DOCSLIB.ORG

Media and Trauma in the Work of Phyllis Webb and Daphne

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
Media and Trauma in the Work of Phyllis Webb and Daphne INTIMATE ENCOUNTERS WITH VIOLENCE: MEDIA AND TRAUMA IN THE WORK OF PHYLLIS WEBB AND DAPHNE MARLATT by © Collin Campbell A Dissertation submitted to the School of Graduate Studies in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of English Memorial University of Newfoundland May 2021 St. John’s, Newfoundland and Labrador i Abstract This dissertation looks at the work of Phyllis Webb and Daphne Marlatt, two West Coast Canadian poets who explored questions of media technologies and trauma violence in their work during the latter half of the twentieth century. This thesis takes up contemporary phenomenological and feminist analyses of the connections between media technologies and trauma, especially war violence, in relation to both the creative and practical careers of these two writers. Research into the histories of media technologies such as the letter, radio, photography, and television shows how these technologies have shaped our experience of violence both globally and locally, from nineteenth-century colonial garrisons in Canada to the internment of Japanese Canadians during the Second World War to the 1991 Gulf War. Ultimately, this dissertation suggests that these two poets offer new phenomenological interpretations of the ways in which media technologies shape our perception of historical, hidden traumas. ii Acknowledgements I would like to thank Dr. Joel Deshaye for endless patience and insight in supervising this dissertation. And thank you to the administrative staff and faculty of the English department at Memorial University. I am also endlessly indebted to the staff at Memorial University’s Queen Elizabeth II library for their dedication and ingenuity. Thank you to Library and Archives Canada and its staff for permitting and facilitating my research into the Phyllis Webb fonds, and also to the archivists at CBC Radio for help in searching for Phyllis Webb’s early radio and television broadcasts. I am grateful as well to the helpful staff at Vancouver Art Gallery’s Library and Archives. And thank you to the Steveston Branch of the Richmond Public Library for picking up a long-distance call and patiently answering the questions of a stranger. I would like to thank Daphne Marlatt and Robert Minden for their challenging and insightful commentary on early versions of the third chapter. And again, thank you to Robert Minden for permitting the reproduction of his photographs in the pages of this dissertation. And finally, thank you to Becky for patience, support, and a careful eye. iii Table of Contents Abstract ii Acknowledgements iii List of Figures v Introduction: Can Media Speak? 1 Chapter 1: Intimations of Grief: Mourning, the Letter, and Wilson’s Bowl 29 Chapter 2: Radio in the Dark: Phyllis Webb’s Late Work and the CBC 66 Chapter 3: Labour and the Lyric Camera: (Re)viewing Robert Minden’s Photographs in Steveston with Daphne Marlatt 123 Chapter 4: Daphne Marlatt’s Taken, Intimacy, Clarity 171 Conclusion 217 Works Cited 229 iv List of Figures Figure 1: Map of radio propagation ................................................................................... 90 Figure 2: Map of 18th-century fur-trading posts .............................................................. 100 Figure 3: “Herring, 1974” ................................................................................................ 157 Figure 4: “Cannery Workers, 1974” ................................................................................ 158 Figure 5: “Canadian Pacific Camp, Spring 1973” ........................................................... 167 Figure 6: “Gill Net, 1973”................................................................................................ 169 v Introduction: Can Media Speak? It is the contention of this thesis that media not only make perceptual demands on us, on how we process and understand violence in our world, but they also make ethical demands. In other words, the perceptual possibilities and constrictions that come with each medium also harbour ethical responsibilities and consequences. In Ways of Seeing, John Berger argues that the invention of the camera disrupted how we look: “The camera isolated momentary appearances and in so doing destroyed the idea that images were timeless [. .] It was no longer possible to imagine everything converging on the human eye as on the vanishing point of infinity [. .] The invention of the camera changed the way men saw. The visible came to mean something different to them” (16). As Berger does here, many scholars of media trace the correspondence between a specific media technology and the emergence of a new form of perception. Berger insightfully notes that the photograph was mistakenly thought to “capture” a scene; however, what it truly represented was a scene at a specific moment in time, that is, a photograph actually captures both a where and a when. Thus, the invention of the photograph as a medium reveals that all sight is always time-dependent, always at the mercy of the moment. Berger links this fracturing of the timeless observer to modernist and postmodernist ideas about the decentering of perspective and a skepticism toward transcendental truth. He suggests that the medium of the camera produces a new fundamental relationship to looking that seems to simultaneously usher in and reflect these changes in twentieth-century Western philosophy. The camera, for instance, challenges the idea of an omniscient “God’s eye” perspective by emphasizing how sight—corresponding to Enlightenment knowledge—changes radically based on 1 perspective. What is more, for Berger, the new relationship to reality that the camera provides is tied up with questions of power and how we understand, or “see,” the past. What this ultimately means, then, is that the camera technology, via the new conditions of perception that it provides, enables alternative (in this case fractured, destabilized) relations to power, or, put another way, the camera enables new ethical potentials. This thesis follows a similar trajectory to Berger’s analysis, but it looks at contemporary theories of violence rather than modernist and postmodernist theories of truth. I ask instead how certain media technologies—the letter, the radio, the photograph, and television news—shape and are shaped by feminist and phenomenological philosophies of trauma and violence. To investigate sensitive ethical responses to the proliferation of media and violence in the twentieth century, this thesis looks at the work of Phyllis Webb and Daphne Marlatt, two Canadian poets who are deeply concerned with media and the ways in which our intimate relations with each other speak to our obligations toward global histories of pain, including war, imprisonment, and suicide. In a 2016 interview with Laura Moss and Gillian Jerome, Daphne Marlatt discusses her experiments with the long line or the run-on sentence that appear in Rings (1971), Vancouver Poems (1972), and Steveston (1974). A new form of the poetic line for Marlatt enables a new kind of perception, which she explains as “the doubleness of how we’re situated, both in the present moment and in our harking back to the past (history included) or anticipating the future” (260). Marlatt’s poetry shows this sensitivity toward the situatedness of perception not only as an aesthetic quality but also as a radical reformulation of the ethical obligations of creative work, specifically in the ways in which the shifting perspectives of the long line counter narrative authority as a reification of 2 patriarchal Western art. But the “doubleness” of perspective, the resonance between the particularities of our context and the historical past, the shifting, uncertain vantage point, all also correspond to the fundamental changes in perception and their attending ethical implications that Berger notes in reference to the widespread use of camera technology. Indeed, one could argue (as the third chapter of this dissertation does) that Marlatt’s work is particularly camera-like, especially in the ways that its alternative forms of perception work to forge new relationships to the world and those around us, creating new ethical possibilities. This thesis takes poetry, and specifically the work of two West Coast Canadian poets, Phyllis Webb and Daphne Marlatt, as a sort of “proving ground” for the ways that media technologies (such as the letter, radio, photography, and television) articulate, reframe, misrecognize, and interrupt how we perceive violence and trauma in our world. Part of the dovetailing of poetry with media is due to the poets’ own interests and subject matter. For instance, as the first chapter, “Intimations of Grief: Mourning, the Letter, and Wilson’s Bowl,” explains, Phyllis Webb’s 1980 book of poetry, Wilson’s Bowl, revolves around an intimate exchange through the medium of the letter between two friends in the few years before their suicides. Webb herself worked in the medium of public radio for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) from the 1950s to the 1970s. She served as an executive producer during the conception of the CBC Radio program Ideas in the 1960s and continued to write and voice radio broadcasts for various CBC programs. The second chapter, “Radio in the Dark: Phyllis Webb’s Late Work and the CBC,” covers Webb’s work in public broadcasting. As the third chapter details, Daphne Marlatt in Steveston expanded the boundaries of poetry by collaborating with the photographer 3 Robert Minden in order to create
Load more

Recommended publications
  • Parliamentary Poet Laureate
    Parliamentary Poet Laureate POETRY CONNECTION: LINK UP WITH CANADIAN POETRY Daphne Marlatt (1942 – ) was born in Australia but has lived most of her life in Vancouver. She was a key constituent of the early 1960’s “Tish” group at the University of British Columbia and has published numerous books of fiction and poetry. Since the 1970’s she has been a major participant in feminist writing and critique and, recently, has written for Noh theatre. Her poems here resonate with two earlier books (Vancouver Poems, 1972 and Salvage, 1991) in her ongoing interest in what might be considered a “poetics of renovation” that attends to texts of revision, rewriting, and extension. In 2006 she was made a Member of the Order of Canada. Poems for discussion: Wet fur wavers and animal sheen From: Liquidities: Vancouver Poems Then and Now Talonbooks, 2013 Wet fur wavers up a long eye-line Sunday sprays interior city ground. Aqueous cut of the sea’s a bottomless lagoon. Logs lash on. The grey stretch of sand I walk, footsteps sucked. jumped. Changes air now wet as the sea, the sh’te comes walking up thru humor in the way of Daphne Marlatt vision, salt. Cedar all over. Cedar for headdress. Beaver or bear, what is there to the touch of, you said. Come well back into view. Trappings, change, what runs in the middle, gestures, wired for vision. Spiral back through city even underground (the esplanade traffics in waves to the point that all of your faces echo, through one I. white. Small figures as blue and white when shadows come, down alleyways of sight, peri winkle, vinca, small single flower by the sea (Salt does.
    [Show full text]
  • “The Great Dreams Pass On” Phyllis Webb’S “Struggles of Silence”
    Laura Cameron “The Great Dreams Pass On” Phyllis Webb’s “Struggles of Silence” “My poems are born out of great struggles of silence,” wrote Phyllis Webb in the Foreword to her 198 volume, Wilson’s Bowl; “This book has been long in coming. Wayward, natural and unnatural silences, my desire for privacy, my critical hesitations, my critical wounds, my dissatisfactions with myself and the work have all contributed to a strange gestation” (9).1 In this frequently cited passage, Webb is referring to the fifteen-year publication gap that divides her forty-year career as a poet. She put out two full volumes before Naked Poems in 1965 and two full volumes after Wilson’s Bowl in 198, but in the interim she produced only a handful of poems that she judged publishable.2 And yet, although it might have appeared from the outside in this period as though Webb had renounced poetry for good, archival evidence—numerous poem drafts in various states of completion, grant applications outlining the projects that she intended to pursue, and radio scripts elaborating on her creative efforts and ideas— reveals that this was not simply a period of absence or withdrawal. On the contrary, the middle years of Webb’s career, her “struggles of silence,” were fertile, eventually fruitful, and integral to her poetic development. The interval was characterized by “dissatisfactions” and “hesitations,” as Webb says, but also—and just as importantly—by ambition and an intense desire to grow and progress as a poet, to expand her vision and to write poetry, as she described it, of “cosmic proportions.”3 The creation of Wilson’s Bowl was “a strange gestation” because Webb’s “progeny” did not mature as expected: Wilson’s Bowl was not the volume that she had initially set out to write.
    [Show full text]
  • UNIVERSITY of CALGARY the Kootenay School of Writing: History
    UNIVERSITY OF CALGARY The Kootenay School of Writing: History, Community, Poetics Jason Wiens A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE STUDIES IN PARTIAL FULFILMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH CALGARY, ALBERTA SEPTEMBER, 200 1 O Jason Wiens 200 1 National Library Bibliothèque nationale 1+1 of canada du Canada Acquisitions and Acquisitions et Bibliographic Services services bibliographiques 395 Wellingion Street 395, rue Wellington Ottawa ON K1A ON4 Ottawa ON KIA ON4 Canada Canada Your lils Votre r6Orence Our file Notre rdfdtencs The author has granted a non- L'auteur a accordé une licence non exclusive licence allowing the exclusive permettant à la National Library of Canada to Bibliothèque nationale du Canada de reproduce, loan, distribute or sell reproduire, prêter, distribuer ou copies of this thesis in microform, vendre des copies de cette thèse sous paper or electronic formats. la forme de microfiche/^, de reproduction sur papier ou sur format électronique. The author retains ownership of the L'auteur conserve la propriété du copyright in this thesis. Neither the droit d'auteur qui protège cette thèse. thesis nor substantial extracts fiom it Ni la thèse ni des extraits substantiels may be printed or otherwise de celle-ci ne doivent être implimés reproduced without the author's ou autrement reproduits sans son permission. autorisation. Abstract Through a method which combines close readings of literary texts with archiva1 research, 1provide in this dissertation a critical history of the Kootenay School of Writing (KSW): an independent, writer-run centre established in Vancouver and Nelson, British Columbia in 1984.
    [Show full text]
  • Post-Cognitive Subjectivity in the Work of Bpnichol and Daphne Marlatt Miriam Nichols
    Document generated on 09/23/2021 10:17 a.m. Studies in Canadian Literature / Études en littérature canadienne Subjects of Experience: Post-cognitive Subjectivity in the Work of bpNichol and Daphne Marlatt Miriam Nichols Volume 25, Number 2, Fall 2000 Article abstract Both bp Nichol and Daphne Marlatt have recently been reproached for "an URI: https://id.erudit.org/iderudit/scl25_2art06 imperialist narrative of nation" and for "feminist essentialism" respectively. The critiques have been aimed at the "subject who knows," when in fact both See table of contents writers "assume the position of the subject who undergoes," rendering much of the negative criticism irrelevant, because misdirected. Theorists such as Foucault, Derrida, and Kristeva have argued that consciousness is a derivative Publisher(s) sociolinguistic product and that the critic should search out blind spots where ideology is received as common sense. Given the notion of the The University of New Brunswick subject-in-process, or the subject undergoing, these theoretical proscriptions are problematic. The work of Nichol and Marlatt contains a double tension ISSN between cultural givens and productive becoming. The polemical and politicized disparagement ignores the aesthetic play and intensely subjective 0380-6995 (print) aspects of both poets' work. 1718-7850 (digital) Explore this journal Cite this article Nichols, M. (2000). Subjects of Experience:: Post-cognitive Subjectivity in the Work of bpNichol and Daphne Marlatt. Studies in Canadian Literature / Études en littérature canadienne, 25(2), 108–130. All rights reserved © Management Futures, 2000 This document is protected by copyright law. Use of the services of Érudit (including reproduction) is subject to its terms and conditions, which can be viewed online.
    [Show full text]
  • Kellie L. Chouinard
    UNIVERSITY OF CALGARY Disconnect by Kellie L. Chouinard A THESIS SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE STUDIES IN PARTIAL FULFILMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH CALGARY, ALBERTA SEPTEMBER, 2012 © Kellie L. Chouinard 2012 Library and Archives Bibliothèque et Canada Archives Canada Published Heritage Direction du Branch Patrimoine de l'édition 395 Wellington Street 395, rue Wellington Ottawa ON K1A 0N4 Ottawa ON K1A 0N4 Canada Canada Your file Votre référence ISBN: 978-0-494-91175-4 Our file Notre référence ISBN: 978-0-494-91175-4 NOTICE: AVIS: The author has granted a non- L'auteur a accordé une licence non exclusive exclusive license allowing Library and permettant à la Bibliothèque et Archives Archives Canada to reproduce, Canada de reproduire, publier, archiver, publish, archive, preserve, conserve, sauvegarder, conserver, transmettre au public communicate to the public by par télécommunication ou par l'Internet, prêter, telecommunication or on the Internet, distribuer et vendre des thèses partout dans le loan, distrbute and sell theses monde, à des fins commerciales ou autres, sur worldwide, for commercial or non- support microforme, papier, électronique et/ou commercial purposes, in microform, autres formats. paper, electronic and/or any other formats. The author retains copyright L'auteur conserve la propriété du droit d'auteur ownership and moral rights in this et des droits moraux qui protege cette thèse. Ni thesis. Neither the thesis nor la thèse ni des extraits substantiels de celle-ci substantial extracts from it may be ne doivent être imprimés ou autrement printed or otherwise reproduced reproduits sans son autorisation.
    [Show full text]
  • Periods of Poetic Silence in Modern Canadian Creative Careers
    “A Strange Gestation”: Periods of Poetic Silence in Modern Canadian Creative Careers Laura Cameron Department of English McGill University, Montreal July 2015 A thesis submitted to McGill University in partial fulfillment of the requirements of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy © Laura Cameron 2015 “The sun climbs to the middle of the sky and stops. It’s noon. It’s the first bell of noon ringing loud from the cathedral tower. … Great shovelfuls of sound dumped in the grave of our activity. The sound fills up every space and every thought. … The future is blocked. The past is plugged up. Layer after layer of the present seizes us, buries us in one vast amber paperweight. Sealed under twelve skyfuls of the only moment.” — Leonard Cohen, Death of a Lady’s Man (1978) “Sit in a chair and keep still. Let the dancer’s shoulders emerge from your shoulders, the dancer’s chest from your chest, the dancer’s loins from your loins, the dancer’s hips and thighs from yours; and from your silence the throat that makes a sound, and from your bafflement a clear song to which the dancer moves, and let him serve God in beauty. When he fails, send him again from your chair.” — Leonard Cohen, Book of Mercy (1984) Table of Contents Abstract ii Résumé iv Acknowledgements vi Abbreviations viii Introduction 1 PART I: Conceptions of Silence Chapter One: “From the Performance Point of View”: Critical Conceptions of Creative Silence 30 Chapter Two: “Why did you stop writing?”: Poets Accounting for Poetic Silence 76 PART II: The Experience of Silence Chapter Three: “The Whole Breathless Predicament”: The Experience of Creative Crisis 121 Chapter Four: “Then let us start again”: Writing Out of Silence 189 Conclusion 288 Works Cited 301 Cameron ii Abstract This dissertation unites a diverse group of Canadian poets who all fell silent for a prolonged period in the middle of otherwise productive and successful poetic careers: P.K.
    [Show full text]
  • John C. STOUT (Mcmaster University)
    Book Reviews/Comptes rendus I 171 innovations of gay and lesbian documentary, and detailing the long and difficult struggle to publish his illustrated history of homoerotic imagery, Hard to Imagine. As with the earlier pieces, these essays display a passionate engagement that is fortunately matched with a sense of humour. There is much to be grateful for in this volume, not just for its documentation of the battles that have been fought and the ones that remain, but for the revolutionary energy that produced these writings (and their subjects) in the first place. bill bissett. b leev abul char ak trs. Vancouver: Talonbooks, 2000.144pp. $16.95(Cdn) ISBN 0-88922-433-1 Mark Cochrane. Change Room. Vancouver: Talonbooks, 2000. 144pp. $15.95(Cdn) ISBN 0-88922-432-3 Daphne Marlatt. This Tremor Love Is. Vancouver: Talonbooks, 2001. 112pp. $15.95(Cdn) ISBN 0-88922-450-1 Erin Moure. Pillage Laud. Toronto: Moveable Type, 1999. 99pp. $25(Cdn) ISBN 0-9684908-0-8 Erin Moure. Sheep's Vigil by a Fervent Person. Toronto: Anansi, 2001. 131pp. $16.95(Cdn) ISBN 0-88784-660-2 nathalie stephens. Somewhere Running. Vancouver: Advance Editions, 2000. 96pp. $13.95(Cdn) ISBN 1-55152-089-3 Rachel Zolf. Her absence, this wanderer. Ottawa: BuschekBooks, 1999. 71pp. $14.95(Cdn) ISBN 0-9699904-8-0 Charles Watts and Edward Byrne, eds. The Recovery ofthe Public World: Essays on Poetics in Honour of Robin Blaser. Vancouver: Talonbooks, 1999. 464pp. $35(Cdn) ISBN 0-88922-388-2 JoHN C. STOUT (McMaster University) on temporary poetry-in Canada and elsewhere- affords the most interesting site for doing, and for studying, experimental C writing.
    [Show full text]
  • Dramatic Mode and the Feminist Poetics of Enactment in Daphne Marlatt’S Ana Historic
    Dramatic Mode and the Feminist Poetics of Enactment in Daphne Marlatt’s Ana Historic Rebecca Waese anadian poet, essayist, novelist, and playwright Daphne Marlatt uses a dramatic mode in her fiction about history to circumvent patriarchal language and create a feminist poetics Cof enactment. The dramatic mode brings to life myriad new versions of history that are unruly, resonant, and subversive. Marlatt’s writing invites connection and resonance through means deeper than, yet incor- porated within, words, such as theatre, ritual, and poetry. Marlatt chal- lenges and transgresses conventional boundaries of genre by utilizing conventions from drama and the theatre which can be seen in her early novels The Sea Haven and Frames of a Story1 and most evidently in her better-known novel, Ana Historic. With a background in theatre stud- ies2 and, of course, poetry, Marlatt has long been conscious of creating experiences for readers that go beyond the text. Her writing strategies create experience in language rather than representing or framing it. While Ana Historic obviously cannot escape representation on some level — it still uses words on a page as a means of signification — its transposition of dramatic strategies to fiction works toward drawing focus inward and diminishing the conventional critical distance from which readers perceive a novel. Following a line of thought close to Stanislavsky’s System, Marlatt positions her narrator Annie to imagine a sensuous embodiment of nineteenth-century Canadian life. Performative moments in Ana Historic present opportunities for re- visioning historical possibilities. Through the deployment of a range of dramatic strategies, historical moments are “re-enacted” in the mind’s eye of the protagonist, and a sense of life is breathed into the telling of the novel.
    [Show full text]
  • Durham E-Theses
    Durham E-Theses The contemporary long poem : spatial practice in the work of Kamau Brathwaite and Derek Walcott; Ed Dorn and Susan Howe; Robert Kroetsch and Daphne Marlatt. Thurgar-Dawson, Christopher Paul Joseph How to cite: Thurgar-Dawson, Christopher Paul Joseph (1998) The contemporary long poem : spatial practice in the work of Kamau Brathwaite and Derek Walcott; Ed Dorn and Susan Howe; Robert Kroetsch and Daphne Marlatt., Durham theses, Durham University. Available at Durham E-Theses Online: http://etheses.dur.ac.uk/1054/ Use policy The full-text may be used and/or reproduced, and given to third parties in any format or medium, without prior permission or charge, for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-prot purposes provided that: • a full bibliographic reference is made to the original source • a link is made to the metadata record in Durham E-Theses • the full-text is not changed in any way The full-text must not be sold in any format or medium without the formal permission of the copyright holders. Please consult the full Durham E-Theses policy for further details. Academic Support Oce, Durham University, University Oce, Old Elvet, Durham DH1 3HP e-mail: [email protected] Tel: +44 0191 334 6107 http://etheses.dur.ac.uk 2 THE CONTEMPORARY LONG POEM Spatial Practice in the Work of Kamau Brathwaite and Derek Walcott; Ed Dorn and Susan Howe; Robert ICroetsch and Daphne Marlatt Christopher Paul Joseph Thurgar-Dawson Thesis submitted for the Degree of PhD University of Durham, Department of English Studies The copyright of this thesis rests with the author.
    [Show full text]
  • Interrogating Canadian White Identity in Daphne Marlatt's Ana Historic A
    “The Trouble with History—It Never Is”: Interrogating Canadian White Identity in Daphne Marlatt’s Ana Historic A Thesis Submitted to the College of Graduate Studies and Research In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements For the Degree of Master of Arts In the Department of English University of Saskatchewan Saskatoon By Tereigh Ewert-Bauer © Copyright Tereigh Ewert-Bauer, January 2005. All rights reserved. PERMISSION TO USE In presenting this thesis in partial fulfillment of the requirements for a Postgraduate degree from the University of Saskatchewan, I agree that the Libraries of this University may make it freely available for inspection. I further agree that permission for copying of this thesis in any manner, in whole or in part, for scholarly purposes may be granted by the professor or professors who supervised my thesis work or, in their absence, by the Head of the Department or the Dean of the College in which my thesis work was done. It is understood that any copying or publication or use of this thesis or parts thereof for financial gain shall not be allowed without my written permission. It is also understood that due recognition shall be given to me and to the University of Saskatchewan in any scholarly use which may be made of any material in my thesis. Requests for permission to copy or to make other use of material in this thesis in whole or part should be addressed to: Head of the Department of English University of Saskatchewan Saskatoon, Saskatchewan S7N 5A5 i Abstract In writing this thesis, I plotted where the streams of whiteness theory, life- writing theory and practice, and Daphne Marlatt’s novel Ana Historic converge.
    [Show full text]
  • Survival: Colonialism As a Discourse in Beatrice Culleton's Spirit of The
    Survival: Colonialism as a Discourse in Beatrice Culleton’s Spirit of the White Bison Debashree Dattaray Jadavpur University, India As a student reading aboriginal Canadian women writings, I have had often to face questions which seek to define aboriginal Canadian women’s literature. Define is to “state or describe exactly the nature, scope, or meaning of” [OED]. To do so would perhaps lead to dependence on the vocabulary of colonialism, which according to Maori writer Linda Tuhiwai Smith may be encompassed in three concepts, viz., the line, the centre and the outside. She explains how these three concepts have manipulated the very manner in which the colonial powers that be have “discovered,” made conquest of, exploited, distributed and appropriated indigenous cultures.1 Moreover, after we ask “What is aboriginal Canadian women’s literature?” or “When would one mark the earliest period of aboriginal literatures?” other questions await us: “What is aboriginal Canadian?” or “What is period?” or “What is literature?” Definitive answers to these questions would inevitably lead to a “validation” of aboriginal literatures on being “heard” as marginalized voices using established theory and irrelevant aesthetics. This would reiterate the reservations of aboriginal women writers about “too easy identification by the non-Native reader, ignorance of historical or cultural allusion, obliviousness to the presence or properties of Native genres, and the application of irrelevant aesthetic standards” (Hoy 9), which are all means of domesticating the unknown. This premise of misunderstanding and misreading could have been a deterrent to my readings in aboriginal literatures had I not read the opening remarks of Native arts activist Viola Thomson, who moderated both panels at the Telling It Conference (1988), and as quoted by Daphne Marlatt in the Introduction to the Telling It Conference Collective: I encourage each of you to continue empowering these women and the work that they’re doing, and you can do that in many different ways.
    [Show full text]
  • Eleanor Wachtel/ an INTERVIEW with DAPHNE MARLATT
    Eleanor Wachtel/ AN INTERVIEW WITH DAPHNE MARLATT "The birds don't sing here": finding a sense of place in the west coast Vancouver writer, Daphne Marlatt, spent her early childhood in Penang, a northern Malaysian island in the Indian Ocean. Her family moved here when she was nine years old and she spent her teenage years earnestly trying to assimilate into the strange Canadian life of North Vancouver. For her, one of the attractions of becoming a writer was that, as an outsider, she could write her way into the world she wanted to be part of. "You write your own script and include yourself." This notion fit right into a concern with the local that characterized the TISH group of poets she encountered at UBC in the early sixties. And it resulted in books like Vancouver Poems and her major work of the seventies, the prose poem, Steveston, which started out as an oral history project of the Japanese fishing community, the old cannery camp on the Fraser River. Daphne Marlatt has always been fascinated by language, the roots of words, the ways in which language shapes and frames reality. It's not a recent, faddish interest. She grew up in what she's described as "a colonial multi-cultural situation"; five languages were spoken in her house. The sensation of having her world turned upside down by the move to Canada gave her a sense of the relativity of both language and reality. 4 Perhaps the biggest upheaval since that early one has been her growing awareness and exploration of the way language informs gender perceptions-a recognition that has been preoccupying feminist writers in Quebec, confronted as they are with the overt masculine and feminine of French, but which has only recently been probed by English-Canadian writers and critics.
    [Show full text]