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LITTERAE
Multilingual literary magazine

Ana Olos:

MYRNA KOSTASH’S:  IDENTITY AND WRITINGS

The adjectives "Ukrainian non-fiction prairie new-leftist  Canadian nationalist", defining Myrna Kostash’s identity reproduce the title of an interview published in Canadian Literature, Spring 2002, by Margarert Fee, Sneja Gunew and Lisa Grekul, as part of a project, “Diaspora, Indigeneity, Ethnicity”, funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. The project is meant to study “contemprorary writer-intellectuals from Canada and Australia whose work reflect their sense of belonging “however uneasily to an ethnic or an indigenious community as well as to a wider nation”. (Preface) Reading the interview, one realizes that this is a quotation from one of Kostash’s answers and reflects the way the writer defined herself at the beginning of her career. But since these dimensions of her personality arise from her intellectual history, the present article intends to give a rear-view of her literary career whose thematic range is much wider than the dimensions of her own personality.

Born in 1944, in Edmonton, Alberta, into a family of Ukrainian origin, Myrna Kostash studied Slavic languages and literatures at the universities of Alberta and Toronto. After her graduation she spent two years in Europe with odd jobs, then returned to Toronto in 1971. She had worked for four years as a free-lance magazine writer appearing mainly in Saturday Night, Macleans and Chatelaine and taught in the experimental women’s studies programme at the University of Toronto.

Stirred by her wish to explore her roots and the ethnic group to which her family belonged to, she returned to Alberta in 1975, in order to research and write a book about the Ukrainian community from the prairies. The outcome of this was All of Baba’s Children, first published in 1977, strategically reprinted in 1980 and 1987, as if to recommend the author’s new books to her former readers so as to enhance the impact and to enlarge the circle of penetration of her writings. In his foreword to the third edition, George Melnyk already recommended it as a “classic”, explaining the reason:

“For a work of non-fiction to become a classic means that it has made a significant contribution to a particular culture by creating a breakthrough in its consciousness and by heralding a new stage in its evolution. ‘All of Baba’s Children’ achieved this by its vibrant, radical and revisionist perspective on multiculturalism. It turns its back to the old cliché s; it dares to question and to criticize. For the contemporary generation of Canadians, it, more than any other book, has revealed the true nature of ethnicity, which has often been hidden under the veneer of assimilation. ‘All of Baba’s Children’ has become a manifesto that is yet to be surpassed.”(vii)

Kostash starts her introduction to the 1987 modestly considering it a “professional”, “journalistic” exercise, just a “writer’s view of Ukrainian-Canadian history”.(xiii) The contradictory reception of the book enabled her to see her own achievement from the outside. On the one hand, there was the “fan mail” from people “with unAnglo last names from small towns, expressing their gratitude” that she had had the ‘courage’ to write bluntly of the unhappiness and failure of the ‘ethnics’ as well as of their achievements” (xiii). On the other hand, she was attacked as “pinko” and “slanderer” because she had written sympathetically of the Ukrainian-Canadians in the Communist Party. Non-Ukrainian readers accused her of “bitchiness” and for “maligning Anglo-Saxons”. (xiv)

Above all these reactions, Kostash had to acknowledge the pulling-force of the community which was reclaiming her, the Galicians of the prairie countryside: “Liking these people or even getting along with them wasn’t the point: I had been born into them and my identity had been sealed.”(xix) Still, she was not content just to acknowledge “the blood relation”: “Identity is also conscious and articulate and self-assigned. There is the ethnicity one inherits and the ethnicity one acquires, and, having acknowledged by the very act of writing All of Baba’s Children the inherited ethnicity, I set out to acquire it as well.”(xiv)

The first generation of Ukrainian immigrants who had arrived at the end of the 19^th century are present in the very title of the book, Baba being a kind of “Founding Mother” of the community. The book explores topics connected to work, family life, education, religion, culture, but also politics, racial discrimination, the situation of the Ukrainian minority in period of the two World Wars, nationalism and assimilation, ending with a chapter entitled “Mythologies”. There are hundreds of “voices” telling their different stories, quotations from newspapers and histories, interviews, showing the differences between the first and the later immigrants, between those who lived on the early homesteads and those who left for the city, summing up the losses and the gains in becoming Canadians and still preserving the former identity: a painful and complicated process during which sometimes the formerly discriminated become themselves racist and discriminators.

Kostash is also aware of the differences inside the Ukrainian community depending on the moment of settling, economic prosperity, religious or political affiliation or gender. Because herself is manipulated by the English culture and language which she writes beautifully, Kostash devotes many pages to explore how language can act both ways: as a means of preserving one’s identity but also as an instrument of assimilation. If learning the language and education was a necessity for men in order to achieve economic prosperity and leave the rural community, it did not work in the same way for women. The patriarchal mentality was perpetuated also by intellectuals and “male teachers derided a girl’s ambition to be a teacher and told her to marry instead, when parents refused to send a daughter to art school, fearing the virtue, then the fact that Ukrainian-Canadian women were schooled to the extent they were is a minor miracle.”(71)

Kostash tries to keep a fair balance between the opinions concerning the Ukrainians’ wish to integrate into the new country and their opposition (supported by priests, teachers and intellectual activists) to a forced denationalisation. She also includes the discussions revived during the debates surrounding multiculturalism: “it was argued that loyalty and identification with Canada wasn’t necessarily the same thing as allegiance to the British way of life.”(85)

Chapter fifteen bears the title Assimilation and Kostash shows how and why during this process of assimilation the Ukrainian did not surrender unconditionally their “exiled identity” to the new one, and continued to identify with the Ukrainian nation and the Ukrainian culture.(363) The moments of “retreat” to the other side of the hyphen happen exactly when the dominant culture manifests its lack of trust in the loyalty of the minority.

In the final chapter of All of Baba’s Children: “Mythologies”, Kostash speaks of the “compromise” of the older generation, represented by the “hyphenated identity” which for the outsider “may seem like a neutralised and attenuated substitute for a real name”.(394) She sees the “ethnic compromise” as a “survival technique” and ethnicity as “a culture of ambiguity, emphasising now one, now the other identity on either side of the hyphen, depending on the prevailing political winds.”(395)

In her straight and provocative tone, Kostash challenges mythologised versions of history and idealised visions of multiculturalism based upon ambiguous keywords such as: national unity, identity, richness, energy, which hardly reflect individual reality. The simple fact that she needs so many diverse points of view and so many contradictory opinions to quote shows that she has not reached the end of the discussion yet. New concepts have to be clarified and new questions arise. There is a difference between acculturation and assimilation, she says, since “whether or not to assimilate into the Canadian mainstream is not a simple decision of ourselves, it is also a decision of the elite, which, according to the image it holds of the ethnics, will or will not allow us access to their structures.” (420)

When the writer goes to a celebration of Ukrainian Day at the Vegerville Ukrainian Festival in June 1975 she remarks: “these days anyone can be a Ukrainian” but she sees herself as the “observer” who looks for “Slavic features” in the faces of the people she meets and tries to find her own face in the “inscrutable expression” on the faces on some old photographs shown in a booth. The program she views has items both in Ukrainian and English. When the people stand up to sing the national anthems, “first the Ukrainian nationalist one”, she is amazed “by the capacity of these people to be moved so artlessly and genuinely by the idea of the liberation of a country they have never seen.” (247) The bilingual programme closes ironically with a men’s choir singing “an anarchist song from the Spanish Civil War”. (430)

The book ends with the sceptical statement: “A tourist I came, a tourist I leave. Like thousands and thousands of Ukrainian-Canadians of my generation and beyond, I only travel these ethnic sideroads when I need to find a breathing space awhile, away from the fumes of the cosmopolitan metropolis and all its works. But the metropolis is what I return to when it’s time to go home.” These lines at the end of the journey summarise Kostash’s search for identity only for the time being. She recognises her “otherness” but also asserts her being “of this place”:

“If there was any way at all that I carry on from where she [ Baba] left off, it won’t be with her language, because I never knew it, nor with her habits, because they make no sense, nor with her faith, because I have lost it, nor with her satisfaction, because my needs have changed. It will be perhaps with the thing she had no choice in bequeathing: the otherness. As the alien, the ‘bohunk’, the second class citizen, and the ethnic she passed on to me the gift of consciousness of one who stands outside the hegemonistic centre, and sees where the real world ends and the phantasm of propaganda begins. As for the generation between us, my parents, her children, they gave me the possibility of action as one who is of this place and this time, free of the ghosts of diffidence. Seeing clearly and acting surely: the journey from Tulova ends here.”(430)

In a rear view of Kostash’s career it seems that her “baba” has acted as a kind of guiding spirit, as the writer has recuperated the “lost language”, learning Ukrainian, looking for her roots in Europe, trying to understand the way religion fashioned her ancestors communities.

Besides her Ukrainian community from the praeries, the most important influence in the writer’s career had been her belonging to the gereation of the sixties, with all the implication of this. Her second book, Long Way from Home (1980), as it is shown on its cover, deals with the story of the sixties generation in Canada, and actually defines the writer as “one of them”. After almost twenty years, she was looking back at the events that marked her for the rest of her life. The titles of the six parts of the book and the titles of the chapters remind of the rhetoric, slogans or grafitti of the “Flower Power” in the United States and the students’ movements which swept all over western Europe as well during the sixties: Part I. Peace and War: I. “Peace now!”, II. “War is good business, invest your son!”, III. “Hell no, we won’t go”; Part II. Student Power: I. “Knowledge for whom?” II. “Be realistic, demand the impossible”; Part III. Counterculture: I. “Back to the Garden”, II. “Hope I die before I grow old” etc.

In this book Canadianness is seen mainly as “citizenship”. In Part VI. This is not a Revolution, sir, This is a Mutation, the third chapter, entitled “It’s my fight, it’s my life”, Kostash sums up also “from within” the consequences of the Revolution which aimed to decentralise and to particularise “the twin impulses of regionalism and ethnicity”. She realises that those who considered that “there was a political and cultural authenticity in the devolution away from the nation-state and the capital city into the autonomous settlement” were not right. Those who voiced that :“It is here, under our feet that we have identity and purpose, it is here we know who we are, what needs to be done and where home is. And it is from this place that we will hold back the barbarians.” 

While speaking and reading to wide and various audiences, Kostash began to really ask herself questions like: “What is ethnicity? How is it related to being a western Canadian? Is it a source of strength or is it debilitating in the modern world? How can I be an ethnic and a feminist in the same time? How does my ethnicity affect my writing?” (1987 Introduction: xv) In the process of answering these questions and clarifying for herself the problem of identity, No Kidding: Inside the World of Teenage Girls (1987), dedicated to her sister Janice, seems only an intermezzo. Based on the exploration of a subculture that was not anymore that of the sixties, the writer tries to deal with the generation gap and understand the younger ones. But in the meantime the reactions to her first book and her trips to Europe, before writing No Kidding, make her return to the exploration of ethnic identity.

While willing “to engage in the construction of neo-Galician prairie identity” Kostash had not been prepared to acknowledge her relationship to the Ukrainian nation as a whole, including the motherland, the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. Her first travel to Europe, in 1982, is followed by another “visit” in 1984, this time to Ukraine, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia (Slovenia and Serbia). Her visit to her baba’s village and the new experiences modified again her vision of identity and engendered the wish to write a “story” about exploring a wider space between cultures. In 1986 she visited once again Yugoslavia; in 1987: Poland, Czechoslovakia and again Yugoslavia; in 1988: Ukraine, Poland, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia (including Kosovo and Macedonia). Because in 1988 she did not know that everything was about to change, in 1991 she had to visit again Serbia and Ukraine, travels which came only as a coda to her journey. The outcome of all these journeys was her Bloodlines, published in 1993.

At first sight Kostash’s Bloodlines could be classified as a travelogue, resembling other accounts about journeys in Eastern and Central Europe. It satisfies the readers’ recent interest in non-fiction books, dissidents’ and exiles’ memorials, published and widely read in response to the process of re-writing history and aiming at a new reconciliation. The publishers of Bloodlines - Douglas & McIntyre, recommended the book as “a deeply intelligent, unconventional account of the author’s journey into Eastern Europe” that should establish Kostash’s place among the world’s pre-eminent cultural journalists”(Brian Fawcett, Books in Canada). Janice Kulyk Keefer finds in it “richly detailed, clear-eyed and passionately engaged with the history of the other Europe”, giving “a deeply moving account of what is to be a hyphenated Canadian for whom the history and community of blood relations extend from the old world to the new”.

The “Introduction” outlines the background and genesis of the book, whole the motto establishes three themes: blood, love and rhetoric. But Kostash warns her readers: “This is a book about memory. About the territories that exist in the imagination of a Canadian writer, in that of her interlocutors, and in the space between them.” The readers are expected and even challenged to add their own territory, their own memories. Even if chronology does not act as an organizing principle, the dates of the writer’s journeys reveal a restless come-and-go between the two continents that have shaped her identity. The book is organized in four sections, each devoted to one of the four countries: Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Poland, Ukraine. Each section is preceded by a short summary of the historical events around the Second World War and is broken down into separate thematic divisions under whose headings Place Names and dates fix the source of the experiences. The writer is guided by the flux of her own memory.

At the start of her successive journeys, Myrna Kostash had a plan in her mind that was to interview writers of her own generation “bred by the events of the 1960s, who were writing from within the opposition in their respective societies”. (1) As a the New Left socialist - whose information about the Soviet Union and the soviet block countries came mainly from books and casual encounters, she intended to confront herself with “actually existing socialism” and see how it affected her own political beliefs. The experience itself proved to be more complicated and upsetting than she had planned and imagined it. She simply lost control and became manipulated by the events and people she met. She had to realize that the political, ethnic and generation solidarity she had thought to feel with the people she met in Europe was illusory or at least ambiguous. Questions to be answered arose in her mind:

How does the ‘old country’ live in the citizen of the new? How may I understand these people and their extraordinary history - my blood relations, as it were, from whom I was separated by the accident of being born in Canada? How do they imagine the place I came from? Can I trust what I see of theirs? What is the source of my feelings - feelings I didn’t even know I had - about their history, their landscape, their languages, their sites of collective memory? What is their claim on me? Mine on them? In other words, what has this part of the world got to do with me.(2)

The book makes the readers share the writer’s experience but also urges them to understand why their own countries have had each a different history, a different perception of “the other”, why only certain experiences remain in people’s memories, why only the wrongs done by “the other” are recorded and expected to be revenged, why territories are changing ownership and are claimed by all those who had once set foot on them, why languages are suppressed and silenced, why boundaries are moving on the map, why people continue to hate and kill each other, why there is no respect for the historical values of “the other” and so on and so forth.

The obsession with the map and the perception of space as “territory” changing ownership has to be connected to Myrna Kostash’s Canadianness that gives her a special sensitivity towards de- and re-territorialisations. When she conducts her research in Eastern Europe as a writer emotionally guided by the European side of her identity, there are always Ukrainians among her interlocutors. This makes her pursue the problem of minorities that has remained a problem, even if the socialist “internationalism” prided to have solved it in the soviet block countries.

In the chapter on Yugoslavia the past is still alive and the present even more threatening. Genocide becomes the dominant theme, and the title question “Are we still in Europe?” rings ironical. History goes back to the battles with the Turk, but in 1988 in Belgrade, “the talk is inevitably of Kosovo”. The stories about genocide remind her “of the cheap propaganda that nations at war have always unleashed against the enemy”, which for her interlocutor has quite another meaning. When she looks around, her eyes are caught by the picturesque mixture of different cultures:

Here in Belgrade, as in all the Balkan places, are the gypsies and their dancing bears and the old men with leathery faces and woolen leggings down from the mountains, Turkish coffee and cheese pies and wailing sopranos on the bus station loudspeakers. And here too are stories of the resistance in the mountains - the hajduks, romantic freebooters in the hills, avenging the poor of the villages against the plundering Turks - and the reference not to Istanbul but to Carski Grad, the King’s city, Constantine’s city, as though to refuse the Turkish name is to keep the thread intact that once linked Athens with Rome with Byzantium. (83)

The visit to the historical sites makes the author conclude that the route from Dubrovnik and Ohrid to Constantinople speaks about polymorphism in a polyphony: Macedonians, Greeks, Albanians, Turks, living together on the Silk Route. Nevertheless, there is always:

The never-ending debate: what kind of people are we? We have wondered all over the southeast lands, scattering our bones, like our cold ashes, in all directions. Austrian generals once measured off a wide swath of territory bordering on Serbia and Bosnia, making the farthest extent of western Christianity into the Balkans, and called it the Bloody Frontier. That’s where we lived: within the blood.( 85)

In Ohrid, Macedonia, the talk goes around the Cyrillic alphabet, and the thousandth anniversary of Christianity. But for Myrna Kostash this is a moment of ardent recollection of laboring at Saturday School in the basement of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of St. John, in Edmonton, learning the letters of this alphabet.

As expected, the discussions in Poland are about Gdansk and the Solidarity, the Polish underground and the collaborators with the regime. Other pages refer to the memory of the Holocaust, the Sopot music festival, but also Poland’s rule over her neighbours, and especially over the western part of Ukraine: “The lost territories: an equation. On the Polish side nostalgia, fear and regret. On the Ukrainian side, resentment, bitterness and vengefulness.”(159) Not even great writers get an excuse for their rewriting history from a nationalist point of view. Myrna Kostash cannot but remember a fragment in Czeslaw Milosz’s The Seizure of Power, where a refined, well-read Polish “pan”, speaks of “my country”, as opposed to the illiterate Ukrainian Ivan who toils on his land and has no right to anything.

The summary on Ukraine starts with 1939, “the incorporation of lands of western Ukraine into Ukrainian S. S. S. R.”. The two parts of this section speak of the liquidation of the Greek Catholic Church, of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army in western Ukraine, about the ideological campaign against “bourgeois nationalism”, the thaw under Khruschev, the massive anti-intellectual pogrom, of intellectuals protesting Russification during the seventies. Recollections recall other recollections: Taras Sevchenko, the national poet, the terrible famine with millions of dead, the Cossacks of Zaporozhia, the serfdom to the Polish pans, and Kostash’s visits and meetings with the members of her own family.

On the whole, Myrna Kostash’s Bloodlines, alike her other books, is not only a quest for the writer’s identity. Her exploration of the Slavic countries and their histories in Europe made her see and include her own ethnic community in a much wider context. Referring to important historical issues in Eastern and Central Europe before the Fall, there is also a warm appeal to reason and understanding so that history should not repeat itself. The feminine and feminist message is that the rhetoric of politics should go together with a rhetoric of love rather than that of domination and hate, a message conveyed also by her stories in The Doomed Bridegroom.

I had discovered Myrna Kostash and her writings during a Canadian Studies conference in Hungary where she presented the audience a piece of her “erotica”. It was a “love story” for a Ukrainian dissident whom she had never met but whom she tried to bring back to life by writing his story. I was not the only one to be moved to tears by her endeavor to resurrect her hero. So I was very glad to receive from the author a copy of her book of stories that I read in the train homewards.

The collection entitled The Doomed Bridegroom (1998), with the subtitle A Memoir, opened with a preface in which the narrator - triggered by the “speaking bitterness” of the revisionist feminists who during the 1970s - considered that the Sexual Revolution had been a fraud and looked back at her own memories of the 1960 and remembered “being always, almost without a break, in love”. (ii) The writer’s “agenda” for The Doomed Bridegroom was - as she had written in a draft application to a journalism program - to explore in a series of auto-fictions “the eroticism associated with suffering and martyrdom, particularly as they were lived out in the political dreams of the Cold War and New Left.” (Preface, v)

The opening piece in the volume is “Mississippi Dreaming”, the memoir of the first “bridegroom”, Lenny, a draft dodger of New York during the 1960s. Lenny attends lectures on “The Political Institutions of the Soviet Union” in a Canadian university, takes methadrine to keep himself awake in order to write articles for student papers about Vietnam and the draft resistance in the United States, speeches for rallies in front of the legislature and letters to his New York friends. Occasionally, he goes to bed with the girls who admire his activism. During the seventies, the narrator visits her hero detained in a Federal Correctional Institution and decides to wait for him as long as it takes. The love story ends ironically because the “doomed bridegroom”, instead of choosing his “bride”, prefers to marry his lawyer. The last piece in the book is “Belgrade”, dated 1997, is about the narrator’s love for a young Serbian poet, only a boy, that directs also the perception of the political events, the rhetoric of love coloring the rhetoric of politics:

He is leaning over the table, his chin in both hands, his face open, guileless, his eyes a wide stare of concentration as though to memorize this moment. Perhaps, much later, if someday he should live in piece and write his poems, my story will be in his. But that is the future, beyond me to tell. My story is this moment, a receding point of light in a contracting history, what is left of memory and a fury of hapless love. (174)

This fragment is undeniably a valid illustration of how feelings and especially sexual arousal can influence ideological convictions. Women seem virtual victims of hero-worship but, with most of them, the heroic vocations are consumed inside the family instead of the public stage. The author leaves the reader to choose between a sentimental or ironic reading of the stories.

Kostash’s latest book, The Next Canada. In Search of Our Future Nation, (1999) takes her readers back to the country whose loyal citizen she is. It explores the young generation’s expectations as concerns the future of Canada. Some of the material of the book was used for a lecture series for the Ukrainian community and published in a beautifully illustrated booklet All of Baba’s Great Grandchildren that bears the subtitle Ethnic Identity in the Next Canada as if to close the cycle that began with Baba’s children. The book is organized as a thematic survey whose summary is given by the writer in her Introduction:

The material is organized into five major topic headings. ‘The New World Order’ includes economic themes, from workplace experience to the new entrepreneurship to issue of wealth and poverty. ‘Culture’ looks at the media, the arts, and the theme of cultural community. ‘Beyond Identity Politics’ encompasses sexualities and ethnicities. ‘Acts of Resistance’ covers the so-called decline of politics, political resistance, eco-activism, and the struggle for social commons. ‘Homeplace’ ranges over rethinking of social values, the rebuilding of the idea of the public good, and the notion of Canadian identity in a new century. (xiii)

Among other topics, identity is again a major concern. The sub-chapter “Ethnicities” included in Beyond Identity Politics, opens with a comment on “Hyphenations” in the new historical context and the author intends to answer the question whether “it is still the case in the so called global village, that that hyphen is a kind of hinge between two equally compelling identities”. (151) This time her interlocutors include, besides the Ukrainian, the representatives of most of the other ethnic communities in Canada. Her knowledge of their opinions and perception of identity was due to her function as chair of the Writers’ Union. Between 1993-1994 she found herself “lucklessly having to mediate several competing interests around multiculturalism and Canadian literature”, especially connected to the conference “Writing Thru Race” which the Union’s Racial Minority Writers’ Committee had proposed to host. (160)

Though the conversations and interviews recorded or just summarized in the chapter “Ethnicities” begin with Ukrainian-Canadians across the street and she interviews a Toronto editor of an English-language magazine for Ukrainian-Canadians, her next interlocutor is a member of the Italian community, the editor of Eyetalian magazine also published in Toronto.(153) She learns that the Italian community has similar perceptions of their status and identity as the Ukrainians, and that everybody’s view of Italianness has been shaped by the media. (154) Comparing the two magazines representing each of them the “ethnic press”, Kostash concludes that the two publications are only superficially alike and what matters is the subtext. Thus, the Italians seem “psychologically secure as urban Canadian” an their representations about themselves coincide with the non-Italian views of the community, while for the Ukrainian Canadians “there’s no getting around the psychological insecurity of a community that has periodically lived under a cloud in Canada as ‘enemy aliens’. (156)

Her next interlocutor is French-Canadian and it is a good opportunity to remember Canada’s earlier history, the “Franco-Manitobans” as a founding nation, Quebec as the “Mother country”, the French (and not the Scottish) hired by the North West company, the French women in the settlement and the Mé tis women in their cotton frock. The annual Festival du Voyageur in St. Boniface, Manitoba, has become a “multicultural festival of “crossing over”. In Edmonton there is a “French Quarter” where you can find the offices of the Le Franco newspaper, Librairie Carrefour, Café Amandine and L’Uni Thé â tre. One of Myrna’s interlocutors shows how the grandchildren have acquired a new territorial patriotism:

Under the heading “Sensory Organs” Kostash tells about how she became acquainted with writer Larissa Lai. Kostash read Lai’s new novel When Fox is a Thousand and learned about “her journey through the minefields of identity politics”. Working together with artist Paul Wong on the exhibition “Yellow Peril Reconsidered”, Larissa Lai had succeeded to realize what she saw then as a life project, anti-racist politics through the medium of arts. (161) Another Chinese-Canadian interviewed by Kostash is Jenny Kwan who, first a community activist, became a candidate for the community in British Columbia.

With the one-time editor of Rung magazine of Asian art and culture, Zool Suleman, of Ismaili Indian origin, the discussion is around the political right wing, the Reform Party in particular the amnesia of the younger Asian-Canadian generation of their grandparents’ experience of racism, due to their economic realism. (165) Malcolm Azania, an Edmonton schoolteacher, on his father’s side a Kenyan, on his mother’s, Welsh and Pennsylvanian Dutch, acknowledges his hybridity. He prays for all his ancestors and intellectually acknowledges European ancestry. But “culturally” things seem to be more complicated. Instead of answers, Myrna Kostash finds new questions: “How could he divide himself up? And how do you separate the African man out of the teacher of English, the English language writer, the lover of the language of the people who conquered and enslaved Africans? How is the hip-hop artist to be extracted from the pedagogue?”(...) as an avowed Afrocentrist and anti-racist and life-long admirer of African-American revolutionaries, to what extent was Malcolm Azania an American?”(170)

It is only natural for Kostash to include into her survey the representatives of the First Nation people. She shows how First Nation Artists are taking up the new tools of technology in order to incorporate their power “into the living skins” of Canadian culture, the regenerated Aboriginal culture trying to “radiate” outwards and influence. Kostash realizes how important “theory” has become in the creation of the new identity based on the concept of “inclusiveness” coming from Aboriginal philosophy:

It is, in fact, the ‘sneak-up dance’ of the ones for whom it is the only motherland.” (200)

Still, it is not yet the end of Myrna Kostash’s quest in search of her hyphenated self. She is working on another project, following the footsteps of St. Dimitri, in a “pilgrim’s progress”, in order to find the metaphysical dimension of her identity. Perhaps her experience and writings could inspire others as well to explore their own identity and past.

--- All of Baba’s Children. NeWest Press, Edmonton, 1987 (first published in 1977).

--- Long Way from Home. The Story of the Sixties Generation in Canada, Toronto, James Lorimer and Company, 1980.

--- No kidding. Inside the World of Teenage girls, Toronto, McLelland and Stewart, 1987.

--- Bloodlines. A Journey into Eastern Europe. Vancouver/Toronto: Douglas & McIntire, 1993.

--- The Doomed Bridegroom. A Memoir. Edmonton: NeWest Press, 1998.

--- The Next Canada. In Search of Our Future Nation. Toronto, Ontario: McLelland & Stuart Inc., 2000.

--- All of Baba’s Great Grand Children. Ethnic Identity in the Next Canada. Heritage Press, Saskatoon, 2000

Who's Ana Olos?

Name: Ana Olos (born in 1940, Timisoara, Romania)
Address: Str. Victor Babes 31/ 31, 4800 Baia Mare, Romania
Tel. +4o. 262. 2765 87, e-mail : olos@alphanet.ro
Status: Professor of Canadian Studies and Literatures in English at North University Baia Mare, str. Victor Babes 62/a, 4800 Baia Mare, Romania

Education:
1957-1962 “Babes-Bolyai” University, Cluj, Romania; major in English
1971-1978 Doctorate, University of Timisoara, thesis in Comparative Literature : Blaga and Eliot -Two Faces of Our Century
2001: MA in Human Rights, Romanian Institute for Human Rights, Bucharest, thesis: Elderly Women and Their Rights

Further Studies:
1978 - Summer Course in Contemporary Literature, Warwick, U. K.
1993, 1994 - British Council Seminars in Literature, Sinaia, Romania
1995, 1996 - British Council Seminars in Cultural Studies, Sinaia, Romania

Grants:
1995 - Stuttgart Seminar in Cultural Studies, Monrepos, Germany
1998 - Canadian Studies Grant for Course Development; 4 weeks visiting tour in Canada.
1999 - Research grant (1 month) in Canadian Studies from the J.F. Kennedy Institute, Berlin, Germany

Professional Positions:
1963-1971, assistant lecturer, Teacher Training College, Baia Mare
1971-1978, lecturer, Faculty of Arts, Institute of Higher Education, Baia Mare
1978-1990, lecturer, Engineering Faculty of the Cluj Polytechnics, Baia Mare
October 1998, associate professor, Faculty of Arts, North University Baia Mare
1998-August 2000, part time professor, North University Baia Mare
2000-2001, returned to full-time teaching as associate professor, North University
Since March 20002 - full Professor at North University Baia Mare

Subjects Taught:
British and American Literature, Methodology of Teaching English, English for Special Purposes, Translation Theory, Cultural Studies, Canadian Studies.

Leading Positions
1992-1998, head of Foreign Languages Department, North University, Baia Mare
1992-1998, member of the Faculty Council and the University Senate

Other Activities
- visiting professor at the Ujgorod University, Ukraine - for two compact 2 weeks teaching periods, 1998;
- supervisor of students’ research and graduation papers;
- director and supervisor of undergraduates’ teaching practice in schools;
- director of students’ drama groups;
- advisor of students’ periodicals;
- member or president of professional boards;
- 1994-1998, editor in chief and since 1998, member of the editorial board of the Baia Mare Modern Languages Department’s “Scientific Bulletin” (collection of research papers);

Private Work and Responsibilities
28 years of housework, the material and spiritual support of artist husband in his career and the education of the 3 children
Founder (in 1999) of a Canadian Studies Centre at North University Baia Mare

Publications:
Books:
1998, Pelicanul si babita. Introducere in urmuzologie I, Baia Mare: Umbria;
1999, In subteranele textului. Introducere in urmuzologie II, Baia Mare: Umbria;
2000, Behind the Text, between the Lines, Wald Press, Timisoara;
2000, How Nice to Meet Findley Angry, Wald Press: Timisoara;
2000, Blaga si Eliot, Baia Mare: Editura Universitatii de Nord;
2001, Timothy Findley’s Recent Work, Baia Mare: Editura Universitatii de Nord
Academic studies: on British, American, and Romanian authors, the latest focusing on Canadian culture and literature (Timothy Findley, Myrna Kostash, Marshall McLuhan) published in Romania and some abroad; academic papers presented at conferences in Romania and abroad:
Translations: From English into Romanian: Athena T. Spear, Păsările lui Brâncuşi, Bucuresti: Editura Meridiane, 1976; Jakob Rosenberg, Viaţa şi opera lui Rembrandt, Bucuresti: Editura Meridiane, 1976; a book of poems translated from the Romanian into English: Ileana Cozmuta, In Search of Meanings, Baia Mare: Editura Universitatii de Nord, 1999; poems and prose by British and American authors, published in various literary magazines.

Affiliation to Professional Organisations:
The Romanian Association of British and American Studies, ESSE (The European Society for the Study of English), AILA (The International Association for Applied Linguistics), RAAS (The Romanian Association of American Studies), the Polish Association of Canadian Studies
 

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