Oldal 61 [61]
OCR
THE RESONANCE OF MANAWAKA: LANDSCAPES OF RECONCILIATION Prairie background by marrying Brooke Shields, a British literature professor. However, their marriage soon turns stifling, largely due to Brookes patronizing behaviour and controlling nature. Some critics, such as Laura K. Davis, draw a parallel between Morag’s experience and Canada’s history of colonization. Imed Sassi likens Brooke to Prospero, embodying “the white patriarchal figure” who regards Morag as his possession (160). Amid Morag’s struggles for autonomy, personal liberation intertwines with Canada’s colonial traumas. Ironically, it is within the confines of the cage of her home that Morag discovers her means of escape through books and writing. Starting to write her first novel, Morag uses storytelling as a refuge from marital constraints. She creates a heroine through whom she can realize herself, allowing her freedom to explore her identity as a woman, a writer, and a Canadian. In this narrative journey, Morag’s writing, like Laurence’s storytelling, becomes a reflection of the vast Canadian landscape, a canvas for coming to terms with identity, ancestral heritage, and past wrongs. Just as storytelling becomes a healing and transformative experience for Morag, Laurence offers her writing as a source of healing and reconciliation for Canada itself, connecting the inner landscapes of characters with the physical landscapes of their homeland. The exploration of ancestral history at both national and individual levels resonates in Canadian literature during the wave of national sentiment of the 1960s and 1970s. As a successful writer, Morag embarks on a journey to Scotland in search of her roots. However, her true quest is not finding the ancestral land but rather discovering the landscape of Christie’s tales. The motif of pilgrimage to Morag’s ancestral country was inspired by Laurence’s own journey to Scotland in pursuit of a deeper understanding of a distant past she had not personally experienced (Laurence, “A Place to Stand On” 6). However, Laurence’s exploration goes beyond her ancestral history. Drawing from Laurence’s experience with decolonization in Africa and her critique of the continued oppression of Indigenous peoples in Canada, Davis argues that “by gender and by her own self-positioning, [Laurence] aligned and sympathized with the oppressed” (7). By writing about the Métis history as a white, middle-class writer, Laurence defies the norms of her time. Despite Laurence’s engagement with Indigenous themes, the Métis characters in her Manawaka fiction can still appear somewhat flat and schematic, primarily serving to challenge the Pioneer myth and warn of the potential loss of Indigenous cultural heritage and pristine Canadian wilderness. The Métis in the Manawaka texts often play a secondary role of “the Others” with whom the white majority is compared and contrasted. Daniel Coleman observes that in Canadian literature written by non-Indigenous authors, “Indigenous, or Métis figures are not central and fully rounded characters but usually ones whose function is to establish the roundedness, sensitivity, or civility of the British White character” (33). Britishness, as Coleman points out, is an « 59 «
