YVONNE KLEIN's fine translation makes available to English readers the dizzying, delirious prose of Jovette Marchessault (Like a Child of the Earth won the Prix France?Quebec in 1976). It's hard to talk about this book, the first volume of her autobiographical trilogy, hard to name what's happening artistically in it, because it opens up so much wild, uncharted territory, unheard of in English?Canadian writing. I can only say, it's like this, it's like that, knowing that the terms, the literary heritage I'm part of doesn't account for the visionary, magical otherness of this story. It is the most profound glimpse into a native Canadian woman's imaginative experience I've encountered. I'm reminded of Maxine Hong Kingston's wonderful account of growing up female and Chinese?American in California in The Woman Warrior, reaching past the conventions of American realism to the ghosts of her own lost culture, recovering the life line in that (stretching narrative plausibility in the meantime to the limit), while resisting furiously the ways the tradition silenced her as a woman. Marchessault's quest is so much the more multiple and fragmented, given her heritage, trying to take in the plurality of contemporary white North American cul. ture, trying to come to terms with the way it's invaded and taken over her own native ground, lamenting and raging against the huge cultural loss in that, while at the same time gathering together . her strength and the strength of her ancestors, her lost Grandmothers, in making a recovery. Loss, for immigrants, is always and only that, learning how to let go of the old stories, the old places, leave them behind, across the sea, if You're lucky, without losing your soul. Loss, for native people, I'm reading here, involves a more intense grief, a fierce recognition that the lost place is still here, being trampled on, still sacred. There is so much power, so much forward?looking, transformative rage in this grief, so much reclamation in it. It does something profound to the concept of time, which, narratively speaking, jumps all over the place. Past and future, life before birth and after death, all these mingle powerfully in this book with the present, from Christopher Columbus to Montreal in the '30s to life in other dimensions, in a sweeping story, which encompasses so many levels of animal and body and spirit consciousness that it's breathtaking:
When I am thirsty, I can, if I stick out my tongue and take a thousand precautions, a thousand baby steps, while fluttering my winds, suck from the breasts of the Great SheBear, she who lives in the white land of the treeeater. When I have satisfied my thirst, I cover the ashes Of my face, now the colour of cornstraw, and return into myself. But if, standing on the edge of horror and cold, I feel I am threatened, I make the sign of the cross and strike the flint and steel to light the little suns which I hide in my armpits and so warm and soothe myself again.
It's appropriate that the story should involve the journey of two women, by Greyhound bus, "in the body of a dog," across America. The seeker as tourist, shamanlike, as sight?seer across the old land.
Occasionally I wanted more discipline in the writing, more control in the use of different narrative levels. It was hard, sometimes, to follow Marchessault's wild metaphors through to the end, only to land, with a bump, against hard realism, or worse, polemic. Consider the following description:
To one part tincture of theobromide, add one part each of creamy cocoa, green tea, and coffee. To this, add one part essence of urine in which some microzoia, a moose fly, some bird lice and a gnat are floating lazily.
This, it turns out, is a tirade against coffee, "A teaspoon a day in a cup of polluted water!" I like the rage in it, I like the theatrics, but I don't like being manipulated into a polemical position by poetic rhetoric. Politics, in fiction, has to be thoroughly absorbed into the story, otherwise I want to spit it out along with the coffee.
Despite such occasional lapses in style, the book offers a splendid visionary experience, reminiscent at best of Doris Lessing, especially the thrill and terror of being born, the ambivalence of entering the hurtful world, spirit taking on flesh, the yearning in it for a transformed earth.
Mother of the Grass, the second volume of Marchessault's trilogy, also just translated, is more sober, down to earth. 'Me wild transcendence of the first volume has been replaced by a more mature, sustained narrative. Gone are the tirades, the stylistic lapses into textbook prose and polemic, but gone are also some of the grand visionary moments of the first book. The story, of a young native girl's growing up, is set on a riverbank in Montreal. The Grandmother plays a prominent role, shaping the children's world with dreams and angels and threats of Hell. Poverty, Catholicism, the horror of working in the munitions factory during the war, and puberty all take their place in this story. 'Mere are wonderful moments of description:
In this house, my first dwelling place on the Earth, there was a piano, a gorgeous, harmonious beast, a bundle of the essences of more than fifty kinds of trees.
But all in all, the soberness of tone in this volume demands an even greater stylistic control, some of the eccentricities of the previous volume coming off as merely lack of technique here. An example is the tennis tournaments in the Third Song, with its latent adolescent eroticism, described as follows:
Our hopes and desires escaped like steam from our mouths and rose as high as the floodlights which lit the tennis court. A cloud of dynamism! An unstoppable flow of thoughts was unloosed, tickled one another, and greeted one another with respect and deference as well.
There is too much explaining here, too much exclaiming, not enough toughness in the prose.
A prominent theme is religion, the eternal battle in Grandmother's terms between the crested Serpent (the devil) and God. Another, inevitably, is feminism, the hardships of growing up twice oppressed, native and a woman in a white male?oriented culture. The anger here is not always well contained; occasionally we get preached at, badly. 'Me book ends, however, on a fine note of grief and tenderness and rage, in a celebration of the Grandmother's death and A tribute to the lasting inspiration of her words and life. 'The kind of arrival that is more truly a beginning.
