“The Place of Language”: Special Multicultural Issue of “Prairie Fire” edited by Andris Taskans

Since its inception, as Writer’s News Manitoba in the summer of 1978, the editors of Prairie Fire (Elizabeth Carriere, Kate Bitney, and currently Andris Taskans) have been concerned with publishing a wide spectrum of artists in Manitoba. With the publication of the Spring 1984 issue, entitled “A Place of Language”, Taskans establishes Prairie Fire, in a new and inviting format, as a comprehensive, thoughtful, and exciting review of the literary experience on the prairies.

The two most recent issues, “A Place of Language” and “Focus on Film” (Summer, 1984, Volume four, number 4) centre on a single multi-dimensional facet of artistic expression; this focus reflects itself in the review, helping to create a unity and a clarity often absent in earlier issues.

“A Place of Language”, presenting and enfolding work by ‘immigrant’ writers, whose mother tongue is neither English nor French, juxtaposes the individual poetic voices, allowing them to resonate, and to inform the reader of this version/these versions of the immigrant experience in Canada. The collection is interesting for its openness: it documents an experience in its very attempt to understand itself. At best, the collection of voices establishes a multi-faceted resonance; at worst, it indicates a hollowness, at moments even a triteness as the language reveals itself unable to communicate, or its voices unable to echo. This difficulty lies, perhaps, in the nature of the assignment: I feel these writers are sometimes trying too hard to be immigrant, to invent and create ancestry; I suspect sometimes too much adherence to the prairie myth of conjuring up ghosts. There is, occasionally, an uneasiness in the telling, belying the assumption, too readily made, that subject alone renders poetry profound.

There is, however, some extremely strong work in this issue, specifically Smaro Kamboureli’s “An Open Parenthesis”; Kristjana Gunnars’ “Words on Multilingualism” and an interview with her conducted by David Demchuk; and Michael Utgaard’s “Cross-Cultural Exchange: An Example from the World of Dance”. These articles not only reinforce each other, creating the dialogue the editor obviously hoped for, but also buttress up some of the weaker work. These, and a few other pieces, make “A Place of Language” valuable.

Kamboureli’s essay is an immediate, sensitive acknowledgement of her immigrant predicament: she suggests it is a “condition” which affords her “the (perverse?) pleasure of a doubled view”. Kamboureli records the ambivalence of becoming “immigrant” in powerful, exploratory language; she reveals her feeling of dis-ease in the transformative process of discovering and losing both language and landscape, in unearthing her vision of relocating. The place of language, then, is a cautious, painful exploration of untried movement towards an uncertain edge; this edge demands the clutching of a lost self, evokes an absent, remembered land, speaks a language of echo. In her dynamic attempt to map her future, Kamboureli evokes the painful awareness of loss, inherent as grief, in all beginnings.

Kristjana Gunnars, both in her essay “Words on Multilingualism”, and, more specifically, in her interview, presents a rich, intelligent, and honest testimonial to the experience of language and place for the immigrant in Canada. Her ideas reflect upon other work in the collection. Her statement about what happens to the immigrant—”The child in you dies because your childhood experiences cannot inform the new setting. You become split in two and your former life seems like an illusion”—adds dimension to Kamboureli’s assertion of a doubled self, just as it affirms it. Gunnars analyses the self-conscious tendency of Canadian writers to be “ethnic”, speaking out strongly against the current mythology which tyrannizes our experience of our own culture. She speaks bluntly of the promise of a future, not yet mapped, affirming the necessity of living a life in the world: “To write, you sometimes have to break promises.” Her unpopular criticism of the ghettoization of ethnic groups; her stubborn refusal to see a ghost town as anything other than an empty place that speaks only of a remembered past; her refusal to sentimentalize; all are refreshing, even inspiring. She does not whine about what she has lost—she states it with respect and then goes on with the business of living with her inheritance which both acknowledges and buries the dead. She is concerned, not with preserving the past, except as it informs and creates the present, but with acknowledging a future which recognizes ancestry as past. She works with the concept of time as it functions for her and for all humans, in relationship to the immediate process of living; her historical overview of heritage affirms all the possibilities of the language itself.

Michael Utgaard, in “Cross-Cultural Exchange: An Example from the World of Dance”, documents an awareness of the synthesis of assimilation, revealing the magnitude of possibility in the merging and emerging of new art forms. In the telling he suggests a concrete metaphor for Gunnars’ “thousands of languages”. This is a marvellous article, which speaks clearly and positively about the very real possibilities that the immigrant artist can make manifest in this new, chosen world.

These are some of the central, exploratory issues that unfold in the honest and painful apprehension of ancestral and immediate Canadian experience included in this issue of Prairie Fire. Other pieces, such as Per Brask’s “The Bureaucrat”, Pamela Banting’s “Women and Words, 1983”, and some of the poems (notably “Word Sketch on Indian Summer” by Andy Suknaski and Kristjana Gunnars), reverberate within the collection, breaking and making the experience of the poet in the world. Unfortunately, some of the work rings hollow and deadens the general vitality of the collection: some of the work reveals too much formula and too little guts, as if nostalgia itself had become the impulse of poetry and story. But in the best work in this issue, there is an affirmation that we have more than this.

Prairie Fire has always provided a vital and necessary forum for Winnipeg writers. Now, in the mature stage evident in the last two issues, it’s in a position to inspire as well as to publish extremely good work. The new issue is accessible and inviting to read—the drawings and photographs variously provide interesting contrasts or complements to the print, and the writers included are among the best in Manitoba. What I would like to see in the future is better, more demanding editing and a set of standards that refuses to print vague or unfinished work. What I want, then, is full evidence of the review’s serious commitment to its very real, necessary and creative function in Manitoba. ♦

Kathie Kolybaba is the literary editor of Arts Manitoba.