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Article Excerpt
Abstract
This article explores the evolution of Ukrainian-Canadian literature written in English over the last fifty years. It begins by outlining how early Ukrainian-Canadian English-language literature posits a sense of ethnicity that is multiple as part of a marginalized Canadian underclass. I then argue that post-1980 there is a shift in the representation of ethnicity to depend upon identifiable Ukrainian elements. I advance this argument, first, through an analysis of pre-1980 literature by Vera Lysenko, Maara Haas, George Ryga, and Andrew Suknaski in contrast to post-1980 works by Haas, Ryga, and Suknaski. I include an analysis of other post-1980 Ukrainian-Canadian writers to show a shift away from representing ethnicity as undifferentiated and class-based to codifying Ukrainianness as a specific kind of ethnicity focusing on the nation. I conclude by attributing this shift in focus to the growing rhetoric of Canadian multiculturalism. While my analysis focuses on Ukrainian-Canadian literature, the dynamics are those common to other ethnic literatures in Canada.
Resume
Cet article explore l'evolution de la litterature canadienne ukrainienne ecrite en anglais au cours des dernieres cinquante annees. II s'agit d'abord de souligner que cette litterature postule le sens d'une ethnicite multiple comme faisant partie d'une sous-classe marginalisee de Canadiens. Je montre qu'apres les annees 1980, la representation de I'ethnicite s'est modifiee a partir d'elements identifiables comme ukrainiens. Je m'appuie en premier lieu sur une analyse de la litterature d'avant cette periode, par Vera Lysenko, Maara Haas, George Ryga et Andrew Suknaski en opposition au oeuvres publiees apres 1980 par Haas, Ryga et Suknaski. Ensuite, j'inclue une analyse d'autres auteurs post-1980 pour montrer comment la representation de I'ethnicite s'eloigne alors d'un critere non-differencie et base sur la classe sociale, vers une codification de I'ukrainite comme un caractere specifique ethnique oriente vers la nation. Je conclue en attribuant cette mutation a I'attention portee a la theorie grandissante du multiculturalisme canadien. Bien que mon analyse se concentre sur la litterature canadienne ukrainienne, la dynamique etudiee ici est commune aux autres litteratures ethniques au Canada.
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Werner Sollors identifies literature as "codes for socialization into ethnic groups"; he writes that "the belief is widespread among critics who stress descent at the expense of consent that only biological insiders can understand and explicate the literature of race and ethnicity" (1986, 11). His study stresses the idea of consent over descent, foregrounding a constructivist notion of ethnic identity. In taking such a view as a starting point, it is a truism to note that the categories of what constitutes "ethnic" continually shift. Literature that was not mainstream yesterday finds itself speaking for the establishment today. For instance, Canadian writers of Ukrainian descent, writing in English, have transformed themselves and been transformed by critics from being ethnic "strangers" and "foreigners," similar to all other non-English speaking immigrants from Central and Eastern Europe at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries, to "living in the hyphen" (Wah 1996, 53) of contemporary Ukrainian-Canadianness. Both J. S. Woodsworth's Strangers within Our Gates (1909) and Ralph Connor's The Foreigner (1909) outline mainstream Canada's fear of these "strangers" and "foreigners," who came to Canada from places other than the British Isles. Those immigrating to Canada speaking Ukrainian dialects were simply one group among the mass of ethnic "strangers" and "foreigners." By the end of the twentieth century, however, their descendents who no longer spoke a "foreign" language and were born on Canadian soil, ceased being "strangers" and became caught in the complexity of being Ukrainian-hyphen-Canadian, grappling with all "its hyphenation, its ambivalence, its confrontation, and its restless exploration of the possibility of belonging" (Kostash 2000, 9).
Canadian literary scholars recognize and document the growing numbers of ethnic or minority literatures during the twentieth century (Padolsky 1994, 364). Vera Lysenko participated in this early tradition as the first major Ukrainian-Canadian author to write in English, producing Men in Sheepskin Coats (1947), an early social history of Ukrainians in Canada. But, generally speaking, writing considered to be ethnic in those early days was not written in English or French; ethnicity was, by definition, a linguistic marker. Ethnic writing, not defined by the language in which a text was written, really only came into its own in the early days of official multiculturalism. The criterion defining ethnicity shifted from the language in which texts were written to the author's cultural background (Aponiuk 1996, 2). Encouraged and supported by the funding and validation accorded minority writing under official federal multiculturalism, Ukrainian-Canadian writers George Ryga, Maara Haas, Andrew Suknaski, and Myrna Kostash rose in prominence.
I propose that what is more important than merely the proliferation of Ukrainian-Canadian writing in English as the twentieth century unfolded is how Ukrainianness in Canada is posited. Enoch Padolsky identifies a straight line of Ukrainian-Canadian literary continuity from "Illia Kiriak and Vera Lysenko to Maara Haas, George Ryga, Andrew Suknaski, Ted Galay, and Janice Kulyk Keefer" (1994, 363). This view, however, is too simplistic, based on the misconception that these writers participate(d) in a straightforward Ukrainian-Canadian literary tradition, when, in fact, the development of this so-called tradition was far from linearly progressive. It was, and is, shaped by the contexts that inform it. Lisa Grekul, for example, has argued that after the increased output of ethnic writing in the 1980s (including writing by those she calls Canada's Ukrainians), there was a dearth in Ukrainian-Canadian literary production until the late 1990s, particularly with the publication of memoirs like Janice Kulyk Keefer's Honey and Ashes (1998) and Myrna Kostash's Bloodlines (1993) and The Doomed Bridegroom (1998). In the introduction to Leaving Shadows (2005), she writes: "[m]ost of the Ukrainian Canadian texts I stumbled on [...] were published in the 1970s and 1980s. Relatively few have been published since," and, she admits, "I am not sure if anybody knows definitively why the 'boom and bust' of ethnic minority writing happened" (2005, xv). To be sure, she has identified something odd in the development of Ukrainian-Canadian literature, but it may not be a "boom and bust." Nonetheless, what is important about her claim is that she recognizes the fact that Ukrainian-Canadian literature has not simply developed along a smooth path from Vera Lysenko and Illia Kiriak onwards. I disagree, however, with her ideas about Ukrainian-Canadian literary silence during the late 1980s and early 1990s until the emergence of autofictions and memoirs. For example, the existence of works such as Maara Haas's On Stage with Maara Haas (1986), Yarmarok (1987), which was the first anthology of Ukrainian-Canadian writing, Yuri Kupchenko's The Horseman of Shandro Crossing (1989), Fran Ponomarenko's The Parcel from Chicken Street and Other Stories (1989), Helen Potrebenko's Hey Waitress and Other Stories (1989), the special issue of Prairie Fire in 1992 dedicated to Ukrainian-Canadian writing, Gloria Kupchenko Frolick's The Green Tomato Years (1985), The Chicken Man (1988), and Anna Veryha (1992), and Marusya Bociurkiw's The Woman Who Loved Airports (1994) undermines Grekul's claims about a literary silence. This literary tradition represents neither a straight line nor an example of a literary "boom and bust," but rather its features change throughout the institution of federal multiculturalism in Canada. While early Ukrainian-Canadian literature in English shaped and presented Ukrainianness within a broad, undifferentiated ethnic milieu, by the end of the 1970s, an idea of Ukrainianness in Canada as a distinct ethnic category with specific features and reference points began to become the norm.
To chart this shift, let us look, for example, at early Ukrainian-Canadian literature in English. Vera Lysenko's first novel Yellow Boots (1954) is ostensibly the more "Ukrainian" of her two fictions by virtue of its representation of a Ukrainian girl's growth and development into a renowned folk singer; however, its representation of Ukrainianness implies that it is not a unique or specific ethnic categorization unto itself. Instead, the novel strives to demonstrate how all ethnicities are, at the core, the same, suggesting that cultural distinctiveness and differentiation are only maintained at a superficial level, represented by folk arts (if at all). The most important aspect of Lilli's ethnicity does not arise from specific Ukrainian traditions, language, or literature, but from her folk music.
Lilli, the Ukrainian-Canadian protagonist, leaves the family farm and finds herself employed as a domestic servant in a home that fortuitously happens to be equipped with a piano, a patroness of music, and a pianist who recognizes Lilli's singing talent. In the playing of the pianist Lilli "recognize[s] a passage. It is part of a song which her mother used to sing" She "caught at it and sang out in a loud voice which could be heard over the thumping of the piano" (250). As a result of this encounter, Lilli begins formal training as a singer, hones her talent, and finds material success in the dominant, mainstream culture by functioning as a pan-ethnic representative. She is a token ethnic folk...
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