“Something in Between”: Monkey Beach and the Haisla Return of the Return of the Repressed
Abstract: The return of the repressed is a pervasive trope in Eden Robinson’s Monkey Beach and it has been well theorized in the criticism surrounding the novel—from a Freudian perspective. However, in order to fully understand the aesthetics and politics of this important text more work is needed to develop the ways in which readers can engage with repression and its return from an Indigenous—and more specifically—Haisla, point of view. Via close reading and historical analysis, this essay locates the return of the repressed in relation to settler colonialism and traditional Haisla storytelling and fundamentally reframes arguments concerning psychoanalytic critique and Indigenous literature.
“Split With the Kind Knife”: Salvage Ethnography and Poetics of Appropriation in Jordan Abel’s The Place of Scraps
Abstract: Pointedly engaging the centuries of settler-invader attempts to dispossess and destroy Indigenous communities, Nisga’a poet Jordan Abel makes appropriation and erasure his central thematic and formal preoccupations in The Place of Scraps (2013). The text itself is a series of erasure poems and collages that takes much of its source material from the Québécois anthropologist and salvage ethnographer Marius Barbeau’s canonical Totem Poles (1950). Barbeau, both in Totem Poles and throughout his career, studied a number of Pacific Northwest tribes, including the Nisga’a. At the same time as The Place of Scraps represents a defiant assertion of resistance, it also illustrates a regenerative desire, responding to recent and urgent calls, by Indigenous scholars and activists such as Taiaiake Alfred, for the reassertion and resurgence of Indigeneity in the present moment.
“Strange fruit hangin’ from the poplar trees”: Cecily Nicholson’s From the Poplars
Abstract: Cecily Nicholson’s 2014 documentary long poem From the Poplars takes up the history of a small island in the Fraser River delta. This island is the original territory of the Qayqayt peoples; it contains their ancestral burial grounds, yet they are denied access due to the island’s current designation as Crown land. Nicholson’s text posits that “there is no hierarchy of oppressions” (Lorde) wrought by the condition of perpetual “second-class citizen status” (Thornhill 324) bestowed upon certain bodies in the Canadian state by drawing together the long-standing pain of two of Canada’s most historically marginalized groups through a shared “affective public” (Papacharissi) of grief (Cecily Nicholson qtd. in Chariandy et al. 75). The island’s currently perceived emptiness of Black and Indigenous presences is actually an “optical illusion” (Compton 105)—From the Poplars brings these “strange fruits” into view. Just as Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit” instigated waves of protest and stoked anti-segregation movements in the United States (Davis; Fields; Hobson; Lynsky), From the Poplars as political ballad signals to new and radical futures for Black and Indigenous peoples of Turtle Island.
“Surprising Developments”: Midlife in Alice Munro’s Who Do You Think You Are?
Abstract: This essay reads Alice Munro’s Who Do You Think You Are? (1978) as a sustained critique of the theory of the “midlife crisis,” a dominant narrative of middle age circulating in popular culture during the 1960s and 70s. Defined in numerous psychological and self-help texts as a traumatic period of rupture from a more desirable youthful identity, the midlife crisis narrative works to generate anxiety around the attainment of particular ages in the middle years. In contrast to how this therapeutic literature prioritizes chronological age as a universal measure of human development and the defining aspect of identity, Munro’s text draws attention to age consciousness as a recent phenomenon, produced and sustained in particular social and institutional contexts, and insists on how awareness of age is mediated by other factors, especially class difference. Working to demystify the concept of middle age as a timeless essence, Munro’s text exposes the midlife crisis as but one among many possible narratives of midlife, not all of which are characterized by a debilitating sense of disjunction from a younger self. In its representation of midlife, Who Do You Think You Are? stresses the continuity of identity that is as much a part of aging as is physical change, emphasizing the possibility of happiness for individuals in middle age, and facilitating the recognition of connections between different age groups, at a time when divisions between the young and the middle-aged were often figured as profound and unbridgeable.
“the absolute / of water”: The Submarine Poetic of M. NourbeSe Philip’s Zong!
Abstract: Despite its status as ahistorical in metanarratives of modernity that serve the colonial project, the sea nonetheless features as a prominent and dynamic space in the global (and especially Western) historical imaginary. In M. NourbeSe Philip’s 2008 long poem Zong!, the seascape features as a kinetic contact zone of modernity by creating a responsive archive that documents and preserves the cultural and historical agency of colonized subjects. This paper examines Philip’s text from the perspective of two related spatial schemas that stand in opposition to land-locked narratives of Western modernity: Kamau Brathwaite’s tidalectics, and Katherine McKittrick’s (via Sylvia Wynter) demonic grounds. Bringing these two lenses together in conversation with Philip’s text highlights the oppositional archive of space and being engendered by Zong!’s resistant maritime poetic.
“The art of making artists”: Canadian Modernism, F.R. Scott, and the New Deal
Abstract:
Federal One, the American New Deal program that funded artists during the Great Depression, provided a complicated model for Canadian writers, who recognized that the framework presented both substantial benefits and real dangers to the artist in need of work. A reconsideration of Canadian modernism with New Deal tensions in mind demonstrates that Canadian artists were acutely aware of the inevitable ideological conflict that surfaces when artists must attempt to satisfy an impossible balance between personal artistic and political commitments and government-imposed regulations. The work of F.R. Scott, in particular, highlights the ambiguities of the New Deal proposal; reading Scott in relation to the New Deal provides fresh insight on both the artistic concerns of the time and the multiple influences that would come to shape Canada’s commitment to government sponsored art.
“The Great Dreams Pass On”: Phyllis Webb’s “Struggles of Silence”
Abstract: Phyllis Webb’s poetic career is divided by a fifteen-year publication gap: she wrote three full volumes before 1965 and three full volumes after 1980, but in the interim she only produced a handful of publishable poems. Far from being a period of absence of withdrawal, however, this was a dynamic stage of artistic growth. In the 1960s, Webb began work on an ambitious project titled “The Kropotkin Poems,” but the project would never come together as she had hoped, and her obsession with this “failure” left her temporarily stymied. The organization of Wilson’s Bowl (1980) records Kropotkin’s disappearance as the poet finally let go of the blockage that had held her back for over a decade. Webb’s later poetry is revitalized by the accumulation of frustrated creative potential and its powerful release: in other words, the voice that she would develop was directly enabled by her “struggles of silence.”
“The Land is Our Greatest Teacher”: Richard Van Camp’s Three Feathers as a Land-Based Pedagogy for Indigenous Masculinities
Abstract: This paper explores Richard Van Camp's graphic novel, Three Feathers, as a pedagogical guide for refusing colonial impositions of masculinity and justice and rooting these in Indigenous ideals instead. The community’s process of restorative justice in the novel shows a land-based pedagogy that teaches the young men how to care and how to be cared for— both of which are essential to their own healing and the healing of their community.
“The mountain’s neck moans” Mourning Places in Robert Bringhurst’s “New World Suite No. 3” and Tim Lilburn’s Assiniboia: Two Choral Performances and a Masque
Abstract: At the end of “Breathing Through the Feet: An Autobiographical Meditation” (1985), the poet and typographer Robert Bringhurst addresses ...
“This show won’t mean anything unless it comes from ‘the people’”:wâhkôhtowin in Tomson Highway’s Kiss of the Fur Queen Movie Treatment
Abstract: Using wâkhotôwin or the Cree concept of kinship, I explore the differences between Tomson Highway's (Woods Cree) unpublished movie treatment for the Kiss of the Fur Queen and the published novel version. Both versions are a fictionalised account of Tomson and his brother René's childhood, residential school experiences and careers as artists. Through wâkhôtowin, the brothers, both in the movie treatment and in reality, engage with various communities to create art that exposes residential school abuses and foreground Two-Spirit gay, lesbian, trans and queer (2LGBTQ) rights.