Discourses, Spaces and Reconciliation in Joy Kogawa‟S Obasan and Daphne Marlatt‟S Ana Historic

Homeward “Bound” Discourses, Spaces and Reconciliation in Joy Kogawa‟s Obasan and Daphne Marlatt‟s Ana Historic by Michelle K. Damour Thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Masters of Arts (English) Acadia University Fall Convocation 2009 © by Michelle K. Damour, 2009 ii This thesis by Michelle K. Damour was defended successfully in an oral examination on August 6th, 2009. The examining committee for the thesis was: ________________________ Dr. Barry Moody, Chair ________________________ Dr. Carrie Dawson, External Reader ________________________ Dr. Herb Wyile, Internal Reader ________________________ Dr. Kerry Vincent, Supervisor _________________________ Dr. Jessica Slights, Acting Head This thesis is accepted in its present form by the Division of Research and Graduate Studies as satisfying the thesis requirements for the degree Master of Arts (English) . …………………………………………. iii I, Michelle K. Damour, hereby grant permission to the University Librarian at Acadia University to provide copies of the thesis, upon request, on a non-profit basis. ______________________________ Michelle K. Damour, Author ______________________________ Dr. Kerry Vincent, Supervisor ______________________________ Date iv Contents Introduction Home and the Narrative of Security 1 PART ONE Discourses of Home Chapter One Freeing Speech: Security and Home in Obasan 16 Chapter Two The Legacy of the Settler Woman: Security, Home and Sexuality in Ana Historic 40 PART TWO Incarnations of Home Spaces Chapter Three The Home as a Stage of the Nation in Obasan 65 Chapter Four Home, Nature and the Paradoxes of White Exile in Ana Historic 85 Conclusion Contradictions and Literary Theory 108 Notes 114 Works Cited 115 v Abstract This study explores Joy Kogawa‟s Obasan and Daphne Marlatt‟s Ana Historic as narrative spaces wherein the imperfections of a fixed narrative of security is exposed, revealing the paradoxes of contaminated discourses. Using postmodern, postcolonial and feminist theories, I examine how Naomi, in Obasan, who experienced internment in Canada during her childhood in the 1940s, and Annie, in Ana Historic, who lives with the legacy of a colonial and settler enterprise, journey towards understanding their identities as necessarily paradoxical due to varying historical conditions and social contradictions. I look first at the historical documents both authors include in their novels to explore the interactions between controlling discourses and the voices they attempt to efface, and second at the home as the space wherein historical and social paradoxes play out. Ultimately, I read both novels as concluding with purposely irreconcilable narratives that illustrate the importance of witnessing contaminations and contradictions. 1 Introduction The Narrative of Security and Threat This thesis has evolved from my early readings of Linda Hutcheon and her postmodern theories on the writing of history. Hutcheon explores “historiographic metafiction,” which she defines as “fiction that is intensively self-reflexively art, but also grounded in historical, social, and political realities” (The Canadian Postmodern 13). She asserts that “the aesthetic and the social, the present and the past, are not separable discourses in these novels”; authors of historiographic metafiction create a “dialogue between the „texts‟ of both history and art, done in such a way that it does not deny the existence or significance of either” (14). While this thesis does not focus on exploring historiographic metafiction (even though both Obasan and Ana Historic can be, and have been, defined and explored as such), I owe much of my meditation on historical texts and literature to this idea that history, in the form of primary and secondary historical documentation, and art, in the form of the novel, are in dialogue. My understanding of the dialogue between text and art has informed my interpretation of the way that Kogawa and Marlatt blur the lines of fact and fiction to open a space for the voices that “official” versions of history attempt to conceal. Hutcheon gave me a starting point to think about the connections between fact and fiction, past and present and the way in which the process of reading and writing gives order and meaning, but throughout much of my early research I was bothered by Hutcheon‟s argument that postmodernism and postcolonialism share the trait of being inextricably tied to what they challenge (“Circling the Downspout” 88). Hutcheon does point to the “major difference” between postcolonialism and postmodernism: 2 postcolonialism has “distinct political agendas and often a theory of agency” while the postmodern is “politically ambivalent” (72). But, in the end, she argues that the postcolonial is “as implicated in that which it challenges as the post-modern” (88). Diana Brydon also identifies a conflict in linking the two theories in this way: Hutcheon‟s “assertion depends on a leap from the recognition that the post-colonial is „contaminated‟ by colonialism (in the word itself and the culture it signifies) to the conclusion that such „contamination‟ necessarily implies complicity” (“The White Inuit Speaks” 191). In other words, Hutcheon‟s identification of the postmodern and the postcolonial desire to deconstruct metanarratives assumes a linear relationship wherein the metanarrative is established first and later contested. But this is not congruent with the dialogic relationship between past and present, between aesthetic and historical, social and political realities that Hutcheon argues of historiographic metafiction. Colonialism and postcolonialism do not have a one-way relationship. The postcolonial is not only contaminated by the colonial; rather, their relationship is characterized by a non- hierarchal cross-contamination. While it is true that contestation is inextricably tied to what is being contested, “cultural dominants” are also inextricably tied to what or who is being dominated. This dialogic relationship of multiple cross-contaminations must be kept in mind when exploring the deconstruction of fixed narratives. Hutcheon creates a similar argument to her evocation of a linear relationship between central and marginal discourses when she explores the relationship between postmodern and female subjectivities. She argues that “if women have not yet been allowed access to (male) subjectivity, then it is very difficult for them to contest it…. Women must first define their subjectivity before they can question it; they must first assert the selfhood 3 they have been denied by the dominant culture” (The Canadian Postmodern 6). However, as Brydon points out, this statement is problematic because it implies that there is “a norm of subjectivity” and that there is the assumption that a “unified subject” must be established before it can be questioned (“The White Inuit” 193). Hutcheon assumes that a stable identity must be established before women can deconstruct its stability. But women have always had identities infused by patriarch and broader social contradictions. The stable (male) identity that Hutcheon identifies has also always been contaminated and plagued with paradoxes. The destabilization of fixed narratives should not be interpreted as a deconstruction of stable structures, but rather should express the illusion of that stability, thereby highlighting the continual presence of alternate narratives that exist alongside, if unrecognized, by metanarratives. This thesis explores Joy Kogawa‟s Obasan and Daphne Marlatt‟s Ana Historic as narrative spaces wherein paradoxes of interrelated and contaminated narratives are revealed. In a recent work, “Storying Home: Power and Truth,” Brydon explores the link between home, nation and narrative. She asserts that the “home,” as represented by a white middle-class nuclear family, is “a signifier of security” (37) and this narrative of home as a secure space is “mapped” onto the nation. This “illusory” security of home and nation requires the creation of “naturalize[d] stories of threat in which anxious citizens seek security through shutting out the unfamiliar… while at the same time directing this quest for security outward into taming and conquering what lies beyond this controlled space” (35). In other words, home is bound by and within a narrative that posits a threat from an “other.” This narrative of security and threat is defined by strict categorizations that seek to separate the familiar and the unfamiliar—a division that 4 “often reinforces patriarchal as well as ethnocentric values” (36). Brydon argues that “Postcolonial fiction and criticism have a role to play in reclaiming tropes and territory for a planetary imagination that reimagines home, releasing” it from narrow categorizations and moving the notion of home towards “a respect for different modes of belonging in the world” (36). Reimagining home involves listening to and witnessing “different modes of belonging in the world” that have always existed alongside and been entangled with dominant modes of belonging. To do so reveals the complexity and contradictions, first, of the diversity that is hidden by singular and controlling narratives, and, second, of the way in which so-called marginal and centric narratives and spaces interact. For Brydon, “Postcolonial theorists know that how to inhabit the world as home and how to inhabit stories are related challenges. Beyond indirections of story, we may not yet have the resources to express this relation” (36). While Brydon does not expand on what

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