In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

university of toronto quarterly, volume 71, number 4, fall 2002 SOPHIE LEVY >This dark echo calls him home= Writing Father-Daughter Incest Narratives in Canadian Immigrant Fiction Both homes and narratives can be described as war zones, refugee camps, and sites of resistance. In postcolonial theory, the subaltern text makes a home for itself both inside and outside the dominant culture, using its liminality as a safe space. This becomes especially relevant for postcolonial and immigrant fictions that also narrate incest. The home, these fictions demonstrate, is no longer a safe space. As the boundaries of home are undermined by abuse, the difference between inside and outside becomes unclear, blurring the distinction between events in the external world, and imagined worlds. Child abuse, which often causes the child to dissociate and thus >forget= the abuse, becomes positioned on this boundary through its narration. In explaining this fragmentation of trauma narrative, Cathy Caruth draws on Freud=s repression of his analysands= incest and subsequent attribution of incest-trauma to childhood fantasies of sexual experience with parents. The reality, as well as the narrative, of incest disappeared in clinical psychology for fifty years (Steed). Works about incest are still seeking to defeat this Freudian repression, at both a cultural and individual level, by rehabilitating the usefulness of language and narrative. Language remains a >dark echo= of experiences B yet survivors speak out. With home destroyed by incest, and the external world unwilling to observe or repair the destruction, where is the >dark echo= to be heard? My title quotation is taken from Janice Williamson=s 1991 Tell Tale Signs. Williamson asks us to >[c]onsider these gothic wounds: your subject of conversation, a tongueless spectre= (21). Yet it is another seven years before she publishes Crybaby!, a meditation on her experience of incest. In the later book, she recalls writing Tell Tale Signs, and the written signs telling her a tale that she could not quite remember. >Only these fractured words are called to mind. She pinpoints her anguish at the moment her father ... But this is where the voice becomes confused= (Tell Tale Signs, 29). I want to consider the place >where the voice becomes confused,= through the father-daughter incest narratives 865 university of toronto quarterly, volume 71, number 4, fall 2002 disruption of the self and voice caused by father-daughter incest, and to work through B as these authors do B the process of recuperating that voice in four autobiographical texts by incest survivors: Williamson=s Crybaby!, Elly Danica=s Don=t, Vanessa Alleyn=s There Were Times I Thought I Was CRAZY, and Sylvia Fraser=s My Father=s House. As my interest here is in the truth-status of language as exercised in trauma narrative, I also want to consider three novels: Ann-Marie MacDonald=s Fall on Your Knees, Gail Anderson-Dargatz=s The Cure for Death by Lightning, and Camilla Gibb=s Mouthing the Words. Divergent as they are, these texts all share two characteristics: the experience of incest and the experience of immigration. In them, the processes of finding a home to speak from are therefore complicated by a double dislocation. Home is precisely the spatial and conceptual point at which readings of immigrant narratives and incest narratives can be laid over one another. Writing home is performed within these narratives by a family dynamic that is modelled on the larger sociopolitical order. Thus the definition of home, which appears to be predicated on clear differences between inside and outside, produces fictions like dolls= houses B opening on a world represented in miniature, on the model of the family home. Home is both the literal and symbolic space being defined. In writing home, Canadian immigrant writers fashion several definitions of home B nation, neighbourhood , family, house, body B that are sometimes perceived as concentric, and sometimes as intermeshing. We can follow these through on a scale of physical dimension, from largest to smallest, moving inwards from the nation to the most intimate physical and psychical space B the writer=s mind and body. All of these spaces have boundaries crossed, blurred, or erased by any act of physical and sexual abuse, but particularly...

pdf

Share