“This brilliant tribute to our grandmothers
blankets us in the fibre of those passionate flesh-and-blood immigrant
women who - through their hard work, love and example - handcrafted
uniquely patterned identities for us, their Canadian granddaughters.”
- Loranne Brown, author of The
Handless Maiden
“Here are hymns of praise for, meditations on the complexity
of and sometimes guilty letters to grandmothers... They will make
you want to rediscover your own grandmothers, to write to them and
of them.”
- Helen M. Buss, author of Mapping
Our Selves and Memoirs
from Away
“This collection allows us to share the fascinating stories of
a wide range of women whose intensely loving relationships with their
grandmothers are marked by a complex mix of delight, pain and a dispassionate
admiration that is perhaps the most meaningful tribute one being can
pay to another.”
- Janice Kulyk Keefer, author of
Honey and Ashes
“These writers speak eloquently about the strong symbiotic bond
that continues to unite them to their grandmothers despite the great
divides caused by space and time.”
- Arun Mukherjee, author of Postcolonialism:
My living
“This is a beautiful and touching collection of narratives by
women who rediscover their roots through their grandmothers will be
cherished by all readers interested in communication across generations
and cultures.”
- Eva C. Karpinski, editor of Pens
of Many Colours
Canadian Woman Studies (Volume
20, Number 2)
By Dorette Huggins
What kind of parents are you looking for? the Talk Show Host asked
five-year-old identical twin boys slated for adoption. Lonnie (or
was it Ronnie?) shot back: “A mummy, a daddy and a grandmother.”
Whether they be maternal or paternal, grandmothers are a breed apart,
who play a key role in the shaping of the lives of their children’s
children. No one would agree more with the underlying sentiment expressed
by these two young brothers than each of the twenty Canadian women
who contributed to Gina Valle’s remarkable collection, Our Grandmothers,
Ourselves: Reflection of Canadian Women.
At the very outset, Gina Valle points out that the contributors are
Canadian women raised in immigrant homes. The reader should thus not
be surprised to find that an anthology of reflections of Canadian
women would then exclude and never once allude to the women who cradled
our native land: our Aboriginal grandmothers. This is somewhat regrettable
because perhaps we would have embraced a deeper appreciation and respect
for the women who unlike their immigrant counterparts have become
foreigners in their own land.
Instead of providing such a contrast, the selections in the book all
follow the same trajectory, with one common denominator: isolation
and the loss of independence. Whether it be the touching recollections
by Nora and Anna Lusterio of the passage of their Filipino Nanay,
or the memories of Christine Bellini’s Italian Nonna living with
Alzheimer’s; whether it be Harriet Grant vowing to live by the
creed of her Jamaican Yea Yea, or a doleful letter from Helen (Bajoredk)
MacDonald to her Polish Babcia; almost all of the tributes in the
collection trace, with varying degrees of frankness, the lives of
women who left the familiar or were sent for by their sons and or
daughters to live out the rest of their lives in an unforgiving, foreign
place of total dependency.
What comes out in many of these tributes is the stark truth: our grandmothers,
the grandmothers of immigrant Canadian women, were treated like foreigners
even within their own families, particularly so when the children
of their children, out of a sense of shame, rejected outright all
that they represented funny accents, odd attire and peculiar religious
or cultural rites of a faraway land. While not all the tributes evoke
this sense of shame, all except two reflect their granddaughters’
struggles to assimilate in the world of their English speaking peers.
They were courageous women, these grandmothers and the thousands like
them whose lives were irremediably marred by the embalming of their
past by the layers of daily pressures from within. Loss of independence,
loss of freedom, loss of hearth and home. Yet they loved. Yet they
loved unconditionally.
There are some exceptions in the collection to this very sad picture
of women, our mothers’ mothers and our paternal grandmothers,
who rightly earned their granddaughter’s acceptance and unreserved
admiration. What sets these women apart, it would appear, lies in
the fact that they mastered the other language, English, while nurturing
and passing on their mother tongue to their children’s progeny.
Thus, one understands Erika Willaert’s truth when she writes
of her Chinese grandmother Po-Po, “I do not place my grandmother
on a pedestal. Rather, I feel closer to her because I have experienced
her humanness, her vulnerability and a part of her reality. For this,
I honour her with a memoir of the impact she has had on my life.”
The separation along linguistic lines between the women in this collection
is especially pronounced in the images Susan Evans Shaw paints in
her tribute to Nana, an immigrant from the “mother country”
England who never really experienced the alienation that was the certain
lot in life of her immigrant sisters from other countries. The readers
of this moving tribute of reflections will not fail to share Shaw’s
dream, when she writes, “My hope is that this book will not only
bring us a greater understanding of the differences that shape us
as Canadians, but, more important, also highlight the similarities
in human experience. We are joined by what we hold in common. In the
end, it is essential to know and understand where that commonality
lies.”
Gina Valle should be commended for bringing to the fore the courage
and compassion of our Canadian immigrant grandmothers, who survived
in silence, an uncommon isolation within the intimacies of the homes
of their very own flesh and blood.
