Great Plains Studies, Center for
Date of this Version
Summer 1999
Citation
Great Plains Quarterly Vol. 19, No. 3, Summer 1999, pp. 203-09.
Abstract
The subtitle comes from a letter Margaret Laurence wrote to Al Purdy on 31 October 1968, when she was still vacillating over her second reconciliation with her husband.! She was also looking ahead to her return to Canada to be Writer-in Residence at the University of Toronto for the academic year 1969-70, and vacillating over that as well. There is evident reluctance in her confession to Purdy about her attitude to Canada. Resistance to any favorable attitude to that country began early in her and accounts for two persistent features of her life and career as she struggled to establish her own identity. Her life was punctuated by a series of escapes that resembles a sustained quest, much like Huckleberry Finn's trip down the Mississippi. Initially she wanted to escape the stifling atmosphere of small-town Manitoba and the restrictive identity imposed on her there as "Bob Wemyss' daughter." Like Huck, she wanted to discover a locale that would enable her to find her proper self and that would accommodate and foster that identity.
She first escaped her hometown of Neepawa, Manitoba, when she went off to college in Winnipeg in 1944, and discovered she did belong in a group of writers who published in the periodicals of United College and the University of Manitoba-even though she published under "J.M.W." or "J.M. Wemyss," protectively. Soon after graduation she changed identity by becoming Mrs. Jack Laurence {although her friends still called her "Peggy" or "Peg"). She then escaped Canada altogether in 1949, accompanying her husband to England. The "mother country," however, regarded her as a colonial or (egad!) as an American. She escaped further, into exotic Somalia, where Jack had secured a job. En route she noted in her diary her anticipation of adventure and discovery: " ... in your excitement at the trip, the last thing in the world that would occur to You is that the strangest glimpses you may have of any creature in the distant lands will be those you catch of yourself."
In Somalia she was certainly a stranger, viewed by the natives as another colonial memsahib of the Establishment. Her identity as writer, however, was confirmed as her interest in Somali poetry and folktales prompted her to give them greater longevity by translating them into English-and setting them down in print. Incidentally, she also discovered the importance of tribal organization. Perhaps her consciousness that she was herself without a tribal identity led her to tell her friend B. W. Andrzejewski one nigh~ around the campfire that she had Canadian Indian blood.3 Answers to the questions: "Who am I, really!" and "Where do I really belong!" continued to be increasingly urgent matters for Laurence.
Comments
Copyright 1999 by the Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska-Lincoln