A Pickled Egg for Adam: An exploration of exile, diaspora, and fractured selves
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Date
2021-03
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University of New Brunswick
Abstract
In 1915, one hundred and fifty thousand Russian-Germans were exiled from their homes and sent on a death march to Siberia; fifty thousand (including my Opa’s parents, grandparents, and sister) did not survive. I grew up in Kelowna, British Columbia, hearing stories of my Russian-German ancestors. The trauma my Opa experienced in Russia began to fuse with the internal world I experienced in literature. My creative research project wonders: how can poetic storytelling influence our understanding of fractured family history? What can a poetic rendition of a life story reveal about the banishment and diaspora of the Russian-Germans in Western Canada? Through the vessel of the long poem, motifs of breaking and mending, speaking and listening, splintering open and sewing shut emerge, ultimately revealing the intrinsic connections among community, storytelling, and healing.