Jean Rivard - University of British Columbia

Books in Review
violence to Muslim peoples." The first two
chapters of the book offer a feminist reading
of a number of texts from Algerian literature
written in French. The third
chapter investigates the failures of French
post-structuralism to theorize and politicize
adequately the relationship between
decolonization, neocolonialism, and
minority literatures. It demonstrates how
"left-wing" French intellectuals avoid dealing
with the "contradictions" and "disjunctures
that mark the history of colonialism"
for women of the Maghreb, for Maghreb
women who emigrated to France, and for
the "culturally ambiguous" Beurs (French
born of Arab parents). In her final chapter,
Woodhull provides close readings of French
novels of the 1980s "that attempt to confront
colonial and postcolonial violence
and establish solidarity between France and
the Maghreb."
While Woodhull criticizes Kristeva's
Etrangers à nous-mêmes for leveling difference,
she joins Spivak and Radhakrishnan
in their rejection of Foucault's critique of
representational politics for its dismissal of
agency and asks why Deleuze and Guattari
in Κάβα: Pour une littérature mineure
exclusively analyse "writings by European
men." Woodhull bases her own readings on
theories of nomadism and métissage,
which challenge essentialist notions of
racial, sexual, and national identities and
take into account shifting and at times conflicting
personal and political configurations
such as those of the Beurs. She
successfully demonstrates that in the study
of a literature or culture, theory cannot be
separated from politics.
Eyes & Letters
Mary Dalton
Allowing the Light. Breakwater n.p.
nick avis
bending with the wind. Breakwater n.p.
Reviewed by Alexander M. Forbes
Although thoroughly contemporary in its
forms, interests, and language, Mary
Dalton's Allowing the Light is a collection
much indebted to eighteenth-century literary
example. In its progress from pastoral
to satire, the volume follows a favourite
eighteenth-century movement, but the
endpoints of this movement are also
indebted to eighteenth-century precedent.
The opening two sections, for example,
are together reminiscent of Blake's Songs of
Innocence and Songs of Experience, with
poems in the first section often finding
darker counterparts in the second, as perspective
shifts. The first grouping, "Veined
Ways," offers a series of descriptions of
plant and animal life, as seen under the different
degrees of natural lighting afforded
by the different seasons. Not surprisingly,
given Dalton's interest in the perception of
natural life in specific seasonal moments,
many poems here are haiku or senryu (or
are derived from these). But if the first
thing one must do, in "reading" nature, is
"to find / the eye" ("The Book of Kells"), it
quickly becomes apparent that the shift
into darkness, in the second grouping, is an
allegorical lesson in reading: a warning
about what our "reading" has become,
because of what we have become.
The title of the second section, "The
Body Cooling," explains what we have
become by providing us glimpses. Where
the poem "harvest codes," in "Veined
Ways," made farm imagery a code of innocence,
the imagery is now transformed into
lurking "terror" in the companion poem
"bachelor brothers," a demonic rereading
of rural existence. A lively cat ("taking away
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