les Américains (des États-Unis) : On ne sent ici en aucune façon cet esprit mercantile qui paraît dans toutes les actions comme dans tous les discours de l’Américain. La raison des Canadiens est peu cultivée, mais elle est simple et droite, ils ont incontestablement moins d’idées que leurs voisins, mais leur sensibilité paraît plus développée. Ils ont une vie de cœur, les autres de tête. (Tocqueville, entrée du 28 août 1831.)

Ces propos de Tocqueville reflètent une conception de la latinité qui est revendiquée même aujourd’hui en Amérique latine : non pas bien sûr celle d’un esprit « peu cultivé » et avec « moins d’idées », mais celle d’un être sensible, porteur d’une vie affective, moins poussé à conquérir et contrôler le monde matériel, et plus soucieux de son prochain. Lorsqu’on contraste les « valeurs québécoises » avec les « valeurs canadiennes », comme le fait le politologue Alain Noël, n’évoque-t-on pas, d’une certaine manière, cette attitude moins matérialiste, moins individualiste, moins rigoriste? Les Québécois, dit-il, seraient moins sévères dans la répression de la criminalité (particulièrement à l’égard des jeunes contrevenants), plus justes en ce qui concerne la fiscalité et plus généreux sur le plan de l’aide au développement2. Le Québec se distinguerait du Canada anglais par son européanité (qui le rapproche de la France), de l’Europe par sa nord-américanité (qui le rapproche des États-Unis) et des États-Unis par sa nordicité (qui le rapproche du Canada anglais)3. À cela se superpose, bien évidemment, l’ambivalence vis-àvis de la canadianité elle-même, car le Québécois « ne peut pas nier son allégeance canadienne en tant qu’identité culturelle : trois siècles de coexistence dans le même espace géopolitique ont développé à leur insu chez les deux groupes concernés, un nombre considérable de traits culturels communs » (Abou 41). En même temps, l’identité québécoise s’est affirmée à travers « l’in-

La « latinité » des Québécois à l’épreuve / Armony

vention » du Canada anglais comme entité monolithique aux traits quelque peu stéréotypés (Latouche 131). Ce type de dynamique d’identification et de différenciation n’est pas en soi inhabituel. En fait, la plupart des sociétés (sinon toutes) définissent en partie leur identité dans une tension entre attraction et répulsion à l’égard des pôles identitaires qui lui sont significatifs (la mère patrie, les voisins – particulièrement les plus puissants ou menaçants – les métropoles, etc.). Ce qui est peut-être unique dans le cas du Québec, c’est que cette dynamique à trois axes a une présence extrêmement lourde dans l’imaginaire collectif4. Bien que le poids relatif des différentes références identitaires ne soit pas le même, aucune d’entre elles n’est négligeable. Ainsi, alors que 68 % des Québécois se sentent davantage Nord-Américains, 48 % se sentent plus près des Canadiens des autres provinces que des Américains et 38 % considèrent que le Québec a plus d’affinités avec l’Europe qu’avec les États-Unis5. Or, qu’en est-il de la « latinité » des Québécois? Il semble clair qu’il n’existe pas de perception significative de cette dimension culturelle (les sondeurs n’ont même pas songé à inclure l’Amérique latine dans la liste des possibles repères identitaires). Bref, la notion de « Latins du Nord » n’aurait qu’une portée anecdotique dans la conscience des Québécois. Les différences entre la société québécoise et les sociétés latino-américaines sont certes très importantes : deux éléments-clés de l’identité nationale en Amérique latine, soit la rupture révolutionnaire avec la mère patrie et l’imaginaire du métissage et de la créolité, sont absents dans le cas du Québec. Si celui-ci est « latin », c’est en raison de la matrice française d’Ancien Régime qui est à ses origines et dont certaines composantes ont perduré dans le ruralisme d’antan. Entre les années 1920 et 1950, l’intérêt pour l’Amérique latine s’est reflété dans une abondante littérature qui célébrait « les affinités de race, de religion et de culture » entre les héritiers de la tradition spirituelle latine en Amérique (Gay 324). Dans les années 1960 et 1970, c’est un discours nationaliste de gauche qui proclame la fraternité des Québécois avec les Latino-Américains dans la lutte contre l’oppression des peuples par l’impérialisme et le mercantilisme des États-Unis. La convergence culturelle est ainsi renforcée par la condition commune de « peuples colonisés » : Dans ce Canada à demi développé, le Québec est à certains points de vue une zone de sous-développement plus marquée et l’économie du groupe canadien-français est soumise à une domination étrangère que nous devons corriger. (Paul Sauriol, Le Devoir, 25 juin 1964, cité dans Gay 190)

Mais après les profondes transformations sociales, politiques et économiques des quatre dernières décennies, reste-t-il un quelconque substrat

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« latin » – ou, en tout cas, une différence vis-à-vis de la culture civique nordaméricaine de matrice anglo-saxonne – dans l’identité des Québécois? Peuton déceler ce substrat dans certaines valeurs collectives, dans la conception de la nationalité et du rôle de l’État dans la société, ou encore dans la manière d’établir la distinction entre le public et le privé? Des auteurs comme Charles Taylor ont signalé l’existence d’une opposition philosophique entre Québécois et Canadiens anglais dans la façon de penser le bien commun; d’autres, comme Bourque et Duchastel, ont trouvé dans leur discours identitaire des contrastes significatifs à l’égard d’idées aussi fondamentales que la communauté ou la nation. Les Québécois semblent former une « société distincte » au sein du Canada, non seulement en raison de leur langue et de certaines de leurs institutions, mais aussi en vertu de certains contenus spécifiques de leur identité et de leur façon d’agir collectivement, de certaines définitions normatives, de certaines priorités partagées, de certaines « règles du jeu » sociétales.

1. L’identité des Latino-Américains du Québec La réflexion sur l’américanité latine des Québécois nous amène naturellement à nous intéresser à la façon dont les immigrants d’origine latino-américaine perçoivent le Québec, alors que les Québécois contemporains eux-mêmes semblent naviguer entre la tiède reconnaissance d’une certaine proximité culturelle avec l’Amérique latine et la volonté de s’affirmer comme une société nettement intégrée à l’univers nord-occidental. Il est aisé de trouver dans le discours politique des références à un sentiment – certes diffus – d’affinité entre le Québec et l’Amérique latine : « Nous [les Québécois] sommes des Latins du Nord6 »; « nous [les Québécois] avons en outre à offrir notre condition de Latins du Nord. Pour les Latino-Américains, il est sans doute intéressant de venir discuter au Québec, où il règne une ambiance un peu plus latine qu’ailleurs en Amérique du Nord7 ». La condition de « latin » semble ainsi renvoyer à une « façon de voir les choses », à une « ambiance », donc à une sorte d’arrière-plan anthropologique dont on prend rarement le temps d’expliquer le contenu. L’idée que les Québécois sont des « Latins du Nord » – une expression forgée par Marcel Rioux – est probablement utilisée par les politiciens d’aujourd’hui de façon purement opportuniste, mais elle trouve tout de même des échos dans certains milieux culturels : lors de la Foire du livre de Guadalajara, une anthologie de la poésie québécoise traduite en espagnol a été lancée sous le titre Latinos del Norte 8. Afin de recueillir l’opinion d’un groupe de Latino-Américains résidant au Québec, nous avons envoyé le message suivant à la liste électronique de l’association Amitiés Québec-Venezuela : « Peut-on dire que les Québécois

La « latinité » des Québécois à l’épreuve / Armony

(francophones) possèdent une culture plus « latine » que celle des AngloCanadiens et des Nord-Américains? Pourquoi?9 » Il va de soi que cette démarche est purement exploratoire. Nous ne pouvons rien affirmer à l’égard de la représentativité de l’échantillon obtenu. Cependant, nous croyons que le discours des répondants est utile pour relever certains aspects de la manière dont les Québécois d’origine latino-américaine conçoivent leur insertion identitaire dans la société d’accueil10. Nous pouvons, par exemple, observer dans la plupart des réponses une acceptation des éléments implicites de la question : a) il existe une « latinité »; b) c’est cette « latinité » qui rapproche les LatinoAméricains des Franco-Québécois. Pourtant, il est intéressant de voir que plusieurs participants ont discuté ces deux prémisses, non pas nécessairement pour les contester, mais du moins pour s’interroger sur la définition de leur propre identité. Une femme rappelle la complexité inhérente à l’identité latino-américaine et souligne son caractère fortement hybride : « Or, notre latinité, est-elle toute latine? Je crois que nous oublions le fait que les Arabes ont passé huit siècles en Espagne et qu’ils ont marqué ce pays au fer. Combien de nos caractéristiques « latines » ne sont-elles pas plutôt arabes ou arabisées »? Un répondant refuse d’emblée l’idée que l’on puisse « être » latin, indiquant que le discours autour des affinités culturelles cache les véritables enjeux politiques qui sous-tendent la société québécoise. Pour lui, le projet d’une prétendue « alliance latine » en est un du groupe dominant. Mais cette réticence n’est pas exprimée dans les autres messages. Nous pouvons y repérer, en effet, les divers traits distinctifs que l’on attribue habituellement à l’identité latine. D’une part, il y a ceux liés au stéréotype « latino ». Une femme les énumère, tout en se disant consciente du caractère superficiel d’une telle caractérisation : « joie, saveur, chaleur, rythme, je-m’en-foutisme, désordonné, bruyant, fêtard, sensible, bon au lit, de belles fesses chez les femmes ». Les Latino-Américains et les Franco-Québécois partagent-ils une identité latine? Une femme considère que cela va de soi : « parce que, tout simplement, [les Franco-Québécois] ne sont pas anglo-saxons, ils sont latins, nous provenons tous de l’Espagne, de la France, de l’Italie, de l’ancien Empire romain ». Un couple nouvellement arrivé au Québec trouve aussi « une société très tolérante et ouverte comme la nôtre en Amérique latine », ainsi qu’une résistance face à « la culture de l’argent [que l’on voit] dans les sociétés anglosaxonnes ». Une impression qu’ils disent partager avec d’autres immigrants d’origine latino-américaine, c’est celle d’une société moins contraignante sur le plan du travail. Une femme qui a immigré récemment au Québec se dit étonnée d’observer des attitudes typiquement « latines », tels le manque de

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propreté dans les lieux publics, la médiocrité des débats politiques et, plus positivement, une plus grande intimité dans les rapports interpersonnels : « Une autre chose que je pourrais noter comme une similitude, c’est que les gens se touchent … oui, oui, ils se touchent!!! Je veux dire, quand je vois des copains qui se parlent dans la rue, ils se touchent pendant qu’ils discutent, ils s’embrassent ». Une femme renvoie aussi aux « vestiges d’une tradition et d’une culture catholiques » au Québec, mais elle met en doute leur véritable importance dans la société actuelle. En fait, elle trouve des ressemblances avec le caractère « insoumis et légèrement gauchiste » des nations latino-américaines, bien qu’elle s’interroge sur le bien-fondé de cette impression : « Toutefois, ces différences me semblent parfois le branding, la marque de commerce d’un peuple qui a su se « vendre » ainsi, mais qui aujourd’hui n’est pas aussi latin qu’il ne le paraît ». Une autre femme met aussi l’accent sur l’emprise de la culture anglosaxonne sur le Québec : « En plus, il y a la conquête anglaise. Même s’ils ont accompli l’exploit de survivre, il est difficile [d’imaginer] que le conquérant ne les ait pas influencés. Et le conquérant était anglo-saxon et protestant, ce qui n’a rien à voir avec la latinité ». Cette enquête, si modeste soit-elle dans sa portée, nous permet néanmoins d’identifier un certain nombre de dimensions dans le discours sur la latinité des Québécois. Rappelons d’abord que nous avons posé une question qui s’appuie sur deux éléments implicites : il existe une latinité et cette latinité rapproche les Latino-Américains des Franco-Québécois sur le plan identitaire. Notre objectif était double : d’une part, nous voulions évaluer à quel point ces deux idées vont de soi lorsqu’on évoque les affinités culturelles; d’autre part, nous voulions saisir les points saillants de la représentation de la latinité chez ceux qui s’en réclament. Il est intéressant de constater que nous avons reçu des messages mettant en cause les éléments implicites de la question sur la base de trois arguments que l’on peut énoncer de la manière suivante : la latinité des Latino-Américains est elle-même hétérogène, ce qui en fait une catégorie dont la signification est ambiguë; la latinité des Québécois est plutôt superficielle, ou tout simplement une chose du passé; le discours sur l’affinité culturelle entre les Latino-Américains et les Québécois obéit à des intentions politiques. Cependant, plusieurs participants ont accepté le deuxième élément implicite de la question, alors que la majorité a accepté le premier. L’existence d’une « façon d’être » latino-américaine s’impose aussi comme une évidence pour la majorité des personnes interviewées dans le cadre d’une

La « latinité » des Québécois à l’épreuve / Armony

recherche récente sur l’engagement civique et politique des immigrants latinoaméricains qui résident au Québec11. Les réponses à une question sur les forces de la communauté latino-américaine renvoient à une représentation positive de la latinité : le sens de la solidarité, la générosité, les valeurs familiales, la religiosité, la sociabilité, la créativité, le degré de politisation, la fierté. Quand les répondants sont amenés à mentionner les faiblesses de la communauté d’origine latino-américaine, ils renvoient de façon récurrente à son manque d’unité, à son absence de leadership et d’organisation. Ces propos sous-entendent, bien évidemment, le caractère naturel, désirable, voire nécessaire d’une cohésion identitaire entre les personnes provenant des différents pays de l’Amérique latine. Bien que le questionnaire n’ait fait aucune mention explicite des affinités possibles entre la culture latino-américaine et la culture québécoise, nous nous attendions à voir ressortir ce thème dans les réponses aux questions sur l’intégration à la vie publique et politique au Québec. Or, les propos à ce sujet sont relativement rares. Autrement dit, la plupart des Latino-Américains qui ont pris part à cette enquête n’ont pas fait spontanément le lien entre leur accès à la citoyenneté – au sens d’un sentiment d’appartenance, d’un apprentissage et d’un engagement civique – et une quelconque proximité culturelle entre la société d’origine et la société d’accueil. Certaines réponses évoquent toutefois les affinités culturelles : « la culture française ressemble à notre culture, c’est l’un des facteurs qui m’ont amenée à choisir cette province » (Femme, El Salvador). Mais la majorité des réponses vont plutôt dans l’autre sens : elles mettent l’accent sur la distance qui sépare les deux cultures. Plusieurs déplorent justement le caractère trop peu latin des Québécois : « Ici il y a très peu de solidarité entre les gens; c’est ainsi qu’il y a des gens qui progressent de leur côté, individuellement, et d’autres qui se battent seuls contre le système, contre l’immense puissance économique » (Homme, Équateur). D’autres voient aussi un écart entre les deux cultures, mais soulignent leur préférence pour celle de la société d’accueil : « Le Québec est un pays latin, il a des racines françaises et latines, mais il a pas mal d’influence anglo-saxonne, ce qui est bon, car elle lui donne de la discipline. Ça, tout Latin en a besoin pour atteindre ses buts » (Homme, Pérou). Certaines personnes sentent que cette distance est aussi le fait d’une société qui ne fait pas preuve d’une véritable volonté d’accueillir des gens provenant d’une culture différente : « Sur le plan politique, c’est très différent de ce que l’on vit en Uruguay ou en Amérique du Sud. Ici les choses sont davantage réglées et c’est plus froid » (Femme, Uruguay).

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Cette brève revue du discours d’un groupe de Latino-Québécois nous aura permis de nuancer le jugement rapide que l’on peut parfois porter sur les affinités que les Latino-Américains perçoivent entre leur culture d’origine et celle de la société d’accueil. Ceux qui acceptent d’emblée l’idée d’une latinité commune doivent tenir compte du fait que les immigrants eux-mêmes ne sont pas portés à l’exprimer spontanément. Quand la question est soulevée de manière explicite, comme nous l’avons fait dans le forum Internet, les réponses manifestent une opinion partagée ou ambivalente. Mais ceux qui en revanche rejettent du revers de la main toute proximité – souvent au nom du caractère pleinement nord-américain du Québec12 – doivent reconnaître que la particularité québécoise est difficilement intelligible en dehors du contraste que l’on établit avec le monde anglo-saxon. La latinité est, en ce sens, définie par ce qu’elle n’est pas. Elle ressort dans le discours subjectif comme un atout (par exemple, plus de solidarité, plus de joie de vivre) ou comme un défaut (par exemple, moins de discipline, moins d’éthique du travail). Mais au-delà de la représentation que les acteurs se font des convergences et des divergences entre les deux cultures, peut-on déceler des traces objectives d’une latinité commune? C’est à cette question que nous nous attaquerons dans les prochaines pages.

2. Les valeurs des Québécois : entre l’Amérique du Nord et l’Amérique latine? Nous avons analysé les données du World Values Survey (Inglehart) afin de repérer, de manière empirique, les coordonnées culturelles des Québécois dans le contexte panaméricain13. À cette fin, nous avons retenu tous les pays des Amériques qui ont fait partie de cette enquête internationale durant la période 1990–1993 (l’Argentine, le Brésil, le Canada, le Chili, les ÉtatsUnis et le Mexique), mais nous avons introduit un changement dans la base de données : nous avons divisé l’échantillon du Canada en deux afin de distinguer les répondants du Québec et ceux des autres provinces14. Nous avons choisi de ne pas distinguer les individus en fonction de leur langue (francophones ou anglophones) ou de leur identité ethnique. Nous nous sommes rabattus sur la définition civique qui est devenue la norme : sont Québécois tous ceux qui résident au Québec. Il va de soi que, du fait de l’échantillonnage aléatoire et stratifié, la majorité des répondants du Québec sont francophones (quoique pas nécessairement tous d’origine canadienne-française), alors que tous les répondants dans les autres provinces sont anglophones15. Une fois constituée notre base de données avec les quatre sociétés latinoaméricaines et les trois sociétés nord-américaines, nous avons construit une

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grille avec sept catégories axiologiques qui renvoient à divers aspects d’une culture publique : Ordre, Équité, Conformité, Confiance, Tolérance, Responsabilité et Individualité (voir page 258). Ces valeurs s’articulent, de façon générale, à la conception du rapport de l’individu à la communauté, aux critères moraux de l’action, aux principes abstraits de l’éthique, ainsi qu’à la représentation de l’identité et de l’altérité. Les catégories que nous avons retenues correspondent en grande partie aux attitudes que l’on considère fondamentales pour l’épanouissement de la démocratie, de la société civile et du capital social. Quoique parfois de façon indirecte, elles nous renseignent sur les caractéristiques d’une matrice culturelle : conception hiérarchique ou égalitaire de l’ordre social, idéologie d’inclusion ou d’exclusion de la différence, éthique moniste ou dualiste, disposition pragmatique ou imaginaire antimatérialiste16. Nous ne prétendons nullement que cette grille soit exhaustive, mais elle recouvre des éléments qui nous semblent névralgiques dans l’analyse comparée des univers normatifs qui sous-tendent la vie collective17. Pour chacune de ces catégories, nous avons établi une variable, elle-même opérationnalisée à travers trois dimensions que l’on peut mesurer à partir de certaines questions du sondage18. L’analyse de la première catégorie nous a permis de constater que, de manière générale, le Québec se distingue de l’ensemble des autres sociétés américaines par une valorisation moindre du « maintien de l’ordre social » : les Québécois sont ceux qui accordent le moins d’importance à l’obéissance des enfants (21,9 % des répondants mentionnent cette qualité, comparativement à 52,2 % au Chili, 45,1 % au Mexique, 41,4 % au Brésil, 38,3 % aux ÉtatsUnis, 32,0 % en Argentine et 30,3 % au Canada anglais). Bien que pour les deux autres dimensions l’écart soit moins prononcé, le maintien de l’ordre dans le pays et la défense contre la subversion sont des valeurs moins prioritaires pour les Québécois que pour la plupart des répondants des autres sociétés. L’ordre social comme objectif normatif s’articule bien sûr à une conception conservatrice des rapports sociaux : il acquiert de l’importance surtout dans des contextes où les structures de la société (institutions, hiérarchies, mœurs) sont perçues comme menacées (par des forces extérieures ou intérieures). Bien que l’on sache les Québécois sur la défensive quant à la culture – et particulièrement sur le plan linguistique –, ils sembleraient accorder, selon nos données comparatives, moins d’importance au respect de l’autorité et à la préservation du statu quo. En ce qui concerne la « priorité d’emploi », en tant que variable pour la catégorie « Équité », nous observons que le Québec se place près de la moyenne continentale, mais avec une claire appartenance au groupe des

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Grille d’analyse Catégories Variables

Dimensions

Ordre

Obéissance

Maintien de l’ordre social

Ordre

Défense Équité

Priorité d’emploi

Hommes Nationaux

Jeunes

Conformité Déviance par rapport aux normes

Pas de billet

Pas d’impôt Marchandise volée Confiance

Confiance aux autres

Compatriotes Système juridique Syndicats

Tolérance

Tolérance de la différence

Immigrants

Séropositifs Homosexuels Responsabilité

Responsabilisation de l’individu

Effort

Individualité

Priorité au choix individuel

Euthanasie

Questions 1. Voici une liste de qualités que les enfants peuvent acquérir à la maison. Lesquelles sont, selon vous, particulièrement importantes? [Obéissance] 2. Si vous aviez à choisir, laquelle de ces choses vous paraîtrait la plus importante? [Maintenir l’ordre dans le pays] 3. Notre société actuelle doit être courageusement défendue contre toute force subversive. 4. Quand il y a une pénurie d’emplois, les hommes ont plus le droit au travail que les femmes. 5. Quand il y a une pénurie d’emplois, on devrait donner priorité aux « nationaux » sur les immigrants. 6. Quand il y a une pénurie d’emplois, les gens devraient être forcés de prendre une retraite anticipée. 7. Dites, pour chacune de ces phrases, si vous pensez que cela peut être toujours justifié, jamais justifié, ou quelque part entre les deux. [Ne pas payer le billet de transport]. 8. Idem [Ne pas payer vos impôts si vous en avez l’occasion]. 9. Idem [Acheter une chose que vous savez avoir été volée]. 10. De façon générale, diriez-vous que l’on peut faire confiance à la majorité des gens? 11. Dites, pour chacun des items sur cette liste, à quel point vous lui faites confiance : beaucoup, assez, peu ou pas du tout. [Le système juridique]. 12. Idem [Les syndicats]. 13. Pouvez-vous signaler les groupes de gens que vous n’aimeriez pas avoir comme voisins? [Immigrants]. 14. Idem [Séropositifs]. 15. Idem [Homosexuels].

16. On devrait encourager davantage l’effort individuel. Travail 17. À la longue, le travail ardu conduit habituellement à un plus grand succès. Responsabilité 18. Les individus devraient assumer davantage la responsabilité de se prendre eux-mêmes en charge.

Avortement Prostitution

19. Dites si vous pensez que c’est toujours justifié, jamais justifié, ou quelque part entre les deux. [Euthanasie]. 20. Idem [Avortement]. 21. Idem [Prostitution].

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sociétés nord-américaines (auquel s’ajoute l’Argentine, un pays d’immigration) pour ce qui est de l’équité envers les immigrants. Il est à remarquer que le Québec se distingue par l’importance accordée au besoin d’ouvrir le marché du travail aux jeunes (en forçant les travailleurs plus âgés à prendre leur retraite) : 46 % des répondants au Québec sont d’accord avec ce type de mesure, alors que la moyenne est de 31 % pour les autres sociétés. Cela peut être interprété comme une attitude inéquitable – ou plutôt inégalitaire (envers une catégorie de la population, celle des plus âgés) – ou encore comme une position favorable à la promotion de l’équité (envers une autre catégorie, les plus jeunes) grâce à l’intervention active de l’État. Il faut d’ailleurs signaler que les Québécois se distinguent des Canadiens anglais pour ce qui est de l’équité envers les femmes : alors que 23,1 % des premiers sont prêts à accorder la priorité d’emploi aux hommes dans une situation de pénurie (presque la même proportion qu’aux États-Unis : 23,8 %), seulement 17 % des seconds se disent d’accord avec cette attitude (la différence étant significative à 95 %). La troisième catégorie, « Conformité », nous permet de saisir les attitudes face à la déviance sociale de « faible intensité » (celle à laquelle un « honnête citoyen » peut succomber périodiquement sans trop de conséquences). Or, tandis que les Mexicains semblent être les plus permissifs à cet égard, on voit encore le Québec se placer dans une position intermédiaire : quoique plutôt stricts en ce qui concerne le paiement du billet de transport en commun (cette question révèle une claire distinction entre l’Amérique latine et l’Amérique du Nord : 12,2 % et 2,5 % respectivement), les Québécois se démarquent par le fait qu’ils justifient davantage que les États-Uniens et les Canadiens anglais (6,4 %, 4,4 % et 2,0 % respectivement) l’évasion fiscale. Cette attitude (qui ne reflète pas nécessairement un comportement réel) rapproche le Québec de l’espace latino-américain. Cependant, il se pourrait que cette réticence à payer les impôts soit liée au manque de légitimité du gouvernement fédéral aux yeux des partisans de l’option souverainiste. Quant à la confiance aux autres (individus et institutions), un aspect-clé du fonctionnement de la société civile, de manière générale, les sociétés nordaméricaines manifestent un niveau d’intégration plus élevé que les sociétés latino-américaines (on parvient à ce résultat en établissant la moyenne des résultats pour les trois questions : 46,6 % pour l’ensemble des répondants nord-américains et 32,7 % pour l’ensemble des répondants latino-américains)19. Dans ce contexte, le Québec se situe dans l’univers du Nord; mais il faut noter que sur le plan de la confiance dans les compatriotes, il se rapproche légèrement des pays latino-américains. Or, la spécificité du Québec à cet égard peut être expliquée, du moins en partie, par le fait que la notion de

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« Canadien » – terme utilisé dans le sondage pour poser la question aussi bien au Québec que dans les autres provinces – suscite probablement des attitudes ambivalentes chez certains répondants. En ce qui concerne la confiance dans les syndicats, le Québec est clairement plus près de sociétés comme le Brésil, le Chili et le Mexique que de ses voisins nord-américains (Brésil : 47,6 %, Chili : 47,2 %, Québec : 42,4 %, Mexique : 38,2 %, États-Unis : 32,6 %, Canada anglais : 32,4 %). La tolérance de la différence est bien sûr un aspect central de la construction d’une société pluraliste20. Dans un contexte d’hétérogénéisation croissante, en termes d’ethnicité et de styles de vie, l’acceptation de l’altérité devient en effet un enjeu fondamental. Or d’après nos données, les Québécois manifestent une très grande ouverture envers ceux qui, pour diverses raisons, peuvent être poussés vers les marges de la société. Cette attitude est particulièrement claire dans les réponses au sujet des personnes séropositives et homosexuelles, deux groupes de la population souvent stigmatisés : en moyenne, 81 % des répondants québécois ne les mentionnent pas parmi ceux qu’ils n’aimeraient pas avoir comme voisins (par rapport à 73 % au Canada anglais et au Brésil, 67 % aux États-Unis, 65 % en Argentine, 51 % au Chili et 41 % au Mexique). Remarquons que, de façon générale, il ne semble pas se dégager des données un contraste marqué entre l’Amérique du Nord et l’Amérique latine. Les résultats correspondant à la catégorie « Responsabilité » montrent une distribution qui sépare nettement l’Amérique du Nord de l’Amérique latine. Cependant, la question au sujet du travail tend à appuyer l’hypothèse voulant que le Québec se situe culturellement quelque part entre les sociétés de tradition anglo-saxonne et les sociétés de tradition latine21 : alors que les répondants des sociétés de culture anglo-saxonne sont plutôt enclins à penser que le succès est la récompense du travail (60,3 % et 57,8 % chez les ÉtatsUniens et Canadiens anglais respectivement), les Québécois sont partagés (48,5 %) et les Latino-Américains sont plutôt en désaccord (Mexicains : 44,7 %, Chiliens : 44,2 %, Argentins : 38,0 % et Brésiliens : 22,2 %). En revanche, l’examen de la question portant sur la responsabilité de l’individu montre que le Québec est plus près des États-Unis que du Canada anglais (58,2 %, 60,6 % et 49,2 % respectivement) et assez loin de l’Amérique latine. La dernière des catégories que nous avons retenues pour cette analyse comparative est celle de la priorité accordée au choix individuel, et particulièrement l’idée selon laquelle l’autonomie normative de la personne est quasi absolue quand il s’agit de décisions vitales concernant son propre corps. C’est ici que le Québec se distingue le plus des autres sociétés du continent. En effet, ce sont les Québécois qui affichent la plus grande ouverture dans deux

La « latinité » des Québécois à l’épreuve / Armony

domaines où le choix individuel peut entrer en conflit direct avec les normes sociales : l’euthanasie et l’avortement. Il est à remarquer que les Québécois sont très près des Canadiens anglais dans leurs réponses (quoique leur taux d’acceptation de l’euthanasie est clairement plus élevé, la différence étant statistiquement significative à 95 % : 27,0 % et 23,5 %22). Les Canadiens, toutes provinces confondues, justifient davantage la prostitution que les citoyens de tous les autres pays, à l’exception du Mexique. On peut donc avancer que le Canada se distingue du reste du continent (les États-Unis et l’Amérique latine) en raison d’une priorité plus grande accordée au choix individuel et qu’au Québec, cette tendance pancanadienne s’avère encore plus forte. Les données nous montrent que le Québec se situe, de façon générale, dans l’espace nord-américain. Cette conclusion ne surprendra personne. Pourtant, il convient de nuancer quelque peu cette affirmation : nous avons en effet détecté certaines anomalies qui méritent une explication. D’une part, nous avons constaté que les Québécois se distinguent des États-Uniens et, dans une moindre mesure, des Canadiens anglais en raison d’une plus grande ouverture au changement (catégorie « Ordre »), à la différence (catégorie « Tolérance ») et à la subjectivité (catégorie « Individualité »). Sur l’axe NordSud, le Québec semblerait ainsi se situer encore plus loin de l’Amérique latine que ses voisins anglo-saxons. Ce constat pourrait être interprété en fonction de la thèse soutenue par Inglehart concernant la transition des sociétés avancées vers une culture de valeurs « postmatérialistes » ou « postmodernes », où le bien-être personnel et le vécu des individus deviennent plus importants que la référence à des principes, idéologies ou doctrines. Le Québec – et le Canada anglais, quoique moins nettement – seraient, dans cette perspective, des sociétés postmodernes. Cet argument met l’accent sur la nordicité de la société québécoise – ce qui établit un parallèle entre les sociétés nordiques de l’Europe – et, sous un angle un peu différent, sur la canadianité des Québécois : une façon d’être nord-américain qui serait moins matérialiste, moins égoïste que celle des États-Uniens. Mais d’autre part, nous avons aussi observé des tendances qui semblent rapprocher le Québec de l’Amérique latine. En effet, même si les données sont fragmentaires, on peut faire l’hypothèse que les Québécois sont un peu moins égalitaristes (catégorie « Équité »), légalistes (catégorie « Conformité ») et moralisateurs (catégorie « Responsabilité ») que les citoyens des sociétés de matrice anglo-saxonne. Ils seraient moins égalitaristes, car ils se disent davantage prêts à renoncer au principe d’égalisation abstraite – selon lequel chaque individu a exactement le même poids, indépendamment de son identité particulière – afin de corriger une situation d’injustice entre des groupes

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(favoriser les travailleurs jeunes au détriment des travailleurs plus âgés). Ils seraient moins légalistes, car ils semblent avoir une plus grande tendance à distinguer la légalité (le respect absolu de la norme) de la légitimité (lorsqu’ils acceptent la possibilité de ne pas payer les impôts). Ils seraient moins moralisateurs, car ils ont une représentation plus cynique du lien entre le travail et le succès (ce n’est pas nécessairement ceux qui s’efforcent le plus qui reçoivent les récompenses). Peut-on supposer que ces quelques éléments sont des indices d’un substrat latin qui demeure présent dans l’identité culturelle des Québécois? Si l’on accepte cette prémisse, il est possible d’interpréter différemment l’ensemble des résultats : la plus grande ouverture au changement, à la différence et à la subjectivité peuvent être autant les marques d’une nordicité postmoderne que d’une latinité plus épanouie, c’est-à-dire plus proche de ses idéaux premiers, une latinité moins prisonnière de ses penchants fixistes et contraignants (que l’on voit apparaître malheureusement trop souvent en Amérique latine, où les structures d’inégalité politique et économique font en sorte qu’il est difficile à l’individu d’échapper aux déterminations sociales). Peut-on imaginer que l’esprit latin, plus holiste dans sa conception du lien social, plus sensible à la notion de bien commun, plus ludique, transgresseur et enclin à l’expérimentation et aux mélanges, puisse servir de contrepoids à une culture contemporaine que l’on sent trop centrée sur l’efficacité instrumentale, la concurrence individualiste, l’hyperrationalisme et le procéduralisme juridique?

Conclusion L’analyse des données nous a permis de situer le Québec comme un lieu de transculturalité dans le contexte panaméricain, en fonction d’un ensemble de valeurs civiques qui orientent les rapports et les actions des individus. Nous ne prétendons nullement que ces résultats apportent une réponse définitive à notre questionnement au sujet des coordonnées culturelles des Québécois. D’autres études plus étendues et approfondies devraient permettre de confirmer ou non les tendances que nous avons dégagées. Nous croyons pourtant que notre démarche contribue à jeter une nouvelle lumière sur l’hypothèse de la latinité du Québec et du caractère complexe et multiple de son identité culturelle. En effet, plutôt que de supposer que l’identité culturelle des Québécois se déploie exclusivement en une tension entre sa nordaméricanité et son européanité – ces deux pôles identitaires étant vus comme essentiellement inscrits dans l’« occidentalité nord-atlantique » – nous avons tenté d’explorer sa possible articulation avec l’« occidentalité méditerra-

La « latinité » des Québécois à l’épreuve / Armony

néenne », elle qui a alimenté la construction de la latino-américanité. Citons encore Carlos Fuentes : « Qu’est-ce qui nous unit comme civilisation? Ce qui nous est propre et tout le reste. L’identité et la diversité. Ou mieux encore, la généreuse ouverture à la diversité à partir de la conscience acquise de l’identité. Mexicains, Français, Brésiliens, nous savons qui nous sommes23 ». Pour terminer, nous suggérerons que l’identité culturelle des Québécois possède bel et bien une composante latine, ce qui pourrait expliquer – paradoxalement – le fait que le Québec se signale dans notre analyse comme une société où les valeurs postmatérialistes ou postmodernes sont plus répandues que dans le reste de l’Amérique du Nord. De plus, nous avancerons que, dans le cadre d’une société démocratique et développée – et dans une dynamique d’interaction constante avec la matrice anglo-saxonne –, la latinité américaine du Québec est porteuse de valeurs autour desquelles peut se construire un projet collectif pluraliste et intégrateur. À la différence des nations européennes, celles de l’Amérique se représentent comme de « jeunes nations » (même si elles peuvent avoir une constitution politique et culturelle relativement ancienne) et leurs populations tendent à percevoir les enjeux collectifs à travers l’image de la promesse. On y partage la croyance selon laquelle la vraie richesse du pays réside dans son potentiel, non pas tant dans ce qu’il est que dans ce qu’il peut devenir. Les Québécois sont en ce sens proprement américains. Il ne fait aucun doute qu’ils sont plus particulièrement nord-américains. Mais nous croyons avoir apporté des arguments permettant d’affirmer qu’ils sont aussi des Latins de l’Amérique. Cet héritage culturel, essentiel pour saisir leur américanité distinctive, reste pourtant à être découvert et approprié par les Québécois eux-mêmes.

Notes 1 C’est surtout dans le parler quotidien que l’on voit circuler cette idée. Un publicitaire qui s’est penché sur les « cordes sensibles » des Québécois – avec plus d’inspiration que de méthode – pouvait écrire : « Paradoxalement, le Québécois est un latin-nordique, “les pieds froids et la tête chaude” » (Jacques Bouchard 48). 2 Voir l’article d’Alain Noël intitulé « Les valeurs québécoises » (Le Devoir, 31 octobre 2000, A6). 3 Le mot « nordicité » renvoie à une condition géographique, mais aussi à une « attitude, une forme des relations sociales » façonnée par le combat contre la brutalité du froid nordique (Saul 210). On a parlé, pour caractériser l’identité canadienne, d’un « north of the mind » (Grant, 1989), d’une « northern destiny » (Morton), d’un « cult of the North » (Francis). Il ne faut pas oublier à cet égard le célèbre « Mon pays, c’est l’hiver » de Gilles Vigneault. 4 À propos du Québec comme cas unique en raison de sa multiplicité identitaire, voir Gérard Bouchard, et Lamonde et Bouchard.

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5 Les deux premiers chiffres proviennent d’un sondage fait par la firme Impact Recherche pour le compte du Groupe de recherche sur l’américanité (Le Devoir, 9 mai 1998) et le troisième, d’une enquête réalisée par Guy Lachapelle (Le Devoir, 21 novembre 1998). 6 Allocution du premier ministre du Québec, Bernard Landry, à l’occasion d’une réception de bienvenue offerte aux représentants du Sommet des peuples des Amériques, Québec, 16 avril 2001. 7 Jean-Pierre Charbonneau, président de l’Assemblée nationale du Québec. Cité dans Forces, n° 117, 1997. 8 Nathalie Petrowski, « Los Latinos del norte contre-attaquent », La Presse, 3 décembre 2003. 9 La question originale en espagnol est la suivante : « Puede decirse que los quebequenses (francófonos) tienen una cultura más ‘latina’ que los anglocanadienses y los norteamericanos? Por qué? ». Le message accompagné de cette question a été envoyé le 1er juillet 2004. Nous remercions M. Jean-Luc Crucifix, vice-président d’Amitiés Québec-Venezuela, de nous avoir permis de diffuser la question aux membres. Cette association a une page à l’adresse suivante : http://www.quebec-venezuela.org. Nous sommes bien sûr très reconnaissant aux personnes qui ont accepté de nous faire connaître leur point de vue. 10 Comme dans toute étude basée sur la participation à un forum Internet, on peut supposer que l’échantillon tend à être surtout composé de personnes de classe moyenne, hautement scolarisées et ayant des opinions arrêtées sur le sujet discuté. 11 Il s’agit d’un projet subventionné par le Conseil de recherches en sciences humaines du Canada. L’enquête, dirigée par Daniel Schugurensky (Université de Toronto), vise à comparer la participation civique et politique des immigrants latino-américains. On a réalisé à cette fin 100 entrevues à Toronto et 100 entrevues à Montréal. L’auteur du présent texte a supervisé le travail de terrain à Montréal. Voir : Armony, Barriga et Schugurensky. 12 Voir, par exemple, cet extrait : « Mais s’il est un domaine où le Québec ne se distingue absolument pas, c’est bien dans ses liens à l’automobile : mêmes autos, même étalement, mêmes autoroutes, même signalisation. Et l’argument de la latinité québécoise fait sourire quand on pense à la pluriethnicité de Toronto ou New York, ou au poids des Hispaniques en Floride et en Californie. [ … ] il faudrait accepter le fait que le Québec est une partie intégrante de l’Amérique du Nord, une évidence trop souvent occultée » (Alain Dubuc, « Les vrais choix de société », Le Soleil, 21 septembre 2001, D6). 13 Nous avons présenté cette analyse dans Armony. 14 L’enquête pour le Canada a été effectuée par Gallup-Canada (Toronto) en mai-juin 1990. Les directeurs de recherche ont été Neil Nevitt (Université de Toronto) et Ronald Inglehart (Université de Michigan). 15 Il y a eu 1301 répondants au Canada anglais (tous anglophones) et 429 au Québec (398 francophones et 31 anglophones). Nous tenons compte de la variable « langue de l’entrevue » pour déterminer l’identité linguistique du répondant. Pour les autres sociétés, les tailles des échantillons sont les suivantes : Argentine : 1002, Brésil : 1782, Chili : 1500, États-Unis : 1839, Mexique : 1531. Toutes les différences entre les pays que nous signalons sont significatives à 99 %, sauf quand nous indiquons qu’elles le sont à 95 %.

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16 Il est important de noter que notre analyse comporte toutes les faiblesses de ce type d’approche : les individus répondent souvent, lorsqu’il s’agit de valeurs civiques, en fonction de l’image qu’ils se font du citoyen vertueux; même si elles sont traduites dans la langue du répondant, les questions – et les mots – peuvent avoir différentes connotations selon les contextes culturels; les échantillons dans les pays à forte inégalité sociale sur-représentent les groupes mieux nantis, urbains et scolarisés. Cependant, en attendant que de meilleurs outils méthodologiques soient développés et que davantage de ressources soient consacrées à ce genre d’initiative, les données du World Values Survey demeurent, à notre avis, la source empirique la plus riche et la plus fiable pour l’analyse statistique comparée des valeurs culturelles. 17 Nous n’avons d’ailleurs pas à insister sur le fait que les « mentalités collectives », les identités et les représentations collectives sont extraordinairement difficiles à étudier de façon méthodique. Il existe cependant une tradition scientifique qui s’est penchée sur la possibilité d’analyser les traits culturels communs des différentes sociétés dans une perspective comparatiste. Depuis quelques années, certaines recherches visent à décrire les variations entre les différentes cultures nationales tout en tâchant de ne pas introduire des éléments d’interprétation avant l’analyse des résultats statistiques. Autrement dit, des centaines de questions portant sur toutes sortes d’attitudes envers la société, l’individu, le travail, les loisirs, l’identité, la sexualité, la politique, et autres sont posées à des individus dans des dizaines de pays. On tente par la suite de regrouper et d’expliquer les similitudes et les écarts qui ressortent entre les échantillons des différents pays. 18 Nous avons traduit les questions. La version publiée des questions est en anglais. La documentation de l’enquête peut être consultée à cette adresse : http ://www.icpsr .umich.edu. 19 Les questions sur la confiance ont été répondues selon l’échelle suivante : « beaucoup », « assez », « peu », « pas du tout ». Les pourcentages que nous retenons incluent les répondants qui ont dit « beaucoup » ou « assez ». 20 Les pourcentages représentent la proportion de répondants qui n’ont pas mentionné le groupe en question (le sondeur montre au répondant une liste de groupes). 21 Les questions pour cette variable exigent que le répondant se place sur une échelle de 1 à 10. Nous prenons la proportion de répondants qui se situent dans les trois valeurs extrêmes de l’échelle (1, 2 et 3, ou 8, 9 et 10, selon la question). 22 Ces pourcentages représentent la proportion des répondants dans l’échantillon qui, sur une échelle de 1 à 10 points (1 : « jamais justifié » et 10 : « toujours justifié »), se situent à 8, 9 ou 10. 23 Discours de réception du Prix de la Latinité accordé par l’Académie française, Rio de Janeiro (Brésil), 27 juin 1999.

Bibliographie Abou, Sélim. L’Identité culturelle, Paris, Pluriel, 1981. Armony, Victor, Martha Barriga et Daniel Schugurensky. « Citizenship Learning and Political Participation : The Experience of Latin American Immigrants in Canada », dans Canadian Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Studies 57–58 (2004), p. 17–38.

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Armony, Victor. « Des Latins du Nord? L’identité culturelle québécoise dans le contexte panaméricain », dans Recherches sociographiques xliii/1 (2002), p. 19–48. Balthazar, Louis et Alfred O. Hero Jr. Le Québec dans l’espace américain, Montréal, Québec-Amérique, 1999. Beauchemin, Jacques. L’Histoire en trop : la mauvaise conscience des souverainistes québécois, Montréal, VLB éditeur, 2002. Bouchard, Gérard. Genèse des nations et cultures du Nouveau Monde, Montréal, Boréal, 2000. Bouchard, Jacques. Les 36 cordes sensibles des Québécois, Saint-Lambert, Héritage, 1978. Bourque, Gilles et Jules Duchastel, avec la collaboration de Victor Armony. L’Identité fragmentée : nation et citoyenneté dans les débats constitutionnels canadiens, Montréal, Fides, 1996. Bourque, Gilles, Jules Duchastel et Jacques Beauchemin. La Société libérale duplessiste, Montréal, Boréal Express, 1994. Brunet, Michel. « Trois dominantes de la pensée canadienne-française : l’agriculturisme, l’anti-étatisme et le messianisme », dans La Présence anglaise et les Canadiens, Montréal, Beauchemin, 1958, p. 113–166. Francis, Daniel. National Dreams : Myth, Memory, and Canadian History, Vancouver, Arsenal Pulp Press, 1997. Gay, Daniel. Les Élites québécoises et l’Amérique latine, Montréal, Nouvelle Optique, 1983. Grant, S. D. « Myths of the North in the Canadian Ethos », dans The Northern Review 3–4 (1989), p. 15–41. Groulx, Lionel. Directives, Montréal, Éditions du Zodiaque, 1937. Inglehart, Ronald. « Culture and Democracy », dans Lawrence Harrison et Samuel Huntington, dir., Culture Matters : How Values Shape Human Progress, New York, Basic Books, 2000, p. 80–97. Lamonde, Yvan et Gérard Bouchard. La Nation dans tous ses états : le Québec en comparaison, Montréal, L’Harmattan, 1997. Latouche, Daniel. « Quebec in the Emerging North American Configuration », dans Robert Earle et John Wirth, dir., Identities in North America : The Search for Community, Stanford University Press, 1995, p. 117–139. Morton, W. L. The Canadian Identity, Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 1972. Remiche-Martynow, Anne et Anne Valier, dir. Demain le Nouveau Monde : dialogues Amérique latine / Europe, Paris, La Découverte, 1993. Rioux, Marcel. Les Québécois, Paris, Le Seuil, 1974. Rocher, Guy. Le Québec en mutation, LaSalle, Hurtubise HMH, 1973. Rodó, José Enrique. Ariel : liberalismo y jacobinismo. Mexico, Editorial Porrúa, 1970. Saul, John Ralston. Reflections of a Siamese Twin : Canada at the End of the Twentieth Century, Toronto, Viking, 1997. Taylor, Charles. Rapprocher les solitudes : écrits sur le fédéralisme et le nationalisme au Canada, Sainte-Foy, Presses de l’Université Laval, 1992.

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Thériault, Joseph-Yvon. Critique de l’américanité : mémoire et démocratie au Québec, Montréal, Québec Amérique, 2002. Tocqueville, Alexis de. « Voyage en Amérique, Cahier alphabétique A », dans Id., Œuvres I, Paris, Gallimard, 1991.

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norman cheadle

Canadian Counterpoint: Don Latino and Doña Canadiense in José Leandro Urbina’s Collect Call (1992) and Ann Ireland’s Exile (2002)

“Aren’t you ever afraid?” [Professor Grenier] asked slowly. “Afraid of what?” “That you might adapt, that you might be assimilated, become integrated and disappear … That for a long time you were señor and then monsieur and one fine day you’re mister, mister for the rest of your life, and your children will call you mister and won’t even know how to pronounce your name.” [ … ] “You may be afraid, but if there’s no alternative, it serves no purpose.” (Collect Call 179)1 “Welcome to Canada,” she remembered to say, but the phrase was rushed this time, an afterthought. “Yes,” I [Carlos] agreed, and inhaled deeply to show her that I wanted to know this place, to feel its air swell my chest, and that I was unafraid. (Exile 21)

he theme of this essay is not the fear and anxiety experienced by the immigrant-in-exile finding him- or herself in Canada, nor the strategies they adopt to survive here. It is, however, about alternatives, an attempt to read in two novels the possible outcomes resulting from the complex phenomenon of transculturation as it takes place within the Canadian confederation. With the term “transculturation,” I refer both to the neologism coined by Fernando Ortiz in his Contrapunteo cubano (1940)2 and to Ángel Rama’s theory of narrative transculturation in mid-20thcentury Latin American literature,3 a theory that requires adaptation to the

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context at hand. From Ortiz, I adopt as well the discursive mechanism of counterpoint, paying him the literary homage of positing, on the model of his Don Tabaco and Doña Azúcar,4 the allegorical figures of Don Latino and Doña Canadiense, who are meant to be heuristic devices (as in the spirit of nominalism) as opposed to substantive notions (as in philosophical realism). However, I am also indebted to Edward Said’s idea of “contrapuntal reading”; his method of reading the role of culture in the project of, and in resistance to, imperialism is more than ever relevant in the latest wave of imperial globalization.5 The fear expressed, in the epigraph above, by Professor Grenier of the Université de Montréal, and projected onto “the Sociologist”—the exiled Chilean protagonist of Collect Call whom Grenier adopted as his spiritual son—refers to the spectre of total acculturation, the very notion that Fernando Ortiz wished to replace with the more flexible one of transculturation. This latter concept was characterized, perhaps a little hastily, by Malinowski as a process of “give and take” in any given encounter of cultures (viii–ix). But who does the giving, and who the taking, and how much? Carlos, the Latin American writerin-exile and main character of Exile, may have a somewhat clearer idea than does the headstrong Sociologist about the terms of the “cultural exchange” to which he is party. Both novels, from almost symmetrically opposing vantage points, have much to tell us about transculturation along the Latino/Canadian axis; one was written by an exiled Chilean male living in Canada, based on the real-life model of Chilean poet Gonzalo Millán (Hazelton “Destierro triple”); the other, by an English-Canadian female writer who invents a protagonist from a fictitious Latin American country. Perhaps by putting these two novels in dialogue, we may learn more. The idea that transculturation can take place through the medium of narrative fiction refers us immediately to Ángel Rama, who took Ortiz’s anthropological concept and transformed it into a “transculturating” project whose end was at once to revindicate and modernize the various cultural traditions of Latin America by reinscribing them into avant-garde literary texts—Rama’s privileged examples are Juan Rulfo, João Guimarães Rosa, José María Arguedas, and Gabriel García Márquez—and thence into the textual fabric of the dominant culture. In Rama’s view, it was a question of correcting the abuses of modernization through a kind of dialectic between tradition and literary avant-garde; thus the project was in the hands of a literary-intellectual elite who, in novels such as Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo (1958) or García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), were accomplishing the work of transculturation on the levels of language, literary structure or technique, and

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“cosmovision” (Rama 40–56). The great Uruguayan critic’s optimistic theory was favourably received for a time; then came the critiques.6 Alberto Moreiras, for example, sustains that for Rama “transculturation is necessarily successful transculturation, i.e., transculturation in which the dominated culture is able to register or inscribe itself in the dominant culture.”7 This already implies, according to Moreiras, an a priori, ideological parti pris from which teleologically to project a synthetic and harmonious totality. In the final instance, Moreira implies, Rama’s theory of transculturation merely relegitimates the hegemonic reason of the dominant European centre.8 Moreira’s negative interpretation of transculturation broadly corresponds to a pessimistic version of the phrase “Canadian Cultural Exchange” according to which Canada, as an economic and cultural adjunct of the United States, would be a handy intermediary whose function was to reabsorb the other into a synthetic global monoculture. Román de la Campa has taken a different view of the matter. For him, Rama’s transculturation not only anticipates García Canclini’s notion of hybridity but also “perhaps suggests one of the roads toward postcolonial or anti-colonial critique in the postmodern period of global capitalism.”9 One might consider in this regard Homi Bhabha’s post-colonial theory of “cultural translation,” also defended by Judith Butler (21–22). Bhabha emphasizes the opening that occurs when immigrant communities are inserted into the metropolis—the Indian community in London, England, for example. This opening destabilizes the cultural hegemony exercised by the former imperial power. Bhabha’s view coincides with de la Campa’s reading of Rama’s transculturation when de la Campa suggests that “otherness is thus transferred to the inner edge of a Western hegemony somewhat disseminated but still powerful.”10 Both Bhabha and de la Campa seem to evince the flexibility and openness that Fernando Ortiz gave to his notion of transculturation in order “to express the highly varied phenomena that have come about in Cuba as a result of the extremely complex transmutations of culture that have taken place here” (Onís 98). In Cuba, immigrants as diverse as Spaniards, Asians, and Africans faced “the double problem of disadjustment and readjustment, of deculturation or exculturation, as well as aculturation or inculturation, and at the end of the synthesis, of transculturation” (Ortiz 80; my translation). The process thus goes through various moments or stages, which Ortiz later sums up as “a partial deculturation” followed by “the consequent creation of new cultural phenomena, which could be called neoculturation” (Onís 103). The proliferation of prefixes (de-, ex-, a-, in-, neo-), all summed up under the prefix trans-, is an index of the fluidity of the notion itself; it can refer to the process as a

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whole or to a facet of it. Furthermore, transculturation may be initiated by the cultural influx from a slave population (Africans) or imposed by force by invaders, as when agricultural Taino natives “imposed transculturation” upon the nomadic Ciboneys (99) or, more notoriously, when the Spaniards colonized the Antilles. And yet even the Spaniards, uprooted from their specific regional cultures, “had to readjust themselves to a new syncretism of cultures” (98). Though a transitive process, transculturation is never totally unidirectional or monological. Ortiz’s characterization of Cuba’s history as “an intense, complex, unbroken process of transculturation of human groups, all in a state of transition” (103) not only applies, by analogy, to the rest of the Americas, as he himself points out, but also anticipates the current globalizing condition of the entire planet. Though Ortiz does speak of the transculturation as resulting in a kind of synthesis, it is evident that he has in mind a synthesis that is not final and closed but rather provisional, a link in an aleatory chain of new syntheses.11 In Ángel Rama’s reading of Ortiz, there are three moments of transculturation: (1) partial deculturation; (2) incorporation of elements from the “external” culture; and (3) cultural recomposition based on elements surviving from the “original” (either indigenous or regional criollo) culture and the new elements from the external one (38). To this scheme Rama sees fit to add the criteria of selectivity and invention: elements are selected from both the external and the American cultures, and then recombined through cultural invention. Selectivity is particularly important, according to Rama; in the 20th century, for example, Marxism was appropriated by Latin American culture, even though it was heterodox to the neocolonial European cultural system (39). But selectivity also applies to the “original” American culture, where resistant elements can be “rediscovered.” Rama concludes that there are four concomitant “operations” at work in transculturation: losses, selections (from the external culture), rediscoveries (in one’s own culture), and incorporations, all of which together bring about “a general restructuration of the cultural system” (39). A reconsideration of the twin criteria of selectivity and invention should attenuate the criticism levelled against Rama’s theory. For if the work of a Marxist like García Márquez seems destined to satisfy “First World” tastes in Europe and North America,12 it also impinges on the cultural hegemony of the metropolitan centre. As Timothy Brennan remarked in 1990, “[t]he recent interest in Third World literature reflected in special issues of mainstream journals and new publishers’ series, as well as new university programs, is itself a mark of the recognition that imperialism is, culturally speaking, a twoway flow” (46). The cultural flow from the centre to the periphery also includes

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elements—Marxism is the outstanding example—that come back to haunt the centre and alter the hegemonic structures of feeling when the “empire writes back,” as Salman Rushdie wittily titled an opinion piece. In Collect Call, the Marxist protagonist’s emigration to Canada is an example of this movement, but what is the result? The importation of the non-Marxist anti-hero of Exile, on the other hand, represents a different sort of cultural flow. Another way of conceptualizing the “two-way street” of cultural flow in the globalized world is though the notion of counterpoint. Edward Said has recommended contrapuntal reading as a productive way to read the relationship between culture and imperialism. To read contrapuntally the literature of the colonial era, according to Said, means reading a text with an understanding of what is involved when an author shows, for instance, that a colonial sugar plantation is seen as important to the process of maintaining a particular style of life in England. Moreover, like all literary texts, these are not bounded by their formal historic beginnings and endings … The point is that contrapuntal reading must take account of both processes, that of imperialism and that of resistance to it, which can be done by extending our reading of the texts to include what was once forcibly excluded … In reading a text, one must open it out both to what went into it and what its author excluded. Each cultural work is a vision of the moment, and we must juxtapose that vision with the various revisions it later provoked. (66–67; my emphasis)

The kind of reading Said recommends for 19th-century literature is, perhaps, a retrospective projection of the way the most interesting novelists write in the late 20th century, especially in the modality of the literature of exile. In the two novels that will occupy our attention here, that which was once forcibly excluded is not only included but foregrounded, for the literature of exile begins from the premise of the violence wrought by neocolonial economic and military violence. The protagonist of Collect Call, for example, has been forced into exile by Pinochet’s regime, whose practical purpose was to install the neoliberal economic regime that favours U.S.-based transnational corporate interests. The main character of Exile, on the other hand, is banished by another despotic general whose purpose in the global economic order is clearly analogous to that of Pinochet. Thus the contrapuntal reading that I am proposing here necessarily differs from that suggested by Said. Its literary model comes from Fernando Ortiz’s Cuban Counterpoint, a point to which I shall return presently. On the one hand, then, I will revisit Ángel Rama’s theory of narrative transculturation, adapting it to a context quite different from that of post-colonial Latin America in the mid-20th century. Here I will follow, in a very general

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sense, the lead of Canadian Studies scholar Roland Walter, who has recently examined the work of Caribbean-Canadian writer Dionne Brand through the theoretical lens of transculturation. Walter finds that the notion is still useful, provided that it be understood as “a multivalent mode encompassing an uneasy dialogue between hegemonic and counterhegemonic forces” and as “a critical paradigm enabling us to trace the ways that transmission occurs within and between different cultures, regions and nations, particularly those in unequal relations of power” (27). Unlike Rama, I will not consider transculturation as a necessarily positive project, since its complexity—its multivalence—precludes assigning it to either hegemony or counterhegemony; the outcome is always undecidable. Thus transculturation becomes a kind of portmanteau notion that acquires specificity in its application. But similarly, the counterpoint between hegemony and counterhegemony will undergo dialectical variations as it is played out in the complex cultural space(s) (co)existing under the formal aegis of the Canadian state.

Introducing Don Latino and Doña Canadiense: plot lines La conocí balanceando en el parque a su hijo único. Y a mí … con el cliché de macho-latino. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Y en una de las gotas de la eyaculación sentí el timbre tan deseado de inmigrante recibido. (Alfredo Lavergne)13

Collect Call: The protagonist, known to us only by his nicknames—first “the Lawyer,” later “the Sociologist”—arrives in Montreal in the mid-1970s where he falls in with other left-wing Chilean militants who have been similarly forced into political exile. The Bar Español on Park Avenue is their regular haunt. He meets Megan, an Anglophone Montrealer who volunteers at the Chilean solidarity group, and marries her. She is studying to become a medical doctor; he begins to study sociology at the Université de Montréal. After several years, and not long before the 1980 Quebec referendum, the marriage breaks up. He forms a new relationship with the Québécoise Marcia, a fellow MA. As the referendum approaches, the Sociologist’s life is spinning

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out of control; his MA thesis is at a standstill and he is drinking too much. The action of the novel begins when he receives word that his mother has died back in Chile. This provokes a crisis, and we follow the Sociologist as he wanders around Montreal on the day of Carifête. By evening, he ends up at the carnival celebration in Parc Lafontaine, where he dances with a woman who turns out to be Chilean. Her offended husband and his henchmen attack him with knives and leave him bleeding on the ground. Meanwhile, he revisits in memory major portions of his life, which are recounted in alternating firstand third-person narration in long flashbacks. The remembered material is structured around his relationships with various women: his mother, his first girlfriend Magdalena (in Chile), Megan, and Marcia. Included are two trips away from Montreal, one taken with Megan to Toronto and the other with Marcia to the Quebec heartland. Exile: Carlos is a journalist and poet from Santa Clara, capital of a fictitious Latin American country. While in hiding from the choleric General who runs the country, he is rescued by cafe, the Canadian Alliance for Freedom of Expression, a human rights organization that installs Carlos as writer-in-exile at ubc in Vancouver. Gradually, we learn that this ostensibly generous gesture is based on a misunderstanding: Carlos was not in hiding for political reasons, but merely because he made a pass at the General’s mistress. Carlos is in fact a cynic and bon vivant, not at all the revolutionary hero of the cafe’s fantasmatic projections. He is a son of the comprador class in his country, his father being an upper-level government bureaucrat. Once in Vancouver, Carlos becomes libidinally entangled with Rita Falcon, and their difficult relationship, with its ups and downs, is one of the main structuring devices of the novel’s plot. An inveterate womanizer, Carlos has nevertheless been fascinated since high school by a character known as A. The dynamic and bisexual A is a real revolutionary, as committed and intransigent as a subcomandante Marcos. Painfully in love, Carlos feels humiliated by A, who spurns his advances and seems to toy with him. At the novel’s ending, A shows up in Vancouver and the two meet once again, albeit anti-climactically. From these brief summaries, it can be seen that the novels start from comparable premises and have related thematic concerns. In both cases, the protagonist is a “Don Latino”—a creative intellectual, at once rebellious and elitist—who finds himself exiled in Canada and who struggles to come to terms with the new society through his erotic relations with Canadian women. However, two additional observations immediately impose themselves. In Collect Call, the plot structure pitting Don Latino against Doña Canadiense is complicated by the splitting of the latter into two: Ms English Canada and

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Mme Québécoise. This will require that we think about the constitutive rift in the nation we call Canada. Secondly, in Exile, it is Don Latino who undergoes a split: he is not only a macho Don Latino but also a Doña Latina who pines for recognition by A, the single initial of whose name tempts allegorical speculation—alpha-male, authenticity? Likewise, Doña Canadiense, in the person of Rita Falcon, is also dually gendered by virtue of her name, for the falcon as a bird of prey is a traditional trope for the male sexual predator. This transgendering will necessitate some thought about sexual difference and its relationship to national culture.

Narrative transculturation and language First, however, it will be convenient to look briefly at the basic textual materials of each novel. Ángel Rama theorized that narrative transculturation takes place on three levels—language, structure, and cosmovision. Here I wish to comment only on how the use of language in Cobro revertido (distinguished here from its English translation as Collect Call) and in Exile, respectively, suggests certain directions for reading these two novels dialogically. On the level of language—both on the level of langage and the obvious difference of langue—the two novels contrast notably. Whereas the first-person narrative voice of Exile speaks in a precise, almost overly correct English, the narrator of Cobro revertido uses a popular Chilean idiom. In 19th-century Spanish-American prose fiction, according to Rama, the cultivated writer would subordinate popular dialect to his or her literary language, while the authoritive narrative voice always belonged to a member of the lettered classes. However, in the “transculturating” prose of avant-garde writers such as Juan Rulfo, this hierarchical relationship is inverted: “the language that once belonged to the popular characters and which, within the same regionalist or costumbrista text, stood opposed to the language of the writer or narrator, [now] inverts its hierarchical position: … it becomes the voice that narrates, it thus takes over the totality of the text.”14 A similar process may be observed, mutatis mutandis, in the original text of Cobro revertido, where the popular register of Chilean Spanish invades not only the cultivated registers of the novel’s more intellectual characters—the Sociologist and Frías (nicknamed the Philosopher)—but also makes bold incursions into the English and French spoken in Canada. During a post-marital confrontation, Megan interrupts the Sociologist in mid-tirade by roaring with hatred “Shut up!” in English, inducing in him “la violenta sensación de venirse despertando” [the violent sensation of coming out of sleep] (Cobro 34; my translation); here the Sociologist

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hears the silencing order directly in all its foreign otherness. On the other hand, English words and phrases such as “call girl” (43) are assumed naturally by the narrative voice, graphically rendered without italics or scare quotes, or altered slightly to conform to the quicker rhythm of Spanish, as for example in “bla bla bla bla” (65) for the English slang interjection “blah blah blah.” Other English words are shamelessly hispanicized, such as keymar for K-Mart (71) and, from French, amigos quebecuás (38) [Québécois friends] and its feminine variant las quebecas [sic] (86). There is even a strange hybrid translation of “the American Dream” as el sueño américaine [sic] (41); a masculine Spanish noun is qualified by a French adjective in its feminine form, perhaps by analogy with la nuit américaine (day for night). Thus, the famous American mytheme is dragged from English into Spanish by way of French, being not only translated but also (grammatically) transgendered and effectively traduced. Crosslingual play can lead both to opacity and to new complexity. When the protagonist calls Santiago from a public phone in Montreal and speaks to a man called Valladares, he fends off the other recent immigrants wanting to use the phone, who are characterized as “el resto de los leprosos diciendo puras huevadas [the rest of the lepers bullshitting away], oui, oui, que est ce que le telefoné” (77; my translation; my emphasis); the italicized phrase may be a phonetic rendering of badly spoken French or a mixture of French and Spanish, and the meaning is impossible to determine. During the telephone conversation itself, the same semantic opacity is deliberately turned into a game that exploits the phonetic equivalence in Spanish of the letters “v” and “b”: “Dile a tu prima que me quiero casar, que la amo y que quiero que venga a vivir conmigo, ça va, ça baba Valladares …” (77; my emphasis). It takes many more words to explicate the many levels of meaning embodied in this brief interlingual verbal performance. The Chilean immigrant tries to call home to his lost girlfriend Magdalena, now idealized by homesickness, through an unwilling intermediary (the girlfriend’s cousin, whose name means “fences”), while at the same time fighting off, in defective French, other newly arrived immigrants from unnamed countries. Thus caught between those who can’t understand him and another who does not want to hear him, he enters a new in-between space that is opened up and performed into existence by his ludic babble lapping up against the “fences” that both bar the immigrant’s return and hinder his effective entry into Canadian social space. The result is at once poignant and humorous. In this very opacity, then, in this interstitial space (as Homi Bhabha likes to call it) between languages and their respective cultures, Urbina’s writing performs transculturation, turning the pain and bewilderment of violent displacement into creative adventure: his protagonist dreams, under

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artificial lighting in a newly hybridized Montreal-Chilean dialect, a sueño americaine that swirls phantasmagorically around the censorious and defensive “Shut up!” emitted by Anglophone culture. Language is deployed in Exile according to an almost dialectically opposite strategy. The command that conditions Carlos’s English-Canadian experience in Vancouver is not “Shut up!” but rather an implicit “Speak! Say the words we want to hear!” Carlos must continually recite poetry, field prurient questions about his prison experience, and endure intense pressure to write his “memoirs.” Having quickly intuited the unspoken imperative, he does his best to speak, in impeccable English, the words that his hosts desire to hear. The literary character Carlos, native of a fictitious Spanish-American country, never speaks his mother tongue, not even in his internal monologue (notwithstanding the few isolated Spanish words scattered throughout the text). Since he comes to us already translated into English, the “original” Carlos will be forever beyond our ken. The novelist Ann Ireland wisely turns this constitutive limitation into a narrative strategy: Carlos must invent a script for himself that corresponds to the character his hosts project onto him. He is, in effect, an imported cultural commodity, his body supplying the flesh to materialize the fantasy of the Latin American revolutionary whom (which) his hosts believe they have fished from the distant sea of savage otherness.

The nation and gender Is there otherness outside of sexual difference? (Irigaray 178)

A good place to start thinking about gender in this context will be the literary conceit that gives Cuban Counterpoint its discursive structure. In his essay, Fernando Ortiz begins by alluding to the medieval dialogue between Doña Cuaresma and Don Carnal, the former allegorically representing the Soul and Lent, the latter the flesh and Carnival. Ortiz recasts the debate as one between Doña Sugar and Don Tobacco, and proceeds to multiply the metaphorical meanings of the pair: The one is white, the other dark. Sugar is sweet and odorless; tobacco bitter and aromatic. Always in contrast! Food and poison, waking and drowsing, energy and dream, delight of the flesh and delight of the spirit, sensuality and thought, the satisfaction of an appetite and the contemplation of a moment’s illusion, calories of nourishment and puffs of fantasy, undifferentiated and commonplace anonymity from the cradle and aristocratic individuality recognized wherever it goes, medicine and magic, reality and deception, virtue and vice. (Onís 6)

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Sugar is civilized science, reality, virtue; tobacco is savage magic, deceit, vice. However, all these signifieds are ordered under the category of gender: “Sugar is she; tobacco is he” (6).15 This master metaphor—“female” sugar and “male” tobacco—alludes to a dynamic that is both inter- and intracultural; it serves as a discursive construct that integrates various tributary strands of discourse— agricultural, historical, religious, economic, and political. Thus Ortiz sees “masculine” tobacco as having undergone, over the five centuries since the Spaniards’ arrival on the island that is now Cuba, a continuous process of transculturation. The dynamism of tobacco is symbolic of Cuba’s cultural creativity, and Ortiz devotes long and fascinating chapters to the odyssey of tobacco from America to Northern Africa to Europe, tracing its cultural resignifications in tandem with its changing place in the world economy. By contrast, he never uses the term “transculturation” in reference to sugar. Sugar never changes. By virtue of its non-distinctive nature, always identical to itself, sugar has been from the beginning the ideal product for the capitalist economy.16 Tobacco is a product grown in small plots of land and then handcrafted, whereas sugar is produced in large plantations powered by brute labour. “Sugar has always preferred slave labor; tobacco, free men” (81). Tobacco’s “nobility of manners” (43) also stands for Cuban sovereignty, while sugar’s “sackcloth” (45) is a sign of colonization from abroad. “Tobacco was more strongly on the side of independence. Sugar has always stood for foreign intervention” (71). In sum, tobacco and sugar together symbolize, as well, the differential cultural dynamic that powers the workings of the global economic order, in its colonial, neocolonial, and now post-colonial configurations.17 Interpreting Ortiz, we may say that tobacco is a cultural signifier whose signifieds may change and evolve, whereas sugar is a signified that is, if not cultureless, then culturally neutral or “monocultural.” Indeed, for Ortiz, tobacco is the privileged cultural signifier, the non-utilitarian supplement to the order of life’s material necessities. Tobacco was once fetishized in religious ritual, later denounced for that reason, then fetishized once again in the libidinal economy of glamour and sexual ritual. It stands for that which at once stimulates and resists the bland and ubiquitous monoculture of globalized capitalism. No wonder, then, that the Latino protagonists of the novels I shall examine are both inveterate smokers. Their women, by contrast, do not smoke; Rita Falcon emphatically disapproves of the habit. If Ortiz posited masculine tobacco as a symbol of Cuban nationhood, how can we think about Canadian nationhood? In a first tentative formulation, the feminine Doña Canadiense would seem to symbolize a variant of globalized culture. However, in Collect Call, Doña Canadiense is a dual figure,

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corresponding to Canada’s “two founding nations.” English-speaking Canada and Quebec are not equivalent entities of like kind. For English-speaking Canada, Quebec is merely one province among nine; Quebec considers itself une nation participating in a larger confederation. When the prospect of Quebec’s separation is proposed, however, English Canada becomes aware that “Canada” without Quebec would cease to exist, whereas Canada without, say, Prince Edward Island might be diminished but not destroyed. The two visions of Canada are radically antagonistic and yet they co-exist. To conceptualize this dilemma, we may resort to Lévi-Strauss’s notion of the “zero-institution,” as  zek (“Class Struggle” 112).18 Quebec’s and the Rest-ofrecalled by Slavoj Zi Canada’s differing perceptions of the Canadian federation are not simply reducible to cultural relativism. Rather, it is similar to the case of the circular layout of the buildings in a Winnebago village and the different ways in which each of two social groups or “moieties” perceive that layout. In the view of “those from above,” the village is divided concentrically as a circle within a circle; for “those from below,” it is divided transversally by a diagonal line. Accord zek, ing to Zi the very splitting into the two “relative” perceptions implies a hidden reference to a constant—not the objective, “actual” disposition of buildings but a traumatic kernel, a fundamental antagonism the inhabitants of the village were unable to symbolize, to account for, to “internalize,” to come to terms with—an imbalance in social relations that prevented the community from stabilizing itself into a harmonious whole. (112–13)

In the case of the Winnebago village, both antagonistic groups perceive the global plan of the village as a circle; the circle figures the “zero-institution.” The Canadian federation is a similar zero-institution: the removal of the antagonism on which it is founded would break the “circle” that is in effect constituted by the antagonism itself. (It goes without saying that this scheme is further complicated by the earlier traumatic wound inflicted upon the First Nations by the European colonization.)  zek’s next move is particularly germane to the problematic that occupies Zi us here. He proposes that the masculine and the feminine are like the two configurations in the Winnebago village; the zero-institution would be, generically speaking, any human society conceived of as a whole. (And, one might add, on the individual level it would be the legal notion of the person.) But he goes even further to suggest that the same logic of the zero-institution should be applied not only to the unity of a society, but also to its antagonistic split: what if sexual difference is ultimately a kind of zero-institution of the social split within humankind … nei-

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ther nation nor sexual difference is the immediate/natural presupposition later perlaborated19 / “mediated” by the work of culture—they are both (presup)posed (retroactively posited) by the very “cultural” process of sym zek’s emphasis) bolization. (114; Zi

Two points interest us here: (1) the twinning of the notions of nation and sexual difference under the theoretical concept of zero-institution; and (2) that this move involves the reversion of this theoretical concept from one designating a unity (figured in the circle or sphere) to one that represents a diremption, which implies that difference itself can be retroactively posited as foundational. Fernando Ortiz, performatively, follows the same procedure when he posits the counterpoint between the feminine Doña Sugar and the masculine Don Tobacco as the foundational difference from which the Cuban nation develops, which we may conceive as a zero-institution, or virtual unity, that is conditioned by the multiple processes of transculturation. Ortiz is aware that the cultural differences to which he refers grosso modo—Aboriginals, Africans, Spaniards—are in turn the products of other transcultural processes in a series of infinite regress. In order to talk about such infinite multiplicity, he must resort to “poetic” artifice, i.e., engage in an act of theoretical poesis, by postulating sexual difference as the zero-institution of minimal difference and then elaborating ad hoc the allegorical Doña Sugar and Don Tobacco who together figure a retroactively posited foundational dynamic that allows the Cuban nation to be conceived of as a whole, or to imagine itself into existence as a community, to use Benedict Anderson’s formulation (6).20 Ortiz then proceeds to elaborate their contrapuntal interaction, not as the cultural work of perlaboration to mediate some originary difference, but rather as the generative differential of neoculturation.

Montreal and Vancouver Cobro revertido is set in the Montreal of the late 1970s in the months leading up to the first referendum on Quebec sovereignty. Exile is set nearly two decades later in the Vancouver of the 1990s. However, this temporal distance is mitigated by the fact that the novels were published only 10 years apart, in 1992 and 2002 respectively; thus they were produced more or less in the same historical moment: the interval between the fall of the Soviet Union (famously celebrated by Francis Fukuyama’s panegyric to neoliberalism) and 9/11. The geographical-cultural distance between Montreal and Vancouver is obvious. The former stands as a microcosmic figure of the zero-institution encircling the antagonism of Anglophone/Francophone

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Canada. The latter, perched on the western extremity of the Rest-of-Canada, is geographically and culturally peripheral. Far from the cultural centre of English Canada, Vancouver is an excentric city that faces west to Asia and south to California and only glances over its shoulder toward Toronto. From Vancouver, the zero-institution of the Canadian federation appears to be based on the constituent antagonism between Eastern and Western Canada. Montreal is a site uniquely disputed by two asymmetrical hegemonies— the English Canadian and the Québécois—and dominated by neither. These two cultural hegemonies are not equivalent in kind. English Canadian culture is buttressed by the Anglophone United States and the enormous resources with which the latter imposes itself worldwide; Francophone Quebec, in terms of population and economic power, is small by comparison. But the source of English Canadian culture’s strength is the very thing that weakens it; far more vulnerable to the cultural imperialism of Hollywood and the American mass media, it struggles to distinguish itself from the McWorld. Quebec cultural nationalism, by contrast, flourishes and attains density through its uniqueness, a rock-solid island standing out from the relatively undifferentiated “sea of English,” to cite the journalistic cliché. Since Montreal is geographically located in the Province of Quebec, the Francophone hegemony is locally strong, grounded in a concrete social body; by contrast, the Anglophone cultural “hegemony” exists spectrally, largely as a reflection of the continental U.S. hegemony that permeates social space like fog, or a virtual network of deterritorialized signs. This is why there is no real clash of cultures between Anglophone and Francophone Montreal; they exist on two different planes, both of which are inhabited by all Montrealers, so that both French and English speakers understand the system, even though they negotiate the structure in different ways. The structural gap between these two levels of the symbolic is, in Lacanian terms, the “Real” of Montreal, i.e., that which resists symbolization. And it is into this breach that immigrant cultures plunge, inserting therein their own cultural symbolic, finding room between the Anglophone supra-hegemony and the Francophone sociocultural hegemony in an intercultural space where they rub shoulders. The result is a porous cultural fabric in which the imperfectly sutured “two solitudes” leave plenty of room for other cultural insertions. The very fact that a major Spanish-language novel such as Cobro revertido, finalist for a prestigious literary prize, the Premio Planeta in Argentina (Hazelton, “Una nueva literatura”), was produced in Montreal proves the point. By contrast, Vancouver’s cultural hegemony (until very recently) has been undisputedly Anglo-Canadian, participant in the North American supra-

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hegemony that in turn is sustained by a transnational web of capital encircling the globe, from New York to London to Hong Kong to Los Angeles. This gives the city its peculiar sense of unreality, which its picture-postcard setting manages only to enhance. The protagonist of Exile perceives this immediately on his arrival there: “We spun through downtown Vancouver and the buildings were like holograms, untouched by age or wind or neglect, apparitions of buildings that might be, shedding water from their shiny surfaces” (22).21 The index of the Real, of course, is the festering misery of east-end Hastings Street, where the disavowed traumatic wound inflicted on the First Nations festers in an inferno that is resolutely ignored by the western, middle-class areas of the city. The approximate east/west division of Vancouver is organized not so much along a lateral axis (as in east-end versus west-island Montreal) as on a vertical one between heaven and hell. If the immigrant communities of Montreal in effect articulate the space between Anglophone and Francophone cultures, the immigrant Asian communities of Vancouver cannot do the same between the Native (and other disenfranchised) lumpen, on one hand, and middle-class Caucasians, on the other. The space in between the disavowed east end and the opulent west end is a disarticulate nowhere, a formless purgatory. In Exile, when Carlos falls from grace and is expelled from his office in a ubc tower, he ends up in the skid-row limbo of Granville Street, the street that bisects the city between east and west. A partial exception to this general rule is the old Chinatown, inserted between Vancouver’s east and west ends, where it serves a buffer zone. The old Chinatown constitutes a culturally autonomous community. It is no doubt significant that Exile’s antagonistic couple—Carlos (an exiled Don Latino) and Rita Falcon (an alienated Doña Canadiense)—will begin to learn a modus vivendi in a house in this very neighbourhood. It is here where a fruitful transcultural negotiation may take place. There is a striking difference between the way the exiled Chilean community can occupy its own cultural space in Montreal compared to the ghettoized Latino community in Vancouver, as we see these two groupings in Collect Call and Exile. The band of Chileans moves through Montreal—bar hopping, dropping into cafés and restaurants, shopping, rubbing shoulders with other Latin Americans, Greeks, Spaniards, and Portuguese—as though they were quite at home. By contrast, Vancouver’s Hispanic community appears to be confined to a single rundown café on the edge of Chinatown (Ireland 175). True, Carlos shuns this group out of fear and snobbery, so we get only a skewed and narrow perspective on this community’s life. The two divergent views are thus due as much to narrative point of view as to cultural differences

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between Montreal and Vancouver. Nevertheless, the point still stands; the Hispanophone community in Vancouver does not have the same presence or cohesiveness as the one in Montreal.

Collect Call: Don Latino between Doña Canadiense and Doña Quebequense The fractious group of leftist Chilean immigrants (mostly men) populating the pages of Collect Call is particularly divided on the issue of choosing an English-Canadian or Québécoise mate. Is it significant that the less educated among the “family” of Chilean political exiles choose Québécoises, while the intellectuals—Frías (the Philosopher) and the Sociologist— have opted for Anglophone mates? In the opinion of the rank-and-file Chilean leftists in exile, such as the brothers Tito and Toño Guzmán, the answer is clear: “the Philosopher lives with an Englishwoman [“una inglesa”] and we’ve hooked up with French ladies [“damas francesas”], and that divides us,” declares Toño. “Tell me who you live with, and I’ll tell you who you are” (Collect 56). Tito backs up his brother by stating that the question of sexual relations is clearly linked to the political and the social, and, we may add, a fortiori to the cultural: “Someone in the future is going to have to study the role of women and sex in great political movements and social cataclysms” (56). Frías refuses to declare himself on the forthcoming referendum on sovereignty in Quebec; however, conscious of his status as an immigrant, he is clearly nervous about Québécois nationalism (54).22 If Frías prevaricates on the issue of Quebec sovereignty, the Sociologist lives a pattern of divided sexual/cultural loyalties. His trajectory is plotted on an oscillation between Francophone and Anglophone culture. He marries an Anglophone Montrealer, Megan, and then, after his marriage fails, he forms a sexual relationship with Marcia, a Québécoise de souche. But the dualism Anglophone/Francophone has begun already in Chile; his first (Chilean) girlfriend was Magdalena, who has been to Paris and immersed herself in the French countercultural tradition of art, poetry, and anti-establishment politics. Magdalena becomes the mother’s chief antagonist, and the mother is at least partially responsible for Magdalena’s fall into the hands of Pinochet’s reign of terror. His mother’s dream, on the other hand, is that one day her son will triumph in the world, learn English, and take her to the United States (133). Indeed, it appears that Urbina has deliberately set up the central conflicts in his character’s life along a dual axis of sex and langue (English versus French). Two warring blocks stand out in his life: the alliance of his Chilean mother with

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Megan versus the line running from Magdalena to Marcia and her roommate Francine. These two blocks are further overlaid by both political and professional dimensions. Under Magdalena’s influence he discovers liberationist politics and joins a left-wing party; his mother, cynically pragmatic, takes the side of the dictatorship. His mother’s ambition is that he become a lawyer, but once in Canada he opts to follow a career in sociology since, in his mind, lawyers are the “ass-kissers” of those in power (27); sociology, by implication, is a more intellectual discipline and is associated with the political left (as, for example, in his mentor Professor Grenier). However, these various dimensions do not line up neatly in a Manichaean scheme. Megan, a Montrealer and daughter of an Irish-Catholic trade unionist, is a volunteer activist helping Chilean political exiles. Moreover, the protagonist switches careers precisely at the moment when he moves in with Megan (132), an event recounted approximately midway through the novel. With her help, he leaves law and enrols in a Master’s program in sociology at the Francophone Université de Montréal (while she continues at medical school, at Anglophone McGill, one assumes, though the name is never mentioned.) It is as though the marriage of several years with Megan were founded on a cultural schism, which both gives it its passionate intensity—indeed, its condition of possibility—and necessitates its eventual foundering. His mother, apprised of the new situation, writes to dissuade him, to no avail, from his career change and includes a number of family photos specifically addressed to Megan; this is her means of forming an alliance with her future daughter-in-law. This move is successful: Megan loves to analyze the photos and takes the mother’s side when the Sociologist denounces her for betraying Magdalena to Pinochet’s repressive apparatus. Among these photos is one that, earlier in the novel, has been described in detail: Nonetheless, there’s one photograph that [Megan] never tried to analyse. In it my mother is in the back seat of the car. I’m sleeping. She’s holding me in her arms. Marta took the picture from the front seat. Joaquín, my older brother, had died of typhus the month before, and my father had decided we should get away to the beach for a few days. It was the end of February then and we were returning home. My mother’s eyes reveal a look of indescribable despair. I’m asleep clinging to her body, and the colour of my clothing melts into hers, and my bony legs are sticking out pugnaciously toward the camera in the same direction as her gaze. I must have been about nine years old, and it’s the only photo I have from my early childhood. (21; my emphasis)

No wonder Megan has no desire to analyze this photo: it encapsulates the contradiction of her new partner’s life, a contradiction in which she too is

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implicated. The boy clings to his mother’s body, even as he struggles to free himself from her embrace, a struggle implied by the adverb “pugnaciously.” However, because the two are as one at a primary vital level (his “clothing melts into hers”), he can also be seen as a kind of extension of his mother’s desperate will to escape the mediocrity and frustration of her life as the wife of a petit bourgeois. He is the last weapon left to her after the death of her first son; she means to triumph through her remaining son. She has turned him into a sort of prosthetic instrument of her will to succeed—his “legs sticking out pugnaciously … in the same direction as her gaze.” It is as though she had sent him as a projectile into North America, one launched from the neocolonial periphery to the hegemonic centre. This is the primary vector of the protagonist’s life, and Megan—a pretty, successful, English-speaking North American doctor—becomes, once she has been enlisted in the mother’s project, that vector’s ideal terminus. Nevertheless, of course, another vector continually interferes, the one figured under Francophone culture: first the Francophile Magdalena, then the swinging pair of Québécoise university students, Marcia and Francine, whom Megan despises as “French whores” (39), echoing his mother’s word (“puta”) for Magdalena (Cobro 50; Collect 48). When the marriage with Megan breaks up, the Sociologist forms a relationship with Marcia. Urbina deliberately highlights the differences between Megan and Marcia by juxtaposing descriptions of them in the text. Megan is a very correct young doctor who speaks good Spanish and pretty good French. Marcia is an ex–call girl who speaks English “with a horrible accent, enough to make you die laughing” (Collect 36). Megan, by virtue of her mastery of three languages, holds the position of the progressive liberal and, in terms of cultural and symbolic capital, clearly has the advantage; she participates in the Anglophone supra-hegemony referred to above. Politically, the two women are on opposite sides of the Quebec sovereignty issue: Marcia is a passionate sovereigntist; Megan will vote “no” in the forthcoming referendum. Megan commands respect with her knowledge and selfdiscipline; with warm and sensual Marcia, on the other hand, the Sociologist feels “free and safe” (38). And yet not completely safe: he feels threatened by her predilection for sleeping with black immigrant males and entertains paranoid fantasies (38) about her manipulation of female sexual power over males of “inferior culture,” including himself, and even calls her a “French racist” (37). In fact, he never ceases to seek his emotional security in Megan. He turns to her at the crisis of his mother’s death—“Meg, you’re my only family here” (34). And in his final crisis, when he lies dying (at least symbolically) in the very Québécois cultural space of Parc Lafontaine, he directs his last words to Megan.

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In this final sentence the reader understands that throughout the entire novel the Sociologist’s interior monologue has been directed only to her. Thus the initial vector, launched by his mother, has retained its force; and this, in spite of his eleventh-hour, alcohol-inspired, and thus dubious intention to propose marriage to Marcia. No successful marriage with either Anglophone Megan or Francophone Marcia will occur. Don Latino, in the person of the Sociologist, lies “like a squashed bug” (193) in the interstitial space of the Real between Montreal’s Anglophone and Francophone hegemonies, after his long, agonistic dialogue with a Janus-faced Doña Canadiense. This presents an apparent paradox: if the Chilean community, as part of the larger Spanish-American community in (political or economic) exile, has so successfully inhabited cultural space in Montreal, why does this avatar of Don Latino fail to establish himself there? In this character, Urbina has mapped the Canadian Anglophone/Francophone conflict onto another series of conflicts—female/male, mother/son, neocolonial periphery/hegemonic centre. The unresolved tension between a resentful, ambitious mother and her revolutionary son represents the traumatic kernel that burns at that heart of successive waves of predatory globalization, the kernel that cannot be successfully neutralized by Doña Sugar’s cultural pacification. The Sociologist, then, is caught on the horns of a personal dilemma, deriving from the unresolved conflict with his mother, which at the same time transcends the Canadian problematic. The “death” of this character fixes the sign of Don Latino’s intransigence, his inassimilable difference, a sign that vouchsafes the inscription of this new strand of cultural discourse into the Canadian multicultural fabric.

Exile: Don Latino/Doña Latina and Doña Canadiense/Don Canadiense Ann Ireland’s Exile, set in Vancouver, speaks not from the transcultural heart of French/English Canada but from its geographical periphery, from the western extremity of the Rest-of-Canada. It thus has only a few basic elements in common with Collect Call: another Latin American protagonist in exile, another Oedipal character, another intellectual but a poet this time (rather than a character based on a flesh-and-blood poet as in Collect Call), another Don Latino duking it out with Doña Canadiense. Paradoxically, if Collect Call is a novel about the experience of exile, Ann Ireland’s novel, its title notwithstanding, is not really about exile in the concrete sense, for Carlos is a totally invented character from an invented, non-existent but

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ostensibly Latin American country. Exile is about “exile” only in a metaphorical sense, whose key is given by Carlos: “We are all in exile from our authentic lives: it is the state of modern man” (17). As we all know, Carlos Marx (as Hispanophones call him) called this condition “alienation.” In the realm of late capitalism, we are all alienated, in a state of exile, whether we live in the First World or the Third, or somewhere in between. Carlos speaks to us from a virtual Latino otherness, and his invention by Ireland provides a means of looking at our Canadian multiculturalism in a new light, under the lurid glare of alienation. Homi Bhabha has observed that “[t]he study of world literature might be the study of the way in which cultures recognize themselves through their projections of ‘otherness’” (12). True, but the corollary is that the same can be done by writing a novel like this one. “[T]hey had all constructed stories for me, much better tales than mine. How could I avoid disappointing them?” (43), muses Carlos at his first meeting with his Canadian hosts, who have brought him from Santa Clara to install him as “writer-in-exile” at the ubc. Exile, then, is about the way liberal-progressive English Canadians, under cover of the ideology of multiculturalism, project fantasies of otherness, and thus the novel holds out a mirror in which we may recognize ourselves, not narcissistically nor in cynical self-disparagement, but critically. The erotic battle between Carlos and Rita Falcon begins immediately upon Carlos’s arrival at the Vancouver Airport. Carlos observes her as she seeks him among the arriving passengers: “she was pretty. A slash of lipstick coated her mouth” (19); then, as he approaches her: “I slid an unlit cigarette between my lips and let it dangle” (20). The game is on. Carlos waits as long as he can before presenting himself to her and surrendering his personal sovereignty to her hunter’s gaze, for Rita Bird-of-Prey is the outrunner for cafe, whose name uncannily echoes that of the right-wing political party based in Western Canada.23 In this encounter between Don Latino and Doña Canadiense, it is never clear who is the hunter and who is the hunted; or whether the contest might really be between Doña Latina and Don Canadiense: “I felt her watching … Did she not say she was a dancer? Then I was caught in her choreography” (26). Once Carlos allows himself to be seen, he will become the performing seal of his Canadian hosts, who feel that their “heroic efforts” (33) deserve to be rewarded with stories of his heroism, his exotic otherness, the savage magic of a poet snatched from a barbarous dungeon in some distant banana republic. They have made him their “project” (26); they have invested in him. When the investment ceases to pay dividends, they throw him out of ubc and he ends up on skid row, before finally finding his way into Rita’s house and bed.

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If in Collect Call we find a Doña Canadiense divided into her two constitutive parts in the characters Megan (English Canadian) and Marcia (Québécoise), the novel Exile provides a concrete image symbolizing the English-Canadian version of the allegorical Doña. Queen Elizabeth is first encountered by Carlos, appropriately enough, on the front of a twentydollar bill: “a middle-aged woman wearing pearls” who “looks like one of my mother’s sisters” (48). Later, at his first poetry recital in Canada, he finds himself standing “beneath the faded painting of Her Majesty the Queen” (78). Faded symbol of the British Empire, the Queen still functions adequately as a sign for the monoculture of imperialist/capitalist civilization, like Ortiz’s Doña Sugar, who at the undifferentiated zero-level of culture is the same in ex-colonial Canada as in neo-colonial Santa Clara.24 Indeed, most of the novel’s Canadian characters, male and female, are manifestations of Doña Canadiense, with “their taut friendliness and polite smiles, their helpful practical advice, their fervent lack of sensuality” (73), to cite only one Carlos’s many apposite remarks on the character of his wasp hosts. On the other hand, as mentioned earlier, Carlos has two long-term sexual antagonists, the Canadian Rita Falcon and his compatriot A. Thus Carlos himself not only functions as Don Latino but also as Doña Latina. On one hand, he is the womanizing Latino macho who in Canada runs afoul of the “sexual officers” of political correctness, but on the other hand he is the “feminine” side of the libidinal dynamic that binds him to A. The homo- or bisexual A is—paradoxically, in an ostensibly patriarchal culture—the embodiment of the phallic signifier, the “male” whose attention and recognition Carlos craves: “So why had he rejected me? Was I so repulsive?” he laments like a lovelorn girl (155). (Conversely, Rita Falcon ceases to be Doña Canadiense in direct proportion to her fidelity to her aspirations to be an artist and an individual.) One of the novel’s dramatic ironies is that the heroic revolutionary whom the progressives of cafe think they are importing in the person of Carlos is in fact that type’s inverse side, a revolutionary manqué. A, who aspires to the status of subcomandante Marcos or Che Guevara (200), is the “real thing” and the true object of Doña Canadiense’s desire. On the personal level, Carlos as the-woman-scorned takes his revenge by betraying A to the authorities. In relation to Collect Call, Carlos’s betrayal of the sexually transgressive and politically revolutionary A parallels the Sociologist’s mother’s betrayal of the similarly transgressive and rebellious intellectual figured in Magdalena. The personal motivation for the betrayal is dissimilar—Carlos simply wants to save his own skin; the mother wants to liquidate someone interfering with

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her project for her son—but the underlying attitude is the same: both characters passively accept the inevitability of the rule of thuggish patriarchal power, “the criminals who rule the world” in the words of the Sociologist’s mother (Collect 28). However, Carlos’s betrayal has a more explicit analogue on the (geo)political level: Carlos becomes a journalist, which in his country effectively means belonging to an ideological state apparatus, a professional guild functioning as an institution that uses political and cultural commentary as a means of control: “I became known for my cynical view toward the kids in their kerchiefs and berets who liked to play revolucionario between exams. I knew men at the highest level of government, and often received whispered phone calls at night from some high-placed councilman or lackey” (162). When he writes as an arts columnist, Carlos’s job is “to report favorably on the endless cycle of concerts and dances promoted by the Ministry of Culture, and to criticize visiting artists from less evolved cultures, such as the United States of America” (157). Here, surely, we have an allusion to Mexico as it existed under the pri (Partido Revolucionario Institucional) until 2000. One of the regime’s ideological strategies was to foster a purely rhetorical antiAmerican sentiment, especially on the level of cultural production, even as an extensive system of corruption made the same regime thoroughly complicit with transnational capitalism; cynical Mexican journalists knew very well how to play this perverse game. And yet Carlos never stops pining for A, and his longing also takes the form of competitiveness: “Every time I crossed his path I was made to feel diminished, half a man” (197). When A contacts him in his capacity as a journalist, Carlos fantasizes about recovering his earlier idealist self and becoming a revolutionary warrior at A’s side (200). Carlos comes closest to closing the gap separating him from the fantasmatic object of his desire when, after a time on skid row, he sees the image of A in his own image, fittingly, in a drugstore mirror: “The face that stared at me under the merciless fluorescent lights was A’s face, as I’d seen him in that concrete bunker, the interrogation room in the Santa Clara jail. We could have been brothers!” (231). But of course they could never be brothers, being socially bound by an antagonism that is perhaps even more radical than that of Don Latino and Doña Canadiense. The metaphoricity, and so the constructedness and plasticity, of the zeroinstitution of both sexual and cultural difference—“masculine” (tobacco, Latino) versus “feminine” (sugar, Canadian)—becomes clear in the sexual/cultural politics as they are narratively developed in Exile.

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Don Latino, conquistador, versus Don Canadiense, comprador Comprador –dora (masc., fem.): buyer, purchaser (Oxford Spanish Dictionary) Comprador (< Portuguese,“buyer”): 1. a Chinese agent, advisor, or factotum employed by a foreign establishment (as a consulate) in China to have charge of its Chinese employees or to act as an intermediary in business affairs; 2. one held to be an agent of foreign domination or exploitation (Webster’s Third New International Dictionary)

Canadian males do not play any important role in either Collect Call or Exile. However, to round out our theory of gendered transculturation, it may be instructive to glance at the relatively suppressed figure of Don Canadiense. A first approach to the figure may be attempted by contrasting him to Don Latino as phallic conqueror. The favourite game of both the Sociologist and Carlos is sexual conquest. Both have a marked sense of masculine privilege and believe that Canadian society, especially the women, ought to cater to their interests. Carlos is continually at odds with his hosts for his self-indulgent, profligate habits and is invariably incensed when they call him to account, especially when a woman does so: “Never before had a woman dared to speak to me in this way” (Exile 63). His attitude is basically the same as that of the Sociologist who comments that the purpose of an opulent society is to support “unconventional creative immigrants” like him (Collect 38). Both experience Canadian society as frustrated conquerors, like the proverbial Spanish conquistador who, upon invading America, would climb to the top of a mountain and claim as his own all the land he could see. An observation from the Sociologist’s interior monologue exemplifies this attitude: “Here they confused intelligence with perseverance, he kept telling himself. Intelligence is the ability to lift yourself above the circumstances dealt you by life and, from that vantage point, to see, to see the whole picture, beyond the wine glasses and the smoke and the neurotic, agitated conversation” (184–85).25 Again, this comment has a gendered context: the Sociologist returns to this thought because he is upset with a woman (Francine) whom he considers to be his intellectual inferior. The comment was made above that the Chilean community in Collect Call inhabits cultural space in Montreal with relative ease. This is due not only to the nature of that city, but also to a sort of “conquistador” attitude. When Megan cuts short a party at her house, the reaction of the Chilean males

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is disparaging: “But of course Meg was a gringa, and a foreigner can’t understand the basic rules of Latin American hospitality [la hospitalidad criolla]” (Collect 167; Cobro 174). For the Chileans, even though they are living abroad, in Canada, Megan is the intruder, the foreigner; in a sense, they have actually “colonized” a portion of cultural space in Montreal. Conversely, once her marriage with the Sociologist has broken up, Megan is the one who feels culturally excommunicated; in a fight with her ex-husband, occasioned by his asking her for a loan, she repeats the pejorative label bitterly: “Why don’t you turn to … your countless [Chilean] friends … instead of a miserable gringa?” (Collect 33–34). Having internalized the pejorative, she feels culturally inferior. At the same time, she resents what she sees as sloth in her husband (145–46). Similarly, even though Carlos never ceases to be painfully aware of his precarious status as “guest,” the Canadian women are incensed at his sense of privilege. “You act above us, as though we were your servants,” Sharon Rose finally accuses him (Exile 128). Doña Canadiense speaks loud and clear through Sharon when she insists that Carlos should “meet them halfway” (128): let there be no special privileges for anyone. The Queen’s image exemplifies the law of uniform mediocrity: she looks like anyone’s middle-aged aunt, her regal status subtly marked only by a string of pearls. What, then, of Don Canadiense? In Collect Call, he is practically non-existent; Megan’s and Marcia’s brothers are entirely incidental characters. Tadeus, Megan’s post-marital boyfriend, makes fleeting appearances in the Sociologist’s interior monologue as a despicable, impotent non-entity. In Exile, there are three secondary Canadian male characters. Concerning the feckless Daniel Rose, a dipsomaniac tightwad in love with his own professorial voice, the most that can be said is that he is the husband whom Sharon Rose eventually leaves. Considerably more developed as a literary character than Tadeus, Daniel Rose is nevertheless his equivalent in insignificance. However, it will repay our attention to look at two other Canadian males in Exile—Stan Drury and Syd Baskin. The poet Stan Drury is perhaps the Canadian counterpart of Don Latino, being a poet who makes a real incursion into Latin America in a way that is neither touristy nor exploitative. Stan wants to get to know Carlos, considering him to be a “dissident writer” and a fellow leftist. Carlos fears him more than anyone, lest Stan figure out that Carlos is not the person he is obliged to pretend to be: “This man would quiz me, naming every bar, every newspaper, every writer he’d met until he nailed me. He would find out precisely who I was—and who I wasn’t” (73). With his big belly and beery breath, Stan is emphatically unglamorous—the poet from Chilly Beach. He will never be

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lionized in Canada. Offering camaraderie to Carlos, he scorns the fuss that Doña Canadiense is making over the exotic Latino poet, while various Canadian women take turns running their hand, uninvited, through Carlos’s hair. But Stan speaks good Spanish, has ventured into the slums of Santa Clara, and has taken a politically engaged stand on the exploitation that takes place there: “For you it’s fine. You have a right, in fact they expect the politics. But for me, it’s pretentious. A Canadian has no right to be engaged. We write pretty, well-crafted poems about bones we find on the beach and the landscape of our lover’s skin” (71). This comment, made at the same recital over which the portrait of Queen Elizabeth symbolically presides, constitutes a rebellion against Doña Canadiense, in whom is figured that “civilizing” force that Ortiz attributed to Doña Sugar, a force that prepares the cultural terrain of the vassal regions of the planet for the extraction not only of surplus value but also surplus libido. Economic exploitation finds its cultural analogue in libidinal exploitation. Syd Baskin, in his role as president of cafe, is a key instrument in the latter operation. Specifically, he has organized the operation of bringing Carlos to Canada. Professor at ubc, fastidious closeted homosexual, and strict vegetarian, he imposes the law of sexual repression, censuring Carlos’s sexual escapades, especially his affair with Rita Falcon. At the same time, he longs to seduce (or be seduced by) Carlos and very nearly collects his sexual toll near the end of the novel. Syd, one might say, is a functionary who works for Doña Canadiense: he is Don Canadiense as cultural bureaucrat. One final aspect of Don Canadiense may be discerned in an incidental character who appears fleetingly as Carlos’s seat-mate when, near the beginning of the novel, he flies north from Santa Clara to Vancouver. “He looked like an explorer in his tan fatigues with dozens of deep pockets and flaps. His hair was thick and orange, his face freckled, yet lined. He was a young man, and I suspected he’d stayed too long in the sun.” His profession: “sand broker. Right now I’m working on a shipping deal from Vancouver to Hawaii” (16). Understandably, Carlos is left speechless. If, in Carlos and in the Sociologist, one can perceive a cultural echo of the Spanish conquistador, the Canadian sand broker is perhaps the parodic hangover of another type: the English (or, like Mungo Park, Scottish) explorer whose heroic exploits in the service of the Empire once filled our colonial cultural imaginary. A more perfectly useless activity than moving sand between Hawaii and Vancouver could not be dreamed up even by Sisyphus, unless it be the commercial mediation of the same.26 The down-to-earth outdoorsiness of the sand broker’s garb is quite at odds with the utterly spectral nature of his occupation. “A sand broker?”

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Carlos thinks later. “Selling sand to Hawaii? It was absurd, a transparent cover. Yes, but for what?” (18). The paradox embodied in the sand broker (and a par zek when he tial answer to Carlos’s question) is neatly unravelled by Slavoj Zi discusses the spectrality of Capital in terms of the Lacanian difference between reality and the Real: ‘reality’ is the social reality of the actual people involved in the interaction, and in the productive process; while the Real is the inexorable ‘abstract’ spectral logic of Capital which determines what goes on in social reality. This gap is palpable in the way the modern economic situation of a country is considered to be good and stable by international financial experts, even when the great majority of its people have a lower standard of living than they did before—reality doesn’t matter, what matters is the situation of Capital … In short, the highest form of ideology lies not in getting caught up in ideological spectrality, forgetting about its foundations in real people and their relations, but precisely in overlooking this Real of spectrality, and pretending to address directly ‘real people with their real worries.’ Visitors to the London Stock Exchange are given a free leaflet which explains to them that the stock market is not about some mysterious fluctuations, but about real people and their products—this is ideology at its purest. (The Fragile Absolute 15–16)

What could be more basic and “real” than sand? And yet the act of shifting it hither and thither and across the sea would be, in the materially real world, the act of an unfortunate lunatic, were it not inscribed in the supra-hegemonic web of relations determined by Capital. It is fitting that Carlos meets the comprador in the (metaphorically) abstract space of the interior of an airplane flying from the vassal South to the North. If the London Stock Exchange is one of the principal nerve centres of global capital, the web of air routes enveloping the atmospheric skin of the planet, along with its terrestrial infrastructure, is the circulatory system of alienated human exchange. “The Vancouver airport looked much like the one I’d left a few hours earlier,” Carlos observes on landing. “Outside on the grey tarmac, the plane I’d so recently departed hummed with sweat. In an hour or so, cleaned out and refuelled, it would return to Santa Clara” (18–19). With his poetic application of “sweat” to the plane, evocative of imported labour, Carlos is obscurely intuiting that he is an imported cargo brought from the South to serve the North. The cultural brokers, or compradors, of cafe have successfully mediated in the transaction; Rita Falcon is standing by to take delivery.

Canadian Counterpoint / Cheadle

Conclusions I would recite my poems in Spanish and they would pay, as they should, for this small moment of cultural aggression. (Exile 248)

In the end, the Sociologist fails to gain a definitive purchase on Canadian culture.27 He is reclaimed by his originary cultural matrix, its violence and machismo, having been knifed by the jealous chileno husband of a chilena with whom he was dancing at Carifête. If the Sociologist is to stay in Canada, he will have to suppress his predilection for conquest; the type of the conquistador is convenient to the smooth functioning of global capitalism only in its vassal regions, not in the vicinity of its privileged northern centres, where Doña Azúcar sets the cultural norms. The Sociologist’s explosive desencuentro with Doña Canadiense, in both her English-Canadian and Québécoise incarnations, represents the failure of his Chilean mother’s project of establishing a beachhead in the metropolitan North with a view to achieving eventual incorporation into the world-hegemonic culture.28 The Sociologist’s bifurcated drive toward the Anglophone and Francophone poles of Montreal at once prevents his successful integration into Canadian society and saves him from the fate of culturally disappearing beneath the title of mister. Though the Sociologist’s brief career in Montreal may be a flashbulb moment and he himself a vanishing mediator between the two solitudes, the novel in which he appears stands as a more enduring contribution. Cobro revertido (with the help of its translations Collect Call and Longues distances) performs narrative transculturation in a sense distinct from Ángel Rama’s conception: by creatively “invading” the gap between Anglophone and Francophone Montreal, its text also inexorably alters the social-textual articulation between the two. Not only does the novel point up the efficacy of the irreducible difference(s) on which Canada is founded—our differences are what make Canada possible—but it also weaves an important new strand into the Canadian multicultural fabric. I dare to opine that Urbina’s novel ought to be required reading for any serious student of Canadian Studies. The protagonist of Exile, unlike the Sociologist, seems to be finding a tentative modus vivendi with Doña Canadiense by novel’s end. Having penetrated Rita Falcon’s newly acquired house in Chinatown, he proceeds to knock down several walls, oblivious to their structural function, for the sake of letting in some light. The ceiling sags precariously, but does not fall. Carlos brings trouble but also badly needed fresh air and light into Rita’s life, their difficult dance helping to liberate her, as both an artist and a woman, from the drab confines of her life as a secretary at UBC. That which Doña and Don Canadiense

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imported as a cultural commodity will change their lives in unpredictable ways. On the other hand, though less aggressive than the agonistic Sociologist, Carlos manages to retain in sublimated form the aristocratic aspect of his character—the commanding gaze of the conquistador. “No one could see me, but I could see all of them” (298), muses Carlos in the very last sentence of the novel, when he retreats into the darkness of Syd Baskin’s backyard to keep watch over a party for A. Carlos eludes the cultural functionary’s vigilance and asserts some control over the new environment he has “invaded.” As the above epigraph suggests, he has understood and strategically adapted to the economy of cultural exchange, becoming a hybrid of conquistador and comprador who exacts a price for his “small moment of cultural aggression.” But Carlos continues to be Doña Latina as well. At the same party at Syd’s house, under cover of the darkness at the edge of the yard, he lies against a rock and strokes the moss in its crevices, “as coarse and damp as pubic hair” (298); he feels sure that A “was searching for me in the darkness” (298). Don Latino and Doña Latina, the two sides of Carlos, are finding a new equilibrium through their interaction with Doña and Don Canadiense. Thus the novel Exile not only engages us in a critical reflection on English-Canadian culture, but also traces the deeper libidinal undercurrents of (trans)cultural formation within the global economic order, which in turn (as Fernando Ortiz first intuited) are gendered. If Urbina’s Collect Call performs narrative transculturation, Ireland’s Exile suggests that, at their most profound level, transcultural processes are also “transgendering” processes, in the sense that culture reworks and inflects the basic constructs of sexuality. In a final reflection, let us drop our allegorical “Dons” and “Doñas” and interrogate for a moment the legitimacy of the opposition Latino versus Canadian. “¿Existe una cultura iberoamericana?” asked Carlos Monsiváis in his article thus titled. His answer, after taking into account the great multiplicity of differences within such a vast region, is yes: “Iberian-American culture exists, but the traditional modes of perceiving it are now in crisis.”29 This opinion comes not from the movers and shakers of commercial propaganda who have attempted to construct Latino identity in the United States, as brilliantly traced by Arlene Dávila in her book Latinos, Inc., but from one of the most respected intellectuals in Latin America. On the other side of the opposition Latino/Canadian, can one speak of a Canadian identity as separate from the North American cultural hegemony? For Latin Americans, as we see them in Collect Call, Canadians too fall under the category of gringo, coexisting with Americans under the same geocultural sign. Is the cultural difference between Mexicans and Chileans, for example, commensurate with the difference

Canadian Counterpoint / Cheadle

between Canadians and U.S. citizens? The diversity among the 18 to 20 Spanish-American national cultures perhaps exceeds the difference between Canada and the United States. Nevertheless, as in the Winnebago village visited by Lévi-Strauss, North Americans will have different perspectives on the (formally non-existent) zero-institution that envelops the United States and Canada in a single entity, depending on which moiety they belong to; Canadians (“those from below”) and Americans (“those from above”) will see the border dividing one country from the other differently. Whereas Americans— as well as all those outside North America who see this continent through the U.S. mass media—will see two concentric circles, with Canada as a fringe around the periphery of the superpower, Canadians sense a diagonal line separating the two. Collect Call boldly traces that line; Exile invites us to rethink the entire, global figure.

Appendix: The Uninvited Guest, by Ann Ireland Every novelist has a story of how a character walked into her life and took over. The process is not simple or even pleasant: we don’t always want to be taken over. It’s like throwing a dinner party and opening the door to an uninvited guest who marches in, elbows flying. This is what happened as I struggled with early drafts of my novel, Exile. The book wasn’t called Exile in those days, because the character of the refugee poet barely existed. I’d planned something entirely different and had a stack of 200 manuscript pages to prove it. Then Carlos walked in, poured himself a glass or three of wine, and tracked mud through every room of my spiffy house. Hello? Where did you come from? I was sitting in the don’s suite at a Trent University residence when Carlos came into my life. It was May and the place was deserted. Exams were over and there wasn’t a student in sight. Earlier I’d foraged for food and discovered that the cafeteria was closed. Those few souls remaining on campus had to fend for themselves. A writer craves solitude and, as writer-in-residence, I had the place pretty much to myself. I’d found a seat by one of the slot windows in my suite where I could work. The cot set in an alcove was suitably ascetic, the walls were concrete as was the whole campus, and in the tiny kitchen I prepared monk-like meals of buckwheat noodles and greens. This was my chance to finish the first draft of the novel, and from then on, it would be clear sailing. Writers live in hope that this will be the one that comes easily, no nasty complications and detours. Yet distraction entered, a voice out of nowhere in the

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form of Carlos, the refugee poet. He breezed into the novel with a wave, one of those sidelong characters who perk up a scene. Or so I thought. Six years later, I can hardly tell you what that original book was about— two young women, antiquarian books, downtown Toronto … For it has gone, withered on the vine, disappeared even in memory. I distrust writers who speak of being overtaken by a character, as if they were channelling voices from some parallel universe. Yet it happened to me, despite layers of resistance. Carlos Romero Estevez began life as a minor character during that stint in Peterborough, a few pages here and there, one voice among many. Then, sneakily, he became the guest who moves in, first one suitcase, a toothbrush, then a box or two on weekends. I resisted the colonization for a long time, determined to stick to my original plan. Eventually, I gave in. There was no choice. Face facts, he was far more compelling than the other characters I’d invited. Sometimes it happens this way. None of my originally conceived characters could hold a candle to Carlos. Voices piped up, struggled to be heard, clearing their throats and waving their arms—to no avail. Years went by, and in each successive draft, the parts that were not-Carlos snapped off like icicles in my hands. Of course I sought to reattach them, and as you might guess, the attempt was doomed. Yet a novelist is, by definition, tenacious. This is both good and bad. There was no single day when I accepted the obvious; it was more a matter of the “new” version of the novel gradually crowding out the old one, until I realized that I’d ditched three-quarters of the original book and Carlos had taken over. The novel instantly sprang to life. The old shell fell away and what emerged was fresh and new. Novelist friends, who’d dutifully read earlier drafts, agreed. This was a story that hadn’t been told: the refugee/exile who won’t measure up to expectation, his hosts’ discomfort that turns to annoyance, frustration, and finally boredom. How does the exile exist when his sad stories no longer engage his rescuers? I sent the manuscript off to editors of the big publishing houses in Toronto and waited, full of giddy confidence. It was midsummer 2001. We all know what happened early that fall. With the horrors of 9/11 came great fear and the sense that anything could happen, even on our privileged soil. We must all be careful, very careful. The continent was reeling, and so was the publishing industry. Editors fled from the idea of a writer like me inhabiting a mischievous character like Carlos Romero Estevez. “If only you’d made him more heroic,” one editor said.

Canadian Counterpoint / Cheadle

Cultural sensitivities were tender. Everyone was signing up historical novels—cowboys and Victorian ladies and local history reenacted. Safe as houses. I realized, to my dismay, that the old issue of voice appropriation had teetered back into our lives. “I am frankly uncomfortable,” another editor wrote,“with a white middleclass woman writing about a less-privileged man from another culture.” Actually, Carlos was more privileged—the man had servants—but never mind. Panic was in the air. Another phoned. “How can I take this to our sales reps?” she asked. “The book alienates the very people in the Toronto literary world that we need onside.” Another came out and said, “After 9/11, we feel very uncomfortable with this book. Is it satire?” I heard the way she uttered the word “satire,” as if it were something foreign and distasteful. Maybe the editor of Vanity Fair was right— 9/11 killed irony. Literalism would become all the rage. (To be fair, some of the editors simply didn’t find Carlos convincing.) One day I got three rejections in the mail, which prompted a long walk in the park across the street. I knew I was wrapping myself in cliché; hit one of life’s bumps, go for a walk in the park. Maybe everyone I saw that day had received bad news, even the jogger who carried a furled umbrella in one hand. He was out there seven days a week at this hour, rain or shine. I decided the editors were all crazy. Carlos was a bang-up character, funny as hell, and why on earth didn’t they snap him up? Yet they didn’t. Fact was, every internationally owned publishing house in Toronto turned down Exile. These included both of my previous publishers. Dog walkers huddled over steaming cups of Tim Hortons while their animals tore up and down the hill. I devised a Plan B: contact editors from the independent publishing houses and see if they wanted to check out Exile. Kiss off dreams of big bucks and snazzy full-page ads in the Globe; small presses operate on passion and hope. They are much like writers. I went home and popped off half a dozen emails. Three offers to publish Exile came within a week. These editors loved Carlos, his cantankerous nature, his bad behaviour. No one mentioned voice appropriation or 9/11. Elation replaced alarm. Relief too; here was proof I hadn’t been deluding myself. When Exile was published by Dundurn Press several months later, I told everyone I would not read the reviews. I assumed I’d get slammed by mainstream media from coast to coast, and who needs to read that over her morning Cheerios?

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Not so. Not even faintly so. Exile received, far and away, the best critical response of anything I’d ever published. Not one critic questioned my right or nerve. I don’t know if I’ve learned a thing from the experience, except not to be surprised by surprise. The uninvited guest is often the one who stays till dawn, dropping ashes on the rug, still spinning his stories.

Notes 1 Urbina’s novel Cobro revertido has been translated into English as Collect Call and into French as Longues distances. Unless otherwise indicated, I will cite from Beverly DeLong-Tonelli’s English translation. 2 Harriet de Onís’s English translation, Cuban Counterpoint, will be cited hereafter unless otherwise indicated. 3 Apparently Rama first used the term in the early 1970s and wrote about it in “Los procesos de transculturación en la narrativa latinoamericana” (Revista de Literatura Hispanoamericana 5 [April 1974]. Reprinted in La novela en América Latina: Panoramas 1920–1980. México: Universidad Veracruzana, 1986. 203–34). 4 The untranslatable Spanish honorifics don and doña indicate deference to persons superior in age or social standing, though they can also be used facetiously. Hereafter, I shall anglicize the symbolic personages as Don Tobacco and Doña Sugar. 5 Walter Mignolo calls attention to the curious fact that post-colonial studies have concentrated mostly on Asia and Africa, whereas the first wave of global Westernization took place in what is now Latin America during the expansion of the Spanish and Portuguese empires (29). 6 See Moraña’s Ángel Rama y los estudios latinoamericanos, especially section 3: “Debates de la transculturación.” 7 My translation. In the original: “la transculturación es necesariamente sólo transculturación exitosa, esto es, transculturación en la que la cultura dominada es capaz de registrarse o inscribirse en la dominante” (Moreiras 228n). 8 Here Moreiras is paraphrasing the critique of García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude made by Franco Moretti in his Modern World Epic. The World System from Goethe to García Márquez (1996). Moreiras favours this critique over Rama’s own interpretation of García Márquez’s novel, implicating at the same time Rama’s theory of transculturation. 9 My translation. In the original: “quizá sugiera uno de los caminos para la crítica poscolonial o anticolonial en la época posmoderna del capitalismo global” (de la Campa 29). 10 My translation. In the original: “La otredad queda así transferida al filo interno de una hegemonía occidental algo diseminada pero todavía poderosa” (de la Campa 21). 11 Antonio Benítez-Rojo, whose famous essay The Repeating Island owes a great deal to Ortiz, aptly comments that Ortiz’s Cuban Counterpoint pulls together “a heteroclitic summa of ideologies, that is, a deideologized ideology” (156), thus eluding inscription within a single (teleological) metanarrative. 12 Carlos Monsiváis comments that, unfortunately, the success of One Hundred Years of Solitude enthroned, “for the greater glory of Eurocentrism,” the paradigm of magic realism “que no es sino el estupor ‘civilizado’ ante los hallazgos del ‘primitivismo’”

Canadian Counterpoint / Cheadle

13

14

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17 18

19 20

21 22

[which is only the amazed stupor of the “civilized” at the ingenuity of “primitivism”] (391; my translation). Poem by Chilean-Québécois Alfredo Lavergne, who forms part of the same Chilean diaspora as José Leandro Urbina and Gonzalo Millán. “I met her in the park / swinging her only child/and me … / with the macho Latino cliché. [ … ] And in one of the drops of ejaculation / I felt the longed-for seal / of landed immigrancy” (qtd. in Hazelton, “Quebec Hispánico” 131–32; my translation). The poem was published only in Sylvie Perron’s French translation (Lavergne). My translation. In the original: “La que antes era la lengua de los personajes populares y, dentro del mismo texto [costumbrista o regionalista], se oponía a la lengua del escritor o del narrador, invierte su posición jerárquica: … pasa a ser la voz que narra, abarca así la totalidad del texto” (Rama 42). Similarly, in his formal definition of transculturation, Ortiz finally resorts to the model of sexual reproduction: “the result of every union of cultures is similar to that of the reproductive process between individuals: the offspring always has something of both parents but is always different from each of them” (Onís 103). Ortiz repeatedly insists on this point: “all refined sugar tastes the same” (Onís 9); “the production of sugar was always a capitalistic venture” (56). “The entire history of sugar in Cuba, from the first day, has been the struggle originated by foreign capital and its overwhelming influence on the island’s economy. And it was not Spanish capital, but foreign: that of the Genoese, the Germans, the Flemings, the English, the Yankees, from the days of the [Spanish] Emperor Charles V and his [foreign] bankers, the Fuggers, to our own ‘good-neighbor’ days and the Wall Street financiers” (62). Walter Mignolo has qualified Ortiz’s Cuban Counterpoint as a post-colonialist text avant la lettre (29). Lévi-Strauss postulated the existence of “institutional forms which one might characterize by a zero value. These institutions have no intrinsic property other than that of establishing the necessary preconditions for the existence of the social system to which they belong; their presence—in itself devoid of significance—enables the social system to exist as a whole” (159). “Perlaborate” is a back formation from the neologism “perlaboration,” the French translation of Freud’s term Durcharbeitung or “working through” (Lyotard 107). Anderson seems to refer implicitly to Lévi-Strauss in this comment: “In fact, all communities larger than primordial villages of face-to-face contact (and perhaps even these) are imagined. Communities are to be distinguished, not by their falsity/genuineness, but by the style in which they are imagined” (6; my emphasis). The consumers/workers of the city likewise appear unreal to Carlos: “they walk around as if sealed in plastic wrap, their faces shiny, buffed masks” (223). And this, long before Jacques Parizeau’s (in)famous comment blaming “money and the immigrant vote” for the negative result of the 1995 referendum. Politically incorrect as it may be, his telegraphic judgment was basically accurate, but the terms “money” and “immigrants” are not on the same level, as Parizeau’s syntagmatic combination implies. The power relations denoted by “money” were indeed the factor that, on the macro-level, determined the result. The majority of immigrants (though of course not all) will have voted against Quebec sovereignty, not because they are in cahoots with “money” or are “anti-Québécois,” but rather as a strategic choice, in order to maintain the relative margin of cultural autonomy that they enjoy between

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24

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26 27

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29

the two hegemonies. Moreover, the presence of immigrant diasporas in Canada is due to neoliberal globalization, either directly (as is the case with the Chileans forced into exile by a coup backed by the United States) or indirectly because of economic scarcity created by globalized capitalism. There was a great public outcry against Parizeau’s blaming immigrants; the question of “money” was studiously passed over in silence by the media, a silence that surreptitiously worked in favour of the interests represented by “money,” which thereby snuck a free ride to the moral high ground created by public indignation. Thus Parizeau, paradoxically, by turning himself into a laughingstock and contemptible scapegoat, rendered a great service to the (Anglophone) neoliberal hegemony he claims to despise. In more than one personal communication, Ann Ireland has insisted that no connection with the political party was intended. And yet the uncanny echo remains, as though the disavowed right-wing obverse of Canadian multicultural liberalism were returning to haunt us. In Collect Call, the Sociologist experiences the Queen staring down from the portrait installed by his Angolan-Portuguese roommate as authoritarian “me mira autoritaria” (Cobro 14). This is a clear index of the very infantile obverse side of his Latino machismo. Carlos, by comparison, is relatively indifferent to the Queen’s gaze. Cf. Mary Louise Pratt’s notion of the “seeing man,” the European male subject who is the protagonist of the “anti-conquest” or series of “strategies of representation whereby European bourgeois subjects seek to secure their innocence in the same moment as they assert European hegemony” (Imperial Eyes 7). In a personal interview, Ann Ireland told me that she in fact met a man on a plane who claimed to be a sand broker. Similarly, the Chilean poet Gonzalo Millán, on whom the protagonist of Collect Call is modelled, returned to Chile as soon as it was politically possible. In the video Blue Jay (by Chilean-Canadian filmmaker Leopoldo Gutiérrez), Millán recalls that, for him and others, the act of speaking and writing in Spanish was a political and ideological struggle against assimilation. He also comments that in Canada we live “en cámara lenta” [in slow motion]. He uses an automotive metaphor to distinguish Quebec from the rest of Canada: the latter never gets out of first gear, while Quebec sometimes gets in second, but neither ever gets up to the third, fourth, or fifth gear that correspond to the intensity of life in Chile. The project of the Sociologist’s mother has recently been converted by the Chilean government into the official educational policy “English Opens Doors.” By 2013, all Chilean students are supposed to have achieved a measurable competence in English (see “mineduc English Program”). “La cultura iberoamericana existe, pero los modos tradicionales de percibirla han entrado en crisis” (392). It is well known that the Spanish-American nation-states that sprang into existence in the early 19th century out of the sudden collapse of the nearly three-centuries-old Spanish colonial regime were both particularist in form and pan-American in their inspiration, from the Bolivarian dream of a united federation of the Americas to José Martí’s idealistic program for nuestra América.

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Works Cited Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. Rev. ed. London: Verso, 1991. Benítez-Rojo, Antonio. The Repeating Island: The Caribbean and the Postmodern Perspective. Trans. James Meraniss. Durham: Duke University Press, 1992. Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 1994. Brennan, Timothy. “The National Longing for Form.” Nation and Narration. Ed. Homi K. Bhabha. London: Routledge, 1990. 44–70. Butler, Judith. “Restaging the Universal: Hegemony and the Limits of Formalism.”  zek. Contingency, Hegemony, UniverJudith Butler, Ernesto Laclau, and Slavoj Zi sality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left. London and New York: Verso, 2000. 11–43. Dávila, Arlene. Latinos, Inc.: The Marketing and Making of a People. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. De la Campa, Román. “Hibridez posmoderna y transculturación: políticas de montaje en torno a Latinoamérica.” Hispamérica 69 (1994): 3–22. Gutiérrez, Leopoldo, dir. Blue Jay: Notes from Exile. Cinéma Libre, 2001. Hazelton, Hugh. “Quebec Hispánico: Themes of Exile and Integration in the Writing of Latin Americans Living in Quebec.” Canadian Literature 142/143 (Fall/Winter 1994): 120–25. ———. “Destierro triple. De Las malas juntas a Homo eroticus: La trayectoria literaria de José Leandro Urbina.” Canadian Association of Hispanists. Bishop’s University, Lennoxville. 5 June 1999. ———. “Una literatura nueva: la latinocanadiense.” Conference at Concordia University. 18 February 2004. 15 February 2005. http://artsandscience.concordia.ca/ cmll/spanish/antonio/Hugh_ Hazelton_Nace_nueva_literatura Ireland, Ann. Exile. Toronto: Simon & Pierre–Dundurn, 2002. Irigaray, Luce. “Questions to Emmanuel Levinas.” Trans. Margaret Whitford. The Irigaray Reader. Ed. Margaret Whitford. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991. 178–89. Lavergne, Alfredo.“Et à la radio … Marjo chantait.” Trans. Sylvie Perron. La Présence d’une autre Amérique: Anthologie des écrivains latino-américains du Québec. Montréal: Éditions de la Naine Blanche, 1989. 33. Lévi-Strauss, Claude.“Do Dual Organizations Exist?” Structural Anthropology. Trans. Claire Jacobson and Brooke Grundfest Schoepf. New York and London: Basic Books, 1963. 132–63. Lyotard, Jean-François. “Anamnesis of the Visible.” Trans. Couze Venn and Roy Boyne. Theory, Culture & Society 21.1 (2004): 107–19. Malinowski, Bronislaw. “Introducción.” In Ortiz. xi–xvii. Mignolo, Walter D. “Occidentalización, imperialismo, globalización: herencias coloniales y teorías postcoloniales.” Revista Iberoamericana 60.170–71 (1995): 27–40.

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“MINEDUC English Program.” Gobierno de Chile. Ministerio de Educación. 10 February 2005. http://www.ingles.mineduc.cl/usuarios/ingles/doc/200411051934060 .planIngles_english.doc Monsiváis, Carlos. “¿Existe una cultura iberoamericana?” Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispánicos 3 (1994): 379–92. Moraña, Mabel, ed. Ángel Rama y los estudios latinoamericanos. Pittsburgh: Instituto Internacional de Literatura Iberoamericana, 1997. Moreiras, Alberto. “José María Arguedas y el fin de la transculturación.” Ángel Rama y los estudios latinoamericanos. Ed. Mabel Moraña. 213–31. Onís, Harriet de, trans. Cuban Counterpoint: Tobacco and Sugar. By Fernando Ortiz. New York: Vintage Books, 1970. Ortiz, Fernando. Contrapunteo cubano del tabaco y el azúcar: Advertencia de sus contrastes agrarios, económicos, históricos y sociales, su etnografía y su transculturación. Madrid: Cuba España, 1999. Pratt, Mary Louise. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. London: Routledge, 1992. Rama, Ángel. Transculturación narrativa en América Latina. Montevideo: Fundación Ángel Rama, 1989. Rushdie, Salman. “The Empire Writes Back with a Vengeance.” The Times. 3 July 1982: 8. Said, Edward W. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Vintage Books, 1993. Urbina, José Leandro. Cobro revertido. Santiago de Chile: Planeta, 1992. ———. Longues distances. Trans. Danièle Rudel-Tessier. Québec: Lanctôt, 1996. ———. Collect Call. Trans. Beverly J. DeLong-Tonelli. Ottawa: Split Quotation, 1999. Walter, Roland. “Between Canada and the Caribbean: Transcultural Contact Zones in the Works of Dionne Brand.” Ed. Robert Schwartzwald. Transculturalisms/ Les transferts culturels. Spec. issue of International Journal of Canadian Studies/ Revue internationale d’études canadiennes 27 (Spring 2003): 23–41.  zek, Slavoj. “Class Struggle or Postmodernism? Yes, please!” Judith Butler, Ernesto Zi  zek. Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Laclau, and Slavoj Zi Dialogues on the Left. London and New York: Verso, 2000. 90–135. ———. The Fragile Absolute. London and New York: Verso, 2000.

V transitive canada (2): from here to where? / un canada transitif (2). en aval

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neil besner

Translating North and South: Elizabeth Bishop, Biography, and Brazil

’d like to begin with the story of how I came to Elizabeth Bishop and to translating this biography, because telling this part of the story in this way is, to my mind, the appropriate beginning of a kind of analysis. And, given that for some readers the biography I translated has been seen to transgress conventional norms by merging elements from the genre of biography with those understood as belonging more properly to fiction, perhaps it is all the more appropriate that I open an argument with a story. At the latitude of Quebec City, as we know in Canada, the early summer sun stays up in the sky until quite late; at the latitude of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, it has become quite dark, even at midsummer, by eight o’clock. I mention this only as the first of many asymmetries: north and south, in Bishop’s imagination as in the world, are not categories or compass points equally or simply distant from some still or normative centre, geographical or otherwise, and they are not simply opposites. But they are different, and a complex awareness of this difference and its degrees marks Bishop’s art, the course of her life, Carmen Oliveira’s biography, and, perhaps necessarily, its translation into English. In late May 1989, I was sitting one warm and still sunny early evening in the plush bar just off the lobby of the Chateau Frontenac in Quebec City, with a colleague, the co-editor of a book of stories we were putting together, and the editor from Oxford University Press who was publishing the anthology. My story begins where it will end, with language. I heard what to my ear, in North America, always registers as the instantly recognizable tone and rhythms of

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Brazilian Portuguese a few feet away, and I did what I always do when this happens: I excused myself for a few minutes and went and introduced myself to the Brazilians, and we chatted. In my adult life, these rare and chance encounters in Canada have always had a recurring, counterpointed rhythm, regulated by my seductive nostalgia: me, always dangerously overjoyed to meet my past rising up again in the present; they, always delighted to speak to a Canadian who is always eager to hear them exclaim over his, that is my, good Portuguese. You can see the seduction. When I returned to my colleagues, my co-editor was excited. He’d known I’d grown up in Brazil and spoke Portuguese, but a thought had just occurred to him: did I know Elizabeth Bishop’s poems? Only vaguely. I had no idea at that point that she’d lived in Brazil for over 15 years—she arrived in 1951; that some of her finest poems were set in Brazil—among others, “Arrival at Santos,”“Brazil, January 1, 1502,”“Questions of Travel,”“Squatter’s Children,”“The Armadillo,” “The Riverman,” “Pink Dog,” “Manuelzinho,” “Under the Window, Ouro Preto,”“Going to the Bakery,”“The Burglar of Babylon,” and “Santarém.” I didn’t know that she’d written a book on Brazil in the early 1960s, commissioned for the Time-Life series, that she was so distraught over—she felt the editors had inexcusably botched up her writing—that she refused to acknowledge sole authorship. I didn’t know that although she’d translated Brazilian poems into English, including some of Carlos Drummond de Andrade’s great poems, she rarely spoke Portuguese in Brazil, because she was shy about the possibility of making a mistake, and she was very sensitive, perhaps with good reason, to Brazilians’ perceptions of her and of her relationship with their Lota: many of Lota’s friends felt Bishop was stealing Lota from them. I did not know anything about Lota de Macedo Soares, arguably the love of Bishop’s life. I didn’t know that Bishop had lived with Lota for a long stretch in the 1950s and 60s in Petrópolis, a 50-minute drive from where and when I grew up; Bishop lived in Samambaia, in the award-winning house Lota built into the side of a mountain, with a detached studio for Bishop some 50 feet up a winding walkway from the main house, on a smooth rock hillside that faced a small waterfall and a bamboo grove. The house and studio and grounds still stand, all beautifully maintained. My colleague who’d been with me at the Chateau Frontenac that sunny evening showed me Bishop’s poem “One Art” the next day. He wanted me to write the definitive biography on Bishop. He had known Bishop at Harvard, had written about her; he would help me. In his eyes I was the ideal person to write this biography. Our editor from Oxford, also a great admirer of Bishop, offered help and advice as well. Over the next year or so, my colleague sent me

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everything he had about Bishop. Meanwhile, out of an obscure but rising interest that I could not explain to myself—I certainly had no intention then of embarking on a biography—I began reading. I was drawn, first and for obvious reasons, to Bishop’s Brazilian material, yes, but concurrently to the abiding countercurrents in her writing of her evocations of loss on one hand, and, on the other, of excitement at the discovery of how to make art—one art, at least—out of loss (think most obviously of the famous closing lines of “One Art,” but think, also, of the opening of “Santarém”). And of course I was drawn to her other poems. (I wince at referring to Bishop’s poems by nationality—Brazilian poems, Canadian, American poems; as several writers have shown, Lorrie Goldensohn perhaps most persuasively in her 1992 book, Elizabeth Bishop: The Biography of a Poetry, Bishop’s geographical or national setting and what she wrote about in that setting were often quite separate issues). By 1997 I’d been reading Bishop and writing about Bishop’s work for eight years, and then I taught a short course in Winnipeg on Bishop’s Brazilian poems, and wrote a paper with the students in that course on the Brazilian poems; I reviewed several critical books on Bishop, including Brett Millier’s monumental 1993 biography, Elizabeth Bishop: Life and the Memory of It. When I went in 1998 to Worcester, Massachusetts, Bishop’s birthplace in 1911, to read the paper at a Bishop conference there, I’d been to Brazil recently, where interest in Bishop had quickened in recent years—because of Oliveira’s book, among other reasons—and had just read and reviewed Carmen Oliveira’s Flores Raras e Banalíssimas: A História de Lota de Macedo Soares e Elizabeth Bishop. The Brazilian title, which I translated literally—the first of many decisions and revisions, although the names in the subtitle eventually got reversed—more on this in a moment—refers to the title given to the caricatures, reproduced in the Brazilian book, that one of Lota’s artist companions, Carlos Leão, drew of Lota’s rarified circle of friends, dubbing each cartoon flower figure with a fake Latin moniker; Lota’s was Carlotia Impudica, of the family Dubiaceas. At Worcester, I met Carmen, who had come to read us a paper on “Luminous Lota”; by popular demand, she presented it twice in two days. I’d taken the position in my review that Carmen’s biography needed to be translated into English, because I thought then as I think now that this book gives us Bishop in Brazil; Brazil; Lota in Bishop’s life; and, simply and monumentally, Lota— as no other work has done to date. I still had no conscious intention of trying to translate it myself, though, until at some point during the conference, as I was talking to Carmen and to several Brazilian colleagues I had just met, when I heard myself say to Carmen that I would love to translate the book— this in English. (I should explain that Carmen, who wrote her Master’s degree

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at Notre Dame on modern American poetry—Notre Dame was where she came to Elizabeth Bishop—speaks excellent English.) What arose some time shortly after this, when I began work on the translation, early in the winter of 1999—forcefully and insistently, and it has not left me since—was the dual, complex, uncanny, and persistent sense on one hand of familiarity with the book in Portuguese—a world arose around and through and within the text that I imbibed, greedy and avid—and an attendant penumbra, a powerful sense, also although not equally persistent, of estrangement as I tried to think, write, conceive, and translate the book in and into English. This feeling was the cause and occasion of my first reaction and resolution: that I would try, at all costs, to preserve what I can only approximately name as the “climate of feeling” of the Brazilian book, the book in Portuguese that I felt to be so familiar, with which I felt so much in sympathy. And this resolution led to my first and most explicit conceptual mistake: I thought that the way to keep faith with the Brazilian book was to be as literal, exact, and parallel as possible in my translation. I now know that this was a typical literalist’s mistake. And yet it continues to intrigue me. Because the first and most acute of all the obvious differences between the two cultures north and south—mine and Carmen’s, to be sure, but also the differences between North American norms and the whole Brazilian context of this biography—made themselves immediately apparent to me first at the level of syntax and style, vocabulary, idiom, and various registers of expression (the book is chock full of very different levels of Brazilian idioms and registers) that often could not—and in effect should not—be rendered in English. I would say that these linguistic differences troubled me more than, even as they were ultimately inseparable from, the obvious differences in what might seem to be more difficult or unbridgeable areas like gender or genre. Before I continue with this narrative, another digression: I’d like to admit what should by now be clear anyway, that one major dimension of my ongoing fascination with Elizabeth Bishop and her poetry has always been selfishly personal, for which I cannot apologize. Bishop’s poems, and more generally, her whole experience of Brazil—including, of course, her experience with and in Portuguese—continues to provide me with a series of almost impossibly rich and various pathways into thinking about poetry and about Brazil and everything connected with both. And of course Bishop’s life in Brazil provides me with another way, another optics through which to reflect on my own. Carmen Oliveira’s book provided me, in Portuguese, with a rich and complex sense of Bishop in Brazil, and a way of approaching that part of my life, too; translating the book opened out other, further, and more com-

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plex issues. Always, the question of any writer’s position amidst a foreign culture arose—and hence, by definition, a translator’s bifocal position too— because, in the first place, Bishop’s poems so often themselves enact insistent, urgent, and conflicted explorations of the tourist’s or the traveller’s eye and ear, the reasons for travel, the quality and motivation of the traveller’s perception. And the translator is, among other things, a perpetual traveller, one who cannot stop in either destination. Think, for one example among many, of the opening lines of Bishop’s first published “Brazilian” poem, “Arrival at Santos”: “Here is a coast; here is a harbor.” As if, after the long days at sea, even these bare alleged facts of the foreign landscape, named, are occasions for surprise, for description, maybe for doubt. And then, transpose that doubt into another, more explicitly textual, but related context: how and why could a white middle-aged Canadian Jewish male heterosexual academic—regardless of his own experience of living in Brazil, returning there frequently, or speaking the language—presume to translate from Brazilian Portuguese into English a dual biography, which draws intentionally and unapologetically on some of the conventions of fiction, to narrate the dramatic and near mythic love story of its two female protagonists, the American poet Elizabeth Bishop and the Brazilian architect and intellectual Lota de Macedo Soares? How can such a translator presume to engage the story of their 16 years of intimacy, mostly in Brazil, during the portentous era for that country between 1951 and 1967? What deep divides might yawn or, worse, cause a perpetual stammer and stutter between languages lushly Latinate or tautly Teutonic; between gender and genre, cultures and climates; between politics sexual and social, ideologies and ethics north and south? The answers to these questions, if they are not simply rhetorical devices— I don’t think they are—are not so quickly arrived at; more to the point, neither “he can” nor “he can’t,” “he should” nor “he shouldn’t” translate such a book is really much of an answer at all. In Portuguese, Flores Raras takes us through several parallel narratives: which ones should become foreground, which ones background for the translator, or, more importantly, for the North American reader; and in what ways might the relations among these parallel narratives shift for North American as distinct from Brazilian readers? Begin with the obvious: in English, the subtitle gets reversed, and A História de Lota de Macedo Soares e Elizabeth Bishop becomes The Story of Elizabeth Bishop and Lota de Macedo Soares. Let us not become immediately offended and leap to conclusions here. Behind this simple reversal is an American publisher’s sense—which might be quite right—that American interest at any rate will be caught first by their Pulitzer Prize–winning poet’s sojourn in exotic Brazil,

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and only second—although this is tricky, the ground might be shifting as we speak, and shifting at different rates for different sections of the North American reading public—by the fact that Bishop lived with, loved, and was loved by, an extraordinary woman such as Lota de Macedo Soares. As most reviewers point out, correctly, the biography itself is asymmetrical, affording Lota more presence than Bishop. Whether that reality is a reflection of the original biography’s Brazilian provenance or of the reality of the relationship is an interesting question, and I believe that the beginning of an answer might be, it is at least both. In Portuguese, one narrative line in bold follows the path of Lota’s life: her work on the aterro, still to this day most often misattributed to the famous Brazilian landscape designer Roberto Burle Marx, with whom, as the book shows in detail and for the first time, Lota had a protracted quarrel that eventually and permanently broke a decades-long friendship. The book tells of Lota’s building of her prize-winning house in Samambaia, in Petropólis, with Sergio Bernárdes, landscaped by Burle Marx; gives us Lota’s Brazilian, American, and English circle of friends and acquaintances—artists, politicians, writers, painters, architects, governor Carlos Lacerda, writer Rachel de Queiroz, painter Candido Portinari, Mario de Andrade, Pedro Nava, Carlos Leão, Hannah Arendt, Aldous Huxley, Alexander Calder, the American scholar Ashley Brown; and introduces us to Lota’s famous and notorious family. In Portuguese, Bishop (or “Dona Elizabetchy” to Edileusa the cook and eventual painter of loud and brassy canvasses in Petrópolis; “Dona Elizabetchy” as well to Lota’s and Elizabeth’s patron saint of a cook in Leme, “Joana,” or “Djuana,” as Bishop called her) is an American poet, shy, reclusive; apparently, under many Brazilian eyes, nastily critical and dismissive of Brazilian culture; transparently, under North American eyes then and certainly now, the greatest modern North American poet to write “about” Brazil in her poetry. I quote “about” because as I’ve suggested above—this is why I began with the story of how I came to Bishop—her poems create a Brazil, they take as their very subject the representation of Brazil. In Portuguese, Bishop is seen as an American poet in Brazil, through the eyes of a culture that understands the categories “American,” “woman,” and “poet” quite specifically and differently from the North American perceptions of these categories. Underlying the categories are specific cultural constructions of nationality, gender, and art, in other words, and these categories, although they shift and migrate over time, remain different in different cultures. So that while there has clearly been a recent evolution in the category “American” for Brazil as for other cultures, the history of Brazilian-American relations continues nevertheless to underwrite these shifts. In the 1950s and 60s,

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Brazil was, then as now, a culture very much drawn to Europe, and particularly to France, where there has for the whole 20th century been a significant Brazilian presence, particularly in Paris. And Brazil was (and is) also a culture riven with conflicted feelings about the United States, which was perceived both as a rich and generous benefactor and as a soulless Imperial and exploitative power. Lota was a passionate admirer and advocate of many aspects of American culture—including its public support of the arts, which she imported to Brazil—but she also deplored the cruder elements in American culture and was quick to denounce them, arguing that Brazil should take what it wanted or needed from the United States and to hell with the rest (which did not prevent some Brazilians from denouncing Lota as an Americanophile and seeing her relationship with Bishop as confirmation of this foolish infatuation). Second, the category “woman”: Lota was a loud, brash, kind, warm, aggressive, powerful, polemical, and political presence in the Brazil of the 1950s and 60s who stormed a largely male bastion—the fearsomely bureaucratic and maddeningly labyrinthine hierarchy of the civil service and the professional classes—architects, engineers, the navy, the municipal government—to design and see through to its completion the aterro, Flamengo Park. She was in equal measure admired, resented, and feared; Bishop—whom many Brazilians perceived as Lota’s drain, Lota’s cross to bear, the sickly woman whom Lota nursed and nourished—was more evidence of pernicious foreign—American—incursion. Lota loved Bishop openly and defiantly, but Bishop was not openly and defiantly like Lota; and so for some Brazilians, Bishop illustrated only in negative if not unnatural terms the women’s damaging love for each other. Even Lota’s close friends, as Oliveira shows, were divided on this issue; some admired Lota’s openness about her sexual orientation, while others chose not to look or to see it. But in almost all of Lota’s friends’ eyes, with a very few signal exceptions, Bishop preyed on Lota’s good nature. Third, “poet”: Brazilian culture has at once a greater and more popular appreciation than does North American culture for art in the widest sense— with the result that, for example, buildings, streets, parks, gardens, and international airports are more frequently named after writers, artists, musicians, composers than those in North America. But Brazil can also fall prey on occasion to a greater mystification of an art such as poetry. Bishop’s winning of the Pulitzer Prize for poetry while she was in Brazil—which was greeted with awe and pride—was accompanied by a mystifying exoticization of her role and position, as Oliveira brings out both through her accounts of the media’s reporting of the event—including reproductions of some of the published

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articles—and by her account of Lota’s women friends’ responses to Bishop’s poetry, particularly to her poetry set in Brazil. A translation should try to recognize these Brazilian categories, and many others, yes; but more importantly, the translator must try to give them to readers in English—not in “accurate” translation—but in English. The translator must remember first and last that he is writing in English. He cannot be, I very quickly found, a ventriloquist; he cannot create or replicate an identical twin, but maybe he can try to bring to life a fraternal one. You can see by now that there might be more than a few issues to negotiate with this translation, and no doubt by now from time to time you have already heard, too, how in writing about this experience I find myself constantly, and revealingly, slipping in what seems to me to be a downward direction, South. This “South” has always seemed to me—in the metaphorical cartography I evolved a long time ago and that has persisted, despite the stern warnings I issue to myself, from myself, in other more Northern norms and climes—to be a seductive, corrosively nostalgic and sentimental South, syntactically suspect, so that time and again I have to pull myself up, sharply, irony in attendance, North. Of course every writer, whether imagining Latin America and North America or other geographies entirely, negotiates his or her own North and South, but Bishop—think of the titles of her books of poems, the titles of her poems—was particularly and necessarily and urgently engaged with a north and south, or head and heart, or eye and ear, or, at times, the reverse; and translating Flores Raras e Banalíssimas engaged me, too, in what I like to think of as that “dazzling dialectic”—the phrase comes from Bishop’s late poem “Santarém,” and refers to the meeting of two rivers, the Amazon and the Tapajos, which are coloured very differently (the Tapajos is jet black, the Amazon a rich brown.) Bishop’s North and South emerge everywhere in the biography, as conflicted readings of both cultures inflect and at times infect each culture’s perceptions of the other; the issue of appropriation is not just one that arises for the translator of a text like this one, but one that arises internally, too, as Bishop, the American, asthmatic, alcoholic poet, writes about Brazil, from Brazil, for an American publication, which edits her piece in ways that distress Bishop and anger Brazilian readers, who perceive Bishop to be a grossly condescending, ignorant, and typically American commentator on Brazilian culture. This best and worst example of the currents of various cross-cultural conflicts looping around each other arises in a 1965 article that Bishop wrote on commission for The New York Times Magazine. I’ll read you the account of this episode from the translation, mid-book:

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The article on Rio followed the trajectory of all the literary commissions that Bishop had accepted for money. It got stuck, she wanted to give up in the middle, and she wound up sending in the text at the last minute, after a lot of dexedrine and strong coffee. It was published in The New York Times Magazine on March 7, 1965. When Bishop received her copy, she was dismayed. She disagreed with the selection of photos. And the title wasn’t what she had written! The editors had appropriated the theme of one of the Carnival songs that Bishop had translated for the article, the samba “Juvenal,” sung by Angelita Martinez: […] I’m very sorry for poor Juvenál, Hanging in the old Centrál All year long … He works in Leblon And lives in Delight And gets to work mornings Late at night. Oh, Marshál! Bishop quoted the samba in a context that exemplified, with the drama of the user of the Central Brazil railway company, how the poor Cariocan expressed his feelings about life’s hardships through music. The district of Encantado, in the translation into English, turned into Delight. That wouldn’t have been so important if it hadn’t been precisely this word that the editors picked out for the title they’d invented: “On the Railroad named Delight.” The title of the article suggested that Central Brazil transported its passengers to a place of glee, delectation, pleasure. The opposite of what the lyrics said. Bishop found this unacceptable. (Rare and Commonplace 126–27)

Here is Oliveira’s account of the scathing comments from a Brazilian journalist who attacks Bishop for her American piece, and Bishop’s reaction: The full page article by Ferdinando Castro, “Paternalism and Anti Americanism,” was crushing. Bishop was vitriolic, racist, and ungrateful to the country that had given her shelter. A false friend. Concluding that the Brazilian reader would not have access to Bishop’s text, Castro quoted from it excessively, to demonstrate to the Brazilian people the negativity and lack of empathy in this foreigner. He reacted indignantly to Bishop’s comments on the poor taste of the costume parades in the Municipal Theater and on the bad habit of Brazilian men of standing at the doors of corner bars at ten in the morning, watching the women go by. He felt himself wounded in his patriotic susceptibility when Bishop glanced at the large number of translations of North American playwrights and the small amount of material

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produced by Brazilian playwrights. The photos chosen had, for Castro, the hidden intention of showing Brazil as a country of niggers. And Bishop’s racism showed through clearly in the way she dealt with a billboard on which a little black maid kissed her white boss, radiant with happiness because the lady had bought a new stove. What did Bishop know of the soul of a Latin American democrat? Pieces like this only served to strengthen the conviction of the average U.S. reader that outside of his own country there flourished an immense desert of underdevelopment, waiting for the paternalistic assistance of the United States government. Heck, Mrs. Bishop didn’t need to amplify the misinformation of her countrymen, who ignored the fact that the Alliance for Progress wasn’t a philanthropic expedition but an economic investment. As far as the Rio slums went, had she forgotten what the housing in Harlem was like, in the heart of New York? Now, the biggest offence, the quatrocentenary offence, lay in the correction that Bishop had made in the epithet for Rio de Janeiro: “Rio is not a Marvelous City; it’s merely a marvelous setting for a city.” Castro sent a curt and gross message to Mrs. Bishop, “stalking on the crutches of her condescending racism”: Monkey, mind your own tail! (Rare and Commonplace 128)

You can see how the issue is further complicated here by Oliveira’s reading of Ferdinando Castro’s reading of Bishop’s reading, a reading itself shaped by an American editor for an American readership. And Castro’s reading begins with the misappropriation, which he attributes to Bishop, by the American editor of Bishop’s translation of Encantada, the name of a poor working-class district, which becomes the title of Bishop’s piece, to her dismay. There are many lessons to be learned here, I think, beyond understanding yet again that context is crucial, and that a text is never inert, but is rather an enunciation that always implicates reader, writer, culture—or several cultures. Finally, to begin to end where I began: what does it mean to say that one of the emphases of Flores Raras in Portuguese—and I think this is a strength of the Brazilian book—is, first and last, on language? I mean something quite explicit as well as general. By way of example, here is a brief excerpt from the opening chapter, “Oh Tourist.” Often, Flores Raras will quote, or reflect upon a phrase or several lines or more from Bishop’s poems; this opening chapter’s title is a phrase from Bishop’s first published poem about Brazil,“Arrival at Santos.” In this passage, with which the first chapter ends, the first subject is Bishop’s apprehension of the Portuguese language; the passage then modulates into a more wide-ranging story. I will give it to you first in Portuguese, if you’ll indulge me for about one minute, so that you can simply hear the sound of the first language, with the discordances of English and French intruding:

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Aliás, o português dos poetas e dos empregados era o que chegava aos ouvidos forasteiros de Bishop, já que Lota e Mary falava com ela em inglês. Parecia lhe uma língua cerdosa, dificílima. Lota garantia que não, que a língua era dulcíssima e com alguns estudos de botânica em pouco tempo Bishop estaria uma perita em rimas proparoxítonas. —Quer ver? Lígula. Pétala. Plúmula—demonstrava ela, devagarzinho, marota. Bishop se encantava com o humor de Lota. Conversar com ela era um deleite: era invulgarmente culta e articulada. Como americana, Bishop valorizava especialmente a formação européia de Lota. Era desconcertante, naquele fim de mundo, encontrar a mesa sempre posto com requinte impecável. Ou, no meio de uma conversa sobre música, vê la tirar da cartola as “Pièces Froides” de Erik Satie. E comentar o escândalo que fora a encenação de “Parade,” com música de Satie, argumento de Cocteau e cenários de Picasso. Lota, por sua vez, admirava o fato de Bishop ter estudado em Vassar e ter entre seus amigos celebridades como Marianne Moore e Robert Lowell. —Vou apresentar você a muita gente interessante, você vai ver, prometia Lota, pressionando convincentemente o braço de Bishop. (21–22)

Here is the published version of the passage in English: In fact, the Portuguese of the poets and of the maids was what came to Bishop’s foreigner’s ears, since Lota and Mary spoke to her in English. It seemed a difficult and harsh language to her. Lota assured her it wasn’t, that the language was very sweet and that with a little bit of botanical study, Bishop would soon become an expert in internal rhymes. “Do you want to see? Lígula. Pétala. Plúmula,” she pronounced, very slowly, roguishly. Bishop was enchanted with Lota’s humor. Talking to her was a delight; she was uncommonly cultured and articulate. As an American, Bishop especially valued Lota’s European education. Miles from nowhere, it was disconcerting to find the table always set with impeccable elegance. Or, in the middle of a discussion about music, to see Lota pull Erik Satie’s Pièces froides out of her top hat. Or talk about the scandal that attended the staging of Parade, with music by Satie, script by Cocteau, and scenery by Picasso. For her part, Lota was impressed that Bishop had gone to Vassar and had celebrities such as Marianne Moore and Robert Lowell among her friends. “I’m going to introduce you to a lot of interesting people, you’ll see,” promised Lota, holding Bishop’s arm. (Rare and Commonplace 13)

What is striking to me about this passage, and this recurs throughout the biography, is how, ineluctably, we move from and through language to cross and recross cultures and cultural norms, constructions, and expectations. We

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begin with language, but immediately we are confronted with class, economic, and national divisions: the first Portuguese that Bishop hears (or reads) is that of the poets and the maids because Lota and Mary Morse, the woman Bishop displaced in Lota’s affections, speak to her in English. The Portuguese that Edileusa speaks is inflected with folklore, with kitchen slang and music, with chants and curses and country songs, and Bishop was delighted with and fascinated by this richly polyglot and mongrel idiom, and so is Oliveira, quoting Edileusa at every turn. It is not only that Mary and Lota speak to her in English that separates them from Edileusa, but that in Portuguese they speak a different language: Mary is never given to us as a native speaker of Portuguese, and Lota revels in a range of idioms, speaking and writing across the widest possible spectrum of the language, from straight gutter talk, to florid curse, to Latinate officialese, with occasional French and English in attendance. The biography is among other things a rendering of conversations— this is one point at which Oliveira has been accused by some of fictional invention. The “lígula, pétala, plúmula” sequence above, as Lota pronounces the syllables slowly and roguishly for Bishop, is connected to all of the many occasions in the book where the sound and sense of Portuguese convey some aspect of Brazilian class and culture. Edileusa, the cook at Samambaia, or Joana, the cook in Leme, would never pronounce or utter those enticing syllabics; these are Lota’s special province, and attest to Lota’s station and learning. Now the passage can modulate into a more direct report on Lota’s fascination for Bishop, as a European-educated but also a thoroughly Brazilian woman, making a home for herself and for Bishop at Samambaia, and living as a citizen of the world that recognizes Marianne Moore and Robert Lowell (and Cocteau and Picasso) as celebrated artists. How many borders does a translation cross and recross in this terrain? And how does appropriation figure in the equation, for better or for worse? It is probably apparent by now that I hold the view that a translation is by definition explicitly an act of appropriation, and perhaps a heightened appropriation, appropriation that might be—I am not sure of this—of a different and more explicit kind or degree than, say, the retelling of a Cree or Ojibwa legend in Canada. A translator, by definition, is appropriating one language and all that the language carries with it—instrumentally, referentially, ideologically; as enactment, as utterance, enunciation, or expression—and moving it into the realm of another language. Further: a male translator of a biography about the love story of two women is crossing boundaries of gender, just as a Canadian translator of a Brazilian biography is crossing national

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boundaries. More: I regard the individual biography of the translator—the fact that I have some familiarity with Brazil and Brazilian culture, or that I speak the language—as irrelevant to this part of the issue. But my question in response to the question posed immediately above is, how do we understand these acts of appropriation? I understand them as at once provisional and necessary. Provisional, in that translation, paradoxically, must always present itself as a version and the only version, in the sense that the translation, if it is to be good, or, in more pragmatic or transactional terms, “successful,” only is as good as the degree to which it allows or indeed encourages the reader to forget that there is an original text in another language. Paradoxically, then, the translation must in this sense erase the original—not only appropriate it but even erase it. At the same time, this translation, if not all translations, must also be provisional: it must carry, and carry in bold outline, as many traces as possible of its particular and non-universal origins—in this case, it must seem Brazilian; speak as if Brazilian; explain, narrate, report, argue, analyze as if it were Brazilian, because it is. The translation must give to a reader in English a complete story, self- contained, and allow that the story is provisional. Second, necessity: translation is, I think, necessarily an appropriative gesture in origin because, unlike the act of writing itself, where this part of the argument is not quite so clear, translation necessarily and explicitly relies upon, departs from, and originates in another text. Perhaps in this sense translation is more honest about the origins of its voice than other kinds of writing: even as it provisionally seeks at once to erase and to conserve the original text, it necessarily appropriates it. And how far is the distance, or how close is the proximity, between appropriation—and the strongly negative connotations the term has accrued in recent years—and adaptation? What of the ethics of these appropriative acts? Is translation the same kind of appropriation as that of land or territory? Is it a kind of theft? To translate, from the North, looking South: is that to reinscribe all of the sentimental, pseudoerotic, infantilizing, fetishizing condescensions of other more literal conquerors—to reinscribe, in the guise of sympathetic wonderment, North American paternalistic hierarchies of disdain for the developing world? No, I do not think that translation is necessarily a theft; nor do I think it is necessarily unethical, although clearly there are ethical dimensions to this work. As there are and were to Carmen Oliveira’s work when she translated Bishop’s poems into Portuguese—beautifully—and, at another level, when she wrote about Bishop in Brazil in Portuguese, bringing her home there—where Bishop was in fact attacked more than once not simply because she was American, but because she wrote about Brazil in ways that Brazilians found patronizing and

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offensive: a perception that devastated Bishop in the 1960s, as we have seen, and one that has largely faded in recent years, when Bishop has been ever more warmly received in Brazil, and when new and very fine translations of her poetry and of her letters into Portuguese have now appeared along with a one-woman play about her life in Brazil that has toured the country to rave reviews. Nor is this dance over: the Brazilian reception of Elizabeth Bishop will, I expect, change and change again over time. But that is another story. Perhaps it is appropriate to close this account, or argument, or analysis as I opened it, with a story. At the end of December 2000, I gratefully used my six-month leave from the University of Winnipeg to move to Brazil and visit family, teach a course on Canadian literature, and work with Carmen on the final draft of the translation (until then we’d been working for two years mostly through email and via a short visit to Brazil at the end of 1999 to finish the first draft). In late January 2001, I finished the last of the revisions to the revisions while spending a week with American friends, who had retired in Brazil after working in the country for many years, at their house in Petrópolis. I had just been again to the house in Samambaia, nearby, with Carmen— interestingly, I actually can’t remember now whether this was just before or just after the episode I’m going to tell you about—to see about getting some photos from the current owner of the house, Zuleika Torrealba, for illustrations for the translation, and I went again to Samambaia in mid-February, the third time I’d been there in about four years. In the late afternoon when I finished the last revision, I walked out into my friends’ garden with a drink. It was the height of summer, mid-January, around six o’clock, and quite warm, although Petrópolis is drier, a lot less humid, and somewhat cooler than Rio; this is why Dom Pedro, the Portuguese king, established his court there centuries earlier. There was a light in the garden that I had been peripherally aware of for a week, but that I now felt immersed in, bathed in: it was a faintly glowing and translucent violet light with lingering warmth from a sun that was not quite visible over the garden wall but that still radiated in the air; and what I felt, South, all the while chiding myself, North, was Lota and Bishop walking out into their garden a few miles away after Bishop had been writing all day and Lota yelling at the workers building their house around them. They were here, I thought to myself, here; they saw this light. Time went, and soon the sun went, but I like to think, south, that their presence returns, many evenings, in several languages, and appropriately so.

Note This chapter transcribes a lecture given at Laurentian University, 28 October 2002.

Translating North and South / Besner

Works Cited Bishop, Elizabeth and the editors of Life. Brazil. New York: Time Inc., 1962. ———. The Complete Poems 1927–1979. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1983. Goldensohn, Lorrie. Elizabeth Bishop: The Biography of a Poetry. New York: Columbia University Press, 1992. Millier, Brett. Elizabeth Bishop: Life and the Memory of It. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993. Oliveira, Carmen L. Flores Raras e Banalíssimas: A História de Lota de Macedo Soares e Elizabeth Bishop. Rio de Janeiro: Rocco, 1995. ———. Rare and Commonplace Flowers: The Story of Elizabeth Bishop and Lota de Macedo Soares. Trans. Neil Besner. New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2002.

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beverley curran

Dry Lips Moves to Tokyo: Does Indigenous Drama Translate?

n Lost in Translation (2003), middle-aged Hollywood star Bob Harris (Bill Murray) sits in a bar of a luxury hotel in Tokyo and wryly explains to Charlotte (Scarlett Johansson) his reason for being there: “[I’m] getting paid two million dollars to endorse a whiskey ad when I could be doing a play somewhere.” Travelling itself can be a version of improvised theatre, but Bob’s and Charlotte’s Anglophone angst confines them mainly to the hotel where they express impatience and amusement at how poorly English is spoken by the Japanese who accommodate their American monolingualism. In this chapter, I would like to consider a much bolder foray into Tokyo and translation by looking at a Native Canadian play staged in Japanese by Japanese actors, namely the Rakutendan 2001 production of Tomson Highway’s Dry Lips Oughta Move to Kapuskasing.1 The production is provocative because contemporary performances in Canada or Australia, for example, acknowledge the sensitive issue of cultural appropriation by casting Native actors to play Native roles. As Aboriginal director Wesley Enoch has explained, “[i]n indigenous productions, the politics of the play are written on the body.”2 If the bodies on stage erase that somatic representation of the political, then a consideration of Dry Lips in Tokyo is an opportunity to examine more carefully what gets lost in translation and what can be learned. For the Rakutendan production of Dry Lips, Highway was in consultation with director Wada Yoshio3 and applauded the decision to stage his drama in Japanese using Japanese actors. In fact, Highway has expressed frustration about the essentialist parameters within which the perception and the

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production of his plays have been obliged to operate: “I don’t see the racial difference between actors as long as they’re generous of spirit and skilled … Any time you say that only native actors have the right to play native roles, you put a nail in the coffin of another native playwright” (qtd. in Bush 49). Certainly, Highway, like other indigenous playwrights, has used drama as a way to get stories told and political discussion started. In staging these cultural histories in Japan, there is the potential to extend the discussion to include Japan’s own indigenous populations. Thus the performances in Japanese by Japanese actors not only show the “processes of negotiation” between artists of different cultures, but also point “to the creative capacity of such interactions to be developed within Japan’s cultural space” (Eckersall 2). This paper will look specifically at the Japanese translation and performance of Highway’s Dry Lips Oughta Move to Kapuskasing and consider the wider implications of such dramatic translations of indigenous works.

Dry Lips Moves to Tokyo Dry Lips is the first play written by a First Nations playwright from Canada to be staged in Japan,4 one of three plays5 featured in the 2001 Canadian Contemporary Drama Festival sponsored by the Canadian Embassy in Tokyo. I begin my consideration of the play’s translation and performance by looking at the promotional handbill for the Rakutendan production to see how Highway’s play was introduced to the Japanese public. The handbill for Dry Lips prominently displays the title of the play in both Japanese and English. The published play’s epigraph by Cree elder Lyle Longclaws also appears in Japanese: “before the healing can take place, the poison must first be exposed.” The background of the handbill is a colourful but blurred representation of a Native wearing the familiar Plains Indian war bonnet, an image found in a photograph of Sitting Bull and Buffalo Bill or George Catlin’s 1832 portrait of Four Bears, which has become an icon through replication “thousands of times, from the old travelling Wild West shows to Hollywood movies like Dances with Wolves” (Rios). It is a blurred depiction of an “American Indian,” then, that is used to visually promote Highway’s play to Japanese audiences. The illustration also provides the historical context used to locate Highway’s play. As the back of the handbill explains, The setting is a Canadian Indian reserve in 1990, the year Dances with Wolves opened in theatres, and 100 years after the first incident at Wounded Knee. With alcohol and Christianity brought from Europe, the Native people are losing their unique way of life, religion, and language. With the spirit of

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Nanabush and seven men, the first performance of a sensational play about “the revival of the goddess” comes to Japan! (my translation)

The handbill thus links Highway’s play to the few visual, cinematic, and historical touchstones of the American Indian that a Japanese audience might be familiar with in order to introduce a Native Canadian playwright’s radical representation of current Native life and the crucial mythic figure of the Trickster, the shape- and gender-shifting Nanabush. However, the introduction does not just harness clichés to promote the production. Its mention of the “first” (daiichiji) incident at Wounded Knee subtly evokes the 1973 siege where Native activists took a stand to end more than a century of “deceit and abuse at the hands of the US government” (Means 98). There is no suggestion, however, that the play has any relevance to indigenous populations in Japan with comparable histories of colonial oppression and displacement. Contemporary Japanese theatre scholar Peter Eckersall has noticed that intercultural theatre is currently popular in Japan, but Rakutendan “has been the sole example of a company working with indigenous issues” (2). Wada, the company’s artistic director, met Highway in 1999 on the playwright’s first trip to Japan. Wada initially wanted to stage a production of Rose, but the scale of the production proved too intimidating. His next choice was The Rez Sisters because he “felt that the women’s vibrant energy in the midst of such a sad story made it an important play for Japan today.”6 However, Rakutendan decided to stage Dry Lips instead because it seemed to present more powerfully the history of physical and mental oppression that North American colonization had imposed on Native lives, a history largely unknown to the Japanese audience.“For Japanese, the problems of Canadian indigenous peoples were utterly unfamiliar. The problems of the Ainu, the indigenous people of Japan, were also never seriously discussed” (Wada). In 1986, for example, Prime Minister Nakasone still publicly described Japan as a nation of homogenous people, reaffirming the ideology behind assimilative policies that saw the Ainu people as “former aborigines” who no longer were distinct from Japanese in name, language, or culture.7 In fact, it was not until 1991 that the Japanese government officially recognized the Ainu as an ethnic minority, and only in 1997 was a law enacted to protect the Ainu culture and traditions. With the aim to bring issues common to indigenous people in Canada and in Japan to the attention of Japanese audiences, the decision was made to perform Dry Lips. Contrary to Wada’s view of an absence of awareness in Japan of indigenous issues at home and elsewhere, critic Minami Yoshinari suggests that the interest Japanese audiences have in a play like Dry Lips is due precisely to its exploration of “the violation of Native Canadians’ human rights” (Minami 184).

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The recovery of indigenous language and culture is relevant to cultural and social issues in Japan, specifically the experiences of minority groups, such as the Ainu, and the discrimination against the burakumin,8 resident Koreans, and the colonized Okinawan people. Nevertheless, it seems safe to assume that Japanese audiences are far from fully aware of the oppressive histories of indigenous populations in Japan or in Canada. Given the assimilative policies embedded in those histories, however, the assertion of language and the visibility of the Native body seem to be crucial aspects of indigenous drama that can be undermined in translation. I now turn to the complex issue of translation in the staging of Dry Lips in Japan.

Staging Translation Highway is enthusiastic about the translation and production of his plays internationally, as well as their performance by actors who are neither Native nor native Cree (or Ojibwa) speakers, because he sees his drama as reflective of not only the Cree world, but also the world as a whole. Yet he is responsible as well for defining Native theatre as “theatre that is written, performed and produced by Native people themselves and theatre that speaks out on the culture and lives of this country’s [Canada’s] native people” (Shackleton 278). This definition, made when Highway was Artistic Director of Native Earth Performing Arts, directly addresses the issue of cultural appropriation by insisting on the integrity of the source text and its performance onstage by Native actors. Can Highway have it both ways? Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s discussion of “The Politics of Translation” suggests he can. She grounds her discussion in the idea that “it is not bodies of meaning that are carried in translation” (397), countering the necessity of physical Native bodies on stage with the idea of translation as a form of re-presentation in which parts or aspects stand in for the whole. In other words, the translation’s connection to its context is never complete: “mismatch and partiality come to seem the very condition for the production of cultural forms” (Harvey 221). Spivak’s theoretical argument gives support to trickster translation strategies that allow the politics written on the Native body to be carried in other aspects of the performance of translation itself. The terms that Spivak uses to understand the role of language and translation in the process of constructing meaning and identity are theatrical. For example, she describes translation as a “miming of responsibility” (397), implicating the body in its textual performance. She also calls language one of many elements, including gesture, pauses, and silence, that “stage” meaning. Spivak has also used the term “staging” in her essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?” to dis-

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tinguish the re-presentation of artistic production from the representation by proxy of the political and to suggest that the confrontation of the difference between these terms can be a creative interruption. Among the elements that construct meaning, she includes “chance,” which presents itself in different situations and makes meaning “swerve from the straight or true line of language-in-thought” (“Politics” 397). In terms of the specific play under discussion, “chance” might be recognized as a trickster translation tactic because of its disruptive possibilities. Spivak identifies logic, rhetoric, and silence as the three tiers operative in the “staging” of language, and sees all three demanding a translator’s engagement: “We must attempt to enter that staging, as one directs a play, as an actor interprets a script. That takes a different kind of effort from taking translation to be a matter of synonym, syntax, and local colour” (“Politics” 399). Logic moves from word to word, making clear connections (399) but the translator must also attend to the rhetoric, which interrupts the process of making meaning, “break[ing] the surface in not necessarily connected ways” (398). Spivak likens this disruptive rhetoricity to the “fraying” of the “selvedges of the language-textile” (398). The moment of linguistic chance then is found in the rhetoric. If I take Spivak’s theoretical staging of language in translation and apply it to the performance of Dry Lips, I can link the rhetorical moment of chance to the disruptive spirit of Nanabush on stage. The stage for the performance has two levels, upper and lower, which correspond respectively to the metaphysical, or mythical, and the “human” domain. The two tiers of the stage can also be seen as a configuration of the logical and rhetorical levels of language, respectively. The third tier of silence or the “absolute” fraying of language can be similarly located in the mute anguish of Dickie Bird Halked as he watches “what language can only point at” (Spivak, “Politics” 403): Nanabush in the spirit of his mother Black Lady Halked dead drunk and pregnant with the not-yet-born Dickie Bird. In other words, Highway’s original script can be seen as a staging of translation. Arguably the performance of the play in Japanese by Japanese actors foregrounds the cultural translation embedded in the play by disrupting the logical connection between the bodies of the actors onstage and the meaning they construct in the play. For example, in the play’s opening scene, Zachary Jeremiah Keechigeesik’s pants are almost ripped in half, a violent if comic staging of cultural fabric giving way and making space for the Native body on stage. Zachary exposes not only his body but his confusion about its own meaning by spending most of the play trying vainly to conceal his body with what remains of his pants. In the final scene, however, he finally comes together,

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not by regaining his clothes, but rather through the act of holding his baby daughter as he stands naked. In the Rakutendan production, a Japanese actor plays the role of Zachary, but the actor’s inability to conceal his body provokes a deliberately different and sustained emphasis on the staging of a translation of a Native play. In the final scene, Zachary will still be clothed. The representation of the Native body and tongue in other guises can be a translation strategy, then, that allows the play to stage the specific emotional and physical conditions of Native life, as well as those of a “sexed subject or gendered agent” (Spivak, “Politics” 408). This disrupts “the too-easy accessibility of translation as a transfer of substance” (411) and makes space for chance/rhetoric/Nanabush to “break the surface” of meaning and unpredictably alter the sense of translation and the play.

Dry Lips in Translation Spivak’s notion of staging translation implies that there are different tasks involved in the translation of the text and its performance. A translator engages with the signs of the text (Bassnett 107), while the director and actors deal with aspects related to its performance. The original script of Dry Lips is a multilingual text, using primarily English and Cree/Ojibwa. Sato Ayako, the translator of Highway’s play, translates the English into Japanese. The Cree/Ojibwa remains in the translated playscript in romaji, or the Roman alphabet, so that it looks as it does in the source text. In the production of Dry Lips, the Cree/Ojibwa is almost absent and appears most frequently in names, like Nanabush. Sawada Keiji, the sole translator of Australian-Aboriginal drama in Japan, has discussed the issue of mixing English and indigenous tongues in a dramatic text that is then translated into Japanese. According to Sawada, the departure text uses languages strategically: [T]here are words and phrases that define only members of an [indigenous] linguistic community. Although these … terms are embedded in a basically English text, [indigenous] identity and its message are different for those who do not understand … and those who do. (8)

Those who do not understand may be Native viewers whose access to their lost tongue is only through traces or rhythms interwoven with the English they now speak exclusively. Those who understand only the English and have no cultural connections may still recognize in the untranslated indigenous words a staged resistance to their understanding, a deliberate withholding in the refusal to translate. In other words, if the linguistic strategies are successful, all members

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of the audience should feel their own entanglement in a complex historical predicament. Certainly, a troubling history of colonization and assimilation exists in Japan. For example, from 1879 until the Second World War, the Ryukyu people of Okinawa were under pressure to assimilate by adopting the “superior” beliefs, behaviour, and language of the Japanese. The process of promoting Japanese culture and language was also one of eradicating the indigenous culture and language. The educational system was intent on implanting the Japanese identity in all Okinawans, and speaking Ryukyu (Okinawan) languages was a punishable offence. In a version of the dunce cap, students were humiliated for speaking their native languages by having a hougen fuda or “dialect label” hung around their neck. The language spoken in Okinawa was reduced to the status of an inferior regional dialect. Under assimilation, however, Okinawan shibai (theatre) developed, and its performance functioned to preserve the spoken language and cultural memory. In short, in the face of Japanese assimilationist policy, the Okinawan theatre became the centre of cultural preservation. Sawada offers the example of Uchina-guchi, a contemporary dramatic production by the Shouchikukageki theatre group that mixed Japanese and Okinawan dialogue. Japanese members of the audience viewed linguistic lapses as sources of humour, recognizing that they reflected the changes in lifestyle taking place between generations of Okinawans. However, for many Okinawan people, the use of Japanese carries with it an historical awareness or actual memory of the prohibited use of their language. Sawada does not believe that translation alone can raise the awareness of the Japanese audience. He compares the Japanese audience watching Okinawan drama with that of an Australian audience viewing Aboriginal drama, but his remarks are relevant to the translated performances of indigenous Canadian drama as well: Like the audience watching Aboriginal drama staged in Australian theatres, the Japanese audience watching Okinawan drama will not be able to understand the meaning of the [Okinawan] words that were used by the playwright. For something unexpected to happen while watching the performance, without recourse to song and gesture, to give meaning in some way to words of a foreign culture by some simple substitution is very difficult. On this point, translation does not really work. (8)

Sawada’s call for “something unexpected” rephrases, I think, Spivak’s idea of rhetorical disruption in textual translation and repositions it in terms of performance. Given the limits of the effects of code-switching on the ears of the audience, Sawada suggests that the disruption of translation be literally staged.

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As a playwright, Highway prioritizes performance over text. For him, the play does not exist in print: “It really exists only on stage. That’s where it lives. [The script] is just a map. It’s like looking at a map and you can see where everything is, but you don’t see the real land” (Curran 151). If we consider the translation of Dry Lips in terms of performance, we can directly confront the issue and effect of the Native body represented on stage by Japanese actors and how the political is enacted rather than inscribed by the disruptive spirit of Nanabush.

Performing Dry Lips in Japanese Before looking at the Rakutendan production of Dry Lips, I would like to try to summarize the rather complicated plot that entangles the seven male characters of the play. The story revolves around the creation of a Native woman’s hockey team, the Wasy Wailerettes, on the Wasaychigan Hill Indian Reserve, and the concern and resistance it generates among the Native men. The outrageous idea of a women’s hockey team turns out to be a dream that begins as Zachary Jeremiah Keechigeesak lies, passed out and naked, on a chesterfield at the start of the play. Zachary has ambitions to open the first pie-making business on the reserve and has made a proposal to receive funding from the band office. His bid for financial support competes with Big Joey’s vision of a chain of community radio stations. Big Joey, the reserve’s resident stud, comes home to find Zachary asleep naked on his couch. He threatens to tell Zachary’s wife that he has been partying with Big Joey’s live-in girlfriend, Gazelle Nataways, thus heightening the tension between the two men. Zachary and Big Joey used to be good friends. They were together, along with Creature Nataways and Spooky Lacroix, at Wounded Knee in South Dakota in 1973, 17 years earlier. That same year, all four were present in a crowded bar, along with Pierre St Pierre, the play’s oldest character, who has a big family, no job, and a drinking problem. There, Spooky’s sister, Black Lady Halked, nine months pregnant and drunk almost senseless, gave birth to Dickie Bird Halked,“in between beers … on the floor under a table, by the light of the jukebox” (Dry Lips 93). Dickie Bird was born with fetal alcohol syndrome; he cannot talk or think straight. He has never known his real father, although he is rumoured to be Big Joey. Spooky looks after Dickie Bird, trying to explain all that has happened from a Christian perspective. Simon Starblanket, who is a few years older than Dickie Bird, is looking elsewhere for salvation. He wants to return to the spiritual and linguistic traditions of his people in order to heal the community. Simon is in love with Patsy Pegahmagabow, the daughter of a medicine woman.

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Following the first hockey game of the Wasy Wailerettes, Patsy is raped by Dickie Bird Halked, as Big Joey and Creature Nataways stand by and do nothing. Immediately after the rape, Big Joey admits his paternity to Dickie Bird Halked and then attempts to shield his son from being arrested by remaining silent. In his drunken despairing rage following the news of the rape, Simon Starblanket accidentally shoots himself. In a final confrontation, Zachary accuses Big Joey of doing nothing to prevent Patsy’s rape, just as he did nothing, 17 years earlier, to stop Black Lady Halked from getting drunk. Big Joey admits that his lack of action stems from his fear and hatred of women and their growing power, but Spooky points out that women always had the power anyway. Another hockey game begins, and as Big Joey does the play-by-play commentary, Zachary slowly sleepwalks his way back through the events of the play, retracing his steps and shedding his clothes until he is again lying naked on a couch. This time, however, he is in his own house, and the woman waking him up with a kiss on his behind is his wife, Hera. Mixing English and hesitant Cree, Zachary converses with his wife, who corrects his lapses in the Native tongue. The last thing the audience sees is a beautiful Native man holding a beautiful Native girl. The last thing we hear before the lights go out is Hera laughing a “magical silvery Nanabush laugh” (130), and afterwards, in the darkness, the laugh of a baby. In short, Zachary’s dream is really a psychic search: the characters are all looking for something, whether it is a comic hunt for a lost skate or a pair of underpants, or a more profound and troubled quest to find a father or to retrieve spirituality. One of the most interesting things about the play is that, aside from Nanabush, who appears in the spirit of Gazelle Nataways, Patsy Pegahmagabow, and Black Lady Halked, there are no women on stage.9 However, the dominant physical presence of men belies the fact that the play is about the power of women and the restorative presence of Nanabush in the spirit of Native women. The opening moments of Rakutendan’s Dry Lips find Zachary (Shimofusa Gentarou) lying naked on the couch with the spotlight on his buttocks. Nanabush/Gazelle Nataways (Hirano Yayoi), in a short red wig and long feather boa, climbs from behind the couch and extends her body over the sleeping body of Zachary to form a cross. The superimposition of a female dimension onto the symbol of Christianity challenges the religion’s exclusion of women in its construction of spiritual meaning. The production critically continues to foreground Christianity as destructive and sexist throughout the play, culminating in the rape of Nanabush/Patsy Pegahmagabow with a luminous white cross. Issues of gender representation are present from the onset as Nanabush/

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Gazelle dons a “gigantic pair of false rubberized breasts,” in a deliberate distortion of a woman’s body. Such obvious artificiality makes the naked body appear, by contrast, completely “natural,” although Nanabush/Gazelle will tattoo Zachary’s bottom with the marks of her kisses, and the audience will soon be aware that the sleeping Native man is Japanese. Throughout the play, characters such as Creature Nataways (Robert Yamada) and Pierre St Pierre (Akugenta Yoshihira) wear clothes of red and yellow. Japanese audiences, aware of reductive colour-coding, especially in racist descriptions of themselves in the Western media during World War II, may read the colours as signifiers of ethnicity. However, the iconic signs used in the play, be they colour or crosses or powwow dancing bustles, undermine any sense of the play as realistic. There is no attempt, for example, to make a set that replicates a living room on a reserve. The “remains of a party” (15) that litter Big Joey’s room are crumpled sheets of reflective tin foil. Similarly, Simon Starblanket’s chanting and dancing are decidedly inauthentic; the director is not trying to simulate the reality of life on a reserve. Colour is used to signify not only ethnicity but also gender. Highway himself sees gender as a continuum and uses colour to explain that all men and women are both male and female. “The male is black, and the female is white and the in-between people are the ones who are pink and purple and orange and all the interesting colours” (Curran 146). We see Nanabush in her guises as Patsy and as the dancer clad in white, and as Black Lady Halked in black and brown, and as Gazelle in shades of pink, to suggest the range of genders the spirit may choose. Big Joey (Ikeda Hitoshi) is the only figure in black, albeit still with a little white kerchief tied around his neck. The skeins of wool that Spooky Lacroix (Kawanaka Kenjiro) uses in his knitting are white, the colour associated with Nanabush in the production, and the audience sees the men continually tangled up in the yarn. The production colours identities in other ways. For example, the blue booties on the ends of the cross on the wall in Spooky Lacroix’s house are arranged in a manji, a kind of swastika which Japanese audiences will recognize as the graphic designation of a shrine, but resonant too of the Nazi genocide. Some of the temporal, spatial, and rhetorical disruptions that take place during the first women’s hockey game interrupt both audience expectations and the performance. Near the end of Act One, the established division between the “mythic” upper stage inhabited by Nanabush and the “human” one below is disrupted by the appearance of Simon Starblanket (Ikeshita Judai) and Dickie Bird Halked (Hiramastsu Atsushi) on Nanabush’s turf. With Simon holding his powwow bustle and Dickie Bird Halked with cross in hand, their

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appearance seems to signal a cultural showdown. In the preceding scene, Spooky Lacroix and Big Joey quarrel violently over religion, so this appears to be a possible escalation of the tension between traditional Native and Christian beliefs. However, when Big Joey and the other men show up, they fill the upper stage as spectators for “Wounded Knee Three! Women’s version” (63): the hockey game. The hockey game is suggestive in terms of Canadian culture and in terms of gender, of the regulated nature of organized sports and the binary opposition of team play. However, this play’s disruptions of rhetoric, space, and time occur when the two levels of the stage, which have neatly distinguished the activities of the human and spiritual worlds, no longer function in that way. Instead, the men gather on the upper level, and mirror the audience’s position as they get ready to watch a hockey game. Further, the temporal idea of watching a play unfold is interrupted by another, that of being a spectator in the momentous present which is the motivation for attending a sporting event. Instead of a play within a play, there is a game within a play that complicates the viewing position and choices of the audience. All we see on stage are men. These men, like us, are spectators watching the hockey game we can only hear. The only figure on the ice is Pierre St Pierre, up until now the clown and comic relief in the production, circling the rink as the game’s suddenly sober referee. The women hockey players are not so much absent from the scene as absent in the scene (Morson 177) so what the audience witnesses as spectacle is a potential event, or chance. The audience does not need an actor’s body to indicate the difference between what is not yet known and indeterminacy: Ignorance is not the same thing as indeterminacy, any more than the suspension of disbelief is the same as belief. Narratives use one as a substitute for the other, but we sense the difference.… [I]n sports time, as in our ongoing lives, indeterminacy is not represented by a substitute, but is real. (Morson 175)

In this performance of sports time, there is a sense of what Spivak and Sawada mean by the disruption or surprise in staging translation as the spectators finds themselves collectively attentive to absence and possibility. In this scene, the production also disrupts at the linguistic level. The amplified voice of Big Joey calls the play with the first mix of Cree and English used onstage, “Welcome, ladies igwa gentlemen (69),” which, heard as uerukamu, redi-zu iguwa jentorumen, adds further texture to the translation. The powwow bustle, the white cross, the roving spotlights, the play-by-play commentary, the roar and confusion—Zachary watches the hockey game, throwing punches as

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if he were at a boxing match—is truly exciting, as if in the temporality of the sportscaster’s narration, there can be no foreshadowing (Morson 177). When Dickie Bird Halked suddenly falls to the ice, silence interrupts our immersion in absence and indeterminacy. The game stalls, the commentary becomes a repetition of Black Lady Halked’s name, and the atmosphere changes to one of almost hysterical pandemonium until the puck “disappears” and everything we see is in slow motion. The spotlight on the upper stage illuminates a jukebox, and Nanabush appears in the spirit of Black Lady Halked, drunk and pregnant, with the bulge of her stomach absurdly prominent. With an unborn Dickie Bird in her womb, she climbs atop the jukebox and drinks, as Kitty Wells sings “Honky Tonk Angels,” while her now grown son, Dickie Bird, a victim of fetal alcohol syndrome, watches from the “ice.” The harrowing scene ends with the Canadian dancer Monpetit, the Rakutendan’s additional Nanabush (see Note 9), presenting an ailing Native spirit. This Nanabush has no energy, no magic, no playfulness; wrapped in white, she slowly dances on the lower stage while the jukebox on the upper stage casts a shadow like a tombstone. In the second act, the link between Nanabush and the manipulation of the rhetorical is overt. The lights come up on a scene of several of the men knitting and limiting discussion to the hockey game, which ended with the disappearance of the puck in Gazelle Nataways’s cleavage. The lights go off. Highway’s stage directions specify: “The ‘kitchen lights’ go out momentarily and, to the men, inexplicably. Then they come back on. The men look about them, perplexed” (81). The Japanese production shows Nanabush/Gazelle Nataways controlling the lights with a snap of her fingers. Each time the lights come back on, the men uneasily find themselves in different positions in the room. First, Spooky and Pierre St Pierre are sitting at the table, and Zachary is on the couch. Next, Spooky is at the table, Zachary is standing in front of the couch, and Pierre St Pierre is behind the bar at the back of the stage. As he starts to climb over the bar, Nanabush snaps her fingers again. When the lights come on, Spooky is against the wall with his hands out, like a human cross; Pierre St Pierre is sitting at the table again, and Zachary is on the couch doing a headstand with his legs open like a “V.” The lights then change colour, and the blue light sets things in slow motion. Pierre St Pierre continues to discuss the puck incident, but he now delivers his lines in the style of a Noh actor. There is an interesting departure from the script during the next “lavender” sequence. Highway’s script calls for “strip music” coming from the jukebox and specifies that Nanabush/Gazelle dance on the kitchen table and strip down to her G-string and tassels. In the Rakutendan production, she does neither,

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and the music selected for the scene is not strip music, but Ray Stevens’s “Guitarzan,” a goofy novelty song from the 1970s about another performance of “going native.” The men start taking off their own and each other’s clothing, as if shedding their skins under the influence of Nanabush and her lavender light. The stages switch, so that the supernatural and the “real” worlds are no longer neatly distinguishable. In the third scene in Act Two, Nanabush/Black Lady Halked is on the upper stage, preparing to go out, but an almost naked Dickie Bird is up there, too. In the next scene, on the lower stage, Nanabush/Patsy is in the forest and finds the underdressed Dickie Bird. She invites him to speak “in Indian,” and the audience hears her coax: “How, weetamawin” [Come on, tell me]. Along with the language, Nanabush/Patsy speaks of sweetgrass (sui-togurasu in katakana) and fry bread (indian no age pan) and deer meat (shika no niku), at the same time that she tries to take the crucifix away from Dickie Bird. Then, as Big Joey and Creature watch from behind a rock, and as we watch from our seats, Dickie Bird rapes Nanabush/Patsy with the white cross, holding it like a sword. As she screams, Montpetit’s Nanabush crawls across the stage, dragging her body. She then rises to her feet and begins again the wraithlike dance she has done throughout the performance, and we finally understand the origins of the contorted choreography. In the final scenes, as Simon rages against Patsy’s rape, his lines mix Cree/ Ojibwa, Japanese, and “English.” In Cree and Ojibwa, he calls “Nanabush, Weesageechak” to come back, bringing to bear a grammar that does not distinguish gender to invoke a god that is both male and female. The English words we hear in phonetic pronunciation are “rape” (reipu) and “cunt” (kanto), violent and misogynist. When Nanabush/Patsy answers the grieving Simon, she corrects his vocabulary, offering shikyuu, the Japanese word for “womb.” Made up of two characters, shi for “child” and kyuu for “palace” or “shrine,” this word affords a striking alternative to the harsh English. In fact, this is a moment when translation changes the text. In Highway’s script, Nanabush/ Patsy offers Simon a change in register and attitude, but not in language. The Japanese word shikyuu shows how the meaning of women’s bodies constructed in one language can be reconstructed in another. The words make one aware that there is no radical shift in the imaginary; that both these terms limit the representation of women to our reproductive organs. Yet the juxtaposition also encourages us to think beyond this limitation and seek the possible meaning of any self and body imagined in another language or cultural context.

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After accidentally shooting himself, Simon appears on the upper stage wearing the two powwow bustles he has only held in previous scenes and dances on the upper stage against a full moon, while Montpetit as Nanabush dances with him on the lower stage. At this moment in the play, the difference between ceremony and theatre is powerfully performed. Simon’s dance on the “mythic” upper stage enacts a ritual, that is, a performance meant to “effect transformations” (Lane 266), but only the audience who knows its purpose understands it as more than entertainment. Highway is likely aware that the Indian Act (1880/1927) forbade ritual performances without permission; they were, however, permitted as entertainment for visiting foreign dignitaries. As Richard Lane points out,“the Indian Acts were a recognition that First Nations performance was highly efficacious and needed to be neutralized … by being turned into entertainment, a mere side-show rather than a process central to indigenous culture and spiritual belief ” (266). The Tokyo production stages its awareness that the dramatic translation itself is “a cultural instrument rather than a mark of cultural difference” (Spivak,“Politics” 409). Whether the audience recognizes its importance or not, the performance offers a chance for its significance to be felt, if not directly or completely understood.

Conclusion In the Rakutendan production, Dry Lips moves to Tokyo and, in the process, stages a different politics of linguistic and cultural translation. Performances in Canada are likely to have Native actors performing the roles, but much of the script they deliver is in English. In Tokyo, the bodies on stage are Japanese and so is most of the language the audience hears. Not only does the play travel, then, but the direction of translation counters the assimilative absorption of minority languages into a vehicular English and allows a meeting of different bodies and tongues, as well as the performance of “different differentiations” (Spivak, “Politics” 408). In its new position, it raises other possibilities to explore in other performances. What kind of cultural translation would happen if, in Japan, an indigenous theatre company were to perform a play like Dry Lips in English and Cree/Ojibwa? Would the Japanese audience still see a play in translation? Would the actors on stage feel the ground shift? What would happen if Dry Lips were to be staged in Ainu? Such questions suggest fraying points in the “networks of conditioning and expectations” (Brennan 58) that contain cultural productions, and which indigenous drama and translation in cahoots can open. Dry Lips’s move to Tokyo shows us that, contrary to the experience of Bob and Charlotte, being in translation can mean so much more than just being lost.

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Notes 1 Rakutendan performances of Dry Lips Oughta Move to Kapuskasing took place at Ryougoku Theatre Kai (X) in Tokyo 1–4 March 2001. The same company performed Highway’s The Rez Sisters 19–24 March 2002 and 25–29 February 2004. 2 Enoch, whose play Seven Stages of Grieving has been translated and performed in Japanese, and who has also produced Jane Harrison’s Stolen in Japan, made this comment in a talk that followed the 15 November 2003 evening performance of the Rakutendan production of Roger Bennett’s Up the Ladder at Repertoire Theatre Kaze in Tokyo. Other participants in the post-performance discussion were Australian drama translator Sawada Keiji, who translated Bennett’s play into Japanese; Kirk Page, an Aboriginal dancer who worked with the Rakutendan actors, who are both Japanese and Korean; and the Ainu composer Ikabe Futoshi, who was the show’s musical director. 3 I maintain the usual surname-first order of a Japanese name. 4 In 1981, Michel Tremblay’s play Bonjour, là, bonjour, became the first Canadian play to be translated and staged in Japan. The 1994 performance of George Ryga’s The Ecstasy of Rita Joe (1967) was the first dramatic production of a play concerned with a Native subject although not by a Native playwright. Rita Joe was presented by Halfmoon Theatre Company as part of the 1994 Canadian Theatre Festival sponsored by the Canadian Embassy in Tokyo, along with Sharon Pollock’s Blood Relations, and another Tremblay play, Albertine, en cinq temps. 5 The other two plays were Lee MacDougal’s High Life produced by Ryuzanji, and John Murrell’s Waiting for the Parade produced by Maple Leaf Theatre, established by Yoshihara Toyoshi and Kaiyama Takehira in October 2000. Yoshihara is the translator of about 25 Canadian plays that have been performed in Japan. 6 From private correspondence with the director, July 2004. The translation is my own. 7 In the construction of the modern nation-state, Japan annexed the regions of the Ainu people (now Hokkaido Prefecture) in the north, as well as the islands of the Ryukyu (now Okinawa Prefecture) in the south. The 1899 Hokkaido Former Aborigines Act denied the Ainu recognition as a people distinct from the Japanese, and it was not until 1991 that the Ainu were recognized as an ethnic minority. The act was repealed in 1997 and replaced by the current Culture Promotion Law, which protects the Ainu language and culture. The historical discrepancies between the Japanese and Ainu are based on assimilative policies since annexation in 1867, which encouraged Japanese settlement in Hokkaido and outlawed the use of the Ainu language. The Japanese government has ignored any attempts to seek redress. Government policies have similarly subjugated the indigenous population of Okinawa and prioritized Japanese national interests, as well as Japanese language and culture. The 1879 annexation of the Ryukyu Islands continued until 1945 when it was occupied by the American military, and the Japanese government handed over governing rights to the United States. Although the islands were returned to Japan in 1972, the American military presence has remained significant and has been a source of tension between the local people and the national government. 8 In Japanese society, the burakumin have been subject to discrimination and ostracization as occupants of the lowest rung on the social ladder, performing “unclean” jobs such as working with leather and performing executions. 9 In the 1989 production of Dry Lips by Theatre Passe Muraille and Native Earth Performing Arts, all Nanabush roles were played by Doris Linklater. In the Rakutendan

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production, four women play the roles of characters inhabited by Nanabush: Gazelle Nataways and Black Lady Halked are both played by Hirano Yayoi; Patsy Pegahmagabow, by Inomata Yoshiko; Zachary’s wife Hera, by Deguchi Keiko; an additional Nanabush presence that haunts the stage, by the dancer Jocelyne Monpetit.

Works Cited Bassnett, Susan. “Still Trapped in the Labyrinth: Further Reflections on Translation and Theatre.” Constructing Cultures: Essays on Literary Translation. Ed. Susan and André Lefevere. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. 90–108. Brennan, Timothy. “The Cuts of Language: The East/West of North/South.” Public Culture 13.1 (2001): 39–63. Bush, Catherine. “Tomson Highway: Words That Heal/ Le Cri du coeur.” En Route April 1999. 40–51. Curran, Beverley and Mitoko Hirabayashi. “A Magician of the Third Gender: An Interview with Tomson Highway, Canadian Native Playwright.” Bulletin of Aichi Shukutoku Junior College 37 (1998): 143–54. Eckersall, Peter. “Going ‘Up the Ladder’ with Rakutendan.” Ancient Future: Australian Arts Festival Japan 2003. 15 May 2004. http://ancientfuture.australia.or.jp/ eng/events/event_pages/up_the_ladder_report.doc. 1–3 Harvey, Keith. Intercultural Movements: American Gay in French Translation. Manchester: St Jerome Publishing, 2003. Highway, Tomson. The Rez Sisters. Saskatoon: Fifth House, 1988. ———. Dry Lips Oughta Move to Kapuskasing. Saskatoon: Fifth House, 1989. Lane, Richard. “Performing History: The Reconstruction of Gender and Race in British Columbia Drama.” Performing National Identities: International Perpectives on Contemporary Canadian Theatre. Ed. Sherrill Grace and Albert-Reiner Glaap. Vancouver: Talonbooks, 2003. 265–77. Lost in Translation. Dir. Sofia Coppola. American Zoetrope/Elemental Film, 2003. Means, Russell. “Making a Stand for Freedom.” Rolling Stone: The Seventies. Ed. Ashley Kahn, Holly George-Warren, and Shawn Dahl. Boston: Little, Brown. 98–101. Minami, Yoshinari. “Canadian Plays on the Japanese Stage.” Performing National Identities: International Perpectives on Contemporary Canadian Theatre. Ed. Sherrill Grace and Albert-Reiner Glaap. Vancouver: Talonbooks, 2003. 181–97. Morson, Gary Saul. Narrative and Freedom: The Shadows of Time. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1994. Rios, Delia M. “In a Chief ’s Portrait, the American Indian Image is Cast.” Newhouse News Service 2002. 20 November 2004. http://www.newhousenews.com/archive/ storyla112002.html Sato, Ayako, Trans. Dorairippusu nante kapusukeishingu ni opparatchimae [Dry Lips Oughta Move to Kapuskasing]. Tokyo: Jiritsu-shobo, 2001.

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Sawada, Keiji. “Aborijini gikyoku no nihonn jôen” [Aboriginal Drama and Japanese Performance]. Engeki kenkyuu sentaa kiyou [Waseda University Theatre Research Centre Research Bulletin] (January 2004): 7–16. Shackleton, Mark. “Can Weesageechak Keep Dancing? The Importance of Trickster Figures in the Work of Native Earth Dramatists, 1986–2000.” Performing National Identities: International Perspectives on Contemporary Canadian Theatre. Ed. Sherrill Grace and Albert-Reiner Glaap. Vancouver: Talonbooks, 2003. 278–88. Snell-Hornby, Mary. “‘Is this a dagger which I see before me?’: The Non-Verbal Language of Drama.” Nonverbal Communication and Translation: New Perspectives and Challenges in Literature, Interpretation and the Media. Ed. Fernando Poyatos. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1997. 187–201. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” In Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. Ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1988. 271–313. ———. “The Politics of Translation.” The Translation Studies Reader. Ed. Lawrence Venuti. London and New York: Routledge, 2000. 397–416. Tymoczko, Maria. “Post-Colonial Writing and Literary Translation.” Post-Colonial Translation: Theory and Practice. Ed. Susan Bassnett and Harish Travedi. London and New York: Routledge, 1999. 19–40. Wada, Yoshio. Personal correspondence. July 2004.

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judith woodsworth

Out of the Shadows: Translators Take Centre Stage

Mme de Sévigné compared translations to bad servants delivering the very opposite of the message with which they are charged. (Taylor 300)

his quotation reflects a common perception of translation and translators in the days of Mme de Sévigné, the 17th-century French writer so often cited in the purported “diaries” of Proust’s mother, which form one of the narrative threads in Kate Taylor’s novel, Mme Proust and the Kosher Kitchen. Translation is viewed as a “bad servant,” hence not only inferior, but also, in accordance with the prevailing “belles infidèles” notion, a betrayal. Mme Proust herself does not accept this downgrading of the act of translation. On the contrary, “setting aside the doubts of Mme de Sévigné,” she resolutely works her way through Ruskin’s The Bible of Amiens, producing an initial French draft on the basis of which her son Marcel is able to create a more literary, and publishable, work of art. Mme Proust and the Kosher Kitchen, a work of fiction layering writing upon reading and translating, is one of a number of recent literary works in which translators are protagonists and in which the act of translation is given a place of importance. Translators, who throughout history have been “widely scorned … severely criticized … distrusted, even called turncoats and traitors” (Delisle and Woodsworth xiii), have only recently emerged from the shadows. Often anonymous, invisible, or at best unappreciated, their work has long been conveyed by the kind of negative metaphor cited above. As John Dryden, a

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contemporary of Mme de Sévigné, writes in the “Dedication” to his translation of the Aeneid, for example, a translator is like a slave labouring in another man’s vineyard (qtd. in Lefevere 24). However, the translation profession has grown and matured since the second half of the 20th century, a period of increasing internationalization and cultural exchange. Translators have become more visible and the profession better organized. To give some examples of these developments, sophisticated training programs have been established and legislation has been enacted to allow for the designation of “certified” translators and to improve copyright protection of translations. Canada, a country of official bilingualism by virtue of specific legislation, as well as a country of significant immigration, has necessarily been the location of a considerable volume of translation in all fields. Consequently, Canada has been at the forefront of the move to enhance the social, legal, and economic status of translators. Canadians have also been major contributors to the discipline of translation studies. Translation scholarship in Canada has focused on translation as a linguistic phenomenon, and then as a cultural one. Efforts have been made to document discourse about translation and to examine metatexts or prefatorial material in which translators have reflected on their work, displaying an ever increasing sense of self on the part of translators. In addition, Canada has been a breeding ground for bilingual, even multilingual, texts, in which linguistic and cultural difference are in the foreground, translation a central theme, and translators the characters.

Women’s double discourse Canadian women writers have placed particular emphasis on the phenomena of language and translation. In a sense, women’s discourse is always double, and writing is always a translative process. Two feminist writers provide interesting examples: prominent Quebec feminist Nicole Brossard has used language and “linguistic deconstruction” (Flotow 15) as a powerful tool. Franco-Ontarian Lola Lemire Tostevin, less well known but equally interesting for our purposes, explores questions of linguistic identity in works of poetry and prose featuring translation and bilingual writing. In these revolutionary forms of writing, translation and identity are inextricably linked. Brossard’s post-modern novel, Le Désert mauve,1 is about translation itself, although, curiously, it presents translation from French to French. Its form has been described as a triptych: the first part is a narrative, the third is its purported “translation,” and the central part recounts how the “translator” discovers the book, decides to translate, and reflects on the process. Through this French-to-French translation, Le Désert mauve provides a “meditation on

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writing as translation” and highlights the pull experienced by Francophone women between opposite poles: “feminist consciousness as a simultaneous translation from an alien tongue” (Parker 134). The alien tongue is English, of course, but also patriarchal language in general.2 The language and culture of Quebec defend themselves against English-Canadian culture at home and against the encroaching Anglophone culture from the United States (which at the same time has its attractions); in addition, Quebec must distinguish itself from France. Lola Lemire Tostevin, a Franco-Ontarian who lives and writes in English, “makes a textual strategy of speaking with a forked tongue” (Moyes 75). In earlier volumes of poetry, for example, some lines and even some poems are written in French. In her 1994 novel Frog Moon, the narrator, like herself, is a Franco-Ontarian who ends up finding her voice as an English writer. For Tostevin, the loss of the mother tongue is problematic, experienced as “a loss of memory or identity, a loss that intensifies the fragmentation of the subject” (Billingham 111), which is reflected in the shifting of the narrator Laura’s voice from first to third person. As she gravitates toward English, and attempts to confront and reconcile the dual/duelling forces within her, “translative activity allows for much creativity and diversity” (Ross 166). Nicknamed “Khaki,” which means “frog” in Cree, Laura is like an amphibian herself—able to mutate, live a double existence, and construct an identity that lies “in between.” Her dualism transforms itself from a loss and silence into a gain and expression through creation. Lola Lemire Tostevin’s relation to her Northern Ontario identity translates itself through code-switching, or what Sherry Simon has called “effets de traduction” (Trafic 172, for example), through personal reflections, and in the end, through an explicit reference to the act of “translation.” In the excerpt that follows, note the words with the prefix “trans”: The only tongue that could tell my parents’ story is the tongue I have all but lost … I cultivated my second language and it replaced my first. As he [my father] speaks to me in French, the words, as I wrote them down, transform themselves into English. Not only do I translate his telling into writing, his history into fiction, but his language into another language . . . Perhaps this is a writer’s function, or the daughter’s role. The denial of a family history as simple reconstruction, each translation a facet in the endless possibilities of a story or a life … The writer as alchemist, practising the arcane art of transmuting elements of reality into the shining, enduring element of fiction. The daughter practising the magical art of transfiguration. (Tostevin 161)

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Tostevin considers that translation has played a major role in her writing, “since all language is a translation of sorts” and since writing is an ongoing translation process.3 This article examines the figure of the translator in two recent examples: the first is the last complete novel published by Carol Shields and the other a first novel by Toronto journalist Kate Taylor.4 Translators take centre stage, as it were: the protagonists are actual translators, working from one language to another (as opposed to the pseudo-translator in Brossard’s novel), and the act of translation itself (as opposed to the figurative or metaphorical presence of translation in Tostevin’s novel) is actually embedded in the plot. It is no coincidence that these works are written by women. In both instances, as in the case of Brossard or Tostevin, translation is associated with a search for identity, with loss and upheaval, with clashes of culture, and ultimately, with finding one’s voice. While perhaps less radical, less experimental in their treatment of language than Brossard or Tostevin, Shields and Taylor have produced feminist novels that could be considered both post-modern and “metafictions” in that they both involve writers/translators reflecting about writing—which Shields describes as “incestuous waters, a woman writer who is writing about a woman writer who is writing” (208). They weave together themes of hybridity, search for identity, and cultural exchange.

Carol Shields’s Reta Winters as translator and writer The protagonist of Carol Shields’s novel Unless is both a translator and novelist. Beginning as the creator of “light” fiction, and at the same time translator of a seasoned feminist French author, Reta Winters eventually gives up translating, devoting more of her creative energies to her own writing, and leaving the French author to “self-translate.” The central drama in the novel is the loss of Reta’s eldest daughter, Norah, who has mysteriously taken to sitting on a Toronto street corner in a near catatonic state, holding up a sign bearing only one word: goodness. Her family, unable to understand this sudden flight from normalcy, nevertheless tries to help her out— with food, money, warm clothes, for example. Parallel to the main plot is perhaps the true “drama”: the way in which translator/writer Reta Winters comes to terms with her own grief, and with the general injustice suffered by all oppressed and silenced women, by finding her own voice as a writer. At the end of the novel, the mystery is revealed: Norah was injured while reaching out to help a Muslim woman who had set herself on fire. The trauma caused her to reject her boyfriend, family, school, and middle-class comfort,

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and take to the streets. Learning about Norah—and her brush with “otherness”—brings Reta back to her own reality and closer to her true mission of writing. The book begins with a bibliography. Expressing sympathy for the disappearance of Reta’s daughter, a friend says to her, “you have your writing,” which leads Reta to “count her blessings” by enumerating her publications. The long and detailed list (3–16) is worth examining for its striking alternation between translation and writing, and for the evolution of her work to increasingly serious fiction. Reta’s literary output begins with a translation and introduction to Danielle Westerman’s book of poetry, Isolation (L’Île). Completed one month before Norah was born, the translation is tied to the fate of the daughter; the gestation and delivery of both occur at the same time. Danielle Westerman, an older, established writer, was Reta’s professor in the French Department at University of Toronto. She has served as Reta’s mentor and has guided her, and others, personally and professionally, even finding her an editor for her fiction (175). Reta’s views on this early work reflect the age-old inferiority translators feel toward the authors they are translating: “I am a little uneasy about claiming Isolation as my own writing.” Westerman, on the other hand, holds the more current view, advanced by translation theorists in the later 20th century: “translation, especially of poetry, is a creative act. Writing and translating are convivial … not oppositional, and not at all hierarchical” (3). Reta calls her introduction to Isolation “creative,” but for the wrong reasons: not because it is her own work of criticism, but because she feels that she has no idea what she is talking about. On rereading it, she feels “shame” and “pretension,” and attributes the “problem” to having been too heavily into Derrida at the time (4). These feelings of self-doubt and of being an “imposter” are not uncommon, as we will see later on when looking at Taylor’s character, Marie Prévost. The translation is followed by a short story entitled “The Brightness of a Star,” which appears in an anthology of Young Ontario Voices published by the “Pink Onion Press.” Reta downplays or undervalues her own writing by comparing it to a (female) hobby: “I dabbled in writing. It was my macramé, my knitting” (4) and further trivializes it with the rather comical name of the press. She characterizes her next short story,“Icon,” as derivative,“rather Jamesian”; it is self-published by her group of friends who have given themselves the suggestive title of “Stepping Stone Press” (5). In comparison, her next work, Alive, a translation of Pour Vivre, volume one of Danielle Westerman’s memoirs, is published by Random House, a more

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legitimate publishing house than Pink Onion or Stepping Stone.5 She remains self-effacing about the status of the translation, and self-deprecating about its quality compared with the original, quoting a review in the Toronto Star that has “slammed” the translation as “clumsy” (6). In the following quotation, she is slightly more assertive, while still deferring to the “authority” of the author. I may be claiming translation as an act of originality, but, as I have already said, it was Danielle, in her benign way, wrinkling her disorderly forehead, who had urged me to believe that the act of shuffling elegant French into readable and stable English is an aesthetic performance. (6)

Next, Reta writes a bilingual text, commissioned for an encyclopaedia of art. She loses a year, as she says, “busy thinking about the business of being a writer, about being writerly.” Combining personal concerns with professional ones, as she will continue to do throughout the novel, she worries about “being in Danielle’s shadow, never mind Derrida, and needing my own writing space” (6). She then translates Westerman’s Les femmes et le pouvoir, the “immense” second volume of the memoirs, published as Women Waiting. This time, she reports, the reviews are good: The Globe and Mail describes her work as “sparkling and full of ease” and The New York Times as “an achievement” (8). This success sparks offers to do more translation, but Reta begins to feel that she could write her own material. Looking for a voice and genre, she rejects both short stories and kiddie lit. Her next publication is Shakespeare and Flowers. Despite the fact that it is published in San Francisco, and that she gets a contract even before she writes one word, she still does not view this as serious writing, as indicated by her label for it: “a wee giftie book” to be sold in greeting card stores (9). She turns once again to translation, doing Westerman’s Eros: Essays. Hastily translated, the book is nonetheless hugely successful (10). After this, Reta and her family visit the region of France where Westerman grew up. On this vacation, Reta reads novels day after day, and gets an idea for a novel of her own: it will be about two characters, Alicia and Roman, who live in Wychwood, a city like Toronto. Her title, My Thyme Is Up, is a pun, from an old family joke, because she intends to write a light novel, with a happy ending (14). This book wins the Offenden Prize, which recognizes “literary quality and … accessibility,” thus confirming the author’s intentions and relegating the work, as she says, to “minor status” (81). After this first novel, Reta translates The Middle Years, volume three of the memoirs. As she praises the stylistic strength of this work, the “gorgeous flu-

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idity and expansion of phrase,” which her translation, she claims, doesn’t begin to convey, Reta mirrors many literary translators whose prefaces and other “metatexts” are apologies for their inadequacies (14). At the conclusion of this “auto-bibliography,” Reta is planning a sequel to My Thyme Is Up. She has no idea what will happen in this book, she says. The gestation of her second novel and the transformation of her work into serious, legitimate writing will run parallel to the resolution of her daughter’s situation, and ultimate reconciliation. Reta Winters is bilingual. Her mother was a pure laine Francophone from Montreal and her father, who was from Edinburgh, spoke English with a Scottish accent. Her mother always spoke to her in French and her father in English, and she was allowed to reply in either language. There is no apparent angst over her linguistic duality or mixed background; in fact, she benefits from this immersion in two languages: “doubleness clarified the world … Every object, every action, had an echo, an explanation … The French-English dictionary with its thready blue cover was our family bible, since we were a family unattached to formal religious practice” (146). Unless, then, as can be expected, is laced with a fair dose of French words and phrases—code-switching that reflects the narrator’s upbringing as the child of a Francophone mother, her occupation as a translator, and her friendship with the French woman whose life work she is translating. It is telling that the character in her novel, Roman,6 is a trombonist, an occupation that came to her quite by chance as she fiddled with a paper clip, which is called a trombone in French (266). While Reta appears to feel at home in her bilingualism, other characters grapple with their “in-betweenness” and lost identity. In the novel within the novel, Roman grieves for his relatives in Albania with whom he has lost touch (237) and longs to visit the land of his forefathers (267). Danielle Westerman has emigrated to Canada from France; she is a professor at an English-Canadian institution, University of Toronto, where she teaches French civilization. Westerman is Jewish, a Holocaust survivor, and bisexual; The Middle Years, volume three of her memoirs, explores numerous love affairs with both men and women, we are told (14). She is the archetypical exile, having left her own family after her mother tried to kill her, and having left Europe after the Nazis tried to annihilate her race. At the end of Unless, in the “book within the book” that is Danielle Westerman’s memoirs, she is finally reconciling her two identities as daughter and writer (319). Arthur Springer, Reta’s new publisher, says that “identity is the dominant mystery of our lives” (279). There is a touch of irony in this because Springer

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is not an altogether sympathetic character. Having tried to exert his power over Reta in order to substantially edit her book, he also comes across as overly pedantic. However, he does underline a common thread in this novel, and Taylor’s, which is the link between writing and the quest for identity. Unless offers interesting commentary on translation and relations between translators and writers. Early on, after the publication of one of the translations, Reta is asked to deal with the media since Westerman is “too old, too distinguished” to handle a day of interviews (25). Thus the translator speaks with the voice of the author, both in the text and about the text. One interviewer asks her an important question: “Wouldn’t you prefer, Mrs. Winters, to pursue your own writing rather than translate Dr. Westerman’s work?” (30). At times, Reta is torn between her different activities—her book on animals in Shakespeare as a follow-up to Shakespeare and Flowers, the translation of the fourth and final volume of Danielle Westerman’s memoirs, writing her second novel, and cleaning her house (63). Nonetheless, she defines herself as a “writer and translator (French into English)” (43). She makes observations about the translation of Westerman’s L’Île (Isolation): I found the poems very tricky to translate (poetry is not my specialty), but I was younger then and willing to stretch myself and be endlessly patient about moving words back and forth, singing them out loud under my breath as translators are told to do, attempting to bring the fullness of the poet’s intention to the work. The poems were like little toys with moving parts, full of puns and allusions to early feminism, most of which I let fall into a black hole, I’m sorry to say. (101)

What Shields gets right about the translation of poetry is its difficulty, the central importance of musicality, the helpful technique of reading out loud, and the importance of trying to retain the intention (if not the exact meaning) of the translator. The manner in which the process is described, i.e., metaphorically, is common in descriptions of poetic translation.7 It is interesting to note that Reta feels that she has not been faithful to the feminist underpinnings of Westerman’s writing, and that she needs to make apologies for her betrayal. In the novel, there are discussions of some of the “problems of translation” at the micro level. The term unless, for example, cannot be expressed adequately in French: “À moins que doesn’t have quite the heft and sauf is crude” (224–25). Interesting as well is the bond between author and translator. When volume two of the memoirs comes out, Danielle calls Reta “my true sister” (“ma vraie soeur”) (8).8 The novel also sheds light on the hierarchical relations between writer and translator, on the “authority” of the author: West-

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erman “is a woman with twenty-seven honorary degrees and she’s given the world a shelf full of books. She’s given her thoughts, her diagram for a new, better, just world” (223). Reta, a former student of Westerman, remains her friend and continues to be guided by her wisdom, frequently quoting her. For example: “‘The trouble with children,’ Danielle Westerman once said, ‘is that they aren’t interested in childhood’” (142). It is typical of Carol Shields that the wisdom of Westerman should extend to ordinary woman’s activities: “Danielle Westerman and I have discussed the matter of housework” (62). On the other hand, one of Westerman’s transcendental dictums, “Goodness but not greatness,” is not only quoted throughout the novel (115, 249, 283), but is also echoed in the sign held up by Norah as she sits on the street corner. For Reta, Danielle is “the other voice in [her] head, almost always there, sometimes the echo, sometimes the soloist” (151). Reta heeds this voice, sometimes imitating her in very concrete ways: “Why do I have red curtains in my kitchen? Because Simone de Beauvoir loved red curtains; because Danielle Westerman loves red curtains out of respect for Beauvoir, and I love them because of Danielle” (170). Danielle once wore her hair in a “shining chignon,” which is how Reta now wears her hair,“a tribute—and not unconscious at all—to young Danielle, early Danielle, that vibrant girl-woman who invented feminism” (180). Nevertheless, we do witness the translator trying to assert her own authority. She makes suggestions about the author’s choice of words, although timidly and without persisting: “I let it go. A writer’s parti pris are always—must be— accommodated by her translator. I know that much after all these years” (63). She even disagrees with Danielle Westerman in a discussion about editors, but does not have the energy to quarrel directly (177). As Reta makes progress on her new novel, she becomes less inclined to translate. She and Danielle meet, they discuss volume four of the translation, which Reta has decided not to translate, to Danielle’s “consternation,” and then they discuss the problems of Alicia and Roman in Reta’s novel (181). This marks an important transition from translating to writing, and puts the two women on a more equal footing. Danielle, however, does not suffer this transformation easily. She becomes “cranky,” shows her “disappointment,” and accuses Reta of abandoning the “discourse” for the “unworthiness of novel writing.” Reta, still lacking confidence in her own form of expression, finds herself conceding: “what really is the point of novel writing when the unjust world howls and writhes?” (223–24). In addition to writing novels, Reta finds her voice by composing letters. These letters are addressed to fictitious recipients, signed with some variation of her name and address, and always left unsent. Interspersed in the text, they

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are described as the letters of a “madwoman, constructing a fantasy of female exclusion,” which, interestingly, she keeps from Danielle (227). Once Reta has abandoned her translation project, Danielle Westerman sets out to translate her own work—which is a very rare enterprise indeed in real life. While the results are described as “both accurate and charming,” Danielle cannot really be said to be working at full capacity. She translates about a page a day, which she faxes to Reta for “tweaking” (suggesting the collaborative approach we will see later when reading about Proust’s translations of Ruskin). Yet, translation is keeping her mind sharp, in the way that crossword puzzles do, so that, at age 86, she keeps writing and expanding her memoirs (319). Danielle, Reta’s mentor, has now become both author and translator. Conversely, upon abandoning translation, Reta the writer comes of age. She begins to plan her third novel, which she describes as a “gift from Danielle Westerman” and which she characterizes—still timidly—as an almost “serious” book: “There you have it: stillness and power, sadness and resignation, contradictions and irrationality. Almost, you might say, the materials of a serious book” (320, my emphasis). Unless is a story of coming to terms with powerlessness by asking questions, breaking the silence, and finding one’s voice. Carol Shields’s character, Reta, interprets not only the work of Danielle Westerman, but also her person when she describes Danielle as having absorbed the “paradox of subjugation” (251). Reta’s husband, a doctor, draws a parallel between Danielle Westerman, their daughter Norah, and his mother, who have all suffered trauma and still suffer shame or sorrow (269). Reta builds on her husband’s theory and maintains that the world is split in two, between those who are born with power and those who are not: those like Norah, like Danielle Westerman, like my mother, like my motherin-law, like me, like all of us who fall into the uncoded otherness in which the power to assert ourselves and claim our lives has been displaced by a compulsion to shut down our bodies and seal our mouths and be as nothing against the fireworks and streaking stars and blinding light of the Big Bang. That’s the problem. (270)

Danielle Westerman had previously interpreted the fate of Norah in the light of powerlessness. Reta recalls another one of her statements that she had not believed when she first translated it and which now becomes relevant: “Subversion of society is possible for a mere few; inversion is more commonly the tactic for the powerless, a retreat from society that borders on the catatonic” (218). “Unless we ask questions,” Reta realizes. She asks Danielle Westerman

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what interrupted her childhood and learns that it was her mother who had tried to strangle her when she stayed out late one night. She also asks her motherin-law why she has been silent during the months of Norah’s absence, to which her mother-in-law replies: “Because no one asked me.” Publisher Arthur Springer uses a cliché technique on her mother-in-law: “Tell me all about your life, Lois,” and she begins to speak. Reta remarks that no one, not even her own husband, has ever said: Tell me all about your life, Reta (316). Asking questions and listening for the answers allows for reading, interpretation, translation, and ultimately writing. This is the way to take control, to take back the power: modes of subversion rather than inversion. Reta comes to the conclusion that this is the way to break the silence to which women are so often relegated, and to find and give expression to one’s voice, in a dignified and serious medium.

Dualisms and translation in Kate Taylor’s tale of three women Translation is a prominent feature of the three narrative strands that make up Kate Taylor’s novel, Mme Proust and the Kosher Kitchen, which extends from the late 19th century into the dawn of the 21st century. The first, told in the first person, is the story of Marie Prévost, a conference interpreter who travels to France to do research on Proust at the Bibliothèque Nationale, posing as an “interloper,” a “tourist in the halls of scholarship” (17–18).9 Instead of the important Proust manuscripts, she is given access to the diaries of his mother, which she sets out to translate. Marie has fallen in love with Max, the son of Sarah Bensimon. The second narrative, told by Marie, is Sarah’s story; she came to Canada as an immigrant child and has been “translating” her experience in her own particular way. The diaries make up the third strand. They tell the story of Marcel Proust, filtered or “translated” by his mother, Mme Proust, who, according to the novel, helped her famous son produce and publish translations, thereby launching his literary career. While the diaries of Mme Proust are fictitious, they are grounded in historical research. Taylor drew on Proust’s correspondence with his mother to recreate the voice of Mme Proust. The diaries reveal an anxious mother, worried about her son’s poor health, lack of direction, and extravagant habits. Most of the events, be they day-to-day ones such as an incident in which Proust breaks his mother’s precious Venetian glass, or public and political ones, such as the Dreyfus Affair, are based in fact. It is worth noting that the building in

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which the diaries are said to be written is unmarked. Marie Prévost visits the various Parisian sites where Proust lived and wrote his great novel; there are plaques on these buildings, but at 9 Boulevard Maleherbes, where Mme Proust allegedly wrote in her notebooks, the “elegant facade goes unmarked” (130–31). This is woman’s writing, after all, private and anonymous. Kate Taylor has worked to give the diaries a somewhat stilted, old-fashioned, and Gallic flavour, making them sound like a translation. She says, for example, that Marcel and his father have “reprised their correspondence” (83), whereas the English term “resumed” would have been more appropriate. Taylor, in Mme Proust and the Kosher Kitchen, comments on both the theory and practice of translation, as does Carol Shields in Unless. She underlines the hierarchy within the field: interpreting, translating, and literary translating. She reflects on the professional realities of publishing translations in Proust’s time, and makes credible observations on interpreting and translation in her own time. Marie’s work as an interpreter is accurately described in the novel.10 The attitude toward interpreters is also realistic: no one notices the conference interpreter and no one says “good job” (425). Marie moves from interpreting to translating hesitantly. Like Reta Winters, she is reticent and apologetic about her abilities: “These are my own translations. You will excuse me if they are not as elegant as they might be” (22). Her regular line of work is interpreting, which she likens to the work of a typist, whereas literary translation is “loftier” (23). Marie finds that the role of translator is indistinguishable from that of editor.11 Instead of translating the diaries in their entirety, she picks and chooses, selecting the most telling entries and leaving out the most mundane. Echoing the Jean Anouilh epigraph at the beginning of the novel, she says, “I have begun to give her life shape.” She is both critical of herself (this is “unscholarly”) and ambitious (“May a translator not aspire to storytelling?”). She is also is aware, however, of the potential for hubris or even stupidity: “A fledgling literary translator, already testing the limits of her little wings, eyes the far-off treetops where the editors and novelists nest, and stupidly thinks that with a bit of flapping she might join them” (32). Early on, we learn what has motivated Marie to pursue a career as an interpreter and then as a translator. She describes herself as a 15-year-old girl from Montreal visiting Toronto. In a flashback, she retraces her childhood in Paris; her phrase “recollection of childhood as something now past” has a very Proustian ring, reminiscent of the original translation of the title of Proust’s novel, “Remembrance of Things Past” (46). Marie is from a mixed family: her mother is an English-speaking Irishwoman and her father is French-Canadian (a

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reversal of the Québécoise-Scots couple who are the parents of Reta Winters). They met in Paris, but later live in Montreal. The explanation of how Marie came to translate is rounded out toward the conclusion of the novel once the story of her own life has gradually unfolded together with those of Jeanne Proust (and her son Marcel) and Sarah Bensimon (and her son Maxime). Marie’s fascination with Proust begins at a young age and continues for some years. Later in life, she finishes reading his work in French, and then in English translation. She compares the two versions, occupying herself with a “doubled reading project,” with Proust as her “companion” and “solace in an empty place” (407). It is not unusual for translators to have ambivalent feelings toward the writer they are translating, to feel a strong bond along with a need to break away, as we have seen in relation to Reta Winters and Danielle Westerman. While Marie does not translate Proust himself, she reads his work, in two languages, along with biographies. It was in reading Proust that she discovered his mother and it was the translation of his mother’s diaries that helped her find her own voice. She thinks of Proust as a “friend, a comrade in pursuit of memory” and feels a “personal gratitude” toward him (86). She points out that Proust himself experienced the same “demon” when he was translating Ruskin, putting him on a pedestal and devoting years of his life to Ruskin pilgrimages. Translating delays, but also fosters, artistic maturity. This motif of translation as “pre-text”—an exercise or preparation for creation—is quite frequent and here applies to Marie herself: Because I lost Max, I went looking for Marcel but instead I found his mother … and in the pages of her diary, it was often the voice of Mrs. Segal, my mother-in-law who wasn’t, that I thought I heard calling to me across the century … I have found the cure for heartbreak. It is literature … Perhaps it is time for me, like the great man himself, to stop translating and begin a work of fiction. Perhaps the moment of maturity is at hand. But first I will publish my translations. They are not without interest. (454)

Marie Prévost is not the only translator in the novel. The diaries provide a portrait of Proust the translator, seen through the eyes of his mother, who believes that this is a way he can make progress as a man of letters. Proust published articles on the English art critic John Ruskin, as well as two translations: La Bible d’Amiens in 1904 and Sésame et les Lys in 1906. It is a matter of fact, not fiction, that Proust actually translated these works from English. This was done with the assistance of his mother, who prepared a “crib,” or rough draft for him. He also had the help of his friend, the English artist Marie Nordlinger, and several others, including Robert d’Humières, the translator of

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Kipling, whom Taylor mentions. As Mme Proust reflects in her diary, Proust’s own style is evident in his translations, as well as in his prefaces to these early works.“Sur la Lecture,” for example, is considered to contain some of the ideas later developed in Du Côté de chez Swann. Proust went on to publish a series of pastiches (another form of “translation”) for Le Figaro in which he imitated the style of 19th-century authors such as Balzac, Flaubert, and SainteBeuve (1908). By the following year he was totally involved in the writing of his novel À la recherche du temps perdu. In the novel, we are told that Proust “can’t even read a menu in English” (301) and that his mother buys him George Eliot to read in translation (24). However, he is not alone, in his day, in translating from English with very little first-hand knowledge of the source language. There was at the time a fairly widespread anglophilie, and many well-known writers thought it important to translate from English. Paul Valéry, for example, following the example of Baudelaire, translator of Edgar Allan Poe, claims to have translated Poe’s Marginalia, although the manuscripts indicate that he did not produce the actual translation, but merely edited and annotated it (Woodsworth,“Quelques fragments”). However, in addition to following a trend, Proust was motivated by a genuine admiration for Ruskin. As is the case for a number of other writers, or even entire cultures, translation is also a form of exercise or preparation for the art of creation. Like Reta Winters, who sees her translation of L’Île as a form of “stretching” (101),12 and like Marie in this novel, Proust uses his translations as a prelude to his work as a novelist. Translation, a form of reading and rewriting, is used as a springboard to writing. Taylor underscores the role of Mme Proust. “This is a classic feminist novel, where you find the woman behind the man,” she says (personal interview). While Mme Proust concedes that her rough translation is not “literary,” and that her English is not as good as it should be (308), she does provide a starting point for Marcel (301). As we have seen, Proust also consults Marie Nordlinger along with others who are more familiar with English. We learn about the process involved in producing the translation, finding a publisher, and preparing the final manuscript. His mother not only helps him at the start but also is there to help him complete the project. When the proofs arrive, she and Marie Nordlinger help him with the revisions. Nordlinger compares the French to the English and draws attention to inaccuracies needing work from Marcel Proust the translator, while Mme Proust indicates the more awkward phrases needing work from Marcel the writer (352). We also hear—albeit through the filter of his mother’s diary—about Proust’s view of his work as a translator. He is discouraged by it, and finds that his French is slipping: “I speak no language” (352). He had wanted to do

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something for France by writing an appreciation of Ruskin,13 but the work of translation is less appealing: “translation is not real work at all” (337). Nevertheless, his mother, who is Jewish, recognizes the role of translation in the process of cultural transmission. Reflecting on the consequences of the Dreyfus Affair, she says: I think with such admiration of our Ruskin at these times. If a Jewess can transmit a Protestant’s understanding of a Gothic arch or rose window, that these great achievements are an expression of our yearning for the spiritual, then surely the Catholic church can be kept safe from overzealous Drefuysards. (355; my emphasis)

There are other, less overt, forms of translation in the novel associated with movement between cultures. Sarah’s “kosher kitchen” is itself a translation. In her kitchen she keeps an encyclopedia of French cuisine beside her kosher cookbooks. Sarah is a transplant to Toronto who has never properly come to terms with her new life and hence remains in the space between cultures, trying to speak French with her increasingly resistant son, Maxime, in a city that is unilingual, with an English-speaking husband. She spends much of her time reproducing the cuisine of her native France while taking into account the dietary restrictions of kashruth, such as not mixing meat and milk and not using seafood, by using imported ingredients and painstakingly adapting recipes. For Sarah, the kosher kitchen is a “place of reconciliation” (370). In her diaries, Mme Proust also makes the connection between food and heritage. Her father used to joke about kosher laws, saying that the reason Jews ate different food was so that they would not be tempted to socialize with Gentiles. She doesn’t have a kosher kitchen, however, and predicts that her grandchildren will be Christians. It makes her sad to think that her sons have “lost a heritage they might have passed on in their turn” (318). Kate Taylor’s novel is a complex tapestry of parallel personalities, pulled in different directions. She has set up a series of what she calls “dualisms” (personal interview): English and French, Jew and Gentile, homosexual and heterosexual. All her characters are on a quest for identity and belonging. Linguistic, cultural, and sexual differences are foregrounded and linked, in one way or another, to the motif of translation. The novel contains many observations on bilingualism. Bilingual Montreal is compared to unilingual cities such as New York, Paris, and Toronto. Marie enjoys the “edginess” and “instability” of Montreal. Perversely, Montrealers are never comfortable, she points out, but love their city nonetheless (451). Although, in general, Taylor considers Canadians to be “happily bilingual” (personal interview), language and bilingualism are problematic in the novel.

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Many of the characters, neither fish nor fowl, are divided between French and English, their situation further complicated by the fact that the French they speak is the French of France rather than the French of Quebec. Max, who speaks French with Marie at McGill, a primarily English university, is referred to as that mythical beast, a Toronto Francophone (118). Bilinguals are “philanderers; having taken two lovers they are always and inevitably cheating” (309). Thus bilingualism, like translation, is associated with illicit commerce and sexuality, with in-betweenness and hybridity.14 As she explains, Taylor has cast Marie as an interpreter, because she is “isolated” and “caught between two directions like all the characters in the novel” (personal interview). Marie’s lack of belonging results in her alienation from the events around her. When she says that “language is a veil that separates me from experience” (309), this is the reverse of what should be true. Language should give meaning. For her it is a façade, because she is undecided about her background. Her relationship with her mother is not explored, and she is not rooted in her Anglo identity because she is not sympathetic to her mother, who in turn is an outsider because she is neither English- nor French-Canadian. As Marie says in the novel, her mother “has never been permitted to live in her own country. She never really knows where she is” (292). Taylor has used Jewishness as another one of the poles in her series of dualisms. Mme Proust is Jewish, as are Sarah Bensimon and Marie Nordlinger, whose cousin Reynaldo Hahn is one of the men in Proust’s circle. Jewishness is problematic, of course, set as it is against the backdrop of major historic events such as the Dreyfus Affair, which occurred in Proust’s day, and the Holocaust, which looms over Sarah and her family. Throughout the diaries of Mme Proust, we observe subtle forms of anti-Semitism, even on the part of Mme Proust as she observes other people. For example, in describing Mme Straus, whose salon Marcel frequents, she writes: “Jewish, I am sure, but very cultivated” (35; my emphasis). On the other hand, Mme Proust writes that she is saddened when her son reports that Mme Daudet is anti-Semitic (134). The Dreyfus Affair15 bitterly divided the Proust family, as it did French society in general. The diaries reveal that Mme Proust and her sons are on the side of Dreyfus, while their father is on the other side. We learn that deprecating remarks are being made about Jews (215) and that there are riots against Dreyfus and the Jews. Mme Proust hears the slogan “death to the Jews” and ends up feeling that both the streets of Paris and her own apartment are hostile to her (257). This “hostility,” or lost sense of place, echoes the loss expressed by Marie on behalf of her mother, as well as that felt so acutely by Sarah, who has been

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uprooted by the Holocaust from her home in Paris and transported to Canada. The Canadian immigration authorities change her name Bensimon to Simon. She is taken in by a childless Jewish Canadian couple, the Plots, but as long as there is no confirmation that Sarah’s parents are indeed dead, they are unable to adopt her formally and give her their name. Sarah’s alienation, distance, and silence also prevent her from becoming a member of the family: “Sarah Simon somehow refused to become Sarah Plot” (75). Later, even in her relatively well-off life as a married woman in Toronto, Sarah continues to grieve the world she has lost (240). The Holocaust is evoked in various ways. There is an almost perverse teacher who shows “dirty pictures” to his pupils—skeletons that, “indistinguishable one from another” (51), represent a loss of individual identity at its worst. Taylor, however, maintains that this is not a Holocaust novel, but rather a “post-Holocaust” one. It is about memory, she says, about people telling other people, and about the Holocaust as a “massive cultural shadow” (personal interview). Sarah, like Danielle Westerman in Unless, is a survivor. Sarah’s son Max is affected because he must put up with his anxious, traumatized mother, because he has no grandparents, and hence has been deprived of part of his heritage. The two translators-turned-writers, Marie Prévost and Reta Winters, are the Gentiles who, in slightly different ways, right history by breaking the silence and restoring the voices of these women, Marie by telling Sarah’s story, and Reta, through her translation of the Memoirs, by telling Danielle Westerman’s. Marie combs Paris, and surrounding area, for traces of the Holocaust, both at a macro and micro level: she visits a chapel dedicated to victims of Nazism, she makes a trip to the French transit camp Drancy and, at a museum in Paris, discovers a photo of Sarah’s father Philippe, taken at Drancy. For her, this represents “foraging in someone else’s history” (259), which after all is what translators do when they transmit the stories and voices of another culture to their own. Marie goes from translation to story-telling when she imagines the life of Sarah. This is an act of memory—in itself a form of translation—a way of reclaiming Sarah’s life, as Taylor says (personal interview). The other dualism to which Taylor draws attention to is that of sexual orientation. As mentioned above, Danielle Westerman is bisexual. Marcel Proust, the starting point for Taylor’s novel, was homosexual and his sexuality was problematic in various ways. It was something that he kept from his mother and that caused him feelings of guilt. His friend Marie Nordlinger makes the mistake of falling in love with him, as her double Marie Prévost does with Max. Sexual identity is tied to the quest for identity at other levels. Marie

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explains her attraction to Max in these terms: she “lusted for his otherness, to share his language, to fix his history” (422). The sexuality of Marcel and of Max is “unspoken” (433) until Marie, once again, breaks the silence. The figure of breaking glass, denoting both moments of crisis and union,16 is used several times, culminating in the grand finale when Sarah deliberately and frenetically breaks all her china, mixes both meat and milk dishes, and ruins the kosher kitchen. This ends with a reconciliation of sorts between Sarah and her son, who addresses his mother in her native French tongue, as Maman. They come together in an embrace, finally able to grieve for the family he has never known because they did not survive the Holocaust and for the grandchildren his mother will never have because of Max’s homosexuality.“He gave her the name of his childhood … they stood there together, holding each other in the ruins of the kosher kitchen, finally mourning his grandparents and her grandchildren” (438). This, finally, was their way of breaking the silence about both the Holocaust and Maxime’s sexuality.

Conclusions Translators and interpreters have long acted as cultural brokers, as go-betweens between different language groups and nations. Often outsiders, hybrids themselves, they have not enjoyed prestige or recognition. Translation studies, cultural studies and, more recently, post-colonial studies, have shed a new light on translation. As Sherry Simon notes, commenting on Homi Bhabha, translation is no longer “confined to its traditional ancillary role as a medium of communication between nations, but elevated to a primary creative activity” (Gender 152). As translation has become an important factor in cultural exchange in Canada, it is significant that women have played so large a role as writers, translators, and theorists. Feminist authors such as Nicole Brossard and Lola Lemire Tostevin, and translators such as Barbara Godard and Susanne de Lotbinière-Harwood, have placed issues of identity politics, language, and translation in the forefront. Theorists such as Sherry Simon have stressed the importance of translation practice in cultural production, examining the case of Brossard’s Le Désert mauve and other works, in which translation is both the subject and framework. A bilingual and multiethnic country peopled by countless individuals such as Reta and Marie, who are of mixed parentage, Canada is animated and often divided by language and cultural politics. This cultural and political space provides fertile ground for the problematization of translation. In the two novels we have examined at length here, the characters are full-fledged trans-

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lators and translational practice has both real and figurative significance. While neither Carol Shields nor Kate Taylor falls into the category of writer-translator, which is not uncommon in Canada, they have imagined characters in which the professional roles of writer and translator tend toward conflation. Their post-modern, feminist novels blur the borders of gender, language, and religion; in these novels about women who write, the boundaries between translation and creation are also blurred. Translation is a characteristically Canadian means of mediating dualisms and approaching the global problem of powerlessness vis-à-vis the powerful and its attendant violence. The fact that translators are also creators elevates the act of translation to a more important, and hence more legitimate, status. While writing against a Canadian backdrop, with the characters rooted in their bilingual Canadian culture, both Shields and Taylor extend their reach to a more universal level by portraying translators of authors who are not Canadian. Kate Taylor is fascinated by a towering French literary figure, Marcel Proust, although she chooses to approach him through his mother, the woman behind the man, who launched her son’s career through the act of translation. In Unless, the work that Reta translates is not from a French-Canadian or Québécois corpus, but is by a French author, albeit one who has chosen to exile herself to Anglophone Toronto. In both novels, translation is bound up with issues of personal identity, but the problems of translation and identity are tied to the broader Canadian intercultural, or transcultural, context, which transcends purely linguistic considerations. The translators begin in the inferior position—the space between two national languages with strong identities—and derive their own sense of identity based on a subversion of traditional cleavages and a reconciliation of difference. Blending fiction with life-writing, and prose with theory, translation is a model of cultural hybridity, to use Bhabha’s term. Unless and Mme Proust and the Kosher Kitchen have provided an opportunity to explore a literary phenomenon that continues around the world, but particularly in Canada: the foregrounding of the translator as an actor in fiction, fiction in which the players are pulled or torn between cultures, and in which translation—like writing—offers the possibility of cultural exchange, reparation or reconciliation, and navigation between difference.

Notes 1 Nicole Brossard’s Le Désert mauve has been well cited and studied: see, for example, Flotow; Simon (Trafic and Gender); Brossard (Interview by Durand); Parker.

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2 In an interview with Marcella Durand, Brossard says that, in Canada and Quebec, “translation has been very important to women writers, translators and publishers because of the way we needed to question patriarchal language. Language was colonizing us, therefore we needed to study it carefully and to find ways to invest it with our own subjectivity.” 3 This view, expressed in an interview conducted with Lola Lemire Tostevin by email in February 2005, echoes the observation made by Paul Valéry in “Variations sur les Bucoliques,” a commentary on his translation of Virgil: “Écrire quoique que ce soit … est un travail de traduction exactement comparable à celui qui opère la transmutation d’un texte d’une langue à l’autre” (qtd. in Woodsworth, “Quelques” 254; Valéry’s emphasis). 4 This study seeks to focus primarily on two case studies in the English language. However, as the example of Nicole Brossard illustrates, the centre staging of the translator is not at all limited to fiction in English, but is also an important theme in the works of Quebec authors such as Monique LaRue (1989), Louise Dupré (1996), and Hélène Rioux (1998). On the fictional status of Francophone (female) translators, see Barbara Godard (2002). 5 Random House is Shields’s publisher. 6 Roman’s name is interesting in itself. It means “novel” in French; it is a common name, in various forms, in Romance languages, yet also has a “foreign” flavour. Winters’s Roman is meant to be Albanian. 7 See Woodsworth, “Aladdin.” 8 Baudelaire, who spent more time translating Edgar Allan Poe than he did writing his own poetry, referred to Poe as his “frère spirituel,” although in this case the author is recognizing her debt to her translator (Woodsworth, “Quelques”). 9 There is a traditional view of translators as “traitors,” and Reta Winters, as we have seen, has also represented herself as an “imposter.” 10 To prepare for a conference on aids, for example, Marie draws up a list of specialized terms. Taylor had at first imagined this technique, but then checked with a professional interpreter, as she points out in her acknowledgements. She confirmed this in a private interview I conducted at her home on 27 July 2004. 11 Note that Reta Winters describes herself as a “long-time editor of Danielle Westerman’s work” (80). 12 The notion of translation as “pre-text,” as an exercise or preparation for original writing, was put forward by certain Romantic poets such as Shelley and developed by Paul Valéry, for example (Woodsworth,“Quelques” 253). The idea of stretching has also been used in the context of minority cultures in which translation provides an opportunity for developing the resources of the target language. (See Bill Findlay on the Scots translation of Michel Tremblay, in Delisle and Woodsworth 86.) 13 This once again echoes Baudelaire’s ambitions in publishing translations of Poe’s stories, with biographical and critical introductions (Woodsworth, “Quelques”). 14 Cf. Sherry Simon in Le Trafic des langues; the title itself conveys the idea of illicit commerce. 15 The Dreyfus Affair was a political scandal that divided the whole of French society toward the end of the 19th century. In 1894, Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish officer in the French army, was convicted of treason. The affair was exposed by author Émile Zola in his famous article entitled “J’accuse” (1898). Dreyfus was later pardoned, and is

Out of the Shadows / Woodsworth

now widely believed to have been innocent, but the case ended up arousing considerable anti-Semitism in France. 16 Taylor makes references to the Jewish custom of breaking glass at a Jewish wedding, saying that it stands not for rupture but rather for union (137). In actual fact, however, the breaking of a plate or a glass is meant to remind Jewish people of the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem, even at a time of celebration.

Works Cited Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. London and New York: Routledge, 1994. Billingham, Susan. “Trans-lations. Lola Lemire Tostevin Writing Between Cultures.” Sources 9 (2000): 111–24. Brossard, Nicole. “Interview with Nicole Brossard: On Translation & Other Such Pertinent Subjects.” By Marcella Durand. Double Change 2 (2001). 20 August 2004. http://www.doublechange.com/issue2/brossard.htm ———. Le Désert mauve. Montréal: Hexagone, 1987. De Lotbinière-Harwood, Susanne. Re-belle et infidèle: la traduction comme pratique de ré-écriture au féminin/The Body Bilingual: Translation as a Re-Writing in the Feminine. Toronto: Women’s Press; Montréal: Editions du Remue-ménage, 1991. Delisle, Jean and Judith Woodsworth, eds. Translators through History. Amsterdam: John Benjamins; Paris: UNESCO, 1995. Dupré, Louise. La Memoria. Montréal: XYZ, 1996. Flotow, Luise von. Translation and Gender. Translating in the “Era of Feminism.” Manchester, UK: St. Jerome; Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 1997. Godard, Barbara. “La traduction comme réception: les écrivaines québécoises au Canada anglais.” TTR 15.1 (2002): 65–101. LaRue, Monique. Copies conformes. Montréal: XYZ, 1989. Lefevere, André. Translation/History/Culture: A Sourcebook. London: Routledge, 1992. Moyes, Lianne. “‘to bite between the teeth’: Lola Lemire Tostevin’s bilingual writing practice.” The Aux Canadas Issue: Reading, Writing, and Translation. Spec. issue of Textual Studies in Canada 5 (1994): 75–83. Parker, Alice A. Liminal Visions of Nicole Brossard. New York: Peter Lang, 1998. Rioux, Hélène. Le Cimetière des éléphants. Montréal: XYZ, 1998. Ross, Colleen.“The Art of Transformation in Lola Lemire Tostevin’s Frog Moon.” International Journal of Canadian Studies / Revue internationale d’études canadiennes 16 (Fall/Automne 1997): 165–72. Shields, Carol. Unless. Toronto: Vintage Canada, 2003. Simon, Sherry. Le Trafic des langues, Montréal: Boréal, 1994. ———. Gender in Translation. Cultural Identity and the Politics of Transmission. London: Routledge, 1996. Taylor, Kate. Mme Proust and the Kosher Kitchen. Toronto: Anchor-Random House, 2003.

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———. Personal interview. 27 July 2004. Tostevin, Lola Lemire. Frog Moon: A Novel. Dunvegan, ON: Cormorant, 1994. Woodsworth, Judith. “Aladdin in the Enchanted Vaults: the Translation of Poetry.” The Aux Canadas Issue: Reading, Writing, and Translation. Spec. issue of Textual Studies in Canada 5 (1994): 105–15. ———. “Quelques fragments d’une théorie de la traduction : Paul Valéry traducteur.” Mélanges à la mémoire de Jean-Claude Morisot. Spec. Issue of Littératures 21–22 (2000): 245–63.

lucien pelletier

Postface. Transculturation et mémoire

ar des voies contournées, le vocable forgé il y a plus d’un demi-siècle par Fernando Ortiz est donc parvenu sous les latitudes canadiennes. Jusqu’à récemment, sans doute, nous n’aurions pu vraiment l’entendre. « Transculturación », sous la plume de l’anthropologue cubain, évoquait les mouvantes synthèses et tensions d’une culture, ses asymétries internes, en un refus de subsumer et occulter certains éléments sous des prétentions normatives particulières comme s’y employait implicitement le terme « acculturation ». Or, ce n’est que bien plus tard que s’est exprimé au Canada pareil souci de prêter l’oreille aux tonalités même les plus contenues du contrepoint national et de leur reconnaître un rôle constitutif. Il y avait moins urgence, eût-on dit. La fameuse « mosaïque » canadienne, en effet, se distingue assez de ces syncrétismes et autres brassages culturels et ethniques auxquels a donné naissance, à Cuba et ailleurs, le viol généralisé des peuples conquis. Si l’histoire canadienne a connu elle aussi sa bonne part de conflits et de violences, rares, pourtant, furent les conjonctures qui permirent à l’un des groupes culturels s’étant trouvés aux prises d’entièrement marginaliser les autres : il fallait parvenir à un modus vivendi, à des compromis qui, comme toujours et quelque iniques soient-ils bien souvent, demeurent compliqués et contraints. Bon gré mal gré, au lieu d’acculturation, c’est de multiculturalisme qu’on en est plutôt venu à parler en nos parages, et le mot est même devenu un projet politique et constitutionnel consciemment embrassé. Si l’introduction du mot « transculturation » semble donc aujourd’hui prometteuse, il importe cependant de bien repérer et évaluer les accents nouveaux dont

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le charge un contexte passablement différent de celui en réaction auquel on l’avait d’abord conçu. Insister, comme on le fait volontiers maintenant, sur les transitions entre les cultures, c’est assurément révoquer une certaine conception surannée de la culture et du multiculturalisme. On se plaît à rappeler que les cultures ne sont jamais des touts aux limites clairement définies, que leurs frontières sont perméables et qu’on aurait tort de concevoir le multiculturalisme comme une mosaïque d’entités discrètes (Benhabib). Ces thèses paraissent difficilement contestables, tant s’est aiguisée notre conscience des déterminations sociales et historiques contingentes qui transissent toute culture. Le temps paraît définitivement révolu où l’on décryptait un sens éternel derrière la lutte que se livraient les peuples sur la scène de l’histoire universelle, chacun étant réputé s’efforcer d’exprimer et réaliser une idée distincte, une essence transcendante. Si le Canadien français, pour prendre cet exemple, se savait naguère né d’une race fière, s’il était confiant que le ciel eût marqué sa carrière en ce monde nouveau, nul de ses descendants ne s’aviserait aujourd’hui de répercuter pareil discours. (Que certains rappellent aujourd’hui les sources et dépendances culturelles plurielles du patrimoine québécois, son caractère construit et non originaire, cela n’a manifestement rien que de très légitime [cf. Turgeon, Patrimoines]). À l’origine, pourtant, le compromis canadien tenait sa plausibilité précisément de cette représentation de peuples à l’identité bien marquée, héritiers de la puissante destinée spirituelle de leurs ancêtres européens respectifs, et qui, appuyés sur ce socle, s’obligeaient enfin à mutuelle reconnaissance. Devenue incroyable, cette conception essentialiste risque d’emporter dans sa chute l’existence même du Canada, de sa synthèse multiculturelle, réduite au coup de force qu’indéniablement elle a aussi été. On a beau jeu soit, comme les peuples autochtones, de rappeler que ladite synthèse s’est faite sans eux, faute qu’ils aient satisfait aux critères de « civilisation » requis par les pouvoirs politiques anglophone et francophone d’alors; soit, comme les souverainistes québécois, de dénoncer cette synthèse comme marché de dupes où le « biculturalisme » dans lequel les descendants de deux puissances coloniales traitaient censément d’égal à égal se voit finalement démasqué comme dispositif de pouvoir, sous les traits d’un « multiculturalisme » qui menace de ravaler le caractère distinct du partenaire francophone au rang de simple élément folklorique. Quant aux immigrants plus récents, plusieurs déplorent le faible potentiel intégrateur d’un multiculturalisme réduit à une idéologie anémique, qui conduit à la création de ghettos culturels plutôt qu’aux bienfaits d’une identité nationale claire (cf. Bissoondath). Il est tentant, en pareilles circonstances, de souligner le caractère simplement fortuit des appartenances ethniques, linguistiques et culturelles, et d’in-

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viter les Canadiens à s’unir en un projet librement choisi, capable de transcender les particularismes régressifs. Plus précisément, puisque nul n’ignore que de telles appartenances président toujours déjà à la constitution des sujets, on insistera sur la capacité qu’ont les individus d’y voir non pas tant des clivages que des occasions d’enrichissement personnel. C’est ce sens que Neil Bissoondath imprime à son propre parcours, depuis l’île de la Trinité jusqu’à Toronto et Montréal : My own roots are portable, adaptable, the source of a personal freedom that allows me to feel “at home” in a variety of places and languages without ever forgetting who I am or what brought me here. My roots travel with me, in my pocket, as it were, there to guide or succour me as need be. They are, in the end, the sum of my experience, historical, familial and personal. They are, in the end, my sense of self. (26)

En somme, c’est le soi qui devrait se faire synthèse multiculturelle au lieu d’être confiné à l’une des parcelles de l’État-mosaïque. Il est significatif que pareil discours soit promu particulièrement par des écrivains ayant eux-mêmes vécu l’immigration. En Ontario français, par exemple, l’auteur d’origine maghrébine Hédi Bouraoui se fait l’ardent promoteur du « transculturalisme » comme invention de soi1. Au Québec, Régine Robin, en une critique acerbe de la psyché nationaliste, de sa « fascination de la souche », de son attachement infantile à la langue-mère, vante les vertus de l’identité hybride ou métisse : « un patchwork de programmes, de cultures, de langues, d’informations et désinformations spécifiques. Quel bonheur! Mélange de tout, bonheur de ce mélange2! » (« L’impossible » 305). Dans un sens analogue, de nombreux auteurs issus d’anciennes colonies britanniques, tel Homi Bhabha, célèbrent de nos jours les mérites heuristiques et critiques de la marge ou de l’entre-lieu culturel, de l’hybridation identitaire, qui permet par exemple un regard ironique et débouche sur de nouvelles formes de résistance. Ces discours « postcoloniaux » visent non pas simplement une « décolonisation », un retour à la pureté ou l’authenticité opprimée, mais s’attachent à rendre les cultures victimes de colonisation à leur propre histoire, à leur propre bricolage identitaire3. Tous ces cas d’écriture migrante, à laquelle le vocable « transculturalité » demeure principalement associé, cherchent à dépasser un rapport simplement dichotomique à l’altérité : plutôt que de peser sur les cicatrices historiques au risque de rouvrir les blessures, ils insistent sur « le potentiel de réconciliation » (Kwaterko 44) des parcours transculturels. Puisqu’ils intéressent surtout à ce titre : à quelles conditions le métissage et la transculturation sont-ils susceptibles d’ouvrir des voies à la réconciliation? Je voudrais suggérer ici deux choses : d’abord, ce potentiel ne peut s’avérer

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que dans la mesure où l’on se donne une conception de la transculturalité qui ne fasse pas l’économie de l’héritage des cultures sur lesquelles elle prend appui. Ensuite, et pour en venir au présent ouvrage, j’indiquerai brièvement, en terminant, qu’un de ses intérêts principaux est d’offrir des lectures de la transculturalité où cette compréhension se trouve précisément promue. L’erreur serait, en contexte canadien, de faire du transculturel une norme susceptible de pallier les insuffisances du multiculturalisme actuel; l’erreur serait d’arguer de la transculturalité, comme fait et possibilité, pour en appeler de manière abstraite à un dépassement des identités cloisonnées. Car cela supposerait l’existence d’une position de surplomb, non entachée de particularisme culturel, celle précisément que s’arrogent les appels libéraux au pluralisme et à la tolérance. Le philosophe libéral H.J. Sandkühler, par exemple, définit la transculturalité comme « the recognition of the diversity of cultures as well as the coexistence of apparently incommensurable cultures at both the macrolevel and the micro-level of individuals4 » (83). Dans cette vue, s’il y a incommensurabilité, elle se trouve seulement au niveau des cultures particulières et elle n’est qu’apparence surmontable par une normativité juridique, formelle et universelle, que l’on déclare disponible tant sur le plan institutionnel que dans les consciences citoyennes. Or, bien plus qu’elle ne les résout, cette position sécrète les maux qu’elle déplore. La normativité « transculturelle » qu’elle invoque ne se distingue en rien du libéralisme actuel, de cette structure abstraite qui vise non pas tant à affronter les contradictions latentes ou déclarées d’une société, qu’à en contenir les effets. Reprenant certaines analyses hégéliennes de cette pensée des Lumières dont, comme on sait, est issue la norme de tolé zek a montré que le multiculturalisme où celle-ci rance libérale, Slavoj Zi trouve une expression contemporaine se nourrit en fait d’un secret mépris des cultures censées s’y réconcilier : le multiculturalisme cherche à les neutraliser, à conjurer ce qu’il perçoit comme leur fondamentalisme invétéré. S’il les tolère, c’est à condition de les réduire à de sympathiques havres d’authenticité où l’on peut momentanément relâcher les contraintes de la responsabilité éthique, dans la jouissance de l’exotisme5. Avec le goût de la provocation  zek va jusqu’à dénoncer le racisme foncier du multiculqui le caractérise, Zi turalisme : the contemporary “politically correct” liberal attitude which perceives itself as surpassing the limitations of ethnic identity (“citizens of the world” without anchors in any particular ethnic community), functions, within its own society, as a narrow elitist upper-middle-class circle clearly opposing itself to the majority of common people, despised for being caught in their narrow ethnic or community confines. (47)

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Ce jugement sévère a du moins le mérite de rappeler qu’une norme émane toujours d’un point de vue particulier et qu’il y a idéologie à prétendre détenir une position d’emblée universelle. La norme véritablement réconciliatrice est celle qui d’abord agit de manière au moins inchoative au sein des singuliers qu’elle veut rallier. Si la notion de transculturation présente un intérêt dans notre contexte, il consiste donc non pas à introduire un nouvel impératif abstrait, mais à aider à l’explicitation de ce qui, le cas échéant, se trame au sein des cultures. Ce sont ces dernières qui procurent les moyens, s’il en est, d’une transculturation meilleure que les synthèses formelles favorisées par le consensus libéral. Un antilibéralisme assurément différent de celui de marxistes comme  zek conduisait George Grant, il y a quarante ans dans son ouvrage Est-ce la Zi fin du Canada?, à annoncer la mort de la synthèse canadienne : à terme, disait-il, le raz-de-marée du libéralisme nord-américain sera fatal pour toute culture ancrée dans une vision du monde déterminée. Grant s’efforçait à bon droit d’expliciter les grandes valeurs auxquelles la société canadienne lui semblait devoir sa légitimité, mais il percevait avec non moins de justesse une incompatibilité entre l’attachement à ces valeurs collectives et la revendication optimiste de liberté de l’individualisme possessif. Conservateur conséquent, il amplifiait cette antithèse en un destin tragique, objet de sa lamentation sur l’impuissance des traditions nationales, celles en particulier dont le Canada est issu, à défendre contre l’esprit moderne l’idée d’un bien et d’un ordre éternel sur lesquels, alléguait-il, ces traditions doivent en principe reposer. Cette vieille opposition entre la subjectivité prétendument débridée et l’autorité des sagesses instituées, l’école dite « communautarienne » en philosophie a beaucoup contribué à la dissoudre depuis une vingtaine d’années (voir André Berten et al.). Elle rappelle notamment que les traditions devraient constituer normalement non pas un frein, mais une condition anthropologique de l’exercice du jugement personnel, dans la mesure où elles procurent un contexte cohérent, appuyé sur des notions claires de ce qui importe au sein de telle société à tel moment de son histoire – en regard de quoi ses membres, ainsi héritiers d’une identité définie, disposent du même coup des ressources interprétatives leur permettant de négocier leurs choix de vie individuels, au besoin par la dissidence. À l’encontre du conservatisme qui tend à voir dans les cultures des sagesses validées pragmatiquement par leur durée et qu’il importe de protéger de l’arbitraire des passions individuelles, le communautarisme considère les traditions d’une culture comme légitimes en proportion de leur capacité à promouvoir la rationalité des individus par le truchement d’une conception claire, mais historiquement ouverte du bien à poursuivre. Prolongeant ces

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vues, mais aussi tirant profit de « la tradition d’une situation » que lui offre la problématique multiculturelle canadienne, Charles Taylor (Rapprocher 153) a montré de façon convaincante que la référence à une tradition, loin de contraindre à un ressentiment antimoderniste, se maintient au cœur même de la modernité, sous les traits de l’« expressivisme », cette vaste posture culturelle éprise d’authenticité et disposée à encourir les risques d’une identité individuelle ou collective incertaine qui, pour se connaître et s’affirmer, doit d’abord être exprimée et reconnue comme significative et valide6. Cette reconnaissance de la part des individus et des collectivités est cruciale : elle introduit, au cœur même de la culture, un moment théorique, un ensemble de valeurs susceptibles d’être jugées vraies ou valides par autrui et par ce même sujet qui d’abord les exprime. C’est à hauteur de ce jugement, de ce partage philosophique du vrai que des échanges exempts de domination peuvent s’instaurer entre les cultures et que des synthèses transculturelles véritablement réconciliatrices deviennent possibles. Ce jugement s’élabore dans un travail d’autoréflexion où les membres d’une société non seulement se reconnaissent une certaine identité commune, un imaginaire hérité, mais, par le biais de leurs lettrés et de la discussion publique, entreprennent la recherche d’une intentionnalité inhérente à leur parcours historique. Celle-ci n’a rien d’une essence ou d’un sens nécessaire à la marche de la civilisation : elle est le dessin qu’une culture qui se souvient cherche à deviner dans le sillage tracé par son propre parcours contingent, et dont les enseignements permettront peut-être un destin plus librement choisi, jusqu’à se faire irrécusable témoignage d’un fragment d’humanité7. (Thériault 270) De cette intentionnalité discursive toujours particulière, sans cesse soumise au débat intraculturel et interculturel et qui, parce qu’elle se propose ainsi au jugement et à la reconnaissance par soi-même et par autrui, est l’unique fondement possible d’une intercompréhension, voire d’une transculturation qui soit davantage que syncrétisme, j’aimerais évoquer brièvement le controversé mais instructif exemple québécois, ne serait-ce que pour compenser quelque peu sa relative absence de cet ouvrage. Dans un texte ému, le philosophe Serge Cantin, ardent nationaliste québécois, fait mémoire de son peuple : d’où venons-nous, qui sommes-nous, demande-t-il, pour ensuite affirmer que les torts auxquels les ancêtres n’ont pu rétorquer qu’une opiniâtre survivance requièrent désormais de la part des descendants la seule réparation conséquente, celle qu’apporterait le choix courageux et digne en faveur de l’État souverain. Cantin proteste contre les tentatives politiques d’oblitérer la mémoire nationale au nom du pluralisme et de l’ouverture à l’autre, ce discours libéral auquel, déplore-t-il, même des politiciens souverainistes en mal de légitimité se croient contraints d’adhérer8 :

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Notre ouverture aux autres, cette disposition à se mettre à la place de l’étranger, révèle en réalité à quel point nous sommes toujours fascinés par le regard que le conquérant a posé sur nous et que nous avons intériorisé … Fascinés au point de ne plus pouvoir, ou vouloir, lutter contre cette fascination, qui loge désormais, tel un cheval de Troie, dans le camp retranché de l’État souverainiste non souverain. Mine de rien, le nouveau credo de la nation québécoise ouverte et plurielle, multi ou transculturelle, mine le projet qu’il prétend servir, en le privant peu à peu de sa raison d’être. Paradoxe terminal de l’histoire de notre peuple, il risque de sonner son requiem. Car il implique que nous disparaissions par altruisme; que nous renoncions, au nom de la démocratie, au principe même de la démocratie, au droit des peuples à disposer d’eux-mêmes, à se gouverner. (Cantin 92)

Ceux dont les opinions politiques sont redevables à des satires comme celle que publiait Mordecai Richler9 en 1992 crieront ici à la xénophobie, à un nationalisme ethnique régressif et verront là une preuve de ce qu’il vaut mieux s’en remettre à la bonne conscience multiculturelle libérale que de s’enquérir des sagesses particulières. Des lectures plus charitables demeurent cependant possibles. Il n’y a rien que de très légitime à en appeler à la mémoire et à se questionner, comme le veut Cantin, sur la trajectoire historique d’un peuple. On peut fort bien le faire en dehors de toute référence à l’idéologie d’un « esprit du peuple » ou autres manifest destinies. Précisément, c’est par la fidélité mémorielle que d’aucuns parviennent aujourd’hui, à la suite d’auteursphares comme Walter Benjamin, à maintenir ouverte la question du sens historique tout en la dissociant des interprétations universalistes d’hier. Quand on ne peut plus croire aux destinées métaphysiques, il n’y a guère que le souvenir des vies révolues, de leurs amours et de leurs espoirs, à pouvoir encore conforter les contemporains dans leur quête d’identité et de sens. En recevant les ancêtres dans notre mémoire, nous témoignons non seulement de leur prix inestimable en même temps que de notre espérance de ce que toute vie, y compris la nôtre, soit un jour pareillement recueillie : nous commémorons aussi ce qu’il y a à nos yeux de valable dans ce à quoi les prédécesseurs ont cru devoir consacrer leurs vies, dans ce qu’ils souhaitaient être en dépit des vicissitudes, dans leurs désirs et leurs espoirs plus ou moins explicites. C’est en s’efforçant de saisir quel bien ils poursuivaient, en tâchant d’appréhender ce qui dans leurs formes culturelles particulières avait à leurs yeux une valeur telle que s’imposait le devoir de perdurer – c’est par cet effort de compréhension que nous pouvons entendre leurs leçons et hériter de ce qui nous paraît être le sens qu’ils ont tracé, en le modulant bien sûr aux particularités qui sont les nôtres. Cette dimension mémorielle qui imprime sens et identité à un parcours historique est celle que cherche à maintenir Cantin, à travers ses formules

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peut-être excessives, mais qui du moins mettent en garde contre un idéal multiculturel ou transculturel seulement formel. Sans préjuger de sa valeur, il faut aussi préciser que le choix politique auquel des auteurs comme Cantin se croient poussés par leur fidélité mémorielle n’en est pas forcément la conséquence inéluctable. Conscient du caractère sélectif de toute mémoire, l’historien Jocelyn Létourneau déplore que certains, à des fins politiques précises, n’entretiennent d’elle que les meurtrissures; à la suite de Paul Ricoeur et de sa « politique de la juste mémoire », Létourneau en appelle également à la faculté d’oubli et recommande de retenir du passé surtout son « potentiel de bonté », les ressources de réconciliation qu’il contient et grâce auxquelles les héritiers, délestés d’une considération morose et paralysante du passé, peuvent s’ouvrir à un avenir inédit et, espèret-il, plus heureux10. (Passer) Mais ce débat pèche peut-être par simplisme, dans la mesure où chacun des adversaires tend à s’arroger le droit de n’entretenir avec le passé qu’une relation utilitaire, ne sauvegardant de lui que ce qui consolide ses propres préférences politiques11. À mon sens, un réalisme interprétatif plus sain veut que, heureux ou malheureux, il y ait dans l’histoire des événements d’une importance objective, qu’aucune mémoire ne peut à volonté éclipser ou enfler indûment. C’est un tel réalisme qui conduit le sociologue Joseph Yvon Thériault à prendre à bras-le-corps la question du sens qu’est susceptible de receler le parcours politique du Québec (en incluant sa forme antérieure, le Canada français). Si l’on est attentif, dit-il, aux débats et événements ayant saisi la vie politique du Québec depuis au moins l’Acte constitutionnel de 1791, on peut y discerner une problématique récurrente : celle de la nature du peuple démocratique. La démocratie moderne requiert du peuple qu’il se constitue en une volonté purement formelle et étatique de liberté et de tolérance; toutefois, ce même peuple est aussi une réalité sociologique, ethnique et culturelle historiquement déterminée et distincte du projet politique libéral. Les tensions découlant de cette double nature du peuple sont aisément désamorcées dans les grands États démocratiques, qui se targuent de multiculturalisme cosmopolite et ravalent les revendications identitaires à de simples régressions. Ils ont beau jeu de le faire, assurés qu’ils sont que l’intégration culturelle des groupes ethniques selon les règles du libre marché identitaire jouera à brève échéance en faveur de la culture et de la langue dominantes. Or, ce modèle démocratique n’est pas le seul : il existe, à côté des grandes démocraties cosmopolites, de « petites cultures » ou de « petites sociétés » dont le caractère démocratique se voit compliqué par la référence identitaire à des traditions ou à une langue minoritaires. Dans ces sociétés, l’exercice des droits démocratiques individuels se heurte à des volontés politiques de

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nature différente, émanant de collectivités particulières, et tout le défi consiste alors à maintenir le précaire équilibre entre les deux natures, politique et sociologique, du peuple démocratique. Thériault pense que le Québec constitue un véritable cas de figure de ces « petites sociétés » démocratiques, en butte à la bonne conscience « postethnique » nord-américaine : la postethnicité nord-américaine est anglaise, ce qui veut dire que la présence d’une société française sur le continent sera toujours une réalité fragile, une anormalité en regard des tendances continentales profondes. Cela veut dire aussi que la langue ne pourra jamais acquérir ici le statut de langue utilitaire que possède l’anglais en Amérique du Nord, un statut qui lui permet de dissocier langue sociétale et identité. Parce que l’historicité profonde de l’américanité est anglaise, la nation française d’Amérique fut interdite d’être une de ces grandes sociétés intégrant et assimilant les nouveaux arrivants par les seules forces spontanées de leur puissance. Une telle modalité d’intégration sociétale est interdite à une petite société, qui doit puiser dans sa mémoire pour solidifier son appartenance, qui doit convaincre, légiférer pour accéder au statut de société d’accueil inclusive de la différence. (354–355)

Tels sont les termes dans lesquels se conçoit l’échange culturel au Québec et, plus que jamais en ces temps de mondialisation, au sein des petites sociétés en général. Le problème qui s’y pose est à la fois celui de la transmission d’un héritage et de son renouvellement par l’inclusion de voix nouvelles (voir Jean-Paul Baillargeon). Ce renouvellement s’impose parce que l’intentionnalité reçue en legs est sans cesse soumise à réinterprétation et à jugement. Les petites sociétés, en effet, ne peuvent faire l’économie de la question de leur survivance : ce que nous avons été, demandent-elles, vaut-il la peine d’être continué? Pareille préoccupation ne s’apparente aucunement à celle de la conservation d’espèces menacées (auquel cas Habermas [224 ss.] aurait raison de dire que des États démocratiques ne doivent pas en faire des exceptions au principe d’égalité) parce que son enjeu est de l’ordre non pas de faits naturels, mais de la vérité : il s’agit de déterminer la valeur – aux yeux de ses acteurs passés et présents, mais aussi de quiconque a une compréhension suffisante des termes du débat – d’une intentionnalité manifestée par une tradition particulière. Il me semble que, compris en ces termes proprement philosophiques, le cas québécois offre un exemple éloquent de ce potentiel de réconciliation que recèlent les cultures particulières. Elles le doivent non pas d’abord à une norme universelle préétablie, mais à l’intentionnalité qu’elles parviennent à tracer, à cette prétention au vrai qui, seule, peut faire l’objet d’un débat démocratique

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et d’une véritable intercompréhension. Telle que dégagée par Thériault, l’intentionnalité québécoise consiste en la recherche sans cesse reprise d’une forme résolument démocratique, mais capable à la fois de maintenir activement une mémoire spécifique, reconnue précieuse autant que fragile. Ce concept de petite société exploité par Thériault, ou encore celui de « petite culture » dont fait usage notamment François Paré dans Les Littératures de l’exiguïté, un ouvrage où se déploie une conscience aiguë de la précarité et, aussi bien, de la valeur des existences singulières et des minorités culturelles en regard des grands ensembles discursifs12 – il me semble que les diverses cultures qui composent le Canada anglophone ont avantage à l’approprier pour elles-mêmes s’il est vrai que, en dépit de la langue qu’elles partagent avec les États-Unis, elles se veulent et se savent distinctes. Il me semble qu’en dépit de tout ce qu’il peut avoir d’irritant pour certains, le partenaire québécois, à la faveur d’une situation linguistique qui l’oblige sur certains points à une réflexivité accrue, peut constituer pour ces cultures anglo-canadiennes un atout, dans la mesure où il présente avec plus d’évidence une situation culturelle et politique qui à bien des égards est aussi la leur et les contraint à penser leur intentionnalité propre en son rapport à la mémoire. Pareil rapport commande une certaine manière de penser les phénomènes de transculturalité. Au Québec, les voix même les plus ouvertes cherchent, tout en les célébrant, à situer les métissages culturels dans une problématique de continuité historique. Ainsi Jocelyn Létourneau, qui n’hésite pas à écrire qu’à son avis « la société québécoise est l’un des endroits sur la planète où l’échange culturel se vit le mieux » (« L’altérité » 437), éprouve cependant une légère réticence face à la notion de transculturalité, entendue comme pur et simple basculement vers autre chose : « pour moi, ce basculement, que j’envisage plutôt sur le mode d’un passage tout à la fois libérateur et éprouvant, n’est qu’une étape dans le cycle de la reproduction de soi, lequel comporte toujours une dimension de retour critique sur soi, ce qui ouvre la porte au changement » (441). Létourneau préfère, dans le cas du Québec tout au moins, parler de nécessaire « actualisation culturelle » plutôt que de transculturalité (438–39). De même, sur le plan plus strictement littéraire, Pierre Nepveu, qui célèbre l’écriture migrante québécoise et affirme volontiers que « toute culture se définit par sa capacité d’auto-altération, de dépaysement, de migration » (« Qu’estce que la transculture » 19) met toutefois en garde contre un « faux pluralisme, niant abstraitement toute identité, toute origine13 » (L’Écologie 202). De telles vues sur la transculturalité me paraissent déborder le contexte québécois et être corroborées, de manière directe ou oblique, par les contributions du présent ouvrage, qui se situent principalement dans la sphère culturelle

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anglo-canadienne. En plaçant la mémoire au centre de leurs préoccupations, ces études témoignent bien de la complexité et de la richesse des expériences de transculturation auxquelles donne lieu le fertile espace canadien. Elles mettent en garde contre toute mainmise sur la parole d’autrui : l’article d’A. Braz notamment, qui porte sur un point tout à fait révélateur de la réception de l’affaire Riel, ou encore le roman de Nancy Huston mis ici en valeur par J. Thibeault, rappellent certaines stratégies coloniales d’occultation qui ont configuré en partie l’État canadien et ils témoignent du besoin actuel d’en venir aux prises avec ce passé et ses effets. L’étude ethnohistorique d’A. Kinge et A. MacDonell manifeste bien ces préoccupations présentes : à l’occasion de récits d’explorateurs de l’Ouest, elle suggère que les ressources de la compréhension interculturelle véritable ont toujours existé, même en des temps reculés, et que les mainmises qui eurent lieu sur la parole et la mémoire d’autrui n’étaient pas un destin inéluctable. Plusieurs des contributions s’attachent à décrire les processus complexes mis en branle par cette rencontre de ce qui n’est pas familier : par exemple, le cas analysé par le sociologue V. Armony, ou les oeuvres romanesques étudiées par N. Cheadle, ou encore les riches correspondances interculturelles évoquées par le récit de N. Besner, illustrent bien la révélation qui s’y produit de l’autre que l’on est à soi-même, cet horizon d’évidences implicites héritées, que l’inouï d’autrui contraint à voir et à juger en soi. Aucun de ces textes ne s’avise de célébrer l’hybridité culturelle et le renouvellement de soi qu’entraîne cette rencontre d’autrui sans, dans le même mouvement, évoquer les difficultés, la douleur de ce processus, soulignant ainsi l’intime rapport que l’identité entretient avec le passé. Ceux qui sont acculés à l’émigration ou à l’assimilation éprouvent l’autre culture d’abord comme un arrachement, et nombreux ici sont les auteurs, notamment A. Giménez-Micó, S. Henighan et N. Cheadle, qui évoquent cette réalité d’exil. La fidélité mémorielle y est soutenue par la plainte, le refus indigné d’oublier les torts subis. Même cet immigré de l’intérieur qu’est le poète Robert Dickson confesse quelque part la blessure de cet exil qu’a signifié pour lui l’assimilation de sa propre mère à la langue anglaise, et qui le laisse au dénuement de ses mots : je ne cherche recherche l’image performante je suis perforé de cela de ceci ici comme la langue maternelle que ma mère n’a jamais apprise là-bas comme le pays où je n’appartiens pas (Grand ciel bleu par ici 41)

La transculturation prend son départ dans ces origines, dans la temporalité d’un corps transi de désir et d’affects, un corps dont l’opacité demeure

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toujours en excès par rapport au langage qu’il profère, un corps qui leste et entrave les discours hâtifs, les universaux abstraits, les idéologies d’une réconciliation bon marché. Remarquons, à cet égard, que ce sont surtout les êtres en marge du pouvoir, en premier lieu les femmes, qui insistent, dans cet ouvrage, sur la transculturation comme expérience corporelle : non seulement la Métisse Miranda de Nancy Huston, mais aussi les protagonistes des romans de Jane Urquhart et Eden Robinson que présente S. Kulperger; et encore, l’auteure Carmen Rodríguez dont l’œuvre, rapporte C. Stos, constitue à la fois une véritable « transcréation » et « traduction de soi ». Il n’est pas jusqu’aux personnages de traductrices, dans les œuvres romanesques de Carol Shields et Kate Taylor décrites ici par J. Woodsworth, qui ne prêtent à leur travail les dimensions de leur existence même - cela n’est pas fortuit et constitue précisément un des traits remarquables de ce livre : cette convergence, opérée par la majorité des contributions, entre les processus transculturels et le geste de traduire. Car s’il est vrai que la traduction est plus qu’un simple équivalent général monnayant la parole d’autrui, si elle est davantage que l’outil d’une mainmise, c’est qu’en elle se renouvelle une mémoire, une expérience qui, plus vaste que le discours qui la communique, n’est pleinement repérable qu’à ses traces corporelles et à sa gestuelle rhétorique. Mais l’intérêt de la transculturation, ce qui nous la rend précieuse, c’est aussi que la résistance mémorielle ne s’y réduit pas à une pure nostalgie de la demeure perdue : le legs s’y trouve reformulé en des termes nouveaux, non moins traversés de désir. À cette croisée naissent les projets – d’une demeure, toujours, mais inédite, en un clair-obscur de deuil et de fête exploratoire. Cet ouvrage fait la part belle à de telles entreprises, évoquant par exemple certaines pratiques translinguistiques d’écriture (cf. H. Hazelton). Avec un art consommé, le Cri Tomson Highway sait, lui aussi, conjuguer passé et présent, les mythes ancestraux aux formes les plus contemporaines d’écriture, afin d’ouvrir un horizon d’avenir à son peuple, mais aussi à tout lecteur, ce dont témoigne sa réception jusqu’au Japon (avec les défis herméneutiques que cela pose et que rapporte ici l’intéressant article de B. Curran). Démarche analogue chez l’Africadien George Elliott Clarke, auquel cet ouvrage accorde une place méritée. Sa propre contribution sur la canadianité du SudAfricain Arthur Nortje montre qu’est pleinement consciente la déterritorialisation qu’il opère dans ses propres œuvres de la notion d’identité culturelle. Certes, comme S. Knutson le montre bien, Clarke sait faire servir les textes canoniques à l’expression littéraire d’une identité déterminée, en un geste qui s’inspire de maintes fondations de littératures nationales des siècles derniers; son chef-d’oeuvre africadien Whylah Falls, roman en poèmes, ne rappelle pas

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par hasard l’Eugène Onéguine de Pouchkine (« Pushkin » est même le nom de l’un de ses protagonistes). Mais L. Steven signale bien l’ironie profonde et voulue de cette stratégie, qui vise chez Clarke à fonder la non-fondation, à établir la tradition du précaire, la tradition des opprimés d’Africadie, en un chant destiné aux nomades de la Terre, à ceux des marges transculturelles. La magie de telles œuvres vient de ce qu’elles produisent des figures de ce que pourrait être un universel concret, un ici-et-maintenant dans lequel autrui, sans préjudice de sa propre différence, pourrait se reconnaître, modifiant du même coup sa compréhension de lui-même. La métaphore du contrepoint chère à Ortiz est souvent employée – ici même, par N. Cheadle – pour évoquer ces rencontres mouvantes où même les oppositions peuvent se résoudre en unité. Un passage fameux des Deux solitudes de Hugh MacLennan décrit en ces termes la dualité canadienne (devenue depuis une pluralité), « chacun lié à l’autre dans une commune destinée, et réalisant, même dans l’opposition, une unité qu’il n’appartenait à personne de pouvoir dissoudre, le point et contrepoint d’une si subtile harmonie qu’aucun n’en avait jamais vraiment deviné l’existence » (239). On peut, certes, dénoncer l’abus interprétatif, même bien intentionné, consistant à se poser en sagesse capable de subsumer à leur insu des termes particuliers sous un même universel14. Mais l’universel n’est guère plus ici qu’un trope et, surtout, son auteur (cela a été signalé dans l’introduction de cet ouvrage) concevait l’harmonie désirée comme faite de voix autonomes, chacune puissamment seule. Si la transculturation doit être davantage qu’idéologie ou qu’un néologisme par lequel on prend acte de processus socio-culturels nouveaux, si par elle s’exprime aussi le projet d’une harmonisation douce des différences, il faut que les partenaires y soient puissamment seuls, assurés d’eux-mêmes et libres. Lorsqu’en 1965 Northrop Frye proposait de reformuler la question de l’identité canadienne, « who am I? », par celle du lieu : « where is here? », il ouvrait le programme d’une exploration des imaginaires et des mythes nés de l’habitation du territoire15. Moment nécessaire, mais qui risquerait de n’aboutir qu’à un inventaire ou à une mosaïque des identités si l’on omettait de considérer la rationalité, même inchoative, exprimée à travers ces imaginaires. From where to here? Quelles sont, en amont, les intentionnalités ayant pris forme dans la culture, dans les vies qui nous ont précédés? From here to where? Qu’est-ce qui, de ce passé, aura notre aval, quel en est le vrai, pour nous et pour quiconque, assez du moins pour que nous y adhérions et le reprenions comme un projet? Il faut être puissamment seul pour reconnaître et juger de ce que l’on est et souhaite être, et seules de telles solitudes sont susceptibles de partager avec autrui la seule chose qui se puisse partager, le jugement sur la vérité. De ce travail philosophique de mise au net

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et de partage transculturel du jugement, auquel chacun des textes de cet ouvrage contribue à sa manière, pourraient surgir, dans l’espace de ce qui est aujourd’hui le Canada, des figures inédites, meilleures, par-delà les idéologies et leurs alternatives creuses.

Notes 1 Voir, sur l’internet : <www.hedibouraoui.net>. 2 Sur ce thème, voir encore de la même auteure : « Citoyenneté culturaliste, citoyenneté civique », « Défaire les identités fétiches » ainsi que la postface de son roman La Québécoite (1993). 3 Sur ce point, on relève souvent des affinités multiples entre le postcolonialisme et le postmodernisme; voir les remarques éclairantes de Marie Vautier, « Les métarécits, le postmodernisme et le mythe postcolonial au Québec; un point de vue de la “marge” ». Par ailleurs, on doit à Laurier Turgeon une précieuse mise au point sur le vocabulaire élaboré tout au long du xxe siècle dans divers contextes pour dire le transculturel, l’hybride ou le métissage : « Les mots pour dire les métissages; jeux et enjeux d’un lexique ». 4 La même thèse, poussée presque jusqu’à la caricature, est présente chez Wolfgang Welsch, « Transkulturalität. Die veränderte Verfassung heutiger Kulturen », 1997, version de l’internet : <www.tzw.biz/www/home/article. php?p_id=409>. 5 À cet égard, on doit à Laurier Turgeon une stimulante étude, qui se trouve au 5e chapitre de Patrimoines métissés, sur les restaurants étrangers de la ville de Québec, sous l’angle de la réification et, bien sûr, de la consommation qui s’y font des différences culturelles. 6 Voir aussi, du même auteur, Multiculturalisme : différence et démocratie, ainsi que Les Sources du moi : la formation de l’identité moderne. 7 Je m’inspire ici et dans ce qui suit de l’ouvrage décisif de Joseph Yvon Thériault, Critique de l’américanité : mémoire et démocratie au Québec. 8 Dans le même sens, voir l’ouvrage solidement argumenté de Jacques Beauchemin, L’Histoire en trop : la mauvaise conscience des souverainistes québécois. 9 Richler, Oh Canada ! Oh Quebec ! Voir aussi un ouvrage de même acabit commis par le Franco-Ontarien Daniel Poliquin : Le Roman colonial. 10 Le thème de l’oubli volontaire en histoire remonte à la deuxième des Considérations inactuelles de Nietzsche : « De l’utilité et des inconvénients de l’histoire pour la vie ». 11 Il est significatif que, partant d’une posture herméneutique analogue à celle de Létourneau, Gérard Bouchard en arrive pour sa part à des conséquences politiques opposées, c’est-à-dire souverainistes; cf. La Nation québécoise au futur et au passé. 12 Voir aussi, du même auteur, La Distance habitée. 13 Nepveu est cité dans Clément Moisan et Renate Hildebrand, Ces étrangers du dedans : une histoire de l’écriture migrante au Québec 1937–1997, Québec, Nota bene, 2001, p. 333, 276. 14 Voir en ce sens J. Cardinal, « Les bons sentiments », part. p. 161–164. 15 N. Frye, « Conclusion to a Literary History of Canada », dans The Bush Garden, part. p. 219–222.

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Bibliographie Baillargeon, Jean-Paul, dir. Transmission de la culture, petites sociétés et mondialisation, Québec, Presses de l’Université Laval, 2002. Beauchemin, Jacques. L’Histoire en trop : la mauvaise conscience des souverainistes québécois, Montréal, VLB, 2002. Benhabib, Seyla. The Claims of Culture: Equality and Diversity in the Global Era, Princeton et Oxford, Princeton University Press, 2002. Berten, André et al., dir. Libéraux et communautariens, Paris, Presses universitaires de France, 1997. Bissoondath, Neil. Selling Illusions: The Cult of Multiculturalism in Canada, Toronto, Penguin, 1994. Bouchard, Gérard. La Nation québécoise au futur et au passé, Montréal, VLB, 1999. Cantin, Serge. « Pour sortir de la survivance », in Michel Venne, dir., Penser la nation québécoise, Montréal, Québec Amérique, 2000, p. 85–101. Cardinal, Jacques. « Les bons sentiments. Amitié et politique dans Two Solitudes de Hugh MacLennan », dans Tangence 63 (2000), p. 135–164. Dickson, Robert. Grand ciel bleu par ici, Sudbury, Prise de parole, 1997. Frye, Northrop. The Bush Garden : Essays on the Canadian Imagination, Toronto, Anansi, 1971. Grant, George. Est-ce la fin du Canada? Lamentation sur l’échec du nationalisme canadien [1965], trad. Gaston Laurion, La Salle, Hurtubise HMH, 1987. Habermas, Jürgen. L’Intégration républicaine : essais de théorie politique, Paris, Fayard, 1998. Kwaterko, Jósef. « L’américanité : voies du concept et voix de la fiction au Québec et dans la Caraïbe », dans International Journal of Canadian Studies/Revue internationale d’études canadiennes 27 (2003), p. 43–60. Létourneau, Jocelyn. « L’altérité chantée, l’altérité vécue. Conceptualiser l’échange culturel dans le Québec contemporain », dans Pierre Ouellet, dir., Le Soi et l’autre : l’énonciation de l’identité dans les contextes interculturels, Québec, Presses de l’Université Laval, 2003, p. 435–446. ———. Passer à l’avenir : histoire, mémoire et identité dans le Québec d’aujourd’hui, Montréal, Boréal, 2000. MacLennan, Hugh. Deux solitudes, trad. Laure Gareau-Desbois, Montréal, Hurtubise HMH, 1978. Nepveu, Pierre. L’Écologie du réel, Montréal, Boréal, 1988. ———. « Qu’est-ce que la transculture? », dans Paragraphes 2 (1989), p. 15–31. Ortiz, Fernando. Contrapunteo cubano del tabaco y el azúcar. Advertencia de sus contrastes agrarios, económicos, históricos y sociales, su etnografía y su transculturación, Madrid, Cuba España, 1999. Paré, François. Les Littératures de l’exiguïté, Ottawa, Le Nordir, 1992. ———. La Distance habitée, Ottawa, Le Nordir, 2003. Poliquin, Daniel. Le Roman colonial, Montréal, Boréal, 2000.

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Richler, Mordecai. Oh Canada! Oh Quebec!: Requiem for a Divided Country, Toronto, Penguin, 1992. Ricoeur, Paul. La Mémoire, l’histoire, l’oubli, Paris, Seuil, 2000. Robin, Régine. « L’impossible Québec pluriel: la fascination de la “souche” », dans M. Elbaz et al., dir., Les Frontières de l’identité : modernité et postmodernisme au Québec, Sainte-Foy/Presses de l’Université Laval; Paris/L’Harmattan, 1996, p. 295–310. ———. « Citoyenneté culturaliste, citoyenneté civique », dans Khadiyatoulah Fall et al., dir., Mots, représentations, enjeux dans les contacts interethniques et interculturels, Ottawa, Presses de l’Université d’Ottawa, 1994, p. 179–200. ———. « Défaire les identités fétiches », in Jocelyn Létourneau, dir., La Question identitaire au Canada francophone : récits, parcours, enjeux, hors-lieux, SainteFoy, Presses de l’Université Laval, 1994, p. 215–40. ———. La Québécoite, Montréal, Typo, 1993. Sandkühler, H.J. « Pluralism, Cultures of Knowledge, Transculturality, and Fundamental Rights », dans Hans Jörg Sandkühler et Hong-Bin Lim. dir., Transculturality: Epistemology, Ethics and Politics, Francfort, Peter Lang, 2004, p. 79–99. Taylor, Charles. Rapprocher les solitudes : écrits sur le fédéralisme et le nationalisme au Canada, Sainte-Foy, Presses de l’Université Laval, 1992. ———. Multiculturalisme : différence et démocratie, Paris, Aubier, 1994. ———. Les Sources du moi : la formation de l’identité moderne, Montréal, Boréal, 1998. Thériault, Joseph Yvon. Critique de l’américanité : mémoire et démocratie au Québec, Montréal, Québec Amérique, 2002. Turgeon, Laurier. « Les mots pour dire les métissages : jeux et enjeux d’un lexique », dans Pierre Ouellet, dir., Le Soi et l’autre : l’énonciation de l’identité dans les contextes interculturels, Sainte-Foy, Presses de l’Université Laval, 2003, p. 383–402. ———. Patrimoines métissés : contextes coloniaux et postcoloniaux, Paris/Maison des sciences de l’homme, Québec / Presses de l’Université Laval, 2003. Vautier, Marie. « Les métarécits, le postmodernisme et le mythe postcolonial au Québec : un point de vue de la marge », in Études littéraires vol. 27/1 (1994), p. 43–61.  zek, Slavoj. « Multiculturalism : Or, the Cultural Logic of Multinational Capitalism », Zi dans New Left Review 225 (1997), p. 28–51.

List of Contributors / Liste des collaborateurs

Victor Armony est professeur au Département de sociologie de l’uqam et professeur auxiliaire au département de sociologie de l’Université d’Ottawa. Il dirige la Revue canadienne des études latino-américaines et caraïbes ainsi que le Centre ato (Analyse de Texte par Ordinateur) de l’uqam. Victor Armony est également directeur de recherches à la Chaire de recherche du Canada en mondialisation, citoyenneté et démocratie (mcd) et responsable de l’Initiative interuniversitaire pour les études en développement international à Montréal, laquelle est financée par le crdi. En 2004, il a publié L’Énigme argentine (Montréal, Athéna). Neil Besner has taught Canadian literature at the University of Winnipeg since 1987; he was Dean of Humanities (2002–05), Dean of Arts (2005–06), and is currently Associate Vice-President, International. He has written books on Mavis Gallant (The Light of Imagination, ubc Press, 1988), and on Alice Munro’s Lives of Girls and Women (ecw Press, 1991), edited two collections of essays on Carol Shields (1995, 2003, Prairie Fire Press), and translated a Brazilian biography of Elizabeth Bishop into English (Rare and Commonplace Flowers, Rutgers University Press, 2002). He has also co-edited collections of short stories (The Short Story in English, 1991) and poetry (Uncommon Wealth, 1997) with Oxford University Press Canada. Currently he is the general editor of a new series of volumes of contemporary Canadian poetry with Wilfrid Laurier University Press. Albert Braz is Assistant Professor of English and Comparative Literature, and graduate coordinator of the Comparative Literature Program, at the 379

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University of Alberta. He specializes in Canadian literature in both its national and continental (inter-American) contexts. Along with numerous essays, he is the author of The False Traitor: Louis Riel in Canadian Culture (University of Toronto Press, 2003). Norman Cheadle is Associate Professor of Hispanic studies at Laurentian University. His publications include The Ironic Apocalypse in the Novels of Leopoldo Marechal (Tamesis, 2000). He is currently working on a critical edition of Leopoldo Marechal’s Adán Buenosayres (1948) in English translation. George Elliott Clarke is the inaugural E.J. Pratt Professor of Canadian Literature at University of Toronto. An expert in African-Canadian Literature, he published the foundational work in the field, Odysseys Home: Mapping AfricanCanadian Literature, in 2002. Named a Trudeau Foundation Fellow in 2005, Clarke is also a revered poet, librettist, and novelist. His collection Execution Poems received the Governor General’s Award for Poetry in 2001. His bestselling poetry-novel, Whylah Falls, is also a major text in Canadian literature. Beverley Curran is Associate Professor in the Department of Creativity and Culture at Aichi Shukutoku University in Nagoya. She is interested in translation theory and practice, intercultural performance, and women’s writing. She is currently doing research on theatre translation theory and performance in Japan. Her articles have appeared in journals and collections, including Canadian Literature, Style, and a/b. Her collaborative Japanese translation of Nicole Brossard’s Journal intime appeared in 2000 (Kokubunsha). José Antonio Giménez Micó is past president of the Canadian Association of Hispanists (2004–2006), Associate Professor of Spanish and Latin American Studies at Concordia University, professeur associé at l’Université Laval, and adjunct professor at University of Calgary. He has published several articles on Latin-American, Caribbean, Spanish, and French literature, as well as on semiotics, hermeneutics, and cultural studies. He is also the author of L’irruption des autres (Balzac/Le Griot, 2000) and Todas las sangres de José María Arguedas. Ética y estética del mestizaje y de la transculturación (Université de Montréal, 1994). Hugh Hazelton is a poet and translator who teaches Spanish at Concordia University. Winner of the 2006 Governor General’s Award for Translation (French to English) for his translation of Vétiver, by Haitian-Canadian poet Joël DesRosiers (Signature Editions, 2005), he has translated eight books from Spanish and French into English. He was coeditor and principal translator of Compañeros (Cormorant, 1991), an anthology of Canadian writing about Latin

List of Contributors / Liste des collaborateurs

America that includes work by 84 English-Canadian, Quebec, and Haitianand Latino-Canadian writers. His third collection of poems, Antimatter, was published by Broken Jaw Press in 2003. His book Latinocanadá: A Critical Anthology of Ten Latin American Writers of Canada is forthcoming from McGillQueen’s University Press (2007). Stephen Henighan is Associate Professor of Spanish at the University of Guelph. He is author of Assuming the Light: The Parisian Literary Apprenticeship of Miguel Ángel Asturias (Legenda, 1999); When Words Deny the World: The Reshaping of Canadian Writing (Porcupine’s Quill, 2002); and Lost Province: Adventures in a Moldovan Family (Beach Holme, 2002). With Antonio Velásquez, he is author of Intercambios: Spanish for Global Communication, First Canadian Edition (Thomson Nelson, 2005), the first introductory Spanish language textbook employing Canadian and Latino-Canadian cultural references. Henighan has published three novels—Other Americas (Simon & Pierre, 1990), The Places Where Names Vanish (Thistledown, 1998), and The Streets of Winter (Thistledown, 2004)—and two short story collections, Nights in the Yungas (Thistledown, 1992) and North of Tourism (Cormorant, 1999). Henighan is a regular book reviewer for the Times Literary Supplement and writes a column on Canadian culture for Geist. Ann Ireland is a novelist and coordinator of the Writing Program in the Department of Continuing Education, Ryerson University, in Toronto. Her creative writing has been published in literary magazines throughout Canada and in Mexico. Her novels include A Certain Mr. Takahashi (McClelland & Stewart, 1985), winner of the Seal/Bantam First Novel Award; The Instructor (Doubleday, 1996); and Exile (Simon & Pierre-Dundurn, 2002), shortlisted for the Governor General’s Award. Alexandra Kinge est étudiante au doctorat dans un programme conjoint de l’Université d’Ottawa et de la Sorbonne (Paris iv). Ses recherches actuelles portent sur les représentations du Canadien dans les récits de voyage européens du xviie et xviiie siècles. Elle a prononcé des conférences sur ce sujet et sur des thèmes connexes dans plusieurs colloques internationaux. Susan Knutson is Professor of English and Dean of Arts and Sciences at l’Université Sainte-Anne, a Francophone university serving the Acadian communities of Nova Scotia. She is author of Narrative in the Feminine: Daphne Marlatt and Nicole Brossard (Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2000), now in its third printing. Her current research is on the question of how and why Canadian authors re-encode canonical literary texts. She has published

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several articles on Shakespeare, Nicole Brossard, Charles Olson, and Canadian women’s histories. Shelley Kulperger recently received a PhD from the University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia, for her dissertation on feminist and post-colonial Gothic in Canada. She teaches in Women’s Studies, English, and Contemporary Studies at University of Queensland. She has published articles on Canadian literature, urban space, and multiculturalism. Her current post-doctoral research project is on “Feminist Cultural Memory in Australia and Canada.” Alan MacDonell est professeur associé au département de français, espagnol et italien de l’Université du Manitoba. Spécialiste en lettres québécoises et en littérature francophone de l’Ouest canadien, il s’intéresse aussi à la traduction et à l’analyse des récits et journaux des premiers explorateurs de l’Ouest. Il a traduit, avec la professeure Connie Cartmill, In Search of the Western Sea/À la recherche de la mer de l’Ouest (2001) et il travaille actuellement à une traduction des deux derniers journaux de Pierre-Esprit Radisson. Lucien Pelletier est professeur au département de philosophie de l’Université de Sudbury (affiliée à l’Université Laurentienne). Il s’intéresse à la philosophie politique, à la philosophie de la religion et à l’esthétique. Il a publié plusieurs articles sur des philosophes allemands du début du xxe siècle, notamment Ernst Bloch et Paul Tillich. Ses thèmes de prédilection sont l’utopie et la théologie politique. Laurence Steven is Professor of English and Director of the Interdisciplinary Humanities ma in Interpretation and Values at Laurentian University. He is the author of Dissociation and Wholeness in Patrick White’s Fiction (Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press). His most recent publications include theoretical essays on subjects such as theory and ethics, D.H. Lawrence and genre, Canadian post-colonial literature, as well as narrative ethics and Martha Nussbaum. Carol Stos is Assistant Professor of Hispanic Studies and Vice-Dean (Anglophone) of Humanities and Social Sciences at Laurentian University. Her research includes 19th-century Peninsular literature and Hispanic women writers; she has lectured on Emilia Pardo Bazán in universities in Spain and Canada. In addition, she has authored articles on Hispanic women in Northern Ontario and on women in Canadian academia. Jimmy Thibeault est étudiant au programme de doctorat en lettres françaises de l’Université d’Ottawa. Il prépare une thèse sur la représentation du processus d’identification dans la littérature contemporaine. Il s’intéresse parti-

List of Contributors / Liste des collaborateurs

culièrement aux rapports qu’entretiennent les individus aux collectivités dans le contexte de la mouvance des frontières que suggèrent les notions de globalisation et de continentalité. Il a d’ailleurs publié des articles sur ce sujet dans Francophonies d’Amérique (Printemps 2003) et dans Lucie Hotte et Johanne Melançon (ed.), Thèmes et variations : regards sur la littérature francoontarienne paru en 2005. Judith Woodsworth has been President of Laurentian University since 2002. She taught translation at Concordia University for 17 years and was Vice-President (Academic) at Mount Saint Vincent University. In 1999, she was inducted as an officer in the Ordre de la Pléiade, Ordre de la Francophonie et du dialogue des cultures, for her work in promoting the French language and intercultural relations. Her academic work includes numerous conference presentations and publications in both translation studies and French literature. She was co-editor, with Jean Delisle, of Translators through History (Les Traducteurs dans l’histoire), published as well in Portuguese and in Spanish. She translated Pierre Nepveu’s novel Des mondes peu habités into English as Still Lives (1997). She has served the translation profession and the broader educational and cultural community both nationally and internationally.

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Name Index / Index onomastique

Agustini, Delmira, 150 Alexe, George, 211 Allende, Salvador, 206, 235 Andersen, Marguerite, 197 Parallèles, 197 Andrade, Mario de, 312 Arendt, Hannah, 312 Arguedas, José María, 270 Atwood, Margaret, 100–101 Aubert de Gaspé, Philippe, 15 Les Anciens Canadiens, 15 Canadians of Old [Les Anciens Canadiens] (trans. Roberts), 15 Aulneau, père Jean-Pierre, 5, 12 Baldwin, James, 125–126 Balzac, Honoré de, 354 Banerjee, Himani, 30 Bannatyne, Annie, 20 Barthes, Roland, 8–9, 103 Batu, Florica, 211 Baudelaire, Charles, 354 Beauharnois, marquis de (Charles de La Boische), 5 Begamudré, Ven, xi Benítez-Rojo, Antonio, xiii, xvii Benjamin, Walter, xx, 369 Besner, Neil, x, xxi, 307–320 Rare and Commonplace Flowers: The Story of Elizabeth Bishop and Lota de

Macedo Soares (Oliveira, trans. Besner), x, 309–320 Bhabha, Homi, 271, 277, 288, 358, 359, 365 Bishop, Elizabeth ¤subject index Bissoondath, Neil, 365 Boone, Daniel, xviii Borges, Jorge Luis, xiv, xv Bouchard, Gérard, 376 La Nation québécoise au futur et au passé, 376n11 Bouchard, Jacques, 263n1 Bouraoui, Hédi, 184, 199n11, 365 Bourque, Gilles, 252 Brand, Dionne, xii, xiii, 45, 131–132, 274 At the Full and Change of the Moon, 45 Brault, Jacques, 183 Bringhurst, Robert, 204 Brossard, Nicole, 342–343, 344, 358 Le Désert mauve, 342–343, 358 Brown, Ashley, 312 Brunet, Michel, 248 « Trois dominantes de la pensée canadienne-française », 248 Brutus, Dennis, 122 Burle Marx, Roberto, 312 Butler, Judith, 271 Caccia, Fulvio, 208 Calder, Alexander, 312 Campbell, Maria, 80–81, 88

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Name Index / Index onomastique The Book of Jessica (Campbell/Griffiths), 80–81, 88 Cantin, Serge, 368–369, 369–370 Caron, Catherine, 192, 200n20 Strip, 192, 200n20 Cartier, Jacques, 14n1, 35 Castellanos Moya, Horacio, 206 Castro, Ferdinando, 315–316 Catanoy, Nicholas, 211 Ceausescu, Nicolae, 213, 215–216, 220n14 Champlain, Samuel de, 32, 33 Charbonneau, Jean-Pierre, 252, 264n7 Che Guevara, Ernesto, 289 Chen, Ying, 210, 219n8 Cixous, Hélène, 142 Clarke, George Elliott, x, xi–xii, xviii, xx, 29–51, 99–116, 374–375 “À Arthur Nortje,” 121–122 Execution Poems: The Black Acadian Tragedy of “George and Rue” ¤ subject index Odysseys Home: Mapping African-Canadian Literature, xvii, 30, 51, 99, 104 Whylah Falls ¤ subject index Cocteau, Jean, 317, 318 Cody, William “Buffalo Bill,” 324 Cohen, Leonard, 180 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 112 Constantin-Weyer, Maurice, xvi, 16–25 La Bourrasque ¤ subject index The Half-breed [La Bourrasque], 16, 20 A Martyr’s Folly [La Bourrasque] ¤ subject index Cook, Margaret Michèle, 197 Corriveau, Hugues, 199n16 Crail, Archie, 134 Curtius, Ernst Robert, 35–36 Cutipa, Alfredo, 66, 70 Da Costa, Mathieu, xvii, 33, 34–35 d’Alfonso, Antonio, 208 Dalpé, Jean Marc, 192, 193, 195–196, 200nn20, 29 Eddy / In the Ring, 192, 192, 200n20 Lucky Lady, 192, 193, 200n20 Trick or Treat, 192, 192, 200n20 Dávila, Arlene, 296 Latinos, Inc., 296 de la Campa, Román, 271 Deleuze, Gilles, 207–208, 209

de Man, Paul, 134 Derrida, Jacques, 84, 86, 345, 346 Desbiens, Patrice, 195, 196, 200n29 Sudbury, 197, 201n31 Desjardins, Richard, 186 Desrosiers, Sylvie, xxiin6 Dickson, Robert ¤ index des matières Abris / Nocturnes, 183, 185, 199n14 Champion et Ooneemeetoo (Highway, trad. Dickson), xx « Gaston Miron et le bilinguisme », 199n9 Grand ciel bleu par ici, 196, 199n16, 200n28, 373 Humains paysages en temps de paix relative, 184, 185, 199n12 Or«é»alité, 183, 185–186, 195 « La « révolution culturelle » en Nouvel-Ontario et le Québec », 199n10 D’Israeli, Isaac, 17 Donnacona (chef iroquois), 14n1 Drabek, Jan, 204–205, 212 Dryden, John, 341–342 Duchastel, Jule, 252 Dugua, Pierre, Sieur de Mons, 32, 33, 34 Duguay, Raoul, 180, 185 Lapolalipsô, 186 « Le stéréo-poème audio-visuel », 186 Duoduo, 210 Crossing the Sea, 210 Edgar, Pelham, 16, 24 Eliot, George, 354 Eliot, T.S., 115, 126–128, 130, 133 “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” 126, 128 The Waste Land, 103, 115, 127 Elliott, Lorris, 132–133 Engel, Marian, 189 The Honeyman Festival, 199n18 Enoch, Wesley, 323 Bibliography of Literary Writings by Blacks in Canada (ed. Elliott), 132 Espinoza, Blanca, 229, 237, 243–244 Tango, 237, 243–244 Etcheverry, Jorge ¤ subject index La calle, 233 De chácharas y largavistas [Small Talk and Binoculars], 235 El evasionista / The Escape Artist, 233

Name Index / Index onomastique Tánger / Tangiers, 233–234, 240–242 The Witch, 233 Faludy, György, 205, 207, 212 City of Splintered Gods, 205 Karoton, 205 Fanon, Frantz, 131, 133 Feliciano, Margarita ¤ subject index Circadian Nuvolitatis, 230, 231–232, 239–240 “Going Down on 280”/“Bajando por la 280,” 231–232, 239–240 Lectura en Málaga, 232 “Océano Pacifico”/“Pacific Ocean,” 230– 231, 239 Ventana sobre el mar / Window on the Sea, 230–231, 239 Flaubert, Gustave, 354 Foucault, Michel, 161 Four Bears, 324 François Ier, 36 Frye, Northrop, x, xiv, 375 Fuentes, Carlos, 249, 263, 265n23 García Márquez, Gabriel, 270, 272 One Hundred Years of Solitude, 270 Garneau, Jacques, 180 Germain, Pierre, 182 Giguère, Roland, 184, 199n10 Ginsberg, Allen, 180 « Howl », 180 Giurgiu, Eugen, xx, 211–218, 220nn11–13 Biserica arsa [Burnt Church], 212 Ca frunzele in vânt [Like Leaves in the Wind], 212 Ewoclem, or The Twisted Paths ¤ subject index Glissant, Édouard, xv, xix, 62–63 La Case du commandeur, 62 Godard, Barbara, 358 Goethe, J.W., 35 Faust, 35 Gonnor, père Nicholas, 13 Grandbois, Alain, 180 Grant, George, 102, 367 Est-ce la fin du Canada?, 367 Griffiths, Linda, 80–81 The Book of Jessica (Campbell/Griffiths), 80–81, 88

Groulx, chanoine Lionel Adolphe, 248 Directives, 248 Habermas, Jürgen, 371 Haentjens, Brigitte, 192, 200n20 Strip, 192, 200n20 Hahn, Reynaldo, 356 Hamilton, George, 29–30, 33 Hamilton, Rufus ¤ subject index Head, Harold, 132–133 Bushman’s Brew (ed. Head), 132 In Us Now: The First Anthology of Black Poetry and Prose in Canada (ed. Head), 132 Hébert, Anne, 15, 17, 180 Kamouraska, 15 Hegel, G.W.F., xiii Hémon, Louis, 133–134 Maria Chapdelaine, 133–134 Henson, Matthew, 171 Hesiod, 36 Highway, Tomson, x, xx, 30, 188, 192, 193, 194, 323–324, 325, 326, 330, 332 Champion et Ooneemeetoo [The Kiss of the Fur Queen] (trans. Dickson), xx, 192, 193, 194 Dry Lips Oughta Move to Kapuskasing ¤ subject index The Kiss of the Fur Queen, xx, 192, 193, 194 hooks, bell, 89 Horace, 38, 40, 44, 50 Humières, Robert d,’ 353–354 Huston, Nancy, xviii, xix, 159–173, 197 Cantique des plaines ¤ index des matières Nord perdu, 197 Pour un patriotisme de l’ambiguïté, 173n3 Huxley, Aldous, 312 Ichim, Dumitru, 211 Ireland, Ann, xi, xxi, 278, 297–300 Exile ¤ subject index Irigaray, Luce, xvii, xviii, 154 Elemental Passions, 154–155 Jérémie, Nicolas, 9 Johnston, A.B.J., 33–35 Jonas, George, 204, 212

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Name Index / Index onomastique Kafka, Franz, 208 Khan, Sharon, 233 Kierkegaard, Søren, 105 Kipling, Rudyard, 354 Kokis, Sergio, 244n4 Koustas, Jane, 23–24 Kristeva, Julia, xvi Kundera, Milan, 212 Kurapel, Alberto ¤ subject index Prométhée enchaîné selon Alberto Kurapel / Prometeo encadenado según Alberto Kurapel, 236, 242–243 Kwa, Lydia, 146 Colours of Heroines, 146 Kyd, Thomas, 46, 49, 50 The Spanish Tragedy, 46 Lacerda, Carlos, 312 Laclau, Ernesto, xvi La Colle (grand chef monsoni), 5–6 Lacombe, père Albert, 169, 170, 173n6 Lacourcière, Luc, 179–180 Landry, Bernard, 252, 264n6 Lange, Norah, 150 Lansdowne, Marquis of, 21–22 Laurier, Wilfrid, 23 La Vérendrye, Sieur de (Pierre Gaultier de Varennes), 5–6, 7, 8, 11, 12–13 Lavergne, Alfredo, 274, 301 Leão, Carlos, 312 Lemire Tostevin, Lola, 192, 193, 194, 342, 343–344, 358 Frog Moon, 343 Kaki [Frog Moon] (trad. Dickson), 192, 193, 194 Létourneau, Jocelyn, 370, 372 Lévesque, René, 190 Lévinas, Emmanuel, 78, 81 Totality and Infinity, 81 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, xiv, xvi, 280, 297 Li, Yan, 210, 219n8 Longclaws, Lyle, 324 Loomba, Ania, 162, 173n5 Lotbinière-Harwood, Susanne de, 358 Lowell, Robert, 317, 318 Maart, Rozena, 134 MacLennan, Hugh, xix, 203, 375 Deux solitudes [Two Solitudes], 375 Two Solitudes, xix, 203

Mair, Charles, 20 Malinowski, Bronislaw, 51n4, 270 Manguel, Alberto, 207, 227 News from a Foreign Country Came, 207 Marlowe, Christopher, 50 Marx, Karl, xiii McFadden, David, 200n29 McLuhan, Marshall, 186 Memmi, Albert, 8, 159 Portrait du colonisateur, 159 Messamouet, 35 Middleton, Frederick, 20 Millán, Gonzalo, 206, 209, 270 La Ciudad, 206 Milton, John, 115 Miron, Gaston, 183–184, 199n9,10, 200n25 L’Homme rapaillé, 200n25 Miska, John, 204, 211 Ethnic and Native Canadian Literature: A Bibliography, 204, 211 Mistral, Gabriela, 150 Moodie, Susanna, 79, 84–85, 86 Moore, Marianne, 317, 318 Moreiras, Alberto, 63, 271 Morency, Jean, 165 Morency, Pierre, 180 Morrison, Toni, 86 Morse, Mary, 318 Moya, Horacio Castellanos, 206 El asco: Thomas Bernhard en San Salvador, 206 Nakasone, Yasuhiro, 325 Nappaaluk, Mitiarjuk, 204 Sanaaq, 204 Nava, Pedro, 312 Nepveu, Pierre, 372 Neruda, Pablo, 131, 133, 146 Canto general, 146 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 105, 376n10 Noël, Alain, 250, 263n2 Nordlinger, Marie, 353, 354, 356, 357 Nortje, Arthur ¤ subject index Dead Roots, 122, 123, 126–128, 132, 134 Lonely Against the Light, 122 NourbeSe Philip, M., 30 Nouss, Alexis, 16–17

Name Index / Index onomastique Odhiambo, David, 134 Oliveira, Carmen, x, 309–310, 313–314, 315– 316, 318, 319–320 Flores Raras e Banalíssimas: A Historía de Lota de Macedo Soares e Elizabeth Bishop ¤ subject index Rare and Commonplace Flowers: The Story of Elizabeth Bishop and Lota de Macedo Soares (trans. Besner) ¤ subject index Ortega y Gasset, José, 237 Ortiz, Fernando ¤ subject index Cuban Counterpoint: Tobacco and Sugar, 30, 141–42, 269–270, 273, 278–279 Ovid, 36, 38, 46, 49, 50 Metamorphoses, 36, 38, 49 Paiement, André, 181, 196 Paré, François, xiv, 208–209, 372 Les Littératures de l’exiguïté, xiv, 372 Paton, Alan, 122 Paz, Octavio, 228 Pavel, Thomas, 211 Peary, Robert, 171 Pedri Rossi, Cristina, 150 Pessoa, Fernando, 235 Petrarch, 38 Picasso, Pablo, 317, 318 Pinochet, Augusto, 144, 147, 273, 284 Plath, Sylvia, 126–128, 130, 133 Ariel, 126 Poe, Edgar Allan, 354 Marginalia, 354 Poliquin, Daniel, 194 L’Obomsawin, 194 Portinari, Candido, 312 Potvin, Claudine, 160, 169 Pouchkine, Alexandre, 375 Pound, Ezra, 125 Pratt, E.J., 102–103 “Towards the Last Spike,” 102–103 Proust, Jeanne ¤ subject index Proust, Marcel ¤ subject index À la recherche du temps perdu, 354 Du Côté de chez Swann, 354 Sésame et les Lys (Ruskin, trans. Proust), 353

Queiroz, Rachel de, 312 Quijada Urias, Alfonso, 206, 207, 227 The Better to See You, 206 Rama, Ángel, 63, 269, 270–272, 273–274, 276, 295 Reid, John, 30, 32 Reimers, Camila, ix Richler, Mordecai, 369 Oh Canada! Oh Quebec!, 369 Ricoeur, Paul, 105, 108, 370 Riel, Louis, xvi, xviii, 16, 18–19, 20–23 Rilke, Rainer Maria, xix, xx, 203 Rio, Nela, 206 Túnel de proa verde / Tunnel of the Green Prow, 206 Rioux, Marcel, 252 Roberts, Charles G.D., 15 Canadians of Old (Aubert de Gaspé, trans. Roberts), 15 Robin, Régine, 365, 376n2 Robinson, Christopher, 22 Robinson, Eden, xi, 75–77, 82, 86–94 Monkey Beach ¤ subject index Rodó, José Enrique, 249–250 Rodríguez, Carmen ¤ subject index and a body to remember with ¤ subject index De Cuerpo Entero ¤ subject index Rodríguez, Jan, 33 Rosa, João Guimarães, 270 Roster, Meter, 233 Roy, Gabrielle, 195 Bonheur d’occasion, 195 Royer, Louis, 180 Poésie O, 199n7 Rulfo, Juan, 270, 276 Pedro Páramo, 270 Rushdie, Salman, 273 Ruskin, John, 341, 350, 353, 354, 355 The Bible of Amiens, 341 La Bible d’Amiens (trans. Proust), 353 Sésame et les Lys (trans. Proust), 353 Said, Edward, xix, 8, 31, 50, 71, 72, 94–95, 270, 273 Orientalism, 94 Saint-Denys Garneau, Hector de, 180, 185 Sainte-Beuve, Charles Augustin, 354

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390

Name Index / Index onomastique Saravia, Alejandro, ix, 60, 66, 71 Habitante del décimo territorio, 64–65 Rojo, amarillo y verde, 65–66, 70 Sauriol, Paul, 251 Sauvageau, Florian, 189 Sawada, Keiji, 328, 329, 333 Schendel, Nicolas van, 165–166 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 238 Scott, F.R., 17, 102–103 “Laurentian Shield,” 103 “On Saying Goodbye to My Room in Chancellor Day Hall,” 103 Scott, Thomas, 20, 21–22, 23 Seneca, 38, 48, 49, 50 Hippolytus, 38, 44–45, 48, 49, 50 Sévigné, Marquise de, 341–342 Shakespeare, William, 31, 40, 101, 108, 115, 348 Titus Andronicus ¤ subject index Shantz, Cristina, 233 Shields, Carol, xvi, 344–351, 352, 359 Unless ¤ subject index Silvy, père Antoine, 9 Simi c, Goran, 210 Immigrant Blues, 210 Simon, Sherry, ix, 343, 358 Sitting Bull, 324 Škvorecký, Josef, 205, 207, 208–209, 212, 214 The Engineer of Human Souls (trans. Wilson), 205 Smith, Donald A., 19 Soares, Lota de Macedo, x, 308, 309, 311–314, 318, 320 Sommer, Doris, xxii–xxiiin7 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, 326–327, 328, 329, 333, 336 Stephansson, Stephan G., 204, 209 stephens, nathalie, 197 Storni, Alfonsina, 150 Taylor, Charles, 252, 368 Rapprocher les solitudes, 368 Taylor, Kate, xvi, 341, 344, 351–358, 359 Mme Proust and the Kosher Kitchen ¤ subject index Theocritus of Syracuse, 35, 50 Thériault, Joseph Yvon, 370, 372 Thevet, André, 14n1 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 250

Todorov, Tzvetan, 4–5, 7, 10 Torres, Luis, 60, 65, 66–71, 206 El exilio y las ruinas, 60, 66–70, 71 Torres-Recinos, Julio, 64, 74 Trémaudan, Auguste-Henri de, 19, 20 Tremblay, Gaston, 181, 182 Prendre la parole : le journal de bord du Grand CANO, 181, 182 truax, denise, 192 Trudeau, Pierre Elliott, 190 Trudel, Sylvie, 192, 200n20 Strip, 192, 200n20 Turcotte, Paulette, 233 Turner, Nat ¤ subject index Urbanyi, Pablo, 206, 207, 227 L’Idée fixe, 206 The Nowhere Idea, 206 Un revolver pour Mack, 206 Sunset, 206 Urbina, José Leandro, xiii, xxi, 206 Collect Call [Cobro revertido] ¤ subject index Urquhart, Jane, xi, 75–77, 78–86, 88, 89, 90, 94 Away, xi ¤ subject index The Whirlpool, 76–77 Valéry, Paul, 354 Vaudreuil, marquis de (Pierre de Rigaud de Vaudreuil de Cavagnial), 5 Venuti, Lawrence, 16 Verdecchia, Guillermo, 227 Verrazzano, Giovanni da, 36 Virgil, 35 Vizinczey, Stephen, 204–205, 212 In Praise of Older Women, 205 Wada, Yoshio, 323, 325 Walter, Roland, 274 Wilson, Paul, 205 The Engineer of Human Souls (Škvorecký, trans. Wilson), 205 Yeats, William Butler, 108 Zeleza, Paul Tiyambe, 134  zek, Slavoj, 280–81, 294, 366 Zi

Subject Index / Index des matières

Aaron (Titus Andronicus), 37–50; as identified with by Rufus Hamilton, 37–39, 40, 44, 45–46, 48, 50; intellect/literacy of, 39–40; and Nat Turner, 42–43, 45, 48; and rape/mutilation of Lavinia, 45, 47; and revenge against racist civilization, 39–40; as seen by Black South Africans, 39, 40 Aboriginal drama: and casting of Native actors, 323–324, 326–328; and history of oppression, 325–326, 336; and translation of text, 328–330. ¤ Dry Lips Oughta Move to Kapuskasing Aboriginal peoples, xvii; and concept of founding nations, xvii, xviii; Indian Act, 336; literature of, xiv, 204; oppression of, as dramatized, 325–326, 336; transcultural interaction of, with Acadians/ Africans, 32–335; travels to Europe by, 35. ¤ Assiniboines; Autochtones; Blackfeet; Cantique des plaines; Cris; First Nations; Haisla; Métis; Monkey Beach; Monsonis; Sauteux; Sioux; traite; white and First Nations cultures Acadia: culture of, 32–33, 35; as locus amoenus, 35–36. ¤ Africadian culture acculturation, 30, 31, 51n4, 141–142, 270; multiculturalisme par opposition à, 363–364; transculturation par opposition à, 363. ¤ transculturation “active incorporation,” as contrasted with assimilation, 59–60

Africadian culture, 30, 31, 32, 50–51, 52n8, 100, 102; and Black Loyalists, 30, 36–37, 41; and Christianity, 40–41, 51; and early translators, 33–35; and locus amoenus motif, 35–36 African Canadians, xvii, 29–30; literature of, 133–134. ¤ Clarke, George Elliott; Execution Poems; Nortje, Arthur (Dead Roots) African diaspora, 33–34, 35 Ainu (Japanese indigenous people), 325– 326, 337n7 Alberta, colonisateurs, 161–162; contexte social et discursif de Cantique des plaines, 161; histoire européenne, 160; identité culturelle, 173n3. ¤ Cantique des plaines altérité, appréhension par la parole, 6; assimilation par la traduction, 7, assimilation par l’appropriation du discours, 10; dans l’écriture migrante, 365; explorateur et, 3, 5, 6, 13–14; maîtrise par l’appropriation du discours, 9–10; rapport des Québécois avec, 260. ¤ Autochtones; colonisateurs; explorateurs; Other and a body to remember with (Rodríguez), 143–149; content of, 146; cover illustration of, 144–145; epigraphs of, 146; extra story in, 146; final story of, 149; immigrant experience, as focus of, 143, 149;

391

392

Subject Index / Index des matières order of stories in, 147–148; as self-translation/“transcreation,” 145, 146; title of, 143–144 appropriation, cultural, x; by George Elliott Clarke, 100, 104; and work of LatinCanadian authors, 60, 69, 72. ¤ altérité; cultural appropriation; exile/reterritorialization; First nations and white cultures; Flores Raras e Banalíssimas; translation; Whylah Falls Arcadia, 35–36 assimilation, x, 59–60, 183. ¤ “active incorporation”; altérité; Franco-Ontariens; marginal/resistant cultures; multiculturalisme; Other; traduction assimilationnisme, 5 Assiniboines, 13. ¤ Aboriginal peoples; Autochtones Autochtones, citation par l’explorateur, 4, 6, 7, 8–9, 13–14, 14n1; dans le discours de l’explorateur, 3, 4, 7, 11–14; dépossession, 160, 161, 162–163, 166–167; idéologisation du discours des, 8–10; perception des Blancs, 160; rapport de l’explorateur avec, 5, 6, 11–12, 13–14; rapports avec les colonisateurs, 160, 161, 162, 164, 165, 166, 167. ¤ Aboriginal peoples; First Nations and white cultures; Métis automatisme, 184–185, 187, 196, 198 Away (Urquhart), xi, 75–77, 78–86, 88, 89, 90, 94–95; and ethics of contact with “Other,” 80, 81–82; and female forms of remembrance, 82–84; and female resistance to domestic/cultural imperative, 78–80, 83–84; “going native” in, 78–80, 90; Gothic elements in, 76–77, 87; haunting in, 76–77, 82, 84–86; Native– white relationship, as central to, 78–80, 81; and objectification of oppressed, 82–83, 89; responsibility/indebtedness in, 84–86; shared Native–Irish experiences in, 80–81, 83, 85–86; and trauma of colonization, 77, 80, 83–84, 85–86, 94 Bible: allusions to, in Clarke (Execution Poems), 40–43, 44; brotherhood/fratricide, as themes in, 41, 42; and colonization, 31, 40, 51; and Great Awakening, 41, 43; and literacy, 43; righteous

revenge, as theme in, 42–43. ¤ Christianity; évangélisation biculturalisme, 364, 375. ¤ bilingualism/ biculturalism “Bilingual Belt,” from New Brunswick to Ontario, xix bilingualism/biculturalism: of Canada, x, xii; of Carmen Rodríguez, 145–146. ¤ biculturalisme Bishop, Elizabeth, x, 307–320: as American, 312–313, 319; and awareness of north and south, 307, 314–316; and language, 310, 316–318; and magazine article on Brazil, 314–316; negative perceptions of/reactions to, 308, 312, 313, 314–316, 319–320; as poet, 312, 314–315; as poet in/of Brazil, 308, 309, 310–311, 312, 313–314; as Pulitzer Prize winner, 312, 313–314; and relationship with Lota de Macedo Soares, 309, 311, 313, 317–318; as woman, 312, 314. ¤ Oliveira (Flores Raras e Banalíssimas; Rare and Commonplace Flowers) Black Loyalists, 30, 36–37, 41, 100 Blackfeet, 170; religion, 168–169. ¤ Aboriginal peoples; Autochtones; Cantique des plaines La Bourrasque (Constantin-Weyer), xvi, 16–25; Anglo-Protestant bias of, 19–20; as changed in translation, xvi, 16, 20–25; condemnation of, 16, 18; as considered racist, 18; and portrayal of Métis, 16, 18–19; and portrayal of Riel, 16, 18; as translated for Canadian and U.S. markets, 16, 20–21. ¤ A Martyr’s Folly; Métis Brazil, 312–313. ¤ Bishop, Elizabeth; Flores Raras e Banalíssimas brotherhood, as Biblical/literary theme, 41, 42 Canada: as “bastard” child, 124; as “black hole” of dissociation, 147–148; and concept of “here,” x, xiv, xvi, xxi; and concept of two founding nations, xvi–xvii, xviii; and concept of “zero-institution,” 280–281, 281–282; early transculturation in, 37; and literature of marginal/resistant cultures, xiv; national identity of, 100–101; as “not-USA,” xviii; “paranoid schizophrenia” of, 100; and place in

Subject Index / Index des matières British Empire, 129–130; as receptive to multiculturalism, xiii–xiv; as transitive space, xvi; two solitudes of, xvi, xix–xxi, 203; woman, as metaphor for transcultural nature of, xvii–xviii. ¤ canadianité; foyer virtuel; politique canadienne Canadian literature: Aboriginal, xiv, 204; canon of, 133–134; Francophone, xiv. ¤ Aboriginal drama canon, national, concept of, 133–134 Cantique des plaines (Huston), xviii, xix, 159–173; colonisation, 169–170, 172; description de Haïti, 164; exploration du territoire par l’entremise du corps de Miranda, 171–172; relation du corps et de l’esprit, 168–169; intégration du passé et du présent, 168; objectivité historique, 170–171; symbolisme de la sexualité, 166. ¤ Aboriginal peoples; Alberta; First nations; Métis Central and Eastern Europe, authors from, 204–205, 206–207; and era of Soviet rule, 205, 211–213; and multiculturalism, 208, 214; and political stability of region, 205, 210. ¤ non-official languages Chile: authors from, in Canada, 206, 210; and body as metaphor for, 153; coup in, 142, 146, 147, 148, 206, 235; exile community of, in Montreal, 283–284, 291–292; exile from, 142, 143–144, 151, 152, 153, 206, 226; and Pinochet regime, 144, 147, 150–152, 284, 285; political stability of, 147, 210; return to, 147, 148, 152–153, 155; Tangier, as metonym for, 233; torture of women in, 150–152. ¤ Rodríguez, Carmen; Torres, Luis Chinese-Canadian authors, 210–211, 219n8. ¤ non-official languages Christianity, 40–41, 42–43, 45. ¤ Bible Collect Call [Cobro revertido] (Urbina), xiii, xxi, 66, 206, 269, 270, 273, 274–97; betrayal in, 284, 285, 289–290; and clash of French–English cultures/sexuality, 284–287, 295; events in, as foreshadowed in Chile, 284–85; linguistic mixing/layering in, 277–278; Montreal setting of, 281–284, 287, 295; and use of popular idiom, 276–277. ¤ Don Latino; Doña Canadiense

colonisateurs, appropriation du territoire de l’Alberta, 161–162; de bonne volonté, 159–160, 172; dissidence, 161–162; entredeux identitaire, 160; rapports avec les Autochtones, 160, 161, 162, 164, 165, 166, 167. ¤ colonization; explorateurs colonization: Bible and Shakespeare, as texts of, 31, 40; and empowerment, 83; of First Nations, 77; language of, as weapon of oppressed, 40; sex, as metaphor for, 47–48; and shared experience of oppression, between Natives and whites, 80–81. ¤ colonisateurs communautarisme, 367 conservatisme, 367 Coopérative des artistes du Nouvel-Ontario (cano), 181, 190, 192. ¤ Nouvel-Ontario counterpoint, concept of, 25, 270, 273, 274. ¤ Ortiz (Cuban Counterpoint); Doña Sugar; Don Tobacco Cris, 7, 11, 12–13, 170. ¤ Aboriginal peoples; Autochtones; Dry Lips Oughta Move to Kapuskasing Cuba, xiii; and concept of “zero-institution,” 281; and empowerment of colonizers, 83; tobacco and sugar in, 270, 278–279; transculturation in, 30, 37, 141–142, 269, 271–272, 279 De Cuerpo Entero (Rodríguez), 143–149; content of, 146; cover illustration of, 144; epigraphs of, 146; final story of, 148–149; and omission of story, 146; order of stories in, 147; political trauma/resistance, as focus of, 146; title of, 143–144, 146 cultural appropriation, x; by George Elliott Clarke, 100, 104; and work of LatinCanadian authors, 60, 69, 72. ¤ appropriation; Whylah Falls cultural exchange, Canadian: concept of, xi; meanings/syntax of, in English and French, xii–xiii; need for, 30; and transculturation, 64, 271 culture, 105; and imperialism, 273 démocratie, 370–371, 372 Dickson, Robert, xix–xx, xxi, 177–201, 373; appartenance, 191–192; biculturalisme canadien, 191; chronique de littérature anglo-canadienne, 189; débuts poétiques,

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Subject Index / Index des matières 180, 181–182; études, 179–180; collaboration au journal Le Soleil, 188, 189; lectures à l’âge adulte, 180; lectures pendant l’enfance, 178–179; lectures publiques, 186; mouvement nouvel-ontarien, 182, 190; origines, 178; parcours professionnel, 179, 180–181; politique canadienne, 188, 190–191; Prix du Gouverneur général, 187; rapport avec le français, 178, 179, 190, 195–198; traduction, 192–195; travail d’écriture, 197–198; travail poétique, 183–188 diglossia, 60 Doña Canadiense and Don Latino, as allegorical figures, 270, 275; and Don Canadiense, 291–294; and English–French duality of Canada, 275–276; transgendering of, 276, 289, 296 Doña Canadiense figure, in Collect Call (Urbina), 274–75; as culturally intrusive/ inferior, 291–292; as represented by English and French women, 275–276, 279– 280, 284–287, 289 Doña Canadiense figure, in Exile (Ireland), 275, 293; artistic aspirations of, 289, 295; as bird of prey, 276, 288; as “civilizing” force, 293; as culturally inferior, 292; as liberated by Don Latino, 295; Queen Elizabeth as, 289, 292, 293 Don Canadiense figure, 291–294; as bureaucrat, 293; as capitalist/colonial explorer, 293–294; as dissident, 292–293 Doña Cuaresma and Don Carnal (Ortiz), 278 Doña Sugar (Ortiz), 270, 278–279, 281, 290; as civilization, 279, 293, 295; as colonialism/imperialism, 279, 289, 293. ¤ Don Tobacco Don Latino figure, in Collect Call (Urbina), 274–75; and clash of French–English cultures/sexuality, 284–287, 295; as conquistador, 291–292, 293, 295; and Don Canadiense figures, 292; language used by, 276–278; in Montreal community, 287; mother of, 284–287, 289–290, 295. ¤ Doña Canadiense figure, in Collect Call Don Latino figure, in Exile (Ireland), 275; and Canadian poet, as counterpart of, 292–293; as conquistador, 291–292, 296;

and Doña Canadiense, 275, 276, 283, 287–290, 292, 293, 295–296; as fraud, 275, 288, 292; homosexuality of, 275, 276, 289, 293; as human cargo/commodity, 293, 294, 295–296; and integration into Canadian culture, 296; as journalist, 290; and longing for alpha-male friend, 275, 276, 289, 290; and use of impeccable English, 276, 278; as “writer-in-exile,” 275, 288 Don Tobacco (Ortiz), 270, 278–279, 281, 289, 290, 293; as sovereignty/independence, 279; transculturation of, 279. ¤ Doña Sugar Dry Lips Oughta Move to Kapuskasing (Highway), x, xxi, 323–336; and history of Canadian Aboriginal oppression, 325–326, 336; languages of, 326, 328, 335; Nanabush figure in, 325, 327, 328, 330, 331–332, 334–336; summary of, 330–331; women in, 330, 331–332, 334–335 Dry Lips Oughta Move to Kapuskasing (Highway), Japanese production of, x, xxi, 323–336; and allusions to Second World War, 332; as cast with Japanese actors, 323–324, 326–328; colour in, 332; gender representation in, 331–332; and history of Aboriginal oppression, 325–326; and hockey theme in, 330–331, 332–334; and Japanese assimilation of minority culture/language, 329; and Japanese indigenous issues, 324, 325–226, 329, 337n4; language issues in, 326–330, 333–334, 335; performance of, 331–336; promotional handbill for, 324–325; rape in, 331, 335; religion in, 331, 333; staging of, 326–328; and translation of multilingual text, 328–330; women in, 330, 331– 332, 334–335 écriture migrante, multiculturalisme et, 364–365; transculturalité dans, 365. ¤ immigrant experience Éditions de l’Hexagone, 183, 184 Éditions Prise de parole, 181, 182, 183, 192 epic: Canada’s lack of, xvi, 102–103; death of, 100, 102–103. ¤ Whylah Falls Europe, Central and Eastern, authors from, 204–205, 206–207; and era of Soviet rule,

Subject Index / Index des matières 205, 211–213; and multiculturalism, 208, 214; and political stability of region, 205, 210. ¤ non-official languages Etcheverry, Jorge, as multilingual author, 206, 228, 229, 232–235, 244n4; Englishspeaking persona of, 235; and “School of Santiago,” 232–33; Tánger/Tangiers, 233–234, 240–242; and translation issues, 234 Europe, Central and Eastern, authors from, 204–205, 206–207; and era of Soviet rule, 205, 211–213; and multiculturalism, 208, 214; and political stability of region, 205, 210. ¤ non-official languages évangélisation, justification par l’appropriation du discours autochtone, 10. ¤ Bible; Christianity Ewoclem, or The Twisted Paths (Giurgiu), xx, 212–218; and candu nuclear reactor, 213, 215; haunting in, 216; and integration into Canadian society, 214–216, 217–218; and Romanian multiculturalism, 213–214; and significance of title, 216–217 exchange/échanges, meanings of, xii; and “bad infinity” of capitalism, xii–xiii; and “good infinity” of thought/creativity, xiii Execution Poems: The Black Acadian Tragedy of “George and Rue” (Clarke), xvii, 29–31, 37–51; Biblical allusions in, 40–43, 44; classical allusions in, 44–45, 47, 48, 50; imitatio in, 38, 45–48; locus amoenus in, 38, 46–47, 50; and poetry as response to violence, 48–49, 50. ¤ Aaron (Titus Andronicus); Hamilton, Rufus; Titus Andronicus Exile (Ireland), xi, xxi, 269, 270, 273, 274–297; alienation/metaphorical exile in, 288; betrayal in, 289–290; language in, 276, 278; and “spectral logic” of capitalism, 293–294; Vancouver setting of, 281–284, 295. ¤ Don Latino; Doña Canadiense exile/reterritorialization, in Latin-Canadian literature: and appropriation, 60, 69, 72; from Chile, 142, 143–144, 151, 152, 153, 206, 226; and impossibility of return, 65–69; and integration into new home/ culture, 69–70, 72; and loss of homeland community, 67–68; and language of works, 207–208; and meanings of

“return,” 68–69; and memory, 65–66, 69; and transculturation, 64–65; and transformation/reinvention of new home/culture, 60, 70; and trauma, xviii, 60, 66, 69–71 explorateurs, justification par l’appropriation du discours autochtone, 10; manipulation du discours autochtone, 7; perception des Autochtones, 3; perte de pouvoir sur les Autochtones, 12; présente autochtone dans le discours, 3, 4, 8–9, 11–14. ¤ colonisateurs; First Nations and white cultures expressivisme, 368 Feliciano, Margarita, as multilingual author, 229–232; excerpts from, 239–240; and ocean theme, 230–231; typographical experimentation by, 230, 239; and variance between texts, 230–232 femme, corps comme représentation symbolique du territoire, 162–163, 165, 166, 167–168, 171–172, 173n4, 173n5. ¤ Monkey Beach First Nations, xvii; and concept of founding nations, xvii, xviii; transcultural interaction of, with Acadians/Africans, 32–35; travels to Europe by, 35. ¤ Aboriginal peoples First Nations and white cultures, intercultural dialogue of: and cultural appropriation/imperialism, 82–84, 86, 87–89, 90, 91–94; and female forms of remembrance, 82–84, 86–87; and objectification of oppressed, 82–83, 89; supernatural elements in, 76–77, 82, 84–86, 87; and trauma of colonization, 77, 80, 83–84, 91–94. ¤ Autochtones; Away; Cantique des plaines; explorateurs; Monkey Beach Flores Raras e Banalíssimas: A Historía de Lota de Macedo Soares e Elizabeth Bishop (Oliveira), translation of, 309–311, 314–320; as both appropriation and conservation of original text, 319; and class differences, 318; and controversy over Bishop’s magazine article, 314–316; and English language, 314, 319; and gender/ sexuality, 311, 313, 318; and Portuguese language, 310, 316–318; subtitle of, 309,

395

396

Subject Index / Index des matières 311–312; and untranslatable idioms/registers in, 310. ¤ Bishop, Elizabeth; Rare and Commonplace Flowers founding nations of Canada, xvi–xvii, xviii; and concept of “here,”xvi; and concept of transitive space, xvi; and concept of “zero-institution,” 280–281, 281–282; as Eurocentric concept, xvii; gap between, as exploited by marginalized cultures, xvii; and lack of national epic, xvi, 102–103; and literature of, in Canadian canon, 133–134; and need for mutual respect, xvi; as two solitudes, xvi, xix–xxi, 203 foyer virtuel, concept of identity as, xiv, xv–xvi; and Canada as transitive space, xvi; as inapplicable to Canada, xvi. ¤ virtual “hearth” Franco-Ontariens, affirmation culturelle, 181, 182; assimilation dans la littérature, 194; mouvement, 184; survie culturelle, 190–191 Haisla, 77, 86–89, 94. ¤ Aboriginal peoples; Autochtones; Monkey Beach Hamilton, Rufus, 30, 33, 37–50; and identification with Aaron (in Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus), 37–39, 40, 44, 45–46, 48, 50; intellect/literacy of, 37–38, 40, 48, 53n20; and Nat Turner, 42–43, 45, 48; revenge murder committed by, 45–46, 49 hauntings: in Urquhart (Away), 76–77, 82, 84–86; in Giurgiu (Ewoclem), 216; in Robinson (Monkey Beach), 76–77, 87 “here,” concept of, x, xiv, xvi, xxi identité, québécoise, 252; canadianité, 166; canadienne, 250–251, 261; conflictuelle de majorité/minorité, 247–248; définition de, 247–248, 250–251; européenne, 250, 251; hybridation, 365; latine, 248– 249, 250, 251–252, 252–255, 261–262, 263; et métissage, 365; multiplicité, 262–263, 263n4; nord-américaine, 248, 249–250, 251, 254, 255, 261, 264n12; nordique, 250, 261, 262, 263n3; postmoderne, 261, 263. ¤ identity identity: and Canada as transitive space, xvi; and concept of “virtual hearth,” xiv, xv–xvi. ¤ foyer virtuel; identité

immigrant experience: of Chilean exiles, 147–148, 151, 152–155; and literature in non-official languages, 204. ¤ Chile; écriture migrante; exile/reterritorialization; Latin-Canadian authors; non-official languages intertextuality, 30–31. ¤ source text Japan: and Ainu culture/language, 325–326, 337n4; indigenous issues in, 324, 325–326, 329, 337n4; and Ryukyu (Okinawan) culture/language, 329, 337n4; and wartime racism towards, 332 Kurapel, Alberto, as multilingual author, 229, 235–236, 244n4; musical career of, 235; Prométhée enchaîné/Prometeo encadenado, 236, 242–243; and simultaneous Spanish–French use, 235–236; and variance between texts, 226, 229, 236 Latin-Canadian authors, xx–xxi, 59–72, 206, 210, 225–226; “active incorporation” of, 59–60; and appropriation, 60, 69, 72; and integration into new home/culture, 69–70, 72; and memory, 65–66, 69; as multilingual, 225–229; and political stability of homelands, 210, 219n7; publishers of, 206–207, 219n4, 226; and transculturation, 64–65, 145; and transformation/reinvention of new home/culture, 60, 70; trauma of, xviii, 60, 66, 69–71. ¤ exile/ reterritorialization, in Latin-Canadian literature Latin-Canadian authors, multilingual, 225–229, 236; bilingual works by, 226; excerpts from, 239–244; and integration into Canadian literary world, 227; and integration with cultural/linguistic Other, 227–228, 236, 237–238; parallel English or French identities of, 228; readership/audience for, 228–229, 236; and Spanish, as equal to English and French, 227–228; and variance between texts, 226, 229, 230–232. ¤ Espinoza, Blanca; Etcheverry, Jorge; Feliciano, Margarita; Kurapel, Alberto libéralisme, et multiculturalisme, 366–367, 370

Subject Index / Index des matières locus amoenus (“pleasant place”), 35–36, 38, 46–47 marginal/resistant cultures, xiv, xvii, xx. ¤ assimilation A Martyr’s Folly (translation of Constantin-Weyer’s La Bourrasque), 15–25; and changes to source text, 16, 20–25; and ethics of translation, 23–24; legal/political themes, as added to, 20–23 masculine–feminine relationship, and concept of “zero-institution,” 280–281, 290 mémoire historique, et identité nationale, 369–370 Métis, 18–19, 80–81, 160; identité, 165–166; métissage imposé, 167. ¤ La Bourrasque; Cantique des plaines Mexico, Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) of, 290 Mi’kmaq, 32, 33, 34, 100 Mme Proust and the Kosher Kitchen (Taylor), translator as protagonist in, 341, 345, 351–358; bilingual/bicultural background of, 352–353; and bilingualism, 355–356; and diaries of Mme Proust, 351, 352, 354; and Holocaust, 356–357, 358; inferiority/self-doubt felt by, 352; as interpreter, 351, 352, 356; and Jewishness/anti-Semitism, 356; and self-identity, 356; and sexual duality, 357–358; as teller of woman’s story, 357; and translation as cultural transmission, 355; and “translation” of immigrant experience, 351, 355, 356–357; and translation as prelude to writing, 354; and translation theory/practice, 352; and translator–writer relationship, 353. ¤ Proust, Jeanne; Proust, Marcel mondialisation, 371 Monkey Beach (Robinson), xi, 75–77, 82, 86–95; as bildungsroman, 87; cultural appropriation/imperialism in, 86, 87–89, 90, 91–94; and disempowerment/commodification of Native women, 91–93; and female forms of remembrance, as privileged in, 82, 86–87; “going native” in, 90; Gothic elements in, 76–77, 87; translation/transfer of knowledge in, 86–87; haunting in, 76–77, 87; monsters in, 76–77, 89–91; and objectification of

oppressed, 89; and stereotype of savage Native, 89–90; and trauma of colonization, 77, 91–94; and Westernization of Native culture, 88, 90, 92–93, 93–94 Monsonis, 5–6, 8, 11. ¤ Aboriginal peoples; Autochtones Montreal, xiii; Chilean exile community in, 283–284, 291–292; multiple solitudes/ cultures of, xix, 282. ¤ Collect Call multiculturalism: and appropriation of minority cultures, 60; and bilingualism/biculturalism, xii; of Canada, as contrasted with that of Central Europe, 208, 213–214; and “cultural differences,” 61–62; as cumulative/inclusive, 59–60; as ideological front for assimilation, x, xi; and increased readership/audience, for literary works, 228–229; and racism, 30; receptiveness of Canada to, xiii–xiv, 60; and translation, x. ¤ multiculturalisme multiculturalisme, 364–365; acculturation par opposition à, 363–364; libéralisme et, 366–367, 370; oblitération de la mémoire nationale, 368–369, 372; racisme foncier du, 366; revendications identitaires et, 370. ¤ multiculturalism non-official languages, of authors in Canada: Chinese, 208, 210–211; Czech, 204–205, 206–207; German, 204; Hungarian, 204–205, 206–207; Icelandic, 204; Romanian, 211. ¤ Central and Eastern Europe; Latin-Canadian authors non-official languages, Canadian literature in: and Aboriginal literature, xiv, 204; and anti-Communism, 205, 207; and condescension towards Canadian culture, 208–209; critical theories on, 208–209; and differences in reception, between ethnic groups, 206–207; and immigrant experience, 204; and integration of authors, 218; and political stability of homelands, 205, 210; and problem of instant/unsustainable success, 209; and problems of readership/ recognition, 203, 204, 212; publishers of, 206–207, 211, 212, 219n4; as reduced solitude, xx, 203–211, 212, 214, 218. ¤ Giurgiu, Eugen; Latin-Canadian authors

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Subject Index / Index des matières Nortje, Arthur, x, xi–xii, xviii, xx, 104, 121–134; as African-Canadian poet, 123–124, 131–134; alienation/exile of, 122, 124, 125–126, 127–128, 129, 133; and ambivalent view of British Empire, 129–130; anthologization of, 132–133; biography and literary career of, 122, 127–128, 130–131; in Canada, 128–130, 131; Canadian experience of, as influencing later work/poets, 131; compared to Eliot and Plath, 126–128, 130, 133; compared to Louis Hémon, 133–134; critical views of, 122–123, 127; in London and Oxford, 126–128, 130–132; mixed-race/“bastard” heritage of, 123–126; and negative views of coloured women, 124–125; political/ racially conscious poems of, 130–132; as South African poet, 122–123, 133 Nouvel-Ontario, 181, 182; mouvement nouvel-ontarien, 190. ¤ Coopérative des artistes du Nouvel-Ontario (cano) Nova Scotia, 29–30, 31; and Africadian culture, 31, 32–35, 36–37, 100, 102 “Océano Pacifico”/“Pacific Ocean” (Feliciano), 230–231, 239 Okinawa, people/language of, 329 opacity, xv, xix, 62; and transparency, 62–63 Ortiz, Fernando, xi, xiii, 30, 83, 92, 146, 363; and concept of transculturation, xi, 30, 141–142, 269–272; on Doña Cuaresma and Don Carnal, 278; on Don Tobacco and Doña Sugar, 270, 278–279, 281, 289; on empowerment of colonizers, 83 Other: Aboriginal, xvii, 80–81; absence of, 102; assimilation of, x; ethics of contact with, 80, 81–82; translation, as integration with, 227–228, 236, 237–238. ¤ altérité Ouest, conquête de l,’ 160. ¤ Cantique des plaines; Métis pastoral poetry, 35 “pleasant place” (locus amoenus), 35–36, 38, 46–47 poésie, automatiste, 184–185, 186, 187; changement entre le XXe et le XXIe siècle, 186; importance du rythme, 187; travail d’écriture, 184 politique canadienne, 188, 190–191. ¤ Canada

Portuguese colonization, and African diaspora, 33–34 postcolonial transculturation/identity, as response to postmodernism, 101, 103– 105 Proust, Jeanne (Mme Proust and the Kosher Kitchen): diaries of, 351, 352, 354; and Dreyfus Affair, 351, 355, 356, 360–361n15; and Jewishness/anti-Semitism, 356; as helping with Proust’s translations, 341, 351, 353, 354 Proust, Marcel, 351–352, 353–355, 356, 359; homosexuality of, 357–358; inferiority/ self-doubt felt by, 354–355; and mother’s help with translations, 341, 351, 353, 354; as translator of Ruskin, 341, 350, 353, 354, 355 publishers, 206–207, 219n4 Québec, atout pour les cultures anglo-canadiennes, 372; discours souverainiste, 248, 364, 368–369; multiplicité des origines culturelles, 364; nationalisme, 184, 189–190; petite société démocratique, 371, 372; société distincte, 252; société postmoderne, 261, 263; valeurs, 256–262. ¤ identité québécoise; Montreal; Quebec Quebec, 280, 281–82. ¤ identité québécoise; Québec; Montreal racism: and multiculturalism, 30; as perceived in La Bourrasque, 18 Rakutendan Theatre Company, 323–325, 328, 331–336. ¤ Dry Lips Oughta Move to Kapuskasing; Highway, Tomson Rare and Commonplace Flowers: The Story of Elizabeth Bishop and Lota de Macedo Soares (Oliveira, trans. Besner), x, 309–320; and importance of language, 316–318; subtitle of, 309, 311–312; and translation issues, 309–311, 314–320. ¤ Bishop, Elizabeth; Flores Raras e Banalíssimas réconciliation, 371; par la transculturation, 365–366, 368 reduced solitude, of authors working in non-official languages, xx, 203–211, 212, 214, 218. ¤ Giurgiu, Eugen; Latin-Canadian authors; non-official languages; solitude; two solitudes

Subject Index / Index des matières reterritorialization. ¤ exile/reterritorialization, in Latin-Canadian literature Rodríguez, Carmen, xviii, xx, 141–155, 207; bilingualism/biculturalism of, 145–146; and differences in original and translated work, 143–149; and exile from Chile, 142, 143–144, 151, 152, 153; and female resistance/resilience, 143, 144–145, 147, 151; and fragmentation of female body, 149–152; and immigrant experience, 147–148, 151, 152–155; and memory, as act of not forgetting, 143, 146, 147, 149; and political activism/resistance, 143– 144, 146, 147, 149; and political repression/brutality, 147, 150–152; translation/“transcreation” by, 145, 146, 206; transculturation, in works of, 143–155; transculturation of, 142, 145–146. ¤ and a body to remember with; De Cuerpo Entero Romania: and candu reactor, 213, 215, 220n14; under Ceausescu, 213, 215–216, 220n14; in Communist era, 211–212, 219n9, 220n10; exile community of, 213, 215; multiculturalism in, 213–214; Transylvanian Catholics in, 214, 221n18 Romanian-Canadian authors, 211. ¤ Giurgiu, Eugen Ryukyu people, of Okinawa, 329, 337n7 Sauteux, 7, 11. ¤ Aboriginal peoples; Autochtones Sephardic Jews, xix, xx sexualité, prise de possession symbolique du territoire, 162–163, 164, 166–167; symbole de l’exploration géographique, 166, 168 Sioux, 5–6, 11, 12. ¤ Aboriginal peoples; Autochtones slavery: and African diaspora, 33, 35; challenges to, 41–42; escape from, in U.S., 30, 111; and literacy, 43; rebellions against, 42–43, 45 solitude, xv; of authors working in nonofficial languages, as reduced, xx, 203–211, 212, 214, 218; and English– French relationship, xvi, xix–xxi, 203. ¤ Giurgiu, Eugen; Latin-Canadian authors; non-official languages; reduced solitude; two solitudes

source text: as “brought into play” by allusion, 38; as changed in translation, xvi, 16–17, 20–25 ¤ intertextuality territoire, appropriation par les colonisateurs, 161; exploration symbolique, 160; représentation symbolique, 160, 162–163, 165, 166, 173n4, 173n5; exile/reterritorialization Titus Andronicus (Shakespeare), 31, 37–51; brotherhood in, 41; classical allusions in, 38, 44–45, 46–47, 48, 49, 50; locus amoenus in, 46–47; and poetry as response to violence, 48–49; and rape/ mutilation of Lavinia, 44, 45, 47, 49; and revenge tragedy, 46–47, 49, 50 tobacco and sugar, in Cuba. ¤ Doña Sugar; Don Tobacco; Ortiz, Fernando traduction, moyen d’assimilation, 7; problèmes associés aux textes métissés, 193–194; renouvellement de la mémoire par la, 374; romanesque, 194. ¤ Dickson, Robert; translation traite, justification par l’appropriation du discours autochtone, 10; motivation du dialogue avec les Autochtones, 13. ¤ Aboriginal peoples; Autochtones; explorateurs transculturalisme, 365. ¤ transculturalité, transculturation transculturalité, 372; actualization culturelle par opposition à, 372; dans l’écriture migrante, 365; definition, 366. ¤ transculturalisme, transculturation transculturation, ix, xi, 269–272, 373; acculturation par opposition à, 363; between Aboriginals and Acadians/Africans, 32–35; and acculturation, 30, 31, 51n4, 141–142, 270; and Canadian cultural exchange, 64, 271; concept of (Ortiz), xi, 30, 141–142, 269–272; in Cuba, 30, 37, 141–142, 269, 271–272, 279; and exile, 64–65, 142, 143–144, 151, 152, 153; expérience corporelle, 373–374; failure of, 63–64, 148; and female body, 143–155; and hegemony, 63, 271, 272–273, 274; and identity, as postcolonial concept, 101, 103–105; and immigrant experience, 147–148, 151, 152–155; and Marxism, 272–273; in narrative fiction (Rama),

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Subject Index / Index des matières 269, 270–272, 273–274, 276, 295; ouverture à la réconciliation, 365–366, 368; puissante solitude des partenaires comme nécessaire à la, 375; reformulation du passé par la, 374; as state of dissociation, 141–142, 147–148, 151; of tobacco, 279; and translation/“transcreation,” 145, 146. ¤ Africadian culture; First Nations and white cultures, intercultural dialogue of; Latin-Canadian authors; Ortiz, Fernando; transculturalisme; transculturalité; Whylah Falls transitive space, Canada as, xvi translation, ix, xvi; as both appropriation and conservation, 319; and changes to source text, xvi, 16–17, 20–25; and class differences, 318; and code-switching, 343–344; and diglossia, 59–60; into English, as on decline, xxiin6; ethics of, 23–24; and gender/sexuality, 311, 313, 318; into hegemonic language, 60, 63; and integration with cultural/linguistic Other, 227–228, 236, 237–238; as “transcreation,” 145, 146; “vertical” vs. “horizontal,” 227. ¤ traduction translation, in Canada, 358–359: and cultural space between founding nations, xvi; from French into English, xvi, 23–24; and Governor General’s Award, 205; identification/non-identification of, 15–16; and integration with cultural/ linguistic Other, 227–228, 236, 237–238; marginalization of, 24; and multiculturalism, x; as profession/area of scholarship, 342; by women, 342–344, 358. ¤ Brossard, Nicole; Mme Proust and the Kosher Kitchen; Lemire Tostevin, Lola; Unless translation, of Dry Lips Oughta Move to Kapuskasing (Highway), x, xxi, 323–336; and language issues of, 326–330, 333–334, 335; and performance of, 331–336; and staging of, 326–328; and use of Japanese actors, 323–324, 326–328. ¤ Dry Lips Oughta Move to Kapuskasing translation, of Flores Raras e Banalíssimas: A Historía de Lota de Macedo Soares e Elizabeth Bishop (Oliveira), 309–311, 314–320; as both appropriation and conservation, 319; and class differences, 318;

and controversy of Bishop’s magazine article, 314–316; and English language, 314, 319; and gender/sexuality, 311, 313, 318; and Portuguese language, 310, 316–318; subtitle of, 309, 311–312; and untranslatable idioms/registers in, 310. ¤ Bishop, Elizabeth; Rare and Commonplace Flowers translators: African, as explorers’ aides, 33–35; as authors, 16–17, 24–25; in fiction, 341; historic perception of, as negative, 341–342; identification/nonidentification of, 15–16; as travellers, 311; women as, 342–344, 358. ¤ Brossard, Nicole; Mme Proust and the Kosher Kitchen; Tostevin, Lola Lemire; Unless Turner, Nat, 38, 50; as Christian, 42–43, 45; as heir of Aaron (Titus Andronicus), 43, 48; intellect/literacy of, 43; slave rebellion led by, 42–43, 45 two solitudes, xvi, xix–xxi, 203. ¤ reduced solitude; solitude United States, xviii; African authors in, 134; and Anglophone hegemony of Quebec, 282; Black escape from slavery in, 30, 111; Black Loyalists in, 30, 36–37, 41, 100; and Canada, as “zero-institution” neighbours, 296–297; expatriate authors of, in Britain, 126–128; Great Awakening in, 41, 43; hegemonic culture of, 63; imperialism of, 111; Latino cultures in, 296–297; and Latino integration into mainstream, 72; “megalomania” of, 100; slave rebellions in, 42–43; translation published in, 16, 20–21 Unless (Shields), translator as protagonist in, 344–351, 352, 357; bilingual/bicultural background of, 347, 353; and daughter’s trauma, 344–345, 350; and Holocaust, 347; inferiority/self-doubt felt by, 345, 346, 347; letters of, 349–350; mentor of, 345, 347, 348–349, 350; and response to grief/injustice, 344; and response to powerlessness, 350–351; and self-translation by mentor, 350; and sexual duality, 347, 357; as teller of woman’s story, 357; and translation process, 348; and translation, as prelude to writing, 346, 354; and translator/writer relationship, 348–

Subject Index / Index des matières 349, 353; as writer, 344, 345–346, 348, 349, 350 Vancouver, 281–284; Chinatown in, 283, 295; Hispanic community in, 283–284 “virtual hearth,” concept of identity as, xiv, xv–xvi; and Canada as transitive space, xvi; as inapplicable to Canada, xvi. ¤ foyer virtuel white and First Nations cultures, intercultural dialogue of: and cultural appropriation/imperialism, 82–84, 86, 87–89, 90, 91–94; and female forms of remembrance, 82–84, 86–87; and objectification of oppressed, 82–83, 89; supernatural elements in, 76–77, 82, 84–86, 87; and trauma of colonization, 77, 80, 83–84, 91–94. ¤ Aboriginal peoples; Autochtones; Away; Monkey Beach Whylah Falls (Clarke), xi, xiii, 99–116, 374–375; appropriation/relinquishment in, 108–109, 113, 115–116; and crucifixion of Christ, 110, 116; and death of epic, 100, 102–103, 113, 114, 115; Devil figure in, 114; as extended lyric sequence, 101, 102–105; and improvisation, 102, 106, 112; incestuous relationship in, 109–111; and intrusion of modern history/values, 111, 113,

114; martyrdom in, 110, 115–116; murder in, 111, 114–116; music in, 106, 107, 112, 113–114; and poetic development of central relationship, 107–109; sociopolitical context of, 109–110, 111–112, 114; and postcolonial concept of transculturation/identity, 101, 103–105; and role of reader, in ascertaining meaning, 115–116; Shakespearean allusions in, 108, 113–116; transcultural relationships in, 107–109, 111–113; water imagery in, 113 women: bodies of, as symbols of trauma, 149–155; and disempowerment/commodification of Native women, 91–93; and forms of remembrance used by, 82–84, 86–87, 143, 153–155; haunting of, 76–77, 82, 84–86; inferiority of, in Hispanic culture, 291–292; as metaphor for transcultural Canada, xvii–xviii; as property/colony, 47–48, 92–93; as resistant to domestic/colonial imperative, 78–80, 83–84; as tellers of other women’s stories, 357; translation by, 342–344, 358; and translation/transfer of knowledge, 86–87 “zero-institution,” concept of (LéviStrauss), 280–281, 281–282, 290, 297

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