Versions of Truth: Drawing Meaning from Claire Harris’s Drawing Down a Daughter
by Andrea Belcham, Pointe Claire, Quebec
.....she catches at trees stones climbs on hands and knees baby I’m coming stomach aching she stumbles begins to roll fast to roll clutching at air at fast whirling earth;
scattering words sentences paragraphs drawing down a daughter/ she scrambles after ... (14)
The above excerpt from Claire Harris’s Drawing Down a Daughter relays a pregnant woman’s literal and figurative nightmare — the loss of her baby and her inability to recover it. This nightmare tortures the Caribbean-Canadian poet protagonist whose musings Harris presents in long prose-poem form. The unnamed mother-poet’s waking-life fears are transferred to her sleep, where they morph into a chaotic and antagonistic landscape that conspires to keep her from her daughter. In the light of day, her anxieties are rooted in an important decision she must soon make: whether to remain in Canada, alone with her daughter, or to follow her husband down to Trinidad, the land of her birth. This impending decision is a "weight about her heart" (15), and as her term draws to an end she agonizes in her notebooks and her thoughts over the possible implications of her choice — most significantly, her daughter’s, and her own, potential to succeed in the North compared to their chances in the South. In this paper I will explore four interpretations of the book’s title by focusing on alternate readings of the verb "to draw," namely: drawing as leading, drawing as exorcising, drawing as creating and drawing as hindering. Taking my cue from the title, I will also address how each type of drawing as the mother-poet undertakes it may empower or, ironically, inhibit both the protagonist and her daughter. It seems a natural extension to equate the "drawing down" of the unborn daughter with the burden that the mother-poet’s over-analysis of her situation places on her family’s well-being. Throughout the book she is virtually motionless, meditating in her Calgary apartment with her "words sentences paragraphs," dreaming of the past and what the future may hold, while her husband buzzes about in the present, constructing a new life for them in Trinidad. She resents the ultimatum he puts to her, yet lacks the resolve to pursue alternatives: she is too tangled in the rough terrain of her mind. However, I believe there are several conceivable meanings to that central phrase "drawing down a daughter," each strengthening Harris’s vision regarding such subjects as race, gender, art, imprisonment and freedom.
I
The act of "drawing" can be a steady pulling or leading. In a general sense this applies to the narrative structure of the book, which while deviating into many stylistic and thematic tangents (memories, the Burri/Jocelyn sub-story, the Patricia/Jocelyn meeting and other notebook imaginings), keeps at its heart the present-day mother-poet’s pregnancy and her related emotional dilemma — the choice she must make between staying in Canada or returning to Trinidad. This drawing is a continuous act. A reader picks up with the mother-poet when she is already well into her pregnancy, and when one leaves her the child is still unborn and the issue of the mother’s return to the islands, unresolved. In the book’s opening, the protagonist is inflicted by painful dreams of her own, elusive, mother; finally, a "darkness of fangs" (8) propels her into consciousness. The book flows in a full circle, concluding with a similarly attributed suffering, this one physical: a "blade"-wielding sun rises and "morning bleeds into the river" (112) as the protagonist writhes with labour pains, as fearful and, ultimately, alone as she was when she emerged from that early nightmare. As a passenger in the mother-poet’s body, her baby is being exposed to her parent’s pains, anxieties and happinesses. Likewise, in reading this book one is merging momentarily with a segment of this woman’s life story, as though entering and being pulled along by the swollen Lopinot River of her youth, and one quits the book with the sensation that the dark and joyous waters will keep on flowing beyond the covers. W.H. New characterizes the genre of the long poem as "enact[ing] different dances with language and life" that "accumulate meaning over space and time, generally through a set of formal and perspectival variations" (338-339): this is the poem as a river, navigating bends, raging here, pooling there, but ever-flowing.
Besides the pull of narration on the reader, there is also a tugging that threatens to rend the mother-poet from her anchored life in Calgary as a writer and teacher and bring her back to where she started from. This is the pull of her husband, and the life he wants to build for his family down in Trinidad. Although raised a Canadian, he sees in his homeland only restrictions — born of a climate of veiled racial intolerance — to what he and his daughter might accomplish as black individuals. To him, Trinidad offers a chance for a better, freer, life: "[I]t’s one of the few places in the world where black children can grow up socially and politically secure," he tells his wife (69). She, however, sees not freedom in Trinidad but barriers. To her, it is "narrow," with too many "[d]oors clanging shut" on her as a woman (71). She had her own reasons for leaving the country of her childhood, among them its machismo attitudes toward women’s roles and its overt class divisions. Her husband reasons that in the South she will actually have more opportunity to write, with a household of servants to tend to menial chores, but she remembers the washerwomen that populated her younger years, and as a feminist she cannot help wondering now about her right to use them thus:
their lives
surrounded by water
pounding white sheets
against rocks worn women
...
bleached soles held flat to earth
their breasts sway with the effort
to force dirt from
their lives
...
meanwhile
in the centre of town
under white poui
on high manicured lawns
dark mistresses
...
entertain with
sweet cakes of coconut (86-88)
The mother-poet is able to counter her husband’s idealism regarding Trinidad with her own childhood experiences, yet it is harder for her to recognize the potential defects of her prized Canadian life. Harder, but not impossible, for she is sensitive to the violent content of her breakfast newspapers, and she is not sure whether a life as a single mother in the North would be preferable to that of a married one in the South. Her memories of how Trinidad failed her are equally met by visions of its strong network of community and family support, and she concedes that in Trinidad, her daughter will "at least...have the ocean" in all its beauty (78). As Tamara Palmer Seiler observes, a "large part of the immigrant story in Canadian literature is... of finding a place in Canadian society through comparing the new country with the old" (57). In Drawing Down a Daughter this juxtaposing for the purpose of self-examination is most apparent in the pitting of the raw and tropical Lopinot River of Trinidad ("The Lopinot rushes / spouts over / rocks falls flashing" [36]) against the cold, winter-congealed Bow River of Calgary. It also appears in the contrast between the active, people-populated scenes of her childhood (for instance, the kitchen bake-making session in which her work is surveyed by her female elders) and those tableaux of her as an adult, meandering and writing in her apartment, alone but for her baby. In the face of such contrasts the South certainly appears warmly enticing. And though she has quit her island life and family, the mother-poet retains physical and ritualistic souvenirs of her ancestral culture, from the food and drinks she prepares to the objects decorating her home. Thus, with this definition of drawing the daughters are two: the unborn child whose father is trying to transport her to the islands, and the mother-poet, a descendent of a tropical land that is working through her thoughts to coax her back to it again.
II
In the term "drawing down" the meaning of pulling out — as well as pulling along — might also be derived. As mentioned, the mother-poet is long into her term already when readers meet her, and she yearns for her heavy child to be removed from her body so that she might reclaim her old shape. At the same time, the baby is a part of her own flesh and because of that, an intimate partner that even her lover could never be. She often uses the pronoun "we" when describing her own condition. "Baby we journey down dreamlines / alone while your father searches islands," she says (8), thereby distinguishing herself from the intentions of her spouse and allying her interests with those of her daughter. In the aforementioned nightmare, her stomach is flat again and her baby lost to the wilderness, and she scrambles through the haunted bush to retrieve what she thinks has been pulled out of her prematurely. The act of writing is a more symbolic form of exorcism. The mother-poet’s notebooks, for instance, compile fears and thoughts that she has literally written out of her — for the purpose of "clearing house" and preserving her own sanity, yes, but also perhaps out of some instinctive duty to prepare a safe, clear environment for her soon-to-arrive daughter. Her narratives are replete with details culled from her own life and aired therapeutically in the concrete form of pen on paper.
III
But writing is as much an act of creation as it is a purging. In making a drawing of something on paper one is composing an artistic interpretation of its "real" form. This impression may be highly naturalistic, and/or it may be reality abstracted to the point of being nearly unidentifiable, and/or it may be reality altered to any degree between those two extremes. The mother-poet exercises creative license in composing her "collage," as she calls her notebooks (15), so that it wavers between accurately (one supposes) reflecting her mundane daily routine of preparing breakfast, reading her newspapers, showering, et cetera, to metaphorically exploring her anxieties via the Burri/Jocelyn/ Patricia writings. Patricia is the mother-poet’s fictional self: both are writers, and both are torn between staying in Calgary and returning to Trinidad. At the lip of this spiral is Harris, who interweaves elements of her own life story with more fantastical details. Harris, as well, emigrated from Trinidad to Canada, and she too lives in Calgary as a writer and a teacher. The degree to which Harris mined her autobiography for materials for Drawing Down a Daughter is a measurement unattainable by any but the poet herself, however — and even then, given the imposition of the subconscious in the writing act, contentiously. As Eva C. Karpinski observes, life writing is an inconstant genre, "ranging from oral histories, ‘as tolds’ and short autobiographical essays, to ‘ethnographic self-portraits’ ... fictionalized memoirs, spiritual autobiographies and extremely sophisticated, highly self-conscious autobiographical metafiction" (111). There is no reason to assume that a writer must remain within the borders of any of these formats within a single work.
The collage image is a suitable descriptor for the irregular style the mother-poet adopts in her narration, as she swings between using dialogue, memory, real-time accounts, dreams, stream-of-consciousness, prose, verse, concrete poetry, recipes and other channels to move the tale along. Harris has professed elsewhere her preference for the assembly of disparate styles into one piece as a means of "mirror[ing] the profound disharmony" of one’s experience and understanding of the world (Morrell 29). In this book, the amorphous structure complements the mother-poet’s alternations between love for and aversion to Trinidad. Marilyn Rose also suggests that the collaged structure of Drawing Down a Daughter "signif[ies] the richness of the heritage into which the child will be born" (516). Whether the family remains in Canada or not, the daughter will be raised and taught by numerous elders and peers who exercise many different ways of seeing. (Cyril Dabydeen suggests that Canadian "reality" is rooted in a "landscape of the imagination," not simply a physical, geographic place [233]; it is conceivable, therefore, that the mother-poet’s "Canadian" values will accompany her to Trinidad, and that they may be passed on to her child.) Although unpredictable, the book is not impenetrable. Harris’s use of two distinct fonts — a rigid Arial for the mother-poet’s world, dreamt or awake, and an embellished serif script for her notebook entries — is a helpful guide, as is the application of boldface to indicate the start of each new section of the long poem. At moments when the mother-poet is fearful, confused or anxious, or when she feels as though life is whirling about her, the text is jammed tight in sympathy, as it is with this description of a visit from an energetic friend:
she unlocks without a check heart leaping grey-green
eyes are spotlights Rosemarie laughs "you thought it was
him sorry, only me! how ya doing sure you don't want
me to come back tonight" she is laughing "wanna hike"/
her stomach achingly flat "I’ve got exams to mark! sure
you don’t want to go sky diving"
a whirlwind! infectious! (19)
Contrastingly, when her thoughts wander between the present and the past, words are arrayed sparsely, as here:
the hour darkening full of cars
... she is five her mother sits up in bed (80)
These are guides, but one cannot hope to uncover Harris’s absolute and pure intentions in composition. Just as the mother-poet is only revealed to us in aspects, so too are only parts of Harris’s worldview transposed into words. Karpinski cautions that anthologized immigrant life writing runs the risk of being "sanitiz[ed]" (in other words, disempowered) by editors and translators (121), and to an extent this filtering down of original authorial meaning applies to Harris’s book as well, even while she is not being "collected" by an editor per se. Patricia’s life has been selectively portrayed by the mother-poet, and the mother-poet’s by Harris (even the stream-of-consciousness is edited!), and Harris herself, one presumes, has been "improved upon" by her publisher’s staff. Each of these levels of telling is further translated by readers. "The fiction persists," Patricia observes at one point in Drawing Down a Daughter, "that autobiography is non-fiction" (62). At the bottom of the spiral-narrative, Patricia recreates episodes from her childhood but admits that she is dressing them up for aesthetic effect: her journey is an incredible, cyclical one, with an eerie re-emergence in her adult life in Calgary of Jocelyn, a figure from her childhood in Trinidad. One level up, the mother-poet is using Patricia’s fated quest as a metaphor for her own dilemma. Overseeing these women is Harris, whose own story has been regurgitated and reassembled to various extents in the plot — and I, in turn, am "creating" Harris, by drawing my version of her vision in (and on) this paper.
While I, as a white, Canadian-born reader, may not understand what it means to be a black woman forced to choose between continuing her new life in Canada or returning to the land of her birth, I can empathize with her anger at being compelled to make such an impossible decision, and with her simultaneous romanticization and rejection of the past. Lynette Hunter offers, as a reader and a critic of a "different" race than that of the author whom she is reading, a similar receptiveness to the personal experience of the author as he/she is offered up in a text:
[T]hese writers write about issues I recognize intimately when they write about their position as women, as lovers, wives, mothers, daughters, women at work. I read these differently depending upon the availability of common ground offered by the texts. That common ground can be radically displaced by the difficulty of my own understanding of race, yet where the grounds that bring women together can be articulated, it can provide a place for talking about precisely those difficulties with race that separate us. (259)
The use of the personal in art as a way of addressing the political is a feminist strategy, but it is also one deployed by black Canadian writers to effect revolution, according to Ayanna Black. "We all speak passionately, venomously," Black says in the introduction of an anthology of African-Canadian writers that includes Harris; "We have learned true liberation can only be achieved through the freeing of the spirit" (xiii). Harris’s small portrait of one woman is in this way a launching pad for the exploration of macrocosmic issues, and wider conditions.
Which brings me to consider why one illustrates, creates, draws. I have called the notebook — the mother-poet’s illustration — a form of therapy, but it is also a legacy. The mother-poet recalls receiving from her own mother "the gospel on bakes" (44). This food-preparation tradition is a link to her family’s heritage, and one that she feels duty-bound to pass on to her own descendents. Her scribblings are a similar contribution to a collective history, as they are letters (whether literal or symbolic) to her daughter that remember the mother-poet’s past and attempt to describe her present — both periods that are or will soon be part of the daughter’s heritage. In Jamaican-Canadian writer Makeda Silvera’s story "Her Head a Village," a writer-protagonist is urged by the diverse "villagers" who clamour about in her thoughts to give voice to each of their stories in her essay: "Write about women in houses without electricity," they demand, then "Write about the dangers of living in a police state," and "Write about Third World issues," and so on (419). Harris may be seen as taking on a similar task of representing various dimensions of the full truth by incorporating the tales of multiple women and, indeed, men (the mother-poet on the cusp of a life-altering decision; her fictional twin, Patricia; the single mother and illegal immigrant, Jocelyn; the wise old woman storyteller back in Trinidad; the cocky Burri; and, to an extent, the mother-poet’s husband) — and then through inconstant lenses (Burri, for instance, is recalled by the old woman, by Patricia and by a retired police inspector). Via this composite of characters, each with their own desires and goals, Harris can address such topics as the Canadian Dream, gender politics, diaspora and the homecoming, using complementary and/or contradictory perspectives. Silvera’s protagonist feels the pressure as a delegate to accurately represent her villagers. Harris, on the other hand, is unapologetic regarding her collage style: through her book, her creation, she has immortalized a black woman’s experiences, but by no means all black women’s lives. Her poetic "I," she has said of her writings, is the "I" of a "specific body, the African body, the female African body, as well as the ‘I’ of imagined, and selectively structured, narrative context" (Morrell 31).
In considering her own childhood memories, the mother-poet is aware that "to live is to dream the self / to make a fiction" (43) that is doomed to grow weaker, with time, in the thoughts of one’s descendents. Her creation is an attempt to counter the misunderstandings that spring from generational conflict, but it is still an imperfect message, for her legacy is one "confined by words" (42). Nor are all of her thoughts actually impressed upon paper, converted from Arial to serif script. Some of her verbal/mental teachings to her baby, while not actually recorded on paper, one trusts will likely be repeated as the daughter ages — among them the tongue-in-cheek "i'm telling you Girl you have to watch men" (23). Other lessons take the form of prayer, addressed ostensibly to a spiritual entity, though reflecting particular values that the poet-mother holds dear and that she wishes her daughter prize too:
Obatala ‘who turns blood into children'
Make me a woman out of my blood
...
A girl who can place brick upon bric
And yet read from a book
A woman of our grandmothers and their wisdoms
And still a woman with the light of dawn on her
Grant her old age and grace (40)
How (whether) the daughter will read or hear these teachings is uncertain.
IV
An oppositional meaning for the act of "drawing down" is that of weighting down or encumbering. Whereas drawing-as-creation represents action, this drawing prevents the individual from moving forward. One manifestation of this hindrance afflicts the mother-poet’s unborn child, who will soon be pulled from the safety of her mother’s womb into a world of violence, changeable emotions, battling parents and definition by gender and race — all of which may impede her spirit. Her father anticipates that she will face limitations to her potential by remaining in Canada, and he tries to curb such future pains by proposing a move to Trinidad, the promised land: "There has to be something better for my child," he tells his wife; "Have you any idea what it is to grow up defined by race? Especially when the definition is, at best, patronizing" (69). Her mother, on the other hand, sees in Canada the sort of "freedom" (ibid.) for her daughter that a Trinidadian life could not offer, and she argues that in fleeing to some romanticized vision of the islands they are doing a disservice to black Canadian peoples of the future, including their own daughter. "You don’t run. You stay and force change!... Don’t you see," she pleads, "the fight just gets harder for those who are left behind. This is exactly what certain white Canadians want! How could you just hand it to them?" (70). One cannot forget, though, that the mother-poet herself fled Trinidad rather than remaining to effect social change. Ironically, while the mother’s wish to preserve her child’s liberty may be well meaning, simultaneously she is transferring the heavy burden of her own desires and fears onto her daughter’s small shoulders. Which is more central in her mind — concern for her daughter’s ability to succeed on equal footing with men in Trinidad, or whites in Canada, or the retention of her own writing career in Canada? Is she dismissing Trinidad (which admittedly may, in the intervening years since her departure, have changed for the better) in the same narrow-minded manner as she accuses her husband of perceiving Canada? Certainly, guilt about this possibility hovers in her thoughts, for in her notebook writings about her doppelgänger, Patricia, she describes an old aunt’s criticism of her niece’s narcissism: "She learn a writer have a right to write anything," the old woman says, "do anything / for the writing" (100). (Patricia’s meddling contributes to the death of Ashley, Jocelyn’s daughter. What, Harris seems to be encouraging readers to ask, may be the consequences of the mother-poet’s decision to stay in Canada?) The mother-poet’s "mother dream" for her daughter, then, is "potent as love or hate" (8): it may be as destructive as it is protective. Another inhibitive weight explored in Drawing Down a Daughter is that which is imposed by language itself. No language is neutral, to borrow the title of Dionne Brand’s book, and here too the English Harris adopts is impregnated by a whole history of Western-world social alignments. Even before the child is born she has been defined. She is a female, a daughter, and as such she must enter into a legacy of how the world classifies and explains femininity and daughterhood. If she is not able to be a woman as her community expects her to be, or as her mother wants her to be, then there will be strife — just as the mother-poet herself faced when as a small girl she could not grasp the making of bakes and wished to be outside playing with the boys instead. Being black, in Canada, the daughter also has other socially conceived meanings thrust upon her from her very beginnings: as her mother laments, "Child all i have to give / is English which hates/fears your / black skin...Reduced to word squeezed into system and ceremony You / thrash out in black agony" (25-26). Lynette Hunter, in an article that compares the strategies of three Caribbean-Canadian women writers (Claire Harris, Dionne Brand and Marlene Philip) to express themselves within a Northern literary tradition that has long excluded and/or devalued them, proposes that these writers feel compelled to operate within that tradition in order "to get published," and that by not doing so "their potential audience will be restricted, their traditionally educated readers will not know how to read their work" (257). Yet Hunter does offer this caveat: "[O]nce access has been gained, there is an opportunity for trying out a new voice, making a new way of reading" (ibid.). Furthering this chance for a purer expression is Marilyn Rose’s observation that Harris insists "on the power of the African-Canadian poet to use English as an instrument for inscribing ‘A Black reading’... upon the ‘white space’ that is North America’s idea of itself" (516). The real experience must be condensed, if it is to be communicated, into a code that is exercised by others in one’s social sphere. There are expectations that words will be deployed "properly" — that the laws of arrangement will be followed. Harris was a teacher, and her mother-poet character is too, and in their role as instructors they are expected to evaluate their students’ success at communicating using the common code. Harris recognizes the paradox: "I write in a tradition," she has stated, "...that is in direct descent from European Literature though it clings to what is left of the ancestral cosmos not ripped from me, even as it elaborates Africa in the Americas" (Morrell 28). As writers who must fit thought into a language-template, Harris and her mother-poet are restricted, but form, style, play and subversive tools and techniques permit an amount of freedom within the prison.
The land of the mother-poet’s birth is affiliated with an oral storytelling tradition and a distinct Caribbean dialect, both of which are channelled by the mother-poet in her writings and thoughts. The inclusion of "[p]rophecy, warning, testimony, ‘cuss-cuss,’ proverbial pronouncements" and other "practices" and "expressive forms" from Caribbean culture is a common feature of Caribbean-Canadian writings (Bucknor 179). Part of the Burri narrative, for example, is presented in the voice of the old woman, who recites the man’s adventures to a group of children. The old woman’s speech is rhythmic, verging on the musical, and indeed at times the children contribute a sort of chorus to her measured recounting: "See-ah Burri See-ah / See-ah Burri Mammy oh / See-ah Burri Mammy oh," chant the children, after which the teller continues,
First thing he know he can’t find his lighter anywhere. He check breast
pocket, breast pocket say, ‘check shirt pocket.’ He check shirt pocket,
shirt pocket say, ‘check pant pocket.’ He check pant pocket, pant pocket say, ‘check jacket pocket.’ He check jacket pocket, and jacket pocket say,‘ain’t my business if you drop it.’(53)
The old woman’s mode of telling directly involves her audience and incorporates movement as well as speech. Her syntax does not conform with the rules of "proper" (read: institutionalized) North American English. In these ways her passages are in marked contrast with those of Patricia, for instance, the Northern-educated émigré who tries — at first — to apply logic to her aunt’s telling of the Burri story. Patricia’s first-person passages are in proper English, punctuated, linear and grammatically correct. Yet Patricia too comes to realize the inadequacy of language to depict the "real." Even the old woman, Patricia sees, is mediated by her memories of how her elder had been, or might have been:
For one thing, I doubt the ability of anyone to relate a series of facts
accurately. For another, I doubt that it is possible to consider any event a fact except in the simplest use of that word. ...For we do not know if any of this really happened. Yet I remember the story being told. I remember the old woman. And I am sure the story was told as I have written it because that is how the books say Afro-Caribbean tales are told. Your books, I mean. (58-59)
The mother-poet is free in the sense that she can cross between narrative forms and voices, and switch between the correct and the incorrect, even while deploying English’s basic building blocks. This is most apparent in her poetry, where extra horizontal spaces take the place of punctuation marks, capitalization is not always applied when expected and words are arranged concretely to further represent that which they communicate in idea (in the shape of a pregnant belly as she writes about her womb [16]; in letters splayed vertically down the page as she speaks of night falling, a falling leaf [81]). She even occasionally weaves in ellipses and non-English "words" as though to underline English’s inability to capture that which she wishes it to — namely sound, or the absence of it ("ooooooooooobabeeeeeeeeeeeaaaaaaababeeee" [110]; "look my flight is called ... yes ... I know" [23]). Such techniques are akin to the oral storyteller’s supplementation of her vocabulary with props, gestures, facial expressions, nonsensical noises and tone variations that together broaden meaning and permit a story to include the "unseen," unnamed "presences" (52) of the world. Oral storytelling, recipes and prayers from the "old" world are given space in Harris’s book, to the end that her protagonist’s experience of Canada is appropriately multidimensional. This fluidity between forms may also be construed as an attempt to carve out a female language and literature in a male-dominated tradition. The white spaces and ellipses may designate a marginalization of the (black) female voice, but they also challenge the convention of the linear, logical progression of narrative. Harris’s long poem is organic, fertile with "other" ways of seeing and telling, so that the body of the poem mirrors the physical state of the mother-poet.
It is significant that Harris does not name the mother-poet, her husband or their daughter, as these omissions constitute another tactic for lightening the burden of language. It is easy to align the book’s characters: one may equate the mother-poet with Jocelyn (both are immigrants from Trinidad, and Jocelyn is the single mother whom the protagonist may soon be) and/or with Patricia (both are haunted by their past, and both are separated from their Trinidadian relatives by virtue of their education and jobs in Canada), and/or Patricia with Jocelyn ("[Patricia] could be Jocelyn, Jocelyn could be she. She look in Jocelyn eye and feel she self Jocelyn. What if she wake up one morning and find she self Jocelyn?" [105-106]). And the temptation is strong to ally the mother-poet, and/or Patricia and/or Jocelyn with Harris — but the latter does not fully allow us to do so. By not attributing specific identifiers to the book’s central family, by not calling her heroine Claire, or any other name, she is giving the reader more freedom for interpretation, her main character more freedom from the reader’s expectations and herself freedom to explore potential plot strands without the limitations of autobiographical "fact."
Conclusion
Harris’s book is at its most basic level a letter for a daughter, a plea by the mother that her child try to understand why she would come to make the decision she did — to stay in or to leave Canada. But it is more than that. As Harris observed of publishing’s implications, "The problem is one of audience. We all know for whom we write; the ambivalence, and it is a dangerous one, lies in to whom we write" (Hunter 279). In this paper I have relayed what she has written to me: four alternate meanings to her title, and thus, four channels through which to view her world as she offers it in Drawing Down a Daughter. I have argued that beyond being a minutely diaristic account of a woman’s last days of her pregnancy, the book considers more general topics such as the parent-child nurturing/restricting bond, sacrifice, women’s social and marital constraints, freedoms enabled by art, language as imprisonment, memory’s alteration of truth and racism. Harris’s method of layering voices increases the likelihood that a reader will be drawn in to sympathize with facets of her narrative. I have also suggested that while the book is life writing, it is not Harris’s life — whether she intended it to be so or not. For in reading we all draw our own needs onto the text, and draw our own meaning from the text. We too are drawing down this daughter.
© Copyright 2006 Andrea Belcham
Works Cited
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Rose, Marilyn. "Harris, Claire". The Oxford Companion to Canadian Literature. 2nd ed. Ed. Eugene Benson and William Toye. Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1997. 515-516.
Silvera, Makeda. "Her Head a Village." Making a Difference: Canadian Multicultural Literature. Ed. Smaro Kamboureli. Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1996. 415-420.
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