|
In Australia, my reading of Raven Road coincided
roughly with the release of the film version of a book by
Aboriginal writer Doris
Pilkington/Nugi Garimara about the abuse perpetrated
on Aboriginal people by white 'protectors', in a time not
that long ago. Rabbit-Proof Fence was a timely reminder
of the importance of women's autobiography in history. It
tells the extraordinary tale of a 1500km walk by three young
Aboriginal girls who escaped from their white captors at
Western Australia's Moore River Settlement, determined to
go home. The true story worked, as much writing by Aboriginal
women does, in representation of survival of an oppressed
people and culture but, until Pilkington wrote about it,
the trek to freedom remained hidden behind established notions
of Aboriginal women's identity – again a repetitive
aspect of dominant Australian historical narrative. By working
with the reality that life is in the main terrifying for
women dispossessed, oppressed, and disenfranchised by class,
Rabbit-Proof Fence revises a history that has otherwise
relied upon assimilation. Connections between then and now
made through autobiography can register on these significant
political scales, depending on the writer that makes the
journey.
Yearning for connection sent Pybus into the subarctic Canadian
wilderness to find a story she could shape around a migrant
woman who had walked from 1927 New York City, all the way
home to Russia. Pybus is determined to set the record straight
in Raven Road about Lillian Alling's trek of desperation
through a dangerous, icy landscape. Unlike Doris Pilkington
in Rabbit-Proof Fence, however, Pybus embarks without
personal experience of the 'true story' and, thus, with
a sense of marvel at the woman alone adventure, instead
of the need to enter historical narrative that makes
Aboriginal women's writing so politically compelling.
Pybus's tale of 'adventure and discovery' instead turns
into a personal quest for self-realisation, a buttressing
of the class and culture-privileged figure in front of which
other women, cultures and landscapes are propped as mirrors.
That is not the result anticipated by the intriguing and
inspired character drawing of the opening chapters. From
these comes expectation of a sustained engagement with Lillian's
experience as a migrant woman who rejected the grim clothing
sweatshop existence she found as the reality of her American
opportunity. With this story would have come a multitude
of female others, obscured by the fortunate lifestyle makeover
narrative that underscores masculinised ideological constructions
of migrant experience in America. They are promised by Pybus
in her detailing of how women migrants were 'processed'
at Ellis Island, and thus established as essentially other
to the American dream, as they were stripped down and probed
for deficiencies in language, body, and mind. Such would
have been Lillian's entry point into the country, as it
was into Pybus's story. In both settings, Lillian stood
as representative of thousands who looked over their shoulders
back to home when they no longer recognized themselves in
the culture that dominated them. It struck a chord with
me, living in Australia, watching Rabbit-Proof Fence,
recalling writers like Nugi Garimara, Labumore, Glenyse
Ward, and Monica Clare, and wondering where Pybus might
have taken her trip if she had had a bit more empathy, and
a lot less sympathy. An impossible demand perhaps,
given that the bourgeois woman engaging in confessional
narrative to affirm a ready-made worldview travels an altogether
separate path.
Even as I yearned for Raven Road to go much further
with the connective histories of women displaced from their
homelands, and make Lillian and Pybus both representations
of the recuperative power of storytelling, I also acknowledged
the vast differences that assured their inevitable estrangement.
There was no way, according to sources cited by Pybus, that
Lillian could have got across the Yukon on foot, let alone
over the Baring Strait to Siberia. Yet the doubt, 'or could
she?' that drives Pybus's writing is somewhat subsumed within
the more immediate frictions played out by Pybus with her
(former) friend and driver, Gerry. Lillian tends to slip
out of the historical centre yet again, just as Gerry eventually
ends up driving off and leaving Pybus to the more accommodating
company of proper strangers. Through the bulk of the text
that precedes this parting, however, Pybus points out the
contrasts between her worldview and that of Gerry, where
the non-academic traveler is constructed as unsophisticated,
bulimic, and self-deprecating. Somehow Lillian's presence
emerges out of this projection to emphasise the differences
between a journey undertaken in desperation and terror,
and one made as a romantic quest for self-affirmation where
class and home advantage ensure a perpetual safety net.
When it does not profess to be revising history, or recuperating
the story of a woman who was clearly from an entirely different
world, this confessional mode of storytelling is, as Pybus
says, 'frank and funny.' Appropriating into such narrative
the stories of women who risk their health, their safety,
and their lives because they hope for a better future seems
from a left political standpoint, rather sad. Pybus undertook
her adventure in subarctic wilderness with the aid of a
large research grant, a Nissan Pathfinder chauffeured by
Gerry, a selection of gourmet food items, some earnest librarians
in Tasmania, New York and Vancouver, and a doting husband
hanging by the telephone back home in Tasmania (The irony
of the presence of these props emerges clearly but, it seems,
unprompted by the narration.) Pybus charted a course through
Canada to Alaska in pursuit of 'the truth' about Lillian.
The resulting Raven Road is a series of journal entries
turned chapters that are sometimes reflective of the process
of working as a historian with a factually flawed archive
on a historical figure with comparatively low cultural exchange
value. It is more often, however, an account of the baggage
(intellectual, personal) that goes with anyone into a research
project, and how the subjectivity of the other emerges
laden with that baggage.
Lillian, for instance, was a Polish Jew branded lunatic
by the telegraph line workers, police and reporters who
ran across her as she walked across the Yukon and, later,
by Pybus who remarks:
The more I try, the less success I have in finding a credible
explanation as to why Lillian should seek to return to Russia.
But as I say, the woman was clearly unhinged. (184)
On the plane home to Tasmania, however, Pybus suspends this
earlier concurrence with the official (male) line, after
reading a report from a Canadian Mounted Police officer
and deciding that 'it points very strongly to Lillian having
taken up with a man in Dawson City':
That's it! An explanation to account for the lack of information
about her whereabouts over the winter in 1928-29.
In the remote subarctic, a woman on her own was a subject
of intense interest and scrutiny, but a woman with a man
was not. To all intents and purposes she was rendered invisible.
(224)
Oh, is that it? The big white out – that erasure
incurred in the patriarchally interested colonial setting;
what black women writers and critics have long called 'invisibility
blues', that experience of being flattened out and slotted
into a narrow historical niche where you become a mere accessory
in someone else's overarching, ready-made ideologically
affirming project.
For Lillian, as it turns out, that experience came out of
the project of 'settling' the North American wilderness
that put an abrupt end to her record in history. The romantic
ending to Raven Road, where Pybus hugs her husband
at the airport and declares that 'nothing else matters'(226),
indicates her need to imagine Lillian in a similar circumstance
that compensates, apparently, for the abandonment of the
journey home and of the struggle for self-determination.
It is a need, or luxury, wholly available to the bourgeois
woman who plays out the same resolution earlier, when the
parting of company between Pybus and Gerry is recalled.
This is where Pybus gets to hear Gerry admitting to the
sense of lack and ultimate inferiority as a woman she perceives
for herself through the authoritative and fuller figure
cut by Pybus:
'Tell me, Geraldine, is that what you are looking for -
a man to marry? Is that why you came up here?'
She turns to me, her face contorted. 'It's all very well
for you.' Tears spill down her cheeks. 'You are so smug,
so sure of your life. Loving husband. Brilliant career.
You have everything you ever wanted!'
I stroke her arm to calm her down but she shakes me off.
'Everywhere we go you know what you want.
Everyone we meet you presume will be interested in your
project. And they are. They don't give a toss about me.
Why should anyone be interested in me? (147-48)
While Pybus calls, at this point, time of death of the friendship,
it marks a culmination of the more significant wrestle with
identity portrayed in Raven Road through recurring
reflections on food and eating, ageing womanhood, and the
familiar binary of nature and culture. The conflict is foreshadowed
early in the book, when it is made clear that Gerry and
Pybus hold contrasting views of their trip, as well as of
each other:
'We are on a kind of feminist adventure. A cross between
Thelma and Louise and the Two Fat Ladies.'…
'I'd say it was closer to The Odd Couple,' Gerry
murmurs.
She has jokingly mentioned this movie a couple of times
since we left Vancouver. She seems to identify me with the
Jack Lemmon character.
I do wish my sinuses weren't going berserk. (56)
The occasions in the book where Gerry could be infuriated
enough to drive the Nissan Pathfinder off a cliff, or where
Pybus describes her various culinary triumphs (and laments
Gerry's jibes about her being keen on her tucker) could
justify Pybus's initial view of the trip. Escalating anxiety
around the relationship, however, meant that I was relieved,
from a feminist perspective, to get to the part where Pybus
went solo.
That is when the food and eating theme broadened into an
account of the quest for 'self realization' through the
wilderness experience which, in the predominantly masculine
history of such examples, frequently resulted in death through
starvation. Alone in the subarctic wilderness, Pybus spends
much time writing about starvation and its use as an apparent
path to self-realisation. It is within this material that
a recollection of the working class writer Jack London's
time in the Yukon is included, since he himself almost perished
in his retreat cabin. London's experience was not so much
a quest for self-realisation as a case of bad timing in
the face of an especially fierce blizzard (but Pybus seems
to prefer the romantic account). His experience is compared
with that of the unlikely cult figure, Chris McCandless,
whose book Into The Wild tells of his bid to find
spiritual awakening by walking off alone into the Denali
National Park. The site where McCandless starved to death
became, as Pybus observes, a destination for pilgrimages
by young backpackers from around the world. Overall, the
effect of the inclusion of this self-realisation through
starvation content is to widen the divide illustrated in
Raven Road between those who can afford the luxury
of choice in self-reflection, and those who move across
the world in search of a better place to live. Starvation
and abuse, by choice or by threat, become in the former
story a matter of worldview, while remaining in the latter
a condition of history.
Specifying and watching how confessional acts of self-realisation
are mistaken for left revisions of history may appear to
be a small act of agency in a place like Australia, where
a film about children escaping from a concentration camp
in the desert resonates too loudly in contemporary racist
foreign and immigration policy. Placing Raven Road
into such a context may, similarly, seem too much of an
expectation for a book about an Australian woman travelling
through the subarctic wilderness. It was only ever supposed
to be an adventure, after all.
Janine Little has a PhD in the area of race, literature
and culture; she had returned to her earlier profession
of journalist but is now training to be a barrister.
An
interview with her including some discussion of the 1996
novel, Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence, can be found
in Hecate 28.1 (2002). The film, scripted by Christine
Olsen and directed by Phil Noyce, expands upon Pilkington's
original story of her mother and two aunts, including additional
historically accurate scenes and events. See Christopher
Hawkes in Arena Magazine 59 (June-July 2002) for
one useful discussion of the film.
|
