Abstract

The Originals depicts a parallel between the paranoia of nuclear war and the codification of urban youth faced with squalor and a sense of hopelessness for the future. The novel attempts to create a locus between the "flashbulb memory" of Samantha Smith, political anxieties of the 1980's, and its effects on a group of impoverished youth living in an urban Canadian centre in the mid 1990's. The narrator Magpie and her friends grew up panicked and obsessed over the possibilities of nuclear war, brought on by the political climate of the 1980's and the foreign policy positions of the Reagan administration. They found a sort of salvation in the historical figure Samantha Smith--an American girl who is accredited with helping to end hostilities between the U.S.S.R. and the United States in the mid-1980's through a letter she wrote to Prime Minister Yuri Andropov in 1983. As events in Magpie's present escalate, she realizes that her world view has been constructed by the rhetoric of war and poverty, and that escaping these narratives is necessary for survival.