Michael Jacklin

Critical injuries: Collaborative Indigenous life writing and the ethics of criticism

Abstract The publication of collaborative Indigenous life writing places both the text and its production under public scrutiny. The same is true for the criticism of life writing. For each, publication has consequences. Taking as its starting point the recent critical concern for harm occasioned in life writing, this article argues that in the reading of collaborative Indigenous life writing, injury may eventuate from critical commentary itself. The critical work of G Thomas Couser and his concern for vulnerable subjects, whose life narratives reach published form through the efforts or with the assistance of another, has its parallel in the critical attention given to collaboratively produced Indigenous life writing in Australia and Canada. In some cases, however, such analysis is generated without consultation with the Indigenous producers of collaborative texts. Criticism directing its arguments toward the conditions of editorial constraint by which the Indigenous subject is enclosed or silenced has the ironic and surely unintended consequence of removing the Indigenous participants of collaboration from the field of critical engagement. With particular regard to the collaborative texts Ingelba and the Five Black Matriarchs and Stolen Life: the journey of a Cree woman, this article argues that literary criticism can benefit from the practice of consultation with the Indigenous subjects whose representations it comments upon.

Detention, Displacement and Dissent in Recent Australian Life Writing

Narratives of persecution, imprisonment, displacement and exile have been a fundamental aspect of Australian literature: from the convict narratives of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, to writing by refugees and migrants to Australia following World War II, to the narratives of those displaced by more recent conflicts. This paper will focus on two texts published in Australia in the past few years which deal with experiences of persecution and displacement from Afghanistan. Mahbobas Promise (2005) and The Rugmaker of Mazar-e-Sharif (2008) are texts that have to some extent bypassed the quarantining that Gillian Whitlock has argued works to locate potentially disruptive discourse at a safe distance from mainstream consumption. The publications discussed here demonstrate that refugee narratives can negotiate their way into the public sphere and public consciousness. In this process, however, representations of dissent almost necessarily give way to conciliation and integration as former refugee subjects attempt to realign their lives in terms that will provide the best outcomes for themselves, their families and their communities.

'Some Stories Need to Be Told, Then Told Again': Yvonne Johnson and Rudy Wiebe

Stolen Life: The Journey of a Cree Woman (Wiebe and Johnson, 1998) is the story of Yvonne Johnson’s experiences of childhood sexual abuse and incest, her repeated experiences of rape through her teenage and adult years, and her participation, with three others, in the 1989 killing and sexual abuse of Leonard Skwarok, a man they barely knew but whom they believed to be an abuser of children, and whom Johnson believed to be a threat to her own young children. Her story is, profoundly, a woman’s story, a story of violation by men: by her father, by his father, by her brother, by their acquaintances, by police and by strangers. It is a story of trauma, recovered and retold, while Johnson served a life-25 sentence for first degree murder. In being written from prison, it is also the story of a woman’s experience of the Canadian criminal justice system, her arrest, trial and sentencing, and her incarceration — for the first part of her sentence in Kingston’s Prison for Women (P4W) and later in the then-recently opened Okimaw Ohci Healing Lodge. Stolen Life is the story of a Cree woman writing back to structures of power and patriarchy that have attempted to silence her. It is also a Cree woman’s story of her recovery of identity through women’s rituals and ceremony. And it is a story recovered and retold with the help of many, but primarily with the help of a Rudy Wiebe, a white, middle-aged man. It is this issue of collaboration and gender in Wiebe and Johnson’s book that I would like to address in this present essay, which is for this writer a returning to Johnson’s story.