To All Appearances A Lady - University of British Columbia

control of the B.C. fishery—a conflict in
which First Nations Peoples were also major
actors—is reduced to a standoff between
"whites" and "Japanese." Given Omatsu's
anger over the injustices she and other
Japanese Canadians have suffered because
of perceptions of "race," such generalizations
are probably more a result of carelessness
or haste than an actual adherence to
theories of racialization, but I wonder why
she did not take care to avoid such
unthinking repetition of racial epithets.
Had Omatsu kept the promise of her preface,
she might have avoided these problems.
Ann DEcter has chosen the wiser course
in her first novel, Paper, Scissors, Rock. Most
obviously, this work is a chronicle of the
narrator (Jane)'s attempt to recognize her
"Self" that played "daughter" in her father's
life and death. But Decter's multiply-layered
text also treats larger political and historical
Canadian events, such as the Winnipeg
General Strike of 1919 and the Aboriginal
Justice Inquiry, as well as the recording of
history in general. Always, though, the personal
account directs the larger historical
one: "History is no longer Columbus and
Brebeuf, brave discovery and cruel burnings,"
decides Jane finally, but the tales of
grandparents and others whose lives are
documented only by their living. Accordingly,
History appears in these pages as fragments
of media reportage, dependent on memory,
and secondary to the story of the narrator's
life, itself a collage of the actions and memories
of other's stories.
It is not so much this message that makes
Paper, Scissors, Rock a remarkable work:
righting history is already a common
theme in Canadian literature. In fact,
Decter's tendency to lapse into a didactic
historical corrective mode is one of the
least engaging features of her writing. What
softens my grimace at this, and her overstated
and (given the flavour of the text)
strangely apolitical conclusion is the daring
way she takes me there.
Decter has divided her text into five sections.
The first, "Hatred," introduces
themes she treats in the course of the novel:
Jane's father's abuse of her mother;
Canadian brands of racism and homophobia;
and history silenced. Fragments of the
game, "Paper, Scissors, Rock," intersect
with Decter's major metaphor of cutting
back the wildly overgrown caraganas
planted by her mother, and still thriving on
the thin soil of pre-Cambrian shield at the
family cabin. The final section, "Justice,"
manages to revisit the earlier ones while
refusing a denouement.
Within the five sections, Decter ventures
a poetic to and fro of language acrobatics
that sometimes falters: "Memory, memoir,
[sic] mindful. / Remember, rememorari,
[sic] call to mind." But this dependence on
deconstructive finger exercises happens far
less than her more sophisticated and challenging
attempts, such as the rollicking
exchange between the child Jane, her brother,
and the graduate student who interviews
the siblings for her research on "cross-religious
marriages." Where the former passage
reads much like a forces reworking of
Decter's early poetry, the latter offers a
hilarious conflation of artificial religious,
cultural, and linguistic boundaries suffered
by the children's unconditioned interpretation
of the Bible and Old Testament epic
movies. Had Decter treated the reader to
more of such dramatic dialogue the book
may not have sagged as it does in places,
but this minor point does not detract from
the overall appeal of Paper, Scissors, Rock.
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