Margaret Atwood’s Survival: Homelands, Settlements, and Families (2 of 4)

One thought I have, often, while reading Survival, is this: I wish I had continued to read poetry.

As a young reader, I loved those anthology volumes that were thick and oversized, with full-page illustrations and usually some riddles and puzzles (once, even a little board game you could play with your own markers): you’d as likely turn the page to find a poem as a story… and I was never disappointed to find a poem. But somewhere along the way, I lost that.

The only Canadian poets I remember studying in school were E.J. Pratt and Robert Service. And Earle Birney’s “David” of course. We had a mock trial for that; I said the wrong thing, and we lost the case. Someone should have objected, because I was totally being badgered. (Nobody was watching “Law and Order” back then.)

When I reread Survival in 2019, I used the lists (one short, one long) at the ends of each chapter and requested every author that I hadn’t already read, if s/he was referenced more than once in the text, from the public library. Her short lists typically include four works, the long lists that follow include about fourteen (here, three or four are less-well-known). And there is a far amount of overlap with the names, but the works referenced are distinct.

Because I’d already read several of the novels and stories, most of what remained for me was poetry (I really loved Alden Nowlan’s stuff) and drama (I enjoyed Roch Carrier’s plays far more than I expected).

All of which is to say, that if you have an interest in Canadian literature, and enjoy reading the kinds of books that tend to be selected for course work, the works included in MA’s reading lists at the end of each chapter are readily recognisable now. But I doubt that was the case at the time. And might not be the case, even now, if you’ve avoided poetry as steadfastly as I have (at times).

MARM 2026 PLANS

Launch (November 1)
Survival: One, Two, Three (November 4)
Week Two: Update and Check-In (November 8)
Survival: Four, Five, Six (November 11)
Week Three: Update and Check-In (November 15)
Margaret Atwood’s 87^th Birthday (November 18)
Survival: Seven, Eight, Nine (November 18)
Week Four: Update and Check-In (November 22)
Survival: Ten, Eleven, Twelve (November 25)
Wrap-Up (November 30)

FIRST PEOPLE: CHAPTER FOUR

What makes this chapter’s reading lists different? The short list and the long list are followed by an appendix, which lists five books. These five writers include: Harold Cardinal*, Terry McLuhan, Pitseolak*, Duke Redbird* and Marty Dunn, as well as Wabashego. (The * indicates availability on Internet Archive.)

Because up to this point, MA notes: “All the books in this chapter are by white people.” She writes about Margaret Laurence’s writing about the Tonnerres (a Métis family in her linked Manawaka works), for instance, and artist Emily Carr’s dealings with members of west coast nations. The appendix, then, is essential: “What the Indians themselves think is another story, and one that is just beginning to be written.” In the absence of those published stories, MA reflects on where Indigenous characters fit into the framework about agency that is her thesis.

“So far we have seen Indians used in Canadian literature for two main purposes: as instruments of Nature the Monster, torturing and killing white victims [e.g. Pratt’s poem about Brebeuf]; and as variants themselves of the victim motif.”

[These are her first and second scenarios; now, of course, plenty of Indigenous literature features characters and plots that fit into her third and fourth scenarios.]

ANCESTRAL TOTEMS: CHAPTER FIVE

Archeological motifs and encounters with the land are key to this chapter, but not as experienced by those for whom these are homelands, but for explorers and settlers (and, no, it was not common for white people to make that distinction back then). She writes about how frequently “wilderness, north, water” feature, rather than cities and towns, and how settlers thought of themselves as implementing the “right” sort of order on a place (like Ellen’s father in Grove’s Settlers of the Marsh: Bill that reference is for you!).

Here, she quotes a poem by George Bowering, “the oil”:

…they roll
we say, rolling hills,
but our things are
straight lines,
oil derricks, elevators, train tracks
the tracks of the white man….

FAMILY PORTRAITS: CHAPTER SIX

“If in England the family is a mansion you live in, and if in America it’s a skin you shed, then in Canada it’s a trap in which you’re caught.”

Galsworthy she cites for the English, Wolfe for the American, for the Canadian example, Ernest Buckler’s The Mountain and the Valley. She talks about the generations and how, because Canada is a young nation, grandparents often were the first generation of settlers, the parents sought to escape them, the children sought to escape both generations (and then plays with how this aligns with her theory of colonization and victimhood).

This is one of my favourite chapters, partly because it includes references to some of my favourite writers (Gallant, Munro, Laurence) but also because I feel as though I can think of plenty of American and English writers with whom to compare these (although, as often as not, the current examples challenge rather than support her thesis, and I think that’s because the possibility of liberation has increased in recent decades).

If you were wondering, did I read all those library books I borrowed with all that poetry? Some, but not all. Gaps remain, but eight years later, I can easily pick out the books I’ve missed, and although some of them are O/P now, they are available at the Internet Archive (and weren’t, back then… strangely, most of them have been scanned by American librarians). Sure, I planned to read them all: the poetry slowed me down.