Mainstream Canadian Writers: a Literary Review of Stolen Life by Rudy Wiebe and the Rüsslander by Sandra Birdsell
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MAINSTREAM CANADIAN WRITERS: A LITERARY REVIEW OF STOLEN LIFE BY RUDY WIEBE AND THE RÜSSLANDER BY SANDRA BIRDSELL By MARIO BIGRAS Integrated Studies Project submitted to Dr. Jolene Armstrong in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts – Integrated Studies Athabasca, Alberta March, 2016 TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction............................................................................................................................... 1 Nesting dolls............................................................................................................................... 2 Mental abuse............................................................................................................................... 5 Physical abuse............................................................................................................................. 7 Sex education.............................................................................................................................. 11 Landlessness................................................................................................................................ 13 Justice.......................................................................................................................................... 17 Spirituality-forgiveness................................................................................................................ 21 Conclusion................................................................................................................................... 23 Bibliography................................................................................................................................ 25 INTRODUCTION In Canadian literary history, authors belonging to the two solitudes (English and French) have been considered representatives of Canadian literature; however, since World War I, men and women from other ethnic groups have immigrated to Canada, and children of these ethnic groups have produced literary works. Not belonging to the two solitudes, they have been labeled ‘minority writers’, even when they write in one of the two official languages of Canada. Accordingly, minority ethnic writers are often read and critiqued as separate and distinct from mainstream Canadian Literature. They are often ranked as being outside of the major canon yet judged according to the values assigned to majority literature. This would include authors like Roy Miki (Japanese-Canadian), Andrew Suknaski (Ukrainian and Polish ancestry), Patrick Friesen and Di Brandt (both Mennonite). However, I believe that the literary works by Canadian Mennonite writers should be examined or read according to the literature’s own values and its contribution to the new composite of Canadian literary history. It is important to distinguish and celebrate diversity but not at the cost of considering their literary works as being of lesser value simply because the authors do not belong to the established majority originally conceptualized by the notion of two solitudes. By judging the works of different ethnic writers and simply comparing them to the conservative literary stronghold equates to a misunderstanding of their imaginary literary talent. I think it is better to consider them as Canadian authors and include their literature as part and parcel of the Canadian literature as a whole. This way, criticism would be rightly based on their own creativity not on arbitrary ethnic divisions. In this paper, I will argue that two Canadian born Mennonite writers, Sandra Birdsell and Rudi Wiebe, should be considered part of the Canadian national literature. This consideration is 1 based on the fact that the contemporary production of Canadian national literature has changed. What primarily consisted of texts specifically addressing the dominant English and French culture, now includes literary texts directly pertaining to other ethnic and marginalized groups. The Mennonites and the indigenous people are included in these groups. The voices of these people are coming to the forefront because of authors like Birdsell and Wiebe. The quality of their literary productions is comparable to literary texts addressing matters pertaining to only the two solitudes and provides literature truly representative of the Canadian pluralistic society. In her novel The Rüsslander, Birdsell writes about the atrocities the Russian Mennonites suffered under the communist regime leading to their exodus from that country. Rudy Wiebe co-wrote Stolen Life along with Yvonne Johnson (a Cree woman), revealing the oppression and injustice an aboriginal woman has experienced living in the USA and in Canada. By focusing in such a manner, they diverge from other Mennonite works such as Armin Wiebe’s The Salvation Canada of Yasch Siemens or Di Brandt’s Watermelon Syrup which is written about Mennonites’ life experiences in the USA or Canada. Birdsell writes about the Mennonite communities in Russia and about the struggles of Katya Vogt until she immigrates to Canada. Wiebe, on the other hand, reaches farther afield by writing about an aboriginal woman, a topic that is totally outside the Mennonite community. Both authors raise issues that are dear to Canadians. This essay will illuminate the complex issues, such as mental and physical abuse, sex education, landlessness, justice/injustice, and spirituality that are present in these two novels. NESTING DOLLS I believe the worlds described in both of these novels consist of different levels of reality, just like nesting dolls, existing one within the other. According to Paula Geyh: 2 [t]he collapse of the grand narratives has left us with no hope of a single conceptual system or discourse through which we might attempt to understand the totality of the world. Instead we have a plurality of frequently incommensurable worlds and often mutually incompatible systems of language and thought through which to comprehend them. (3) Therefore, it is a multitude or a 'plurality' of different worldviews or a series of small narratives that enables people to comprehend their world. The modernist writer is concerned with "[h]istory with a capital H" yet as Geyh points out, the postmodernist writer is preoccupied with history with a "small h" (3). Small 'h' history for Yvonne Johnson and Katya Vogt means looking at their personal and intimate life stories which have been influenced by a variety of social factors. Geyh makes it clear when she states that "the single most crucial conceptual determinate of the postmodern era and of postmodernism . is an uncontainable and irreducibly de-centered multiplicity of coexisting cognitive and cultural paradigms, without any one of them being uniquely dominant or central"(2). Although these two novels display postmodern traits, they include other 'cognitive and cultural paradigms' found in theories such as postcolonialism and feminism. To begin the comparison of these two novels, it is important to understand post- colonialism and how Yvonne Johnson was capable of co-writing her book. According to Robert J.C. Young, to understand post-colonialism, one only needs to look "at the world not from above, but from below" (20). In Stolen Life, Yvonne Johnson's worldview is depicted as a world seen from 'below'. In the video Postcolonial Theory, G.C. Spivak explains that any woman living in a world from ‘below’ is often unable to reach a broad and receptive audience without having some 3 kind of infrastructure. This is precisely Yvonne Johnson's case, as she so rightly points out that “[i]f no one ever speaks the words that should be spoken, the silence destroys you” (329). How does a woman like her break the silence? At the end of her article entitled "Can the Subaltern Speak?", Spivak states that "[t]he subaltern cannot speak. There is no virtue in global laundry lists with "woman" as a pious item. Representation has not withered away. The female intellectual as intellectual has a circumscribed task which she must not disown with a flourish" (Spivak 308). In other words, given the disadvantaged position of a marginalized speaker, a scholar must help Yvonne to speak. Prior to the engagement of a scholar, Spivak also mentions that the first step in speaking out, is that the subaltern must develop a political consciousness (Postcolonial Theory). During her jail time in P4W, Yvonne did a lot of soul searching and read books by Carl Jung. She says that Jung "...has the White words...but to me he thinks like an Indian... [h]e writes this which is me. I wish I could speak to him" (425). Equipped with some philosophical inspiration from Jung, she developed her own political consciousness and wrote a series of notebooks about her personal life struggles. At that moment, she was ready to reach out to an intellectual to complete her 'speech act'. Knellwolf proclaims that "[t]he project of looking at subaltern actions and histories needs to go on, but it is now the task of the intellectual to stand in and speak on behalf of this irrecoverable voice of the subaltern (241). Beck is impressed with Rudy Wiebe's guidance in enabling her voice to be heard. He even qualifies Wiebe's intellectual assistance as "brilliantly demonstrat[ing]s how it is indeed possible for an author to enable a "subaltern" to "speak" (9). Birdsell becomes the intellectual that completes the 'speech act' depicting the violence endured by Katya and other Russian Mennonites. Although the novel The Rüsslander is fictional, it tells