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Article Excerpt
Palimpsest: Space Into Place
During the 20th century Canadian authors of European descent living in and writing about the Prairie West took part in a process of palimpsest. They inscribed themselves and the experiences of their communities into and onto the ongoing story of the gigantic space of the Canadian Prairies. It is the story of the gradual transformation of space into place, i.e. the material and ideological process of mentally constructing a seemingly untouched and anonymous "new" territory into a specific locale, which the settlers understood to be their own place, becoming their home. In this transformative process they were inscribing their own--and their owning-experiences into the prairie landscape, thus constructing themselves as the people of that place, as "Prairie people."
But besides identifying as Prairie people and as new Canadians, the settlers simultaneously continued to identify themselves ethnically each as a specific people constructed in terms of their European nationalisms, i.e., as defined by a shared history and culture, a shared language and territorial occupancy, and, more often than not, a shared lineage of descent that set them apart from other nations. While the settlers in the Prairies had left behind their traditional territorial occupancy and gradually abandoned languages other than English or French, they often tended to cling to specific cultural practices and nostalgically to cherish memories of their histories before immigration--thus foreshadowing, as it were, the multicultural policies of the Canadian mosaic of today.
But what about lineage? Or, what about a common descent out of which to construct a "racial" identity? (1) Obviously, European settlers on the prairies, coming from different national backgrounds, did not share a common lineage beyond the fact that they were Europeans, or "Whites," bringing with them the whole ideological package which "Whiteness" entailed in the late nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century. Beyond that, not only in terms of divisions along lines of gender, age and health, there was little that bound them together, especially since European notions of social class kept them apart. Even their shared experiences of emigration and immigration were marked by socio-economic stratification, which created vast differences in the conditions of making their passages or acquiring homesteads. What eventually did bind them together, then, as Prairie people, was the place itself and their interaction with it--what they did with and to the space they had come to, because "[It] is not space that matters ... but what you do to make it place" (Keahey xii). This notion entails that the process of palimpsest began with the coming of the Europeans, with the surveyors' grid system and the parceling out of land into homesteads. In the perception of European settlers, then, the first breaking of the soil would mark the end of the Prairie as a historical tabula rasa and the beginning of its palimpsest--a eurocentric fallacy.
Chronology or Chronotope
The questions of nation building and nationalism may enter the palimpsest process described above, but Canadian nationalism is not the prime focus here. Rather, I would like to explore how the space, not the state (the landscape itself as a cultured and historical entity is reflected in literature produced in the space of the prairie between the 1920's and today), and how, to varying degrees, writers of European descent dismiss and silence or come to address, understand, and articulate, older presences and stories belonging to their region-stories that are carried or harboured, as it were, by the places they inhabit and write about. Of particular interest here is the historicity of place, understanding history not primarily as an outer chronology of years and related events, which are then selected and arranged in terms of a retrospective teleology, constructed to explain the present as the inevitable outcome of the past, but rather, history as related to and embedded in locality. Instead of "when?" this approach to history would ask "where?" Instead of identifying a specific event chronologically by the corresponding year it took place, a chronotopical approach would locate an event in the specific locus where it look place. (2) History not as a chronology but as a chronotope is typical for Indigenons North American oral traditions, as Keith Basso has shown so convincingly in his 1996 study Wisdom Sits in Places: Landscape and Language Among the Western Apache. The idea of a chronotopical relationship to history seems crucial to the way in which most traditional Aboriginal cultures in today's Canada structure their experiences of events literally as "taking place", and this idea is reflected in much of contemporary First Nations Literature throughout North America. The works of non-Aboriginal Prairie writers since the 1920s, by contrast, tend to follow a eurocentric chronological approach, but over time there developed varying degrees to which the characters identify with the history of place as well as different degrees to which the protagonists relate to their environment and its older presences, including the Aboriginal inhabitants.
Modernism's Angst, Desires to Belong, and the Colonial Legacy
A desire to belong to a specific place may well be universal (3), but it is intensified by modernism's general feelings of disconnectedness and alienation. Often today the longing to belong is more generally understood as a psychological need, a desire produced by the disorientation, loss of self-determination, angst and fragmentation within an urban modernity, which produces its own desire for the "real" and the authentic. Philip Deloria in his 1998 study Playing Indian defines the authentic as a "culturally constructed category created in opposition to a perceived state of inauthenticity," and he identifies the "quest for such an authentic Other ... [as] ... a characteristically modern phenomenon" (101). The desire for an authenticated personal ethnic identity', to belong to a place's culture, may become especially poignant in people who have been uprooted, driven out, displaced, and resettled by processes of emigration or, even more forcefully, by the more recent experiences of so-called "ethnic cleansings" in the aftermath of the Holocaust and the many civil wars and military interventions since World War II. (4) In much of contemporary postcolonial literature of so-called settler societies there seems to he a desire, a need, a specific emotional and moral Befindlichkeit to identify with the "new" land in a more profound way, fostering strong desires to create home place out of alien space.
In North America, a longing to belong to the land has been identified to form the motivational drive behind attempts by non-Aboriginal Canadian authors and artists (and many others) to appropriate "Nativeness." Daniel Francis' study of "The Image of the Indian in Canadian Culture" (subtitle), The Imaginary Indian (1992), sees the non-Natives' insecurity about their own presence on the continent...
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