Haunting Books and Stories in Janice Kulyk Kefer's Postethnic Family Memoir

Résumé 0

Kulyk Keefer reads and writes about her family’s homeland’s tragic history, which she claims to have inherited. The memoir is centrally concerned with the kind of memory Marianne Hirsch calls postmemory—the memory of the child of survivors (Hirsh 1997, 22) who is haunted by his or her family’s past. The stories, that are both seductive and full of holes, trigger a desire to know more, which results in an investigation, with Kulyk Keefer commenting on her readings, and a reconstruction. This chapter intends to show that Honey and Ashes, a postmodern narrative that draws attention to its author’s gathering, perusal and interpretation of family documents as well as history books and novels, is centrally concerned with reading—both reading lives and reading herself home. My analysis will focus on the author’s careful reading and/or examination of her sources and her attempt to create a “postmodern space of cultural memory composed of leftovers, debris … ” that are interwoven “to tell a variety of stories, from a variety of often competing perspectives” (Hirsch 1997, 13). I will pay particular attention to the family photographs that are included in the memoir, a device that draws the reader in, encouraging her to engage with a different way of reading. I will examine Kulyk Keefer’s attempt to produce an alternative form of memory work by weaving her family’s story into (Canadian and Eastern European) History, and her attempt to write a postethnic story that speaks “across borders.” Finally, I will show that her belief in a “continuum of experience and imagination” (7) is linked to her belief in the power of literature, and more largely, art, to move and touch human beings, and to haunt them.