Global Friction, Alberta Fictions

n asking, “How does one study the accept my premise that the orientations of global?,” globalization theorist and imperialism and capitalism have led to ethnographer Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing distortions such as those analysed by Edward (2005) suggests that global aspirations Said (1978) in Orientalism, then disorientation “come to life in ‘friction,’ the grip of is a necessary step toward more properly Iworldly encounter” (p. 1).1 What might such a balanced orientations, a step that literary texts reorientation of local and global mean for are well qualified to negotiate. interpretations of disorientation, dispersal and The dispersals discussed here are those diversity as they constitute a “prairies in 3D”? connected to the increased mobility of Disorientation, dispersal and diversity are often Canadians in the late twentieth century, which taken as marking the human and community are changing the experiences of expatriation, experiences of globalization. At a time when exile, migration and belonging in ways not yet globalization is associated with an ideal of fully comprehended. Dispersals are being frictionless capitalism and any form of dissent addressed by contemporary creative writers who becomes easily demonized as a threat to the are retrieving the histories of previously security of the supposedly homogeneous state, it marginalized or forgotten communities: the is important to remember the value of friction as Franco-Albertan contribution to prairie culture an enabling form of democratic participation. as gestured toward by Nancy Huston, the newly What insights might attention to friction and ‘the remembered black community of Amber Valley, grip of worldly encounters’ in contemporary as recreated in Esi Edugyan’s The Second Life of Alberta fictions generate for understanding the Samuel Tyne (and referenced in Lawrence Hill’s function of local space in globalizing times? Winnipeg novel, Some Great Thing), and the In this paper, disorientation refers to the newer communities of black and mixed-race ways in which globalizing processes are immigrants described in Edugyan’s and Suzette challenging conventional understandings of the Mayr’s three novels. While some anti- interrelations between the region, the nation- globalization theorists argue that globalization is state and the international sphere leading to ultimately homogenizing in its cultural impact, theories of glocalization that challenge the majority of analysts see more complex traditional distinctions between the local and the processes at work, with a rise in the assertion of global and how they interact. Disorientation also local and ethnic identities indicating the flip side describes the ways in which the disciplinary of homogenizing tendencies. In other words, categories of knowledge construction and globalization gives rise simultaneously to assignment of jurisdiction for the production of increased expressions of diversity and pressures knowledge no longer appear adequate to the toward conformity. challenges of contemporary times. If readers

1 The research for this paper was conducted with the support of the Canada Research Chair’s Program. It derives, in part, from my continuing participation in the SSHRC-funded Major Collaborative Research Initiative, directed by William D. Coleman, on “Globalization and Autonomy.”

ENGLISH QUARTERLY 40 (1/2) 3 This paper situates itself within that uncanny that constitutes any notion of home, strand of contemporary research that is Freud’s theory provides insights into interested in “the groundedness of transnational contemporary anxieties aroused by mobilities” (Featherstone, 2007, p. 385) and the disorientation, diversity and dispersal without ways in which contemporary literary texts pitting the local against the global. represent everyday life in Alberta under Michael Arnzen (1997), in his globalization. Tsing’s productive metaphor of Introduction to The Return of the Uncanny, a ‘friction’ may be seen at work in a range of special issue of the journal Paradoxa: Studies in contemporary Alberta fiction encompassing the World Literary Genres, suggests that urban and the rural: Aritha van Herk’s parable “Modernity and postmodernity share similar, yet Restlessness (1998), Suzette Mayr’s three tales different anxieties—the uncanny gives us a way of multiple metamorphoses (Moon Honey, 1995; of thinking about the interrelationship of both: The Widows, 1998; Venous Hum, 2004) , Nancy the doppelgänger and the automaton haunted the Huston’s Plainsong (1993) and Losing North moderns, for example, while clones and techno- (2002), and Esi Edugyan’s The Second Life of human cyborgs haunt us today” (p. 316). While Samuel Tyne (2004). provocative, this formulation is still probably too My interest lies in how these simplistic to accommodate the many ways in contemporary fictions situate their depictions of which doubleness and metamorphoses function the contemporary prairie cities of Calgary and in the Alberta fictions chosen for analysis here. Edmonton in their diversity and aspirations (Van In these texts, it seems rather that modernist Herk, Mayr) in relation to the sweep of prairie fascination with the doppelgänger or twin takes history as seen within global contexts (Huston, forms in an era of globalizing transformations Edugyan). Each of these texts confirms Tsing’s that turn away from technology to reinvestigate interest in “the history of the universal, as it, too, pre-industrial forms of spirit possession and the has been produced in the colonial encounter” powers of magical thinking, not to recuperate (2005, p. 1). primitivism but to rethink the productive In a recent editorial in Inter-Asia frictions of ethical engagement at a time when Cultural Studies, Ivaylo Ditchev (2007) worries homogenizing pressures seem to be flattening there may be a danger of cultural studies and reducing the potential of narrative. becoming “an accomplice” to a “new hegemonic Insufficient attention has been paid to culture of the global-popular” (p. 454). Noting the ways in which twins, for example, function what is happening to culture under globalization, in Edugyan’s Second Life and Huston’s he asks “should we localize cultures to combat Plainsong. Edugyan refers to West African (the new) global hegemony or should we beliefs about the magical qualities and dangers undermine cultural sovereignty to combat (the of twinship while Huston employs the African- old) local hegemonies?” (p. 455). To pose the derived Haitian beliefs in the marasa qualities of question for cultural studies in such a way may twinship to triangulate the dualities between be to misconstrue the options and risk mind and body that have threatened to destroy misreading the complexity of the kinds of texts her characters. Although marasa is the Haitian discussed here. There are different ways of word for any twin, it also signifies the divine posing the dilemma of the relation of the local twins of vodoun practice. Huston’s text explains and global under globalization, each of which them in terms oriented toward a syncretic provides analysts with different perspectives on understanding of history, describing them as what is at stake in such discussions. This paper “the children of Saint Nicholas and Saint Claire, turns to contemporary theorizations of Freud’s beloved and highly honoured ancestor twins uncanny, building on work such as Sneja whose magic was so powerful it was visited not Gunew’s Haunted Nations 2004), to only upon all twins but even upon their younger demonstrate the complex ways in which Alberta siblings…” (p. 201). However, she employs fictions are understanding the frictions generated them much as critic Vévé Clark (1991) explains by local, global and glocal modes of habitation them, to suggest that “marasa consciousness and belonging. By stressing the unhomely or invites us to imagine beyond the binary,” identifying it as a later stage in diasporic powerful 2005 novel 26A, for example). Only development that inaugurates a tradition of the effects of their mysterious powers are “imagining beyond difference” (p. 43-46). observed. In partial reaction to the racism of Huston’s narrator Paula sees evidence in the their inhospitable white-dominated community twin’s magic that they were on her “side,” as she and the lack of comprehension and imaginatively links herself to her grandfather disorientation of their immigrant parents, the and his native mistress Miranda. She describes twins in Second Life create havoc for themselves this side as “the side of deep secret against and others. In this text, prairie conformity shallow fact, the side of glimmering triumphs in the short term over diversity, leaving contradiction against glassy certainty; the side of only a small ray of hope in the survival of one of tremulous Crowfoot against triumphant these African-Canadian twins, who is able, Lacombe” (p. 21). In stressing the continuities perhaps, to form a more productive relationship between the Haitian heritage of slavery and with her Métis friend in old age at the end of the diaspora and Canada’s history of colonization, novel. In Plainsong, the influence of the twins, Paula reorients the dynamics of prairie while remaining frightening, is substantially disorientations toward acknowledgment of benign, contributing to the narrator’s ability to prairie complicity in the sweep of global history. resist what she sees as the dominant tendencies Elsewhere (1999), I have discussed this novel as of settler prairie culture toward homogeneity and an attempt to come to terms with the the stifling of creativity. Whereas Huston contradictions of invader-settler history through employs the partially black twins to challenge the novel’s recasting of the utopian and the supposed rationalities of her narrator’s imperialist dynamics of Shakespeare’s Tempest. Protestant heritage, Edugyan explicitly, in Here, I suggest it is useful to remember that it Andrea Davis’ (2007) reading, “interrogates might also be possible to discuss Plainsong as what it means to be black in western Canada, a one of a small number of fictions set at the time Canadian space historically constructed as of the Oka uprising. While Lee Maracle’s imaginatively white” (p. 33). SunDogs (1992) shows the impact of Oka across While both Huston and Edugyan employ the country, particularly in British Columbia, African twins to assert diversity and mystery in and Tessa McWatt (1998) sets her narrative of a the face of the flattening tendencies of young woman coming to terms with her modernity and a hegemonic Canadian culture, Guyanese heritage in Montreal during the each ultimately deploys them to very different turmoil of Oka in Out of My Skin, Huston uses ends. For Huston and her narrator, they provide the occasion of Oka to revisit the last hundred an alternative to the blankness of the years of Canadian history to question narratives “irremediably modern” (1981, p. 223) that of progress. In other words, she makes concrete Huston associates with what she describes as the Tsing’s insight into “the history of the universal, “prolonged refrigeration” of her own childhood as it, too, has been produced in the colonial (1991, p. 235). Her Haitian detour, she explains, encounter” (2005, p. 1). is what enabled her finally to return to that In particular, the marasa enable childhood to compose Plainsong. In contrast, Huston to question the logic of what the twins’ Edugyan’s novel is based on a true story of father calls “a literate country” (p. 201). For disorientation, suffering and loss, where magic Paula, they are “proof that no matter how is less reassuring and retains its capacity to energetically it is attacked, mystery will never terrify. be overcome” (p. 199). Although the dangerous Huston’s Plainsong is told backwards power of mystery asserts itself more negatively from Paddon’s death to his birth, retracing the in Second Life, it too insists on the necessity of history of the twentieth century as a backdrop to this disorientation if more equitable Paddon’s investigation of “time and reorientations are to be achieved. In both texts, spirituality.” Paddon’s interest in “The way a the mysteries embodied in the twins are never society’s conception of time affects the penetrated. Their consciousness is never seen philosophy it can produce” (p. 168) can be from the inside (as it is in Diana Evans’ compared to the impact of Samuel’s decision, in

ENGLISH QUARTERLY 40 (1/2) 5 Second Life, to set the clocks in his house to destabilizing. In this sense, then, the twins in indicate both Ghanaian and Alberta time. This these texts indicate the unhomeliness that does not represent the nostalgia of the immigrant inhabits any sense of home and the anteriority, for a lost life, but rather an awareness that there depth, verticality and disruptiveness that readers are different tempos to time in different cultures. value in the literary imagination. This gesture marks Samuel’s effort to live within In Losing North, her memoir-like this dual knowledge, attuned to two temporal “musings on land, tongue and self,” the and civilizational systems without decisively expatriate Huston imagines a parallel self who choosing between them. He cannot manage this has continued to live in Alberta: “all these years negotiation, and abandons his Ghanaian after my departure from Alberta, there’s a me customs, refusing to perform the ceremonies for who continues to live back there” (p. 94). This the dead. His refusal provides one possible other self sings the songs that she has “lost or explanation for the havoc wreaked by his twin forgotten” in her Parisian expatriation (p. 96). daughters. His clocks, with their doubled time, Aritha van Herk’s novel Restlessness, also signal a postcolonial condition that is employs a doppelgänger to signal the mystery of “distinguished by heterogeneous temporalities identity and the choices facing her central that mingle and jostle with one another to character, Dorcas. While Huston’s Losing North interrupt the teleological narratives that have argues the necessity of writing in the face of the served both to constitute and to stabilize the disorientation that comes with expatriation, van identity of ‘the West’” (Gupta cited in Gregory, Herk’s Restlessness dramatizes the impending 2004, p. 7). Those heterogeneous temporalities, but always deferred death of Literature in an age let loose through the inability of the parents and of globalization within the larger context of the the twins to control and direct their powers, continued relevance of story-telling. Her central wreak havoc in Second Life. Both Huston and character Dorcas is a courier who travels the Edugyan’s prairie novels remain committed to globe delivering information and products. In remembering these heterogeneous temporalities the performance of her job, she literally but respectively stress different dimensions of embodies the circulation of culture within global their power. circuits of communication and exchange. The The doubleness inherent in their poetics novel takes place within the Palisades Hotel in recalls what Amit Chaudhuri (2007) believes is downtown Calgary, a space where travellers being flattened and lost with globalization. To only briefly settle in the course of their journeys him, “globalisation represents a new phase—that yet also a place with a settled history. In other of the rapid, incremental reification of the words, this hotel is a place where the local and special post-modern notion of narrative…The global meet to create a space of glocality. ideological language of globalisation is made up Contrary to theorists who might postulate that of terms from older discourses, terms such as (to the hotel functions as kind of non-place within name a few) ‘freedom’, ‘democracy’, ‘popular’, global circuits of mobility, van Herk’s hotel ‘people’. These words, once located in retains its local identity in ways that stubbornly antithetical world-views and rival resist Dorcas’s desire to cast this space as interpretations—in liberal as well as socialist anonymous. The specificity of this place is in ones—still carry, confusingly, echoes of their part what she seeks to escape through her chosen old, conflicted meanings while never really death yet it is also what the narrative seems to referring to them; they lack anteriority, depth, lovingly celebrate. verticality, and, in effect, disruptiveness; they’re The story takes place over a single night catch-words in the new-found reification of the during which Dorcas exchanges stories with the discursive” (p. 108-109). Everything that these hired killer that she has contracted to end her words, in their contemporary usages lack, is life. The invocation of Scheherazade, who told what the twins in these narratives carry. Their stories through the night to prolong her life, disruptiveness cannot be contained within the forces questions about what may have changed stories they inhabit; they enter their readers’ and what remains the same in the current minds in ways that must remain profoundly context. If the Biblical Dorcas was brought back

ENGLISH QUARTERLY 40 (1/2) 6 to life after her death to resume a life devoted to ways her double, appears to have others, then van Herk revives her to counter metamorphosed from a brown girl into a white societal expectations of women. Particularly one (p. 176-178). Nothing is what it seems and interesting is the way in which this universal nothing stays the same. In Venous Hum, Lai- story becomes embedded and transformed Fun, the mixed race half-black, half-white child within the particular colonial, feminist and urban of Louve and Fritz-Peter is conceived as “their history of Calgary in van Herk’s challenging Love child, their glorious Canadian parable. Robert Budde (2001) writes that proclamation …. She was made the night Pierre Restlessness “brings the Calgary landscape Elliott Trudeau—with his crooked, sexy smile— erotically alive” (p. 46). Perhaps, but that announced that the state had no business in the landscape is also presented as always already bedrooms of the nation” (p. 93). As such, “even globally embedded so that its particular history though Lai Fun was born in western Canada, she inflects and shifts any preconceived will be a child of all of Canada …. Trudeau and understanding of the universal as potentially his new immigration policy have made sure outside or beyond Alberta. Restlessness also everyone is welcome in this country. Everyone” seeks to disorient conventional understandings (p. 93), the narrator proclaims. But Lai-Fun’s of life and death, and the trajectory of narrative path is not easy. She thinks of Lloyd itself, echoing Robert Kroetsch to ask “Is Weaslehead, a native boy, as “her first twin” and DEATH a happy ending?” (cited in Budde p. is described by the narrator as “not a girl, she is 193). a haunted house” (p. 131). Lai-Fun is haunted, In death, Dorcas seeks the frictionless not just by her broken heart, but also by her world extolled by contemporary advocates of monstrous English teacher, Mrs. Blake, who economic globalization but the events of her torments her in school and rises from the dead to night in the Palliser Hotel imply that such a attend her high school reunion, where Lai-Fun is dream is fruitless. If restlessness as a concept finally able to make peace with her past. This describes contemporary capitalism’s quest for unstable narrative traces the shifts in identity and the ever more fleeting satisfactions of a life belonging generated by Trudeau’s 1967 “divorce devoted to consumerism, then van Herk’s novel reform bill and amendments to the Criminal of that title, like Huston’s Plainsong, seeks an Code liberalizing restrictions on abortion and antidote to stifling domesticity and conformity homosexuality” and his 1971 proclamation of an in reclaiming restlessness for the creative “official Policy of Multiculturalism” (n.p). Since imagination. That restlessness, however, is these two acts, the narrator asserts, “Canada’s always conflicted and haunted by the dead who hair has been dishevelled ever since” (n.p.). refuse to be silenced, in Huston, or by the living Through these invocations, the author who refuse to let one die, in van Herk. demonstrates the uneasy relationship between A restlessness shared by both the living provincial and federal constituencies, within and the dead characterizes Suzette Mayr’s which Trudeau concentrates the divided loyalties portrayals of Edmonton and Calgary as seen of characters who value some of his innovations through the eyes of some unusual female while reviling him for others, especially his characters. Most remarkable is the haunting of National Energy Policy (176, 195). As the the women as they drive across Canada on their narrator notes: “Living in the West it was hard way to Niagara Falls in The Widows, to love Trudeau completely” (195). Yet he culminating in the scene where Cleopatra-Maria haunts the narrative as simultaneously hero and wrestles with the bones of Annie Edson Taylor villain, double and model for Lai-Fun, through before lying down with them and then inviting his various policy enactments and the vagaries her to breakfast with the three old women who of his private life and public persona (61, 76, 91, have followed her, so many years later, over the 93, 97, 101, 102, 107, 159, 165, 176, 195). falls (p. 237-240). In the upside-down world of Mayr’s subject is the friction of encounter and Moon Honey, diversity takes on new meanings the contradictions that it entails. In her text, as Carmen metamorphoses, apparently, from a these knots are tied in the classroom and untied white girl into a brown girl, and Renate, in many through the imaginative capacities of fiction.

ENGLISH QUARTERLY 40 (1/2) 7 With Tsing, each of these writers Alberta fictions participate within the local, recognizes that “globally circulating knowledge national and global debates of their times in creates new gaps even as it grows through the ways that provide support for glocal frictions of encounter” (p. 13). Reading the interpretations of their interactions. Important prairies through the 3D perspective that attends dimensions of how these fictions work would be to disorientation, dispersal and diversity, readers obscured by taking a purely regional approach to may find in these texts troubling engagements their achievements yet a similar disservice with the particular ways in which globalizing would be done by confining these texts solely to processes are lodging themselves in the prairie the kind of Eurocentric global dynamic imagination. To return then to Tsing’s question suggested within Pascale Casasnova’s (2004) of how to study the global, some tentative semi-autonomous “World Republic of Letters” conclusions might be drawn. While prairie or the alternative world of enmeshment asserted literature has long been treated as a semi- in Amitava Kumar’s (2003) edited collection, autonomous space, as a regional literature, and World Bank Literature. The complex relations Alberta claims a distinctive identity as a that these texts negotiate challenge readers to province like no others, this paper argues against develop new ways of reading beyond those such views, showing the ways in which these developed for different times.

Works Cited

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ENGLISH QUARTERLY 40 (1/2) 8 Huston, N. (1983). Cantique des plaines. Québec: Actes Sud/Leméac. Huston, N. (1991). “‘Reassuring strangeness’ revisited” In Longings and belongings: Essays by Nancy Huston. (2005, pp. 233-238). Toronto: McArthur & Co. Huston, N. (1993.) Plainsong. Toronto: HarperCollins. Huston, N. (2002.) Losing north: Musing on land, tongue and self. Toronto: McArthur and Co. Kumar, A., ed. (2003). World bank literature. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Maracle, L. (1992). Sundogs : a novel. Penticton, B.C.: Theytus Books. Marasa, masa, mayasa. (1996). In Haitian-English Dictionary. University of Kansas, Lawrence: Institute of Haitian Studies, Port-au-Prince: La Press Evangélique. Mayr, S. (1995.) MoonHoney. Edmonton: NeWest. Mayr S. (1998.) The widows. Edmonton: NeWest. Mayr, S. (2004.) Venous hum. Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp. McWatt, T. (1998). Out of my skin: A novel. Toronto: Riverbank Press. Said, E. Orientalism. (1978). New York : Vintage Books. Tsing, A. L. (2005). Friction: An ethnography of global connection. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press. Van Herk, A. (1998). Restlessness: A novel. Red Deer: Red Deer College Press. Verduyn, C., ed. (2001.) Aritha Van Herk: Essays on her works. Toronto: Guernica.

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