28 - A Sentimental Journey: Janice Kulyk Keefer, “Dreams:Storms:Dogs” (1999)

Summary

As a second-generation Ukrainian immigrant to Canada, long-time resident of Europe, and literary heir to English Modernism, Janice Kulyk Keefer situates herself on the margins of several groups. For one thing, her relationship to the Ukrainian community in Canada is ambivalent. Born in suburban Toronto in 1952 to parents who were neither pioneer immigrants from Ukraine nor postwar DPs (displaced persons), Keefer has long repressed her ethnic origins by striving to conform to the English environment, on both a linguistic and a personal level (she married an Englishman). She majored in English Literature and did not express an interest in the Ukrainian language and culture until very late. Having attended the University of Toronto as an undergraduate, she studied in Europe — in England and France — for eight years and returned to Canada, more precisely to Ottawa, where she picked up a copy of Mavis Gallant's From the Fifteenth District, which turned out to be her first encounter with contemporary Canadian literature. After a stay in Europe that had left indelible marks, Keefer could relate to Gallant's experience and referred to her book as a “revelation.” Ever since then, she has addressed the question of how we construct personal and collective identities through narratives, which she recounts in a lyrical style that is more commonly seen in poetic novelists such as Anne Michaels than in social fiction. Like Myrna Kostash, Dionne Brand, and Rohinton Mistry, Keefer exploits and at the same time yearns to dissolve ethnic and cultural boundaries by ignoring the secluding ring that the words “immigrant” or “hyphenated” writer convey and opening up to a larger audience.

Her ethnic background — part Ukrainian, part Polish on her mother's side — has played a large part in Keefer's explorations of Canadian encounters with Eastern Europe and her forays into the hybrid genre of “creative non-fiction.” This only occurred, however, after 1991, when she could gain first-hand experience of the Ukrainian culture and investigate “the true site” (Keefer 1995, 89) of her ethnic heritage. Her conversion could not have been timelier: the stigmatizing trend of “writing ethnicity,” which emerged in the 1970s, had begun to die down, while Keefer had already made a name for herself through other writings that did not emphasize her personal background. There is no doubt, however, that questions of identity interference, ethnic or otherwise, are the trademark of her oeuvre.