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The picture expressed in words by Mosionier depicts a miserable story clashing between cultural ups and downs that revolve around the issues of discrimination, social isolation, and poverty. The narration involves two sisters April and Cheryl Raintree, who under tremendous racial pressure are oppressed by emotional and physical torture. While they are being raised in different foster homes, they experience the maltreatment of various institutions particularly with those who are deprived of having a native and rich social and family situation in Manitoba. The novel is a story of victimized sisters whose childhood and adolescence rests on the success of its ability to emotionally engage readers as to its consideration of familiar themes, values, and ideas. It reveals the socialization of how Metis children put their efforts to continue their struggle with others and how the sisters under suffering and pain manage to maintain their quest for identity.
The novel depicts the vulnerability behind assessing the rights of children for which an author like Grant illustrates his vision of documenting Mosionier in a spectrum where she addresses the theme of racial discrimination and victimization (Mosionier, 1999, 3-4). She portrays some issues that rest upon the vulnerable foundation of discrimination, these start from the alcohol abuse at the beginning of the novel, and while going through a family separation, vulnerable child welfare system and awful situation of foster homes end up at violence and rape. It caters to the perspective of those poor families who are unable to raise their children on their own. She portrays April as a symbol of courage that despite being subjected to child abuse and poverty, continues her struggle as a grown-up lady to seek her real cultural identity.
Belonging to a Metis culture, April and Cheryl continue to experience their poverty in foster homes in an identical manner, but later on, in the stage of adulthood, both perceive their cultural heritage differently. April, being an elder sister, possesses the bold thoughts of a woman who is never ashamed of her culture, because she disillusioned her as white. Cheryl enters into prostitution with a disruptive personality. Despite the cruel experiences in foster homes, April never disliked her fair color (that partially revealed her true identity of being Metis) and never bothered to resent her Metis heritage. Contempt by abusive comments and beatings, April is indoctrinated with damaging stereotypes about her people and sheds part of her ancestry to fully take on a White character. This character which she dreams of lets her envision life as a pure white person, this thought not only deteriorates her personality but also affects her relationship with her younger sister. Such an illusion helps her to envision secure criteria of saving herself from the rest of the socialized world, and she thinks being white will protect her.
A Metaphor of Discrimination
European dominance is asserted by mixed-race people among which the Metis remained significant for they appeared fair complexioned with white facial features, close to Euro-Canadians. When Metis claimed their rights to lands, Euro-Canadian officials promoted racial inferiority against Metis, and even that in a legal framework. Thus, the novel constructs a link between racial categories, power, and violence. Many authors believe that how Mosionier has constructed and depicted whiteness in the novel, makes no particular sense to the rising question of how it answers the racial category created by Aboriginal peoples in Canada or Metis. Indirectly, many authors have criticized Mosionier for leading the drama through a void passage where she has failed to provide adequate reasoning for the whiteness, April envisioned as a fairy tale.
Writers including Helen Hoy present a spectrum in which whiteness is created as an identity that April prefers to wear yet she never chooses because of the reality of being pale-skinned Canadian. This suggests that whiteness is only constructed as a symbol to bifurcate between brown and white color. Various attempts by April throughout the novel reveals her desperateness as a teenager to fulfill the criteria set by white, however, as an adult, April feels and experiences the endeavor to observe the creation of whiteness in a social, cultural, and moral context. This she remains unable to project because she already had her ties in a mixed-race where she is no more than semi-Indian. Another significant aspect of the struggle is April and Cheryls search for their identities, which proves methodically how whiteness remains a racial identity that works through various invisible and visible violence modes. The novel created by Mosionier is not only a fictional story that links the circumstances of her protagonists childhood, but also a struggle that makes her childhood a symbol of the infantilized position of Aboriginal peoples in Canada during the 1950s and 1960s.
Mental and Physical Trauma
Smulders (2006) expresses her idea about the novel by pointing to those images that are enforced to those poor families that are not even aware of various types of acculturation to which they are subjugated, and are drawn from the material facts of Aboriginal existence. The author validates the traumatic realities that occur to the sisters during foster care, these realities include rape and torture and all sorts of physical and mental abuse that indicts the systematic oppression of indigenous women and children in Canada. Mosionier through depicting victimization of the sisters, both at an emotional and social level, presents from generation to generation the wounds of Metis. These wounds work in parallel to the domain of knowledge and positive action that restrict Metis culture to be organized around gradations of knowledge. The unrated violence in the novel, often condemned by educational institutes for rating it depicts an Aboriginal social and cultural reproduction in which the existence of a womens domain is argued as a new realm in each instance, and its relationship to the reproduction of Aboriginal society and culture must be demonstrated truly.
The story about a traumatic experience from childhood to adolescence escorts April to the threshold of catastrophic events like rape and intense torture, where no other adult could have survived the accident, if devoid of optimistic attitude and desperation in seeking the heritage. This literature of trauma, where the author is concerned about serving cathartic vehicle as a therapeutic exercise strengthens the cultural belief. What Mosionier has tried to express is her emotional composition during her childhood which after In search of April Raintree helps her understand the suicides of her sisters, Vivian and Kathy, and might help her to find some unresolvable issues about her own family (Smulders, 2006). The novel depicts a dramatic and political opinion about Mosionier who in the form of April and Cheryl, according to many authors possess dual personalities. This is so because Mosionier experienced a foster child who survived rape and torture and witnessed the systematic subjugation of Metiss child.
Psychological Dissociation
Native parents had already low self-esteem, Alice in this case feels so incompetent due to poverty and victim of discrimination, that she throws her daughters into the aiding hands of social workers who run the orphan house. This suggests Alice is a fragile parent who is further helpless by her social and financial crisis. While April interprets Alices weakness as rejection, she remained unable to envision what caused her mothers powerlessness as an Aboriginal woman to invalidate her power as an adult. In this stance, what is clear in the novel is the contemplation of the abusive child welfare system which reacts to the race and class differences that grant Euro-Canadian women the authority to take Aboriginal children from their parents. Psychological trauma is depicted uniquely and impressively where the reader is grabbed by the intensity of the rape scene. This illustrates gender in context with the social services system, ruled by feminists, but still dramatized by the unnecessary artificial care that comes under the control of a legion of child welfare providers. There are many roles played by actors who participated in delivering this trauma to the children including social workers, religious sisters, foster parents, and school teachers. However, the amazing aspect is that all caretakers are biased women. This process in which the author modifies the ethic of care, elucidate and inform about social services in which the orphanage to which the maternal workers take the children, offer as models of the peculiar feminine violence. It is this violence that Mosionier links with welfare institutions. This is an important aspect of the novel that is often neglected and argued by the social workers.
A bold reader can question the rape culture depicted in the novel which is only revealed to discriminated society. Such a culture is promoted at an unconscious level by many of the social workers who claim to work for the welfare of women. The dilemma is that the social environment where the crime of rape is not only assumed but is considered necessary for the perpetuation of others as it confesses more subtle forms of gender inequity. When it comes to racial segregation, rape is discriminated against based on its justness or unjustness which highlights rape as a function of the effectively disruptive lever that possesses the potential to reveal the systematic discrimination against and devaluation of women.
Smulders (2006) considers In Search of April Raintree a controversy that creates rape and torture on two levels. First, it physically hurts April, and secondly, it desolates her on an emotional level. She envisions it as a double assault that takes that physical and emotional form on the female victim while conveying a literal and devastating impact of racism on Metis people. Rape genders the horrendous attack on various subjects that have already been the victims of racism and hostility, however, the actual power of sexual assault sets its base on the material factors. Moreover, racial segregation alone is not responsible for bringing sexual violence to the subjects but facilitates it. The rape scene depicted in the novel has a political glance and focuses on those attitudes that were usually found toward rape in the early 1970s. Such orientation under-evaluates the political dimensions of Aprils testimony which seems like an essential component of optimism in Mosioniers work. The first Canadian rape crisis center opened in 1973 after which for 9 years rape remained difficult to prosecute, ten years after the events of the novel and one year before its publication when parliament redefined the offense as a form of assault (Smulders, 2006). But in the novel, Mosionier remains unable to declare to indicate the exact reliance of the prosecution on the corroborative testimony of the driver who is Aprils reluctant rapist.
Mosionier focuses on the dissociative impact of trauma that incurs during the breakup of the Raintree family. She figures the final re-bonding of Aprils personality in the reconstitution of her family which occurs only after the suicide of her mother and the tragic devastation of her sister. Through this, she demonstrates the dramatic core experiences of psychological trauma envisioned by many critics as horrible to sketch the rape scene. Recovery is the name given to Aprils empowerment of the survivor in which she manages to create new connections.
The end of the novel glitters with a little compensation for April in the sense that Smulders (2006) mentions as an embark on a quest to recover the lost familial relationships through her adoption of Henry Liberty Raintree (the orphaned nephew). Such compensation provides little anticipation of healing from the survival of the trauma of racism. Since April accepts her Aboriginal ancestry as a response to her adoption of Cheryls son, her fairy tale no longer exists. The conclusion of the novel is too dramatic to present racism in a showcase in which a child first demands and then horrifies. Nonetheless, it contends racism by expressing how discrimination feeds destructive processes of identification that lead to desperation. Despite the fearsome incidences of the novel that sketches rape as a horrific mishap, the conclusion escorts April to recover and recount her experiences of trauma, while at the same time making her more strong internally. That is, April transforms into a symbol of strength who not only recovers memories of her sisters, Anna and Cheryl, as well as her parents, Henry and Alice but also achieves the liberty that previously eluded her. Thereby, April transforms the meaning of her disastrous experiences and tragedies into optimism by making it the basis for social action.
The novels conclusion is realistic but bitter for it destroys Aprils illusion that being white and living a white life will protect her. Despite achieving all the stability that as a child she wished for and living a white life, April fails to save herself from the harsh realities and is brutally raped. She fails to fulfill the laws of whiteness and as soon she realized this fact, it is too late to consider it because her attackers whiteness betrays her exterior white, and she realizes that those who should be protecting are attacking (Dunbar, 2007). Dunbar (2007) associates this whiteness with violence and suggests that even white criminality is often hidden behind the curtains of racism and is purposefully kept invisible in society. Later April realizes her mistake by confessing that her real asset is her internal Metis heritage and not the whiteness she was disillusioned into.
In the light of Critics
Hoy (2001, p. 81) declares the novel as unsuitable for younger grades due to its explicit content. However, she writes that the early responses to the drama were encouraging because readers were impressed by its simplicity and honesty. This authentic testimony to the native information, in this era, seems only a confession of nostalgia, where cultural practices are significant to the extent they use to label us. April and Cheryl are confronted by all kinds of truths and lies that are inflicted upon them by their foster parents, foster homes, and even those history books that are more than books for them (Hoy, 2001, p. 82).
Many authors perceive the novel as a myriad expression of simplicity that holds in each situation the romance of authenticity. However, Mosionier does not consider the notion of performance and our dependence on representations (Hoy, 2001, p. 87). This perception if considered from a childs point of view is capable to grasp the untold notions of spontaneous self-expression. A political expression on this subject is governed by charisma escorted by authenticity and simplicity. Truth-telling is an important plot of the novel which governs the fictive Metis sisters from the beginning till the end, where Aprils evidence at the rape trial witnesses her assault. Ruffo (1997) mentions that such an intolerable situation is only exacerbated by having the Native voice raised by the dominant society. This is so because people are used to reading a novel written by a non-native writer, in this way Ruffo (1997) suggests that they provide an opportunity to the writer to sell millions of copies riddled with stereotypes, racial attitudes, shallow, one-dimensional character and cultural inaccuracies. Stewart (2002) criticizes the novel for being into unrealistic fiction that is not the requirement of contemporary ethnic texts taught in the classroom. Contemporary readers might feel some kind of unrealistic paradigm in the fictive story, but the childlike biographical approach makes it worth reading to be able to fix the roots of racial segregation.
This violent flux of sexual and racial identities is described in Mosioniers work in the form of nonnegotiable graphic content which is disturbing for young readers. Therefore, after many revisions of the rape scene in the novel, it was introduced as high school coursework for Canadian literature. To portray the real language of the assailants, the revised version capture linguistically the violence of rape. To alleviate its psychological impact there has been kept a suitable distance between the embodied narrator and the disembodied reader. Aprils assailant then utters and carries on assaulting the victim doubly as an Aboriginal and as a woman.
This transformative discourse accentuates a recovery that not only helped April to elevate her expression over repression but also links memory to health issues. There is a barrier between identification of the horrendous events witnessed by April and the internal conflict within the will to deny horrible events. She bridged the gap by proclaiming the catastrophic events aloud which acts as the central dialectic of psychological trauma. Many psychiatrists including Judith Herman asserts that remembering and declaring the truth are two different things which if a victim combines to utter about terrible events, he or she can restore the social order necessary for the healing of individual victims (Smulders, 2006).
Works Cited
- Culleton Mosionier, Beatrice. In search of April Raintree. Ed. Cheryl Suzack. Winnipeg:Portage & Main Press. (1999).
- Dunbar Bronwyn. Internalizing Oppression in In Search of April
- Raintree (2007).
- Hoy Helen. How should I read these? Native women writers in Canada. University of Toronto Press. (2001).
- Ruffo, Armand Garnet. Why Native Literature? . American Indian Quarterly. (1997): 21(4): 663.
- Smulders Sharon. A Double Assault: The Victimization of Aboriginal Women and Children in in Search of April Raintree. Mosaic. (2006): 39(2): 37.
- Stewart, Michelle Pagni. (2002). Judging Authors by the Color of Their Skin?: Quality Native American Childrens Literature. MELUS. (2002): 27 (2): 179.
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