Learning to Listen

Liz Millward, University of Manitoba

from sessions at THE UNIVERSITY OF MANITOBA, WINNIPEG, CANADA

When I first read The Journey Home/Te Haerenga Kainga I was desperate to read work by lesbians from Aotearoa New Zealand and was afraid it might be a pale imitation of North American (or British) tales of lesbian subjectivity. After all, coming from the Antipodes had to have an impact on a lesbian’s experience and knowledge of the world, but what gets published usually has to be recognisable to a guaranteed market.  As I progressed through the novel I could hardly bear to turn each page. “Whoever Cathie Dunsford is, she cannot sustain this,” I thought to myself. The novel covered so much material with such humour and compassion that it seemed impossible that it would not collapse under the weight of the issues crammed in between the covers. Indigenous rights and spirituality; lesbian sexuality; sadomasochism; neo-colonialism; the politics of women’s studies programmes and of food; body issues; domestic violence; race; class; even some ecology. Geographically it covered Aotearoa, Hawai’i, the USA, and Canada, with passing references to England and the Caribbean. This was a tale which knew all about those North American lesbian stories, and it was nothing like them.
Much of the North American literature on lesbians follows a predictable narrative, organised around coming out, developing a political consciousness starting with the Stonewall riots and moving through feminism and AIDS activism, the creation of urban enclaves such as those in San Francisco, and struggles over sexual expression, desire, class, and race. Throughout it all sex and drugs liberate us from the boredom of heteronormativity (but not patriarchy). There is a tired oppositional anger in that narrative and no longer any sense of possibility.

The Journey Home was different. This was a novel about lesbians in which being a lesbian was situated not in a narrative of liberation organised around an oppositional identity, but in the wide cultural, neo-colonial, and geographical context of the Pacific. The novel captured the immensity of life, the links between places, between people, the power of spiritual and dream worlds. It came from an indigenous perspective, and the indigenous characters observed North American culture with amusement rather than the anger which signals a sense of defeat in the face of a powerful enemy. Almost every character was a lesbian, so that lesbian sexuality was the normative sexuality. Moreover, all the lesbians - indigenous and non-indigenous alike - came from different backgrounds, had different politics, and, most importantly, had different ways of being lesbian. Not all of them were likeable or admirable.

I decided to use the novel to teach about the complexity of lesbian culture and subjectivity in a course called “Queer Cultures,” offered at York University in Toronto, Canada. I wanted to expose the students to the idea that the classic North American lesbian narrative was just one of many. It might be the dominant story circulating on Great Turtle Island, but it was not the only one, nor did it provide the “correct” way to understand lesbian culture or the absolute co-ordinates by which any lesbian should orient herself. Dunsford’s novel decentred this narrative entirely: at the centre of the novel is the Pacific, not San Francisco, even though much of the action takes place in and around the sprawling city. The dominant narrative (particularly struggles over sexual expression, desire, class, and race) exists as important to the lives of some of the characters, but only the minor ones. 

The response from the students enrolled in the “Queer Cultures” course was divided. Certainly most of them loved the novel. They relished the descriptions of sex between Cowrie and Peta. They engaged enthusiastically with some aspect of Cowrie’s struggle to deal with marginalisation, racism, a complicated long-distance relationship, cultural expectations about body size, the significance of dreams, her boundary breaking. They were interested in the details about indigenous culture and life. But a small segment of the class hated the novel. These were the self-identified “queer” students. They refused to engage with any characters who were not white. They picked out the tiniest references to white people and wrote their essays about how misrepresented these characters were. They honed in on the discussions about sadomascochism which Cowrie had with other characters, and they misrepresented these discussions in order to dismiss Cowrie’s voice. It was easy to assume that they were simply racist, and resented having to read a novel in which the white North American was not at the centre of the story. I wondered if part of their reaction was also a response to Dunsford’s damning portrayal of the emotional and spiritual sterility of the postmodern form of intellectual life at that moment in time. This small cluster of students intended to apply to undertake postgraduate study in the USA.  They wanted to be Rita YoungBlood and Marlene du Fresne, not critique them. I also wondered, though, if there was a better framework in which to situate the novel. “Queer Cultures” focused on the role of sexuality to the exclusion of other questions of context. Students could practise identity politics, decide that they did or did not identify with the characters, and disregard the novel as a whole.
The next time I taught The Journey Home was in a class called “Race, Class, and Sexuality,” offered through the Women’s Studies Program at the University of Manitoba. This course dealt with more than just sexuality, but even so, rather than create a framework for analysing the novel solely around axes of identity, I chose geography as the organising structure. We looked at scientific racism and colonialism as interdependent spatial practices with material effects on people’s geographical imagination and their ideas about who belongs where. We explored the idea of the monadic individual, defined through the boundaries between the self and all others. We considered how mapping and naming can erase and silence people and their histories. We introduced ourselves to Michel Foucault and ideas about power, discourse, and knowledge, subjugated or not. And to keep attuned to possibility we paid attention to the cultural practice laid out in the novel: talkstory.

This focus on geographical relations provided a richer way into the novel than sexuality alone. Everyone knows their own location relative to others, even when they are determined to believe they are unmarked by race, class, or sexuality. They know about school districts, farms, reserves, the North End, the wrong side of the tracks, whose land will be flooded for a hydro project. They know whence their parents or grandparents emigrated. They can see every single day how boundaries are material barriers. And geography makes more sense to people in Winnipeg, Manitoba, than it does in Toronto, Ontario. Winnipeggers know how far away they are from everywhere else. Like Pacific Islanders, they occupy what is assumed by Torontonians, San Franciscans–by those who think they are in the centre–to be the backblocks, the boondocks, a barely inhabitable, almost uninhabited landscape. They know, like Cowrie, how their mixed identities, based in different homelands–Metis, Cree, Ojibway, English-Canadian, French-Canadian, but also Filipina, Ukrainian, East Nigerian, Irish, Scottish, Sicilian, Portugese, German, Mennonite–pull them painfully in different directions while they try to create a place for themselves. Once the relationship between place and identity is brought into play, the sheer complexity of experiences overwhelm rigid solutions, and oppression becomes more clearly an endlessly proliferating force which permeates every action we take or refuse to take. Karin Meissenburg suggests that understanding this vast interconnectedness is a form of “contextual logic,” which requires the consideration of “the interplay of the multiple aspects of all being,”  rather than the isolation of one aspect of identity.

If geography was a way in to the novel, talkstory was a way to take up the ideas it raised about boundaries and interconnectedness. Talkstory requires people to learn two things: where they come from; and how to listen. From this basis change becomes possible. Dunsford argues that “it is our task to be as present as possible to the voices from the past to inform the present and allow us to move into the future. One of the ways this is possible is by reconnecting with our own mythologies and the layers of spirituality that unfold from this process and to move forward into the world of light as modern day visionaries.”  While she is referring to a specifically M ori cultural context, the task is a challenge for non-M ori too. To attempt to relocate an original authentic culture on which to base a resistance movement or a claim to speak is pointless. Contextual logic suggests that such a search is an isolating and potentially divisive one. Talkstory, instead, brings with it a sense of responsibility to the past and the future. This responsibility includes witnessing the horror and genocide of what has already been done, but it also insists on future possibility. As Meissenburg points out, “the Pacific Paradigm requires that we focus on what we actually can do to promote, sustain, enhance life and not on what we can’t do because it is better left undone as it might be dangerous.”  Dunsford says that the Cowrie series of protest novels “against nuclear power, warfare, genetic manipulation and destruction of the environment were also novels of peace and hope. They became celebratory. The dominant power shifted from the oppressors to those defining their own alternative ways of living, those imagining a better universe and finding specific ways to enact this on their own terms.”  Talkstory is a way to enact this shift.

Geography and talkstory provided a better framework than sexual identity for understanding what The Journey Home has to say about race, class, sexuality, and our responsibilities to each other. The section below is divided into five different types of response to the experience of reading the novel. First are two essays which explore key aspects of the novel. Schellenberg discusses the role of boundary breaking and power and how Cowrie exemplifies a more integrated connection with her world than that of the Western, monadic mindset.  Hildebrand then examines dreams as a form of subjugated knowledge which guide Cowrie throughout her many struggles. These essays are followed by five short reflections on the practice of talkstory. In these short pieces, Santos, Shaw, Hill, Hildebrand, and Canfield consider the possibilities of this practice for bringing people together across boundaries of race, class, and sexuality. What is particularly interesting about these reflections is that each woman attends to a different element of talkstory, be it knowledge, bonds formed, listening, orality, healing, or spiritual energy.

Cathie Dunsford and Karin Meissenburg visited the University of Manitoba in April 2007, and students in “Race, Class and Sexuality” were offered the opportunity to interview them or prepare talkstories to present to them. A small group of students elected to do this work, and Van Nest provides a detailed and thoughtful account of her interview with them. Another group of students prepared talkstories. They spent time reflecting on the story each wanted to tell and what it meant to tell their story. They presented their talkstories in a closed session in the University of Manitoba Womyn’s Centre. As Boeff, Bermudez, Lambert, and Santos explain below in their reflections on that experience, the energy they collectively created turned the space into somewhere almost magical. They refer to a sense of power, love, and connection created within the room and now carried by them in their everyday lives. The section closes with the words of Valerie Bermudez. This piece is her talkstory. It contains the very core of talkstory and contextual logic, which put into practice will make possible a different world: “As long as they can listen, feel the vibes & let love in.”