Reviews for The Piper

The average rating for The Piper based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2012-10-13 00:00:00 Peter W Niebauer Synopsis: A play in two acts, The Ecstasy of Rita Joe is the best known Canadian play. It chronicles the life of a woman from the First Nation, Rita Joe, who reaches the city in search of work. But instead, she has to suffer at the hands of the state and the system, ultimately leading to her tragic demise. Review: In the mid-1960s, the play opens on a courtroom scene where Rita Joe is being charged with vagrancy. It follows a couple of other false charges that have been piled upon her by the police. The play then uses the weather and the memories of Rita's lover, Jaimie Paul, and her sister, Eileen to move the narrative forward in a beautifully haunting way. I once warmed up to the magistrate who was hearing Rita's case, but he too makes the law a reason with which to further increase Rita's suffering. The two major themes are the Canadian White's ignorance towards the Native Canadians, often acting as the latter's saviours. Another one is the feminist angle, which made me think of double discrimination which women from Rita's community have to face. First is the White man's prerogative of how she should look, dress, act, have an accent! The second being that she's at a disadvantage in even her own community for being a woman. The play reads like a modern fable, with hidden meanings that bring forth the plight of the characters. More than the form, the play is a means to the end for the message that it seeks to convey. What happened with Rita Joe is an eye-opening take on the injustices that the Reservation people have to face at the hands of the White people. Through a myriad of characters, Ryga powerfully describes the situation which brought tears to my eyes and filled my heart with fury. A story of displacement, unfulfilled aspirations, lost identities, about how working in the city doesn't guarantee happiness while staying in the Reservation doesn't satisfy one's growing ambitions seeing that there are not many opportunities there. A play which will rankle long after it ends. I could imagine what an impact it would have had on me had I watched it sitting in a theatre as it played out along with direct interaction with the audience. It makes the audience feel uncomfortable through its display of violence, distortion, and exaggeration. It shows a mirror to society. P.S. For more clarity, do refer to the Study Guide issued by The National Arts Centre English Theatre Programmes for Student Audiences. Originally posted on: Shaina's Musings

Review # 2 was written on 2016-02-02 00:00:00 John Chesser 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.