(UN) WANTED FOREIGN BODIES:
THE COLONIZATION OF PSYCHIC SPACE IN SASKATCHEWAN AS PLACE
A Thesis
Submitted to the Faculty of Graduate Studies and Research
In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements
for the Degree of
Master of Arts
in
Interdisciplinary Studies
in
Media Studies and Theatre
University of Regina
by
Regena Lynn Marler
January, 2011
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1*1 Canada UNIVERSITY OF REGINA
FACULTY OF GRADUATE STUDIES AND RESEARCH
SUPERVISORY AND EXAMINING COMMITTEE
Regena Lynn Marler, candidate for the degree of Master of Arts in Interdisciplinary Studies in Media Studies and Theatre, has presented a thesis titled, (Un)Wanted Foreign Bodies: The Colonization of Psychic Space in Saskatchewan as Place, in an oral examination held on Monday, November 19, 2010. The following committee members have found the thesis acceptable in form and content, and that the candidate demonstrated satisfactory knowledge of the subject material.
External Examiner: "Dr. Nicole Cote, Universite de Sherbrooke
Co-Supervisor: Dr. Christine Ramsay, Department of Media & Production Studies
Co-Supervisor: Dr. Kathleen Irwin, Department of Theatre
Committee Member: Dr. Carmen Robertson, Department of Visual Arts
Committee Member: Dr. Leanne Groeneveld, Campion College
Chair of Defense: Dr. Wendy Kubick, Department of Women's and Gender Studies
*via Video Conference ABSTRACT
Employing three contemporary examples in theatre and film, this Master's thesis
variously challenges the role of the displaced immigrant in the (neo) colonial shaping of
white settler Saskatchewan. Reading across these works, the homesteader's journey
unfolds, spanning across a century of agrarian history in the context of the projected ideal
of a dominant British consciousness and its dream of an edenic Garden, a mythic colonial
landscape called the Last, Best West. In this imagined community the Anglo-Canadian
Wheat Farmer would prosper along with the Prairie Town that emerged to support him
and the train that linked him with other Prairie Towns and lifeworlds beyond his own. As
the British Crown colonized Saskatchewan's geographical place, it also colonized
psychic space via subject constructions through processes of abjection. Such a
hegemonic subject formation draws distinct demarcations between dominant and
subordinate populations, justifying an ideology that casts aside and throws under the
"unwanted foreign body." Drawing upon the structure of the epic poem, the creators of
the three works under investigation - Windblown / Rafales (Knowhere Productions,
2008), Sisu: The Death of Tom Sukanen (Chrystene R. Ells, 2009), and Tideland (Terry
Gilliam, 2005) excavate such themes as being / nonbeing, place / placelessness, death,
transcendence, and quests for the afterlife. As well, they explore alternative notions of
the land, gender and / or ethnic performativity to critique various repressions and projections that leave their characters, to varying degrees, as cultural non-beings
inhabiting a Paradise Lost, a space threatening traditional farm life with its demise. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The research for this thesis was undertaken with the financial support of the Social
Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and The Faculty of Graduate
Studies and Research at the University of Regina. I am very grateful for the assistance that they have provided.
Very special thanks must go to my co-supervisors Dr. Kathleen Irwin and Dr. Christine
Ramsay for their guidance, interest, assistance and support through the various drafts.
Thanks are also due to Dr. Leanne Groeneveld and Dr. Carmen Robertson who read and offered thoughtful and insightful comments. Each, in their own way, has been invaluable in helping me distil my ideas.
Finally, to my parents I owe many thanks for their interest and support.
ii TABLE OF CONTENTS
ABSTRACT
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
INTRODUCTION: SASKATCHEWAN AS PLACE: THE BIG EMPTY AND EPIC OVERLAYS
CHAPTER 1: WINDBLOWN / RAFALES 1. 1 Knowhere Productions' Found Space: Ponteix as Prairie Town 14 1.2 The Motherland's Gift: A "Precious Antiquity" 20 1. 3 Inside the Father's House: An Habitual Space 27 1. 4 Mother House: The Heart of the Womb / Tomb 32 1. 5 The Desolating Act of Displacement 36
CHAPTER 2: SISU: THE DEATH OF TOM SUKANEN 2.1. The Tom Sukanen Story 40 2. 2 Home and the Intimate Space of the Individual 42 2.3 Home in Biwabek: Battle of the Straw Horse and the Copper Ship 45 2. 4 Home in Macrorie: Wheat Farmer turns Madman 50 2. 5 North Battleford Asylum: "I Go Home Now, Mama's Waiting" 54
CHAPTER 3: TIDELAND 3. 1 Gilliam's Prairie Postmodern Landscape 59 3. 2 Into the Land of the Abject: A Prairie Puppet Show 65 3. 3 House Mother: Alice in Wonderland Meets Psycho 68 3. 4 Wash Me in the Blood of Jesus 76
CHAPTER 4: CONCLUSION: THE HOMESTEADER, EDEN, AND
THE DARK SIDE OF MYTHMAKING 82
LIST OF REFERENCES 98
APPENDICES Appendix A 108 English text / French translation for Stanza One - Windblown / Rafales
in INTRODUCTION: SASKATCHEWAN AS PLACE: THE BIG EMPTYAND EPIC OVERLAYS
Grandad burst into the room, his eyes wild, his face trembling. "Sweet Jesus Christ," he shouted. "There's too much of it! There's just too damned much of it out there." He staggered around the room in circles, knocking against the walls and moaning, "Miles and miles of nothing but miles and miles." He collapsed onto one of the beds and lay staring at the ceiling. "It'd drive us all witless in a week."1
Playing its role in the larger Canadian task of nation building, Saskatchewan's
colonial experience has led to a unique mythology, one that is almost entirely rural.
Promoted in nineteenth century Europe as paradise and a garden of abundant opportunity,
the province experienced a "spectacular settlement story" during the first decade of the
twentieth century, according to western Canadian historian Bill Waiser in "The Myth of
Multiculturalism in Early Saskatchewan." However, as thousands arrived at the turn of
the twentieth century, many discovered that they had been duped by seductive advertising
sanctioned by the federal government. Patterns of rapid immigration, settlement,
economic downturns, political shifts toward socialism, and population depletion over the
subsequent decades have resulted in a kind of geo-cultural abjection that persists today in
spite of the energies that have come out of Saskatchewan's urban centres and its
emergence as a "have" province since the turn of the twenty-first century.3 It can be
argued that Saskatchewan's particular prairie experience has left it firmly entrenched in a
landscape that is perceived as strange and paradoxical, suffering from many negative
stereotypes in Canadian popular culture and the Canadian imagination.
As the agoraphobic protagonist from Ken Mitchell's story "The Great Electrical
Revolution" exemplifies in the epigraph above, Saskatchewan's cultural landscape often
conjures up an image of the land as an overwhelming empty space with a boundless horizon line that boggles the mind and wears on the human soul. This sublime image of 1 the power of the endless landscape historically reveals itself through a prairie aesthetic originating in literature that is taken up later in theatre and cinema. W.O. Mitchell's novel Who Has Seen the Wind (1947), which became a movie of the same name under the direction of Allan King in 1977, exemplifies this trend. Another classic film which underscores the harsh effects that climate and geography meted out to immigrants from early settlement into the Depression is the National Film Board's Drylanders (Don
Haldane, 1963).4
Mitchell, one of Saskatchewan's best known writers and playwrights, focuses on the prairie and its people in his work. His best known play Cruel Tears (1975), a country and western contemporary opera inspired by Shakespeare's Othello, received critical acclaim at the national level - a first for the prairies. Mitchell wrote The Shipbuilder in
1978, depicting the thwarted attempt of Finnish immigrant Tom Sukanen to sail home to
Finland during the 1930s. Joey Tremblay, another Saskatchewan playwright, explores in
Elephant Wake (2008) the experience of growing up in a now-defunct Saskatchewan town and the complex psychological conflicts generated when "one must leave the dying town," a theme that resonates across Saskatchewan literature and with the fictional characters studied in this thesis.5
Over time, the image of the Canadian prairie as vast, desolate space dotted with vanishing towns became the norm and took on a particular Saskatchewan character, that of an inhospitable wasteland whose economic and political undesirability manifested in mass exodus. The seemingly endless outflow of population in the latter half of the twentieth century left its imprint on the popular imagination in the form of several long standing national jokes including: "If it's noon in Toronto what time is it in
2 Saskatchewan? 1954;" and "Would the last person out of Saskatchewan please turn out the lights?"
In order to engage in Saskatchewan as place through the aesthetic that has repeatedly presented the landscape as a deserted and potentially soul destroying space while, at the same time, questioning and challenging this stereotype, this thesis will offer a critical examination of three recent works of theatre and film produced in the province: the site-specific performance Windblown / Rafales (Knowhere Productions, Inc., 2008), which marked the centennial of the town of Ponteix in south western Saskatchewan; the independent art film Sisu: The Death of Tom Sukanen, Chrystene Ells' lyrical account of the death of Tom Sukanen (the same figure depicted in Mitchell's The Shipbuilder, mentioned above) in Macrorie, Saskatchewan that re-enacts what the distressed wheat farmer remembers from his hospital bed in a mental asylum; and Tideland, director Terry
Gilliam's Canada / UK co-production shot in Saskatchewan's Qu'Appelle River Valley and in Regina's Canada Saskatchewan Production Studios. Gilliam's film re-counts how a young girl, Jeliza-Rose, is abandoned to her own devices upon the death of her heroin - addicted father in his dilapidated family farm house.6
Engaging in a close reading of Windblown / Rafales, Sisu, and Tideland, and their variously abjected characters and protagonists, this thesis will examine Saskatchewan as place through works that conjure up the shadows of the province's heritage as "The Big
Empty," excavating this metaphor to better understand Saskatchewan subjectivity and sensibility in their historical and contemporary contexts. During initial settlement,
Ottawa bureaucrats attempted to fill the 'void' and claimed the vast, empty space through the myth of the Fertile Garden in "the Last, Best West." According to Waiser, in 1896,
Sir Clifford Sifton, Minister of Immigration in Wilfred Laurier's Liberal government, 3 embarked on an extensive advertising campaign, driven by the slogan "Canada: The Last
Best West," in his aggressive quest to settle the Prairies. Noting that "for the better part of the 1880s and early 1890s ... the American frontier captured the lion's share of immigrants who came to North America," Waiser states that Sifton capitalized on historical events that swung the momentum in Canada's favour. The United States
"exhausted its homestead land, prompting historian Frederick Jackson Turner to declare in 1893 the end of an era in American history," signalling the Canadian western interior's moment of origin. Waiser writes, "Almost overnight, the Canadian Prairies were transformed into 'the Last, Best West.' An advertiser could not have asked for a more enticing image."7 Hence, from its inception, the Saskatchewan identity narrative and its colonialist/agrarian history have been buttressed by the biblical story of the Garden of
o
Eden and tinged by American frontier mythologizing.
Consequently, Windblown / Rafales, Sisu, and Tideland, while sharing mythic
Saskatchewan themes, also share a similar foundational structure. They use the epic poem to both address and challenge the province's mythic foundation, creating counter- meaning and resistance, making them interesting and important examples of contemporary Saskatchewan theatre and filmmaking. Windblown / Rafales engages the
Odyssey through Alfred Tennyson's poem Ulysses; Sisu employs the Finnish Kalevala; and Tideland adopts the adventures of the Mesopotamian hero Gilgamesh. The immense space within the Saskatchewan landscape provides an ample backdrop for the "epic" scope of the Odyssey, Kalevala, and Gilgamesh legends as the artists draw upon them to take up the Canadian prairie's sublime and "empty" nature.
As literary theorist Barry Powell argues in Classical Myth, Gilgamesh is an epic hero whose anguish surrounding the meaning of his actions in both the untamed 4 natural and civilized cultural worlds forms the subject matter significant to his quest.
Upon witnessing the death of his lifelong friend Enkidu, Gilgamesh becomes filled with a fear that one day he too will fall prey to death's power. This terror motivates his next journey - the search for everlasting life. Powell writes: "This explains our interest in him: We, too, live between nature and culture and we, too, are destined to die."9 Powell notes that the ancient Greek poet Homer appropriated in his Odyssey Gilgamesh's quest for the afterlife and struggles with death's allies in nature and culture (sleep, narcosis, and darkness). However, in the Western telling, Odysseus (in contrast to his counterpart
Gilgamesh) overcomes death, which eventually leads to re-birth. He writes that it is through the Odyssey that "the West has taken the self-image as restless and inquiring, spinning inquisitively on across the prairies, even into space."10 Set in this context, the
Kalevala provides an interesting contrast. In the Finnish epic, the fashioning of physical and metaphysical form (including death) involves magic: singing the imagined into being. The heroes in this legend, thus empowered, move towards death and transcendence.
Death and immortality are central concerns within the epic poems under discussion and these themes unite Windblown / Rafales, Sisu, and Tideland. Mortality leaves one face to face with the corpse - abjection in its purest form. In this thesis, I will read death through the figure of the corpse/doll/abject human, and literary critic Jerrold
Hogle's thinking on the abject (from ab + iacere: to throw, to cast away) will be significant to my analysis. Abjection involves debasement in cultural status and moral worth for hegemonic gain. This practice justifies subsequent denunciation and de- humanization of targeted groups. Hogle writes of the process of abjection vis-a-vis its
5 significance to an expansive empire-building culture and its project of civilizing nature.
In many Western cultures,
threatening religious, ethnic, sexual, or class deviants from the privileged identity
norms are relegated inferior and culturally thrown off and thrown under. The
process of rejection and casting down into the Western underbelly produces an
'abject' human. This fictional other, manufactured in the dark abyss, renders
invisible the colonization of psychic spaces, thereby aiding the Western subject in
the denial of responsibility for a dominant cultural unconscious bent on exclusion
and domination.11
Accordingly, colonial settlement was preoccupied with rendering the ideal subject present
while throwing off (rejecting) and casting under (debasing) all the rest. Since my thesis
explores forms of colonialism, the absenting of Indigenous people and their dispossession
from the history and discourses of Saskatchewan as place, and from the examples that I
take up, must be noted here.
Indigenous "absence" has been addressed by Native Studies scholars such as
Taiaiake Alfred in his Wasase: Indigenous Pathways of Action and Freedom and in
Linda Tuhiwai Smith's Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples,
among others, in important and influential ways. Smith provides a Maori perspective on
pre-existing Western conceptual maps and the process of subjectivity. She argues that
history reveals that imperialist methods structure a subject / object binary that describes
the colonial object (Indigenous "other") as an object that had neither a spirit nor
animating life force to make it human.12 She writes that European democratic imposition
of colonial "formulas of domination" disciplined the white male body as language and knowledge were exploited to colonize the "other" and structure Indigenous ways of
6 knowing through colonization of the mind. Alfred describes the colonial construction of "the mimetic euroself," a passive identity "constructed to serve the state," and it is against this de-humanizing "material reality that the spirit of revolt / freedom must act on with intelligence and vision to generate a new identity." 14
Offering a Saskatchewan perspective on the production of the abject human cited above, Cree scholar Neal McLeod writes in Cree Narrative Memory that "colonialism for the nehiyawak (Cree people) began in the 1870s when the British Crown extended its influence into Western Canada through the treaty process"15 Colonial presence and control over Cree territory, especially after the Northwest Resistance of 1885, "radically altered our [the Cree people's] ability to govern ourselves and perpetuate our stories."16
The 1885 Rebellion left the Indigenous people of the Northwest disgraced as traitors and rebels in official historical records and in the popular imagination. Historian Sarah Carter explains that such stigmatization was made possible via the construction of the "hated other." In Capturing Women: The Manipulation of Cultural Imagery in Canada's
Prairie West, she writes:
The military action taken against the indigenous populations of the Canadian
West was a rare and fleeting instance of near national unity between French- and
English-speaking non-Aboriginal Canadians and between the different regions of
the new nation. ... It is clear from the rhetoric and propaganda of the military
campaign, and from the verse and song produced in the months of conflict, that
efforts to create a spirit of national unity, to create an imagined community, were
built on a series of negative assumptions about the indigenous people of the West,
who were depicted as a cruel, treacherous, subhuman enemy.17
7 Such political rhetoric and propaganda constructed racial categories justifying social and spatial boundaries that segregated Indigenous people from the Euro-Canadian settlers. Counterpointing these colonial dynamics and focusing on the oral history of
Cree elders (and supported by comprehensive research) Blair Stonechild and Bill Waiser argue in Loyal till Death: Indians and the North-West Rebellion that, even though they were frustrated by the government and its empty treaty promises that left their people starving, the Indian leaders did not ally with Metis leader Louis Riel. Instead "the Cree were determined to bring about change by peaceful means. . . they were not prepared to break their [treaty] vow and plunge the region into war, even if Ottawa was violating both
1 R the spirit and terms of the agreement." Even though Stonechild and Waiser's work illuminates the notion that this moment in history has been manipulated and misread, as a result of Ottawa's response to the events in 1885, McLeod writes that, for the nehiyawak, spatial and spiritual exile followed:
Alienation from our stories and languages was brought about by coercive
government policies and legislation, including the Indian Act (s.l 14), that
outlawed our religious ceremonies, and other policies that made attendance at
residential schools mandatory . . . The nehiyawak were taken from our lands and
confined to small areas and thus alienated from spiritual sites and sacred places. . .
This removal from the voices and the echoes of the ancestors is an attempt to
destroy collective narrative memory.19
The persecution visited on the Indigenous people by the subsequent influx of immigrants dedicated to the imagined community of Canada with its newly imagined
Prairie region, marked further de-humanizing and attempted colonial erasure during the settlement of the territory now known as Saskatchewan. The term "imagined 8 community" is coined by International Studies theorist Benedict Anderson and is central to his academic work on nationalism. In his book Imagined Communities he defines the concept of nation as "an imagined political community . . . both inherently limited and sovereign." To Anderson, nations are finite because of territorial boundaries that demarcate them from other nations and sovereign because ideals of freedom revolve around notions of independence and the ability to self-govern. Anderson explains that a nation is imagined as community because "regardless of the inequality and exploitation that may prevail in each, the nation is always conceived as a deep, horizontal
9 i comradeship." This mental image of affinity "makes people live and die for nations, as well as hate and kill in their name."22
The Indigenous experience in 1885 exemplifies the centrality of death in
Anderson's thinking around the fraternal democratic nation. It is, as well, an early and related example of psycho-spiritual and social control according to Hogle's theory of subject constructions through abjection: a hegemonic subject formation which, through its media propaganda and existing cultural categories, consciously constructs an unwanted foreign body in the form of a threatening deviant or hated other to carry its projections and conceal hegemonic will to power and domination. However, Indigenous sacrifice and abjection, although important concerns, are not the main thrust of this thesis, which focuses on the difficulties and unexpected misfortunes of white settler
Saskatchewan as well as its mythologization of a landscape perceived, paradoxically, as both edenic and utopic as well as dystopic - foreign, empty, and abject.
Motivated by the work of Knowhere Productions, Ells, and Gilliam, this thesis will engage, instead, a critique of the imposition of British traditions through the dominant settler identity narrative reiterating the Anglo-Canadian Wheat Farmer thriving 9 in Saskatchewan as a paradisiacal Garden. In the decades that followed the late nineteenth century "emptying" of the Great Plains to enable an agrarian Last, Best West, the dynamics of abjection as outlined by Hogle reveal the dark nature of a xenophobic,
Judaeo-Christian colonial framework based on a dominant British bourgeois consciousness that continued to describe its power over the Prairies. The colonizing mission, filtered through the lens of the Odyssey, Kalevala, and Gilgamesh as they figure in Windblown / Rafales, Sisu, and Tideland respectively, allows the artists to expose the repressions and projections in the colonial discourse and speak about "other" desires as well as notions of placelessness, itself an imaginary construction in a mythic colonial landscape. For example, as McLeod articulates, the Cree Indigenous Being did not experience the boundless horizon line of the prairie landscape as empty, desolate, or soul- destroying when the worldview and life-world of the nehiyawak inscribed itself upon it.
In fact, the land "echoed" with the stories of a collective memory that connected a distinctly Cree imagined community and Cree ways of representing it through place and time.
Carter delineates a facet of colonialism that "draws sharp distinctions between the dominant and subordinate populations," and within such a colonial framework definitive
9-3 demarcations "inform both groups of their appropriate space and place." As a result, ideology replaces narrative memory or folklore as colonialism breeds alienation. The
British, as dominant group, imposed its utopic narrative, overlaying the space with notions of an idyllic non-place, thereby keeping those who uprooted to settle in the Last,
Best West in varying degrees of exile, especially if the immigrant was part of a non-
British subordinate population whose appropriate place was deemed the margins and, seen as a foreign body, cast under all the rest. 10 Phenomenologist Edward Casey calls place the "bedrock of being" and, in fabrications of abjection that colonize psychic space, the quintessential place is the abyss, the underbelly where the other is perceived as threatening and subhuman. For Casey, the space of the abyss, a vast cosmic vacuum that troubled philosophers from prior eras, has in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries become internalized as the inner realm of the
9S unconscious. As inner workings tend to mirror the outer (and vice versa) in the imagined communities of (post)modern nations, reflecting on the impression of the infinite void, a "non-place" where space is vacuous and menacing, Casey's notion of placelessness, when applied to geographical space, perfectly describes the colonial shaping of Saskatchewan itself as portrayed and variously challenged in the works examined here - an ocean of ground and endless horizon characterized by loss and abjection.
Consequently, the following questions will be raised in terms of their function in the context of the aesthetic constructions of Saskatchewan identities explored in this thesis: 1) Within the binaries of being and non-being, place and placelessness that frame the colonial self, how does the recurring device of the puppet / simulacra, itself a representation of abjection, essentialize this paradox?; 2) How is the notion of alterity conveyed in recent Saskatchewan theatrical and filmic representations of individual and collective settler identity?; 3) How did settlers cope with the phenomenon of feelings of placelessness and desolation as they tried to adapt Saskatchewan's particular geographical space into a new home?
Following this introduction, Chapter One addresses Windblown / Rafales and focuses on the dramatization of material found in researching the Ponteix townsite, structured within Four Stanzas culled from Tennyson's Ulysses. I will engage sociologist 11 Anne-Marie Fortier to argue that, in the town's colonial formation, as the British elite
were manufacturing them as cultural and abject foreign others, the French settlers of
Ponteix were simultaneously "manufacturing belongings that mark terrains of
96
commonality," assimilating the patron saint as their "cultural and historical possession."
The Roman Catholic Church dogma, founded on the mythical events in Eden and its
justification of gender differences and mortality, offers the Christian salvation myth to the
settlers of Ponteix as promise of an afterlife and to overcome the repulsion of a body
corrupted by original sin.
Chapter Two, Sisu: the Death of Tom Sukanen, examines Ells' film as it explores
the notion of sisu (meaning Finnish spirit) through an animated psychic space nurtured by
the Finnish Kalevala, represented by an immigrant's abject madness and death. The
strength of Sukanen's sisu is articulated in the depth and intensity of his dedication and
desire to build his Sontianen, the ship that he hopes will carry him out of what he
experiences as the abyss of Saskatchewan and home to his motherland of Finland.
Tideland, a dark, twenty-first century fairytale and the focus of Chapter Three,
concentrates on the experiences of a ten-year-old girl who, with the help of Lewis
Carroll's Alice in Wonderland and the heads of four decapitated dolls, tries to make sense 97
of the world around her grandmother's decaying, vandalized farmhouse. Jeliza-Rose
finds herself abandoned in an isolated Prairie Gothic setting filled with death in the form
of her father's corpse, taxidermied animals, and human effigies. A stylistic tour de force,
Gilliam's film is a postmodern irreverent mix that pokes fun at Gilgamesh's quest for the
afterlife through Christian fundamentalist apocalypticism and its story of the pre- tribulation Rapture - the prophetic belief that Christ will return to take believers with him 98 before the holocausts foretold in Armageddon theology. 12 Hogle's subject constructions through abjection and its unwanted foreign body
(uprooted in a psychic void that undermines the assurance of place and being), coupled with Casey's notion of placelessness or atopia (a sense of not being in one's proper place in geographical space), articulates a resulting crisis of eradication that plays out through the cultural construct of the colonial homesteader. These works are all set in the prairie space of Saskatchewan (or, in Gilliam's case, a postmodern, transnational, stereotypic backward rural "Prairie") and within an established prairie aesthetic including an abandoned, "empty" landscape haunted by loss, death and decay that extends to the iconic built environment associated with the homesteader. Hence, the rejection of the family farm, and the dying Saskatchewan prairie town with a defunct rail line and few viable future prospects are prevalent and problematic concerns that ebb and flow within each work. Using epic structures to deal with these issues, Knowhere Productions, Ells, and Gilliam present alternative ways of seeing the disturbed energies historically relegated to the abject by (neo) colonial perspectives.
13 1: WINDBLOWN / RAFALES
I cannot rest from travel; I will drink Life to the lees . . . Old age hath yet his honour and his toil. Death closes all; but something ere the end, Some work of noble note, may yet be done, 9Q Not unbecoming men who strove with gods. Site-specific performances are conceived for, and conditioned by, the particulars of found spaces, (former) sites of work, play and worship. . . . They are an interpenetration of the found and the fabricated.30
1.1 Knowhere Productions' Found Space: Ponteix as Prairie Town
In 2007, Rev. Keith Heiberg, then Pastor of the parish of Ponteix, Saskatchewan commissioned a site-specific work from the Regina-based production company
Knowhere Productions, Inc. to commemorate and celebrate the centennial anniversary of his community. The company, a "not-for-profit organization committed to exploring the
T 1 relationship of a local population to a particular place," had produced site-specific works in both the Weyburn Mental Hospital (2002) and the Claybank Brick Factory ^9
(2006) and accepted the challenge to engage with another Saskatchewan place, the community of Ponteix. On June 28, 2008, after a year of planning, the company's artistic directorship, director Andrew Houston and scenographer / producer Kathleen
Irwin, arrived in Ponteix, along with their crew of writer, musicians, and actors, to perform in the town's centenary, scheduled to take place July 13-16, 2008.
In early 2008, Irwin had commissioned epic poems, referencing Alfred Lord
Tennyson's poem Ulysses, from Regina-based writer Ken Wilson to animate the history of the town-site. The result: "I Am a Part of All That I Have Met' became the text that formed the armature for the performance in the Notre Dame d'Auvergne Church, while
14 "Tis Not too Late to Seek a Newer World," formed that for the Parish Hall. Lindsay
Stetner composed and conducted the music accompanying the dramatic action in these two host sites.
Narrator (also Ken Wilson) recited the performance text as the actor / puppet duos performed. The four actors, along with their elderly half-human scale puppet characters, who performed in the site-specific project on July 15, 2008 were (in order of appearance)
Derek Lindman with Sister Therese (a representative of the Sisters of Notre Dame);
Melanie Bennett with Henri Liboiron (the town's archaeologist); Eugenie Ducatel with
Grandma Agathe (the community do-gooder); and Regena Marler with Grandpa Jimmy
(the alcoholic). The puppets were designed by Irwin and constructed by Regina-based artists Chrystene Ells and Kristine Dowler. During the two-week rehearsal period that followed the initial year of research, community interaction, and writing Windblown /
Rafales evolved into a devised site-specific performance within six host sites: the Church of Notre Dame d'Auvergne, the Gabriel Residence, Ponteix's Main Street, the Convent
Orchard, the Oasis, and the Parish Hall. Combining theatre, music, dance, video and visual art, Windblown / Rafales deconstructed the accepted hundred-year identity narrative of Ponteix.
On the afternoon of July 15, 2008, the day of the event, Stanza One {I Am a Part of All That I Have Met) introduced the actors and puppets as they launched boats in a rough rectangular-constructed wading pool in front of the church. Throughout
Windblown / Rafales, the puppet is supported by the actor as puppeteer, the ensemble moving together to enact the gestures. This action of releasing paper boats via a bamboo stick held in the puppet / puppeteer's hand referenced both the notion of the mythic
15 odyssey of Ulysses and the historic Atlantic sea crossing of the settlers outbound from
France.
The doors to the Notre Dame d'Auvergne Church opened, and composer Lindsay
Stetner's majestic music conducted from the upper choir loft called the spectators inside.
The Narrator led the succession of actors and puppets, moving the performance into the church. As he reached the pulpit, the puppets took their reserved seats among the audience and the actors joined him on the stairs in front of the altar. There, the Narrator delivered his epic text, explicating the history of the land surrounding this specific place in the form of a homily, a gesture motivated by the Catholic context of a parish diocese and a religious community of nuns.
In the enactment of Stanza One, as the principal narrative began to address the tension between the world of colonial / imperial ideologues and the isolated settlers who must accommodate themselves to hegemonic agendas, the device of the play within the play established itself as the puppets were brought into the dramatic action to portray the
Ponteix immigrants who suffered the consequences. The visible symbiotic relationship between the puppet and puppeteer exposes the act of acting. Such a strategy, according to Robert J. Nelson in Play Within a Play, denudes art and "invites us to the view of human life as itself theatrical."34 Nelson writes: "The play within a play is the theatre reflecting on itself, on its own paradoxical seeming."35
The Gabriel Residence hosted Stanza Two: (Greatly Have I Suffered). This represented actor Melanie Bennett's exploration of the abject nature of the Spanish Flu
(which felled many settlers and returning World War One veterans in 1918) engaged through the Last Rites - the sacrament of the dying, the priest's final blessing that
16 removes the curse of suffering, transforming the sick from "creatures of repulsion" into ones worthy of Christ's salvation.
Stanza Three (To Strive, to Seek, to Find, and Not to Yield) moved the audience, in a Pilgrimage, down Main Street. In developing this segment, asking questions of the townspeople became the means by which the creative team gathered material. This process focused the way in which the cast understood and ultimately performed the social body of Ponteix through a series of constructed "stations" that reflected the ritual of the
Way of the Cross. During this section of Windblown / Rafales, Melanie Kloetzel and
Naomi Brand, dancers from the University of Calgary, performed simultaneously in the
Convent orchard. In addition, spectators had the choice of investigating the work of visual artists Shauna Dunne and Heather Benning, scattered about the performance spaces.36
Following the interlude in the Convent Orchard, the dancers joined the cast on unused land by the railway tracks known as the "Oasis," and staged another interpretive movement piece that included the actors. Ending the Pilgrimage, the actors carried their puppets aloft on chairs and moved in procession to the Parish Hall, the host site for
Stanza Four (Tis Not too Late to Seek a Newer World). This evoked the annual ceremonial journey of Notre Dame d'Auvergne as performed by the townspeople of
Ponteix. The final segment of the performance represented the turbulence of dispossession through the metaphor of the sea-crossing and the challenge of initial
"settlement." A rendition of Stetner's "Folk Suite" (played by Melanie Kloetzel on the fiddle), transformed the Parish Hall into a place of social gathering, thus bringing closure to the work's juxtaposition of chaos and order, nature and prairie culture.
17 Stanzas One, Two, and Four will be re-visited in further detail below. In my
exploration of these stanzas, the following three points will be central to my argument for
this chapter: 1) Stanza One introduces the history and obliquely references Odysseus'
mishaps in his travels returning home. Windblown / Rafales counterpoints the legend
through the enactment of a series of trials and struggles faced by the community's
establishment of a "new" home, settling within a dystopic geographical desert: a
metaphoric abyss. Odysseus' vast seascape filled with threatening demons is thus
paralleled by a colossal stretch of inhospitable land: the terrain called Saskatchewan; 2)
Stanza Two engages the process of naturalizing gender and ethnic bodies in a religious
tradition that abjects the human body through the concept of sin, which, in turn shapes
notions of mortality and the quest for the afterlife; and 3) Stanza Four again re-enacts the
notion of the Odyssey - the destabilizing movement between two places - and the
transformative adventures encountered therein.
The initial settlers of Ponteix embarked from France to pursue a better life in a
new world. Unlike Odysseus / Ulysses, the core of this community was not endlessly
restless; however, the founding father, Father Royer, had dreams of his own little
Francophone colony, an aspiration in human scale that mirrors the ambition of the mythic
hero "who strove with gods."37 In the context of Ponteix, the pantheon of Greek /
Roman gods becomes the monotheistic, Judaeo-Christian God. Barry Powell writes that the myth of "Pandora, like the biblical story of Adam and Eve, is etiological to explain the origin of woman, marriage, and suffering in the world. . . Zeus offered a deception to
TO man [Pandora's box]: it looked good on the outside, but inside was filled with lies."
Thus, as Powell notes, "ancient myth usually depicts human beings having lived in a paradise, now lost."39 True to the mythic model, during the historical colonization of 18 Saskatchewan, immigration was marked not only by dispossession but by Ottawa's deception. Settlers, coming to the south western corner of the province, discovered that, instead of the fertile paradisiacal garden where official propaganda had insinuated money grew on trees, they had been tempted by the "apple," which would lead to a prairie paradise lost. Such a deception shaped the blueprint for Saskatchewan's agrarian experience and Ponteix was no exception.
In "Re-Membering Places and the Performance of Belonging(s)," sociologist
Anne-Marie Fortier investigates a displaced Italian community in central London and argues that questions "of what it means to speak of 'home,' 'origins,' 'continuity,' and
'tradition' are paramount"40 for immigrants, no matter where they come from and where they end up. Fortier's work will be useful in my examination of how the community of
Ponteix assimilated a patron saint to manufacture a communal sense of belonging in a new and foreign place - one that could counter the manufacturing of the Fransaskois as a foreign body by the Anglo-Canadian majority. I argue that through this collective act of belonging, the community talked back to the Ottawa-centric myth of the Fertile Garden in the Last, Best West. In Windblown / Rafales, the puppets were activated to represent such a fictional abject and "othered" being. Fortier writes:
I shall explore how efforts of settlement and roofings manifest themselves in
locally specific ways . . . One theme I address in my analysis is the relationship
between the construction of the identity of places and the constructions of terrains
of belonging ... I raise here the ways in which cultural identity, in migration, is at
once deterritorialized and reterritorialized.41
The Italian community has many apt points of comparison with the isolated community of Ponteix. These central ideas will be addressed after a brief delineation of the town's
19 history, where I apply Fortier's thinking to Ponteix and its core group of displaced French immigrants in Saskatchewan as they uprooted from Ponteix, France to re-root in Ponteix,
Saskatchewan.
1.2 The Motherland's Gift: A "Precious Antiquity"
Une tempete sur 1'Atlantique Certains passagers fanatiques Se disaient victimes d'un mauvais sort Voulaient les jeter par-dessus bord.42
Ponteix, or Notre Dame d'Auvergne as it was originally called, began as a French speaking settlement founded by a Roman Catholic priest, Father Albert Marie Royer, in south western Saskatchewan in the early years of the twentieth century. Since then, it has grown into a bilingual community of approximately 500 residents. Responding to advertising propaganda circulated by the Canadian government, Royer set off from
Ponteix, in the region of Auvergne, France, on a venture that led him to a remote and unsettled corner of one of Canada's newest provinces, Saskatchewan. In 1907, an oak sculpture of the Pieta, Notre Dame d'Auvergne, was given to Royer as a gift from France and it was to this iconic representation of the Virgin Mary, holding the crucified body of
Christ, that he dedicated his new parish in Canada the following year.43
In 1913, a significant occurrence shaped the history of the town. The existing hamlet moved south of the Notukeu Creek to be closer to the rail line. In the process, it was re-named Ponteix after Royer's parish in France because the Canadian Pacific
Railroad would not accept its former name, arguing that there were too many Notre
Dames in Manitoba.44 According to cultural theorist Jacqueline Edmondson in Prairie
Town, in the early days, the train held exceptional importance to prairie immigrants: it
20 brought people, resources, and services, signifying the vitality and progressive nature of
life on the prairie. Many early settlers had a strong commitment to place and held the
hope of passing on an inheritance in land to their children, stressing generational
continuity and reflecting an ideology that included the desire to live off the land, which,
in turn, was bound to notions of geographical specificity and place.45
Royer forged a common history and attachment to place as he shaped the space
surrounding the Notukeu Creek into his imagined Christian community. To enable his
dream, Father Royer submitted a proposal for a foundation of Sisters to the Superior
General at the Mother House in Auvergne with the hope that they would support his
aspiration towards a generational continuity and a spiritual inheritance that paralleled the
hope early settlers held in the land.46 Thus, the Sisters of Our Lady of Chambriac (now
Sisters of Notre Dame d'Auvergne) became the first religious community established in
the territory that later became the Diocese of Gravelbourg. The vows of the apostolate
manifested in their devoted focus towards the education of youth as well as to the care of
the sick and the poor. Their order founded the Convent of Notre Dame d'Auvergne and
the former Gabriel Hospital (now Residence). The Michelin family, whose headquarters
are also situated in Auvergne, funded the building. Completed in 1918, the Gabriel
Hospital knew its first challenges with the outbreak of the Spanish Flu and the
homecoming of war veterans.
Fortier believes that Marian devotion incorporates meaning through a "threshold
figure of collective belonging." Mary is the Mother of the Divine Son through an
immaculate conception with God and, as one religious follower explains, "Her faith, her trust in the Lord, never faltered or wavered, however little she understood . . . she is revered above all other human souls."47 Ponteix resident Odette Carignan states: "In
21 Catholicism, one prays to the Virgin so she will intervene on your behalf in the triad of
Father-Son-Holy Ghost. She is the bridge. She intercedes to Jesus to attain things for
you." The Mother Superior (Sister Dumont) remarks: "Mary is our Heavenly Mother
so she is a spiritual mentor, and she once lived on earth like us, so she knows the
difficulties of being human. As a Marian congregation it is not always the Pieta that we
relate to."49 The Catholic community worships not only the vulnerable mother aggrieved
over the death of her only son but the powerful woman interceding as spiritual guide on
behalf of others as well.
Other icons of saints stand in the niches along the walls that flank the nave of the
Church of Notre Dame d'Auvergne but the Pieta dominates the raised platform at the
head of the church that she shares with the altar and the tabernacle. Ponteix has two other
icons of Mary: the Annunciation and Conception, which stands in the centre of the space
that houses the Convent, the Gabriel Hospital / Residence and the building once called
the Noviciary, and Our Lady of the Fields, another carved wooden statue commissioned
from a sculptor in British Columbia by two longstanding members of the community who
wanted to honor their family. This image of Mary stands where the family farmhouse
used to be. No other saint equals Mary's visual presence within the religious community
of Ponteix. Of these three sculptures, Windblown / Rafales featured the Pieta in three of
its four stanzas and it is for this reason that the thesis references this image above all
others.
Unlike the other icons of Mary (both feature the Virgin alone), the Pieta portrays
Mary in relationship to her sacrificed son. The wooden statue of Notre Dame d'Auvergne evokes the Passion of Christ, the Five Sorrowful Mysteries of the rosary and the canonized meditations that Fortier argues are fundamental to communal order and the
22 strict discipline of the body in Catholic tradition. The Catholic institution's framing of
the penetrated and bleeding human body in the iconic image of the Pieta opens the
discussion to notions of impurity, abjection, sin, mortality and the need for purification
rituals such as regular communion and the reading of the Last Rites.50 The Pieta
simultaneously references Notre Dame and the body of Christ. Both are represented with
equal visual weight in this particular iconic image.
Fortier argues that icons of Mary become communal material possessions
connecting them to a past tradition, yet they belong to the community in the present.51
Royer's patron saint is a good example of this. The apocrypha surrounding the wooden
statue dates its origins prior to Carder's discovery, in 1534, of what we now call Canada.
It includes the stories of the statue's survival of the persecution of Catholics in France
during the Reign of Terror, either buried in a haystack or down an empty well, and of its ( near loss at the bottom of the Atlantic en route to Canada. According to the latter story, a
violent storm raged during the sea voyage. The Protestants aboard believed the
turbulence was the result of a curse from Our Lady and demanded the statue be jettisoned, an action prevented only through intervention by the Captain. This legend
inspired the fervent devotion of Father Royer and subsequent parishioners to the
"precious antiquity."52
To the Francophone community in Ponteix, I argue that the threatened loss of the
material Pieta adds another layer to the legend. Like their exile during the Reign of
Terror, it suggests that God's intercession protected them and would, by extension, protect Ponteix from religious persecution. As their patron saint, the icon provides the
site around which culture and historical belonging are manufactured, and marks out a
"terrain of commonality" that delineates a socio-political dynamic of "fitting in." The
23 practice of collective devotion performs and confirms French ethnic identity. As well,
Fortier writes, the Catholic "religious discourses appeal to women as descendents of
Mary and ideals of love and devotion are woven through the conflation of femininity and motherhood and the sublimation of female sexuality." Thus, the facet of Mary as mother shapes gender roles and notions of family values and dynamics.54 Furthermore, the Pieta foreshadows the intolerance, as well as the suffering that the human being endures because of discrimination, that continued once the French immigrants passed through the uncertainty of the Atlantic abyss onto the "void" of the Great Canadian Plains.
The statue of the Notre Dame d'Auvergne was transported from Europe, symbolizing the propagation of French Roman Catholic Christianity in Canada and, indeed, the spreading of Catholicism wherever France's flag penetrated the globe.
Historian Patricia Seed writes in Ceremonies of Possession in Europe's Conquest of the
New World, 1492 - 1640 that "at the heart of European colonialisms were distinctive sets of expressive acts - using cultural signs to establish what European societies considered to be legitimate dominion over the world."55 According to Seed, "the emissary of French colonial authority operated as a theatrical director, choreographing and staging the ceremonial alliance of French and Indigenous peoples."56 During the first phase of colonial "discovery," Frenchmen "preferred to envision themselves" as the designers of a
"consensual colonialism" where France's presence in the New World resulted in
"conquest not by arms, but by the cross, not by force, but by love."57 However, while the icon fired Father Royer's imagination, faith, and mission, in 1908, during the second phase of colonialism marked by revenue-based national projects, settlers coming to
Canada were clearly expected to share in the British Empire's civilizing project and ideal
24 of progress - that of "calmly laying out fences, employing architectural objects and
CO
everyday agricultural activity."
Father Royer's establishment of a long-term attachment to France and continuity
with French tradition via the town site's name, its religious ceremonial processions, the
gift of the Pieta and the Holy Sisters sent from the Mother House, did not correspond to
the colonial ideology and the ideal vision or imagined community of Anglo-Canadian
bureaucrats. During the first third of the twentieth century, the French Catholic
immigrant was perceived as a threat to the Anglo-Canadian ideal whose presence brought
into high relief contesting cultural heritages that began in the fur trade. According to
historian Robert Rothwell, by this time, French-Canadians had a well established history
in Eastern Canada, and, as Ottawa ideologues and politicians determined Prairie identity,
French and English contestation became transplanted to the West, affecting settlement
dynamics in Saskatchewan. He writes:
In 1905, Saskatchewan and Alberta were carved out of the Northwest Territories.
The celebration which should have accompanied this event was marred by a bitter
fight over the educational rights of the Catholic minority in the new provinces.
French Canadians demanded guarantees that French and Catholic rights be
respected in the new provinces. The cabinet divided on the question . . . [the new
Conservative leader] Robert Borden found the French Canadian concerns for
special rights peculiar. They should be 'content to be Canadians.' Worry about
whether 'ancestors were English or French only tends to keep alive ideas which
really have no useful place in the life of this country.'59
French-speaking people in Saskatchewan fought linguistic assimilation and English rituals designed to erase French traditions under the neutralizing term "Canadian," a 25 rhetorical one thinly disguising a colonizing identity narrative. Waiser speaks of the
"angry provincial atmosphere" that resulted.60
Thus, Knowhere Productions wanted to evoke the collective anxiety of the
Fransaskois community of Ponteix in a hostile physical and political environment. The
frustration of being an undesirable element is evidenced in Windblown / Rafales during
the transitional scene between the prologue, in which the actors and puppets were
introduced to the audience animating the ancestors' journey, and the performance inside
the church. Standing at the doorway of the Church of Notre Dame d'Auvergne dressed in
a school uniform, a ten-year-old girl (Camille Svenson) speaking in French addresses the
audience, claiming that the Fransaskois are nothing but a mirage. For the Anglo-
Canadian, they do not belong, do not exist, and should go home.
The anger and despair that permeates the text reveals the anxiety surrounding
placelessness, for it is clear that they are without country. Her character rails against the
dominant identity narrative that marks the landscape as an abject non-place where
Francophones are scapegoated and demeaned. Hence, in Ponteix, ritualistic Catholic practice and the desire to keep Father Royer's founding vision alive illustrates, as Fortier would argue, how the townspeople's cultural identity reterritorialized following their deterritorializing migration. Fortier, drawing upon Judith Butler, explains the role of tradition in the Catholic Mass in assuaging estrangement through gendering and ethnicizing an embodied Francophone identity:
[Butler's] insistence on repetition helped me come to terms with understanding
'ethnicity' as more than a mere social construct. As I sat there in the pews, it
seemed as if I was watching a re-run of part of my identity in the making: the
'stylized repetition of acts' reached into some deep-seated sense of selfhood that
26 had sedimented into my body. The rituals, in turn, cultivated a sense of
belonging. This short episode made me realize the extent to which cultural
identity is embodied and memories are incorporated, both as a result of iterated
actions. And how these, in turn, are lived as expressions of a deeply felt sense of
identity and belonging.61
Performing the ritual of communion in this "terrain of familiarity" would empower the
original French settlers and their children as the community became increasingly English-
speaking and the weekly Mass began to be delivered, in whole or in part, in the language
of the colonizer. Hence, from the onset, the practice of Roman Catholicism largely
determined everyday behaviours and social rituals as the Ponteix community defined
itself and its new prairie space through faith.
1.3 Inside the Father's House: An Habitual Space
As the title [Windblown] suggests, the wind takes precedence; the wind as a threat to survival, as the manifestation of yearning and desire to explore other destinies, and as a physical medium through which instruments, voices, and the spoken word are carried. We will examine what it is like to be windblown and posit themes that address hope, fear and the ineffable quality of "ongoingness."
In what follows, I present a detailed analysis of Stanzas One, Two, and Four of
Windblown / Rafales. Each stanza reflects an important facet of Ponteix. Through these
sections I will explore the town's identity project. I find Fortier's taxonomy useful in my
examination of the formation of a religious, Francophone, agrarian identity and the means
by which this community carved out its unique place in the new land - specifically the
land surrounding Ponteix (a part of the historic Palliser Triangle). In this part of Western
Saskatchewan, the soil is dry, there are no trees, and the climate is semi-arid, making it unsuitable for agriculture. I begin with Stanza One, "I Am a Part of All That 1 Have
27 Met," which explicates the history of the land that serve to legitimate the creation of the traditions which made Ponteix home.
Given the sacred and charged atmosphere embedded in the church and its primary icon, performing the kind of secular story that Kno where Productions attempted involved strategic intervention. With the opening phrase "You were a stranger here," Narrator Ken
Wilson spoke directly to the wooden statue. As he writes in the Windblown / Rafales weblog: "I would say whatever I had to say to the statue of the Virgin . . . and, I had to make it clear that I was addressing the statue itself, as an object, and not the religious (or mythological) figure it represents."64 Thus, the archetypal dimension of the icon is neutralized so that the text may underscore the human experience and the hardships that have haunted the community. Interweaving the storied aspects of the land into those of the Father's House, for the duration of the first part of the performance, the epic poem allows the church to stand in for the entirety of Ponteix and its one hundred year history.
The Narrator spanned the history of the territory around Ponteix from the
Plesiosaur, to the Indigenous presence in pre-contact times, to the current effects of contemporary agribusiness. The Narrator spoke the text as the actors animated his words.
For example, during the initial sequences of this performance the female actors primarily performed as one body gesturing in unison and differentiated by swathes of red (Eugenie
Ducatel), yellow-gold (Melanie Bennett), and Madonna blue (Regena Marler) silk draped around their individual bodies. Their collective "female body" represented key images such as "Virgin," or "Native grass dance." Together, they painted the broad textual strokes. The male actor (Derek Lindman) portrayed the roles of "sacrificed Jesus" who, when the Narrator tapped him on the shoulder, rose from his supine position to become
"Father Royer" and later, taking a cue from the text, became the character of "Henri
28 Liboiron." After the Narrator established the "long view" of the history of Ponteix, the text took up the town's tenuous hold on the landscape as farmers found their dreams of living off the land thwarted by the Anglo-Canadian elite. He stated:
This gives little comfort, though,
when in a boardroom hours away men vote to close the elevators,
or give a college to another town,
when scientists box up and take away the bones that could bring tourists,
when children lose, or just pretend to lose, their mother tongue,
when rain's too early, late, or not at all,
when crosses burn and hooded neighbours jeer[. . . ].
At this point in the performance, the play within the play intersected with the depiction of history. The actors brought their puppets from seats among the spectators into the performance arena, bringing the spirit of the ancestors into high relief. As the text accentuated the bitter hardships of the pioneers, in association with the puppet, an affective connection was established with the audience as the gestures were enacted by the puppeteer whose body shadowed the puppet, resonating with a technique art critic Jill
Bennett describes in Empathic Vision: "By engaging in expressive facial gestures, the puppeteers encourage us [the spectator] to read emotions across bodies, imposing those produced by the manipulators onto the puppets themselves."65 This segment culminated in the Narrator's presentation of a Russian Thistle (tumbleweed), that had been preset on the altar, to each of the puppet / puppeteer ensembles.
I argue that, in Pontiex, adversity is represented as religious symbols and prosaic metaphors intersect. The Narrator's offering of the thistle to the puppets metaphorically alludes to the delivery of the symbolic Host during the Mass and, in so doing, evokes the 29 abject as it interpenetrates the religious and the secular domain. He tells the rural French
Catholic abjected "other" the puppets represent that they are "like the Russian thistle."
Thus, labelled a weed, disengaged from their roots and tumbling in the wind, the people
of Ponteix appear cut off permanently from any life-sustaining source, except for the
Word of God. According to Fortier, scripture establishes the base for the "cues" to
perform "the proper bodily movements" of ritual in a "habitual space,"66 a shared
experience that tentatively grounds the community in "real" dystopic geographical place,
represented by the metaphoric offering of the thistle in Windblown / Rafales.
In After Theory, Terry Eagleton states that there is nothing quaint "about
searching for some terra fir ma in a world in which men and women are asked to re
invent themselves overnight, in which pensions are abruptly wiped out by corporate greed
and deceit, or in which whole ways of life are casually tossed into a scrapheap." His
thoughts on contemporary subjectivities and the issues affecting us have special relevance
when applied to traditional farm life in Saskatchewan. In Ponteix, Roman Catholicism
and an endangered agricultural lifestyle provide the context for the town as a conservative
Francophone community situated on the shifting ground that constitutes the Canadian
Prairies in the new millenium. Farmers here struggle to survive as global economics
threaten to obliterate their traditional cultural identity.
At the centre of the Canadian Prairies, Saskatchewan's geographical and cultural
landscape has been historically marked by a sense of non-place. The promised colonial paradise quickly dried up, demonstrating the unobtainability of the myth that provided the initial raison d'etre of rural Saskatchewan. In the same way, the characters performed by the puppets reflect the unattainability of the bourgeois values that undergird the dominant myth of the Prairie Fertile Garden. The mythology of subsequent decades, springing 30 from the destructive energies of a capitalist ideology, activated the force of centralization which lured people into urban centres, once again, through the promise of material gain and a richer cultural experience; all at the expense of a rural lifeworld where only the weeds seemed to thrive. At the end of the first decade of the twentieth-first century, the rural way of life is now corporate and we witness the death of homesteader mythology.
In Ponteix, an aura of death permeates the environment, demonstrated through the gradual destruction of social institutions such as the nuclear family, the tight knit ethnic community, and the Church that Father Royer strove to put in place, as well as the train that connected them to worlds beyond the stark horizon line.
Currently, in Ponteix, the community represents an aging demographic, some of whose parents were members of Father Royer's congregation. They hold lifelong friendships in and attachments to Ponteix. The first Canadian born generation of the local population is now old and, like the Greek mythic hero, is reflecting on the past.
According to literary critic George P. Landow, the journey that Tennyson's Ulysses contemplates is his final one, that is, his death. Like Ulysses, the life work of this core group of the population is largely done but, unlike Ulysses, in Ponteix there is no future generation to carry on - no equivalent to Ulysses' son, Telemachus. Hence, Ponteix has become another dying prairie town.
As Fortier argues, the process of identity formation is "tied in with the broader theoretical questions about reterritorialization of identity: namely, the invention of tradition and the embodiment of culture that lead to the simultaneous genderization and ethnicization of both bodies and spaces."69 Turning now to Stanza Two, I will investigate Windblown / Rafales with regard to gender performativity, identity and the
31 means by which the Roman Catholic tradition makes abject the body and its human
functions through its obsession with purity.
1.4 Mother House: the Heart of the Womb / Tomb
Women's bodies, their wombs, become the sites of authentic human experience that clear the path to redemption and divinity (Pope John Paul II, 1995). . . . Yet, the affirmation of the primacy of womanhood, of the maternal function is defined within a gender position. In Catholicism, languages of authority are written on male bodies, while languages of purity are inscribed on female bodies, and they are arranged in a hierarchy.70
In Stanza Two, "Greatly, Have I Suffered, Both with Those That Loved Me, and
Alone" Melanie Bennett's performance explored the abandoned place of the Gabriel
Hospital / Residence and the memories of death, bodily impurity, decay, and the desire
for immortality embedded there. In her piece, Bread for the Abyss, Bennett evokes the
hospital during the Spanish Influenza of 1918, and the three female actors who performed
in it captured its abjection like "ghosts caught in a time loop."
Feminist scholar Julia Kristeva argues that, with the advent of Christianity, the
abject became interiorized as darkness, inner corruption and sin. Thus, to represent faith,
and the symbolic order, the body must be clean and proper. Narrator Melanie Bennett
addresses this notion in her opening lines:
Last rites, the last utterance of the reprobate or rogue, blood pouring out of
cavities; the priest coming to anoint the sick, bringing the ritual of transformation
to the bedside.
Throughout the Narrator's performance, Devout Patient (Regena Marler) performed a series of ritualistic gestures with the rosary beads, repeating the prayers as Nursing Sister
32 (Eugenie Ducatel) knelt in a pool of red silk, endlessly attempting to wipe up the
metaphoric flowing blood.
Feminist scholar Deborah Caslav Covino states that, in Western philosophical
aesthetics, the female body is defined by the binaries of beautiful / grotesque; women
cannot represent the sublime as their body either incites "inspiration through the muse or
79
is symbolic of sin and corruption. Throughout the stanza, the Narrator challenges both
the social practice of the hospital in which is embedded the hierarchy and "habits of
thought" of the Roman Catholic Church and the tradition of Western aesthetics. She
embodies the paradox of a figure who, as a woman, could never be ordained nor
authorized to perform the Last Rites. In fact, as far as the Catholic Church hierarchy is
concerned, ordaining female priests is a "graviora delicta" or a grave offense.73
The Narrator makes her entrance down the stairwell from the Maternity Ward
formerly located on the second floor. She makes her way along the hall, entering into the
lavatory, cradling a blue silk "baby" in her arms. Operating as both the beautiful
Madonna and the abject and grotesque ("sexual," procreative) feminine, her performance
makes concrete the notion that, while childbirth represents new life and continued
existence, it is a female bodily function that culture suggests is abject and unclean. The
Narrator exemplifies Fortier's notion that Notre Dame, as feminine symbol, holds both
utopic / dystopic projections that extend to women as progeny of Ave Maria / Eve.74
The Pieta portrays the suffering mother. The myth of Christ's body, Covino argues, is defined through the fiction of the resurrected male and the long-suffering female. In Ponteix, the Virgin Mother holding the crucified corpse highlights Jesus as human son in death. It captures his body in a moment of non-being awaiting resurrection, a state akin to the puppets awaiting animation. Mary is feminine in her attendant 33 suffering and I would argue that God is the masculine present in this image, activating
His divine plan for eternal life to which both the human Jesus and Mary submit. German novelist and poet Gertrud von le Fort reflects on surrender as a metaphysical mystery.
She argues in The Eternal Woman:
The Marian dogma, reduced to a brief formula, expresses the co-operation of the
creature in the work of salvation / transformation. Passivity (inherent in the
feminine and which ancient philosophy regarded as purely negative) appears as
the positively decisive factor - it is the very essence of religious experience. . .
[The veneration of Mary] is the profession of faith of the willingness of the
human to surrender - which, in turn, signifies the understanding of the mystery of
humanity's co-operation with the Creator.75
The Pieta image portrays the body of Christ in the liminal space between the feminized physical suffering endured on the cross (and the events leading up to it - see
Steinberg below) and the entombment culminating in his resurrection, which represents the sublime, masculine symbolic realm. Leo Steinberg writes in The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and Modern Oblivion, referencing the Archbishop of Genoa, Jacopo da Voragine, that
the wounding of it [Christ's sexual member in Circumcision] initiates the
salvation of humankind . . . Then, after citing three subsequent effusions of the
precious blood (at the agony of the Garden, the Flagellation, and the Nailing to
the Cross), Voragine comes to the fifth and last shedding - when his side was
opened [with a lance] ... the Passion which culminates on the cross in the blood
of the sacred heart, begins in the blood of the penis.
34 Steinberg argues that the myth of Christ's body is contained in an ordained cycle. In
Voragine's formulation, "the knife's cut to the gash of the lance" allows humanity to
witness the passage of Christ from human son to Divine Son. I would argue that the
dynamics encapsulated in Ponteix's patron saint reflects a moment of stasis in the cycle,
and that this pause is pivotal: the corpse holds echoes of Christ's human experience and
echoes the promise yet to come in the Christian drama of Redemption. Christ has
reached his terminal point as a man, as the signs, registering his transformation into a
divine entity, incubate.
As it illustrates the grotesque, feminine principle of decay and bodily impurity,
the corpse present in the image of the Pieta is experienced as abject in Western culture.
As Covino notes:
Abjection, in its barest form, is the picture of common mortality, the degenerate
body, and this prompts desire to replace it with more pleasing, comforting,
interpretive categories. Resurrection overcomes bodily decay, which is repulsive
enough that we repress mortality and eternal damnation through the myth of
salvation.77
The structure of the Christian salvation myth excavates the abject through the split self,
78
the trope of the masculine / feminine - spirit / body. Windblown / Rafales explores this
notion in the next movement of Stanza Two. Set in the lavatory, Devout Patient is
overcome by the flu; she succumbs and falls to the floor. Her diseased body is associated
with corruption, degradation, filth, and death and is in need of purification to ensure her
own salvation. The gendered notion of the womb / tomb is called into high relief as the
Narrator performs the last "rites," holding the "baby" in one arm as she takes small
handfuls of water from the sink to cleanse points along the corpse of the Devout Patient, 35 Again, the Narrator questions the Catholic hierarchical structure and its institutional
discourse sanctioning performative acts that favour the masculine: "Did he [the priest]
comfort the Sisters who nursed the sick, those who carried the heaviest burden of caring
for the dying . . . Could they have been spared if they wished?" Through Nursing Sister's
servile, repetitive ritual action of cleaning the blood, the Narrator interrogates the
stereotype of the female body as long-suffering.
Turning to Stanza Four, I will now examine Windblown / Rafales' depiction of the
colonial process of homesteading, as having overcome the hardship of the Spanish flu,
Father Royer's group of settlers continued to establish themselves in Ponteix. During the
early twentieth century, Europeans were temporarily deterritorialized (spatially and
socially) based on the expectation that they would quickly adapt and reterritorialize into
the Canadian prairies as wheat farmers. For some, the process of inhabitation eventually
overcame the lingering feelings of placelessness and desolation marked by the void of the
Atlantic and the disappointment of a settling process marked by the gap between idyllic
conditions of a Fertile Garden myth and the desert reality.
1.5 The Desolating Act of Displacement
One can perceive barren land or sea in small increments and find it non-desolate, but when it seems to continue without end, desolation begins to loom. A desolate landscape stretches out so extensively that one cannot tell just where its precise perimeter lies or even how its horizon is to be delineated ... a vast emptiness in the landform answers to and exacerbates a seemingly endless emptiness of 7Q
emotion, memory, and thought within the person stationed in its midst.
Recreating the historic journey to the new world, the action of Stanza Four, '"Tis
Not too Late to Seek a Newer World," examined pioneer French Roman Catholic identity.
36 Sister Lea Robert records the reminiscing of one of the founding Sisters of Notre Dame in
Rachel Lacoursiere-Stringer's Histoire de Ponteix: History of Ponteix:
. . . little by little, the lights of Paris grew dimmer and the land was disappearing.
. . . The next morning, upon awakening, France was already far away. ... the boat
floated as a small dot on the boundless ocean. At the beginning of the voyage, a
violent storm raged - all experienced sea sickness.
During the course [of the journey by train from Regina to Swift Current], we
continually saw dry prairie plains unfolding: not a bit of green, not a single tree,
not even a bush . . . then, small shacks isolated at considerable distances. . . . We
wondered how people could live in these deserted prairies. . . . [Upon arrival at
Pambrun] The Sisters, installed in a carriage, began their journey under a sun that
was burning and the roads were so dusty they hardly saw the horses. After three
hours, they arrived at the village of Ponteix - ten to fifteen small houses at
intervals here and there. The collective shocked response of the Sisters: "My
God! Give us faith!"80
As Windblown / Rafales drew to a close, the echoes of these words permeated the performance in the Parish Hall. The five actors enter single file, tentatively, into an alien landscape of Russian thistle strewn about the acting area. Used in this way, the tumbleweed is a metaphor marking the stark contrast between the desolate, uninviting landscape of the "unsettled" Canadian plains and the lush countryside of Auvergne.
Here, the actors enact an historical moment of disconnection and displacement from their old homeland as they face the dilemma of settling a threatening new space of extremes.
37 First, a storm begins and the prairie is turned into a boat on the turbulent sea; this action alludes to the initial phase of the journey that brought the settlers to the new world.
Through the actions of the actors, the boat becomes a solitary house on the vast prairie, a boundless space of ground and endless horizon that dwarfs the human being. Suddenly, the settlers are left snow blind in a blizzard, trying to "beat" the storm that eventually overwhelms them. Rising from their frozen graves, their ghosts nonetheless confirm the passage of time and their sense of communal survival through the action of a family portrait. Finally, animating the puppets as materializations of the original settlers, they perform the cultivation of the land through the cleanup of the Russian thistles. This reclaiming of the space for the grand finale alludes to the settlers' victory over nature, overcoming dispossession and establishing a new "home." However, beyond merely providing an echo of the past, the thistles' presence foreshadows the possible future death of the town and the homesteader. Windblown / Rafales ends with a symbolic meal, the breaking of the bread, addressing once again the symbolic potency of the Catholic Mass as it honours the tenacity and courage of these people and pays tribute to the Hall as a grounded material place that has served the town well in times of strife.
In summary, Tennyson's Ulysses provided a guiding image for Kno where
Productions' project marking the centenary of Ponteix, Saskatchewan. The Odyssey evokes the notion of historical expansion and the founding of colonies. It is a story of the human journey from birth to death. At a symbolic level, it operates as a voyage driven by
Q 1 a vision of national identity. Such adventures test endurance through hardships. These notions were performed in Windblown / Rafales as the site-specific performance activated the theme of journey via the notion of immigration to Saskatchewan and the French
38 colonizing mission of the founding father with the attendant sacrifices and rewards of participating in the British colonial project of settling the Last, Best West.
It thus appears, as Windblown / Rafales has tried to demonstrate, that the Western agrarian Promise of Eden failed in the south western corner of Saskatchewan.
Reminiscent of the archetypal American Wild West, Ponteix is scattered with tumbleweed, the abundant presence of which provides a stark, haunting visual metaphor alluding to Ponteix's abject future as a ghost town in the semi-arid desert. Currently, the immediate landscape provides few prospects for exploitation that would fuel future dreams of Western expansion and the town is left actively seeking viable means for sustainability, often to no avail. Consequently, in Ponteix, the "Last Best West" rings hollow. Like the Odyssey, used to support the structure of Windblown / Rafales, the
Finnish Kalevala helps articulate the story of immigrant farmer Tom Sukanen and his difficult life as a Saskatchewan homesteader. It is to his story that I will now turn in
Chapter Two.
39 2: SISU: THE DEATH OF TOM SUKANEN
The Finnish people have a story. It tells how the world began long ago. And how the eternal smith crafted a woman of gold. And of a magic harp made from the jawbone of a gigantic fish. And of ships built with song alone. It tells of the Finnish spirit, of "sisu." Of strength and courage even in the face of death. We have this story, this Kalevala.82
2.1 The Tom Sukanen Story
"Sisu" is a word that defines the Finnish spirit, signifying steadfastness, perseverance, courage, and loyalty, thus making it a highly regarded character trait - a trait that director Chrystene Ells argues the now legendary Saskatchewan pioneer Tom
Sukanan embodied. And, Ells states in an interview in the Regina Leader Post on the making of her film Sisu: the Death of Tom Sukanen (2009) and her artistic interpretation of his life, "My suggestion for Tom is that he never really did go crazy. He was just so invested in returning to his own roots and returning to what he was." These convictions determine Ells' unique portrait of Sukanen in Sisu, a project that began as a personal obsession seventeen years ago after Ells first heard the yarn around an Alberta campfire.
Her methodology included travel to Finland where she researched Finnish history and cultural identity, discovering these elements were strongly linked to the epic poem
Kalevala. Consequently, Ells decided to explore the Sukanen legend through the lens of this work, its stylistic and cultural considerations influencing the character and essence of her protagonist and his experience of Saskatchewan as place. Hence, the film interweaves representations of Finnish maritime history, visual art, and folklore with the space of Canadian prairie rural culture. In the end, with Sukanen, the maritime legends and Finnish nationalism win out in his imagination, while in reality he is overcome by abjection and relegated to the mental asylum, where he eventually dies, lost and broken.
40 Sisu: the Death of Tom Sukanen recaptures the Saskatchewan pioneer's last twenty-four hours, recalling pertinent events in the former sailor and shipbuilder's life.
In Ells' fictional telling, her protagonist, played by Don Wood, remembers his life as a young man in Finland, which he refers to as the Years of Oppression. Life became intolerable for Sukanen after Tsar Nicholas II implemented a law enforcing conscription into the Russian army. To avoid this fate, he emigrated, but his life took a number of frustrating and tragic turns in North America. Arriving in New York City in 1899, Ells' protagonist had hopes of resuming work in the shipyards in America only to find that the
Irish had control of the docks. From a bartender, he learns that recent Finn and Swede immigrants have travelled inland, finding work as farmers in Biwabek, Minnesota.
Despite initial protests ("No farm ... I ship make!"), he follows suit. In 1910, after several unsuccessful years of working the land he inherited from his father-in-law,
Sukanen leaves his young wife and three children - a son and two daughters ranging from infancy to ten years of age - behind in Biwabek to build a better life for them in
Saskatchewan where, as newspaper propaganda would have it and his son Taivo pronounces in the film, "wheat is king."
In Ells' re-telling, Sukanen was perceived as "obviously gone off his head" and referred to as the "crazy Finn" by Lloyd (Mark Claxton), the proprietor of the Macrorie general store and one of the members in the district who mobilized to have him committed. As Marge (Lili Zwart) comments: "What on earth is he doing with that ship on the bald prairies!" Sukanen, ultimately rejecting the role of the Anglo-Canadian wheat farmer, singlehandedly tore apart his barn and his empty farmhouse (his family did not re-join him in Saskatchewan) to build a better home in the form of a boat. He envisioned navigating from the middle of the wheatlands down the Saskatchewan River
41 to the Hudson Bay then across the Atlantic Ocean and home to Finland, metaphorically reversing the process of white contact, the fur trade, and the Last Best West. In Ells' cinematic reality, Tom Sukanen managed to finish his boat, the Sontianen, but was unable to transport it from his homestead, located fifteen miles inland. For his undaunted attempts to realize this dream of returning to his motherland in a ship he designed and fashioned with his own hands, he was condemned by his community. Arrested by RCMP constable Bert Fisk (Rod McLeod) on the grounds that he posed a threat to himself and the Macrorie community, Sukanen was transported to the mental hospital in North
Battleford where he remained until his death on April 23, 1943. Thus, I would argue,
Ells' Sisu creatively adapts Sukanen's experience of abjection and despair on the
Saskatchewan prairie.
2. 2 Home and the Intimate Space of the Individual
Dr. Elias Lonnrot, a country doctor who loved these ballads, traveled the length and breadth of Finland, visiting those who remembered the old songs, collected them and set them down in writing ... He believed that they formed a single epic, like the Iliad, and he pieced them together in a poem called the Kalevala. The word may be roughly translated as Land of Heroes, and was sometimes used as a name for Finland . . . They tell the story of Vainamoinen, the great singer and magician . .. the character of the original runes, with their mixture of the familiar and the fantastic, their marvels of magic and their homely wisdom.84
Sisu: the Death of Tom Sukanen offers interesting aesthetic territory for thinking about performance theorist Joanne Tompkins' notion, in Unsettling Space, that "identity is grounded in spatiality" and that identity can be effectively staged in "psychic place and
or displacement." Moreover, as phenomenologist Gaston Bachelard argues in The Poetics of Space, the house image has become the topography of our intimate being.86 Our earliest memories of place initiate who we are and ground our being and identity. In Sisu,
42 there are four "homes" of significance: Sukanen's childhood home in Finland; the family farmhouse in Biwabek, Minnesota; the boat in Macrorie, Saskatchewan; and finally, the crisis space of the Battleford Mental Institute. I will argue that, in Ells' depiction of the legend of the Kalevala, Tom's "being" remained deeply rooted in his primal home of his mother country. In essence, Sukanen never left Finland. His heart and imagination - his sisu - remained loyal and true to Bachelard's notion of home and its original space, the space his mother filled with the Kalevala. The potency of such an inner space left his experience of Saskatchewan one of lament, and ultimately abjection.
Ells' film enters the Sukanen story at the breaking point of the community's tolerance of the "crazy Finn's" behaviour. According to the citizens of Macrorie, he must be removed and restrained because he is becoming dangerous, despite evidence to the contrary. For example, the opening scene re-enacts an anecdote provided by Sukanen's nephew; in the course of his arrest, he clung to his hammer (it was all that he had left) as he quietly walked to the police car, peacefully got in and offered no resistance, either verbally or physically, as Fisk drove him to his new home in the mental institution. In the next scene, Ells introduces the Kalevala and, as the voice-over of Sukanen recites
"The Last Adventure," Vainamoinen's departure from the Land of the Heroes in his copper ship, Ells visually projects her animations of the ancient hero's adventure on an artistically rendered wooden plaque that doubles as a projection screen. The spectre of
Tom's mother Annika Sukanen (Megan Fries) appears, quietly commenting that "You used to know the ending." When Sukanen answers: "I have forgotten," Ells cuts to his hospital bed in the mental asylum and the hand of the day nurse (Geri Hack) enters the frame to take his pulse. Again, Mama's spirit appears to ask: "Are you coming home,
Tomi?" As he returns to the psychic place of his childhood bedroom and Mama's
43 bedtime stories, Tom is encouraged by the ghost of his Mama's voice, asking, "What do you remember?"
Thus, the poetic structure and style of the film is established: the hospital bed containing Sukanen's dying body as it sleeps or rests becomes the launching pad for his mind as it travels back and forth in time, his spirit re-living private memories from previous periods of his life. As a result, the film lives in the phenomenological "other" realm of memory and fantasy as Sisu maps the immigrant's inability to settle in the geographically "real" and, for him, existentially harsh, alienating, and soul destroying landscape of Saskatchewan. In this way, Ells reveals her strategy, that of overriding the modern Prairie metanarrative of the Anglo-Canadian wheat farmer with the counter- narrative of the Finnish ship maker, in the process making the absent visible and present,
As Joanne Tompkins writes, "The staging of a ghosted and ghost-filled landscape recalls various historical moments in which people have been disconnected and dispossessed from the land, often violently, in an attempt to settle an unsettled and
oo unsettling nation." Steeped in a maritime culture alive with Nordic sea legends, yet hegemonically expected to re-root and thrive in a landlocked, agrarian culture that both the American Midwest and Canadian Prairies promoted, Sukanen was ever displaced, without country, atopic. Atopia, according to Edward Casey, comes from the Greek word atopos, meaning "no place." In human beings, no place evokes feelings of estrangement and despair linked to the fear of being permanently uprooted - without place or country.
I suggest that, in Sisu, Tom suffers from Casey's atopia: North America remained
"strange" to Tom, experienced by him as a void that undermined the assurance of his DQ place and Being.
44 According to Casey, Gaston Bachelard suggests that to "re-find place - we may
need to return, if not in actual fact then in memory or imagination, to the very earliest
places we have known."90 This trajectory sums up Sisu. In his resulting loneliness,
lengthy periods of silences, and desire to re-find place, Sukanen retreats into reverie
where he repeatedly returns, through memory, to his mother in Finland and the childhood
home - a space nurtured by a realm of enchanted heroes and mythic sea demons. When,
during the Great Depression of the 1930s, Sukanen begins materializing his fantasy by
building his boat, he appears "strange" to the people around him who had re-rooted,
settled, and assimilated Canadian norms and values. And, their attitude towards this
Finnish stranger is clearly suggested to be that, because they were able to do it, so should
he. Consequently, Sisu focuses on the protagonist's psyche, illuminating Tom's mental
space - a devouring inner world, an abyss which increasingly defines and overtakes his
sanity. Yet, as Tompkins argues, such psychic or mythic places introduce archetypal
characters (such as Vainamoinen).91 For Sukanen, mythic place becomes the very ground
of his "being."
2. 3 Home in Biwabek: Battle between the Straw Horse and the Copper Ship
Dear John Wayne /. . . Always the lookout spots the Indians first, / spread north to south, barring progress, /. . . Only the arrows whining, a death-cloud of nerves / swarming down on the settlers who die beautifully, tumbling like dust weeds / into the history that bought us all here / together: . . . /The sky fills, acres of blue squint and eye / that the crowd cheers. His face moves over us, /. . . Each rut, / each scar makes a promise: / Everything we see belongs to us. I. . . He smiles, a horizon of teeth92
In Sisu, the Sukanen family farmhouse in Minnesota represents important
interpersonal conflicts between Sukanen's own subjectivity and Finnish traditions that pull on him as he struggles with his significant others - his wife Katja (Lori Abbott) and
45 his son Taivo (Jonathan Bragagnolo). Throughout the film, the two nameless daughters
(Amanda Gooding and Gracelyn Lisik) embrace the Victorian adage "children should be seen and not heard," and Tom has no relationship whatsoever to them. Ells also depicts historical accuracy where gender is concerned. Katja is his wife and bears him children; her domain is the domestic realm. She looks after the girls while he raises the son.
However, conflict between father and son is exemplified in a dialogue that unfolds in
Taivo's bedroom on the eve of Tom's taking leave for Saskatchewan. Sukanen echoes the personal experience he valued with his mother in the parenting of his ten-year-old son, that being the tradition of fuelling the childhood imagination with legend. Taivo holds a toy straw horse throughout:
Tom: What story you want tonight?
Taivo: The straw horse one.
Tom: No, Papa's tired of that story. You always want to hear about straw horse.
Maybe ship story tonight. The Witch and the Three Heroes and the Fast Boat (he
begins telling the story)
Taivo (interrupting): Papa, how long will you be gone?
This disruption leads to an interchange between father and son that explains why
Tom has made his decision to leave. He has unsuccessfully mosquito-farmed his father- in-law's marshes long enough, wants his own homestead with land suitable for farming, and Saskatchewan seems to hold promise. He assures Taivo he will return. Once the family re-settles in the new place, Tom will buy him a real black horse, replacing his toy one. At this point, Katja enters the room:
Katja: A man that leaves his family should be ashamed. . . . Where is your sisu?
Tom: I go make home for my family - that is sisu.
46 Katja: If you had any sisu, you'd stick to your family.
An argument ensues. Katja leaves, crying. Tom remains by Taivo's bed. To
Katja, her father's farm is their inheritance and cannot be abandoned. If her husband is
coming up against adversity, he should use his sisu to get through it and endure the
consequential suffering. His loyalty is to his family and she admonishes him not to be a
coward and run, abandoning the ones for whom he has responsibility.
Tom: Give me horse
Taivo: But I sleep with him.
Tom: Give me horse
Taivo: Mama made him for me.
Tom: Papa make you something better (Shows him a toy model ship). It's made
of copper. Papa made it. A fine little ship made of copper.
As Bachelard argues, all space is measured against one's initial memory of home.
Even though they are biological father and son and they live under the same physical roof
in "real" space, in the metaphysical sense, Tom and Taivo live in a different primal home.
Tom is rooted in Finland, his psyche influenced by the Kalevala, and in Sisu the
metaphor for this reality is the copper ship. Taivo's home of origin is the American
Midwest; his psyche has been inundated with the American frontier myth which underlies
American national character. A mythic icon of the American frontier is the horse. Taivo
looks awkward and uncomfortable being an unwitting pawn in his parents' dispute and is
confused by his father's passion for ships. Out of respect he listens to his Papa but the
look on his face indicates that he has no interest in accepting what his father is trying to tell him. To a first-generation American farm boy living in the Midwestern United States
in 1910, a horse seems more practical. 47 Tompkins suggests that, at the self s inception, space structures identity and then language articulates the body's practice. I find this useful as I attempt to examine the means by which colonial worldviews produce multiple, interacting meanings that manifest in language and space which, in Sukanen's case, construct his madness and confinement. The scene continues: In his desperation, because he is going to be absent from the family for an extended period and, thus, unable to provide a role model, Tom tries to fire the Finnish spirit in Taivo. Sukanen decrees to his son, "Taivo Sukanen, never forget, the sea is in your blood. You are a Finn. Taivo, you have sisu. Sisu get a
Finn through life. A Finn never give up, he always keep going, even if he is dying, he don't give up." Taivo manages a wan, polite smile but, in his mind, he is an American and, in regards to this sisu business, Mama says Papa doesn't have it. Grandpa did but not his Papa.
Russian philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin's dialogic Law of Placement offers an alternative reading to the threatening other in the fictional production of the abject suggested by Hogle, and it is useful in understanding Tom Sukanen's troubled subjectivity. In Bakhtin's theory of the Law of Placement, place provides the locus from which the self perceives and shapes meaning. As Michael Holquist explains in
Dialogism: Bakhtin and His World, because meaning involves exchange and the stabilizing other (emphasis mine), from the self s discrete location, events take place that are addressed reciprocally in relation to others.94 The concept of dialogue establishes the existence and value of the other person. Applying the Law to Sisu, I argue that, in this geographical place of Biwabek, Minnesota, because Tom remains rooted in Finland, the locus from which he perceives meaning, Tom cannot share his reality with his intimate others, his son or his wife. Although these others are not, necessarily, threatening, they
48 remain destabilizing because of a lack of common ground to produce reciprocal intersubjective meaning. In the Sukanen home, such relational instability permeates the definition of and the struggle for Finnish ethnic identity.
Katja, who is another Finn, is not resisting the identity narrative that leads to her cultural construction as an American citizen in the nation's democracy. Her father was an immigrant who left Europe to settle America. As far as she is concerned, she has distanced herself from Russian domination. For her the struggle for Finnish national identity remains in Finland. In contrast, Sukanen emigrated from Finland to avoid twenty-five years of enforced service in the Russian army. To Katja, the Russian soldiers who intrude into Tom's own cultural memory of dispossession in Europe should have been left behind. Her children have not learned to fear them nor has their presence disrupted play. To Tom, this attitude deadens Finnish sisu. If he assimilates Russian,
American, or British ideology, he doesn't get to be a proper Finn. If Tom wishes to engage in a dialogic process to author himself as a Finn, the other in the dyad becomes the mythic hero Vainamoinen whose adventures are animated through song, incantations, and spells. Through this process, he illuminates Tom's Finnish identity and sisu. It is this internal process that Ells concentrates on and brings to life, literally, through the technical cinematic process of animation, in her film.
In an America that was, for the most part, considered "settled," challenges arose in the Sukanen farmhouse surrounding the appropriate expression of Finnish tradition in an American identity narrative characterized by the model of the melting pot. This schism between heterogeneous and homogeneous cultural identity is dramatized through
Tom and Katja's conflicting interpretation of sisu, a disagreement causing an irreparable rift. If something is not working, the brave Sukanen, like the ancient heroes, embarks on
49 the necessary adventures to rectify the situation. But, when Sukanen leaves the next
morning for Saskatchewan, Katja shuns him and pointedly returns the straw horse to
Taivo. The last image Tom has of the farm in Biwabek is of Taivo joyfully swinging his
beloved toy as the family walks back to the farmhouse without him.
2.4 Home in Macrorie: Wheat Farmer turns Madman
Here was the least common denominator of nature, the skeleton requirements simply, of land and sky - Saskatchewan prairie. It lays wide around the town . . . waiting for the unfailing visitation of the wind, gentle at first, barely stroking the long grasses and giving them life; later, a long, hot gusting that would lift the black topsoil and pile it in barrow pits along the road, or in deep banks against the fences.95
W.O. Mitchell's famous depiction of small town Saskatchewan as place in Who
Has Seen the Wind (1947) is resonant in Ells' depiction of Macrorie. As a new province
still loyal to British institutions, Saskatchewan translates into the social reality that
Sukanen, his closest friend and neighbour Vic Markkula (Brian Dueck), and everyone
else settling in Macrorie, is ideologically expected to appropriate: the lifeworld of an
Anglo-Canadian wheat farmer. However, just as Sukanen failed to embrace the frontier
space-myths of America, he fails to perform what is hegemonically expected of him in
Canada. Canada's founding fathers, as British colonizers, enforced a spatial design
(meting out homesteads on a bare and isolating grid) that perpetuated their dominance in the nascent nation. Within the context of Sisu, Tom is required to assume spatial
identities that he will not willingly adopt. ("No farm ... I ship make!")96 This reinforces his anxiety that he is without country, caught between the binaries of Finland / North
America; having sisu / lacking sisu; maritime / prairie; copper / straw; sane / insane; and, life / death. In Sisu, the characters of Katja, Lloyd, Marge, Vic Markkula, and Constable
50 Bert Fisk represent pioneers who could adapt to the hegemonic ideal. An immigrant who did not comply became an unwanted "foreign element"; (hence), Tom is asked to see his
Finnish self on Saskatchewan soil as an abject foreign body, a notion appalling to him.
In Macrorie, Tom Sukanen embodies Casey's concept of placelessness: he is a human being with no place to stand. Consequently, he is estranged. Sukanen's profound sense of alienation - due in part to the difficulty of establishing common ground in the former home in Biwabek - is demonstrated in the letter writing scene to Katja, where he is informing her that the new home he has built is ready and that he will be coming for the family:
Tom: . . . Tell Taivo that wheat field look like water when the wind blows.
Katja: What are you talking about?
Tom: Like ocean.
Katja: Taivo's never seen the ocean, (the ghost of Katja materializes on the chair
across the kitchen table)
Tom: Big skies. Man can see weather coming, like on sea. . . I come get you in
the spring. We take train ride together. Tell Taivo he can ride on Iron Horse.
Katja: I think next spring is too late ... It's been five years. He's fifteen. He
doesn't remember you Tom. ... Is this what you call sisu?
Tom: I have sisu! (Katja's spirit dissolves) I have sisu!
In Ells' version of Sukanen's story, his imaginary conversation with Katja's ghost and her (projected) rejection of his Macrorie home ultimately prevent him from returning to Biwabek after he has become a successful prairie wheat farmer. In this case, her ghost reflects difficulties surrounding a troubled masculine identity, a projection of his own critical self, feminized by his inability to perform his ethnic identity in a gratifying way
51 and / or to become the assimilated immigrant. Tom can build a house in Macrorie but he cannot "be" inside it. The identity of farmer does not fulfil him. He wants to return to
Finland. His failure to bring Taivo to Saskatchewan on the Iron Horse and then buy him a real one symbolizes a critical juncture between father and son: Tom's broken promise to his son demonstrates the stumbling block he internally encounters because Taivo does not share his obsession with ships and that troubling reality comes back to haunt him at a community get-together at Vic Markula's place.
To prove to himself he has sisu, Sukanen invents a threshing machine, contributing positively to the community, increasing the harvest's efficiency. At the threshing party, Markkula congratulates his friend and invites the Finn to say a few words. Tom manages "Thank you" and Markkula and various members of the crowd offer looks and gestures of encouragement to continue; but Tom's eyes meet those of a little boy cradling a wooden horse - Taivo's double. Even though this is painful to him, he appears to be developing a dawning understanding of the power of the horse in the prairie boy's imagination. He retreats into his inner world, signalled in the film by faint strains of Finnish song and a cut to the wooden plaque framed by an ocean of wheat gently blowing in the breeze. The memory of Taivo as he remembers him on the morning he said his final good-byes in Biwabek appears on the "screen" before the image dissolves into the projected animation of a legend from the Kalevala. This canto involves the enchanted poet's ride across the open ocean, galloping over the sea on a straw stallion. The arrow of a jealous boy severs the horse's head and the horse and the enchanted poet hurl headlong into the water, swallowed by the sea. Tom is attempting, in his imagination, to Canadianize the Finnish myth, move the legend to Canadian soil.
52 However, to Ells' epic protagonist, the mythic creature the wheat field spawns has no substance when compared to the power of the sea.
Ells' animation bears a resemblance to Babette Deutsch's re-telling of the
Kalevala in her book Heroes of the Kalevala: Finland's Saga. Ells re-enacts the canto of
Lonnron's epic poem entitled "What Befell the Oldest Magician." Here, Vainamoinen, mounted on his blue elk, rides across the ocean. The arrow of a vengeful boy hits the elk in the spleen, sinking the elk into the water, plunging Vainamoinen into the sea.
However, heroes do not drown as easily as mortals and as Vainamoinen is swimming about in the ocean he laments (paraphrased from Deutsch's version), "I have wandered far from my country. I will never reach home again. How should I live in this place?
Should I conjure up this, should I conjure up that, should I simply drown? " An eagle flies over, spies the old magician and offers to carry him as far as the North Country, the setting of his next shamanistic adventure.97 In Sisu, during the ship-making scene underscored with Finnish song, Ells cuts to an animation of an eagle soaring overhead in the sky as Sukanen "conjures up his ship" below.
Tom comes out of his reverie. There is an awkward moment until Vic comments,
"Well, how about another tune?" As the fiddles strike up, Tom walks away from the farmers and the party as his friend looks on, concerned for his behaviour. Tom immediately enters into another scene in his imagination where he sees Katja and the two girls walking. He asks: "Katja, where are you going?" She rejects him completely.
Taivo, following behind, is carrying the copper ship his father gave him five years earlier.
"Taivo, come to your Papa!" Tom cries. Taivo turns to look at him, callously discards the ship and dissolves into thin air, which exemplifies the deep, psychological rupture
Tom feels with his family. Taivo has effectively discarded the Kalevala, which is the
53 essence of his father's identity. Sukanen has to build a ship and return to Finland alone.
This marks the turning point. From this moment on, the Finn focuses on re-finding place and returning home. Paying a heavy price, Sukanen becomes a threat to the people around him when he refuses (because of his sisu) to join together in the spirit of the compliant "heroic" Saskatchewan wheat farmer and, like a martyr, make do, suffering with the other flatlanders during the harsh conditions of the Depression.
2. 5 North Battleford Asylum: "I Go Home Now, Mama's Waiting"
He walked ... to the darkening water. There at the cloudy coast he sang his last song, his final spell. At the river's edge, he sang and conjured up a copper ship.98
Refusing to appropriate the lifeworld of the Anglo-Canadian wheat farmer,
Sukanen is culturally punished for his determination to construct a more satisfying alternative reality and retain his sisu. Sukanen staged a counter-narrative in another space - Finland - which the Saskatchewan culture into which he entered rendered valueless and void of meaning. As philosopher Michel Foucault comments, space is fundamental in any exercise of power." In his History of Madness, Foucault notes that culture imposes order on experience and puts borders around our way of thinking.100 I find Foucault useful in delineating my view that, when considering early twentieth century dynamics of space, power, and knowledge, Sukanen's character animated that which was supposed to remain silent and absent from the socio-cultural place of
Macrorie, Saskatchewan. Foucault argues that archaeology is the process of "uncovering the latent grid of knowledge," which defines both the language spoken and that which remains beyond reason in the void of silence. This framework of inclusion and exclusion defines the rules upon which scientific and medical theories leading to dominant
54 discourses are built. In the discourse of madness, madness occupies "space in the field
of excluded languages."101 Consequently, I draw upon Foucault, along with feminist
literary critic Elaine Showaiter, to develop my argument that the "Crazy Finn's" story
exemplifies, as she writes, "the story of the 'zero,' the empty circle, the image of [abject]
negation. His "speech" is nothing, representing the horror of having nothing of cultural
value to say."102
However, philosopher David Wood argues that the production of a counter-
narrative is far from a "speech" that says nothing, for it "reopens the space of narrative
1 0^
contestation, opening a space not governed by narrative but by polemics." The
practice of disputing significant, broad-reaching topics like religious, philosophical, or
political matters involves a critique of the underside of dominant cultural values and
narratives where the abject human resides. A colonial national identity narrative such as
"the Last, Best West," laced with a xenophobic British "us" and non-British "them" that
attempts to disguise imperial self-justification, can be opposed through engaging
narrative resources that enable a person to conceive of him- or herself differently, such as
in Ells' portrayal of Sukanen. Yet, the option that the privileged narrative may be
challenged or re-written is often, consciously, not offered by those with a will to power
and a dominant cultural unconscious bent on exclusion and domination. As philosopher
Richard Kearney claims in his essay "Narrative and the Experience of Remembrance,"
particular narrative identification, although it acknowledges other narratives, can still lead
to a "desire to kill those who tell a different story," or, at least, I would argue, organize to
have them committed into an asylum.104 And, it can cause anxiety for the perceived
deviant other in the subject / object (abject) dyad, such as Sukanen, who becomes a threatening deviant, "culturally thrown off and thrown under."105 55 In the case of Sisu, the fact that Sukanen is socially considered as an insane and thus abject human being, poses a threat in the geographical space of settler Saskatchewan, where events unfold within traditions determined by the Anglo-Canadian ideologues and justifies his arrest and confinement in a mental institution. The same ideology colonized the settler psyche in Macrorie to co-opt and perform as "normal," sane subjects abiding by the rules that control the Canadian nation. The dialogue between the characters of
Lloyd, Marge, and Vic in the general store demonstrates the threat that one individual's insistence on his right to cultural diversity could represent to the rest of the community.
The decision to go above the constable's head in Macrorie to the RCMP in Saskatoon and ensure that, this time, Tom would be locked up illustrates one of the forms in which the citizens actively resist the acceptance of multiplicity.
Sukanen's case exemplifies the power of the authoritative discourse on madness, itself defined by a dyad where, as existential phenomenologist R.D. Laing writes, "Sanity and madness is viewed as degrees of conjunction and disjunction between two people where one is sane by common consent."106 Should one hundred "sane" people in
Macrorie call Tom "insane," Tom is definitely in trouble. The discursive monologue of the Last, Best West erases Sukanen from "settled" geographical space via the asylum as it
"discursively clears" him into the void of silence beyond reason and language. As
Bakhtin notes, the individual does not exist outside of dialogue.107 Fortier's "community of belonging" in a "terrain of familiarity" that stabilized individual ethnic identity in
Ponteix is precisely what has been denied Tom in Macrorie.
The one person through whom Sukanen experienced an acceptance of selfhood and encouragement to embrace his epic hero Vainamoinen as an intersubjective other was his mother. During the last night of his life, his repressed promise to return home to
56 Mama filters through and the absence of the past that he has tried to bury becomes present. His mother leads his spirit back in time to his Sontianen which, in "real" time, has become firewood and other farmers' building materials during the hard times of the
Depression in Saskatchewan. When the full awareness hits him that the asylum is his final home, Ells' protagonist loses his will to live. Sukanen's life journey has subjected him to much misunderstanding and tragedy that cumulatively wear him down. The film ends with the ghost of Mama appearing, tenderly stroking her son's face and forehead.
She pulls back the covers, guiding her son's passage over from life into death. When the day nurse repeats the gesture of checking his pulse, only his corpse remains.
Thus, the psychic setting of Sisu in an abjected Saskatchewan gives way to the land of death. Death in the Finnish tradition becomes a moment of magic as one speaks their last spell, conjuring up a copper ship that transports them to the lower regions of the heavens. When Sukanen announces "Now my Sontianen is ready," he remembers the ending to Vainamoinen's "Last Adventure," and the legendary copper ship of Finnish folklore becomes another form of the archetypal image of home: the vessel of his transcendence, transporting his spirit into the next realm. Even his death retains its
Finnish character.
In the mental asylum, Sukanen was abjected and discursively cleared yet his myth lives on. Sukanen has evolved from "madman" into legend because he has, in subsequent decades, become a powerful symbol for immigrants to Saskatchewan who could not settle in the new continent. As L.T. "Moon" Mullin puts it, quoted in Erin Lough and Paul
Johnson's Together At Last, "Tom wasn't crazy; he just wanted to go home."109 Ells' project is valuable because it presents the attempt to enable his Finnish spirit to do just that - through art. 57 In summary, as the fictional "abject human" acting out of the very dark abyss of madness, Sukanen performs a polemic critique, both enacting and exposing the underbelly that renders him a cultural Non-Being. For Tom, the Kalevala gives meaning to Finnish subjectivity as he tries to eke his way out of a discursive void. Employing the strategy of capturing her protagonist's stream-of-consciousness during the last day of his life, Ells cinematically animates the internal world of his psyche, the frontiers of Tom's existence. She aesthetically portrays his ground of being through the gesture of reversing the myth of the Last, Best West in "real" geographical space. As the dominant
Saskatchewan culture surrounding Sukanen does not value his story, riding "home" via his beloved Finnish myth provides the only conceivable form in which he can "be." As the Kalevala is used to structure Ells' portrait of the Finnish immigrant Tom Sukanen, the
Gilgamesh epic underpins the world of ten-year-old protagonist Jeliza-Rose in Gilliam's
Tideland, to which I will now turn.
58 3: TIDELAND
"The dead and the sleeping, how they resemble one another."110
Those who have died are unconscious, as if they are sleeping, awaiting their time to be called out of the grave and resurrected to a new life.1 *1
3.1 Gilliam's Prairie Postmodern Landscape
Terry Gilliam's Tideland, based on Mitch Cullin's novel of the same name, unveils a cinematic story that focuses on the imagination that drives the life of Jeliza-
Rose (Jodelle Ferland). Gilliam's ten-year-old protagonist finds herself abandoned in her grandmother's rundown farmhouse after the death of both parents from drug overdoses within days of each other. Conversations with her companions Mustique,
Sateen Lips, Baby Blonde, and Glitter Gal (dismembered Barbie doll heads stuck on the ends of her fingers and animated by her as fantasy interlocutors), reveal different facets of
Jeliza-Rose's psyche as she embarks on numerous adventures inside Grandma's house in the vast Saskatchewan prairie landscape with its "miles and miles of nothing but miles and miles" as far as the eye can see. In Gilliam's film, the metaphoric Prairie abyss becomes Alice in Wonderland's rabbit hole - one of the stories-within-the-story. Like
Alice, Lewis Carroll's famous fantasy protagonist, Jeliza-Rose enacts the adventures of a young girl who falls into a strange, paradoxical prairie world of gothic, hybrid characters.
Interlinking with the fairy tale is the Gilgamesh epic, which Gilliam, in turn, interweaves with Christian Fundamentalism, creating a darkly comic postmodern critique of fundamentalist views of life and death, set against the infinity of the prairie horizon.
In Classical Myth, Barry Powell writes that Gilgamesh is an epic poem from ancient Iraq delineating a series of legends surrounding the mythological hero-king's quest to rise above death to live in a spiritual or physical form into infinity.112 Gilgamesh
59 seeks out Utnapishtim, the Iraqi equivalent of the Judaeo-Christian patriarch Noah, who survived the flood and now has eternal life. Through the trials of his heroic quest,
Gilgamesh fails a test to conquer Sleep, a practice for conquering Sleep's brother,
in
Death. It is through the heroin nod that Gilgamesh becomes irreverently interwoven with Noah (Jeff Bridges), a heroin addict and this film's patriarch. Upon injecting the drug into his bloodstream, Noah inevitably feels drowsy and "nods" off. In such a comatose state, it is difficult to determine if he is dead or appearing like he is sleeping, a complication Gilliam employs to call into high relief current American Judaeo-Christian beliefs surrounding the soul and the afterlife.
Gilliam takes up the image of the generic "Prairie" as a Non-Place, a vast ocean of land and sky, as a potential space that provides his protagonist with "plenty of time to look about her and wonder what would happen next,"114 as her voice-over informs us in the opening sequence. Gilliam encourages the audience to make meaning through the eyes of the ten-year-old girl as she leads us into an altered space of disturbed inner states
(similar to Sukanen's "madness" in Sisu), an ordinary world made extraordinary through the strategy of parody. Tideland's send-up on the Last Best West turns the contemporary
Prairie reality introduced by Ponteix into a disturbing fantasy: the fusion of the weed- infested, spoilt agrarian promised land and Alice's wonderland; a dream-like world where squirrels behave like people and the conduct of the real adults Jeliza-Rose is acquainted with is bizarre. Tinseltown invades the Big Empty as the washed out Prodigal Son comes home a junkie on his quest to rise above death, living into eternity as a mummified "bog man."
Gilliam's film introduces Jeliza-Rose in her Los Angeles home with her mother
Queen Grunhilda (Jennifer Tilly) and Noah, her has-been rock star father. From a library 60 book, Noah discovers "the powers of the bog water," namely the Jutland marshes, to yield well preserved bog bodies with internal organs, skin, and hair intact. Becoming obsessed with Norse mythology he tends to his altar, lighting candles in a Viking ship that flanks a map of Denmark, visually expressing his desire to visit Jutland and benefit from the restorative nature of its waters. Upon the discovery that the Norse Queen
Grunhilda drowned in a bog, Noah pointedly gives the title to his wife. When Queen
Grunhilda "drowns" in a methadone overdose in Los Angeles, Jeliza-Rose and Noah give her corpse a true Viking send-off. Noah, paranoid that he will be charged with homicide and social services will take Jeliza-Rose from him, flees with his daughter to the desolate family farmhouse of Noah's own long-dead mother in Tideland's generic Prairies. Jeliza-
Rose ensures she takes her copy of Alice in Wonderland while Noah clutches his map of
Denmark and the book containing his coveted image of the Danish Bog Man - an entity, according to Noah, that is "just lying there, waiting to come back to life." Not surprisingly, they find Grandma's house vandalized and in a state of decay. However, while the two move in, Noah quickly dies of a heroin overdose. Failing to make it through the first night, he echoes Gilgamesh's plight: like the Mesopotamian hero, Noah could conquer neither sleep (narcosis) nor death.
The characters in Gilliam's self-proclaimed version of Alice in Wonderland meets
Psycho perform Hogle's fictional "abject human" within a very dark abyss that engages death's allies (sleep, narcosis, and darkness) and, in the process, heightens awareness of
Death and non-Being. Julia Kristeva writes in Powers of Horror that:
the abject refers to the human reaction of horror to a threatened breakdown in
meaning between the subject and object or between self and other. The primary
example of what causes such a reaction is the corpse (which traumatically
61 reminds us of our own materiality). Confronted by the corpse of a family member
the realization of one's own death becomes palpably real. The corpse seen
without God and outside of science is the utmost of abjection. It is death infecting
life.115
However, as her father's corpse begins to rot, Jeliza-Rose does not react with horror. In fact, she is unable to readily acknowledge his death because she has grown accustomed to
Daddy's "little vacations." Ironically, although Noah fears decay, this is the process the audience watches him move through for much of Gilliam's film. Noah's corpse, wearing dark sunglasses, remains seated in a living room chair "staring" at his map of Jutland - an ironic and dark, yet, often highly amusing postmodern counterpart to Tom Sukanen pining for Finland.
Life has not stopped for Jeliza-Rose, who has spent her entire childhood tending to the needs of her irresponsible, co-dependent parents. Their deaths have freed her from this constricting care-giving role, opening up the possibility for new adventures in the spaces between nature and culture that mark the trials of her quest. Her wanderings lead her into the neighbours' yard where her encounters with the epileptic man-child Dickens
(Brendon Fletcher) and his artist-taxidermist older sister Dell (Janet McTeer) act out a fantasy world into which Jeliza-Rose and her doll heads magically pass. The railroad tracks that separate Dell's property from Noah's become the home of the predatory
Monster Shark (the nightly passenger train) that "mashes everything in sight." Nearby quarry blasts signal Bog Men stirring, ghosts send psychic messages, and Goth Barbie,
Glitter Gal, notes in her gravel voice, sounding like she's possessed, "It's Halloween": both Noah and Dell's houses are full of dead things and spirits. And, through Dell and
Dickens, Jeliza-Rose is introduced to Christian Fundamentalism. 62 Circa 2004-2005, during production of the film, America was a nation overheated with Christian fundamental, End Time rhetoric. According to Damian Thompson in The
End of Time, Faith and Fear in the Shadow of the Millennium, "[t]he percentage growth of evangelical Christianity probably outstrips that of any religion in the world today, including fundamentalist Islam. We are witnessing the fastest expansion of Christianity in history, far greater than the missionary waves of the past."116 And, in Forcing God's
Hand: Why Millions Pray for a Quick Rapture — And Destruction of the Planet, Grace
Halsell writes that followers of this wave of Christianity "hold a different - and radically new, as history goes - idea about the Rapture."117 Halsell goes on to explain that the
Rapture is described in the scene recorded in First Thessalonians 4:16:17:
For the Lord Himself shall descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of
the archangel, and with the trumpet of God. And the dead in Christ shall rise first;
then we who are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the
1 1 o
clouds to meet the Lord in the air."
Amy Johnson Frykholm argues in Rapture Culture that "in a complex and confusing social arena, the Rapture divides saved and unsaved."119 The notion of "saved" means conversion, which, in this case, includes the belief that to be judged worthy of "meeting the Lord in the air," one must be "Born Again" (accept Jesus Christ as one's personal savior). As one follower notes: "All who are Born Again will see the Battle of
Armageddon, but it will be [in the grandstand seats] from the skies."120 And, as Halsell notes, "if one can escape the suffering of the End Times by being Saved, then being Born
Again becomes all important."121
Since the beginning of the twenty-first century, in the wake of September 11,
2001 and President G.W. Bush's response to the terrorist attacks on the World Trade 63 Centre, this apocalyptic imagination has initiated a new kind of violence that psychiatrist
Robert Lifton refers to as "superpower syndrome." In his book of the same name, he
describes
two competing apocalyptic visions - Islamist and American - each aiming at
massive destruction in the service of global purification and renewal. While the
Islamist forces are overtly visionary in their willingness to kill and die for their
religion, American forces claim restraint and reason while offering a no less
visionary program for using their overwhelming military power to remake the
world.122
Through the characters of Dell and Dickens, Gilliam satirizes the hegemonic
power of the Bush administration with its concentration of neoconservative Religious
Right and the violence it unleashed in its war on terror. In the microcosm of his film,
Dickens' thoughts and actions mirror its apocalyptic violence that Lifton argues appears
as a "form of ultimate idealism, a quest for spiritual Utopia." And, with this idealism
comes an all-consuming violence required to "obliterate a hopelessly corrupt world" and
bring in the "hopeful and lofty rebirth" prophecied to follow." Dell is Jesus' earthly
emissary who announces: "I stop Death from proceeding. That's my calling." Dell
enacts Rapture theology with its fundamentalist vision of life and death as she turns
Noah's corpse into a shellacked and wired simulacrum. Now, as the metaphoric Born
Again convert sleeping in Christ, he too, like his coveted (Prairie) bog man, is "just lying there, waiting to come back to life."
Dell believes that "your loved ones don't have to disappear into the ground" and, through the same artistic process of quasi-mummification employed on Noah, she preserved her own mother who was stung to death by an angry swarm of her husband's 64 bees while taking an apple pie out of the oven. Dell's father promptly abandoned his family and the farm while Dell took revenge, covered her father's hives with gasoline and set them ablaze, which, in turn, led to a bee-sting; a vengeful act from a "jealous creature" that left Dell with a "dead peeper" (blind in one eye). As she puts it, she was
"stung in my own garden" and they "never ate apple pie again" - a cheeky allusion to the
Christian Fall and the notion of an agrarian Paradise Lost which justifies the myth of
Christ's body and the fiction of resurrection, the Apocalypse, and Jesus' Second Coming as the contemporary twist on the Rapture underscores the importance of a personal
"calling" that involves her unique ability to save souls.
As well, it speaks of the dystopic projections on women as Eve's progeny and their mythic relation to the introduction of corrupt sin, attendant suffering in the world, and the resultant abject and grotesque ("sexual," procreative) body that dies and decays.
Yet, this body remains close to Nature as does the lifeworld of agriculture itself. The demonizing of the mother and her house is key to American Gothic strategies Tideland interrogates in high postmodern style. Dell's mother's effigy is a spitting image of
Noah's Bog Man, which Dell has enshrined in her bedroom, complete with a place of worship that mirrors Noah's altar to Jutland. Dell's altar reveals a past romance between
Dell and Noah before Noah's rise to a rich and famous rock star. Later, Noah fell into heroin addiction, which led to his death, and Dell became eccentric, to put it mildly.
3.2 Into the Land of the Abject: A Prairie Puppet Show
The mannequin as manifestation of the "REALITY OF THE LOWEST ORDER:" [OJnly the poorest and least prestigious objects are capable of revealing their full objectivity in a work of art. Mannequins have always existed on the peripheries of sanctioned Culture . . . [They are] shaped in human image, almost "godlessly," in an illegal fashion ... a manifestation of the Dark, Nocturnal, Rebellious side of
65 human activity ... so similar to a living human being but deprived of consciousness.. . . MANNEQUINS transmitted to us a terrifying message of Death and Nothingness.124
In Tideland, Gilgamesh*s "dead and the sleeping" is metaphorically represented by the Bog (Wo)Man, a human-looking shell that, lacking consciousness, waits in a state of nothingness for its "animating" moment. By extension, this metaphor includes the doll's head. Jeliza-Rose's imaginative story-telling animates the inanimate objects of her
Barbie heads. Therefore, I argue that Gilliam's film can be best understood as a postmodern Prairie puppet show. The fact that his protagonist spends much of the film talking to four decapitated Barbie dolls heads that she has fashioned into irreverent finger puppets suggests the possibility of exploring the film through puppet theory. As several writers argue puppet theatre (a theatre employing dolls, mannequins, and effigies as well as puppets) seems to suffer from a denigrated status in society. It is a form of entertainment that amuses children or big people remaining at their level of maturity.
The activities of re-creating and enjoying simulacra have traditionally been associated with lower states of being or levels of understanding. In making his decision to explore the story of Tideland through the eyes of a little girl who has grotesque inanimate puppets as friends and cannot discern between the sleeping and the dead, Gilliam opens up its analysis to notions of mimesis and representation that leads one into the land of the abject.
Embarking on such an investigation, Gilliam appeals to performing objects culturally marked in similar fashion to his characters. Effigies and dolls are also "cast down and cast under." Through their quirky interrelationships, the director can render a dark postmodern meditation on death. Filter the fictional abject human and performing object through the lens of a right wing fundamentalism that has taken root across many
66 cultures in the last few decades and this meditation on death begins to pose disturbing
ideas about "what happens next." In Tideland, God's promise of life after death takes on
a whole new meaning. Consequently, the film's deliberation of society's outcasts or non-
beings in a generic "Prairie" non-place is marked by a heavy dose of irony and
reflexivity. As a director, Gilliam asserts a rebellious, impertinent, "almost godless"
style. Hence, some viewers have found Tideland difficult, if not obscure.
Jeliza-Rose's sense of stability dissipates with the death of both parents and the
trip to the "Prairies." Reality is no longer predictable. Through ongoing role play with
her finger puppets, the child tries to find the stabilizing other to author herself into being
(as Sukanen turns to the heroes of the Kalevala, or the people of Ponteix to the statue of
the Pieta), as she opens up her psychological process to the spectator, showing and telling
them exactly what is going on inside of her at any given moment. Three disturbed adults
funnel their quest to overcome mortality and fears of bodily decay through the medium of
Jeliza-Rose. Because she is a child and does not have strong boundaries, their
psychological needs complicate her own process of making meaning of the death of both
of her parents through her strange relationships with their corpses. The fact that the
remainder of the dolls' body parts - the torso, the legs, the arms - are often visible in her
play area alludes to the lack of a strong container for her psychic self as this visual
strategy flaunts the joints and articulations of the marionette as well as the Lacanian hommelette (from homme = man, mensch) - the child before the mirror stage.
I will illustrate that Gilliam's brand of postmodern puppet show operates out of two places: 1) A stage where Barbie heads and a pubescent girl enact a narrative of maturation from childlike simplicity to Western notions of adult sophistication.
Tideland, in part, is a narrative of Jeliza's coming-of-age and the film parodies American
67 Gothic genre strategies that construct cultural and abject alterity that control female sexuality; and 2) A performance place articulating the ideologically controlled manipulation of subjectivity. Marionette theatre is mainly about manipulation. Someone is always pulling the strings. It is through the metaphor of the Prairie puppet show that
Gilliam's bizarre story-telling strategy enables him to speak out against hegemonic manipulation in global capitalism with its new millennium infusion of End Times jargon to justify US military might. He critiques its far-reaching inequalities responsible for the economic and social devastation that permeates his film as it toys with corpses infecting life and effigies simulating being.
3.3 House Mother: "Alice in Wonderland Metis Psycho"
Traditional elements of the Gothic genre are elaborated on in particular ways, notably through the central character's troubled identification with her good/bad/dead/mad mother, whom she ambivalently seeks to kill/merge with; and her imprisonment in a house that, mirroring her disturbed imaginings, expresses her ambivalent experience of entrapment and longing for protection.127
According to Fred Botting in Gothic, Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho (1960)
"brilliantly re-works Gothic extravagance in the creation of mystery, absurdity, and menace within the world of the normal and everyday." Sets (the abandoned, gloomy, isolated motel) and scenes (especially the shower curtain stabbing). . . "are grotesque mirrors for disturbed inner states haunted by the ghostly and dominating figure of the mother."128
Roberta Rubenstein argues in "House Mothers and Haunted Daughters" that the
American Gothic delineates the struggles that the gothic daughter faces as she attempts to emerge into selfhood in spite of the very domineering figure of the domesticated mother.
The house, as projected mother body, is a character of such significance that House
68 Mother is the name Rubenstein gives to this persona. The convention of the House
Mother as an imprisoning structure that encloses a "ravenous mother" body forms the core around which the psychic construction of troubled mother-daughter relationships, so central to the genre, pivots. This is exemplified in an early scene in Tideland in the
House Mother of Queen Grunhilda. The film starts out faithfully portraying established generic practices.
In Queen Grunhilda's bedroom, Jeliza-Rose's mother enacts the needy smother mother, the ravenous body who engulfs Jeliza-Rose, as she gorges herself with chocolate while Jeliza-Rose pampers her, massaging her legs. Suddenly, she blurts out "Jeliza-
Rose you know I love you honey" grabbing her, pulling her into herself, almost physically crushing the child in a head lock, blubbering into her hair "I don't want you to leave me, Jeliza-Rose." Queen Grunhilda has caught Jeliza-Rose in such an effective death grip, she doesn't have to worry. Then, when Jeliza-Rose tries to assert herself and go after something she wants - her mother's chocolate - she's quickly met with "what the fuck are you doing?" as she gets her fingers slapped. The mother knows self-indulgence and excess, the daughter knows deprivation. In traditional forms of the female gothic, the female is systematically consumed (haunted) until she becomes completely incorporated through the act of a "sacrificial suicide" within the House Mother as a disembodied spirit.
The dynamic of the haunting is illustrated through Gilliam's use of a night-time shadow-puppet play in the House of Queen Grunhilda, starring the Witch. One night, well past midnight, Noah bursts into his daughter's bedroom to share his discovery of the
Bog Man. Noah finishes with "let's hope we're in that kind of shape in two thousand years. You'd better go back to sleep, otherwise your mother and all the bog men in the world might get upset." As he is standing up to leave, he bumps the light which, in 69 Jeliza-Rose's imagination, becomes a shadow puppet of a Witch, the projected mother body.
To explain the nature of this projection, the psychic self of Jeliza-Rose is yet in the process of becoming; hence, the shadow of the Witch is associated with maternal authority. The daughter's projection on the silhouette is one of an overpowering, consuming mother body threatening to overcome her nascent subjectivity. The inert cast shadow is brought to life by Jeliza-Rose's projected unconscious anxieties and made to perform. The Witch becomes a figure of fear. Here, the House Mother becomes a space affiliated with death that still contains a powerful, haunting presence that is out to get little girls, shaping the "terror tactics" needed to bring the daughter's self under the proper ideological control. In the American gothic, according to Rubenstein, female gender construction is based on terror tactics inherent in Kristeva's abjection and the gothic genre reveals this underbelly.
As well, her father has just told her his Bog Man behaves and has a temperament like her mother. In this moment, Jeliza-Rose is not fully awake - closer to the subconscious place of memory and dream than daytime consciousness - and Noah's Bog
Man plants a disturbing concept of sleep - death / coming to life that terrifies her. As fate would have it, Queen Grunhilda dies that night, bringing Jeliza-Rose face to face with her first abject corpse. Her mother's empty shell introduces the notions of soul and the afterlife into a space she already associates with threats of psychological death.
However, Rubenstein argues, the male hegemony covertly directs the narrative that points to the Mother as the problem and the root of the daughter 's disturbance.
Within the logic of the nuclear capitalist family, the mother is seen as the nurturer and primary care-giver to the children and the house is her domain. By the late 1950s, the
70 formulaic conventions of the masculine ideology controlling the strings of the narrative continued to highlight the ravenous mother engulfing the female daughter self, but, brooding in the background and lurking in the shadows, hid the sadistic hegemonic male.
This dynamic is satirically referenced during Jeliza-Rose's travels by bus from her old
House Mother in Los Angeles to her abandoned grandmother's house. Noah, as he works the radio "monitoring the information," hoping to garner at least a headline surrounding his wife's abandoned corpse, tells Jeliza-Rose: "We won't be safe until we get to
Grandma's house" - a not-so-subtle intertextual nod to the fairy tale Little Red Riding
Hood. In this popular children's story, grandma's house is the last place a little girl is safe and, because of the wolf waiting in the bushes, neither is grandma. In Tideland,
Grandma's house isn't so kind to Noah either.
Noah's displacement begins with his rejection of his rural legacy, and, like
Sukanen, once he leaves his primal home, he is unable to establish another place of belonging. Tideland enters into the colonial project during the transition phase between
American imperialism and global capitalism and its back story exemplifies the decline of rural populations and their displacement to urban areas. The devastation this wrought on the small family farmer manifests in the film's central location - an isolated, rural Prairie ocean of land and sky with its Gothic-looking farm house, metaphors for the demise of the homesteader. Noah comments, "the weeds took over everything," a situation resonating with Ponteix. Gilliam is considerably unabashed in his use of this particular metaphor portraying "noxious" and "returning to the wild."
Following the American Dream and its urban call that Paradise can be found in its cosmopolitan space, Noah left the Prairies for Hollywood. Living "on the road" as a rock star, being addicted to heroin, left Noah in a permanent state of atopia, just like Tom
71 Sukanen, but with a postmodern twist. Noah's placelessness dispossesses Jeliza-Rose.
Like the people from Ponteix and Tom Sukanen, Jeliza-Rose becomes an immigrant - from Los Angeles - on the run because Jeliza's father is paranoid and, because he has exhausted other options, is returning to his primal home. The return lacks Sukanen's nostalgia but much can happen in five decades and successive imperial and global appropriations of capitalism.
Noah's (and therefore Jeliza-Rose's) estranged, "empty" inner space is mirrored in the external setting - a geographically neglected space that extends to the built environment. Noah's derelict psychic space inspires Tideland's quintessential puppet show. Utilizing the green screen and computer generated imagery, Gilliam attaches everything on the lower floor of Grandma's house, including Noah and Jeliza-Rose, to strings and proceeds to simulate its sinking to the bottom of the sea. Even though the space of this fantasy enactment is filled with water, the desert pervades in the abandoned decaying home where Noah literalizes "sinking" to the bottom of Hogle's abyss, metaphorically sounding the death knell to the construction of the colonial homesteader, the Paradise Lost of Noah's American Dream, and the dead-beat rock star. In contrast to
Sisu, this moment does not inspire vessels of transcendence. Tideland's focus remains on the putrefying body.
In the child's case, displacement and atopia are filtered through the alternative space of fantasy and the magic of childhood. This is how Jeliza-Rose articulates herself as a cultural non-being relegated to the void. At times she appears, like Sukanen, mad to those considered sane through authoritative cultural discourses. Gilliam's use of puppetry leaves the terror of projected shadow play to take up the animation of finger puppets. Rainer Rilke argues in "Some Reflections on Dolls" that the doll is an
72 unresponsive shell lived through the child's energies and, as the silent void of the doll's body is not yet experienced as devouring, the child does not project her fears on the doll as she does on the cast shadow of the Witch.130 For Jeliza-Rose, the void is the rabbit hole in Alice in Wonderland, a place full of wonder with potential for a multiplicity of adventures. She rips off her doll heads, sticks them on her fingers, and turns them into her friends.
Rilke also notes that play with the doll helps assert subjectivity as the doll's
1 -j 1 silence encourages the child to split, taking both the doll's part and its own. Again, this describes the nature of Jeliza-Rose's play with her Barbie heads. During the invasion of the squirrel scene (her first adventure inside Grandma's house), Mustique emerges as the leader; she was "born ready" for adventure and does not even quake in the face of fear. In contrast, Sateen Lips seems to be more sensitive to the fact that gothic forces bent on devouring the independent selfhood of a ten-year-old girl and two doll heads could be lurking in the space beyond. Consequently, she is always whiny and afraid.
With her father's death, Jeliza-Rose finds herself truly deserted by human beings in the decaying family farmhouse and she needs the dolls to perform the brave and the frightened parts that co-exist inside her.
Rubenstein's Mother House renders a house of the colonial / imperial master intent on the (c)overt use of terror to ensure social domination. Other notions of house exist that offer an alternative reading. Gaston Bachelard argues that the poetic image of home is the abandoned inner space where the imagination returns to experience daydreaming,132 inviting play and imagining things more amazing than reality, like
Alice, after she falls through the empty inner space into Wonderland. In the house as our
73 first universe, we experience the real beginnings of our images (if we study them phenomenologically) and, consequently, we don't feel lost.
The child Jeliza-Rose and her best friend Mustique stir up the past that dwells in this primal house, bring it alive once more as it offers her some sense of place and continuity with her past. Jeliza-Rose begins imagining her grandmother into existence out of the boa, hats, wigs and lipsticks that she left behind. This is evidenced in the following conversation:
Jeliza-Rose: I bet she was beautiful
Mustique: She was old and ugly and these are nothing more than squirrel chewed
dresses.
Jeliza-Rose: She wanted to be beautiful so shut up!
Shortly afterwards, Jeliza-Rose hears the squirrel scuttling along the roof of the house and Jeliza realizes "that's what happened to her. She went into the squirrel." In this postmodern solution, she grounds the disembodied spirit in the House Mother. In her imagination, when grandma died her soul took another form. Therefore, in the moment, it makes sense that the squirrel is foregrounded as an important presence.
In Gothic, Fred Botting notes that the postmodern gothic is "playful in its questioning of narratives of authorship and the legitimacy of social forms."133 In
Tideland, events are made "playful" as no one experiences Kristeva's abject response of terror to Noah's corpse. According to Botting, when Gothic formulae and themes become overly familiar as they are in our postmodern image-saturated culture, they become susceptible to (self-) parody in their inversion of everyday American family life, often producing laughter as readily as feelings of horror and terror.134 As well,
"polymorphous sexuality parodies Gothic forms and the horrors associated with them in a 74 ridiculous artificiality" like blond wigs and blush on a decomposing corpse or Navy
IOC captain. Grandma's blond wig allows for much caricature and irony in gender roles, interlacing the beautiful with the grotesque, as it becomes, simultaneously, fertile ground for Jeliza's imagination as she searches for meaning in mortality - her parents and the thought of her own.
When Jeliza-Rose is in front of the vanity mirror in Grandma's house she takes melodrama over the top. As she is unpacking, a cut on her lip causes a drop of blood to fall on the torso of a doll lying in her suitcase. She begins her "play" at dying; enacting the possibility of her own death in fine soap opera style. Then, when she is playing dress- up with grandmother's blond wig, boa, and lipstick, she sees the image of her mother in herself as she practices adolescence, her next phase of life. Mimicking her, she taunts,
"Get on with it you little bitch!" and then moves into playing / working through the thought that, maybe, her father is dead too. "This is not a vacation this time!" and then into the possibility that she is a ghost, an ethereal vision more like her reflection in the mirror than a body with material substance. "I'm a vision. A beautiful vision."
Mustique, poised on a thumbtack at the top of the vanity watching the proceedings, gets the idea that they should turn Noah into a beauty queen. If he is beautiful he will become a vision too. Then, he'll never die because death is ugly.
According to Rilke, the binary of inside / outside which articulates issues surrounding identity and boundary formations plaguing the self is central to the abject because a corpse, marked by death, becomes a horrible foreign body which leads us into the land of the abject. Rilke is aware of the adult experience of terror and abjection that is inherent in the subject / object knowledge.136 Consequently, once we graduate from childhood to adulthood - the journey on which Jeliza-Rose is embarking - we come to 75 see the corpse as something we must avoid if we wish to have our life. In the land of the abject, Noah has become dirt - a concept that anthropologist Mary Douglas has termed in
Purity and Danger as "matter out of place." Decomposing, his being is in a state of constant dissolution; moreover, he stinks. As Jeliza-Rose is still a child, she has not made the distinction between subject and object so is not mortified by the fact that she is sharing space with a rotting body. In the child's fantasy world in generic Prairie
Wonderland, Noah's rotting corpse (complete with blond wig and blush) becomes another doll's head, an unresponsive shell animated by the child's energies.
But, the corpse of Noah, as foreign abject body, is not the only character that evokes an aura of the irrational and incomprehensible. Tideland's entire cast are characters in abject ruins. All appear to us as strange, like alien beings. At times, one gets the impression that Dickens, Dell and Jeliza-Rose are the lone survivors on the face of the earth until the 7:05 passenger train races past, flaunting the message that acts as a metaphor for Prairie as place: "life happens, just elsewhere." This message is articulated in the final scene when the character of the Woman on the Train assures Jeliza-Rose "I'll help you get where you're going," as if it were inconceivable that she could belong here in this apocalyptic wasteland - a wilderness its Christian inhabitants have made "clean, clean, clean."
3.4 Wash Me in the Blood of Jesus
The fundamentalist tries to outwit death, thus making life itself eternal and imperishable."
Neither Dell nor Dickens reacts with horror at the sight of Noah's corpse, joining
Jeliza-Rose in the failure to respond to him in the culturally conditioned manner. The
76 moment Dell walks into Grandma's House, Gilliam's puppet show begins to focus on the
manipulation of power (the realm of the marionette theatre) as power interweaves with
the apocalyptic imagination. Apocalyptics, according to Lifton, "merge with God in the
claim to ownership of death .... This ownership of death comes to include ownership of
meaning and of all aspects of life."
In this film, the ambassador of the fundamentalist regime is Dell who, just like
Jesus, is "keeper of the silent souls" and knows exactly what to do in this situation:
Preserve him as a simulacrum. Such a solution answers any questions Jeliza-Rose may
have had surrounding soul - he has been "saved" by Jesus so he's guaranteed eternal life
and, as an added bonus, Jeliza-Rose gets a replica of his body to keep in the earthly realm
with her (but, she has to share him with Dell). Lifton writes:
What [s]he shares with all of us is the universal impulse to spiritualize death, to
find some larger meaning in the continuity of life. That tendency is expressed by
most cultures in funeral rituals that de-emphasize the physical evidence of death,
the dead body, while embracing and nurturing the immortal soul. Whatever its
extremity, the apocalyptic imagination has its beginnings in ordinariness, in the
conundrum we human beings experience in the face of death.140
As an apocalyptic owning this death, Dell through her artwork creates a
reproduction of the dead body. Simulating Noah's life through death allows her to treat
Noah "as if he were still alive, outwitting death in her denial of mortality. In the land of the abject that Tideland explores, through Dell's intercession in the process of decay, the
filth and contamination accompanying Noah's spoilt corpse inside the decomposing
farmhouse leads to the film's "musical number" - Wash me in the blood of Jesus - evoking Christ's redemptive Passion in a scene that puts Grandma's house in order, a
77 necessary strategy to keep the nasty creatures and vengeful spirits away as it purifies the sinful flesh.
As well, Jeliza-Rose is cleansed with the house. Dell tolerates no challenges to her power. Dell, the drill sergeant, commands: "Seal your mouth and eyes. Extend your arms and hold your breath ... Do your panties." Through Dell's idiosyncratic relationship with the effigy of Noah, Dell has reduced Noah to an empty shell over which she has complete control. And, at no time does she ever hesitate to objectify his daughter and bring her under the same degree of submission as well. In this way she mirrors the apocalyptic identity of the Bush political administration, motivated by a claim to total power in its putative role of purifying the globe of its evil.
In Puppets and <(Popular " Culture, cultural theorist Scott Shershow argues that puppet theatre as metaphor for hegemonic manipulation is rooted in a philosophical worldview initiated in Western thought by Plato.141 Plato's Cave allegory illustrates that the puppet becomes, at once, a metaphysical and social object, performing in a way that is denigrated by those holding the authoritative voice in the culture.142 And, in this case, so would be Jeliza-Rose - as a child she remains at their lower level of being. In Plato's time, co-existing with this practice was the notion that affections were strings of virtue / vice leading to the metaphor of the human being as marionette, a creature capable of ideological control moved by the machinery of Plato's Republic,143 or, in 2004, the republic of G. W. Bush.
These notions are spoofed in the scene following Dell's conversion of Noah.
After they have gorged themselves on the feast Dell has prepared, featuring the "Fruits of
Eden" for the "Children of Noah," Dell and Jeliza-Rose move Noah's simulacrum up to
Jeliza-Rose's bedroom so that he may enjoy his "sleep of the just." Dell starts out,
78 relatively calmly: "I see children hiding behind bushes," she says. "Sometimes, children hiding behind bushes see more than they should." In this case, Dell is referring to the time Jeliza-Rose and Mustique witnessed Dell performing fellatio on Patrick, the local grocery delivery man. Manipulated by invisible strings, Jeliza-Rose, feeling shame and guilt, averts her eyes as her body shows visible signs of discomfort. Really moving in,
Dell roughly pulls Jeliza-Rose so close she is shouting in her face: "Rose you smell awful. You reek of the Devil. Terrible things are going to happen to you under the sun."
The world may be full of sinners, like the child, Jeliza-Rose, but Dell's not one of them.
God is the Muse, the invisible Creator, who animates her strings. Hence, Dell performs on the side of virtue.
Jeliza-Rose has a desire to understand the world that is going on around her to move from child-like innocence to adulthood. Metaphorically this is represented by the fact that Sateen Lips and Baby Blonde are now harboured inside of Noah's silent, sleeping shell, gifts from Jeliza-Rose for her father's "new life." Systematically, she is letting go of her childhood toys and her childlike ways, moving towards adolescent interests - like boys such as Dell's brother, Dickens. And, as Jeliza-Rose will continue to discover, movement towards maturation involves run-ins with Dell, the Witch who persists with the technique of intimidation to bully the child into resigning herself to her mastery.
Jeliza-Rose is not the only child in Tideland. Dickens is a child as well according to the official, hegemonic values embodied in the text. As Tideland's Dickens is an epileptic, he is a diseased, grotesque, feminized other even though he is male. As he informs Jeliza-Rose in their initial encounter: "If I run too fast, I faint like a girl." In spite of this, both contemporary novelist Cullin and filmmaker Gilliam could be seen as
79 employing Dickens' character to comment on the latest ideological appropriation of the
"narrative of terror" featuring the Freedom Fighter (if you're on the side of democracy) and the terrorist (if you're not), moving into issues of hyper-masculinity. Hence, Dickens introduces hybridity into gender roles that attempt to remain traditional: Jeliza-Rose wants to have Dickens' babies while Dell cooks and cleans, using food to punish and reward. Dickens wants to be "pretty" in the blue-eyed blond pin-up sense and a military
Hero.
To enable Dickens' valiant quest as a Freedom Fighter, the train plays a significant role in Tideland. The nightly passenger train becomes the focus of Dickens' obsession - killing the Monster Shark. Much of his play centers on the train tracks where
Dickens sets bait, or else, in his submarine, Lisa, submerged in the deep waters of the
South Pacific where he hunts the voracious beast. Consequently, he spends much of the film in goggles and a wetsuit, breast stroking through the overgrown prairie grass; at times, adding a sea captain's hat and the blond wig, lipstick, and blush that he inherits after Noah is re-born as a Fundamentalist Christian effigy.
Here, "captaining" alludes to the colonial project of settling the Last Best West and the train's role in nation building as it became the first mode of transportation and means of forging connecting links from East to West, uniting the vast expanse of national territory making up the geography extending across Canada and the United States. In
Tideland, Captain, the man who, in the Victorian era, brought the immigrants across the void of the Atlantic from Europe to Canada, preventing Protestants from throwing a
Catholic patron saint overboard, currently makes an ironic comment about technological progress and the predatory nature of the global market which devastates local economies as easily as Dickens decimates the 7:05 passenger train.
80 In summary, Tideland offers a biting critique of a resurgent North American fundamentalism, opening with Jeliza-Rose's announcement of her metaphoric Fall through Alice's rabbit hole into a desert(ed) agrarian space and ending with a backwards, rural Apocalypse. Tideland employs the "empty" abyssal spaces of Saskatchewan to examine the production of the abject human in a gothic context where existing metaphysical and theological habits of thought have conditioned us into believing that there is terror inherent in subject / object knowledge. The characters we meet perform from its derelict depths. But, in Tideland, Alice in Wonderland is employed to turn the terror of losing our selfhood and the possibility of death into a magical, adventuresome experience. Gilliam portrays the unconscious abyss as potentially generative, rather than a place-space limited to the manufacture of the abject justified, in this case, through teachings originating in Genesis and terminating in Revelation. Gilgamesh's heroic quest to conquer death becomes satirized in the fundamentalist preservation of the corpse, turning Tideland into a Prairie puppet show where the characters believe the dead are merely sleeping and can be animated through their energies, or the spirit of God, at any given moment. Contemporary Saskatchewan, with its "infinite horizons," thus furnishes
Gilliam with a stunningly apropos backdrop for his postmodern themes. Now, I turn to the concluding remarks of this thesis.
81 4: CONCLUSION: THE HOMESTEADER, EDEN, AND THE DARK SIDE OF MYTHMAKING
There is no journey without myth, but also there is no journey without some measure of suffering.144
Although we acknowledge the suffering occasioned by personal or collective displacement, we tend not to trace it back to the loss of a vital connection with place itself. . . . The result is a suffering not limited to the experience of exile: in a 'dromocratic,' speed-bound era, every mobile person is a victim of placelessness in one guise or another. ... By late modern times, this world has become increasingly placeless, a matter of mere sites instead of lived places.145
The homesteader's journey structures Windblown /Rafales, Sisu, and Tideland- be it the early twentieth century colonial settler from France or Finland seeking a new home, or the early twenty-first century globe-trotter with rural roots in a postmodern world, rejecting his inheritance of the family farm. In each case, the quest begins when the individual, desiring paradise, leaves his or her home of primal origin. The journey,
"home and away," brings with it mishaps, suffering and loss due to displacement, which, in the works cited above, is closely interconnected with abjection.
The introduction to the new world placed the immigrant in an elusive, utopic non- place - the edenic Last, Best West. However, the myth bore little resemblance to the reality and the agricultural promise of Eden quickly betrayed the homesteader, situating the wheat farmer in an endangered, agricultural lifeworld. The fictional characters and their stories studied in this thesis illuminate that Saskatchewan as place reifies a desert(ed) landscape and manifests an alienated psyche. In this study, Saskatchewan represents the interrelationship of the abject with the sublime. The vast geographical space invited an epic telling proportionate to the expansive nature of the colonizer's project. The boundless parameters of its landscape provide ample space for mythic dreams and projections. I have argued that the colonial experiment of "settling" the West
82 involves the notion of the Saskatchewan rural landscape as a metaphor for the abyss where its "miles and miles of nothing but miles and miles" provides abundant place to culturally repress the unpresentable subjectivity resulting from the production of Hogle's mythologized and abjected foreign body. For the homesteader with desires that did not align with the prevalent and governing ideology, the establishment of a vital connection to place became problematized.
This thesis has argued that physical journeys explore psycho-spiritual passages that address and distance the characters from the workings of colonialism. In the three examples I have cited, story-telling devices drawing upon the epic poem have proven productive. In these examples, the Last, Best West, seen as Paradise Lost, helped define the abject, psycho-social landscape and desolate, rural setting the fictional characters inhabit. To engage the Canadian Prairie as an imagined version of the Garden, these contemporary works of film and theatre mine alternative, mythic worlds. Such an excavation reveals characters who variously echo, reject, subvert and / or knowingly and reflexively mock the colonial experiment (and its subsequent appropriations into imperialism and globalization) which have led to patterns of abjection and a sense of loss definitive of the provincial character. The epic poem provides the framework for the artists to connect with the sublime nature of the land's arid, agrarian dystopia. These marginalized, absented fictional "others" speak out from the abyss in an attempt to make present thwarted prairie identities.
As these characters represent abject humans they are closer to cultural Non-Being than being, ideologically constructed as empty shells with no animating spirit forfeiting an "othered" selfhood to animate an assimilated, pre-determined (neo) colonial subjectivity. In addressing the relationship between the illusory nature of being and non- 83 being within such a colonial object, Knowhere Productions and Terry Gilliam turn to the puppet to represent this paradox. Thus, the turn to the Odyssey, Kalevala, and
Gilgamesh, as they figure in Windblown / Rafales, Sisu, and Tideland respectively, examines the abjected spirit in the Prairie abyss. Repressions and projections in the colonial discourse are exposed through inner structures of self-sacrifice in the social or individual body. Like the heroes of the epic poems, the protagonists and their supporting cast (as living actors or puppets), encounter "sinister apples," narcosis, madness, darkness, and conjure up ships and spells as they move between nature and culture, engaging in quests for the afterlife.
In a geo-cultural colonial formation based, in part, upon a Judaeo-Christian framework with its evocation of Eden in Saskatchewan's settlement process, notions of the land, gender, loss, and death are highlighted. In As Eve Said to the Serpent, Rebecca
Solnit writes that Eden:
deals with landscape, gender, time, the ideal, and the tragic. . . . This creation
myth explicates - and justifies - gender differences, mortality, the necessity of
working the land to get food, the tendency to regard work as punitive and nature
as flawed and in need of improvement.146
Driven by the privileged, British male subject, abjected gender alterity is conveyed in these creative projects through projections of the Eve archetype and through the notion of original sin. These embedded stereotypes justify hierarchic arrangements that naturalize social practices and strict gender demarcations. The image of woman as both utopic and dystopic becomes an icon to be worshipped or symbolizes the spirit guide into the realm of death. At the other extreme, the mother and her house are demonized. In the same vein, geographical space becomes ethnically marked as a non-place for those who do not
84 hold ideal British subject positions. Entering into a hegemonically prescribed agricultural lifeworld, the settler remains closer to nature than do those living in a civilized urban culture. Constructed as inferior to culturally valued cosmopolitan space, the category of rural is relegated to the margins, viewed by those in urban areas as devoid of a human presence and a rich cultural experience.
As ideologues in the first decade of the twentieth century looked to Genesis to characterize Saskatchewan's moment of origin, the new millennium may be ideologically defined as one in perpetual, martial emergency, aligning itself more with Revelations. As
Terry Eagleton reminds us, in contemporary times, as cultural non-beings trying to exist in the abyss where there is no solid ground, "fundamentalism is a neurotic hunt for solid foundations to our existence."147 Loss of human identity, alienation from self and the social bearings that anchor one solidly in reality are a pervasive trope in the prairie landscape. In our mobile postmodern world, insecurity of being is reaching epic proportions of neurosis / psychosis. Indeed, through these works that reference the epic form as structuring principle, the boundless space of ground and horizon is revealed in various stages of abandonment and alludes to both desert and future wasteland. This field of abjection is an ideal setting for apocalyptic narratives. Our culture has become so dispossessed with acute threats of eradication of selfhood and a rootless existence that the end is now conceived as the self-destruction of the human race. Examining these works reveals the power of these artists to variously capture and [re]present a definitive historical Saskatchewan myth, while offering alternative human geographies and subjectivities that challenge a dystopic and decaying Last Best West.
85 1 Ken Mitchell, "The Great Electrical Revolution," in The Wascana Anthology of Short Stories, ed. Ken Mitchell, Thomas Chase, and Michael Trussler (Regina: Canadian Plains Research Centre, 1999), 319.
Bill Waiser, "The Myth of Multiculturalism in Early Saskatchewan," in Perspectives of Saskatchewan, ed. Jene M. Porter (Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2009), 59.
3 See Robert Wardhaugh, "Introduction," in Toward Defining the Prairies: Region, Culture, and History, ed. Robert Wardhaugh (Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2001), 3-11. Examples of urban energy would be: 1) The Regina Symphony Orchestra (Canada's longest running symphony); 2) The first Arts Board in North America, an entity whose working mandate, according to the Regina Leader Post, requires the Board to "pool Saskatchewan's scattered cultural facilities and extend them to the smaller towns and villages." Saskatchewan's Top News Stories: Arts, "New Arts Board for Saskatchewan," Regina Leader Post, February 2,1948, Arts section, 3, http://library2.usask.ca/sni/stories/art3a.html (accessed September 3, 2010); and 3) The Regina Five - a small but active artistic community of five painters from Regina. Their 1961 exhibition represented a new direction in abstract painting which caught the attention of New York art critic Clement Greenberg. Canadian Encyclopedia Online, "Regina Five," http://www.thecanadianencylopedia.com/ (accessed September 3, 2010). Since Premier Brad Wall's victory speech, he has been extending a hearty invitation for all expatriates to "come home" as Saskatchewan is, once again, the land of abundant opportunity. Saskatchewan Votes 2007, "Saskatchewan Party wins Majority Government," in CBC News Library, Wednesday, November 7, 2007/ 8:51 PM CT. http://www.cbc.ca/canada/saskvotes 2007/story/2007/ll/07/sask-main-election.html (accessed July 19, 2009). See also, "Saskatchewan Enjoys Economic Boom" in Vancouver Sun, December 27, 2007, Can West MediaWorks Publications, Inc. www.canada.com/vancouversun/news/business/story (accessed February 9, 2010)
4 Who Has Seen the Wind. dir. Allan King (1977; USA: Janus Films, 1982). Drylanders. dir. Don Haldane (National Film Board of Canada (NFB), 1963). Other examples of Saskatchewan's paradoxical "threatening" landscape can be found in Paper Back Hero, dir. Peter Pearson (Agincourt International, 1973) where a hockey player in a small town becomes convinced he is an Old West gunslinger. Mitchell's "The Great Electrical Revolution" (1984) was made into a movie in 1989 by Larry Bauman. As well, Regina filmmakers Brian Stockton and Gerald Saul's Wheat Soup (1987) offers a tongue- in-cheek illustration exposing and critiquing this longstanding tradition, giving play, in part, to agoraphobia and an apocalyptic narrative. Conquest, dir. Piers Haggard (Greenpoint Films, Heartland Motion Pictures, Shaftesbury Films, 1998) depicts a young woman whose car stalls in Conquest, Saskatchewan as she travels across the prairies. To pay to have it fixed, the young woman works in the local store, a strategy enabling Haggard to portray everyday life in "small town," Saskatchewan. See also Kristian Moen, "The Polyphonic Prairies: The Creation and Re-Creation of Drylanders," Canadian Journal of Film Studies Vol.10, No. 1 (Spring 2001): 28-47.
86 Cruel Tears, by Ken Mitchell, music Humphrey and the Dumptrucks, dir. Brian Richmond, Persephone Theatre, Saskatoon, March 15, 1975. The Shipbuilder, by Ken Mitchell, dir. Gabriel Prendergast, University of Regina Drama Department, 1978. Elephant Wake, by Joey Tremblay, dir. Bretta Gerecke, Globe Theatre, Regina, February 2008. See also Leanne Perry, "Elephant Wake Inspired by Hit-and-Run Childhood Memory," The Cultch Blog, entry posted March 9, 2010, blog.thecultch.com/2010/03/elephant-wake-inspired-by-hit-and-run-memory (accessed March 25, 2010). The work of playwrights Don Kerr and Barbara Sapergia also excavate similar Saskatchewan historical themes. Roundup, by Barbara Sapergia, dir. Tom Bentley-Fisher, 25* Street Theatre, Saskatoon, 1990 is set on the Saskatchewan prairies during the 1990s and explores the intimate lives of rural and small town communities. Don Kerr began writing plays in the 1980s, all of which are of a political or historical nature. An example includes Talkin' West, by Don Kerr, dir. Tom Bentley-Fisher, 25th Street Theatre, Saskatoon, 1992. The Red Truck, by Tim O'Shea, dir. Angus Ferguson, Dancing Sky Theatre, Meachum, Saskatchewan, 2007 explores the contemporary financial burden of the family farm and the conflicts inherent in the agrarian tradition of intergenerational inheritance.
6 Windblown / Rafales, text by Ken Wilson / Melanie Bennett, music Lindsay Stetner, dir. Andy Houston, seen. / conceived & produced by Kathleen Irwin, Knowhere Productions, Inc., Ponteix, Saskatchewan, July 15, 2008. Sisu: The Death of Tom Sukanen. dir. Chrystene R. Ells (Moxie Films and Dacian Productions, 2009). Tideland. dir. Terry Gilliam (2005; THINKFilm, 2007).
7 Waiser, "The Myth of Multiculturalism," 59.
8 For a key example, see The Englishman's Boy. dir. John N. Smith (Minds Eye Entertainment, 2008) which premiered as a made for TV movie on CBC. At a surface glance, it appears to exemplify the American frontier myth with its token Cowboys and Indians dramatization. Through the strategy of a character as Hollywood director seeking a story he can market as the authentic American Western - a true American story about America produced by Americans - the myth is actually deconstructed. The essence of the Englishman's boy's confessional story occurred on Canadian soil as a result of his involvement in the Cypress Hills massacre. As this is not a "true" Hollywood story the studio fictionalizes an historical event beyond recognition to make it conform to its ideological agenda. Through Hollywood reification of the American hero and American experience, Canadian history and mythic imaginings of its own Western frontier are absented, usurped by the generic "Wild West" of its imperial gaze. This appropriation is witnessed again, in its global form, in Tideland's generic "Prairie" space-place. The cinematic gaze is now transnational.
9 Barry Powell, Classical Myth, 4th ed. (New Jersey: Pearson Prentice Hall, 2004), 325.
10 Powell, Classical Myth, 325.
87 11 Jerrold E. Hogle, "The Gothic Crosses the Channel: Abjection and Revelation in Le Fantome d L'Opera," in European Gothic: A Spirited Exchange, ed. Avril Horner (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), 226-228.
12 Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1999), 59-61.
Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies, 68.
14 Taiaiake Alfred, Wasase: Indigenous Pathways of Action and Freedom (Peterborough: Broadview Press, 2005), 128 and 180. See also John Mohawk, Utopian Legacies: A History of Conquest and Oppression in the Western World (Santa Fe: Clear Light Publishers, 2000), Harold Cardinal, The Unjust Society (Vancouver: Douglas and Maclntyre, 1999), Albert Memmi, The Colonizer and the Colonized (Boston: Beacon Press, 1991), Homi K. Bhabha, Location of Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 1994) for a discussion of colonial mimicry, and Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1979).
15 Neal McLeod, Cree Narrative Memory: From Treaties to Contemporary Times (Saskatoon: Purich Publishing Ltd., 2007), 56.
16 McLeod, Cree Narrative Memory, 55.
17 Sarah Carter, Capturing Women: The Manipulation of Cultural Imagery in Canada's Prairie West (Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1997), 22. Carter borrows the term "hated other" from historian Peter Gay, The Cultivation of Hatred: The Bourgeois Experience, Victoria to Freud (New York: W.W. Norton, 1993).
1 8 Blair Stonechild and Bill Waiser, Loyal till Death: Indians and the North-West Rebellion (Calgary: Fifth House Publishers, 1997), 55. 19 McLeod, Cree Narrative Memory, 55.
90 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London and New York: Verso, 2006), 6.
91 Anderson, Imagined Communities, 1.
99 Anderson, Imagined Communities, liner notes.
9"3 Carter, Capturing Women, xiv and 205. 24 Edward Casey, Getting Back into Place: Toward a Renewed Understanding of the Place-World (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1993), xv.
9S Casey, Getting Back into Place, x-xi. 88 Anne-Marie Fortier, "Re-Membering Places and the Performance of Belonging(s)," in Performativity & Belonging, ed. Vicki Bell (London: Sage Publications, Inc., 1999), 42.
27 Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There, illus. John Tenniel, ed. Roger Lacelyn Green (London: Oxford University Press, 1977).
98 See Amy Johnson Frykholm, Rapture Culture: Left Behind' in Evangelical America (New York: Oxford University Press Inc., 2004), Grace Halsell, Forcing God's Hand: Why Millions Pray for a Quick Rapture and Destruction of Planet Earth (Maryland: Amana Publications, 2003). For recent political use of the apocalyptic imagination see also John Bellamy Foster, Naked Imperialism: The U.S. Pursuit of Global Dominance (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2006), Robert Jay Lifton, Superpower Syndrome: America's Apocalyptic Confrontation with the World (New York: Thunder's Mouth Press / Nation Books, 2003), and Bob Woodward, Bush at War (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2002). 29 Alfred Lord Tennyson, "Ulysses," in Classical Myth, 4th ed. (New Jersey: Pearson Prentice Hall, 2004), 574.
30 Nick Kaye, "Cliff McLucas and Mike Pearson (Brith Gof)," in Art into Theatre: Performance Interviews and Documents (The Netherlands: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1996), 211. Bold text in the original.
T 1 Kathleen Irwin, "On Watching and Being Watched: Performing in Another's Place" (unpublished article, 2009), 4. The Weyburn Project, dir. Andy Houston, seen. Kathleen Irwin, Souris Valley Extended Care Centre (formerly the Weyburn Mental Hospital), Weyburn, Saskatchewan, August 30, 2002. Crossfiring / Mama Wetotan, text by Trevor Herriot, dir. Andy Houston, seen. / prod. Kathleen Irwin, perf. David Ouellette, Derek Lindman, Michael Kolodziej, Melanie Bennett, Trenna Keating, Claybank Brick Plant National Historic Site, Claybank, Saskatchewan, September 2, 2006.
For a complete copy of the text, see Appendix A: Anton Iorga provides the French translation.
34 Robert J. Nelson, Play Within a Play: The Dramatist's Conception of his Art: Shakespeare to Anouilh (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1958), 132.
35 Nelson, Play Within a Play, 10.
36 "Ligne Etheree / Ethereal Line" by Regina-based installation artist Shauna Dunn invited visitors to fly kites in a nearby field to "connect the prairie to the sky." Heather Benning's "Blown Away" explored, through the construction of a miniature model of a
89 farm, the wind in relation to domestic architecture. (Windblown /Rafales Program, July 15, 2008), 6-7.
37 Tennyson, "Ulysses," 574.
38 Powell, Classical Myth, 118.
39 Powell, Classical Myth, 114.
40 Anne-Marie Fortier, "Re-Membering Places and the Performance of Belonging(s)," in Performativity and Belonging, ed. Vikki Bell (London: Sage Publications, Inc., 1999), 42.
41 Fortier, "Re-Membering Places," 41-42.
42 Odette Carignan, "Notre-Dame d'Auvergne," in La Saskatchewan en rimes et monologues (Regina: Les Editions Louis Riel, 1991), 53.
43 Odette Carignan, personal interview, April 30, 2008.
44 Odette Carignan, personal interview, April 30, 2008.
45 Jacqueline Edmondson, Prairie Town: Redefining Rural Life in the Age of Globalization (New York: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2003), 50-51.
46 A Mother House is the headquarters of a religious community from which one or more additional houses may be formed, in this case, the Convent of the Notre Dame d'Auvergne. The Mother House is the home of the Superior of the order upon which the Sisters of the lower ranking house in Ponteix would depend for direction, supplementary human resources as their order expanded, and the training of young novitiates to sustain themselves in the future.
47 Fortier, "Re-Membering Places," 51.
48 Odette Carignan, personal interview, April 30, 2008.
49 Sister Rose-Alma Dumont, personal interview, May 15, 2008.
50 These are the precise notions that Tideland puts under the microscope and explores for its entire running time in Protestant Fundamentalist form. These notions surround psychic colonization and the human challenge of facing death - the place of the dead and the sleeping.
51 Fortier, "Re-Membering Places," 42.
90 Information gleaned from conversations held with residents of Ponteix on a personal visit April 23-24, 2008, a personal interview with Odette Carignan, April 30, 2008, and cards included in the information packages handed out during the Centennial celebration July, 2008.
53 Fortier, "Re-Membering Places," 42.
54 Fortier, "Re-Membering Places," 53.
55 Patricia Seed, Ceremonies of Possession in Europe's Conquest of the New World, 1492 - 1640 (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 179.
56 Seed, Ceremonies of Possession, 188.
57 Seed, Ceremonies of Possession, 65 and 61-62.
CO Seed, Ceremonies of Possession, 13.
59 Robert Rothwell, Ian Drummond, and John English, Canada: 1900-1945 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1987), 43-44.
60 Bill Waiser, "The Myth of Multiculturalism in Early Saskatchewan" in Perspectives of Saskatchewan, ed. Jene M. Porter (Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2009), 62.
61 Fortier, "Re-Membering Places," 48. Emphasis in original. Fortier is a bilingual sociologist from Montreal conducting research on Italian emigres in London. Consequently, the particular Mass to which she refers was delivered in Italian rather than in her familiar French vernacular.
62 Edward Casey, Getting Back into Place: Toward a Renewed Understanding of the Place-World (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1993), x-xi.
63 Kathleen Irwin, "Detailed Project Description for Windblown /Rafales" (Unpublished document, 2007) 1-2.
64 Ken Wilson, "Untitled," Windblown / Rafales Weblog, entry posted July 6, 2008, http:// windblown2008.blogspot.com/ (accessed July 7, 2008).
65 Jill Bennett, Empathic Vision: Affect, Trauma, and Contemporary Art (California: Stanford University Press, 2005), 119. Although Bennett is describing African artist William Kentridge's Ubu and the Truth Commissions (1997) what she is saying can be applied to the effects of Knowhere Productions similar stylistic decision as well.
66 Fortier, "Re-Membering Places," 47.
67 Terry Eagleton, After Theory (London: Penguin Books, 2003), 204.
91 George P. Landow, The Victorian Web www.victorianweb.org/authors/tennyson/ulyssestext.html.-
69 Fortier, "Re-Membering Places," 44.
70 Fortier, "Re-Membering Places," 53.
Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 101. According to philosopher Madan Sarup, in the individual's psychic, social, and textual life, Kristeva's conception of the semiotic and symbolic functions is based on Freud's distinction between "pre-Oedipal [semiotic] and Oedipal [symbolic] sexual drives. To Kristeva, the symbolic is regulated by the Law of the Father. Therefore, it is the domain of position, regulation, and order as well as linear time. In contrast, the energy charges and psychical marks of the semiotic must be harnessed and appropriately chained for social cohesion and regulation. The semiotic is feminine and dominated by the space of the mother's body. Madan Sarup, An Introductory Guide to Post-Structuralism and Postmodernism, 2nd ed. (Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 1993), 124. As well, Kristeva argues abjection disturbs identity, the system and its order because it does not respect borders, positions and rules. Abjection is a space of immorality. Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 4.
72 Deborah Caslav Covino, "Abject Criticism," Genders 32 (2000): 1. http: www.genders.org/g32/g32_covino.html (accessed October 2, 2009).
73 On May 21, 2010 the Catholic Church condemned female priests who perform the sacraments as comparable to pedophile priests. For the Vatican's official position on the ordination of women and the changes made to the Normae de gravioribus delictus, see Article 5, Section 1, http://www.vatican.va/resources/resources norme en.html.
74 Fortier, "Re-Membering Places," 53.
75 Gertrud von le Fort, The Eternal Woman (Milwaukee: The Bruce Publishing Company, 1962), 4.
Leo Steinberg, The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and in Modern Oblivion (New York: A Pantheon / October Book, 1983), 58.
77 Caslav Covino, "Abject Criticism," 5.
78 Caslav Covino, "Abject Criticism," 3-6.
79 Casey, Getting Back into Place, 195-196.
80 Sister Lea Robert, "The Sisters of Notre Dame d'Auvergne in Western Canada," in Histoire de Ponteix: History of Ponteix, ed. Rachel Lacoursiere-Stringer (Manitoba: Derksen Printers, 1981), 247-248.
92 81 Powell, Classical Myth, 585.
82 Megan Fries, perf, Sisu: the Death of Tom Sukanen, dir. Chrystene R. Ells (Moxie Films and Dacian Productions, 2009).
Chrystene Ells, quoted in "The Ship that Tom Built," Regina Leader Post, September 8, 2007 (CanWest MediaWorks Publications, Inc.). www.canada.com/reginaleaderpost/news/weekender/story.html (accessed December 15, 2009).
Babette Deutsch, Heroes of the Kalevala: Finland's Saga (New York: Simon and Schuster, Inc. 1967), 7-8. or Joanne Tompkins, Unsettling Space: Contestations in Contemporary Australian Theatre (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2006), 129 and 133. as Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (New York: Onion Press, 1964), xxxvi.
87 There are numerous versions of the legend and much inconsistency exists between the various narratives.
88 Tompkins, Unsettling Space, 163.
OQ Edward Casey, Getting Back into Place: Toward a Renewed Understanding of the Place-World (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1993), x-xi.
90 Casey, Getting Back into Place, x.
91 Tompkins, Unsettling Space, 155.
09 Louise Erdrich, "Dear John Wayne," in The Wascana Poetry Anthology, ed. Richard G. Harvey (Regina: Great Plains Research Center, 1996), 238. Tompkins, Unsettling Space, 129.
94 Michael Holquist, Dialogism, Bakhtin and his World, 2nd ed. (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), 21-22.
95 W.O. Mitchell, Who has Seen the Wind? (Toronto: Macmillan of Canada, 1947), 4.
96 Tompkins, Unsettling Space, 138.
97 Deutsch, Heroes of the Kalevala, 47-52.
93 Don Wood, perf., Sisu: the Death of Tom Sukanen, dir. Chrystene R. Ells (Moxie Films and Dacian Productions, 2009).
99 Michel Foucault, "Space, Knowledge, and Power," in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), 252.
100 Michel Foucault, History of Madness, ed. Jean Khalfa, trans. Jonathan Murphy and Jean Khalfa (London and New York: Routledge, 2006), 541.
101 Foucault, History of Madness, 541 and 549.
102 Elaine Showaiter, "Representing Ophelia: Women, Madness, and the Responsibility of Feminist Criticism" in William Shakespeare: Hamlet, ed. Susanne L. Wolford (Boston and New York: Bedford / St. Martin's, 1994), 222.
David Wood, "Double Trouble: Narrative Imagination as Carnival Dragon," in Traversing the Imaginary: Richard Kearney and the Postmodern Challenge, ed. Peter Gratton and John Panteleimon Manoussakis (Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 2007), 133.
104 Richard Kearney, "Narrative and the Experience of Remembrance," in Questioning Ethics, ed. M. Dooley and R. Kearney (New York: Routledge, 1998), 26.
105 Jerrold E. Hogle, "The Gothic Crosses the Channel: Abjection and Revelation in Le Fantome d L'Opera," in European Gothic: A Spirited Exchange, ed. Avril Horner (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), 226.
106 R.D. Laing, The Divided Self: An Existential Study of Sanity and Madness (Middlesex: Penguin Books Ltd., 1965), 36.
107 Susan M. Felch, "In the Chorus of'Others': M. M. Bakhtin's Sense of Tradition," in The Force of Tradition: Response and Resistance in Literature, Religion, and Cultural Studies, ed. Donald G. Marshall (New York: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2005), 56-57.
108 Anne-Marie Fortier, "Re-Membering Places and the Performance of Belonging(s)," in Performativity and Belonging, ed. Vikki Bell (London: Sage Publications Inc., 1999), 42.
109 According to Lawrence "Moon" Mullin, in 1918, Tom walked back to his former home in Minnesota. When he arrived at the farm, he found the place abandoned. After making inquiries he discovered his wife had died in the Spanish Flu epidemic and his children had been placed in separate foster homes. He did manage to find his son, now named John Forsythe, and tried to bring him back to Macrorie but they were stopped at the border. His son was returned to the foster home. Together at Last, ed. Erin Lough and Paul Johnson (Moose Jaw: Ferguson Printing, 1976), 7.
94 Mitch Cullin, Tideland (Pennsylvania: Dufour Editions, Inc., 2000), 8. Cullin opens his novel with this quote from the ancient epic poem of Gilgamesh.
11 x United Church of God, "What happens after death?" 2. http://www.ucg.ca/booklets/AD/lifeafterdeath.asp (accessed August 7, 2010).
1 n Barry Powell, Classical Myth, 4th ed. (New Jersey: Pearson Prentice Hall, 2004), 323- 326.
113 Powell, Classical Myth, 324.
114 Jodelle Ferland, perf., Tideland. dir. Terry Gilliam, (2005; THINKFilm, 2007).
115 Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia, 1982), 4.
116 Damian Thompson, The End of Time: Faith and Fear in the Shadow of the Millenium (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1997) quoted in Grace Halsell, Forcing God's Hand: Why Millions Pray for a Quick Rapture And Destruction of Planet Earth (Maryland: Amana Publications, 2003), 9.
117 Halsell, Forcing God's Hand, 33.
110 Halsell, Forcing God's Hand, 36.
Amy Johnson Frykholm, Rapture Culture: 'Left Behind' in Evangelical America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 19.
120 Carl Mclntire, quoted in Halsell, Forcing God's Hand, 36.
191 Halsell, Forcing God's Hand, 39.
1 99 Robert Jay Lifton, Superpower Syndrome: America's Apocalyptic Confrontation with the World (New York: Thunder's Mouth Press, 2003), comments on back leaf.
19^ Lifton, Superpower Syndrome, 13. 124 Tadeusz Kantor, "The Theatre of Death (1975); "The Writings of Tadeusz Kantor," The Drama Review 30.3 (Autumn, 1986): 142-143, Emphasis in original.
125 Kantor, "The Writings of Tadeusz Kantor," 114-176. See also E. Gordon Craig, "The Actor and the Uber-marionette," (1907/8) in On the Art of the Theatre 1911 (New York: Theatre Art Books, 1956), 54-94. Peter Schumann, "The Radicality of Puppet Theatre," The Drama Review 35.4 (Winter 1991): 75-83. Steve Tillis, "Coda - Metaphor and the Puppet," in Toward an Aesthetics of the Puppet: Puppetry as a Theatrical Art (New
95 York: Greenwood Press, 1992), 159-69. Scott Shershow, Puppets and <(Popular" Culture (Ithaca & London: Cornell University Press, 1995).
126 In 1936 post-Freudian-psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan defined the mirror stage. This notion forms the basis of his "ideal ego." Lacan argued that a baby (around the age of sixteen to eighteen months) begins to recognize the image of itself in a mirror. This realization leads to the infant's first identity crisis because it calls into awareness the experience of separation as well as the Other. Separation brings with it a sense of loss, resulting in a lifelong desire to regain connected wholeness. Hence, the "ideal ego" endures in a narcissistic fantasy of a perfect self that remains largely unattainable. According to Lacan, the previous stage to the mirror phase is experienced by the infant as one in "bits and pieces." Lacan called this the "hommelette" - the little man (homme) made out of broken eggs (omelette). "The membranes of the egg in which the foetus emerges on its way to becoming a newborn are broken . . . and that one can do it with an egg as easily as with a man, namely the hommelette." See www.changingminds.org/disciplines/psychoanalvsis/concepts/mirror phase.html and Jacques Lacan, The Seminar, Book XI, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, 197-198.
127 Roberta Rubenstein, "House Mothers and Haunted Daughters: Shirley Jackson and Female Gothic," Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature 15.2 (Autumn 1996): 312.
128 Fred Botting, Gothic (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), 167.
129 Rubenstein, "House Mothers and Haunted Daughters," 309.
130 Rainer Marie Rilke, "Some Reflections on Dolls" (1914) in Where Silence Reigns, Selected Prose (New York: New Directions, 1978), 43.
131 Rilke, "Some Reflections on Dolls," 48-49.
132 Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (New York: Onion Press, 1964), 6.
133 Botting, Gothic, 168.
134 Botting, Gothic, 168.
135 Botting, Gothic, 168.
136 Rilke,"Some Reflections on Dolls," 45.
137 Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (New York: Praeger, 1966), 36.
138 Terry Eagleton, After Theory (London: Penguin Books, 2003), 213.
96 139 Lifton, Superpower Syndrome, 22 (emphasis in original).
140 Lifton, Superpower Syndrome, 21.
141 Shershow, Puppets and <(Popular" Culture, 14.
142 Shershow, Puppets and <(Popular" Culture, 15.
143 Shershow, Puppets and (lPopular" Culture, 21.
144 Deena Metzger, Writing for Your Life (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1992), 167.
145 Edward Casey, Getting Back into Place: Toward a Renewed Understanding of the Place- World (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1993), xiv and xv. "Dromocratic" means obsessed with speed. See also Paul Virilio, Speed and Politics, trans. M. Pollizotti (New York: Semiotext[e], 1986).
146 Rebecca Solnit, As Eve Said to the Serpent: On Landscape, Gender, and Art (Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 2001), 1.
147 Terry Eagleton, After Theory (London: Penguin Books, 2003), 204.
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Filmography
Conquest. Dir. Piers Haggard. Greenpoint Films, Heartland Motion Pictures, Shaftesbury Films, 1998.
Drylanders. Dir. Don Haldane. National Film Board of Canada (NFB), 1963.
The Englishman's Boy. Dir. John N. Smith. Screenplay by Guy Vanderhaeghe based on a novel by Vanderhaeghe. Minds Eye Entertainment, 2008.
The Great Electrical Revolution. Dir. Larry Bauman. 1989.
Paper Back Hero. Dir. Peter Pearson. Agincourt International, 1973.
105 Sisu: The Death of Tom Sukanen. Dir. Chrystene R. Ells. Perf. Don Wood, Rod Mc Leod, Megan Fries, Lori Abbott, Jonathan Bragagnolo, Brian Dueck, Mark Claxton, Lili Zwart. Moxie Films and Dacian Productions, 2009.
The Theatre of Tadeusz Kantor. Dir. Denis Bablet. 1991.
Tideland. Dir. Terry Gilliam. Perf. Jodelle Ferland, Jeff Bridges, Jennifer Tilly, Janet McTeer, Brendan Fletcher. Screenplay by Terry Gilliam and Tony Grisoni based on a novel by Mitch Cullen. 2005; THINKFilm, 2007.
Wheat Soup. Dir. Gerald Saul and Brian Stockton. 1987.
Who Has Seen the Wind. Dir. Allan King. 1977; Janus Films, 1982.
Site-Specific Performances
Claybank / Mama Wetotan. Text by Trevor Herriot. Dir. Andy Houston. Seen. / Prod. Kathleen Irwin. Perf. David Ouellette, Derek Lindman, Michael Kolodziej, Melanie Bennett, Trenna Keating. Knowhere Productions, Inc., Regina. Claybank Brick Factory, Claybank, Saskatchewan, September 2, 2006.
The Weyburn Project. Dir. Andy Houston. Seen. Kathleen Irwin. Knowhere Productions, Inc., Regina. Souris Valley Extended Care Centre, Weyburn, Saskatchewan. August 30, 2002.
Windblown / Rafales. Text by Ken Wilson / Melanie Bennett. Music Lindsay Stetner. Dir. Andy Houston. Seen. / Conceived & Prod. Kathleen Irwin. Perf. Ken Wilson, Derek Lindman, Melanie Bennett, Eugenie Ducatel, Regena Marler, Camille Svenson. Knowhere Productions, Inc., Regina. Ponteix, Saskatchewan. July 15,2008.
Youtube
Windblown / Rafales - Part 1 & 2 (Birdsong Communications, 2009)
Plays
Cruel Tears. By Ken Mitchell. Music Humphrey and the Dumptrucks. Dir. Brian Richmond. Persephone Theatre, Saskatoon. March 15, 1975.
Elephant Wake. By Joey Tremblay. Dir. Bretta Gerecke. Globe Theatre, Regina. February 2008.
106 The Red Truck. By Tim O'Shea. Dir. Angus Ferguson. Dancing Sky Theatre, Meachum, Saskatchewan. 2007.
Roundup. By Barbara Sapergia. Dir. Tom Bentley-Fisher. 25 Street Theatre, Saskatoon. 1990.
The Shipbuilder. By Ken Mitchell. Dir. Gabriel Prendergast. University of Regina Drama Department. 1978.
Talkin' West. By Don Kerr. Dir. Tom Bentley-Fisher. 25 Street Theatre, Saskatoon. 1992.
Visual Art Installations
"Blown Away." By Heather Benning. Windblown / Rafales, Ponteix, Saskatchewan. July 15,2008.
"Ligne Etheree / Ethereal Line." By Shauna Dunn. Windblown / Rafales, Ponteix, Saskatchewan. July 15, 2008.
107 APPENDIX A
I Am a Part of All That I Have Met Poem by Ken Wilson
You were as stranger here, a wooden virgin in a treeless plain, a continent, an ocean, and centuries from home. When mallet, gouges, files were put away, and brushes cleaned, the final coat of varnish dried, this place was still a vast ecstasy of grasses and flowers and sky. Horses still a rumour then. Assiniboine and Cree picked saskatoons, drove bison into pounds. Their tongues, their dances, gods, their own. The season told by plants as well as weather: crocus meant the end of winter, golden bean the start of spring, then beardtongue, arnica, and June grass. July: blue grama, bluebunch wheat grass, sage and bergamot and coneflower bloomed. August's latent chill brought goldenrod and little bluestem. Chokecherries by the creek turned yellow, dropped their leaves before the autumn moon. Then snow, maybe, and cold, always. Another year began. The animals and the people read the signs. They took what the land offered, moved along. A world away, you held your son, dead. Your eyes gazed on a different sky. When Father Royer first took in this spot, the hill above, Noteku Creek below, This country had been emptied, surveyed, subdivided, marketed: the Last, Best West. Here, he said, here will I make a parish for Our Lady. Not another disappointment, another Gravelbourg, snatched away while he was back in France, collecting emigrants. Not this time. Tents were erected. Homestead claims were filed. Behind the ploughs, the earth was steeped in steaming furrows. Wood, nails, and glass. A store, a church, a post office. Streets named for generals and poets. The Sisters' dancing hands. First harvest of a crop of Marquis wheat. A change in name, location, but so what? The tree that cannot bend breaks in the wind. 108 So one world ends. Another one begins.
But other worlds have come and gone. This place bears witness, Ask Henri Liboiron. Shoeless, walking across fields stripped even of topsoil by a decade without rain, he found arrowheads and spearpoints, hammers, pestles, mortars, things too heavy for the wind to carry off. And later, tipi rings, centuries of cooking fires. Just think of it: right here, as glaciers melted, people hunted mammoths, buffalo, gigantic horses, pitched their lodges by an icy lake. They camped here every seven years. Their shadow hid 10,000 years until laid bare by harrowed soil and pitiless wind and skies And later, evidence of an even stranger world. A cutbank along Noteku Creek revealed its treasure: the bones of an aquatic dinosaur. It stretches comprehension. There was time when this dry land was a shallow sea inhabited by monsters. Long necks, sharp teeth. What other creatures fed upon each other here? What skies and wind and rain? What flowered if not grass? That world the blood of ours, its traces marked by gas wells, pipelines, pump jacks. This, the long view: who can be surprised by anything, when seas can turn to deserts, when ice mountains advance and melt away, when in the air we breathe are molecules exhaled by dinosaurs? This gives so little comfort, though, when in a boardroom hours away men vote to close the elevators, or give a college to another town, when scientists box up and take away the bones that could bring tourists, when children lose, or just pretend to lose, their mother tongue, when rain's too early, late, or not at all, when crosses burn and hooded neighbours jeer, when widows grieve for men called up by France and gassed in mud, when banks foreclose, when influenza takes the young and spares the old. So people turn to you, or what you represent, 109 a community defined by faith, and promises of mercies if not here then yet to come.
But still, no one controls the wind. Your people know that all too well. Enough rain falls, or doesn't, at the right time, or else not. An early frost, or hail, or rust, or hoppers, a crop is lost, or saved despite a farmer's skill, What's left? Drink gopher poison when your implements are repossessed, your frightened children crying while they watch, or somehow pray that you'll outlast the drought. Take heart that Wilf Liboiron saved the Virgin, instead of crying because the church has burned. Be grateful that the hospital was finished just before the Spanish flu. A cyclone leaves a twisted mass of wood and steel? Finish the new church anyway. Tempered by disappointments, loss, cold wind, blue sky, it's not for nothing this is next year country.
This town, he said, these people are like Russian thistle, brought from Europe, windblown, tumbling, leaving seeds behind to germinate, perhaps, if not next year then later. Proscribed by governments, it thrives, piles along fences, inside barns, taking root anywhere there's earth and air and water. One dry year, it was all there was for hay. Sometimes you have to take what you can get.
No scent, thought, nothing much to look at, thorns. So beauty falls away. What's practical? These wooden shed, these numbered streets. Forget Napoleon Pope. Paint only to preserve, not beautify. Survival leaves no room for luxuries. Perhaps our children, or our children's children, will have the time. For now, we do without.
Which makes the church they built, completed at the start of years of dust, so wonderful. A church is a necessity, perhaps, but every church is not like this one.
110 I saw its twin spires from the highway. Two concrete utterance of faith in God, and in this town. And yet, since concrete does not burn, still practical.
Now, almost a hundred years since you, Royer's Penelope, were uncrated - after the storm, the passengers who thought Shaeffer some kind of Jonah, the confusions that sent you back to France, not west to Notre Dame d'Auvergne - you must belong. Your foot thrusts forward, roots you here. Now I'm the stranger. And I'm no Suknaski. I'll never know this town the way he knew Wood Mountain. This sky's not in my blood, the bones of my relations are a thousand miles from here. My people built the combines, they didn't bet them against the wind and frost. But I learn. I stopped for gas on Number Four. We talked about the rain, the first all year. There's some, he said, who'd like to be optimistic, only they're afraid it wouldn't work.
I think of that, and you, and Father Royer riding south to find this place, And Sisters shivering as the wind cuts through the convent walls, drought and macaroni, schools where children kept their tongue from strangers, August rain and ripe wheat sprouting in the field, the Klan, and French and English over morning coffee at the bakery, and someone's answer to another stranger's question: Why do you stay? Because it is my home.
Ill Je suis une partie de ce que j?ai vecu Poeme de Ken Wilson traduit par Anton Iorga pour Pevenement Windblown/Rafales
Tu etais etrangere ici, vierge de bois dans une plaine sans arbres, a un continent, un ocean, des siecles de chez toi. Quand maillets, gouges et limes furent rangees, les pinceaux nettoyes, la derniere couche de vernis sechee, cet endroit etait encore une vaste extase d'herbes, de fleurs et de cieux. Les chevaux n'etaient alors qu'une rumeur. Assiniboines et Cris cueillaient des saskatoons, menaient les bisons dans des enclos. lis avaient leurs propres langues, leurs danses, leurs dieux, et distinguaient les saisons par les plantes, ainsi que par le temps: le crocus indiquait la fin de Thiver, les thermopsis le debut du printemps, puis penstemon, arnica et koelerie. En juillet bouteloua, agropyre, sauge, bergamote et ratibida fleurissaient. La subtile fraicheur d'aout amenait verge dfor et stipe a balai. Les cerises sures pres de la crique devenaient jaunes, leurs feuilles tombant a la lueur de la lune d'automne. Puis, la neige, peut-etre, et toujours le froid. Une autre annee commen9ait. Les animaux et les hommes dechiffraient ses signes. lis prenaient ce que la terre leur offrait, continuaient leur chemin. A un univers de la, tu tenais ton fils, mort, dans tes bras. Tes yeux regardaient un autre ciel.
Quand le Pere Royer s'installa en cet endroit, la coline au-dela, la crique Noteku en de9a, le pays avait ete vide, cartographie, subdivise, commercialise: la Derniere Frontiere de l'Ouest. Ici, dit-il, je ferai une paroisse pour Notre Dame. Pas une autre deception, un autre Gravelbourg, qu'on lui avait vole tandis qu'il etait en France,
112 rassemblant des emigrants. Pas cette fois-ci. Des tentes furent erigees. Des demandes de homestead recensees. Derriere les charrues, la terre etait amoncelee en sillons fumants. Du bois, des clous, du verre. Un magasin general, une eglise, une poste. Des rues nommees en l'honneur de generaux et de poetes. Les mains dansantes des Soeurs. La premiere recolte de ble Marquis. Un changement de nom, d'endroit; et alors? L'arbre qui ne peut plier se brise au vent.
Un monde s'acheve. Un autre commence. Mais d'autres mondes sont venus et disparus. Cet endroit en atteste. Demandez a Henri Liboiron. Nu-pieds, marchant a travers champs denudes meme de terre arable par une decennie de secheresse, il trouva des pointes de fleches et de harpons, des marteaux, des pilons et des mortiers, des objets trop lourds pour que le vent les emporte. Et plus tard, des cercles de tipi, des siecles de feux de camps. Pensez: ici-meme, tandis que les glaciers fondaient, un peuple chassait des mammouths, des bisons et des chevaux geants, construisaient leurs loges pres d'un lac glace. lis campaient ici tous les sept ans, leurs ombres oubliees pendant 10 000 ans avant d'etre decouvertes par des sols dechires, des vents et des cieux sans merci.
Et plus tard, les traces d'un monde encore plus etrange. Une berge le long de la crique Noteku revelait son tresor: les ossements d'un dinosaure aquatique. Cela depasse l'entendement. II y avait un temps ou cette terre seche etait une mer peu profonde peuplee de monstres. De longs cous, de dents tranchantes. Quelles autres creatures se nourrissaient les unes des autres ici? Quels cieux, quels vents et quelles pluies? Quelles plantes fleurissaient sinon des herbes?
113 Ce monde fait du sang des notres, ses traces faites de puits de petrole, de pipelines, de pompes.
De voir ce tout ainsi, qui peut se surprendre de quoi que ce soit, quand des mers peuvent devenir des deserts, quand des montagnes de glace avancent et fondent a vue d'oeil, quand dans l'air que nous respirons se trouvent des molecules expirees par des dinosaures.
Tout cela nous donne si peu de reconfort pourtant, quand dans une salle de conseil d'administration a quelques heures d'ici des hommes votent pour fermer nos silos, ou dormer une ecole a un autre village, quand des scientifiques emboitent et emportent les ossements qui pourraient attirer des touristes, quand des enfants oublient, ou font semblant d'oublier, leur langue maternelle, quand la pluie vient trop tard, ou trop tot, ou ne vient pas du tout, quand des croix brulent, et des voisins en robes blanches vociferent, quand des veuves portent le deuil pour des hommes appeles par la France a suffoquer, gazes dans la boue, quand les banques font des saisies, quand la grippe tue les jeunes et epargne les plus vieux. Alors les gens se tournent vers vous, ou ce que vous representez, une communaute definie par sa foi, et des promesses d'une misericorde qui, si elle n'est pas presente, viendra bientot.
Mais encore, personne ne controle le vent, Votre peuple le sait trop bien. Assez de pluie tombe, ou ne tombe pas, au bon moment, ou non. Une gelee precoce, de la grele, de la rouille, ou des sauterelles, une recolte est perdue ou sauvee
114 malgre le savoir-faire d'un fermier. Que reste-il? Le desespoir ou l'optimisme. Boire du poison a rat quand ses machines sont saisies, ses enfants terrifies pleurant, les yeux fixes sur vous, ou prier -d'une maniere ou d'une autre- pour survivre a la secheresse. Trouver du reconfort dans le fait que Wilf Liboiron a sauve la Vierge, au lieu de pleurer parce que l'eglise a brule. Encore heureux que l'hopital ait ete termine juste a temps pour la grippe espagnole. Un cyclone laisse derriere une pile de bois et de metal tordu? Finissez la nouvelle eglise quand meme. Trempee par les deceptions, les pertes, le vent glacial et le ciel bleu, ce n'est pas pour rien que cette contree est celle de l'an prochain.
Ce village, dit-il, ces gens sont comme des chardons de Russie, ramenes de l'Europe, pousses par le vent, laissant leur progeniture derriere a germer, l'annee prochaine peut-etre, sinon plus tard. Bannis par les gouvernements, ils prosperent, s'accumulent le long des clotures, dans les fermes, prenant racine partout ou il y a de l'eau, de l'air et de la terre. Une annee de secheresse, c'est tout ce qu'il y avait comme foin. Parfois il faut apprendre a faire avec ce que Ton a.
Aucune odeur, par contre, rien de special, sauf des epines. La beaute fait place au pratique: des granges de bois, des rues numerotees. Oublier Napoleon et Alexander Pope. Peindre seulement pour preserver, pas pour embellir. La survie ne laisse aucun espace pour le luxe. Peut-etre nos enfants, ou les leurs, auront-ils le temps. Pour le moment, on doit faire sans.
Ce qui rend l'eglise qu'ils ont construite, terminee au debut de ces annees de poussiere, si merveilleuse. Une eglise est peut-etre une necessite, mais toutes les eglises ne sont pas comme celle-ci. J'ai vu ses deux pointes de l'autoroute. Deux verbes rendus chair par la foi en Dieu, et en ce village. Et elles persistent toujours, puisque le ciment ne brule pas. Pratique.
115 Maintenant, presque cent ans depuis que vous, la Penelope de Royer, avez debarque -apres la tempete, les passagers prenant Schaeffer pour une sorte de Jonas, les directions confuses vous renvoyant en France, plutot qu'a l'ouest a Notre-Dame D'Auvergne- C'est votre pays, a present, votre pied allant de l'avant, vous ancrant au paysage. C'est moi qui suis l'etranger. Et je ne suis pas Suknaski, je ne connaitrai jamais ce village comme il connaissait Wood Mountain. Ce ciel n'est pas dans mon sang; les os de mes ancetres sont a milles miles d'ici. Mon peuple a seulement construit les moissonneuses-batteuses, il ne les a pas parees contre le froid et la pluie. Mais je peux apprendre. Je me suis arrete pour de l'essence sur la Quatre. On a parle de la pluie, la premiere cette annee. II y en a, a-t-il dit, qui aimeraient etre optimistes, mais ils ont peur que 9a ne marche pas.
Je pense a tout cela, et a vous, au Pere Royer chevauchant vers le sud pour trouver cet endroit, et aux Soeurs grelottant tandis que le vent traversait les murs du couvent, a la secheresse et au macaroni, aux enfants se gardant de parler leur langue a des etrangers, a la pluie d'aout et au ble mur germant dans les champs, au Klan, et aux Fran9ais et Anglais a table devant un cafe matinal a la boulangerie, a la reponse de quelqu'un a la question d'un autre etranger: Pourquoi restes-tu? Parce qu'ici, c'est chez moi.
116