Fall 2023 · Vol. 52 No. 2 · pp. 163–165
Book Review
Return Stroke: Essays & Memoir
Dora Dueck. Winnipeg, MB: CMU Press, 2023. 225 pages.
Dora Dueck’s Return Stroke is the sort of book you reach for when you’re traveling with your mom to, say, St. Kitts—any place troubled by a long colonial history, like Dueck’s carefully constructed Chaco. My mom and I share a sweet tooth for Mennonite memoirs that make us blink. We favor out-of-Russia tales told by men whose disinterest in their wives and kids is positively page-turning. Return Stroke, though, is readable in a different way. It explores the lingering effects of a patriarchal culture by balancing tensions between a woman’s experiences in the domestic sphere and a richly interior calling to write.
“Return Stroke,” the eponymous essay in which Dueck attempts to reclaim the irreclaimable, is the strongest piece in the collection. The essay narrates Dueck’s search to gather a sense of the personality of Heinrich Dueck, a sixty-seven-year-old Paraguayan who dies of a stroke shortly before the author marries his son. With Dueck’s effort to summon the character of a man she’s never met in a place she’s never been, the Chaco becomes as much a site of personal literary imagining as an expression of the corporate Mennonite story.
The stroke that kills the father-in-law is not the titular return stroke. No, that stroke refers to literal lightning. This essay’s epigraph references a line by George Eliot, whose Middlemarch also meditates on the theme of obsession:
While he was speaking there came a vivid flash of lightning which lit each of them up for the other.
In Dueck’s essay we learn that the father-in-law’s mother was killed by lightning in her own kitchen. (Ah, the dangers of the domestic sphere!) Heinrich himself was struck by the same bolt, though he survived. The lightning functions metaphorically as the crystal-flash epiphany that drives so much of our contemporary nonfiction. Like the proverbial bolt from the blue, a hard epiphany changes everything. It can come like a tardy box of diary notebooks long after Dueck has given up hope that she can construct anything but secondhand stories about Papa. Those diary notebooks, typed by a curious daughter-in-law, offer a metonymic substitute for real relationship.
All good essays nudge us to a spacious place where the story becomes much bigger than it seems. Dueck, a Canadian, ambitiously tries to reinvent herself as a chaqueña, a Chaco girl. She knows she can’t do it. But she wants to. In the otherworldliness of a remote landscape, her faith and her wishful thinking are the constants. With a subtle sleight of hand, Dueck invites us to see her longing for the absent Papa as the believer’s longing for God. It’s a good essay. {164}
The lightning bolt of epiphany has an opposite: anagnorisis. Call it the slow-motion gathering awareness that characterizes literary memoir. Anagnorisis is a realization that stretches out during the time it takes for the experience to unfold, but also afterward, in the insight that develops from the process of remembering. Anagnorisis is what tracks a change in the speaker’s self-awareness. Memoir always asks a big question: “What was this time for?” In Dueck’s last piece, “In the house of my pilgrimage,” we anticipate a memorable takeaway. This is because literary memoir is never about our circumstances. It’s about our change.
Unlike the preceding essays, this memoir sidesteps anagnorisis. The speaker has a curious passive quality, as if she believes insight might or might not land on her, like a fly. But sentience is not something that just happens to us. It’s an act of agency. We have to go after it. A willingness to seek knowledge and gain understanding—that’s Proverbs, but it’s also the memoir genre in a nutshell. Without anagnorisis, personal experience is an event, not a development. As I read the memoir, my big question became, How could this stiffness have happened to a good writer?
I may see a potential explanation.
Rightly concerned with the ethics of the genre, Dueck experimented with structural choices to protect the privacy of her children. For example, she changed from using real names to made-up names to no names. Dueck is so conscientious about privacy that we encounter only sketchy, generic stand-ins for real people: Older Son, Younger Son, Baby.
All memoirists will get why Dueck chose not to reveal much about her characters. The bias, fuzziness, and misrepresentation that cling to memoir wave red flags. But, oh! Memoir shouldn’t have to settle for shadowy cardboard signifiers! How can we imagine the friendship that sustains Dueck, for example, when we do not really see the woman who befriends her? That unnamed woman must have been more than an accessory to Dueck’s life, but you’d never know it from the way she’s written. We’re told the friend was an artistic married mother of two, but we never even hear her speak in her own voice. The friend’s personality, her Denkensart, her sense of humor—all unwritten. It’s the memoirist’s job to make us love the characters whom the speaker loves.
Or consider Dueck’s two significant subtexts in this piece, colonialism and racism. How can we enter a thoughtful consideration of the history of the Mennonite colonies among the Paraguayan indigena when Dueck insists on calling her housekeeper “my Nivaclé helper”? Dueck did agonize “about hiring indigena help.” But here’s the rub. If the characters function as mere props, they inevitably undercut the effect of a speaker who is growing in awareness. {165}
Good memoir requires authentic, well-rounded characters, with quirks and complexities, flaws, and foibles. We need to know how these characters see the world, not just how the speaker sees the characters. My students sometimes object, “But I’m writing my story, not theirs!” Yes: but if as authors we background the people in our lives, we end up foregrounding ourselves at their expense. Then we begin to sound not unlike the patriarchal memoirists of yesteryear, those whose wives and kids functioned as mere kickstands for their own ego.
Please know that nobody will ever accuse Dora Dueck’s speaker of self-absorption! Yet if the author is unwilling to create characters in whose reality and complexity we can believe, why would we trust the speaker to connect the dots of self-awareness? We write memoir to understand our human connectedness, to explore our agency, and to demonstrate our change. And we read it to know that all these things are possible.
For me the essays are stronger than the memoir. If there is a theme that unifies the work in Return Stroke, it’s that a writer’s interior landscape can compete with an external landscape as huge as the Chaco. Would Dueck say that the call to write brings us together? I don’t know. In this memoir Dueck’s speaker does not depict genuine, real-seeming people who form a community, friends and family with recognizable voices, distinct personalities, nuanced motivations. Dueck is protecting her people, not ignoring them, so I don’t think she’d argue that a writing gift isolates us within imagination’s limits. For Dueck perhaps the important thing is that the call to write is as beautifully tasky as it is non-negotiable. Whatever the weather, it goes on pinning its diapers to the clothesline. And it’s our job to gather them in before the coming storm.
