Between Languages and Cultures: Colonial and Postcolonial Readings of Gabrielle Roy by Rosemary Chapman (review)

pour elles de s’entraider. Rencontres essentielles soulève d’autres aspects de la question, par exemple la place que tient la maternité dans la vie d’une femme et la manière d’agir face à l’inconstance masculine, mais surtout il propose que la femme assure sa propre subsistance. Dans ses œuvres, Liking attaque le christianisme pour avoir relégué la femme au second plan. A cette fin, elle se réfère à la littérature orale et au mythe de Soo, la femme originelle chez les Bassa. Elle suggère aussi que la femme a droit à l’amour et à choisir son partenaire, notions révolutionnaires dans une société où le groupe familial décide des alliances. Beyala continue sur cette voie. Elle insiste sur la complémentarité du couple et elle développe son concept personnel du féminisme. Quant à Bassek, à travers le rituel de “l’anlu” et la difficile question de l’avortement, elle montre que les femmes peuvent résister aux exigences masculines arbitraires. Ces analyses parfois plus culturelles que littéraires offrent des informations fort précieuses sur la société moderne, mais aussi sur la créativité féminine même dans les circonstances difficiles d’aujourd’hui. Kansas State University Claire L. Dehon CHAPMAN, ROSEMARY. Between Languages and Cultures: Colonial and Postcolonial Readings of Gabrielle Roy. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s UP, 2009. ISBN 978-0-7735-3496-4. Pp. 308. $85.00 Can. Rosemary Chapman has written a well-researched, sensitive appraisal of Gabrielle Roy’s lifelong attempt to understand the various cultures that constitute Canada’s ethnic composition and to situate herself within that dynamic. Chapman sees Roy’s representations of Francophones, Anglophones, immigrants, métis, and indigenous peoples as an attempt to explore different modes of belonging, in short, to “write Canada.” The book is remarkable for the range of its inquiry, covering journalistic pieces, fiction, and autobiographical writings (including some unpublished material) and for the fresh light it sheds on issues central to much of Roy’s œuvre. The author begins with a searching discussion of Roy’s bicultural education in Manitoba followed by a reflection on her experience as a teacher of multiethnic students. Chapman’s archival research at the Fonds de l’association des Canadiens français du Manitoba, as well as at the Manitoba provincial archives, encompasses a careful review of curricula, textbooks, teachers’ manuals and other pertinent information relevant to Roy’s formative years. While this analysis concentrates primarily, though not exclusively, on the Francophone Manitobans in the early twentieth century, particularly in the wake of the abolition of bilingual schools in 1916, which made teaching in French illegal, it raises broader issues of linguistic and cultural hierarchy. Chapman discusses how education, seen in imperial situations as a tool of colonial governance, was used to direct all Manitoban children to view the world through the categories of the Anglo-Canadian elite. The author examines how a peculiar form of cultural resistance led to the establishment of a Francophone confessional system within the official school system, in contravention of the law, but sometimes with the knowledge of school inspectors. This dual system was in place during Roy’s final school years and then during her tenure as a teacher, creating an experience that sensitized her to issues of cultural survival and hybridity. Using this understanding of Roy’s Reviews 155 experience allows Chapman to contribute significant insights into Roy’s fictional and autobiographical narratives, especially those that feature a school teacher. Likewise, the author’s important discussion of La Détresse et l’enchantement, in which she focuses on Roy’s identity as a colonized subject, including her sense of linguistic exclusion (also experienced in Paris), draws on the analysis of the Manitoban formation. Always attentive to the representation of the unequal power relations between languages, Roy brought to her fiction and journalistic writings a clear sympathy for allophone immigrants and native peoples, including the Inuit. As Chapman observes, in Roy’s writing, the characters most marginalized by the dominant language tend to be allophone rather than Francophone. The focus of Roy’s reflection is not primarily the marginalization of French speakers but rather the condition...