Canada as a Woman

            On Tuesday morning I worked out most of the chords for “Disk Jockey” by Serge Gainsbourg. 

            I finished typing out the lecture notes that I’d made during my stolen Thanksgiving holiday.

            Close to 11:00 I logged on for my “Introduction to Canadian Literature” lecture. 

            Once again I was the only student who used its camera and the only one that wanted to chat.

            Professor Kamboureli asked if I had a nice long weekend and I said “No”. I told her about a lecture having been posted on Thanksgiving but she didn’t seem to think it was that big a deal. These professors stick together. 

            Our next assignment is an essay outline due between October 22 and November 3. Someone asked if she could do it on her own but the professor said she had to collaborate. 

            Something about colonialism being a foundational element. 

            Who owns the stone hammer? 

            She talked about the pioneer in Margaret Atwood’s “Progressive Insanities of a Pioneer” and referred to him as white even though the poem doesn’t say so. I asked if it’s obvious that the pioneer is white. She said whiteness is taken as a normative condition. His perspective is that of a European. We know he’s white because he sees himself as the centre. He is anthropocentric. He tries to come to terms with the land as Terra Nullius. 

            He tries to name. What does naming signify? Naming to control, contain, to tame, to cultivate, make into property, to overpower and to deny Indigenous presence. I’m not sure that any of these things is really a prime motivation for naming. One certainly can’t say that Fort York was renamed “Toronto” to deny Indigenous presence. Was this country called “Canada” to deny Indigenous presence? Naming tends to be just trying figure out where you are and if the name you come up with is easier to understand than the name given by the Indigenous guide one might go with that. There are probably hundreds or thousands of accidental reasons why some places ended up with European names rather than Indigenous names. Naming may be an instinctive creative act. Not renaming things could be seen as a kind of plagiarism. Different First Nations groups had names for each other. Chances are each one would have preferred the other group calling them by their own name. In most cases Europeans called First Nations groups by their Indigenous names. 

            The idea that white Europeans are the only people that think they are at the centre of the universe sticks in my head sideways. I asked if there aren’t non-whites and non-Europeans that think that way. She said it’s true in the context of Canadian colonization. 

            The wilderness is fetishized. Emphasizing culture versus nature. Atwood uses the term “Ordered absence” as a paradox and an oxymoron. The pioneer is threatened and wants to turn nature into a resource. 

            The green paper in Atwood’s poem refers to cartography. I just thought the pioneer was an unformed name on the green page of nature. 

            He only relates through rationality. Impose self and assert self. 

            Colonialism’s mission was to civilize. I don’t think that's an accurate statement. The mission of colonialism was to colonize and that would have gone ahead whether there were Indigenous people in the Americas or not. Civilizing people was more of a fanatical sideline of some of the colonists. Saying the purpose of colonialism was civilizing people is like saying the purpose of a stick is to hit people. Colonialism could have formed colonies in cooperation with Indigenous people and still would have been colonialism. 

            The pioneer fails to read the language of the land. I am not random. 

           “I" is a masculine word. Not grammatically. I guess she means that women are more likely to be team players. 

            Both Atwood’s pioneer and Rasmussen express disgust. To be fair, Rasmussen's disgust is probably something that a Cree would have expressed if they sat down for an Inuit banquet. 

            The whale in the prairies is another paradox. 

            Black writing is reclaiming history that has been either rendered absent or destroyed. Double diasporic trajectory involves a middle passage. Slaves first brought to the US become immigrants to Canada. Most Canadians think that there was no slavery in Canada. 

            There was mention of the famous story of Marie Angelique who was hanged in Montreal for arson. The professor said she did burn the house down but that was never proven. 

            Dionne Brand is one of the most important black writers in Canada. “The Map of the Door of No Return". 

            Mary Ann Shadd Hill came from the States and was the first black newspaper publisher in Canada. 

            Lawrence Hill wrote The Book of Negroes. 

            In St Armand, Quebec is a cemetery for slaves called “Nigger Rock". 

            Africville in Nova Scotia was demolished in the 1960s. 

            Wayde Compton wrote After Canaan about Hogan’s Alley, Strathcona, Vancouver. 

            George Elliot Clarke also wrote about Africville in “Odyssey’s Home". 

            She reminded us of the poem CanLit by Al Birney in which he says “We are haunted by our lack of ghosts". 

            Rinaldo Walcott wrote “Black Like Who?”. 

            Black writing. Positioning as witness / witnessing as testimony. When witnessing crosses the threshold of observation and begins to operate as a speech act, then what is witnessed is no longer solely about the event itself, but also becomes a self referential act about the witness. 

            Black pioneers via Kareena Vernon in Black Prairie Archives. Vernon was Professor Kamboureli’s student and she supervised her dissertation. 

            There were four black migration periods to Canada: 

            1790-1900: The fur trade 

            1905-1912: The Oklahoma migration 

            1960s- now: The points system. A period when black immigrants weren’t allowed unless they were domestics, which is the basis for Austin Clarke’s story. 

            2012- now: Neo-Liberal immigration / Asylum 

            We looked at the narratives of black pioneers to Alberta and she compared them to Margaret Atwood's poem. I said that it's not a fair comparison and it would be better to compare white pioneer narratives with the black ones. I also said that it’s not obvious from the accounts that these are black pioneers. 

            Someone said that the black narratives are in the present tense while the white ones are in the past. 

            I could see on her webcam Professor Kamboureli light up a cigarette in her study. It was the first time I’d seen a U of T professor smoking. 

            There is not often contact with Indigenous people in white narratives. 

            Self alienation versus social rejection.

            Susana Moody’s accounts more about the individual. 

            Austin Clarke 1934- 2016 was the first black Canadian writer to become internationally known. He won the Giller prize and later became an ambassador to Barbados. His book “Nine Men Who Laughed" talks about what blackness entails. 

            Us versus them; remembering versus forgetting. Laughter as a trope of self irony. For coming to terms. Carnivalesque laughter. The use of colour of skin and of brown suit. Them/there versus Now/here. Mobility versus stagnation; body versus gender; assault versus embrace; inside versus outside. 

            Introduction: In search of a rhetoric. Finding a language that articulates. There is a slippage between Clarke and the voices of his characters. He writes himself into characters. Character as metaphor. Author as reader. The particular versus the universal. 

            Rabelais wrote in the medieval period about carnivalesque laughter. Laughter as a sign of defeat and resistance, as a nervous tick but not as mirth. Laughter as the weapon of fools. The fool in Shakespeare was allowed to speak the truth since nobody took him seriously. 

            Abjection is the state of being cast off like a parasite. 

            The powers of horror when body experience doesn’t conform to dominant paradigms. A sense of self developed through a sense of loss. A condition of otherness. He has no life because he is not free in mutual creative relationships. 

            J.S. Woodsworth wrote Strangers within Our Gates" in 1909. He provides an hierarchy of races and ethnicities based on their ability to assimilate into Canadian society. References to undesirable immigrants. Wastage and parasites. 

            Canada as a woman. A metaphor for arrogance. "She assaulted me”. The land was penetrated. The male immigrant is feminized. The Canadian system immobilizes black men. How is Clarke using gender? 

            A young woman seemed to try to articulate that she thought there was something misogynistic about Clarke’s treatment of women but she was too shy to get her point across. 

            The professor’s phone kept ringing and she explained she didn't know how to turn it off except by picking up and then hanging up. She further explained that these calls were coming because it was her birthday and suddenly several students flooded the chat with "Happy Birthday" wishes. 

            George looked at himself in the mirror and laughed. He saw that he didn’t look right and stopped laughing. 

            The character is unnamed except by his neighbour Pat who wrote the name on a Christmas card. Why does Clarke forget George’s name? 

            How is Pat’s body represented? 

            How does George think of his father? 

            I had a cold hot Italian sausage for lunch. 

            I worked on typing my lecture notes. 

            Later when I checked my email my British Literature professor offered me an extension for my essay until Monday. I responded that I thought he should pay back this offer to everyone but that I would take it. 

            For dinner I had a couple of potatoes, a chicken leg and gravy while watching “Interpol Calling”. 

            This story begins with a nervous man passing through customs in New York after arriving on a boat from Europe. He is allowed through but then the when the customs officer shouts for him to come back he runs and gets hit and killed by a truck. The officer had called to him because he’d forgotten his gloves. It is found that his passport says that he was a wanted criminal in Europe named Jason Tasker. But police reports show that Jason Tasker was killed in Hamburg two months before. At Interpol Inspector Moray suddenly has a thick French accent whereas it was closer to English in the previous episode. Duval looks at a picture of the tattoo found on the man with Tasker’s passport. It is an elaborate design meant to conceal a German concentration camp tattoo. They track the number and find he was Jacob Serrack and had left Auschwitz for Hungary after the war but had turned up at a refugee camp called Kernick in Austria a month ago and disappeared from there two weeks ago. They also find that a considerable amount of refugees have been disappearing from that camp. It also turns out that all of the men came to the camp with property such as jewellery. Duval arranges with the local Austrian police to put an officer named Muller undercover in the camp and for him to make it known while he is there that he has money if it will help him get out. Shortly Muller disappears from the camp but leaves a tape recording behind for Duval that reveals that the Anna Grauber, the secretary of the camp’s director had made a deal with him. The police drop the information near Grauber that they’ve picked up Muller. Muller follows her when she heads to warn her accomplices and they are all arrested. Duval decides that this is only one end of the operation. Muller has already been given a passport and a job on a merchant ship to New York. Duval asked him to go all the way and he agrees. Duval also goes to New York. In the United States Muller connects with Marston’s Employment Agency. They will find him a job but take half of his pay. A man named Carter in the same boat as Muller comes to pay Marston and then leaves. Muller is assigned a handler named Creedy to watch him. In his hotel Muller calls Duval and lets him know what’s happened so far, including about Carter. After Muller hangs up Creedy comes in and checked the phone to see if any calls have been made. When he finds the call was to Immigration he beats Muller. He dies in the hospital. Duval tracks down Carter and convinces him to expose the operation by showing him Muller’s body. 

            Anna was played by Colette Wilde who appeared on a few British TV shows and was in “Day of the Triffids".