Settler Relations

“I planted him in this country
like a flag.”

-Margaret Atwood, “The Journals of Susanna Moodie” 

I first heard of Susanna Moodie, as I suspect many English majors hear of Susanna Moodie—through the poetry of Margaret Atwood. I was nineteen and backpacking through Montreal. I had just been broken up with and thought it a good idea to leave my province for another one. I spent a lot of time at the Grande Bibliothèque, poring over Atwood’s poetry and books. I was determined to have a Canadian experience and what better way than to explore Canada on my own, through the eyes of one of our most celebrated authors. Susanna Moodie was thrown at me, at a time when I was feeling alone, destitute, confused. I took out her Roughing it in the Bush  (1854), and never returned the text. This is a confession, I think.

I am not trying to draw a direct comparison towards moving across Canada as a nineteen year old and Susanna Moodie’s complex negotiations of emigration. I am, however, interested in the ways that these two ideas of leaving, coming to new space, re/defining the self in relation to this space, and starting anew can be read as distinct parallels. Thinking (or feeling) through these ideas laid out to us of second Edens and empty and negotiated lands draws me to her introduction where she describes the “Salubrious climate, its fertile soil, commercial advantages, great water privileges, its proximity to the mother country” (Moodie) (emphasis added). I am fascinated by this idea of proximity in the works we are examining. What does it mean to be close to the country you have left? How does physical proximity factor into what ‘home’ can or should become? She writes in Chapter 11 of a fear that moving away from the ‘mother country’ becomes an “approaching ill” (Moodie). She goes on to say that this fear“strove to draw [her] back as from a fearful abyss, beseeching [her] not to leave England and emigrate to Canada” (Moodie). In this way, proximity becomes a way of talking about ownership. This image of a vast, “unwasted” Canada that she explores again and again only becomes less terrifying as she lays claim to it, settles it.

This double idea of an Eden at once beckoning the many English subjects who develop a “Canada mania” (Moodie) and also offering the harsh and cold realities of the earth after the Fall begin to come to light in her introduction. It is a true testament to the Enlightenment that this text offers explicit ways of knowing or coming to know Canada as a settled space. Both absencing and ignoring the fact that Canada was not absent, not ‘unwasted’, but was home to many complex and wildly differing nations and peoples before contact, Moodie’s work begins to rewrite Canada through this proximity to knowledge. Only by getting far enough away from England, and close enough to a “real” or “factual” account of settling Canada does Moodie begin to at once complicate the ideas of Eden (eg by pointing to the “cold winds and drizzling rain” in Chapter 2) , as well as paint Canada as the tax-free paradise that immigrants might come to expect. Indeed, though it is a rough gift, an “empty” “unsettled” Canada is built by Moodie as a gift from god.

The resurrection King performs of Moodie in the café scene in Green Grass, Running Water (1993) can be read as a delicate and complicated investigation of power in-text. Achilles Mbembe, a post-colonial scholar speaks to great lengths of what “conviviality” looks like in his “On the Postcolony” (1991). I turn to his complicated reading of colonialism and Africa because I think the ways in which King reanimates Moodie is a toying with these notions of conviviality (friendliness or ‘liveliness’). Moodie is brought back in a satirical way (as is King’s specialty). Immediately he renames her as “Sue” (184), and has her explain in a contemporary context that her and her companion Archie have been “roughing it” (184) in dingy hotel rooms. What King is doing here is acknowledging the deep-histories that Moodie summons in the Canadian literature canon, and toying with them, making them unrecognizable and ‘unconvivial’. Mbembe speaks of satire and humour in the discussions of postcolonialism, pointing to an unfriendliness or satirical changing in works to alter or challenge overarching stories of power.

Margaret Atwood came to speak at UBC two years ago about zombies. I remember asking a rather pretentious and long-winded question on the nature of zombies to her—she wasn’t too interested as I recall (and I don’t blame her the question was maybe reserved for a paper and not a Q&A). I am once again reeling with the thoughts of what a zombie in-text can look like. If we can read Moodie’s reconvivial state in Green Grass, Running Water, as a zombie-type character, then there is perhaps room to think about the ways in which Canada as a consumer of Moodie’s work in our building of “Canadian canon” (which also includes Atwood’s work) works in the same ‘mindless droves’ that zombies do in our ongoing history of ‘forgetting’ or ‘making invisible’ First Nations peoples.

Works Cited