Anne A Collett

Portrait of the Artist as a Young Colonial Girl: Emily Carr and Judith Wright:

In their autobiographical writing, painter Emily Carr and poet Judith Wright record a remarkably similar experience of how growing up in colonial/postcolonial Canada and Australia shaped them as artists. Although each identified strongly with the region of her birth, and felt a deep love of its landscape, issues of belonging preoccupied both women from childhood on as they negotiated their place within the family, the immediate society and the nation. Neither could fully conform to family expectations, nor comply with the restrictions society sought to impose on them as artists and each actively sought, or else found herself cast in, an outsider role. Carr and Wright’s self portraits each have something in common with James Joyce’s representation of Stephen Dedalus in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man as an insider/outsider figure who seeks to escape the confining networks of nation and society, only to find himself thoroughly entangled in them.

Phantom Dwelling: A Discussion of Judith Wright's "Late Style"

Abstract This article addresses “the problem” of Judith Wrights last volume of poetry, Phantom Dwelling (1985), seeking to understand why it has been neglected by literary scholars despite very positive reviews. It positions this work in relation to Edward Saids thesis on “late style” (2006), seventeenth-century Japanese poet, Matsuo Bashōs The Narrow Road to the Deep North and “Record of the Hut of the Phantom Dwelling”, and Romanticism.

Jean Batten and the 'Accident of Sex'

Through the critical analysis of visual and verbal texts, this essay offers a sighting of New Zealand aviator Jean Batten—one of the greatest women solo flyers of the twentieth century to ‘disappear’. Unlike US flyer Amelia Earhart whose disappearance some miles off Howland Island in the South Pacific prompted endless search and research, Jean Batten’s disappearance from stage and page of flight history engendered no such interest until the late 1980s when a documentary film (1988) and the first book‐length biography (1990) were published by Ian Mackersey. Although important contributions to understanding Jean Batten’s place in aviation history of the twentieth century, Mackersey’s construction of Batten’s life relies heavily upon a psychological interpretation of character and action that is largely removed from and uninformed by gendered history. Hence, an important aim of this essay is to offer an analysis of the impact ‘the accident of sex’ (a phrase coined by Earhart) and the performance of gender had and continues to have upon ‘the life’ of Jean Batten.

Ritual Masking and Performed Intimacy: The Complex ‘I’ of Edward Kamau Brathwaite's Life Poem

This essay charts the shift in Edward Kamau Brathwaites poetic oeuvre from the w/Word of the tribal poet drummer whose ‘I/eye’ is the body through which the peoples of the African diaspora are enabled to see themselves and their history, to work that is more clearly aligned with a personal biography in which the poet might be understood to ‘perform intimacy’—‘I’ is ‘me.’ The poetry that follows this personal ‘middle passage’ represents a re-visioning and re-vocalisation of public utterance: poems, or bits of poems, that appeared in the earlier volumes as historical or archetypal journeys are re-contextualised as contemporary and personal journeys. The ‘I/eye’ in this most recent work is clearly signalled as the body through which the interdependent biographies of a community and an individual are performed.

Tracking the Literature of Tropical Weather

This chapter tracks the etymology and usage of the terms hurricane, cyclone, and typhoon. It discusses the relationship between indigenous knowledge, scientific data collection, and analysis, and the place of tropical cyclone in a range of literatures—as a record of event and impact—but also its employment as a metaphor of human-centred disruption and violence. The authors discuss the association of tropical cyclone with the sublime, with a colonial, othering discourse of tropicality, and with palliative politics. This chapter offers a rationale for the book itself and an overview of the range of discourses through which tropical cyclone can be tracked.

Hurricane Story (With Special Reference to the Poetry of Olive Senior)

Much of the reportage of hurricanes is a numbers game of weather statistics and dollars lost. But the personal/affective impact of these numbers on individuals and communities can be found in the work of creative writers, like Jamaican-Canadian poet, Olive Senior. Senior places hurricane at the heart of the Caribbean story. It is a story of losses and gains, of grief and, surprisingly, of humour. Importantly, Senior’s “hurricane stories” in Gardening in the Tropics suggest that resilience lies within Jamaican capacity to “orchestrate disaster,” which in turn lies in the power of story. Story is knowledge: knowledge that accretes over time and in whose light we make changes to how we think, understand and act—how we respond to geo-political climactic events.

'Femmes a part': unsociable sociability, women, lifewriting

When Christine de Pizan, in her 1410 Lamentation on the Evils of Civil War, described herself as ‘seulette a part’ (de Pizan, 1984: 84) she expressed a divided sense of identity that has echoed throughout women’s lifewriting right up to the present day. Calling desperately for an end to the warfare that was dividing France, she marshalled all the rhetorical pathos she could to attain her end, portraying herself simultaneously as a loyal member of, and an outsider to, French society. The striking ambiguity of the phrase ‘a part’ captures the uncertain standing she experienced as a widow and a female commentator, alluding to the social marginality her position brought with it, but also, vitally, to the valuable reflective distance it allowed her as a lone woman calling for peace in her fractured society. In this short, three-word self-description, which informs the title of this chapter, Christine captures succinctly the complex, uneasy relationship between the female autobiographical self that is ‘a part’ of communities and institutions, and the self that stands ‘apart’ from them. It is this complex and frequently agonized sense of self — seeking to belong yet yearning for solitude and privacy, or indeed for distinction from the group — that is at the heart of this volume’s exploration of women’s life-writing. This mode of self-representation, in the many guises in which it is taken up in the chapters that follow, is at the heart of what we are calling the unsociable sociability of women’s lifewriting.

Size matters: the oppositional self-portraiture of Emily Carr

Everything about Canadian artist Emily Carr was big. She painted huge canvases with great sweeps of movement and colour. Her subjects were the giant cedar and dense pine forests of west-coast Canada, wide expanses of sky and sea, and the exaggerated face and figure of First Nations ‘totem poles’.1 Carr’s work was energized by an emotional personality, a forceful creative drive and an intense spiritual yearning. Even the darkest forest depths radiated light and energy. Her prose exalted in the drama of life — its joys and anguish; her language tended towards excess. Carr’s writing did not have the smooth polish of a sophisticated stylist; rather it was crafted to emulate and to evoke the ‘truth’ of life as she knew it in the rawness of being and feeling. Carr herself was round-faced, short but broad — a woman with bodily presence and an idiosyncratic style of dress that prioritized comfort (pragmatic and loose) over fashion (decorative and restrictive). She lived her life in the company of a monkey, a rat, various dogs and birds. She travelled alone into the wilderness and indigenous settlements of British Columbia and Alaska in the last decade of the nineteenth and first decades of the twentieth centuries, undaunted by her own fears or the expectations and reactions of others. For brief periods she had an old grey caravan, dubbed ‘the elephant’, towed into the depths of the forest that she might better capture the mystery of its green life-force on canvas.