Survival of the Fittest in Canadian Gothic Literature between: Ghetto and Garrison Mentality

Abstract

This paper offers a study of some selected Asian-Canadian literary works that have capitalized, in Graham Huggan’s terms, “on their perceived marginality while helping turn marginality itself into a valuable intellectual commodity” [1:viii]. The study of contemporary Canadian literature has been marked by the emergence of various ethno-racial writers such as Hiromi Goto, Joy Kogawa and Gurjinder Basran. The focus of this study will be on three gothic narratives notably, Basran’s Everything Was Good-Bye (2010), Goto’s Chorus of Mushrooms (1994) and Kogawa’s Obasan (1981). The ethnic women writers selected, namely, Kogawa, Goto and Basran write their gothic novels based on their traumatic memories as dislocated Asian-Canadian minorities and their gloomy present as well. Such ethnic writers find themselves lost between various identities and this is what they seek to reflect through their female characters’ internal exile and their efforts to determine which identity they should have embraced in order to be accepted as Asian-Canadians with their in-between identities. This paper seeks to provide a critical analysis of the so called ‘The Canadian Theme of Survival’, or let us call it the survival of the fittest, and the paradoxical notion of ‘garrison mentality’ as represented in such Canadian gothic literature.