“Ethnic patterns,” according to Wsevolod Isajiw, “even if completely torn out of their original social and cultural context, become symbols of one’s roots,” so that “through [an] ancestral time dimension one can, at least symbolically, experience belonging.”1 His idea that belonging can be located in the ethnic symbolism of the past tells only half the story; the other half belongs to space, particularly what Sneja Gunew refers to as “spatial entitlement,” or a sense of belonging to a particular place.2 In the context of English-language Ukrainian Canadian writing, this combination of the past with a place blends to make a heady identity elixir, one not without a strange taste.
Ethnic identity, or the experience of belonging, arising from a “home” precisely coded as Ukrainian-hyphen-Canadian, appears in much Ukrainian Canadian English-language literature through the coupling of symbolic references to perogies, babas, folk songs, and big Ukrainian weddings with a prairie landscape as a place of ethnic belonging.3 Because Cold War Ukraine was a closed locale—one difficult, if not impossible, to visit during much of the twentieth century—contemporary Ukrainian Canadian writers began to take their images of Ukraine’s culture, history, language, literature, and politics and write them on the Canadian prairie as a substitute for “their original social and cultural context,” Ukraine itself. In his seminal essay on home, J. Douglas Porteous reminds us that “although a psychic space, home is usually identified with a particular physical space,”4 and for many Ukrainian Canadians, a prairie landscape offers a place onto which they can project the “psychic space” of Ukraine as a lost ethnic home. This chapter examines this construction of “Ukrainian-ness” and “prairie-ness” in literary texts, because the nexus where the contested concepts of home, Ukrainian Canadian-ness, and the prairie meet creates a particular kind of Andersonian “imagined community” at the subnational, ethno-cultural level.
Postcolonial theorist Rosemary Marangoly George tells us that “twentieth century literature in English is not so concerned with drawing allegories of nation as with the search for viable homes for viable selves,”5 and contemporary Ukrainian Canadian literature—of both the twentieth and twenty-first centuries—searches for ways of making the Canadian prairie operate as a viable replacement home to substitute for a lost and inaccessible Ukraine itself. In her introduction to the 1987 reprinting of All of Baba’s Children, on the tenth anniversary of its first publication, Myrna Kostash writes, “I had been insisting that ethnicity was one thing, having to do with this time and this Canadian place, nationalism another having to do with Europe and history, and that the latter were not my affair. I was willing, even eager, to engage in the construction of neo-Galician prairie identity, but I was emphatically not prepared to take up the baggage of the Ukrainian nation.”6
Kostash explicitly states that her ethnicity arises not just from “this Canadian place,” but specifically the Canadian prairie place; her interest lies in a “neo-Galician prairie identity,” not one that finds its origin in Ukraine, inviting us to interrogate the connection between Ukrainian-ness and prairie-ness in a public imaginary. What does this “neo-Galician prairie identity” look like?
The literature suggests that it is particularly interested in Ukrainian peasant folk culture of a previous era as its main expression. Scholars of this literature write about “an entire genre of Ukrainian-Canadian pioneer stories”7 that are “historical narratives that sentimentalize or romanticize the bygone days of early immigration and settlement.”8 Critics have agreed upon some defining features of this pioneering narrative: first, a focus on “the undeniable hardship that these pioneers endured”; second, “an emphasis on hard work”; third, a construction of the “Ukrainian farmer [as] imbued with a certain nobility of character”; an attention to characters who “are sanctified as forefathers engaged in a noble pursuit”; a “reliance upon biographical material and alleged socio-historical truth”; and finally “the overwhelming use of first-person narration.”9 This focus on the lost, and somehow more simple and satisfying, days of early immigration is a dominant thematic of the literature.10 The corpus of literature that contributes to this genre “simultaneously perpetuates a narrative of progress that constructs Ukrainian immigrants and their children as innately amenable to hard work; as willing to assimilate to Canadian culture while retaining some aspects of their ethnic identity; and as successful, ultimately, in ascending the social and economic hierarchies of the multicultural society they helped build.”11
Both literary critics and historians have provided reasons for the proliferation of this prairie pioneer myth as a particularly persistent articulation of Ukrainian-ness in a Canadian context. Some simply point to the verifiable facts behind Ukrainian immigration to Canada at the turn of the last century. Given the significant numbers of Ukrainian immigrants who arrived on the prairies seeking ten-dollar homesteads, Sonia Mycak understands the dominance of this pioneering motif in the literature to represent the desire of a hitherto silenced and marginalized community to tell its story.12 Mycak’s view foregrounds the historical reality of Ukrainian immigration to the Canadian prairie. In contrast, Kostash suggests that the continued construction of Ukrainian Canadians as part of an “imagined community” of ethnic homesteaders appearing as “colourful, dancing, horilka-tippling hunkies recently arrived from a wheat farm in Saskatchewan” is preferable to the more sinister conceptions of Ukrainian Canadians as Nazi sympathizers or anti-Semites; in her words, “compared to these stigmatizations, the fun-loving bumpkin is almost lovable.”13
Another strategic reason has been suggested for the adoption of such an image of this ethno-cultural group: namely, that as similar pioneer myths are at the heart of many settler-invader identities, we should not be surprised to see Ukrainian Canadian writers claiming their place through manual labour on the land. Think here of the last two lines of Margaret Atwood’s poem “Death of a Young Son by Drowning” as the young immigrant mother buries her stillborn child, she says, “I planted him in this country / like a flag.”14 Ukrainian Canadian pioneer stories present death and sacrifice as a claiming of place. Thus, these stories fit into a general trend of asserting legitimacy by claiming a kind of baptism through suffering as a way of claiming one’s legitimate space on a landscape. Related to this general claim is a more specific one about the timing of this kind of national assertion. By the 1970s and 1980s, debates in Canada arose in response to the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism that contributed to its evolution from a document codifying the bilingual and bicultural nature of Canada into one articulating a formal recognition of federal multiculturalism. Using the pioneer story, Ukrainian Canadians could write themselves into Canadian history as a “third force” to counter the two founding nations’ model that dominated those early discussions.15 Historian Frances Swyripa convincingly argues that Ukrainian Canadian “myth makers were driven by the desire for a tidy and satisfying picture of the past that promoted the goal of recognition for their group as a legitimate and valuable actor on the Canadian stage. The result was a founding fathers myth erected on the peasant pioneers: in their backbreaking toil and sacrifice to introduce the prairie and parkland to the plough and to exploit mining and forest frontiers so that Canada could be great, lay Ukrainians’ right to full partnership in Confederation.”16 She makes it clear that there were very real political gains to be made by constructing Ukrainian Canadian-ness as synonymous with a pioneering forefather mythology, thus creating a legitimate space for Ukrainian Canadians within the larger Canadian polity.
Even as much of the corpus of English-language Ukrainian Canadian literature developed this genre of pioneering stories—lionizing a Ukrainian émigré past as essential to the Canadian nation-building project—other authors recognized some of the problems inherent in this type of myth-making. For instance, Helen Potrebenko’s feminist rewriting of the typical Ukrainian pioneering tale, her 1989 “A Different Story,” which Mycak reads “as a parody of the myth of the glorified pioneer,”17 and her 1977 study No Streets of Gold seek to show darker sides of the pioneering experience to undercut its dominance in the literature. Further, Lisa Grekul rejects these homesteading stories as offering nothing more than a “hackneyed prairie pioneer myth.” She specifically sets her own Ukrainian Canadian coming-of-age novel not in the pioneer era, but “in the multicultural heyday of the 1980s and early 1990s,” calling it a story “shaped as much by humour as by hardship.”18 Even though writers such as Potrebenko and Grekul attempt to engage critically with the celebratory mythology of the pioneering era, they still set their stories in the Canadian prairie. They are not alone. In addition to the ever-increasing genre of contemporary Ukrainian Canadian texts set in a historical homesteading era, such as Shandi Mitchell’s widely acclaimed 2009 novel Under This Unbroken Sky or Yuri Kupchenko’s Cossack cowboy 1989 epic The Horseman of Shandro Crossing, Ukrainian Canadian authors often set their contemporary narratives in the prairie provinces, such as Daria Salamon’s popular “chick lit” 2008 novel The Prairie Bridesmaid or Orest Talpash’s sweeping family epic, Rybalski’s Son, also from 2008. The trend of seeing “Ukrainian-ness” and “prairie-ness” as somehow interconnected persists.
The trend of reading Ukrainian Canadian texts as representing socio-historical facts about Ukrainian settlement and life on the prairies, and the connection linking the author and subject matter, remains dominant. Analyzed not so much as creative fiction but more as ethnographic documents creating “generic confusion,” blending together the fictive with “social history, personal memoirs, historical fiction, biography, [and] autobiography,” critics conflate the literature and the history of Ukrainians in Canada.19 And this history is that which most Canadians (of Ukrainian descent or not) still see as synonymous with homesteading on the Canadian prairie. Janice Kulyk Keefer points this out when she laments that for a “Canadian reading public” Ukraine—the country, its history, politics, and culture—means “only borshch and cabbage rolls, vast and shining wheat fields.”20 While some voices—Potrebenko’s, Grekul’s, and Kulyk Keefer’s among them—reject overly simplified folk culture versions of Ukrainian-ness in Canada, there persists a reading of these texts as “less provocative than predictable” in their portrayal and reaffirmation of “the centrality of the pioneer era in the Ukrainian-Canadian imaginary.”21 I argue, however, that even in the earliest examples of this pioneering story, the “underlying, but unmistakable sense of nostalgia for what [Ukrainian Canadians] see as a simpler time and place, a nobler way of life,”22 is complicated by an underlying ambivalence and discomfort with the forced assimilation and loss of culture that shaped the experience of immigration to Canada by those early homesteaders. In looking closely at these texts, we find the literature expressing more than a desire to express a silenced history, more than a desire to claim a legitimate space within the Canadian national narrative, and more than a desire to present a non-threatening cultural symbol. Grekul suggests that Ukrainian Canadian authors feel frustrated with multiculturalism as offering “too little encouragement too late.”23 I argue that this frustration is embodied in the ever-present “baba” figure in Ukrainian Canadian texts set on the Canadian prairie. The baba is a figure that elicits feelings of both nostalgia and frustration. She represents the desire to belong as much as feelings of non-belonging, particularly in her relationships with her Canadian-born granddaughters.
The tendency to read these texts as offering little more than an overly simplistic linking of Ukrainian-ness to prairie-ness fails to reckon with the prairie space as anything other than a blank page onto which specific ethnic fantasies can be written. Gerald Friesen challenges the idea of prairie emptiness with his assertion that “the West has taken a new shape in recent decades,” a shape informed as much by economic and social ties as by the myth of the empty landscape.24 Likewise, the interpretation of stock symbolic references, particularly the “Ukrainian grandma figure, the saintly ‘baba,’ ”25 in reference to a stable “home” on a fetishized empty prairie, uncritically replicates the traditional positioning of home as a stable, feminized space, ignoring the work of feminist theorists who argue that envisioning stable, female homes reproduces limiting binary constructions of knowledge that do not account for multiple perspectives.26 While this literature has been read and understood as signalling a desire for a clear and coherent articulation of a stable and acceptable, even “lovable,” ethnic identity as “Ukrainian Canadian,” located in a specific place and rooted in land and matrilineal families, I contend that this body of literature complicates this simplistic picture. Often the literature problematizes home and place, and plays with ethnicity and identity in ways that indicate a much greater discomfort with Ukrainian-ness in Canada than a celebration of it as something fixed and folksy. In particular, the figurations of baba in this literature are often much more nuanced than merely representing a typical matriarchal figure embodying hearth and home in the most traditional manner.
Swyripa offers important observations about the dominance of women in Ukrainian Canadian literature, categorizing them into two groups: Nasha Meri and Katie on the one hand, and baba on the other. In Swyripa’s words: “Nasha Meri and Katie—together they symbolized the Ukrainian immigrant girl in young womanhood and her Canadian-born sister testing the freedoms and attractions of the new country.”27 Nasha Meri and Katie often appear Canadianized, and distanced from their Ukrainian roots.28 Their counterpoint appears in the traditional baba, “the revered pioneer grandmother,” who holds tight to and preserves Ukrainian folk culture for Ukrainian Canada.29 In her survey of ethnic prairie symbols, Swyripa calls the “much loved baba (grandmother)” a “popular grassroots incarnation” of Ukrainian Canadian-ness, and points out that the folk and culinary arts over which she is the undoubted mistress have become the symbols, monuments, and handicrafts of a Ukrainian Canadian identity on the prairie. She writes that baba as a symbol is “Neither beautiful and feminine nor conforming to the settlement-era stereotype of the Ukrainian peasant woman as submissive and downtrodden, baba […] personified [a] Ukrainian peasant heritage, even endearing traits once branded foreign and inferior.”30 Poet Andrew Suknaski made a similar comment in 1979 when discussing ethnicity and writing in Canada. He states: “baba demythologizes our long-standing belief that the man was the head of the household in those days. In fact, baba was the god and the head of the household.”31 This kind of powerful baba appears in the literature more often than the saccharine, “revered,” and “saintly” figure that critics so often discuss. In my reading of the genre of Ukrainian Canadian pioneer stories, as well as those set in the contemporary prairie, the babas are more complex and sometimes more angry than they are usually given credit for being. More importantly, her interactions with her Nasha Meri and Katie granddaughters demonstrate that these protagonists are not merely “guilty of rejecting traditional restraints and values, and of succumbing to the vulgar and superficial in the Canadian lifestyle,” as Swyripa characterizes them.32 Rather, the authors create young, female protagonists engaged in complex cultural and personal negotiations with their babas.
Let us begin first by looking at the figure of baba in the novel that is often considered the first in this genre of backward-looking Ukrainian pioneering tales, Vera Lysenko’s Yellow Boots. First published in 1954, Yellow Boots is credited as the first English-language novel written by a Canadian of Ukrainian descent.33 It tells Lilli Landash’s story: as the daughter of Ukrainian immigrants, Lilli experiences a harsh life on a prairie farm as the victim of a tyrannical and patriarchal father. Ultimately, she leaves her ethnic, rural surroundings and becomes a renowned singer. Lysenko sets her novel in 1929, more than twenty years prior to her writing, and paints a picture of a Ukrainian Canadian peasantry whose culture includes rich musical traditions. Lysenko writes this novel, in part, to create a kind of memorial to what she views as the lost Ukrainian culture of immigrants settling across the Canadian prairie. In the foreword to the book, she writes that her “story of a girl’s search for music is offered as a reminder of their lost inheritance, and to preserve for them something of the old beauty.”34 From the beginning, cultural preservation motivates her. According to Carolyn Redl, many early ethnic writers worked to preserve elements of their ethnic identity; she even cites Lysenko’s Yellow Boots as an example of this preservation and presentation mode of ethnic writing.35 While some critics read this novel as a feminist, proto-multiculturalist text,36 Grekul disagrees, arguing that Lilli’s story articulates an ethnic compromise wherein Lilli’s Ukrainian Canadian-ness becomes nothing more than “simply a costume she will wear on stage,” as her femininity and ethnicity become assimilated into a dominant, masculinist, and Anglo-normative Canadian culture. While these critics may disagree about the implications of Lilli’s story as that of a Ukrainian Canadian girl from the prairies who achieves mainstream success as a pan-ethnic folk singer, they agree on the focus of both Lilli and her mother as the embodiments of the feminized Ukrainian subject.37 Tamara Palmer Seiler goes so far as to suggest that Lysenko’s novel creates in Lilli a protagonist who appears as “a new world embodiment of the ancient female earth goddess,” one who possesses the “power of a nurturing and holistic female vision,”38 a notion which calls to mind Marian Rubchak’s work on feminine symbolism in contemporary Ukraine. In her analysis of the appearance of Berehynia, a combined figure of female youth and the “ancient ‘hearth mother,’ ” Rubchak suggests that “the archaic hearth mother” functions as an enduring symbol in Ukraine and, in her words, “female centrality remains lodged as an idea in the Ukrainian psyche.”39 Yet Lysenko does more than demonstrate the connection between ethnic Ukrainian-ness and femaleness through Lilli’s relationship to her mother and to the prairie landscape her mother clings to; she also complicates this idea that culture operates as a matrilineal inheritance through the grandmother figure.
Alexandra Kryvoruchka suggests that this baba operates as “a folk poet who passes on the stories of days gone by,” and sees her as one more example of the general notion that in this book “the retention of Ukrainian culture is carried out by the women.”40 Mycak shares this attitude, and sees the grandmother figure in this novel possessing the simple function of perpetuating Ukrainian culture and passing it on to Lilli.41 There is, however, more to this baba and her relationship with Lilli than that. This baba first appears in the second chapter of the book cooking the feast for the anticipated funeral for Lilli that never materializes, because, against all odds, the girl survives her childhood fever and cheats death. In this scene, her grandmother is not a simple, “saintly” figure of a mythologized “hearth mother,” but a proactive and powerful force in the home. Lysenko writes: “Granny was casting wax into water and murmuring incantations. She was convinced that some evil thing had caused the girl’s illness and that the wax would take the shape of this evil and drive it from the girl.”42
As the rest of the family sits vigil over the sick child—professional mourners already wailing, the mother already sewing a shroud, and the father anxious to get back to his fields—Lilli’s grandmother works her spells and magic to save the child from death: “Granny, imperturbable in the midst of the tumult, now stepped in to take charge of the situation. From the bags around her waist, she had taken an herb and was now scattering it over the bed of the girl, murmuring an incantation…. The old lady stood with a crafty smile upon her face. ‘I have fooled the Old Robber,’ she triumphed. From the oven she extracted a brick, wrapped it in grey flannel and placed it under the girl’s feet. ‘She sleeps.’ ”43
Lysenko offers us a baba more aligned with witchcraft than specific Ukrainian culture. She is referred to as “Granny” rather than baba, and her use of spells, wax, herbs, and incantations are elements of pagan folk medicine that can certainly be associated with Ukrainian peasant culture, but that can also just as easily be associated with women’s alternative folk practices with no specific ethnic element. Even when Granny tells her granddaughter stories, Lysenko characterizes these stories as creating an “enchantment” and writes “Granny could enter the child’s world of fantasy and create something new and beautiful out of scraps, whether of cloth, food or words.”44 It is false, therefore, to see in grandmother nothing more than a “folk poet” who embodies the Ukrainian peasant culture that she bestows upon her granddaughter. In their collaborative analysis of witches in contemporary culture, Silvia Bovenschen, Jeannine Blackwell, Johanna Moore, and Beth Weckmueller write: “witch mythology mediates between the historical and the empirical witch, at the juncture between the femininity syndrome and aggressive self-representation. In popular myth, witches stand side by side with the ancient mother goddesses.”45 In this iteration, Granny Yefrosina is both specifically Ukrainian—like a Berehynia—but also just another figure within a larger “witch mythology.” She is, therefore, a much more complicated figure than a simple repository “of the old beauty,” as Lysenko may have intended.
Importantly, “witch mythology” has long connected the figure of the witch to gendered dissent. “When women began to deliberately assume the witch role,” for instance, “they were in no way behaving as spontaneously and arbitrarily as it may appear.”46 Lilli’s grandmother casts her spells, saving the child from death, and lures Lilli into a world of fantasy, introducing the girl to the folk arts that will inform her career as a singer, in the context of resistance to blind adherence to cultural practices. Lilli’s mother and father await her death, replete with an outward projection of all the expected cultural norms and practices, but her grandmother rejects these and busily casts her spells. Far from being a simple repository of Ukrainian-ness on a peasant prairie homestead, this grandmother figure implies that power also resides in resistance to cultural norms and expectations.
However, Lysenko presents for Lilli a cautionary tale about female resistance. The true witch character in the book, Tamara, is expunged from the text in the most macabre fashion. Lilli’s village bands together in a mob and kills Tamara one night, a murder that Larry Warwaruk echoes in his 1998 book The Ukrainian Wedding, where Marusia, the town’s provocative and sensual figure of natural magic and allure—like Tamara—is found murdered. These murdered women represent the risk to the protagonist of being associated with witchcraft or dissent through sexuality. Tamara’s face is “full of the sensuality one sees in beautiful women who have grown up in primitive surroundings,” and her voice is “delicate.” In Lilli’s mind, Tamara is linked to witches throughout the ages.47 Unlike Granny Yefrosina, whose witchcraft is stripped of sexuality (“neither beautiful [nor] feminine,” to use Swyripa’s words), Tamara’s version is threatening and ultimately expunged as a result of the townspeople viewing her as an eroticized danger. As the community gathers to plan the lynching of the unfortunate Tamara, one of the widows, as “homely as a potato,” delivers the “most telling charge” against Tamara, claiming that she “cast a spell” on the woman’s husband, driving him to suicide.48 The homeliness of the widow contrasts with Tamara’s beauty and sensuality, and after this final charge against Tamara is made, the villagers head out into the dark night towards Tamara’s home, which is burned to the ground—either by her own hand or the mob itself. The novel leaves the assignation of responsibility ambiguous.
Immediately after Tamara’s death, the novel reintroduces Granny Yefrosina. The juxtaposition of the death of the sensual witch with the one whose face is “smocked with wrinkles” reinforces the connection between these two women.49 Once again, on this visit Lilli’s grandmother is cast as a natural healer, a good witch. She treats a cut on Lilli’s foot and feeds her husband “a herbal concoction” for his mysterious ailment.50 At the end of this chapter, “Granny, bristling with bossiness, apt to mischief, teeming with legend as a bee with honey,” dies.51 Lysenko removes both witch figures—Tamara and baba—from the novel. With their deaths, Lilli begins her process of leaving the farm and moving to the city to become first a labourer and then a famous folk singer. Thus, baba appears less as a figure intimately connected with the landscape—operating as the wellspring of cultural specificity on the prairie—and more of an ambivalent figure vis-à-vis Ukrainian-ness. In this novel, she is more associated with the dissident and the aberrant than with the traditional and the sacred, and her death represents not necessarily a lost culture or lost way of life, but rather the inability for Lilli to move into mainstream culture and still accommodate this seemingly atypical grandmother figure and even less so her more sexualized younger version. Lysenko cannot seemingly reconcile either “safe” dissidence (through baba) or “dangerous” dissidence (through Tamara) for her protagonist, and kills both witch figures—characters representing female power and/or resistance.
Enoch Padolsky creates a linear trajectory from Yellow Boots and Illia Kiriak’s epic Sons of the Soil, which was translated into English from Ukrainian in 1959, right through to more contemporary Ukrainian Canadian writings.52 Scholars of ethnic minority writing in Canada have long documented the growing number of ethnic or minority literatures in Canada in the post-war era, and Ukrainian Canadian literature is most often seen in this context.53 The pioneering stories that emerged in the latter half of the twentieth century can be understood through the explanations offered by scholars such as Mycak or Swyripa, or even in reference to Kostash’s view that the lovable is better than the problematic. However, Lysenko’s early novel prefigures dynamics that continue through the literature that Padolsky mentions right up into the 1990s and the early years of the new millennium, decades shaped by both the conscious problematization of the politics of identity and Ukraine’s 1991 declaration of independence from the Soviet Union. The latter opened up a hitherto-closed Ukraine to the west, when Ukrainians in Canada could conceive of themselves as part of an international Ukrainian diaspora with the ability to travel “back” to Ukraine (a Ukraine that many of the Canadian-born have never seen).54 If Ukrainian Canadian literature of the late 1990s and early 2000s need not imagine Ukrainian identity as intimately connected to the Canadian prairie—because Ukraine itself could be seen as the locus of identity formation for members of the Ukrainian diaspora—then why do texts from this era still revisit the Canadian prairie? The answer lies in baba.
Read straightforwardly, the many Ukrainian Canadian prairie tales following the publication of Yellow Boots may run the risk of situating home in outmoded ways, as a mere fixed point around which a stable identity can cohere meaningfully.55 But, homes, as George and others contend, are not mere givens—spaces “already marked out in symbolic and material dimensions for the occupant”—but are often fractured, mutable, and multiple.56 A simplistically stable notion of home fails to grapple with more contemporary ways of understanding subjectivity that foreground instability and mutability rather than stability.57 Attending to the ways that Ukrainian Canadian authors have created complex and complicated baba figures offers insights that these prairie-focused stories are often doing more than merely replaying a “hackneyed prairie pioneer myth,” which can be read as more complicated than critics generally acknowledge even back as early as Lysenko’s novel.
A close examination of the later literature reveals a baba not so very different from Lysenko’s portrayal. Even in a post-Soviet era, after Ukraine’s 1991 independence, we still see Ukrainian Canadian literature creating babas on the prairie, and she remains much more than a celebratory repository of Ukrainian folk culture and identity; rather, her presence in texts often dramatizes the complicated negotiations underlying the split subjectivity of a Canadian-born, English-speaking, minoritized, ethnic subject.
For instance, Marusya Bociurkiw’s 2006 novel The Children of Mary presents a baba who is much more a feminist figure of agency than a conduit for Ukrainian-ness. This novel offers an account of Sonya’s coming of age as she learns how to deal with her abandonment by her father, her sister Kat’s death, her mother’s cancer, and her own queer sexuality. Sonya traces the story of her sister’s death, and ultimately discovers that one summer while she was staying with her baba, the father sexually abused Kat and is ultimately responsible for her death as well. Within this narrative arc, the novel explores memory, womanhood, family, and grief—and the interplay of these very personal things in a larger, public context. Bociurkiw often casts the private sense of Sonya’s loss and grief in the public domain, with references to TV shows, pop culture, and news events. In addition, rusalky, or Slavic water spirits, figure prominently, representing a commingling of the female in Ukrainian folk culture and the sisterhood of lesbianism.58 Like Yellow Boots’ positioning of its witch-like baba in rural Manitoba, The Children of Mary also creates a rural Manitoba baba who employs herb craft. Bociurkiw constructs baba’s home as an herbalist’s dream filled with dried weeds, boiling concoctions, and dark containers with mysterious contents.59 Yet unlike Lysenko’s novel that offers only a limited narrative point of view—Lilli’s image of her grandmother—Bociurkiw’s lets us into baba’s own mind, through which we discover that this baba hates cooking traditional Ukrainian foods and likes working with healing herbs instead.60 Abandoned by her husband, this baba earns her independence through her healing arts; she says: “in those days people came to see me, for one sickness or another. Word spread, I didn’t mind…. In this way I did not become so bitter. I had something to give.”61 Like Granny Yefrosina, whose concoctions save Lilli and represent her power, Baba Maria (“always just Marie, or Mary, or Mrs. M.” in the mouths of non-Ukrainians) claims independence and autonomy through her healing.62
Where Lilli needs her grandmother’s healing help to cure her of a physical sickness, Sonya needs her baba’s intervention to help heal her soul. As the immigrant herself, split between the Old Country and Canada, she mixes up her memories and blends places together, the here of now and the there of memory.63 In contrast, when Sonya returns to the prairies after a time in Toronto, she reflects on it as her plane lands: “The prairie looked beautiful from the air, in a way I didn’t remember, a picture postcard, ugliness airbrushed away. Canola and wheat fields for miles, as you come in by plane. The land divided into circles and squares, every shade of blue and green. Home. I tried out the word on my tongue, like a candy from childhood, one you couldn’t get anymore. A place you could be from, a place you thought could save you, a place you made up in your head.”64
This rumination on the complexities of home—its imaginary status, its glossy superficiality, its impossibility—articulates Sonya’s relationship to the Canadian prairie rather than to the Old Country that her grandmother recalls. While her grandmother’s psyche vacillates between the two homes inhabiting her memories, Sonya’s psyche is torn by the loss of her sister, “what haunts her,” such that her baba figures she “should slip some medicine into her tea.”65 Baba, in this book, appears powerful at first, seeking to heal her granddaughter, not merely transmit her cultural knowledge to her. Baba here is also angry. When her daughter considers her herbal healing arts nothing more than magic and superstition, she says: “Many times did I long to strike my own daughter’s face.”66 As that daughter grapples with her cancer treatments through the channels of mainstream medicine, baba wishes she would be allowed to intervene with her alternative approaches; she screams and rails at her daughter, but ultimately must accept the limits to her herbal remedies. She cannot save her dead granddaughter, and she cannot prevent her daughter’s cancer from spreading.
In an eerie echo of Yellow Boots, Kat, Sonya’s sister, whose death serves as Sonya’s narrative focus, appears as another version of Lysenko’s Tamara (or Warwaruk’s Marusia). When Kat returns from a summer with her father, Sonya notes that she has become an utterly sexualized teen. She tells us “Kat started dressing kind of slutty.”67 Ultimately Kat leaves home and starts living on the streets; one of the final times Sonya sees her sister alive, Kat lies on a bare mattress on a floor in a commune, her face “turned toward the wall, a man on top of her.”68 Tamara’s sensuality develops out of her loneliness as a widow, Marusia’s develops out of her unhappy marriage, and Kat’s develops in response to her sexual abuse. In each case, the younger, sexualized woman dies a violent death, while the less sexually threatening baba survives just long enough to die a natural death and to be seen as angry or forceful, but ultimately impotent against the forces swirling about her. Granny Yefrosina cannot prevent Lilli from growing up and away, and Baba Maria (“always just Marie, or Mary, or Mrs. M.”) cannot heal her daughter’s cancer, salve her granddaughter’s wounds, or overcome her own anger. In both novels, the protagonists, not their grandmothers, move forward and develop a sense of their own agency, either as a renowned folk singer or a woman learning to put her ghosts to rest.
Grekul’s novel provides yet another alternative, a version of an angry but impotent baba. While Lilli and Sonya love their babas, Grekul’s protagonist feels a much greater sense of disconnection from hers. Grekul writes her novel as a kind of corrective or complement to the existing genre of pioneering stories set at the turn of the twentieth century, setting it in the late 1980s and early 1990s in both Alberta and Africa. Kalyna’s Song tells Colleen Lutzak’s coming-of-age story, first in the small Alberta town where she finishes high school, and then in Swaziland, where she attends school for a year. Her simple-minded cousin, Kalyna, personifies Ukrainian folk culture, and her traumatized piano teacher, Sister Maria, personifies Ukrainian classical culture. Colleen tries to come to her own definition and understanding of what it means to be Ukrainian in contemporary Canada in reference to these women.69 When in Africa, Colleen becomes friends with Rosa Richardson, an artist obsessed with eggs and embryos. As I have written elsewhere, if Kalyna represents simplistic Ukrainian folk culture, and Sister Maria represents sophisticated Ukrainian high culture, then Rosa represents all culture as an embryonic tabula rasa.70 Tellingly, by the end of the novel, all these women are dead, as are the kinds of cultural options they symbolize for Colleen. Like Lysenko, who juxtaposes Granny Yefrosina with Tamara and kills them both (in back-to-back chapters), or Bociurkiw, who links baba to Kat through Sonya and kills them both (one at the start and the other at the end of the novel), Grekul creates parallels amongst these three women who influence Colleen and kills them all. Like Lilli and Sonya, who must move forward after the deaths of the witch figures—the non-sexualized babas and the eroticized younger women—Colleen, too, functions as the character in Grekul’s novel who bears the burden of continuation after the deaths of Sister Maria, Kalyna, and Rosa. Moreover, Grekul creates in Colleen’s baba the antithesis of the “saintly ‘baba’ ” critics see as ubiquitous on the Canadian prairie.
Colleen’s baba features in one important scene of the novel: the Christmas just before Colleen leaves for Africa, when her family meets for a traditional Ukrainian-Christmas meal in the town of Vegreville, famous for its giant statue of a psyanka, or Ukrainian Easter egg. The Ukrainian symbolism of the scene is as obvious as Grekul can make it—the Ukrainian food, the Ukrainian traditions, the Ukrainian Canadian prairie setting—and in this setting, Baba makes her only significant appearance in this novel. She terrifies the teenaged protagonist and is specifically not the “saintly” baba that critics would lead us to expect: “Baba’s face is all veins—grey-brown liver spots and veins—and Gido looks like a skull. A bony, fleshless skull. I’m afraid to touch them…. Our Baba can’t cook anymore, and she needs a walker to get around…. Neither of them speaks more than a word or two of English.”71 Colleen’s baba is not a robust figure of Ukrainian culture, presiding like a matriarch over all things Ukrainian Canadian, happily awaiting the opportunity to gift her culture to her granddaughter. While Sonya’s baba admits to hating cooking the expected Ukrainian Canadian dishes, Colleen’s baba has moved to a level of decrepitude where she no longer can cook. This baba appears as a deathly crone, stripped of her ability to perform the cultural acts over which she should be mistress, and grotesque in appearance. She has no natural medicines or witchcraft to bestow, nor stories to pass on. Her inability to communicate with her granddaughter in English underscores her impotence as a traditional, matrilineal figure of cultural transmission. She never teaches her children or grandchildren the folk arts she is expected to; Colleen does not learn Ukrainian folk songs from her grandmother, nor does she learn pysanky making from her. Rather, her cultural learning comes from old folk song recordings and books with directions for how to make Ukrainian Easter eggs.72 When Colleen’s plans to leave Alberta for Africa are shared with her grandmother, Baba sees this adventure as a tragedy. This baba is rooted in her prairie context, but that context appears limited and culturally abridged. Upon hearing the news of Colleen’s imminent departure, her baba “cries quietly,” repeating “Bozhe, Bozhe,”—God, God—“as she rubs her eyes with the edge of her apron.”73 The Christmas dinner breaks up, and Colleen departs for Africa, leaving her grandparents behind as near-dead figures of a limited and limiting culture rooted in outmoded traditions, unable to communicate with the younger generation. By the end of the novel, when Colleen realizes that she had to go away in order to change and recognize her Alberta town and her familial context as home, her aged and impotent grandparents are only one part of the complex and complicated dynamic that shapes it, rather than fixed cultural points defining a stable, unmutable ethnic identity for her.74
Both Lysenko and Bociurkiw create babas with an affinity with witchcraft, healing, and dissidence who die before the end of each novel, and Grekul creates female characters—Kalyna, Sister Maria, and Rosa—who die and a baba who is impotent. Each of these novels, set in the Canadian prairie and addressing notions of Ukrainian-ness in Canada, offer much more ambivalent portraits of baba as a symbol of Ukrainian-ness and prairie-ness than critics generally tend to acknowledge. Each novel refuses to offer a “revered pioneer grandmother,” and offers instead figures who resist, but who also function as mere foils for the protagonists whose journeys of self discovery are shaped, in part, by their relations with their grandmothers. These babas are less the touchstones of culture to which the granddaughters can refer and more unresolved and open-ended figures, ones who are not completely understood by their granddaughters and who seem strangely linked and connected to their more tragic younger counterparts, Tamara and Kat (and Warwaruk’s Marusia).
In this disconnect between baba and her Canadian-born granddaughter in these stories set on the prairies, we see Ukrainian-ness as something uncomfortable and unresolved, not neatly confined within a stock baba symbol. Poet Elizabeth Bachinsky writes at the end of her collection God of Missed Connections, in which she struggles to articulate her own relationship to her ethno-cultural heritage, “by now, it is impossible to encapsulate all that is Ukrainian. It is an ethnicity that is, by its very nature, fractured, diasporic, transient; there is no one definition of what it is to be Ukrainian.”75 The ambivalent feelings apparent in the construction of babas in many of the prairie-set texts, showing her at once a powerful healer or an angry woman while simultaneously killing her or demonstrating her impotence, hints at some of the instability inherent in attempts to affix Ukrainian-ness to a straightforward homesteading mythology, or its contemporary iteration in the stories set in the contemporary prairie and focusing on the descendants of immigrant pioneers.
Grekul suggests that books set not in the Canadian prairie, but in Ukraine itself offer a more productive complement to the insistence that Ukrainian-ness and prairie-ness must somehow be synonymous.76 However, another way of understanding these texts that feature a journey “back” to Ukraine notes that often they construct the most powerful moments of connection between the female protagonist and her Ukrainian ethno-cultural heritage in ways that evoke the ambivalent feelings towards baba and “home” on the prairie seen in the other books. Thus these memoirs may not necessarily challenge the prairie myth—they may just be an alternative form of it.
Kostash’s Bloodlines: A Journey into Eastern Europe and Kulyk Keefer’s Honey and Ashes: A Story of Family, for instance, construct their narratives of travelling to Ukraine as journeys into a past that evoke intergenerational conflicts and understand a Ukrainian Canadian identity through the lens of nineteenth-century peasantry, which looks very much like some of the Canadian-based stories. Exemplifying the typical journey Ukrainian Canadians make to Ukraine to meet distant relatives and capture something of a lost ancestral connection, both Kostash’s and Kulyk Keefer’s travel memoirs locate ethnic identity in a rural, ancestral place that looks remarkably like the Canadian prairie. Both texts also situate the grandmother-granddaughter relationship as paramount in both author/narrators’ experiences of Ukraine, once again foregrounding baba as in the stories set in the Canadian prairie.
Even though Kostash travels to Ukraine during the 1980s when it is under Soviet control, and many of her observations are thus politically based, she also recognizes that, for Ukrainian Canadians, Ukraine is loaded with meaning as a potential originating source for ethno-cultural identification.77 She does not find this originating source in the cities of Lvov or Kyiv, which fill her with rage at their “grossest Stalinist bravura.”78 Instead she finds something to connect with in the rural village from which her grandmother emigrated to Canada. Before leaving Canada, she looks at photographs of her extended relatives in Ukraine and seems disappointed to see them dressed in present-day suits or skirts with nylons; she prefers the image of “the matriarch,” who is the one member of her family dressed in traditional, peasant clothing, “an embroidered blouse and a thick kerchief and looks wizened and worn out,” completing her idealized “image of all Ukrainian women from the village.”79 Like the many critics who see in baba a stock and satisfying image of Ukrainian-ness, she wants to find a “saintly” baba presiding over her family of “real Ukrainians.”80 However, as she seeks this idealized baba figure in Ukraine, she finds something much more complicated, an image which evokes the ambivalent baba figures in the prairie-set stories.
One Sunday, Kostash’s Ukrainian relatives take her to her “baba’s natal village,” despite the fact that in 1980s Ukraine, the region in which the village is located is closed to westerners.81 In her baba’s village, Kostash discovers the poignant feeling of her baba’s absence, and through that absence, her own disconnect from Ukraine, the place of her baba’s birth. Following a Derridean attention to the spectral in her account of haunting and the in-betweenness occupied by the figure of the ghost, Avery Gordon links photographs to the spectral. She sees in photographs the opportunity to affix an absence, to render the absent person ghostly.82 Kostash creates this sense of photographs as evidence of absence as she describes her experience of her grandmother’s village: “A neighbour, stout, baggy-bosomed and kerchiefed, knee-deep in red and yellow tulips. Click. The church where Baba used to go, still in good shape, white-walled and tin-roofed with a single, squat, hexagonal dome. Click. The very pathway along which she used to drive the sheep out of the village and into the upland meadow. Click.”83 With each “click” of her camera, she captures images that omit her baba. Like the photograph that Gordon analyzes that does not include the missing Sabina Spielrien who was supposed to be present, providing “photographic evidence of her absence,” these photographs that Kostash takes provide evidence of her baba’s absence.84 Like the babas on the Canadian prairie who inhabit a rural space, but who ultimately die and who seem unable to provide for their granddaughters a neat and tidy Ukrainian cultural legacy, Kostash’s baba here appears as a hint, a ghost, an absence.
If Kostash’s journey to Ukraine creates a Ukrainian-ness in ghostly images of a missing baba, then we find this dynamic even more pronounced in Kulyk Keefer’s Honey and Ashes. Unlike Kostash, who visits the actual village from whence her grandmother departed, Kulyk Keefer does not find the house that her ancestors left behind; rather, she finds her connection to the past through a museum. Like the dead, dying, or impotent babas in the prairie texts, or Kostash’s empty photographs evoking a ghostly absent-present baba, Kulyk Keefer constructs her connection to her own baba through the lens of loss. Museums, like photographs, attempt to fix moments, but are just as illustrative of what is absent as they are of what is present. Like Kostash, who finds echoes of her baba and “clicks” to preserve that absence, Kulyk Keefer finds her grandmother’s absence affixed in a peasant museum that recreates a rural, Ukrainian home, much like the homesteads that the prairie pioneers would have inhabited. As she approaches the museum, she remarks with wonder: “Out of time, out of place, I’ve found my grandmother’s house, the very room where my mother was born.”85 In this museum that she allows to become a stand-in for her own ancestral home, she sees “images formed on wavy glass, as tentative as breath. They dissolve into shadows first, then emptiness: the disappearing tricks of ghosts.”86 She takes off her shoes to walk barefoot in the recreated peasant house to feel the “ghostprints” of her ancestry.87 In many ways, this is the climax of the memoir. This small house, not unlike the pioneer homes constructed in the prairie stories, represents a sense of ethnicity that Kulyk Keefer claims. Once again, a granddaughter’s journey of self-discovery develops in relation to her baba, and once again, the baba is dead and gone, impotent in her own right.
While witches can be seen as figures of gendered dissent and both Derrida and Gordon analyze the agency of the ghosts they theorize (such as Hamlet’s father rising from the grave and demanding retribution for his murder), these Ukrainian babas who reside in prairie settings or rural Ukrainian ones—that seem very similar to Canadian prairie ones—as witch-like crone figures and ghostly absences have much less agency. Rather, their granddaughters have agency. Lilli’s baba dies, but Lilli goes on to become a famous folk performer, making sense of her Ukrainian-ness as part of a larger ethnic socio-economic group; Sonya’s baba dies, but Sonya goes on to learn about herbal remedies and healing, not just from her baba’s notes, but from a wide variety of sources; Colleen’s baba appears as an impotent crone, unable to cook or communicate, but Colleen blends her Ukrainian folk songs with the music she learns in Africa; Kostash’s grandmother is an absent figure, glaring as an empty space in a photograph, but Kostash returns to Canada to master the Ukrainian language and develop that lost connection; and Kulyk Keefer’s grandmother is nothing more than shadows and ghostprints in a museum, but Kulyk Keefer creates the connection through her imagination and her creative arts. In looking at these texts, therefore, baba is less of a “saintly” figure of cultural specificity presenting a safe image of Ukrainian-ness, but more of an ambiguous figure. She is angry and frustrated at times, impotent and absent at others. This corpus of prairie pioneering stories and their more contemporary prairie-set cousins offer us a more complicated baba embodying Ukrainian-ness in Canada. Her appearance suggests that we turn our attention from her in all her unresolved and possibly irresolvable complications and focus rather on the Nasha Meri and Katies of Ukrainian Canadian English-language literature.
At the end of the introduction to her scholarly survey of English-language Ukrainian Canadian writing, Grekul writes that she hopes readers will take away “the realization that keeping ethnic identity alive requires acts of will, courage, and, above all, imagination,” highlighting “the crucial role that literature plays in nurturing—imagining and re-imagining—ethnic identity.”88 The narratives that focus on prairie settings and babas, dramatizing the stories of Canadian-born granddaughters, articulate this creative sense of imagining and re-imagining. They suggest that if she is anything, baba is a catalyst for change, not a repository of Ukrainian culture, tout court. The Lillis, Sonyas, Colleens, Myrnas, and Janices who narrativize a struggle to articulate Ukrainian Canadian-ness do so in a way that looks forward as much as it looks backwards.
1 Wsevolod Isajiw, “Olga in Wonderland: Ethnicity in Technological Society,” Canadian Ethnic Studies 9, 1 (1977): 82.
2 Sneja Gunew, Haunted Nations: The Colonial Dimensions of Multiculturalism (New York: Routledge, 2004), 97.
3 Robert Klymasz, review of Echoes from Ukrainian Canada, ed. Jars Balan, special issue of PrairieFire 13,3 (1992), in Canadian Ethnic Studies 26, 1 (1994): 163.
4 J. Douglas Porteous, “Home: The Territorial Core,” Geographical Review 66, 4 (1976): 385.
5 Rosemary Marangoly George, The Politics of Home: Postcolonial Relocations and Twentieth century Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 5.
6 Myrna Kostash, Introduction to All of Baba’s Children (1977: Edmonton: NeWest Press, 1987), xv–xvi.
7 Sonia Mycak, Canuke Literature: Critical Essays on Canadian Ukrainian Writing (Huntington, NY: Nova Science Publications, 2001), 68.
8 Lisa Grekul, Leaving Shadows: Literature in English by Canada’s Ukrainians (Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 2005), 116.
9 Mycak, Canuke Literature, 51–53, 81; Grekul, Leaving Shadows, 116–17.
10 Mycak, Canuke Literature, 47; Frances Swyripa, Wedded to the Cause: Ukrainian-Canadian Women and Ethnic Identity 1891–1991 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993), 225; Grekul, Leaving Shadows, 116.
11 Grekul, Leaving Shadows, 117.
12 Mycak, Canuke Literature, 50, 93.
13 Myrna Kostash, All of Baba’s Great Grandchildren: Ethnic Identity in the Next Canada (Saskatoon: Heritage Press, 2000), 30, 32.
14 Margaret Atwood, “Death of a Young Son by Drowning” in The Journals of Susanna Moodie (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1970), 31.
15 For an overview of Ukrainian Canadian contributions to this larger debate, see Bohdan Bociukiw, “The Federal Policy of Multiculturalism and the Ukrainian Canadian Community” in Ukrainian Canadians, Multiculturalism, and Separatism: An Assessment, ed. Manoly Lupul (Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 1978), 98–128.
16 Swyripa, Wedded to the Cause, 221.
17 Mycak, Canuke Literature, 57.
18 Grekul, Leaving Shadows, 118, 202.
19 Mycak, Canuke Literature, 85–86, 88.
20 Janice Kulyk Keefer, Dark Ghost in the Corner: Imagining Ukrainian-Canadian Identity (Saskatoon: Heritage Press, 2005), 19.
21 Grekul, Leaving Shadows, 118.
22 Ibid., 116.
23 Grekul, Introduction to Leaving Shadows, xv.
24 Gerald Friesen, “Introduction” in The West: Regional Ambitions, National Debates, Global Age (Toronto: Penguin, 1999), xvi.
25 Klymasz, Review, 163.
26 Biddy Martin and Chandra Mohanty, “Feminist Politics: What’s Home Got to do with It?” in Femininity Played Straight: The Significance of Being Lesbian, ed. Biddy Martin (New York: Routledge 1996), 165.
27 Swyripa, Wedded to the Cause, 64.
28 Ibid., 64.
29 Ibid., 240.
30 Frances Swyripa, Storied Landscapes: Ethno-Religious Identity and the Canadian Prairies (Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2010), 174–175.
31 Andrew Suknaski, quoted in “Ethnic Identity: The Question of One’s Literary Passport” in Identifications: Ethnicity and the Writer in Canada, ed. Jars Balan (Edmonton: CIUS Press, 1982), 75.
32 Swyripa, Wedded to the Cause, 64.
33 Illia Kiriak, Sons of the Soil, Trans. Unknown (1939–1945 Syny Zernli; Winnipeg: Trident Press, 1959); Vera Lysenko, Yellow Boots (Edmonton, CIUS and NeWest Press, 1992 [1954]).
34 Lysenko, Yellow Boots, ix.
35 Carolyn Redl, “Neither Here Nor There: Canadian Fiction by the Multicultural Generation,” Canadian Ethnic Studies 28, 1 (1996): 23.
36 Alexandra Kryvoruchka, Introduction to Yellow Boots (Edmonton: CIUS and NeWest Press, 1992): xi–xxiii; Tamara Palmer Seiler, “Including the Female Immigrant Story: A Comparative Look at Narrative Strategies,” Canadian Ethnic Studies 28, 1 (1996): 51–66; Tamara Palmer Seiler, “Multi-Vocality and National Literature: Toward a Post-Colonial and Multicultural Aesthetic,” Journal of Canadian Studies 31, 3 (1996): 148–65; Beverly Rasporich, “Retelling Vera Lysenko: A Feminist and Ethnic Writer,” Canadian Ethic Studies 21, 2 (1989): 38–52; and Janice Kulyk Keefer, Review of Leaving Shadows: Literature in English by Canada’s Ukrainians, by Lisa Grekul, University of Toronto Quarterly 76, 1 (2007): 539–40.
37 Grekul, Leaving Shadows, 45, 35–46.
38 Palmer Seiler, “Including the Female Immigrant,” 56.
39 Marian J. Rubchak, “Ukraine’s Ancient Matriarch as a Topos in Constructing a Feminine Identity,” Feminist Review 92 (2009): 132.
40 Kryvoruchka, Introduction, xxi.
41 Mycak, Canuke Literature, 33.
42 Lysenko, Yellow Boots, 20.
43 Ibid., 23.
44 Ibid., 29–30.
45 Silvia Bovenschen, Jeannine Blackwell, Johanna Moore, and Beth Weckmueller, “The Contemporary Witch, the Historical Witch and the Witch Myth: The Witch, Subject of the Appropriation of Nature and Object of the Domination of Nature,” New German Critique 15 (1978): 85.
46 Ibid.
47 Lysenko, Yellow Boots, 166.
48 Ibid., 178.
49 Ibid., 187.
50 Ibid., 188, 189.
51 Ibid., 194.
52 Ibid., in Ethnicity and Culture in Canada: The Research Landscape, eds. J. W. Berry and J. A. Laponce (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994), 363.
53 Enoch Padolsky, “Canadian Ethnic Minority Literature in English,” 364; Mary Kirtz, “Old World Traditions, New World Inventions: Bilingualism, Multiculturalsm, and the Transformation of Ethnicity,” Canadian Ethnic Studies 28, 1 (1996): 8.
54 Satzewich, The Ukrainian Diaspora, 202.
55 Porteous, “Home,” 386.
56 Marangoly George, The Politics of Home, 21.
57 Marangoly George, The Politics of Home, 27–29; Kaplan, “Deterritorialiations,” 189; Diana Brydon, “Postcolonialism Now: Autonomy, Cosmopolitanism, and Diaspora,” University of Toronto Quarterly 73, 2 (2004): 700.
58 Lindy Ledohowski, Review of The Children of Mary by Marusya Bociurkiw, The New Pathway 77, 30 (2006): 8.
59 Marusya Bociurkiw, The Children of Mary (Toronto: Inanna Publications, 2006), 17.
60 Ibid., 41.
61 Ibid. 41–42.
62 Ibid., 41.
63 Ibid., 57.
64 Ibid., 54.
65 Ibid., 57.
66 Ibid., 72.
67 Ibid., 25.
68 Ibid., 30.
69 Lindy Ledohowski, Review of Kalyna’s Song by Lisa Grekul, Canadian Ethnic Studies 39, 3 (2007): 232–34.
70 Ibid., 234.
71 Lisa Grekul, Kalyna’s Song (Regina: Coteau Press, 2003), 221.
72 Ibid., 365–66.
73 Ibid., 223.
74 Ibid., 383.
75 Elizabeth Bachinsky, God of Missed Connections (Gibsons, BC: Nightwood Editions, 2009), 75.
76 Grekul, Leaving Shadows, 118.
77 Myrna Kostash, Bloodlines: Journey into Eastern Europe (Vancouver: Douglas and McIntyre, 1993), 168.
78 Ibid., 164.
79 Ibid., 163.
80 Ibid., 186.
81 Ibid., 185.
82 Avery Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 32–35.
83 Kostash, Bloodlines, 185.
84 Gordon, Ghostly Matters, 32, 33, 35.
85 Janice Kulyk Keefer, Honey and Ashes: A Story of Family (Toronto: HarperCollins, 1998), 255.
86 Ibid., 256.
87 Ibid.
88 Grekul, Leaving Shadows, xxiii.