Sandra Birdsell -- Katya/ The Russlander

The first novel to tell the story of Russlander Mennonites from a woman's point of view, The Russlander (called Katya in the United States version of the book) by Sandra Birdsell won several awards in Canada: The Saskatchewan Book Award for fiction, and the Saskatchewan Book of the Year Award, the Regina Book Award. It was also a finalist for the Giller Prize, Canada's largest prize for fiction. How do you write a "survivor" story in order to capture the humanity of those who have endured the unendurable? In this interview, Sandra Birdsell shares her thoughts as she created this haunting novel.

Sandra Birdsell, born in Manitoba to a Mennonite mother and Metis father, began as a writer of short fiction. Her first two volumes of stories, Night Travellers and Ladies of the House were reissued in 1987 as Agassiz Stories (for this American audience, Agassiz is the name of a town.) Birdsell's first novel, The Missing Child (1989), won the W. H. Smith/ Books in Canada First Novel Award. Her second novel, The Chrome Suite (1992) and her third collection of short fiction, The Two-Headed Calf (1997), were both short-listed for the Governor General's Award for fiction.

Her most recent novels are Children of the Day (2005), based loosely on her family growing-up years as one of 11 children in a mixed marriage between a French-speaking Cree Metis man and a Russlander Mennonite woman, and Waiting for Joe (2010) about a couple who is fleeing the current economic crisis in a stolen motor home. Waiting for Joe won the Saskatchewan Best Book of the Year Award and was a Finalist for the Governor General's Award for Fiction.

The Structure of Katya (The Russlander)

The novel begins with a newspaper clipping, detailing the massacre on the estate Privol'noye which Katya will escape. We know from the beginning that many of the characters we are reading about will be killed in this way. The reader has to absorb this information before reading the novel, which begins seven years before the massacre.

The novel is divided into three sections. The first section takes us deeply into the details of life on a wealthy Russian Mennonite estate and acquaints us with the characters' intimate lives and the social structure in which they live. The massacre occurs at the very end of the second section. The third section tells of the struggle of survivors to continue to survive and finally to emigrate. The story of the Russlander is also the story of Birdsell's mother's people.

Developing Critical Consciousness - Coauthoring Your Life

Who are you? How much of who you are has to do with your individual choices? How much has to do with the family, community, society, class you are born into? How much has to do with the genetic heritage and sex you are born with? How much has to do with the ways in which the social world around you responds to these factors?

Last fall at Kalamazoo College my daughter took a Freshman Seminar entitled "Co-Authoring Your Life." The texts the students read and discussed were familiar to me--Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye, John Krakauer's Into the Wild, Tobias Wolff's This Boy's Life--but the framework was new. The course, taught by Andy Mozina, asked students to consider how much of their life had been "authored" for them, and how much they had "authorized." I thought this was a brilliant way to introduce students to "critical consciousness," or an awareness of how social factors, upbringing, and cultural situated-ness creates who we think we are.

"Critical consciousness" is a term developed and defined by Brazilian educator Paolo Friere. Known for his work on teaching pedagogy, such as The Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Friere developed ideas for teaching the poor in Brazil in such a way that would raise their awareness of the ways in which society was oppressing them. For Friere, effective education should not simply be the transmission of the values of the power elite through the "banking" model of education--transmitting the teacher's knowledge to the students--but should be a dialogue in which students and teachers develop knowledge together by interacting and responding to texts and ideas. In this way, he believed, his students would be empowered to act in the world with a new awareness of the ways in which their lives were interconnected with the production of knowledge. In other words, students learn that they are "co-authors" of their own lives.

In a college education, we develop an awareness of our own values, the texts of our own lives, as we encounter the ideas of others. We test what we believe and what we experience against the new ideas we encounter. Sometimes this can be threatening. Sometimes it is exhilarating. And sometimes it changes the way we see the world and our ability to act in it. Understanding how our world view is related to our position in society is a form of critical consciousness.

This is the second time I have had the privilege of teaching Mennonite literature at Goshen College. As you know, I love the material and am passionate about this topic. Like the study of any "minority" literature, it asks students to develop critical consciousness. I see this happening in your posts recently and it delights me to see this intellectual growth in response to the course readings. However, it is also a painful and delicate process, one that requires generosity on the part of each one of you as we develop our critical consciousness from a different perspectives. Mennonite literature is a peculiar situation. It is a minority literature, but it developed from white European origins. Today, the majority of Mennonites are from cultures and countries in the Southern Hemisphere. Mennonites are a tiny minority in the United States, but they are a slender majority at Goshen College, a Mennonite institution. Many students in this class will feel, for the first time, that their cultural background and values are represented in a literary text. Others will feel that their cultural background is misrepresented in a text, because Mennonites are an extremely varied bunch of people. Some students will feel "othered" by a discussion of values and ideas and history that does not include their own heritage. In a Mennonite literature class we must engage these issues; but it is vital as we develop our critical consciousness to understand that we are developing it from a variety of perspectives--including non-Mennonite ones. (Frankly, Mennonite literature, like Mennonite higher education, would not exist without non-Mennonites.) In some ways, the challenge of this class reflects the challenge that the college itself is facing as it strives to retain its distinctive identity while opening its educational opportunities to a broad spectrum of students from all faiths, races, genders, and places. We begin with who we are, but we are all challenged to read between the lines and across the human boundaries we impose upon our lives to find the connections between literature and life.

Fundamentally, engaging in the study of literature of any kind is to engage in the study of the HUMAN story AND stories. We are one, we are many. Humans live in particular communities. They bring a wide variety of experiences with them. To honor both the particular nature of stories, peoples, and communities -- and to see the broader human connections that undergird them--is what literary study is all about. I'm excited to see critical consciousness developing in your conversations on this blog and I'm hoping that our study of Rudy Wiebe's and Sandra Birdsell's novels will help us to stay engaged with this challenging conversation. Both are prize-winning novelists in Canada whose HUMAN STORIES have gained them a strong audience across cultures.

Rudy Wiebe - The Writer Who Started It All

The first novelist from Mennonite heritage in Canada to publish with a mainstream press is Rudy Wiebe, who has since gone on to win the Governor General's Award twice during his career. Peace Shall Destroy Many (1962) created a stir in the Canadian Mennonite Brethren community, something Wiebe had not anticipated.

Most recently, Wiebe published a memoir, Of this Earth (2006), about his boyhood growing up in a community very much like the fictional Wapiti of Peace Shall Destroy Many. In both the fictional and the real community the Mennonite settlers worked extremely hard to eke out a living from the poor soil in Northern Saskatchewan. However, Wapiti was not marked by the strong ideological conflicts that are the focus of the story in Peace Shall Destroy Many. Wiebe's recollections of his childhood in the Mennonite community are positive. In this article he reflects on both the controversy of his early fiction and his memoir. Wiebe rejects the idea that the Mennonite artist must leave the community in order to create. Although the Mennonite Brethren were disturbed by his first fiction, he has remained a member of the denomination throughout his life.


This image of Rudy Wiebe, reading from his memoir at Princeton University is from http://www.princeton.edu/canadian/photo_gallery/

RUDY WIEBE PUBLICATIONS

Novels

Peace Shall Destroy Many. Toronto, McClelland and Stewart, 1962;Grand Rapids, Michigan, Eerdmans, 1964.

First and Vital Candle. Toronto, McClelland and Stewart, and GrandRapids, Michigan, Eerdmans, 1966.

The Blue Mountains of China. Toronto, McClelland and Stewart, andGrand Rapids, Michigan, Eerdmans, 1970.

The Temptations of Big Bear. Toronto, McClelland and Stewart, 1973; Athens, Ohio University Press, 2000.

The Scorched-Wood People. Toronto, McClelland and Stewart, 1977.

The Mad Trapper. Toronto, McClelland and Stewart, 1977.

My Lovely Enemy. Toronto, McClelland and Stewart, 1983.

A Discovery of Strangers. Toronto, Knopf, 1994.

Sweeter Than All the World. Toronto, Vintage Canada, 2002.

Short Stories

Where Is the Voice Coming From? Toronto, McClelland and Stewart, 1974.

Personal Fictions, with others, edited by Michael Ondaatje. Toronto, Oxford University Press, 1977.

Alberta: A Celebration, edited by Tom Radford. Edmonton, Alberta, Hurtig, 1979.

The Angel of the Tar Sands and Other Stories. Toronto, McClelland and Stewart, 1982.

River of Stone: Fictions and Memories. Toronto, Vintage Books, 1995.
Play

Far as the Eye Can See, with Theatre Passe Muraille. Edmonton, Alberta, NeWest Press, 1977.

Collected Stories. Edmonton, University of Alberta Press, 2010.

Nonfiction

Of this Earth: A Mennonite Boyhood in the Boreal Forest. Knopf Canada, 2006.


Stolen Life: The Journey of a Cree Woman. Toronto, Knopf Canada, 1998; Athens, Ohio, Swallow Press, 2000.

Other

A Voice in the Land: Essays by and about Rudy Wiebe, edited by W.J. Keith. Edmonton, Alberta, NeWest Press, 1981.

Playing Dead: A Contemplation Concerning the Arctic. Edmonton, Alberta, NeWest Press, 1989.

Silence: The Word and the Sacred (essays). Waterloo, Ontario, Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1989.

Chinook Christmas (for children), illustrated by David More. RedDeer College Press, 1993.

Editor, The Story-Makers: A Selection of Modern Short Stories. Toronto, Macmillan, 1970.

Editor, Stories from Western Canada: A Selection. Toronto, Macmillan, 1972.

Editor, with Andreas Schroeder, Stories from Pacific and Arctic Canada: A Selection. Toronto, Macmillan, 1974.

Editor, Double Vision: An Anthology of Twentieth-Century Stories in

English. Toronto, Macmillan, 1976.

Editor, Getting Here: Stories. Edmonton, Alberta, NeWest Press, 1977.

Editor, with Aritha van Herk, More Stories from Western Canada. Toronto, Macmillan, 1980.

Editor, with Aritha van Herk and Leah Flater, West of Fiction. Edmonton, Alberton, NeWest Press, 1982.

Editor, with Bob Beal, War in the West: Voices of the 1885 Rebellion. Toronto, McClelland and Stewart, 1985.

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Manuscript Collection:

University of Calgary Library, Alberta.