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    Ana Historic: A Novel
    Ana Historic: A Novel
    Ana Historic: A Novel
    Ebook142 pages2 hours

    Ana Historic: A Novel

    By Daphne Marlatt and Lynn Crosbie

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    About this ebook

    A classic of Canadian literature, here is the A List edition of Daphne Marlatt’s utterly original novel about rescuing a forgotten woman from obscurity. Featuring a new introduced by celebrated author Lynn Crosbie.

    Ana Historic is the story of Mrs. Richards, a woman of no history, who appears briefly in 1873 in the civic archives of Vancouver. It is also the story of Annie, a contemporary, who becomes obsessed with the possibilities of Mrs. Richards’s life.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherA List
    Release dateJul 22, 2013
    ISBN9781770893757
    Ana Historic: A Novel
    Author

    Daphne Marlatt

    Daphne Marlatt is the author of the novels Ana Historic and Taken. She has published numerous collections of poetry, including Steveston and The Given, which won the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize. In 2006, she was appointed to the Order of Canada. She lives in Vancouver, British Columbia.

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    • 4/5
      For a viscerally experimental and gorgeously postmodern glimpse at queer Canadian women’s herstory, there is no better place to look than Daphne Marlatt’s 1988 novel Ana Historic. I say postmodern and experimental because the novel undoubtedly is, but this is not so much a warning as an invitation to watch Marlatt deftly and beautifully use words to carve out a space for queer women not only in Canadian history, but also in contemporary Canadian society. This carving needs to take the form of Marlatt’s disarming poetics and rhizomatic, circular style in order to do the difficult and necessary work of counteracting the overwhelmingly masculinist history that the protagonist Annie—ironically or perhaps appropriately a failed history graduate student—begins to understand as only “a certain voice” (111). The anchor in the novel, Annie Torrent, is a contemporary Vancouverite disappointed with the ways in which her life has followed a conventional woman’s heterosexual plotline. She becomes obsessed with a little-known historical figure, Mrs. Richards, a widowed British woman who emigrated to Vancouver in the late 1800s and determines to tell her story. This telling is mostly directed at Annie’s mother Ina, at whom Annie is angry, perhaps most of all for the ways in which she begins to see their lives overlapping; like Ina, Annie is “in the midst of freedom yet not free” (54). She realizes the life she is living, married with children to her former history professor Richard—whose name of course echoes Mrs. Richards’s name, which is the rem(a)inder of her deceased husband—is unfulfilling but she struggles to build a path that might lead out of it. Luckily, Annie meets Zoe, an artist, in the archives while doing research for her project and Zoe becomes her first reader, challenging Annie both about her feminist politics as well as sexually. When near the end of the novel Zoe provocatively asks Annie what she wants, Annie boldly answers: “you. i want you. and me. together” (157). The end of Annie’s story in the novel, then, is only her lesbian beginning.Telling the life stories of Annie, her mother Ina, and Mrs. Richards, Marlatt creates an alternative queer feminist discourse that refuses to be tied down into either a linear narrative or conclusive characterization. Indeed, although there are distinctions made between the three main characters, their identities are also necessarily blurred, in the same way that the novel refuses to draw boundaries between prose and poetry and between fiction and history. At one point, Ina accuses her daughter: “the trouble with you, Annie, is that you want to tell a story, no matter how much history you keep throwing at me” (27). This profoundly poetic novel insists, however, that history is nothing but men’s stories made fact and that women need to dismantle the fiction/fact dichotomy and “mak[e] fresh tracks” with their own stories in the snowy landscape of the past (98). Women writing their stories, as Annie does for Mrs. Richards and Marlatt does for Annie (and perhaps herself?), is the “body insisting itself in the words” (46). If you can look at the words of this novel as a woman’s body—that delightful and frightening unruly femaleness—then the sometimes bewildering experience of sifting through Ana Historic can become a delightfully ecstatic one. There is an enormous amount of life in this novel; Marlatt presents us with the vivid image that books are “breath bated between two plastic covers” (16) and I’d encourage any reader to challenge herself to mingle her breath with Marlatt’s and her characters’ by picking up Ana Historic.

    Book preview

    Ana Historic - Daphne Marlatt

    Ana Historic Cover

    Ana Historic

    Daphne Marlatt

    Anansi Logo

    Copyright © 1988 Daphne Marlatt

    Introduction copyright © 2013 Lynn Crosbie

    All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

    Distribution of this electronic edition via the Internet or any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal. Please do not participate in electronic piracy of copyrighted material; purchase only authorized electronic editions. We appreciate your support of the author’s rights.

    First published in Canada in 1988 by Coach House Press.

    Published in 1997 by House of Anansi Press Ltd.

    This edition published in 2013 by

    House of Anansi Press Inc.

    110 Spadina Avenue, Suite 801

    Toronto, ON, M5V 2K4

    TEL 416-363-43437

    www.houseofanansi.com

    LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION DATA

    Marlatt, Daphne, 1942–, author

    Ana historic : a novel / by Daphne Marlatt ; introduction by Lynn Crosbie.

    Originally published: Toronto : Coach House Press, 1988.

    ISBN 978-1-77089-375-7

    I. Crosbie, Lynn, 1963–, writer of added commentary II. Title.

    PS8576.A74A8 2013 C813’.54 C2013-902747-5

    C2013-902748-3

    Cover design: Brian Morgan

    Cover illustration: Jillian Tamaki

    pub1.jpg

    We acknowledge for their financial support of our publishing program the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund.

    Introduction by Lynn Crosbie

    Ana Historic — the title demands critical, political, and social context.

    Published in 1988, the novel is at the very crest of third-wave feminism — a rogue wave whose rebel surfers included lesbian radicals; thrashing post-punk bands; raunchy sex-writers and artists; shocking philosophers, heavy intellectuals, genre-benders, and riotous, straight-up revolutionaries — surfers who would eventually sink below the calm, flat sea that followed.

    Marlatt’s novel appears three years before L7’s Smell the Magic. One of the foxcore group’s anthemic lyrics is, in Fast and Frightening and speaking of the title girl, She’s got so much clit, she don’t need no balls.

    And while Ana Historic takes its very prominent place among the new French feminism of its time; among such Canadian avant-gardists as Nicole Brossard and Fred Wah; and among an august history of experimental, female-authored literature (from Gertrude Stein to Dionne Brand), the novel also belongs to the Riot Grrl movement. That is, to a movement concerned with writing the female body electric as cerebral and sexual, as powerful and tumultuous and filled with sheer jubilation, in Marlatt’s words.

    It is a writer’s job, Marlatt has observed, to give accurate witness of what’s happening.

    In Ana Historic, we find a woman, Annie, preoccupied with the history of a Mrs. Richards, whose name she discovers in a civic archive, a woman with no history.

    And we also discern what is happening around the novel: scholars and artists of this era were preoccupied with recuperating the testimonies and work of women long obscured by history — that subjective entity that is comparable to a sadistic gym teacher, demanding that popular kids choose their own teams.

    This was an ethnographic and artistic endeavour; this was a labour of love, like looking very deeply into Margaret Atwood’s This Is a Photograph of Me and seeing, and saving, the drowned speaker.

    Annie’s quest to furnish Mrs. Richards with a history is both the plot of the novel and the plot of one of the most significant of the feminist enterprises — how we, once, not only rejoiced in ourselves, but reached back, and pulled the lost and the forgotten forward, to strengthen our ranks.

    And to rewrite history, of course.

    If history is written by the winners, then Ana Historic gives us a wonderful sense of the climate of the battle being pitched and advanced around its composition.

    the real history of women, Marlatt writes, is unwritten because it runs through our bodies.

    History is a-historic, a blood-jet. It is Annie and Mrs. Richards and the massive current of female life that runs, that has always run, more quickly and deeply than history, that static, unchanging line.

    If less political, less wild times prevailed after the late 1980s and early ’90s, or after the first de facto Pussy Riot, this is not to say that Ana Historic has lost its currency.

    On the contrary, it remains slippery and steadfast, remarkable in its innovation, bravery, and brilliant demonstration against the silence of women.

    And it tells a new generation the story of Annie.

    A generation who may want to dig deeper, as she does, to learn more about what it meant and what it means for a woman to speak of history, and, in doing so, change it forever.

    for Cheryl Sourkes

    ‘The assemblage of facts in a tangle of hair.’

    SUSAN GRIFFIN

    Who’s There? she was whispering. knock knock. in the dark. only it wasn’t dark had woken her to her solitude, conscious alone in the night of his snoring more like snuffling dreaming elsewhere, burrowed into it, under the covers against her in animal sleep. he was dreaming without her in some place she had no access to and she was awake. now she would have to move, shift, legs aware of themselves and wanting out. a truck gearing down somewhere. the sound of a train, in some yard where men already up were working signals, levers, lamps. she turned the clock so she could see its blue digital light like some invented mineral glowing, radium 4:23. it was the sound ofher own voice had woken her, heard like an echo asking,

    who’s there?

    echoes from further back, her fear-defiant child voice carried still in her chest, stealing at night into the basement with the carving knife toward those wardrobes at the bottom of the staircase. wardrobes. wardrobes. warding off what? first the staircase with its star scrawled on the yellow wall and COMRADE, an illicit word never heard upstairs but known from Major Hoople’s talk about those sleazy reds who were always infiltrating from some foreign underworld and threatening to get under or was it into the bed. nobody ever erased or painted over the scrawl and nobody seemed to see it but her, like some signal blinking every time she had to go downstairs with the knife. Comrade / would she really kill? she who was only a girl but even so the oldest in her family recently settled in cold-war Vancouver of the Fifties — a cold country, Canada, her mother said, people don’t care. would she kill if she had to? after all she was responsible for her younger sisters sleeping innocent above while she, their guardian on those nights (babysitter wasn’t quite the word), conscious and awake, unable NOT to hear, tiptoed after those suspicious noises — what if he were hungry, starved even, and so desperately from outside he would kill to get what he wanted, as afraid even as she, to get what he needed, while she who had her needs met, secure (was she really?) in her parents’ house, trembling and bare-armed (in nightie even), she was merely in his way — no, he was in the wrong if he were there at all he meant to do them harm, and she would resist, righteously. she stood in front of the darkest of the six-foot wardrobes, teak, too big to place upstairs, big enough to hide Frankenstein, stood feeling her fear, her desperate being up against it, that other breathing on the other side of the door she could almost hear, would take him by surprise, her only real weapon, kick it open flashlight weaving madly yelling (don’t let me see! don’t let me!)

    Who’s There?

    empty. it always was. though every time she believed it might not be. relief, adrenalin shaking her legs. she had chosen the darkest first and must go to each in tum, confronting her fear (for what if he were there, in one of the others, waiting til she had her back turned, absorbed and vulnerable and never thinking he would leap on her from behind?). wishing, even, that what she knew could be there would be there and she be taken, lost, just to show them. who? her parents who went out leaving her alone to defend the house. her mother who . . .

    my mother (who) . . . voice that carries through all rooms, imperative, imperious. don’t be silly. soft breast under blue wool dressing gown, tea breath, warm touch . . . gone. I-na (the long drawn calling out at night for a drink of water, one more story, one last hug, as i experimented with attracting your attention, Mum-my, Mom-eee, Mah-mee . . . )

    I-na, I-no-longer, i can’t turn you into a story. there is this absence here, where the words stop. (and then i remember —

    i was two perhaps, you told me often enough, hurry up Annie, we have to go now, while i went on playing, paying no attention, Annie, hurry up! i’m going now! playing with your attention, delaying, and then there was silence, the whole house filled with it. Mummy, i cried, Mummy? and you said in a low distant voice i didn’t recognize (i did but i knew i wasn’t meant to): your Mummy’s gone. i burst into tears. don’t be silly, darling, i’m here, you see how silly you are — as if saying it makes it so. but it does, it did. you had gone in the moment you thought to say it, separating yourself even as you stood there, making what wasn’t, what couldn’t be, suddenly real.

    and now you’ve made your words come true, making it so by an act of will (despair). gone. locked up in a box. frozen in all the photographs Harald took. the worst is that you will never reappear with that ironic smile, don’t be silly, darling. pulling through. the worst is that it’s up to me to pull you through. this crumbling apart of words. ‘true, real.’ you who is you or me. she. a part struck off from me. apart. separated.

    she, my Lost Girl, because i keep thinking, going back to that time with you (and why weren’t there Lost Girls in Never-Never Land, only Lost Boys and Wendy who had to mother them all, mother or nurse — of course they fought the enemy, that’s what boys did) and what i did when i was she who did not feel separated or split, her whole body trembling with one intent behind the knife. and it was defense (as they say in every war). no, it was trespassing across an old boundary, exposing my fear before it could paralyse me — before i would end up as girls were meant to be.

    who did my Lost Girl think might be there in that house on the side

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