Ecstasy of Rita Joe Book

Indelibly inked on the skin of my mind, this book still gives me brain fever as it continues to quietly enrage me 20 years after my first read. Let be absolutely clear. I am neither an angel/saint (who has experienced a pinnacle ecstatic epiphany) nor a victim/martyr/advocate of masochism, neither have I ever identified as a First Nations person/woman. I am however a feminist.

Now with that important proviso, if one reads a book more than all other rereads of books that they have ever read, then I suppose it has had a VERY strong impact on me and I should rerate it higher. It was originally a 4.

Reread this after a university professor said to me in his office, "You're a regular Rita Joe." (Another example of a wrong assumption of my ethnicity (see my review of "Boy, Snow, Bird") And I have reread this twice more since.

Each time after I reread, The Ecstasy of Rita Joe, I am even more deeply insulted by the prof's comment and at the same time deeply moved by the plight of First Nations women.

"You're a regular Rita Joe," was said in the prof's office.

I had not yet shared with him anything that would have directly supported his assumption that I was utilizing supposed 'self-defeating," behaviours like those of Rita Joe as she was indoctrinated and inculcated into systemic racism against Native Women and told the role that she needed to fill.

"You're a regular Rita Joe." is a statement that labels "the other" and is very similar to that of my prof trying to assign me a "victim-role" to fill.

Not only am I still very quietly enraged that:

I was being cast in a light of being a vessel for housing a"victim mentality."
or that I should somehow self identify where I was at on Margaret Atwood's Victim Positions Scale as outlined in her book, "Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature."
But that it was the prof's position that Rita Joe brought her outcome solely to herself.

The idea of victim-hood as a product of BOTH the self and society is a more objective, hard-fought-for position I now hold and it stays indelibly inked on the skin of my mind.

This paper by Saradindu Bhattacharya ameliorates my brain fever over this issue.

Staging the Human in George Ryga's The Ecstasy of Rita Joe
by Saradindu Bhattacharya

"The double victimization typical of colonized subjects: on the one hand, she is rendered
vulnerable to exploitation and abuse for the lack of equal social opportunities, while on the other,
she is admonished on the very grounds of her inability to operate as a valuable citizen of society.
The racial stereotypes that limit the possibilities of civil life for Rita as well as inform the
official judgment on her conduct thus constitute a recursive loop and operate across various
inter-related institutional domains of power, preventing identification of/with her humanity and
perpetuating her victimization. Pramod K. Nayar identifies in human rights literature examples of
perpetrators distancing themselves emotionally from the target of their actions and thereby
offering "legitimacy and justification for their cruelties". Nayar contends that such discursive
constructions of subjects that deny them their dignity and identity as humans are "made possible
due to their emplacement in a condition of moral vacuums" and "anticipate the actual acts of
torture" that destroy the victim (11). It is in this moral vacuum, constructed and validated through
colonial discourses of racial identity, that Ryga locates Rita's indictment as a criminal and
presents it as the pre-condition for the violation of her rights as a human being.

Thankyou Saradindu Bhattacharya.

This book is a must-read for anyone wanting to better understand the climate in which First Nations women are immersed. After you read it, please, please write a review. This book needs to also have more reviews, please.