I’m very taken with “Song of Rita Joe, Autobiography of and a Mi'maq poet,"which my summer reading group will be discussing later this week. Rita Joe was born in 1932 on an Indian
reservation in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia.
Her very early life was poor but also warm and happy. After her mother died in childbirth, when Rita was five, the child live in a series of Native foster homes until her father was able to reunite
the family for one year. Then when she
was ten her father died, and she went to live with a much older half brother
and his wife. That household was so
bedeviled by alcohol and neglect that Rita contacted the authorities and asked to be sent to
a residential school. The school, run by nuns, operated in a highly regimented
manner. Rita lived there from ages 12 to
16. After graduating from eighth grade
she left to work in Halifax.
In reaction against having her spiritual life so highly organized, she
stayed away from church for a year. She
also began drinking rather freely and got involved in a naive and needy way
with any man who paid attention to her. By
the time she was twenty, she had given birth to three babies by three different
men. The first she turned over to her
older, married sister to adopt.
While engaged to be married she met a charming Native man
whose impulsive proposal she accepted. Frank Joe,
her husband was fond of one of her two children but persuaded her to give the
other one to her sister who could find a home for it. During the next fifteen years Rita and Frank
had eight children together. In spite of his many good qualities and despite
the love they bore each other, the marriage was tumultuous in large part
because of Frank’s womanizing, his drinking and his abusive behavior.
Rita did not write about her husband’s abuse until after he’d
died. She did finally speak of it
earlier, however, and it’s when she went public that he shaped up. She would leave their home for days, the
older children looking after the younger, and seek out elders and other wise
people to confide in. She had come up
with the idea that peer pressure can change abusers for the good. When Rita was pregnant with her last child, her mother-in-law, who was tough
and had never allowed either of her husbands to abuse her and who had come to
love Rita as though she were her own, smacked Frank as hard as she could with a block of
wood and yelled, “Don’t you ever lay a hand on Rita again as long as you live!” And he never did. Before this time several
people, including her mother-in-law warned Rita that she was acting like a
doormat. It’s when she stopped trying to
hide the abuse—which, nevertheless, was obvious to others in the community—that
matters began to improve. Eventually, Frank gave up drinking and pursued higher education.
In her mid-thirties, Rita had a hysterectomy. Although the author doesn't blame her husband for her gynecological problems I can imagine that the severe beatings she alludes to might have played a role."...I was having a hard time with bleeding, miscarriages and
stillborn children. There came a time when the doctor said to me, 'If you want to live for the other children, you must have a hysterectomy.'
"'Yes!' I said. 'Of course I want to live.' I knew what it was like to be without a mother and I didn't want that for my children. I went to see a priest and told him about this choice. 'You have to make up your own mind. I cannot tell you what to do,' he said. 'Do what your heart tells you.'
My heart told me that I should be with the children I had. Excuse me, God, I said, I do not want to die like my mother. I have to do it this way."
It was about this time that Rita began writing the poetry that eventually led to her national fame in Canada.
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