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Home , Jane Urquhart, Marian Engel, Matt Cohen (writer), Robert Kroetsch

Introduction

This volume is a peer-reviewed selection of the literary articles pre- sented at the 7th triennial conference of the Nordic Association for Canadian Studies (NACS). It was held in Stockholm, Sweden, in Au- gust 2002, on the theme of “Old Environments, New Environments”. In a country like Canada, the word environment has numberless meanings for its people, who happen to live in widely different sur- roundings in one of the largest countries of the world. This is especially so when seen from an extended time perspective, a historical dimension indicated by the themes of “old” and “new”. In a literary context, we can see how important place and the mapping of it is to a writer such as , to take just one example. In an article written some twenty years ago, she speaks about her elder brothers and sister, who were all born somewhere, i.e. in Holland, while she being younger was born nowhere, since the family had moved to Canada and this was a place that could not be defined. All the stories of her childhood were from Europe and all the references to other places. So, where was she? In reading L.M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables and W.O. Mitchell’s Who Has Seen the Wind?, she began to discover a map. Later she tried to write poetry to give her territory shape: Writing poetry naturally introduced me to Canadian poets Raymond Souster, A.M. Klein, Frank Scott, John Newlove, Earle Birney, and Leonard Cohen. Those poets influenced my early attempts to outline my country. They seemed to know it well, but arrogant child that I was, they too dissatis- fied me. I knew what recognition I was waiting for, and it did come, with and Phyllis Webb and Margaret Avison and . (69) It was not, however, until she read ’s novel, The Studhorse Man, set in Alberta, where she lived at the time, and featuring a scene described as taking place just outside the window of her flat in Edmonton, that this environment became real to her, that it changed from nowhere to somewhere. That was when she started to write fiction herself. “Fiction will make us real”, she says: I now live somewhere, in a place created by Robert Kroetsch, by and , by and , by Margaret Atwood and and and Billy Valgardson. I have a map. (71)

9 Literary Environments. Canada and the Old World

This collection of articles, entitled Literary Environments: Canada and the Old World, opens with Joy Kogawa’s reflections on Canada and the rest of the world. “Canada connects”, she claims, because “[o]ur ancestries circle the globe making us uniquely suited today to building bridges ‘over troubled waters’” (15). The crucial environments in the global world that Kogawa sees have to do with war and peace. She focuses on three incidents of violence, or threats of violence, connected with close encounters with the Deities of Mercy, Grace, and Abundance. The first is Abraham’s readiness to sacrifice his son, when the protec- tion of the child should have been much more important. The second is situated on the island of an intensely peaceable people who refused to take up arms when attacked and were therefore killed in large numbers. Even so, the survivors prayed for the murderers, thus quietly demon- strating the power of mercy. The third case is the atomic bombing of Nagasaki, “the fire of hell [...] let loose” (21), followed later by acts of reconciliation from both sides. The environments in which we live are, thus, “the holocausts of the world” (26) – terror, violence – and, by contrast, the spiritual topography of mercy. This is “a paradoxical planet, a severe and generous place” (25), Kogawa said. It was an unusual talk for an academic gathering, but one that made a deep im- pression on the listeners. Having heard Kogawa’s way of interlacing her argument with one story after the other, we find Ruta Slapkauskaite’s unravelling of fairy tale motifs in Kogawa’s best-known novel, Obasan, singularly appropri- ate. At this point, we go back to history to see what the concepts of old and new environments stand for in earlier periods. Thus, Richard Davis examines descriptions of Canada by the explorer Sir John Franklin, who came from an English background with very little opportunity for educa- tion. The different styles required for a variety of purposes and for meeting different reader expectations are issues dealt with along with the development of Franklin’s rhetoric. Jane Mattisson investigates similarities and differences in the jour- nals of two pioneer women from the first half of the nineteenth century. Since one of them started her life in Canada as a visitor, while the other came with the intention of settling there, these diarists show different attitudes to both the old and the new country. But for both, their journal writing was a way of creating their new environment, of making it real. Over fifty years later, Agnes Laut travelled round North America, seeking to prove its advantages by comparison with Europe to the point of launching a “See America First” campaign, as Valerie Legge demon- strates.

10 Introduction

Gudrun Björk Gudsteins tells the story of an Icelander, Freeman B. Anderson, who not only travelled extensively – having lived for more than fourteen years in Canada, then in the US, Scotland, England, and France, with spells in Iceland in between – but who also wrote a great deal – including the first poetry in English by an Icelander in Canada – and, not least, who started newspapers and magazines in Icelandic, while also working in several other languages. His is an important contribution both to Iceland and to the Icelandic community in Canada. Birgitta Brown deals with the sites of encounters between the English and the French in novels by Roberts, Raddall, MacLennan, Richards, and Keefer, while Elisabeth Mårald focuses on the silenced existence of Inuits and women in the patriarchal environments of official Canadian history, as demonstrated in John Steffler’s and Daphne Marlatt’s respective historiographic metafictions. The works by Guy Gavriel Kay and Sean Stewart discussed by Allan Weiss are set in an urban Canadian environment, even though it is the genre of fantasy that is focused upon here. In Björn Sundmark’s contri- bution, another subgenre, hockey fiction, approaches the national sport as a setting for literature. In recent plays, Albert-Reiner Glaap examines shifting understand- ings of Canadian identity in relation, among other things, to the past and to new urban, global, and post-national environments. Heather Spears switches the focus to poetry. She has graciously al- lowed us to use some of her poems dealing with place – be it with the countryside and cityscape or with the land and sea. Alternatively, her works also look back to the Viking environment, but even then, people or animals always remain at the centre of the composition. After which, Ene-Reet Soovik goes on to analyse the clashes and the interaction between natural and cultural spaces in Atwood’s poetry, pointing out the extent to which the environment is shared between humankind and the animal world. Discussing the work of Marlene Nourbese Philips, Gurli Woods pays attention to the issue of how an original environment in Africa is lost and replaced, first by a widely different and enforced one in the Carib- bean, and then by a chosen but still problematic environment in Canada. Woods particularly emphasises how these changing circumstances are expressed in language – be it in poetry or prose. In the world of fiction, Janne Korkka investigates the settings of works by and , while Malin Sigvardson studies non-extensional movement in one of Wiebe’s novels.

11 Literary Environments. Canada and the Old World

Two writers in their own right, Heidi von Born and Stephen Scobie, consider two other prose writers, Gwendolyn MacEwen and , respectively. Through her eponymous character Noman, the former maps the inner and outer landscapes of Canada as a continent of lonelinesses. The latter follows the writer-flaneur on the changing streets of a Paris that seems to be disappearing under the weight of the student revolt. The contributions by Britta Olinder and Anna Branach-Kallas deal with novels by and in which differ- ent generations and the memory of the past play important parts. To the characters going back to the place from which their families originated, old and new environments become entirely reversed. In her reading of Alistair MacLeod’s No Great Mischief, Margrét Gunnarsdóttir Cham- pion also shows how the old Scottish family background lives on in both memory and tradition in the new environment in Canada, providing consolation for latter-day descendants. Another dimension of moving from old to new environments is dem- onstrated in translations of Canadian books which subsequently get reviewed abroad in the language of another country, the result being the gradual formation of a special canon of works. This is what Katarina Leandoer investigates in the last article of this collection. In the literary field, there were, thus, a great many approaches to the theme of the conference, “Old Environments, New environments”. In its multiplicity of meanings, the topic could be said to sum up the problem- atics of postcoloniality in relation to issues like place and displacement, language and identity. What has not been specifically dealt with is the importance of old environments to the First Nations and their different perceptions of them compared to those of colonisers over the last few centuries, as well as to those of today’s immigrants and asylum seekers.

Britta Olinder

Reference

VAN HERK, ARITHA. “Space and Landscape: A Personal Mapping”. Ed. Britta Olinder. A Sense of Place: Essays in Post-Colonial Literatures. Gothenburg: Gothenburg University, 1984. 64-71.

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Joy Kogawa giving her talk

Drawning by Heather Spears © Heather Spears, 2002

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