Literature Grappling with History

This morning I heard Joseph Boyden, David Bergen and Gail Jones speaking about the way words matter. Boyden read a scene from his new novel in which a young Cree boy is taken into a residential school. Bergen's excerpt dealt with a Native teenager being warned off his white girlfriend by her uncle. In Jones’s Sorry, a white Australian girl and an Aboriginal girl join together as a makeshift family in hard circumstances. The discussion afterwards centred on the two governments, Canadian and Australian, which have recently offered apologies to Aboriginal people. Jones explained that her novel, published in 2004, was a response to her despair over the lack of an apology when one had been expected since 1997, she posed the question, what are the consequences of not saying the right things at the right time? Moderator Duncan McCue asked her about the title, Sorry. In Australian Aboriginal culture, she explained, the forms of grieving a death are referred to as "sorry work." In addition, when the Australian government refused to apologize, a grassroots movement of "Sorry Books" grew up, where regular citizens added their words, their sentences of grief and apology, to empty books that were placed in libraries and stores. Over half a million Australians wrote in sorry books, now held by Unesco.

This idea was picked up by the Canadians, both on stage and in the audience, who wondered if such a thing would be possible in Canada. Would Canadians sign a "Sorry Book" and take responsibility for Canadian atrocities? Jones felt that post-colonial nations forget their violence in order to build national narratives of discovery, settlement, and development. What would we have to be willing to give up in order to see our history through the histories we've suppressed? Boyden pointed out how difficult for him to make one of his characters, a truly heroic figure in his first novel, turn his son over to a residential school in the second novel, yet this is what history tells us happened. Bergen described the habit of many Mennonite communities in his Manitoba upbringing adopting First Nations children in the belief that this was a form of helping them, a storyline which is reflected in his book. The audience picked up on this issue: the problem of "help" which is meant well, and is absolutely disastrous. Perhaps what is hardest is acknowledging, as Jones said, that good people do terrible things.

While all three writers had highly interesting things to say about writing about Aboriginal/white relations, it was Jones, a long-time activist in the Australian reconciliation movement, who was most articulate and passionate in describing why atonement is essential--and not nearly enough. ("Boy, Gail is smart," Boyden said at one point). To me this indicated that if we are to make the current mediated discussions on First Nations work, we might need to draw on those who have already been there. I am seriously considering starting a Sorry Book. Anyone willing to write in it?