Aritha van Herk: Essays on Her Works ed. by Christl Verduyn (review)

558 letters in canada 2001 university of toronto quarterly, volume 72, number 1, winter 2002/3 Really, the passion animating this essay is a defeated Marxism channelled into a >migrant Black intellectual= superiority complex. Thus, it repeats the dilemma that Chinosole (2001) identifies in African American author Richard Wright=s autobiography, Black Boy (1945): >portrayals shaped by distorted, popularized Marxian views ... give the work sharp political insights, but rob everyone except [the author] of the complexity that suggests their capacity to rise above social conditions.= Given her success among the audience she so astutely flatters B namely, white liberals B Brand may feel free to sneer from her pulpit at other black Canadians. Fascinatingly, her travelogue okaying of British >openness= and >politeness= over Canadian >racism= (as if British racism were history), her supposedly cosmopolitan put-down of >hyphenated= Canadians and their attempts to maintain cultural ties they deem important, and her ascription to an identity essence loosely defined, sticks her in the same elitist, reactionary camp as Canadian Alliance-Reform B and even the Brand-maligned Neil Bissoondath himself. Brand is, has been, a brilliant writer, and her lustrous lyricism and patented catalogues here are truly to die for. Yet, her most inadvertently curious self-revelation in this notebook is her Naipaulization: her adoption of a voice that no longer represents our community, but which speaks, happily, down to us. I pray that, for her, this work does not constitute a >door of no return.= (GEORGE ELLIOTT CLARKE) Christl Verduyn, editor. Aritha van Herk: Essays on Her Works Guernica. 126. $10.00 Aritha van Herk: Essays on Her Works, edited by Christl Verduyn, has a difficult task: to try to illuminate the work of one of Canada=s best quickchange artists. Like her character Dorcas, the protagonist of the novel Restlessness , van Herk seldom stays in one place for very long. Vast critical pronouncements about her work are liable only to map where the writer was. Perhaps for this reason, Verduyn weights this collection of critical essays towards Restlessness, van Herk=s most recent book. Two of the five essays included, by Robert Budde and Robert Kroetsch, focus on that novel. The remaining papers include a previously published essay by Marlene Goldman on changing depictions of the north in van Herk=s writings, a discussion by Verduyn of the centrality of the Dutch language to van Herk=s work, and an analysis by Isabel Carrera Suárez of the place of work in van Herk=s uncollected stories. Rounding out the book are a brief biography of the writer, an interview conducted with her by Verduyn in 1999, a selected bibliography (erroneously titled >A Selected Biography= in the text) by Karin Beeler, and a list of additional resources for researching van Herk. This collection of essays is both useful and strange: useful, in that more humanities 559 university of toronto quarterly, volume 72, number 1, winter 2002/3 ought to be written on van Herk, and these papers, though not densely written, provide various insights into aspects of her writing; and strange, in that the collection as a whole provides little sense of the span of van Herk=s writing career and range. The essays by Goldman and Suárez come the closest to critical surveys. Goldman reads representations of the north in van Herk=s works (from The Tent Peg to In Visible Ink) as moving from landscapes that are governed more or less by the laws of the traditional western to those that >have begun to set themselves apart from traditional, imperialist discourses.= She points to how van Herk=s narratives of female liberation may also perpetuate myths of northern emptiness that disempower the region, and underscores the need to integrate feminist and postcolonial thought. The essay by Suárez, my favourite, links feminist criticism, psychoanalysis, and class analysis to illuminate the ways a number of van Herk=s uncollected stories >explore the connections between work and desire,= particularly as work relates to family and gender. Suárez argues that these connections are particularly important because of what she sees as van Herk=s >unique recognition of work as desire, as a vehicle to self,= ideas which would...