Abstract
This paper analyses Beatrice Culleton’s April Raintree (1984) and Sally Morgan’s My Place (1987) as life-stories or life narratives of the Metis of Canada and Aboriginals of Australia, significant sections of humanity who have been denied their land, history and voice for centuries. Both the writers have attempted to evolve their own genre and counter discourse breaking the boundaries and the conventional categories of Western epistemology. The paper examines how these autobiographical texts employ memory, orature and identity quest to decolonise master narratives, and argues that Native/Aboriginal autobiography constitutes a distinct genre of “Life Narration” with its own ideological and aesthetic imperatives.
Keywords: April Raintree, My Place, Beatrice Culleton, Sally Morgan, Metis, Aboriginal, life narration, postcolonial autobiography, identity, Canada, Australia
Introduction
Indigenous writers transform their truth-based experiences into art form evolving a new genre with realism in their “life-writing” or “Life narration” and “self-writing” modes of expression. As Frederic Jameson has observed, all texts can be read as having an “ideology of form” (76). The texts of the indigenous writers have their own form and ideologies connected with native orature and myth. These writers, in their autobiographies, attempt to subvert the earlier master narratives, also undergo a kind of Bakhtinian “novelisation.” They write their own stories narrating their life experiences. Autobiographical stance chosen by Beatrice Culleton in April Raintree (1984) and Sally Morgan in My Place (1987) is clearly a strategy for the expression of a growing defiance and insubmissiveness on the part of the natives. Both the novels record the reminiscences of the authors and a historiographic depiction of the traumatic experiences in the lives of their kinsmen.
This paper attempts to analyse Beatrice Culleton’s April Raintree and Sally Morgan’s My Place as life-stories or life narratives of the Metis of Canada and Aboriginals of Australia, significant sections of humanity who have been denied their land, history and voice for centuries. Both the writers have attempted to evolve their own genre and counter discourse breaking the boundaries and the conventional categories of Western epistemology.
Penny Petrone in Native Literature in Canada, argues that Western epistemology is unable to comprehend Native Literature for various reasons, including its relation to the oral and cultural values of mythology. As she puts it:
Canada’s Native writers have borrowed from Western traditions the forms of autobiography, fiction, drama, and essay. Their uses, however, judged by Western literary criteria of structure, style and aesthetics, do not always conform. They are different because form is only the expression of the fabric of experience, and the experience of the Native writers has been different. (183-184)
The personal experiences of the Native/Aboriginal writers are unique and they cannot be borrowed hence they borrow the forms, especially autobiography to express their feelings and struggles. The borrowed autobiography too undergoes transformation as it is blended with orature and written form. These writers attempt to develop a form of life narration against the conventional form of the genre, autobiography. What is said about Native writers is applicable to Sally Morgan for she transforms the genre autobiography into a new narrative form of a combination of narratives within a narrative and folklore.
Search for Identity
A strong sense of self identity is a pre-requisite to self determination. The central characters in April Raintree and My Place undertake not only a search for roots but also a search for identity. The two sisters, April and Cheril in April Raintree, are silenced victims of racial discrimination that has started even at the school level. Their separation from their family and the sufferings in the foster homes allow April to feel resentful to her heritage. There are four autobiographies that constitute the structural frame work of My Place namely those of Sally Morgan, Arthur, Gladys and Daisy. Sally’s quest for the truth about her family heritage and her genuine urge to establish her aboriginal identity links these four autobiographies. Fear of discrimination of the aborigines prevented both Gladys and Daisy revealing their past. These Autobiographies, April Raintree and My Place also strive to register resistance and serve as strategies for empowerment through the central characters’ quest for identities.
Beatrice Culleton, an acclaimed Metis writer of Native Canada, was born at Manitoba in 1947 as the youngest of four children. She became a ward of the Children’s Aid Society of Winnipeg at the age of three. She grew up in different foster homes as a displaced person from her family and her people with an exception that once she lived in one foster home with one of her older sisters. Two of her older sisters committed suicide. Her tragic past with unusual experiences contribute to the formation of her fictional rendering, April Raintree.
Sally Morgan, recognised as one of Australia’s best known Aboriginal artists and writers, was born in Perth in 1951, as the eldest of five children. As a child she found school difficult because of the questions from other students about her appearance and family background. She understood from her mother that she and her family were from India. However, when Sally was fifteen she learnt that she and her sister were in fact of Aboriginal descent, from the Palku people of the Pilbara. This experience of her hidden origins, and subsequent quest for identity, was the stimulus for her first book, My Place published in 1987.
Trauma, Dispossession, and the Colonial Legacy
In April Raintree, the protagonists, April and Cheryl are two sisters separated very young and cruelly treated in different foster homes. They choose to take two different ways of life amidst physical and psychological tortures. April, the elder and fairer one, is able to assimilate with the white society. Whereas Cheryl develops a militant, political identity at a very young age and grows up to work for Native Canadians at a Friendship Centre. Eventually, Cheryl turns to be an alcoholic and commits suicide while April determines to nurse Cheryl’s son, Henry Liberty Lee, as a model for the future Native generation and decides to reclaim her native identity.
In My Place, Sally, the eldest of the five children of the family, records her childhood as a time of difficulty. Her father, the veteran of the Second World War, suffers from illness and dies when Sally was a nine year old young girl. Her mother, Gladys, has to do odd jobs like cleaning to make both ends meet. Sally spends most of her childhood days with her young brothers and sisters and her grandmother Daisy. She has to face a difficult time as she was questioned by the fellow students about her identity. On pressing her mother about her family background she is told that she is an Indian. However, in the long run, she learns that is a lie, and she is instead descended from Australia’s Aborigines. This instigates her to undertake a quest to discover the hidden branches of her family tree.
Morgan’s My Place, recognized as a milestone in Indigenous writing, sketches a picture of generational dispossession and denial of land, of kinship, of children stolen away and of wealthy white men who disown them. The fear of discrimination against Aborigines has persisted in Nan, Sally’s grandmother, for a long time and she keeps telling Sally that terrible things will happen to her if she tells people what she is. One such terrible thing that happened is the children were stolen away from the family. The half-caste children are thus separated from their aboriginal fathers or mothers and treated as poor whites. They are then brought up as inferior whites as a way of denying the co-existence of equal but different civilization.
The stories narrated in My Place uncover the plight of many Indigenous children and communities devastated by government policies and laws which allowed Indigenous children to be taken from their families. The white masters treat the Aborigines as objects and the novel My Place uncovers the fear that Gladys and Nan felt about authoritative figures. The terrifying and heartbreaking experience that Gladys experienced through the Substitutive Care System in Australia reveals how she lost her identity; how the fear of being taken away from her mother scarred her for life.
As for Nan, she has gone through worse circumstances in her days since she belonged to an earlier generation. When she was a child, her brother Arthur was taken away by the whites who gave an assumption that he was getting education. Blacks were ill-treated and considered as Nan revealed: “‘Cause you’re black, they treat you like dirt … we was owned, like a cow or a horse. I even heard some people say we not the same as whites. That’s not true, we all God’s children” (M P 415). When Nan was fifteen she was permanently taken away from her mother giving a wrong notion that she had been given education. Thus her right to get education was denied and she remained as an illiterate all along her life.
Identity Negotiation: April Raintree
In April Raintree, April’s reminiscences fictionalize their forceful and tragic separation from their parents, Henry Raintree of mixed blood Indian and Alice Raintree of part Irish and part Ojibway. Their Norway house is transformed into a microcosm of Canadian Metis life. April reflects it in the following words: “Most of my misery, however, was caused by the separation from my parents” (A R 10). Amidst all the cruel deeds April realizes the tragedy of being a Metis: “Being a half-breed meant being poor and dirty. It meant being weak and having to drink. It meant being ugly and stupid. It meant living off white people” (A R 34). This realization forces April to reject her identity.
Unlike April, Cheryl feels proud of being a Metis. She tells April: “we should be proud of our heritage. You know what that means? It means we’re part-Indian and part-white. I wish we were whole Indians” (A R 30). Cheryl rebels against the falsehood charged against on the Native Indians in her history class. She loudly protests saying “this is bunch of lies!” When provoked, she asks:
If this is history, how come so many Indian tribes were wiped out? How come they haven’t got their land anymore? How come their food supplies were wiped out? Lies! Lies! Lies! Your history books don’t say how the white people destroyed the Indian way of life. That’s all you white people can do is teach a bunch of lies to cover your own tracks! (A R 40-41)
April Raintree marries Bob, a white man in order to shed her Metis identity. April’s fantasy of her fake white identity is demolished after a moral ordeal when she is mistaken for Cheryl as a Native person. Cheryl dismantles the fabricated system of assimilation while April, the narrator protagonist attempts in her life to bring out the identity crisis. April at the end determines to embrace her real heritage. In Julia Emberley’s words:
The ending marks a reclaiming of “identity” over difference…a new synthesis of the split narratives of subjectivity constituted in Cheryl and April…a new order of unification and reconciliation in which the ‘Indiannes’s’ of Cheryl is absorbed into the whiteness of April. (162)
Memory, Land, and Empowerment
The authentic firsthand experiences of the two authors, Beatrice Culleton and Sally Morgan become a rich and reliable resource material for their writing. Memory plays a pivotal role in both the novelists’ life in describing their personal story, family history, and nostalgia. The genre of native autobiography emphasises the importance of ancestry, memory, aboriginal history and family stories. Both the novelists express their longing to regain their unpolluted land. Before the arrival of the white, black people had enjoyed a co-existence of all life. In My Place, representing the aboriginal urge Arthur says that they “want their own land, with no white man messin’ about destroyin’ it” (230). As a champion of Aboriginal cause Cheryl in April Raintree mourns for the loss of the Native lands and freedom:
…we are here for centuries. We kept the land, the waters, the air, clean and pure, for our children and for our children’s children.
Now that you are here, White Man, the rivers bleed with contamination. The winds moan with the heavy weight of pollution in the air.
The land vomits up poisons which have fed into it. Our Mother Earth is no longer clean and healthy. She is dying…
… we the Indian people, we are still dying. The land we lost is dying, too. (136)
In both the novels, Education plays a significant role in the lives of the central characters to empower them. Sally in My Place undertakes the quest for identity as she was questioned by the fellow students about her origin. Her higher education empowers her to search for it with determination and fortitude. Realising the need to write private and communal histories independent of European ones, Sally Morgan has written My Place. She reveals her aim of attempting this text as she explains things to Arthur, her grandmother’s brother:
I want to write the history of my own family …there’s almost nothing written from a personal point of view about Aboriginal people. All our history is about the White man. No one knows what it was for us. A lot of our history has been lost, people have been too frightened to say anything…. I just want to try to tell a little bit of the other side of the story. (M P 208)
In her self-writing process she narrates the facts of not only her experiences but also the collective experiences of her community masked in a fictional vein. Orature and memory vitalise her narration and she fictionalises the facts of her real experiences. This aboriginal consciousness is displayed through a fiction of her own creation. Her acknowledgement of her Aboriginal past enables even her mother and her grandmother to reveal their past.
The authentic firsthand experiences of the two authors become a rich and reliable resource material for their writing. Both the writers weave their life narratives by reviving their past cultural heritage, rediscovering their identities and their roots and hold high the rich and matchless primitive knowledge, beliefs and their affinity with nature. In this way the two novels when read together afford an excellent understanding of lands, people, cultures and predicaments.
Works Cited
Culleton, Beatrice. April Raintree. Winnipeg: Peguis Publishers, 1984. Print.
Emberly, Julia V. “Thresholds of Difference.” Feminist Critique, Native Women’s Writings Postcolonial Theory. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1993. Print.
Grates Jr., Henry Louis. Figures in Black: Words, Signs and the Racial Self. New York: Oxford UP, 1987. Print.
McLeod, John. Beginning Postcolonialism. New Delhi: Viva Books, 2010. Print.
Mitra, Reena. “Autobiography as a Strategy of Resistance and Empowerment: Sally Morgan’s My Place.” Critical Responses to Literatures in English. By Reena Mitra. New Delhi: Atlantic, 2005. Print. 146-156.
Morgan, Sally. My Place. Australia: Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 1987. New Delhi: Indialog Publications Pvt. Ltd., 2001. Print.
Petrone, Penny. Native Literature in Canada from the Oral Tradition to the Present. Toronto: OUP, 1990. Print.
Jameson, Frederic. The Political Unconscious. New York: Oxford UP, 1981. Print.