A Jest of God - Margaret Laurence [0]
MARGARET LAURENCE was born in Neepawa, Manitoba, in 1926. Upon graduation from Winnipeg’s United College in 1947, she took a job as a reporter for the Winnipeg Citizen.
From 1950 until 1957 Laurence lived in Africa, the first two years in Somalia, the next five in Ghana, where her husband, a civil engineer, was working. She translated Somali poetry and prose during this time, and began her career as a fiction writer with stories set in Africa.
When Laurence returned to Canada in 1957, she settled in Vancouver, where she devoted herself to fiction with a Ghanaian setting: in her first novel, This Side Jordan, and in her first collection of short fiction, The Tomorrow-Tamer. Her two years in Somalia were the subject of her memoir, The Prophet’s Camel Bell.
Separating from her husband in 1962, Laurence moved to England, which became her home for a decade, the time she devoted to the creation of five books about the fictional town of Manawaka, patterned after her birthplace, and its people: The Stone Angel, A Jest of God, The Fire-Dwellers, A Bird in the House, and The Diviners.
Laurence settled in Lakefield, Ontario, in 1974. She complemented her fiction with essays, book reviews, and four children’s books. Her many honours include two Governor General’s Awards for Fiction and more than a dozen honorary degrees.
Margaret Laurence died in Lakefield, Ontario, in 1987.
THE NEW CANADIAN LIBRARY
General Editor: David Staines
ADVISORY BOARD
Alice Munro
W.H. New
Guy Vanderhaeghe
If I should pass the tomb of Jonah
I would stop there and sit for awhile;
Because I was swallowed one time deep in the dark
And came out alive after all.
– Carl Sandburg, Losers
ONE
The wind blows low, the wind blows high
The snow comes falling from the sky,
Rachel Cameron says she’ll die
For the want of the golden city.
She is handsome, she is pretty,
She is the queen of the golden city –
They are not actually chanting my name, of course. I only hear it that way from where I am watching at the classroom window, because I remember myself skipping rope to that song when I was about the age of the little girls out there now. Twenty-seven years ago, which seems impossible, and myself seven, but the same brown brick building, only a new wing added and the place smartened up. It would certainly have surprised me then to know I’d end up here, in this room, no longer the one who was scared of not pleasing, but the thin giant She behind the desk at the front, the one with the power of picking any coloured chalk out of the box and writing anything at all on the blackboard. It seemed a power worth possessing, then.
Spanish dancers, turn around,
Spanish dancers, get out of this town.
People forget the songs, later on, but the knowledge of them must be passed like a secret language from child to child – how far back? They seem like a different race, a separate species, all those generations of children. As though they must still exist somewhere, even after their bodies have grown grotesque, and they have forgotten the words and tunes, and learned disappointment, and finally died, the last dried shell of them painted and prettified for decent burial by mortal men like Niall Cameron, my father. Stupid thought. Morbid. I mustn’t give houseroom in my skull to that sort of thing. It’s dangerous to let yourself. I know that.
Nebuchadnezzar, King of the Jews,
Sold his wife for a pair of shoes.
I can imagine that one going back and back, through time and languages. Chanted in Latin, maybe, the same high sing-song voices, smug little Roman girls safe inside some villa in Gaul or Britain, skipping rope on a mosaic courtyard, not knowing the blue-painted dogmen were snarling outside the walls, stealthily learning. There. I am doing it again. This must stop. It isn’t good for me. Whenever I find myself thinking in a brooding way, I must simply turn it off and think of something else. God forbid that I should turn into an eccentric. This isn’t just imagination. I’ve seen it happen. Not only teachers,