From displacement to emplacement : nature, imagination and language in Lorna Goodison’s From Harvey River, Michael Ondaatje’s Running in the Family and Eva Hoffman’s Lost in Translation

This thesis undertakes to examine the sensorial underpinnings and poetics of three literary memoirs: Lorna Goodison’s From Harvey River (2007), Michael Ondaatje’s Running in the Family (1982) and Eva Hoffman’s Lost in Translation (1989) in their relationship with the geographical dislocation and expatriation of the works’ protagonists and authors. The authors were born and raised on different continents: Goodison in the Caribbean (Jamaica); Ondaatje in Asia (Ceylon/Sri Lanka); and Hoffman in Europe (Poland) and they either live, or have at one time lived, in Canada. This commonality, while not foregrounded in the memoirs – their subject is primarily countries and cultures of origin and personal losses associated with them – constitutes part of this thesis’s study of displacement. I explore the ways in which selfhood is disrupted by intra and international displacement, and exilic experiences therein, but I also demonstrate the ways in which it is rebuilt through language, arguing that the memoirs not only assert relational selfhood but also selfhood as multifaceted, mutable and plural. Goodison, Ondaatje and Hoffman were born in the 1940’s, during, or in the immediate aftermath of, World War II, and raised at a time of decolonization (Goodison and Ondaatje) or within the sphere of Soviet influence (Hoffman). Taking into consideration these geographical, historical and political factors, while focusing on the humanistic and psychological elements of the works, my thesis parses and seeks to understand attachments to places of origin that are formed during childhood, sustained over time through memory and the imagination, and later go on to inform the memoirs, creatively and constructively. It does so first by presenting the concept of the ecological self and its development during childhood; second through an examination of displacement related to home of origin, attachments and belonging; third in an exploration of the writing process as a transformative act of emplacement. In so doing, my thesis poses, and responds to, questions of situated knowledges that span local and global parameters, the conditions that contribute to them, and their expression through writing. It ultimately points to the deep influence of childhood experiences upon memory, the imagination and language, and demonstrates the capacities of writing to re-emplace displaced selfhood.

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