“Nothing is forgotten,” or Forgiven: First World War Internment in Barbara Sapergia’s Blood and Salt

Focused on Barbara Sapergia’s Blood and Salt (2012), one of the first book-length works of fiction to engage with Canada’s First World War internment operations, this paper examines the ways in which the novel grapples with discourses of class, ethnicity, and race during, and after, the first decades of the 20th century. Discussion of Sapergia’s text is prefaced by historical background on the internment, including discussion of the widespread fear of “enemy aliens” which led to the incarceration, between 1914 and 1920, of some 8579 immigrants from empires (Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman, German) (an estimated 5954 of them ethnically-Ukrainian) at war with the British empire and Canada. The analysis itself is informed by debates about Joy Kogawa’s Obasan (1981), long-viewed as breaking the silence around the Second World War internment of Japanese Canadians but, in recent years, critiqued for its complicity in constructing that “dark chapter” of the nation’s past as a forgivable anomaly. While the first four of Blood and Salt’s seven parts, grounded in meticulous historical research, trace Ukrainian Canadian protagonist Taras Kalyna’s (and his fellow internees’) suffering at the Castle Mountain, Cave and Basin camps near Banff, the last three sections of the novel seem to narrate his triumph over trauma. Consequently, the essay addresses the possibility that Taras might be (mis)taken as a character who performs the part of an ideal immigrant or model minority: in exchange for gaining entrance into the prospering, white middle class, he turns a blind eye to historical instances of xenophobia and racism. Does his fictional narrative align with prominent Ukrainian Canadians’ aggressive support in the 1960s for the problematic politics and practices of multiculturalism, as well as their acceptance of a disappointing compromise, in 2008, vis-à-vis redress for the internment operations of the First World War? Via close readings of the novel’s protagonist (and his unresolved trauma), his wife’s persistence in writing about the internment (and the reasons for it), and the tragic absent-presence of several minor, yet crucial, characters (some radically left-wing, others Indigenous), the paper argues that Blood and Salt, in fact, refuses to forget or forgive. Read alongside complex developments in Ukrainian Canada, between the First World War and the 1960s (and beyond), the text offers complicated perspectives on the historical actions of the government, their aftermaths, and all Canadians’ shared responsibilities in contending with past and ongoing “dark chapters” of the national narrative.

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