Canadian Literature
Louise Halfe – Healing Through Orality and
Spirituality in Poetry
Louise Bernice Halfe was born in 1953 in Two Hills, Alberta. Her Cree name is SkyDancer. She grew up a member of the Saddle Lake Reserve and at the age of 7 was sent to the Blue Quills Residential School in St. Paul, Alberta. . After leaving the school at the age of 16, she attended St. Paul’s Regional High School where she began to journal about her life experiences. (McNally Robinson)
Halfe has a degree in Social Work from the University of Regina, as well as training in drug and addiction counseling (Moses and Goldie 396). In 1990, she made her first appearance as a poet in Writing the Circle: Native Women of Western Canada. Her other works include Bear Bones and Feather which received the Canadian Peoples Poet Award and Blue Marrow which was a finalist for the Governor General’s Award for Poetry. The Crooked Good is her latest novel which has just been published.
In January of 2005, Halfe was named Saskatchewan’s poet Laureate. She currently lives in Saskatoon with her husband and has two grown children. (McNally Robinson)
“I write because I love. I write for the survival of self, my children, my family, my community and for the Earth. I write to help keep our stories, our truths, our language alive”. (qtd. in Anthology 396.)
This quote describes how Louise Halfe uses all four common elements of native literature in her writings. I have chosen to discuss two of the elements she frequently uses, Spirituality and Orality in relation to three of her poems: My Ledders, She Told Me and The Heat of my Grandmothers.
Orality is used widely in Halfe’s poetry. In My Ledders she writes as if it were being spoken, using phonetic spelling. It is written in the form of a letter from a native woman to the Pope. She starts the poem “dear pope i no, i no, you dired of my ledders i couldn’t let dis one go i dought you could do somedin ‘ bout it.” (403)
Halfe also uses the repetition of words to express orality.
I began a study of autobiography and memoir writing several years ago. Recently I discovered two poets who believe that recording one’s place in history is integral to their art. Carol Muske and Joy Harjo are renowned poets who explore the intricacies of self in regards to cultural and historical place. Muske specifically addresses the poetics of women poets, while Harjo addresses the poetics of minority, specifically Native American, writers. Both poets emphasize the autobiographical nature of poetry. Muske and Harjo regard the self as integral to their art. In this representation of self, Muske and Harjo discuss the importance of truth-telling testimony and history in their poetics. Muske says, “…testimony exists to confront a world beyond the self and the drama of the self, even the world of silence—or the unanswerable…” (Muske 16).
Katya had lost everything that her family owned and was forced to move to another country, where she had to start a new life from scratch. Even though she had relatives living in Canada, it was not an easy task. Just like other immigrants to Canada, she had to face many difficulties, like the learning of the new language, and adapting to the new lifestyle. Many years later, she came back to her homeland to visit the places she grew up in. After more than fifty years she still remembered the tragedy that suddenly ended the happy life of her family.
Jerilynn Webster; also known as ‘JB The First Lady’, is an Indigenous Vancouver based beat-boxer, hip-hop artist, activist, aboriginal youth educator and a single mother (News, CBC). Jerilynn is a proud Indigenous member of the Nuxalk and Cayuga (Six) Nation (Jb the First Lady) who immensely contributes to her community. She was born in Moosejaw, Saskatchewan in an impoverished ‘single-parent, Christian home” (Warner). Upon her arrival to Vancouver; at the age of 14, she was flooded by a culture-shock of experienced racism and discrimination as people negatively labelled her with elements of her race and culture (Hong). It was after this incident that she began to become aware of the profound issues living in a white-dominated city. She often attended the friendship centre where she felt at home and began her own career as an emcee, director and actor (Hong). She also began recording in a studio called KAYA (Knowledge Aboriginal Youth Association) (Hong). Seeing that her childhood memories restricted her from listening to music with the exception of Christian or ‘50s music (Warner), in her lyrics, Jerilynn delivers messages of racism, discrimination, effects of residential schooling, female empowerment, female experiences, and other politicized topics (JB The First Lady). Jerilynn states, “Using my words to go upwards/ not backwards”, she strives to empower, motivate and encourage the Native culture to fulfill their dreams and achieve the unachievable(Jb the First Lady). More importantly, Jerilynn’s motive is to “...capture the moment and the environment that we’re in, but come with a female perspective”(News, CBC). Thus, drawing on feminist and intersectional theories, this paper will highlight JB The First lady’s demonstration o...
On December 10, 1950, in Stockholm, Sweden, one of the greatest literary minds of the twentieth century, William Faulkner, presented his acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize. If one reads in between the lines of this acceptance speech, they can detect a certain message – more of a cry or plead – aimed directly to adolescent authors and writers, and that message is to be the voice of your own generation; write about things with true importance. This also means that authors should include heart, soul, spirit, and raw, truthful emotion into their writing. “Love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice” (Faulkner) should all be frequently embraced – it is the duty of authors to do so. If these young and adolescent authors ignore this message and duty, the already endangered state of literature will continue to diminish until its unfortunate extinction.
She elaborates on the traditional act of hunting through a simile: “my mother would lift and lay it in place / like a dead relative” (40-41). The relation to a dead relative shows reverence and respect for the animal. The white judges also observe the practice of “praying, coaxing, and thanking” (42), the dead animal as the speaker describes her mother performing the cultural practice of preparing the meat. Dumont’s use of description adds imagery to the poem as she states, “until we had become it and it had become us” (20), further noting the cultural and spiritual connection with animals. Overall, this incorporation provides the reader with information about the Indigenous culture and
Lydia Marie Child was born on February 11, 1802 and died on October 20, 1880. During her life she wrote in many forms and on various topics, but Lydia was more than just a writer. She wrote short stories, biographies, science fiction, serialized fiction, children’s literature, historical novels and antislavery literature (Karcher 6). She was also a journalist and a feminist, and wrote about the American Revolution and Native Americans. She helped Harriot Jacobson escape slavery, encouraged reform and was an abolitionist. But, before she could help others, Lydia had to fight for her own right to advance and succeed. Lydia was born in Medford, Massachusetts, as the sixth and youngest child of Convers and Susannah Francis. Susannah died when Lydia was twelve, and she was sent to live with a married sister until the age of nineteen. Although Mr. Francis encouraged the intellectual advancement of his sons, he discouraged his daughter, Lydia, from her fondness for books (Myerson 5). Lydia continued to read and learn, without her father’s encouragement or help, an...
Leslie Marmon Silko is a Native American from New Mexico and is part of the Laguna tribe. She received a MacArthur "genius" award and was considered one of the 135 most significant women writers ever. Her home state has named her a living cultural treasure. (Jaskoski, 1) Her well-known novel Ceremony follows a half-breed named Tayo through his realization and healing process that he desperately needs when he returns from the horrors of World War II. This is a process that takes him back to the history of his culture.
“She was from Pasadena, this six-foot-two marvel of a woman. It was not so much because she was an extraordinary cook- and she would pointedly remind us that she was a cook, not a chef” (Kehoe 1). Julia Child was an extraordinary woman who had a passion for cooking that she didn’t even know could change the way people cook. Julia Child most definitely influenced cooking for generations to come with her passion for cooking and love for food.
The two essays, Splintered Literacies and Writing in Sacred Spaces, both revolve around the inherent “why” of storytelling. Each addresses a different facet, with the former delving into how the types and varieties of writing we experience affect our identities. Meanwhile, the latter explores the idea of thought concretization. Humanity developed writing as a tool to capture the otherwise intangible. Whether belief or abstract concept, the act of putting something in writing creates a concreteness, trapping the thought in a jar like a firefly. The thoughts and ideas we manifest onto the page or into the air give life to our knowledge, perpetuating its’ existence.
For the purpose of this chapter, these words by Stephen Vincent Benet in his foreword to Margaret Walker’s first volume of poetry, For My People (1942) are really important. They give an idea about the richness of the literary heritage from which Walker started to write and to which she later added. This chapter is up to explore those “anonymous voices” in Walker’s poetry, the cultural and literary heritages that influenced her writings. Margaret Walker’s cultural heritage, like her biological inheritance, extends back to her ancestors in Africa and the Caribbean. It is quite genetic, something she got by birth; which is quite there just by being African American. Echoes of ancient myths, lost history, mixed bloods, and complex identities are brought about along with the skin colour and the racial origins.
Woman without voices seems to keep all feelings and thoughts to themselves, yet screaming for a shout out of understanding without spoken reasons. Lucille Clifton, an African-American Postmodern/Modernist poet enables that feeling through her heart felt inspired poetry.
As these few tales reveal, my memories of writing are strongly connected with the intense emotions I felt as I grew up. They are filled with joy, disappointment, boredom, and pride. I believe that each of these experiences has brought me to where I am today. I can only look to the future and hope that my growth will continue, and my writing will reflect those changes within me. As a writer, I have grown immeasurably and will continue to so long as I can find some paper and a pencil.
in her venture in Florida a homeless couple with a baby. In her poem she
Joy Harjo has been my favorite author that we have studied this year. She brought a level of insight and understanding that many of the other authors did not. Her love of life and her theme of continuing on despite challenges puts a spin on Native Americans that is not always addressed in Native American literature. Harjo’s works do not ignore the difficulties of life, but encompass them as well as the things that make life worth living.
I write because I'm a reader and I want to be the creator of a big, fat stack of books. Books I haven't read before.I write because I want to provide a reader an escape from their reality into a different life with hopes they've never had, love they've never experienced, adventures they would not dare to make. I want to make them happier and more content, to inspire them to do and be more, and finally to delight them. I write to not lose those little glimmers during the night. Writing lets me be better, stronger, braver than I could ever be in real life (also thinner, younger, and a whole lot smarter). Capturing these glimmers on paper lets me relive those heroic moments. Some one once said they wrote "because kidnapping people and forcing