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Abstract
The aim of this contribution is to look at Silentium And Other Reflections On Memory, Sorrow, Place, and the Sacred (2017) written by Connie T. Braun in the context of thematic and formal approach to life writing. The analysis will be informed by the concepts of Elżbieta Rybicka’s geopoetics and Dorota Kozicka’s definition of travel writing, both of which dialogically correspond with Marianne Hirsch’s notion of postmemory. It is through Braun’s travels to Poland and the life writing practices resulting from it that she retraces her family’s past through memory, delving into the troubled Polish and Mennonite history, and a self-imposed scrutiny. As a person belonging to the “generations of postmemory” (Hirsch 2012), Braun also relies on shards of memory gathered and inherited from her closest relatives, whose painful recollections also determine her narrative. In order to offer a rendition of her identity as a Canadian Mennonite rooted in Poland, she calls for an experimental form of palimpsestic travelogue which turns out to be a fusion of essays, poetry, and fragmented historical and personal narratives. The text also interrogates Braun’s self-positioning as a Canadian of Central and Eastern European as well as German-Dutch Mennonite extraction.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 The dilemma regarding the classification of Mennonites is connected with the group’s twofold identification. On the one hand, if they are treated as a religious group only, the numbers are much lowered as baptism (which equals belonging to the group) is only available to adult members. On the other hand, however, since children and youth participate in church rituals and cultivate customs equally well, they should also be included in the group. Thus, many scholars propose to see Mennonite also as an ethnic group originating from Dutch/German settlements in Eastern Europe, mainly from Poland and Ukraine (cf. Klassen Citation2002, Citation2009; Marchlewski 1986).
2 The biographical information is taken from Connie T. Braun’s website: https://connietbraun.com/about (date of access 2 Dec 2022).
3 Rybicka 10-11.
4 Ibid 24.
5 Ibid 244, 286.
6 Ibid 312. All quotations from Polish sources are translated by the author of the article unless stated otherwise.
7 Ibid 54.
8 Ibid 317.
9 Kronenberg 127-128.
10 The detailed discussion on the genological intricacies of journey, travel books, travelogues and other genres are also the subject of Moroz’ inquiry in A Generic History of Travel Writing in Anglophone and Polish Literature (2020), as well as in an essay, “Travel book a gatunki podróżopisarskie w literaturze polskiej” (2017).
11 Moroz 3.
12 Qtd.in Moroz 3.
13 Ćwikliński 10.
14 Bernat et al. 58-78.
15 Braun 154.
16 Kozicka 13.
17 Lubas-Bartoszyńska 29. Apart from Lubas-Bartoszyńska (Citation1983, Citation1993), a similar stance is expressed, for example, by M. Czermińska (Citation2019), J. Kandziora (Citation1993), R. Zimand (Citation1990).
18 Burkot 6-7.
19 Czermińska 119.
20 Smith and Watson 14, italics mine.
21 Kozicka 21.
22 Ibid 50-51.
23 Braun, Silentium 2, 1.
24 Kronenberg 128.
25 Braun, Silentium 12.
26 Ibid 2.
27 Ibid 4.
28 Ibid 15.
29 Caruth 15.
30 Braun, Silentium 21.
31 Laub 64.
32 According to historians, Hitler himself defined the term Volksdeutsch as individuals “whose language and culture had German origins but who did not hold German citizenship” (Bergen 596).
33 Braun, Silentium 27.
34 Ibid 128.
35 Ibid 51.
36 Ibid 45.
37 Ibid 45.
38 Ibid 154.
39 Ibid 33.
40 Ibid 135.
41 Ibid 142.
42 Ibid 136.
43 For a more in-depth study of Braun’s Silentium seen in the context of Mennonite gastro-graphy, see D. Drewniak (Citation2022).
44 Braun, Silentium 142; emphasis in the original.
45 Ibid 147.
46 Ibid 151.
47 Ibid 155.
48 Ibid 153.
49 A totally opposite attitude to a similar take on ancestral roots is presented for example by Myrna Kostash in her recent Ghosts in a Photograph (2022), where she argues: “It had never occurred to me that this nation-building, transcontinental event, so celebrated by settler mythologists such as Pierre Berton and Gordon Lightfoot, represented the eventual devastation of an entire culture. For the train would bring settlers. It would bring us. And we would plow the so-called vil’ni zemli (free lands) of another people’s ancestral homeland and call it ours” (2022: loc 124-129, italics in the original). Kostash thus acknowledges that the settlements of Ukrainians in Alberta plains did not happen on “empty lands” as they were named by colonizers for the European settlers to facilitate and justify their habitation there. Despite the fact that the lands were granted to European newcomers by the British monarchy, the Eastern European immigrants to Canada were participating in a largescale colonial machinery of taking the lands from the Indigenous peoples who used to live there and owned the lands forever.
50 Braun, Silentium 18.
51 Ibid xv.
52 Ibid 142.
53 Ibid 151.
54 Rybicka 39.
55 Braun, Silentium 31.
56 Ibid 40.
57 Rybicka 106-107.
58 Braun, Silentium 100.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Dagmara Drewniak
Dagmara Drewniak is an associate professor at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, Poland where she teaches American and Canadian literature. Her research interests include: literature by migrants from Poland and Eastern Europe to Canada, life-writing, Jewish and Holocaust, migrant and postcolonial literature. She is the author of several books: Forgetful Recollections: Images of Central and Eastern Europe in Canadian Literature (2014), The Self and the World: Aspects of the Aesthetics and Politics of Contemporary North American Literary Memoir by Women (2018, co-authored with A. Rzepa and K. Macedulska), The Figure of Home. Essays on Anglophone Literature of Migrants from Polish Territories and their Descendants in Canada (2022, in Polish; recipient of the Pierre Savard Award 2023) as well as a number of essays on Janice Kulyk Keefer, Eva Stachniak, Eva Hoffman, Michael Ondaatje, Lisa Appignanesi, Anne Michaels, Bernice Eisenstein and Norman Ravvin among others. She is currently a President of the Polish Association for Canadian Studies.