Whose Story is It, Anyway?: Or… Power and Difference in The Book of Jessica: Implications for Theories of Collaboration

Abstract

Jessica was an experience so complex, inspiring and horrific that Maria Campbell and wrote a book about it--The Book of Jessica--which is about process, theatrical, personal, and political. Linda Griffiths, Process It was co-written by myself and Linda Griffiths. We spent a lot of time talking about what we were going to do and how we were going to do it. had to take Linda through experince before we started to write it. Maria Campbell, You IN THE ABOVE EPIGRAPHS, Linda Griffiths and Maria Campbell describe their collaboration. begin with these two epigraphs, for feel imply not only trauma of creating play Jessica and complex relations of power between two women, but also way in which Maria and Linda's dialogues in The Book of Jessica trouble theories of authorship. want to write about The Book of Jessica as a written text and about implications of this text for theory of collaboration. However, there seems to be no way of evading quandary of having to speak about either Maria or Linda, and not both together. Co-authored, The Book of Jessica is a text about process of writing play Jessica, a play about a Metis woman's life. The Book is a text about how, and in which, two women from different cultural and social backgrounds work together, and it is a product which reflects process of its construction. Yet, in contrast to common expectations of written texts, in The Book of Jessica subjectivities of co-authors, I and I, cannot be merged into a neat authorial we. Unlike many other written texts, both academic and creative--about which might write, for instance, are concerned with ...--constructing Linda and Maria as a they seems much more problematic; their union is always already ruptured. There is Maria and there is Linda. belabour point that as collaborators Linda and Maria are together-yet-apart for wish to investigate relations of power between Campbell and Griffiths in order to problematize dominant notions of writing. The stories of writing of Jessica and The Book of Jessica, told, for most part, in dialogue form in The Book, recount a long and tumultuous process, revealing ever shifting, tense and ambivalent relations of power between two authors. The concern of much theorising of collaboration has been intimacy and unity of a team, in resistance to, as Ede and Lunsford characterise it, the pervasive commonsense assumption that writing is inherently a solitary, individual act (5), so much so that in collaboration has received little attention. It is this difference--of culture, class, education, personal experience--which is likely reason why The Book of Jessica is rarely read as a collaboration or, if it is, as a collaborative process which breaks down, or nearly does (Boardman 29). In her treatment of text, Jeanne Perreault approaches book as Linda Griffiths' story, and Diane Bessai attributes authorship of play to Linda alone. Similarly, Kathleen Venema, Susanna Egan and Helen Hoy each read Maria Campbell's role in The Book of Jessica as that of resister to Griffiths' story. Although text is characterised as collaboratively written, Griffiths' voice is privileged or regarded as dominant in text, and relationship between Campbell and Griffiths is often constructed in binary terms: Object/Subject, Examined/Examiner, Exploited/Exploiter. (1) Grounding my reading of The Book of Jessica in model of talk and in postcolonial critiques of power, difference and identity, in this article wish to recover text as a collaboration and in so doing expand and clarify concept of authorship; collaborators of The Book of Jessica are neither equal nor like-minded, and The Book is a text in which individual subjectivities of its collaborators do not merge. …