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Writing the Journey: June 1999

"Canadian Women's Travel Writing: Travelling Mother-wards, Writing Mother-words"


Denise Heaps
University of Toronto
d.heaps@utoronto.ca

As Linda Hutcheon notes in her introduction to the anthology Other Solitues: Canadian Multicultural Fictions, Canada is a multi-racial, pluri-ethinic country where most citizens could quite easily trace their origins or perhaps even their arrival from somewhere else (4-5). Many writers included in Hutcheon's anthology identify "doubleness-- a sense of living in and between two worlds - as the "essence of the immigrant experience." (9) This binary ethnic subjectivity accounts for what Janice Kulyk Keefer, in her contribution to an essay collection titled Writing Ethnicity, identifies as the "janus-faced" quality of Canadian literary ethnicity, an apt descriptioon fo the myriad texts which feature a return to or a fore-grounding of the author's country of origin. (93) Although Kulyk Keefer's examples are primarily fictional texts, where return journeys occur in the realm of the imagination, many Canadian non-fictional travel texts document the author's actual return-journey experience.

The travel book I wish to focus on, Myrna Kostash's Bloodlines: A Journey Through Eastern Europe (1991), narrates the author's struggle with her Ukrainian-Canadian identity. In a stragetic attempt to alleviate the tension and confusion engendered by her culturally and ethnically hyphenated existence, she spent much of her youth trying to slough off the "ethnic" side of her identity by repudiating and repressing her Ukrainian self. Seeking authentic self-knowledge in her adulthood, she felt compelled to examine this accumulated, repressed material, which entailed a journey to the Ukraine. In *Bloodlines*, the story of that journey, Kostash writes from the subject position of the estranged daughter, the daughter of the "New World" (81), who visits the Ukraine -- a site of personal origin which has been repressed, forgotten, and abandoned -- seeking resolution, understanding, orientation, home.

Madan Sarup, in his essay "Home and Identity" from Travellers' Tales: Narratives of Home and Displacement, asks, "What makes a place a home? Is it wherever your family is, where you have been brought up? The children of many migrants are not sure where they belong. Where is home?...Is home where your mother lives?" Kostash never doubts that Canada, the place where she grew up and where her mother lives, is home; rather, the question she explores is how she might possibly belong to the home of her grandmothers - her babas -- who spent most of their lives in the Ukraine. Although Bloodlines is laced with matrilineal and patrilineal family romance, the emotional cathexsis is largely matrocentric, a phenomenon I have observed in other journeys by Canadian daughters of the "New World." Bella Brodzki, in her essay on women's autobiography entitled "Mothers, Displacement, and Language in the Autobiographies of Nathalie Sarraute and Christa Wolf," posits the mother as the "pre-text' for the adult daughter's autobiographical project. According to Brodzki, this project is a symbolic search for origins that is motivated by a desire to "enter into discourse" with her first significant other, the mother of maternal figure who "engender[ed] subjectivity through language," a melange of speech and love which became obfuscated by other modes of discourse over time. The daughter's autobiographical text, writes Brodzki, "seeks to reject, reconstruct, and reclaim -- to locate and recontextualize -- the mother's message." (246)

Brodzki's observations are particularly germane to women's travel writing which incorporates the trope of the return journey, because, in such cases, the author's motheer, grandmothers, or surrogate mother figures often function as pre-texts for the author's travel and its concomitant textualization. Kostash's Bloodlines, an autobiographical travel writing, is a quest for maternal origins which encompasses a literal journey to her motherland as well as a metaphorical journey back in time, to the historical moments when her foremothers inhabited it. By travelling, studying, and writing her matrocentric text, Kostash reclaims her babas' "lands, histories, and language, and in so doing, reconstructs the hyphen that links her to her heritage and her maternal ancestry. That is, she writes as the daughter of the New World who seeks, and finds, a place for herself in the Old World by tracing her maternal bloodlines.


Denise Heaps
University of Toronto
d.heaps@utoronto.ca

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Updated May 23, 1999