Millennial Wisdom at York: Writers speak from viewpoint of another culture, gender

By Cathy Carlyle

Tomson Highway speaking at the Millennial Wisdom Symposium.

How do authors write in the voice of another culture or gender? Shouldn't these groups tell their own story? Canadian writers Karen Connelly and Tomson Highway attempted to answer the challenging questions at the fourth lecture in York's Millennial Wisdom Symposium series. The series is hosted by celebrated novelist, York Professor Susan Swan, who is Robarts Millennial Chair in Canadian Studies for 1999-2000.

Connelly discussed her current work, in which she speaks for Burmese political prisoners, and Highway commented on his use of women's voices in some of his novels and plays. Each made a case in defence of appropriating the voices of other genders and cultures.

"There is no gender in Cree," began Highway. "A male/female hierarchy doesn't exist. In fact, if God is male in the European culture, then it's female in the Cree. In Cree it makes perfect sense. That's where I start. Christianity is the only one of the systems of mythology where the idea of God in a female form is absent. How can a species on earth come into being with a father and no mother?"

Highway, born in the bush in northern Manitoba, mentioned the years he spent in a residential school. "We were taught that God is male," he said. "But where is our mother? People like me suspect that we have a case of a wife and mother battered to death. I was taught [at home] that earth is a woman. Then I was told by the Roman Catholic school that that is not so. But with no mother, we would not exist."

He said that every day he reads of women being tortured to death and asked what kind of system could spawn and sanction such misogynistic behaviour. "We're told in the Bible that man is the image of God and woman is the glory of the man. I remember when a woman would run to a 'holy man-of-God' on the reservation, all black and blue and with broken bones, this Roman Catholic priest ...would send her back to her husband saying, 'You must go back and do your wifely duty. That is your place'. And he would wave the Bible in her face."

To the intently-listening audience he said, "I'm sorry, but I think the Bible is the ultimate woman-hating book. Do you know how many people have died as a result of this book? If you wonder at its power and how it affects every living organism, just look at you squirm because this Cree Indian here dares to say such words about this 'great' piece of literature.

"These beaters of wives, these swarmers of old women, these bashers of feminine men - these sick men are straight men. What I find so flawed about Christian mythology is that it makes room for only two genders. Talk about a recipe for disaster." In the aboriginal world "the deity permeates all living things and holds the same position of equality in all living things," said Highway. "So men have no right to lord it over women or women over men, or anyone over the rest of creation."

Life and the universe are drawn as a circle, he explained further. Everyone has both genders within, in different proportions. "I would say I am 50 per cent male and 50 per cent female," said Highway. "But there are really three genders in the aboriginal belief. The third gender is the buffer, the peace-maker, between men and women. These are the people who can speak the same emotional language and, theoretically, can talk and feel like men or women when they choose. They are the ones who infuse the colours of the rainbow to the strictly black-and-white universe of two mere genders."

He railed against the straightjackets in which heterosexual men, particularly in northern Manitoba, are imprisoned, calling the men "wolverines caught in a leghold trap, chewing off their own testicles, rendering themselves totally dysfunctional. I see women holding communities together on their own, carrying the world on their backs, nurturing languages and cultures, and huddling together in corners and laughing secretly.

"Because it is they who have the power...to give birth to new life. Men in the northern landscape are considered perverse and sick. What choice do I have left but to huddle with these women, my sisters every one of them, and help nurture languages and culture with them...huddle in corners with them, laughing secretly, adding colours, colours and more colours to the rainbows in progress? It is the feminine side of my own spirit that celebrates with them, sings with them every day that I live," he said in a powerful closing speech.

Highway, a member of the Order of Canada, is known for his award-winning works, such as Kiss of the Fur Queen and Dry Lips Oughta Move to Kapuskasing. His latest play to be staged is Rose.

Karen Connelly is a Governor General award winner who has written such books as Touch the Dragon: A Thai Journal and The Small Words in my Body. Currently she is working on The Lizard Cage, a fictional account of a Burmese political prisoner kept in solitary confinement and how his relationship with a child in prison changes each of their lives irrevocably. When living on the border of Burma and Thailand she met Burmese rebels, many of them students. They had fled the military dictatorship of their own country after witnessing torture and the bludgeoning and bayonetting deaths of comrades and children.

In answer to the question of how she felt able to give her voice to people from a culture and gender other than her own, she replied: "I think when you have a powerful experience in another place and you enter the community of 'other', to a certain extent you become the other. As I've been writing this book my emotions of violence and transgressions from my own past have come through. Every story I write has my stories in it. Writing this novel has been a deepening of experiencing the 'other'."

She told of the alcoholism and drug abuse in her family and how she tried to escape it at age 17 by living elsewhere for about 12 years. "I searched out people who were marginalized: gypsies, drug addicts, artists - various kinds of people whose codes I understood. Then I discovered that there is no escape. Almost everyone is broken and always hungry for love and attention."

Connelly said the child in her work represents the many children she met in Burma, where she lived until banned because of her interest in political activists. Her protagonist was born of an amalgam of the many dissidents she spent months talking to on the Thai-Burma border. There, people from all spheres of life who had been stifled by the government spoke passionately and openly to her, an experience that was at time harrowing and depressing because of their stories. "Those people asked me to write about their experiences....They have been reading my manuscript along the way and their feedback has been indispensable to me," she said.

She described the book in part as a community project emanating slowly and with great labour out of the prison of her own mind and spirit.