Education, Faculty of
DSpace
UBCV
Klassen, Irma Marion
Master of Arts - MA
University of British Columbia
Current historiography has begun to search the records for the voices of women as they themselves perceived life to be in their place and time. As a consequence the lives of the women which are being written have provided a vibrant texture to the fabric of History. This thesis adds the voices of seven teenage immigrant/refugee girls to the material. Using life history methodology it considers how personal experiences of traumatic sociohistorical events shape the life stories teenage immigrant/refugee girls tell. Drawn from a culturally diverse urban high school population, these young women trace their journey of displacement from the historical events that changed the direction of their lives, to the present. The research shows how life history methodology allows the story to be told from the speaker's point of view, and how in this instance it breaks down the otherness of "refugees" as a category. With startling frankness these stories capture the disjuncture of the girls' lives and teach us about the resilience of the human spirit. They teach us also of the acclamation that is possible when we listen to the voices of those outside of the standard text.
4856612 bytes
application/pdf
LISTENING TO LIFE STORIES TEENAGE IMMIGRANT/REFUGEE GIRLS TELL by IRMA M A R I O N K L A S S E N B.Ed., University of British Columbia, 1966,1981 A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS in THE F A C U L T Y OF EDUCATION Department of Curriculum and Instruction We accept this thesis as conforming to the required standard THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA February, 1997 © Irma Marion Klassen 1997 In presenting this thesis in partial fulfilment of the requirements for an advanced degree at the University of British Columbia, I agree that the Library shall make it freely available for reference and study. I further agree that permission for extensive copying of this thesis for scholarly purposes may be granted by the head of my department or by his or her representatives. It is understood that copying or publication of this thesis for financial gain shall not be allowed without my written permission. Department of C lMjL424cUtUUA\ S.f^<Z~ifiMC~Tfc>/^ The University of British Columbia Vancouver, Canada Date Jo liefer DE-6 (2/88) 11 ABSTRACT Current historiography has begun to search the records for the voices of women as they themselves perceived life to be in their place and time. As a consequence the lives of the women which are being written have provided a vibrant texture to the fabric of History. This thesis adds the voices of seven teenage immigrant/refugee girls to the material. Using life history methodology it considers how personal experiences of traumatic socio-historical events shape the life stories teenage immigrant/refugee girls tell. Drawn from a culturally diverse urban high school population, these young women trace their journey of displacement from the historical events that changed the direction of their lives, to the present. The research shows how life history methodology allows the story to be told from the speaker's point of view, and how in this instance it breaks down the otherness of "refugees" as a category. With startling frankness these stories capture the disjuncture of the girls' lives and teach us about the resilience of the human spirit. They teach us also of the acclamation that is possible when we listen to the voices of those outside of the standard text. TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract i i Table of Contents i i i Acknowledgements iv Chapter 1: INTRODUCTION 1 The Research Question 4 Background of Displacement 6 Organization of the Thesis 9 Chapter 2: LITERATURE REVIEW 11 Introduction 11 Writing Women into History 12 Writing Women into Canadian History 20 Women and Children as Immigrants and Refugees 24 The Culture of Teenage Girls: Sameness, Difference and Friendship 29 Chapter 3: METHODOLOGY 33 Ethnography and the Life History Method 33 The Interview Process 34 Transcription/Voice Considerations 37 Chapter 4: S E V E N PROFILES 39 Profile 1: Amina - Afghanistan 39 Profile 2: Gordana - Croatia 44 Profile 3: Dominique - A Latin American Country 48 Profile 4: Sophie - Romania 51 Profile 5: Anastasia - Estonia and Another Soviet Republic 54 Profile 6: Bojana - Serbia 56 Profile 7: Noorah - Iraq 58 Chapter 5: MAJOR ISSUES for T E E N A G E IMMIGRANT/ REFUGEE GIRLS 61 The Theme of Loss 61 The Theme of Difference and Resistance 65 The Theme of Friendship 68 Reflections on the Mother: "My Mother would say it Differently" 70 Chapter 6: AFTERWORD 76 WORKS CITED 82 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS My journey along this road began with my mother's story. For her willingness to take me back to the memories of her childhood, and then send me in the direction in which I needed to go I owe the deepest thanks. For always believing I would complete this committment with honour, I thank my father who did not live to see the finished version of this thesis. I would like to thank the rest of my family and friends who with encouragement, patience and good humour kept wondering how "it" was coming along. For being fine listeners and critics, for keeping me at my desk and taking me away from it, I would like to thank my companions Jan, Brie and Georgia in particular, and Muriel, Carol, Deirdre, Ingrid, and Madelene for being my "wise women" between the drafts. A special thanks is due to Virginia for lending me her summer room with a view of the garden, in which to write. In a work of this breadth the criticism of experts in their fields is invaluable. I would like to thank Dr. Peter Seixas, my faculty advisor, who was enthusiastic and supportive of this discourse from the beginning. For his willingness to imagine with me and for his words of wisdom always perfectly timed, I am deeply appreciative. For their knowledge of ethnography and life story, I would like to thank Dr. Shauna Butterwick and Dr. Elvi Whittaker whose queries and suggestions as members of the committee, enriched the research by helping me clarify my ideas. Lastly I would like to thank my friend Dr. Deb Weiner whose example and insights were like markers along the way. Finally, I am indebted to the seven immigrant/refugee women who allowed me to listen to their stories. From their young lives, they have spoken with frankness and authority of their experience. They along with my mother, have shown me how personal experience told in the form of life story can open a window in history and illustrate in a startling way, the vibrant texture of an era. I thank them for showing me what the world would be like i f women were placed at the centre of the historical inquiry. 1 CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION To be asked to sit down and compose one's life story is an exercise that can build a sense of continuity, a bridge from the past, the shore where one has been, to the other side where one is going. This is what my mother is doing as I listen to her life story. I began this work because as an educator in the area of Social Studies and History I have been increasingly interested in life history. With an interest in how teenage immigrant/refugee girls tell their story, and where they put themselves in their story, I realized that my mother had been a refugee as a young girl, and that her journey would be the logical place to begin. Consequently I have gone to my mother and asked her to take me back to her adolescence and tell me her story. As my mother tells her story, it is the sense that she has of her life that surprises me. I am startled by how my mother has contextual ized the story. It is her story of being fifteen and of living away from her family, but just as much it is her family's story and she is their representative. It is not just my mother living her life. Who her family is affects every decision she makes, and so does her faith. When she defines herself it is in relation to family tradition and honour. For example, when her father died suddenly when she was fifteen, the older siblings who were raising their own families decided it would be most expedient i f she went to the city to seek employment. It is not clear who specifically made the final decision, or whether my mother was consulted. Her suitcase was packed and she left directly from the funeral "to find her own way." Having been used to eating at a large country table of boisterous brothers, sisters, nephews and nieces, she now ate her meals alone. My mother says: 2 You can't imagine how lonely I was coming from a big family, and there I was all alone with no mother or sister to tell me what to do, eating my meals by myself and no laughter around the table. Orphaned and out of context she recalls: I always felt very responsible, because I did not want to hurt my dad's memory. I did a lot of stupid things mind you, but my dad's memory was the last thing, that was there all the time. As she builds the bridge from the past I am moved by her young courage, her determination to be independent and to honour the memory of her father. That her family was behind her is not the only continuity in her story. As I listen to her, I am aware of how traumatic socio-historical events can impinge on the structure of one's personal life, and alter forever the direction in which one is going. The first event in my mother's case was the Russian Revolution and the Civi l War of 1918-21 in the Crimea and Ukraine, and the political chaos and economic instability that propelled her family to seek safety in Canada. When the November Revolution of 1917 toppled the Provisional Government of Alexander Kerensky, the Russian government lost effective political control of three-quarters of Russia, and brought economic chaos and personal terror to southern settlements lying in the path of the opposing armies of the Civil War (Rundle 1979, 97-102; Friesen 1989, 261). My mother was four years old when her family's life was thrown into shambles as a result of the civil disorder. Fearing for their physical safety and religious freedom under the new order, and concerned over changing economic policies, Mennonite families began to search for avenues of emigration. Barber states that in the decade after 1923 approximately twenty thousand of these refugees were brought to Canada by an agreement between the Canadian Mennonite Colonization Board and the Canadian Pacific Railway. They were refugees fleeing for their lives. Collectively these landowners and businessmen had originally been prosperous but like thousands of refugees before them they had lost their livelihood in 3 civil strife (Barber 1987, 109). When exit visas were granted to my mother's family, preparations were made for the journey by train north to Riga, Latvia. The second trauma occurred when the family reached Southampton, and her baby sister and mother were detained because the child had a fever. The decision was made that her father and the rest of the children would continue on their journey, and her mother and an older brother would follow with the baby when the fever had subsided. After the fever was gone, the little family was cleared for travel to Halifax, where they took a train to join the family in Alberta. As the train crossed the prairies, a heavy piece of luggage dislodged from an overhead compartment striking her mother on the head. Initially she was overcome by headaches and dizziness but appeared to recover, but within forty-eight hours she was dead. So it happened that when the family and my six-year-old mother saw their mother next, it was to prepare her body for burial. One of the photographs that remains portrays a dejected and forlorn-looking group standing outdoors in two irregular rows, with the adults looking steadfastly into the camera and the little ones peering into the open casket. The third image that my mother includes in her story is one of how much she loved going to the country school. By the late 1920s the family had established a small farm on the west coast of British Columbia where the mild climate was more to their liking and more akin to their experience in southern Russia. She enjoyed school, where she excelled in feats like reciting epic poems, and dreamed of becoming a teacher. She also remembers the first dollar she earned. At school we could help out by earning just a little bit of money. It was usually one of the more mature boys who would light the fires and chop the wood. He would get the fires going in the morning and that was his responsibility for a month. And two girls would do the sweeping and they each got a dollar a month. You know you had to ask for this, and there were so many people asking for that and the teacher tried to be kind and 4 allow as many as possible. And one time I got the job. The first thing I did I got my dollar and I went across the street to the general store. He carried runners and I had looked at these white runners, and so I bought myself a pair. So after a few days I guess dad noticed, and he said, "Where did you get your runners?" and I told him I had swept for the school. And he said, "Oh well, that is a careful girl!" [laughter] Anyway, that's the first dollar I ever remember earning. I might have done the blackboards for twenty-five cents, but this was a dollar, enough to buy a pair of shoes. The dream of graduating, however, came crashing down when, after the sudden death of her father, she was withdrawn from school to go earn her own living. My mother's memories of the Civi l War, emigration, her mother's death en route, the premature death of her father, the end of a childhood fantasy of continuing her education, removal from her rural family and going to find employment in an urban/industrialized setting all shape the story my mother tells about being an adolescent. I am not prepared for the enormity of her struggle. There were times that were singularly difficult for my mother, times of heartache, times when she struggled with overwhelming loneliness and loss. Because she was forced outside of her culture at a young age, her identity was defined earlier than most. Historical conditions interacted with her life to create an individual who endured because of her spiritual groundedness, the support of her family network, and her previous sense of psychological well-being. These are the threads that are woven together as a strong sense of personal achievement comes through in the fabric of her story. The Research Question Because of ethnicity, religion, class and gender, my mother's story takes a distinct direction. Of Dutch Mennonite ancestry living in southern Russia, in a family of 5 prosperous landowners, her family emigrates as refugees after the Civil War, and she is orphaned as an adolescent. Without a livelihood she travels to an urban environment to seek employment. This is why it is important to understand the nature of contextual as well as individual variability. Because my mother's story startles me, I am forced to look again at ethnicity, class, culture and gender. I work in a school environment where there are dozens of countries represented in the student population, where there is a growing percentage of the student body who, like my mother, have emigrated to Canada because of traumatic social and political unrest in their home countries. When there is a military conflict and refugees are on the move, we generally see the displaced children of these conflicts in our school shortly thereafter. As I reflect on my mother's story I begin to think about the teenage immigrant/refugee girls who sit in my classes, displaced but trying to find a place in our culture. Each of them has an immigration story. Gerda Lerner (1979) suggests that a new stage of promise in women's history may be the study of separate women's cultures, taking into consideration the factors of race, class and ethnicity. Hannah Lerman maintains that feminist theory, in order to be adequate, should encompass "the diversity of women" (quoted in Unger and Crawford 1992, 29). Vicki Ruiz and Ellen Carol DuBois in Unequal Sisters suggest that historians abandon the notion of a universal female past (1994, xii) and look instead at race, class and gender. Listening to the life stories immigrant/refugee teenage girls tell could be a promising place to begin. The question then becomes, what would the historical inquiry be like i f young immigrant/refugee women were the centre of the research as my mother was at the centre of my questions? How did traumatic and socio-historical events impinge on the direction that their personal lives took? What sense do they have of their lives? These questions combined form the central question of this research: How do the personal experiences of traumatic socio-historical events, shape the life stories teenage immigrant/refugee girls tell? 6 Background of Displacement It is worth noting that in the interviews undertaken for this thesis, all of the young women referred to themselves as refugees except one [Sophie] who always spoke of her self as being an immigrant (therefore the use of the term immigrant/refugee in this context). According to United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), the world's 18.2 million refugees in 1993 were part of a more encompassing and complex migratory phenomenon. The United Nations has estimated that 80 to 100 million people currently live outside their country of origin (Appleyard 1991). World migration involves a range of motivations, from those of the more privileged, who are able to move for reasons of personal preference and convenience, to those who are attempting to leave behind a lack of opportunity, to those like the young women in the space of this thesis who are who are fleeing from serious danger, and those at the far end of the spectrum who are fleeing from persecution (UNHCR 1993). The distinctions are important ones, as terms related to migration have changed in usage over the last decade and are interpreted differently by organizations such as UNHCR, the Red Cross, Red Crescent and NGO's (non-governmental organizations) when compared to the popular press. To the popular press a refugee is anyone who has been forced to leave their usual place of residence due to circumstances beyond their control. In 1976 the United Nations, in an attempt to establish an international code of rights for refugees, adopted an international code of protocol which stated that "a refugee is anyone who owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion is outside the country of his [her] nationality and is unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail himself [herself] of the protection of that country; or who, not having a nationality and being outside the country of his [her] former habitual residence as a result of such events, is unable or owing to such fear, is unwilling to return to it" (Martin 1991, 1). It is 7 important to note that this definition by the U N not only makes women invisible, it also denys the acknowledgement of the differences which exist for women within the refugee framework, such as the gendered perception of women during conflict (Higonnet 1987). Given that this thesis is about 7 young women, it is fitting to make mention of the challenges to the U N definition. Recent statistics (Martin 1991, Cole, Espin and Rothblum 1992) for example indicate that eighty percent of the world's refugees are women and children, and that the lack of this recognition establishes a distortion in the discourse on refugees. Aristide Zolberg, Astri Suhrki and Sergio Aguayo (1989, 5) note that in the Western historical record, the word "refugie" as a noun originated in France in the late sixteenth century in the context of providing asylum and assistance to foreigners escaping from the Low Countries where the Protestant Reformation had established itself. The English word "refugee" was first used one hundred years later to refer to the Huguenots fleeing from France to England when Louis XTV revoked the Edict of Nantes. Originally, then, the term refugee referred to individuals who were fleeing dangers which threatened their physical and spiritual safety, and who had been targeted as a group for extinction. A key dynamic then and today in the refugee process is that certain conditions must exist in the country of destination in order for the flow of refugees to commence. Many countries have opened their gates to refugees since those beginnings. But the generous era represented by the Emma Lazarus poem "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free" is no more (Zolberg, Suhrki and Aguayo 1989, 6). The refugee framework has become increasingly complex in the 1990s. There is, for example, an increasing resistance within countries to governments that perpetuate, tolerate or are powerless to correct poverty and abusive situations. The result is an outpouring of refugees as witnessed recently from Iraq, Ethiopia and Haiti. Secondly, ethnic tensions have been a root cause of a growing number of conflicts resulting in horrific acts in the name of ethnic cleansing. Ethnic cleansing has been defined by the 8 UNHCR as a nationalistic campaign to kill and/or drive unwanted populations from areas controlled by authorities. Filice and Vincent have defined ethnic cleansing in the Bosnian context as "the practice of targeting other refugees and ethnic groups [Croats and Muslims, in this instance] for persecution, killing, expulsion and imprisonment, in order to rid parts of Bosnia of non-Serbian populations" (1995, 80). The UNHCR estimates that there are approximately 190 independent states in the world, containing at least five thousand ethnic groups. The viability of an ethnically pure nation-state seems to be possible only as a fiction. Yet ethnic displacement is clearly a cold fact of life for the present flow of refugees from Armenia, Azerbaijan, Bosnia, Herzegovina and Rwanda. The number of people seeking refugee status around the globe has escalated sharply in the last two decades. In 1970 there were 2.5 million refugees in the world. Within ten years the figure had more than tripled to 11 million. In The State of the World's Refugees 1993: The Challenge of Protection, the UNHCR (1993) reported the figure to have reached 18.2 million refugees. In that time the nature of the refugee problem has also undergone fundamental changes. The United Nations has drawn attention to three of these variables. Today flight from one's country is more often the product of vicious internal conflict, as seen in Ethiopia, Bosnia and Herzegovina. Secondly, nationalistic, ethnic and communal tensions are the predominant factor in propelling refugees to abandon their homeland. Lastly, most recently, the political intrusion of states into territories controlled by competing factions (Somalia, Rwanda, Bosnia) has made any attempts of rescue organizations to protect or assist refugees a precarious enterprise. Traditionally, protection of refugees was deemed to be necessary only after a refugee had crossed an international border. Since 1993, however, "internal displacement" has become part of the grim refugee picture. To put this in perspective, 9 there are an estimated 24 million internally displaced refugees in the world today, in addition to the 18.2 million refugees who have crossed an international border. Simply put, Martin (1991, 7) makes the distinction that non-refugees move because they wish to make a better life for themselves, refugees move because they are forced to leave in order to seek safety. For them the move is often sudden and occurs when families have exhausted all other resources. It is often sparked by a realization that there is little to keep them because everything of importance has already been destroyed. Increasingly, she notes, members of the same family end up in different refugee camps or even in different countries of asylum. The conceptual framework aside, the dynamics of displacement distinguish the refugee from other immigrants. The problem is not simply to identify the multiple causes of flight, but to understand the complex way in which interrelated patterns of political, economic, ethnic and human rights pressures interact with the lives of those they affect (UNHCR 1993,14). For example, a Croatian family may be forced to flee its village of birth due to harassment because of a marriage where the mother is Serbian and the father is Croatian, but the larger framework may be aggravated by nationalistic fervour stirred up by events which occurred during the Second World War in that village, or memories of events that preceded the Ottoman Empire. Anthropologist Bette Denich, for example, has shown that there is a strong link between the repetitive cycle of feuding and death and social structure in the Balkans, when clans and tribes are patrilineal and all the ancestors are male (Denich 1974, 243). That refugees turn their backs on their homeland is the result of an individually complex sequence of events behind the immediate cause for flight. Organization of the Thesis The purpose of this thesis is to listen to the stories of seven displaced young women. Listening to a life story is one way to understand how traumatic socio-historical 10 events can completely disrupt the lives of those they affect, and set into motion a chain of events before unimagined by the individual. Barbara Meyerhoff (1982, 101) has suggested that life history allows people to become visible to others while at the same time allowing the tellers of the story to show themselves to themselves. It is rare that young refugee women become the centre of the story. In these pages young immigrant/refugee women will become the means through which we consider life story. This chapter has included an introduction explaining the origins of the research question, the research question itself, an explanation of the concept of displacement as it pertains to the research question, and an outline of the organization of the thesis. Chapter 2 is a review of current literature pertaining to the thesis question. After beginning with a review of women in history, the search narrows to women in Canadian history, then to the literature on women and children as refugees, and finally to the specific culture of teenage girls as it relates to sameness, difference and friendship. The third chapter describes the ethnographic and life history methods which were used to acquire the data in the research. It also includes a discussion of the interview process, and of the transcript/voice considerations which were part of the concern when interviewing refugee women. Chapter 4 becomes directly involved with the profiles of the seven young women who were interviewed. Using historical background of the socio-historical events that intervened in their lives, and their own recollections of that time, this chapter traces the girls' lives up to the time they entered Canada. Chapter 5 presents the themes that the girls spoke most passionately about. Using their words, the themes of loss, of difference and resistance, and of friendship are considered. Of interest also are interpretations by the girls of how they thought their mother would have told the story. The final chapter, the Afterword, includes implications about the research and some reflections. 11 CHAPTER 2 LITERATURE REVIEW Introduction Before we look at something as specific as the life histories teenage immigrant/refugee girls tell, it is important to step back and look at how the lives of women have been recorded in history. Moving from the external world to the school hallway, from the historical past to the present, this review begins by looking at how women have been recorded in history. Early cultures teach about goddesses like Kali , who invented the Sanskrit alphabet, and the Egyptian goddess Seshat, who was the mistress of the alphabet and books, and who had a caste of scribe-priestesses who answered to her (Boulding 1976; Miles 1988). Medievalists tell us that the women of the holy orders of medieval Europe were the first women to begin to write histories like the famous "sister books" (Wemple 1985). The custom of recording the lives of famous women became the genre of women's history during the Renaissance and into the eighteenth century. It was well into the twentieth century, however, before women were permitted to join the ranks of historians as scholars in the Western academy. Initially the research that followed focused on a compensatory and contribution history that attempted to fill in the gaps left by the male academics (Lerner 1976). More recently the shift has been towards a women-centred history concerned, for example, with women telling their stories from their own perspectives in time and place. This has led to an interest in such primary documents as diaries and letters, and in methodologies like oral and life histories. It is the genre of life histories or life stories, as they have also been called, which forms the core of this thesis. 12 Secondly, the research follows the particular course that Canadian history has taken in regard to women. Although fledgling in many respects, the volume of scholarship in this field in the last two decades has been astonishing in its variety and breadth. Social historians in particular have contributed to a greater understanding of the dynamics of ethno-cultural relations. Of late, the research has taken a particular interest in gender-related issues. The problems women face within the climate of displacement or of being refugees is the third concern of this research. Although refugees have been a part of history for hundreds of years, the analysis of the dynamics of displacement by social historians and psychologists is very recent. Of concern is how the immigrant woman views herself in transition, vis-a-vis how she is viewed by the host country. Issues of adaptability and coping with loss are also common themes in the literature. Lastly, I consider the dynamics of adolescent culture as it applies to concerns of loss, difference, belonging and friendship. The realities of school culture are looked at, particularly in relation to issues of exclusion and isolation. Writing Women into History What would the world be like i f women were placed at the centre of the historical inquiry? That is the question Gerda Lerner posed in The Majority Finds Its Past (1979, xxi). To answer the question, Elsie Boulding takes us back to the beginning of language and reminds us that countless ancient myths ascribe the birth of language and the means to write it down to women and to goddesses. Carmenta, a Roman goddess, adapted a Latin language from the Greek, Medusa gave the alphabet to Hercules, Queen Isis presented the alphabet to the Egyptians, and the priest-goddess Kali invented the Sanskrit alphabet (Boulding 1976, 193-94). Early cultures like the Egyptians had a caste of scribe-priestesses who answered to Seshat goddess of the alphabet and "mistress of the house of books" (Miles 1988,129). 13 It is in the convents of Europe that historians first observe women recording their histories on a significant scale and using the confines of that institution to, in Beard's words, "spring into freedom" (in Lane 1977, 223). Miles (1988, 131) makes reference to an early Brigid of Ireland who founded that country's first convent in the fifth century, and historians like Lerner and medievalist Suzanne Wemple (1985, 184) trace the beginning of women writing history to the cloisters of the seventh century (Lerner 1993, 249). It is in these closed communities that early examples of historical biography are seen, and it is here in 609-614 A.D. that Baudovinia a nun and historical biographer, in a "cell of her own" at the abbey of Chelles, penned the Life of St. Radegund, abbess of Ste. Croix in Poiters and peace-maker among Frankish kings. The writing of individual lives of religious women by their contemporaries continued well into the fourteenth century, as did the writing of autobiographies by mystics like Hildegard of Bingen, St. Catherine of Siena and St. Teresa of Avila. The biographical tradition of writing lives was particularly strong within Saxon orders. The Saxon nun Hrosvitha of Gandersheim (932-1002), known for her intellectual accomplishments, left a large body of work including legends, poems, plays and biographies, concerned chiefly with the history of women (Gies and Gies 1978, 67). "Schwestern Buchen" or "sister books" are a genre of historical writing appearing in the convents of the German states in the 1300s. They are of particular interest because they typically blend descriptions of the daily life of the ordinary women of the convent with the vitae of thirty or forty of them. The maintaining of lists (by both women and men) of famous women as heroes and role models continued well into the Renaissance. One of the earliest histories of famous women as heroines and role models was written by the Renaissance humanist Giovanni Boccaccio between 1355 and 1359. Choosing 104 mythological and allegorical women from antiquity, Boccaccio wrote Of Famous Women for an audience who he believed deserved to learn of their famous predecessors both virtuous and infamous 14 (Lerner 1993, 256). Christine di Pizan, poet at the court of Charles VI of France, was the first woman to utilize Boccaccio's model in a universal history of women. Frustrated by the slanderous portrayal of women, and disheartened by the seemingly unanimous male authority in the field of history, she received a vision. In it Lady Reason, Lady Rectitude and Lady Justice appeared before her to give her counsel and show her the way out of her entrapment. To her they entrusted the task of constructing a city of women in which women could find refuge from slander and vindictiveness. Jubilant, she began and, inspired by their guidance, wrote a history illustrated by the exempla of valiant women. She published her work Le Livre de la Cite des Dames (The Book of the City of the Ladies) in 1405 (Lerner 1993, 258-59). Although she relied on Boccaccio as a source for much of her list of women, she nevertheless experimented with her own framework in the depiction of her subjects, following themes rather than the chronological traditions of the time. She also consistently interpreted her histories so that they maintained a sympathetic view towards women. Rosalind Miles (1988, 12) has pointed out that early women's history was largely an effort to search the archives for authority figures like goddesses, queens, abbesses and learned women to set against the always longer list of male figures of ability. To Miles this "pop-up version" of women's history not only reinforced the false effect of male domination of history, it failed to consider the realities of and give dignity to the lives of the majority of women. By the eighteenth century, histories of notable women had become a literary genre, and represented an initiative to write women of achievement into history. Towards the end of the nineteenth century the lists of notable women had made room for a growing interest in documentation based on source materials, for preserving records of words and deeds. This marked a change in attitude towards the value of the records of ordinary women. In a cyclical manner it returned to the ordinary women depicted in the 'sister books' of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries (Lerner 1993, 268). 15 In 1946 it was American historian Mary Beard, writing from outside the academy, who noted that even though women were absent from history texts, they had in fact always been active at the centre of history. When Beard looked at women's history, the importance for her was not that women in their long history were subjected to men, but rather that women had made an "indispensable contribution" to history and to the maintenance and the promotion of civilization (Beard 1946, 339). It was her concern that women's substantial and continuous contribution not be buried by the quantity of rhetoric on the "oppression of women." The understanding that the oppression of women existed, and still exists, is clearly essential to our understanding of women's history. For Beard the focus on women as victims had obscured the true history of women. She was one of the earliest historians, for example, to insist that the history of women had to reflect the variety in the status of women according to class. Beard was also the first historian to suggest that we embark on what is now referred to as "women-centred" research, and is regarded by many to be the materfamilias of the "new women's history" (Smith 1984, 711), with its concern for social and cultural issues. When historians responded by writing women into history, it was often in terms of what Lerner called "compensatory history" (1976, 357). Lerner is not speaking of writing women into history in a traditional conceptual framework in order to fill the gaps. That methodology would not address the dilemma that women were still being fit into a value system that "considered man to be the measure of significance" (Lerner 1976, 360). Historians would still be in the position of finding famous women or the "woman worthies" referred to by Davis, while not dealing with how the majority of women had functioned in history (Davis 1976, 85). Even as a later "contribution history" considered women who were "also there" in abolition and labour movements, women's contributions "on their own terms" were not represented. Women were still outside of history. They were still De Beauvoir's "the Other," the incidental "defined and 16 differentiated with reference to man and not he with reference to her." He was still the Subject and she was still the Other (De Beauvoir [1953] 1989, xxii). In the last two decades, as historians and social scientists have considered new ways of approaching historical material, the shift has been towards female-oriented consciousness found in primary documents like letters and diaries, and the interpretation of these works. Historian Laurel Ulrich (1990) presented a rich example of this genre in A Midwife's Tale using the diary of New England midwife Martha Ballard, dated 1785-1812. The writing of women's history as found in primary sources such as Ballard's diary involves a gleaning of facts with a combination of luck. It also often involves the unmasking of historical memory in the search for the subject's truth on her own terms. The search for female-centred consciousness and women's words has also led to an interest in the life history method. In Rosie the Riveter Revisited: Women, the War and Social Change, historian Sherna Gluck (1987) uses life history to present the stories of ten women who were typical of the dozens who worked in California's wartime defense industry in the 1940s. Catharine Warren (1986) portrays the life histories of contemporary Albertan women immigrants in order to describe experiences identified as being important to them during the transition process as newcomers. By interviewing two survivors, Pamela Klassen (1994) has looked at the transformed capacities of women on the Russian front in the absence of conscripted males and male clergy in the Second World War. Anthropologist Lila Abu-Lughod visited a small Bedouin community in Egypt and has used women's narratives, songs and reminiscences in what she refers to as "narrative ethnography" (1993, xvi), a blend of conversations around anthropological themes such as patrilineality, honour and shame, and polygamy. The result is a fresh rendering of old themes. Patai (1988a, 1988b) translated the life stories of the sixty ordinary Brazilian women of various races and classes; Behar (1990, 1993) compiled the life story of Esperanza, a Mexican marchanta (flower woman). Finnish domestic servants who came to Canada as young women between 1890 and 1930 are the subjects 17 interviewed by Lindstrom-Best (1988) in her work on how immigrant women viewed themselves. Freund and Quilici (1995) have shown how German and Italian immigrant women utilized myth to help them reconcile the differences between their expectations of the host country and the reality of their experiences as newcomers. What is particularly forceful in each of these accounts and runs through them like a thread is the historian's awareness that preconceived notions of the interviewer can deny the women the story they wish to tell. Gluck, for example, learned that although her personal concern about the subjects being a group united by oppression as they lost their status and position after the war was a seductive view, it was not one generally held by the women she interviewed. Klassen had the preconception that the absence of male clergy on the Eastern Front, in a strongly defined patriarchal Mennonite culture, would mean no church at all, when in fact women acted quickly to bring spiritual leadership to the chaos of retreating armies. Patai (1988a, 8) relates how powerful the interviews with Brazilian women became when they began to establish their own themes and rhythms, and became the authorities on their own stories. What is also forceful is the underlying commitment to portraying women's lives as they appeared to the women themselves. It is because these two elements are pursued that one gains a sense of the cultural constraints and patterns that provide structure and direction for these women's lives. There is also a growing body of literature dealing with how specific socio-historical circumstances affect and shape the identity of the individual immersed in those events. Psychologists like Espin (1987, 1994) and Brinton Lykes (1989, 1994) have looked at how biography intersects with historical events in the lives of Latina women. Oliva Espin (1994, 189) has asked i f there is any "biography" outside of historical events for anyone. When she analyzes the "Letters from V , " a Latina adolescent, for example, she finds it difficult to separate the historic/political events of the country from V's individual development (Espin 1994). She maintains that "it is impossible to understand individual psychological development without considering the specific historical 18 circumstances in which that individual was immersed" (Espin 1994, 189). For example, V was an adolescent Latina girl raised in an upper-class home of privilege. When she was thirteen, her parents were arrested and imprisoned by the military regime for being political dissidents. When her grandparents were also arrested a year later, arrangements were made for V and her two brothers to be sent to live with a "guardian" in a distant Latin American country for their own safety. Because of her parents' resistance to the rise to power of a military regime, and because of her gender, religion and class, V's story took a distinct shape. M . Brinton Lykes (1989, 1994) has explored the question of the construction of identity under traumatic circumstances in her work with Guatemalan Indian women. She is particularly concerned with exploring the impact of the return from exile on one refugee woman's self-understanding and praxis. At an early age, while other girls of the Mayan village were learning how to weave and make tortillas, Maria's father insisted that she and her two sisters also go to school and learn Spanish. Recognizing the limitations of the social roles for his daughters in a rural village, he bought them shoes and sent them to school, thereby broadening their prospects "to be more" (1994, 99), and initiated Maria on a path rarely taken by other girls in the village's memory. Maria does not remember a time when the government of her country was not embroiled in military conflict with the guerrilla insurgents in Guatemala. When her village was attacked in the early 1980s, Maria was not at home. Her father was tortured until he lost consciousness, their valuables were stolen, and what remained was burned. The family fled to the Highlands, where they survived among the Communities of Population in Resistance (CPR), for the next ten years. Having been active in resistance activities of her own, Maria escaped into exile. She was a rural, naive, sixteen-year-old who was suddenly out of context. Maria had to live outside her culture in order to become politicized. By contending with her losses as a refugee, she was forced to develop a new identity. Through the experience of exile, she was able to "choose herself 19 (Brinton Lykes 1994, 104), "to be more," as her father had wished her to be. In time Maria returned to help her own people. In Going by the Moon and the Stars, Pamela Klassen (1994) uses life story, ethnography and feminist theory to co-construct the lives of two Russian Mennonite women, Katja and Agatha. They are part of a group of women who emigrated to Canada after fleeing the Soviet Union at the end of World War II. Because they were displaced women affiliated with the German army, and single mothers with an "unacceptable" story to tell, they were doubly marginalized, as they attempted to establish roots in the Mennonite culture of Ontario. Like Espin and Brinton Lykes, Klassen finds that the "construction of identity occurs in relation to the multiplicity of gender, political, religious, family, class and ethnic plots" (1994, 2). It is these factors of class, gender and ethnicity that concern Varpu Lindstrom-Best (1988) in her study of young Finnish women as immigrant domestic workers in Canada from 1890 to 1930. Using the framework above, she examines the impact of culture on Finnish workers. Her work does not view Finnish women as oppressed, because the women did not view themselves that way. She thereby addresses Beard's and Lerner's concern that the true history of women is the history of their functioning "on their own terms." This approach of immigrant woman-centred history is both refreshing and enlightening. Lindstrom-Best finds that although the experiences and problems of Finnish domestic servants were not significantly different from those faced by other immigrant women, their responses were different. They chose to disregard the prevailing opinion of their class and ethnicity, because it was outside their culture. As Finnish women emigrated and struggled to adapt to a new land, their responses were informed by the traditions of work and religion in which they had been raised. Their lack of skills, their inability to speak the language, the biased attitudes of Canadians of that era towards immigrants, and Federal immigration restrictions limiting women to domestic work and farm labour severely limited the young immigrants' options. Lindstrom-Best says that in 20 Finnish jargon, "going to America" (1988,4) became synonymous with going to be a domestic servant. The key to "going to America" was that Finnish girls went willingly to be servants, thereby changing the experience of their agency in this dynamic. Whereas Canadian women viewed domestic servants as a low-status occupation, these immigrant workers did not. For them the stigma of low-status work was not very relevant. For many it provided independence and an income they could only dream of achieving in their homeland. What is important in this research is that it is possible to see how Finnish domestic servants constructed their own meaning, and constructed it particular to their own class. Lindstrom-Best states that "to consider the Finnish woman's response to the immigration experience, one must forget the middle-class reformers and their Victorian ideals, which most Finnish women simply did not share" (1988, 4). It is statements like this from within an ethnic worldview, and a gendered and class worldview, that underscore the positions that Beard, Lerner and Lerman have taken. Writing Women into Canadian History Within the last decade Canadian social historians like Lindstrom-Best (1986, 1988) and Jean Burnet (1986) have expanded the area where the history of immigration intersects with that of women and ethnicity. They have attempted, in Burnet's words, to "create a richer nap to the fabric" of Canadian history. For example, essays related to the issues faced by Armenian, British, Finnish, Jewish, Greek, Italian and Mennonite women in Looking into My Sister's Eyes (Burnet 1986) speak to the lives of some of the immigrant women in the ethnocultural groups of southern Ontario. The issues raised in Burnet's collection indicate the need for further research among immigrant women who are not part of the "visible minorities" or "women of colour" construction, who in their "whiteness" are tremendously diverse, representing dozens of ethnic and cultural groups, yet are readily and collectively dismissed precisely because they are "white." 21 Historian Veronica Strong-Boag (1990, 176) has noted that Canadian historians in the past have written Canadian history focused on a small group of "great men" with names like Talon, Champlain, Macdonald, Borden and Diefenbaker, thereby implying that to know them was to know Canadian history. By her own record in research she challenges scholars to search for the critical issues in the study of Canadian women's history. The current flowering of journal articles, monographs and essay collections attest to the range and variety of current scholarship in social and cultural history. Special issues on Canadian women's history (Canadian Woman Studies/les cahiers de la femme 7, no. 3 [Fall 1986]), and women's history and gender studies (BC Studies 105/106 [Spring/Summer 1995]) indicate how popular and productive the scholarship in women's history has become. In the area of labour, a collection of essays edited by Janice Action, Penny Goldsmith and Bonnie Shepard (1974) explores the history of working women. Many of the contributions deal with the exploitation of industrialized workers in rapidly expanding nineteenth-century Canada, and women's responses to the demands of that era. The work experience of B.C. women from Native to Asian is the underlying theme in Not Just Pin Money (Latham and Pazdro 1984), a collection of some of the essays presented at the first Women's History Conference in B.C. in 1984. It follows an earlier anthology, In Her Own Right (Latham and Kess 1980). Alicja Muszynski (1984) has looked at some of the disturbing union practices related to gender and race as experienced by cannery workers in B.C.'s fishing industry. The theme of gender and race is also Star Rosenthal's concern in Union Maids, her essay on domestic service in turn of the century Vancouver (1979). Speaking from a social perspective, Alison Prentice and Susan Trofimenkoff (1977, 8) state that when women did appear in nineteenth-century Canadian history, it was as "charming dancing partners at the Confederation balls" who rarely stopped long enough for closer consideration. Gillian Creese and Veronica Strong-Boag (1992) have 22 compiled an anthology which illustrates the richness of what social historians have found in B.C. history when closer consideration is taken. For example, Sylvia van Kirk (1992) considers the spirited women in the era of the Gold Rush; Theresa Jeffries (1992) traces the history of Sechelt Native women as keepers of their culture; and Strong-Boag and Kathryn McPherson (1992) examine the medicalization of childbirthing practices beginning in the 1920s. What is particularly significant about this collection is the emphasis placed on how gender influenced the lives and the circumstances of the individuals concerned. Strong-Boag and Anita Fellman's (1991) collection broadens the range of historical exploration to include race, culture and gender in particular. In this collection Jean Barman (1991) examines the position of Native girls in the white dynamic of A l l Hallows School from 1884 to 1920 in Yale, B.C. Joy Parr (1991) in her classic work explores a reversal in the gendered economic world when women are recruited for textile work and their kin must follow. Sylvia van Kirk (1991) sheds new light on the role of Native women and their Metis daughters in the production and diplomacy of the fur trade in the western Canada. Julie Cruikshank (1990) uses the interaction of life story to relate the passages of three Yukon Native elders. In Bettina Bradbury's anthology Canadian Family History (1992), articles like Yves Landry's intriguing study of gender imbalance and the consequent plan for les Filles du Roi in New France from 1663 to 1673 work particularly well in their analysis of the social construction of gendered roles in the society on the St. Lawrence River. The idea of gender as a social construct in Canadian women's history has been present in social science research for the past decade. Psychologist Rhoda Unger has noted that in American society the process of creating gendered individuals begins at birth. The presence of a vagina or penis represents biological sex, but the pink or the blue blanket that soon follows represents gender (Unger and Crawford 1992, 18). Whether the blanket is pink or blue is an example of one society's construction of gender. Although distinctions based on gender are not always binary in nature, it appears 23 that all societies form some. These distinctions in turn shape expectations and relationships between women and men and within their societies. Gender distinctions establish a form of stereotyping. They can also determine access to resources and to positions of influence (Unger and Crawford 1992, 20). Marion Kaplan (1995, 17, 47) has explored how gender differences within families had an impact when Jewish women wanted to emigrate from Nazi Germany between 1933 and 1939. Women responded in a gender-specific way as they coped with husbands and fathers losing their jobs, and children's increased harassment at school as the Nazi noose tightened the economic deprivations and the social restrictions imposed on the Jewish population. They appeared to have a heightened sense of danger for their families, as they alleviated much of the stress as husbands and male relatives became house-bound. Although they were interested in emigrating, single women were less likely to do so because employment opportunities for them in the German sector of the economy increased as those for males decreased. It was also very unlikely that a single woman in the Jewish culture would be permitted to emigrate to a foreign environment on her own. As a consequence of some of these factors, figures show that more women than men stayed behind and perished in the Holocaust. Gender differences, then, influence how individuals are treated and how they perceive themselves in their social world. In a broader sense, gender can determine socially acceptable cues and patterns of behaviour, like acceptable levels of violence against women and children, and who to send into conflict. It can also be used to justify hierarchal social status and established value systems. Alpern, Antler, Perry and Scobie (1992, 7) have suggested that when the subject is female, gender should move to the centre of the analysis. Social anthropologist Michelle Rosaldo found that even though feminine/masculine roles varied among societies, and women were powerful and influential in relation to males of the same age and status, women still lacked socially valued authority. Male activities were 24 consistently recognized as having more validity than female activities (1974, 17-19). She found, for example, that at feasts in parts of New Guinea where women grew sweet potatoes and men grew yams, it was yams that were the prestige food and the staple of celebrations. Abigail Stewart emphasizes that according to theorists, there is no universal social definition of gender (Stewart 1994, 23). Not only do gender-role definitions vary among societies, so do the definitions of the ideal woman, or the very concept of what a woman or man is, or what good or bad is. What this suggests is that we cannot comprehend how a woman (or man) perceives herself to be unless we also understand how her social world conceives of her. What society believes about her does not totally control her responses but it does establish the framework within which she chooses her answers (Stewart 1994, 24). Women and Children as Immigrants and Refugees That women and children constitute 80 per cent of the world's refugee population is a widely used statistic (Martin 1991), yet its implication for research and programming of policy is just beginning to be realized. That the human face of refugees is mostly female (Cole, Espin and Rothblum 1992) becomes of deep concern when one realizes that unlike their brothers at war, the women and children of displacement are not protected by the Geneva Convention. In transition they have no human rights. Responses have improved in the past decade as organizations within the United Nations and NGO's began to integrate policy and programming. The problems of women as refugees was put into focus by a UNHCR position paper presented at the 1980 U N Decade of Women Conference in Copenhagen. The First International Conference on Refugee Women, held in Geneva in 1988, marked the beginning of a collaborative and determined effort between NGO's around the world and refugee women to define and deal with their situations. Current literature like the Spring/Summer 1995 issue of 25 Canadian Woman Studies/les cahiers de la femme, dealing with the effects of war on women, and recent monographs and anthologies are examples of the growing response to the problem of refugee women. Roxana Ng emphasizes that the legal status of the immigrant is determined on their arrival (1981, 100-103) but in reality the application of the term may vary. She found that not everyone who was an immigrant saw herself as such, and at the same time, individuals who had been in Canada for fifty years were still regarded as immigrants by others. For some newcomers "immigrant" was only a label that became necessary in certain legal situations, for others the label was always there. For the latter, their "immigrant-ness" was reinforced whenever a disjuncture occurred between the day-to-day social world and their comprehension of it, whenever they found themselves in situations on a bus or at the cashier where they could not function adequately for what was expected of them. Elizabeth Hopkins (1986, 8) and Marilyn Barber (1986, 56) have noted that even in early Canadian history, both Anglo-Irish upper-class women like Susanna Moodie and Catharine Parr Traill, and British domestic servants who went to work in Ontario in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, saw themselves as thoroughly British and going to work in another part of the empire. Their host country, however, viewed them as "foreigners," the equivalent at that time to the present's "immigrants." In their studies Anwar and Eastmond found that newcomers saw themselves not only as immigrants but as sojourners, thereby allowing themselves a zone of comfort should circumstances turn against them. When Anwar (1979) looked at Pakistani immigrants in the United Kingdom she found that they carried in their memories an idealized remembrance of the past, and held on to a "myth of return" even though it was apparent that the second generation was becoming comfortably settled in Britain. Similarly, Eastmond (1993) found that although Chilean women refugees had gone with trepidation to work in the silicon industry of California, "in the belly of the beast," they 26 could rationalize their continued stay once it became clear that their children and grandchildren were assimilating into American culture. The ability to adapt is one of the largest issues facing the new arrival. Forced to leave their homes because of persecution and violence, women and their families must learn to cope with a new environment, new language, new social and economic roles, new community situations and new familial relationships. At the same time women generally seek to reconstruct familiar lifestyles as much as is physically and socially possible. When Gina Buijs (1993, 2) looked at migrant and refugee women her concern was with the change in gender relations brought about by the migration process. Many of the women were forced to accept social and economic roles that they would have rejected in their homeland, thereby "remaking" themselves. What these women had in common was an uprootedness from the familiar, the experience of multiple losses, and a desire to establish a sense of continuity and control over some portion of their lives (1993,4). They supported their menfolk, wanted a good education for their children, and made a working-class living even though they had not all come from working-class roots. A l l the women had utilized old job skills, or regressed to jobs that decreased their self-esteem. Martin (1991, 7) has emphasized how in a real sense immigrant women are both agents of change and sources of continuity while in transition. Although there are issues which affect refugee women regardless of their geographic relocation, women remain responsible for most domestic activities, whether in refugee camps or in the industrialized world. The woman's day-to-day routine may change very little. Warren (1986, 10) has referred to this process as the "traditional role bridge," when there is little discontinuity between the old and the new life in the domestic realm. Some of the research shows that for the female migrant the comfort of some semblance of sameness can at least be found in her domestic role in the host country. While the male of the household may have been the chief breadwinner in the home 27 country, he may in the host country be deprived of any immediate role of consequence while the family is finding its feet. The woman may gain psychological security and maintain a favourable sense of worth and importance because of the sameness of some factors, in spite of a world turned upside down. With the more positive validation that continuity brings, she may direct her energies to be more inventive and creative in the host country sooner than it is possible for the males to be. Whether her society encouraged women to succeed outside the home, or whether women were assigned solely to domestic and child-care responsibilities, the new situation gives her a strong psychological advantage. According to Martin (1991,9) the most significant thing we can say about refugee women is that they are resilient and inventive. She refers to the example of Afghani women in refugee camps in Peshawar, determined to form committees and support systems outside of their families despite the increased imposition of purdah in the new environment. In the dynamics of displacement, one of the prevailing themes which runs through the literature on migrant women is that of coping with the loss of one's past (Martin 1991; Warren 1986; Hoffman 1989). Eva Hoffman, in her provocative testimony Lost in Translation: A Life in a New Language, describes a moment of recognition of loss through her eyes as a teenager in 1959: There is no point in getting excited. Of course I will not convince these teenagers in the Vancouver classroom that Poland is the centre of the universe, rather than a grey patch of land inhabited by ghosts. It is I who will have to learn to live in a double vision. Until now Poland has covered an area in my head coeval with the dimensions of reality. I suppose this is the most palpable meaning of displacement. I have been dislocated from the centre of the world, and the world has been shifted away from my centre. Really there is life there, winter, colours, even happiness. People live their lives. How to explain? (132) 28 Eva had status, recognition and a culture in Cracow. Now she was not only a nobody, she was a nobody from nowhere. Paradoxically, in situations like this the need for preservation of self and of the old values may lead to an initial resistance to the culture of the host country. In her work with Latinos, Espin found that acculturation did not imply the disappearance of all values, customs and beliefs of the home culture (1987, 490). In fact, immigrant families became more interested in traditional roles as a defence against the strong pressures of acculturation. Much research has been done on the psychological impact of loss on displaced women and children. Disman (1983) has likened the recognition of loss and the patterns of grief of the woman immigrant to that of the grieving widow. In her work with Latinos, Espin (1987, 1994) found that a certain amount of cultural shock included mourning the loss of the old country and love objects (1987, 489). NGuyen and Malapert (1988) have worked with southeast Asian children and adolescents of war trauma. They found that children needed personal space which was sufficiently safe so that they could maintain their identity and come to terms with the shattering of their past (248). They found, furthermore, that much of a child's response in situations of trauma is coloured by the necessity for mourning over loss of family, homeland, compatriots, and friends left behind. For the mental health of the child, it was NGuyen and Malapert's conclusion that every refugee child needs to work out her/his mourning, and to come to terms with it so as to achieve release from anxiety, and to be able to invest in a new life. Alice Miller ([1988] 1991) also has written extensively of how the true self is disowned in young children, and of the consequent splitting of self into the political versus the personal self. Adolescent girls migrating without their family or mother were of particular interest in Espin's work regarding loss. Forced individuation from the parent caused by premature separation, without an opportunity for rapprochement or reconciliation, could result in guilt, anger, frustration, restlessness and lowered self-esteem (1987,494). For 29 these young people, feelings of guilt and loss were heightened by inaccessibility, which the occasional long-distance phone call could not assuage. The Culture of Teenage Girls: Sameness, Difference and Friendship Anyone who has spent five minutes in the hallways of a typical Canadian high school recently will have observed the culture of adolescence, complete with specialized language, rules of conduct and hierarchies. While the hierarchy of subgroups within the adolescent culture range from most desirable to least desirable, most teenagers work to belong to one of those groups as a source of support. Perhaps the most traumatic experience that an adolescent can experience is to be completely isolated from any group. Isolated students walk or ride to school by themselves, spend their lunch hour by themselves, and are excluded from virtually all social events. They are devalued in subtle and obvious ways by their peers (Stevic and Rossberg 1972, 43). The dynamics of this relentless teenage rating game can be ruthless and the effects devastating to one's sense of self-worth. When Warren (1986, 8) listened to the narratives of new Canadian women, she found that a theme equal in importance to that of loss was the desire for belonging. Referring to the interactionist theory of social philosopher George Herbert Mead, she suggests that the self is a social self, one developed through interactions with significant others (family, loved ones), and generalized others (a composite of the norms and values expressed by institutions). For the immigrant adolescent coming to terms with loss of family, culture, country and friends, the additional experience of walking the halls as a non-person can lead to frustration, depression and painful self-appraisal. Stevic and Rossberg (1972,44) hypothesize that in these instances, making the choice of the "wrong" friends is sometimes better than the prospect of having no friends at all. The rigid demands of being seen with someone will force students into incongruous relationships primarily for the sake of being included in some/any social group. There are, however, some students 30 who are brave enough and have received a strong enough sense of self from other substantive groups and experiences outside the school environment, that they can navigate the hallways on their own. Interestingly, Stevic and Rossberg (44) add that while an individual may be excluded for personal, ethnic, racial, religious or political reasons, the cruel realities of the adolescent subculture are within the conscious awareness of most individuals. The terms "friend" and "friendship" as they are commonly used in North American culture denote a range of roles and relationships, and may mean something quite different in another social context. The study of what constitutes the dynamics of friends and friendships among adolescent girls in different cultures is an area of research that still needs more attention. When Hoffman (1989, 148) first arrived in Vancouver she recalled that Friendship is a word which in Polish has connotations of strong loyalty and affection bordering on love. At first I try to preserve the distinction between "friends" and "acquaintances" scrupulously because it feels like a small lie to say "friends" when you don't really mean it, but after a while I give it up. "Friendship" in English is such a good-natured easy-going sort of term, covering all kinds of territory, and "acquaintance" is something an up-tight snobbish kind of person might say. As someone from another culture, Hoffman is describing sociability and it is markedly different from friendship. Whether the word loses or gains in cross-cultural meaning, it holds strong connotations for the adolescent girl in our culture. The particular advantage of the adolescent friendship is that it offers a climate of growth and self-knowledge which the family is not equipped to offer, and which very few persons can provide for themselves. Friendship engages, discharges, cultivates and transforms the most acute passions of the adolescent period (Douvan and Adelson 1966,174). In so doing it allows the youngster to confront and master these passions. Douvan and 31 Adelson observed that because friendship in North American society carries so much of the burden of adolescent growth, it acquires a pertinence and intensity it has never had before, nor in many cases will ever have again. Writers distinguish between shallow and deep friendships, between sociability and deeper friendship (Douvan and Adelson 1966). In an early work, Lewin (1948) observed that Americans moved easily from friendliness to sociability, but hesitated at intimacy in friendships. Intimacy in friendship is characterized by Douvan and Adelson (1966, 176) as including mutual trust; it permits a fairly free exchange of emotion; it allows the shedding of privacies; it can absorb pain within limits; it involves the discussion of personally crucial themes; and it provides occasion to enrich and enlarge the self through the encounter of difference. Axelrod (1956, 17) has suggested that the gift of intimacy has always been rare, yet it seems likely that Americans are peculiarly uneasy about intimate relationships. He speculates that for a large percentage of the population, close personal relations are restricted to extended family, while in the adult world many friendships may be a thinly disguised and mutually understood flight from boredom. The "fierce proprietary affection" that many teenage girls in North American society have for one another~or more specifically for one special other—is a phenomenon of a particular moment in their lives. Further research needs to be done as to how this might apply to immigrant/refugee girls for example or to class or ethnicity. Kostash has captured this intense affection vividly in her popular ethnographic account No Kidding: Inside the World of Teenage Girls, based on interviews with fifty girls from Toronto, Edmonton and Vancouver (1987, 8, 27). She underscores that this is the time of the "best friend" (27) and the best friend is she who has the right to your time and attention, and the privilege of hearing your confession. Kostash states that never again in life will there be someone quite so unambiguously interested in you. Part of her analysis suggests 32 that the most significant thing about adolescent girls in our culture is that they are not taken seriously. As historians delve into the records left by women, whether they be the "Schwestern Buchen" of the fourteenth century or a midwife's tale in a New England colony, they have begun to unearth the perspectives of a women-centred consciousness and women's words not previously recognized in historiography. What is forceful in these accounts is the portrayal of women's lives as they appeared to themselves. It is when we consider these accounts that we gain a sense of the patterns that provide structure and direction for women. Social historians, anthropologists, ethnographers and psychologists have added to the literature dealing with the specific circumstances that shape the identity of individuals. Certainly when one considers the refugee record, it is difficult to separate the political/historical events of a country from individual development. So for instance in the "Letters from V " , when V 's parents resisted a military regime, her life because of gender, religion and class, took a specific direction, as she was sent to live in "a distant Latin American country." It is the conflict of multiple plots like those in V ' s story that have brought refugees to our doorsteps. The life history method, as we shall see in the next chapter, allows their stories to be told from an experiential point of view. 33 CHAPTER 3 METHODOLOGY Ethnography and the Life History Method Abu-Lughod (1993, 29) has defined life history as stories that people tell about their lives. Life history for Watson and Watson-Franke (1985, 2, 25) is any retrospective account that has been elicited or prompted by another person. Behar (1993,225) has suggested that the work be called life story rather than life history to emphasize the way in which a life is made, in the telling by someone looking back and imposing order on disorder. The story is not equivalent to the informant's life, as Frank (1979) has pointed out. The story/text is not the person, but a version constructed by a subject to present to an ethnographer. Ethnographic life history, according to Behar (1993), is a genre which offers a paradox. On the one hand there is the wish and temptation to leave the story totally in the speaker's voice, and on the other hand there is the obligation to place the story in a theoretical context, in order to provide background and analysis or interpretation. It becomes a delicate act to mediate between the two positions. Crapanzano (1980, 1984) has argued that the whole notion of "a life" may not be meaningful for everyone, and that the conventions for talking about oneself may differ radically from one culture to another. Gelya Frank (1979, 77) suggests that ethnographers need to do more life history work, and to think about how to read the native text. Life history, she believes, is not meaningful in itself. Meaning is constituted in the recalling and interpretation of the text. De Beauvoir ([1953] 1989, 5) has emphasized that the constructions of self and others are rarely innocent of power. To be a feminist ethnographer means being aware of 34 domination in the relationship between the writer and the people being written about. For Abu-Lughod (1993, xviii), the purpose of plunging into stories and recovering the actual words is to give the speakers the power to overflow our analytical categories. Oscar Lewis' The Children of Sanchez (1963) was for many the most famous sociological document of its era, as it portrayed the subjective side of family interactions. It did not, however, give a close study of what the subjects had actually said. For Behar, the writing of life history text calls for an interpretation of themes as they are constructed by the teller (1993, 227). When I asked the young women in this study to tell me their stories, my concern was to listen to how they viewed themselves as they were moved by socio-historical circumstances from one world stage to another; and to how they sought to cope with or make sense out of the transition. This work seeks to move away from the stock generalizations about teenage girls, by capturing the stories and spirit of seven individual immigrant/refugee young women. Life story allows the story to be told from an experiential point of view. As the stories are told here, they break down the otherness of refugees as a category, as my mother's story broke down the otherness of adolescent/female/refugee in its telling. Large blocks of text "in their own words," and a focus on seven individuals, breaks down the otherness of teenage/refugee/girls, and enables us to identify with the predicaments in which they found themselves. These stories are told from the inside to the outside, from the speaker to the observer, and this underscores that when we see them in our hallways, they all have stories to tell. The Interview Process The interview method used to gather the information in this work was what Moser and Kalton (1971,71) have referred to as the guided or focused interview, or what Denzin (1978,115) calls the non-scheduled standardized interview, where the respondent is allowed a great deal of freedom and the interview aims to cover a certain number of 35 topics in a more or less systematic way. There is no set questionnaire and most of the questions are open-ended, in order to encourage the respondent to talk freely around each topic. There is enough flexibility to allow the interviewer the freedom to change the sequence of the questions and add additional ones i f needed. I approached the interview in part as a conversation, what Denzin (1978, 120) refers to as "talk managed around a specific set of questions." Life histories may take a variety of forms, but they generally contain three critical features, according to Denzin: the person's own story of her/his life, the social and cultural situation to which the subject and others see the subject responding, and the sequence of past experiences and situations in the person's life. The research criteria suggested that I interview six or seven young immigrant/refugee women, between grades ten and twelve, who had emigrated to Canada in the last six years under circumstances of traumatic social/political upheaval. As a teacher in the Social Studies Department, I approached colleagues in my department who would have been familiar with recent international conflicts, and colleagues in the Counselling Department who would have been aware of recent admissions. They agreed to speak to a few immigrant girls to see if they were interested in participating in the process, and i f so to pass their names on to me. It was understood that the identity of the subjects would be protected by using pseudonyms and by altering details when necessary. The interest from the girls was immediate. The first seven girls I interviewed represented the diversity of race, class and ethnicity that Lerner (1979) had recommended, and offered a rich texture in their stories. Since the research proposal had suggested interviewing seven candidates, I decided to work with the young women who had already made a commitment to the research, rather than enlarging the circle. As circumstances would have it, they also represented three continents and seven different countries. I wanted the girls to choose the initial direction of their own stories, because I was interested in the issues they might raise as immigrant adolescents. I was also 36 interested in how another member of the family like a mother (partly because that was the starting point for my work) would tell the story. The mechanism of how they thought the mother would tell the story could also build reflexivity, the distancing of self, into the interview process. The two questions "Would you tell me your story?" and "How do you think your mother would tell the story?" framed the interview like two book-ends. The smaller questions in between these two were mainly concerned with the sequence of past experience and an explanation of terms as they arose. As a rule we met in one of the counselling offices, where the comfort of a small and private space would be conducive to private conversation. The girls approached the beginning of the interview moment with a variety of responses from an eagerness bursting to "get into it," to a near reverence for what we were about to create together, to a plea from one to start the interview again because she had not started with what she wanted to say. Some spoke in a flow of words that needed little encouragement. Others chose their words with more deliberation. My position as a teacher in Social Studies and History, and as a student advocate may have given them the confidence to speak of their past with the frankness which they did. Although they represented different countries and conventions, the 'wil l you tell me your story' approach was a meaningful beginning for these young speakers. They laughed and cried, sighed and raged. Each wanted to be heard. The girls seemed to enjoy the interview and all of them were surprised that they had so much to say. Bruner (1990,125) has mentioned that this realization is very common in autobiographical interviews, and that it speaks in an interesting way about the constructional nature of "telling about your life." I was secretly pleased when they would ignore an interruption of mine to their train of thought and carry on in the direction in which they were going. I saw this less as resistance than as an ability to take responsibility for the story. It was very satisfying to hear the girls take the reins and feel the story become what Bruner (124) calls "a product of the teller and the told." 37 Transcription/V oice Considerations During the course of the interviews, I was struck by the oddity of the construct of the interview: two strangers sitting in a smallish space, speaking together, usually for the first time, with such intensity. I was confounded by how I could convey the texture of the moment to a reader. How exactly does one capture the cadence of a voice in a transcript? Why is it not possible to capture accent on a printed page? I favoured transcribing the sentences/fragments exactly as they had been spoken, with no cleaning up of the grammar or meaning. I felt my position was to mediate a text, not to "improve" the "refugeeness" of their voices. The girls suggested that having their words transcribed as they had been spoken was one way of indicating where they were in the transitional process. Secondly, I decided to experiment with what Brown and Gilligan (1992) have called a voice-sensitive "listening guide." Their voice-sensitive approach is a way into the complexity of voice and meaning. The first time through the tape and the transcripts, they listened to the story the person told: the geography, the psychological landscape, the plot, the unfolding of events; the who, what, where, why and when of the narrative. On the second play through the tapes and text, they listened for the "self," for the voice of the "I." They also listened for the geography/landscape of the narrator, their awareness of the power to control, to name, to identify and to distance. "How does she speak of herself before we speak of her?" The first two listenings then are relational; one listens for plot and for the voice of the "self or "I" in the interview. In their third and fourth times through the tapes, Brown and Gilligan paid attention to how people talked about their relationships. The first time I listened to the tapes after the interviews, I wrote my impressions— in a stream-of-consciousness manner-of whatever I was thinking and feeling as the tape rolled. The second time I listened for the geographic landscape as Brown and Gilligan had done. Since my thesis related to the impact of traumatic socio-historical events on 38 individual lives, I listened for the unfolding of events, to the who, what, where, when and why of the plot. During the third playing of the tape I listened for where the self was in the story, in relation to others, and in relation to the events being described. Lastly, I particularly wanted to know what the important issues were for immigrant/refugee girls as they told their stories. Here I followed Patai's (1988b) suggestion and listened for the issues that moved them the most, that they spoke the most passionately about. After the tapes had been transcribed and the analysis completed, I asked the girls to read the profiles and relevant materials that pertained to them, and to read the Afterword. They were very pleased with the interpretation and expressed amazement that I had captured them "exactly the way I was". They seemed taken aback at the impact and power of their own words written into text, and hopeful that efforts like these would bring change within the framework of how history is conceived and written. Other than the correction of a date or of an adjective, we left the script unaltered. Concerns with issues of confidentiality, prohibited a group discussion of what we had created together. Each however speculated on meeting one day when time had passed, to take another measure of their j ourney. The purpose of moving into life history methodology is to record the words of the narrator as they speak about their life. As they speak they throw open the windows into the past, enabling us to see and perhaps understand an aspect of an event in history "as it was actually constituted" (Cruikshank 1990, 14). The constructional nature of "telling about your life" was a welcomed format in the interviews, and none of the girls was lost for words. Their words allow us to envision the terrain of the roads they have travelled. As these stories are told in the following chapter, they break down the otherness of teenage/female/refugee as a category, and force us to identify with worlds turned upside down. 39 CHAPTER 4 SEVEN PROFILES Each of the seven young women's stories demonstrated dramatically how traumatic socio-historical events can interact with life history to shape the direction of people's lives. This chapter profiles all seven stories to illustrate that point. These are limited profiles, selected profiles, and as such offer a small window onto the narrative of each young woman's experiences. Each of the stories deals first of all with the socio-historical events that intersected with the individual's life and secondly with the shift in direction that compelled the young woman to leave her country. A brief context has been provided from the literature on these conflicts at the outset of each story. There is difficulty in summarizing the complexity of these conflicts in such a short space, nevertheless it is necessary in order to provide a background to their stories. In this chapter the immigrant/refugee path is followed up to their arrival in Canada. Profile 1: Amina—Afghanistan When President Taraki spoke at his first press conference in May 1978, he characterized his national democratic revolution as reformist, constructive and tolerant of Islam. In the decrees which followed, he introduced bold programs for social change, including an aggressive literacy campaign, land reform, cancellation of peasants' debts and marriage reform. As decrees followed, opposition to the reforms began to mount, particularly from those threatened by large-scale social structural change, the large landowners, the religious establishment led by the mujahidin, and the large money lenders. When President Taraki was killed on the orders of his deputy, Hafizullah Amin, in September 1979, the Soviet Union made plans to invade the country. The Soviet 40 Union's invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979 represented the largest Soviet military operation since World War II. During the nine-year Soviet occupation the Afghani government allied itself with the Communist government, and was pitted against the interests of the mujahidin, the landowners, and the money lenders supported by Pakistan and the American government. Since 1988 the fighting in the capital has been steady, as factions within the mujahidin and tribal interests compete for government positions (Moghadam 1993). Amina was born in Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan, where she lived with her mother, father, and five siblings, four brothers and one sister. Her family is Muslim. When Amina speaks of her life, the geography she gives of her country is a scarred physical and psychological landscape. After the third sentence her account describes her recollections of a series of conflicts. I went to school there, and my brothers went to school there. But there was war there, Russia was there and then they left the country. Then some of the people in the provinces were fighting against the government because they wanted more religion. Like our government was not a religious person, he was following the Communist. So there was lot of war going on there was lots of fighting and lots of bombs and lots of rockets. As the war continued and it became apparent that Amina's older brothers would be conscripted, the family decided to make plans for escape. The guys were eighteen and they had to go to war and join the army and go fight with their own brothers, like i f in a family they had two sons one son was with the government and one son was with the other side, so like the war was between brothers. So my parents we did not want that we kill our own brothers. Money changed hands and the brothers were smuggled out of the country first. 41 We paid them and they took my brothers out of the country by walking like about sixteen hours to cross the border. So they had to walk then across the desert and everything, they had a very hard time getting there, and then they had to travel by animal, camel and stuff and then they got to Pakistan. Amina has a deep affection for her traditions and for her people. What Amina says about her country is that "I love it, I just never got to see it." Amina's story begins with details of herself and her family. As she begins to talk of war, she recalls how it changed the way of doing things. But it was OK in the beginning. My mom said "Well you guys have to go out and get an education." I remember one day I was going to school and there were rockets over there and there were rockets over there, and I didn't want to go back home because I wanted to go to school. When I got home everybody was so mad at me, "You could have come back because you could have got killed today." I have seen so many people lying on the street dying but I just went to school and come back home. I had no fear there no more. It is like people had to do everyday life you have no choice any more. One of her remarks about the constant bombardment of war was put this way: You know the Oklahoma bomb? It just reminded us as well that it is everywhere where the people are working and the school. When there is a bomb everyone is running around. It's not like Oklahoma where there is one bomb. It is like they keep coming one after the other. When it is quiet you go gather them, because you find bits and pieces of every person and you go and you bury them. 42 After the brothers had escaped it was Amina's turn to leave with her father and mother. She remembers the women having to wear the head cover as they travelled through the mountains under rebel protection. For young girls and my mom we had to wear a cover so i f they will see you, the other side, they would rape you. So when I had to cover myself I hated it, I was crying the whole time for the whole day I hated to leave my country and all the time I was scared. After they had spent time in the refugee camps in Peshawar, the family settled in the Pakistani capital of Islamabad. Life here was grim, as they waited to be sponsored as refugees in Canada: It was really such a tough time it was so hot, sixteen people in one room with no window. Water was really gross, there was like flies and animals and everything in it. We had no choice, we had to boil it and then drink it. Everybody had, we still do, my brothers still have trouble with their stomachs. For almost two years women were sitting at home wearing those big covers over their head because the mujahidin who were fighting in Afghanistan they were in Islamabad too. In Afghanistan women wear a head cover called the burka, which covers them from head to foot, fitting close around the head with a little grille for the eyes, and flowing out around them as they walk. The women who wear the burka say that it actually allows more freedom and anonymity of movement and transaction than the veil worn by their sisters in other countries (Lessing 1987, 102). When relief came from her uncle and a sponsoring church in Ontario, it was none too soon. We were just lucky that we had some family here and then you had to buy your tickets and everything to come to Canada. Everything was gone and 43 we had probably ten kuldars for the last couple of months that was the day "That is it our life is over. What are we going to do? We will have to sleep on the street or something." But fortunately my mother's step-uncle he was with this Muslim group, he was fighting against our country, he came over and saw our situation and gave us some money to survive. So we had some family and we asked for money to help and they just had to help us there was no choice because we really had such a hard time. So when we went and got our passports and everything, it was the happiest time of our life. Everybody was... like we had not enough money to shop. Eight of us, we only had one bag, like we don't need anything. We just have to get out of there. Amina can still recall her first morning in Canada: The next morning I got up and see everything. It looked so clean, so fresh, and I thought, "My God this is a life!" Amina is sixteen when she leaves Afghanistan; her personal story is also the story of her family, her world of meaning, and her country. When she tells her story it has personal triumphs like dodging rockets to get to school, but when she stops to pick up the dead on the street, it is her people, her history that she is picking up and burying. The family left Afghanistan, because like Martin's refugees (1991), they had exhausted all their resources. They fled too because of gender, because war in Afghanistan is mostly a male activity, and Amina's brothers were about to be conscripted into the army. They fled too because the women's physical safety could not be assured. Higonnet, Jenson, Michel and Weitz (1987) have argued that war is a gendering activity "that ritually marks the gender of all members of society, whether or not they are combatants." When there is total war, "the discourse of militarism, with its stress on 'masculine' qualities, permeates the whole fabric of society...as it restructures gender relations" (4). A Baltic 44 Odyssey:War and Survival edited by Elvi Whittaker (1995) for example, includes an in-depth look at how war impacts on gender, using the life stories of a husband and wife separated by World War II, he as a prisoner of war, and she as a refugee. When Amina tells her story of war and escape, it is noteworthy that everyone in the family is working for a common cause. In her story the group takes precedence over the individual. The I is linked to the we, and the collective is bigger than the self. The theme of the family pulling together and its needs surpassing the needs of the individual will repeat itself in Gordana's story. But in no other story is the tragedy of the self linked so closely to the tragedy of the country and the culture as in this one. Profile 2: Gordana—Croatia In the Spring of 1991 full-scale war had already begun in Yugoslavia. The final straw for Croatia and Slovenia occurred in May, when Serbia refused to accept a Croatian president as the next holder of the automatically rotating federal presidency. With the federal system paralyzed, Croatia held a referendum on full independence on May 19. Ninety per cent of the population voted in favour of the question. On June 25 both Croatia and Slovenia declared independence (Rady 1992). Gordana was fifteen when she arrived in Canada from Yugoslavia in 1993 with her parents and her brother and sister. Her story is full of images of public and personal hostility and recrimination. When Croatia declared its independence in 1991, the family was living in a city on the border between Serbia and Croatia. Her story begins immediately with her family on the move. I came from Yugoslavia where, now lots of people know, there was a war going on. In 19911 still lived in Croatia, but when the war started we had to move out because my father was like mixed, he was half Croatian, half Serbian so we had problems living there. People did not want us living 45 anywhere in that place. They wanted us to fight for Croatia or get out. Or they were just telling us they would kil l us i f we did not stick with Croatia. The family fled to Belgrade in Serbia, where it was impossible for Croatian refugees to get any kind of decent employment. Family members who had offered to help and had encouraged the family to flee from Croatia were now nowhere to be found. It was through the mercy of strangers that the family was able to scrape by. It was hard for my parents to get any kind of job in Serbia because when they see that we come from Croatia as refugees, they would do the same thing, they would say "What are you doing here, why don't you go back and fight for where you live?" M y mom was a tailor so she somehow got to know people around and they were getting customers for her, so she was at home making clothes and that is the way, how we were sort of surviving. Like thank-you for people we never knew because even in war time your family, your cousins, would not help you at all. While "sort of surviving" in Serbia for almost two years, the family had made the decision to apply to Canada for refugee status. We waited for a visa for approximately eight months and we did not know whether we would get it or not. Just one day they phoned us up and they said you are leaving in two weeks, pack up and take as less as you can. There was a lot of "I," of the self, in Gordana's story. She spoke openly about the pain and the humiliations she endured from her peers, and how she struggled to survive on the streets of her home city and of Belgrade. I loved the way how I lived before. I had a beautiful childhood, but when the war started everything turned the people that were around you. They were before really friendly, and now they would just turn around and they would stab you when you turned your back. They would kill you just 46 because of what your name was, not because of what you were inside of yourself. I was going through the different kind of person I was. When the war started in Croatia I was still, like you would say, a child. I was still only fourteen and at that time there were not so many children knowing what's going on. But when I was in Serbia and I had to go to a different kind of high school, I was getting pressure from Serbian children like "What are you doing here? You are refugee. You are supposed to be fighting for your country, for your land where you used to live. Why did you come here? Why is your father here? He is supposed to go there." I wouldn't cry right out but I would cry before bedtime and before I went to sleep. Everything would come up to my mind. Before I was quite hurt by people saying things but my sister made me stronger, and my parents and my brother too. Because the pressures were intense for Gordana's brother to enlist or at least become a street fighter, the family was particularly concerned about his safety. There were guys over there who were there for him and kept him strong. It was dangerous for him over there, that was one of the reasons we came over here, it was because of my brother's life. In Croatia they wanted him to go to war, in Serbia he had to fight in the street. There were so many kids who were fighting in the streets, having their own way, not even knowing what was going on. Schools were conducted in a morning and an afternoon shift. After grade nine students would go to different schools depending on their specialty; in this instance, Gordana was studying medicine in one part of the city, while her brother was studying electronics/technology in another. 47 He would be coming home like about eight o'clock at night and we would be worried and "Oh boy, where were you?" and he would say "I had to run off because guys were chasing me so I just jumped on to this bus and rode it to the other side of the city, so I just wanted to take off, so I did not want to be killed." It wasn't any more a case of whether you were Croatian or Serbian, it was more "Hey I don't like his face, I'm going to go beat him up, or I am going to take off his pants or shoes." People went crazy. There were no more nice words like here to be heard on the street. It does not seem possible to separate the historical events in Gordana's country from the direction her life took. She was born into an ethnically mixed marriage, and lived in a city that was among the first to support the principle of an independent Croatian state. Old hatreds festered, animosities escalated and increasing concern for their personal safety forced the family to move to Belgrade. The family is a strong unit in the story, watching out for each other and working to make sure that individuals learn how to be strong. What is interesting about this story is the discussion and recognition by Gordana of how war changed her into a different person from the kind of person she was "on the way to becoming"; and how war effectively closed the book on her childhood, and transformed her into another kind of person. In Gordana's story and in Amina's there are gender differences, as the brothers are pressured to join the militia. As in Kaplan's study (1995) of gender differences within families in Nazi Germany, the women in Gordana's story responded in specific ways by closing ranks to protect the younger brother and feed the family. It was the mother who was able to put food on the table with her tailoring as the family tried to survive in Belgrade. Gordana went through harrowing times on the playground as the verbal abuse she endured forced her to go through her own war, "to go through the kind of person I was." 48 Profile 3: Dominique—A Latin American Country Unlike the previous two stories, this one does not have the political backdrop of war and the apocalyptic chaos of Picasso's Guernica. Although Dominique never once mentioned war, she had her own psychological turmoil to deal with. There were other characters in her story, but the one she talked about the most was herself. We are two sentences into the interview when Dominique begins to talk about how she was raped when she was twelve. In her story she always refers to the rapist as "this man." I was living with my grandparents like in a community, and his house was there. His daughter was like a friend of mine, not my good friend but I knew her, and this man he raped me when I was twelve years old. It was kind of difficult for me because it was in the newspaper and on TV. I was living with my grandparents for fourteen years. I never in my life was living with my mom and brothers, like my mom was living in Los Angeles with my brothers and my step-father. I never knew my father. After "this man," who was a television personality, had raped her in his motel room, he dropped her off at her home and threatened her not to tell her family. For a week she kept it to herself, until she finally told one of her aunts. I had nightmares. Sometimes I still do. Sometimes I would just cry for nothing. So I told my aunts what had happened to me and we did not have a chance to go to the police or anything because it was a Friday, so I remember next week, Monday, we went to the police. And on the same day it was in the newspapers and on TV. And it was kind of hard because in my family they do not have money, like I could say he had power over me with his money. 49 Dominique did not go to school for the next two years. Her grandparents switched her to another school but, having been raised in a girls' school, she found it difficult to survive in the co-ed population, particularly in light of the assault. When she switched to a third school, the rapist started to stalk her and send her notes blaming her for the incident, and for the fact that he had lost his job. When it was discovered that the lawyer provided by the court was also on "this man's" payroll, Dominique's family dismissed the lawyer but could not afford to hire a new one. The case has never been closed. The repercussions for Dominique and her family in a small Latino community were immense. In those two years that I wasn't in school I had to stay at home, my grandparents would go to work and they would leave me there inside and they would lock the doors outside. They were scared and I was scared too. In the first place it was so difficult for me because my neighbours knew about it. And they believed him right? So it was kind of difficult for my grandparents to know that our neighbours knew about it. What was happening to Dominique during these events was further complicated by the fractured history between Dominique's mother and her grandfather. When I was born my mom was sixteen. My grandpa, because he is very strict, and he didn't like it, so he kicked my mom out of the house. So when I was born he wanted me to live there with them but he did not want my mom to live there with me. So she went to Mexico, she was living in Mexico, she was working as a maid. He had a bad side because he was very strict, my grandfather. We couldn't watch T V or listen to the radio. We couldn't go to parties, I never had a boyfriend in my country because of him. He wanted everything to be perfect, maybe he is overly protective. 50 My grandfather always wanted to have the best education for me. My grandparents they put me in an expensive school. Like I said before, they did not have very much money, but they found a place for me with their daughters. Sometimes we did not have very much money, we did not have money for the bread like for breakfast. I remember my grandmother she used to come in my room and tell me that I was lucky because he just raped me, like he didn't kill me or something. Because of the impossibility of the situation with Dominique being resolved, and because her life continued to be under threat, an application was made jointly by Dominique and her mother to have her accepted into Canada as a refugee. Although her country has recently survived its own military conflict, it is never referred to in the story. Dominique's inner conflict is her war zone. NGuyen and Malapert (1988), when speaking of the mental health of survivors of trauma, found that refugee young people needed to work out their own mourning and come to terms with it in order to find release from anxiety and to be able to invest in a new life. Unger and Crawford (1992) and Stewart (1994) have shown that gender differences influence how individuals are treated and how they perceive themselves to be in the world. Because of socially acceptable cues and acceptable levels of violence in her community, Dominique was raped. Because of class and gender "he had power over me with his money." In addition to this she was given the impression that she was responsible for the rape and therefore guilty, for causing "this man" to lose his job, and for bringing shame to her grandfather's house. Dominique says that in her life she had "some very, very difficult situations." The mother who was not there for her, the overly protective grandfather, "this man" who raped her, her house confinement and isolation, the ever-talkative neighbours of the barrio. As she left for Canada at fourteen, she was clearly a survivor of post-traumatic 51 stress disorder (PTSD). In its initial history, the disorder was associated with symptoms like "survivor's guilt" displayed by male veterans returning from World Wars I and II, the Korean War and the American war in Vietnam. Recent PTSD studies involving female veterans at the front, female refugees from war zones like Vietnam and Bosnia, and rape victims are considering how women's experience of wartime and other trauma differs from the experience of men (Sheperd 1992). Bowen, Carscadden, Beighle and Fleming (1992) have described the symptoms of PTSD to include "recurrent and intrusive recollections and dreams of feelings associated with the event, persistent numbing of responsiveness and avoidance of stimuli associated with traumatic events, and increased arousal including sleeping difficulties and exaggerated startle response" (268). Left untreated the victims may experience depression, guilt, anxiety, and difficulty controlling their behaviour. How did the historical situation interact with the direction of Dominique's life? In her own words, It interrupted time, and it changed everything, because before "this man" raped me it was a pretty good my life. Still when I remember this and all the things what have happened to me, I cry. Profile 4: Sophie—Romania By the late 1980s the Romanian government had become famous for its unique Ceausescu-isms. The economy was rooted in improbable and massive industrial programs, and the government obsessed by a drive to increase the country's birth rate. Ceausescu had announced a systemization program which included plans to reduce the number of Romanian villages from thirteen thousand to five or six thousand at the most. Residents of the villages would be removed to agro-industrial complexes to make room for further farm collectivization. The plans had caused widespread alarm, especially among the population of Transylvania, in the western part of the country, which were to bear the brunt of the systemization plan (Rady 1992). Sophie says, 52 Even though the Cold War was over, we were still a satellite country. Everything was harsh, people didn't have their freedoms. I remember we didn't have very many stuffs, we didn't have oranges or bananas. And people in food lines would get into fights because they would finish selling the last of the food right in front of you. [She laughs and sighs.] We would have time to chat especially the chatting and the gossiping part, that was the grandmothers' part. The milk, my parents had to get up at five o'clock in the morning to stand in line. The bread was actually good because we lived in the city where they made the bread. On December 22, 1989 popular uprisings in Timisoara and Bucharest, Romania, marked the overthrow of the dictatorship of Nicolae Ceausescu. On Christmas Day the dictator and his wife Elena were tried on charges of genocide and of attempting to flee the country with in excess of one billion dollars. By the next evening, the pair had been executed. Although their downfall seemed promising for the future, Romania appeared to lack the dissident leadership that had distinguished the uprisings in Czechoslovakia, and Poland. Romanian intellectuals had never seen themselves to be the caretakers of the nation's soul or to be political leaders of the society. Instead they had distanced themselves from the working class, thereby preserving a long-lasting distrust between the educated and the peasant classes. Within months, therefore, the promise of the Christmas Revolution had foundered, because of ethnic conflict, fraudulent elections and a depleted economy (Rady 1992, 59). Sophie is from Timisoara, the furthest west and the most westernized of Romania's cities. She was near the central square on December 17, 1989, going to a cousin's birthday party, when the uprising began. I remember very clearly because my cousin she is born on the fifteenth of December and the revolution started on the seventeenth. She had her birthday party on the seventeenth and that is the same day that the school 53 ended. I went to see her because they had this play and then we were going back to her house. We were going and then we saw this mob of people in front of the house [the uprising was sparked after the arrest of priest Laszlo Toeke at his house for his constant criticism of Ceausescu's policies], and the transit was unable to move because of the people. And we were wondering "What is going on here, is someone selling oranges or eggs?" One year later, when Sophie was fifteen, she and her parents and her little brother emigrated to Canada. Sophie states that they left because they wanted something better. She is the only one of the seven participants who refers to herself as an immigrant rather than as a refugee. She states that the government did not like Romanians to leave the country, particularly if they were intellectuals. M y parents made the decision to come here, I didn't even know about it. I found out about it actually a month before. My friends didn't even know about it. It was a surprise, I just vanished. I phoned my friend just hours before we were leaving and she didn't believe me. She thought I was joking. It is clear from the manner in which the family, exited however, that their leave-taking was shaped in part by the turmoil surrounding the execution of the dictator and the political and economic chaos that followed. Of the teenage girls interviewed, Sophie was the most optimistically naive in her expectations about the journey her family had undertaken. She assumed that she would make friends in Canada as easily and readily as she had done in Romania. Perhaps because the family had travelled to other countries in Europe and returned, she viewed this trip to Canada as a sojourn rather than something more permanent, much like Anwar's (1979) "myth of return." Also, that the leave-taking coincided with school and 54 Christmas holidays probably added to the surrealness of the experience. Then also the intrigue and secrecy of the departure added to the mystique of the journey to "the West." When the family landed in Canada the blanket of fresh snow, dazzling Christmas lights and a round of Yuletide festivities only served to cloak the difficult year of transition that lay ahead for Sophie. Profile 5: Anastasia—Estonia and Another Soviet Republic Anastasia was born in one of the republics of the U.S.S.R., and lived there with her parents until she was a young child. At that time her parents, who were both engineers for the Soviet government, moved to Estonia to pursue a job offer. In early 1991 the three Baltic republics, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, achieved full independence from the U.S.S.R. By August, Mikhail Gorbachev was under house arrest and the U.S.S.R. had ceased to exist. At the time of the dissolution, the Soviet population was made up of more than one hundred recognized ethnic groups. The population of Estonia, the smallest of the fifteen republics, was approximately 62 per cent Estonian. In 1992 the largest minority, at 30 percent, were the Russians who had arrived in Estonia during the large-scale Soviet industrialization of 1939-1945. This was a significant and problematic increase since prior to the Soviet annexation of Estonia in 1940, the Russians comprised barely 8.5 percent of the population. Ukrainians, Belorussians, Finns, Jews, and Latvians were some of the other minorities. After the new constitution was approved in 1992, all residents who had lived in Estonia prior to 1940 and their descendents were granted citizenship. A l l other inhabitants other than the aged and the handicapped, were required to meet a two-year residency requirement, and pass a proficiency exam in Estonian. Although the Russian government complained to the Conference for Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE) about Russian human rights abuses in Estonia, a mission rejected claims of discrimination after visiting the republic in 1993 (Engelmann 1994). 55 So when we lived in Estonia, the Estonian people, they actually wanted to get rid of us those who weren't born there, they wanted everyone of other nations to leave their country because they separated. And we couldn't stay in Estonia because actually native people they would bang the windows of Russian people and people of other nations, and they would throw stones, stop you in the street. You couldn't get a job and all kind of things. Anastasia's parents lost their jobs when Estonian language-speakers became the preferred employees. When they lost their political status as well, they made efforts to return to their former republic. When they were refused entry to that republic, it appeared that they were without a country. They had heard that it was possible to obtain a visa to apply for work in a Latin American country. En route, when the plane stopped in Gander, Newfoundland for refuelling, people would get off the plane and apply for refugee status. It was a risky business because so many things could go wrong. Because the plan was to hide in the airport washrooms at Gander until the flight had departed, everything was sold, except for what they could fit into two carry-on bags and Anastasia's backpack. None of us spoke any English. My mom, she had asked a friend back in Russia who knew some English to write her a little note of what to say to a policeman when she gets off at the airport. So when we got off at the airport there was another family with us, a mother and her daughter, so there were five of us. We just got off the plane like everybody did and we were just waiting for when they got back on. Then we just went and hid in the bathroom so they wouldn't see us. And when the plane took off we waited because we were so scared that they would be waiting there for us. So when we saw the first policeman my mom she was so nervous she 56 forgot what she was supposed to say. A l l she kept saying was "Refugees, refugees we want to stay in Canada." That is all she had been memorizing, that is all she ever thought about. They were taken to the proper authorities, where a file was opened and the process of applying for refugee status began. Like Sophie in the previous story, Anastasia brought a strong sense of optimism to her journey. When she talked about arriving in Canada at twelve, she used the analogy of an explorer discovering a new continent, a new world. Because of her parents' employment experience in Russia she had already lived in a number of countries, and had seen other new lands. Her mother had been the strongest proponent of the idea of emigrating to this country and her fantasies had been contagious. Anastasia's enthusiasm was tempered, however, by the experience of being a person who in her short life had been rejected by two countries, and had seen her parents fired from their jobs. Her descriptors included being a "nobody," and wanting finally to be a "somebody." Like the individuals described by van Gennep ([1908] 1960) and Hoffman (1989), she found herself in a liminal state. There was fear in the small families' stomachs as they approached government officials at Gander, and began the wait to see i f Canada would accept them as refugees or not. Profile 6: Bojana—Serbia By the winter of 1993 life had become unbearable for Bojana, a Serbian girl living in Belgrade. I am used to being free in the capital of Serbia in Belgrade, it was a really nice town and everything and then the war came and we had never actually experienced war and I had never seen people really fighting. Because of the enormous influx of refugees from the Serbian-Croatian and Bosnian conflict, Belgrade had become what Bojana refers to as "an escape city." 57 There was no bread and we could not eat and there would always be something we would need from the store, salt, sugar or milk or something like that. So we had to get up in the early morning like five o'clock and wait in line for my sister she was five years old, because she needs milk and she does not have anything and you have to wait in line for that kind of thing. It was impossible to get any gasoline, which affected all public transportation. Even getting to school was an ordeal. So you would have to walk ten kilometres because we didn't have any buses whatsoever and you would walk in the snow and rain and it was really bad, or the windows were broken last winter so we were freezing, and we didn't have any heat, so students would have to pay. So that kind of thing. Although Bojana's deepest ties appear to be to her mother and sister, she just could not deal with the chaos any longer. It overwhelmed her. Everybody had lost something, a son, a brother, a cousin, a friend. Before, my country, they were the kind of people, they were always laughing, they were always really nice. But not anymore. It was too depressing I had to go-When her father and her step-mother, and her family had moved to Canada earlier, her father had told Boj ana that should the situation ever become unbearable, she would be welcome to join his family. Bpjana has made a tough trade: strong family ties and a sophisticated city she loved for a family of strangers and a suburb she cannot understand. When she speaks, sadness frustration and loneliness overshadow everything she says. Disman (1983), NGuyen and Malapert (1988), and Espin (1987,1994) suggest that cultural shock includes the mourning of the loss of country and love objects. As Boj ana speaks, 58 however, her problems are deeper than the loss of a culture. Espin (1987, 1994) has suggested that forced individuation from the parent caused by premature separation without an opportunity for rapprochement can result in symptoms of guilt, anger, frustration, restlessness and lowered self-esteem. Bojana was eighteen when she traveled alone to Canada, but she arrived with a number of unfinished issues. Profile 7: Noorah—Iraq In 1980, the year after Noorah was born in Baghdad, Saddam Hussein launched a costly and inconclusive war against Iran. Her earliest memories are of war. I remember the times when the alarm would go off that there was a bomb or something coming, and the place would shake from the bombs and everything. But we were used to it, it was not as strong as the Gulf War. There was food, there was electricity, everything was there, actually people were happy. It was eight years of war and the day the war ended everyone went so crazy everyone was shooting. In my culture if you are happy especially for the men, they start shooting with their guns just to show how happy they are. People went out and they were hugging each other, yes the war was over. But we thought it was going to be always like that. The euphoria of peace and of having electricity was short-lived. In August 1990 Iraqi troops invaded Kuwait. Although the Gulf War was short in Iraqi terms, its cumulative effect on the daily life of the inhabitants of the city of Baghdad was devastating. So at about two-thirty in the morning I hear a really strong knocking at the door so I looked out the window and the sky was red, totally red. My mom was crying like "my God, we are going to die." The house was 59 shaking it was really bad. So the phones start ringing "OK meet us in the morning and we will go out together like out of the city." So we took the cars and we went to my uncle's with our luggage and everything. When we went up the way was full, like totally full, lots of cars it was like God it was so scary. And you can see from here up to two and three kilometres away it was full of cars. So we took a side road and everything to this place. I don't know how it was that we survived, five minutes after we left one area the planes came back and hit the place. The entourage, numbering thirty people, hid in an empty four-room farmhouse for two weeks. It was early January and bitterly cold and within days they had lost their electricity and water supply. Noorah has the following memory: The first two nights there were lots of dogs around us, they wouldn't let us sleep. So the second day the son at the place took a gun and he was killing all the dogs. It was so cruel, but then we didn't have no choice because some of them were like sick. But one dog was pregnant and he was chasing her and he was almost going to shoot her and I went in front of her and said " i f you shoot that thing then you shoot me first." So he said "get away." So I took the dog and ran away with it until I got it lost and I got lost and people were looking for me. When they returned to Baghdad for the remainder of the war she recalls the family being washed up and in their beds by seven because that was the time bombs would start. Life also became very difficult for those who had any antipathy for Saddam Hussein. The day that they said the war was going to stop, everyone knew that the war was over and that Saddam Hussein was still there. In our street you 60 can swear about God, but i f you say "Stupid Saddam Hussein," you will get killed right in the street. Noorah's family had made one earlier attempt to get out of Iraq but their contact did not materialize. On their second try they were able to get through Jordan to Sudan. As they were about to fly to England, however, they were arrested at the airport in Sudan for travelling with false passports. Fortunately for them, the British Consul was also in the line-up that evening, saying goodbye to his family. Hearing the commotion and seeing their agitation, he intervened on their behalf and offered them protection. The family applied for refugee status, and in due course was accepted by Canada. Noorah would like to work in the media or be an actress someday. When she speaks of the wars and her family's escape it is with dramatic flare, vivid imagery and little hesitation. She has tremendous energy for her story as well as distinct expectations about what lies ahead of her. Noorah is loyal to her country and is not enamoured of the teenage behaviours she has found in our hallways. At seventeen she has an understanding of life and she clearly wants her story to be told. In this portion, where the girls' stories concern themselves with the events leading to emigration, they have dramatically portrayed and interpreted the intervention of traumatic events in their lives. What they have in common has placed a certain tattered frayedness at the edge of their voices, as they speak of what their lives were like in a distant part of the world. The voices from these interviews underscore how important it is to put a human face on being a refugee. Their words are a reminder of how fragile life is in the arena of the displaced. While they remind us of how bottomless human cruelty can be, we are encouraged at the same time by the resilience of the human spirit, no matter how meagre or uncertain the hope that is offered. As we consider their words, there are certain themes that stand out in their stories and deserve closer attention. 61 CHAPTER 5 MAJOR ISSUES FOR TEENAGE IMMIGRANT/REFUGEE GIRLS Patai (1988b) suggests that the aim of life history should be to ask, how do the lives of the subjects appear to them, what are the constraints and pathways that provide structure and direction for their lives? As the girls spoke about their experiences three themes stood out for me in their stories. It is these themes—loss, difference and resistance, and friendship—that are the focus of this chapter. These were the issues which they spoke about repeatedly and passionately, that moved them the most and indicated how their lives appeared to them. The Theme of Loss When the seven immigrant/refugee young women in this research discussed the specifics of their lives, one of the recurring themes was that of loss—loss of language, loss of status, loss of a country and culture. It was the loss of language that they usually spoke about first, their sudden inability to express themselves, their being in limbo between two languages. When analyzing stages in the rites of passage van Gennep ([1908] 1960,105) refers to this in-between phase as being in a liminal state, as waiting in a suspended existence like a novitiate. Hoffman (1989, 124) refers to this space in linguistic time as "linguistic dispossession." She describes her early determined attempts as a fourteen-year-old immigrant to bring sequence and control to the unfamiliar sounds she uttered. "I know that language will be a crucial investment that I can make to overcome the stigma of my marginality, the weight of presumption against me, i f only the reassuringly right sounds would come out of my mouth" (126). 62 When Sophie and her family "just vanished" from Romania, her initial euphoria of living "in the West" quickly came down for a hard landing. Like Hoffman, she had difficulty in getting the right sounds to have meaning. I didn't know English and that was the biggest price of all, because I started to realize that I do not know how to communicate with people. She did not like the Romanian people who were here because they were not of her class. She basically began to hate her first year as she realized how long it was going to take to even be a somebody. I hated it basically because I couldn't speak, and it hit me that I couldn't go back. I would feel like I was a nobody, like I would walk around the hall and I would feel that I was out of place. Nobody would talk to me. She adapted to the crisis that faced her by withdrawing, by what Berry (1988) refers to as voluntary withdrawal or exclusion from the adaptive environment. I would spend a lot of time at home, I wouldn't go out a lot, I watched a lot of TV. My mother had to get us out, my brother and I. "You kids are so scared." Before, we used to go out a lot. When Gordana speaks of linguistic dispossession, it is in the different context of a Croatian refugee who has just arrived in a Serbian city and is not permitted to speak in either dialect. Driven by personal safety reasons her adaptive strategy was to adjust (Berry 1988) as quickly as possible. By going out among the people, she practised in spite of the derision she encountered. Bettelheim (1943, 431) has described situations where concentration camp inmates resocialized dramatically under extreme stress. Taft (1977, 128) has described these situations as ones where rapid "desocialization" needs to take place before "resocialization" can occur. Gordana explains: I was there [in Belgrade] only for two years but I received the accent from Serbia, and now they would not even believe that I was from Croatia. But when I came from Croatia into Serbia they would recognize anybody. It 63 would hurt you every single day them saying "Shut up you don't even know how to speak." I didn't fight not to learn the accent, you can't just sit in your room and try to be isolated from the people around you, you have to study and move around and learn the Serbian accent. With this experience as the initiation, it is not surprising that she acquired the English language with little difficulty at all. When she expresses concerns over language it is in the context of a collective family endeavour. This time the three teenagers were helping the discouraged parents to adapt to the English language. They would be drained and depressed, especially my dad. He would be coming home all tired and it would be hard for him to speak with us because I guess he was depressed because people were talking to him and he could not explain his point of view. We would come home and try to talk to him in English, and whenever we would watch movies together we would ask him "How do you say this" or "How do you say that?" Or we would listen to him talking and try to correct him and say "You don't say it this way, Dad, you say it that way and people will understand you." That is the way he learned and that is the way we would learn it too. The first English word that Amina learned to say was "liquorice" and she relates the story with a laugh. The first word I learned was liquorice, the candy. Because I was listening and everybody had a test and the teacher said "Well Amina" and he wrote it down "Go to the cafeteria and here is the word for me liquorice." And the question is can I say that word and I was scared to say that word and he said "Here you go buy it." And everybody was cheering and I finally brought it back and he said "This time you go back and say you want liquorice." So I said "OK I go" and I couldn't say it when I came and the 64 teacher say "Did you say the name?" and I said "No, I just find it." [Laughter] She remembers her language struggles as being "tough," but as in Gordana's story, they were also her family's struggle, and the struggle of the church group that had sponsored them. She is conscious about the pressures she felt and rewards she received at that transitional stage. But all the teachers there they really tried, and I was able to speak English after three months, and I was able to go to Immigration and translate for other Afghanis. And I have been awarded for that. It was really tough. I mean it was fun to learn English but everyone was wondering all the time what are they saying, but we learned it pretty easily because everyone was paying attention to us so much. Loss of language was not the issue for Anastasia that it was for some of the other girls. It did not concern Anastasia as much as the awareness of her parents' loss of social status. When the Soviet Union broke apart in 1989, her parents had been living in Estonia for eight years. They had worked for the Soviet Union around the world, and were accustomed to a certain lifestyle because of their position. So we couldn't get a status to live there any more, so we tried to get back to the mother country, and when we went back there, they told us we couldn't stay there either. So we couldn't get status anywhere in any of the republics. The story is one of seeking asylum, appealing deportation orders and the eventual acceptance as landed immigrants. Right now Anastasia's father delivers pizza. That is the only job he has been able to find, although the family did deliver newspapers in the snowy winters in Newfoundland at five in the morning. The parents have over ten years of university education between them, but it has not counted for anything here. They 65 want to stay in Canada and they think that they are going to make it, that things will get better. Still Anastasia remembers: When they were back in Russia, they lived in high status. They had a lot of connections there, they felt they were somebody, people respected them, and they had lots of people that they respected. It is apparent as the young women speak of their adjustment to life in Canada that some of them anticipated that loss would be a factor in their lives. Travelling as they did with one suitcase representing their whole life, or with one suitcase for the entire family, they were familiar with loss at one level. But loss also includes loss of one's ability to converse, to have oneself understood, to be appreciated and have status among one's acquaintances. It means the loss of one's historic and geographic roots, and loss of the comfort of one's culture. What becomes obvious in this section is the realization by the girls of the pervasiveness of what they have lost. The Theme of Difference and Resistance A second theme that ran strongly through the girls' stories was that of the awareness of cultural difference and the resistance to change. In his work on coping with unfamiliar cultures, Taft (1977, 140) has observed ways in which culture shock has been defined. One of these is the realization of differences between cultures, accompanied by feelings of surprise, discomfort, anxiety and sometimes disdain. Boj ana speaks of difference in terms of students here assuming that because she came from Serbia, she would know nothing about the modern era. She was proud of the past Yugoslavia had before the war came. It's not as though we are really poor. We hate it when people come up to us and say do you like Michael Jackson? Like well of course I do, I don't live in another time period, and when they ask do I wear Reeboks, well of 66 course everybody wears that in Belgrade. They don't realize we are not stupid and we have computers in Belgrade as well. When Noorah describes the high school culture she has experienced here, her accounts include elements of discomfort, aversion and a clear sense of superiority. She says: For me I am not used to Canada yet. It is still that strange country. Every day I realize that there is something new I have to learn. Everything is so different here: people, culture, relationships, and friendships. Some things are better, some things are never good. For example the family here is not so close to each other. The second thing is relationships, the thing that I really do not like here is sex. It is like so popular and it is something really normal and people talk about it as though it is a breakfast or a lunch or dinner. The way people talk about it it's as though it is only something fun. It's really hard here, things are way too different. They are so mean. I would rather have friends who are twenty years old and up, mostly those people are grown-ups and they know what they are doing. She is amazed at the ease with which relationships are initiated and discarded. She wishes that people here treated each other with more respect, and thought more carefully about their futures in terms of family as opposed to only the individual. Of all the girls, Anastasia was the most vocal about the differences between the two cultures. She was also the most patriotic about her roots. Her responses seemed to have less to do with the resistance Taft talks about, and more to do with genuine pride in her heritage. She spoke about Canada as though she was an explorer finding a new land. It was like totally different here. For me it was like a totally new planet, like a new world I never knew about, like discover, everything. 67 The first thing I noticed when I got here is people they put themselves first. In a way I think it is really good, they will think of themselves first and then they will help you out if they can. So they will always put themselves first, that is not the way it is in Russia. I found a lot of people here were phony. Maybe in a way it is good, because look at the way this country is progressing, it is beautiful, and then look at ours. It is falling apart. If you go into a store here it is " H i , how can I help you" and stuff like that. Even in a restaurant they have those fake smiles on their faces sometimes. My mom's friend, she is a Canadian, she went back to Russia and she said people are so rude there, but they are not. It's just that they never pretend, they tell you what they think i f you want to know. They won't smile at you i f they don't want to smile at you. If they don't like you they are not going to pretend that they like you. What stands out regarding the theme of difference and resistance is the loyalty some of the girls expressed towards their traditions. Whereas this thesis pursued the theme of difference/resistance, there are sufficient hints to suggest that the collectivism/individualism continuum among refugees would be a worthwhile consideration for a future research question. Coming as Anastasia does from a collective sense of tradition, where the wishes of the family or group are primary and the individual's are secondary, she finds the absorption with the individual to be peculiar and rather self-centered. These young women are not necessarily enamoured by what they have seen of our Canadian mores. They are sceptical of and sometimes offended by the immaturity of our adolescent's behaviour. It baffles them that teenagers are treated with such special favour on this continent. Altogether it was refreshing to find such clearly stated observations from an outsider's perspective. 68 The Theme of Friendship Stevic and Rossberg (1972,44) have shown how the demands of having friends in our high school setting, can lead to to frustration and painful self-appraisal for adolescents faced with exclusion. The studies of Douvan and Adelson (1966, 174) in North America, have emphasized the engaging and transformative powers of friendship during this time period. When the girls speak it is evident that the term of friendship varies in meaning and value across cultures. As the girls talked about having "friends" in this new culture, it was clear that their interpretation was different than the term in common usage. Here the word "friend" did not mean close as they had experienced "closeness" in their home country. Anastasia says: There if you have a friend, it's like you are really, really close. It is more than just friends' friendship. There i f you have a friend it is really respect. Noorah also comments on this cultural penchant for friends, but questions the sincerity and the depth of the relationships that are being established. I am trying to find the good people and be friends with them. I am not looking for popularity now because I know that I will not get it easily here. Because being popular here means being impolite, swearing too much, going out with guys a lot and fooling around. This is not what I am like. If I get two or three friends who like me or respect me and know what I am like inside, that is more than enough. Ever since Bojana left Serbia to join her father, her step-mother and her step-brother in Canada, she has struggled with the adjustments she has had to make. Her family here is a group of strangers she is not used to, and she knows very few people at school. Of the seven interviewees, she was the refugee who had been here the shortest time. For her it had been seven months of frustration and alienation. 69 Now I am totally by myself, I am solving the problems inside of my head and my head is my friend and nobody else. I want to talk with them but when I tried they have a friend already. They don't understand what I am saying. They totally don't understand what I am saying so I have to be by myself all the time. I am like a camera here observing everybody and I don't really feel like I am fitting. I came in grade twelve and they all know each other so they are older friends among them. Because of that I don't have the memories with them of that. Now it's like ten days can pass and I can't even remember me smiling in those ten days. Sophie probably went longer than ten days without smiling the first year she was in Canada. She put it this way: I had friendships over there that I just left and I expected that I would just come over here and people would be my friends. I found that people had already friendships, and I was kind of shy and insecure. I wasn't able to go up to people and talk to them at all. I always thought they were phony with me for some reason. When these four speakers talk about friends, there is a clear sense that developing friendships in this country is not at all what they anticipated it to be. They are looking for friends that are "really, really close," "friends' friends," "real friends," that provide "respect," that like "good conversation." They know this level of closeness exists because they have experienced it in the home country. Three of the girls would rather be by themselves than be with "phony friends," or surround themselves with many friends/acquaintances Canadian-style. These three expressed impatience and anger with the immaturity of their new peers, feeling that they were witnessing someone's prolonged childhood. "I feel like I am their mother" or "I feel like giving them a good shake" are 70 feelings that were expressed. Overall there seemed to be three paths for dealing with friendships: (a) they totally don't understand what I am saying so I have to be by myself all the time; (b) I am surviving by trying to find the good people and be friends with them and forget the rest; and (c) since I came to Vancouver I made lots of "friends," I guess just like a Canadian person does, a Canadian Canadian. The disappointment in what relationships are like here may spring from cultural conditioning. Quite possibly, it may represent an impatience that comes from those displaced by conflict towards those who seem unable to understand how encompassing conflict can be. At the end of her interview Noorah said: I wish I could get a meeting with all my friends and kids at school, especially the nasty ones and we could start talking about some of the stuff that we have been talking about today. So they would know what life is about. They should stop, and they should think about the future. Hoffman (1989,148) has suggested that "friendship" in English has lost its original meaning, and become just a good-natured easy-going term. It is not a word that captures the depth of expectations that the girls had of it. Yet as Douvan and Adelson (1966) have shown, friendship carries the burden of adolescent growth. What is obvious is that the young women recognize a real friendship when they are fortunate enough to find it, and they have not all found friendship here. By the same token they value the friendships they had in the past and hold them in their memories. For all of them it was the relational aspect of friendship that they longed for as they struggled to establish themselves. Reflections on the Mother: "My Mother Would Say It Differently" In Motherless Daughters, Hope Edelman (1994,199) states that a mother's storytelling serves a vital function in a daughter's development. It is a reflexive process by which she can make sense of her past and think about what it means for the future. It can also give the teller a sense of what her family/traditions are, and where she stands as 71 a representative of that collective. When the girls were asked to think about how they thought their mothers would tell the story, the question stopped them in their tracks. Although it was a tough question, their responses revealed that they were equal to the challenge. Amina sees her mother as a conduit of the country and culture they have lost. She is aware of how much more of a past her mother left behind than she, when they fled Afghanistan. Many Canadians can envision the Sahara and Kalahari deserts of Africa, the Gobi desert and the desert in Nevada, but they would be hard pressed to put an image to the landscape of Afghanistan. Yet it draws a passionate response for those who call it their homeland. It is not possible now to return to Afghanistan, but Amina and her mother love their country deeply, and both work at keeping its memory alive. Doris Lessing has worked with Afghan Relief and recorded her visit to the refugee camps in Peshawar in 1986 in The Wind Blows Away Our Words: An old woman bursts into tears, forgetting all about the camera, and begins a plaint or chant like this: "Oh Afghanistan, Afghanistan is my sweetheart, I long for my home, for my homeland, for my people, for my Afghanistan." I think of the irony that of all people in the world the Russians ought to understand this "I long for my homeland"--for they never stop talking about their homeland, their rodina. (Lessing 1987, 81) Amina expresses it this way: Well my mother would tell it differently with lots of pain. For example when my brother got hurt, my mother was working in the factory. She was a tailor. One of her boss got killed, her friend got killed, and she has a lot of memory of our country. She grew up there forty years or something, she has a lot to say more than I do. I just grew up there and did not get a chance to get to know my country, what it really is when 72 there is not a war going on. My mom would say it differently with a lot of passion. Well my mom she is a really hard-working person, and she was willing to do any job. She worked on the farms and there is a place i f they needed help for cleaning, housekeeping and stuff, she did that. She works so hard, I always tell her "You work so hard!" Sophie said that her mother regretted their first years in this country. Her parents were intellectuals and had worked "really hard" for their way of life. My mother she was a translator of English and French. She had a good life because she was respected for what she did. If you go to school and university in Romania you are a somebody and that is what it was for my parents. When she came here, what hurt her the most was that she couldn't find a job, so for a few months she had to work in a kitchen. It brought her self-esteem really low, that is when she regretted the fact that she left Romania. She was really depressed and I hated to find that she was so depressed. I guess that was the age that I realized that I was not a kid anymore. I started to look at my parents differently, like they are people, they are not just parents. That was really harsh because I never judged my parents before. I decided to concentrate in school more. In Romania I cared about school, actually I've been brought up to care about school. When I came here I cared about it way more. I don't want my parents to regret that they came here, they basically gave up their way of life. Sophie's mother has been able recently to secure a very good job in one of the professions. This prompted Sophie to say, I was talking to my mom and she said that she is glad that she came here. So I am glad that she said that. It was hard the first years. 73 When Bojana speaks about how her mother would tell the story, it is clear that there are unfinished issues here. Well my mother, she is so unselfish you can't believe it. If I were my mom and she were my daughter, I would never let her go. She totally understood that I had to go, she had to give me the chance to see i f here I could have a better future for me. She didn't even put me in the position that I ask her can I go. She said "OK, it is totally O K if you want to go." And now she is writing me letters always. Because I can't speak with her over the phone I start to cry immediately. I don't have anything to ask of her except how is the weather like. It is really stupid. I don't want to know how is the weather like. Dominique is seventeen but she has only lived with her mother for three of those years. When I ask her how her mother would tell this story, she says, I think it would be pretty much the same because I think she was feeling like me, I love her and she loves me, but being away for fourteen years from parents it is something that you can't recover. I regret it even today, I think I should have spent those fourteen years with my mom. And when I was raped she wasn't in the country, and my grandparents told her. When I came here to Canada she told me that when they told her that I was raped, she was crying every night for me. The situation was very difficult for her too, because she was in Los Angeles as immigrant labour. She was illegal there. Dominique's mother "drives her crazy sometimes." Yet she is proud of herself that the two of them are learning to live with each other, because "I never in my life had a relationship with my mother before." It was because Gordana's mother was a tailor that the family was able to "sort of survive" when they arrived in Belgrade from Croatia. Her skill at making clothes was 74 soon known in the neighbourhood, and it was this skill that put bread on the table. But life has been difficult for Gordana's mother in Canada. Most recently, she lost her job when the garment factory where she was working closed down. She has also been less successful at learning the English language. Her mother misses the support of her family network at home. Because she is a woman and she can't go to her family, her mother is still there and her sister is back there in the war, so she is still lost. Sometimes she comes up to this idea "I wish I would still be there I would at least be working, I would be happy and satisfied." But then she knows there is no future there for us, for my sister and brother and me. She knows that, "I came here because of you and I will help you as long as we go in the right way of living," and not worry later on that "Oh my God, my child is without a leg or my child has mentally had a breakdown because we stayed here." "So it would not be what is best for me, but what is best for them." , But now she is better already, she is studying and started to go to English classes. It is getting better, she can now put some words together and make up a sentence in English. What rings true in these stories is the realization by the girls of how "really really tough" the experience of displacement has been on their parents. Their mothers, their parents, had this dream of what Canada would be like, but it has taken "much much longer" to "turn the corner" than anyone anticipated. These teenage girls have spent sleepless nights worrying about their parents' well-being, about how they together are going to put food on the table, about whether it was worth the risks they took. They began their journey as children, but abruptly left that part of their life behind them. For most families the interval of turning the corner has taken about five years. Speaking about her mother, Anastasia describes the experience this way: 75 It was really my mom's decision to come here, she had heard all these stories of how it is so much better here. You come here and get a great job right away, and you have your own house right away and your car and everything. Obviously it sounded great. It was a great vision for her, it would be a great life, just like a fairy tale. I think my mom was really disappointed. She would never show it because she is too proud. She would never show it, like "No, well I am happy here." Because she came here because she really wanted to. But I could hear her at night, crying every night. Once I told her I wanted to go back anyways. She got really, really mad. And I shouldn't have said that because they went through so much to bring me here. It really hurt her because I was saying like it was worth nothing. I am grateful that I am here and everything. And my mom has now decided that it is worth waiting for. Even though the girls were in their teenage years where resistance and even rebellion towards parents are common in our culture, they spoke willingly of their mothers. They seemed to relish the process of stopping their own activity, and telling their story the way they thought their mother might have told it. In the end it gave them a second perspective on what they had been through together. 76 CHAPTER 6 AFTERWORD Espin (1994) has asked i f it is possible to have biography outside of historical events. As these seven girls laughed, cried and struggled with the stories they told, it was plain that historical events had clearly changed the direction of their lives and their perception of life. Simone Weil (1971, 225) has said that history has always been written by the conquerors, the winners. The character Ana Historic (Marlatt 1988, 28), while surveying the landscape of her city, Vancouver, in the 1800s, observed that history is the real story that the city fathers tell of the only important events in the world, the tale of their exploits. The consideration of women's history is an attempt to provide a broader vista of human experience than what we are traditionally given by the city fathers, by the winners. Denzin (1989, 161) states that the meaning of life story lies in the discovery of the differences that set the subjects apart from others, yet join them in the common epoch they share with other ordinary people. The decade under consideration here has unfortunately been one in which terms like displacement and ethnic cleansing have become all too common. This inquiry has considered the social and historical particularities that tempered the lives of seven subjects. The process of understanding a life story is always conducted from within the life story being studied, and is best understood in the person's own terms. It allows the uniqueness and starkness of the speakers' experiences to startle us once again so that we can appreciate the differences and hope that they offer. As an educator I am humbled in the presence of their words. I am reminded of how the meagerness of the standard canon has deprived our students of a richer historical 77 text. The shared authority of this thesis has opened a space for voices not traditionally included in history, the young voices of teenage immigrant/refugee girls. They represent different classes, races, religions and ethnicities. Although they are young in years, they have spoken with authority and wisdom about their experience, and about the issues that concern them. The sense they have of their lives is given through images of loss, difference and belonging. They have thought about themselves, and have shown themselves to themselves and to us. With frankness and honesty they have observed themselves becoming who they now are. The stories that these young women have shared of themselves in transition belong, in the final analysis, to them. The stories of their courage are lent to us to resonate in our memory. The girls have spoken in a fascinating way about their time in transition, especially in terms of implications for schools. One of the first themes mentioned has been the loss of language, the loss of actual words to speak, the despair in the realization that they had lost their ability to communicate, that they did not know how to be understood. It was this place between two languages that they hated the most. It isolated them in the hallways, and it intensified their loneliness. In spite of the best intentions of ESL classes, "this is a table, this is a book, this is Canada" could not help them survive the lunch hour and the unstructured times as they stood alone in the corner of the field or walked the halls by themselves. This implies that schools need to take a second look at how they provide opportunities for students in this liminal phase. It is not sufficient to rationalize that all immigrants go through this, and these too will survive in the end. Elementary schools seem to be more successful at providing buddy systems, drop-in centres, game rooms, and social mixer activities. This attention to need, seems to break down at the secondary level, as it become easier to get lost in the system. One of the resources to help solve this conundrum could be the recent survivors themselves. They will remember what could have helped them as they were waiting to be recognized and respected in those early months. 78 Another theme that particularly rankled the speakers was the assumption that as immigrants they had no past, and therefore no contribution to make. It was clear that they valued their cultural origins and traditions, and that they wanted to be considered for what they had been, not just for what we saw and assumed as they arrived at our door. Schools might consider that the perils of adjustment can be made less formidable when those who have been displaced are encouraged to acclaim what they value of their cultural origins, as they seek some continuity and relevance in the present. The subject of acclamation is encompassing enough to warrent further research in its own right. Third, the history traditionally presented in school texts still suggests that the key events of history occurred exclusively thanks to a handful of remote individuals. When Peter Seixas (1993) looked at how adolescents of multicultural backgrounds understood the historical process, he found that for those students history was other people's history. Traditional history and the format in which it had been taught had been unable to integrate the depth and the richness of the students' backgrounds with the formal learning process. It is time for the authors of teaching resources, and educators, to address challenges like these, and to consider how to integrate into the text, the authority of the other voices that have arrived in our midst. One would anticipate that in a culturally diverse school population, staff would be encouraging of the progress of immigrants, particularly as they bravely take the first steps from transitional classes into the mainstream. Yet as the girls spoke it seemed quietly apparent that some of us as educators had fallen short in this regard. Fourth, then, it is important that staff, particularly at the high school level, be sensitized in cross-cultural understanding through workshops and in-service training, and that they be encouraged to create a more receptive and trusting environment in which newcomers can feel safe to respond in their new language. Last of all, it was evident that these immigrant/refugee students were eager to be involved in the planning and implementation of solutions to problems affecting them in 79 their new culture. As newcomers they can provide a different perspective and a fresh viewpoint on the culture to which they want to contribute. Immigrant students arrive with strengths and talents, imagining that they will be able to make a contribution, and yet often no avenue for this exists. It seems that i f schools provided the opportunities for involvement, students like these would participate. Jane Gaskell (1988, 166) has said that any attempt to give young people a sense of their own agency in the world must involve showing them that the world is constructed through a series of political and personal voices that can be altered through action. Like Noorah they "could start talking about some of the stuff that we have been talking about today." Until then, we have served them poorly by not providing them a place to express the truths which they bring. In 1928 when Virginia Woolf went to the British Museum to seek the truth about women in fiction, she was horrified at the mountain of materials that had been written about women—all written by men. Listings from "Habits in the Fiji Islands" to "Dr. Johnson's opinion o f met her gaze. No women had written a word on the subject of women in the "avalanche of books" brought to her table, when every other man capable of picking up a pen had apparently become an expert. Things were even more one-sided when she continued along the shelves to the History section. A bizarre hybrid began to emerge. In Literature, woman was of the highest importance; in History, she was completely insignificant. She was "a worm with the wings of an eagle, the spirit of life and beauty in a kitchen chopping suet" (Woolf [1929] 1967, 66). Occasionally, Woolf observed, an Elizabeth or a Mary appeared, but according to historians ordinary women did not take part in any single one of the greatest movements of history. Nor was it possible to do more than just surmise about any of the women's actual lives. The role models were absent from history. "Some of the most profound thoughts in literature fell from her lips; in real life she could hardly read, could scarcely spell and was the property of her husband" (66). 80 Looking in history for what was not there, Woolf concluded that history was in need of an infusion. Twenty years later Mary Beard also noted what Woolf had observed about gender and class, and suggested that a true history of women was needed and that it should reflect the variety in states of women. Lerner suggested in 1979 that a new stage of promise in women's history could be the study of women's cultures, considering race, class, ethnicity and religion. The scholarship that has followed has been abundant in its richness. In the last two decades, life history~the retrospective account of individual lives-has been explored as a methodology for telling women's history. Life story allows the story to be told from the speaker's point of view, and, as in this thesis, breaks down the otherness of 'refugee' as a category. Teenage immigrant/refugee girls have spoken in the space of this thesis. At a time in North American society when peer friendship and belonging carries much of the burden of adolescent growth, immigrants/refugees walk the hallways of our schools with additional concerns. The trauma of their journey, that they even had a past, is barely recognized in a culture which to the newcomer must seem fickle. The refugee is in a new country but without a country. Like novitiates in a liminal state, they watch and attempt to participate. But often ideas that were central to their lives have no corresponding meaning or currency in the host country. When the idea is finally tentatively expressed, the listener is impatient and insensitive to the hearing of it. Bruner (1990, 124) has stated that despite the epistemological burdens of autobiography which theorists have been concerned about in the last decade, ordinary people have very little difficulty in telling their stories. This was certainly the case during the interviews I conducted. As I listened to the girls speak I was startled by their frankness and amazed by the imprint of disjuncture on their lives. The most surprising thing of all was the sense the young women had of who they were, in spite of everything. At a time in their lives when life should hold promise and problems should be kept in 81 abeyance, they were coping with severe trauma and finding solutions to begin a new day. They had experienced discouragement, defeat and rejection; had felt fear and isolation; and had looked death in the eyes. They had waited for the bombs to stop so they could go out and bury their dead, and had stood in line at five o'clock in the morning to bring milk to a child. Today they are not optimistic as the innocent are optimistic. There is a distinct frayedness at the edge of their voices when they speak. Nevertheless, they search for ideals; you can also hear that in their voices. I could not help think of another teenager's optimism during conflict. Anne Frank wrote: It's twice as hard for us young ones to hold our ground, and maintain our opinions, in a time when all ideals are being shattered and destroyed, when people are showing their worst side, and do not know whether to believe in truth and right and God. In the meantime I must uphold my ideals, for perhaps the time will come when I shall be able to carry them out. (1952, 278) As these girls told their stories, they were clear in their determination to make this new life work for themselves and for their families. I leave the last words to two of them. Now we are at least settled down compared to the way we were before. We are at least happy that we could come here and start some kind of lifes. (Gordana) But it is certain things I miss. You know the simple things like what kind of chocolate you are eating, that is the kind of thing I am missing about my sister. But still I am happier with who I am, and I now think that I am actually getting there. (Bojana) 82 WORKS CITED Abu-Lughod, Lila. 1993. Writing women's worlds: Bedouin stories. Berkeley: University of California Press. Action, Janice, Penny Goldsmith and Bonnie Shepard, eds. 1974. Women at work: Ontario 1850-1930. Toronto: Women's Educational Press. Alpern, Sara, Joyce Antler, Elizabeth Israels Perry and Ingrid Winther Scobie, eds. 1992. The challenge of feminist biography. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Anwar, Muhammad. 1979. The myth of return: The Pakistanian in Britain. London: Heinemann. Appleyard, R. 1991. International migration: Challenge for the nineties. Geneva: International Organization for Migration. Axelrod, M . 1956. Urban structure and social participation. American Sociological Review 21:13-18. Barber, Marilyn. 1986. Sunny Ontario for British girls 1900-1930. In Looking into my sister's eyes: An exploration of women's history, edited by Jean Burnet, 55-74. Toronto: Multicultural History Society of Ontario. —. 1987. The servant problem in Manitoba, 1896-1930. In First days, fighting days: Women in Manitoba history, edited by Mary Kinnear, 100-119. Regina: Canadian Plains Research Center, University of Regina. Barman, Jean. 1991. Separate and unequal: Indian and white girls at A l l Hallows School, 1884-1920. In Re-thinking Canada: The promise of women's history, edited by Veronica Strong-Boag and Anita Clair Fellman, 215-33. Toronto: Copp Clark Pitman. 83 BC Studies. 1995. Woman's history and gender studies [Special Issue]. Nos. 105/106 (Spring/Summer). Beard, Mary R. 1946. Women as a force in history. New York: Octagon Books. Behar, Ruth. 1990. Rage and redemption: Reading the lifestory of a Mexican marketing woman. Feminist Studies 16:223-58. —. 1993. Translated woman: Crossing the border with Esperanza's story. Boston: Beacon Press. Berry, John W. 1988. Acculturation and psychological adaptation among refugees. In Refugees: The trauma of exile and the humanitarian role of the Red Cross and the Red Crescent, edited by Diana Miserez, 97-110. Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers. Bettelheim, Bruno. 1943. Indivudual and Mass Behaviour in Extreme Situations. In Journal of Abnormal Social Psychology 38:417-52. Boulding, Elsie. 1976. The underside of history: A view of women through time. Boulder: Westview Press. Bowen, Deborah J., Lisa Carscadden, Kate Beighle and India Fleming. 1992. Post-traumatic stress disorder among Salvadoran women: Empirical evidence and description of treatment. In Refugee women and their mental health: Shattered societies, shattered lives, edited by Ellen Cole, Oliva M . Espin and Esther D. Rothblum, 267-80. New York: Harrington Park Press. Bradbury, Bettina, ed. 1992. Canadian family history: Selected readings. Toronto: Copp Clark Pitman. Brinton Lykes, M . Dialogue with Guatemalan Indian women: Critical perspectives on constructing collaborative research. In Representations: Social constructions of gender, edited by R. K. Unger, 167-85. Amityville, N.Y. : Baywood. 84 —. 1994. Speaking against the silence: One Maya woman's exile and return. In Women creating lives: Identities, resiliance, and resistance, edited by Carol E. Franz and Abigail Stewart, 97-114. Boulder: Westview Press. Brown, Lyn Mikel and Carol Gilligan. 1992. Meeting at the crossroads: Women's psychology and girls' development. New York: Ballantine Books. Bruner, Jerome. 1990. Acts of meaning. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Buijs, Gina. 1993. Migrant women: Crossing boundaries and changing identities. Oxford: Berg. Burnet, Jean, ed. 1986. Looking into my sister's eyes: An exploration of women's history. Toronto: Multicultural History Society of Ontario. Canadian Woman Studies/les cahiers de la femme. 1986. Writing women into history [Special Issue]. Vol . 7, no. 3 (Fall). —. 1995. Women's rights are human rights [Special Issue]. Vol. 15, nos. 2/3 (Spring/Summer). Cole, Ellen, Oliva M . Espin and Esther D. Rothblum, eds. 1992. Refugee women and their mental health: Shattered societies, shattered lives. New York: Harrington Park Press. Crapanzano, Vincent. 1980. Tuhani: Portrait of a Moroccan. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. —. 1984. Life histories: A review essay. American Anthropologist 86:953-60. Creese, Gillian and Veronica Strong-Boag, eds. 1992. British Columbia reconsidered: Essays on women. Vancouver: Press Gang Publishers. Cruikshank, Julie. 1990. Life lived like a story: Life stories of three Yukon Native elders. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press. Davis, Natalie. 1976. Women's history in transition: The European case. Feminist Studies 3, nos. 3/4:83-103. De Beauvoir, Simone. 1989. The second sex. New ed., New York: Vintage Books. 85 Denich, Bette S. 1974. Sex and power in the Balkans. In Woman culture and society, edited by Michelle Zimbalist Rosaldo and Louise Lamphire, 243-62. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Denzin, Norman K. 1978. The research act: A theoretical introduction and sociological methods. New York: McGraw Hi l l Book Co. —. 1989. Interpretive interactionism. Newberry Park: Sage Publications. Disman, Milada. 1983. Immigrants and other grieving people: Insights for counselling practices and policy issues. Canadian Ethnic Studies 15, no. 3:106-18. Douvan, Elizabeth and Joseph Adelson. 1966. The adolescent experience. New York: John Wiley and Sons. Eastmond, Marita. 1993. Reconstructing life: Chilean refugee women and the dilemmas of exile. In Migrant women: Crossing boundaries and changing identities, edited by GinaBuijs, 35-53. Oxford: Berg. Edelman, Hope. 1994. Motherless daughters: The legacy of loss. Reading: Addison-Wesley Publishing Company. Espin, Oliva M . 1987. Psychological impact of migration on Latinas: Implications for psychotherapeutic practice. Psychology of Women's Quarterly 11,no.4:489-503. —. 1994. Traumatic historical events and adolescent psychological development: Letters from V. In Women creating lives: Identities, resilience, and resistance, edited by Carol E. Franz and Abigail Stewart, 187-98. Boulder: Westview Press. Engelmann, Kurt E. 1994. Estonia. Encarta '95 Redmond: Microsoft Corporation. Filice, Ivanna Linai and Christina Vincent. 1995. Developing a culturally sensitive framework for assisting Bosnian Women refugees. Canadian Woman Studies/les cahiers de la femme 15, nos. 2/3 (Spring/Summer):76-80. Frank, Anne. 1952. The diary of a young girl. Garden City: Doubleday and Company. Frank, Gelya. 1979. Finding the common denominator: A phenomenological critique of life history method. Ethos 7 (Spring):68-91. 86 Freund, Alexander and Laura Quilici. 1995. Exploring myths and women's narratives: Italian and German immigrant women in Vancouver 1947-1961. B C Studies 105/106 (Spring/Summer): 159-82. Friesen, John, ed. 1989. Mennonites in Russia: 1788-1988. Winnipeg: C M B C Publications. Gaskell, Jane. 1988. The reproduction of family life: Perspectives of male and female adolescents. In Gender and society: Creating a Canadian women's sociology, edited by Arlene Tigar McLaren, 146-68. Toronto: Copp Clark Pitman. Gies, Frances and Joseph Gies. 1978. Women in the Middle Ages. New York: Barnes and Noble Books. Gluck, ShernaB. 1987. Rosie the Riveter Revisited: Women, the war and social change. Boston: Twayne Publishers. Higonnet, Margaret Randolph, Jane Jenson, Sonya Michel and Margaret Collins Weitz, eds. 1987. Behind the lines: Gender and the two world wars. New Haven. Yale University Press. Hoffman, Eva. 1989. Lost in translation: A life in a new language. New York: Penguin Books. Hopkins, Elizabeth. 1986. A prison-house for prosperity: The immigrant experience of the upper-class British woman. In Looking into my sister's eyes: A n exploration of women's history, edited by Jean Burnet, 7-19. Toronto: Multicultural History Society of Ontario. Jeffries, Theresa M . 1992. Sechelt women and self-government. In British Columbia reconsidered: Essays on women, edited by Gillian Creese and Veronica Strong-Boag, 90-95. Vancouver: Press Gang Publishers. Kaplan, Marion. 1995. Jewish women in Nazi Germany before emigration. In Between sorrow and strength: Women refugees of the Nazi period, edited by Sibylle Quack, 11-48. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 87 Klassen, Pamela E. 1994. Going by the moon and the stars: Stories of two Russian Mennonite women. Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press. Kostash, Myrna. 1987. No kidding: Inside the world of teenage girls. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart. Landry, Yves. 1992. Gender imbalance, les Filles du Roi, and choice of spouse in New France. In Canadian family history: Selected readings, edited by Bettina Bradbury, 14-32. Toronto: Copp Clark Pitman Ltd. Lane, Anne J., ed. 1977. Mary Ritter Beard: A sourcebook. New York: Schocken Books. Latham, Barbara and Kathy Kess. 1980. In her own right: Selected essays on women's history in B.C. Victoria: Camosun College. Latham, Barbara K. and Roberta J. Pazdro, eds. 1984. Not just pin money: Selected essays on the history of women's work in British Columbia. Victoria: Camosun College. Lerman, Hannah. 1986. From Freud to feminist personality theory: Getting there from here. Psychology of Women Quarterly 10:1-18. Quoted in Rhoda K. Unger and Mary Crawford, Women and gender: A feminist psychology (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1992), 29. Lerner, Gerda. 1976. Placing women in history. In Liberating women's history: Theoretical and critical essays, edited by Berenice A. Carroll, 357-68. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. —. 1979. The majority finds its past. Oxford: Oxford University Press. —. 1986. The creation of the patriarchy. New York: Oxford University Press. —. 1993. The creation of feminist consciousness: From the Middle Ages to 1870. New York: Oxford University Press. Lessing, Doris. 1987. The wind blows away our words. London: Picador. Lewin, Kurt. 1948. Resolving social conflict. New York: Harper. 88 Lewis, Oscar. 1963. The children of Sanchez. New York: Random House. Lindstrom-Best, Varpu. 1986. "I won't be a slave!" Finnish domestics in Canada 1911-1930. In Looking into my sister's eyes: An exploration of women's history, edited by Jean Burnet, 33-54. Toronto: Multicultural History Society of Ontario. —. 1988. Defiant sisters: A social history of Finnish immigrant women in Canada 1890-1930. Toronto: Multicultural History Society of Ontario. Marlatt, Daphne. 1988. Ana Historic. Toronto: Coach House Press. Martin, Susan Forbes. 1991. Refugee women. London: Zed Books. Meyerhoff, Barbara. 1982. Life history among the elderly: Performance, visibility and remembering. In A crack in the mirror: Reflexive perspective in anthropology, edited by Jay Ruby, 99-117. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Miles, Rosalind. 1988. The women's history of the world. London: Paladin. Miller, Alice. [1988] 1991. Banished knowledge: Facing childhood injuries. Reprint, New York: Anchor Books. Moghadam, Valentine M . 1993. Modernizing women: Gender and social change in the Middle East. Boulder: Lynne Rienner Publishers. Moser, Claus and Graham Kalton. 1971. Survey methods in social investigation. Aldershot: Gower. Muszynski, Alicja. 1984. The organization of women and ethnic minorities in a resource industry: A case study of the unionization of shore workers in the B.C. fishing industry 1937-1949. Journal of Canadian Studies 19, no. 1 (Spring):89-107. Ng, Roxana. 1981. Constituting ethnic phenomenon: An account from the perspective of immigrant women. Canadian Ethnic Studies 13, no. 1:97-108. NGuyen, Ba Thien and Brigitte Malapert. 1988. The psychological consequences for children of war trauma and migration. In Refugees: The trauma of exile and the 89 humanitarian role of the Red Cross and the Red Crescent, edited by Diana Miserez, 248-86. Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers. Parr, Joy. 1991. The skilled emigrant and her kin: Gender, culture, and labour recruitment. In Re-thinking Canada: The promise of women's history, edited by Veronica Strong-Boag and Anita Clair Fellman, 337-55. Toronto: Copp Clark Pitman. Patai, Daphne. 1988a. Brazilian women speak: Contemporary life stories. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. —. 1988b. Constructing a self: A Brazilian life story. Feminist Studies 14 (Spring): 143-66. Prentice, Alison and Susan Mann Trofimenkoff, eds. 1977-1985. The neglected majority: Essays in Canadian women's history. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart. Rady, Martyn. 1992. Romania in turmoil: A contemporary history. London: LB. Tauris and Co. Rosaldo, Michelle Zimbalist. 1974. Woman, culture and society: A theoretical overview. In Woman culture and society, edited by Michelle Zimbalist Rosaldo and Louise Lamphire, 17-42. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Rosenthal, Star. 1979. Union maids: Organized women workers in Vancouver 1900-1915. BC Studies 41 (Spring):36-55. Ruiz, Vicki L. and Ellen Carol DuBois, eds. 1994. Unequal sisters: A multicultural reader in U.S. women's history. New York: Routledge. Rundle, R. N . 1979. International affairs 1890-1939. London: Hodder and Stoughton. Sartre, Jean-Paul. 1981. The family idiot: Gustave Flaubert 1820-1857. Vol. 1. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Seixas, Peter. 1993. Historical understanding among adolescents in a multicultural setting. Curriculum Inquiry 23, no. 3:301-27. 90 Sheperd, Judith. 1992. Post-traumatic stress disorder in Vietnamese women. In Refugee women and their mental health: Shattered societies, shattered lives, edited by Ellen Cole, Olivia M . Espin and Esther D. Rothblum, 281-96. Harrington Park Press. Smith, Bonnie G. 1984. The contribution of women to modem historiography in Great Britain, France, and the United States, 1750-1940. American Historical Review 89, no. 3 (June):709-32. Stevic, Richard R. and Robert Rossberg. 1972. Youth: Myths and realities. Columbus: Charles and Merrill Publishing Co. Stewart, Abigail. 1994. Towards a feminist strategy for studying women's lives. In Women creating lives: Identities, resiliance and resistance, edited by Carol E. Franz and Abigail Stewart, 11-35. Boulder: Westview Press. Strong-Boag, Veronica. 1990. Writing about women. In Writing about Canada: A handbook for modern Canadian history, edited by John Schulz, 175-200. Scarborough: Prentice-Hall Canada. Strong-Boag, Veronica and Anita Clair Fellman, eds. 1991. Re-thinking Canada: The promise of women's history. Toronto: Copp Clark Pitman. Strong-Boag, Veronica and Kathryn McPherson. 1992. The confinement of women: Child-birth and hospitalization in Vancouver, 1919-1939. In British Columbia reconsidered: Essays on women, edited by Gillian Creese and Veronica Strong-Boag, 43-71. Vancouver: Press Gang Publishers. Taft, Ronald. 1977. Coping with unfamiliar cultures. In Studies in cross-cultural psychology, vol. 1, edited by Neil Warren, 121-53. London: Academic Press. Ulrich, Laurel Thatcher. 1990. A midwife's tale: The life of Martha Ballard based on her diary 1785-1812. New York: Vintage Books. Unger, Rhoda K. and Mary Crawford. 1992. Women and gender: A feminist psychology. New York: McGraw-Hill. 91 United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). 1993. The state of the world's refugees 1993: The challenge of protection. New York: Penguin Books. van Gennep, Arnold. [1908] 1960. The rites of passage. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. van Kirk, Sylvia. 1991. The role of Native women in the fur trade society of western Canada, 1670-1830. In Re-thinking Canada: The promise of women's history, edited by Veronica Strong-Boag and Anita Clair Fellman, 73-80. Toronto: Copp Clark Pitman. —. 1992. A vital presence: Women in the Cariboo gold rush, 1862-1875. In British Columbia reconsidered: Essays on women, edited by Gillian Creese and Veronica Strong-Boag, 21-37. Vancouver: Press Gang Publishers. Warren, Catharine E. 1986. Vignettes of life: Experiences and self perceptions of new Canadian women. Calgary: Detselig Enterprises Limited. Watson, Lawrence C. and Maria-Barbara Watson-Franke. 1985. Interpreting life histories: Anthropological inquiry. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Weil, Simone. 1971. The need for roots. New York: Harper and Row. Wemple, Suzanne F. 1985. Women in Frankish society: Marriage and the cloister 500-900. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Whittaker, Elvi , ed. 1995. A Baltic odyssey: War and survival. Calgary: University of Calgary Press. Woolf, Virginia. [1927] 1967. A room of one's own. Reprint, London: The Hogarth Press. Zolberg, Aristide R., Astri Suhrki and Sergio Aguayo. 1989. Escape from violence: Conflict and the refugee crisis in the developing world. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Thesis/Dissertation
eng
Education
Vancouver : University of British Columbia Library
For non-commercial purposes only, such as research, private study and education. Additional conditions apply, see Terms of Use https://open.library.ubc.ca/terms_of_use.
Graduate
Listening to life stories teenage immigrant refugee girls tell
Text