Transcultural creative nonFiction: caterina Edwards’ Finding Rosa and Janice Kulyk Keefer’s Honey and Ashes. Finding the Way Home Through Narrative

Maria Tognan

IN THIS PAPER, I DRAW a parallel between Janice Kulyk Keefer’s Honey and Ashes and Caterina Edwards’ Finding Rosa in order to cast light on the ways in which transcultural creative non-fiction became for both authors the elected medium to write, and therefore find, their way home. Honey and Ashes was published in 1998, while Finding Rosa appeared ten years later, in 2008. However, neither time nor differences in ethnic background need prevent the drawing of a parallel between the works of these two authors in search of a deeper understanding of their identity, because, even though driven by different needs, both writers chose to piece together family narratives and to connect them to collective history in order to bring home a new, rediscovered, sense of self. Kulyk Keefer’s and Edwards’ are works of highly emotional creative non-fiction which foreground historical and personal reflection through a balanced mixture of travel writing, biography, memoir and imaginative reconstruction, in a powerful combination made possible by an acute meta-narrative awareness. Far from trying to simplistically level out their differences, I wish to compare and contrast aspects of writing ethnicity, memory and imagination in the works under scrutiny, seeking to distil such elements not into a paradigm but into a host of comparable transcultural processes which underlie the understanding of ethnic identity. After providing the background to Edwards’ and Kulyk Keefer’s respective works of creative non-fiction, I intend to outline a framework for the ideas of transculturalism and creative non-fiction, in order to clarify how the authors exploited the possibilities of this hybrid genre to map the neighbouring terrains of memory and identity in their private and collective (and therefore cultural) aspects. Finally, I will argue that the authors described how they found their way home by means of writing, and also that the process of writing itself became their way home in that it contributed to the creation of a narrative scaffolding for identity.

Kulyk Keefer and Edwards are two prolific writers who have explored the issues of ethnicity both in fictional and creative nonfictional works. Kulyk Keefer was born in Toronto from a mixed Ukrainian and Polish background. She grew up, and currently lives, in Canada, although she also spent part of her life in England, where she had moved for her graduate studies, and in France (Kulyk Keefer, “Coming Across Bones” 85-88; “Janice Kulyk Keefer Interviewed” 188). Edwards was born in England and currently lives in Edmonton. Her background is also mixed: her father, Frank, was English and her mother, Rosa Pagan, was born in Lussino (now Lošinj), an island in the Adriatic Sea, characterized in the past by a troubled political history (cf. Edwards, Finding Rosa; Caterinaedwards.com). Edwards’ family migrated to Canada when she was eight years old.

In the 1990s Kulyk Keefer travelled to Ukraine to carry out research for Finding Rosa, a novel which was published in 1996, and later to investigate her ethnicity and her family history. Her endeavours in this direction led her to write Honey and Ashes – A Story of Family. As Kulyk Keefer explained in her essay “Coming Across Bones: Historiographic Ethnofiction” (1995), even if for some time she had distanced herself from, and even repudiated, her ethnicity, she finally claimed that baggage and engaged in writing ethnicity to conceptualize her “hyphenated state” in terms other than those of “two discrete ethnic or national identities” (87). Throughout Kulyk Keefer’s childhood, the narratives of life in her mother’s village had formed “a third terrain, even a home ground of imagination” which she could enter effortlessly “without the shameful clumsiness marking those shifts from ‘Ukrainian’ to ‘English’ spheres” that she associated with Canada (88). As she stated in Honey and Ashes, for her, travelling “back” to Ukraine meant returning somewhere she had never been (215; cf. “Coming across Bones” 94). There she experienced first hand the hardships of the land, the gap between the real Ukraine and the imagined one, and the troubling sensation of being at once a native, or at least an envoy, and a tourist (Honey and Ashes 244 et passim; cf. Grekul 147).

Similar feelings with regard to identity are effectively expressed by Edwards on her website, in which she states that the opportunity she had in her youth to spend the summer holidays with her mother’s family in Venice, and to experience the contrast in cultures, made her realize that “identity is not fragmentary but multiple” (Caterinaedwards.com). Finding Rosa is the result of a research into the culture which shaped Rosa Pagan (261), carried out in order to understand the kind of upbringing the writer received from her. Edwards is part of that “sandwich generation” of women, caught between providing for children and caring for ailing parents and in-laws (“Finding Rosa – Paperback” Dmpibooks.com): as the subtitle to the book – A Mother with Alzheimer’s, a Daughter in Search of the Past – clarifies, her project was an attempt to counteract the consequences of her mother’s condition (which leads to memory loss) through writing. At the same time, it was an endeavour to inscribe her own identity by defining it in relationship to (and possibly against) that of her mother. In an interview with Sabrina Francesconi, Edwards declared:

She lost her memories and she gradually lost herself. At the time, in trying to understand the process, I started to think of the concept of lost memories and lost histories ... I was interested...in the way we recreate the past through writing. I tried to recreate my mother’s life through my imagination. But of course the result is my construction. (Francesconi, “Constructing Memories” n. pag)

As Edwards states on her website, the writing of Finding Rosa originated from the need to piece together family history to arrive at the roots of her sense of never belonging. Unlike Kulyk Keefer, Edwards had travelled to Istria and Italy before the journey of 2001 described in Finding Rosa. However, in her memoir, she confessed that throughout her youth she had perceived her mother’s past as “hazy and...irrelevant” (29): “Istria was a fantasy, a mental construct, a sequence of images incubated by my dreams. It existed in my mother’s mind [...] as the beloved, lost homeland, the wellspring of nostalgia” (29). Edwards set out to research the past of Istria to discover which historical events had affected her mother’s family directly, and thus arrived at the roots of her mother’s often difficult behaviour (Finding Rosa 291) and finally managed to forgive her (Personal Interview).¹ Different as the needs which drove Kulyk Keefer’s and Edwards’ investigations are, it is still possible to detect a resemblance in the authors’ wish to achieve a geo-political, historical and personal knowledge of their “homelands” and share it through narrative. During their journeys, both writers faced the difficulty of reconstructing their family history in places where historical evidence was scanty, since masses of people had been deported or forced to leave, and archives had been conveniently destroyed as a consequence of wars and violent political instability. Furthermore, Kulyk Keefer and Edwards were confronted with the fact that some of their relatives were reluctant or unable to share stories from a past so strongly marked by suffering. The memories they were trying to put together proved to be subjective, selective, decaying, even unreliable – although unwittingly so. In the process of recuperating family stories and connecting them to one another, as well as to collective history, both writers experienced and re-discovered the value of memory by measuring it against its absence. As a consequence, in the books under scrutiny, the scantiness of evidence, the limited number of documents, and the defectiveness of memory are counterbalanced by imagination.

The imaginative reconstruction of the past, fuelled by stories passed on by family members, constitutes relevant portions of both Honey and Ashes and Finding Rosa. In Kulyk Keefer’s and Edwards’ works of creative non-fiction, the entwining of memory and imagination results in compelling narratives which reach out to the “old country” to foreground, in Kulyk Keefer’s words, that “continuum of experience, and, most of all, imagination that can bring us all, however momentarily, together” (Honey and Ashes 7). Writing creative nonfiction to bridge a cultural gulf between the present and the past, between Canada and the country of origin, becomes for the authors a way to perceive the weight exerted by history on their ethnicity and their identity. Edwards writes: “The dynamic of memory and stories is that of two glowing ropes that intertwine and separate, slip by each other and knot over the dark pit, the foiba of forgetfulness” (Finding Rosa 176). As a remedy to a worrying collective tendency to the oblivion and denial of uncomfortable historical truths, the writers’ family memories are shared through the same means they were received: narratives in which the human side to historical events emerges from the intersection between the personal and the collective; a result which could not be achieved by means of historical writing alone. The skilfully woven narratives by Kulyk Keefer and Edwards expound historical information in a form which fosters the emotional response of the reader, enabling him to relate to individual destinies singled out from, and conjured out of, the anonymous multitudes of collective history.

The choice of “creative non-fiction” as a genre does not entail the authorial decision to give free rein to imagination, embellishing fact with invention. According to Judy O’Malley, the cardinal rule of creative non-fiction is “[n]ever lie: [i]f you made up some of the elements, bring your reader into that process: use an author’s note to explain clearly what, why, and where” (qtd. in Taylor Brown n. pag.). In fact, both Kulyk Keefer and Edwards, by means of different devices or meta-narrative choices, make the reader aware of their authorial insertions. Kulyk Keefer, for instance, declares in her prologue to

Honey and Ashes that “what memory hides and what imagination discloses” (5) are all part of the book she has written; and later reminds the reader, in the acknowledgements section, that “the turns given to these stories, and the inevitable errors that have crept into the telling are [hers] alone” (330). Although Edwards is more substantial in her semi-fictional reconstructions, she also makes them overtly recognizable. To quote just one example from Finding Rosa, in Chapter 8, “Who remembers?”, the writer reconstructs a trip to the piazza which little Rosa took with her father, narrating it in a voice which reproduces the little girl’s thoughts, and is therefore markedly different from the main one.

Both authors underline the inextricability of memory and imagination. Edwards declared in the interview with Francesconi that memory and imagination are entwined, explaining that memories of the past change, they are constructed, and yet they are “essential to our creating a narrative, an understanding of our world.” In addition, in a personal interview, Edwards described the way in which she perceives memory to be connected to imagination, saying that when you think back on your life you remember certain details, but you also imagine and recreate them in a process which involves fictionalization. She then paralleled such a process to what happens in creative non-fiction, that is, that fictional narrative strategies are employed in order to produce a story that is connected to one’s personal construction of reality. Similarly, also in a personal interview, Kulyk Keefer explained that there is “no such thing as pure memory,” because “it always emerges as story,” and added that since it is inherent in human beings to remember in narrative form, imagination inevitably inserts itself in the process. Therefore, all one can do is “test” that what one has “superimposed” such as a metaphor or a correlative, is as “fitting, ... resonant” and “as truthful as it could possibly be.”²

In light of these considerations, it becomes clear that the reader of creative non-fiction should take the stories told by the writers not as objective truth, but as an imaginative reflection of it, linguistically engendered in a subjective mind and therefore by no means less true. In other words, the truth of creative non-fiction is the truth each author has unearthed for herself digging through archives, memories and family narratives; the truth on or against which each of them will base any further understanding of her self image. The empowering value of narrative lies in the fact that the authors can accommodate in it a sense of belonging which is at once real and imagined. Narrating their family stories enabled them to, in words borrowed from Pier

Aldo Rovatti, “accettare la sfida di una identità senza luogo, disegnando i contorni di una prossimità esposta al fuori e all’alterità ma non cancellata da questa esposizione” (29).³ In both Honey and Ashes and Finding Rosa, what is at stake is the construction of an identity and of an idea of home which are supported by the scaffolding of narrative and writing. Peter Brooks, in Reading for the Plot wrote: “Our lives are ceaselessly intertwined with narrative, with the stories that we tell and hear told...all of which are reworked in that story of our own lives that we narrate to ourselves in a virtually uninterrupted monologue” (3). In Finding Rosa Edwards confessed that, before she could write words down, she told herself stories, and identified her storytelling with the need to create a space for herself by erecting a wall against her mother, especially in times of transition (247). Finding Rosa ends with a passage in which Edwards thinks back to the time she received a blessing from her mother. To speak about it, the writer alludes to the Biblical image of Jacob, who fought with the angel and hung on until he received his blessing. Edwards hung on, she explains, not just until she received the blessing but until she knew her mother – a knowledge she achieved by writing the book (Finding Rosa 334). Interestingly, in her 2004 paper “Wrestling with the Angel, the Self and the Publisher in Life Writing” (27), Edwards compared the process of writing to wrestling with the angel, alluding to the same Biblical reference (and to Virginia Woolf). In writing Finding Rosa, the effort made to be blessed as a daughter and as a writer, the processes of getting to know her mother and of writing about it, took place simultaneously, both struggles a contribution to shaping Edwards’ identity as a woman, a mother and a writer (cf. Finding Rosa 127).

As to Kulyk Keefer, she declared in Coming Across Bones that the most important, yet invisible, component of her ethnicity was something she never could or wanted to shake off: “the component of story, the narratives my grandmother, mother, and aunt would tell me all through my childhood and adolescence.” In the same essay and in her novel Finding Rosa, to convey the ambivalent experience of ethnic identity in a visual way, Kulyk Keefer employed the image of double-faced Janus, the Roman god of thresholds, implying that ethnicity signifies looking at the same time in the direction of the old and the new country. As Grekul aptly summarized, Kulyk Keefer in her 1991 essay From Mosaic to Kaleidoscope argued that, as opposed to multiculturalism, transculturalism reflects more accurately “the day-to-day realities of individuals from ethnic minority backgrounds, many of whom harbour strong material and/or emotional attachments to their ancestral homelands” (Grekul 111). Furthermore, Deborah Saidero, in “Janice Kulyk Keefer’s Transcultural Transcodifications” explained:

Keefer [...] postulates the construction of a postor transnational identity, wherein immigrants can develop a sense of belonging to their Canadian homeland without denying their other homes in the process. This new concept entails a reconfiguration of the idea of “home,” which becomes an imaginative space that transcends political and geographical confines, a space where history, memory and place cohabit and intermingle (110).

Kulyk Keefer’s and Edwards’ works of creative non-fiction are therefore transcultural in that they satisfy the need to create a connection to the respective “old countries” in an effort to understand and embrace one’s cultural background, and also in that they fulfil the need to bear witness and keep memories alive for the sake of later generations. Writing plays a paramount role in the process of re-imagining the authors’ sense of self and community, which together comprise the ideas of home and identity. The two authors exploit the hybrid genre of creative non-fiction to depict within its blurred boundaries, “the jumble of the individual and the universal” (the words are Edwards’, from her website). To summarize, the choice of creative non-fiction as the means to merge the results of research with the fragments offered by family history, is significant in many respects: first of all, it allowed the writers to fill in the gaps created by the selectivity of subjective memory or by the intentional and more or less extensive obliteration of collective memory operated by historical agents; secondly, it helped to foreground the role of narrative in providing a scaffolding for the ideas of identity and home, and finally, it proved ideal for depicting what Kulyk Keefer calls “this world that’s mine by inheritance and imagination” (Honey and Ashes 202), an ethnicity defined at once by fact and by family myth.

To conclude, I would like to make reference to a few lines from “Homecoming,” the epilogue to Honey and Ashes, in which Kulyk Keefer weighs up a dictionary definition of the word “home” against her own appraisal of the notion:

Home, as the dictionary defines it, a ‘fixed dwelling-place, one’s habitual or proper abode....A place, region or state to which one properly belongs, in which one’s affections centre, or where one finds rest, refuge or satisfaction. One’s own country, one’s native land, the place where one’s ancestors dwelt.’ Yet even as I read this litany of definitions, the conflicts and contradictions leap up at me. Rest, refuge, satisfaction – none of these fit what I feel about Staromischyna, or about the Ontario to which I have returned. Perhaps home is only this: inhabiting uncertainty, the arguments desire picks with fear (328).

Uncertainty lingers because books of creative non-fiction are “books that are open-ended, asking as many questions as they attempt to answer, demonstrating that we are constantly expanding, re-assessing, and gaining new understanding of who we are and what we know” (O’Malley, qtd. in Taylor Brown n. pag.). This is especially true of Finding Rosa and Honey and Ashes. Both Edwards’ and Kulyk Keefer’s writing of their way home can now be described as twofold: on the one hand, through writing they describe how they found their way home (the difficulty, the research, the discoveries); on the other, the process of writing itself becomes their way home by being the force which holds the jigsaws of awareness together, finally giving coherence and meaning to their journeys, and preparing them for new ones (cf. Honey and Ashes 329 et passim).

Works Cited

Brooks, Peter. Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative. 1984. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1992. Print.

Donovan, Melissa. “Creative Nonfiction.” Writingforward.com, 2010: n. pag. Web. 19 May 2010. http://www.writingforward.com/category/genres/ creative-nonfiction;.

Edwards, Caterina. Finding Rosa: A Mother with Alzheimer’s, a Daughter in Search of the Past. Vancouver: Greystone Books 2008. Print.

_____. “Wrestling with the Angel, the Self and the Publisher in Life Writing.” Shaping History: L’Identità Italo-Canadese nel Canada Anglofono. Vol. 1. Eds. Anna Pia De Luca and Alessandra Ferraro. Proceedings of the International Conference Oltre la Storia / Beyond History / Au delà de l’Histoire: L’Identità Italo-Canadese Contemporanea,” 20-22 May 2004, Udine. Udine: Forum 2005. 23-30. Print.

_____. “Finding Rosa – Paperback.” Dmpibooks.com. 2008-2010 Web. 19 May 2010. "http://dmpibooks.com/book/finding.rosa-paperback;.

Francesconi, Sabrina. “Constructing Memory Through Imagination. An Interview with Caterina Edwards.” Bibliosofia: Letteratura Canadese e Altre Culture/Canadian Literature and Other Cultures. Ed. Egidio Marchese. Bibliosofia.net, 21 May 2004: n. pag. Web. 14 Apr. 2009. http://www.bibliosofia.net/files/Sab.htm;.

Grekul, Lisa. Leaving Shadows: Literature in English by Canada’s Ukrainians. Edmonton: U of Alberta Press, 2005. Print.

Kulyk Keefer, Janice. “Coming Across Bones: Historiographic Ethno-fiction.” Essays on Canadian Writing 57 (Winter 1995): 84-104. Print.

_____. Honey and Ashes: A Story of Family. Toronto: Harper Collins, 1998. Print.

_____. “From Mosaic to Kaleidoscope: Out of the Multicultural Past Comes a Vision of a Transcultural Future.” Books in Canada 20.6 (Sept. 1991): 13-16. Print.

_____. “Janice Kulyk Keefer Interviewed by Cherry Clayton.” The Journal of Commonwealth Literature 34.1 (1999): 183-197.

Marchese, Egidio. “Presentiamo Caterina Edwards.” Bibliosofia: Letteratura Canadese e Altre Culture/Canadian Literature and Other Cultures. Ed. Egidio Marchese. Bibliosofia.net, 1 April 2006: n. pag. Web. 14 Apr. 2009. http:// www.bibliosofia.net/files/presentiamo_caterina_edwards.htm;.

McCrary, Micah. “Creative Nonfiction: In Defense of the Truth (with a Lower Case T).” Bookslut 95 (April 2010): n. pag. Web. 19 May 2010. http://www. bookslut.com/features/2010_04_016065.php;.

Pivato, Joseph, ed. aterina Edwards: Essays on Her Works. Toronto: Guernica, 2000. Print.

Rovatti, Pier Aldo. Possiamo Addomesticare l’Altro? La Condizione Globale, Udine: Forum, 2007. Print.

Saidero, Deborah. “Janice Kulyk Keefer’s Transcultural Transcodifications.” Reading Janice Kulyk-Keefer. Ed. Deborah Saidero. Udine: Forum, 2009. 105-116. Print.

Taylor Brown, Susan. “Creative Nonfiction: a True Story Well Told.” 2004. Susantalyorbrown.com, 2005: n. pag. Web. 19 May 2010. http://www.susantaylorbrown.com/creativenf.html;.

Tognan, Maria. Personal Interview with Caterina Edwards. Unpublished. 28 April 2009.

_____. Personal Interview with Janice Kulyk Keefer. Unpublished. 18 May 2009.