Margaret Laurence by Donez Xiques

Author:Donez Xiques
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781459714694
Publisher: Dundurn

CHAPTER NINE

Stolen Time

Vancouver: 1957-1962

In early January 1957, Jack Laurence stood at the Accra airport and watched his wife cross the tarmac toward BOAC flight #272, carrying David in her arms and holding young Jocelyn by the hand. This would be their longest separation since their marriage ten years earlier. On the morning of January 9, the plane finally landed in London, where Peggy and the children visited for several days with Adele Wiseman.745 The two women spent hours catching up on news of family and friends and talking about their writing. Then, within a few days Peggy and the children were on their way to Canada. Fortunately, little Jocelyn and David slept during most of that long transatlantic flight.

The years in Africa had followed upon Peggy’s work for The Westerner and the Winnipeg Citizen. Without her weekly or daily newspaper deadlines, Peggy had time to experiment with her literary gifts. Living in the Horn of Africa and the Gold Coast had a significant intellectual as well as literary impact on her development as a writer. When Peggy left Africa in 1957, it was only a physical departure. The continent and its people were to remain with her. Her homes in Vancouver would have African items as part of the décor, and friends who came to dinner recall that Peggy would serve traditional African foods from time to time. She would also review books about Africa for the Vancouver Sun and Canadian Literature, and later, when living in England, she continued to read literature in English by authors from the newly independent African countries. She attended London performances of new plays by African writers, such as Wole Soyinka and went to the Commonwealth Literary Festival with Marjory Whitelaw of the CBC. Margaret would also spent a good deal of time researching her seventh book, which is her only work of extended literary criticism: Long Drums and Cannons: Nigerian Dramatists and Novelists 1952-1966, published in 1968. When it was reissued in 2001, the noted scholar, Douglas Killam, remarked that “it has lost none of its validity as a way into understanding the literature that was produced between 1952 … and 1966.”746 Considering the number of times that Margaret Laurence moved after she left Africa, it is worth noting that, at the time of her death twenty years later she still had almost a hundred books by or about Africa and Africans in her library.747

While living in Africa, Laurence’s short fiction had not met with the success she had hoped for in terms of publication. Nevertheless, out of her experiences in the Gold Coast and her omnivorous reading about the customs and beliefs of West Africans, Laurence was later to produce a very fine first novel, This Side Jordan, and a remarkable collection of short stories, The Tomorrow-Tamer and other Stories, which captures the former British colony on the threshold of independence and sheds light on that situation from various perspectives. But these achievements were not on her horizon in January 1957; they lay in the future.

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