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George Ryga Award
The three finalists for the fourth annual George Ryga Award for Social Awareness in B.C. Literature (July 2007) are The Wolves at Evelyn: Journeys Through a Dark Century (Brindle & Glass) by Harold Rhenisch, Red Light Neon: A History of Vancouver's Sex Trade (Subway Books) by Daniel Francis, and Nobody's Mother: Life Without Kids (Touch Wood Editions) edited by Lynne Van Luven.
I read these books while traveling across Canada on a 30-day road trip with my partner and my daughters-Kate, 5 years old, and Thea, 2. Mine is most definitely not a life without children. A long, slow road trip over the Rockies in a VW van, across the prairies, and through the expanse of Ontario made that abundantly clear. My choice of this year's winner was likely influenced by these circumstances. Each of these books is deserving of the award in different ways; a different reader could easily have made a different choice.
As we made our way through Wawa and Thunder Bay, through Winnipeg and Eriksdale, Swift Current, Moose Jaw, and Morse, Saskatchewan, through Cranbrook and Crawford Bay, and finally home, to the Okanagan, my daughters sang "This land is your land, this land is my land, this land was made for you and me."; And I made my way through the equally rambling terrain of Harold Rhenisch's The Wolves at Evelyn: Journeys Through a Dark Century and I wondered if the song was true.
Rhenisch is this year's winner.
In "Multiculturalism: Address to Curriculum Conference"; (1977), George Ryga writes: "We are all demeaned by half-truths, by abbreviations of reality from out past, by the corporate and official bias which runs through the core of history taught to our children. And worse still, by the growing tendency among our scholars and researchers to deceive themselves deliberately, within the context of the system, to create false expectations on the basis of a false assessment of history."
As the son of Ukrainian immigrants, raised in a farming community in northern Alberta, Ryga understood how history-the history of a family, a people, a country-continues to live and to influence how we see ourselves, how we're seen by others, and how we see each other. Ryga calls for "honesty-just plain, uncomplicated honesty"; and the recognition "that many of our history books are as much myth as they are facts." "Where,"; he asks, "is the history of the human experience?"
Harold Rhenisch gives us a history of human experience. In doing so, however, he shows us just how complicated that can be. His book is sprawling; it took me all of Canada to read. It is, in part, an immigrant's tale. Like Eva Hoffman's Lost in Translation: A Life in a New Language, it makes personal what it means to leave home-Heimat-to become "invisible";, to leave behind "family, history, and ... language"; to "make a new world";, to become "a people of the earth, and only of the earth";.
It is also, in part, a travel narrative, in the tradition of Chatwin and Bowles, a kind of wandering over the earth, a story of a place, of nature, of wilderness, a narrative without hope or fear but not without politics. Rhenisch mourns the loss of the land.
If you go to find that first moment when we lived in the splendour of the land, though, you will only find other people looking for it, building log houses above newly cleared pastures, where they can watch aspens reclaim fields that my mother, for instance, once helped hay by hand; you will find people driving their motorhomes on an endless pilgrimage along asphalt highways, camping in crowded RV parks lying along the rail-line, with thirty-amp power and city water and full sewer hookup.
Exploited, overrun, misunderstood, "[t]he earth,"; says Rhenisch, "is invisible."
As I drove across the country, part of that long line of motorhomes, my journey was shaped by Rhenisch's journey. Is the earth invisible? I wondered. Sometimes a stretch of beach along a lakeshore or an ocean of blue alfalfa on a prairie or a mountain rising hard and grey above a cloud felt like a perfect first moment. How would it have felt had I taken this trip without Rhenisch? Would it have felt like anything all?
The Wolves at Evelyn: Journeys Through a Dark Century is about much more than I'm able to say here. It is about history, about home and family, about colonialism and labour, about land, earth, and nation, about Germany, British Columbia, and Canada. It is about Rhenisch's journey to find "the freedom to re-imagine"; a way of being in the world. It may take me another road trip to fully understand.
-- Sharon Josephson
I read these books while traveling across Canada on a 30-day road trip with my partner and my daughters-Kate, 5 years old, and Thea, 2. Mine is most definitely not a life without children. A long, slow road trip over the Rockies in a VW van, across the prairies, and through the expanse of Ontario made that abundantly clear. My choice of this year's winner was likely influenced by these circumstances. Each of these books is deserving of the award in different ways; a different reader could easily have made a different choice.
As we made our way through Wawa and Thunder Bay, through Winnipeg and Eriksdale, Swift Current, Moose Jaw, and Morse, Saskatchewan, through Cranbrook and Crawford Bay, and finally home, to the Okanagan, my daughters sang "This land is your land, this land is my land, this land was made for you and me."; And I made my way through the equally rambling terrain of Harold Rhenisch's The Wolves at Evelyn: Journeys Through a Dark Century and I wondered if the song was true.
Rhenisch is this year's winner.
In "Multiculturalism: Address to Curriculum Conference"; (1977), George Ryga writes: "We are all demeaned by half-truths, by abbreviations of reality from out past, by the corporate and official bias which runs through the core of history taught to our children. And worse still, by the growing tendency among our scholars and researchers to deceive themselves deliberately, within the context of the system, to create false expectations on the basis of a false assessment of history."
As the son of Ukrainian immigrants, raised in a farming community in northern Alberta, Ryga understood how history-the history of a family, a people, a country-continues to live and to influence how we see ourselves, how we're seen by others, and how we see each other. Ryga calls for "honesty-just plain, uncomplicated honesty"; and the recognition "that many of our history books are as much myth as they are facts." "Where,"; he asks, "is the history of the human experience?"
Harold Rhenisch gives us a history of human experience. In doing so, however, he shows us just how complicated that can be. His book is sprawling; it took me all of Canada to read. It is, in part, an immigrant's tale. Like Eva Hoffman's Lost in Translation: A Life in a New Language, it makes personal what it means to leave home-Heimat-to become "invisible";, to leave behind "family, history, and ... language"; to "make a new world";, to become "a people of the earth, and only of the earth";.
It is also, in part, a travel narrative, in the tradition of Chatwin and Bowles, a kind of wandering over the earth, a story of a place, of nature, of wilderness, a narrative without hope or fear but not without politics. Rhenisch mourns the loss of the land.
If you go to find that first moment when we lived in the splendour of the land, though, you will only find other people looking for it, building log houses above newly cleared pastures, where they can watch aspens reclaim fields that my mother, for instance, once helped hay by hand; you will find people driving their motorhomes on an endless pilgrimage along asphalt highways, camping in crowded RV parks lying along the rail-line, with thirty-amp power and city water and full sewer hookup.
Exploited, overrun, misunderstood, "[t]he earth,"; says Rhenisch, "is invisible."
As I drove across the country, part of that long line of motorhomes, my journey was shaped by Rhenisch's journey. Is the earth invisible? I wondered. Sometimes a stretch of beach along a lakeshore or an ocean of blue alfalfa on a prairie or a mountain rising hard and grey above a cloud felt like a perfect first moment. How would it have felt had I taken this trip without Rhenisch? Would it have felt like anything all?
The Wolves at Evelyn: Journeys Through a Dark Century is about much more than I'm able to say here. It is about history, about home and family, about colonialism and labour, about land, earth, and nation, about Germany, British Columbia, and Canada. It is about Rhenisch's journey to find "the freedom to re-imagine"; a way of being in the world. It may take me another road trip to fully understand.
-- Sharon Josephson
Submitted on July 30, 2007 in By David.
