Abstract

Joy Kogawa's Obasan , M. Nourbese Philip's Looking for Livingstone: An Odyssey of Silence and Dionne Brand's Sans Souci and Other Stories are compared to examine how these fictions explicate the relationship between silence, voice, and language through their revisions of history. Language is problematic to these writers because it is ideologically charged with their non-belonging on the basis of their race and gender. Contradictions in language divide concepts such as silence/voice and past/present and privilege certain ideas over others. The texts studied undertake to resolve their issues with language as part of the process of coming into voice. In various degrees, these texts acknowledge and revalue silence as a defense against a totalizing history and as a means of explicating the condition of language. In addition, the thesis compares how the revisionary projects that these fictions undertake map back to the material reality of the Canadian nation within which they were created.