Canadian Woman Studies / les cahiers de la femme (E-Journal, York University)

Hofmann Nemiroff, Greta

Sufi Evening

Weston, Joanna M.

82 CANADIAN WOMAN STUDIES/LES CAHIERS DE LA FEMME
did say I was a bit of a cleaning nut.” 
Then she rose slowly to her feet and 
crossed to the cupboard to get her 
kitchen mop.
Mary Kay Ross has worked in pub-
lishing, public relations, social work, 
broadcasting, and teaching. Having 
worked as an assistant editor for a 
publishing firm in England for several 
years, she returned to Toronto and was 
hired as a story editor for The Braden 
Beat, Global Television. She also worked 
for cbc Radio as a broadcaster on shows 
such as Morningside and The Judy 
Show. For tv Ontario, she co-hosted 
and wrote three series called Beyond the 
Fridge, Ferguson, Short and Ross, and 
Behind the Shield. She loves reading, 
dogs and cats, and the joys of her life 
are her grandchilden: Napoleon, Ronin, 
and Juliette. This is her first novel. is the 
author of Blind in One Eye, published 
by Inanna Publications in 2011.
JOANNA M. 
WESTON
Washing Up
my gloved hands stir foam
lift and wipe a plate a spoon
as I stare into the falling dusk
mindlessly place dishes
in the draining rack
watch the gathering dark
drop cleaned knives and forks
in the cutlery holder
gaze through fading light
I fumble a serving dish
against the edge of the sink
come awake in the gloaming
Joanna M. Weston’s poetry appears 
earlier in this volume.
CHRISTINA FOISY
I am a truck driver’s underarm
I spit my gum onto the curb, and
you criticize my civility, and so we walk on
endings like sidewalks. I have grown tired
of dreaming of walking away. Lying
beside you is pedestrian. I imagine
the gentle ways I could say goodbye.
I chew each sentence until dawn,
blowing smoke into your eyes. Perhaps,
I would start by saying that I should go
home. I have domestic things to do,
like laundry and baking. Although I can’t 
decide: what is more important? 
I smell awful, almost wild, around you
and your lavender and bergamot oils,
your tea-leaves, and Spanish pastries.
I smell like the underarm of a truck
driver who cheats on his wife and eats
crème de maron between motels
and backseats. Perhaps, there is
an ounce of refined taste in me,
but I have swallowed it too. Or
maybe I could be a chain-restaurant
waitress named Sonia, who chews
gum all day and doesn’t even spit it out
for a cigarette. I feel for Sonia and the underarm
her sweaty blouses, his heart-attacks. Sometimes,
I wear Sonia’s scent, like a woman who waits
in a damp parking lot for a truck driver’s lift.
But not today, I will walk home the long way.
You touch my untied hair, hold strands
between your lips. You deserve a nice girl,
in clean clothes, who doesn’t spit
her gum out when she is tired of it, 
a girl who doesn’t share bad dreams
or body odor. 
Christina Foisy’s poetry appears earlier in this volume.


Washing Up

Bohórquez, Paola

CANADIAN WOMAN STUDIES/LES CAHIERS DE LA FEMME154
to both the Canadian and the larger 
African community should have been 
explored. The research could benefit 
from a more specific analysis of the 
Africans who are not Christian, with 
regards to possible discrimination 
within the African and Canadian 
communities—especially gender 
marginalization. 
Nevertheless, this study makes a 
valuable contribution to research and 
the existing literature by showing how 
this small group manages to create 
spaces of recognition by building 
a supportive community network. 
Creese’s attention to gender dynamics 
and the different experiences among 
men and women further adds to 
this cogent study. Her findings are 
applicable to scholars in a variety 
of fields and lay the foundation on 
which further research on immigrant 
groups in Canada will build.
Sanja Ivanov is an ma student in the 
Department of English at the Univer-
sity of Waterloo. Her research interests 
include various kinds of life writing, 
especially immigrant life writing and 
life stories in graphic form. 
effectively shows, the experience of 
migration shifts the gender relations 
within many of the families of the 
interviewed, which in turn affects 
parent-child relationships. Further, 
Creese addresses the participants’ 
positioning of themselves in the new 
society with regards to racialization, 
acceptance and enquiries about or-
igins from Canadian society, which 
augments the significance of the larg-
er Canadian community in defining 
the identities of the immigrants. 
The grim picture of the immi-
grant repeatedly troubled by the 
question “Where do you come from” 
is replaced in the last chapter by a 
socially active immigrant, willing to 
position him/herself within Canada 
as a part of the emerging pan-African 
community in Vancouver. This study 
demonstrates that this negotiation is 
markedly gender-specific. Women 
stress the importance of network-
ing and both informal and formal 
support for the fellow immigrants, 
and tend to focus on improving 
their situation within Canada, while 
most of the men express the need for 
creating African entrepreneurship 
and organizations which focus on 
Africa. 
Creese puts emphasis on the 
pan-African identity that characteriz-
es the community in Vancouver and 
their collective difference from the 
Canadian majority. However, certain 
differences within this community 
are not addressed. Creese curiously 
downplays the role of religion among 
African immigrants and in what ways 
this has an impact on integration into 
Canadian society. Notably, Creese’s 
assistants did not interview anyone 
coming from predominantly Muslim 
countries such as Somalia, which has 
a significant number of immigrants in 
Vancouver. Despite the explanation 
by one of the collaborators that only 
ten percent of the African population 
in Vancouver are Muslim, their ex-
periences with regards to belonging 
Working within a thoroughly 
inter-disciplinary framework in-
formed by poststructuralist, feminist, 
and postcolonial approaches, Eva 
Karpinski’s book articulates a novel 
and multifaceted concept of trans-
lation that approaches immigrant 
borrowEd ToNGuES: 
lIFE wrITING, 
MIGraTIoN aNd 
TraNSlaTIoN
Eva Karpinski
Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University 
Press, 2012
reviewed by paola 
bohórquez
women’s life writing as a project of 
meaning transfer between differing 
signifying contexts. Through her 
nuanced close readings of migrant, 
diasporic, and postcolonial self-nar-
ratives, Karpinki’s book displays the 
potential of translation to unsettle the 
conventions of the autobiographical 
genre, problematize monolingual 
understandings of the relation be-
tween language and subjectivity, and 
elucidate the historical and material 
conditions underlying the produc-
tion of immigrant women’s writing, as 
well as the cultural politics informing 
these texts’ reception. What emerges 
through Karpinski’s versatile back 
and forth between the memoirs and 
the more theoretical analyses is a rich 
account of the intertwined registers 
of translation as textual practice 
and lived experience for immigrant 
women writers. 
Karpinski’s translative reading 
strategies reveal the condition of 
in-between languages, cultures, 
subject positions, and genres to be 
a contentious and unstable space 
traversed by conflicting investments, 
demands, and desires. Thus, immi-
grant women’s narratives are shown to 
be entangled in complex negotiation 
strategies: between the distrust of 
translation and the desire to domesti-
cate one’s foreignness in and through 
the receiving language and culture; 
between the fluid and unstable space 
promised by translation as an un-
ending process of self-configuration 
and the imposition of debilitating 
categories that fix and objectify 
immigrant and racialized women as 
other; between intergenerational and 
intersubjective forms of belonging 
and re-membering, and liberal and 
androcentric ideologies of individu-
ality with which the autobiographical 
genre is complicit.
Karpinski’s sustained attention 
to the vicissitudes of transfer and 
interference present in each of the 
examined texts progressively reveals 
VOLUME 30,  NUMBER 1 155
an ethics of translation animating 
her reading strategies. Rather than 
simply taking a celebratory or criti-
cal stance in response to each text’s 
success or failure at dwelling in the 
aporetic space of in-betweenness, 
Borrowed Tongues, refuses a gesture 
of semiotic closure and pays close 
attention instead to the necessarily 
ambivalent, unfinished, and symp-
tomatic transactions occurring 
between asymmetrical languages 
and cultural imperatives. In this 
sense, Karpinski’s work importantly 
demonstrates that the ethos of decen-
teredness, hybridity, and multiplicity 
embraced by so much contemporary 
critical discourse constitutes, in fact, 
a collective achievement, for without 
immanent forms of social solidarity 
and intersubjective witnessing, all 
efforts at sustaining the space of in-be-
tweenness become double binds.
If immigrant women write in 
“borrowed tongues,” Karpinski’s 
book compellingly exemplifies what 
it means to listen with a “borrowed 
ear” (Derrida The Ear 35). Thus, the 
author’s transversal reading of Laura 
Goodman Salverson’s Confessions of 
an Immigrant Daughter, for instance, 
allows her to explore the tensions 
attendant to configuring a subjec-
tivity marked as “female, ethnic, 
proletarian, and immigrant” and to 
complicate prior critical readings of 
Salverson’s memoir which, in privi-
leging gender alone, fail to consider 
the material constraints within which 
she writes and how these conditions 
shape the strategies through which 
Confessions “translates the experience 
of female embodiment.”  Similarly, 
Karpinski’s beautifully articulated 
reading of in the second person, ex-
amines how Kamboureli’s productive 
distrust of translation—with its 
promises of equivalence without 
remainder and full arrival into the 
language of the other—allows her 
to trace “the processual, mobile, and 
unfixed nature of subjectivity.” In 
understanding Kamboureli’s exper-
imental translative strategies within 
intertwined conditions of privilege 
and marginality, Karpinski engages 
in a situated analysis of the text’s 
economy of loss that raises crucial 
questions regarding the possibilities 
and limits of translation as work 
of mourning. Lastly, and drawing 
much more explicitly on postcolonial 
theories of translation, Karpinski’s 
reading of Marlene Nourbese Philip’s 
Looking for Livingstone: An Odyssey 
of Silence and Jamaica Kincaid’s The 
Autobiography of my Mother focuses 
on the problem of translation “when 
there is only the target language.” 
For both African Caribbean writers 
whose linguistic identity has been 
shaped by an agonistic relationship 
between a devalued Creole and a 
Standard English experienced as 
extraneous to the Caribbean, writ-
ing in English entails resignifying 
the adversarial language through 
articulating its foreclosed difference, 
while simultaneously revealing the 
language’s complicity with impe-
rialism and colonial domination. 
Karpinki’s analysis of “the rhetoric 
of negativity” that informs Kincaid’s 
text, as well as of its uses of allego-
rization, deconstructive mimicry, 
and parodic repetition as translative 
strategies raises intriguing questions 
regarding the reader’s implication in 
constructing, deconstructing, and 
perhaps missing or misrecognizing, 
the meaning of the text.
“Passing through the ear of the 
other, the autos of the autobiograph-
ical subject is displaced into the otos 
of “otobiography.” As Karpinski 
eloquently exemplifies, while such 
displacement reveals the structurally 
intersubjective nature of the self and 
foregrounds the act of reading as con-
stitutive of textuality, it also compels 
us to ask how to listen otherwise to 
the displaced voices of those who say 
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“Wonderful, dark, witty and wild. Stories within stories. Poetry. Madness. Illicit love. A city’s power
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CANADIAN WOMAN STUDIES/LES CAHIERS DE LA FEMME156
In Breadwinning Daughters, Katrina 
Srigley paints a detailed portrait of 
Depression era Toronto from the per-
spective of the city’s young working 
women. An extension of Srigley’s 
doctoral thesis at the University of 
Toronto, the book is academically 
rigorous while still being engaging 
and readable. Srigley’s approach to 
the subject is influenced by oral 
history and feminist social history. 
She is careful, however, to remain 
balanced in her presentation of the 
material. Srigley’s book is well-re-
searched and organized, improving 
and expanding upon existing schol-
brEadwINNING 
dauGhTErS: YouNG 
workING woMEN IN a 
dEprESSIoN-Era cITY, 
1929-1939
Katrina Srigley
Toronto: University of Toronto 
Press, 2010
reviewed by nina kaye
arship. Her bibliography cites over 
one hundred interviews along with 
approximately three hundred other 
references. Breadwinning Daughters 
is an important work, offering a new 
perspective on the Depression era by 
showcasing the experiences of young 
working women in Toronto. 
Breadwinning Daughters attempts 
to correct the omissions of earlier 
research on the period which focused 
on male unemployment, politics, 
and economics. In contrast, Srigley 
focuses on social history and women’s 
experiences, drawing on interviews, 
court records, newspaper articles, 
census statistics, novels, memoirs, 
and history books to detail the lives 
of young working women. Srigley 
argues that these young single wom-
en, or dutiful daughters, provided 
financial support for their families 
when their unemployed fathers and 
brothers could not. Their experienc-
es, Srigley asserts, are integral to a full 
understanding of the period. 
As Srigley’s research reveals, young 
single women had better access to 
employment than their male coun-
terparts during the Depression. As 
such, many dutiful daughters were 
suddenly thrust into the role of family 
breadwinner. This circumstance was 
important in shifting traditional fam-
ily structures. Additionally, working 
had a significant impact on the lives 
of the young women in question. 
Certainly, many women felt pride 
and an increased sense of autonomy 
as a result of their labour, yet many 
also felt sorrow at lost opportunities 
for education and marriage.
Breadwinning Daughters offers a 
detailed overview of life in the De-
pression for young working women 
in Toronto; providing an important 
cultural and social context for the 
period; exploring how young wom-
en’s work experience impacted their 
family life; outlining the labour mar-
ket for women in Toronto; discussing 
sexuality, criminality, and women’s 
safety at home and at work; and 
examining the leisure activities that 
young working women engaged in 
during the period. Throughout each 
chapter, Srigley is careful to point out 
how race and class were factors that 
affected women’s experience of the 
Depression. Breadwinning Daughters 
is an invaluable compendium of 
women’s lives in the 1930s. However, 
due to the extensive breadth of the 
book’s subject, it contains occasional 
generalizations, and is not always able 
to fully address the issues that it raises.
Katrina Srigley’s impressive ac-
cumulation of subject interviews 
enriches her portrait of the era. 
Following in the footsteps of oral 
history chronicles of the period such 
as Broadfoot’s Ten Lost Years, Srigley 
argues that personal accounts are in-
strumental in “allow[ing] scholars [...] 
to change the focus of history.” The 
interviews acknowledge the contribu-
tion of women’s marginalized voices, 
preserving memories which would 
otherwise be lost. The interviews 
also provide a unique opportunity of 
understanding the effect that working 
during the Depression had on the 
lives of young single women. 
Despite its value, Srigley does ad-
mit that oral history can be problem-
atic. Memory is subjective, changing 
over time. The interview process is 
similarly subjective. Srigley cautions 
that the circumstances of the inter-
view and the perceived relationship 
between her and the interviewees 
coloured the information she attained 
through this process. Interviewees, 
for example, avoided discussion of 
sexuality as inappropriate, perhaps 
inhibited by Srigley’s youthful age. 
Srigley is careful to supplement the 
interviews with other sources of 
research in order to present a more 
complete picture of the time period. 
She delicately navigates the varied 
sources, conscientiously noting any 
divergences between them. 
Breadwinning Daughters is a won-
“I” in borrowed tongues. Karpinski’s 
heteroglossic reading of immigrant 
women’s life writing attunes our 
ear to such voices, thus allowing us 
to listen to the self writing itself in 
translation.
Paola Bohórquez holds a Ph.D in So-
cial and Political Thought from York 
University, where she teaches in the 
Writing Department. She also teaches 
graduate courses in cultural studies, 
psychoanalysis and culture, and critic-
al applied linguistics at the Program 
for Integrated Studies at Athabasca 
University. Her articles appeared in 
the Journal of Intercultural Studies, 
Synthesis, and in the collections On 
and Off the Page: Mapping Place 
in Text and Culture and American 
Multicultural Studies.


Borrowed Tongues: Life Writing, Migration and Translation

Fretwell, Katerina

92 CANADIAN WOMAN STUDIES/LES CAHIERS DE LA FEMME
DIANE DRIEDGER
Devils and Saints
it’s a red devil
the nurse said
as she fed chemo into my veins
I think   is that
Dirt Devil
Tasmanian Devil
Devil in the deep blue sea
devil’s food cake
the devil that fooled Eve
I am a one and two thirds
breasted woman
infused with the devil
eating me from within
that’s definitely not
cake
or maybe it is
most chocolate has soy lecithin
feeds tumors
the nutritionist says
don’t eat it
later I’m in the grocery store
soy in every processed food
salad dressings
chocolate
candy
crackers
soups
granola bars
I thought soy
was a vegetarian saint
but it’s a devil
wrapped in sweetness
Diane Driedger is a poet, visual artist, 
editor, and educator. Her most recent 
book is Living the Edges: A Disabled 
Women’s Reader (Inanna, 2010).
KATERINA FRETWELL
Clinic A, Exam Room 7
 Tears pool as I watch you in profile, stark,
backlit, angel wings poised for takeoff,
hair and goatee flowing silvered,
blue-eyed-gaze, hollowed out
warrior of war waged
within, while ninety
minutes ticktock,
Doc Crusher’s
phone for
facts. 
Weird, 
he says,
could be 2
cancers or IV
staged incurable.  
O fuck projectiles up,
out my mouth into cyto- 
toxic silence to the doc’s grin.
Inanna Publications and Education Inc. published Katerina Fretwell’s 
sixth poetry collection, Angelic Scintillations, in 2011 and will publish 
her seventh, Class Acts, in Fall 2013. Her poems have appeared in two 
Welsh magazines: Scintilla #16 and The Seventh Quarry. One of 
her poems was shortlisted for Descant Magazine’s Winston Collins 
Poetry Prize, 2012. The above poem is from a manuscript called The 
Cancer Letters.


Clinic A, Exam Room 7

Foisy, Christina

English

I am a truck driver's underarm

Norman, Renee

50 CANADIAN WOMAN STUDIES/LES CAHIERS DE LA FEMME
The aroma of freshly baked bread 
bothered my nose. My mouth swelled 
with saliva as we strode toward the 
counter where a short, small-eyed, 
frail, sixtyish-looking woman peeked 
over the cash register smiling. Mum-
my placed her order and slid a toonie 
and a loonie across the glass counter. 
The woman extended her hands, 
punched a few keys on the cash 
register, and deposited the change 
in the drawer before hobbling off, 
disappearing into the back of the 
store. Moments later she reappeared, 
holding two crispy hot-out-of-the-ov-
en Jamaican beef patties sandwiched 
between two cocoa breads—just the 
way we would have it back home. The 
glass door chimed again as we pulled 
it open. We continued in the direction 
toward our apartment building. 
 
Adwoa Ntozake Onuora received her 
Ph.D. at the Ontario Institute for 
Studies in Education at the University 
of Toronto. She has worked in formal 
and informal educational settings 
and has established expertise in com-
munity-situated learning, indigenous 
knowledges, equity, and social change. 
As a facilitator, Adwoa brings to life 
critical equity frameworks, storytelling, 
and narrative. Her research interests 
include diversity in education, cultural 
studies, indigenous knowledges, the 
intersections and impact of gender, sexu-
ality/sexual orientation, race, ethnicity, 
class, abilities, and culture on women’s 
lived experiences.
renee nOrMAn
this is What it All Comes to
gumming cookies
I soften for her in tea
her teeth in a container
on the table
mouth and mind unwilling
the teeth an irony of centrepiece
she is hungry
I cut crusts off egg sandwich
hand her tiny pieces
wonder if it hurts
to chew with gums
she is back to baby
the woman who shakes and shakes
approaches
her babble either foreign or nonsense
I can’t tell
pat-pat-pats me on the back
folds in the tag on my shirt
I feel her longing
solicitude a tribute of sorts
she knows the tenuous
mother-daughter bonds
in a surprising burst of lost language
my mother asks
for a solution
high-vocab-speak for drink
later I rub her back shoulders
arms
the only conversation she truly understands
she tells me
stop picking
I am back to baby
Renee Norman’s poetry appears earlier in this volume.


This Is What It All Comes To

Ross, Mary Kay

VOLUME 30, NUMBER 1 79
A Speck of Dust
mary kay ross
Une femme obsédée par la propreté et 
abandonnée par son mari se découvre 
une autre vie et un nouveau monde 
dans ses rêves. 
“You see, I mean … my problem is, 
well, my wife is just a cleaning nut. 
I’m telling you, it’s driving me crazy 
and it’s getting worse all the time. 
It used to be the worst of it was our 
furniture was all covered in plastic, 
like you know, you couldn’t sit down 
anywhere and shoes—oh, shoes. You 
could never wear those in the house. 
But now! If I’m smoking, she follows 
me around with an ashtray. If I go 
to the fridge for a beer, she follows 
me around with a towel under it. 
I’m telling you, it’s driving me crazy. 
You gotta help me. What am I going 
to do?”
Heidi pulled her head out of the 
oven, wiped a speck of Easy Off from 
her nose and turned around to stare 
at her kitchen radio in amazement. 
There was no doubt about it. That 
voice, whining, self-pitying, some-
how shot through with vulnerability, 
was unmistakable. It grated on her 
nerves because there was something 
so messy about it. And now here it 
was, speaking at her through the 
radio … speaking to her from her 
favourite talk-show program, Let It 
All Hang Out. Without rising, she 
crawled across the floor and quickly 
switched off the radio, not waiting 
for, not wanting to hear, the host’s 
advice. No doubt about it. That voice 
belonged to her own husband, Jack. 
And he had been talking about her. 
Complaining about her for all the 
world to hear, for all the world … 
oh, my God, the neighbours.
Heidi jumped up and ran to the 
window. She peeked through the 
curtains to Maureen’s house. She’d 
be listening, you could just bet she 
would and soon it would be all 
over the neighbourhood. What an 
embarrassment—worse than an em-
barrassment, a disloyalty. And such an 
exaggeration. Hadn’t she said to him 
that most men would be proud to have 
a house so spotless they could bring 
a guest home anytime, any old time 
they wanted? Yes, hadn’t she said that 
to him just two weeks ago? And he 
had answered, “Okay, okay, but how 
can I bring a guy home when you treat 
everyone like a speck of unwanted 
dust? Hell, we can’t sit anywhere; we 
can’t smoke in the house. Even in 
the summer when it’s nice, we can 
hardly sit in the garden without you 
fussing over us and worrying we’ll 
tread a little mud onto the patio. I 
just don’t understand you anymore, 
Heidi. God, the times I’d like to take 
your clothes off, they just seem to look 
back at me and stand at attention.” 
And he had turned and walked away 
from her.
He didn’t try to take her clothes off 
much anymore, that was for sure. It 
was all right with her too. Let others 
discuss the vagaries of sexual passion, 
its tragedies or joys. Sex, to Heidi, had 
become just another cleaning prob-
lem. She thought bleakly of crumpled 
sheets, dirty bathtubs, sodden towels. 
No, she shuddered. The less of that, 
the better. But still, she admitted, as 
she got back on her knees in front of 
the oven and began to scrub again, 
she remembered vaguely a time when 
the compulsion to clean was not so 
strong, a time when she might even 
have enjoyed the taste of sweat on 
Jack’s body. But this time was so long 
gone, she was unsure whether it was 
fantasy or memory.
She shrugged and set her mind 
back on the oven. She scrubbed with 
dedication and purpose and, at last, 
the oven glowed to her satisfaction so 
80 CANADIAN WOMAN STUDIES/LES CAHIERS DE LA FEMME
bright and shiny it could have starred 
in a commercial. She sat back on her 
heels and rubbed the small of her back, 
then stretched. There was nothing so 
satisfying as a job well done.
Later, she could never imagine 
what had drawn her attention to the 
front door. A slight noise? Footsteps? 
A sense of inner breeze? Someone 
else’s presence? She went to the front 
door and saw the envelope. It was 
addressed to her. When she opened 
it, the note said only, “Heidi, I can’t 
stand it anymore. Goodbye, Jack.”
She sat in the living room chair, 
looking out the window, the note 
folded neatly on her lap. Maureen 
went by walking her dog—that filthy 
thing. Children skipped home from 
school. Office workers returned from 
work. At last day deepened into twi-
light and still Heidi hadn’t moved. She 
slept that night in her chair, afraid to 
face the empty bed.
The next day, stunned but func-
tioning, Heidi called Jack’s work only 
to be told he had quit. She walked 
to the bank. The manager, brusque 
but sympathetic, told her that Jack 
had arranged to have some money 
deposited in their joint account at 
the beginning of each month. He had 
given the manager no explanation and 
the manager had not thought to ask 
for one. Heidi walked home slowly. 
It was obvious that her husband had 
been planning to leave for some time. 
She accepted this as she accepted 
almost everything but the presence 
of dirt. She spent the rest of the day 
cleaning and then, exhausted, went 
to bed.
That night a speck of dust, for-
bidden in that home and as yet 
inarticulate, circled the bed on which 
Heidi lay. It moved cautiously, then 
more erratically, along the soft curves 
of her body, sketching a meandering 
path from toe, to knee, to thigh. It 
wove ever-deepening circles from 
abdomen, to breasts, to chin until at 
last it settled longingly on the high 
ridge of cheekbone just beneath her 
left eyelid. Heidi murmured as a soft 
breath of desire touched her body, 
and pushed herself further into the 
comforting mattress.
As the speck of dust moved along 
her cheekbone toward her nose, Heidi 
saw Jack clearly. He was striding across 
a ridge of the Andes mountains, head-
ing toward a silent, solitary peak. He 
paused and rested himself as he leaned 
against a twisted rock. His face was 
alight and alert; she had never seen 
him so consumed, so intensely alive. 
With passion and purpose he began 
to scale the peak just as the speck of 
dust began the climb up Heidi’s nose. 
Heidi, her breath coming in short, 
sharp gasps, her brain dizzy from the 
high altitude, felt herself hurled from 
the peak, plunging through space and 
time, to land, exhausted and satisfied, 
safe in her bed.
The next morning, Heidi awoke to 
the day with unaccustomed pleasure. 
She felt heavy yet sated and complete-
ly relaxed. She lay there a moment and 
savoured this unexpected feeling of 
contentment, this release from bur-
den and tension. Then she bounced 
out of bed. She sang as she showered 
and dressed. She danced around the 
kitchen to music from the radio as 
she made her breakfast. She began to 
clean out the kitchen cupboards and 
found herself laughing at everything 
and nothing at all.
By the afternoon, the house was 
perfect in its pristine cleanliness and 
even Heidi acknowledged herself 
pleased with it. She became restless 
and grabbing her jacket, she put it on 
and left the house. She headed toward 
the library with no conscious purpose, 
but with ever-quickening strides. 
Once there, she headed as if aimed to 
the travel section. Her hands roamed 
blindly over the books on the shelf 
until they stopped at one clearly titled, 
The Andes. She pulled the book from 
the shelf and, her brow wrinkled in 
puzzlement, stared at the cover photo 
of a ridge leading toward a lofty peak. 
Suddenly Jack came into the photo. 
He was walking on the ridge and as 
she stared intently at him, he stopped 
and turned to look at her. He was a 
Jack she had never known before, or 
at least had never allowed herself to 
recognize. Her heart twisted and she 
clutched the book tightly to her as 
if determined never to let it go. She 
stood there many moments before 
she shook herself out of her trance 
and walked to the counter to check 
the book out and go home.
She spent the rest of the afternoon 
leafing through the book, gazing at 
the pictures of the godlike range 
that was itself the kingdom of gods. 
She read of the mystical cities of 
the Incas and tried to imagine Jack 
there amongst the ghosts. Could he 
be there? It seemed so unlike Jack, 
whom she had always thought of as 
a rather cautious businessman, that 
her mind turned upside down at the 
mere idea. But he was certainly not 
here with her and so, she supposed, 
anything was possible.
That night the strange speck of 
dust, still forbidden but bolder now, 
waited only until Heidi had fallen 
asleep before it approached her eagerly 
and set about its exploration of her 
body. It moved with great persever-
ance up her inner thigh, crossed over 
her slightly bent leg, and braved the 
slope of hip into buttock. It felt as 
though it were travelling on a sea 
that curved toward the horizon, a 
sea of depth and solidity, a sea of 
golden flesh.
Jack sat astride his camel and raised 
his hand to his forehead to shield 
his eyes from the blazing sun. The 
desolate yet magnificent sands of 
the Sahara stretched before him for 
as far as he could see. Around him 
swirled the Berbers and their beasts; 
the manic laughter of the tribe like 
the clanging of their bells shouted a 
challenge to the power of the desert. 
At the signal to depart, Jack galloped 
VOLUME 30, NUMBER 1 81
she glanced at the book, there Jack sat, 
stubbornly astride his camel.
Her nights became glorious. She 
could hardly wait to fall asleep so that 
the subtle explorations of her body 
would begin. Her breasts became 
dream islands, her eyes the sheltered 
waters. The clearly etched lines on 
her palms contained prophesies of 
ancient Greece. Her legs flowed freely 
problems in school. They talked of 
the new community centre that was 
to be built across the park. At last, 
Maureen blurted out, “Heidi, you 
look wonderful. Tell me honestly 
now, do you have a new lover?” Heidi 
smiled enigmatically but said noth-
ing. She rose, thanked her hostess and 
left. “The Mona Lisa has nothing on 
her,” Maureen thought and swiped at 
ahead, straight toward the centre 
of the desert, toward its gleaming 
heart, which seemed to him to be 
rounded, golden, the very sun itself. 
The Berbers followed, laughing, but 
he had set his face, eyes pointed 
sharp, to become another Lawrence 
of Arabia.
The next day Heidi again felt com-
pelled to visit the library where she 
exchanged her book on the Andes for 
one on the Sahara. As she walked past, 
her neighbour Maureen wondered at 
Heidi’s new ebullience, at the strength 
and freedom of her purposeful stride. 
Maureen peeked out her window, a 
quizzical frown on her face. Heidi 
had always been attractive of course, 
with her blond hair, trim figure, and 
wide-set blue eyes. But she had been 
attractive in a prim, almost matronly 
way. Maureen’s curiosity was whetted. 
What could have happened since that 
husband of hers had left her? One 
thing was certain. Heidi didn’t look 
like a deserted wife. Maureen sniffed 
and turned away from the window, 
determined to investigate at the first 
opportunity.
Heidi, unaware that she had been 
observed, walked home as blithely 
as she had set off downtown. She 
clutched the new book on the Sahara 
to her breast and, once inside, looked 
at the photos with a mixture of awe 
and astonishment. Visions of Law-
rence of Arabia, naturally enough, 
swept through her mind with the 
relentless quality of a desert wind. 
But she somehow couldn’t connect 
these images to Jack. Jack? Lawrence 
of Arabia? Come on. Yet, whenever 
like the great rivers of the Amazon 
and Nile. Her mouth was filled with 
the sweet wet heat of the jungle. Her 
hair shone silver with the hidden 
landscapes of the moon. Her back 
arched with beauty like the stars of 
the Milky Way. Now she knew Jack 
had meant it when he’d said, “You’re 
all the world to me.”
This nightly joy could not be hid-
den in the light of day. It burst from 
her, surrounding those who saw her. 
Most of her neighbours shrugged 
uncomfortably and turned their 
heads aside—but Maureen could 
wait no longer. She waylaid Heidi and 
scrutinized her closely. She observed 
Heidi’s glowing, tousled hair. She saw 
that the blue of Heidi’s eyes seemed to 
have deepened and those eyes, once 
rather blank and expressionless, now 
held secrets, maybe even mischievous 
ones. “She has a lover,” Maureen 
decided quickly. “These trips to the 
library are just a front.” Just as quickly, 
she asked Heidi in for a cup of tea.
The two women sat in the kitchen 
sipping their tea; Heidi lost in her 
own world while Maureen desperately 
sought to gain entrance to it. They 
chatted of this and that. They dis-
cussed Maureen’s children and their 
the teacups viciously, dropping them 
into the sink.
One morning Heidi awoke and 
stretched languorously in her bed. A 
smile as gleeful as the Cheshire cat’s 
played across her face. She jumped 
out of bed, and turning to smooth the 
sheets, she noticed a small, dark speck 
of dust on her pillow. She clicked her 
teeth, pinched the speck between 
thumb and forefinger, and walking 
quickly to the kitchen wiggled her 
fingers over the garbage can until she 
was sure she’d gotten rid of it.
As soon as she had lowered the lid 
of the can, though, a sense of deso-
lation swept over her, so strong that 
she grabbed her stomach in sudden, 
sharp pain. What had she done? Did 
that little speck of dust have anything 
to do with Jack? Impossible. Yet 
acting on instinct, not thought, she 
dumped the contents of the can all 
across her immaculate kitchen floor. 
She pored through the garbage like 
someone demented or starving but 
she could not recover the speck. She 
sat immobile on the floor, surrounded 
by mess. She shook her head in dismay 
at he futility of mourning a speck of 
dust. “Oh, well,” she murmured as 
she wiped away a tear. “He always 
Maureen wondered at Heidi’s new ebullience, at the strength and 
freedom of her purposeful stride. Maureen peeked out her window, 
a quizzical frown on her face. Maureen’s curiosity was whetted. 
What could have happened since that husband of hers had left her? 
One thing was certain. Heidi didn’t look like a deserted wife.
82 CANADIAN WOMAN STUDIES/LES CAHIERS DE LA FEMME
did say I was a bit of a cleaning nut.” 
Then she rose slowly to her feet and 
crossed to the cupboard to get her 
kitchen mop.
Mary Kay Ross has worked in pub-
lishing, public relations, social work, 
broadcasting, and teaching. Having 
worked as an assistant editor for a 
publishing firm in England for several 
years, she returned to Toronto and was 
hired as a story editor for The Braden 
Beat, Global Television. She also worked 
for cbc Radio as a broadcaster on shows 
such as Morningside and The Judy 
Show. For tv Ontario, she co-hosted 
and wrote three series called Beyond the 
Fridge, Ferguson, Short and Ross, and 
Behind the Shield. She loves reading, 
dogs and cats, and the joys of her life 
are her grandchilden: Napoleon, Ronin, 
and Juliette. This is her first novel. is the 
author of Blind in One Eye, published 
by Inanna Publications in 2011.
JOANNA M. 
WESTON
Washing Up
my gloved hands stir foam
lift and wipe a plate a spoon
as I stare into the falling dusk
mindlessly place dishes
in the draining rack
watch the gathering dark
drop cleaned knives and forks
in the cutlery holder
gaze through fading light
I fumble a serving dish
against the edge of the sink
come awake in the gloaming
Joanna M. Weston’s poetry appears 
earlier in this volume.
CHRISTINA FOISY
I am a truck driver’s underarm
I spit my gum onto the curb, and
you criticize my civility, and so we walk on
endings like sidewalks. I have grown tired
of dreaming of walking away. Lying
beside you is pedestrian. I imagine
the gentle ways I could say goodbye.
I chew each sentence until dawn,
blowing smoke into your eyes. Perhaps,
I would start by saying that I should go
home. I have domestic things to do,
like laundry and baking. Although I can’t 
decide: what is more important? 
I smell awful, almost wild, around you
and your lavender and bergamot oils,
your tea-leaves, and Spanish pastries.
I smell like the underarm of a truck
driver who cheats on his wife and eats
crème de maron between motels
and backseats. Perhaps, there is
an ounce of refined taste in me,
but I have swallowed it too. Or
maybe I could be a chain-restaurant
waitress named Sonia, who chews
gum all day and doesn’t even spit it out
for a cigarette. I feel for Sonia and the underarm
her sweaty blouses, his heart-attacks. Sometimes,
I wear Sonia’s scent, like a woman who waits
in a damp parking lot for a truck driver’s lift.
But not today, I will walk home the long way.
You touch my untied hair, hold strands
between your lips. You deserve a nice girl,
in clean clothes, who doesn’t spit
her gum out when she is tired of it, 
a girl who doesn’t share bad dreams
or body odor. 
Christina Foisy’s poetry appears earlier in this volume.


A Speck of Dust

Mendonça, Marlene

VOLUME 30,  NUMBER 1 149
society. Others seem more embry-
onic or speculative: Robin Jarvis 
Brownlie’s comparison of settler 
and indigenous understandings of 
race in Upper Canada and Victo-
ria Freeman’s exploratory essay on 
attitudes towards miscegenation in 
Australia, New Zealand, Canada, 
and the United States, for instance. 
Similarly Kathryn McPherson’s 
chapter may not answer the ques-
tion of how white women actually 
interacted with indigenous people, 
but it effectively analyzes “domestic 
intrusion” narratives—white pioneer 
women’s stories of surprise visits by 
indigenous neighbours. She finds 
these stories follow a particular con-
vention: the visits initially produced 
fear, but the women survived with 
their dignity intact (usually helping 
the stranger), deploying the pioneer 
woman archetype of respectable na-
tion builders (through the civilizing 
power of their domestic realm).
The essays are generally written in 
an accessible style, which makes them 
suitable for upper year undergradu-
ates. Some readers may think the two 
sections of the book might be discor-
dant, but they are kept harmonious 
by their connection to Sylvia Van 
Kirk. While the research essays are 
informative and introduce the type 
of exciting research we can expect to 
see more of in the near future, the 
book’s most unique contribution 
is its self-reflective look at changes 
in the academy and the discipline 
of history, a useful reminder of the 
giants’ shoulders that we historians 
stand on, which is both inspiring 
and humbling.
Jennifer Hayter is a fourth year Ph.D. 
student in history at the University 
of Toronto. Research interests include 
ideologies of race, gender, and the 
family, particularly the cultural and 
intellectual foundations of identity 
regimes. Her dissertation examines 
laws, policies, and everyday state ac-
changes in the academy, in terms of 
equity hiring and the establishment 
of new fields such as gender history. 
Iacovetta credits her successes to her 
approach; she assumed her colleagues 
were reasonable and would make the 
right decision if presented with com-
pelling facts in a respectful manner. 
Van Kirk also helped many students 
battle marginalization through 
her work as a feminist teacher and 
mentor, as Valerie Korinek describes. 
And of course, as detailed by Eliz-
abeth Jameson’s historiographical 
chapter, Van Kirk’s research was 
extremely influential, even outside 
of Canada, in fur trade, western, 
indigenous, and women’s histories. 
Finally, Adele Perry writes that Van 
Kirk can inspire all scholars with 
her skillful interweaving of intimate 
and political histories. Perry argues 
for replacing the impossible goal of 
scholarly objectivity with a “located, 
embodied, and empathetic” history. 
(Incidentally, the chapter by Katrina 
Srigley admirably succeeds in this, 
delivering both a well-researched 
argument about the effects of Bill 
C-31 on indigenous women as well 
as a sense of connection to the women 
she interviews.)
The second part offers a taste of 
the latest research made possible by 
the path-breaking work of historians 
like Van Kirk. The essays are valuable, 
filling gaps in our knowledge or offer-
ing needed corrections to established 
views. Robert Alexander, for example, 
argues historians have been overly 
fixated on “tribal” histories, which 
obscure the multicultural composi-
tion of most bands of the northern 
plains. Some of the essays consist 
of straightforward well-developed 
research, such as Angela Wanhalla’s 
chapter about intermarriage among 
the shore whaling communities in 
Southern New Zealand, and Patricia 
A. McCormack’s portrayal of Fort 
Chipewyan’s “fur trade mode of 
production” and pluralist fur trade 
tivities to reveal how the Canadian 
state understood and categorized the 
Métis in the nineteenth and twentieth 
centuries.
ThrouGh FEMINIST 
EYES: ESSaYS oN 
caNadIaN woMEN’S 
hISTorY
Joan Sangster
Edmonton: Athabasca University 
Press, 2011
reviewed by marlene 
mendonça
Through Feminist Eyes: Essays on 
Canadian Women’s History includes 
an extensive compilation of essays, 
all written by distinguished histori-
an Joan Sangster over a thirty year 
period. These carefully chosen essays 
are used as a gateway to reflect the 
changing concerns and debates that 
have not only shaped feminist his-
toriography in Canada throughout 
the past thirty years, but are also 
a reflection of Sangster’s past work 
and ideas. In addition to a number 
of essays previously published by 
Sangster in the past three decades, 
it also includes some new scholarly 
work published for the first time.
Sangster’s book provides a wealth 
of information on different method-
ological and theoretical approaches 
to the history of Canadian women. 
In her explanatory introduction, 
“Reflections on Thirty Years of 
Women’s History,” which was written 
specifically for this collection, Sang-
ster documents the significant work 
that has been done by prominent 
feminist historians in Canada since 
its emergence to the academic scene 
in the 1960s. In addition, she sheds 
light on new ways of thinking about 
CANADIAN WOMAN STUDIES/LES CAHIERS DE LA FEMME150
feminist scholarship and despite the 
varying subject matter in her essays, 
she seems to be concerned about 
how power relations are sustained 
and experienced. The following 
questions seem to drive her new 
work and the reexamination of her 
past publications:
does our writing effectively 
uncover and understand power 
relations in the past, and if so, 
how and why does it do this? 
In this regard, both gender 
and women’s history can be 
considered ‘feminist’ history 
(or not), depending on their 
commitment to feminist politics 
and perspectives.
Ultimately, Sangster encourages 
us to think of gender and women’s 
history “through feminist eyes” and 
view it as feminist history. 
In each of her chapters, she includes 
a preface examining the ways in which 
the debates and theories have evolved 
since they were published and how 
her own ideologies have shifted over 
time. According to Sangster, new 
research questions are being posed 
that were not thought about before, 
new generations of historians are re-
visiting old problems that were never 
solved and more and more work is 
being published, which in turn, not 
only challenges previous notions of 
women’s history but also sheds new 
light on the previous debates and 
theories used. 
Although she does not aim to pro-
vide “a detailed ‘from then to now’” 
history of feminist scholarship in 
Canada, Sangster argues that
Canadian women’s history does 
have its own peculiarities, shaped 
by distinct patterns of economic 
and social development, by Can-
ada’s own version of colonialism, 
and by in- and out- migration, 
not to mention historians’ 
past preoccupation with the 
nation-state and nationalisms.
Her essays include well-researched 
and documented case studies, which 
demonstrate the ways in which Ca-
nadian women’s history is shaped 
by social, economic and political 
movements. She particularly fo-
cuses on gender, class, politics, and 
colonialism. In Discovering Women’s 
History, a preface to The 1907 Bell 
Telephone Strike, Sangster explains 
how her methodology and political 
stance attempts to understand the 
agency of women who worked in 
factories at the turn of the twentieth 
century. She draws on skillful empir-
ical research and uses such sources as 
government documents, newspapers, 
personal letters, and company files 
to further explore organized labour 
movements. Her other essays, Girls 
in Conflict with the Law and Crimi-
nalizing the Colonized uncovers the 
history of criminality and power 
imbalances in the court towards 
girls and women—both Native and 
non-Native—who were socially 
marginalized. In her final essay in 
this collection, “Making A Fur Coat,” 
Sangster argues that “feminist writing 
on fur as a gendered symbol for the 
nation, or as the feminine ‘skin of the 
body’ reflects the continuing influ-
ence of postmodern preoccupations 
with the discursive, representation, 
and sexual identities.” Instead, she 
takes a path not taken in previous 
feminist scholarship and focuses on 
women’s labour, bush production, 
manufacturing work and retail labour 
of skinning, sewing, and selling fur, all 
by women, in mid-twentieth-century 
Canada. 
This groundbreaking work would 
be of great interest to graduate stu-
dents and academics interested in 
feminist scholarship and women’s 
lived experiences in Canada. Sangster 
does an extraordinary job at situating 
her work within the literature of 
Let me tell you something, kid. 
Love is like a magic carpet with 
a mind of its own. You step on 
that carpet and it takes you plac-
es–marvelous places, odd places, 
terrifying places, places you’d never 
have been able to reach on foot. 
Yeah, love’s a real adventure! But 
you go where the carpet goes; after 
you’ve stepped onto it you don’t 
get to choose a goddamned thing.
Helen Oyeyemi’s novel, Mr. Fox, is a 
complicated matter. Complicated, I 
must add, in an incredibly powerful 
and generative way. The vignettes that 
Oyeyemi unfolds through the lives of 
the foxes are a haunting reminder of 
the dynamics that saturate all kinds 
of relationships (especially those of an 
intimate kind) and of power in its very 
Mr. Fox
Helen Oyeyemi
Toronto: Hamilton Hamish Canada, 
2011
reviewed by kathryn 
travis
women’s history and politics and 
engages with theoretical debates 
in feminist ideologies since its first 
emergence in academia. She goes 
beyond a historical examination 
of gender and women’s history by 
interweaving her own experiences 
and challenges as a feminist academic 
conducting research in the field for 
over thirty years. This text is a vital 
contribution to the scholarship of 
Canadian women’s history. 
Marlene Mendonça is a doctoral stu-
dent in Theatre Studies at York Uni-
versity. Her main research interests 
include: feminist theory, Girl culture 
and Girl Studies, Women in theatre 
and performance in the early twenti-
eth century. 


Through Feminist Eyes: Essays on Canadian Women's History

Lagacé-Roy, Daniel

CANADIAN WOMAN STUDIES/LES CAHIERS DE LA FEMME158
For some, Dorothy Day was a vision-
ary, a feminist, a human and civil 
rights advocate, and even an anar-
chist. For others, she was a humanist, 
a catholic defender, a saint and, above 
all, a special human being. These 
names or labels are describing some 
facets of Dorothy Day’s personality. 
Though none of them fully capture 
the complexity of her extraordinary 
“ways” of being herself.
In reading the third edition of Jim 
Forest’s book, first published in 1986 
by the Paulist Press under the title 
Love is the Measure and republished 
in 1994 by Orbis Books, you have 
no trouble in noticing that these 
different appellations didn’t come 
from Day herself but were attributed 
to her by friends, family, and various 
authorities she dealt with. While it 
is often tempting to label people, 
it is important to recognize that in 
the case of Dorothy Day these labels 
serve, at least to a certain extent, 
as examples to illustrate how she 
expressed herself at various times of 
traveled through challenging paths 
that shaped her own vision of what 
her life should be. The practice of 
becoming a journalist was for her an 
opening door to the discovery of a 
world where poverty, labour disputes, 
low salaries, and much more are cus-
tomary to many people. Her writings 
would turn out to be the medium by 
which she would express her views 
and opinions on various issues. More 
importantly, her writings reveal a 
woman dealing with her own lim-
itations as she experienced intimate 
relationships that didn’t work: she 
became pregnant twice and had to go 
through one abortion; struggled to be 
a single parent; decided to embrace 
Catholicism; founded a newspaper 
called The Catholic Worker, and more. 
Jim Forest’s book is packed with ex-
amples of what she was, became, and 
achieved during her life. But more 
importantly, this book is a testimony 
to a woman before her time. She was 
the type of woman who, in spite of 
what happened to her—being jailed 
a few times is a good example—she 
would not stop believing in and 
advocating for social justice. Is there 
a special label for that? Maybe, just 
being herself!
Dr. Daniel Lagacé-Roy is an associate 
professor at the Royal Military College 
of Canada. He is presently teaching 
in the Military psychology and lead-
ership department. His publications 
are mainly related to military identi-
ty, religion and violence, and military 
ethics.
 
all IS GracE: a 
bIoGraphY oF 
doroThY daY
Jim Forest
Toronto: Novalis and New York: 
Orbis Books, 2010
reviewed by daniel 
lagacé-roy
her life vis-à-vis the changing world 
she was in.
All is Grace is a good introduction 
to the life and work of Dorothy Day. 
The author sketches the usual se-
quence of someone’s life by providing 
an account of important dates and 
the description of defining moments. 
But more importantly, he introduces 
the reader to the essentials of her life 
by identifying their central meaning 
which is a profound calling to help 
others based on the teaching of 
Christ. In other words, the reader is 
invited to closely participate to the 
comprehensive calling (i.e., Christian 
calling) that shapes her entire life.
Jim Forest met Day in 1960 and 
joined The Catholic Worker thereafter. 
His close encounter to her life and 
work gives recognitions to his book 
and makes it more personal. While 
he follows, as mentioned above, the 
typical account found in biogra-
phies, he gave Dorothy the central 
stage by quoting her countless times 
throughout his book. This overload 
of citations is, at times, distracting 
and overwhelming. However, it re-
veals something that is particular to 
this book: it is Dorothy that dictates 
how the book should be presented. 
In a sense, it is Dorothy herself as it 
was when she was alive who sets the 
agenda. No one speaks for her because 
she likes to be in control.
The trajectory of her life could 
be described as someone struggling 
to find her own identity. A vigilant 
reader would notice that Dorothy‘s 
journey contains the tribulations of 
a woman living in today’s society 
although she was born in 1897. Since 
her childhood, she discovered that her 
life had to have a “meaning” different 
than the one assigned to women by 
the society of her time. Very soon, 
her avid love for reading combined 
with her sharp ability to structure her 
ideas around various issues collided 
with her surroundings. It is obvious 
that the search for a “life meaning” 
sides which speak to women’s roles 
as subjects of state policies and as 
influential historical agents of social, 
political, and economic change. 
Weronika Rogula is a Ph.D. student 
in Gender, Feminist and Women’s 
Studies at York University where her 
research focuses on lgbtq struggles 
within Poland.


All is Grace: A Biography of Dorothy Day

Onuora, Adwoa Ntozake

48 CANADIAN WOMAN STUDIES/LES CAHIERS DE LA FEMME
L’auteur nous raconte sa conscientisa-
tion à l’altérité de son statut d’émigrante 
et de la violence systémique inhérente à 
la racialisation et ses conséquences. Elle 
a été marquée comme intellectuellement 
inférieure dans un système d’éducation 
autoritaire. C’est aussi une histoire qui 
témoigne de la résistances des Africaines 
face à une violence discourtoise.
I sit on the floor beside the oversized 
windows with my legs crossed, scan-
ning my trove of high school photo-
graphs. As I gaze out at the expanse of 
blue sky, the deceptive sunlight shines 
through the windows beckoning to 
me. I do not submit. Having lived 
here long enough I know better. Even 
as the sun’s scattered beams caress my 
face and warm my shoulders, I know 
that it is freezing outside. 
I think back to the summer of 
1998, the year I turned 15. It was 
the year I graduated from Wolmers’ 
High School for Girls; the year my 
father received the news that my long 
awaited papers being filed by Mummy 
through Citizenship and Immigra-
tion Canada had been approved; the 
year I said goodbye to my Island home 
and boarded a plane for what was 
to become my new home, Toronto. 
“Killing Me Softly”
adwoa ntozake onuora
Seated on the floor of the apartment 
I saw my first day at Weston Collegiate 
Institute. Mummy and I sat between 
two girls on a row of benches outside 
the guidance counsellor’s office. A 
man, in his late sixties perhaps, face 
blemished by age lines with thin hair 
stretched and pasted across his balding 
forehead, appeared in the hallway. His 
thin, cherry pink lips parted in a smile 
that inched wider and wider across 
his ghostly pale face. He scanned a 
piece of paper attached to a clipboard 
in his hand, and looked out into the 
hallway through brilliant blue eyes 
that glistened through his rounded 
spectacles before calling out in and 
unexpectedly harsh, raspy voice, 
“Watson, you can come in now.” 
As he walked down the hallway in 
front of us, his uneven gait drew my 
attention. He hobbled on one foot 
dragging the other closely behind 
him. He led us into his office, closed 
the door, shook my mother’s hand, 
and introduced himself (Mr. Albanese 
was his name) before sitting in a 
big-armed, dark brown leather chair 
that swallowed his slender frame. 
Except for the mahogany stained desk 
intruding on the space between the 
guidance counselor and us, the office 
had very little furniture. Even still, 
the atmosphere inside the dimly lit 
room weighed heavy. 
Off to one side of the desk in a 
corner stood a vintage coat hanger 
embossed with ornate vines and 
flowers meticulously crafted onto a 
wrought-iron rod. The vines danced 
around the pole eventually spilling 
out into an open claw at the top where 
a felt hat sat comfortably. 
On the opposite side stood a filing 
cabinet that also doubled as a shelf. 
On the shelf sat a lamp whose de-
pressing glow flickered into the small 
space, gradually dying as it landed 
onto the bare off-white walls. I gazed 
at the odd looking large yellow shade 
meticulously painted with pictures 
of horses running in an open field. 
He opened his mouth to speak. His 
words poured with such profusion 
they surged through the yawning gap 
that was his mouth, and spilled over 
his crooked yellow teeth before leap-
ing and landing onto my mother and 
me. As he spoke, the flesh separating 
Mummy’s freshly plucked eyebrows 
furled into ripples. They remained 
unyielding as he continued to speak. 
My mother, now overwhelmed by 
the volley of words—words she 
VOLUME 30, NUMBER 1 49
knew nothing about—offered up 
the only response she could, her still 
furrowed brow. 
I sat quietly, scribbling notes in my 
notepad. Leaning forward on the edge 
of my chair, I glanced at the pile of 
papers he stacked before Mummy.
She looked away surreptitiously. 
Reaching down deep into her large 
patent leather handbag, I could hear 
get used to the system.” 
He stopped talking. I managed to 
squeeze a few words in.
“I don’t want to do basic level 
courses, I can do the advanced ones.”
He sat motionless, staring at me. 
His pale face suddenly looked fever-
ish. I leered back at him defiantly. 
“You speak English very well,” he 
said in an incredulous tone. 
It was still light out when Mummy 
and I left the guidance counsellor’s 
office that day. A faint glow from the 
brilliant reddish orange sun setting, 
pressed against the sky suspended 
itself behind the sprawling brown 
buildings that lined Jane Street and 
Lawrence Avenue West. 
As we hurried down Lawrence 
Avenue West, I thought about find-
her air-brushed acrylic nails claw 
through loose change, compact, 
wallet and a pair of scissors—my 
mother always carried a pair of scissors 
in her purse—before making their 
way to an opening in the side of the 
purse. Her hand surfaced, clutching 
a zip-lock bag filled with report cards 
from my old high school, transcripts, 
immunization cards and immigration 
papers. She placed the bag on the desk 
before him. 
His eyes darted away from the 
package towards Mummy’s face. He 
continued to tell her what courses 
I should enroll in, quickly mulling 
over the difference between basic and 
advanced level courses. Mr. Albanese’s 
words rained on Mummy, trickling 
down like water running off a duck’s 
back. 
“Mrs. Watson,” he said, then 
paused and cleared his throat before 
continuing. “Hmm, hmmm, it is Mrs. 
is it?” Mummy nodded. I looked at 
him with disdain knowing that the 
question he really wanted to ask was, 
“Are you married?” He continued to 
speak. Mummy listened intently try-
ing to digest his words. He continued, 
“I recommend that she take all the 
basic courses to start just so she can 
I wanted to let out a scream of pro-
test. I wanted to respond with, “The 
British colonial lackeys in Jamaican 
schools spent years shoving English 
down my throat from the moment 
I started kindergarten. Of course I 
speak English!” A violent fury welled 
up inside me, emboldening me to 
say in a still petulant voice, “Yes, of 
course I do. And I will do just fine 
taking the advanced level courses.” I 
heard my Jamaican accent weave its 
way through my words, quickly filling 
the small room. 
I shrugged in contemptuous re-
proach lifting the zip-lock bag from 
his desk before handing it back to 
Mummy. His recently spoken words 
rolled around like marbles in my 
head. I sat and stared off into the 
grim distance thinking: a man who 
assumed without knowing anything 
or caring to know anything about 
me, who thought I was intellectually 
inferior, was deciding my future. That 
day, I left the office bereft of hope that 
I would survive in that school. By 
the time I walked through the glass 
doors of his office, down the freshly 
polished corridors of Weston Colle-
giate Institute, the hurt, the sadness, 
the despondency slowly dissipated. 
ing something to eat. My stomach 
growled loudly. Mummy heard. We 
looked at each other and laughed 
out loud. 
Strolling past the Money Mart at 
the corner of Weston Road and Law-
rence Avenue, I saw a car parked off 
to the side of road with a man seated 
inside wearing an orange t-shirt. The 
car pulsated with a hip-hop beat as 
Lauryn Hill belted out “Killing me 
softly with his song, killing me softly 
with his song, telling my whole life 
with his words, killing me softly.” 
The car hurled bass into the streets 
provoking rapid movements from the 
hips of two girls standing by a bench 
at the bus stop. 
We walked on, passing a kaleido-
scope of banks, fast food joints, a 
barbershop, and a store displaying 
an array of colourful hair weaves and 
“African beauty products” all closely 
pressed together until we eventually 
slowed at the entrance of a store where 
a sign suspended on metal rods read 
“Chu’s Convenience and Variety 
store.” A smaller, laminated red and 
white “Come in we’re open” sign on 
the glass door beckoned us. The door 
let out a shrill ding-dong as Mummy 
pushed it open. I followed.
“You speak English very well,” he said in an incredulous tone. I wanted to 
respond with, “The British colonial lackeys in Jamaican schools spent years 
shoving English down my throat from the moment I started kindergarten.” 
A violent fury welled up inside me, emboldening me to say in a still 
petulant voice, “I will do just fine taking the advanced level courses.”
50 CANADIAN WOMAN STUDIES/LES CAHIERS DE LA FEMME
The aroma of freshly baked bread 
bothered my nose. My mouth swelled 
with saliva as we strode toward the 
counter where a short, small-eyed, 
frail, sixtyish-looking woman peeked 
over the cash register smiling. Mum-
my placed her order and slid a toonie 
and a loonie across the glass counter. 
The woman extended her hands, 
punched a few keys on the cash 
register, and deposited the change 
in the drawer before hobbling off, 
disappearing into the back of the 
store. Moments later she reappeared, 
holding two crispy hot-out-of-the-ov-
en Jamaican beef patties sandwiched 
between two cocoa breads—just the 
way we would have it back home. The 
glass door chimed again as we pulled 
it open. We continued in the direction 
toward our apartment building. 
 
Adwoa Ntozake Onuora received her 
Ph.D. at the Ontario Institute for 
Studies in Education at the University 
of Toronto. She has worked in formal 
and informal educational settings 
and has established expertise in com-
munity-situated learning, indigenous 
knowledges, equity, and social change. 
As a facilitator, Adwoa brings to life 
critical equity frameworks, storytelling, 
and narrative. Her research interests 
include diversity in education, cultural 
studies, indigenous knowledges, the 
intersections and impact of gender, sexu-
ality/sexual orientation, race, ethnicity, 
class, abilities, and culture on women’s 
lived experiences.
renee nOrMAn
this is What it All Comes to
gumming cookies
I soften for her in tea
her teeth in a container
on the table
mouth and mind unwilling
the teeth an irony of centrepiece
she is hungry
I cut crusts off egg sandwich
hand her tiny pieces
wonder if it hurts
to chew with gums
she is back to baby
the woman who shakes and shakes
approaches
her babble either foreign or nonsense
I can’t tell
pat-pat-pats me on the back
folds in the tag on my shirt
I feel her longing
solicitude a tribute of sorts
she knows the tenuous
mother-daughter bonds
in a surprising burst of lost language
my mother asks
for a solution
high-vocab-speak for drink
later I rub her back shoulders
arms
the only conversation she truly understands
she tells me
stop picking
I am back to baby
Renee Norman’s poetry appears earlier in this volume.


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