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Reviews 2009
Home Words: Discourses of Children’s Literature in Canada. Edited by Mavis Reimer. Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2008. 231 pages. USD 85 (hardback).
Home Words
is the result of four years of collaboration between a team of literary
scholars, most of whom do not consider themselves to be specialists
in Canadian children’s literature, although many of them are familiar
with other areas of scholarship in children’s literature or other
kinds of Canadian literature. The collaboration is most immediately
visible in the fact that three of the ten articles in this collection
are co-authored. More interesting is that the various critics fill,
expand and enrich one another’s definitions of what constitutes “home”
in the context of Canadian children’s literature.
Mavis Reimer
opens the collection with a discussion of the wide varieties of meanings
attached to the term “home.” Her conclusion connects the idea of
home to George W. Bush’s speeches at the time of 9/11 and to increased
security along the Canadian-American border, which implies that for
Canadians today, home is primarily defined in opposition to America.
The following seven articles consider what home might mean for various
groupings of Canadians, who are defined in terms of their native language,
their historical period, their ethnicity or a combination of these features.
The underlying assumption of these contributions is that what constitutes
home depends on who one is. The remaining three articles approach the
question of home from other vantage points.
All the papers
in the collection seek not only to discern the nature of “home”
in the literary works they discuss, but also to question whether this
view of home is as it should be. As Reimer explains in her introduction:
Learning to read ‘home’ matters. The homely imperatives adults direct to children through the texts designed for them proceed from determinate constructions of class, race, gender, and nation, and entail complicated understandings of the relation of self and other, kin and stranger, here and there. Learning to read ‘home’ matters: it is, perhaps, the beginning of rewriting it. (Reimer xviii)
Given the focus
on identifying categories of Canadians in the first seven articles,
Reimer and her team’s primary, albeit unstated, goal for rewriting
home in the Canadian context seems to be the creation of a home which
is more sensitive to differentiation.
In their discussion
of texts produced during the colonial era, Danielle Thaler and Alain
Jean-Bart establish the starting points for Francophone Canadian children’s
literature and Andrew O’Malley does the same for Anglophone literature.
Read alongside Reimer’s comments on 9/11, one can discern a historical
precedence for defining Canadian identity in terms of what it is not:
not British, not French. Whilst both evidence ambiguous relationships
to the “home” country, the Robinsonades examined by O’Malley suggest
a tight bond to Britain through their continued reliance on traditional
colonial discourses. By way of contrast, the prevalence of the archetypal
coureur des bois in Francophone writing opens up a way of defining
Canadian identity without reference to Europe. These fur traders are
valorised for their intimate knowledge of the potentially hostile landscape.
Their engagement with the land creates a sense of “home” which is
specifically located in Canada, whereas the characters engaged in the
Robinsonades find “home” by imposing a priori
notions of home onto the landscape.
Both articles are tinged with a sense of shame which is not directly addressed beyond Reimer’s comment that home might need to be rewritten. Nevertheless, this unspoken sense of inherited culpability is evident in the primary texts selected for the volume. Texts by and about Aboriginal Canadians or works that draw attention to Canada’s ethnic and linguistic diversity are foregrounded. The two primary texts most cited are not, as one might have expected, classics by L. M. Montgomery or contemporary works by well known writers like Janet Lunn or Margaret Mackey (all of whom are discussed in the volume) but Flour Sack Flora by Deborah Delaronde and Gary Chartrand and Lights for Gita by Rachna Gilmore and Alice Priestly. In this way, the collection consistently undermines the centrality of white, Anglophone Canada in the construction of home. Whilst I suspect that this inversion of centre and periphery is motivated more by political desire than an accurate presentation of the current climate, the result is a refreshingly new insight into Canadian children’s literature. By focussing on texts which the general reader is less likely to have read, and providing rich glosses that enable the uninformed reader to follow the argument even when s/he has not read the primary text, the collection contributes to a rewriting of the Canadian “home.”
Reimer’s
own article in the collection distinguishes between texts in which “home”
is created and texts depicting homelessness. Reimer draws attention
to the class values which underlie the distinction between what is home
and what is not. “Simply put,” she explains, “the homes children
reject are lower-class homes; the homes they choose are cultured, middle-class
homes” (11). Anne Rusnak engages with the commonly expressed view
that children’s literature is structured around the home-away-home
plot. In her study of 102 Francophone novels and novellas from 1975
to 1995, she found that, unlike Anglophone writing, the majority of
texts (54%) had plots in which away enters home. Rusnak notes
the lack of a French term that encompasses the range of meanings proffered
by the English word “home” and leaves the word untranslated. All
these findings might suggest that different forces are at work in the
discourse of home in the province of Quebec. Her conclusions, however,
are remarkably similar to those writing about Anglophone children’s
literature: home is a privileged space in Francophone Canadian children’s
literature, not just because of what it means for the individual whose
home is threatened, but because home represents the nation.
The nation of Canada is located in the homelands of Aboriginal Canadians. Two articles consider how children’s literature by and about Aboriginal Canadians responds to the notion of home. Doris Wolf and Paul DePasquale report on a larger project in which they are engaged: compiling a bibliography of Aboriginal children’s literature by Aboriginal authors. Perry Nodelman discusses novels depicting Aboriginal Canadian youths, written by non-Aboriginals. Whilst both articles are sensitively critical of the various attempts to address Aboriginal children’s sense of not being at home in their native land, neither overtly comments on what I consider to be the key problem: the primary texts’ presentation of Aboriginal identity as being inherently problematic – an “issue” the text must address and attempt to “resolve.”
Wolf and DePasquale’s
overview is a helpful guide for situating a specific work within a wider
context. They confirm the trends reported in earlier surveys, noting
that the majority of texts are either retellings of traditional tales
and legends or fictional stories about Aboriginal youngsters in both
historical and contemporary settings. They observe a slight change in
trends as the latter now outnumber the former. More notable, I think,
is their finding that approximately 75% of their texts are picture books.
This medium, they suggest, offers the flexibility to critique native-settler
relations, but also allows for readings that celebrate the loss of ethnic
identity. For instance, the key problem of the eponymous protagonist
in Flour Sack Flora is that she cannot leave the reserve to accompany
her parents on their shopping trips in town because she does not have
a “suitable” (i.e. white girl’s) dress and shoes. Flora’s success
in creating an outfit out of a flour sack is valorised, and a surface
reading celebrates industry and community. However, the desired goal
(leaving the reserve to go shopping) implies that an identity based
on non-Aboriginal material goods is of higher value than the community
which enabled her to create her new dress. Nodelman observes a similar
problem in the resolution to Welwyn Katz’s False Face
when the protagonist, Tom, thinks of his tears as “not red and not
black, not White and not Indian. Just tears from someone who was a person,
nothing else” (145), which celebrates universal humanity at the expense
of the individuation inherent in embracing one’s ethnic heritage.
Whilst the layout of Louise Saldanha’s article on Multicultural Canada should make the publishers hang their heads in shame, the article itself is a thoughtful response to the ways in which Canadians who are of neither Aboriginal nor European descent are exoticized. Noting that Canada’s multicultural policies inadvertently reinforce the idea of Canada as not-home, Saldanha shows how, in practice, books which purport to celebrate diversity reinforce Canadian children of colour’s sense of being an outsider.
The diversity
of the first seven articles creates a sense of the multiple discourses
of home operating within the Canadian context. Each article establishes
tropes of home for particular groupings of Canadians. The remaining
three articles go off at a tangent. Deborah Schnitzer investigates the
trope of the window in Canadian picture books and creates a classification
of window types. Clare Bradford continues the theme of defining Canada
in terms of what it is not by comparing Canadian and Australian presentations
of home. Noting the ways in which these two former settler colonies
are both similar and different, Bradford further delineates the relationship
between home and nationhood. Finally, Margaret Mackey and her colleagues
report on a group endeavour to build a website aimed at taking the discussion
of the earlier articles to a wider audience. The article emphasises
the practical problems (the need for face to face interaction, for example)
but gives less space to the more interesting problem of how to translate
“academic discourse into an address to a broader public” (215).
These articles
are not without interest, but their approaches differ so markedly from
the earlier part of the book text that the resulting reading experience
is somewhat unsatisfying. Articles on changes in the portrayal of Canada
as home in response to the two World Wars, the referendums on independence
for Quebec and regional variation would all have seemed more logical
topics. Yet perhaps the fact that I start to miss such texts implies
that Reimer and her team have successfully raised my awareness of the
centrality of home in Canadian children’s literature. In doing so,
they open the doors for others to engage with additional aspects of
home in Canadian literature, and also to begin the larger study of home
in other national literatures.
University of Wroclaw, Poland