There are many voices in every story, even if you can only hear one. Coming from a rather loud family with two other sisters, I know what it’s like to almost hear half a dozen voices at once and attempt to pick which one to listen to or not.
My name is Cristabel Koo, but you can call me Crista. I’m a fourth year student majoring in English literature and minoring in sociology. I have recently taken a seminar course on Canadian autobiographies and most (pretty much all) of my knowledge on Canadian literature is from that awesome class. However, before that, I came into my studies initially interested in gender and sexuality discourses in literature, or what is called Queer Theory. Yet as I progressed in my studies, I was reminded how, as gender and sexuality is fluid, other matters of intersectionality flow into these realms as well. I was not only realizing the flexibility of gender and sexual identity, but how identity is also impacted by cultural landscapes.
Wah’s book is written like an autobiography and talks about his life growing up in his father’s diner. It’s a bit of a tough read but I have the idea that Wah is a tough guy and that’s pretty cool.
As a Canadian born Chinese, my experiences in Canada would differ from common historical narratives found in Western colonialist culture. Fred Wah’s Diamond Grill is one of those stories I can relate to. He writes about living in the hyphen, or in a place that straddles the doorways of whiteness and Chineseness and how that all comes together to create what he sees as Canadian. Attempting to understand where you are and who you are in certain places is something I feel that is common in forming Canadian identity.
On the same vein, English 470A Canadian Studies will explore the experiences of European and Indigenous Canadians and how these experiences are passed on through literature and oral tradition. These stories can be used to cement canons of Canadian literature or even at times, break them down in order to create new narratives. These narratives help to create a sense of identity, or in relation to the course, a Canadian identity. However, it is important to understand Canadian identity is not one solid idea. It is many and goes beyond just Western colonizing narratives. As Northrop Frye writes, the “Canadian identity has been profoundly disturbed, not so much our famous problem of identity […] but by a series of paradoxes in what confronts that identity.” These paradoxes being the many differing and conflicting histories and experiences of Canadians. The course will focus on how each voice and story has a legitimate part in creating a Canadian literary canon – more specifically, whose voice and story is heard, or unheard, and whose histories makes it into the canon.
Really Professional Photo taken from my very professional iPhone at the Museum of Anthropology
This brings in the debated idea of authenticity and legitimacy of Canadianism. We are often surrounded by First Nations art – from the Canucks logo to the walkway entering Canada when you arrive from international flights at the YVR Airport – but the stories of these artworks are not always heard. And I am guilty of looking at them with an air of distance and I know it can seem non-Canadian to some. Last term, I attended a mini-class field trip in one of my sociology courses. We visited the Museum of Anthropology on campus. There, the guide walked us through the artwork and artefacts displayed and spoke of how often people have complained about the legitimacy of contemporary Aboriginal artwork being mixed in with the “traditional”. Upon starting this course, I am reminded of the tour guide’s story and how it raised the question of what can be considered “real” or authentic Aboriginal artwork and what is not. What is Canada then? Who is a Canadian and who is not? Whose work is allowed to pass the mark and whose isn’t? I’m hoping this course will add on to these questions that are very difficult to answer (and probably have no single all-defining answer) and to help me gain knowledge and understanding of the perspectives of European and Indigenous Canadians.