Writing in Dust: Reading the Prairie Environmentally (review)

Kerber places her reading of ‘prairie’ literature within histories that saw the prairies as Edenic, as site for economic gain, or as blighted wasteland. The book is well researched in geography, history, government policy, corporate intervention, and literature. It is also openly partisan and supposes that to tell ‘the right stories’ can profoundly alter our lives. To be ‘a citizen’ of the prairies ‘means taking responsibility’ for ‘an alternative future.’ Kerber advocates ongoing reciprocity between place and inhabitants, whatever their ethnicity, gender, region, or status as ‘non-human.’ Against a view of the prairies as agricultural, male, post-European, and guided by faith in technological or economic progress, she advances a claim for an ecological response.

Kerber includes relatively known writers – Edward McCourt, Robert Stead, W.O. Mitchell, Frederick Philip Grove, Margaret Laurence, and Rudy Wiebe – reading the failure of characters as instances of imperial masculinity. Her comments are illuminating, and most successful in discussing Mitchell, whose novel promotes a wise innocence that respects both ‘nature’ and ‘culture.’

An innovative chapter on the ‘nature memoir’ explores Grove’s Over Prairie Trails, Wallace Stegner’s Wolf Willow, and Trevor Herriot’s River in a Dry Land. In welcoming Herriott’s book, Kerber extends the standard bibliography and advances our understanding of prairie writing. Though the chapter wobbles a bit when it concerns Grove, it positions the memoirs in illuminating ways. The book persuasively argues that though Stegner was sympathetic to aboriginals, he names them as having no hope for a continued existence.

Kerber is careful to note that ecological awareness need not be limited to direct claim or bare statement. She warns against the ‘illusion of un-mediated access to nature’ in ‘an attachment to realism.’ Resisting ‘talk about purity and exclusion,’ she speaks of a ‘contact zone’ where cultures engage with the environment, and with one another, often in unequal conflict.

Other writers (poets Tim Lilburn, Louise Halfe, and Madeline Coopsammy) emerge as exemplars of those who write in sensitivity about the region. Responding to technological threats and corporate intrusions, and to increased urbanization and ethnic diversity, they extend the range of prairie writing. One section shows how skilfully Halfe mixes Anglo culture and Cree culture, formally as well as thematically. The most impressive analysis comes in the look at Thomas King. It is bright and engaging, sparkling in style, widely informed, and subtle in insight.

Kerber’s book slides too easily past some literary scholars. Those qualities she finds commendable in Halfe, say – orality, mixed discourses, expressions of local experiences and marginalized people – she claims to have been disallowed in earlier statements. Yet one of them, which she quotes, calls for writing that ‘in some way had to show signs that it came out of the prairies or that it engaged with the place.’ Kerber speaks too cursorily of earlier scholars as those who saw ‘“natural” connections between literature, culture, and regional landscapes.’ Those readings were part of the earliest theorizings about prairie writing (Grove, McCourt, and Kreisel), but they recede. Critics from the 1970s, particularly Dick Harrison, called for an adequate, not simply realist, depictions of the prairies. He and others called for newer forms of expression. Laurie Ricou, far from arguing that the land determines views, said ‘prairie literature shares with all Canadian literature the theme of the land, and the evolution of the mental capacity to make some sense of the land’s vastness and complexity.’ They viewed responses to the land as culturally inflected, as, more radically still, did Deborah Keahey in her more recent work.