Imprints and Casualties: Poets on Women and Language, Reinventing Memory ed. by Anne Burke (review)

396 LETTERS IN CANADA 2000 >First World= dominated the media, >Second World= was forgotten, except to those few pedants who said, >If there is a First World and a Third there must be a Second.= It was a term which needed a better home, especially since George Manuel in 1974 referred to Indigenous peoples in still colonial situations as >the Fourth World.= Given that the Fourth World, such as the First Nations of Canada and the Maori of New Zealand, are dealing with these settler hegemonies, >Second World= seems appropriate. Most of Lawson=s pieces are worth searching out, as is this. He begins with an assessment of recent land-title rulings in Australia and moves on to consider the >tropology= of the Second World. The title establishes the tenor: >Proximities: From Asymptote to Zeugma.= A zeugma is a word which has the same grammatical relation to two objects but a conflicting meaning as in Pope=s >or stain her honour, or her new brocade.= This position syntactically lost in space seems appropriate to >postcolonial,= a word which has multiple applications which seem to discomfit all. I suggested that such collections tend to be a bit ungainly, and this is no exception. The Lawson is wonderfully stimulating, but of the rest, in opposition to Baugh=s judgment, I was stimulated not by textual analysis but by theoretical possibilities. Thus Susan Spearey told me little new on Salman Rushdie but added to my collection of postcolonial commentary on Freud=s unheimlich, as did Lawson. Spearey suggests that the postcolonial is not so much uncanny, the usual translation of unheimlich, but rather unhomely. The figure postcolonial, especially when appearing as Ms Settler, fears that she might not be homely, or perhaps that she might be. Does that count as a zeugma? (TERRY GOLDIE) Anne Burke, editor. Imprints and Casualties: Poets on Women and Language, Reinventing Memory Broken Jaw Press. 172. $19.63 To begin my review of Imprint and Casualties: Poets on Women and Language, Reinventing Memory, I want to dwell on the cover painting by Elyse St George. It is an arresting image of two strong faces cheek to cheek, one brown and one fair, with intertwined fingers, brown and fair, embedded agonistically in the bleeding cheek and forehead each of the other. The painting is allegorically titled >Poet Lovers and the Last Dancing Bear.= The bear at the bottom right of the frame is open mouthed and its red tongue links with the trickles of blood streaming down the twinned faces. This image speaks of grappling across difference. The brown and white skins make race here, as so often elsewhere, bear the mark of difference even if there are few brown-skinned entries in this volume, only two of eighteen contributors B Suniti Namjoshi and Marie Anneharte Baker. The first half of Imprints and Casualties indeed witnesses women HUMANITIES 397 grappling across difference, a difference arising out of the particular matrix of (mostly white) Canadian literary feminism of the 1980s. What this volume does best is offer a vital record of that dynamic time by reprinting in full Two Women Talking: Correspondence 1985B87, Erin Mouré and Bronwen Wallace as well as the counterpart panel proceedings of the 1987 Feminist Caucus of the League of Canadian Poets, >Illegitimate Positions: Women and Language.= We can all be grateful to the women, who as editors and conveners persistently midwived the >Living Archives= publications project of the Feminist Caucus of which this volume takes part. As living archive, Erin Mouré and Bronwen Wallace=s correspondence, marked with deep respect for each other=s work, friendship, love, and anger, reflects a central debate in Canadian literary feminism. It arises on the one hand from the inspirited Anglo-French literary collaborations, friendships, and experimentations at the intersection of theory, life, desire, and writing of which Erin Mouré was a part. (For a >living archive= of this, see Collaboration in the Feminine: Writings on Women and Culture from Tessera (1994), ed Barbara Godard.) On the other hand, women like Bronwen Wallace, who were deeply embedded in the >realist= narratives of women=s conversations in the kitchen, in the feminist speak-outs, in the safe houses and shelters...