The Authentic Uncertainty of Mary Prince

History is not authentic. History has an inherent bias, it is almost a record of the opinion of the writer at the time it was written. Mary Prince’s history then, gives us a snapshot of the historical period in which her work was produced, and a snapshot of her identity.

When we question “authenticity” we perpetuate the inferiority/superiority power dynamic rather than deconstructing social constructions, say of race, sex, class, and critically analyzing the historical context within literature, or historical texts. The pieces of work themselves become power to show the structure of difference, and how individuals work within this structure, and how we redefine our power within and outside of the powers that define us. Authenticity can perpetuate ideas of inclusion and exclusion, although someone’s work may be their own personality and spirit they may not meet a standard or norm set by society, and so may be dismissed.

Why was it that Mary Prince’s story could only be heard through print literature? Who controls the power behind what is “heard” or “read”? Why is oral storytelling not recognized in the same light as print literature? Mary Prince was a woman trying to tell her story in a world rigidly structured around patriarchy and power. Prince signifies the refusal to accept “slave status”, but also the refusal to give up her own power and will in a world entrenched in violence and control. Yes, we must understand that her story was edited and shaped to reflect the opinions of anti-slave activists like Thomas Pringle, but as Sandra Pouchet Paquet says in The Heartbeat of a West Indian Slave: The History of Mary Prince, it is still her story. Do we take power away from what Prince accomplished for her time by questioning the authenticity of her story? She is telling a story of a history that has been collectively shaped, by many within structures of power, why must she be critiqued for collectively writing and retelling her own story, a story that reflects many.

For Prince, her story is one of resistance, literature itself is a site of resistance. Even though The History of Mary Prince was created through collaboration and editing, it is still a form of resistance, and a reclaiming of power. If we look at literature as a projection of oneself from within, we can understand that Mary Prince’s story is her own, yes, but also that of others; simply recognizing the existing social order during the nineteenth century, and within the anti-slavery movements, gives us further insight into Mary as a powerful woman, Mary as a survivor, Mary as author.

James Opp and John C Walsh discuss in Home Work & Play how we situate social history in space and time. History can be heard, understood and experienced in so many different ways, in multiple contexts, that Mary’s story should not be lessened for being written and edited by someone else, this happens in writing, in literature, in history “(re)telling.” Reading The History of Mary Prince allows us to recognize that history is not “authentic” in the telling, and offers an approach for destabilizing what is perceived as neutral, uncovering hidden knowledge and power that is present in the history itself. Mary’s history is not neutral, and the knowledge of place and time – gender relations and class relations, race and sexuality, that her work provides for us is powerful. We can understand her social experience, as well as the social structures in place that limit and/or define her experiences.

Colonized Spaces, Colonized Times, Colonized Bodies, Colonized Minds

 

While reading Fatty Legs by Christy Jordan-Fenton and Margaret Pokiak-Fenton I was reminded of the historical treaties between Canada’s Aboriginal People’s and the British Crown. One of the main agreements between many Aboriginal leaders and politicians during the settlement of Canada was the desire for education, housing, and healthcare. The Canadian TV series 8^th Fire explains this in detail. In reality how were the needs of Aboriginal peoples of Canada actually met? We took their traditional lands, ways of being – spiritually, physically, culturally, and replaced these ways with government and church run schools meant to “kill the Indian in the child.”

I find it difficult to speak about this book, simply because I am not Aboriginal. I believe power comes from the people themselves who have experienced the transgenerational effects of the residential school system. This book is a reminder that the residential school history and experience is something that must be shared from those affected by it, or from the communities within. This is an extremely important aspect of Canadian history, and is what our country has been founded on, violence and theft of land. The stories from residential school survivors should be in school textbooks, and oral histories should be shared and given more importance in our educational system. I believe this book is a good starting point for educators to teach young readers about the residential school system, however I feel that pairing this book with historical facts and documents will further enhance the knowledge of Canada’s past and Aboriginal relations. An interesting and interactive way of doing this is through the Blanket Exercise, meant to actively engage and educate individuals about the historical relations between Aboriginal and Non-Aboriginal peoples.

What happens when we flip oppression, and look at Oleman, Margaret Pokiak-Fenton, as a survivor and resistant? Who really is the dominant culture? When we (as white people) speak of cultural genocide, yes we must think of what happened to Aboriginal culture as genocide, but we cannot forget that culture is resilient, and Aboriginal identity was not completely destroyed.  Every community is different, every person’s experience is different. This book is a good stepping stone to prompt discussion about the issue of cultural genocide and Canada’s violent past. However, alone it does not give one the full scope of the traumatic history between Aboriginal populations and the government of Canada, and how this violent past has effected relations between Native and Non-Native people in our country to this day.

Mary-Ellen Kelm discusses in her book Colonizing Bodies the issue of colonization and Aboriginal bodies through power structures at play, like political and economic control. Kelm addresses ideas of power inherent in the process of colonization, and the opposition of colonial assimilation and control. Aboriginal peoples were sometimes able to maintain distinct identities for themselves, communities and cultures by softening the impact of colonization. Kelm states Aboriginal communities never gave up their power, but maintained a power that was less a ‘power over’ and more a ‘power to.’ “A power to resist, to create, to control, to survive.” In Fatty Legs, Olemaun maintained her power to learn, to resist, to create, to control her own life, and to survive.

Olemaun represents the struggle of resistance, the struggle of tampering with what is expected. Women in literature are often outsiders, however Olemaun was lucky enough to maintain her traditional knowledge and language, and incorporate knowledge of both worlds into her life. Her resistance and persistence to maintain her own identity within power structures beyond her control symbolically represent her journey as an author within the world of literature as well. Where do female authors fit in a world seeming to reject their voices and experiences? Does Olemaun’s experience within the residential school reshape our traditional views of history, and who’s voices are included and left out?

How Do We Share Our Stories If That’s All We Are?

We all have invisible scripts that we follow throughout our lives. Scripts for the play of life we have parts in; we become actors in our daily lived experiences. Stories reflect what we tell ourselves to confirm our place within the world. Often the significance of our individual stories is overlooked or forgotten. The author Thomas King states, “The truth about stories is that’s all we are.” I think of this quote when I think of Gender Failure by Rae Spoon and Ivan E Coyote, as well as Ain’t I a Woman by Sojourner Truth. Rae and Spoon are storytellers, using stories to shape and reshape their own bodies, as well as their own histories. Sojourner Truth’s Ain’t I a Woman speech asks us to question who is telling the story of race, gender and recognition. Who transcribed Ain’t I a Woman? Who’s story is it to tell? Sojourner Truth is destabilizing the plot of race, class and gender with this one phrase. She begs the question, don’t you see me as a woman? – do I not “pass” as a woman because of the colour of my skin? She was disturbing the racial boundaries that existed.

Rae and Spoon discuss how language forms the body, and the desire to exist within a space beyond the gender binary. This pervasive gender binary they speak of categorizes people into masculine or feminine boxes. The performance of gender works to reinforce our own gender, the stories well tell and create for ourselves become who we are. Language, writing, storytelling, speaking and performance allow ownership of one’s narrative.

Rae and Spoon wish to reject the notion of “passing” as a man or a woman. This idea of passing, trying to fit in to a certain social category, can be analyzed through an intersectional lens. “Passing” can be a site of exploration for gender, race, and class. Sara Ahmed discusses ideas of passing and race theory. With regards to race she says passing as white allows one entrance into an invisible and privileged community. While Rae and Spoon may be in a place to reject the notion of passing, others may not. Sojourner Truth was working to destabilize the dominant narrative of women’s suffrage. Ahmed believes that passing can take place through what she claims as “strange encounters” – a crisis between what is already assumed and what has yet to be assumed, and I agree with her. Rae and Spoon ask use to question was is assumed about gender, and Truth asks us why she different as a woman, because of the colour of her skin? Why does she still not pass as a woman into this privileged community? Truth is arguing for rights for black women, but in a sense I feel she is also saying do I not pass as a woman because of the colour of my skin? Am I rejected, is my body a site of dispute? Am I rejected as a black woman or included as a woman? With different interpretations of Truth’s speech, is her narrative being rejected, is her narrative shaking what is to be assumed?

The idea of passing does not necessarily reject the notion of agency – to understand what keeps society in these strict roles, or what makes us think we have power to pass through cultures that are not our own, and how the idea of “passing” within gender, within race, continues to confirm or reject our roles, and our stories. Passing almost asks us to look at the dominant culture, and understand how this culture has the ability to move within or through different roles freely without this danger of being found out, or without the historical violence of cultural histories, identities and backgrounds. “Passing” can mask us further yes, but passing can also allow us a perspective into our own ways of seeing and being, how the world works around our identity and through our identity. Is our story really our story, or is it someone else’s?

 

Susan Seddon Boulet, Transcendence

If Virginia Woolf Were Alive Today, What Kind of Feminist Would She Be?

Reading A Room of One’s Own, I first believed Virginia Woolf was critiquing female writers before her for carrying too much “bitterness” or anger because their writing was an expression of their oppression and unfair positions reflecting roles they were put in as caregivers and dependents. Then I found myself wondering, was Woolf taking the position of a man critiquing the works of fiction by women? In a sense she was praising women for completing works of fiction and/or poetry while living within the constraints of masculine privilege? However when she states, “women must transcend their grievances to attain free and pure thought to produce great art”, was it possible she was playing the part of a masculine literary critic? It seems as though Woolf critiques the inherent masculinity of literature without openly stating this. Does Woolf challenge the literary structures of power by playing roles, with Mary Beton, Mary Seton, and Mary Carmichael,  using these characters, like hiding behind masks, to look at her own work, and the work of women in literature from the stand point of the “masculine” lens? Is she in a sense critiquing herself within the masculine literary sphere, while maintaining her literary voice as a position of power within it?

Then I began to wonder, if Woolf were alive today would she be a radical feminist or a neoliberal feminist? A postmodern feminist or a sex positive feminist? Would she support difference feminism and transnational feminism? Is she an accessible feminist? Would she even consider herself a feminist? Would she look back upon her own work today, and claim that it was feminist in nature? In A Room of One’s Own, Woolf discusses the historical oppression of women by coming to the conclusion that if a woman is to write, poetry, novels, etc., she must have a room of her own and financial independence. During Woolf’s time, this challenges the core of what women “ought” to be doing, however even today this is still true. If a woman is to write, or have a career, she must have her own space and independence to do these things. Woolf challenges the fact that our society expects so much from women, and so little from men, in that men can do what they please, and still get praise and recognition. Virginia Woolf’s feminism uprooted the fact that women must be privileged to have a stake in the literary world. A Room of One’s Own prompts the reader to look at marginalized women, or the true reality of women’s roles, throughout history. If a woman is to write to be recognized she must have space and money to be free from the constraints of domesticity. And yet, if she is to be freed from the constraints of domesticity she is not necessarily recognized as a credible woman. If Virginia Woolf did not have privilege, ie. money and a room to herself, to write and produce literature would she still be claimed as a feminist author?

In A Room of One’s Own Virginia Woolf is like the secretariat for women and literature. She is the woman who files other “great” works of literature by other women, and men. In her essays, she holds the power, however she is not the one who is in control of what is being classified as great literature and what is not; simply the one who places things where they belong, keeps things in order – while at the same time works to disrupt the order of things, to change the literary order from within. Is Woolf the Beadle reminding us who is allowed on the grass, and the opposition walking on the grass? Filtering who and what is allowed in the realm of literature, while questioning this filtering and oppression in itself. Woolf ultimately asks us to question who is the secretariat of history, especially that of women’s history. Woolf asks us again, who records the daily lives of women, where are the stories of women who lived and wrote and worked, and were never published.

So, if Woolf were alive today would she feel as though women have been released from their oppressive and anonymous worlds, and free to write works of art alongside men? I think Woolf would want us to uproot the masculine tradition of literature and history to disturb the order of the whole, and tamper with the sequence of the plot.

 

How To Suppress Women’s Writing, Joanna Russ

 

THE BACKGROUND

Source: THE BACKGROUND