Episode 51
January 15, 2022
I Am Woman
Hosted by Chris Piuma and Suzanne Conklin Akbari
Admit this, all of you. I laugh too loud, can’t hold my brownie properly in polite company and am apt to call shit “shit.” I can’t be trusted to be loyal to my class. In fact, the very clever among the elite know that I am opposed to the very existence of an elite among us. For me, the struggle for self-determination will end with the dissolution of this elite and the levelling of the CanAmerican class structure or it will continue—for a thousand years if need be.
You have acquired your knowledge, friends, through the spoils of a colonial system which intends to use you to oppress my poor country-cousins. I owe no apology for refusing to go along with that.
At the end of each year, we like to read a book by an author who passed that year, and in 2021, we lost someone very close to the show: Lee Maracle, whose book Memory Serves we talked about in a previous episode, and who joined us in a bonus episode about Great Expectations. We chose to read her book I Am Woman , a collection of essays (interwoven with memoir, story, and poetry) subtitled “A Native Perspective on Sociology and Feminism”. And, in addition to responding to the specific issues that the book brings to the forefront, and appreciating Maracle’s craft in putting these issues on the page, Suzanne and Chris think together about how it feels to read and talk about a text that might not be addressed to you at all.
![[Episode artwork]](/images/podcast/art/s/spouter.png)
Show Notes.
Lee Maracle: I Am Woman. [Bookshop.] [The book went out of print shortly after her passing, but should be back in stock next month.]
Also by Lee Maracle: Memory Serves. Celia’s Song. My Conversations with Canadians. Hope Matters [with Columpa Bobb and Tania Carter].
Our episode on Memory Serves and our bonus with Lee Maracle on Great Expectations.
Our episode on Bear.
Lee Maracle delivers the 2020 Margaret Laurence lecture, which addresses many of the questions we had about literature, gender, and the power of story.
The New York Times’s (unfortunately headlined) obituary.
An overview of Lee Maracle’s life.
Gratitude for Lee Maracle from Hiromi Goto, Rita Wong, and Larissa Lai.
The Literary Legacy of Lee Maracle with Drew Hayden Taylor, Tanya Talaga, and Waubgeshig Rice.
LitHub’s list of notable literary deaths in 2021.
bell hooks: Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black.
Norton Juster: The Phantom Toolbooth.
Beverley Cleary: Dear Mr. Henshaw.
Next: Frantz Fanon: Black Skin, White Masks. [Bookshop.]