Sojourner’s Truth
Lee Maracle
Press Gang
The stories in Sojourner’s Truth are funny and painful and relentlessly honest. Lee Maracle’s talents as an orator and her ability to relate universals from the perspective of a First Nations woman give her collection of 13 stories an unmistakable cohesiveness.
In a short preface to the collection, Maracle explains that she tries to integrate the European short story and Native oratory media. She warns that most “conclusions” have to be drawn by the readers themselves because in Native oratory, “the reader is as much a part of the story as the teller.” She warns that “this is most disturbing for European readers/listeners. Much of their condition of life hinges on instructive learning.” She’s right.
And so we have “Maggie” and “Charlie,” stories about children for whom the one-way instruction in the European schools they have to attend is completely irrelevant. Maggie mouths off to her teachers about “this boring shit” and Charlie feigns dullness to avoid being punished for not doing his schoolwork.
But Maggie keeps a journal, “painting with words whatever pictures of the world she wanted,” and Charlie daydreams of romps with his dog through the forest near his home.
It is ironic that these children’s escape from a system they have no part in lies in shutting themselves off from it altogether. It is the rigid and self-righteous European system of instruction which lies behind the children’s tragedy.
Maracle’s readers, who are probably very adapted to this system, can react to her stories in two ways. They can breeze through them, extract what they think is the writer’s message, and put the book back on the shelf. Or they can try Maracle’s suggestion. A story’s message is only one which the readers themselves draw — “not necessarily the lessons we wish them to draw, but all conclusions are considered valid.
“The listeners are drawn into the dilemma and are expected at some point in their lives to work themselves out of it.” The book may not return to the shelf for years.
The stories’ subjects are honest and hard-hitting. Maracle does not shy away from the woman who dies of alcoholism, the victim of incest, urban poverty, spirituality, sexism within the Native community, or tensions between Vancouver’s Asian and Native populations (which vanish when both groups get together and make fun of white people).
It has clearly been a struggle to publish stories about such issues. In one story Maracle hints that a previous story was rejected by the publisher who wanted her to remove the drinking. “It is kind of hard to take the drinking out of a story about a woman who dies of alcoholism,” she comments.
“Sojourner’s Truth” deals particularly with the issue of truth. The protagonist has just died, and is realizing that he knows what hell is.
“Hell just might be seeing all the ugly shit people put each other through from the clean and honest perspective of the spirit that no longer knows how to lie and twist the truth.”
This man’s hell is realizing that when he was alive and could actually have done something to prevent wife and child abuse, racial harassment and environmental infractions, not to mention his own wife abuse, he did nothing.
“On the wings of a snow white dove, my truth sails across the vast expanse of weeping earth and choking fauna and my soul mutters helplessly to the wreckage below: Jesus, I didn’t know.”
And Jesus appears, starting a funny and painful dialogue which lasts throughout the story each time the man swears, “Jesus.” No one appears when he mutters, “God,” and he realizes that “the whole notion of lords in heaven is ridiculous. It could not have been contrived by ethereal souls.”
But this experience is not hell; it is heaven, where all one can feel is pleasure or pain. Hell, the Jesus character explains, is guilt, “an intellectual contrivance that reduces the pain the spirit needs to experience if it is to alter the actions of the body.”
The stories are also political. But for Maracle, political does not mean civil disobedience and meetings. It’s clear what “political” means in “Who’s political here?” The wife of a man who has been arrested for postering muses, “I do all the laundry, cook and clean after that man, type all his leaflets after midnight and mother his two children so that he can risk postering downtown. Who is in prison here?”
In “Eunice,” the protagonist woman writer sits in a political meeting thinking, “I recall my efforts to get here, running about readying my four kids for my departure, giving last minute instructions about their care to my husband and finally robbing my change bank of loonies so that I can buy gas on the way — that’s political.”
Sojourner’s Truth is a collection of stories that anyone can draw truths from, with a little effort to participate in the oratory. It also deals frankly with First Nations issues in a way that any Canadian should have a chance to experience.
