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4. Epistemological Crosstalk: Between Melancholia and Spiritual Cosmology in David Chariandy’s Soucouyant and Lee Maracle’s Daughters Are Forever
- Wilfrid Laurier University Press
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4 Epistemological Crosstalk: Between Melancholia and Spiritual Cosmology in David Chariandy’s Soucouyant and Lee Maracle’s Daughters Are Forever Daniel Coleman Working through the cross-talk, those moments when the normal circuits of give-and-take discussion get broken, is part of the task of postcolonial pedagogy as I understand it. But prompting that crosstalk in the first place, so that it can be worked through, is essential. Too often misguided notions of politeness prevent these debates from emerging. We must constantly seek strategies to bring such muted disagreements to the fore and in ways that allow them to do their productive work. – Diana Brydon, “Cross-Talk” Both David Chariandy’s Soucouyant (2007) and Lee Maracle’s Daughters Are Forever (2002), two recent novels published in Vancouver, use the term “melancholy” to describe the residual effects of historical colonial trauma on the lives of characters living in twenty-first century Canada.1 Taking up as they do the memory-scars of brutal, colonial violence that have been passed down from generation to generation and now cause suffering in the minds of characters in the present, both novels would readily reward critical analysis informed by the theory of melancholia that has gained wide currency in cultural studies and critical theory over the past fifteen years. But while both Chariandy’s Soucouyant, set in a Caribbean diasporic cultural context, and Maracle’s Daughters, set in a Coast Salish First Nations context, indicate 53 awareness of melancholy as a possible conceptual framework for pursuing their explorations of historical trauma, both novels feature explicitly spiritual frameworks, as opposed to purely psychological ones, and my purpose here is to think about why. I aim to explore what it might mean for us, as scholars of the diverse literatures published in Canada, to read these frameworks as serious challenges to, rather than to simply assimilate them as supports for, the interpretive epistemologies we have inherited from the secular, Euro-American Enlightenment tradition.2 By generating an epistemological crosstalk between the references to melancholia and the spiritual worlds that are featured in these two novels, I am aware that I run the risk of creating a false dichotomy between psychological and spiritual dimensions, but my goal here is not primarily to valorize one and discredit the other. Instead, I hope that my discussion of these two particular novels will serve as an exploratory case study, one that helps to open and enlarge a space within current scholarly discourse for serious engagement with the spiritual paradigms that are so often central to the political, social, and aesthetic projects of writers from various cultural traditions who publish their work in Canada.3 My purpose, then, is to read the spiritual frameworks of these two novels to contest the secular assumption that quietly predominates in much Canadian cultural criticism, not in order to suggest that melancholy is not a helpful way to understand them, but to show how attention to the spiritual counterbalances melancholia theory’s focus on existing power relations with a focus upon the agency of those who live with the heritage of colonial oppression and are working to heal its scars. Reading these two novels in relation to the theory of melancholia reveals that melancholia theory tends to focus on the structures and psychology of domination, on how the values and perceptions of those in power are formed in relation to those who are dominated—a valuable set of insights, to be sure. But if our attention is wholly taken up with the structures and psychology of domination, conceptualized with exclusive reference to secular, Euro-American epistemologies, we remain ignorant of the values and perceptions out of which those who have been oppressed very often generate their own restoration, healing, and empowerment. This kind of ignorance is structured by what Miranda Fricker, in Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing, calls “the economy of credibility” (4), wherein some knowers and kinds of knowing are “hermeneutically marginalized—that is, they participate unequally in the practices through which social meanings are generated” (6). By engaging in epistemological crosstalk between the theory of melancholia and the spir54 COLLABORATION, CROSSTALK, IMPROVISATION [44.222.149.13] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 07:41 GMT) itual epistemologies signalled in these two novels, I hope to intervene in the economy of credibility that privileges some kinds of knowing over others in the study of literatures in Canada. “The spiritual objective of study,” Maracle writes in an essay on Salish philosophies of teaching...