Canadian Studies

The Precambrian Shield

E. J. Pratt

The first poems are related to the geography of Canada. The Precambrian
Shield is considered to be the oldest mountain range in the world. This
shield is a very huge range of mountains which covers more than half of
Canada. This is not demanding poetry it is based simply on the natural
beauty of Canada. In the first stanza we are given the location of the
shield.
We see that it is located on the North Shore and it is depicted as a
mythical reptile, powerful, huge – it is personified although it is asleep,
inactive. A hybrid means a mixture of various species. It says in the poem
that the myths might have conceived it but not delivered, so this reptile is
not a part of history written by man, it was there long before the first
settlers, it dates back to the matriarchal myths of creation. Matriarchal
because crawling, gliding things are mentioned and this implies snakes
with their ability for copulation, snakes were sacred animals in the period
of matriarchy, and also they are reptiles. The progenitor is a she and this
corresponds to the orphic legend, there is one more legend based on
Prometheus. According to the orphic legend everything is connected and
intertwined, cosmic totality is a kind of a postulate for this legend
meaning cosmic unity, justice, a single universal system of laws,
imagination and reason are together as inseparable aspects of a human
being, there is no dissociation of any kind. Dissociation first appeared
with the first settlers, before them everything was in harmony. Snug –
ususkana, Boa – snake. Now there is some more information on the
location of the Precambrian Shield. When First Nations people started
their fight for independence it started in these 2 provinces(Manitoba and
Saskatchewan). We get some more information on the geographical
location of the shield.
And then the poet mentions that this reptile is dead, motionless,
implying that this mountain is not a volcanic mountain. The poet
emphasizes the fact that this mountain has been there from the beginning
of Earth(before bivalves(a shell consisting of two parts)) and will remain
there until the end of it, it can’t be destroyed. She survived numerous
geological changes, but she is still there. She is within life-death zone,
she is neither dead nor alive(too old for death, too old for life), this
variation between life and death matches the geological changes that the
reptile had to undergo and survive. Sprawl - to sit or lie with your arms
and legs spread out in a relaxed or awkward way. Torpid – hibernated.
She is now sleeping, lying on the mineral mattress. There were ice ages
that shaped her physical appearance(carboniferous hair). Ridges - a high
pointed area near the top of a mountain, Molochs – deities with spikes,
dragons. By the end of the poem the poet is reinforcing the same idea,
that she cannot be destroyed, and that will be there till the end of time. By
the description of the Precambrian Shield we get a glimpse into all the
geological and climate changes that occurred in Canada.
The poem ends in a question. Van Home was one of the Scottish
explorers who set out to explore this wilderness, and he is actually a
symbol for the industrious spirit of the first settlers who brought changes
to this wilderness with their technology. It seems that this explorer was
on this quest to fight this wilderness, to conquer, tame, master the
sleeping lizard. But he didn’t know anything about this wilderness so
once he got there he realized that it was more powerful than he had
thought. It seems that it cannot be tamed.

The Height of Land

Duncan Campbell Scott

The setting is the Arctic watershed(razvodje), the poet is on the top of the
mountain, it is night, he hears the wind in the woods. Again this poem too
deals with the geography of Canada. The poet is looking on the watershed
and one stream goes to Hudson Bay, the other to Lake Superior. Ojibwa
are the first tribe that the white settlers met when they started colonizing
the wilderness. Potan the Wise is one of the two Indian guides who led
the speaker into the Wilderness, Cheese-que-ne-ne is a shaman who is
able to summon supernatural powers or beings.
The poet hears this wind and it reminds him of the song of these
tribes made during the population of the wilderness on the part of the first
settlers. Acquiescence – acceptance. The white settlers are regarded as a
potential enemy, and these two figures, predict what might happen to
their people – ills of life – diseases, alcohol, war, shortage of food(buffalo
extermination) – as a consequence these tribes are going to die out. But
the Indians are not going to fight, this song is a song of acceptance. Now
there is the image of fire. The fire is dying out just the way the Indian
tribes are going to die out. Something comes by flashes – although these
things are going to happen to the Indians nature will remain untouched by
the white settlers even though they’ll try to tame it, it is some kind of
omnipresence that is deeper than peace.
The poet now climbs further up the mountain and he doesn’t see the
woods and the spruces(zimzeleno drvece) anymore. Marigolds –
hrizanteme. He is now closer to the top and he can see the open sky and
stars, he admires this beauty.
 But the Indian guides are dead asleep they don’t admire the beauty
of the mountain because they are used to it, they are accustomed to it,
they see it every day. The poet is the only who is receptive of this beauty
because it is not something that he sees every day. The poet describes the
tranquility of the mountain. Now he describes the routine of their
expedition – they came across lots of lakes. He describes where they
camped and personifies the roses, which also seem to be sleeping and to
be peaceful. But in the dawn the roses woke up and saw the camp and
then they were captured, they don’t act naturally, there is no dew on their
leaves, because the visitors disturbed their everyday activity and
peacefulness. Bracken – paprat, dwarf-cornel – like dogwood. Basically
where they pitched their tent they saw something of nature and it was
beautiful. With these different camp sites he actually describes the way
the vegetation changes as they climb the mountain. The last scene in the
poem is when the poet is finally on the top of the mountain and he
describes the view. Targe – shield of Hudson Bay.

Laurentian Shield
F. R. Scott

This is another poem dedicated to the geography of Canada. This shield is

also called the Precambrian shield and it is so to say a cradle, bed for the
Hudson Bay. Its name originates from the St. Laurence river. This river
played an important role in the settling of Canada because at the time
when the first settlers arrived, Canada was unexplored wilderness, there
were no roads nor passages except for this river which allowed them to
go further inland.
The part that the poet is talking about is really covered in snow, but
why is it hidden in wonder? Because to the people this land was
mysterious, they didn’t know anything about it. And there is a reference
here to the Canadian climate, winters are long and heavy and the summer
is sudden and brief. In the previous poem they reach such heights where
there is nothing but snow and silence, in this poem when the poet says
that the land stares at the sun in a huge silence it is only a reference to the
density of population in this land which is low, there are no people.
Nature is repeating something that we cannot hear, and we cannot hear it
because we are not as close to nature as animals are. As civilized people
we cannot hear the language of nature anymore and that’s why the poet
says that it is inarticulate. This is told from the point of view of the white
settlers, it is said that Canada is an empty piece of paper, not written in
history – because there is no white people’s history there as if there were
no people before the settlers, but there were Indians, however the settlers
disregarded them and that’s how we know that this is the point of view of
the settlers. Love is mentioned here, love entered this world with
mankind, that’s why the songs of nature are older than love.
For example just from one stanza of this poem we can already see the
numerous problems that Canada has to deal with – harsh climate(snow),
low population(huge silence), short history(empty paper).
The poet now says that the land was waiting for people to populate
it, it wants European settlers to come there. Canada is a blank piece of
paper but now when the settlers populated it, it can choose its language to
write its history. The technic, the way of life, and it will start developing.
Flesh – body, muscles, strength, physical effort – this is the language, the
way of life where the emphasis is on the improvement of the standard of
living in the material sense , the technic for material productivity, tilling
the land, building with hands. The language of roses – the way of life
where people are in harmony with nature and more connected to it, the
way of life of the First Nations people. The white settlers came already
preconditioned to view nature as something to be exploited not something
to live in harmony with. When these settlers came they had a choice
between two ways of life and they chose the language of flesh.
In the rest of the poem we are given the full history of settling this
land. The poet begins the stanza with ‘Now…’ he means now that the
settlers arrived, after their arrival. And we can see that they started
building cottages. These people were focused on building a place where
they could live, so they didn’t have time to talk, read or anything similar.
They have to start from the beginning and that’s why the poet says ‘now
there are pre-words’ not words or language that they spoke in Europe,
they are inventing a new language, they didn’t have words for many new
things they saw there and they had to invent them, so in the beginning
they create mere syllables, which are the most practical and sufficient for
this purpose, not adjectives or verbs, only nouns. The words were slowly
forming, but the syntax was still, they were firm in their decision, they
couldn’t go back, they didn’t have money, they had to be persistent to
succeed there, they are so determined that it is reflected in the language –
the long sentence of exploitation – this is the way for them to succeed and
they stick to it. This is the sentence that is being written on the blank
piece of paper which represents Canada.
In this stanza the way the exploitation went is described, first we
have the trappers who exploit animals for fur, then the digger for gold,…
The poet describes these people as nomads because they move all the
time, trappers move with the animals, miners search for gold. The poet
also says that they are no-man, because they are alone, there are no other
people to recognize them as human beings. The population is low, the
distances are huge, people are so far from one another that they look as
particles. ‘Then the bold commands…’ Then – meaning after some time.
Companies appeared and this is monopoly because for example the
Hudson Bay Company simply occupied, claimed the whole area around
the Hudson Bay disregarding the First Nations people who lived there,
they presented themselves as the authority, that’s why they are bold
command and of course with the development of technology there are
also machines. They are carving their kingdoms(piling up private profit)
out of public wealth. Then the poet for the second time says ‘now’ and
this stands for the present moment. Drone – a continuous low noise. Now
after all that exploitations we are presented with the image of numerous
huge airplanes making noise. The poem started with the empty land and
huge silence. The planes are scouting the ice, this ice was before
considered an insurmountable obstacle for the explorers but now it seems
that nature is tamed. The north pole is vanished pole because it is not
considered an obstacle anymore as if it were not there anymore. And the
poet says that now the huge silence is filled with neighbourhood, so now
there are people. They chose the language of flesh and they developed but
that seems to be the problem because we shall see now what kind of man
is the one who chooses this option.
In the last stanza the most important line is the last one. It means
that Canada was just a giant rock, nature, wilderness, and that the early
settlers by opting for the language of flesh were productive and managed
to transform this wilderness into a place where children can be born,
where civilization is possible, if the settlers hadn’t applied the language
of flesh to write on the empty piece of paper which was Canada, today’s
Canada wouldn’t exist. The problem is that this is a justification for what
they did to First Nations and nature. He calls the sound heard from the
mines and scattered camps and mills the language of life, he actually calls
now the language of flesh the language of life because without it life as is
known today on that land wouldn’t be possible. The full culture of
occupation, the western culture where people are devoted to their work
utterly, this way of life will be productive, something will be written.

The Lonely Land

A. J. M. Smith

This poem is about Canadian landscape, the effect of man on the land.
Jagged – nazubljeno. This is how the poet describes the fir tree, it is not
something beautiful, it is threatening. The spruces have barbs(iglice), but
these barbs are uplifted, as if they were to attack, the vegetation is
threatening. The sky can be blue, but the poet chooses gray and cloud-
piled sky, the wind blows, it is misty. Nature can be very pleasant but the
poet describes it here as inhospitable and dangerous. This is how the
painters from the group of seven describe nature, it is always broken, the
trees have broken branches, the sea is always rough. The painters from
the group of seven became famous because they celebrated the Canadian
landscape.
In this stanza we have the image of a female duck looking for a
drake, but the noise she produces in the attempt to attract a partner is
rough, crude, uneven(stagger and fall). The duck is up in the air and the
noise she produces falls on the stones and disappears in the lapping water,
so the water is not still either, there is movement everywhere. But now
the poet says that this is beauty, the poet doesn’t see harmony, he sees
dissonance, chaos, but he finds beauty in it. The sound resonates from the
stony strand and curles over a black pine. He uses various metaphors for
this sound but the words aren’t nice, because he wants to show the
harshness of the Canadian nature. Curdle – usiri se. Under the influence
of the wind the gray sky curdles, the clouds gather. So this land is
extremely wild, but the poet appreciates that and he finds beauty in it.
The idea in the last stanza is that nature is strong and will
regenerate. In nature there are various elements, rain, floods, snow, wind,
… these aspects of nature can harm it but nature will always survive,
regenerate, and remain strong.

Injured Maple
Ronald Everson

The maple in the poem was struck by lightning. The maple is here
personified it has blood, it is bleeding, and this can be seen even in the
title, the maple is injured as if it were a human being or an animal. Its
blood is poisoned and we can presume that it is going to die. Samaras – a
type of seed that is attached to something that enables it to be carried
away by the wind. Myriads – multitudes. Now that the tree is struck
by lightning the poet notices that it produces much more of these
seeds, myriads. The samaras are are all over the ground. This is
good, some of these seeds will become trees, but the narrator
says that the seeds litter the ground which has some negative
connotation. The roots heave the ground, meaning that as they
grow larger they crack the soil or pavement. Quilt - pokrivac. The
man observing the tree wants to have a nice lawn, a quilt of grass,
but the roots of the tree are spoiling it, and the samaras litter the
lawn. Writhed - broken. Saplings - mladice. He says that the tree is
trying to murder the lawn, but that is only the point of view of the
modern man who wants to control that piece of nature(lawn) he
wants it to look perfect, orderly, but it is spoiled now. The man
asks a question but we know why the tree suddenly produces
more seeds, it is about to die and these are its last seeds. But how
does the tree know what to do? It is insensate, no reason. And the
man now says 'her seeds' because of the ability to reproduce. With
this question the poet shifts the focus from the tree to the man
looking at it. The man's body is injured by years - he is old. The
problem is that he has no children and probably won't have them
at all. The man talks about the tree all the time with negative
connotation as if he were jealous of the tree. The tree is able to
reproduce and he can't. And then he even gives human
characteristics to the tree, he says that the tree is sly. There is a
reference to the story of Lot and his daughters-the daughters got
their father drunk and then slept with him because they wanted to
have children and there was nobody else, so they did what they
had to do. Macbeth was ready to murder for his sons, and this is
what people are ready to do for offspring, and the man compares
the maple to these figures. In the last line the man mentions dusk
which stands for the approaching end of his life. He is fearful and
the reason is he is facing death, the great unknown. The tree is
active unlike the man. He also says that the tree is primitive
because reproduction is one of the primitive functions, but in
today's civilisation there are things that come before that which
are perceived as more important - money, career,...and when u
are finally ready for family it's too late. The point is that man is
alienated from nature and his own instincts.

Twenty Below
Robert Arthur Douglas Ford

The poem deals with a family, a couple and two children, these are
people who are absolutely unprepared for what they have to deal with,
incredible cold, inhabitable nature, lack of food, lack of wood for the fire,
hopelessness, and the woman is the only one who has enough mental
strength to imagine that they will survive.
This poem is related to the experience of the first settlers
though this is not obvious from the title, twenty below refers to
the climate of Canada. In Canada this kind of temperature is usual
but the first settlers were not accustomed to that. From the title it
is obvious that the dominant feeling will be the feeling of despair
and not fitting into the new surroundings. The poem is written
from the female perspective which is very important because the
status of women was questioned in Canada, there was this woman
question. Right away we notice the difference between male and
female settlers, they have different tasks. The woman is taking
care of the house in general, children, preparing the food,...
Woman's duties are related to the inside of the house whereas
male's are related to the outside he is absent from the house,
chopping woods, or holes in the ice,... Although the atmosphere is
a bit warmer inside the woman doesn't experience this place as
home. Thaw - to cause frozen things to melt, in this case the male
is warming his hands. 'Sitting by the stove with his eyes nowhere'
- so even when he is present in the house, he is absent-minded.
His eyes are peasant eyes because he is not an intellectual
pondering on philosophical themes, he is just a labourer doing
some physical work. He is looking nowhere because there is
nothing to look at but snow, he is fed up with it. This nature is not
tamed by civilisation it is menacing and he is the one who faces
this dangerous aspect of it every day that's why he cannot
appreciate it. We have the contrast between male and female,
wilderness and civilisation. The woman is supportive and helping
the male but she cannot really count on him and she understands
his being absent. The poet now focuses and the stove which only
shows how cold it actually is in Canada. Another contrast is
between the cold outside and the heat inside, the pipes are white
with heat, no matter how they try to warm themselves it will
always be cold, they can't warm the house. Mongrel - mixed breed
dog. The atmosphere of despair does not refer only to the humans
but to the animals as well, the mongrel feels cold as well. The
children are not playful and restless as they are supposed to be,
they are dozing, the same goes for the dog, but they are cold.
The woman doesn't have anyone to talk to and explain her
position. She is there to support everybody but there is nobody to
support her. She is the pillar of the family but she has no one to
talk to and since she is the pillar she can't show weakness, she
can't reveal that she is also desperate. The pane is glacial frosty
because of the cold. There is again the contrast between the
outside(northern cold) and inside. The poet says that sleep is
impossible. They are aware of their situation and they can't sleep,
they constantly worry about their survival. Sleep would be like a
getaway from this image of frost and snow, but the image is all
around them and they can't get rid of it, that's why even the
children are only dozing and not sleeping. Silence because there is
nobody there. Sky of slate - od leda. Mighty hills are mere
shadows on the pale immeasurable horizon - distance, loneliness,
there is no ending to the frost and to their difficult position.
In the third stanza there is another contrast, the contrast
between reason and heart. Now she is dissociated she doesn't
think with reason anymore, she feels what this life is like- her life
stopped the moment she moved to Canada. Hoar - belo-sivo,
prekriveno injem. Drift - nanos. Every week is hoar and drifted.
When she uses her reason she knows that she is supposed to be
strong and set a kind of an example but emotionally she feels
despair. However we know that she conceals this reaction and
emotions from the family, that's why she is alone her face turned
from the family so as not to be seen as she cries. Rivulets -
streams.
The cabin is made of logs, stones, but there are chinks
between the logs where the cold enters. Sopor - trans,
zanesenost. There is nothing else for them but to fall into this
soporific state and for a moment forget their hardships. The
woman conceals these feelings of sadness from the rest of the
family. She is strong enough to disregard these feelings and be
optimistic and she provides the mental strength for the rest of the
family to endure.

The poems so far dealt with geography and landscape of Canada

now with the injured maple and on they deal with the plant world.

Silverthorn Bush
Robert Finch

Here we have first person narration, the speaker is the bush itself
so the main stylistic device used is personification. It is
dispossessed, robbed of smth. It had a crown before, a king-like
appearance, the reference is to the primordial woods and idyllic
picture of nature. But now that the settlers took the territory from
nature they bring havoc, destruction, they cut down the trees and
they also bring noise. Before there was silence - whispered mood.
Enterprise-companies, business. Enterprise struck down the trees
from the wood, which were like towers in the former kinglike state
of the wood.
In the next stanza there are some questions, the prevalent
tone in them is that of melancholy. These rhetorical questions only
point out that in reality there are no woods anymore and they can
be seen only in poems or paintings. The idea is that nature
inspired people to create art, and now there is enterprise,
civilisation. But since personified the bush expresses hope that
there must be someone who still appreciates the beauty of nature.
Its fragrance(miris) can be felt somewhere where the air is not
polluted by civilisation.
Vagabonds - homeless people. Vagabonds and children still
remember beautiful silverthorn bush, people who are not
interested in money and the material. The bush is dying, it has no
more buds and all that is left is the memory that exists in
vagabonds and children.
Truant - nestasno. If we could share the sensibility of these
children and vagabonds we could recognize the spirit of the bush.
And this does not refer only to the bush but to the river as well
and the whole world of nature. Pensive - zamisljena, ozbiljna,
setna. Children are closer to nature and vagabonds are social
drifters they are more connected to nature than to civilisation.
People like these can see the truth that the river has to spill and
the light towards which the fibres of the bush point.
The conclusion is however that no matter how much we
destroy nature it will linger on, manage to survive due to
regeneration. The bush will come to a dusty end, dusty because
they cut the trees and use them to make saw dust. Revery-
daydreaming. Although the bush is cut there is still hope because
the roots are still there. The idea is that the civilisation is
dangerous to the world of nature however nature will always
manage to survive. We have the same idea in the injured maple,
when it is dying it is sheding its seed and creating new life,
regenerating. The poet praises nature's power of regeneration.

Wart Hog
Robin Skelton

Wart hog - bradavicasta svinja.

The wart hog is related to the moon goddess. It has tusks shaped
as crescent moon. Wrench - kopati. We know that it is connected
to the moon goddess because in the matriarchal period it was
regarded as a sacred animal. The intention of the poet is to remind
us what these animals once represented. It dreams of women
because it is related to the moon goddess and his instinctual
aspect, primal sexual desires are very active.
Now the poet makes it even clearer for us, once the boars
were regarded as sacred and lovers of the goddess, the woods
were sacred. The primal erotic desire is so strong that they were
regarded as the lovers of the goddess and that's why the poet
says that they dream of women. Eaters of the corpses refers to
the primitive understanding of death where after it you are reborn
so people were not afraid of dying, that's why it was the eater of
corpses, it was not afraid of dying. The boars have all these
functions and under the command of the goddess. Groves - sacred
areas where druids performed their rituals. This is what the boar
symbolized before.
Grub - grabiti, jesti halapljivo. But today hog is regarded as a
disgusting animal, there is nothing sacred about it. Trample - to
step hard. Squeal - skvicati. Bulk-shouldered - nabijen. Rank -
bazdi. But it is the sweat of terror, it stinks but people are afraid of
it. They even feel shame when they look at it. Nowadays it is a
guardian of no rituals because all the rituals are forgotten. The
world that it belongs to now is that of darkness and disgust.
Thrust - probosti. In the last line the moon is mentioned again,
meaning that the moon goddess is still there for those who are
perceptive enough. The natural world is still sacred but people
don't pay attention to it. P.S. The group of seven are actually
painters not poets.

Butterfly on Rock
Irving Layton

The first image in the poem is that of a butterfly resting on a rock.

The poet's association when he sees this image is the soul of a
dead person. The butterfly is the soul, and the rock is the still face
of a dead person. The person is dead and the soul leaves the
body, flutters like a butterfly. The body after death becomes
inanimate and it disintegrates(the rock), whereas the soul lingers
on(the butterfly).
The poet express his thoughts about the connection between
the two, he says that he thought the rock had given birth to the
butterfly, it had brought it to life. What does the rock actually want
with the butterfly. The rock is inanimate but wants to become
animate. Nature is inanimate and according to science life became
from inanimate matter, the inanimate became animate. It might
not be so strange that this rock desires to be alive and that its
wish produced this butterfly which now sits on the rock just like
the soul on the face of a dead person. This is the poet's
imagination, he indentifies with the inanimate world and he sees
this innate desire of the inanimate world to become animate. This
butterfly represents the rock's secret desire, to be alive. If one has
such a strong desire it has to be made manifest(visible).
Before the narrator spotted the butterfly on the rock he saw
two shattered porcupines(jez, bodljikavo prase) in the
bleak(sumorna) forest. The poet is building an atmosphere in this
poem and so far there is no joy, that's why the forest is bleak. The
two porcupines are dead but he uses the word shattered(broken
into pieces). The adjective shattered implies some action on the
part of the poet. He probably dropped a big rock on them, and he
killed them both at the same time probably because they were
mating. Why would the narrator kill two mating porcupines? They
are togther mating and he is alone, this is the same idea as in the
injured maple, the narrator is jealous of the porcupines because he
is a modern man who cannot reproduce so easily because of the
restrictions that the society imposes upon him. We know he killed
them - he doesn't say I had seen dead, he says I had seen die. So
he was there because he is the one who dropped the rock on
them. He then says pain is unreal,...I heard my voice cry. He had
to yell this out in order to convince himself. Here we find out that
the problem that bothers this modern man is death. He is god
now, he determines everything, he killed the porcupines, meaning
he decided whether they were to live or die, so he is the authority,
and he yells that death is an illusion and now that he is the
authority this statement might be more convincing. In the last two
lines he also smashes the butterfly and we know that he smashes
it because the rock moves from the force of his strike. He is angry,
lonely, jealous, not certain about his purpose but sure that he is
going to die, he is a modern man with the restrictions of society.
The rock moves from the power of his strike, but the rock is huge
and it can't be moved so easily, that it moved symbolizes the
intervention of humans on nature. He is bothered with the fact
that he is mortal. He can't deal with this in an adequate way, he is
to die so he destroys everything alive around him, he destroys life
in order to show that neither life nor death have meaning. This is
the attitude of the modern man towards nature and death.
So far we dealt with geography, climate, plants and animals and
now we move to the early settlers' experiences and history. We
will read Margaret Atwood because she address the woman
problem in Canada because just a few decades ago women in
Canada were really underprivileged. They couldn't get jobs, they
were subordinate to man, they were to sit at home and take care
of it,...

Further Arrivals
Margaret Atwood

In the title we see that it addresses the arrivals of new settlers,

and they had two ways for that, St. Laurence or Hudson Bay. The
poem deals with people's feelings while travelling to Canada and
how they felt upon arrival.
In the first stanza the trip is compared to a long illness, long
because the trip took long(weeks), and illness because during that
long period they didn't even have where to wash hands and during
storms they would catch cold because tickets were expensive and
there were lots of people on one ship, the food too was not
prepared properly if there was any food. They left Europe because
of poverty, religious reasons, persecutions, famine,...these were
poor people and we can imagine how their life looked on a boat.
There was not even enough of drinking water and all of this
caused diseases. There must have been some toilets on the ship
but god knows what they looked like. After the ocean they finally
sailed up-river, and we know that it was St. Laurence.
Now there is this image when they get to the first island
suitable for disembarking. The first thing they do is throw their
clothes which were dirty, and they dance like sandflies, they are
happy because the journey is over.
They reached the destination but they don't recognize
anything it's different from what they left in Europe. They left
crowded cities, diseases, industrialization, social diseases like
poverty. They leave all of this behind which is good, and also they
leave their civilised distinctions referring to classes, money and
religion. Not only that they left even the way they dressed, you
can't be a lady in the wilderness. All these distinctions are
something that civilisation imposed upon us. They enter a large
darkness, this is Canada from the settlers' point of view, they
know nothing about it. It was darkness because we were ignorant,
we entered our own ignorance. There was this propaganda about
Canada in order to make people leave England which was
overcrowded, but propaganda was false of course and people
would realize they were fooled only upon arrival. M. Atwood read
Susanna Moodie's diary, she was one of the settlers, but M.
Atwood didn't like it because there were just descriptions of
Canada and emotional reactions were excluded so she wrote it all
over again from Susanna's point of view, and in this poem she
says from Susanna's point of view - I have not come out yet - from
this darkness. Susanna finally returned to England and M. Atwood
imagines her saying these words, she didn't get used to Canada.
The next image is the first night on the island and the poet
describes the settlers' feelings. We process the world through our
brain, and the brain gropes nervous tentacles. We explore, smell,
listen, look, it’s like we spread tentacles to explore the world
around us. But the person is nervous because they are afraid and
don't know what to expect, uncertainty and lack of knowledge.
Now these fears are compared to bears because the Canadian
imagery starts now. Lamps are light and light stands for
knowledge, they lack and want knowledge.
She is waiting for her husband who is described as shadowy.
On the literal level she can't see him because it is dark, but on
another level he wasn't shadowy to her in England, she knew who
he was, but now he is changing and her perception of him is
changing as well. She is waiting for him to enter the room but
doesn't know who it will be, they are all changing under the
influence of the new environment. Whisper is actually the rustling
of the leaves and Susanna experiences the land as threatening,
she hears malice. The world of nature is absolutely indifferent but
she perceives it as malicious, this is her projection because she
feels insecure.
She says she needs wolf's eyes but it could be any other
animal just as well, because all animals have something that we
suppress and that is instinct, we suppress it and we lost
connection with nature that's why we can't see the truth. Wolf
sees in the dark enough to know whether he is safe or not and
people lost this ability and they feel threatened all the time. She
refuses to look in the mirror because she has changed for the
worse. Vesna regards the last three lines as unnecessary. It
depends on who lives there, the settlers for example were at a
loss, but to the animals this is home.

People were unprepared for the conditions there and that can be
seen also in twenty below where the cabin has all those chunks,...
Not enough wood, food, there is plenty of it but u have to cut it,
hunt and so on. In theory you can eat plants, mushrooms, berries,
roots, but in practice u don't know what roots are good or
mushrooms for that matter and therefore you starve. In order to
make their lives easier they have to plant their own food.

The Planters
M. Atwood

Jagged - nazubljeno, reckavo. The jagged edges of the forest and

of the river and the people are in between as if they were in jaws.
Stump - panj. The people cut the forest in order to make some
cultivated soil but they couldn't remove the stumps of the cut
trees.
So there are three men who move between these stumps
and weed(remove the weed) the soil. They are growing beans and
potatoes, the food for the poor. These are poor people who are
struggling to survive they are planting the kind of food that can be
preserved for a long period of time without going bad. These are
all journal entries of Susanna Moodie rewritten as M. Atwood
imagined her life. So Susanna is watching them as they weed the
crops.
They do what is most natural, when you weed you have to
bend, pull the weed out and straighten, their faces go up and
down all the time and to her they look like candles flickering in the
wind. When they are down you don't see the whiteness of their
faces and when they straighten you see it again. They are weak
the wind can extinguish them easily and this tells us something
about their position. They are existentially threatened. And what
threatens to extinguish them is actually the land itself, they are
imposing themselves upon the land that has never been tilled
before and the soil doesn't welcome them it is unbright. Susanna
is looking at them from a distance and she says I know she
understands them. They don't believe that they are here and left
Europe for this. They refuse to face the reality and pretend that
here is the future. They deny the ground... Denial becomes a way
of life. They assume this attitude of blindness and the woman says
they are right because it wouldn't be possible for them to succeed
in any other way. She says that if they let go of the illusion and
saw where they actually were there would be no hope and they
would die. In order to survive they had to nourish this illusion, to
them it was as real as the shovel they worked with. If they'd open
their eyes they'd see that no matter how much they weed and cut
trees the natural world wouldn't cease ceasing to be. It will grow
all over again and they would lose hope then, but this way with
the illusion they don't give up. If they stopped they would be
surrounded by the green monster(nature). Tendrils - izrastaji na
korenu, zilice. They will be broken in by the darkness of
hopelessness.

The Bull Moose

Alden Nowlan

The bull moose is a poem which is related to the animal world of

Canada. Again the main idea is the distinction between nature and
civilisation and the bull moose represents nature.
The bull moose comes from the purple mist from the mountain. As
if he were coming from a mythical sphere, from an exotic place.
Tamarack - evergreen. And the moose is stopped by a pole-fenced
pasture. Now this is the image of civilisation, there is nothing
exotic about it. Nature where the moose comes from is described
as exotic. The pasture represents civilisation, it is a controlled
piece of land. Here is also visible the difference between the
moose which is a wild animal and the domesticated animals in the
pasture. Domestic animals are afraid of the moose they smell and
sense danger, strength of wilderness which they don't possess. He
is seen as the ritual mask of a blood god. Blood god because
sacrifices were offered to gods and the domestic animals are
pontential sacrifices. These animals are civilized, controlled as well,
they are not as connected to nature as the moose is and they are
afraid of what it represents. We also have the reaction of people.
Alder switch - leska,stap. A tree that was regarded as sacred. The
moose dint show any sign of being dangerous, he is tolerant and
the people especially children behave as if they were in a zoo
watching an attraction. They are so alienated from nature that this
animal represents something exotic that you can't see every day.
Collie - sheep dog. Nobody sees it as coming from nature because
he is not attacking he is tolerant.
The oldest man stands for wisdom and experience. He
remembers to have seen a moose once but it was
gelded(kastriran) and used for plowing, domesticated. The
implication is that it is extremely unusual to see a bull moose
today. Snicker - to laugh scornfully. They poor beer down its
throat - the meaning of this is that people don't show any respect
for what's coming from nature anymore, nothing of this sort is
regarded as sacred nowadays.
The purple colour before was associated with the mist on the
mountain and now it is present only in the little cap. The cap of
thistles is a reference to Jesus, the moose is represented as a
victim of people, as a martyr.
They think the moose is cute, cuddlesome now, they don't
think it should be shot, it is a shaggy animal, they don't show any
respect for it at all. Scaffolded king - svrgnuti kralj. Topple -
stropostati se. Although the moose seemed tame, it has all the
instincts and shows its nature, it roars to mark its territory. And
the people only now recognize the power not visible at the first
glance. They are afraid and they try to find shelter in the world of
civilisation, in their cars. The moose is killed and as it topples to
the ground the men sound the horns in the cars. These two
sounds are contrasted, the roar coming from nature and horns
from civilisation. The horns are there to prove people's supremacy
just as the moose tried to prove its supremacy by roaring. But
animals in nature don't kill each other they enter a challenge and
when one proves stronger the other retreats. So when the moose
roared the people were supposed to roar stronger to scare the
moose and prove their supremacy, but they can't and they know
that the moose is stronger and poses a threat so they kill it. They
don't even use what they've been given by nature - their own
voices - they rely on technology and civilisation, they use horns.

Progressive Insanities of a Pioneer

Margaret Atwood

It consists of 7 separate parts and it is based on the history of

early settlers in Canada and the problems they encountered there.
Progressive insanities, the implication is that the idea to go there
was insane in the first place and once they got there the insanities
continued. The insanities are given in seven steps. They try to see
some logic around them but after a while they find out that it is
impossible.

I
Point is written in italics to emphasise the fact that man is alone in
Canada and absolutely insignificant in this vast country. He's
declaring a sort of war to nature which is all around him. He wants
to conquer the wilderness, but against nature he's a mere dot. He
comes from the world of civilisation where man is the measure of
all things where man is the center, and now he wants to impose
that upon this landscape and to create civilisation. He proclaims
himself the center but this is absurd because it doesn't matter the
slightest bit, there is nothing to be the center of, no walls, no
borders. And these physical restrictions stand for civilisation, like in
the bull moose where the fenced pasture represents civilisation.
There are things that he learned from where he came from but he
cannot apply those for here there are different rules. He wants out
but it is absurd because he is not in, not limited in any way.

II
In the second stage of insanity he tries to create a world similar to
the world of civilisation. He tills the land with man-made tools. He
imposes, asserts himself upon nature, this is a struggle, nature is
not welcoming. He tills the land and says I’m not random, not
doing this by chance, I have a plan. Nature replies in aphorisms it
mocks his futile attempts to bring order into something that is
random. The sprouts and weed are a kind of words because it is
the only means of communication between nature and civilisation,
but they don't understand each other.

III
Staked - ogradjen kolcima. Pitched - podignuta. This is only one
house in the middle of nowhere it doesn't make civilisation. He
makes a plot but there’s no one to stop from entering. He is alone
its night the thought of taming the wilderness is troubling him. He
made a fence, he brought some kind of order in the world of
nature but it’s futile the fence is not stopping the plants from
coming in. The wilderness pays no attention to the fences, it
doesn't care about them, his idea that nature would care about
this limitation is absurd. At night he's alone and listens to the
sounds coming from nature, he's afraid -an animal patters across
the roof, he's afraid of every sound it seems to him that an animal
is on his roof.

IV
During the day he resisted because he was engaged in hard work
and didn't think much. He's disgusted with the sounds coming
from nature because they represent the absence of order. Nature
replies that it is an ordered absence, in other words nature is
ordered but not according to the rules of civilisation but according
to its own rules, however the man doesn't like that, he wants to
control it he doesn't like the natural order, he wants to impose the
civilised, human order.

V
But he is persistent to create civilisation of this wilderness. He is
trying to make fertile ground out of the soil, to grow some plants,
but the earth remains shallow he can't put the roots in it. The poet
compares his futile attempt to hunting whales with a bent pin. He
could grow nothing the worms ate everything.

VI
This is a kind of a moral. The allusion here is to Noah. All his
attempts to cultivate the land were futile, it would be better for
him to collect all the animals like Noah, even the wolves and float.
Deluge - flood. The idea is that he should've realized that this
wilderness was not only his but home to many other creatures and
should have shared it with them and then he would survive. He
should have accepted the animals like Noah did. But he was
obstinate in the illusion thinking that it is good solid land and then
watched his foot sink in it, he is in denial. Progressive insanities -
at this moment he is absolutely insane and stands on a rock but
he perceives that he is sinking through this rock - this is how solid
his illusion is. His mind gives up here, he's getting insane. So these
were the problems of the early settlers, the problems were not
only physical - they had to work hard and still couldn't tame the
wilderness - they had to deal with the psychological pressure, they
couldn't find themselves in this new environment.

VII
Here is more resistance on the part of the world of nature. He
cannot civilize the wilderness it resists. Wilderness can't be tamed,
the wolves hunt outside. Ragged - shabby, worn out, exhausted.
In Canadian literature Canada is usually called the green monster,
Atwood here calls it the green whale, and it won, it invaded in the
end. The man's eyes are exhausted he is tired of futile attempts.
In this struggle between the subject(man) and the object(nature)
the whale(nature) invaded.

Thoughts From Underground

Margaret Atwood

This poem is spoken by Moodie after her death. It is logical why

the poem is called thoughts from underground because Moodie is
dead and her spirit speaks to us. It is based on the first impression
of Canada, she hates it. This is not the way of life she was
accustomed to, she came from a completely different world. She
hates it because in the summer all the light they see is a violent
blur - neka mrlja na nebu. The heat is combined with moisture.
She says the green things as if the plants coming from nature and
insects were some kind of pests, she is disgusted with nature.
Teeth brittle with cold - cvokotanje. They had to thaw bad
bread, the house cracked from cold. But after the period of
assimilation and civilisation they became successful, and now that
the things are different she is supposed to love it. But although
she publically proclaims that she loves it, she says my mind saw
double, she didnt really love it. When you tell lies and spin a tale
you forget yourself in the middle of sentences, and that's what
happens to her. She's now supposed to make up stuff why people
should love Canada, but she has to think of something because
she doesn't really see any reason why would they love Canada,
she starts talking we should love Canada and then she stops in the
middle of sentences. She then says the reasons why they should
love Canada, because they will all be rich and powerful. Belleville is
her settlement. It is growing fast considering what it was like
when they came, so no one can doubt the prosperity, however -
the punchline is in brackets - you can't find civilisation here yet. All
the time she was trying to convince herself that Canada is good –
there are all those beautiful things like superb penitentiaries.

Now we move on to First Nations and their rebellions.

There were many Indian tribes and their customs differed
depending on what part of Canada they occupied. They lived in
tepees which were made of buffalo hyde. They didn't make solid
houses because they constantly moved around following the
buffalo which was their primary source of food. There were also
wigwams and they were made of tree bark. They also used the fat
and the dung(excrement) of the buffalo as a type of fuel. Their
system was patriarchically ordered, there were wars for territory
among tribes. The bones were used for all sorts of tools like
needles. The hunting technic was to drive the buffalo towards the
edge of a cliff and there they would fall down and die, then the
hunters would skin them, and store them for the winter. However
when the settlers arrived they started building the CPR(Canada
Pacific Railway) connecting the Atlantic and the Pacific oceans, this
allowed the settlers to get deeper into the country. This railway
interrupted the buffalo's usual migratory routes form North to
South and vice versa, the buffalo was afraid of the trains. The
buffalo was a nuissance ti the railway builders so they started
systematically exterminating the buffalo, because of this the First
Nation people starved. The Metis(French metisage - mixed) are
mentioned and they are the mixture of Europeans and Indians. In
the beginning only men came to Canada because it was wilderness
and no woman wanted to go there, and that's why they made
offspring with Indian women. These were French colonists, the
English were not so cooperative and didn't want to have anything
with Indians so their first colony in Canada failed, whereas the
French learned things from the Indians and were able to survive.
Canada was created in 1867. Four provinces got into confederation
in this year. Today there are three territories and ten provinces. At
the beginning there were 3 nations the English, French and First
Nations. The problem for the Europeans was that the Metis who
could speak French and some were even educated realized what
was going on, one of these men was Louis Riel. In 1869 he and
his followers created a provisional government with the idea to
make the British to whom Canada belonged as a colony at that
time accept Manitoba where most of the Metis were at the time as
an independent province. This whole territory was inhabited by
English-speaking population and in order to preserve their identity
the Metis insisted on French. One more distinction between these
peoples was that the Metis just as the French were Catholics
whereas the English were Protestants. The Metis demanded also
to have schools on French and money to compensate for what the
Europeans had done to them. But Canada was at that time still
very young and the request was seen as a threat and a sign of
rebellion. Louis Riel was a pacifist, he had no intention of fighting
but he had to because the requests were discarded and the
government sent army against these rebels. We will read the text
from the trial to Louis Riel. Even though this was treated as a
rebellion - Red River Rebellion - nobody really got killed. Seeing
the numbers of the people involved in the rebellion they promised
to allow all the demands of the Metis. There was a person during
the rebellion who died, it was Thomas Scott, he threatened Riel to
kill him all the time and at then ended up on a trial for this where
he was found guilty and killed. The British used him as an excuse
after to go back on their words and not fulfil the requests but start
another attack. When the situation became dangerous Riel left
Canada for America where he spent a few following years. All the
agreements fell through because there were these huge
companies like Hudson Bay which was the authority for Canada,
they brought more people and sold them the land, and they
pushed the Metis back taking Manitoba as well. The Metis had to
move westwards to Saskatchewan. And for that time it seemed
they would live there. During that time Riel was a teacher in
America. However the same scenario repeats again, the settlers
need more land and they claim Saskatchewan. There was this man
who was important to the Metis - Gabriel Dumon - he was the
leader of the last buffalo hunt. He was now the leader of the Metis
he was more aggressive and they realized that peaceful
negotiations couldn't lead to the sovereignty of Saskatchewan so
they created another provisional government but they needed
someone to communicate with the settlers - they called Louis Riel.
Together with Gabriel Dumon he starts the North West Rebellion.
That's the time when the shareholders in the CPR company
demanded to finish the rail as soon as possible so as to send
troops there and quell the rebellion. Riel was trialed and convicted
of murder of Thomas Scott and then hanged. Instead of giving
them a province where to live as equal to all the other provinces,
they were first decimated and then put into reservations. They
were now crowded into the reservations depraved of their natural
way life, they migrated with the buffalo, now they are not allowed
even to hunt, we will also read a story about how mercilessly an
Indian is chased for killing a wild animal. They don't have territory,
no jobs, they are bored, they turn to alcohol.

The Red River rebellion took place in 1869, Louis Riel was the
leader and this was a reaction against British domination. 1885
was the year of the North West rebellion. Big Bear was the chief of
the Cree tribe he wanted to fight for natives' rights but by peaceful
means. It is important to know the main figures from this text
about the Riel's trial. We see that the pattern of imperialism
remains the same only social orders change but people are still
greedy, and with the excuse of prosperity and progress these
people justify their actions.

The next topic in the Canadian studies is the history of literature

developing in Canada.

The Canadian Prairies View of Literature

David Donnell

The Canadian Prairies are right below the Hudson Bay. This is the
fertile land where the first settlers began creating civilisation, and
this is where the first Southern Ontario towns emerged. Before the
towns the people lived in the bush and this is the first time they
moved to the clearings and started building and this is when the
first literature written by these people living in Canada appeared.
This is a narrative poem which tells us the story of Canadian
literature, and there is this statement at the beginning. Anecdote
is a short humorous story which often refers to an important event
worth remembering through this short story. The first line says
that the first literature must have consisted of anecdotes. These
were not educated men, they were gold diggers, ordinary working
people so they probably created anecdotes. He says ideas don't
exist - ideas of the nation, the future, people believing in the
green vision. There are just very few people dispersed in the
wilderness and literature doesn't exist. In the next line he says
that after some time themes start developing. What will Canadian
literature deal with? In the beginning the themes will be nature,
plants, animals, climate, hardships of the first settlers,... The
image of how these themes develop is interesting. Themes
struggle dimly - they struggle, they are not clear, just vague ideas.
Accrued - accumulated. They have been living there for some time
they have experiences and all of this serves now as accumulated
material for producing themes for literature. They struggle like the
shadow of a catterpillar - the catterpillar is in a cocoon and we can
see only its shadow struggling to get out. And later on we will find
out who is this person who starts thinking about writing. The
reason why it was so difficult for them to start writing was that
they had huge problems in life like ensuring survival in the
wilderness and preventing starvation, and when you have this kind
of problems you don't really have the time for literature, you work.
The poet then corrects himself, he says well I used this similee but
even this is too urban. How are catterpillars related to towns? Well
the poet says that even the catterpillars as the means of
comparison are too urban because the houses in the town, and
even today, are made of wood, and the catterpillars eat this wood.
So the poet thinks catterpillars would imply cities but there were
no cities at the time only a few small Ontario towns. Towns are
alright, they have streets bordered with trees, but still there is
some problem, they are not like French towns. There are two
nations in Canada the English towns look urban, ok, but the
French towns which are in Quebec preserved the spirit of France.
The poet actually with this difference between French and English
cities points to the disagreement between the French and the
English.
If we are to write literature we need some plot, story. The
poet says that the action of that literary work should take place
between April and October because this is the period of more or
less summer and the poet wants to say that this is the only period
when you can actually live in Canada, the period when some sort
of action is possible. For the rest of the year you have to stay shut
in your house due to the harsh weather conditions and especially
in the beginning when there were no towns but farms the distance
among which was huge. Because of the distance people couldn't
visit each other and lead some kind of social life, all the activity
was on the farm. And in the next line the poet describes a
Canadian winter. Now we see that the first people who started
thinking about writing were school teachers because they were
literate and also at the time there were not much pupils, these
were small country schools, so the teacher had a lot of free time
for thinking during the lessons. They dream of being somewhere
else. They have the desire to leave this place and desire is all that
is necessary to write poetry, they just need to have talent to
transform the desire into poetry. Reporters will write the first
novels in Canada. They report about events, life, relationships. The
reporter's head is hot, he is curious, inquisitive, stubborn. The
reporter investigates the relationships between farms(a son from
one farm falls in love with the daughter from the other, but their
parents are against it,...) this is a possible theme for a novel. In
the next line we see that slowly towns develop. People who sit in
the beverage rooms obviously like drinking and get drunk often
and then there is excitement and action and this is a possible
theme for a novel. Cheap hotels - affairs,... When gold was
discovered people hurled to Canada and little towns developed
into cities. No matter how hard they tried to make the Indians
disappear, they were always there and one can't avoid them when
making a novel about Canada. The poet discovers to us what they
look like, they are alienated because of the way the white man
treats them, they are segregated and live in reservations. They are
sullen and confused, they are not happy about what's happening
to them and often they don't even understand and this is
compared to the weather because it surprises you, it is
unpredictable. A town drunk is also an interesting character for a
novel. The mayor is an ambitious person, he is out ward - heeling
- he walks the you-can't-do-anything-to-me walk, and he kisses
womens' hands and buys the drunk a drink. These are all possible
characters for a novel. And then we see what was the attitude
towards children. Until the child becomes useful it will be just a
load, another mouth to feed. Now we have social life represented
in that town, people sit together in the evening, the time for
elections approaches and they wonder who to vote for. Corn
shucks - shash. Their heads are empty they have shucks instead of
brains. These are not educated or sophisticated people, they are
very average. And the options are between two young men who
are distinguished by irrelevant features. This is what they have
and they work with what they have. This is how they describe
them one is good the other is strong. Now that Canada has
developed a bit, people became patriotic - this is a positive feeling,
the bad aspect of it is nationalism. We see that nationalism
develops in small local communities and it is present even in the
early history. We are in Southern Ontario, they dislike the East.
Because Newfoundland is in the east and they hate these people,
they believe they are stupid. And also there is the hostility towards
the French. And these are all possible themes for novels. They
muse on their situation and they realize that there is not much of a
future for them and that they are in the middle of nowhere and
this allows for their discontent to flower into rancor. And for this
they blame the Other(the French) they are the source of their
problems and that's how people become nationalistic. The poet
says that the East gives them form. They understand that they
have their identity because they identify themselves via Eastern
people, they are not from the East. They use the negative
definition like in 'The Rent' where a Canadian defines himself and
says - I'm not an American. Now we turn to the narrator. The poet
is not different from the people living there, he lives there too and
shares the spirit and the atmosphere. He connects the previous
line with the next which refers to himself by using the same words
again - musing and rancorous. Since he shares the atmosphere of
the place no wonder he is also musing and rancorous. He lives in
this little town of Gait. He walks down the side streets and not the
main street and by the end of the poem we will see why. He gives
us the time and also his age. At the age of 12 he's already
dissatisfied with life in Gait. Rimbaud - a French poet. He
compares himself to this French poet who was already a famous
poet at the age of 17 and left Charleville to go to Africa. His hands
are like white stones because he squeezed them into fists and he
holds them so tight that they turned white because he is angry,
dissasitsfied but he also has a talent, he uses a simile a poetic
device, he compares his hands to stones, and he promises himself
once again that when he moves to the city everything will happen.
The city is Toronto. This everything is to become a writer, that's
his ambition. And what literature does to us is makes us laugh and
cry. He wants to be the best and move people. The people from
the city treat them like scum because they come from a small
Ontario town and therefore he will drink their whiskey and sleep
with their wives. This is an angry child walking down a street and
mumbling this. Hector - Trojan prince, a great warrior. Now he
sees that at that time he was more like Hector than Rimbaud, he
was vengeful. In the last two lines we see that he stole some corn
and he is hiding it under his shirt, and this is the reason why he
walked along side streets, and arms in his pockets, he is holding
the corn so that it doesn't fall through. And now we understand
where the motivation comes from.

Poetry
F. R. Scott

The poet says nothing can take its place, it is important you can't
do without it, he of course means poetry. And now the poet
supports his thesis by various poetic devices. Ostrich - noj. The
poet combines the image of an ostrich with Mackanzie King and
his speech on Freedom of Trade. An ostrich puts its head in the
sand when it's afraid - this is the image given and it is associated
with this politician who was at one point prime minister of Canada
and was famous for being too cautious. Mackenzie is explained in
the book. He tried to reach an agreement with the US concerning
trade, so as to avoid trade with Britain and consequently
dependence on Britain. He reached an agreement but then he
backed away from US as well for the same reasons. In the poet's
mind an ostrich and this politician share some characteristics. So
the poet shows us that he can use this word 'ostrich' as a
metaphor for anything for example this prime minister. He shows
us that by poetry he is able to convey this much without using so
many words.
In the next stanza he shows us that he can even connect
things which are at first glance totally unrelated. He shows us the
connection between holocaust and nightingales. They are related
through their concern for their premiums, the poet says they
would both be startled at seeing these words. They have things to
protect from the external influences, and in the long run this is
something that could bring the language of the flesh and the
language of the roses together. Holocaust belongs to the language
of flesh, reality, history of civilisation, whereas nightingales are
usually associated with the language of the roses, poetry. So poets
have the potential to connect the two aspects of life which are
seemingly impossible to relate. Insurance agents deal with money
and are not connected with spiritual unlike virgins but they can be
connected through poetry and here the poet found a way through
their premiums which they protect, money and virginity. Holocaust
is connected with insurance agents because innocent people die
and there is all this collateral damage that the insurance
companies have to cover, as for virgins they are symbolically in
poetry often connected to nightingales.
There may be an item from every day life and the poet may
use it so that it stands for something different. A rose is arose.
This is abstract modern writing and particularly this line alludes to
a line from Gertrude Stein's poem 'Sacred Emily'. So in poetry this
item from ordinary life stands for something different, sometimes
the symbol can be rather abstract. He walked down a street
marked No Outlet - slepa ulica. What was blocking the way was
railroad roaring to the West. The railroad may stand for civilisation
and it means that technological advancement was not always
beneficial. It is useful for everyday life, but it can constray(sputa)
the artist in the society. Because a lot of attention is paid to
progress and prosperity and no attention is paid to the role of the
poets, it seems that the poet doesn't benefit the society. That's
why he says that this was blocking his path.
He knows that it will survive because nothing can take its
place. Again in the last stanza we have the image of the modern
society - what is valued is genuine pornography used as a way of
advertising, decline of reading. The words that the poets use are
just like mushrooms because they grow quickly and everywhere.
Because of this he is sure that poetry will survive even the
situation is difficult. The poet when inspired hears all these nouns
in his head, he hears the overtone and nothing can drown it. He is
quite optimistic regardless of everything.

Portrait of the Poet as Landscape

A. M. Klein

The idea is again the same as in the previous poem - the position
of the poet in modern society. The poet is here like an
omnipresent entity, he is like the landscape, however people are
usually negligent of the poet and the idea is that poets are not
always given recognition. The poet starts with this idea and then
he creates a kind of an imaginary situation about what would
happen to a poet if he was found dead, who would mourn him.
Editorial-writer – probably writing for the papers. The editorial
writer is here described as a drunkard – bereaved with
Bartlett(alcoholic drink made of pears). The poet is compared to
the shelved Lycidas. Lycidas is a poem by Milton. He wrote about a
young man who drowned and this man was his friend, he was
really talented but couldn't achieve what he wanted because of
death. So this poet is compared to Lycidas a young man, very
talented, who drowned, who could not contribute and achieve his
full potential. Nobody misses this poet who is probably dead.
Nobody even notices that he died. He is somewhere on a shelf and
nobody pays attention to him. Not even an actress fakes with a
glycerine tear that she is sorry for him. His story is not a part of
something that we are presented with every day on our screens.
There is not even an announcement on the radio about his death.
He is not known to anyone to even report his death.
In the second stanza we have something like a murder plot
in a detective novel. We are given various possibilities. The people
treat him in the manner as if he were dead.
In this stanza it seems from the first line that the poet is not
a true member of society, nobody knows what happened to him
but he is not a part of the society. The poet has disappeared from
the society, officially we cannot find him anywhere. He doesn't
count except in the statistics. Gallup poll is the most famous poll in
Canada - ankete za ispitivanje javnog mnjenja. He's just a number
not a personality. Everybody is shouting and in this mob he's just a
sigh.
Scroll - svitak. The idea is that the culture of our civilisation
started with the poet. It started with his scroll. Rostrum -
govornica, podium. He was at the rostrum listened by people. He
is the one who clarified the structure of the earth with sky and
seven circled air. He named heaven one name and air another, he
named them. This is probably a reference to a medieval
understanding of how earth functioned. This could be achieved in
his poetry. And this is the transition from then to now, once he
was important and his voice was heard, but now he is nobody.
Lacunal - a hole in the wall.

II
He is not dead, he is ignored, this is his position in the society. He
compares himself to a pair of glasses forgotten on a brow of an
absent minded professor who forgot where he put them and is
looking for them. He is one of our neighbours but although
perceived as a passable fellow, he is eccentric, not solid(doesn’t
have regular incomes. You can forgive his eccentricities and at the
same time you disregard him, you don’t take him seriously.
He is eccentric because he is moody like every poet. Nadir –
the lowest point there is. Sometimes he would be really depressed.
Throwback – the one who does not fit in. Quintuplet – five. He
curses his five senses because with his five senses he can feel
more than ordinary people. And sometimes when he is depressed
he curses this talent he has and sometimes he believes that
exactly this talent is guilty for his depression. He curses the senses
and their tutors(the poets from long ago). These are all things
which are guilty for his not fitting into the society. But then at
other times he remembers what a process it is to write a poem
and then he gets soft and he feels good. He describes the process
of writing poetry as one would describe a beautiful woman, his
beloved – torso verb, beautiful face of a noun,… and he enjoys it.
Writing poetry was his first love, love at first sight. So this is the
reaction that is opposed to the first one when he is depressed. So
this process of writing poetry is just like falling in love.
And then he remembers how when writing poetry he would
get totally transformed, he experienced a kind of change he would
glow and feel the growth of his being as if he were in love. So the
process of writing poetry is just like falling in love. Suddenly when
he starts writing he becomes more aware of the things around
him, he is more aware of the air, he is like a shaken tinfoil(he
reacts to the tiniest gust of wind). The patents of nature – he is
more aware of everything that is going on in nature. It is like
waiting for his beloved to come and he is impatient and then
suddenly she appears and he is shocked. He is in crowd but he
feels as if he were alone so this is just as if he were in love.
Since he is writing he has this ability to take some of the
roles of the people in his poetry, so he sees himself as the Count
of Monte Cristo,… He can play different roles. And when he is
deflated(down in the dumps) he can imagine that he is the convict
on parole.
He says that these are not mean ambitions, he just wants to
reach people, to move them. He doesn’t want to deceive them, he
wants to entertain them. Meanwhile – until this stage is achieved,
until he is recognized by the society – he creates of his zero status
in the society a rich garland, halo(oreol) of anonymity. He shines
in secret because people do not respond to him, they cannot
perceive that he shines, but he is like phosphorus he shines at the
bottom of the sea quite symbolically because he is not recognized
in the society, nobody actually recognizes him he is just a number,
nobody, and that’s why he says that he indeed shines but at the
bottom of the sea, so nobody sees him. The sea is a metaphor for
the society, so in the first scene the poet is at the bottom of this
society because he is not recognized but that will not stop him
from shining. However he is there and the mere fact that he is
there is what is important. He shines for anyone who cares looking
at him. This is why the whole poem is titled ‘Portrait of the Poet as
Landscape’ the poet in modern society has become the part of our
landscape, he is there but we don’t pay attention to him.
Landscape is beautiful but we don’t appreciate it, we are used to
it.

The Canadian Authors Meet

F. R. Scott

A nation is characterized by its literature and it is very important

for national identity. So while reading about the development of
Canadian literature we also deal with the issue of Canadian
identity. In ‘The Canadian Prairies View of Literature’ we had the
first would-be authors and this poem we have real authors who
have gathered with the hope that they are the best Canadian
authors, however they are mocked in this poem, these are not
really witty people, they would like to be authors. But they’ve
come from Europe and are aware of how important it is to have
national literature, they’ve come from England where there is this
title for the poet ‘poet laureate’ which is a prestigious award, it is
not even an award it is a sort of recognition, a title that you are
given for life and then you have a lot of privileges. A celebrated
poet usually gets this title only after the old holder of the title dies.
What this means is that you become a member of the royal family
and get a salary, your duty is to write poetry. Some of those were
Alfred Tennyson, Wordsworth, A. Pope,…
Here in this poem the wanna-be authors know what they’re
talking about but they don’t have the talent. Puppets are dolls
controlled by strings. Self-unction – miro pomazanja. Percolate –
ooze. These are all chosen words, sort of elevated, the vocabulary
is supposed to show us how highly they think of themselves. They
are so important that they don’t really need a priest for this ritual,
self-unction, they are important, the smell radiates out of them.
The puppets are expansive(sire se u smislu sta se siris), they are
bragging, boasting, ego. This is a kind of a ball and they are
standing beneath the portrait of the Prince of Wales, but this is
Canada, so why are they so loyal? Canada is a part of the British
Commonwealth, dominion. The British loyalists moved out of the
states to Canada after the war of independence and that’s how
this Canadian nation started developing. Though Canada is not a
colony anymore these people are still loyal to the mother country.
The hostess of the ball is Miss Crotchet. Crotchet – heklati. So this
is the top of her creativity – crocheting, and she wants to be a
poet. But she doesn’t have the talent, and she blames it on her
muse, the poet says that her muse has somehow failed to
function. This is how she justifies her lack of talent. But this will
not stop her, she might not be the best poet, yet she’s a poetess.
She is beaming – glowing, she is self-satisfied, she doesn’t walk,
she sails, floats.
We learn that she is a Victorian lady, and the year is 1927 so
the Victorian age is over in Britain. However Canada was always
behind the trends in Britain so that in Canada a few decades after
there is Victorian age. So in Canada the Victorian virtues are very
much alive, in Britain there are already women with voting rights,
while in Canada they are still subordinate to the male power. She
is not a young woman, she is sixty, and this is how Victorian ladies
spent their time, they were supposed to entertain guests, visit
people, as the ladies do. Since she is a fine lady she of course
sticks to the conventions so she greets all the guests with a cheer
and she talks to every chattering group, and behaves as a good
hostess. They are unknowns not in the sense that she doesn’t
know them, but in the sense that they are not celebrated, famous
for some talent of theirs. Miss Crotchet is one of them too. The
poet says she greets the other unknowns, meaning she is one of
them too. All of them are unknown to the wider public. They don’t
matter as literary figures however they have those ideas and they
will keep up the pretenses, because they feel that Canada needs
authors and they want to be these authors. And the topic of their
writing is passion. There is nothing illogical with the theme for
literary work being passion, however these are virgins, how can
they know of passion. The idea here is that if you write about
something that you don’t have any experience with then your
poetry probably isn’t good. This is the poet’s idea and we may
assume that he is right, however we read Wuthering Heights
which involve passion almost out of this planet, and the book was
written by a person who never married and barely even left her
farm and yet she managed to convince us that this passion is
possible. But what we have in this poem is completely different,
the poet mocks these women because he thinks that it is very
unlikely for them to write good poetry about something that they
never felt.
 Now in the next stanza we have a list of the best known
poets up to that moment, the earliest poets of any recognition in
Canada(including F. R. Scott), and the poet basically says that
these women are trying to be as these poets but they can’t
achieve that. But they discuss these poets, they now become
critics of Canadian poetry, which is logical because when there is a
bad poet he usually becomes a critic like when a bad actor
becomes a director. They are discussing these authors and what
they actually do is judging people for their faith, this is Victorian
age and having faith in God is an important convention and also
philanthropy. They impose themselves as the authority to judge
about other authors because they themselves are poor authors.
But since this is a ball there are other entertainments as well and
not just discussing poetry.
They have the feeling that they are in a very good company
of educated people, the elite and the poet says that this feeling is
to them sweeter than the cakes at this ball. They are among the
literati and inevitably the word has to be foreign. Since they are
mostly old about sixty years of age, the poet almost mocks them
by saying that this conversation and company warms the old and
melts the congealing. Really it is a most delightful party, this is
what they’ll say after the party, this is the convention – nothing
could be more delightful.
Mulberry – dud. In this stanza the poet lays out for us to see
what are their daily preoccupations, and he gives us four options
one of which is of great significance the other three are absolutely
insignificant and he purposely puts the important one among the
irrelevant ones so that we see how much these people actually
care about appointing a poet Laureate, the idea is that they don’t
address this matter seriously at all, it’s all one to them, and this
tells us about their sensibility, these are not poets. The author of
this poem can only despair now and that is what he does in the
last stanza.
Welkin – sky. The poet plays with the word Canada in the
beginning this stanza in a very interesting way, he interrupts it and
that may have some significance implying that Canada is still not
developed. He asks a rhetorical question, of course that there are
new would-be authors every day who want to paint the native
maple(da izmisljaju toplu vodu), they don’t really create something
new, just repeat what has already been invented. When you
produce a sound it is a vibration that spreads all around you, the
idea is that poetry makes the sky ring, and these would-be poets
don’t create anything original they are just following the footsteps
of the old authors, they just set the sky ringing again for no
special reason.

Can. Lit.
Earle Birney

In the first line the poet says that in Canada there has always
been plenty of sky implying that Canada has huge territory. The
idea is that there is a lot of space in Canada. When they had
eagles these flew out and the only place for them to fly to is USA.
The eagle here stands for an artist. The eagle is a beautiful, potent
bird. For Birney this is the image of a poet. The problem is that
they leave Canada and they go for the states because it is a wide-
spread belief that the USA offers much more than any other
country. And this is a huge problem that Canada has, they also
suffer from brain drain. It is easier to publish in the USA but the
thing is that when they publish a book in the USA they are not
signed as Canadian authors but as American, they are
appropriated by the USA so that they are not even Canadians
anymore, so this makes the situation even worse for Canada. The
eagle flies high and he throws a small shadow the size of a
wren(kraljic, a small bird). This shadow is so small that it can’t
frighten even a hen sitting on eggs.
This stanza refers to the railway, CPR. The poet now refers
to the early history, the problem was huge distances in this vast
country, and it was solved by building railways, however what the
poet says is that they didn’t choose the right way to bridge
loneliness. The loneliness exists between individuals, so these
individuals should have done something, establish relationships
among people, but they chose the language of flesh, they chose to
build railroads. Emily here is a reference to Emily Dickenson, an
early American poetess who never left her house and wrote a lot
of poetry. She wrote a poem ‘the bone that has no marrow’ and
there she said – this is my letter to the world that never wrote to
me. Her poetry is her way of bridging loneliness, so it was through
the language of roses that she tried to bridge the loneliness. The
idea is that building this civilization Canadians forgot the language
of poetry.
 The French came to Canada before the English and they
started the first settlements along the St. Laurence river, and then
the English who were more powerful usurped the French
territories. Especially after the seven-year war when France had to
give over the territories it possessed in America and Canada, and
that’s how the English pushed the French from the land they had
possessed and they started dominating Canada, so that now
French live in only one part, Quebec. The French never really
reconciled with their position and they still insist on sovereignty.
The poet says that they had their civil war but it never stopped
and it became a bore, a bloody civil bore. So this is one more thing
that bothers Canadians.
The first line of this stanza refers to the previous stanza and
these are actually the casualties from the civil war. The poet says
that these people who were involved into bloodshed don’t need
any Whitman – Walter Whitman, American poet whose collection
of poems is titled ‘leaves of grass’. He doesn’t write about the
American dream and progress, he is the one who advocates return
to nature, so this is the language of roses that Birney insists upon,
and this is the language that Canada doesn’t understand. Why are
there no ghosts in Canada? Because Canada doesn’t have a long
history. The poet plays with words and he says that Canada is
haunted by the lack of history. So this is another problem of
Canada, it is too young, people have hard time identifying
themselves, like with those negative definitions Canadian is not an
American. And with all the immigrants the country really has
problems with identity. Canadians are described as those who
search for their identity.

The next topic after the development of literature in Canada is the

position of women in Canada.

The Onondaga Madonna

Duncan Campbell Scott

Onondaga – An Iroquois tribe. Madonna means virgin, and it

usually refers to Virgin Mary. The poet uses this Christian figure to
bring the picture closer to us. There is a kind of a contrast in the
title, she belongs to a tribe of the First Nations who were not
Christians and yet there is this reference to Virgin Mary. Full-
throated – having or producing a rich, sonorous sound. She looks
as if she doesn’t care about anything, as if she is in the center of
everything and this is not the idea with the Christian Madonna,
because she is submissive, humble, virtuous,… Her race is referred
to as a weird and waning race. Weird from the point of view of the
white people, of course, they are not white so they are weird, and
they are also difficult to understand. They are also slowly
disappearing with the coming of the white settlers.
The reference is here to the past glory of her tribe, their
system of beliefs, stories, attitude towards life was passed on from
generation to generation, to her it was passed down from the
blood of her ancestors, and this savage ancestry is reflected
through her face. It is tragic because it is waning. Pagan is usually
connected with irrational, passionate. Her careless posture from
the beginning actually anticipates the slow disappearance of her
race, not only through the actions of the white settlers, but also
through intermarriages. The ancient foes are the white settlers,
the implication is that she had a child with one of the settlers,
anyway the idea is that it is not only the war that slowly
exterminates this race, but also the mixing of races. She belongs
to a savage race so her blood is not tame, or better to say civilized
as that of white people, she is wild. Dabbled – spotted, umrljane.
Forays – pljackanje, haranje, pustosenje. There are two totally
contrasted cultures and she belongs to this ‘savage’ culture, so the
blood in her veins is not tame, this is from the point of view of the
white man.
In the second stanza the reference is to her child, so there is
this picture of a mother and a child, and this child represents the
latest promise of her nation’s doom. So the idea here is not that
the tribes are disappearing through wars with the white settlers,
but through the process of intermarriages. This child is paler than
she is, meaning she had sex with one of the white settlers. It
seems that in this child the two races are fighting for supremacy,
whose features will be more visible. The primal warrior gleams
from his eyes so this is something that can be related to Indians,
he sulks – mrsti se. He is burdened with the infant gloom, infant
because it is present from the moment he was born, and gloom
because he doesn’t belong to any of the two races, wherever he
goes he won’t be accepted immediately, and also he represents a
kind of hope for the future, however it is already clear that these
tribes will certainly disappear because the child is a future warrior
– it will be killed. The main idea is that this is how Indians will
disappear, not only thorough aggression and violence but through
intermarriages and this Madonna is a proof for that. The poem is
about this transition from savagery to civilization, of from the
language of roses to the language of flesh. Vesna pointed out to
the symbolism of the word weird which is in the second line of this
poem and related to the woman. The word means to begin, to
happen, to grow – three goddesses merged into one with three
aspects. And also the word waning which we use for the Moon,
the idea is that these people are much close to this mythology.

Night Song for a Woman

Al Purdy

The first hing we notice about the poem is that there are no
punctuation marks, no fullstops. Akin to – similar to, related to.
This first stanza refers to how the poet remembers his beloved.
They met only a few times and then she went away. But that
doesn't mean that the poet stopped thinking about her, although
she is physically absent this absence is similar to presence, her
physical absence has nothing to do with the poet's state of mind.
It seems to him that she is still present in his mind. How is she
present? In the changed look of buildings. After he met her now it
seems to him that the world has changed, of course his view of
the world has changed, and she is responsible for this, and also he
feels pain after she is gone which always reminds him of her. He
undergoes a kind of an inner transformation just by the fact that
he met her a few times, it is like personal revelation, epiphany.
This woman became the center of his life and he feels an inch off
centre. When she is not there nothing is right.
After this experience with the lady he has this emotional
reaction, he is oversensitive, and he has the feeling that all the
things enter into him softly – he is all the things that he
experienced, he is aware of them not himself – he knows that
these things are not himself but at the same time he is all these
things that enter into him through his senses. He says I am aware
of them not myself the mind is sensuous – so this is a kind of
paradoxical idea, he is aware of everything around him, but he
doesn’t identify with everything around him. He had this like
epiphany and he understands things better and he is aware of all
the things around him, but he says I’m not myself(nisam sasvim
svoj). And the mind is usually not sensuous but sensible so this is
a kind of a paradox. So he is not split within himself into the
thinking part and the feeling part, they are united within him. He
says that the mind is sensuous as the body, so there are no two
aspects, they are united, he is now a complete person. He is a
sound because he is a poet and he is a man and whenever he
produces the sound it spreads it is out of hearing past – he cant
hear it anymore but the energy doesn’t disappear. Arcturus - the
third brightest star, far away from the earth. Being a poet he
wants his voice to be heard, resonant. We already mentioned
sounds with Vesna and now with Milena too and they both for the
purpose of understanding the ideas of the poems said that
according to the laws of physics sound as a vibration never ends
and never stops travelling, the fact is - No. We don't generally say
that sound disappears. Sound will dissipate as its energy is
absorbed by the things it comes in contact with (though some of
that energy may be reflected). That includes the air through which
it is traveling. Eventually, all its energy will have been absorbed.
Sound does lose energy as it travells through matter, and will
eventually not have enough energy left to continue travelling. But
here the idea is that sound never stops travelling, so for example
you produced a sound some time in history and it travels and it
can be heard again in the future. He wants his poetry to be just
like Arcturus this star which we don’t always see but is always in
the sky. We can’t really perceive it but it is there, the same goes
for the sound, we can’t really perceive it but its there. If anyone
were to listen they’d know about humans – listen to poetry, the
idea is that maybe if there were aliens in this other solar system of
Arcturus they’d hear the sound and they’d know about humans.
They’d know something about humans, they’d know that we have
feelings. So this poem ends as a comment on the position of
poetry in the modern world, if we read poetry we would learn a lot
about humans, about ourselves. He starts with this even in his life
when he fell in love, and then by the end of the poem he turns it
into the praise of poetry. So this poem is actually related to the
previous topic of the position of poetry in the modern society. It is
called night song for a woman because it is inspired by this lady. It
is night time he probably can’t fall asleep and then he is inspired
to write a poem and give a comment on the significance of poetry.
And that is visible in the poem he first starts thinking about her
and how everything is an inch off centre and then he is inspired
and proceeds. Vesna gives us a different interpretation where the
poet doesn’t give a comment on the position of poetry, this is
actually a love poem where the poet celebrates the feelings that
he has for this woman and puts it in poetry and then says that if
aliens were to here his poetry they’d learn about our feelings and
love.

Emily Carr
Wilfred Watson

Emily Carr was one of the first woman painters in Canada. And she
is one from the group of seven, seven painters who glorified the
Canadian landscape. This is a description of a woman as an artist.
Jonah – a character from the bible who was swallowed by a whale
and after some time the whale came to a shore and spat him out.
God chose him to become a prophet but he escaped his duty and
therefore was punished, the punishment was to be swallowed by a
whale. After a couple of days the whale spat him out and Jonah
then accepted the duty of being a prophet. After this life
threatening experience Jonah is transformed. In the poem Emily
Carr is compared to this prophet from the bible. She is in the
green belly of the whale, the green belly of the whale stands for
Canada. Leviathan – a mythical sea monster. She is overwhelmed
by this monster’s lights and liver, this is her initial reaction, she
was not really planning on becoming a painter, but she got
immersed into this countryside of Canada and at first she felt as if
she were threatened by this vast nature, this is her first reaction,
she feels imprisoned and appalled. After this initial reaction, she is
not desperate about her situation, she starts drawing what the
poet describes and from the point of view of the first settlers as
the monstrous cathedral. It seems that she even identifies with the
monster because she experiences and feels the living bones and
its green pulsing flesh. So this is her first reaction to Canadian
landscape imprisonment and shock. But later on they become one
and identified. The poet says that she starts inscribing it as if she
were leaving her seal, sign on it. She is swallowed by the Canadian
landscape, she uses this experience, she paints on the walls of the
whale’s belly and she transforms this experience into creative art.
After a while just like Jonah she is thrown up on the coasts of
eternity. Jonah underwent a transformation while in the whale and
then became a prophet, Emily too underwent a transformation and
she became an artist, and this is how she managed to remain on
the coasts of eternity meaning that she will always be remembered
even after her death, after these three days she is dead, but here
paintings are still there and she will be remembered. She turns the
belly of the whale into a kind of a church, the poet says monstrous
cathedral, so nature to her becomes a kind of cathedral. She
adores its green pulsing flesh, the green pulsing flesh here stands
for the plant and animal world of Canada. John of Patmos – he
was known in bible for surviving immersion in boiling oil. This is an
example of how something bad can be turned into something
valuable. John got immersed into the boiling oil, literally the river
of life burned for him, he was literally burning there. In her case
she was burned for emerald and jasper smoke, emerald is related
to the green colour of the country side, jasper is a kind of quartz
that can be found in the Canadian country side. This experience
when she was literally thrown to the Canadian landscape, at first
she felt appalled but then even this bad experience could be
transformed into something good. She transforms Canadian
wilderness into transparent vapour, this is what her art becomes.
To this uncivilized, savage wilderness she contributes and gives it
this artistic air(transparent vapour). Ghostly – sablasno. Stroke
refers to her paint brush, she represents god’s creativity in her
paintings. Nature was created by God and she truthfully represents
it in her paintings – this can be seen in the last line. The worst
experience can be transformed into something valuable and
significant, and in this case she got immortalized through her
paintings.

Beautiful Woman
Dale Zieroth

In the first part of the poem there is a description of what really

happened. Now it’s morning, the night before there was a party,
but now it’s morning the rising sun brings light and we know that
there was a kind of a party because there are remains of food and
dishes waiting to be washed. Probably after this party they felt too
tired to wash the dishes immediately. Now from this meat stuck
to the knife we turn to the flesh. So this is now the description of
the lovers, after passionate love making their flesh is aching. And
the poet says that they’ll do it again the following night. And then
he says that they may not but the situation will remain the same.
How is anger related to the situation of lovemaking? From this
anger that he feels we may actually develop a whole story about
frustrations that the society with its restrictions imposes upon us.
When he has these extreme feelings she is the only one he can
turn to for comfort, she is the only one who can listen to him and
understand him. After the passionate, physical aspect represented
by this image of broken flesh aching, now he is finally ready for
proper touch, so now he wants her to touch him, he instinctively
turns to her. Now that the skin is dead – now that the passion is
gone. Now that the music and bruises have gone – bruises are
something that remained after their love making and is also in
connection with passion, refers to the flesh, to the physical aspect,
so now that this physical need is satisfied they can turn to each
other for spiritual satisfaction, understanding. In the last few lines
we have the image of light spilling off the floor and staining the
bed like wine. Light here may stand for the garden of Eden, and
the two of them could be just like Adam and Eve falling from the
garden of Eden – the poet says all that remains refuses to begin
without falling. They fell from the world of innocence into the
world of experience. This light is what remains from the garden of
Eden and it is compared to wine which in Christianity stands for
the blood of Christ who redeemed the sins of the mankind. So
they are just like these first people Adam and Eve who had to
indulge themselves into this physical passion in order to start
anew. They have nobody else to turn to except each other, just
like Adam and Eve. So they have to pass this phase in order to
start anew. They passed this phase of lust and passion and now
they are ready for communication and mutual understanding.

Loose Woman Poem

Sharon Thesen

This is the woman who wants her liberty, who now understands
her rights. When the poetess sees a group of women it seems to
her that she sees a landscape full of holes. It seems to the poet
that all of them are talking at the same time. Their voices pierce
the ceiling – they are not afraid of anything, they don’t respect the
authority, they are liberated, they are yelling, shouting, singing,…
they are also drinking and they are probably in the mood for it, the
poet says a little choir stung by wine. And then follow the songs
that these women are singing – I Fall to Pieces and Please Release
Me. Now she says that she puts her wedding ring and then goes to
a party which is a bit strange because people usually go to a party
to find a partner so the idea is not to look engaged or in this case
married. She does this to show that she doesn’t really want to be
disturbed by men at the party. 222’s refers to the law that was
known as 222’s in Canada and this law meant that the government
could check private mail of every citizen in Canada in order to
catch communists. Canadians did not object to this, they actually
thought that the government was entitled to spy on them. So the
next day after this party she’s been to, she hears about this new
law, but she is not really bothered with what she heard, she
doesn’t protest about this new law, her reaction is carelessness,
she is clipping her nails – the moon(crescent) falls out of my
fingernail. But also the reference is to the moon because this is
the archetypal symbol of women. The house where the ladies are
smells like oysters because there are a lot of women, the idea is
that their organs smell like oysters, it seems to the poet, she
projects this smell onto the house. The moon is on the loose too,
like these women, because, again, the moon is the symbol of
women. Their presence is based on some kind of energy it is
shimmering, radiant, and the house which is full of women
vibrates with this energy. Now the poetess says – I’m fed up with
the wages of sin – and the reference is to this Christian idea that if
you indulge yourself into bodily pleasures then you go to hell, the
poetess is a modern woman and she doesn’t care about these
Christian ideas. Charles Mingus – an American jazz bassist. She
listens to his records and hepcats(cupka) around. So this is the
modern, liberated woman, she is not any longer subordinated to
the dominant ideologies – Christian or patriarchal. In the next part
of the poem there are some rhetorical questions. She gives a kind
of comment on the position of the modern woman in general. A
question of loss, being sick of self,… you are longing for something
that you lost, you are always feeling guilt because you never meet
the standards that are imposed on you so you have to question
your conduct all the time, displaced like you don’t belong to it,
even mad, chopped out of the world of discourse – not a part of
the main trend because this world is the world of men, the
dominant ideas are of the male ideology. Waylay – make an
ambush for sb – women are usually regarded as oversentimental,
illogical, irrational, so they are seen as if they wanted to trick
somebody with their sighs and tears. Now we have the image of
the relations between men and women in the modern society- it
comes down to getting laid or not getting laid and by whom, these
are the connections that we are really interested today and not in
the real connections between men and women. By the end of the
poem there is a bit of irony, she doesn’t perceive this act of love
making as getting laid, she sees it more like something that her
moons can waylay in the dark. Her moons are a reference to the
menstrual period. What she wants to say is that she doesn’t think
like a man, this is not just the question of getting laid, but
something that her moons can waylay – she can get pregnant, she
knows exactly when her period is to be and by knowing that she
can set a trap for men so she is in control. The point is that this
new woman is totally liberated and she perceives her position, role
in the society as a valid and meaningful one, although she is not
given enough space in the world of discourse which belongs to
men, although she is not given enough space in the body of
politics, she is not even interested in politics which we can
perceive from the reference to the law 222’s, she is not involved in
anything that goes on around her, she can still be in control. She
was not aware of this during those medieval periods when the
ideologies were still very active, but now she is aware of this
potential of hers and she can waylay.

Another Poem About the Madness of Women

Tom Wayman

So again here is discussed the position of the modern woman in

Canadian society. What is this madness that refers to the woman?
She is actually afraid to leave the house, she has agoraphobia, she
is afraid of open spaces and people. She feels perfectly secure in
her house, but outside she feels at a loss, it began as a joke. She
doesn’t perceive herself as belonging to the society, she doesn’t
leave the house even to shop for groceries. From the first image in
the poem there is this contrast between inside and outside. Now
she wants to be better – so in the beginning nobody took her
seriously, now she will try to be better and to belong to the
society, to do the chores, to perform all the duties that she is
expected fulfill, she wants to contribute and become a useful
member of the society and of her family. So her family drives her
to the nearest supermarket and they let her off, this is their
attempt to help her become useful, as if she were an animal. She
doesn’t enjoy this whole venture, but she is resolved. They park
and wait for her – so this is like a test for her, an initiation in order
to become a useful member of the society. Since they themselves
drove her there they could’ve done the shopping by themselves
but this is an assignment for her.
And this is her assignment – first she has to pass through
the parking lot and then enter the supermarket. She is surrounded
by people, but she is alone and she is afraid of looking at them,
she is afraid of eye contact, looking at their hurrying and stopping
faces. People at supermarkets don’t pay attention to each other
they look at the merchandise. This is really an ordeal to her, while
doing this she is listing the things she has to do to become useful,
she is ticking them off, she wants to get it over with so that she
can return back to safety.
So this is really an ordeal, she just has to accept this and
hope that she’ll get used to it – until it becomes easier. In this part
of the poem the position of the modern woman is compared to
that of the settlers’ pioneer wives in Iowa, it seems that they have
a lot in common. The women in Iowa were alone at home all day
just like modern women. Although she was in her house where
she could experience some safety and security, she could hear the
sounds from nature(there is a contrast between the noise outside
and the silence inside). Everything that surrounded the house was
whispering and hissing it was alive and hated her, of course she is
projecting her own hatred for the wilderness she is forced to live
in. We have this comparison now between the madness of the
women in pioneer Iowa and the modern women. Now this modern
woman has these technological gadgets like the clock which runs
with hardly a hum. When she throws the rubbish she doesn’t see
tall corns, she is not alone like the women in Iowa where there
were no houses around them for miles. She sees all these houses
but does that mean now that she is not alone? In the last line we
see that she understands that in these houses there are also
women who are afraid to go outside and be useful members of the
society. The comment is on alienation on the part of women in the
modern Canadian society. It seems that nothing has changed since
the settler’s wives. They are there but they are not communicating
to each other, so they are all alone. So the stress is on alienation
not only in Canada but in the whole world between not only
women but people in general. This is the alienation within the
consumer society. Also we have alienation within the family
because it seems that even her family doesn’t understand her. The
family wants to help her but they don’t know how to do that
anymore because they are a modern family who has forgotten all
the old rituals and the old ways of communicating with people. So
they do what they know they take her to the supermarket every
Saturday and Sunday and this is a parody of the old ritual.

This is a Photograph of Me
Margaret Atwood

The poem is divided into two parts, and the second part is even
graphically separated from the first by brackets. The first part is a
reference to the beautiful Canadian landscape. The poet here
recalls her childhood days, childhood experience in the wilderness
of Ontario and Quebec. The first stanza refers to an actual
photograph which was taken some time ago when she was still a
child. The photograph is smeared, blurred, has grey flecks –
umrljana, flecks(mrlje) the photograph is like this because the poet
herself is trying to remember all those vague memories of her
childhood, and at first she has some difficulties in doing so.
In the left part of the picture after a while we can see the
pan of a tree(nalicje nekog drveta), but it is still too blurry to
distinguish whether it is balsam(jela) or spruce(smreka). On the
right hand side there is a slope and a small frame house, all of this
is related to her childhood. The poet intentionally uses ‘what ought
to be’ she doesn’t say what is, this contributes to some ambiguity
and will be clearer later on in the poem. There is nothing wrong
with this picture in the first part of the poem.

Now this is a shocking revelation when she says that the

photo was taken the day after she drowned. It seems that this first
part of the poem with its calm imagery was just a set up so that
the surprise would be even bigger. She is in the picture but she
can’t be seen she is not visible, she is just under the surface. Who
is the narrator, who took the picture, how is she telling the story
when she is dead? These are the questions that are not answered
and they contribute to the mysticism of the whole story. It is
difficult to say where or how big she is because of the water, but
she is present she is there. Then we have two lines which sum up
the whole poem – the effect of water on light is a distortion – the
photo is actually a distortion of the harsh reality which is that this
lake together with the imagery from the first part of the poem
stands for the society and the poet is drowned, she is in the
picture however she can’t be seen. But she says if you look long
enough you will be able to see me. Her message in the last lines is
that if we start paying attention to people as individuals they can
be distinguished and seen in this lake of society. This poem could
be a comment on the position of women in Canadian society – if
you look long enough you will be able to see me – the real me, not
the roles that I’m supposed to play, prescribed to by the society.
But there could also be another interpretation – this could be a
comment on the position of artists in the modern society and we
have a similar idea in one of the previous poems where the artist
shines as phosphorus on the bottom of the ocean. So the poem is
divided into two parts – the idyllic picture of Canada, Canada as it
ought to be, and then the true Canada in the brackets.

Vesna about the position of women in Canada

In the beginning there were only native women in Canada. Then

there were white men coming from Europe to Canada without
women. And then they started bringing women to Canada. There
was this practice of bringing ships full of women from Europe.
Before this men usually found partners among the Indian women.
Because of the situation in Europe there were women who were
willing to experience this adventure. In the new land they would
probably marry some of the white men. This was even arranged
by the companies by which the women sailed so that immediately
upon arrival when they would exit the ship a man would pick his
woman. They were mostly poor women, prostitutes, and all other
sorts of desperate women who saw Canada as their last chance.
So there was not much love in these marriages which were
arranged according to Christian tradition unlike the marriages with
these native women, and these women were actually there to help
men survive in Canada. So these women were most of the time in
the house helping men with whatever they were doing. The men
are doing the hard work, working in the fields, and women were
from the beginning subordinate to men but at the same time they
were essentially important because without them the civilization
there wouldn’t have developed. They all came to Canada from this
patriarchal world which is the world of 18 th, 19th century England
and France. So women were subordinate but at the same time
they depended on these women. This is why the evolution of these
women differed from the one of the European women. The basic
political right is the right to vote. Women in Quebec got the right
to vote when they became owners of property, so the right to vote
was related to owning property. So if some of the women got
lucky to own some property, for example if their husband died
then they would get this right, so the emphasis is through these
laws on the property, the material side of life. So the language of
flesh dominated Canada from the very beginning. Later on in 1849
they lost this right – these were the women in Quebec and this is
actually the oldest part of settled Canada since the French settlers
came there first. In 1903 they pass an act since by then they are
already a well organized country with its birth in 1867. The name
of this act is married women’s property act. This first of all meant
that a woman has to be married, and then also to have some
property in order to be given legal rights. The situation in England
was such that till the end of the 19th the woman was a possession
of her husband, a property. Until 1916 – only women owning
property had some voting rights. For example they could
participate in appointing education officials like principals in
schools and this only at the local level, they couldn’t choose the
minister of education for example. In 1916 women were given the
right to vote but not in all Canada only in some provinces and
these are the provinces where there were rebellions – red river
rebellion and the North West rebellion which took place in two
provinces Manitoba and Saskatchewan and also Alberta. The
setting of the novel Green Grass Running Water is in Alberta. But
this is also the time when the senate decided that women could
not be represented in the senate of Canada. Today the situation is
completely different but back then women were considered not to
be fit for this kind of discourse, they don’t belong to this world of
discourse, they are related to the bridge of sighs, their sensibility
doesn’t allow them to be involved into serious business. This world
is the world of politics which is considered rather important but
women should remain at the bridge of sighs because they are
emotional therefore not quite rational. In 1918 women got the
right to vote in federal elections meaning for the whole Canada, till
then it was only on the provincial level. This is not surprising
because immediately after the World War I women in England got
the right to vote. But women are still not quite happy, the right to
vote is not the only right that people deserve. There is a lot of
discrimination against women in Canada, the Victorian mentality
perseveres so women start fighting against it and they start the
movement ‘Feminism’ in 1953. Fair Employment Practices is
another act which has been active since this time. In 1953 they
realized that they had this problem where women were
discriminated in the process of employing for no other reason but
being a woman therefore they had to pass this act. 1956 another
act named female employees equal pay act resulting from another
kind of discrimination where women were working the same job as
men but were not paid equally. 20 years after this the Canadian
human rights act was passed, the humans mentioned in the title of
this act are actually women. So they gave women equal
employment and equal salary, but that doesn’t mean that they are
treated equally on the work places. 1987, ten years after this, they
have to be even more strict because the discrimination against
women didn’t stop just by passing these acts so now they find that
discrimination in hiring women was found to be unlawful, which
means that there still are employers who refuse to hire women
simply because they are women meaning that they will have
babies sooner or later and they will be absent for a while and not
fully committed to their jobs. The consequence of this is that
women make a different list of priorities now, they choose career
before family, they delay having a baby till it’s too late for them
because they get too old to give birth and then we have the same
situation as in the poem ‘Injured Maple’. 1989 the supreme court
of Canada decided that sexual harassment is a sort of sexual
discrimination. There was also this idea of domestic bliss which
was a cunning way of manipulating women.

Where is the voice coming from?

Rudy Wiebe

The most important themes in this story are:

- Relationship with the past
- Dying of the nation
- Loss of community
- The problem of history – objective, impartial?
- Facts vs fiction

The main theme in this story is the relationship between the

First Nations and the white settlers. The actual event being
described here is that a young Indian guy being referred to in
the story as the Almighty Voice stole a cow and than he was
prosecuted for stealing a cow, there was a kind of hunt for him
and he was evading arrest. After a while they ambushed him
into a kind of a pit but he didn’t want to surrender himself
willingly, and after a while he was killed in a kind of a trench,
but before that he managed to kill several police members.
Rudy Wiebe uses this particular incident and he starts with the
facts like date, location, people involved,… Another theme
appears and that is the relationship of the modern people and
their attitude towards the past, how do they account for the
imperialist tradition of the white people who settled there and
stole the land from the First Nations. What is also described
here is the slow process of the dying of the nation. The writer is
here actually turning facts into fiction and he says that facts
should be the main body of history. However there are various
interpretations of historical events. Rudy Wiebe takes an even
and he gives us two different interpretations of the same story.
The question is whether the historical data should be regarded
as objective and impartial. Here the story is interpreted from
the point of view of a young Indian who by the end of the story
becomes the Almighty Voice a kind of a visionary from the
Indian point of view because he fights for his rights he shows
defiance, he knows that he cannot win because people chasing
him are numerous but he sticks to his beliefs. In this way he is
very powerful because he leaves an example for the future
generations. On the other hand there is this historical account
given by the white settlers which in theory should be objective
because history is a science, but the reality is different. There is
this journalist who goes to the place where this event took
place and the first thing he sees is this museum erected by the
white settlers. In the museum there is a piece of skull belonging
to the Almighty Voice, and the rifle he got killed with, the badge
numbers of the police officers – so this is the kind of history
that entered the official records. So this is a museum erected in
the glory of all those policemen. This is the history from the
point of view of the white settlers. On the part of the First
Nations there is no a museum or official records, they have this
song that is repeated through history and is stated twice in this
story – Hey Injun you’ll get hung for stealing that steer… And in
the end there is this song – We have fought well… This is the
song sent by the Almighty Voice and this song becomes a part
 of the Indian tradition. So here there are two traditions oral
versus written. The Indians don’t have official records of what
really happened, they don’t have a museum to glorify Almighty
Voice. They have this oral tradition, a song that is passed from
generation to generation. The question is what voice should we
believe? Where is the voice coming from? In the beginning he
gives a general introduction about the problems that a person
has when writing a story.

One difficulty of this making………of obvious legal restrictions and requirements.

What he says here is that reality is not based just on facts that
we can obtain regarding certain events. Although we do not
participate in the event he says that we are spectators. What is
important is to make your own value judgments deducing on
your own what really happened in the story because you can’t
form an opinion only from the facts, facts can be misguiding.

Presumably all the parts of the story…even less can be expected.

Even if we have official documents they are not to be trusted

because sometimes official documents contradict each other,
sometimes we don’t know the whole picture, sometimes there are
missing information, sometimes we miss some aspects of the
story, also these data are not always accurate. He is a journalist
who wants to find out what really happened so he goes to this
place to discover. So he first lists all the things that are necessary
for a good journalist to write a report. When he read the official
version of the story he sensed that there was something more, so
he investigates on his own. In the first part there is this list of all
the people that are involved in the story. He says hearing cannot
be enough, he goes to these people and questions them, that’s
not enough in order to form your own opinion about what really
happened. We are introduced into the main details of the story,
we know that this incident happened 1896. He goes to the
museum and then he enumerates the evidence that he finds there.
The first item that he sees is the white bone, the sample of the
skull. We get the correct date May 29, 1897, and then there is
some military equipment exhibited there. He goes to this museum
with previously collected knowledge about the protagonists of the
story. We are slowly introduced to the factual side of the story and
now we get the location.
Now we are on the Saskatchewan territory and there is their
museum erected by the white settlers in honour of the policemen
who died on duty. And then there is this place Kinistino which was
probably small so it disappeared, but the other place Minnechinass
Hills is still there. This is the description of the location. We are not
really introduced to what happened we only know that it is
something that concerns the white people and the Indians. This is
the evidence on the part of the white settlers, the museum. And
now for the first time in the story there is the introduction of this
song – Hey Injun. This is the song that does not belong to the
official records of what had happened. This is the song that is
probably popular among the First Nations people in that area and
this shows that this journalist is not only open to the facts coming
from the white settlers but he is also open to the stories, myths
and songs coming from the Indians. He is willing to create his own
future about what really happened. When he says as long as the
grass grows and the rivers run it implies that he is going to pay
attention to the Indian version of the story. He listen to their
stories and even adopted some expressions like this one which
means 'forever'. After listening to these stories and visiting the
museums he goes to the graveyard. He reads the scriptures on the
grave stones of the police officers who were shot by Almighty
Voice, the data given there is scarce. He comes to a conclusion.
We are given all the details, the location of the event, the location
of the graveyard, officers' badges' numbers and so on, how come
then that we are not given any details about their death appart
from what's written on their graves and that's they were killed on
duty by Indians. We have their names there are even their
pictures, museums in their honour, but their cause of death is
anonymous. What's actually going on here on the part of the white
people is that they actually don't want to uncover the details and
in that way promote this event so that other Indians start
following Almighty Voice's footsteps and fight for their beliefs. And
what is really going on here is colonization, imperialism, first the
white settlers took the First Nations' land by force and now when
this Indian, Almighty Voice, takes a cow because he is hungry they
prosecute him for theft. So they reveal their hypocrisy and
moreover they don't want to reveal his name and this event
because that may serve as an open invitation for other Indians to
rebel. So what the white people's history presents to us is selective
information. The police officers have tombstones and museum
errected in their honour but the Indians don't, the burrial place of
Dublin, Going-up-to-sky and Almighty Voice is unknown. There are
only stories and myths, but graves do not exist because people
could go and pay some respect. Now we are presented with some
photos. There is a photo of sergeant Colebrook, but we don't have
a photo of sergeant Dickson who was accused of negligence and
then sentenced to two months of hard labour. Now this unreliable
authority on purpose conceals some facts - they probably have his
photo too, but that undermines their authority and the system of
values because it shows that it wasn't only the Indians who were
responsible but this Dickson too. So this version of the story is not
presented to the masses because it is something that could
corrupt their image of themselves, the image of the white settlers
who were spreading civilization among these wild and ignorant
savages and christening heretics. And the photo of Dickson is
something that could corrupt this ideal image of the white settlers.
There are no pictures of the Indian boys Dublin and Going-up-to-
sky who helped Almighty Voice, there is however a photo of one
said to be Almighty Voice junior, his son who was born during this
hunt for his father. And now finallt there is a photo that the
narrator says is purported to be of Almighty Voice himself, the
narrator says that it would be improper to doubt such evidence as
this picture however he is puzzled with the two existing
descriptions of Almighty Voice which do not correspond to each
other. Almighty Voice in one of these descriptions is actually said
to be a bit pale and having feminine appearance which is not
probable taking into account the resistence he displayed and how
many officers he had taken down with him. So this is propaganda
they are trying to make him look weak pale like a woman, gay,
and his own people call him Almighty Voice, so they are trying to
make him look bad. The narrator says that the problem is that this
description doesn't correspond to the picture. The narrator says
that all of this disagreement could have been disregarded if there
wasn't for the feminine features in the description and of which
nothing could be seen in the picture. The narrator compares his
face to all the great leaders in the history and he says this face is
like an axe, there is nothing feminine in it, even though this
description was sealed by the queen's seal it appears false. Now
the narrators returnes to the general comment about the creation
of the story given in the beginning. His idea was to go there and
write an objective story about what really happened because he
noticed that the official records were kind of scanty(insufficient,
inadequate). And now he says thathe can't be impartial anymore,
he has to choose a side, and that means that he has to become an
active participant in the story, an element. He says that he cannot
endure the shadows of the eyes which are obscured from the
official data. Although his voice is never heard in the official
documents it is present in the stories which are passed from
generation to generation.
The unknown contradictory...on the slopes of the
Minnechinass.
The bluff is so green this spring...Only a voice rises from the
bluff
Almighty Voice was a boy of at most 20 years, the narrator asks
himself what could inspire a boy to this act of defiance, and the
narrator says that this becomes even stranger because the war
long ended. And then the narrator gives us a reconstruction of
what really happened. So Almighty Voice is there in a pit at the
edge of the bluff where they ambushed him and there they
eventually killed him. The narrator is looking at the country side
and in his mind he is trying to reconstruct what happened, he can
imagine all those police officers who were hunting him. The official
records dont include the voice of Almighty Voice, but the narrator
can imagine his warrior song.
We have fought well...almost to the rim of the red sun.
He gives us the specific number of people who were hunting
Almighty Voice, and the Indians who were squatting nearby and
waiting for the boy to get killed because they can’t help him. And
then we also see the rim of the red sun, the sun is red, this is
symbolism, it announces bloodshed.
The narrator says – and there is a voice – appart from the official
versions tell, at least the narrator can hear it.
And there is a voice...understand the Cree myself.
Appart from all the evidence the story is ending with the voice
which is described as the worldless cry because the narrator
doesn’t undestand Cree. In other words he says this is my
interpretation of what really happened. Although it seems that this
voice is denied, he can hear it and it is a wordless cry because all
has been told there is nothing else to say and now it is just a
wordless cry because of the injustice. It is a wordless cry because
the narrator doesn’t have a reliable interpreter who would make a
reliable interpretation. In other words this is his interpretation of
the story, and it is not reliable. Basically he says that there is no
such thing as reliable narrator, so it’s up to us to form our own
opinion, to investigate on our own what version of the truth we
can believe because history is not to be taken for granted.

Vesna about short story and Rudy Wiebe

Short story is a genre that appeared in the second half of the 19 th

century. For some reason this genre became very important in
Canada. The only difference between a novel and a short story is
the unity of effect. When you read a story if it is really good it
strikes you,the novel does the same thing but it takes more time.
Short story is a piece of prose fiction that could be read in one
sitting. The themes for this genre follow the development of
Canadian society. In the beginning those who recorded their
experiences inevitably recorded what was going on around them.
This is the period when these short stories are dominated by the
encounters between man and animals, various anecdotes. In the
20th century there is finally urban experience due to the
development of towns, and with this urban stories there are all
modern problems captured in the stories like alienation,
dissatisfaction,… These stories are more inward, man concentrates
upon himself, not that much on the world around him. So we have
this shift in the short story from dealing with the world to dealing
with yourself.

Rudy Wiebe is a man of Mennonite origin, in their community

violence is not accepted, they are pacifists, and they are also
famous for they attitutude towards technology, they oppose it and
refuse to use any appliances. Canada tolerates their communities
which form their own little towns usually far away from the big
cities, they do not really communicate that much with the outside
world. They were persecuted in Europe so they had to leave. And
with the constant progress and modernization they find it difficult
to maintain their normal way of life, they are more and more
influenced by civilization. Rudy Wiebe who was very much
concerned with the rights of his people who are a minority in
Canada chose to write about the First Nations people exactly
because these two peoples are so similar, and are treated in the
similar manner because although they are free people, and given
the same rights as everybody else Indians are to stay in their
reservations. Rudy Wiebe realizes the injustice done to the First
Nations and other minorities in Canada. But his story doesn’t deal
only with the First Nations and their life in Canada, in a more
general context it deals with the relationship between minority and
majority. The fact that Rudy Wiebe chooses a reporter to tell us
the story is significant. This reporter seems to be an educated
reporter, he mentions certain theoreticians, by doing this he is
refering to the authorities because these theoreticians are the
authority, he wants to prove his credibility, he wants to be reliable.
But he is confused first with the discrepancy between the
descriptions and the photo and then with the number ratio
between the Indians and the officers involved. There are these
three Indians and they have unique names, they are individuals,
but the names of the officers are all alike, they all begin with
constable or officer… In the mind of the Indians this doesn’t make
any sense they all have the same names, but of course it is not
the name that is important but the formal position that they have
in that society, so they are either mayors, constables, officers,…
Almighty Voice stole the cow because he needed it for food, he
killed this animal because his tribe was hungry. And this of course
leads us to another question and that is why is this tribe hungry
when they lived there for centuries without any problems. Of
course we also know that this is so because the white settlers
systematically killed off the buffalo. They killed him because he
stole from the government of Canada. The question is did he have
any idea that he was stealing, that he was stealing from the
government of Canada, that it is an offence? Of course not, they
didn’t even have the notion of possession, private property,
everything belonged to the spirit not the people, or at least to the
community and not individuals. This story is about the clash
between two different systems of value. So they kill him not
realizing that he doesn’t understand why they hunted him in the
first place. The main reason for misunderstanding between these
two cultures disregarding all the other differences related to their
culture is their language, they don’t understand each other – the
last sentence in the story refers to a valid interpretation of the
wordless cry because the reporter doesn’t understand Cree. He
says of course I do not understand the Cree. Why is this so
logical? Because the white settlers didn’t even try to learn it. The
white people who came to Canada came there as masters, like in
Robinson Crusoe where he immediately teaches Friday his own
language,religion and system of values, he never makes an effort
to learn Friday’s name or understand his language, understand
that Friday also has a religion whatever it is. The white settlers feel
that they are superior and they put themselves above the natives
right away. Of course they don’t speak their language. The
problem is to make the story – meaning the true story. History is
always a story written by the victor, the consequence of this being
that we are given only one perspective. The authority of course
tells the story and the authority are the white people of Canada.
But their version is not really objective because they always try to
hide some shameful details. Like the number of bullets with which
the Indian was killed, so many that his skull was smashed. Police
officers and also citizens are involved in this and there are so
many of them. They use winchesters and they even bring a
cannon and for a cow, so many of them for three young Indians
and a cow, this is one of those shameful details that need hiding.
The song says Hey Injun – first of all this is politically incorrect.
They hate them and they use all these terms of abuse when they
deal with these people. So he is hiding and they are closing on the
pit where he hides and sing this song. So we can see now that
their system is based on intolerance. The history is of course
written by the victorious party, so they glorify the defeat against
these people. History is supposed to deal with facts, when we
want to describe the facts and report the events that happened in
the past we actually make fiction. However truthful we try to
represent even something that happened a couple of minutes ago
we create fiction. It is hard to make the story not only because we
don’t have all the facts, but simply because on the psychological
level memory is unreliable, we tend to forget things to protect our
conscious self without even being aware of that, these are defence
mechanisms. But even if we disregard this, still we forget things,
human mind has to suppress old data to memorize new. Memory
is also fragmentive because we remember what is important to us.
In this story we have an objective person who still meets and
understands all these obstacles, by the end he understands that
he might have failed because the crucial point in the end is
communication based on language. When we read the story we
will often see words such as perhaps, as if, presumably, cant be
determnined, it may be, doubtful, relatively,… – this only tells us
that precision is difficult. The narrator at the end says that he is
not sure, he needs an interpreter, and who will interpret things for
the general public? That’s what history does and we now learn
that history is unreliable. The title of the story is a question. The
name of the main character is Almighty Voice and before he dies
he cries, so that is the voice that he leaves behind and the
question is where is the voice coming from. The reporter doesn’t
reach an answer to this question. This voice is coming from the
past, it belongs to the First Nations people and it wants to be
heard. The writer wants to liberate the voice of the minorities.
Where is the voice coming from? Who writes history? We have to
be aware of this and be careful in reading other people’s
interpretations because their interpretation is their view of a past
event.

To Set Our House in Order

Margaret Laurence

The story is about a little girl who has to negotiate these two
realities, the reality of present day Canada(present moment in the
story),the time in the story is after the World War I. At that time
there was this economic crisis which affected Canada as well, so
her father who is a doctor is going through hard times because the
times were hard for everybody. This little girl is somehow a
witness of the transition between two traditions. There is the
tradition which they brought from Scotland to Canada and the
tradition being built in Canada. This problem is also visible in the
story through the character of Old Granny. She is a tiny, weak
woman but with straight back – this is how she is described as if
she were a lady. But this is not her real origin, she comes from
one of the Scottish clans, and she is very proud of her clan. As a
matter of fact she is attributing too much significance to her clan
which is only one clan among many. Her problem is that there
were no people there who would recognize the significance of her
origin, and also she got it into her head that she was a lady and
she cannot get reconciled to reality because there are no more
ladies and it is absurd to act as a lady when they became
impoverished due to the economic crisis. Vanessa who is a girl of
ten is now supposed to read a book on Scottish clan. And the
granny teaches her some mottos like you are not supposed to
play, pleasure is in work, and that the MacLeods never lie, but the
story is based on lies. The whole story is about the relationship
between the past and the present. The future in this story is
represented through Vanessa, the past is her granny, the present
are her parents and her aunt. The aunt is extremely important
because she gives an alternative model of existence, something
that the granny won’t approve of at all, but that Vanessa is
exposed to and will learn from. The question is how the
relationship between the past and the present affects the future.
The past is the Scottish Presbyterian past, very strict, formal,
demanding. These are the three principles that the granny wants
to be respected in the house. You’re not supposed to use slang,
laugh, play(at least in the house). To set our house in order is a
story taken from a collection – a bird in the house. The bird in the
house is Vanessa. In the attic there is a cage.

So this story comes from Margaret Laurence’s collection called a

bird in the house, the stories from this collection are usually
regarded as autobiographic. The main character is Vanessa
MacLeod, she is ten years old and she writes about the whole
period of growing up. In this story there is the first person
narration. The title is very important to understand the whole story
and it is actually a quotation from the bible. This is the sentence
which in the story utters granny MacLeod who is described as the
authority on all the things concerning the house. She says that by
keeping our houses in order we serve god and that she had never
lived in a messy house, she would like to be considered a lady.
She is very proud of her Scottish Presbyterian origin the teachings
of which are that God loves order and pleasure arises from work.
So this is a family who migrated from Scotland to Canada and they
maintained some of their main beliefs, customs related to their
origin. There are two dominant themes here, the first one is
related to the women in the story, and the second one is actually
the theme of entrapment. Concerning the women in the story
there are three generations – the first is granny MacLeod, then
Vanessa’s parents and aunt and finally Vanessa herself. Vanessa is
the narrator of the story, she is a ten year old girl, she doesn’t
have a close relationship to her grandmother, she is fond of her
aunt Edna who is the only vivid character in the story. Vanessa is
unable to comprehend the world of the grownups, however she
can instinctively guess the meaning of certain things, she is not
sure how to explain them but she understands. She is the one who
will question the order of the authority, her grandmother. The
second generation comprised of her parents,… somehow failed to
question the authority of the grandmother. What we know about
mom Beth is that she had already lost a child before. She is
incapable of asserting herself as the authority upon the
grandmother, she is completely in an inferior position. Aunt Edna
is also in an inferior position although she makes fun of granny.
Grandmother is represented as the authority in the house, she
demands obedience by all the people in the house, she likes the
British lifestyle although she is now in Canada and things are
different, she still wants to be a lady, she never raises her voice
when she speaks and so on. What matters to her most is wealth or
the position in the society, she doesn’t believe in the existence of
fear and she says MacLeods never lie, but at the same time she
lacks the sense of reality, she is not aware of the changes that
occurred. The story starts on Remeberance day 11 th, November.
This day is devoted to all the casualties of the World War I. And
while reading the story we find out that they remember uncle
Roderick who died during this war. So this story takes place
between two wars in the period of great depression, but it seems
that the grandmother is not at all aware of this great crisis in the
society, she is only aware of certain changes within her own
household. For example they cannot afford servants, Vanessa’s
parents had to move in with her, because they couldn’t afford
living on their own. But she is not at all interested in what’s going
on in the real world, she prefers to think of herself as a lady, to
live the British life style, to order expensive things, so she is the
one who sticks to the old times as if she doesn’t want to break up
with the past. The second generation although they offer some
resistance are not capable to reject the authorities of the past, and
here there is the third generation, Vanessa who instinctively
understands certain things, she can’t name them, she can feel
certain things, and she is the one who will break up with the past.
She is the one who will question all the rules and orders of her
grandmother which are based on the bible.
The theme of entrapment is also very important, appart from
these female characters who cannot offer resistance to the
authoritarian grandmother, there are other people like Vanessa’s
dad Ewen who feels entraped within his own house. So there is
this need to escape. Uncle Roderick literally escaped to the war
and got killed there. Vanessa is the one who having seen all these
things goes to the field and then on a blade of grass she finds this
beautiful ladybird which tries to climb this blade of grass, but this
ladybird is not aware that she possesses wings and that it could fly
away. Unlike this ladybird who is unaware that it is able to fly
away by using its own wings Vanessa is, and especially when she
says – I felt that whatever God might love in this world, it was
certainly not order – this is her understanding of the situation
which describes the world of the grownups. The implication is that
she is the one who will become aware of her own potentials and
she is the one who will make the break with the past.

The story opens by an incident, and the father who is himself

doctor is really afraid for the life of his wife. Vanessa although she
doesn’t really know what’s happening can feel their fear. She
instinctively knows that something is wrong with her mother and
she is afraid because she thinks that she will lose her. At this
moment of crisis within the family there is the description of
grandmother Macleod. There is this confusion and alarm in the
house, but grandmother thinks of herself as a lady and a lady is
always properly dressed with a proper makeup.

Grandmother MacLeod appeared…for afternoon tea.

Although there is this crisis within the family that is not a reason to
look messy. So this is the old idea that appearance is extremely
important.

Ewen you’re only…I’ll see to everything.

The child is logically anxious and disturbed by the fact that her
mother is not well, but the grandmother finds the appearance
more important than the family, it is extremely important to be a
lady. Vanessa can’t be a child, she can’t play or express her
feelings, she is a big girl of ten and there is these rules to follow.
There is this contrast between the two worlds, the world of order
that her authoritarian grandmother belongs to and the world of
the children which is a messy world, children like to play, explore,
she is ten, she wants to play with all these things she can find in
the house. But whenever she is in the room she must pay
attention to all those statues and other ornaments and objects,
she must not touch or break anything. But this doesn’t only apply
to Vanessa but to her parents as well, it seems that they are all
the time tiptoeing and respecting the wishes of the old lady. It
seems that they are afraid to offer any kind of resistance.

In the next passage there is the relationship between the

grandmother and Vanessa. Vanessa is afraid for her mother’s life
and the only adult that she can talk to is her grandmother, so she
asks her if her mother will be alright, and the reaction of the
grandmother is in the following passage.

Grandmother MacLeod straightened her…and the Lord taketh

away.

Is this a proper conversation with a ten-year old child who is afraid

for the life of her mother. The child is of course scared to death.

Appaled, I turned away………………It was a swell book,

Grandmother.

So as we can see from their relationship they are not really close
to each other. Grandmother treats Vanessa as an adult. There are
principles upon which the grandmother arranged her life and these
are the principles that she applies to all people disregarding their
age, sex, philosophy, religion,… Vanessa remembers this sentence
from her childhood that she heard from her grandmother that god
loves order, and that we serve god properly if we don’t live in
messy houses. It is up to us that each one of us should create
order within his or her own house and this is the most important
task. This is the guiding principle in Vanessa’s grandmother’s life.
She is also really proud with her Scottish origin. She belonged to
this clan MacInnes and she is really fond of it and that’s why she
gives this book on Scottish clans to Vanessa to read. She wants to
make a connection between the old world to which she once
belonged and the new world – Canadian prairies, the area where
they live is called Manawaka, probably a name which remained
from the First Nations time, so it’s not even a proper Anglo-Saxon
name but it doesn’t matter she wants to apply all those principles
and customs of Scotland to the Canadian prairies. From this
perspective it is really silly, but she takes it seriously. She says that
her husband enabled her to do this, he told her – although we are
going to live in the prairies you are going to be a lady! – and that’s
how she continued the way of life she had in Scotland. She now
describes how wonderful it was in the past when they had all that
silver, maids, dishes, guests, and this is all a matter of prestige.
Vanessa says people are too broke, she hears this from her
parents she realizes that people don’t have money and she tells
that to the grandmother but she only tells her not to use slang, so
she is all about forms, it is important to pay attention to the
conventions, and she doesn’t really take into consideration what
Vanessa said, she doesn’t want to accept that. She gives Vanessa
this book and there are some mottos in it – Be then a wall of brass
– accept stoically whatever life throws at you, in other words
suffer, learn to suffer, consider the end if you are suffering in life
you’ll end up in heaven, be careful in life, fear life. And now
Vanessa applies these mottos to the reality and her friends and
she understands that they are worthless. Vanessa remembers the
MacInnes’ motto and she mentiones it because she wants some
praise from her grandmother.
Aunt Edna comes to help with the household duties because
they are too broke to hire a servant, this is the core of quarrel
between the father and the grandmother. There simply is no
money, despite the fact that he is a doctor he is given food instead
of money. She finally accepts Aunt Edna to come and help, but
she herself wouldn’t lift a finger because she is a lady. although
grandmother MacLeod is all about truth and order, aunt Edna
reveals certain details about the grandmother’s background. She
originated from Scotland but she was born in Ontario.

Page 105,bottom
My father laughed…I had lost interest now that he was speaking
once more like himself. P 106 middle.

In this interraction between the father and Vanessa the most

important theme is that of unfulfilled desires, hopes, dreams,…
This is actually the theme of entrapment because we can see that
her father was prevented from fulfilling his dreams. Vanessa
perceives her grandfather as the authority because this is the
image that she got from her grandmother, he is the person who
provided for them so that they could live like the upper class, and
now she is being revealed a new aspect of his personality, it
seems that the grandfather was entraped within that kind of life
himself. He had to make a living for himself and his family, and
during this process of settling in Canada he had to give up all his
dreams. He probably wanted to be a scholar, he had these Greek
books and his passion was probably Greek language. But he found
himself in the prairies and he had to make the best of the
situation. And yes he was definitely lonely because this hobby of
his was not something that she could understand because she
obviously didn’t possess the intellect for that. This is not only
present in her relationship with her husband but with her children
as well, she could never understand Ewen, she didn’t understand
Roderick as well. Ewen tells his daughter that he had this dream to
be a kind of a sailor. He felt entraped and he wanted to get away.
However he followed his father’s footsteps and became a doctor
and this is something that provided his family with the sense of
security as well. So they had to give up their hopes and dreams in
order to survive. After the baby was safely born nobody even
considered what his name would be, the father was concerned for
his health but the grandmother requested that the name should be
Roderick, and the father accepts this, he doesn’t want to offer
resistance to her.
We also have the relationship of the brothers. Roderick was
the younger one, and there was this incident between the two
brothers when they were hunting. The accidental shot from Ewen’s
rifle struck Roderick’s eye and from that moment on he couldn’t
see with that eye. During the World War I they felt it their duty to
register for the army and they were accepted, even Roderick
because they didn’t pay too much attention, they’d see that he
was an invalid. The battle of Somme in France was the bloodiest
battle with 1.500.000 casualties. During this battle Roderick got
killed and Ewen felt that this was his responsibility because he
didn’t care about his brother. When he got back home he had this
guilty conscience he had been living with till the rest of his life.
The grandmother doesn’t realize this or she doesn’t want to realize
this and she demands that the child be named Roderick. So
whenever his father calls him by his name he will feel guilty
conscience. She doesn’t understand how hard this will be for
Ewen. Roderick was her favourite but she probably didn’t
understand him too because he also wanted to get away.

Page 108
Then the baby began to cry…and could have flown up.
So this is the image that is extremely important. If we compare
Vanessa to this ladybird we see which is trying to climb this blade
of grass and is not aware that it possesses wings and can fly
away, we see that Vanessa on the other hand is aware of her own
potentials, she recognizes that the ladybird can fly. Unlike the
second generation unprepared to offer resistance to the authorities
she can. But that doesn’t mean that she will lose her connections
with the past, she will be aware of her origin but she wants to
transcend it and not be a slave of it.

I thought of the accidents…given his life’s name.

She is lying on the ground looking at the world around her, and
then she connects all the experience from her family with
everything that goes around her. And here we have a kind of a
stream of consciousness, the listing of all the happened to her and
how she connects that – in childlike manner of course. But
somehow she manages to find a connection between all things
that are happening and she reaches the conclusion that nothing is
a coincidence. What her grandmother talks about is not order,
these things happen, bad things, good things, but they don’t
happen according to a certain plan or order.

I could not really comprehend…it was certainly not order.

So she is still a child she can’t find a logical connection, she feels
that these experiences are somehow connected but she can’t
comprehend them, she can sense their strangness as various kinds
of experiences happening all the time. If god really loved order
these things wouldn’t happen. These things happen but not
because there is order but because there is disarray.

Vesna about ‘to set our house in order’

We see the attempts of these Canadians to negotiate the past.

They slowly obtain a new system of values which replaces their
old. But to negotiate the past is not easy and that’s why there are
three generations in the story and these three generations are in
different ways dealing with the past. Grandmother deals with the
past by sticking to it, refusing to admit the present and in this way
she affects the future embodied in Vanessa, we see that she wants
to impose the past upon the future. We don’t have to live in the
past in order to remember and pay respect to the past. Granny
has her mottos and she sticks to them like God loves order. There
is also another aspect in this world and that is disorder. Disorder
of course exists but granny refuses to accept it. Her picture of the
world is one-sided. She sees the world as the Scottish Presbyterian
heritage teaches her to see it. She is also very proud of her family
heritage. But there is no really much to be proud of, they were
only one clan among many in Scotland. She says that in their
family there were always doctors, but they were actually horse
doctors and she never mentions this detail. She would like to be a
lady. The fact that her husband treated her like one, fragile and
precious might have contributed to this. But this is ridiculous
because the time at which she lived was not the time for ladies. It
was the time of economic crisis, poverty.
The father’s problem is that he shows incompetence as the
head of the family. Besides the financial problem he has like
everybody else at that time, he also has a personal problem, he
has guilty conscience because of his brother. He believes that he is
responsible for the death of his brother. He is also dissatisfied with
his life because he had these dreams but they remained unfulfilled
because of his mother pressured him to become a doctor. So there
we see that he can’t really oppose his mother, so we see who’s the
authority. His mother is a stronger figure than himself, of course it
is good to be an obedient child but up to a certain point only. So
the real boss in the house is actually granny and this is the
problem that he has.
The mother also belongs to the second generation which
stands for the present. She has a problem with her husband
because she feels that he is not honest with her. He is hiding
things like the problem with his brother. This is a big problem
because it seems that he feels that he cannot trust his wife and
she notices this. She also has a problem with her health. She has
this mysterious health issue, she lost a baby once and this
pregnancy is complicated too. So we see that the present
generation has some serious problems and the economic crisis
adds to their problems. The question is how this affects the future,
and the future is always in the form of children.
There is a problem with the granny or the past first. Past is
imposing itself on the future, or in other words granny wants to
impose the values of her childhood to Vanessa and that is not
good at all. She is giving all these restrictions like you can’t sing
loudly, play, laugh,… because children are supposed to be seen
but not heard – this is a Victorian motto. She wants her to be adult
prematurely. This is a relationship that we don’t approve of. It is
not enough emotional and supportive. And then we may say that it
is even abusive because granny imposes her system of values
upon this girl by making Vanessa read the book on Scottish clans
which is very interesting to read especially if you are a ten year old
girl.
But appart from this bad influence there was a good one
reflected in her aunt, Edna. She is positive because she is not
authoritative and submissive like her parents. She is not
authoritative in the way that she doesn’t impose her values, but
she sets an example which will be followed and in this sense she is
the authority only she never tries to impose it like the granny, and
now becomes obvious why granny doesn’t want her in the house
because she lives her life the way she wants and in the granny’s
eyes that is a sin because she has these values and rules which
guide her. Edna is that sort of person who makes work really
pleasurable, they do the hovering, and she makes Vanessa laugh,
and they sing, and it is fun, and that’s how Vanessa learns that
there is nothing wrong with work. Because the version of work
presented by her granny involves a lot of work and no fun at all.
Edna is an authentic person, regardless of what the environment
says or does, she lives her own life the way she wants. She curses,
uses slang, sings, she calls grandmother names, and she makes
this picture of a different option in life that Vanessa can adopt, not
because she is force but because she is intelligent enough to
follow the best example offered to her. And all of this needs to be
put in the context of Canada, because after all Vanessa represents
the future of Canada, and this is Canadian national story. Aunt
Edna even hugs Vanessa and children are not supposed to be
pampered like that. This is something that granny would not
approve of.
All of these people had different ideas of who they want to
be, even granny, she wants to be a lady but the fact is that she is
not, they don’t even have money for food, and in English terms to
be a lady you need to be of noble origin which she was not. All of
this is very frustrating, it is related to miscommunication and leads
to alienation which is their main problem. The grandfather wanted
to be a Greek scholar but he became a doctor because it was a
family tradition. So this is how tradition can smother your own
personality. We have the father who wanted to be a sailor, he
wanted to explore the world and instead he becomes a
doctor,again the infulence of the past, tradition. So he is frustrated
of course though he never talks about that to anybody, not even
his own wife.
Mother is trying to be a mother, to have babies, and she is
not very good at that, so she too is frustrated. She is trying to fit
into the role of the mother, but she fails and feels frustrated not
because of her psyche but because of the environment in Canada
which views a mother as a mother of several children, not only
one. This is the reason why they don’t work, and they stay in the
house all the time trying to make family atmosphere. But she has
some health issues and she is not good at it, so she is also
frustrated.
Roderick’s dream was to be a soldier despite his young age
and blindness. He insisted on being a soldier so he tricked the
doctors and he got recruited, but he too couldn’t be a good
soldier, he got killed.
As far as Vanessa is concerned there is a good indication in
the story that she will create her own path in life, she will live her
own life using her own abilites, and we see this at the end of the
story when she watches the ladybird. She will not be something
that her mother wants her to be but just like her aunt she will
create an option for herself. These forms of culture Vanessa wants
to preserve in memory and ritual but to transcend in life and social
attitude.

Something I’ve Been Meaning To Tell You

Alice Munroe

There are just a few characters in this story. There are two
sisters, Et and Char, we may guess what their full names are but
we don’t get them throughout the story. The writer’s intention by
reducing their names is to show that they are not fully realized
persons, they are very complex, but not fully realized as human
beings. The main difference between the sisters is that one is so to
say extraordinarily beautiful and the other is plain. Char is like a
marble statue, she has this white complexion, very noble-like,
people fall in love with her, Blaikie Noble and Arthur. The time
reference is between the two world wars, again the time of the
economic crisis, just like in the previous story. This is what affects
people in the story as well. Whenever Char goes to see Blaikie she
brings Et with her who is now a teenage girl and Blaikie always
teases her. Although she says that her first impressions are the
feelings of hatred for this boy she secretly admits that he is
beautiful. She understands that something is going on between
this boy and her sister, but at the same time she is not allowed to
see anything, Char is very much interested but she never talks
about that to her sister, there is this scene when they two make
love and Et discovers them, but tomorrow Char pretends that
nothing had happened. She is young at that time girls don’t know
much about this, Et sees her sister with her lips swollen, she looks
differently, but she is not sure what this is about, so she goes back
to bed. At one point Blaikie leaves the town with this woman
ventriloquist who is twenty years older than him and he marries
her. Because of this Char poisons herself, she takes the
blueing(plavilo, similar to bleach). Of course late at night she feels
sick and Et helps her, the parents don’t know a thing. What’s
wrong with the parents? They lost their son, and because of the
grief the mother completely disregards her parenting duties, so
these girls actually depend on each other. So Et helps Char she
gives her instructions to vomit and gives her milk to drink. Later
they have coffee and talk about this, but Et never asks her the
crucial question. This becomes a pattern in their relationship. Char
marries a young teacher who comes to their school. Et has classes
with him, he teaches history, and all of a sudden Et develops a
huge interest for history. She wants to impress the teacher, while
Char impresses the teacher simply by being beautiful. Arthur
organizes a play and of all plays it is Shaw’s Pygmalion. This is
Shaw’s version of the pygmalion myth where an artist creates a
marble figure and it is so beautiful that he falls in love with it, but
when he touches it, it is cold, emotionless. Char will play the
sculpture, and she is perfect for that not only because she has
white complexion and perfect body, she is able to stand for 8
minutes without blinking. Arthur falls in love with her and he
proposes her, she accepts. They don’t live happily ever after, the
first indication of that is that they don’t have children. Char gets
pregnant and then loses the baby and she never gets pregnant
again because they sleep in separate rooms. Et helps Char
ocassionally because Char hates the house chores, she has always
hated it. The first time that Et realizes her sister is beautiful is on
the washing day when Char is doing the washing which she hates.
In this story we have the third person narration but we get
everything from Et’s point of view.
After thirty years Blaikie comes again, as soon as they meet
they start golwing. Arthur has been sick for a long time so every
evening the four of them gather at their house and play games like
‘who am I?’
One day Et comes to Char and she sees in the kitchen a little
bottle containing rat poison, why would she have rat poison in the
kitchen cupboard where she keeps spices? And she doesn’t have
rats, and they also have a cat. But whenever she comes to the
house she checks and the poison is there. One day after playing
cards Blaikie disappears. Tomorrow when the three of them get
together Et says something like Have you noticed that Blaikie
disappeared again. Her sister Char goes to her room and plays the
piano which she does whenever she is really disturbed, she never
shows her emotions. Tomorrow morning they find her dead.

The title of the story is something I’ve been meaning to tell

you which implies that whatever it is it wasn’t told, it is the lack of
communication between the sisters which is visible throughout the
story. By the end of the story we see them at the age of fifty or so
and we see that they still don’t communicate. It was probably Et’s
fault that they were not communicating because we see Et, at the
end of the story, going on with her life, living with Arthur. And we
see it because in the end of the story it says that it almost slipped
her tongue to say something to Arthur but she never does. The
two of them can be seen as a happy couple, playing cards, reading
or something like that, but we see that there is no real
communication. Why doesn’t she tell him now when Char is gone,
when she is not a rival anymore? Maybe she was afraid of the
possible answer that Arthur could give her.
Et never really communicated with her sister, instead she
was seemingly helping her, and now especially when she became
a tailor. The clothes shape us, they give us form. The clothes in a
way control us, and the person who makes clothes for you,
especially if the person is given the freedom to design the clothes
for you, that person actually controls you. Et was making beautiful
clothes for her sister so that her sister who was beautiful looked
even more beautiful but at the same time Et was controlling her
sister. She was controlling her life, the last evening Et tells her that
Blaikie is gone with another woman, but that is not true, Et made
it up. She invented this story knowing that this would really hurt
her sister, and it did to the point that her heart may have
exploded. So we don’t know whether she was killed, whether she
took poison, but we know for sure that emotionally her heart
exploded, she died of a broken heart, this is what her sister did to
her and that is a form of ultimate control, she decided whether her
sister will live or die. We can understand the psycholgical
mechanisms underneath this, she was always in the shadow of her
beautiful sister, but still there is this fact that she killed her sister,
out of her own selfishness, not planning to do that, so she killed
her emotionally. And whether she used the poison on herself, or Et
used it, or Blaikie maybe because even he makes up a story of a
wife who poisoned her husband, everybody is a suspect here, the
doctor just says that it was a heart attack, but writer doesn’t focus
on that, the focus is on the fact that her sister killed her
emotionally. The manifestation of Arthur’s ilness points to
poisoning, we see that Et very often makes food and drinks for
him. These are all mysteries.

The Man from Mars

Margaret Atwood

This last story tackles one of those important questions that

trouble Canada, the Canadian identity. We read where is the voice
coming from trying to understand the relationship between the
settlers and the First Nations because that relationship also defines
modern Canadian identity. To set our house in order discusses the
relationship of Canadians to their past which is also part of their
identity, without past there is no identity. Something I’ve been
meaning to tell you in order to understand modern Canadian
identity which we see is fragmented, full of mysteriousness. This
question is still relevant, they are still not sure how to define
themselves. So they have to turn to the last option which they
have been propagating for the last thirty years and that is Canada
as a multicultural society, this is the idea which they came up with
and they like it so they keep supporting it. So they still propagate
this idea but in this story of Margaret Atwood we will see that
there is evidence which contradicts this idea. We started by
distinguishing Canada from America, and what goes for America is
that it is a melting pot of nations. Instead of the melting pot
Canada is a cultural mosaic.
The title itself is rather interesting, the man from Mars
suggests a stranger, foreigner, the Other. We don’t know his
name, we are not given his name throughout the story, as if he
didn’t have a name. It is of course impossible that a man has no
name, the fact is that the heroine of the story whose name we
know cannot remember his name, she couldn’t pronounce it at all
so she didn’t put any effort at all. He puts his name on a piece of
paper for her and she looks at it and immediately gives up. We
don’t know where he comes from too, judging by his looks he is
oriental, meaning that he could be Chinese, Japanese, Korean,
……… She doesn’t really know. He is short, slightly cross-eyed,
black hair and yellow complexion. But the fact is that Christine was
told even the name of the town where he came from. He was
sending her postcards and photographs and of course there was
his address on the envelope, but she threw away all of them, so
that in the end she wasn’t even sure which country it was, let
alone city. We see that this is a man without a name, without a
country, we don’t even know his age. He speaks French and
English, but he is poor at it, it was difficult to communicate with
him, but that is not the reason for the lack of communication
between them. Christine is a typical Canadian girl. She is a big,
stout girl. She is also strong, therefore she isn't helpless, but she
feels helpless. When they meet for the first time in the park, she
feels that somebody touches her bare arm. No physical contact is
something that is typical for Canadians, private space is very
important to them, nobody should violate your private space, and
this man does exactly that. Immediately she grabs her racquet,
she feels threatened and this is a paradox because she is a very
strong girl faced with a small Asian guy, immediately as she turns
around she is relieved to see that it only a child. She was scared
for her life, that's how she is preconditioned to think about
foreigners. So we clearly see that Christine experiences this man is
the Other which is obvious from the title. This is the chance that
she will miss in her life. So we have to discuss what is the chance
tha she missed by avoiding to establish a relationship with this
Asian guy. So now after a while we have a big strong girl who is
being chased by this weak asian guy. So what we have here is the
pattern of a damsel in distress who needs a knight to kill the evil
man and preserve her virginity. So he follows her everywhere and
she runs from him and when she finally has enough she stops and
asks him what he wants from her and he says that he wants to
talk to her, and then he is silent, and she can’t put up with him. So
we see that the Canadian tolerance easily disappears in these real
life situations. He is also very strange, when he gets the chance to
talk he is silent, probably because of the language problem, but
there is one more reason. In the fairytales there are always weak
unprotected girls who are chased by strong, aggressive vilains,
here we have a reversal, the woman is big but she still feels
unprotected, the man is small but he is experienced as dangerous.
There are two ways to interpret the story, two ideas, one of them
is the damsel in distress, the other is multiculturalism. We also see
how Christine’s mother calls foreigners, a person from other
culture, so we see that she somehow distinguishes between
Canadians and all the other people. There is this scene when the
Asian guy comes to their house, and they are very polite to him for
no obvious reason, so it seems that they pretend in their
politeness. So he calls Christine on the phone, her mother picks
up, he sounds French because his English is bad, so the mother is
very much thrilled with this young man who wants to talk to her
daughter. Christine’s mother has three daughters, two of them are
beautiful just like her, and she is a delicate woman, with marble
hands, the only thing she does in the house is arranging flowers.
The eldest daughter is already married, the middle one will get
married too, so that’s not the problem, there is only Christine who
took after her father, so that’s why judging by the looks she is not
feminine. They don’t see the woman in her, simply that is the
cultural pattern, if you are a woman you have to look and behave
like one. But she doesn’t look like a woman therefore what are her
options in life? This story was written in mid 20th century, and we
know what the role of a woman in Canada is, to get married, have
children, take care after the children and the house, and provide a
comfortable home for her family. In order to this a woman has to
be attractive so as to attract a future husband. The elder sisters
have no problem with this, Christine has a problem or her mother
has a problem with Christine, because she doesn’t fit into the
standard, she doesn’t look like a woman, at least not enough. So
we know what are her options, if she is not pretty she has to be
smart, she studies hard, she is active, plays tennis, she is active in
the debating club – this is the world of discourse which belongs to
men, so she is treated as a boy more than as a girl, she is also the
president of international society where the idea is that foreign
students should be integrated, so she does all these things that a
boy is traditionally supposed to do. When she goes out with boys
they consider her one of them, a mate, but the worst problem is
that she doesn’t feel like a girl at all, she sees herself as a dolphin,
as a lump of meat. So her mother is so much relieved when
somebody wants to talk to her, and without asking her the mother
invites this for tea. When the guy shows up, the mother is shocked
with his appearance, and before shaking hands with him she puts
on her gloves so this is a comment on Canadian hospitality and
multicultural tolerance. There is another comment on Canadian
open mindedness and multiculturalism, when the guy pulls out a
camera she is sure that it is going to be only her in the picture, but
he sets it up and hugs her, and she is shocked because she didn’t
see that coming. She doesn’t want to interract, she is self-
centered, probably egoistic, she is simply not aware of this
possibility that the two of them could establish a sort of
relationship. It si impossible for her to imagine this relationship
because she is a Canadian who had been taught to be polite to
strangers as long as it is formally needed, but when the guy tries
to establish a closer connection she refuses it. She will draw a map
for him, give him a cup of tea, but she is not willing to give any
more than that. We see that he is a very poor exchange student in
need of friendship, he is doing really badly in Canada, his
scholarship doesn’t cover all his expenses, he moves to Torronto,
we see that by the end of the story he is overdue with the rent, so
he needs help, and he appeals to her not maybe for that reason
directly, but he asks for help and all that she gives him is a cup of
tea, and he obviously says at her house – you are rich implying
that he is poor. So we see that there is this miscommunication
throughout the story because they don’t have knowledge about
each other’s culture.
When we pay attention to the photo, however they ackward
they look in it, we see this possibility for connection, we see a
couple. The last word in the story is interpreter. Maybe this man
from Mars was there for Christine without knowing it himself to
help her interpret the meaning of her life. We see that he is
following her around almost as if they were connected with an
invisible link. He creates this image of Christine as an irresistible
girl whom he has to follow having no other option. The only
reason why he follows her is because she is a woman and he is a
man, and he is man enough to know that she is a woman, no
matter how she looks she is a woman. His vision is not distorted
by our civilisation and cultural patterns imposed by the Western
culture, his vision is clearer, he indentifies a woman when he sees
one and because he is a man he follows a woman, Vesna related
this to a bitch in heat followed by many dogs . The policeman
afterwards when they catch him says that he is weird, and the
original meaning of the word is to begin to happen to grow,
something that has to happen, something that is most natural,
your destiny. Of course the policeman means strange, but the
writer leaves her message. But we see that he is a natural man,
and as a natural person who has not been moulded by our culture,
recognizes a woman and he follows a woman, and Christine is not
the only woman he follows. The last woman was a nun, and an old
one, aged sixty, which to us seems strange, we are trained,
preconditioned not to see a woman in a nun, a nun becomes an
empty icon representing ideas. And a woman is a woman no
matter how old she is but we also we see an old woman, nobody
says well that’s an old woman. This is the way Margaret Atwood
wanted to draw our attention to all the misconceptions we have
about the relationship between the sexes. So she reverses the
roles, we have a weak man following a strong woman and that to
us seems ridiculous but she does that to draw our attention to the
unnatural concepts which we adopt. That is why this guy from
time to time sends her photos, in the photo she sees the two of
them, but she doesn’t know what she is supposed to see, she
looks at the photo, there is no message, so in her opinion there is
no point in repeatedly sedning the same photo, it doesn’t make
sense, to her. And she is not the only one who is confused, but
also her family, and her friends, who are also influenced by the
culture there. While he follows her various things happen to
Christine, she loses weight, and she also gets this mysteriousness
which attracts other men, and the same guys who considered her
a pall, now want to go out with her, discover her secret. There is
also this transformation in Christine so that when she takes a bath
now she doesn’t imagine herself as a dolphin anymore but as
Merlyn Monroe. Her problem was that she never questioned the
role that was assigned to her by her culture, because now we see
that transformation is possible. By the end of the story we see that
she has a job, apartment, but she is not married, and she was said
about it for some time. She keeps asking herself about him for
some time but then she gives up. She is not ugly, that’s not the
reason why she is not married, the thing is that when the Asian
guy got deported the picture that she had of herself slowly
disappears and she gradually retrieves the old picture of herself
and that is how everybody else starts looking at her again. So we
see that the state of mind is important. While she believed that
she was special, she was really special, when she found out that
she was chasing many other girls as well, then she didn’t feel so
special anymore so other people stopped seeing her as special as
well. She has this image that she is like dolphin, the fact is that
there are good things about dolphins, because here they imply
something clumsy and big, but when they swim they do it
gracefully. So if she is big that doesn’t mean that she is not
feminine. Her femininity should not be destroyed simply because
she is not very pretty, or because she doesn’t fit into the standard
of beauty and this is what she doesn’t understand. While he was
sending here the photo he was telling her that she was woman
enough and there is a man who likes you for what you are, but
she never got this message, she couldn’t understand why he was
following her. So we can see here what modern civilization does,
in this case, to women. So we are moulded by the patterns of the
society, but this actually destroys our uniqueness, because we all
have to fit into patterns, and if we don’t fit then we are odd and
shouldn’t lead a happy life. This is the idea behind the picture
which he sends her all the time. And when he got arrested
Christine was the one who helped them, she stops and for the first
time she addresses him without him doing anything, she now acts
normally and she asks him how he had been doing, and he is
startled, he takes a step back, he knows that this is not their
pattern where he is a man chasing her. A relationship has to be
based on trust and instead of trust we have here betrayal. In this
case Christine actually stands for Canada. She is now this typical
Canadian who seems to be welcoming, but whose patience cannot
last long. She loses patience with this guy, she wants to get rid of
him and though she regrets immediately after this she helps the
police arrest him. That’s why when the police tell her that he got
deported because of chasing a nun she feels disappointed. After
some time living on her own without a family without children as a
typical Canadian, she thinks she sees him in the newspapers.
There is a war in some of these Asian countries and she is now
worried and wants to find out whether he is in danger and if that
was his country that was in war. And then she buys more papers
and whatches tv in order to find out more about him. While he
was around she never even tried to remember his name, now
when she wants to find him she doesn’t know where to start
because she knows nothing about him. Finally she finds a way to
calm herself by the idea that he is probably safe and because he
speaks languages he might have become an interperter. So this is
the last word in the story. He was interpreting to her and other
Canadians that what you can see in this photo is a multicultural
picture, two persons coming from two different cultures and still
being together, this is possible, that’s what he was trying to tell
her. Margaret Atwood actually criticizes Canadian society by
showing how this works in practice, that the institutions of the
society are not tolerant towards the differences that exist not only
in other cultures but in whatever doesn’t fit into the standard.

Milena – The Man from Mars

Multiculturalism means various nations living together,

eqality, tolerance, democracy are the guiding principles of such a
society and Canadians are proud of this idea, however there is a
difference between theory and practice.
Christine is a representative of the white Anglo-Saxon
culture, she is the emodiment of all the Canadian values. On the
other hand we have this guy who is an immigrant, even the
country where he came from is not specified, his name is not
specified. At one point he writes his name for Christine to read it,
but it is too difficult to pronounce it so she disregards it. His name
is never mentioned in the story and that’s why the whole story is
titled as it is. He obviously can’t keep up with all the Canadian
trends and he is just like an alien there.
In their relationship we can see the attitude of the dominant
culture to the immigrant culture. In their relationship we can see
whether the idea of multiculturalism functions or not.
There is also another topic in the story and it is related to
the gender issue, the relationship between the sexes.
The dominant Canadian culture perceives the immigrant
culture as strange. Christine gives the guy the official welcoming
smile and she shows politness but only on the formal level. These
people are indeed regarded as strange, in the text they are
referred to as people from different cultures. Therefore there is
this implication that they are not on the same level. She doesn’t
want to get further involved into this.

Halfway across the park she stopped…the Palestinian

refugees.

This is the part that Vesna often gives for analysis. For
example we may get a topic to discuss the idea of multiculturalism
based on this exerpt. So we may say that the idea is different from
reality, because when she meets him she first recognizes that he is
what is in her family called ‘a person from another culture’ so he is
immediately indentified as different, as the Other, and then she
gives him her ‘official welcoming smile’ meaning it is not a real
smile, she is just pretending. We also see that she was a president
of some kind of a club where she had to work with persons from
another culture and that was an unpopular assignment, meaning
that nobody wanted to accept it. They are all the same they are all
put into the same category as the people from another culture –
this is why we don’t know where he is from, and also when the
war breaks out we don’t where is this going on because it is not
important, they are all the same. The basis of this politics of
multiculturalism is that these people should be respected and
treated equally as everybody else, however this is not so in
practice. She is polite towards him, but her initial reaction is fear,
and all the time after that she is afraid for her life. So her
instinctive reaction is to grab her racquet. So the politness is the
way they are trained, educated in schools, they learn about this in
schools, she was the president of this club concerning other
cultures. She even made a good speech about the Palestinian
refugees but she doesn’t really care for the refugees, she cares
only for how good impression will she leave with her speech.
Another topic is the male-female relationship. After giving
him directions, he still refuses to leave her alone, and he asks for
her name, at first she is amazed but then she thinks maybe that’s
a custom in his country, it crosses her mind that maybe he makes
some passes at her but after giving it a second thought she thinks
that this is probably not the case because men in general were not
interested in her except for a Moroccan waiter but he is also a
person from another culture so she said no, but people from her
own culture are not at interested in her. He carries her racquet
and if he was from her culture he would be understood as a
stalker, but he is from another culture, so maybe this is a custom
there. The meeting between the two of them ends by Christine’s
running away.

Page 132
This firl was from the West Indies…but they would have to
do.

So whenever Christine offered to help her, there was this

disgust on the part of this girl from the West Indies. Christine
understood this as a kind of a competition between them, but the
girl is better because no one had yet attempted to get Christine
pregnant and no one will because she is not attractive to the
people from her culture. Here we also have a person from another
culture and we can see what her position is like. She is different,
she offers resistance, she can understand them, she got a job
there, but we can see in the relationship between this girl and
Christine’s mother what is the Canadian idea of multiculturalism in
practice. We also see in the story that people from other cultures
do not get for example good jobs, they are servants, waiters. The
Asian guy is a student, but his scholarship is so low that he is
overdue with his rent. And we can see that the girl could have
been easily fired for getting pregnant. Her getting pregnant is such
a disappointment. And it is said in the story that she begin to be
more difficult to cope with, so she became more relaxed, casual,
she understood the difference between the proclamation of
multuculturalism and its impact in real life, so she offers
resistance, she doesn’t want to be fool around with her false
official welcoming smiles. Even when Christine offered a sort of
friendship to her she declined it because she didn’t want to have a
fake friendship. They are all politically correct, formal, official, even
Christine’s parents don’t want to say that she is fat, ugly, they say
that she is statuesque. So the mother knows that guys are not
interested in Christine because of this, that’s why Christine has to
develop interests and and get educated, she needs to find a job
while the other two, pretty daughters will get married and
provided for by their husbands. When the guy calls Christine home
her mother is thrilled because maybe this is a chance for Christine,
and the guy sounds French, but when she sees him she discards
him immediately.
 Page 133
The teapot was at last empty…I send to my family; they will
like.

This is the climax of the second meeting between the two of

them. When he sets up the camera she thinks that she will be the
only one in the photo and she prepares and smiles but when he
crouches next to her she is startled. And this tells something about
Christine, she is self-centered, egoistic. After this he chases her
around all the time and then we have the result of this process.

Page 135
Annoying and tedious though it was…their contempt for
most women…she was losing weight.

After this process somehow she turned to be mysterious to

other people – mysterious as a quality of women. She wasn’t
mysterious before, she was plain, very ordinary, as bread. Now
she became enigmatic people because no one could really
understand why she was so attractive to this person who is
chasing her. The result of this process is that guys start asking her
out, they want to know why she is so interesting. And she is
transformed now and thinks of herself as a female. The worst
thing is that she believed to be ugly. That’s why this encounter
with the man from Mars is very important, he showed her another
aspect of herself, and he showed her that she needs a conterpart,
she can’t be alone. While she was chased she felt special, but
when she heard that she was chasing other women this feeling
stopped, she was disappointed. The question is why did he chase
after her. She first thought that he was a maniac. Maybe he felt
that she was discarded by the same culture by which he was
discarded, maybe he needed a bit of understanding and
compassion.

Now we see that she managed to get a good job and

apartment, but there are problems. Nobody sees her as female,
she is maybe even depressed because she is gaining weight and
having headaches, she seems to have given up and accepted the
situation as it is. But one day she hears about this war and she
obsessively buys papers and listens to the news.
 Page 139
When, despite herself, she would think about him…Perhaps
he had become an interpreter.

An interpreter of what? His role in the whole story is that he

is an interpreter of life. He is there to show Christine what life
could be really like. As people who are outcast from that society
they could really have a meaningful life, and that’s why she
understands him as an interpreter. This was the most important
event in her life.

Green Grass Running Water

Thomas King

The current period in literature is called postmodernism,

some of its characteristics are multiple narrators, framed story –
there is a frame and then a story within a story, or more stories -,
fragmentation of the plot which corresponds to the fragmentation
of human sensibility or the dissociation of sensibility, the feeling
that we somehow do not function as integral human beings is very
much present in the modern literature, so we are fragmented. The
way the story is told also indicates the fragmentation of human
sensibility.
We have this idea present in the story ‘something I’ve been
meaning to tell you’. The idea is that we are not fulfilled as human
beings, there is not enough communication among the people, the
lack of will to undestand, and the reason why we don’t have the
will to understand is because we are not whole and we are
frightened of some aspects of our psyche and we tend to conceal
these aspects from ourselves, we tend to suppress.
The way these modern authors tell a story actually indicates
the fragmentation of our sensibility, that is why this story is so
complex.
There are two principal stories. One is more realistic, the
other is more fantastic. The fantastic one is fantastic because this
is not the myth that we have, this is a myth that Thomas King
invented although it contains the elements of the real myths which
are from native American mythology but also from the bible,
Christian mythology. This is the story about the four Indians and
what happens to them and what they do. It doesn’t deal with this
reality.
 The other one, which is a very realistic story, the story of a
woman in Canada whose name is Alberta and who has interesting
relationships with her lovers, Charlie and Lionel. The main story is
this one but it is being interrupted by another story, actually
different versions of a story told by four Indians. So the real story
is interrupted by this magical one dealing with mythology. The
realistic story is interrupted four times, because there are four
occasions when the listener wants to hear a story and the listener
is the coyote. The figure of the coyote is very important in the
native mythology. The coyote is the trickster, shapeshifter,
equivalent to the fox in our stories. This figure needs to hear a
story. Whether it is a he or a she we are not sure, but it
represents the modern mankind, we need to hear stories, without
these stories there would be no mankind, we are what we are
because we remember these stories related to us. Telling a story
actually means ordering this reality, imposing some order on this
experience which is actually chaotic. What happens in the book
seems to be chaotic but then telling the story actually introduces
order into this experience. The persons who are telling this story
to the Coyote are the four Indians. We don’t know whether they
are male of female, but judging by the names they are males –
Lone Ranger, Robinson Crusoe, Ishmael, Hawkeye. Ishmael is the
main character from Moby Dick. Ishmael is originally from the
bible. Lone Ranger is a masked rider, riding on his own through
the wild west. Hawkeye is actually a white man, though his name
is Indian. Thomas King is himself a native Blackfoot, and he writes
this book clearly about the relations between the white people and
First Nations in Canada. He chose these names for his narrators
because in all of these stories Robinson Crusoe, Moby Dick, the
Last Mohican, there is a companion to the main character in the
story. There are these four characters coming from the literature
and history of the white men, at the first sight they have nothing
in common but there is one thing, each one of them has a native
companion, each one of them establishes a relationship with a
native companion. So this might be a clue enough that the book is
about the relationship between the modern white men and the
present natives. Now we have five stories – there are four stories
being told by the Indians and there is the fifth story about Alberta.
Each of the stories is told in a specific way, it is strange to
us, because they are told in a way in which a parent would tell
them to little children. We would not for example repeat things as
he repeats them all the time. In terms of telling the story this is
the American native oral tradition. Thomas King couldn’t gather us
and tell us the story of the four Indians recreating the creation of
the world in their own terms that’s why he had to put it in writing,
but he actually managed to recreate the oral way of telling the
story. The sentences are too short, there are interruptions all the
time, nothing is clear, there are repeptitions all the time, it is
confusing in the beginning, but that is actually how we
communicate. The four stories are told by the Indians in this oral
tradition whereas the fifth story is a modern story, so it is not oral,
it is a written story which is what we are used to. The mythical
story is being repeated a few times at least, so it also part of the
old, mythical, world view which is based on cycles, the cycle of
life. The early man whose technology was not developed but
whose imagination was really fully developed, whose sensibility
was perfectly equipped to experience and describe the world in
which he lived. He tells this stories and the stories are a reflection
of the world view, if they see the world as a cycle then of course
they will tell stories which are cyclical. And the written stories even
in this postmodern tradition where there are all these
interruptions, we still have the beginning and the end, all these
stories are linear. And there is one more division which is also
present in the book and that is between myth and history. Alberta
is a professor who teaches Indian history, it can’t be just by
chance that the author chose the main character to be a history
teacher. She teaches something that is very important to her
people who are disappearing but the students aren’t really
interested and she has to cope with that. She is trying to relate to
her students but that is inevitably a failure. So this is also a
comment on what will happen to the First Nations unless
something changes in the attitude of the white people. The
memorable event from the past that she deals with in her class is
the chase of the white men after Indians when they arrested 71
people and put them in Fort Marion. There was only one woman
among them, and because they were there for a long time and
there was nothing to do, they were given paper and colours to
draw and this is the beginning of native art as we know of. This is
the event that she discusses in her class, but this is actually the
inspiration for Thomas King, because he works from that event.
What actually happened while these people were imprisoned.
There is this mythical story and there is history, or history as the
white man told it in his history books.
The book opens with the coyote sleeping, and the coyote
dream which is becoming a living entity. The coyote dream wants
to be in charge of the world, God. He wants to be god but
somehow everything goes wrong and instead of becoming god
everything is reversed and he becomes a dog, but he still believes
he is god. And then we have a new character in the linear story,
the real story and it is Lionel. But in this story there is also a dog
and the question is what it is doing there. The dog is yellow,
simple, stray, but it plays an important role in the realistic part of
the book. Everything begins with this dog. One morning in the
asylum Babo is looking out of the window and she sees a dog
coming close to her car and peeing. We see that this little puddle
of water becomes larger and larger until it becomes a flood and it
carries Babo’s and other cars away to the artifical lake. This lake is
actually by making a dam, and the territory on which this dam is
made is Indian territory, a reserve. So the water is not running
anymore because of the dam, that is what the white men do to
nature, it is unnatural, destructive. We have a collision of two
world views, the view of the white men which is very aggressive,
destructive towards the world of nature and of course mankind
because we depend on nature, and there is the world view of
these native people, Indians, who are still much better related to
their environment, nature. They still carry out these rituals that
relate them to the world. That’s the point of the Sundance ritual,
that’s why it is sacred, it is not meant for the white man because
he doesn’t belong there and if he ever comes there something will
go wrong. But a white person was nevertheless present at one
Sundance ritual in the past. It was Eli’s wife. Nothing really
happened then, but it seems that this is not supposed to be done
because bad things happen to them. She was not killed in a car
accident without a reason and Eli then had to go back. He was a
university teacher, he was Lionel’s role model. Lionel wanted to be
like him, respected, that’s why he became a student. But even this
man Eli who seems to have been completely incorporated in the
white culture goes back to his reserve not simply as a passive,
retired, frustrated man, but he went there with a purpose. He
wanted to prevent the dam from working, he couldn’t really
destroy it. But the dam was in the end destroyed. The water came
and the dam burst. The question is where the water came from.
The water actually comes from the mythical, mystical part of
reality, unfortunately we are not connected to this magical part of
our reality. We only see what is physical, perceptible through our
senses, but that doesn’t mean that there is no other reality that is
not perceptible in this way, we don’t really know. The water comes
from somewhere it is not illogical there is an explanation, the dog
made the water and that water kept rising so that it finally
overloaded the dam, but this is not the beginning of the process,
the dam was damaged already by an earthquake. The dog was
dancing in front of the dam and through his dance created an
earthquake because of which the dam slightly cracked. In front of
the dam was the little cottage belonging to Eli which was made by
his mother. He decided to live in the primitive cottage in front of
the dam because that’s the only thing that he as an individual
could do to change the course of history. This huge corporation
built the dam because it is economically profitable but the dam
never operated because of this obstruction. He wouldn’t leave his
cottage and he was entitled to it. They couldn’t make him sign an
agreement and there was this long lawsuit. Charlie was
representing the corporation. He is the greedy, sleazy lawyer that
Alberta in a way loves. Charlie despite his name is a native person.
He turned against his people because of money. He is trying hard
to move Eli because then he would get even more money. Eli in
the end dies, but that is also a message. Eli did what was in his
power even if meant giving his life.
After the part with the dream we have the real story about
this university teacher who has two lovers. She cannot decide, this
story is the story about a modern woman. Her position in the
society depends a lot on her being a teacher, she is financially
independent, educated, she is pretty – has two lovers, everything
is on her side, what is the problem then? She wants a family but in
order to do that she needs a partner, she doesn’t even need a
partner to have a child and that is one of the options that she is
considering. One day she puts on a beautiful dress and decides to
go to a pub and pick up the first man she likes. She is a young,
independent, confident woman, she knows what she wants and
what she doesn’t want – she wants a child, but she doesn’t want a
husband. So she is dressed up, she just needs to cross the street
and get into the bar, the light is red and she stops. She starts
thinking, she doesn’t know anything about the man, the child will
grow without a father, but nothing else. This is a comment on the
modern generations, nobody is thinking about love, you are
supposed to have family with the person you love. This is why she
didn’t cross the street, and this means that she has preserved her
humanity. Despite the appearances we see that she is actually a
confused young woman, because she can’t do the most natural
thing, to choose one of the two because by doing that she would
choose to commit. It is better for her to be with two guys because
if she were with one then sooner or later she would have to make
a decision, either to marry this person or break up with him. We
live in such a world where a simple thing like making a
commitment becomes impossible. But Lionel gathers the will
power and makes an effort, he had his dream of becoming a
university teacher like Eli but he is easily manipulated by the
system, he makes these mistakes and one of the messages in the
book is you’d better not make a mistake. Lionel’s aunt Norma
needs to buy a carpet, the colour of it is the most important, it
seems to be insignificant, but everything is significant, when you
have to make a decision there are consequences, they start with
carpets and come to stories, later on there is this comment you’d
better not make a mistake with a story. This is why the mythical,
magical, cyclic story is being repeated so many times in the book.
It is the same story, the story about the creation of the world, but
it is reworked because the coyote is not pleased with it, he wants
a better version, he always says no, no you made a mistake it was
not like that, can you start from the beginning. And he wants to
hear this story over and over again. It is important when you make
a decision to think well about what you get and what you lose and
this is what different characters in the book teach us. Alberta in
the end makes a decision, she chooses Lionel, the loser. This tells
us something about her, we may get an impression of her as an
easy woman, a hedonist perhaps because she moves between
these lovers all the time and the lovers know about each other,
but this is all misleading, we see that this woman has a serious
problem, she cannot choose her husband. At the end she chooses
Lionel because he goes to the reserve, sundance, he goes to see
his parents, all the time in the story he wants to sever his roots
completely, to leave the reserve, he’s been making the plans of
going back to the university for twenty years and in the meantime
he’s been working in a tv-shop selling tv sets for a guy named
Bursum who represents the worst aspect of our civilisation. So
when he decides to go back to his roots this is a big decision.
Alberta finally undestands that he is a better choice. And indeed
he is because we can see what Charlie did to his own people,
Lionel in the end returns to his own people. So we see that Charlie
completely and uncritically accepts the system of values of the
white men, the worst aspect of it, and we know that lawyers
somehow by default represent what is most corrupted about the
white civilisation. If she had married Charlie that would mean that
she was completely immersed in this world that’s why it is good
that she marries the loser, because the loser is a good man. He is
confused because of this transition from his heritage, background
of a native Indian to the world of the white men in which they all
live, still he decides to go back which proves that he is a much
better man than Charlie. And we see that after the sundance they
make love and Alberta immediately conceives which proves that
her choice was a good one, because when there are children
coming in the story that is very optimistic.
The stories we have in the book are all about women, we
have five stories about women, and they are native women. First
woman, Changing woman, Thought woman, Old woman and
Alberta Frank. Her family name Frank means sincere, honest, she
is quite honest about her confusion, she has these two lovers
openly and this also is a comment on her personality, it is much
better than if she kept them a secret. All these women fall from
the sky, so everything begins with the woman not man. Of course
this novel is a revision of the Christian mythology. Thomas King
wanted us to understand that the Christian mythology doesn’t
apply without any changes to the world view of the North
American Indians and other communities. The missionaries
couldn’t simply spread the word and expect that the people will
accept what they preach unquestioningly and this is why he makes
fun of the original mythology, that’s why it starts with the first
woman and not the first man. In his version of the book the first
man is Ahdamn which is a kind of comment on the part of the first
woman. He ridicules the Western Christian mythology, Ahdamn is
a much weaker figure than the first woman and the woman is the
one who is really in charge, that’s why the coyote is probably a
female coyote, and the four Indians who escaped are female
Indians. The First woman meets God and she becomes the Lone
Ranger. The companion of Lone Ranger was Tonto in the original
story. Changing woman meets Noah and she becomes Ishmael
after leaving the camp, and Queequeg is the companion to
Ishmael. Thought woman meets Gabriel and she becomes
Robinson Crusoe and his companion is Friday. Old woman meets
Jesus and she becomes Hawkeye whose companion is
Chingachgook. And we have Alberta who has these two lovers
Lionel Red Dog and Charlie Looking Bear. The four Indians who
occasionally leave the hospital do that because they want to fix the
world because it is bent morally. These four persons coming from
past times, from the mythology we are not familiar with want to fix
it. One of these bad things in the world is – Only a dead Indian is
a good Indian – this is a sentence from a Western movie and
Thomas King couldn’t name the movie because then he would
probably end up in court. But this is one of the injustices, this is
pure racism.
Other characters in the book are Latisha who is Lionel’s
sister. She is a success story, she was abused by her husband, left
with her children and finally a woman who becomes an
independent provider for her family. She starts with the Dead Dog
caffe and there she sells dog hamburgers to stupid Americans and
tourists. Her caffe is on the border of the reserve so she is
between the two worlds but she takes best of the two worlds. She
financially supports her family but she is also very close to her
roots. Norma was trying to teach Lionel the wisdom of life and
while she is teaching Lionel is ignoring her. He made the three
fatal mistakes. The first one was with his tonsils, the second was
when he got manipulated by his teacher, he was a brilliant student
but because of this he got involved into a protest and arrested by
the police which ruined his chances of getting a job. His third
mistake is working in the tv shop. So the conclusion is that he
made a mistake by not choosing wisely, at least three times in his
life he made this kind of mistake and that ruined his life. Babo is
the first person that the inspector interview when the four Indians
went missing. Babo is a janitor in the asylum. She is the first one
who saw that the four Indians are missing. This is a mystery we
don’t know how the Indians escaped the doors were locked on the
inside. How did they leave the hospital? We now enter the world
of magic. They have been in the hospital for hundred years or so.
Ever since the hospital was founded they were there. It seems that
they have been here all the time. Each time they leave the hospital
a disaster happens. Why do these catastrophes happen, like the
bursting of the dam? They want to fix something. So what seems
to be a catastrophe for the white men, which it really is, is actually
the way some powers fix the world. The bursting of the dam saved
the First Nations reserve. The way Thomas King tells the story is
because of the four Indians. The inspectors come and they talk to
Babo, they want to hear the story. They are interested in the story
of how the Indians escaped and Babo tells them the story that is
important to her. She is an old woman coming from the First
Nations civilisation and she starts the story like the four Indians,
from the times immemorial, and this doesn’t make sense to the
inspectors, they don’t see the link. They believe in reality as we
see it, the factual world, they are the people of history, they are
not interested in these stories. They want to make a record of
what happened and they don’t know that they are really lucky
because they have this woman who is their interpreter. In one of
the stories we had an interpreter – the man from Mars. There was
an interpreter who was there to help Christine but she didn’t get
the message. These inspectors too won’t get the message. We see
this pattern in Canadian literature, the white man who can’t
understand. We have complete misunderstanding, at one point
two characters, the doctor and the inspector talk, but they talk
about completely different things at the same time.
Concerning the narrators in the story there is the coyote
trickster who listens to the story, there are the four Indians who
tell the story. But at the very beginning we have the coyote talking
to somebody and the answer is ‘That’s true,’ I says. ‘And here’s
how it happened.’ Who is this ‘I’? He is the narrator. It is the
author.

Milena – Green Grass Running Water

The title refers to the contract between the white settlers in

Canada and the First Nations. This is actually a reference to the US
government promising the native people the right to their land as
long as the grass is green and the water runs meaning forever,
and this expression is taken from the First Nations so that they
could understand the white people. We know how this ended, the
land was stolen from them by the white people and still is in their
possession.
The story is set in the First Nations Blackfoot community in
Alberta, Canada. Blackfoot is one of the tribes of the First Nations
in Canada. It is rather difficult to understand the story because it is
based on two plots which are mixed and we cannot really
determine what is real and what is based on the mythical plot. The
first plot is based on the myth of the creation of the world. This is
the plot that we usually refer to as the mythical. In this story there
are various figures appearing like coyote as the trickster who
belongs to the Indian tradition. He is given in the story for a sort
of amusement and clarification of certain things, however after we
are faced with the clarification of the creation of the world by
coyote we are not sure about anything. So this is the first plane,
the mythical one which belongs to the oral tradition. This myth
about the creation of the world has a lot in common with the
matriarchal tradition. Because of the cycles and because the story
is repeated four times and each time it starts with woman and
water, and water in literature as well as in Indian tradition is
regarded as the symbol of beginning, chaos. Out of this chaos
woman organizes the world. There are four stories first there was
First woman, so this Indian tradition is totally contrasted to the
Christian tradition, the patriarchal tradition where there is no first
woman but first man. Not only does it start with a woman but
there is also a pun concerning Adam’s name, he is Ahdamn. We
have this first woman and then there is a sort of transformation
within this woman character because this action is cyclical, she
becomes changing woman, thought woman, old woman. And this
actually corresponds to the phases regarding the matriarchal
tradition. The mythical story starts with an unknown narrator,
maybe this is Thomas King himself, he explains the beginning, the
creation of the world. Also the coyote is present and they talk
about the creation. Coyote has this dream which takes a
substantial form and wakes him up from his sleep. The dream is
personified, it thinks it is very smart, it thinks that it is god. Coyote
is amused by this and he labels the dream not as god but as dog a
reversion of god. The dream asks why is there water everywhere,
and the unknown narrator tries to explain the escape of mythically
old Indians from a mental institution. And from here on we have
the story of the four characters Lone Ranger, Ishmael, Robinson
Crusoe, Hawkeye. The book is divide into four sections, each one
is based on the narration of one of these figures and this narration
concerns the creation of everything. And we have the mingling of
the mythical plane and the realistic plot because these mythical
characters somehow mingle into the lives of the real people, the
citizens of Blossom. The realistic plot is based on the events in and
near the Blackfoot reservation. These two plots are mingled and
from the point of view of the white men this is totally irrational.
In each of the creation stories these four encounter a figure
from the bible as well as a figure from the Western literarly canon.
After a while there is a transformation, they are given new names,
so these four women are transformed after encountering these
figures from the bible and they turn into Lone Ranger, Ishmael,
Robinson Crusoe, Hawkeye, and the reason for this is quite logical,
they are not allowed to be what they are in the new society
imposed by the western civilisation, and it also illustrates the
change from the matriarchal to the patriarchal poing of view, they
become men. So we have the coyote and this narrator and the
four women and somehow they start to explain why there is water
everywhere, they are to explain how the world was created, they
meet the figures from the bible and the rest of literary canon,
there is a kind of transformation in them because in the colision
with the new culture the matriarchal culture is rejected, and now
they assume a new identity, it is from the rest of the literary
canon. A change was necessary but the author here comments
that the change took a wrong direction. The four Indians in the
realistic plot escape an asylum because no one understands them
in the realistic world and they want to fix the world, so the author
is telling us there is something wrong with the world. The main
theme of the story is the meeting of native American and the
white culture, from the native point of view it somehow seems that
the native culture was rejected in the collision of these two
cultures, so what we have as the most important theme in the
meeting of the two cultures is the resistance to the new way of
life, and the values of the white society. And this kind of resistance
was seen in the real characters Eli, Alberta, Latisha, Lionel. The
character which is important in the mythical plane is that of water
because water offers resistance, this is the resistance on the part
of nature because what is done by the white settlers’ culture is not
natural. At the end we have the Sundance festival and the
earthquake which is another way of resistance on the part of
nature, as a result there is water everywhere and Eli dies but his
name will be passed down from generation to generation as the
keeper of the tradition and the old values. This is why it was
important to introduce the characters from the western literarly
canon and the bible because quite symbolically we have the
meeting of the matriarchal and the patriarchal culture. Ishmael
was an illegitimate son of Abraham so when there was a new child
to the family, he was banished from his home because Abraham’s
wife hated him. So the idea that we have by inserting this
character is that the Indians were there first, it was their own
country and then the white settlers came and created some illegal
laws in order to steal the land from the Indians. All these literary
characters also have in common that they all had a native
companion. They never treated these companions equally, they
were servants, instruments and also in Robinson Crusoe he never
asks Friday about his religion but immediately teaches him his
own, the same situation between the white people and the
Indians. This is why King uses these four figures from the
literature because he wants to show that even though the white
people were exposed to the Indian culture they acted as superior.
The genre of the novel is magic realism. Because of this
there are two contrasted narrative techniques, the oral and the
written. The oral is related to the native American tradition and the
written is related to the white settlers’ society. The characteristics
of the oral technique – it is direct but full of repetitions, and this is
something very difficult when you read it, but these are all the
elements of the oral tradition. The written tradition – once you
write something down there is no turning back, it is a kind of a
legalism, you should trust the written word the letter of the law,
however by the end of the book we have this idea that written
word precisely because of its inflexibility, because it can’t be
changed it shouldn’t be trusted, and that the oral technique is
quite superior because it can be changed. The whole novel is
based on this question what is real and what is magical, and that’s
why the novel fits into the category of magic realism. Whenever
something magical happens in the story white men can’t cope with
it they don’t accept it which shows the inflexibility of their minds,
there is only one truth. If there is something wrong with the story,
if there is a change in the story then there something must be
wrong with the equipment, not the story itself, like in the Bursum’s
shop. Bursum doesn’t even consider the idea of the changing of
the story. When we talk about the western culture the story is of
course that of John Wayne. Like all western movies the story is
about – something like what Eli says when he reads the book on
the relationship between the white and the Indian culture. You
know who the good guy is, you know who the bad guy is and you
know the ending so all these stories are the same, there are some
noble savages among them like Tonto, Friday who are not
completely savage.
So. In the beginning,…But you can be a dog.

So there is obviously an inversion. This dream thinks that it

is god, it has this godlike ability to create the world, to be involved
in the creation. Constant puns are made on this dog and god
identity. Now this unknown narrator is involved in the process of
telling the story about creation. This is the beginning of the story.

The very last page of the book.

Okay,okay, says Coyote…and here’s how it happened.

The beginning and the end of the story are exactly the same,
but we have the story beginning and ending four times in the book
so it never stops, it has this cyclical element. This cyclical element
is related to the Indian concept of grasping the world. In the linear
time frame related to the western mind we have the story related
to Alberta who is actually a history teacher, she teaches kids about
the history related to the native Americans.
Page 18
In 1874,…the tribes to surrender.

So this is the linear time framework, this is obviously not the

way the Indians would tell the story. She is telling the story but
the kids are not at all interested in the story itself but they are
interested in some details that are not really important like how do
you spell some Indian tribe or what is important for the exam.

The army indentified seventy-two…Plains Indian Ledger Art.

So this is a nice story belonging to this linear time frame

about the Indians and how they resisted the white culture and
how they were entraped, and in these terrible conditions they
created art. However on the part of the listeners there is no
interest for what really happened and what this art stood for, the
importance of these people and so on. The only real hope comes
from the person, Helen Mooney who stops her at the end of the
class and asks her about what happened with these Indians, the
rest of the class is not interested in this, they belong to the
superior white culture. So we read the beginning and the end of
the story to see that there is no end and no beginning. The
question is now how much we should trust history? History is
written by the winners. Thomas King actually criticizes the written
from and the emphasis is on the importance of the oral narrative
technique.
There is this theme of resistance which we can see in the
realistic part of the book. Water here has an important role as a
sort of resistance on the part of nature. Eli is the figure of
resistance on the part of American native culture. As a young boy
he realized that he had to take sides, in order to be accepted,
incorporated, he had to adopt another kind of identity not loyal to
the Indian tradition, he had to adapt to the white culture. So in
order to be accepted he had to give up his old tradition. In his
marriage we have a collision of the white culture and the native
culture. This whole period of his life was marked by the absence of
tradition values, he hasn’t seen his mother for twenty years. He
decides to go back to the sundance festival because to his wife
who is a Canadian this festival sounds exotic. He was totally
unwilling to become a figure of resistance but after his wife’s
death he goes back and he is seen there as a role model for the
younger generations because he strayed from the tradition
however after a while he came back. So he is a figure of resistance
but he fell into this role blindly, not willingly. He never intended to
become an activist, he was happy with his life in the white society,
he didn’t mean to go back to the reserve, his journey was
accidental but necessary. On the other hand there is Alberta,
another figure of resistance. There is this resistance to the
institution of marriage, this is another patriarchal institution.
Although she is a native, she is an independent, modern
woman,she is divided between the two men in her life.
Page 44
Alberta liked having two men…Alberta did not want to make.

She is a resistance figure because she resists the patriarchal

institution of marriage. But in the end she is pregnant with Lionel.
She chose Lionel because he chose to go back to his roots, he is a
better man. Latisha also offers resistance. She lives with her three
children who all have Christian names because their father is a
white man. She owns this caffe and lives by reappropriating the
stereotypes, she actually resists against the stereotypes of the
native culture. So she sells the customers ‘dog meat’ because they
experience this culture as something exotic while she actually
laughs at them. Lionel in the end resists capitalism, the consumer
society, the material wealth by givin up his job and returning
home, so this is the transformation in his character. The theme of
resistance is not present in the character of Charlie because he is
totally swallowed by the white culture. The company needs an
Indian to fight against Indians so they take him as a lawyer but
the dam is in the end destroyed and he loses his job so he goes to
find his father in Portland and this is his way of reconnecting with
the roots.
Milena je rekla da posvetimo paznju delu koji se tice
Sundance festivala I narocito da obratimo paznju na strane 360-
366 gde se nalazi razgovor izmedju Eli-ja I Lionel-a, gde Eli
objasnjava kako je on the figure of resistance and how he didn’t
want to become such a figure and he explains this to Lionel
because he sees in him such a figure for the future.

Life of Pi
Yann Martel

The central story is the experience of an Indian boy, Pi. The

way the author describes this experience renders the story
believable. He uses a lot of details to describe the life at sea with
almost nothing to support him while he was on this little boat.
Though we have a boy who is barely 17 and these wild animals on
the boat with him, we find this story believable. He spent 7
months at sea on a small boat with wild animals which is in itself
impossible but the way author tells the story makes it believable.
For someone to survive such an experience he would need
practical knowledge about the sea, and he was also a good
swimmer. When he was a small boy his uncle took him to the sea
and told him this is my gift to you. Mamaji’s passion was
swimming, he takes it seriously, he was a competitive swimmer.
When he studied abroad he visited all the swimming pools, he
found there the best swimming pool, and later when he returned
to India, he was telling stories about the life in Paris and especially
about the swimming pools. There was one pool the name of which
was Piscine Molitor and he liked it most. When Pi’s mother got
pregnant with Pi, she and her husband decided to give their
second boy the name of this pool because in their imagination this
pool was wonderful. So it can’t really be a coincidence that a boy
who will spend 7 months at sea was given the name of a
swimming pool, and that he was given the gift of the sea by his
uncle when he was only 7. All of this will somehow direct his life
towards water because he will start practicing swimming and
become really good. He was swimming until molten lead turned
into liquid light – and this sentence shows how good he became at
it. In the beginning when you start learning the water feels heavy,
pulling down, you have to struggle with it, it’s like molten lead. But
now that he became good the feeling of being in the water is like
being in liquid light. So Pi, very early in his life, gets this practical,
life-saving knowledge of the sea. We know that he was no alone
on the boat, some animals were with him – a tiger(a royal Bengal
tiger) it is a big, powerful animal weighing 220 kilos, and Pi was a
small Indian, vegetarian boy, and he was also young, so not even
fully developed. On the boat there are other animals as well –
orangutan, zebra, hyena, and smaller species. Pi got onto the
lifeboat because he was thrown overboard by the crew during the
accident when the ship was sinking. So this is an emergency, all
the wild animals are roaming free on the ship. One of the sailors
during the alarm dropped him off the deck and probably not with
the intention to help him, they threw him in order to distract the
hyena who would maybe chase after him. These people are in the
state of emergency fighting for their lives, so they don’t act
rationally but instinctively.
There is the tiger in the boat, there is the hyena, the zebra
that jumps from the ship into the boat and breaks its leg, and
there is this orangutan who reaches the boat floating on a pile of
bananas, this doesn’t seem plausible, but he checked it later and it
seems that bananas float. When they all get onto the boat the
animals start eating each other. First zebra gets eaten because its
leg is broken, the hyena eats the zebra alive, then the orangutan
arrives and the hyena wants to eat Pi but the monkey protects Pi
and gets killed by the hyena, this is a she-monkey so she probably
has this motherly instinct. Finally the tiger eats hyena. So it
wouldn’t be a problem for the tiger to eat Pi. So the two of them
remain alone in the boat. Pi has the necessary knowledge of
animals to survive with a tiger on a little boat. It can be said that
he possesses almost scientific knowledge of animals. His father
runs a zoo and he spent all his childhood in this zoo in the small
Indian town of Pondicherry. Before this he was a director in a
hotel so he runs this zoo like a hotel, so these animals are treated
like guests in a hotel, it’s just that these guests never leave. What
makes life bearable to these animals in confinement is habit, they
are used to being treated in a certain manner. So there is a way to
bring food to them, to clean their cages, how the visitors are
received. The animals get used to this routine especially because
Pi’s father is a very modern zoo keeper, he belongs India which is
now in progress after getting its independence, and he treats his
animals in accordance with this, he treats these animals which
bring food to his family really humanely. Pi is there with his
brother, but Pi is specially related with the animals, he is more
sensitive and spiritual than his brother. By the age of 16 he
already knows a lot about these animals. His relationship with the
tiger is characterized by patience, persistence. He knows that in a
group of tigers there is an alpha-male, so he knows that he has to
establish himself as the leader. He knows that the tiger will obey
him if he proves more powerful than the tiger. They have to
coexist somehow on this boat, Pi can’t jump into the water, he
spent 7 months at sea, he certainly wouldn’t be able to swim for
that long. It is very difficult not to panic in such a situation. The
tiger is hiding under this tarpaulin which is the waterproof canvas
spread over an area of a boat to keep it dry. Pi falls on the
tarpaulin and that’s why he doesn’t break his leg or something
else. So the two of them don’t see each other in the beginning and
Pi is not aware of the tiger. What is interesting is that Pi doesn’t
adopt the philosophy the western people probably would, and that
is how to get rid of the animal, it’s either me or him. There is this
scene when his father teaches him about the tigers, he throws a
goat into a starved tiger’s cage, the cage is split into two parts by
bars, the tiger sees this food and he gets excited, his father gives
the order that the bars be hoisted, the goat now realizes what’s
happening and it starts jumping incredibly high, so the two boys Pi
and his older brother Ravi, are fascinated with the skill of the goat,
but the tiger devours the goat while they are watching this at the
consternation of their mother because the father brought the
whole family to see what wild life actually means. Pi’s father
teaches them a lesson that there are no tame animals, any animal
no matter how meek it may look has instincts. Now that Pi is in
this situation this knowledge is very useful to him, he knows that
he cannot kill him nor be friends with him, he can coexist. He uses
his knowledge and manages to control the tiger. He splits the boat
by using urine, he marks his territory, he also uses a whistle which
simulates a roar. So he creates a new philosophy, not either…or
but both…and. This can be achieved only if he trains the animal,
so he uses the whistle when the tiger is restless to show him that
he has the power. Pi also understands that the tiger gets seasick
so when the tiger is nervous he rocks the boat and then the tiger
loses his appetite, this is how Pi pacifies the tiger. He also feeds
the tiger and this is the activity that requires all of his time
because it is difficult to catch fish at sea when there are no tools,
and he also provides the tiger with drinking water, he collects rain
water, but it is never enough for the two of them and his priority is
the tiger. He has to keep the tiger satisfied in order to survive.
This is something strange because we are used to the philosophy
of elimination and selection but here the author teaches us a new
approach to life. There is also the issue of madness, a person is for
too long all alone at sea. Pi survives because the tiger helps him
survive, he has to worry about the tiger all the time so he doesn’t
have the time to think about his existential condition, his
loneliness, he works in order to survive, and when they finally find
him he is incredibly tired and extremely skinny. He is barely alive
but alive, and he is relatively sane because of the tiger.
His faith is also perfectly in harmony with his life philosophy.
When a person belongs to a certain religion and starts liking
another religion more he discards the previous one, but Pi accepts
all three so this is both…and. He has his own way of doing things.
Pi is born as a Hindu, he is a young child, his father is not a
believer but Pi has it in himself. To believe in the existence of god
means that you believe in something you can’t see, something
irrational, but you also believe that you are not alone, there is this
power that makes world meaningful, you feel connection and we
call this connection love. So in accordance with this you treat the
creatures of this world in the same way. So Pi loves all these
animals in the zoo especially the tiger whose name is Richard
Parker. So this tiger got a human name by mistake. The person
who filled in the form put the name of the person who found the
tiger. So this is a coincidence but we will see till the end of the
novel that it is very meaningful. We see that Pi loves this world
and that is how he shows love for god. But at one point, on
holiday with his parents, in a little town at the seaside he sees
three hills and a temple on each of them. He first goes to the
Hindu temple because that is part of his religion but he is curious
and the next day instead of going to this temple he decides to go
to another, to see what it is like. He walks into the Christian
church and there he finds a priest who tells him the story of
Christianity which is a fascinating story about Jesus Christ saving
the humanity. Listening to this story Pi is fascinated, he was not
familiar with that story, but he is also bewildered because there
are some inconsistencies in the Christian story – if god loves us
how can he be so cruel to us. But there are also nice sides to this
story and he likes the story so he decides to join the Christian
church but what is unusual is that he doesn’t leave the Hindu
church. The third day he goes to the third hill and he finds a
mosque and in the mosque there is another priest, he makes
bread. And when Pi walks into the church the priest gives him
bread. And of course the priest tells him about Islam, Pi again likes
what he hears and he decides to join this religion too. When they
find out that he believes in all these gods they tell him that he has
to choose because it is the convention to have only one religion.
So this is the problem we uncritically accept conventions. Pi says
that he only wants to love god. In school there are also teachers
that influence him, one of them is the teacher of biology whose
name is Satish Kumar. This is also the name of one of the priests,
the Muslim. So a priest and a teacher, a man of faith and a man of
science have the same name, this too isn’t a coincidence. The
name of Richard Parker was not chosen by coincidence by Martel,
there was this castaway by the name of Richard Parker who was
eaten by the other survivors, and there are also other people who
are shipwrecked and eaten in the same manner, their names are
also Richard Parker, this is recorded in history. So faith really helps
him when he becomes desperate. So this is all the things that he
needed, knowledge, skills, faith. He also needs imagination. The
first clue of his imaginativeness is in his school when he goes to
the blackboard and writes Pi on it. Everybody was laughing at him
because of his name, he felt uncomfortable because everybody
called him pissing. This pi also stands for the irrational number pi
= 3.14. He chooses his name, we are usually given names and
they define us, but by choosing a name for himself he takes his
destiny into his own hands. Many of us would probably die at sea
but he is a survivor because he takes destiny into his own hands.
When he is finally rescued he is adopted by a French family in
Quebec because his family died at sea. He becomes a student and
he studies zoology and theology which is not really common, so
here again there is the philosophy both…and. He becomes an
expert for a three-toed sloth(lenjivac). These animals blend with
the environment and when they move they move so slowly that
they are almost imperceptible. It is an absolutely harmless animal
and it survives. This animal deserves its existence because it found
a mechanism of surviving without harming anything except the
plants that it eats. He later blends with the Canadian society but
he preserves his uniqueness, his house is like a temple celebrating
all three religions.
At the moment when Pi is saved there are two Japanese
inspectors who talk to him and want to find out how the ship sank.
Pi tells them the story and the inspectors don’t believe it, they
want a to hear a better story, so Pi tells them a different story that
he was thrown overboard and his mother too, and also the cook,
and a sailor. The sailor’s leg was broken and they were hungry so
the cook cut off the sailor’s leg to use it as a bait to catch fish. The
sailor then bled out to death and the cook ate him. Pi’s mother
was very angry and attacked the cook and the cook killed his
mother, he cut her head off and threw it into Pi’s lap, and then Pi
couldn’t control himself so he killed the cook and ate him. ‘A better
story’ is a possible exam question. We don’t know now which story
is true. A more realistic story however is the one with people on
the boat and not animals. So Pi found himself with these people
where the orangutan is his mother, the sailor is the zebra because
of his broken leg, the cook is the hyena, which makes Pi the tiger.
So Richard Parker is actually the id part of Pi’s psyche, the instincts
which our civilization always suppresses. We are taught here that
these instincts are necessary for survival. But Pi managed to train
the tiger that is his instincts. We need to control our instincts in
order to function in the society but we overdo it. When they reach
the land Richard Parker runs away, he leaps to the land and
disappears to the jungle. So what this means is that once Pi
reaches civilization again, his instincts need to be suppressed.

Milena – Life of Pi
Milena said that we don’t have to memorize names.

The story has three parts – Pi’s childhood, his ordeal at sea,
and the last part which happens in a hospital in Mexico – the
conversation between Pi and Japanese investigators who want to
know what happened to the ship so that we have the retelling of
the story. And even in the novel these parts are divided some of
them are written in italics. There is also double narrator, the main
narrator is Francis Adirubasamy and his words are given in italics
and then there is the writer who is maybe actually the writer of
the novel Martel. His part is given in italics and then there is the
story of Pi given in an ordinary way as if Pi himself is the narrator.
The story is based on the conversation between the main writer
and Pi. Pi’s full name is Piscine Molitor Patel. The first part is
related to an area in India called Pondicherry. The dominant
theme is that of religion and spirituality. Quite childishly he relates
all the religions that are practiced in that small part of India where
he lives. He finds this common trait for the religions, in a way he
practices all three religions. People consider this impossible and
unacceptable but we see that his childish beliefs are actually quite
right. So he just wants to love god regardless of what form god
takes. And we see that in emergency he prays to all of them. His
childhood is also important for the lessons that he acquired in the
zoo. There is also another possible interpretation of this story
where there are these beasts on the boat and each of them stands
for a certain human condition. Pi represents human divinity
because he has three different religions. He has hope because he
has faith and he believes that this will save him in the worst
situations. Richard Parker, a dangerous tiger, is regarded as an
allegorical symbol of animalistic characteristics of humans. The
whole journey is based on the fact that Pi is able to control Richard
Parker and thus he is able to suppress the animalistic
characteristics in a human being, instincts. There is a tendency in
the society that this aspect of human beings be suppressed but
the idea is that you never know when this aspect will resurface,
appear. Pi needs this aspect in order to survive, but he also needs
to control it for the same reason, Pi realizes that coexistence with
Richard Parker is what will enable him to survive. At the end Pi
actually admits that Richard Parker is a part of himself, they are
one. Orangutan stands for motherly instinct, hyena for cowardice.
All these animals represent different characteristics of human
condition and the reason why Martel uses all these animals is to
demonstrate the necessity to survive, the will to live. So the
experience he got in the zoo is quite useful now not to tame
Richard Parker but to control him. If Richard Parker is an aspect of
human psyche and Pi’s experience in the zoo was very useful for
controlling this aspect than that means that we are very similar to
animals, at least in this instinctual aspect, anyway this experience
made it easier for him to control this. Pi gets into Richard Parkers
head and asserts himself as the alpha male, he gets him used to
these rituals which he knows helped the animals in the zoo endure
their captivity. So he uses his whistle, urinates to mark territory,
rocks the boat and so on. If Pi doesn’t establish himself as the
alpha male, then Richard would become the alpha male and the
authority is threatening.
They were sailing and reached this island that was green,
and they got the chance to eat some different food, Pi is very
happy about it. Pi decided to stay on the island but then he found
out why Richard Parker was going back all the time and ate the
animals that lived there and slept on the trees and not on the
ground. This is carnivorous island and when in contact with the
ground it slowly digests you because the ground is covered in
algae which are acidic. He comes to the conclusion that the island
is like a massive organism that had previously consumed humans,
so he has to leave this island. Soon after that they find themselves
on the coast of Mexico. When they reach the coast the tiger
immediately goes into the jungle. At that moment Pi felt lonely and
deserted by the dearest friend.
The last part of the novel is related to Pi’s stay in hospital
when he is visited by two Japanese officials. When Pi tells them
the story they are quite skeptical about it so Pi tells them another
version of the story which is more realistic. There is this beautiful
Chinese boy who hurt his leg and the cook chops it to bait fish,
and later butchers the boy and eats him, also kills Pi’s mother and
throws her head in Pi’s direction that’s when Pi kills him and eats
his heart, liver, flesh. The Japanese officials are now asked which
story they like better and they all agree that the story with the
animals is a better one. So there is this imaginative and factual
aspect of the story. In civilized society there are limits, restrictions
which suppress our instincts but in a situation as the one Pi got
into all of these resurface, and there are no moral restrictions the
only thing important is to survive. So it’s a thin line between
animal and human in us, this is what Martel talks about. Pi really
believes that the story with the animals is real. The difference
between factuality and imagination is blurred here, we have two
stories and it is up to us to decide which one is true, or better to
say which one we believe. Pi is an unreliable narrator because he
is telling two versions of reality and it is up to us which version will
we accept. Pi questions reality because he asserts that even reality
is a story, he only tells them a better story. There is a lot of
symbolism in Pi’s name, pi is an irrational, imaginative number,
also we get this number by dividing 22 by 7, and Pi spent 227
days at sea. Pi is also a Greek later which contains alpha and
omega and in the book this is how the dominant and submissive
creature is defined. So they are a unity they are merged like alpha
and omega are merged in the letter pi. Richard Parker is a
character from a story, it is a story about four castaways who
drew straws to decide who should get killed and eaten, and
Richard Parker drew the shortest one.
This is a novel written in a frame narrative, there is a
fictional character who is met by another fictional character, the
supposed author. This author meets Pi’s family. Martel uses italics
to distinguish the authors notes from the story of Pi’s life. We get
the impression that the fictional author writes the story but in Pi’s
own words. There are three tones which correspond to each
section of the novel. At the beginning when Pi is a child there is
this innocent, naïve tone, energy, curiosity. After the death of his
family the tone in the book changes because Pi is forced to grow
up and take care of himself. In the conclusion of the novel there is
another change in the tone, there is this reaffirmation of the will to
survive, a new-found respect for life. Pi doesn’t accept his faith he
actively fights against it in order to survive. First of all he
abandons vegetarianism, he has to eat fish in order to survive. We
have all these animals at the beginning and they all fight the best
they can to survive. The idea is that living creatures will often do
unexpected even heroic things in order to survive, but they will
also do shameful things if pressed too much like the cook’s turn
towards cannibalism. Pi is not a liar, actually there are various
versions of the same story. One version is factually true but the
other is emotionally, but the version which is superior is the one
based on the animals. As far as the religions are concerned Pi
considers them all different versions of one. He admires atheists
because it is important to believe in something even in the
absence of it, so what is actually important is the belief. Pi
personally believes, but what he considers important is to take a
stand so atheists took a stand they don’t believe but he accuses
agnostic for a shameful lack of imagination because they don’t
take a stand at all, they believe that the existence or non-
existence of god cannot be known or proved. They are like
listeners who cannot appreciate the truth that the fictional story
provides. So even atheists have a stand, but agnostics don’t take a
stand they only believe the evidence, the idea is that when you
incessantly seek for rational evidence all the time this destroys the
various versions of the story.
Pi marks his territory with piss, in the animal world there are
these rules like this one which remind of the rules in human world,
animals are territorial. Around the boat there is plenty of food and
water, but the water is undrinkable and the food is difficult to
catch. There are rituals that Pi employs to train the tiger, animals
are accustomed to the repetition of some events and these rituals
should be respected in order to establish peace and tranquility on
the boat. We have the symbolism of the orange colour, it is the
colour of the tiger, it is the colour of the cat that Pi’s daughter
Usha has, so in a way it is a symbol of hope, life survival. This is
also the colour of the life jacket and the whistle.
There is a moment when Pi is so exhausted that he thinks he
sees a Frenchman also blinded by the sun and they of course talk
about food. What is the thing between the kind of behavior typical
of animals, and the behavior typical of humans? So are humans
different from animals or not? It seems that these instincts are
suppressed by the laws, rules, conventions, that is certain rituals
of the civilized society. This is exactly the reason why he needs a
man to talk to, that’s why he imagines this Frenchman.
Important pages :43(the world of animals <> the world of
man), 48(about religion), 91(things didn’t turn out the way they
were supposed to, but what can you do? You must take life the
way it comes at you and make the best of it.), 164(Pi identifies
with Richard Parker, it is stated that the two of them function
together, they have the same identity.), 294(Investigators, two
versions of the truth). These are the parts that Vesna mostly gave
for the exams.