On Tuesday morning after yoga I continued going through my lecture notes and the corresponding slides in preparation for my Canadian Literature exam. I was surprised to find one slide about Residential Schools that had the same misinformation that I’d seen last year when I took Indigenous Studies. The slide stated that starting in 1920 Residential Schools were mandatory for all First Nations children between the ages of 7-15. This is incorrect, since the Indian Act at that time clearly states that “Indian" children must attend either a Day School, an Industrial School, or a Residential School. It fell on the Indian Affairs minister to decide which kind of school they should attend. I think out west the Residential Schools were more dominant but the fact is that only for a couple of years in the 1940s did more than half the Native students go to Residential Schools. The rest either went to Indian Day Schools or regular schools.
Perhaps because I was pumped up with anxiety over my assessment later that morning but I was extra perturbed over the misinformation. I made a point that I would email Professor Kamboureli about it after my exam.
I decided that I needed to relax before the test and so I did a song practice, but I shortened some of the songs so I would be done by 8:30. That way I could have breakfast and coffee before my exam.
I did a bit more studying after breakfast and then logged on at 9:01 to take the assessment. I had three hours from then and it didn’t look like there was a place for me to write on the site. I had been given the impression that we would download a document to write the test on but I didn’t see any. So I created a document with Word and wrote in it offline while the clock was ticking on the site. There were two questions, each with three essay choices. I took the poetry choices and started writing. Like I’ve said before I don't type quickly and so if I get low marks writing short essays I will protest to the full extent of the possibilities for doing so.
Here are my two essays:
In Marlene NourbeSe Philip’s “Discourse on the Logic of Language” she deals with the sense of being alienated from one’s own language. It is the speaker in a main, verse formed, first person section of the poem who personally addresses this abjection. The other sections take different forms to communicate the primary feeling of being cast out as a speaker. The gloss on the left is turned on its side in relation to the rest of the poem, but as it presents a deeper, unencumbered reality of speech, its positioning actually reveals that it is the other texts of the poem that are sideways. The gloss on the immediate right of the first person poem is presented as a historical edict in the voice of authority enforcing the abjection of discourse and of speaking any tongue other than that which the authority enforces. This text serves as the hard counterpoint to the sideways text of free use of the tongue. Separate from those three texts, on an opposite page is a fourth voice, presenting pseudo scientific declaration about the nature of speech in the brain. Finally, a fifth voice below the scientific voice presents a multiple choice test, meant to poke fun at ideas about the tongue and to soften the impact of the more extreme authoritarian voice.
Using five distinct voices in a poem about the suppression of language serves to create irony, humour and a way of resisting the forces that would limit multilingualism. Also the fact that all of the voices are speaking English adds to this irony, while also communicating that there are multiple languages contained within a given tongue, as well as many forms of speech.
In the central, first person poem, Philip breaks down language with a stuttering effect when she has the speaker say, “A mother tongue is not / not a foreign lan lan lang / language.” The stuttering creates another moment of irony as it works against the lines own statement. The breaking up of the words renders the declaration about the mother tongue foreign. It expresses lack of confidence in the truism that is being expressed. This effect is accentuated in the next line when “language” is slant rhymed with “l/anguish”, to communicate confusion about the speaker’s relationship with their mother tongue. There is another instance of irony as Philip manages to once again break free from the limits of speech by using one word “l/anguish” constructed with a slash to make it exist as two words in the same space: “languish” and “anguish”. She both defeats abjection through this trick of syntax and communicates frustration with feeling defeated by it at the same time.
The turned sideways gloss on the left presents an idealized reality of the use of the tongue in a world where the speaker is the authority. The use of the tongue to not only clean a baby by licking but also to unoppressively silence the infant’s own tongue stands counter to the threat of the edict to the right. The threat of cutting out the tongue of slaves that speak their forbidden language pulls upon the right side of the first person poem while the account of the mother using her tongue to nurture pulls on the left. But the mother’s world of nurturing with the tongue is flipped and harder to read to accentuate that it exists in a world that must be accessed by way of effort. The right side is representing authority and ultraconservatism that enforces the abjection of language while the left represents a liberal but secret world where mothers have power and use their tongues to give life and language. It is the opposite of abjection.
Question 2
Margaret Atwood’s “Progressive Insanities of a Pioneer” uses time differently than Robert Kroetsch’s “Stone Hammer Poem.” Atwood is presenting an unfolding history of a surreal situation in which a faceless pioneer finds himself. Kroetsch, on the other hand moves backward and forward in time as he presents the real situation of an object having existed longer than the speaker's experience, or that of his father or grandfather who found it. Kroetsch’s method of putting some verses in the past and some in the present but eventually ending in the present serves to convey better the idea of time, either past or present as that which is remembered.
But Atwood is less concerned with time in her poem as she is with conveying a sense of wilderness as emptiness. Kroetsch’s poem is actually not about wilderness at all but rather about its timeless absence as is conveyed by the stone hammer. The stone hammer is the opposite of wilderness because it represents the civilization that created its technology connecting through time with the speaker creating a poem. The stone hammer is never alone in any verses of the poem. It always has human companionship while Atwood’s pioneer is thoroughly isolated from mankind and untouched by anyone. Kroetsch’s verses show that the hammer has been touched by its creator, by the Indigenous people that made use of it, by the imagined First Nations child who might have lost it, by the speaker’s grandfather who found it and lost it, by the speaker’s father who found it again and by the speaker poet who connects all of these people together through the hammer. The placing of the hammer in the present for the first two verses, then in its farthest past, followed by it being found by the speaker’s grandfather, then back to its far past and forward again serves to crowd all of the people that have touched it together. This sense of communion would not be created if Kroetsch were to have used time in a linear manner. This sense of community is infused in the hammer and therefore it civilizes it’s environment even when it is lost. By its existence into the past it renders the land where it exists as having never been wilderness.
Atwood’s pioneer however is continuously lost even though he is at the centre of a map. Unlike the hammer he is not found and he is not touched by human hands. He craves the enclosure that the hammer has of being surrounded by timeless community. As line six of the poem suggests he is not only “Unenclosed" but he is "un-" before "enclosed". He is detached from the very concept of enclosure. His plea at the end of the first verse suggests that his situation in this wilderness is a type of purgatory outside of his own making. There is an empty space before the last line of the verse. The space is presented as the space in which he is trapped and from which he shouts, “Let me out!" Atwood uses the irony of a victim being contained in a lack of enclosure.
In the third verse of Atwood’s poem the pioneer’s house has more containment than the pioneer as it is “in the middle of nowhere” with the word "middle" being in the middle of the last line of the stanza. But inside of the house the pioneer’s mind is "in the middle / of nowhere" with the word "middle" on the edge of the middle of the stanza, about to be pushed off into the end “of nowhere". She conveys here that although the enclosure that is the house has enclosure, the pioneer’s mind continues to exist in the wilderness.
And so these two poems convey opposite ideas. Robert Kroetsch’s Stone Hammer exists in a world where there is not and never has been a wilderness as long as it has existed. Because it is a technology created by civilization and later found by a speaker creating art, the hammer connects the past civilization with the current one with no wilderness being wherever it is. Margaret Atwood’s “Progressive Insanities of a Pioneer” creates a situation where nothing can exist but wilderness even though it is occupied. The pioneer needs community but only has himself. The hammer civilizes by existing while the pioneer de-civilizes by resisting the environment that surrounds him.
I enjoyed writing the essays but I don’t like being tested. Whether I get a high mark or not I was glad that horrible Canadian Literature course was over. There was no reason why it should have been such a trial since I’ve enjoyed all the other “Canadian” themed courses I’ve had before, but this one had such a social agenda that it just got under my skin. I also didn’t think I was marked fairly and so I don’t have high hopes for a great final grade.
After I’d finished I emailed the professor to tell her the information she’d used on Residential Schools was incorrect. I also explained why. She got back to me later saying, “Thanks for this, but I got my information from the Native Healing Foundation. I’ll look into it though.” Unbelievable! It’s right there in the Indian Act and people ignore it.
I had jalapeno kettle chips and yogourt for lunch.
I took a siesta but didn’t sleep very long and got up by 14:35. I posted my blog and then had time for a bike ride.
On Bloor Street at around Ossington a young redhead thundered past me while riding standing up. She was wearing a short black ruffled skirt over fashionably torn panty hose with knee length black and purple horizontal striped socks. Almost at every red light she reached down to adjust her panty house and at least once while riding. I passed her around Bathurst.
At Bay Street two guys passed me at the red light and crept out to the other side of the crosswalk to be ahead. The camouflage pants of one of the guys was way down over his underwear in 80s hip hop style.
I rode down Yonge Street. At Dundas the Chinese guy who’s always there with the sign was shouting, “Merry Santa Clause! Ho Ho Ho! Santa Clause not real!”
At Queen and Bay there is a new homeless guy on the vent where the guy with the tent used to live. This guy has no tent. In front of the Sheridan, over another vent was someone lying in a sleeping bag.
When I got home Benji was standing in front of our building so I chatted with him for a while. He doesn’t understand why there’s a pandemic after all these years. I pointed out that I grew up on a farm and he was close to nature in Guyana, but now people are living so close together that it creates more chance for the spread of disease. He went to the Skyline to get a strawberry strudel they make that he likes. He says right now they only serve one customer at a time and so he had to wait.
I checked online and found that I only got a B + for my revised essay but that’s a lot better than the D – that I received for the one it replaced.
I downloaded all the superhero movies that came out this year, which weren’t very many. I got The New Mutants, Birds of Prey and Wonder Woman but it turned out that the Torrent for New Mutants contained a couple of Trojan viruses. Windows Defender caught them right away and I got rid of them and deleted the file. I’ll try another New Mutants torrent later.
I edited some photos from the negatives I scanned a couple of months ago.
I had two small potatoes, a pork chop and the last of my gravy while watching Andy Griffith.
This story was pretty empty of plot. A Hollywood movie producer is charmed by Mayberry and wants to shoot a picture there. But when everybody hears about it they start to change their clothes, and their stores to make them showy. The only one who doesn’t change is Andy who knows this is not going to go well. When the producer arrives the mayor's daughter Juanita sings "Flow Gently Sweet Afton” in a horrible voice. The mayor orders the old oak tree in the middle of the square to be cut down and that's when the producer speaks up and says that he doesn’t want the tree cut down and he wants everybody to go back to their normal lives and their normal ways of dressing. So they do and that’s the story.
Juanita was played by Josie Lloyd, who was the daughter Norman Lloyd who worked as a director for Alfred Hitchcock Presents. Julie returned once more as Juanita but later played the eccentric character Lydia Crosswaithe.
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