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Ursula A. Kelly & Elizabeth Yeoman (eds.) (2010) Despite This Loss: Essays on Culture, Memory and Identity in Newfoundland and Labrador, St John's NL, ISER Press, ISBN: 978-894725-09-5. 274pp. Can$26.95
In Despite This Loss: Essays on Culture, Memory and Identity in Newfoundland and Labrador, Memorial University Professors Ursula A. Kelly and Elizabeth Yeoman along with twelve cultural workers including teachers, curriculum specialists, academics, an architect, an Innu activist, a visual artist, and a playwright investigate the intricate legacy of loss that haunts and institutes-in part-Newfoundland and Labrador (NL) identity. "Grief is not a house, it's a country," states Bernice Morgan in Cloud of Bone. Likewise, for Kelly and Yeoman, NL performs as a "country" whose multiple significations-while over-determined and elusive-are profoundly mediated by the allusiveness of loss. About their book's contributors, Kelly and Yeoman write: "They invite us to understand loss as inevitable and disruptive, as inconsolable and productive. Together, they suggest that the chaos born of loss can become a space in which to reconsider what in life is germane and to reorient-to make something of what loss leaves us by resituating ourselves, individually and culturally, in relation to the event. Examining loss can propel a renewed ethic in relation to memory" (p. 254). In this undaunted and principled view, NL is not so much a fixed place as it is a practiced place, comprising unforgiving temporal/spatial realities and the need for consciousness to articulate and safeguard itself in mobile and creative ways.
However, the problem is that, as Adam Phillips reminds us, "from a psychoanalytic perspective, the patient is always suffering from the self-knowledge he has had to refuse in himself". The intrusion of a personal/collective remembrance of loss onto a terrain of melancholia creates identities that are emergent and turbulent spaces of struggle and agency. This theme anchors many of the chapters. Vicki Sara Hallet (pp. 74-90), for example, presents a case study of NL's intergenerational patra-linear families to reveal the performative geographies of island spaces in which newcomers are "strangers", a designation that produces the aporia it names. R. M. Kennedy (pp. 103-116) draws...