Basements and Attics, Closets and Cyberspace: Explorations in Canadian Women’s Archives

Of Mini-Ships and Archives

Of Mini-Ships and Archives Daphne Marlatt To think about women’s archives is to think about how recently (say, in the last century and a half) women’s lives in the Western world have moved from the private and domestic sphere to the public cultural-political one, becoming “collectable.” This transit from private to public is embedded in the origin (or at least as far back as written records will reveal) of the word archive in Greek: arkhë, or first place where government records were kept. Despite its ark-like association, arkhë is the word for a process, the process not only of recording and keeping what has been said in the moment but also eventually making it public for posterity (for long-after-the-fact eyes) in a waterless and dust-free atmosphere. Does writing itself, even the writing of women’s “private” journals, inherently contain the possibility of going public? After all, writing is an act of externalizing, of potentially making ideas and thoughts available for other eyes to peruse, even one’s own eyes at a later date. Printing and distributing are steps beyond that. Preserving in amenable conditions is also a step further. It is the reverse of instantly, on an impulse, pressing the “delete” button before pressing “send.” 2 3 2 4 d a P h n e M a r L at t But then, from a broader perspective, language itself is a living archive. More specifically, the history of a language is an archive of the cultural changes and linguistic borrowings of its speakers through centuries of usage. As a poet, I recognize this fact from hours at my desk behind a closed door (the gift of not just solitary but uninterrupted time) where I trace glimmers of half-erased, half-perceived connections between words and their historic trade routes through time. Nouns, little ships freighted with meaning, fossilized verbs that once sailed their way through seas of speech, language to language. My tracing of these routes will find their way (or not) into sentences composing a larger verbal structure that may (or may not) eventually find its way into print. Often these mini-ships, hand jottings on draft pages of print or nearly illegible scribbles on scraps of paper, get lost in file folders in drawers or boxes, eventually to land, years later, on a library shelf under bright lights in what is termed an archive. Docked, documented. Archivally (re)constructed. Reconstruction: putting together scattered fragments, putting together what once occurred or was experienced as a gestalt, a whole, but is now available only in shards, odd notes on variously sourced, undated pages or bits of paper. To some degree, the drive behind collecting a writer’s archive is rather like what drives archaeology. It is similar to resurrecting the dead, if such a thing were possible. But then there is also what is lost in the living, layers and layers of memory that are now simply recalled by outline, by the repeated telling of an event that the body’s complex sensoria once experienced fully in all the emotional and mental reverberations of a moment’s impact. Perhaps this desire is the drive behind oral history and its effort to uncover and make public what people have experienced as personal. It is the memories of individual lives that together make up the particular history of a community—another kind of archive—recorded and made public as the unofficial history of the legislated-upon, rather than the official history of the legislators. These memories, often considered too personal to be of public value, when collected and published compose alternative or alternate views of official history, views that deepen our understanding of the impact of past events. So I discovered in 1972, when I first began working on a team collecting the Japanese Canadian oral history of Steveston, which at that point was largely untold outside of the community. In the early 1970s, Maya Koizumi began interviewing members of the community about their experiences fishing and boat-building on this coast. The oldest, Asamatsu Murakami, then in his late eighties, recalled arriving in Victoria by ship in 1899, and then, once in Vancouver, travelling by stage coach down a still partially forested Granville Street to Steveston, where he began fishing for one of the canneries—in one man’s lifetime, the o F M i n i - s h i...