First People, First Voices ed. by Penny Petrone (review)

comment, instead, on literary economics. I am very glad to have the book on my desk. (LAURIE RICOU) Penny Petrone, editor. First People, First Voices University of Toronto Press. ix, 221. $19.95 To purify the dialect of the tribe may well be a poet's first responsibility; but what if the poet is not sure which tribe he belongs to, and which is his own language? This is the dilemma of many writers, of course; but to aboriginal peoples the language of colonization is in a particularly intense way both a blessing and curse. Few of the texts in Penny Petrone's richly varied anthology are specifically poetic, but most of them are haunted by a divided allegiance. The indigenous discourse hovers in the background, shaping the narrative line and controlling the imagery, but usually overwhelmed by diction and syntax that are relentlessly and conventionally English. This is part of the fascination of some of the passages, but unfortunately the individual texts are seldom allowed to take on a life of their own, a fact which is not really Petrone's fault, for she is bound by the limitations of this kind of anthology. Nonetheless, it is a pity, just the sort of thing museums often do to works of art, eliminating the tension between mirroring and making. Yet somehow much of this book maintains the strenuous integrity of its speakers, and of their subjects. In one sense, it presents us with a history in discourse, running from the ponderous circumlocutions of the seventeenth century to the insistent qualifications of the twentieth. In the early material, much of it translated and transcribed by priests and explorers, there is an ideological commitment to the notion that the language of primitive people is radically figurative, while the language of civilization is an accumulation of dead or dying metaphors. And so the speeches display an overwhelming range of figurative expression, a sort of tropically luxurious confusion of imaginative turnings and transformations . Petrone keeps us interested by means of admirably intelligent, though also admirably brief, commentary. Some of the translations are almost comically convoluted; and then all of a sudden the rhetoric becomes comfortably accomm')dated into the nineteenth-century language of reform, with its own convenient tropes but much less awkward in its logiC and its language. Itis here that I miss the ambivalence which, if the oral histories are any indication, was very much a part ofthe process of this intercourse; though it is remarkable how powerfully a sense of outrage survives the conveniences of commercial transactions conducted in the currency of European languages. ,Through the generalizations come the particulars of specific predicaments, and the personal anxieties and aspirations of the speakers. What develops in the anthology itself, 448 LEITERS IN CANADA 1983 then, is a tension between superficial thematic interests and more powerful and less controllable imaginative energies working through the language and the texts. What the anthology does not do is develop a sense of the differences between spoken and written discourse, though it does provide some indications. But it might have been useful to be more explicit about the kinds of translations involved in some ofthe texts, and more sophisticated about the kinds of texts that we discover in the book. Even so, Petrone has a nice light touch in proposing categories, and then leaving the texts to speakfor themselves. Perhapsinevitably, there are few moments in which the spellbinding intensity and casual ferocity of some of the most powerful Indian discourse come across, but the book does give a vivid picture of some aspects of an Indian inheritance, and sustains that wonderful fusion of the secularand sacred that characterizes so much that is crucial about Indian life. (J.E. CHAMBERLIN) Marian Fowler. Redney: ALife of Sara Jeannette Duncan House of Anansi. 336. ilIus. $19.95 SaraJeannette Duncan (1861-1922), nicknamed'Redney' by her family, is well known to Canadians as the author of The Imperialist (1904). Before Marian Fowler embarked on this biography, not much beyond this one salient fact was widely known. Fowler's scrutiny of Duncan's life and work unearths many a surprise: that she was the first woman to work in the editorial department...