Our Grandmothers, Ourselves

Patricia Whitney, former coordinator of the Women’s Studies Program at
the University of Prince Edward Island, is the Bank of Montreal Visiting
Scholar in Women’s Studies at the University of Ottawa.

This collection belongs to a genre of feminist writing that privileges
the voices of “ordinary women.” The consciousness-raising groups of
1970s second-wave feminism (the first wave being the struggle for
suffrage, which in Canada resulted in Dominion-government votes for
women in 1918) stipulated that each woman’s voice was valuable and
worthy of attention, an idea not widely honored at the time. This
respectful listening became a principle in the women’s movement and,
indeed, was analyzed and promulgated by such conferences as “Telling
It: Women and Language across Cultures,” held in Vancouver in 1988.
The gathering of women writers featured, among others, Joy Kogawa,
author of the brilliant novel Obasan, who introduces Our Grandmothers,
Ourselves with the words “grandmothers should be ruling the world.”

Respect for the wisdom of these crones, these wise women, is the motif
linking the narratives in this collection—crossing many of Canada’s
cultural traditions while preserving the shared transcultural experience
of the beloved grandmother. All the writers are women, and while one
understands the editor’s attempt to be inclusive, this demand at times
seems honored above the ability to tell an effective story. That said,
there are some good selections here, one being Susan Evans Shaw’s
evocation of a British grandmother’s trailing tedious colonial notions
throughout her life in Canada. Shaw avoids the sentimental in this
portrait of her grandmother, admitting that her “teenage years with
Nana were extremely trying.”

Jo-Anne Berman captures her beloved Jewish “Bubie” with warm humor
as Harriet Grant shares her devout and courageous Jamaican “Yea-Yea”
and Erika Willaert portrays her Chinese-speaking grandmother’s
humanity.

The love these writers have for their grandmothers, both prickly and
endearing, is touching, and the idea of such a collection worthy, but
one wishes the editor had encouraged her contributors to develop more
vivid written expression. The overall impression of these memoir-essays
is of well-meaning but for the most part plodding attempts to capture
the spirits of these brave foremothers.