Question #3: “Words. Chamberlin talks a lot about language, in particular the strangeness and wonder of how language works. Stories, he says, “bring us close to the world we live in by taking us into the world of words” (italics mine,1). He describes learning to read and write as learning “to be comfortable with a cat that is both there and not there” (132). Based on Chamberlin’s understanding of how riddles and charms work, explain this “world of words.” Reflect on why “words make us feel closer to the world we live in” (1).”
“There are moments that the words don’t reach. There is suffering too terrible to name.”
–Hamilton (2015), “It’s Quiet Uptown”
Lyrics by Lin-Manuel Miranda
One of the beautiful paradoxes of stories, as Chamberlin articulates, is their ability to simultaneously provide both means of escaping the world and reframing it – offering a pleasurable distraction, but also elucidating salient concerns through fictional illustrations, and making them accessible. In the best case scenarios, stories can excel at providing cathartic pleasure through reframing the world, galvanizing audiences to find beauty in the mundane or everyday, as with Oscar Wilde’s claim that poetry ‘invented’ fog in London by teaching readers to appreciate it (136), providing anthems to get through tough times (145), or providing the means of literally re-writing the history and cultural identity of a country or people (150). However, Chamberlin also unpacks the cultural tendency to dismiss stories as more frivolous diversion than able to genuinely incite proactive societal change – as Derek Walcott puts it, “The classics can console. But not enough.” Despite Chamberlin’s imbedded retort (“Songs like that don’t really bring the dead back, or take you home, do they? Oh, but they do; they surely do” [75]), it’s hard to shake the culturally ingrained sense of doubt – the worry that, although words and stories may make us feel closer to the world we live in, that feeling may be nothing more than mollifying delusions of grandeur, and a refusal to engage with actual functional change.
In weighing this debate as I unspooled Chamberlin’s thoughts, I reflected on the propensity for some instances of personal or cultural trauma that, try as we might, are too cavernously affecting for words or stories to adequately lend escape or elucidation from – “moments that the words don’t reach,” as beautifully stated in Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton. I experienced a really powerful such moment in watching the Canadian film Indian Horse earlier this year.* Although my overall impression of the film was mixed, one particular moment, where director Stephen S. Campanelli and writers Dennis Foon and Richard Wagamese made the deliberate decision to bypass words, brought me so much closer to an experience of reality than any other means of storytelling could have.
**Spoilers for Indian Horse follow**
A substantial portion of the first half of Indian Horse is dedicated to a brutally uncompromising depiction of the horrific abuse of Indigenous children growing up in the residential school system. I, most likely along with many other audiences, sought out the film primarily for this dramatization – to feel a deeper sense of emotional empathy for the horrific mistreatment of other humans within my lifetime in my country; to accentuate my feelings of disgust and outrage from having read articles and testimonials on residential schools. In short: to feel closer to the world I lived in. However, good intentions or not, I found myself, sheepishly, generally distanced and disinterested during the first third of the film, caught up in scrutinizing elements of the film (a particular flatness in the performances; a stilted, ‘staged’ feeling to the dialogue) that threatened to only further distract me more from confronting the realities of the horrors depicted. It was the words of the story – the scripted lines, and a somewhat hokey authorial voiceover – that rang of faintly disingenuous artifice, further jarring me from its emotional truth, rather than immersing me deeper within it.
Then, there came a moment in the film that completely turned this sense around. A young girl in the school, and friend of protagonist Saul, is, at one point, so wracked with all-consuming grief at the school’s abuses – including being locked in a cage in the school’s basement – that she beats herself to death, bashing her head into the bars of her cage over and over again. No words are spoken – just the grotesquely slow, impassive, meaty sound. Thump. Thump. Thump.
It was this horrific moment – more specifically, the sonic, almost musical quality to it – that jogged me out of my critical distance, and became a fulcrum and anchor for all of my outrage and heartbreak, both at the story itself, and how unimaginably common it was for far, far too many real Indigenous children. The thump thump thump seared itself into my brain – a devastatingly perfect sensory microcosm for the slow, inevitable beating down of an array of cultures, and the experience of feeling so deeply, all-consumingly trapped, erased, and beaten out of existence. I’m not sure whether director Campanelli intended for this thump thump thump to reference the sound of distant Indigenous drums, but my brain made the connection, and it only further drove the moment sickeningly home. I was moved to tears watching – and listening to – this scene. And it felt like this one moment lent me more insight into the unimaginable psychic weight and trauma of the centuries of systemic abuse towards Indigenous communities, in Canada and around the world, than years of reading about it ever had. It was a moment that the words didn’t reach – but wordlessness did.
Chamberlin discusses how inevitably slippery, subjective, and politically hierarchal the mere act of using language as a means of communication inherently is (15). But the unambiguous universality in the sound of a little Indigenous girl smashing her head repeatedly struck me as a moment of horror, outrage, and tragedy – but also imbued with a sordid kind of hope. As Chamberlin puts it, “I believe that none of us […] will be able to rest in the Americas and call this place home until we acknowledge the brutal campaign, by design and by default, to deny the humanity of aboriginal peoples” (59). Chamberlin posits that acknowledgement is crucial to understanding, and that the ensuing understanding could – eventually – lead to a measure of healing and peace. And stories, words – and sometimes, knowing when to supersede the limitations of words – can help serve as incremental pieces of common ground towards making that healing and peace a reality.
-KH
Indian Horse (dir. Stephen Campanelli, 2017).
*There is, of course, a further level of irony that Indian Horse the film was adapted from the novel by Richard Wagamese – a powerful, wordless cinematic moment spawned by a repository of words. I have not yet had the opportunity to read Wagamese’s novel, and thereby can’t speak to how comparably this suicide scene is conveyed (if at all) by Wagamese’s written words. Regardless, my points regarding how well the film’s scene conveys this sensorial, affective trauma through its universally accessible horrific auditory musicality stands.
Works cited:
Chamberlin, J. Edward. If This is Your Land, Where Are Your Stories? Toronto: Random House of Canada Limited, 2003.
Hamilton (musical). Music, lyrics, and book by Lin-Manuel Miranda. Grand Central Publishing, 2015.
Indian Horse (film). Dir. Stephen S. Campanelli. Devonshire Productions, 2017.
Hey Kevin, I wanted to preface this by saying that your writing is magical to read; it’s poetic almost, and to be able to articulate so beautifully about such a horrendous subject is really powerful. I wanted to respond to your post because I’m coming from the opposite perspective as you. I just finished reading the novel for a class I have this semester, but I wanted to hold off on watching the film until after we’d finished discussing the novel. It’s a puzzling contradiction to think about how writers craft words to bring life to wordless moments, moments too powerful, too beautiful, or too horrific for words to do them justice, yet many a time, they do just that – do these moments justice. I found, while reading the novel, that Wagamese would disperse the scenes of Indigenous children being abused, killed, or killing themselves throughout the novel, in somewhat of a detached way. Detached in a couple of ways – literally, as they often made up their own chapter, but also emotionally; they were quite factual accounts, rather than emotional recounts. I also found that the portions of the novel that deal explicitly with the horrors of residential schools are quite limited, so, while they are brutal, readers don’t seem to be as bombarded by visuals as you describe viewers being while watching the film.
I’m wondering how much you think the medium in which a piece of art or literature is created affects its ability to profoundly impact someone? You mention that this film struck you in a way that no other readings on the subject have been able to. Do you think it’s because words do in fact have a limit, or because you just haven’t yet experienced a writer who can shape words in a way that can truly express the horror and pain of both those who died in and survived residential schools? You mention that “it was a moment that the words didn’t reach” – didn’t, not couldn’t – and I’m wondering if you think there is a particular moment or feeling that words cannot reach?
Hi Kirsten!
Wow! Thank you so much for your kind words – they’ve absolutely made my day! I really appreciate you sharing your experience of the novel – and it’s both fascinating and unsurprising that Wagamese opted to treat many of the more upsetting segments of his novel so comparatively dispassionately. I’ve noticed a trend in a lot of fiction I’ve read lately leaning towards avoiding ’emotionally milking’ depictions of hardship or trauma – almost as if anticipating and bypassing the criticism of an almost fetishistic, ‘Hollywood’ feeling of emotional manipulation, which could almost cheapen the moment. I’m not sure if you’ve read Heather O’Neill’s The Lonely Hearts Hotel (and if you haven’t, I highly recommend it!), but it’s another perfect example of this – it’s a novel full of pretty harrowing, upsetting happenstances, yet the more traumatic the incident, the more the authorial tone skews towards matter-of-fact bluntness – to an almost darkly comedic extent at times.
It’s highly possible that this ‘detached’ tone that you’ve drawn attention to is a way of conveying the numbness of the individual experiencing the kind of persistent trauma that Wagamese’s characters would experience throughout a childhood in a Residential school (and a lifetime of feeling generally beaten down by systemic racism and discrimination…). I imagine that for many who experience trauma or traumatic incidents so regularly and persistently, each occurrence isn’t experienced as an emotional unravelling so much as a “Ah. This is happening again” – a distanciation to help the brain safeguard itself (In Lonely Hearts Hotel, O’Neill even plays this for grim laughs some of the time). In this way, accounting for traumatic instances more ‘factually’ rather than drumming up the emotional resonance of the moment could actually be seen as a lot more ‘truthful’ than a more heightened or ‘over-written’ means of depiction.
With this in mind, I think this line of thinking actually ties into your second question, pertaining to medium specificity. I’m a former Film major (and English minor), and I feel pretty strongly that there are some stories that benefit from varying degrees of visual, auditory, or written components (and it goes without saying that the effectiveness of any story or means of telling it is highly subjective, and varies depending on the audience, and their personal life experience). I think certain sites of cultural trauma (ie: Residential Schools) can, in some instances, be a bit too ‘raw’ to ever feel adequately depicted by a fictional means – which might be why the earlier segment of the movie didn’t resonate as much with me (too easy to pick apart the ‘fictional’ aspects of dialogue, acting, etc.), but the raw, brutality of the later act of violence was too universal and primal an act not to resonate. So, for both Wagamese’s novel, and in the Indian Horse film, the best avenue into effectively conveying the deep pain of the moment is to avoid as many fictional trappings as possible: blunt prose in the novel, and blunt visual violence in the film. BUT, on the other hand, Chamberlin talked extensively about Oscar Wilde’s quote about how fiction, prose, and language can, in some instances, add to a deeper appreciation of ‘the real’ – but, granted, a lot of the examples of poetry embellishing reality were generally positive ones (ie: the beauty of the fogs in London, etc.), so maybe trying to use language to accentuate the real can benefit positive takeaways, but often cheapen devastating ones? It’s an interesting idea, and one that I’m sure we’ll circle back to throughout this course. Thanks for sparking this preliminary discussion, though!
Hi Kevin, thank you for your post! What I drew most out of it was the debate of words and if/when they have power. In other posts I’ve read this week (Cassie Lumsden) it was highlighted that people also think differently depending on what language they are using. Specifically, they may think more favourably of a topic in one language versus another. In your post, you discuss the power of moments that can’t be described by words. That saving space for those moments, where words haven’t done them justice, is necessary. I wonder, as this course is about stories and how we tell them, do you feel like words and language are almost futile? In that there is no way they can describe what it is we actually experience? Compounded with the idea that different languages also make us think differently, the very act of using words influences are understanding of an event, and can possibly misrepresent it? Should we be spending less time trying to give words to ideas, or is it more of a case of being aware and being even more careful of the words we do choose?
Thank you for your thoughts!
Hi Ross,
Thanks for these thoughts – you pose a really interesting ethical dilemma here. I definitely think that words are still overall a worthy endeavour to invest in (Chamberlin’s laundry list of the situational benefits of language alone, which I briefly touch on in my post here, is as impassioned a case as any for the unique quirks and use value of words – and I think that the idiosyncratic inconsistencies between languages are completely fascinating, and often shed so much insight into the imbedded ideological values of their cultures of origin, which is kind of an additional macro layer of communication unto itself!). That said, I heartily agree with your suggestion that being deliberate with their usage is key – stories have the ability to harm as well as heal, after all, as Thomas King puts it.
I do think that we, raised within the Western literary tradition, have quite the tendency to often lean too heavily on words, used to the idea that, by throwing a lot of them at a situation, we can help rectify it, which is often far from the case (a stray thought that I nearly incorporated into my post here but didn’t quite have the room for was how most features on how to speak to those suffering from depression, loss, or other forms of grief usually involve saying LESS, or being forthright about not knowing what to say, rather than throwing empty platitudes that are more likely to make the person suffering feel worse.* “I know how you feel?” Do you really? DO you…?). I think we’re used to conflating silence with ignorance, or uselessness, when sometimes forgoing words – with thoughtful discretion – can be much more useful or supportive. Thanks for your great points, though!
*Just one of many such examples: https://grief.com/10-best-worst-things-to-say-to-someone-in-grief/
Kevin.
Your style of writing is intricately complex, full of emotional intensity, and rare combination of poetic phrasing, and casual speech. Reading this piece was simply a joy, so thank you.
I have not read the novel “Indian Horse” nor have I seen the film. What strikes my interest is the use of art to illicit emotional response. Clearly, this film has ignited, not only your understanding of the “brutal campaigns” in which we have subjected our First Nation’s brothers and sisters to, but also your empathy towards a people wronged.
Chamberlin states (as you have stated) ““I believe that none of us […] will be able to rest in the Americas and call this place home until we acknowledge the brutal campaign, by design and by default, to deny the humanity of aboriginal peoples” (59), by acknowledging our role in the subjugation, crimes committed against the First nations people here in Canada, we can move one step closer to true reconciliation.
My question for you is this: Do you think it is morally right to expect reconciliation in the long run? What does reconciliation look like to you?
My next analogy may seem ridiculous and out of place but hear me out.
Star Trek was envisioned by Gene Roddenberry, first a method of showing an ideal society, devoid of war, hungry and claims for power. Many of the technologies that we use today were first conceived as science fiction but later came to reality. This is life imitating art. In the case of “Indian Horse” art is imitating life.
Is it our job as artists to portray, both a world, we wish to imitate, as well as a world in which we are living?
In this particular instance, Is it valid to show a piece of art where everyone, specifically European Canadians and First Nations have learned to live together and how that relationship looks so that we may emulate it in reality, or is it too early to start portraying that life in art? Should we do both or should we focus on our admission of past and current treatment?
Love to hear your opinions.
Sean
Hi Sean,
Thank you so much for your kind words – they really mean the world!
Whoof. You pose a pretty hefty question here – kind of THE question on most Canadians’ minds these days, I’d say – and I thank you for jumping right in with it. I don’t think there’s an easy or comprehensive answer to whether settler Canadians necessarily ‘deserve’ Reconciliation (certainly not as a trite ‘forgive and forget,’ at any rate), but, personally, I do think that it seems like the healthiest means of looking towards a future for Canada for everyone living therein. I think I agree with Chamberlin in that the natural next step – which is still very much underway, and having plenty of pitfalls and setbacks along the way – is simply an act of acknowledgement: being aware of the abysmal mistreatment and cultural genocide of Indigenous and First Nations Canadians, both past AND present, and how pervasive and harmful the ripple effects therein have been for generations trying to live with the psychic weight of it (while still being beset with everything from ongoing racism to bureaucratic hangups – many of which, as Thomas King outlines in The Truth About Stories, seem to revolve around simply the right to self-declare as an Indigenous or First Nations citizen, despite centuries of family lineage! Gah!!). I think it’s easy to forget how substantial a portion of the population remain consistently unaware of those facts {I don’t like the word ‘ignorant,’ as it implies more negative ownership than I find is conducive to prompting people who could easily remain in convenient blind spots to learn and care more}. I think the best apologies are those that come with a full empathetic awareness of why and how what was done was wrong – and we have a lot of work to do before we as a populace and country are even at that step, let alone being able to move forward from there.
I’ve been struggling with that fact quite a bit of late, as it’s easy to get disillusioned with how slowly an ideological tide turns (I’m now harbouring hope that my kids’ generation might be the ones breaking actual ground in terms of proper acceptance and equality, and part of why I work with kids now is doing my tiny part to try to work towards preparing and raising a future generation that will be adequately prepared to make better decisions and stand by them than those of the past) – but just the act of being in this class, of learning facts and perspectives, and taking part in discussions about them, is something positive, which I think is worth remembering.
Your citation of Star Trek did make my chuckle – but I actually think it’s quite appropriate. Despite the main thrust of my post here about the circumstantial futility of words, I think stories and popular culture are enormous contributors into shifting widespread cultural attitudes and ideological tides, and I think Star Trek’s cultural value in terms of promoting positive values of acceptance and tolerance, and combatting racism, is something that shouldn’t be underestimated. I would definitely agree that popularizing similar stories of utopic acceptance and cohabitation (especially with a government assembly that properly balances the concerns of both European-descendant and Indigenous/First Nations affairs) could do wonders to help both spread positive messages and working towards a brighter, more tolerant future. I tend to, as a broad statement, find a lot of Canadian fiction quite dour and depressing, so it’d be really nice to see Canadian popular culture willing to put itself out there as working with national concerns in a more hopeful, optimistic, and forward-thinking fashion.
That said, in light of my previous point about acknowledgement, I think it’s REALLY necessary to be cautious to ensure that any depictions of that kind of utopic ‘sci-fi Star Trek Canada’ wouldn’t feel dismissive of the long history of mistreatment of Indigenous Canadians that we’re working really hard to unearth right now – but instead depict it as ‘we’re now here BECAUSE of the foundation we laid acknowledging past mistreatment,’ rather than sweeping it under the proverbial rug. Again – careless words can cause so much harm, but deliberate, thoughtful, and well-crafted ones can do so much to build towards a positive future. I love this idea, though, and will probably continue to mull it over throughout our course. Thanks Sean!
Hi Kevin,
I really enjoyed your academic yet compassionate analysis of the capability of words and stories to convey extraordinary trauma.
I was fascinated by your thought that, “the propensity for some instances of personal or cultural trauma, try as we might, are too cavernously affecting for words or stories to adequately lend escape or elucidation from. [trauma is an experience …] that the words don’t reach,’.”
You indicate that sometimes the //words themselves// do not exist for trauma.
I agree with your point, but I also see an alternative approach.
“The Ruins of Memory” by Lawrence L. Langer (1993) speaks specifically to Holocaust testimonies, but I will tentatively claim its relevance in this discussion. Langer argues that it’s not that words never exist for trauma. It’s more that, we’re so used to a specific survivor narrative which frames words and stories: and this narrative is both difficult to escape from and problematic in that it doesn’t have the space for all trauma experiences.
Langer elucidates that conventional narrative patterns of survival stories speak to resilience. The cultural expectation is that survival narratives should be uplifting and optimistic, with some kind of happy ending.
Therefore, the violent colonization and attempted genocide of Indigenous peoples is a disruption of narrative codes used by humanity for centuries. There is an incompatibility between the attempted genocide and colonization of entire tribes of people, and the optimism of conventional survival narratives. Because the experience of an on-going colonization; a history of sexually abusive residential schools; a historical attempt at government-sanctioned genocide of Indigenous peoples; the on-going land claim disputes; the studies of which show Indigenous peoples today are experiencing trans-generational trauma; the loss of language and certain traditions due to the historical criminalization of practicing Indigenous traditions -this all speaks to an experience of colonization and trauma which exceeds the frameworks of familiar literary and historical narrative forms.
(See link for source referencing government-sanctioned murder and scalping of Indigenous peoples: https://search-proquest-com.ezproxy.library.ubc.ca/docview/348627413?accountid=14656&pq-origsite=summon )
I remember being in eighth grade and reading a sociology textbook. I cannot remember the exact wording, but the contents spoke to how despite a brutal history: Indigenous languages and tradition are slowly being restored and the generational gap invoked by residential schools is going away. My eighth-grade teacher frowned when he read this with us. He said that it’s too optimistic, and not necessarily true. This is an example of how sometimes it isn’t that words don’t exist. It is that narratives which are powerful are hard to escape from. It can be hard to navigate new narratives to frame words: but we cannot rely on old trauma/survivor narratives of optimism and hope because it problematically obscures the devastation and impact of human atrocity and trauma.
when you have writers who are not indigenous, telling stories of indigenous experience: aside from the problem of colonizing narratives, it’s a narrative which obscures the devastation and impact of trauma. And as Chamberlin indicates, stories are powerful.
A quick summation of this different approach then: It is not the words, so much as a difficulty to overcome the way we are used to words being framed by narratives. And the problems which arise when that powerful narrative speaks over the voices and agencies of actual Indigenous peoples sharing their own stories.
Kevin, your writing is very fascinating. You said, “it’s hard to shake the culturally ingrained sense of doubt – the worry that, although words and stories may make us feel closer to the world we live in, that feeling may be nothing more than mollifying delusions of grandeur, and a refusal to engage with actual functional change”.
I will argue that in light of this powerful and problematic historical narrative. That there are events which disrupt historical narratives of resilience and hope: like the violent colonization against Indigenous peoples. In this case, a new narrative and way of structuring/framing words is needed which does not obscure or soften the blow of violence perpetrated against Indigenous peoples. I argue that by listening to the words of Indigenous people using their agency and voice to speak to their own story: as listeners, we are, in fact, even if in very small part: refusing to partake in the obscuring of human atrocity. Stories have power. So this is actual functional change.
Hi Alexis,
Thank you so much for your incredibly powerful, and thought-provoking reply. I think you make an excellent and really necessary distinction of ‘not finding the right words’ and them not existing, and I thank you for it. You also hit upon what I think is one of the toughest things about tackling Truth and Reconciliation head-on: the disappointment, incomprehensibility, or even frustration of it not leading to a conventional ‘happy ending,’ and the inevitable process of framing it within our own imbedded narratives and involuntary plot arcs, when the reality is far more complex. That said, I think that there’s actually a lot of hope imbued in that seeming helplessness of not knowing how to properly approach Reconciliation, and that recognizing and being forthright about expectations and imbedded narratives is a great way to have a more conducive discussion, and better work towards Chamberlin’s notion of common ground.
If I can amend my blog post here in light of your much appreciated insights here, I’d probably assert that we (Canadians, regardless of descent, but especially those who haven’t experienced firsthand the kind of hardships of Indigenous or First Nations communities – and heck, probably people on the whole, regardless of background or life experience) could probably infinitely benefit from becoming better and more patient listeners, and more willing to vocalize what we don’t know, without fear of judgment (and paired with the intention to listen and learn). In the case of the Indian Horse example I used, I personally may not know the proper means for making sense of the trauma of Residential schools – but I can resolve to always be willing to listen to the experiences of Indigenous Canadians who lived in them, or the families of those who did, listen to their words unpacking the experience, and gradually accrue a richer and deeper understanding. Stories, embedded narratives, and the corresponding prejudices may have carved out the horrific past and present for Indigenous Canadians – but I fervently agree that allowing them the proverbial floor to share their own can help unravel, and even, eventually, start to heal, so much of the harm of the past, and work towards determining a kind of future where all words and stories are given proper consideration, presence, and value. Thank you so much, Alexis, for your articulate and thoughtful challenge to do so.
PS: Thanks also for introducing me to Langer’s work, as well, which I am now keen to investigate further! Great – and very appropriate – recommendation!
I forgot to cite my sources so:
Works Cited
Fink, Bob. “Scalping Not a Native Invention.” Star – Phoenix, Nov 24 2000, p. A16. ProQuest. Web. 21 Jan. 2019 .
Langer, Lawrence L. Holocaust Testimonies: the Ruins of Memory. Yale Univ. Press, 2007.