Métissage: Weaving our Differences

 

“With each word we write, we open up to new worlds erupting and evicting us from our old selves,”  So write authors Erika Hasebe-Ludt, Cynthia Chambers and Carl Leggo in Life Writing and Literary Métissage as an Ethos for Our Times.  While the introduction to this book is written in academic language, the braided life writing that follows is anything but.

The authors explain that, “the word métissage is derived from the Latin mixticius, meaning the weaving of a cloth from different fibres (p 35).  The cover of the book shows a detail of a woven Métis sash that ends in braids as a wonderful illustration of this concept.  They go on to explain that,

“Métissage affirms, rather than polarizes, difference and calls those who practice métissage to create an aesthetic product that combines disparate elements without collapsing or erasing difference.  The act of creating new mixed forms, stronger and more resilient than the existing ones, gives métissage its generativity in the face of difference and thus the power to reconfigure the past, to transform the present and to imagine otherwise (p35).”

I found this idea of affirming difference instead of polarizing it very interesting.  Mainstream (White supremacist) culture affirms one right way, this or that and seeks to assimilate everything into the “norm” which is white.  The whole tragic history of Indian Residential Schools in the land we now call Canada is a good example of this.  So, the idea of weaving disparate elements into new mixed forms that are stronger than the existing ones makes sense.  It makes me think of the fragility of a monospecies-green suburban lawn which requires constant care and “weeding” to stay a monoculture versus ground cover made up of native species that take care of themselves.

As I read through the life writing part of the book and hear stories of growing up in British Columbia, Germany and Newfoundland, the fabric begins to appear.  The authors describe their work in this way:

We take métissage as a counternarrative to the grand narratives of our times, a site for writing and surviving in the interval between different cultures and languages, particularly in colonial contexts: a way of merging and blurring genres, texts and identities, an active literary stance, political strategy, and pedagogical praxis.  Our writing illustrates métissage as an artful research praxis that mixes binaries such as colonized with colonizer, local with global, East with West, North with South, particular with universal, feminine with masculine, vernacular with literate, and theory with practice.  We braid strands of place and space, memory and history, ancestry and (mixed) race, language and literacy, familiar and strange, with strands of tradition, ambiguity, becoming, *re)creation, and renewal into a métissage (p 9).

In imagining how this praxis could be used in everyday conversation and in storytelling, I am grateful for the visual image of the Métis sash.  I can imagine hearing the stories of Indigenous and non-Indigenous people who are my friends and neighbours, weaving together as an expression of where we are now.  This praxis would change my listening to story.  Instead of listening for only what is the same or for only what is different from my story, this praxis of métissage would allow me to simply listen and understand.

The authors think that, ”… autobiographic work invites a recognition from others, not of who we are, and who we have always been, but who we are becoming in the encounter with the other (p33).”  Once again, I imagine the Métis sash on the cover of the book.  Colour theory tells us that yellow will look different if it is beside blue as opposed to red.  Our encounters change us.

“Postcolonial theorists have named this site a ‘third space’, a ‘hybrid place’ where colonial worlds are reconstructed into new ambivalent literary and political spaces (p37),” suggest the authors.  This space is available I believe to the people who live in the land now called Canada.  And the idea of métissage as an ethos for our times is compelling.

The authors state their goal clearly.  “Our aim is to go out into the world, to embrace it and love it fiercely, always returning home with the gifts of new knowledge, new hope that it is possible to live well in a particular place, at this time, with ourselves and with all our relations (p. 9).”

So, the next time you are reading ideas that are different from your own, or listening to someone describing a vignette from the story of their lives imagine it as weaving mysteriously with your own into a fabric that is strong and resilient.  See how that feels and see if it changes how you listen.

Hasebe-Ludt, Erika, Chambers, Cynthia M. and Leggo, Carl. (2009) Life Writing and Literary Métissage as an Ethos for Our Times.  New York: Peter Lang.