Dialogic Interactions: Traumatic Narratives of Forced Removal Inscribed in Archives and Memoirs

Dialogic Interactions: Traumatic Narratives of Forced Removal Inscribed in Archives and Memoirs explores the dialogic interaction that takes place between memoirs and archives during three distinct moments in Canadian history: Indian Residential Schools, Japanese Canadian internment and Jewish Canadian internment. This project pairs Edmund Metatawabin’s Up Ghost River: A Chief’s Journey Through the Turbulent Waters of Native History with the 1999 court transcript of Cree nun, Anna Wesley, Tom Sando’s Wild Daisies in the Sand with his Japanese diaries (which I commissioned to have translated into English) and Eric Koch’s Otto & Daria: A Wartime Journey Through No Man’s Land with letters from family and friends. Using Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of the dialogic and heteroglossia as a foundation, this dissertation proposes a new theoretical framework for reading between memoirs and archives. This framework consists of dialogic citizenship, counternarratives, code switching and/or composition. While the chapters on Metatawabin and Sando engage with dialogic citizenship, counternarratives and code switching, the chapter on Koch introduces dialogic composition. This dissertation also engages with thinkers on national narratives such as Benedict Anderson, James Wertsch and Berber Bevernage. I argue that reading the memoirs and archives in tandem helps readers to challenge engrained national narratives, and also shows ideological shifts that would not be evident simply by engaging with one form.

These close, historically and politically informed readings of the memoirs and the archives reveal the power of rejoinder and response. As this dissertation shows, response does not need to take place between two people, but can take place with one person (at different moments in one’s life). Furthermore, the difference in forms (court transcript, diaries, and letters) present vital discussions of memory, time, language, accessibility, citizenship and belonging in drastically different settings. By engaging with some of the dialogic threads that exist between memoirs and archives, I argue that a generative space exists between them for readers. This critically challenging space not only forces readers to look inward at preconceived biases but also to engage with material that they might be culturally outside.