FICTION
Voice for the voiceless
JYOTI NAIR BELLIAPPA
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The double dispossession and colonisation of native women is presented through the eyes of women writers.
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Canadian Women's Writings; S. Armstrong, Creative Books, Rs. 400
IT is sometimes argued that a work is created less by its author than by linguistic and social structures and perhaps by structures of the mind. Literature relates to the real world. S. Armstrong employs poststructuralist techniques in his readings of four women writers' in Canada voicing the voice of the voiceless and drawing a parallel with their counterparts anywhere in the world. Mimesis is employed to reflect life; exaggeration and parody expose and locate oppression on the basis of race, class, and sex; the absurd assumption that literature is the domain of Imperial culture, and Native cultures lack the creative urge is set aside. In this study of the lives of Canadian women's writings, the double dispossession and double colonisation of native women is presented.
New genre
S. Armstrong has taken up the works of Maria Campbell, Beatrice M. Culleton, Jeannette C. Armstrong and Lee Maracle for a discussion of their `counter discourses.' Armstrong conceives of Native Autobiography as a new genre, which studies mainstream history along with the culture of depraved women.
Maria Campbell's "Halfbreed" is the story of a Metis woman's search for identity in a patriarchal, white and Euro-centric set up, and is a miniscule peep into the "joys and sorrows, the oppressing poverty, the frustrations and dreams of the half breed." The author suggests the marginalised status of these mixed breeds that are objects of sexual abuse and caught between two worlds by lecherous economic middlemen. In a larger sense the book addresses the problem of the acceptability of the diaspora of women on the basis of "language, religion, blood-line" with the desire to create a Native communal solidarity the world over.
Painful memories
Beatrice Culleton's "In Search of April Raintree" touches on the painful memories of April and Cheryl separated and cruelly treated in two different homes. While Cheryl prides in being a Metis, April resents it. But the `fantasy of her fake white identity' is demolished when rapists mistake her for her sister. The discrimination between "brown-skinned" and the "white-skinned" children at school show cases the racial stereotyping of the Metis identity in the Canadian cultural diaspora. In the words of Armstrong, "The conflict is happily resolved when the pseudo (white) identity is jettisoned to pave the way for the assertion of the Native identity."
Armstrong reflects on the importance of ancestry, memory, aboriginal stories and family history while exploring the genre of native autobiography in Culleton's book. Jeannette C. Armstrong's "Slash" is yet another novel set against the Native historical backdrop of 1960s in Canada. It posits the problem of the power of the North American agricultural economy over the aboriginal people and provides memorable political insights through the medium of Thomas Kelaket later nicknamed Slash. It is also the story of colonisation of the rest of the continent. In "I Am Woman" and "Bobbi Lee", "Indian Rebel", the novelist Maracle records the views of subaltern women and uses a grandmother as a mouthpiece providing an insight into the past. Bobbi Lee shows "how Aborginal people continue to be disadvantaged by systemic racism" but in the republished version, patriarchal domination is done away with.
Armstrong has synchronised voices through the textual synthesis of select Canadian women's writing to reflect on the anti-imperialist solidarity of natives in the post-colonial period. He has sought a new space for Canadian native women's writing by historicising these documentary autobiographies.
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