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

Baril, Joan

VOLUME 30, NUMBER 1 137
Une jeune artiste qui a fait carrière comme photographe, 
peintre et poète se prend à faire tapisserie au mariage de sa 
sœur. Trop timide pour danser seule ou avec des copines, elle 
quitte la fête et se rappelle un copain d’université avec lequel 
elle a déjà cohabité parce que toutes les filles le faisaient.
The band starts and the bride and groom swing on to the 
floor. Colleen is sitting beside her Aunt Joyce at the family 
table, her hands clutched tightly under her evening bag. 
She’d rather be anywhere else, anywhere in the world, but 
you can’t skip out on your sister’s wedding. 
Or can you?
At the head table, the best man bows out the maid of 
honour. The ushers, fulfilling their roles, partner the other 
bridesmaids. The six young women wear sleeveless green 
silk with trailing white ribbons. A swirling forest waltzes 
to, “You Light up My Life.” The blond bride, green piping 
on white satin, glows in the centre.
Typical Dorion staging, thinks Colleen. Her sister’s vo-
luminous 1980s gown matches her passion for retro music.
She sees Sam Fellows, the groom’s cousin, walk over to 
the far wall where her brother Guy is talking to three or 
four other men. They’re colonizing a wall, she thinks, just 
like high school. A black and white male phalanx stands 
in front of the bar, facing the dancers. She knows most 
of them, went to school with many of them, is related to 
a few, but she knows none of them will ask her to dance. 
They never do. 
Her mother and her new stepfather stand up for 
“Chantilly Lace.” 
“Your flowers are wonderful, Colleen,” her mother says. 
“Unbelievable.” Her stepfather, Max, nods in agreement. 
The Wall Flower
joan baril
They jive into the crowd.
Aunt Joyce speaks in her ear. “The way you got itty-bitty 
rose buds twining around the cake. Magic! What’s the 
variety?” 
“A miniature,” Colleen tells her. “A polyanthus called 
“The Fairy.” Very floriferous,” 
“Just a minute. I’m going to write that down.” Aunt 
Joyce scrambles in her evening bag for a miniature note 
book and pen. But before she can open the tiny book, 
Mr. Fellows, the groom’s father, approaches. He holds 
out his hand to Aunt Joyce who pulls herself up, flushing 
with pleasure. Even when you’re seventy-five, it seems, 
you still love to dance. 
She’s now alone at the table. The floor is crowded, 
mainly with married couples. A waiter comes by with 
champagne and she takes a glass for something to do. 
As she watches the dancers, tapping her toe to “Pretty 
Woman,” she keeps her eyes away from the groom who 
seems to be dancing with each bridesmaid in turn. Alex 
Fellows. Too good looking. Too nice. Ah, she thinks, lucky 
Dorion. Lucky Dorion.
She stands. The familiar feeling of failure engulfs her and 
she has to get out. Like wallflowers everywhere, she’ll go 
to the restroom. Her Uncle Leon waves her over, takes her 
hand and praises her table arrangements: posies of sweet 
William and baby’s breath. If he were not crippled with 
arthritis, she thinks, she’d ask him to dance. 
In the corridor, she stops. Other unattached women 
will have collected in the restroom by now, putting on 
makeup, chatting and wasting time before going back to 
dance with each other. As the evening progresses, they will 
start on the shooters and some will get drunk. 
138 CANADIAN WOMAN STUDIES/LES CAHIERS DE LA FEMME
The coat room is on Colleen’s right. Her shawl’s in there 
and also her cloth bag with her secateurs, her packets of 
flower preservative and the low-heeled pumps she wore 
when she came an hour early for a final flower tweak. She 
goes in, slips the high-heeled torturers off and the pumps 
on. Flinging the shawl around her shoulders, she heads 
for the front door but stops again. The smokers will be 
clustered outside. She slips to the far end of the hall into 
the kitchen. Here, before the reception started, she soaked 
the bouquets, snipped and clipped, tweezed and wired. 
She crosses the shadowy space to take the emergency exit.
Outside, at the back of the building, a single bulb lights 
the parking lot and the dumpster by the brick wall. The 
music thumps through. “Mama Mia.” She weaves among 
the cars to the sidewalk. She’s now an escapee. But not for 
long. If she stays away more than thirty minutes, her family 
will notice, start asking everyone, whispering with each 
other. “Have you seen, Colleen?” She cringes to think of it.
The last of a July sun splotches the asphalt, its warmth 
lifting out the pavement smells, the garden smells from 
behind hedges and fences, the food smells from narrow 
houses just putting on their evening lights. A faint breeze 
waltzes by moving her silk skirt around her ankles. In 
the vanishing light, her dress glows a peachy apricot, her 
favourite colour, the shade of certain martagon lilies. She 
slip-steps, swinging her body, making the silk glimmer. 
Each front yard holds a puddle of shadow and some sort 
of flowers. Happily alone now, light footed, she dances 
along the sidewalk, mouthing, “Ob La Di, Ob La Da, 
Life Goes On,” glimpsing shasta daisies, a row of cosmos, 
bleeding heart, a dark line of monk’s hood.
It’s ridiculous to be so sensitive at thirty years of age. 
It’s ridiculous to be ashamed of being a wall flower. To be 
defined by male approval. She’d always been a wall flower, 
even in high school. Why can’t she just sit, tap the toe, 
enjoy the music? Why not dance with her girlfriends; 
why wait for a male? 
She turns at Gratton Street, slows to walk up the hill. 
The street where she was born. The old narrow insul-brick 
house hides behind a long glass veranda. According to her 
mother, in 1978, a gang of hippies lived next door coming 
and going at all hours and playing the Moody Blues half 
its path, no matter how the world temps you otherwise. 
Colleen’s father died when her sister Dorion was four, 
her brother Guy a baby. She was six, old enough to have 
vague memories of his tobacco smell, his prickly unshaven 
face. When he came home from the bush, he let her rub 
his whiskers before he shaved them off. But she has no 
memory of the day his prospecting buddy arrived on the 
porch and her mother fell screaming at the man’s feet. 
Yet she was present, she’d been told later by Aunt Joyce. 
Luckily, her guardian angel also incised the funeral from 
her brain, leaving behind some blurry shadows, a few 
faces and voices, the smell of the carnations, the texture 
of their leaves.
Now, when her relatives mention her father, they al-
ways say the same thing: he missed the big news. But she 
remembers it very well. January 9, 1995, a sloppy day of 
winter thaw. She was seventeen and in Grade Thirteen. 
After school, she sprinted home because a split along the 
sole of her Wal-Mart boots was sucking in water and she 
wanted to get to home before her toes froze. She’d not told 
her mother about the leaking boot. She dreaded the look 
on her mother’s face, the brief sweep of despair before the 
smiling gloss took over. “Don’t worry, Darling One, we’ll 
manage somehow.” The lilt in the words always made her 
wince inwardly.  
She rushed up to the bedroom to change her soaking 
socks. Dorion sat at the tiny dressing table painting her 
nails black to match her heavy black eye liner, her black 
spiked hair, her black clothes and black lipstick all con-
trasting with the multiple studs winking in her nose, ears, 
and eyebrows. 
A shout from downstairs. “Colleen!” Her mother home 
the night. They must have been the last hippies in Thunder 
Bay, she thinks. What would it be like to live with a large 
group of friends, people filling the house with talk, the 
music always on? No shortage of dance partners there. 
Shared dinners, she thinks, and lots of laughter. She stares 
at the former hippie house, a brick three storey, now dark 
with blinds drawn. The truth stares back. If she’d lived 
there, she’d have been miserable. 
Genes, dna, one’s early life, whatever. One’s fate. It 
designs your inner being, sends you out and you follow 
It’s ridiculous to be so sensitive at thirty years of age. It’s ridiculous 
to be ashamed of being a wall flower. To be defined by male approval. 
She’d always been a wall flower, even in high school. Why can’t she 
just sit, tap the toe, enjoy the music? Why not dance with 
her girlfriends; why wait for a male? 
VOLUME 30, NUMBER 1 139
so early? “Dorion, come down now! Guy where are you?” 
She heard the basement door open as her mother shouted 
down the backstairs to her brother’s bedroom.
They gathered at the kitchen counter in shock. Steaks? 
Their mother had brought home two large T-bones for 
dinner and was now cutting them to fit the two battered 
fry pans. The steaks were marbled with veins of pale yellow 
fat and had a distinctive smell, sweeter than hamburger 
or stew meat.
“Where did you get them?” Colleen whispered.
“Maltese’s Meats,” her mother said gaily. “Steak is noth-
ing. Get ready for the news, kiddos. The family train has 
jumped its rusty track and we’re sailing the super highway.” 
She circled the knife above her head, doing a little jig. In 
the other hand, she held an inch-thick slab which she 
dropped into the smoking grease. “I’m quitting my job 
at the radio station at the end of the month.” 
Colleen tried to speak, but couldn’t. Her mother had 
worked in the office of ckyy as long as she could remember. 
A big squeeze of worry pressed her stomach.
“I’ve signed up for an evening real estate course.” Her 
mother was pulling out several containers of salad from 
a grocery bag, ignoring the looks exchanged among her 
children. “You kids probably don’t remember but Dad 
left me his mining claim in Gracie Township. You can’t 
get there, except by bush plane. But today, I learned the 
province is building a road to a palladium mine the next 
township north. I saw the map. Hot news at the station. 
The road will swing right by our lakes and I’m going to 
divide the land into cottage lots and sell them all—rocks, 
trees, beach, swamp, the bleeding lot.” She set a slab of 
brownies and a cheese cake in the middle of the table. 
“The market’s on fire. Everyone wants a summer cottage 
and now they’ll get one. A dream cottage less than ten 
miles from the city.”
“You’re going to sell my lake?” Colleen’s sister wailed. 
Dorion Lake was the largest of the four with islands and 
long beaches. Her lake, Colleen Lake, sported a marsh at 
one end, or so she’d been told by Uncle Leon. She was 
sure the swamp would be rife with wild orchids. She’d 
dreamed of flying in one day after she started working 
and made some money. She’d camp there, canoe the lake 
and catalogue the plants. Guy Lake was rocky with a 
spectacular cliff gracing the far end. The lakes created a 
rough necklace of three, with her mother’s lake, Kate Lake, 
behind the others. “The most beautiful,” her late father 
supposedly had said, “and so I named it after my wife.”
“It’s not your lake, Dorion, dear,” her mother said. “The 
lakes are mine. But, I’m going to set up trusts for you kids, 
splitting the money into four parts. After supper, I want 
each of you to write me a list of the five things you need 
right away. I went to the Royal Bank this afternoon and 
asked for a ten-thousand dollar loan.” Colleen gasped at 
the others who both gasp back at her like beached whales. 
“With those lakes as collateral,” her mother went on, “it’s 
a snap to be approved. I’ll probably get the money tomor-
row.” She threw some cutlery in a heap in the centre of the 
table. “Nosh on, you lucky rich kids,” she said.
Colleen ate the steak and wrote her list at the same 
time. She could not touch the salad or dessert. She didn’t 
want to think about the bank loan or her mom leaving 
her job. She wrote:
1. Don’t sell the marsh on my lake. There might be 
orchids.
2. Snow boots 
3. A winter jacket 
4. A subscription to “Fine Gardening.” 
5. A dress for the Valentine’s dance. 
She had an idea if she had the right clothes, then, for 
once, she’d enjoy the dance. A hard lesson. The dress did 
not deliver.
Dorion tore up several lists. A week later she handed 
hers in.
An Aljean kilt in Hunting Fraser tartan and short black 
velvet jacket.
Abercrombie and Fitch clothes 
A cashmere pant suit—Ralph Lauren with Coach bag 
and shoes to match.
Hairdresser’s for a cut and colour—white blond
Tommy Hilfinger casuals with leather boots.
At fifteen years of age, Dorion morphed overnight from 
a Goth to a Preppie.
Twelve-year-old Guy had trouble with his list. It con-
tained two items.
Downhill skis.
Save so I can go to medical school.
Now, Doctor Guy Gathercole is off to Kosovo with the 
Red Cross at the end of the month. Before her wedding, 
Dorion moved her boutique to the Internet. And Colleen 
has a garden, a ten-acre paradise on land she bought from 
Uncle Leon. She designed a small house jewelled with 
windows. She makes her living as a hybrid: one who can 
photograph, paint, sketch and write about flowers. Slowly, 
she too is morphing. She’s becoming an expert, seen in 
magazines and on tv. She’s in demand. 
But not at a dance. 
Once, a year ago, when Dorion dropped by to get flow-
ers for her shop, she’d asked why. Her sister grimaced in 
embarrassment. “Guys are like weeds; they’re everywhere,” 
she said. “You’re not half bad looking, Colleen. Someone 
will drift by one of these days. But your problem is you’re 
too insular. You like things the way they are.”
140 CANADIAN WOMAN STUDIES/LES CAHIERS DE LA FEMME
Colleen almost said, “I don’t want to be insular. I want 
to be loved. I want to love. I want to get married and 
have children, like normal people. Like you.” But she felt 
her throat seize up. Each sentence seemed shadowed as if 
a parade of perverse imps lurked behind them, refuting 
them. She’d bent to clip fulva lilies and false spirea, filling 
two silver bowls, her hands shaking in confusion.
Now, she walks back down the Gratton Street hill to 
still more music from Mama Mia. “Waterloo.” She can 
hear people singing along. She had a few boyfriends in 
university. She lived with Bruce Bonnycastle her entire 
final year. He was a great dancer but he was too big for 
the little apartment. He was always there: talking to her, 
including her, making plans, asking her opinion, trying 
to make her come up for air, to be present. She could not 
think, she could not read, she could not sketch or dream or 
design in her head. Her brain closed down. For two weeks 
that spring, she twisted in shame until she understood the 
extent of the waste, the travesty of the relationship. She was 
living with him because that’s what women did. Women 
had boyfriends. They moved in with the guy. They were 
together forever. The thought gave her the horrors and so 
did the shame at her dishonesty to herself but especially 
her dishonesty to him. 
She broke the news to him after the graduation dance.
Back inside, she slips on her heels, repairs her hair and 
lipstick. The dance floor is crowded. The single women 
are jiving up a storm. “Take a Chance on Me,” bellow the 
guests. The same men stand and watch. Why don’t they 
dance with each other, she thinks, get out on the floor 
and have some fun? It’s ludicrous, pitiful, laughable. Just 
as idiotic as she is. She walks over to her brother Guy on 
his wall.
“I’d like to dance with you before you go away,” she 
says ignoring his surprise. “Will you do me the favour?” 
They float out to “Unchained Melody.” Guy dances like 
he skies or plays hockey, with such grace he makes it look 
easy. Her apricot silk flares around her legs. Her feet in 
the expensive heels move like delicate leaves caught by the 
wind. The single women don’t dance to the slow music. 
Chatting and laughing, they head for the tables or the bar. 
The bride and groom are nowhere around. She hopes she’s 
missed the bouquet toss. 
“I caught the garter,” Guy says in her ear. “I’m taking 
it to Kosovo.” 
“I’ll miss you,” she says. “I hope the garter brings you 
a wonderful wife.” He laughs. The band segues, speeds 
into “Dancing Queen.” Her mother waves during a com-
plicated step. Colleen decides that later she’ll ask her new 
step-father for a dance.
“Do you want a drink?” Guy says.
“No, I’m going to dance with Posie and the other gals. 
Then I’ll come over and join you at your wall.” 
Later, at home in bed, watching the moon top up the 
garden, she remembers she almost said, with the other 
wallflowers. She’s glad she didn’t say it. Her body still feels 
energized but her mind is melting into sleep, forsaking 
her thoughts about men, about women, about herself. 
She thinks about her brother off to Kosovo, the bride’s 
garter tucked into his bag. And she has a new brother-
in-law, the handsome Alex. But he’s more than a single 
person, she realizes. Alex’s entire family is now linked to 
hers, tendrils emerging and merging , just as, a few years 
ago, the numerous kin of her new step-father were slowly 
grafted on. 
Sprawling vines of connections.
She turns over into a happy thought. Her Aunt Joyce 
is coming to tea tomorrow. She’ll pick a special bouquet 
for the tea table. 
The dark yellow lilies called Fata Morgana are just 
moving into bloom. 
Joan Baril lives in Thunder Bay, Ontario.
A. MARY MURPHY
words keep bursting out of books
words keep bursting out of books
birds startled into flight
butterflies clouding home from winter
keep the lids of all these books
closed to stop the words from getting out
like all flighted things they know secrets
the elaborate choreography of journey
they settle with their tissue-paper wings
their talons in my heart
A. Mary Murphy’s poetry appears earlier in 
this volume.


The Wallflower

Norman, Renee

14 CANADIAN WOMAN STUDIES/LES CAHIERS DE LA FEMME
revolution will highjack the ordinary life of a nation, 
generation after generation.”
Lily Pourzand was born and raised in Iran. She migrated to 
Canada in 1999 and obtained her Women’s Studies degree 
from York University in 2006, and then her ll.m. with a 
special focus on Gender Equality and Law from Osgoode Hall 
Law School in 2010. She works as a Women’s Individual and 
Transitional Support Counsellor at the Women’s Centre of 
York Region. She has lived in Toronto since 2000.
more cheerful colours would cover a woman’s body just 
as well! When the report was published, I was called to 
the university’s Moral Committee and received a written 
warning that I would be suspended if I continued my 
activity. They spied on my personal life and entered into 
the most private spheres of my life. I was used as a tool 
to put more pressure on my parents so as to stop their 
work. To me, the guards’ invasion of my private life was 
like physical and emotional rape. That very day, I made 
up my mind to leave my country as soon as I could. From 
that moment on, I was no longer the silent observer, but 
rather a silenced but angry rebel. 
I left my homeland just two months after my graduation 
in November of 1999. I came to Canada with a visitor visa 
and two thousand dollars in my pocket. I landed in my new 
home, Canada, where I had no friends or acquaintances 
or any plans in my head except that I would not go back 
to my homeland until I secured a life in a democratic 
country where my private life did not become a tool in 
some political game. I survived the hardships of living as 
a young non-status woman and was used as cheap labor 
for many months. Meanwhile, my mother was arrested 
six months after my departure due to her women’s rights 
activities. While in prison, she developed an aggressive 
breast cancer. Overnight, while I had no roof over my 
head or life security in Canada, I became the voice of 
advocacy for her abroad. Finally, with the help of inter-
national pressure, my mother was permitted to leave Iran 
in September 2001 in order to receive better treatments 
in the United States. She has been living there in exile 
ever since. Soon after her departure, in November 2001, 
my 70-year-old father was kidnapped by the secret police 
and kept in secret and undisclosed prisons for months. He 
was tortured and forced to confess to crimes he had never 
committed. Later on, in spring of 2002, he appeared on 
the Iranian state television. He had lost over 40 kilograms 
and we barely recognized him. On the television, he con-
fessed to whatever his interrogators had wanted him to. 
We never saw him again as he was not allowed to leave 
the country and we were not allowed to go back for safety 
reasons. Finally, in April 2011, he ended his life at the age 
of 80 by throwing himself off the sixth-floor balcony of 
his apartment in Tehran where he was under house arrest. 
I, Lily, a “daughter of the revolution,” lived and will be 
living the life my grandmother predicted for me 35 years 
ago. I survived a revolution, a war, political violence in 
public and private and a very difficult migration. I lived an 
extraordinary life just like thousands and millions of other 
children who lived and grew up amidst revolution, war 
or political conflicts around the world. Many of them do 
not have the ability to tell us about their lives and survival.
I will always remember my grandmother’s words: “A 
Renee noRman
Dreaming Grandchildren
I look at those sweet faces
your granddaughters
a photo
I know how fortunate they are
your devotion lit
by the ways you support women
you shine more than a camera lens
on feminisms
and I remember my daughters
vibrant toddlers
joy and chaos
different now of course
still flashes of opalescent colors
some temporary darkness
I am dreaming my own grandchildren
into focus
hazy visions
small dear ghosts
in the space between
note to daughters: no pressure, understood?
I have dresses, little ponies, flaming room
in my mother’s heart
ah, granddaughters!
gender is not an issue
I promise
my two miscarried babies
taught me patience
how to release plans
like so much gossamer
some day I will show photos too
Renee Norman’s poetry appears earlier in this volume.


English

Dreaming Grandchildren

Patriarca, Gianna

78 CANADIAN WOMAN STUDIES/LES CAHIERS DE LA FEMME
put on the linen pants
sans  the girdle
a new top from the
big lady store
it teases
with a hint of cleavage 
puffed up the hair
slipped on the purple sandals
going shopping today
i will buy you a treat
you deserve it
must get that Extract of Eden
creamy rich
lightly scented
promises to make you look
like Eve
you’re wondering what
Eve looked like
Raphael knew
or was it Caravaggio
no double chin on Eve
no tributary lines on the largest 
organ
did you know skin is an organ?
perhaps Eve had moles
impossible
tags maybe
something to do with 
menopause
or too much calcium
is there calcium in paradise?
GIANNA PATRIARCA
Big Woman Blues
the porous rock thing
will smooth your heels
it comes from the ocean
healing
something about salt
the esthetician  said
you  have lovely skin
you look much younger
than your years
don’t know how she knew 
your years
soap and water
has served you well
time out for coffee
a poem or two
you and Eliot  counting spoons
while women come
and women go
all very slowly
on this Tuesday
afternoon
TARA KAINER
This Yearning
The way you look
at me I can tell
you think I haven’t
noticed. Doesn’t care
Lets herself go
Given up
Those thoughts
flit across your face
like shadows
on stagnant water.
Not Life, I want
to say, Men,
but our relationship
isn’t so intimate as that.
Anyway,
it’s the inexorable struggle
against the role: you know,
2000 years of false images?
But I can tell
by your
gaze
you fancy yourself
a better judge
of what woman is.
This yearning you sense
in my body, this desire,
you read it all wrong:
I long to walk off the stage,
it says, For once
let me be.
Tara Kainer has published poetry in 
literary journals and anthologies, as 
well as essays, articles, interviews and 
book reviews in newspapers, journals, 
and magazines. She lives and works 
in Kingston, Ontario. This poem 
appeared in her poetry collection, 
When I Think on Your Lives 
(Hidden Book Press, 2011). Reprinted 
with permission of the author.Gianna Patriarca’s  prose and poetry appears earlier in this volume.


Big Woman Blues

Ivanov, Sanja

VOLUME 30,  NUMBER 1 153
for counseling although we’re never 
quite clear what exactly it is that she’s 
troubled about. Through it all, Janey 
continues to go through the motions 
of parenting, teaching, interacting 
with colleagues, entertaining in-laws, 
and her relationship with Hector. 
Somehow, the whole episode of 
Janey’s depression and her turning to 
spirituality for comfort does not ring 
true to the character. One cannot help 
but feel that a different type of answer 
other than a spiritual one may have 
been truer to the character and the 
general theme of the novel. 
Sorensen does, however, an excel-
lent satire of the academic life, from 
portraits of Janey’s colleagues and 
the relationships among them, to 
meaningless meetings, and research 
projects and conferences with obscure 
and nonsensical titles. This culmi-
nates with a scene in which Janey has 
too much to drink at a conference on 
decadence and lets fly all the “witty 
little quips” that pop into her head. 
The large harmonium in the title 
is an organ that is “gathering dust in 
a Music Department practice room 
on the top floor of the university 
building.” The instrument in ques-
tion becomes the object of numerous 
jokes and even a plot to hijack the 
decadence conference.
Nevertheless, for Janey the phrase 
‘a large harmonium’ symbolizes the 
harmony of her domestic life:
It sounds like harmony and then 
some, harmony with all the stops 
pulled out. Hector has played 
the harmonium for me. It is a 
ridiculous instrument but makes 
a fabulous noise.
Secondary characters in the novel 
are less developed. The best delin-
eated ones are Jam and Blanche 
Grimm. Jam, short for James, has 
been Hector’s best friend since they 
were fourteen.
Jam plays the French horn and 
wanders around Canada, play-
ing with various quartets and 
doing workshops in schools. He 
has no ambition to own a house 
or have a steady job, and boasts 
that he has slept with women 
from all ten provinces.
When Jam falls for Blanche 
Grimm, a new lecturer in Janey’s 
English Department, and then they 
break up, Janey ends up playing the 
mediator between the two. 
This is overall a lighthearted, witty, 
and funny debut novel, a Bridget 
Jones’ Diary set up in the academic 
world. I look forward to her next 
novel. 
Oana Secrieru is an Assistant Profes-
sor of Economics at the Royal Mili-
tary College in Kingston, Ontario. 
She is an avid reader and, when she 
is not working, enjoys spending her 
time with her husband and their two 
daughters.
In her book, The New African Diaspo-
ra in Vancouver: Migration, Exclusion, 
and Belonging, Gillian Creese offers 
the first study to explore the relatively 
small population of Black sub-Sa-
haran Africans living in the Greater 
Vancouver area, comprising some 
one percent of the of the population. 
Creese provides the first substantial 
academic study of their immigrant ex-
ThE NEw aFrIcaN 
dIaSpora IN 
VaNcouVEr: 
MIGraTIoN, 
ExcluSIoN, aNd 
bEloNGING 
Gillian Creese
Toronto: University of Toronto 
Press, 2011
reviewed by sanja ivanov
perience. At the centre of her analysis 
are testimonies of sixty-one partici-
pants, both female and male, from 
twenty-one countries in Africa, who 
struggle to integrate into Canadian 
society. Two researchers—African 
im-migrants themselves—have col-
laborated with Creese on this project, 
with a goal to reinforce impartiality 
of the interviews. 
Creese’s case studies show that 
despite their desire for inclusion, 
immigrants are often racialized and 
perceived as the inferior “other” to 
the white Canadians. The author 
focuses on language issues of par-
ticipants from Commonwealth and 
non-Commonwealth countries and 
utilizes Pierre Bourdieu’s claims 
about erasure of linguistic capital 
of the immigrants, which shows the 
inextricable link between linguistic 
competence and power. Her study 
reveals that “African accent” func-
tions as a factor for the exclusion of 
immigrants, with female participants 
experiencing stronger alienation in 
terms of language. Moreover, the 
educational credentials of African 
immigrants are often not recognized, 
which results in a downward mobility 
on the Canadian labour market and 
leads them to feel betrayed by the 
Canadian promise of multicultural-
ism and equality. However, according 
to Creese’s results, this situation is 
improving for women, as they, unable 
to find any job, choose to take up 
post-secondary education in Canada, 
which often enables them to obtain 
better positions than the men. More-
over, once they obtain employment, 
the interviewees of both genders recall 
instances of marginalization, which 
further prevent them from complete 
integration. 
In addition to the issues of be-
longing in relation to language and 
employment, the following chapters 
address the adjustments a family 
must undergo to feel like a part of 
the Vancouver society. As Creese 
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 


The New African Diaspora in Vancouver: Migration, Exclusion and Belonging

Kaye, Nina

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.
VOLUME 30,  NUMBER 1 157
derful resource that greatly furthers 
an understanding of Canada during 
the Depression. The book is suc-
cessful in shifting the perspective of 
scholarly research, changing the focus 
from unemployed men to employed 
young women. It offers a detailed 
survey of the experiences of young 
working women in Toronto during 
the Depression, and is invaluable in 
providing a new perspective. Nev-
ertheless, as a survey, Breadwinning 
Daughters can only begin to address 
the sweeping issues it introduces. As 
such, Srigley’s work invites further 
scholarship into the experience of 
working women in Canada from 
1929–1939. It is certain, though, 
that her book will be instrumental 
to that research. 
Nina Kaye is a student and theatre 
artist born and raised in Toronto. She 
is an award-winning playwright, a 
published poet, and the Artistic Dir-
ector of Unspoken Theatre Company. 
Nina holds an Honours B.A. in Eng-
lish and is currently completing her 
Masters in Drama at the University 
of Toronto.
Malgorzata Fidelis provides a signif-
icant and comprehensive research 
study that questions conventional 
historical accounts of women and 
communism within the Europe-
an context. By centering gender 
and women’s experiences, Fidelis 
challenges several notions within 
the scholarly literature including 
the perceived natural opposition 
between, and incompatibility of, 
a production-oriented regime and 
family-oriented women; the notion 
of the “double burden” of labour 
within and outside the home as a 
social phenomenon specific to the 
lived experiences of women under 
communist rule, and a reading of 
stalinism as irrevocably detrimental 
to women’s issues and struggles. Her 
work provides an important and new 
contribution to the study of commu-
nism and women’s politico-social and 
familial roles within postwar Poland.
Through an extensive historical 
and comparative analysis that exam-
ines three industrial centers in Poland 
with divergent histories, Żyrardów 
and its textile factories, Zambrów 
and its cotton factories, and Katowice 
and its coal mines, Fidelis traces the 
ways in which the postwar Polish 
state conceptualized and reconfigured 
sexual difference and equal rights 
based upon this difference in order to 
address social and political pressures, 
local cultures, and a sense of Polish 
nationhood resistant to stalinism as 
well as the economic demands of 
industrialization and later liberaliza-
tion and reform. Fidelis uses archival 
documents including previously 
undisclosed party and secret police 
records, ordinary citizen’s letters to 
the press and popular magazines as 
well as oral interviews in order to 
account for the ways in which wom-
en, who in identifying as producers, 
mothers, and consumers, utilized 
essentialist difference between the 
sexes and gender stereotyping to 
their advantage in order to advance 
and gain rights within the context 
of industrial labour. Fidelis argues 
that women’s perceived inferiority 
within society provided them with 
the space to build a strong resistance 
movement. She states that “[w]hen 
politically ‘backward’ women op-
posed socialist policies, they did so 
not as ‘enemies’ of the system, to be 
punished, but as babas, the ‘unen-
lightened’ female members of society, 
to be instructed and corrected.” Their 
“perceived backwardness” allowed 
them to mobilize around their rights 
as workers and as women as well 
as organize and orchestrate strikes 
with fewer consequences (than men) 
during the repressive stalinist era. 
This book provides an alternative 
perspective on communism by re-
counting the stories of women spin-
ning and weaving in cotton factories; 
operating heavy-machinery in the 
underground coal mines; struggling 
on the shop floors and holding strike 
meetings within the privacy offered 
by women’s washrooms; attending 
Party meetings; escaping the confines 
of village life; raising the next gener-
ation of workers and managing the 
household; struggling to gain access 
to abortion; and eventually fighting 
to remain within male-dominated 
production work that once regarded 
them as labour heroines. This detailed 
and well-documented account of 
postwar Polish realities is integral 
to the scholarly literature regarding 
women and communism as it affords 
women agency, an aspect which is too 
often discounted within convention-
al historical accounts, and explores 
the possibilities and boundaries of 
women’s struggles. 
In unearthing the lived experiences 
of women within the context of 
postwar reconstruction and socialist 
state building within Poland, Fidelis 
provides a rich and nuanced account 
of the ways in which gender was taken 
up by state and society who shifted 
its meaning depending on social and 
politico-economic needs of the time. 
Fidelis’ book, Women, Communism, 
and Industrialization in Postwar 
Poland, provides us with the other 
side of communist regimes within 
the European context, the human 
woMEN, 
coMMuNISM aNd 
INduSTrIalIZaTIoN 
IN poSTwar polaNd
Malgorzata Fidelis 
Cambridge: Cambridge University 
Press, 2010
reviewed by weronika 
rogula


Breadwinning Daughters: Young Working Women in a Depression-Era City, 1929-1939

Lipszyc, Carol

The Singers of Grodzka Street

Tyrell, Janet

108 CANADIAN WOMAN STUDIES/LES CAHIERS DE LA FEMME
L’auteure nous raconte les joies de son enfance le Vendredi Saint 
dans les Caraibes quand elle faisait voler les cerfs-volants selon 
la tradition de cette journée très spéciale. Ses frères l’avaient 
aidée à fabriquer le sien qu’elle faisait voler elle-même, tout 
excitée d’être la seule fille à le faire. 
I was born on the island of Nevis, West Indies, in the 
north-easterly chain of islands known as the Leewards. I 
was the last of six children, born prematurely, and weighed 
three and a half pounds at birth. I am told that I resembled 
a little doll and that everyone was fascinated with me. I 
guess that is why I was pampered and spoiled by my older 
siblings but most of all by my three older brothers, who, 
after pulling and tugging at me and making me walk at 
the age of seven months, saw nothing wrong in constantly 
“stealing” me out of the house to accompany them on little 
errands (and sometimes not so little ones). And so they 
turned me into a regular tomboy. I could climb nearly all 
the fruit trees around to gather English plums, mangoes, 
genips, and soursops. I never really mastered the art of 
climbing a coconut palm tree except for a miniature one 
that I managed to climb only once. I knew how to bait a 
mongoose trap and to check it to see if it had caught any 
mongoose. These animals were introduced into Nevis at 
the turn of the century to kill all the poisonous snakes and 
turned to killing chickens after they had eradicated the 
snakes. The government was at the time paying a bounty on 
mongoose under a pest control program and my brothers 
threw themselves wholeheartedly into catching mongoose 
as a lucrative pastime. 
Good Friday was one of my favorite days in the Anglican 
Church calendar. I loved the tradition and mystery asso-
It Happened on Good Friday
janet tyrell
ciated with this holy day when Christ died on the cross. 
I loved the cassava bread that Mom made only on Good 
Friday as we were not allowed to eat leavened bread. And 
so, just as I always had to wait a long time for Christmas 
or my birthday to arrive, I had to wait in anticipation of 
the tasty bread for a whole year. I now realize that the 
operation was so labour intensive that she couldn’t afford 
to do this more often.
My mother would rise early on Good Friday, peel, wash 
and grate the cassava, sans food processor, squeezing the 
pulp through a clean towel until almost all of the bitter 
juice had been squeezed out. She would sift the meal, mix 
it with a few pinches of salt and let it dry in the air for 
about 15 minutes. Then she would put a “dish” (our local 
skillet) on the fire to heat and on it she placed a small, 
round, metal hoop reserved for shaping the bread. Into 
the hoop went one thin layer of cassava meal, followed 
by a layer of freshly grated coconut mixed with sugar, 
and topped off by another layer of cassava. When one 
side was brown, she removed the hoop and turned the 
bread over to brown the other side. On completion, they 
resembled a stack of pancakes and were put out in the 
sun to dry in a large wooden tray. They would be ready 
for us to eat when we returned from the Good Friday 
morning service. I also loved the Good Friday dinner of 
salted codfish or mackerel soaked overnight, stewed and 
served with dumplings and vegetables.
Mysterious “things” were supposed to happen at midday. 
If you dribbled the white of a freshly laid egg in a glass of 
water left in the sun to heat, you would be able to predict 
your future from the shape it formed in the water. A cof-
fin would indicate a death of a family member or a close 
VOLUME 30, NUMBER 1 109
friend, a church would indicate an imminent wedding 
and a ship would mean that travel was in the immediate 
future. It was all open to interpretation and people had 
fantastic interpretations for the shapes they had seen in the 
water. If you found a piece of coal at the root of a thistle 
plant and put it in your purse you would become rich. If 
you cut a pigeon pea tree it would bleed. I never tired of 
a story that Mom always related to us—the story about 
a mysterious stranger who had entered the Basseterre, St. 
Kitts Sugar Factory one Good Friday, at midday, long 
a plane and dominating the scene. It would be the only 
aeroplane kite in the village for my brother, Gilbert, was 
the only one around who had perfected the art of making 
them. What was even more exciting, I would be the only 
girl with her own kite.
About two weeks before Good Friday, Gilbert went off 
to collect enough sugar cane arrow bones—the stalks that 
bore the sugar cane flowers. The arrow bones would make 
a light fuselage and the aeroplane would be easy to launch. 
Next he shaved some leaves off a few green coconut palm 
fronds down to the midrib. These were locally referred 
to as “coconut pointers” and were flexible enough to be 
bent into forming the wing tips and the tail. He laid the 
frame out on the verandah in the shape of an aeroplane 
and our family members and friends automatically knew 
that kite-making was in progress and that the verandah 
was out of bounds. For the next week and a half, while 
Gilbert worked on the kite, I talked constantly about its 
progress to anyone who would listen—my Mom, Dad 
and siblings, my friends, both at home and at school, and 
the neighbours. I existed only for the kite that was under 
construction. I watched it taking shape. Gilbert pinned 
the arrow bones together with straight pins; he formed 
the wing tips and tail with the flexible “pointers;” we 
boiled a thick glue paste from laundry starch and dribbled 
in a generous amount of juice from an aloe vera leaf to 
protect the paper from insects. He cut brown paper and 
stuck it on to the fuselage with the paste. Then we stuck 
an assortment of purple, pink, and blue tissue paper on 
to the brown paper covering, making patterns as we went 
along. There were even extra pieces of tissue paper along 
the front (or the nose). We called these “bawlers” as they 
would drone and produce the wooing sounds as they 
fluttered in the wind.
By Maundy Thursday night we had produced a mas-
terpiece and everyone in the family got caught up in the 
excitement. My brother Lloyd who, by this time, had 
already left school and was working provided me with a 
hefty ball of cord. (Nylon string had not yet “made it” 
to the Caribbean.) I had a kite, I had string with which 
to fly it. All it needed was the tail. This is not to be 
confused with the tail of the aeroplane. It is the material 
before we were born, and dipped a silver cup into the 
boiling sugarcane juice turning it to blood. “And that is 
the reason,” she said, “why the Sugar Factory stopped the 
practice of making sugar on Good Friday.”
But what I loved most of all was watching the myriad 
of kites made by the neighbourhood boys, which flew 
overhead with gay abandon. They were of varying shapes 
and sizes. Some were named after their shapes—box kites, 
star kites, diamond kites, hexagonal kites, locally known 
as six-sided kites. Others, flown by the younger boys, 
were named after the materials from which they were 
made—bookleaf kites, seaside grape leaf kites. They gave 
the feeling of freedom and joy. Some would dance and 
shimmy in the wind, some pranced about, some were 
regal and stately, just giving their tails a little shake every 
once in a while. But, regardless of the type of kite, they 
would sing and make joyful “w-o-o-o-ing” noises way up 
in the sky. And they were nearly all dressed up in tissue 
paper in a kaleidoscope of vivid colour combinations: 
mauve, pink, yellow, blue, green and red. Just imagine the 
beautiful picture they all made against the background 
of the blue tropical sky!
Girls never flew their own kites. If they were interested, 
they would help with their brothers’ kites. I was around 
eleven years old when I decided that I had had enough 
of holding my brothers’ kite tails on Good Friday. We, 
kids, believed that you had to whistle to call the puff of 
wind that would take the kite up into the air. Well, I had 
had enough of helping them whistle too. If I was going 
to whistle to launch a kite, it would be my very own. 
This Good Friday, my kite would be an aeroplane kite 
flying high up in the sky among the others, droning like 
This Good Friday, my kite would be an aeroplane kite flying high up in the 
sky among the others, droning like a plane and dominating the scene. 
It would be the only aeroplane kite in the village for my brother, Gilbert, 
was the only one around who had perfected the art of making them. What 
was even more exciting, I would be the only girl with her own kite.
110 CANADIAN WOMAN STUDIES/LES CAHIERS DE LA FEMME
tied on to the back of the kite to stabilize it in the air. I 
was raised on a reading diet of Enid Blyton’s novels and 
had seen pictures of kites with tails of ribbon with bows 
placed at equal intervals. If my kite tail could be similar, 
that would be the crowning touch. However, we didn’t 
have the luxury of ribbons for tails but, rather, an odd 
assortment of material. Gilbert and I raided Mom’s bag 
of rags and tore strips from old bed sheets that had been 
washed and bleached in the sun so many times that they 
had outlived their use; old school tunics and blouses, old 
tears. Today, it was the same. I felt his intense pain and 
agony as he was crucified. I sang with the congregation:
“Glory be to Jesus,
Who in bitter pains
Poured for me the lifeblood
From his sacred veins.”
As I sang I looked up at the stained glass window in 
the altar. There, high above Fr. Thomas’ head was the 
cast off shirts from my father and brothers. We next moved 
to Mom’s scrap box and cut some strips off the material 
left over from the clothing she had made for the family. 
We knotted all the strips haphazardly together for a tail 
and attached it to the kite. My tail might look ragged 
but my aeroplane would certainly be an eye-catcher. I 
could hardly wait for the next day to arrive. We had to 
go to the early Good Friday service and would be back 
home by eight-thirty. 
Good Friday dawned fair, not a cloud in the sky, which 
meant it would be good weather for kite flying. Mom made 
us some herbal tea and sent us on our way to church. We 
would get our cassava bread and milky tea when we got back 
home. On the way to church all I could think of was the 
kite. When I got back from church I would eat breakfast, 
launch my kite, tie it on to our golden apple tree in the 
front yard for all the passers-by to admire—an aeroplane 
kite flying way up in the sky among all the others and 
everyone would know whose kite it was! 
Then around eleven o’clock I would fill my glass 
three-quarters full of water and leave it in the sun. Since 
all the hens were laying, Mom had already promised me 
a freshly laid egg, the white of which I would dribble in 
the water and get a glimpse of my future. My sister had 
done it the year before, had seen a ship and had gone 
to the neighbouring island of Montserrat by boat to an 
inter-school netball competition. Would I, too, sail on a 
boat to one of the neighbouring West Indian islands or 
would I go by plane? 
The Good Friday readings were always the same, focus-
ing on Jesus’ crucifixion. I would suffer silently with Jesus 
as I listened to the readings, surreptitiously wiping away 
picture of poor, tortured Jesus hanging on the cross with 
his head bowed to one side, weighted down by the crown 
of thorns they had made him wear. Today, however, was 
a little different, for through the tears in my eyes, I could 
see an aeroplane kite perched on his head.
The morning prayers seemed longer than usual and 
by the time church was over, the sun was already high in 
the sky with the promise of Good Friday heat. There was 
already an array of kites, bobbing, waving and dancing in 
the sky with the “bawlers” singing “woo woo” and I could 
hardly wait for mine to join them.
I rushed into the house, changed into my shorts and sat 
down to eat my cassava bread breakfast. I wolfed down the 
bread hardly savouring the treat for which I had waited so 
long. It was now time to go and fly the kite.
Gilbert and I picked up the kite from the verandah and 
rushed down through my Dad’s sugarcane field. The canes 
had been freshly cut but the ratoon shoots were just tall 
enough to make the going slightly difficult. Gilbert carried 
the kite and string and I carefully held the tail away from 
the young cane shoots. I whistled ”phewoo, phewoo” to call 
the wind that would take my ragged princess high up in 
the air, above the fruit trees, above the hydro lines, so very 
high, in fact, that the bawlers would drone with delight.
The gust came and Gilbert tossed the kite up in the air, 
at the same time running backwards, gently tugging at the 
kite and gradually releasing the string. “Let go of the tail, 
Jen,” he shouted. But it was an aborted attempt. The kite 
fell. I whistled again to call the wind and again Gilbert 
tossed the kite up in the air. At the appropriate moment 
I released the tail. My joy and excitement mounted as 
the kite gradually rose up, up above the soursop tree, 
High above Fr. Thomas’ head was the picture of poor, tortured Jesus 
hanging on the cross with his head bowed to one side, weighted 
down by the crown of thorns they had made him wear. Today, however, 
was a little different, for through the tears in my eyes, I could 
see an aeroplane kite perched on his head.
VOLUME 30, NUMBER 1 111
above the mango tree, above the hydro lines, ducking and 
weaving from side to side like a drunk trying to walk a 
straight line. “It’s dancing too much,” said Gilbert. “I’ll 
put some more tail on.” I realized that the kite needed 
to be stabilized and for me, that was no problem. There 
was plenty more tail where the first set came from, even 
if it meant tying on a piece of the cane trash to the odd 
assortment of rags. I had seen the bigger boys do that when 
they were flying their kites too far away from home to get 
more tail for their kites.
Gilbert began to reel in the kite and it continued its 
drunken dance, weaving dangerously close to the hydro 
lines. Suddenly my heart lurched with fear and appre-
hension, for as I looked, the tip of the tail was getting 
even nearer to the hydro lines; then, in a flash, the drunk 
paused for breath, clinging to the lines. My fear turned 
to horror and pain for Gilbert was tugging harder, and 
the more he tugged, the faster the kite stuck. It did not 
take long for me to realize that the kite would never let 
go of the hydro line.
The pain was tearing at my insides—my heart, my head, 
my eyes. The tears were rolling down my cheeks, blurring 
the picture of the kite stuck there forever. Jesus nailed to 
the cross could not have felt the intense pain that was 
consuming my whole being.
There was now no need for me to break my freshly laid 
egg to see what my future held. The future was now rolled 
into the present and staring me in the face in the form of 
an aeroplane kite wrecked on its maiden flight.
Janet Tyrell is a retired librarian and is currently enjoying 
the courses offered at the Academy for Lifelong Learning in 
Toronto. This piece is the result of an exercise for her “Memoirs” 
class at the Academy.
RENEE NORMAN
Last Summer of Childhood
we are watching What Not to Wear
in pyjamas and old shorts
this her last summer of childhood
before university begins
soon enough she will be writing papers,
walking on campus in the rain,
wondering where summer went
and holding her damp coat close
to keep warm
this is my last baby
the one I rocked slowly
savouring, savouring
her faded cotton sleepers
smelling of sisters,
old milk
when we shopped at the mall
our own episode of What Not to Wear
again and again she emerged:
a white eyelet skirt,
a rust tunic
my eyes on her becoming
the transformation taking place
behind a curtain of clothes
we are watching What Not to Wear
this our last summer of childhood
Renee Norman’s poetry appears earlier in this volume.
“And Neither Have I Wings to Fly”: 
Labelled and Locked Up in Canada’s Oldest Institution
by Thelma Wheatley
A powerful exposé of a part of Canadian history kept secret — 
this book exposes the role of psychiatrists and leading eugenicists 
in Canada in the abuse of intellectual and physically handicapped 
children’s civil rights in Canada.
www.inanna.ca
inanna.publications@inanna.ca.
Smart books for people who want to read and think about real women’s lives. 
spring 2013                                 inanna publications


It Happened on Good Friday

Costa, Claudia

116 CANADIAN WOMAN STUDIES/LES CAHIERS DE LA FEMME
said if she had to spend all day with Grandpa anyway, one 
of them would end up a patient in the hospital instead. 
Grandpa Sparks doesn’t work ’cause a bomb hurt his legs 
in World War II and now his legs are pretty much useless. 
He has to walk extremely slow with his hands groping the 
wall. Usually he sits at the kitchen table smoking behind 
a newspaper when we’re here, or he talks with Dad, or 
he takes a nap. He doesn’t leave the house much. He says 
he doesn’t give a good goddamn about nobody anymore 
anyway. Most of Grandpa’s best friends and two of his 
four brothers died in the war. Grandma said he came back 
miserable and has been in a bad mood ever since, which 
was a rotten deal for her ‘cause that wasn’t the man she 
married before he went off.
Grandma and Grandpa Sparks say mean things and 
swear at each other all the time, but it’s funny. Mom 
hopes her and Dad don’t end up talking to each other the 
way Grandma and Grandpa do. Dad thinks Mom’s mom 
and dad, Grandma and Grandpa Beale, have brainwashed 
my mom into thinking the way she grew up was normal, 
where nobody swears and everyone lives in La La Land 
and happy endings. Grandma and Grandpa Beale live on 
a farm about a half hour away from Grandma Sparks, but 
we’re usually too busy to go see them. 
Mom lifts our bikes out of the trailer and sets them 
against the house where the foundation meets the white 
siding. Dad backs the trailer out and they drive over to 
the new house to work. 
Our whole family builds houses. Grandpa and Grandma 
Sparks built their house in the late forties when Dad was a 
baby. Because it’s two storeys, it was probably harder to build 
than the bungalow Dad’s working on now. Dad showed 
me ancient black and white pictures of them building their 
house: happy Grandma holding a two-by-four stabbed in 
a dirt hill, one foot on a cinder block—like the captain 
of a ship, pictures of Grandpa and his brothers sitting on 
the roof against blank white skies, cigarettes in the corners 
of their grins, grey skin, work pants, and black boots, a 
picture where the house was just wrapped in tar paper: a 
two story black block face with its neck stuck in dirt, dark 
empty windows for eyes, and the front door-hole like an 
open mouth saying “awww.”’ There is one picture of the 
finished house. The massive oak at the edge of Grandma’s 
lawn looks the same in the pictures as it does today. The 
maples we climb in now were scrawny babies. Trees have 
to survive through anything.
Michelle Hartai is inspired and supported by her family (even 
the strange ones), and resides in Guelph. This novel-in-progress 
is the focus of her current work in the Humber School for 
Writers Correspondence Program.
CLAUDIA COSTA
Do you remember?
Do you remember
How cold it was that night?
I do.
I could see my breath float away
The air frosty.
I remember the ground,
How hard it was.
I remember the speed,
at which your truck slammed
into my bike
The speed at which,
helpless, a rag doll,
my body was propelled.
Do you remember?
I remember the sounds:
The crunch of 
metal hitting metal,
intertwining battling rams.
Bones snapping like twigs.
The sound of my voice.
Did you hear me?
My desperate whimper
The way it echoed
Down the canyon of that street?
Maybe you hear it now.
Only it sounds more like
The pounding of a gavel,
Minimal justice.
You may have also forgotten
picking up your keys.
Or how many times
you picked up that bottle.
But you will have plenty of time
to put the pieces together now.
Which is more than I
will ever have a chance to do.
Claudia Costa is a grade 12 student living in the 
Madawaskwa valley.


Do You Remember?

Payne, Janna

20 CANADIAN WOMAN STUDIES/LES CAHIERS DE LA FEMME
les battements de mon cœur, la puissance de ma mémoire 
et ma passion de femme du monde.
Micheline Mercier was born in Windsor in the Eastern Town-
ships (Quebec). She worked in the field of finance for some 
40 years and on retirement she trained to work in palliative 
care. She is currently writing hear autobiography, “‘Mémoires 
intérieures,” a reflection on her personal accomplishments. 
CaRol lIPSZYC
letter for emily D.
Convention saw a pallid shell,
and not her myriad colour,—
Mute to the lyric form she fused
with elemental power.
How she gleaned ripe the natural world,
her open heart, a grail,—
And steered ethereal her verse,
its earthly light unveiled.
The first book of poetry I bought as an adolescent was a 
complete collection of Emily Dickinson’s poems and letters. 
On its lemon yellow cover, I studied Emily’s supposed 
likeness, the sketch of a thoughtful, diminutive face. I read 
the book aloud, carrying it with me like a secret companion, 
as if I alone had discovered her work in a place undisclosed 
to others.
In my response to her call from anonymity, to the “tender 
majesty” of Dickinson’s words, I composed these couplets. 
And in writing back, I returned to a point of personal 
origin, drawn as ever to Dickinson’s meter, to the honesty 
and empathy in her voice, and to the dichotomies she 
explored with self-effacing energy. Attendant to the natural 
world around her, she sought answers to all-encompassing 
questions that leaped beyond the here-and-now.
So many years have passed since I first read Emily 
Dickinson’s poems, yet I remember having a felt sense about 
the trajectory of a life devoted to the arts, a path I intuited 
might one day be my own.
Carol Lipszyc’s book of poetry, Singing Me Home, was 
published by Inanna in 2010.  Short stories on children in 
the Shoah have been published in Parchment, Midstream, 
www.jewishfiction.net. She is currently an Assistant 
Professor at State University of New York, Plattsburgh, 
teaching English teacher education and writing arts.
Janna PaYne
mother teresa
patron saint of burnt out—
destroyed the shit out of that San Francisco 
convent
ripped up the carpet, spewed her agenda 
(solidarity with the poor) & let the cameras 
roll
made a scene & a name for herself
claimed space
the whole space, essentially
vandalism over a thousand, but she was in 
the clear
already served her time—
carrying the weight of the church
the weight of a thousand crying babies &
the weight of losing her unfaltering faith
oh & when she cracked
oh we didn’t just sit there
oh no we di’int
we overlooked her compassion fatigue & 
begged for her canonization
it was the least we could do
after parading her off the grid of humanity
Janna Payne is a Canadian poet. She holds a Masters 
from Loyola University Chicago. Her work has recently 
been featured (or is forthcoming) in broad: A Feminist 
and Social Justice Magazine, Communities, Role/
Reboot, Room, The Steel Chisel, and Women and 
Environments Magazine. To read more, visit <www.
facebook.com/jannaspeaks>.


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The Wallflower

Dreaming Grandchildren

Big Woman Blues

The New African Diaspora in Vancouver: Migration, Exclusion and Belonging

Breadwinning Daughters: Young Working Women in a Depression-Era City, 1929-1939

The Singers of Grodzka Street

It Happened on Good Friday

Do You Remember?

Mother Teresa

Editorial/Éditorial

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