by Lilah Dymund
When getting to know one another, we tend to wonder, “what’s her story?” In fact, it might be more accurate to ask, “what are her stories?” Both Margaret Laurence’s collection of short stories, A Bird in the House, and Elsie Paul’s multimedia digital work, As I Remember It, are uniquely structured works that challenge conventional linear storytelling [1]. While Laurence’s collection focuses on protagonist Vanessa’s life and identity, Paul’s memoir employs a nonlinear, multimedia approach to narrating memories and cultural teachings from the perspective of a Sliammon elder. Despite these structural differences, both texts emphasize the idea that identity is not the product of a singular, linear narrative but a complex interweaving of stories, experiences, and teachings. Through their distinctive narrative techniques, Laurence and Paul both explore the evolving relationship between the younger and older versions of their narrators, highlighting the ways in which time and reflection deepen understanding of familial and cultural heritage.
Though they are presented differently, both of these works are uniquely structured in ways that reject a linear pattern of storytelling. While Laurence follows a singular protagonist throughout A Bird in the House, the book is not a novel but rather a collection of short stories that each explore an aspect of Vanessa’s life and identity outside of a chronological framework. In Challenging Territory: The Writing of Margaret Laurence, Christian Riegel describes the text as “a series of intertwined recollections … that are told retrospectively from the perspective of an older and mature narrator” (69). As I Remember It, on the other hand, is an entirely nonlinear, multimedia collection of stories and memories from Elsie Paul’s life. The structure of Paul’s work mirrors the “cornerstone of indigenous educational practice” (Patrick 73) that is storytelling. For Indigenous peoples, “It really is through stories that we share our existence, not just our identity, but our existence in the world” (Thomas King, qtd. in Patrick 15). Paul’s nonlinear narrative demonstrates how Indigenous storytelling “transmits thousands of years of knowledge, anchored by time and space, as well as the immediate, personal experiences of the storyteller” (Patrick 16). Contrary to the idea of a person having a story, both As I Remember It and A Bird in the House explore how identity can instead be made up of a collection of stories that come together to shape the individual—as Vanessa herself puts it, “being set into the mosaic of myself” (Laurence 182).
These stories do not consist only of what a person has done, but also what they have learned from others, what they have observed about the world, and events that have happened outside of their control. In A Bird in the House, Vanessa does not always seem to do much in her stories, especially in those stories where she is a younger child. She is primarily an observer, “spen[ding] so much of [her] life listening to conversations [she is] not meant to hear” (71), and yet these are the experiences that make up her identity. In a similar way, As I Remember It is not made up only of stories about Paul’s own life: instead, Paul’s own life stories are told along with those of her grandmother and other relatives, as well as legends and tɑʔɑw, meaning “the teaching, what we learned from our ancestors, the traditional teaching, the traditional values” (“An Invitation to Listen”). Paul specifically recalls that,
You learned by watchin’. You were always brought along. So when the older women went root diggin’, you went along—the children went along. So it was by watchin’. Because every step of the way, everything they did…was really important to pay attention. (“Root Digging”)
These teachings, though not stories about her own life, are a fundamental part of Paul’s identity. Each of these texts in its own way rejects the idea of an individual’s story following a linear path from the younger to the older self. Through these nonlinear forms of storytelling emerge complex relationships between the older and the younger versions of these stories’ narrators and their mosaics of identity.
While each of these works is structured differently, both feature stories about the younger self which are told from the perspective of the older self. Paul writes, “sometimes I think I was always old” (“Childhood Fun”), while Vanessa is pushed by her family to “`grow up before [her] time´” (Laurence 44). These two women, who come from very different families and live very different lives, share this sense of interconnectedness with a younger version of the self. As well as carrying their childhood selves with them into adulthood, both Paul and Vanessa feel that some version of the older self has always been with them, ever since they were young. In A Bird in the House (which is ostensibly a fictional work), Laurence creates a sense of young Vanessa’s stories being narrated simultaneously by the younger and older versions of Vanessa. As Arnold Davidson puts it, “Vanessa marks—and retrospectively maps—her course to self-determination[,]…restructuring or re-creating those memories into meaningful stories” (qtd. in Riegel 67). Vanessa’s childhood stories are told with the added awareness of her adult self, using mature concepts to understand the emotions she experienced as a young girl. At one point in “The Mask of The Bear,” Vanessa witnesses her Aunt Edna struggling to understand her relationship with her mother, Vanessa’s Grandmother Connor. Older Vanessa reflects that,
I understood that she was not speaking to me, and that what she had to say could not be spoken to me. I felt chilled by my childhood, unable to touch her because of the freezing burden of my inexperience. (Laurence 65)
Here, Vanessa’s “words are tinged with the thoughts of young Vanessa, and not the older narrating person” (Riegel 74). Though it is the older Vanessa who narrates this event, overlaying her child self’s experience with adult vocabulary, the phrase “chilled by my childhood” creates a sense of alienation from that childhood self that Vanessa has developed as an adult. Paul touches on a similar idea in her chapter on residential school, directly addressing the limitations of children’s understanding when it comes to complex, mature issues. She reflects on the “anger and hate towards their parents” that so many children felt in the residential school system, though “In those days, they take your child away whether you like it or not” (Agnes McGee, qtd. in Patrick 64). Paul comments on the children’s inability to understand the complexity of the situation, saying “That’s the child’s mind, right? You’re rejected from your parents” (“Residential School”). As she recounts these stories of her younger self through the eyes of her older self, Paul recalls the struggle of the child’s mind to process the complex challenges of Indigenous life within a settler-colonial context. The reflective form of storytelling in both of these works allows us to recognize the way in which depth of understanding develops with age, a theme which can also be connected with the cultural importance of elders Paul describes in As I Remember It.
Throughout As I Remember It, Paul discusses the importance of relationships between young people and elders which existed in Sliammon culture long before the trauma of European contact and the residential school system. In particular, she explores the importance of practical education, teaching and learning through real-world experience. The role of community and family—especially elders—is central to the traditional education system of the Sliammon people:
Elders play a critical role in a child’s education. Grandparents frequently raised their grandchildren which allowed them to pass on family history and cultural knowledge. Elsie recalls that she only went to residential school for one year, “But I learned other things from my grandparents. I was raised by my grandparents and to me that is just as important. I try to share that with my children and other younger people in the community, to share with them the values and the traditional practices that is our culture, and how rich it is.” (Patrick 66)
The traditional education Paul received from her elders was made up of two main components: observation and storytelling. Paul writes, “our people did not teach, per se. Wasn’t a lot of lecture, but it was a lot of examples. A lot of legends and stories were talked about” (“Learning by Example”). Throughout As I Remember It, Paul provides several examples of these “legends and stories,” such as the legends about qɑyχ that she recounts in the “Territory” section and the story of her grandmother’s brother, which she shares in “He Got His Spirit Back.” It is through this traditional education that Paul’s younger self came to understand herself, her culture, and the world around her.
One teaching in particular that Paul emphasizes in As I Remember It is the way she learned from her grandmother to process grief and pain. Paul’s grandmother was well-versed in the experience of loss: “She had sixteen children, and out of the sixteen, six survived. So she had lost ten children throughout her life” (‘My Grandmother”). However, she never allowed this grief to weigh her down in her everyday life. Paul recalls that her grandmother would go outside early in the morning and practice sohoθot (spirit cleansing)—wailing and cleansing herself with water and cedar branches in order to release her pain—“And she would talk to us: ‘You must have heard me cryin’ out there. But I do that. That’s my medicine. I have to release my pain in the morning. Otherwise, it’s too heavy. It’s a burden for me to carry that’” (““sohoθot [Spirit Cleansing]”). In addition to setting this example of a healthy way to grieve, Paul’s grandmother clearly communicates to her children and grandchildren why this process is important:
And she’d come in and, “I’ve done what I needed to do,” and get everybody up and get busy. And she would say, “It’s okay to grieve. It hurts, because I’ve lost someone I love. But we don’t stay in bed and cry all day. Life goes on. You have to get up and get things moving, get things done. We got a lot of work to do.” So for her, it was fine. And we understood that. We all knew that! (““sohoθot [Spirit Cleansing]”)
Paul’s grandmother demonstrates how, for the Sliammon people, learning by example was not just imitating the behaviour of elders, but was instead a careful and intentional educational process that ensured young people understood not only what they were learning, but why they were learning it. As well as following examples set by elders, important teachings—such as the ability to live with grief—were shared with Paul through stories. In As I Remember It, Paul provides the example of her Grandmother’s brother, who lost his son: “And for a long time, he wasn’t able to do anything with his life. He was grieving. He just kind of fell apart: everywhere he went, he was mourning, he was crying” (“He Got His Spirit Back”). Paul shares his story, describing how a healer determined that he had lost his spirit along with his son, and helped him to call it back from the mountain where it had gone. Stories such as this were used to teach Paul the consequences of holding onto grief, further emphasizing the importance of learning to process and release it.
A clear distinction can be made here between this practice of releasing pain and the grief that seems to consume Vanessa’s family in A Bird in the House. Vanessa’s family is wrought with “undue attachments to the dead,” and Vanessa learns very early in life “how such attachments can have harmful effects on those still living” (Riegel 72). Vanessa’s Grandmother MacLeod in particular embodies an inability to move on from loss. Her son, Vanessa’s Uncle Roderick, was killed in the First World War before Vanessa was born, and now Grandmother Macleod’s bedroom is lined with “silver-framed photographs of Uncle Roderick—as a child, as a boy, as a man in his Army uniform” (Laurence 39). These photographs symbolize a refusal to let go of grief, which contradicts the lesson taught to Paul by her own grandmother. Despite Grandmother MacLeod’s valiant efforts to bestow a kind of order on her surroundings (“God loves Order — he wants each one of us to set our house in order” [Laurence 42]), Vanessa comes to associate Grandmother MacLeod’s house first with death and discomfort, describing it as being “like a museum, full of dead and meaningless objects…which had to be dusted and catered to for reasons which everyone had forgotten” (Laurence 73). Grandmother MacLeod carries her grief with her like one of these “meaningless objects,” maintaining it not because it has any continued purpose in her life, but simply because she has become accustomed to its presence. Like Paul’s Grandmother’s brother, Grandmother MacLeod is “so absorbed in [her] grief” (“He Got His Spirit Back”) that her spirit is broken and her grief begins to seep into her everyday life and define her identity.
Paul notes that when it comes to pain, “You’re going to have to deal with it sooner or later. And when you do it the way I remember seeing it done, then you’re dealing with it right from the moment of your loss” (“sohoθot [Spirit Cleansing]”). Vanessa, however, is prevented from healing “right from the moment of [her] loss” due to “the prevailing notion that children should not be exposed to such rituals but should be protected from death” (Riegel 77). Despite losing so many immediate family members throughout her childhood, Vanessa attends her first funeral—that of her Grandfather Connor—at age twenty, noting that “I could no longer expect to be protected from the bizarre cruelty of such rituals” (Laurence 191). Instead of teaching her to process grief, Vanessa’s family tries—and fails—to protect her from it, leaving her lost and confused in her mourning. What Vanessa’s family fails to realize is that she cannot be protected, and that neither her youth nor her family’s efforts to shield her can prevent her from feeling pain and grief. In their effort to protect her, Vanessa’s family instead remove any potential outlet for her grief. When Vanessa’s Grandmother Connor dies—her first personal experience of loss—she remarks that, “I had not known at all that a death would be like this, not only one’s own pain, but the almost unbearable knowledge of that other pain which could not be reached nor lessened” (Laurence 74). Unlike Paul, who learned from her grandmother that grief should be shared with one’s family and community, Vanessa finds herself juggling the pain of her various family members while at the same time not having the space to feel her own.
This childhood example remains with Vanessa as an adult and fundamentally shapes how she views herself, her emotions, and the world around her. Paul, too, carries the example of her elders with her throughout her life, and both women are fundamentally shaped by these early influences—both when it comes to processing grief, and to other important teachings. However, just as the example set for Paul and Vanessa in childhood differs greatly, so too does the influence that example has on each of them in their adult lives.
Paul, having learned healthy patterns of behaviour from her elders, continues to live out those teachings as an adult. She is faced with a challenge, however, since “European contact ruptured the education Tla’amin children received” (Patrick 67),2 threatening the continuation of the traditional knowledge she was given as a child. Both the Sliammon people’s ways of teaching and the teachings themselves have been nearly destroyed by the residential school system, as generations of children have been “[f]orced from their communities and sent to alien educational institutions, …deprived of the spatial anchors that grounded their understanding of the land” (Patrick 73). Paul’s older self reflects on how much her own world has changed since she herself was young:
It’s so different now. Attitudes have changed, and it’s totally different. I try to keep it alive. I know some people my age keep it alive and I think my own family are really good about, I think, doing things that way that I think I’ve brought down. My grandmother’s teachings, and lot of people her age, that taught—lived! Not so much teach, but lived. And you followed that example. It was not about teaching. (“Learning By Example”)
Paul has been one of the lucky few to have retained her culture, language, and teachings through the destructive colonial systems that have sought to destroy that very culture. Paul moves through her adult life working to pass on the same teachings she received as a child, fighting to maintain that knowledge in a changing world. Young Paul was given the tools she needed to live a healthy, traditional life, and the older Paul continues to put those tools to use.
Vanessa, on the other hand, must build her own tools. Without the kind of education Paul received, and provided with nothing but harmful and confusing examples as a child (such as that of her Grandmother MacLeod), Vanessa is forced to learn for herself what her family was unable to teach her. The young Vanessa longs for this kind of knowledge, romanticizing the character of Piquette, a Métis girl who spends the summer with Vanessa’s family at Diamond Lake. Vanessa reflects, “[i]t seemed to me that Piquette must be in some way a daughter of the forest, a kind of junior prophetess of the wilds, who might impart to me, if I took the right approach, some of the secrets she undoubtedly knew” (Laurence 110). Vanessa’s conception of Indigenous culture is extremely flawed, however, owing again to the example of her elders (such as Grandmother MacLeod, who declares, “if that half-breed youngster comes along to Diamond Lake, I’m not going” [Laurence 107]) and to her environment, in which Indigenous peoples are constantly othered. Vanessa’s transition from childhood to adulthood is marked by her departure from Manawaka at age eighteen, when she escapes both the physical environment she grew up in and “all the restrictions such an environment places upon individuals” (Riegel 68). In fact, the entirety of A Bird in the House can be seen as Vanessa’s act of “free[ing] herself psychologically by remembering a place she earlier left physically and by then restructuring or re-creating those memories into meaningful stories” (Arnold Davidson, qtd. in Riegel 67). This psychological freedom is imperative to Vanessa’s process of separating herself from her family’s influence and creating her own traditions.
It is after she leaves Manawaka that Vanessa begins to recognize the harmful examples set for her as a child, and upon returning to Manawaka years later, the older Vanessa is able to separate herself from that influence. She returns to Manawaka alone, without her husband or children, since “[i]t would have no meaning for anyone else” (193). Vanessa has made the intentional choice to separate her new family from the one she grew up in, and she will not allow the setting of her childhood to have meaning for her adult self’s family. As Vanessa herself puts it, “everything had changed in the family which had been my childhood one, but now I had another family” (Laurence 193). The only way for older Vanessa to start anew—to create her own new traditions and teachings to pass down to her children—is to draw a separation between the family she grew up in and the family she has created for herself. She herself acts as the barrier between those two families, refusing to pass on the same harmful teachings she received as a child to her own children. Vanessa’s role as an elder is therefore very different from Paul’s. The older versions of both narrators demonstrate intentionality and awareness in the teachings they pass on to the younger generation, but their contrasting influences and environments call for them to take on different teaching roles. Where Vanessa rejects the harmful example of her family and begins a new tradition of teaching, Paul clings to her cultural teachings in a changing world where youth are increasingly surrounded by harmful examples.
The narrative structures employed by Margaret Laurence in A Bird in the House and Elsie Paul in As I Remember It offer unique insights into the intricate relationship between identity and storytelling. Laurence’s use of interconnected stories rather than one singular narrative challenges linear conventions, exploring the complex influence of childhood experience on adult identity. Similarly, Paul’s nonlinear, multimedia approach in As I Remember It underscores the multifaceted nature of one’s identity, emphasizing the particular importance of cultural teachings and personal experiences. Through their respective works, both authors highlight the power of storytelling to shape one’s outlook on the world, demonstrating how the interplay between past and present narratives can enrich our understanding of the self.
Endnotes
[1]A print version of Paul’s text, entitled Written As I Remember It, also exists and was published in 2014, five years before the digital text.
Works Cited
Laurence, Margaret. A Bird in the House. Penguin Random House Canada, 2017.
Patrick, Lyana Marie. Storytelling in the Fourth World: Explorations in Meaning of Place and Tla’amin Resistance to Dispossession. MA Thesis. University of Victoria, 2004.
Paul, Elsie. As I Remember It. University of British Columbia Press, 2019, https://scalar.usc.edu/ravenspace/as-i-remember-it/index.
Riegel, Christian. “‘Rest Beyond the River’: Mourning in A Bird in the House.” Challenging Territory: The Writing of Margaret Laurence. Edited by Christian Riegel, University of Alberta Press, 1997, pp. 67-79.