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Memory Encoded in Words: Three Texts of Reminiscence

The short story “The Summer My Grandmother Was Supposed To Die” by Mordecai Richler, the personal essay “White Breast Flats” by Emma Lee Warrior, and the memoir “Franken-Frogs and the Mushroom Bear” by Thomas LaBrie are all reminiscences of childhood or youth within a specific culture. All three texts also contain words from a language reflecting that cultural heritage. Those words are important elements of the cognitive maps that allow the authors and protagonists of the texts to remember the landscape of their childhood or youth. The words express a sense of belonging of the author to the community (s)he grew up in and also give insights into how the author viewed and experienced the world while in that community. Those words could not be translated into plain English or any other language without losing those two aspects of memory encoded in them.

The term “cognitive map”, coined by the psychologist Edward C. Tolman in the 1940s (Bjornson 52) , means a subjective interpretative framework in each individual's mind which allows her or him to make sense of the present state, recollect past states, and imagine future states (Renfrew and Bahn 392). This framework allows individuals to attach meaning and value to their experiences (Bjornson 54). In turn, the cognitive map is modified by the input of new information through new experiences and perceptions (Bjornson 52). The three basic components of that complex cognitive map are the individual, the culture, and the environment (Bjornson 54). As an aspect of culture, language is integrated in that interpretative framework. In the three texts “The Summer My Grandmother Was Supposed To Die”, “White Breast Flats”, and “Franken-Frogs and the Mushroom Bear”, words in Yiddish, Polish, Blackfoot and Cajun English assist the narrators in recollecting, in their cognitive maps, the realm of their childhood or youth within a community having a specific culture. All of those words are, directly or indirectly, concerned with interpersonal relationships; indeed, a community and its culture are created by multiple individuals who are linked to each other in a system (“Community noun”), and not by solitary and unrelated individuals. The following paragraphs explore the use of words of the particular languages mentioned above in each text.

The first text, “The Summer My Grandmother Was Supposed To Die” by Mordecai Richler, is a satirical sketch of a young boy's experience of family, Orthodox Judaism, anddeath on Montreal's St. Urbain Street. The story was first published in “The Street” (1969), a collection of semi-fictional and non-fictional stories revolving around Richler's own childhood onthat street ("The Street."). St. Urbain Street has historically been an axis of the Jewishand working-class quarter of the city (Chevalier 1496). Richler grew up within the cultural context of the street in a family of immigrant East European Jewish heritage (Kramer 38). As an adult, Richler had mixed feelings about his childhood community, which is captured in this statement when he returned to Quebec from Europe: “I worry about being away so long from the roots of my discontent" (Brown). Those feelings form part of his cognitive map as much as the language and culture of his childhood. This love-hate attitude towards his childhood community is reflected in the choiceof Yiddish, and sometimes Polish, words in the story “The Summer My Grandmother Was Supposed To Die.” One group of those words are pejoratives that are both derogatory and affectionate or playful. This group includes the Yiddish words 'putz' (para.9), which means 'penis' or 'jerk' (Bluestein 84), 'knacker' (para.31), which means 'big shot' (Kogos 188), and 'pisherke' (para.119), which means 'young squirt' (Bluestein 79).The young boy is called two of those words ('putz' and 'pisherke') by his friend and sister during moments when they are socializing. Those two words capture how the protagonist, in his cognitive map, remembers his friend and sister as having been both close to him and mean to him during his childhood in the Jewish and Yiddish-speaking cultural context of St. Urbain Street.

A second group of Yiddish or Polish words in the story deal with Orthodox Judaism and family. The story's protagonist's grandfather is a rabbi, and Richler's own grandfather was a rabbinical scholar (Kramer 38), so the experience of Orthodox Judaism and family life would have been closely interlinked for both the author and the protagonist. This second group of words includes 'straimel' (fur-trimmed hat of a rabbi [the grandfather in the story]) in paragraph 27, 'zeyda' (grandfather [Boberg 223]) in paragraph 31-33, 'lokshen' (noodles in Jewish cuisine ["Lokshen noun plural."]) in paragraph 79, and 'baba' (grandmother [Steinmetz 41]) in paragraph 102. The mere presence of the words within the story shows that the author and protagonist remember and acknowledge their belonging to their immigrant Jewish and East European families. However, again, this feeling of belonging has dark hues. For instance, the zeyda, a rabbi, is remembered for having unjustly favored his followers' wishes over the rights of bakery workers (para.33). The protagonist's mother makes the lokshen: the mother, who carries out household work, and the lokshen, which feeds the family, are both factors that bind together the protagonist's family. However, this homely and nurturing scene in which the mother cooks lokshen is darkened by her worries revolving around the ill grandmother and the burdensome presence of the zeyda's old followers, who keep visiting the house even if the zeyda has long since died. Thus, in the protagonist's cognitive map, the Yiddish word 'lokshen' is remembered as both homely and dark withinthe context of a rabbinical (Orthodox Jewish) family.

The texts "White Breast Flats" and "Franken-Frog and Mushroom Bear" contain fewer words from the authors' cultural backgrounds than "The Summer My Grandmother Was Supposed To Die", but the words are just as important in the process of remembering as in the first text. In "White Breast Flats", the author, Emma Lee Warrior, reminisces about her childhood within the landscape of White Breast Flats in a Peigan Reserve in southern Alberta. She remembers people within this landscape by their names in Blackfoot: her grandfather Otohkostskaksin (Yellow Dust) in paragraph 1, a dead white man called Inopikini (Long Nose) whose ghost was believed by Warrior and her sisters to haunt a house on White Breast Flats (para.11), and Warrior and her sisters themselves, named Ippisuwahs, Piiksi Kiipipi Pahtskikaikana and Itsinakaki (para.16). The title of the essay, "White Breast Flats", is a proper noun that is the home of all the other proper nouns listed in the previous sentence. White Breast Flats is the place in which the people bearing the names Otohkostskaksin, Ippisuwahs, Piiksi Kiipipi Pahtskikaikana and Itsinakaki formed part of a community and in whose history and legend a person bearing the name of Inopikini was included.

Long before Warrior wrote this personal essay, she had left her childhood and White Breast Flats(para.16). Her memories became distorted as she aged. They "take on the dimensions of myth" (para.1) when she tries to remember a distant childhood landscape as an adult. In the essay, the proper nouns in Blackfoot help to ground Warrior within that youthful view of the Peigan reserve while also lending a mythical cast to the panorama. Indeed, the characters in the essay are depicted in a mysterious and spellbinding way that borders on myth. Otohkostskaksin is depicted as having been close to the divine through his daily ritual burning of sweetgrass, a plant sacred to Peigans for many generations, to the Creator (para.7). He is also depicted as an idyllic provider of the family (para.8). The ghost of Inopikini is remembered by Warrior as a legend that aroused both fascination and fear in her and her sisters (para.11-13). Inopokini was a childhood ghost within a specific cultural context: he was a non-Peigan in White Breast Flats and a mysterious cultural "Other" to the curious Peigan children. His name, which means 'Long Nose' in Blackfoot, makes him be linguistically remembered as the racial and cultural "Other" on the basis of his physical appearance. If the name 'Inopikini' had been replaced by only the plain English 'Long Nose' in the essay, it would not have conveyed that the children viewed the white man from the standpoint of being Peigan.

The story "The Summer My Grandmother Was Supposed To Die" and the personal essay "White Breast Flats" are reminiscences of childhood, but the memoir "Franken-Frogs and the Mushroom Bear" by Thomas LaBrie is a reminiscence of youth. While the tone in "The Summer My Grandmother Was Supposed To Die" is dark and satirical and the one"White Breast Flats" is nostalgic, the tone in "Franken-Frogs and the Mushroom Bear" is jovial. The author, Thomas LaBrie, fondly remembers the folly of his youth by recollecting a time a friend and he went on a nighttime adventure when they were young Cajun men in Louisiana. The nighttime adventure took place in a specifically Cajun cultural context: it involved the outdoors of Acadiana and the activity of frogging. The Cajun culture has been largely shaped by the natural environment, especially the bayous, of Louisiana. From the time of the earliest Cajun settlers in Louisiana, hunting, fishing and planting in the bayous havebeen thebackbone of Cajun cuisine (Marshall 330). Among the typical Cajun foods that come from the bayous is frog meat (Edmonds 43). By recollecting his participation in the Cajun cultural activity of frogging in the outdoors of Acadiana and using Cajun English hunting terminology ("huntin'" [line 7], "fishin'" [lines 7, 20, 22 and 24], "shrimpin'" [line 7] and "giggin'" [lines 21 and 22]), the author shows his belonging to the Cajun community. The Cajun English language plays a role in bringing back the landscape of Acadiana and the experience of frogging in it to what is seen of LaBrie's cognitive map in this memoir.

In addition to rooting LaBrie within the Cajun culture, the activity of frogging also strengthened interpersonal relationships within that culture: it bonded Thomas LaBrie and his friend Marvin. As the author says in lines 24-25, "Now froggin' can be done alone, but there's not much fun in it alone." Another Cajun English term in the memoir, one not related to hunting, is a soda called "pop rouge" (line 14) in which the young men mixed psilocybin mushrooms. Like "froggin'", the drink also bonded Thomas LaBrie and his friend on their youthful drug-enhanced frog-catching spree. Thus, in LaBrie's cognitive map, Cajun English words like "froggin'", "giggin'" and "pop rouge" link culture (Cajun culture) with interpersonal relationships (friendship), the carelessness of youth, and the gain of maturity after the experience of carelessness.

In conclusion, as can be seen from this essay's analysis, the words in Cajun English, Blackfoot, Yiddish, and Polish in the three texts of reminiscence play an important role in the process of remembering. Using the psychological concept of a cognitive map present in each author's mind, the words in those specific languages were seen to encode the authors'experiences of interpersonal relationships during their formative childhood and youth years within particular cultures. Those words root each author's process of remembering in a specific cultural context. Language is not simply a one-dimensional form of communication; it is also one of the closely-linked factors (among other factors such as cultural heritage, family, physical environment) that shape an individual's cognitive map. The writers Mordecai Richler, Emma Lee Warrior, and Thomas Labrie use the linguistic part of their cognitive maps in reminiscence and story-telling.