Cultural Citizenship and Writing Post-Colonial Vancouver: Daphne Marlatt's Ana Historic and Wayde Compton's Bluesprint

As acts of citizenship, Daphne Marlatt's novel Ana Historic and Wayde Compton's Bluesprint: An Anthology of Black British Columbian Literature and Orature intervene in Canada's colonial history different West Coast locations. These two texts foreground the contradictory function of race in the rewriting of post-nationalist histories and literature. ********** In a moment of critical self-reflection, Bluesprint: An Anthology of Black British Columbian Literature and Orature, edited by Wayde Compton, playfully opens itself to questions of revisionist historiography. (1) In a section of his Natural Histories of South Western British Columbia, Peter Hudson, a writer, theorist, and historian of black writing and contemporary of the editor, makes reference to Compton (without naming him). Hudson writes, A friend and I joke of writing our own histories of black Vancouver: forging documents, parodying the discourse of poorly written syndicated columns and low-budget pamphlets that are underground best-sellers in the black world. These fictional histories mimic their bad spelling, creative punctuation including excessive and random capitalization and the overuse of exclamation marks--and amateur typography. Their forgeries would uncover the original civilization--including Masonic secret societies and pre-Christian temples of the Black Pacific. As an example, Hudson offers the following: PROOF 1 Proving the So-called 'CANADIAN NEGRO,' Son of Ham 'IN FACT!' DESCENDED THE ANCIENT PRINCES OF AETHIOPIA AND the WHITE MAN IS a DEMON CREATED in 1977! BY THE EVIL SCIENTIST YACUB! However, as the two historians understand, in the context of British Columbia's still volatile memory of its colonial past, and on-going preoccupation with the myths of racial purity, such acts of fiction are potentially dangerous. Hudson tells us, We were afraid that what wrote might be true (270). As a point of entrance into a discussion of cultural citizenship studies (Rosaldo 259), and their relevance to Canadian literary studies, this essay draws on Daphne Marlatt's Ana Historic and Wayde Compton's Bluesprint as acts of citizenship. Ana Historic, Marlatt's first novel, presents a lesbian-feminist coming of age/coming out story, a herstory, set against the backdrop of Vancouver's historical development; its narrative spans the city's first 100 years and links three generations of women, bringing together the archival Mrs. Richards (Vancouver's first schoolmarm), Ina (the narrator's mother who immigrated to Canada in the 1950s), and Annie (a contemporary narrator who reappropriates the archival figure). The central trope of Ana Historic hinges on Annie's renaming of Mrs. Richards as Ana. With this leap of the imagination, Annie's fictional detournement of the historical facts, the novel invents a social space beyond the strictures of the phallocentric, patriarchal nation. As Marlatt puts it in the final words of the novel, we give place, giving words, giving birth to each other (153)--her text gesturing toward a new feminist collectivity, a newly sexualized body politic. In contrast, Bluesprint is an anthology of published and archival material British Columbia's African Canadian and mixed-race writers, orators, and performers. Like Ana Historic, however, Compton's editorial work is predicated on a desire to express, or at least investigate, the voices of a marginalized collective and to locate this subjective desire in the larger context of Canadian history and politics. In an interview with Myler Wilkinson and David Stouck, Compton says that Bluesprint comes out of needing to know about [his] own circumstances in order to do something artistic that felt honest and important. Following 49th Parallel Psalm, Compton's first book of poetry, Bluesprint continues the process of creating a context, or mapping out a context, uncovering what the conditions are here that [he] could write from (Wilkinson and Stouck 131). …

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