structures that are being erected on what was, after all, originally their land?
Joy Kogawa has observed that 'a Canadian is a hyphen and… we're diplomats by birth.' The hyphen in ethnic-Canadian leaves considerable room for negotiation and might even in the absence of any 'codified Canadian- ness to which one could even credibly pre-573- tend' (Robert Schwartzwald's formulation) take precedence over the two connected terms and particularly the second one, leaving for the ethnic-Canadian novelist the task of writing the hypen, the conjoining disjunction, the break that is also in part a bridge. No recent writer has done this better than Kogawa herself in Obasan (1981). Yet, paradoxically, her novel about Canada's brutal refusal to allow Japanese Canadians to be Canadians during and after World War II is itself essentially Canadian and comes out of a long tradition. 'We are all immigrants even if we were born here,' Margaret Atwood has Susanna Moodie observe in The Journals of Susanna Moodie (1970), and to choose to remain is to choose 'a violent duality.' As a character in Sky Lee's Disappearing Moon Cafe (1990) notes of the killing of a white woman that is part of this intricately structured chronicle of four generations of life in Vancouver's Chinatown: 'Under the strain of bigotry, they were outlaws. Chinamen didn't make the law of the land, so they would always live outside of it. In fact, it was a crime just for them to be here.'
Immigrant and ethnic novelists such as Naim Kattan, John Marlyn, Alice (Poznanska) Parizeau, Josef Škvorecký, W. D. Valgardson, Adele Wiseman, and others have charted the violence and duality of negotiating the divide between something else and Canada. For example, Final Decree (1982) by George Jonas tells of a protagonist who comes in his twenties (as did the author) from Hungary to Canada; who marries a woman of partial Hungarian descent but cannot cope with her New World values, especially as they are shaped by contemporary feminism to be totally at odds with his Old World ways, just as he cannot reconcile memories of his European past with his ongoing Canadian present. Neither can he cope with divorce and the prospect of losing his wife and their two children. During protracted legal proceedings, he shoots her lawyer, and the novel ends with him awaiting a final decree on a charge of murder, a trial in which he is doing no better than he earlier did in divorce court.
Of course not all ethnic protagonists fare as disastrously as does Jonas's Kazmer Harcsa. In Brian Moore's The Luck of Ginger Coffey (1977) Canada could not possibly live up to Ginger's Irish dreams. Nevertheless, this character retains his integrity and survives his numerous setbacks by finally saying, graphically, 'piss on this.' During the course of his subsequent trial for public indecency Ginger even -574- manages to win his wife back. But most of the characters in immigrant and ethnic novels are ambivalently poised between paradigms of defeat and possibilities of victory or at least survival. Thus Mordecai Richler's The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz (1959) ends with Duddy well on the way toward the wealth he has so avidly pursued even though he is again temporarily short of funds. To reach this uncertain position, he has trampled over various other characters, particularly Yvette, his French Canadian girlfriend who has shared in his aspirations and efforts but who, by the novel's end, cannot countenance all his means. So it is hard to say which best finally defines Duddy — what he is in the process of gaining or what he has already lost. An ambiguous dialectic of dream and disaster also characterizes Austin Clarke's novels about Caribbean immigrants in Toronto, such as Storm of Fortune (1971), while a slightly different reading of that dialectic is seen in Harold Sonny Ladoo's Yesterdays (1974) when a Trinidadian Hindu decides that his mission should be to go forth to convert and subjugate the Canadians. Or to run that Canadian/ Caribbean connection and journey the other way, both Clarke with The Prime Minister (1977) and Neil Bissoondath in A Casual Brutality (1988) show that in the hyphenated Canadian context, as opposed to a plain Canadian one, Thomas Wolfe was right in positing you can't go home (to 'home' in the old sense) again, for the attempt to do so only demonstrates how much the hyphen has become home. But Obasan especially charts the life of dislocation in between, as it positions the protagonist, Naomi Nakane, between her two aunts, Aunt Emily, 'a word warrior' who strives for justice and for some acknowledgment of the wrongs done to her and her people, and Obasan (the Japanese word for 'aunt'), who tries, just as unsuccessfully, to remain silently Japanese in the face of inflicted disasters. By gradually recovering and remembering her own story, Naomi speaks (Aunt Emily) the silence (Obasan) at the heart of this novel and in the process gives the lie to the country's claim of a mosaic ideal and its view of itself as a kinder, gentler North American nation.
Native writers are also more and more giving the novelistic lie to other (read white) renderings of Native life. Admittedly, much of this other rendering is, as already noted, sympathetic. But there is still a crucial difference between the depiction of harsh arctic survival in -575- Yves Theriault's Agaguk (1958; English translation, 1976) as compared to Markoosie's Harpoon of the Hunter (1970). Theriault, although of partly Native ancestry, necessarily writes from outside Inuit experience. Markoosie writes from within that radically changing experience and that makes a difference. Agaguk ends with the heroic hunter-protagonist allowing his infant daughter, born in a difficult time, to live (she would have traditionally been put to death). Harpoon ends with its heroic hunter refusing to be rescued, drifting on an ice pan out to sea and to death. Each conclusion is presented as a parable of still more change to come. Theriault sees promise in that process; Markoosie, only further desolation.
Numerous other novels, such as Maria Campbell's Halfbreed (1973) and Beatrice Cullerton's In Search of April Raintree (1983), present firsthand accounts of the fracturing of Native or Métis culture (especially as seen in the partial breakdown of the family and the forced separation of parents and children) and document the contradictions inherent in the ideal of total assimilation (such as the fact that white society refuses to countenance the very assimilation that it demands of Natives), as well as how those contradictions are endured (partly through the survival of the traditional family and particularly the grandmother). As Margery Fee has recently pointed out, In Search of April Raintree and Jeannette C. Armstrong's Slash (1985) especially 'debunk the 'choices' that white acculturation has forced on Native peoples in Canada.' Similarly, in Joan Crates's Breathing Water (1990), a young Métis wife has to discover her own 'voices' from her past, which she cannot do in her marriage to her wealthy white former employer. Or in Thomas King's Medicine River (1990) the male protagonist comes back from a successful career in Toronto to Medicine River (obviously based on Lethbridge, Alberta) and partly comes to terms with his own dispossessed childhood by standing in as the father for a child not his own. The novel slyly advocates self-determination (the vacillating protagonist, named Will, does come to merit that name) and self-portrayal (Will as a photographer refutes the convenient white hypothesis about Native apprehensions regarding representation).
Perhaps the best book on the whole difficult question of rendering Native experience in white forms is The Book of Jessica (1989), a novel/memoir/script/trial transcript about authoring and acting a play -576- based on Maria Campbell's painful life as a Métis woman and an account that records the additional pain of having that experience appropriated and romanticized by the very people who inflicted it. Written jointly by Maria Campbell and Linda Griffiths, the white author/actress who 'represented' her, The Book of Jessica powerfully records both sides of an extended case of cross-cultural artistic negotiation/theft. Of course, one solution to this problem of expropriation is to make the whole process of writing and publishing mostly Native, as with Jeannette Armstrong's En'Owkin Writing Center (from an Okanagan word meaning, roughly, 'a challenge and incentive given through discussing and thinking together to provide the best possible answer to any question') along with its associated publishing house, Theytus ('preserving for the purpose of handing down') Books in Penticton, British Columbia, or Fifth House Publishing in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan.
The Native novel as one product of the country's most recent literary 'explosion' should feel right at home, for one of the most obvious features of Canadian fiction is its recent flourishing. The Canadian Renaissance, so far as the novel is concerned, is right now, the present generation, from, roughly, the sixties forward. There is something exhilarating about the fact that the best writers are not, mostly, safely dead but very much alive and writing. One can study the kaleidoscopic interplay of texts, as a major literature comes into being (and the unique opportunity that the Canadian novel allows in this respect has not yet been adequately apprised). One can also study unfolding careers (and here the opportunity has been seized, especially with respect to Atwood). One can study, too, the ways in which a new literature has been institutionalized and canonized in a partly postfeminist and even postcanonical time.
As late as 1965, Northrop Frye could maintain that any 'rigorous' attempt to ascertain the 'genuine classics [of] Canadian literature would become only a debunking project leaving it a poor naked
