| If we were asked what it meant to be a western Canadian, most of us would be hard-pressed to come up with a meaningful reply. Wheat? Pickup trucks? The question seems elusive, yet most people in the West feel there is something that grounds them and gives them a distinct identity. Sharon Butala’s new work, Lilac Moon: Dreaming of the Real West, is the first time in recent memory that a legitimate voice has set out to provide some answers. What exactly has happened in our past to shape us, she asks, and is there really a separate western identity?
The native of Nipawin, Saskatchewan, whose books range from best-selling memoirs (Perfection of the Morning) to short-story collections (Real Life, Fever) and novels (The Garden of Eden), turns her hand again to non-fiction with a work that, like her best stories, is fresh and rooted in the soil of the Canadian West. Considering her past work, you might assume that the subject of Lilac Moon is something she’s been meditating on for awhile.
"I wouldn’t say that," replies the author during a recent visit to Calgary. "What happened was more along the lines of a writerly crisis. I had finished two books in 2002, and I was completely exhausted. And I was feeling angry with the fact that I wasn’t Shakespeare and I’d worked so hard. I decided I needed to take time off, so I stopped writing, almost completely, for almost a year." Eventually, however, she concluded that she’d given her life to writing and it was too late to turn back. "I went to bed one night and I woke up in the morning and had this great idea for a book. And I knew it was going to fly. And this was the book – Lilac Moon: Dreaming of the Real West, my attempt to define what a westerner is."
Butala doesn’t write a textbook here; the emphasis is on history as it pertains to identity and relationships, those formed between the settlers and the land, and the settlers themselves. Doing this involved drawing her own family history into the story, something she finds to be the current trend in writing.
"I’m beginning to think in some ways that the new fiction is non-fiction," she says. "I feel that the two genres are coming closer and closer together, and they’re coming closer together in my own mind and in my own writing."
In her memoir Perfection of the Morning, Butala dealt with the urban-rural dichotomy, and in this book she suggests that to forge a western Canadian identity, we need to appreciate the West’s agrarian roots.
"It’s getting to be less and less true that ‘scratch a Prairie person and you find a farm,’" she says. "I think that the rural-urban gap is a big one, and seems to be not improving. I think artists can make a big difference. I decided a long time ago to use rural, agricultural people for my subjects. I wanted to do it in such a way that urban people would be interested, and that they would begin to gain some kind of understanding about the real importance of agricultural issues."
Of course, there is an inherent difficulty in establishing a western identity, when even what it means to be Canadian is disputed. If an identity can be constructed, where do we begin?
"The attempt (to give) ourselves a coherent and widely applicable sense of what ‘Canadian’ is, is something that everybody is struggling with," says Butala. She doesn’t get the sense that there is the same struggle to define being western Canadian. "And yet, at the same time, I do think there’s a basic unease in Western Canada among Euro-Canadians. And that unease is, ‘Who are we? Where is home? If we are neither indigenous people to this region, to where we live, nor are we any longer Europeans, then who are we?’"
In her book, Butala provides an illuminating chapter on the dark side of Western Canada – the colonizing of its aboriginal people. She finds there is a disturbing side to what we consider Canadian "politeness" in the continuing ignorance and injustice shown to First Nations people.
"It certainly is, in my view, the shadow side of the West – what the first Euro-Canadians did to the aboriginal people of the Great Plains," she says. "I regard it as one of the great historical wrongs that has never been righted. Contemporary racism, which I don’t see getting better, is appallingly bad."
As well, Butala says that with Lilac Moon she was trying to reclaim the West for women in the face of a historically patriarchal society.
"The icons of the Prairie West are the Indian brave, the hearty yeoman farmer with dirt on his hands and his face, all heart, deeply connected to the land, and the cowboy. And those are all male," she points out. "And if you think, ‘Well, what could be the equivalent female icon?’, the only one I can think of is Frances Hyland in the early National Film Board movie The Drylanders, who played the portrait of the pathetic Prairie woman, dried up and wrecked by the time she’s 30, which actually happens to be true.
"And yet, I think we should be celebrating the courage and open-heartedness of western women and the tremendous contribution that they made, so that we might have an icon of the western female. I’m seeing a big strong woman who is undaunted by hardship, brave, and has always managed to hold in her heart and mind a vision of home.
"I did at one time plan to have a chapter on wealth in the West, and I planned to focus on women because there are a lot of wealthy, entrepreneurial women in Western Canada," she adds. "But it was taking me into territory that I don’t know enough about."
That doesn’t matter. As it stands, Lilac Moon gives us what we need the most right now – a familial and historical exploration of where we came from, and how we constructed our identity. It isn’t as glamorous as the rugged portrait of the cowboy would suggest, but then the real question is: how honest is that image anyway? |
Copyright ©2005 FFWD. All rights reserved.