THE AUTHORITY OF THE "I".(ethnic identity)

LIFE STORIES AND ETHNIC IDENTITY

AS A RESEARCH fellow in the field of English, I have studied the multicultural literatures of Australia and Canada for several years. Although my work has varied in approach (thematic studies of texts, editing anthologies, empirical investigations and case studies) I have retained an interest in the role of life-story telling in the formation of personal and cultural identity, and the ways in which narrative can be used to construct a cultural location. I want now to draw upon my own experience as a person of "ethnic" background who has written short stories about ancestry and culturally diverse experiences.

I first wrote a story in response to a call for papers for a book prospectively titled

"Living Two Cultures". The book was to deal specifically with the experiences of second-generation immigrant women in Australia--that is, the Australian-born daughters of immigrants. The title immediately imaged a contradiction--to be Australian-born and yet still be an "immigrant" of some sort. The idea of writing about my own cultural experiences appealed to me despite having never written a story before, and I was drawn instinctively towards the theme of living two cultures, since it seemed to describe so succinctly the way I had lived--and struggled with--an Australian and Ukrainian way of life.

For three evenings in succession I wrote. I wrote of experiences only a few years old. I wrote of an adolescence the immediate pain of which had now faded away. And I wrote of a childhood that seemed light years away, a world no longer accessible to me. I wrote without thinking, from the heart. In fact, I have never written a piece so easily. Feeling sure that my work would not be good enough for the anthology, I wrote with the freedom of writing for myself.

I wrote what I knew to be true; I strained to remember, to describe what I had seen and taken for granted at the time. As years sped past in my mind's eye, people from my past stumbled by, places sprang to life. 1 stopped at key points: points of pain, points of pleasure. In some I luxuriated, in most I cringed, inwardly, remembering the pain of rejection, humiliation, remembering the sneers and smirks of others, a shot of pain in the back of my throat as I held back tears, blubbering in private behind a building or a tree. I wrote simply, descriptively, not rhetorically. I didn't think about what I was doing, I just wrote, despite the fact that by day I was a doctoral student caught in a world where the whirlpool of literary theory raged around me.

For all around me the notion of identity was in disrepute. Every school of contemporary thought was hacking away at it, undermining its foundations, waiting for it to topple, foreshadowing its collapse. Feminist theorists accused identity of being a "phallogocentric" construct of paternal law that suppressed a pre-existent feminine. Post-structuralists announced identity to be endlessly deferred and deferring, much like the poor signifier, fated never to be satisfied. Psychoanalysis had found identity to be a construction of the ego, balancing precariously upon the incessant demands of an unconscious, tightly restrained but champing at the bit to be free. Postmodernists saw it all as a simulation, a continual reproduction, the image of an image, a pastiche.