On Thursday morning after yoga I skipped song practice because my Introduction to Canadian Literature short response essay was due at midnight. There is a one week grace period but I didn't want to fall behind so I set my goal to meet the official deadline.
I wanted to get my journal entries updated so they were out of the way so it wasn’t until 9:15 that I actually sat down to write with the essay in mind. Up until that point I hadn't even checked to see what the essay was supposed to be about or downloaded the instructions. We were given a choice of three passages on which to write a close reading paper of five hundred words. I picked the passage from Thomas Wharton’s Icefields because it had more meat on it. I sat down and wrote on the top in long hand in stream of consciousness and also wrote down the most interesting phrases from the passage. I then typed out my long hand and pretty much had a rough first draft by 11:00 when it was time to log on for my Introduction to Canadian Literature tutorial.
Kelly told us that we wouldn’t need to provide in text citations as long as the essay was entirely based on the provided passage. If we were going to add elements from elsewhere in the book or from outside we would need a Works Cited list.
She told us that our final essay would definitely require outside sources.
She informed us that we need to form teams of two for our Ask the Author assignment, in which one student plays the role of an author and the other that of an interviewer. She said that if we don’t have a preference of partner to let her know so she can put together teams made up of those that aren’t socially fussy. I will definitely do that since I don’t want to fish around for a partner in this adolescent sea.
We looked at the Margaret Atwood poem “Progressive Insanities of a Pioneer” and I was surprised that all the students that commented used the term “terrifying" to describe it.
I said that I understand how people could see it as terrifying but I think that it’s comical and somewhat slapstick.
Kelly reluctantly agreed that some playfulness and humour can be found in the poem but rejected my assertion that it’s slapstick.
The green energy serves as bookends for the poem.
Atwood uses language to reinforce lack of agency.
The poem says that the landscape refuses to name itself.
I pointed out that things can’t refuse to name themselves because they can't name themselves. He can name it until the cows come home like everybody else did before him. I argued that his difficulties with naming are an internal conflict.
Again Kelly disagreed with me and said something about the people having named it thousands of years after living there.
I wanted to argue but she was already taking other comments from those she agreed with.
She’s wrong that Indigenous people would have waited thousands of years to name a place. They probably named it the first time they saw it and there might have been hundreds of names before one stuck. Other First Nations groups visiting the land would have had their own names and so on.
We looked at the text from a page of Knud Rasmussen’s journals about Rasmussen negotiating with a tribe of Inuit to get them to trade him some of their amulet charms because he was collecting them. He presented an argument that the charms would still have power if not worn and so they would still benefit by giving them to him. The people agreed with his argument and he also made it clear that he wasn’t interested in the charms for their power.
I was again surprised by the responses of other students. They all thought that Rasmussen was being arrogant and manipulative while swinging around a sense of entitlement.
I argued that the text shows him to be strikingly un-arrogant, especially when compared to hundreds of examples of explorers that out and out lied to Indigenous people and were abusive towards them.
The students thought that the Natives were being deceived by Rasmussen and Kelly agreed that Rasmussen was taking elements of local knowledge and using them to win his pitch to get the amulets.
I think it stinks of patronization to assume that the Natives were being fooled by Rasmussen. To see his arguments, which the leaders agreed with as manipulative is too assume that the Inuit were too naïve to have any understanding of basic human intention. The assumption that he was being manipulative comes without evidence. How do they know this wasn’t the way that every Inuit haggled over amulets?
But everyone in the class besides me, including the TA seems to readily believe the cookie cutter interpretation.
If every explorer had been as honest in his transactions as Knud Rasmussen, colonization would have been a much less negative experience.
Kelly tends to agree with every student besides me. I hope that our differences don’t affect my marks. My other TA Alexandra seems to make an effort to see everyone's perspective.
I returned to my essay.
I had chips and salsa with sour cream for lunch, worked a little more and then took a siesta.
When I got up at around 15:30 I worked straight through until dinnertime.
I had a potato, a chicken leg and gravy and then kept on working.
I uploaded my essay to the Quercus site a little before midnight. Here it is:
True love leaves no traces – Leonard Cohen
Freya is No Small Violence in Thomas Wharton’s Icefields
In Thomas Wharton’s Icefields Freya is presented as the perfect explorer who visits and studies a society without causing perpetual disturbance. The falseness of this claim can be found in analysis of her methods. She feels the need to become part of the societies with which she comes in contact in order to induce reactions that display the character of these communities. She believes that she only does this enough to harvest characteristics without leaving a trace of herself behind. But she does not stay long enough to see her traces disappear and so she cannot not know that this is true. The passage presented on page 184 is in itself proof of her permanent impact; and finally her own modernity could not help but inflict upheaval at the point of first contact.
Freya claims that she must become part of the subjects she touches in order to stir “shifts and adjustments to her presence”, to extract and record truthful impressions of cultural character, but not enough to inflict lasting injury. She asserts that she only “puts herself there because she knows the trace will be lost.” But how does she know this if she does not stay long enough to see her trace disappear? She could not remain without her presence continuing to leave a trace unless she were to become invisible, which she says she cannot “pretend to be”.
The jolt of Freya’s “small violence” is perhaps meant to be as slight as that of a doctor testing a patient’s reflexes with a hammer that does not smash the knee. But the idea that her work is harmless because it is only “first contact" rings false, especially when “her writing is a record of damage.” Making herself part of a community inevitably changes the social landscape. The act of becoming a part of something changes what that thing is, as does later removing oneself from the whole. In fact, adding to a whole and later disengaging from it permanently changes it twice.
The passage on page 184 is ironic because it is itself a canyon gouged out by Freya’s passing. Hal sits at the bottom of that gorge trying to convince himself the wounds she inflicted upon those around her were superficial and temporary. Freya’s effect upon Hal was not a “small violence”. As he admits, she moved “like a bullet”, and even slight bullet wounds leave scars. It is not true that there is no lasting trace in her aftermath, and Hal’s reaction to her passing is evidence of this. He converts himself to her belief that her journalistic intrusions on communities left no lasting marks. In joining this faith he can apply it to their relationship and console himself that the painful effect she had on him will soon also disappear.
Freya is not the ideal explorer because she believes that the reactions of communities to her intrusions communicate what is essential about them. She further fails in this regard because she is blind to the permanence of those responses.
However, it is ironic that the last community with which Freya interacts is made of settlers of European descent. She enters this settlement as a harbinger of a society in which women are more liberated. As any first contact with someone more advanced will have a drastic impact on the other, her presence produces the shock of culture clash on those who do not know what to make of her. As a representative of the new womanhood Freya’s final first contact effectively results in a colonization of the colonists.
I stayed up for an extra hour to post my blogs and then I went to bed a little before 1:00.
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