JSalter PhD Final Thesis Submission.pdf - University of Guelph

authors tell their ‘real’ stories obliquely through historical fiction. Susan Stanford
Friedman argues that for the oppressed “to counter the narratives of their alterity
produced by dominant society, they must tell other stories that chart their exclusions,
affirm their agency (however complicit and circumscribed), and continually (re)construct
their identities” (230). By piecing together a silenced past from fragments of stories and
memories not one’s own, storytelling enables a teller to creatively re-imagine and
interweave the past into the present moment in order to locate oneself within a narrative
continuum. As Anne Whitehead claims, memory is “historically conditioned; it is not
simply handed down in a timeless form from generation to generation, but bears the
impress or stamp of its own time and culture” (Memory 4).
While the novels I address all emphasize the importance of storytelling for
providing agency to both tellers and listeners, their subtexts raise important ethical
questions about the politics of listening to and telling stories of trauma and violence,
particularly when these experiences are not one’s own. A closer analysis of these novels
reveals that not all storytelling engagements are empowering. Not all storytellers are
afforded a listener, and not all listeners are equipped to hear what is being said. And
while forcibly silenced histories demand articulation, sometimes, for various reasons,
some stories are simply not meant to be passed on. Considering Paul Gilroy’s 1987
multilayered analysis of Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved, as to what constitutes “not a
story to pass on” (187), I examine fictional storytelling engagements that echo the
ambivalence in Gilroy’s statement. I explore whether a narrative can still convey an
ethics of reciprocity when the storytelling act is not “conversive,” that is not “co-creative,
Himani Bannerji, Rinaldo Walcott, Dionne Brand, Fred Wah, Roy Miki, Maria
Campbell, Lee Maracle, and SKY Lee.
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