Making it Home: Place in Canadian Prairie Literature by Deborah Keahey

Abstract

REVIEWS Deborah Keahey. Making it Home: Place in Canadian Prairie Literature. Winnipeg: University of M anitoba Press, 1998. 178. $19.95 paper. Deborah Keahey offers her conception of “place” as the basis for a new reading of prairie literature. She takes issue with a gen­ eration of scholars who, in keeping with Henry Kreisel’s dictum that all study of western Canadian literature “must of necessity begin with the impact of the landscape upon the mind,” tended to identify “place” with the land and to impose forms of envi­ ronmental determinism on the literature. Keahey argues that the Prairies, where most of the people have experienced some sort of radical unsettling, require a more complex and flexi­ ble conception of “place,” one that recognizes it as a cultural construct, as “space inscribed by cultural, psychological, and social significance.” Place, Keahey says, is intimately related to “home,” and, in the creation of home in the literature she has under study, “land and landscape in themselves have relatively little effect or importance.” Keahey acknowledges a debt to that earlier, misguided gen­ eration more graciously than most young scholars proposing a radical departure, but, given her argument, it is surprising that she makes no mention of two fairly recent general studies. Robert Thacker’s The Great Prairie Fact and Literary Imagi­ nation (1989) applies the most explicit and unqualified of envi­ ronmental determinist theses to prairie literature, and Arnold Davidson’s Coyote Country (1994), while it does not address the concept of “home,” does approach the Canadian West as culturally and linguistically constructed space. And consider­ ing the word-play on “Home: Place” in her title, Keahey might have acknowledged American prairie writer Wright M orris’s The Home Place (1948), which focused literary attention on the title expression, a phrase that was apparently in common usage in the American West although rare on the Canadian prairies until the 1970s. Keahey also opposes the earlier critical tradition with a se­ ries of post-modern convictions about literature. Rejecting the canon and the tyranny of canonical genres, she is free to as­ semble some unusual selections and groupings of texts and to arrange them not chronologically but around a constellation of 393 ESC 27, 2001 “issues” that arose from her new reading of the literature. Under her first issue, “Imperial Inscriptions,” for example, she groups M artha Ostenso’s Wild Geese and R. J.C. Stead’s Grain, as fiction inscribing the old British imperialism, with two contem­ porary plays, Kelly Rebar’s Bordertown Cafe and Ian Ross’s fareW el, exhibiting the American and Canadian imperialisms that now inscribe prairie space. These unusual groupings enable Keahey to elaborate her conception of “home,” as in her chap­ ter “Relative Geographies” where she uses a pairing of Kristjana Gunnars’s Zero Hour and David Arnason’s Marsh Burn­ ing to illustrate the performative function of language in the act of writing oneself home without a physical home place. Her chapter “Centres of Gravity” includes another unusual but illu­ minating comparison. In Over Prairie Trails, Grove builds up an image of home as a sheltered bluff that he perpetually cir­ cles without quite entering, while Lorna Crozier, in the poems of Inventing the Hawk, speaks from within the “walled city of family” that represents a more ambivalent home, full of love and hate, nurturing and violence. Again in “Placing the Self in Motion,” Keahey contrasts Robert Kroetsch’s Completed Field Notes, in which the speaker quests after an elusive home that is past and female, some uneasy combination of sexual fulfillment and m aternal womb, with Aritha van Herk’s No Fixed Address, in which Arachne escapes an unsatisfactory past and identifies journeying itself as the only home. Keahey draws some new or neglected texts into her dis­ cussion, including Emma Lee W arrior’s short story “Compa­ triots,” Maria Cam pbell’s Halfbreed, and Uma Parameswaran’s Trishanku. She does include many established writers, although often not their most celebrated works; Rudy Wiebe, for exam­ ple, is represented by Peace Shall Destroy Many. And Keahey’s unexpected juxtapositions create some refreshingly new angles of vision, opening areas of insight into familiar texts and elab­ orating...