3.7

“…A text is made of multiple writings, drawn from many cultures and entering into mutual relations of dialogue, parody, contestation… ”  -Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” p. 148. 

My assigned section of GGRW: Start “Babo Jones sat in the Staff Room [19]” End “A white man,” said Norma …..”…” [30]

Babo Jones is a reference to Herman Melville’s character Babo in  Melville’s novella “Benito Cereno.” Babo is the leader of the slave revolt on board the San Dominick (Flick 145). When Amasa Delano boards the ship he believes that everything is going according to plan; however, he is unaware that there has been a revolt on board, in which the slaves, under the direction of Babo, rose up and slaughtered the majority of the crew (New York times).  Babo pretends to be Captain Cereno’s devoted servant, but in fact, he is closely monitoring Captain Cereno’s movements.

Sergeant Cereno refers to Captain Cereno in Herman Melville’s “Benito Cereno.” While it appears that Cereno is acting autonomously, Cereno is in fact, under the command of his “servant” Babo (Flick 146).

The “Pinto” refers to a horse with a “piebald” coat. It is also the name of a model of Ford automobile. Flick notes that Pinto horses are prominent in the drawings of the prisoners who were held at Fort Marion (146). Flick also notes that there may be a play on the word “Pinta” which was the name of Columbus’s ship. This may explain the link between the Pinto car and the puddle of water. Babo imagines that the “Pinto looked a little like a ship” (King 27).

Jimmy Delano is most likely a reference to Columbus Delano, a lawyer and politician, who worked as the head of the Bureau of Indian Affairs during the presidency of Ulysses S. Grant (1822-1885). Flick describes how Delano defended the Bureau of Indian Affairs against charges of mistreatment of the Native Americans in the Red Cloud Agency in South Dakota in 1875 (146).

Martha Old Crow : She is a medicine women who also appeared in King’s Medicine River (Flick 146).

George Morningstar: A reference to George Armstrong Custer. Custer was a military captain during the Sioux Wars. He achieved notoriety for leading an outnumbered infantry into battle against Sioux and Cheyenne warriors. Custer and all of his men were killed (Encylopedia of World Biography). To cite the Encyclopedia entry on Custer: “Custer was a man so paradoxical that he could fight corruption in the Indian Bureau to the disservice of his own carrier, yet also order a charge to kill Native Americans.” Custer was given the name “Son of the Morning Star:” by the Arikaras in Dakota (Flick 146). George’s comment “Right…And I’m General Custer” (384) makes this allusion to George Armstrong Custer quite evident.

John Wayne is referenced frequently throughout King’s novel. John Wayne was an iconic Hollywood actor featured in numerous Westerns. He has come to epitomize the glamourized Cowboy figure of the Hollywood Western. Flick tells us that Native Americans have boycotted his films in the past due to the discriminatory portrayal of Native Americans (147). In an interview with Playboy in 1971, Wayne reveals some troublingly racist, sexist and homophobic assumptions.

The Lone Ranger is a prominent figure in the American literary and filmic imaginary. The Lone Ranger is portrayed as a masked man, who has a devoted “Indian” companion named Tonto.  He has served as the hero of numerous films, western books, radio productions and television series.

Ishmael : The name of a character in Herman Melville’s Moby Dick.The opening line of Moby Dick has become one of the most iconic in American literature: “Call me Ishmael.” (Flick 143).

Robinson Crusoe : Refers to the hero of Daniel Defoe’s now iconic novel Robinson Crusoe published in 1719. Flick draws the connection between Crusoe’s shirt: “the one with the palm trees,” (King 9) and Defoe’s desert island story.

Hawkeye : Apparently borrowed from Native American culture, Hawkeye is a name that circulates in American “frontierest” literature and film. He is the hero of numerous Hollywood features.

Works Cited

Flick, Jane. “Reading Notes for Thomas King’s Green Grass Running Water.” Canadian Literature 161-162. (1999). Web. April 04/2013.

King, Thomas. Green Grass Running Water. Toronto: Harper Collins, 1993. Print.

(*All of my other research sources are linked directly into the text!)

3:5.

Question # 4

One of the instances of King’s “narrative decolonization” that I found particularly interesting was the sequence in which Changing Woman encounters Ahab, the protagonist from Moby Dick. The passage ambles in King’s non-linear fashion; he weaves references from Herman Melville’s Moby Dick into the Coyote narrative, to produce a dream-like sequence in which Western literary texts are split open, stretched apart and disassembled.  The narrative follows Changing woman, who (as is outlined in the introductory material to this lesson) is a figure which will be unfamiliar to a non-First Nations audience. The passage thus constitutes an encounter: a re-imagining/re-assembling of Western and First Nations stories and cultural frameworks. By imbedding Changing Woman within a comic perversion of Moby Dick (one of the hallmarks of the Western literary canon) King disorients the ideological scripts that police the precincts of Western cultural and artistic achievement. The violence of the whale hunt seems to symbolically encode the violence of western imperialism, as well as the violence of white male privilege. King writes:

“And everyone grabs their spears and knives and juicers and chain saws and blenders and axes and they leap into little wooden boats and chase whales. And. When they catch the whales. They kill them” (195).

King draws a linkage between the European imperial project (whale hunting as one expression of this project) and the institutionalized racism and sexism that permeated the canonization of certain works of Western literature. The exchange between Ahab and Changing Woman clearly illustrates this: “We’re looking for the white whale, Ahab tells his men. Keep looking.  (…) Black whale? yells Ahab. You mean white whale, don’t you? Moby-Dick, the great male white whale? That’s not a white whale, says Changing Woman. That’s a female whale and she’s black (196).”

It is difficult not to miss the highly charged racial and sexual politics **(click on link for a discussion of the intersection between settler colonialism and patriarchy)  of this exchange. Positing Changing Woman as the spokesperson for silenced discourses  (those belonging to women and non-Europeans)  King injects the story of the oppressor with the voices of the oppressed.

Another instance of narrative decolonization is the sequence in the realist story, in which the narrative line cuts between scenes of characters all watching the same Western (pages 214-221).  The Western, featuring John Wayne, replete with its images of charging cavalry and ‘Indians’ on horseback, serves as a frame through which King filters the experiences of his characters. The clichéd archetypes presented in the pop culture genre of the Western, seem hollow and sterile in comparison to the vibrantly complex and psychologically nuanced characters that King has created. This tension between the Hollywood version of “Indian-ness” and the lived realities of First Nations people is central to King’s commentary and to his textual decolonization.  I referred in my discussion of Moby-Dick to the violence of white male privilege. In this particular passage, we find a different kind of violence: the violence of having one’s identity subsumed into hollow stereotypes, and commodified as a product in the entertainment business.

Works Cited

King, Thomas. Green Grass Running Water. Toronto: Harper Collins, 1993. Print.

3:2.

Question #5.

The question that I have selected for this week’s blog assignment asks us to examine parallels between King’s writing style in Green Grass Running Water, and Robinson’s in “Coyote makes a deal with the King of England.” I find the similarity in narrative voice most evident in comparing the Coyote narrative thread in King’s novel to Robinson’s story.  The non-linear, disjunctive and tangential style employed in King’s coyote sequence echoes that of Robinson’s narrative style. In both texts, the disjointed and slightly ambling narrative style mimics the peaks and valleys of conversation. I find that both of these texts reproduce, in a sense, the complexly shifting terrain of verbal communication. Both texts seem to mirror the pauses inherent in conversation, as well as the shifts in emphasis, the ungrammaticality, and the creative re-framing of words that happens in a conversation. The semantic play and the elisions in meaning that are present in both texts, seem to gesture to a communicative space beyond language itself.  As a reader, we may not wholly follow Robinson’s narrative, or we may find ourselves getting lost in King’s verbal play and digressions. In a sense, we are brought to the limits of language itself.  The pauses, and gaps in meaning, (which I find are also represented visually in the way in which the texts are arranged sporadically on the page) gesture perhaps to the extra-lingual, the multiple forms of communication that are present when we engage in conversation with one another. Both the coyote narrative in King’s story, and Robinson’s “Coyote Makes a deal with the King of England” invoke both the authority as well as the slipperiness of language. This makes me think of a phrase that struck me when I was reading Robinson’s story: “But that’s going to be your word from now ’til the end of the word” (72).  I feel that this play upon “word” and “world,” gestures to an understanding of language as ‘giving shape to our world.’ But simultaneously, when considered in light of what I have proposed about Robinson’s story- the way which the writing style both affirms and denies the supremacy of language- I think this verbal play can also be read as ironically tongue-in-cheek. What lies beyond the “end of the word?” I find that both King and Robinson’s texts, which suggest a confluence of oral tradition, literary tradition, and the everyday speech of conversation, are actively implicated in investigating this space beyond the “end of the word.” Both King and Robinson both invoke the ‘word’, in its ‘world shaping powers,’ as well as paradoxically gesture to its limitations, and to those ways of knowing which reside beyond language.

Works cited

King, Thomas. Green Grass Running Water. Toronto: Harper Collins, 1993. Print.

Robinson, Harry. “Coyote Makes a Deal with the King Of England.” Living by Stories: a Journey of Landscape and Memory. Ed. Wendy Wickwire. Vancouver: Talonbooks, 2005. 64-85.

I realize that this post is incredibly late, but I wanted to share it anyways.

In reading over some of my fellow students’s blogs concerning our stories of home, I found several through lines that permeated our narratives. I want to discuss three main elements that I found in common across our blogs.  Firstly, I found that there was a repeated emphasis on home as being something that is fluid and mobile, rather than something fixed and static. This was articulated in Hava Rosenburg’s story as home being “in transit,” both literally and figuratively: “Home is riding the 41 down Marine Drive,” and in Hannah Vaartnou’s narrative, as something which escaped easy definition but which she equates with the ocean (interesting to note how the sea is itself an iconic symbol of change and of kinesis). In both of these depictions, home is fluid. Notions of home seem to reject easily definable boundaries. Home seems to exist just as much in the “in-betweens” as it does in the centres. This notion is in dialogue with my own narrative of home, and my depiction of home as an ‘estuary.’ Secondly, there was a sense that the notion of home is not one without problems. In all three blogs that I read, home was not something that was taken up without a certain critical lens. Hayden Cook closes his piece by investigating the geo-politics of home. He asks whose home is it? Is it the home of “the people who live there, the Tsuu T’ina, the government who restricts development…?” His piece addresses the problematics of overlaying one narrative of home onto the other. In Hannah’s account, she juxtaposes her idea of home against the archetypal versions of home that we are exposed to through dominant cultural narratives and through the media. This tension between a culturally sanctioned version of ‘home’ and the home that we are constantly in the process of crafting, is one which Hannah’s narrative explores. Finally, I found there was an emphasis on nostalgia and memory in our accounts of home. I found again that there was a tension in these descriptions of nostalgia. On the one hand there was a sense of nostalgia in its seductive potential, as something to which we cling indulgently, and on the other hand, as something which is essentially illusory.

La Malinche by Jimmie Durham

2.6

Question 5

In his work “Orality and Literature: The Black and White of Salish History,” Keith Thor Carlson discusses the problematics inherent in European notions of “authentic” indigeneity. He writes, “While non-Natives have generally not been overly concerned with the historical legitimacy of Aboriginal legends and myths (if only because they assume them to be fiction) they have been greatly concerned with their authenticity” ( 55).  Carlson examines this eurocentric perspective, which holds that a Native story containing post-contact knowledge is somehow “not authentic.” To begin with,  this emphasis on pre-/post-contact is problematically eurocentric, in that it asserts European contact as the defining feature of an Indigenous temporal world view. Secondly, Carlson articulates that such an emphasis on “authenticity” challenges Salish modes of “truth making” and ways of knowing. By asserting the dominance of the Western conception of truth (indebted to Enlightenment epistemology) Europeans who question the “authenticity” of Native stories, risk violently overlaying one mode of “truth making” onto another. Carlson describes how the Salish history of literacy (which has been subjected to debates concerning its “authenticity” by European scholars) is embedded within a sacred narrative, making it, in essence, “sacrosanct” (59).  According to Carlson’s argument, to question the authenticity of these stories, which are embedded in a sacred narrative, is to fundamentally disrupt Salish frameworks of thought and ways of knowing. Lastly, the question of authenticity is implicated in a continual process of “Othering” which implicitly tries to keep Indigenous peoples in the “past,” as emblems of a static, “timeless” culture which can be juxtaposed against the “developing” cultures of the western world. This “Othering” is an ideologically loaded, and hugely troubling act, and one which I argue is still very much present today in the representations of Indigenous peoples in the popular media etc.

In thinking about constructions of authenticity, I was reminded of the artwork of Jimmie Durham. Durham’s work is frequently concerned with identity politics, and with undermining and exposing the ideologically weighted stereotypes that attempt to define “Indian-ness.” His work La Malinche, is a complexly ambiguous portrait which, in my opinion, speaks to the ways in which intersecting systems of oppression play upon the body. We do not know how to understand La Malinche; her hybridity is disorienting, and she troubles our understands of “authentic” indigeneity.

Here is a link to another of Durham’s works entitled Pocahontas’ Underwear, which deals with the problematics of exoticization and fetishization inherent in the “Othering” gaze.

Works Cited

Carlson, Keith Thor. “Orality and Literacy: The ‘Black and White’ of Salish History.” Orality & Literacy: Reflectins Across Disciplines. Ed. Carlson, Kristina Fagna, & Natalia Khamemko-Frieson. Toronto: Uof Toronto P, 2011. 43-72.

Question 3

In “First Contact as a Spiritual Performance” Lutz writes, “One of the most obvious difficulties is comprehending the performances of the indigenous participants” (32). This statement contains an assumption about the nature of the article’s audience which I would like to examine. Lutz expands upon this comment by claiming, “The key and usually unremarked problem is that we have insufficient distance from our own and our ancestor’s world view.”  In this statement Lutz is demonstrating the extent of his own ‘unremarked’ assumption about his readership. By using the inclusive “we” and “our ancestors” (32) Lutz is actually excluding all non-europeans. This implicit exclusionary act betrays a certain ideological assumption about knowledge production and the institutionalization of knowledge. While Lutz’s article makes a concerted effort to promote critical self awareness on the part of the reader by emphasizing a  “defamiliarization of the familiar,” the article nonetheless reproduces certain ideas about academic authority and issues of power. The very fact that Lutz expects to be writing for an audience of european descent reveals the implicit power hierarchy present within the academic institution.  As an academic,  Lutz speaks from a position of socio-cultural authority, whose claims to knowledge also invest him with a certain claim to cultural capital. While it may be impossible to transcend such a position as an academic, it is nonetheless possible to gesture to this position of cultural authority in one’s work and to acknowledge some of the problematics that such a position entails. Perhaps an acknowledgement on Lutz’s part as to the structural inequities present in the ‘researcher- subject of study’ relationship would help to address some of the implicit assumptions in the text. This discussion makes me think of Thomas King’s commentary on postcolonial theory in Chapter 2 of The Truth about Stories.  While acknowledging the promise that postcolonial theory contains, King questions the extent to which post colonial theory actually affects the lives of colonized peoples. He writes: “I know that postcolonial studies is not a panacea for much of anything” (58).  I feel King’s comment speaks to the structural inequality that is still very much present within academia and institutionalized education.

Works Cited

King, Thomas. “You’re not the Indian I had in mind.” The truth about stories: A native narrative. Toronto, Ont: House of Anansi Press Inc, 2003. 31-60. Print.

Lutz, John. “First Contact as a Spiritual Performance: Encounters on the North American West Coast” Myth and Memory: Rethinking Stories of Indigenous-European Contact. Ed. Lutz. Vancouver: U of British Columbia P, 2007. 30-45. Print.

August drips in fat oily droplets off the clusters of blackberries lining the railway. The air is thick with salt and the lingering smoke of fire pits. The berry studded bushes line the tracks owned by the BNSF Railway. The rail company runs a single-track mainline through the ocean side municipality of White Rock, British Columbia. How many times have I walked these tracks?  Born and raised in White Rock, the railway runs through my childhood like a river.  It cuts through my hazy childhood and rubs up against the shorelines of my adolescence.  At night, the tracks will become the mise-en-scène for the Friday night rites of teenage-hood. Bonfires, flaming testaments to the romances, the comedies, and the tragedies of burning youth, will erupt, defiantly leaving their mark on this seaside no zone. Being a teenager in White Rock, a town where birthing and dying are the two main pastimes, is a unique balancing act. Perhaps one could argue that adolescence in general requires a particular understanding of equilibrium, however, there is something about this post-card sea-town, flung out on the west coast of Canada, that demands a particular gangly grace from its teenage residents.

What is it about this particular crack in the late august evening? The fissure that splits its way through the sweaty air? What is it about this particular emulsion of light, with its heady mixture of gold- almost too ripe for photography- that has me intoxicated, spouting sugar drenched stories of ‘home’? How did I come to pin ‘home’ inside scent- inside summer, and blackberries, and bonfire smoke? Inside the over used metaphor of the railway?- a trope grown rusty with the once dewy eyed lustre of progress, now scarred with the violence of colonialism.

The railroad’s steel caress, that smears itself across a landscape that my ruthlessly virile ancestors once injected with their world affirming metaphors of a new life, runs through the unceded territory of the Semiahmoo First Nations.  I’m walking along a sprawling project in possession. To what extent are my stories of home fixed in such a project? Those stories that tell me where I’m from, where I “belong,” where I’m going. Those stories that make tidy little gardens out of unruly wilderness- that colonize mobility and liminality in favour of stasis and rootedness. Is my story like the railroad?: the great story making project of my forebears, who sought to unite a feral country from coast to coast, eclipsing the stories of others with their own.

I too have travelled coast to coast. I was sixteen, strapped in the back seat of my family’s minivan, making stories through the car window. It was one of those late august evenings maybe. Perhaps a bit like this one. A memory now lazy with haze and the bruised edges of dream. Somewhere in Ontario perhaps. A barbecue? A lake? Some pimped out Canadian kitsch dream, like the ones you see on postcards. The memory is faded now, torn and frayed at its edges, but I’ve still held onto it, an artifact from that time my parents trapped us in the car and drove us across this corrupted nation- puking my guts out on the dim future of my country’s shame. The nation’s body jellied and primped in the language of neoliberalism, ecological crisis, and silenced histories.

I fix my eyes on the point of convergence, where the tracks and the sea and the pine meet.  Glassy eyed and sugar tongued, I let the last dregs of the sun blur my story until it is no longer distinguishable from the hazy evening. Why cling to the steel through-line of story when perhaps ‘home’ is more like an estuary? Choosing wilderness over cultivated plots, I turn back towards my parents’ house.

1.5

“Blood sports on the edge of the world”

There is a cockfighting ring at the edge of the world. It sits on the border between the earth and the sky. It is said that it exists at the precipice between what we believe and what we can only imagine. Between reality and dream. Because as everyone who subscribes to a certain understanding of the world knows, the world has no edges. But nonetheless there exists a cockfighting ring at the edge of the world, which sits somewhere between reality and dream. It is said that each one of us has visited the ring before. But only in our dreams. And most of the time you don’t remember the dream. Nonetheless, the screams of the ring linger. The cheers of the crowd bleed their way in through the cracks in reality, becoming that buzzing in your head, that ringing in your ear, that phantom voice that calls your name in a crowd.

The people at the edge of the world are also people of the edge.  They exist between the sky and the earth, and they exist between life and death. It is unlikely you have met an edge person. But you may have felt them. Or you may have seen them without really knowing what you were seeing. You may have felt an unseen hand on the nape of the neck, and witnessed the way your hair stood on end, acknowledging someone’s presence. You may have seen them, suspended as an expression in the eyes of a human being who has lost everything. You may have only known them through story and through dream.  But it is possible to speak of a time- though so long ago that it seems impossible that there was such a time- before the edge people haunted the earth, a time when the edge people were only sky people. This was before the great cockfight that is, because everything changed after that.

The people at the edge of the world were once the sky people.  And they wanted to live on earth as the humans did. But there was no room on earth- what with the humans, and the animals, and the insects, and the plants, and the fish, and the fungi. How were the sky people to make a space for themselves on the earth? They decided to hold a contest, in the form of a cockfight (because cockfights are the only way that the sky people ever made any decision) to determine who had the best idea, and which sky person they would listen to.

There were four birds entered in the competition.

The first bird was pale gold, with feathers like wheat. “If my bird wins,” the owner of the golden bird said, “I propose a drought on earth, and all the humans crops will wither, and enough humans will die for there to be room for us on earth.”

The second bird was sapphire with teary eyes and dewy feathers. “If my bird wins,” the owner of the sapphire bird said, “I propose a great flood that will wash away the houses of the humans and the forests of the animals, which will make room for us on earth.”

The third bird was silver, with metallic feathers, and talons sheathed in iron. “If my bird wins” the owner of the silver bird said, “I propose a great war, and so many humans will kill other humans, that there will be room for us on earth.”

The fourth bird was small and unadorned. It was barely half the size of his competitors. The small rooster belonged to a sky woman whom no one recognized. She was a stranger. She proposed a story, and her only stipulation was that she be allowed to tell her story as her rooster fought. The other sky people laughed at this woman who owned this rooster and who had entered it in this blood game. How could so small a rooster compete in this game? How could a story prove more powerful than famine or flood or war? But nonetheless, they let this woman play.

The competitors prepared their roosters for the fight.

Despite his small stature, the story rooster fought valiantly.  What he lacked in size he made up for in speed. He was nimble, and his small size made it easier for him to dodge the blows of the larger birds. Before the crowd knew what was happening, the story rooster had won his first round.

And all the time, while her rooster fought, the stranger told her story.

She told a story of the earth. And how she had once been to the earth. How she had seen the humans who lived there. And she told them a story about the sky people themselves. About the sky people who wanted to become earth people. She told them that the sky people eventually go to earth, only to find that there is still no room for them. She told them that the humans already had famines and floods and wars. But what the humans didn’t have was a story. The humans didn’t have anyone or anything to blame the famines and the floods and the wars on. The sky people, recognizing that there is still no room for them on earth, try to return to the sky, but realize that they are stuck. They are trapped, stranded halfway between the earth and the sky. And this is how the sky people become edge people.

The stranger explained how the sky people would be forced to live neither here nor there- neither on earth, and neither in the sky. How they would exist on earth only as spectres, as half formed thoughts, as shadows. And so she concludes,

“It is in this way that the edge people first came to dwell on earth. And it is this way that humans first found a story for all the bad things that had no explanation. The humans finally had a way to explain all of the terrible things that happen, and all of the terrible things that humans do to each other. And because the humans had no way of knowing that the buzzing in their ears, or the ringing in their minds, or the voices in their heads that whisper awful, unspeakable things, were caused by the presence of the edge people, the humans named these happenings “Evil.” And it was “Evil” that the humans were able to blame all the awful things of the world upon.”

As the stranger finished her story, her rooster delivered the final death blow to its opponent. The small story rooster had won. The crowd grew quiet. Faces turned in disbelief to the stranger who had just won the game. Eventually, a murmur of confusion rose from the crowd. Voices called out asking the woman to take back her story. The sky people did not want to be trapped in between; they did not want to live as edge people. But the story had been told. The small rooster had won. And you need to be careful with stories, for once you tell them, once you set them loose, they cannot be taken back.

** My story mutated so many times over the course of writing, thinking and telling it, that I’m surprised it has even arrived in the form that it has. I started off with a series of fragmented images and let the story develop from there. The story revealed itself to me as I wrote it. If not for the due date deadline, I am sure it would have spiralled off in another direction. I still think there is much needed in the story to increase clarity. I guess this is merely a snapshot then- a glimpse into a perpetually moving story, one that doesn’t seem to like to be pinned down. 

In his work, If this is your land, Where are your stories? J. Edward Chamberlin emphasizes the contradiction at the heart of the concept of ‘Home.’ He writes, “Home is always border country, a place that separates and connects us, a place of possibility for both peace and perilous conflict” (Chamberlin 3). I feel that understanding Chamberlin’s concept of home as one of inherent contradiction helps us think through the problematics associated with our stories of home. “Home both binds and liberates us,” (Chamberlin 76) writes Chamberlin. In thinking about the ways in which we make sense of Canada as our home, I find this statement instructive. As Chamberlin articulates- stories of home shape us. It is through stories of home, of belonging, that we come to understand ourselves. As children, it is through understandings of home that we first come to understand the world. “Home” allows us to pinpoint ourselves on a conceptual map, to overlay an orderly schematic onto on an otherwise unruly understanding of self and world. It this sense we could say that home “liberates” us. It plays a fundamental role in the formation of our sense of self. However, as Chamberlin writes, these internalized narratives of home also bind us. They bind us to both a psychic and physical geography that risks eclipsing the psychic and physical geo-narratives of others who do not share our own. They bind us to a story of “belonging” that risks, (most likely without our awareness) perpetuating a binary of those who belong versus those who don’t. This fraught notion of home as one of both emancipatory as well as dangerously limiting dimensions, takes on new urgency in the light of Canada’s colonial history. The contradiction that Chamberlin identifies at the heart of ‘home’ aptly speaks to the feeling of unease held by many Canadians of European heritage. How am I, as a Canadian of European descent able to reconcile the fact that my narrative of home, in all the ways in which it has come to define me, is implicated in the erasure of the home narratives of others? Or as Chamberlin puts it, how do you come to terms with the way your nation’s narrative of home is implicated in a “history of dismissing a different belief or behaviour as unbelief or misbehaviour” (78). Perhaps, according to Chamberlin’s views on contradiction, home must necessarily exist in a state of tension and paradox. Perhaps this keeps us from getting too comfortable with notions of home. Maybe home needs to be perpetually held in a state of questioning to ward off the possibility of re-inscribing the “belief/unbelief” binary.  In his work, Deactivated West 100, Don McKay writes, “stories… have beginning and ends we can count on; they create little homesteads for us that, whether inflected comically or tragically, colonize flux” (McKay 44). This metaphor of story as “homestead” is one which I think serves this discussion quite well. I think that Chamberlin’s idea of ‘home’ as contradictory cautions us against the “homesteading” impulse in our own narrativizing surrounding ‘home.’ By embracing the contradiction at the heart of ‘home,’ by understanding the ways in which home both “liberates” and “binds,” we take a stance against the colonization of other people’s stories by our own stories.

Click to see a quick video of Don McKay reading from his work “Strike/Slip” 

(Chamberlin also gives a thorough discussion of how our narratives of home are steeped in a legacy of inclusion and exclusion, of belief and unbelief, of barbarian and civilized. His commentary made me think of the poem “Waiting for the Barbarians” by C.P. Cavafy. The artificially constructed nature of these binaries, and the ways in which they serve the ideologies of the powerful is illustrated in this poem.) Cavafy link

Works cited:

Cavafy, C.P. “Waiting for the Barbarians” from C.P. Cavafy: Collected Poems. Translated by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard. Translation Copyright © 1975, 1992 by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard. Reproduced with permission of Princeton University Press. Poetry Foundation.org. Accessed May 21 2015. Web.

Chamberlin, J. Edward. If this is your land, Where are your stories?. Toronto, ON:Vintage Canada, 2003. Print

McKay, Don. Deactivated West 100. Kentville, NS: Gaspereau Press, 2005. Print.