Ingrid Johnston
Department of Secondary Education
University of Alberta
In this article, I consider the ideological and imaginative potential of literature for questioning notions of Canadian identity in the Social Studies classroom. I compare various literary texts published in the early part of the twentieth century, considering how writers differ in their attempts to create a unified metanarrative of nation or to offer a more fluid discourse of inclusion and exclusion. These early texts are contrasted with more contemporary Canadian literature in which previously marginalized writers speak from the in-between spaces of culture, emphasizing the hybrid and fluid nature of Canadian identity as it redefines itself in an increasingly global and globalized environment.
"A Canadian is a hyphen." Joy Kogawa
Literary works, Sven Birkerts (1994, 204) suggests, "have always derived their artistic value, their importance, from the fact that they comprehended the changing terms of our world and gave us narratives that could help us understand the forces impinging on our lives". Literature, viewed in this way, seems an ideal companion for the Social Studies classroom. Literature can offer students insights into events and experiences beyond their own world view and enable them to reflect on their own lives in re-imagined ways. As travellers in imaginative literary realms, readers cross the line that divides the everyday experiences of their lives from the imaginative representation of those experiences in fictional writing and gain new understandings that transcend the limited dimensions of charts, maps and textbooks.
This view of literature's potential for the classroom, however, conceals its ideological underpinnings. What writers choose to represent through literature is always a political act. Narrative is never a neutral form, representing real or imaginary events, but a form, which entails specific choices with distinct ideological and political implications. As Ajay Heble (1997, 87) suggests, " Self-representational acts are narrative acts that construct a story of subjectivity and belonging and, in doing so, they have the power to shape the production, maintenance, and transmission of knowledge 'about' both self and other."
One such ideological function of literature is nationalist. Stories have the power to shape nations, and many formerly colonised peoples have used narrative as a way to re-memory their silenced pasts. In the Western world, as Homi Bhabha (1990, 1) suggests, narrative as a discourse has consistently been used to "represent the idea of nation as a continuous national narrative of national progress." Such a metanarrative of nation authorises stories that consciously or unconsciously work towards a single voice and thereby repress knowledge of difference. This kind of narrative works to develop unity through emphasizing symbolic differences between "ourselves" and "others," subsuming significant individual differences by perceived distinctions of race, ethnicity and language that isolate one group from others. This ideology is clearly in operation in an old Canadian textbook entitled Wide Open Windows that I discovered in a used bookstore in Sherbrooke, Quebec last year. Copyrighted in 1946, the book is stamped as "Property of the Board of Protestant School Commissioners" with a label indicating it was in use in Canadian classrooms in the mid-1960s. The first section of the book, entitled "Young Citizens of Canada," opens with a poem by Jean Blewett:
There's a thing we love to think of when the summer days are long,
And the summer winds are blowing, and the summer sun is strong,
When the orchards and the meadows throw their fragrance on the air,
When the grain-fields flaunt their riches, and the glow is everywhere.
Something sings it all the day,
Canada, fair Canada!
And the pride thrills through and through us,
'Tis our birthplace, Canada! (Barrett 1946,1).
This introductory poem, which sets the tone for the rest of the text, immediately creates an authorizing story of nation, setting up a tension between us/not-us in terms of Canadian identity. To be included under the epithet "we," to be considered a young citizen of Canada, there are certain prerequisites set up by the narrative: being born in Canada, and, as the rest of the narrative makes clear, being white, Christian and a native speaker of English, and/or French.
In a later section of the book, author Nora Kelly presents a story of "The Canadian Eskimo," (280-88) offering a description of an "other" kind of Canadian who is represented as the not-us of Canadian identity. "In the part of Canada where the Eskimos live," Kelly writes, "both the land and sea are frozen for more than half the year. That is why the Eskimo's life is so different from ours." In contrast to the supposedly "civilized" summer pursuits of Canadian citizens described in Blewett's poem, Kelly explains that "The Eskimos wander about the north country like gypsies,(sic) hunting and fishing, until after the autumn freeze-up when they gather together on the sea shore, and build their igloos side by side." The issue of language is addressed in an equally unambivalent fashion. "Missionaries," Kelly explains, "have taught the Eskimos to read and write in a sign language they invented just for that purpose." Despite these and other "civilizing" efforts by missionaries and Mounties, Kelly concludes "the Eskimo is much better off in his own northern land and no doubt will be quite content to stay there."
The text provides a striking example of how literature with a specifically didactic cultural ideology can present a subject position for one particular kind of reader who is enabled to recognize and to understand his or her own material conditions. Focalized through a single perspective, with only one idealized audience being addressed, a text such as Wide Open Windows creates a story of nation that privileges one perspective and represses all others with its particular talk on ethnicity, race and gender.
Not all Canadian literary texts written early in the twentieth century are as didactic and problematic as the textbook described above. Some texts, such as L.M. Montgomery's novels, offer more conflicting ideological messages, and the imaginative and enduring force of their narrative addresses a broader range of readers. Her most famous novel, Anne of Green Gables, sold over 19,000 copies within its first five months of publication in 1908 and has become a national and international icon of Canadian culture and a cultural tourist commodity (Gammerly and Epperly 1999). For numbers of Canadian readers through the past century, Montgomery's novel has redefined the dichotomy of us/not us in surprising ways.
I first read Anne of Green Gables as a young adult who had just immigrated to Canada, and I was empathetically drawn to the story of an unwanted "outsider" finding a place within the strictures of Canadian society. Adrienne Clarkson, our current governor-general, coming to Canada as a young refugee from Hong Kong, was also enchanted with the novel. For the young Clarkson, Anne Shirley as the orphan child who is taken in and loved by a "traditional bachelor and spinster" outside her family became a metaphor for Canada as a country that receives immigrants. Describing her early literary encounters with Anne of Green Gables, Clarkson (1999, x) writes:
For me, the immigrant child, the world of the Cuthberts, the Lyndes, and the Barrys was the world of Canada - rural, rooted and white - a world to which I would never have had access any other way...the depth of understanding, the texture of generations of feuds and forgettings, the nature of the Scots-Irish Presbyterianism, constituted a reality that only fiction could convey. Only fiction can bring the truth because only fiction is not unbelievable. L.M. Montgomery understood emotions and she understood motivation; her people are Canada. I was taught by them as I read through her novels. Fiction, like all art, tells the truth from the inside.
Of course, Montgomery was still a writer of her time, and there are examples of silences and stereotypes in her writing that today's readers might find disturbing. In Anne of Avonlea (1909), for example, there are several derogatory references to French Canadians. Marilla, Anne's guardian, comments early in the text that "you can't depend on [those French] for a day" (21), and later exclaims, "If I ever catch you at such tricks again you'll be made to wait for your meals till everyone else is done, like the French" (169). Montgomery situates her characters within the thinking of her day, but in her writing she is still able to move beyond a simple rhetoric of sameness and difference, articulating what Laura Robinson (1999, 21) describes as a "tangled web of communal and national identity" in which discourses of inclusion and exclusion, Canadian and foreigner, become less rigid and more fluid. The character of Anne Shirley, the unwanted orphan in the opening of Anne of Green Gables, draws on the literary lineage of darker and more realistic fictional characters portrayed in books such as Jane Eyre, Oliver Twist and The Secret Garden. These literary characters, author Margaret Atwood (1999, 223) explains, "have all contributed both to Anne Shirley's formation as orphan-heroine and to the readers' understanding of the perils of orphanhood in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.". For readers such as the young Clarkson, Montgomery presented a version of a Canadian identity that excluded the new immigrant but also offered the possibility of acceptance and change. In Anne of Green Gables, Montgomery exposes the rigidity of a fixed identity, national and familial, and argues for an identity that recognizes the power of difference. The character of Anne Shirley symbolizes that difference.
While Montgomery's stories allow for some ambiguities in the notion of a Canadian identity, many other early twentieth century writers attempted to maintain a notion of cultural purity that suppressed and silenced the experiences and contributions of Canadians outside the ethno-cultural mainstream. The poet E.J Pratt, for example, saw Canada as a homogeneous national community joined from sea to sea by a railroad. His poem "Towards the Last Spike" (1952) celebrates the nation-building contribution of the railroad, while omitting, and effectively writing out of history, all mention of the history of Chinese laborers who helped to build the railway. Pratt's perspective exemplifies the view of many writers and curriculum developers, who, until the past two decades, perceived Canada's story as a metanarrative emerging out of a particular series of contradictions: French Canada against English Canada, the regions against the federal center, and Canada against the United States.
Newer perspectives in Canadian cultural criticism have challenged this notion of a metanarrative. As Ajay Heble (1997, 87) explains:
Important recent developments in critical and cultural theory, in Canada and elsewhere, have... invited a radical reassessment of received models of inquiry and necessitated an altered set of strategies for reading and responding to Canada's self-representational acts. In effect, many of the new contexts of Canadian criticism have forced Canadians to expand their repertoire of contradictory experiences to include, for example, a consideration of tensions between some of the following: race, class, ethnicity and gender; nationalism and globalism; postmodernism and postcolonialism; Canadian studies and postcolonial theory; Canadian, Native, and Postcolonial contexts; subaltern or oppositional voices and hegemonic or media-constructed narratives.
This re-defining of Canada's unified story into a postmodern bricolage of competing traditions, histories, re-tellings and re-imaginings has emerged from a variety of sources, including the writings of women, the newly-recognized voices of First Nations peoples and the stories of Canada's immigrant peoples who have striven to assert their own hybrid identities and the existence of their own histories. The Native Canadian writer Basil Johnston (1997, 348) explains why he believes it is so important for these diverse stories to be heard in the classroom:
Students ... as well as adults, are interested in the character, intellect, soul, spirit, heart of people of other races and cultures. They want to know what other people believe in, what they understand, what they expect and hope for in this life and the next, how they keep law and order and harmony within the family and community, how and why they celebrated ceremonies, what made them proud, ashamed, what made them happy, what sad...But unless scholars and writers know the literature of the peoples that they are studying or writing about they cannot provide what their students and readers are seeking and deserving of.
Since the 1970s, these diverse voices have increasingly been acknowledged as forming part of Canada's literary heritage and have effectively challenged the Canadian literary mainstream. Smaro Kamboureli describes the unfolding of ethnic anthologies that appeared between the mid-1970s and mid-1980s with the advent of "official multiculturalism" in Canada. These collections of stories and poems marked the first concentrated unfolding of ethnic writing in Canada. She explains:
As it emerges from the Other side of Canadian literature's cultural syntax, this writing brings into play what was previously disregarded. It makes present what rendered it absent; it brings into relief the boundaries that separated it from the mainstream tradition. And so it stands on the threshold of what Canadian literature has become since those 'strangers at our gates' took it upon themselves to cross the boundary separating those who are silenced, who are written about, from those who give voice to themselves...Their voices sometimes converge, sometimes remain dissonant. Whatever the case may be, these writers set out to legitimate ethnic voices in their own terms, but also in terms that reflect the given cultural and political climate (Kamboureli 2000, 132).
These early anthologies and the ones that followed in the 1990s share the intention of translating their writers' image as "Other" into a self-defining specificity. They are presented as texts that reach out to readers from a point of view that is at once marginalized and affirmative (Hutcheon and Richmond 1990). Writers such as Joy Kogawa, Rohinton Mistry, Paul Yee, Tomson Highway and Marlene Nourbese Philips acknowledge their debt to the official policy of multiculturalism because of the financial support they received, but the self-contradictory images of ethnicity that emerge from their writing and from these anthologies defy the ideological assumptions of the Canadian Multiculturalism Act. They attempt to deconstruct the notion of multiculturalism as a unified entity inspired by official multiculturalism. As the writer Dionne Brand (1990, 277) explains, "We are the new wave of Canadian writing. We will write about the internal contradictions." Many writers such as Brand have succeeded in remaking themselves and fashioning new kinds of cultural identity by, consciously or unconsciously, drawing on more than one cultural repertoire. They speak from the in-between of different cultures, always unsettling the assumptions of one culture from the perspectives of another, and thus finding ways of being both the same as and different from the others among which they live.
Canada's newer literary voices, who bring to their writing the remembrances of diverse cultures, languages, histories and traditions, have succeeded in challenging the notions of a Canadian metanarrative that supposedly speaks for all Canadians while, in reality only addressing a select few. Their stories have helped to raise new questions and tensions that have the potential to disrupt any homogeneous notion of Canadian identity in the Social Studies classroom. They create possibilities for readers to move away from a notion of narrative as a linear representation of reality, towards a recognition of narrative as an art form that sees history as inevitably ambiguous and identity as shifting and evolving. These stories suggest that who we are as Canadians cannot be defined by our color, accent or name, that there is no one essential element that makes a particular person Canadian and another "not-quite." What once was thought to have been a "true" story of Canadian identity has become a prism of possibilities: hybrid and heterogeneous, told and retold, imagined and re-imagined in the literatures of its peoples:
A story of yours got this one going,
so I'm sending it back now, changed, of course,
just as each person I love
is a relocation, where I take up
a different place in the world.
(Wallace 1997, 174)
Literature does have the power to provide insight into the "changing terms of our world," as Birkerts (1994) suggests. Its transformative potential for today's students is enriched and enhanced by its capacity to challenge and redefine any notion of a metanarrative of Canadian identity.
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Brand, Dionne. 1990. "Interview with Dagmar Novak." In Other Solitudes: Canadian Multicultural Fictions, ed. Linda Hutcheon and Marion Richmond, 56-77. Toronto: Oxford University Press.
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