First Year Hons. Mention: Resistance: The Song of Healing.”

HUMA 1825, Law and Morality in Literature and Culture. CD: Neil Braganza.

Abstract

The course, “Law and Morality in Literature and Culture,” asked students to “write an essay on the two-headed serpent in Lee Maracle’s novel, Celia’s Song, and how this figure sheds light on the struggle against colonialism in Canada,” specifying a close reading. This essay, “Resistance: The Song of Healing,” deserves Honorable Mention as an impressive example of a close reading in a Humanities context, paying careful attention to the ways that Maracle’s deployment of the two-headed serpent figure structures the plot of her novel and the forces pulling her characters toward each head – Restless and Loyal. The essay is an articulate analysis that works closely with the language of the novel to connect, throughout, the concerns of the individual characters and the events in one community, to the larger, continuing, struggle against colonialism in Canada. As the essay notes, Maracle uses the serpent figure to present both a “labyrinth of intergenerational trauma” and an “Indigenous family’s resistance to the havoc of cultural genocide [. . .] the community’s dance with restlessness and their recovery from it”.