Heart of a Stranger.

Kertzer, Jon

Heart of a Stranger. Margaret Laurence, Ed. Nora Foster Stovel. Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 2003. xxxiii + 236 pp. $29.95 sc.

This volume reprints essays written by Margaret Laurence between 1964 and 1975 and first published as a collection in 1976. It is edited and annotated by Nora Foster Stovel, who appends an additional essay on tribalism as well as Laurence's translations of the Somali poet, Salaan Arrabey. Stovel also includes an introduction that nimbly surveys Laurence's life and career. Her annotations are unobtrusive and devoted to biographical and textual matters.

Laurence lived in Africa for seven years and in England for another ten before returning home as a famous author. As her biblical title suggests ("Also, thou shalt not oppress a stranger; for ye know the heart of a stranger, seeing ye were strangers in the land of Egypt," Exodus 23:9), her main concern is travel and the insights that travel afforded her into the lives of strangers in Africa, Britain, and Europe, insights that later provided a mirror for recognizing herself as a Canadian writer. The essays vary in interest and style. Some are slight and were intended to amuse magazine readers with humorous sketches of airplane trips, television interviews, taxi rides, and Christmas. Others are history lessons, plump full of facts delivered in a schoolteacher voice and instructing us about Egyptian pharaohs, Somali verse, the Suez Canal, or Gabriel Dumont. Others are about Laurence's ambitious as a writer, especially in relation to the places that nurtured her; these have already become classics of Canadian literature. All are carefully crafted even when they sound casual, and all are personal in the sense that they chart Laurence's curious, compassionate engagement with cultures far from her native Neepawa, Manitoba. In different ways, all of the essays seek to combine knowledge (all those plump facts) with sympathy (accepting the strangeness of strangers)--where the knowledge is usually tragic, because it exposes the cruel injustice of what she simply calls "the world's way" (p. 83); and the sympathy is redemptive, because it promises to relieve our suffering. Laurence's novels convey the same tragic-redemptive vision, but Heart era Stranger reveals that she always summoned subtle powers of thought, observation, and expression in the service of moral sensitivity.

A few recurring themes knit this collection together. One is Laurence's fascination with place, one's "heartland," in relation to personal and communal identities. People are rooted in locales that provide them with ancestral myths, yet the history of the world is a tale of wandering and displacement. Hence the plight of people who feel both rooted and nomadic, like the Scots in her poignant sketch, "Road from the Isles." She tries to work out the competing demands of belonging (remaining rooted) and longing (travelling, exceeding one's limits) in the essay on tribalism, but here as elsewhere, she finally seeks solace by embracing rather than resolving "human paradox" (p. 83). Similarly, she reveals her love of the epic, as she is drawn to the heroic examples of doomed leaders like Dumont and the Somalis, Mahammed 'Abdille Hasan, and Elmii Bonderii. Nevertheless, for Laurence, heroism is always flawed, whether enhanced by the soothing deceptions of legend, or simply a lie. She has too strong a sense of human frailty, and too strong a taste for incongruity to uncritically accept magnificent appearances. If the world presents a spectacle of noble efforts, it is also full of "individual twits" (p. 100)--the last words applied to fifteen canaries that perished on a trip to Egypt, but also, more mischievously, to human frailty in general. What strangers and familiars ultimately share is the human compulsion to blend the authentic with the fraudulent--a paradox that Laurence expresses beautifully in her novel, The Diviners, as the river that flows both ways.

I did not realize that the original edition of Heart of a Stranger was out of print, and I welcome its return. As Stovel notes, we can enjoy these essays as travelogue, as autobiography, or as a key to Laurence's fiction. While some of their commentary has inevitably become dated, they still speak in a fresh voice because Laurence always evokes her fascination with people and a sense of urgency about their needs, even when the needs are as old as the pharaohs. She never belittles her subjects or talks down to her readers, which means that her writing will always appeal to a wide readership.

Jon Kertzer

Department of English

University of Calgary

Email: jkertzer@ucalgary.ca