Smaro Kamboureli, ed.
Making a Difference: Canadian Multicultural Literature
Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1996. Pp. 547. $25.95
Reviewed by Deborah Stiles
The study of Canadian history has long been informed by a center-periphery paradigm; what has gone on at the center of a nation-state, the argument goes, has had an impact upon those regions and peoples seen as existing at the margins. Sometimes, though not often, the periphery has made its presence felt on the center. Substitute race, ethnicity, and culture for geography in this formula, and one could imagine the margin speaking to the mainstream in the way that Making a Difference: Canadian Multicultural Literature attempts to limn the problematic contours of those three categories. In an overly long introduction to an equally unwieldy volume, editor Smaro Kamboureli invites “the reader to consider the social, political, and cultural contexts that have produced Canadian literature” (1) by providing a text of twentieth-century writing in Canada. Difference-making is what these writings ostensibly do; each is informed by the distinctions placed on art operating outside of the “Anglo-Celtic” standard assumed for the literature called Canadian. That this book is only partially successful at this task has largely to do with two things: the first is the premise upon which rest representations of identity in general; the second is the unfortunate inclusion/exclusion dichotomy of thought that results from attempting to define what is “Other” by defining what it is not.
Making a Difference is a stylistically diverse assemblage of short stories, poems, and excerpts from longer works. Its authorial roots entwine the globe, although the larger number of the writers included in the anthology were born in Canada (places of birth are noted in the table of contents). They are writers, however, for whom the Canadian geopolitical landscape has played some role in the above-ground nurturing of that art, if only as a space for those who, like the initially-mysterious-of-origins Frederick Philip Grove, ultimately end up writing and publishing in Canada. Kamboureli’s decision to include First Nations writers and to exclude writers of what is ambiguously termed “Anglo-Celtic” origins (except those Anglo-colonials like Daphne Marlatt, born in Australia to parents who were British, and Bill Schermbrucker from Kenya, who is of English, Dutch, and German ancestry) flags an unfortunate, and most assuredly accidental, fostering of specific exclusions. As a consequence, it makes visible but also erases along lines of representations of race and ethnicity.
At the same time, the reader is provided a collection worthy of lengthy perusal, for the anthology highlights as much or more than it darkens and dims. In “Bertha,” to note only one instance, Lee Maracle’s clean prose exposes the power relations between First Nations peoples and the whites involved in the fish canneries of the Northwest. Through both characterization and exposition, the realities of race, class, and gender that shape the main character’s experiences are illuminated. Rather than being drawn into a world that condemns the currently existing social milieu that allows racism of this type to continue, the reader is confronted with a strikingly realistic description of the ways in which such structures of oppression shape both the individual and society.
There are seventy-one poets and writers in the anthology, authors both well established and not. Alongside Governor General’s Award-winners Irving Layton and Rohinton Mistry are relative newcomers such as Zaffi Gousopoulos and Hiromi Goto, a choice that makes the thematic and stylistic quality of the work included eclectic and, at times, uneven. “Difference” in these selections from what is perceived to be central to Canadian letters is undermined by the inclusion of these and other established writers; as well, the omission of other writers who possess a seeming lack of racial or ethnic identity-a whiteness, for example-masks significant difference and marginality in terms of cultural diversity (imagine a Welsh immigrant from the countryside dealing with the urban chaos of Toronto). Class and region are especially underrepresented, when one considers that only one of the seventy-one writers selected was born in, or claims a link to, the Atlantic provinces. George Elliott Clarke, of Nova Scotia, may well be a poet of talents unsurpassed among living writers, but his work does not reveal the tremendous range of creation currently at work in Atlantic Canada-yet he is the only writer included from the region. Consider the gamut that can be run in the experience of Rita Joe’s poetry, or in the fiction of Leo McKay; that this region of Canada is “represented” by only one writer and not represented in its diversity to at least some degree speaks quite succinctly to the questions of identity and representation that Kamboureli ostensibly wished to address and offset.
Nonetheless, Making a Difference grapples with the issues openly and without apology, through both the creative work and the introductory material presented on each author. The sum is an admirable attempt to come to terms with questions of representation and identity as they both affect and effect art. Noteworthy in this regard is an excerpt from Drawing Down a Daughter, by Claire Harris, who, in the following, aphoristically touches upon one of the key dilemmas of the anthology and of the all too often maligned concept of multiculturalism. The final admonition to the “Girlchild,” to “Drink often remembering there / is mystery in spite of perception / truth despite the word” (147), might also be directed at us, the readers. There is much to take from this text, but there must also be some continuing dialogue: on how art makes a difference, by how it portrays and embodies, mutes or highlights difference, and how it does all that in the Canadian context.