More than ‘two solitudes’, or Cree (Canadian) and (Italian) Canadian fiction*

What adventures can a protagonist, self-identifying as a Cree, experience in the territory belonging to the Dakehl nation in Northern British Columbia as a school principal in the 2000s? Darrel J. McLeod’s character in A Season in Chezgh’un (Douglas&McIntyre 2013, pp. 320) undergoes a gamut of feelings, and a variety of expected and also unforeseen events. Although a fictional character, James not only gives the reader a really interesting and engaging look at the life stories of one of the First Nations people, but also provides numerous examples of emotions and events that closely resemble those of the characters in immigrant/Italian Canadian fiction.

James’s life story gives us examples of the atrocious history of abuse, maltreatment, neglect, discrimination of all First Nations peoples. Having experienced some of these, having lived without his father and with his alcoholic mother, having been caught in the web of sibling suicides and addiction, and suffering from sexual abuse by his white brother-in-law, James is, however, able to leave his Cree birthplace, study at the university, travel, enjoy varied cuisine, fashion, and music, live with his lover in a Vancouver apartment. All these experiences, however, not only make him insecure, but also extremely unhappy and he never feels that he belongs. He is aware of these negative pressures that his environment as well as himself put on him. And yet he does not give up: he compares himself to the sockeye salmon who leave fresh water to migrate great distances in the sea and then come back to their spawning grounds and die there. (p. 18) As an educator, he applies for, and receives, the position of a principal at a Dakehl school. His expectations (also muffled by his welcoming committee) soon make him realize that if he wants a real school, he has to build it himself. He is not undaunted as he joggles his ideas between the local/provincial school administrators and the elders of the community. He is truly happy when he sits at the shore of the lake and observes the wild life there or when he shares food with the Dakehl community, or when he participates in a ceremony with the tribe in a Mayan village. He is able to hire new, young staff, he promotes the cooperation with and experiential learning for the children and adults in his community. He observes the internal squabbles and the disagreements between and among the different tribes and is able to walk this tightrope with success, without making too strong enemies. His most successful projects are having the youth like the school, attend it and participate in all the activities, as well as having the elders take literacy classes that lead to participation in their political struggles. His feelings of being different in any and all circumstances are heightened because of his belonging to the gay community, with the concomitant fear of an HIV infection. He finds release from stress in sex. When he is offered to come and play the piano at the white neighbours, his answer illustrates not only his complex of inferiority but also his desperate need to be approved by others (p. 69):

“That’s generous, Louise. thank you.” James answered earnestly, although he knew he could never take her up on her offer. In addition to his shyness, his pride wouldn’t allow him to accept what felt like charity – the benevolence of someone in a position of privilege and wealth bestowed upon a lesser being. And then there was the optics of it all, if he were to be seen as being too cozy with the local gentrified white folks, what would the Native people he was working with think of him?

The novel concludes with James accepting another job and going to another post in Salmon Arm. On his way he swerves his car to avoid a beaver who nevertheless is injured; while James muses on the importance of this animal for his people, the animal jumps up and claws his thigh. The fact that beaver is also a national emblem of Canada, and this emblem injures him, is a clear metaphor for the impossibility for James to live in peace with his environment.

There is a metafictional element in A season in Chezgh’un when James reads Une saison dans la vie d’Emmanuel by Marie-Claire Blais (the use of the word “season” in Mcleod’s title is interesting). James notices that the novel “recounts a story of poverty and oppression in rural Quebec, and it comes as close as any mainstream piece of literature has to capturing the reality that James, his siblings and cousins grew up in.” (p. 31) Besides mixing reality and fiction, this metafictional detail in McLeod’s writing gives away one of the most troublesome perspectives that Canadian fiction can have for an author that does not deem himself to be a Canadian. The desire to become an author of “mainstream” fiction is great. In Native authors’ case, though, this is a struggle which they wrestle with more than any other “ethnic” Canadian author, since they do not identify with Canadian culture, whereas the “immigrant” authors have to.

Although a comparison between Native-Canadian and ethnic-Canadian writing requires a full treatment, I will concentrate here only on points of convergence between themes and tropes common to the Cree-Canadian and Italian-Canadian prose (the Cree-Canadian is represented by only one novel, though). Therefore there is no discussion of differences in topics such as sexual abuse of young children (in the Natives’ cases but not mentioned in the Italian Canadian case, although rape is present), or the abuse lived through in residential schools suffered by the Natives (Italians in Canadian schools, just like any other “ethic” pupils received other types of discrimination in schools). The following common themes in stand out:

1. grappling with history: protagonists both Cree and Italian struggle to come to terms with the fact that they “lost” or are in fact losing the cultural certainties (language, beliefs, ancestors’ way of life, naming practices, etc.) which their ancestors had held for millennia.
2. impossibility to belong to any group, “mainstream” or indeed to one’s own: blatant and covert discrimination makes this even more profound.
3. intense desire to belong to the mainstream group, to be accepted and included, even though this desire clashes with the innermost feelings of the individual.
4. ancient belief systems shattered, i.e. in the case of the First Nations the perpetrators are the Catholic nuns and priests, in the case of Italians, it is also the Catholic priests who do not allow or do not understand certain pre-Christian beliefs to be practiced.
5. comparison with nature: James compares himself with the sockeye salmon, the trope in the Italian Canadian culture of the immigrant generations was the fig tree: it can survive in Canada, but it has to be bent out of shape and protected, covered in the winter.

In conclusion, A season in Chezgh’un underscores the necessity to go beyond the received truths about an individual’s life and their history. This is the lesson also from (Italian) Canadian fiction. And as we are now (2024) at the cusp of an unprecedented general cultural upheaval – the use of AI becoming so much more than simple aid to human life – what can the slash between pre-history and modernity teach us about the division between modernity (humanity, anthropocene) and bio-techno-world? If these processes can indeed be compared, humanity does not have much to rely on for support from the past. The two solitudes, representing Canadians and Natives/immigrants are truly becoming many solitudes.

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*To be consistent, I should have written Molisan Canadian or Calabrian Canadian fiction to make it clear that the authors of Italian origin (or their ancestors) come from different parts of Italy, just like First Nations peoples come form different regions, and therefore have different cultures and languages. The Italian Canadian prose fiction which I base my comments on include Frank Paci’s Black Madonna, Nino Ricci’s Lives of the Saints, In a Glass House, Where she has gone. Poetry requires another post, but one can start here: https://www.tlnoriginals.com/title-item/invisible-voices/.

Ferocity, home, heritage

If ever there was need to describe in words the various incarnations of evil and hate people show for each other and toward themselves, this need has been satisfied by Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing (Penguin, 2016).  The novel follows the history of 2 families (through 8 generations) of Asante/Fante peoples both in Ghana and in the United States, where some were brought as slaves as early as the late 1700s.

                The stories of the characters offer a quick, honest, and simple read. The themes of these stories  echo themes found in most narratives which deal with the search for ancestors, search for the purpose of one’s existence, and the role of the family, subject matters dear to second, third, fourth generations of “Americans”*: the case of “Italian American” narratives comes to mind readily. The elaborations of three ideas stand out from the novel’s flow: the iterations of ferocity, the lack of a solid definition of home, and the role of ancestors.

                The iterations of ferocity, evil, and hate span the whole gamut of human experience shown in the novel: mother against children, step-mother against step-daughter, husband against wife, chief of the tribe against his subjects, tribe against tribe, British against Asante, “Americans” against “African Americans”*, men against women, etc. Even though some characters in the novel attempt to offer a different reaction to violence and evil (such as suggesting not to increase the number of weapons, or falling in love with someone who may be regarded as “the enemy”), in the final analysis, the existence of ferocity and evil for ever is almost guaranteed by the novel. Some evil, mostly realized as hate (and therefore spawning violence), has roots in culture (the Asante tradition of not trusting an individual who is an orphan of an unknown mother), other ferocity stems from the feeling of superiority (Asante tribes feeling superior to other tribes – and vice versa, the British feeling superior to the Asante – and vice versa), other evil originates in exploitation, racism, discrimination, dehumanization (African slaves in the US a hundred years ago, “African Americans” in New York today).  There is, moreover, another type of violence, that of being perpetrated on oneself, and in the novel, this is the one that results from the economic, political, cultural environment in which the individual lives: as one character says, “I am nobody from nowhere”: a statement which determines her uneasy relationship with the tribe. But the novel is not all about viciousness, ferocity, hatred, violence; there is also love between men and women, parents and children, grandchildren and grandmothers. This reciprocal love, however, does not reach tribal or national levels.

                Despite the title (“Homegoing”), “home” is an elusive concept throughout the novel, never receiving a full treatment. No character seems to have a “home” in the dictionary definition of the term, i.e.” a place where one lives permanently”. The closest to “home” is of course the nostalgic feeling for a traditional way of life in an Asante village, but one can be uprooted even from there by a rival tribe looking for slaves, or a British slave trader, or a desire to emigrate to the US.  The uprootedness is exacerbated by modernity, where ex-slaves, “African American” mine workers, poor “African Americans” reel as corks in the enormity of economic, political, social, psychological ocean.  So “homegoing” means going back to purported ancestral home, even if that may be vastly different in reality from the nostalgic, spiritual, attractive notion the homegoing characters have of it. The search for the ancestral home does not include the idea that this is the village that “evil had built”, as one character claims.

                The role of the ancestors and ancestral land is crucial in the novel. Only through ancestors and ancestral lands characters can come to terms with themselves, their fears (of the ocean, of fire),  their lack of motivation (of completing their PhD), their search for love. Interestingly enough, this role of ancestry and ancestral lands is eerily similar to that found by a study of second-generation “Italian Americans”: according to the Italian immigrant parents of the 1940s, their children have been pushed out of the paradise of the ancestral land where everything was like paradise and everything was in its place, so the experience was meaningful. In the novel, this picture of the ancestral paradise sustains the imagination and builds meaningfulness into the “homeless” characters’ lives. In this sense, “homegoing” has the function of supporting their understanding of identity enveloped in mystery and spiritualism. Ancestors, of course, being full of mystery, increase their status as image-makers, and echoes of spiritualism span centuries: spirits of mothers who, subjected to visions of fire bringing death and destruction, destroy the lives of their children and their own;  spirits of slaves who died during the trans-Atlantic voyage, whose laments are heard across the centuries and are part an parcel of the water in the ocean.

                In conclusion, the novel is a good, fast read. At times, however, it has the quality of an anthropological study of a culture whose details elude the researcher, but these are supplanted by the author’s skillful interweaving of  magical and spiritual threads. If art is the search for the understanding of oneself, and verbal art makes this search so much more varied, it is not entirely clear whether the author has found the route to herself and her identity through the novel. Perhaps the sequel to this novel may answer this query. Admittedly, the most interesting aspect of the novel is left unsaid: the fate of the two characters who in fact engage in “homegoing”, albeit ending up in a resort at Cape Coast, where they finally let go of their fears (she of fire, he of the ocean) rather than finding solace and answers at a village family compound.    

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*The quotation marks in words and phrases such as “American”, “African American”, “Italian American” simply denote the frustrating vagueness of these notions which are devoid of historical, sociological, political, psychological, or cultural context.