Aug 112013
 

Jungle GirlJungle Girl: The author, age 5

One of NC’s Saskatchewan stalwarts, Byrna Barclay, sent in these nuggets that tell us you don’t have to write a tome to make an impact, to have panache and éclat. Here we have a photo of the author taken in a studio when she was five, the author’s delightful one-paragraph micromemoir of same, and a snippet from a novel-in-progress based on the incident. We meet the author, the author’s fictional alter ego, Annika Robin, and the amazing Grandmunch, the reallife and fictional Jesse Emma, grandmother extraordinaire.

The fictional fragment is taken from House of the White Elephant, the last of the series of Barclay’s Livelong Quartet (Summer of the Hungry Pup, The Last Echo, and Winter of the White Wolf have already published by NeWest Press in Edmonton).

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Memoir

When I had measles my teacher mother sent me to my grandmother, affectionately known as Grandmunch.  The daughter of a Judge and graduate of the Sorbonne, she had lived through two world wars, lost her husband and son, and survived the Depression by bartering her music — lessons in ballet, violin, piano, and elocution — for eggs, butter, chickens, whatever the parents could spare.  To commemorate my visit she took me to James Studio, stood me on a black box, draped the leopard skin she had brought from India over me, then dashed out to the green grocer to buy a banana to place in my hand. Just when the photographer, whose head had disappeared under a black cloth, took the photo the skin slipped and I gasped.  Jesse Emma chose that photo and had it air brushed to hide the exposed part of me.  Oh yes, even the frame was hand-carved in India at the turn of the 20th C.

—Byrna Barclay

 

The Jungle Girl

How well Jesse remembers the day she took Annika Robin down Central Avenue to James Studio.  She removed her clothes and stood her on a box covered with a black velvet cloth.  She draped her own mother’s leopard skin over Robin’s shoulders, but had nothing to fasten it.  She let down the child’s braids, and with her strong piano-fingers messed up her white-blonde hair til it was wild and tossed raggedly about her shoulders.  She stood back, like an artist with a vision yet to be drawn on blank canvas.  Something vital was missing; it lack the full effect Jesse sought.

She dashed out and down the street to the green grocer’s and returned with an overly ripe, motley banana that looked more like a plantain.  She thrust it into Robin’s right hand.  Perfect.  The photographer ducked his head under the black hood on the free-standing camera.  Just as the shutter clicked the pelt slipped and Robin gasped and bit her bottom lip, which gave her an impish expression in the photograph.  Never mind, the photographer said, he would air-brush the portrait, creating a shadow on the inside of the child’s thighs to hide her private parts.

When Jesse gave a copy to Linnaea, the loony Swede didn’t like it and was furious with Jesse: What are you trying to do? 

The portrait took Jesse Emma back to her own childhood in Calcutta, to stories her mother had told her about white girls lost in the jungle and raised by apes or elephants or Bengal tigers, tales that Jesse hoped would delight fanciful Robin who played Tarzan & Jane among the elms hand-planted along the bank of the North Saskatchewan River.

Excerpt from House of the White Elephant — Byrna Barclay

 

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Byrna Barclay

Byrna Barclay has published three in a series of novels known as The Livelong Quartet, three collections of short stories, the most recent being Girl at the Window, and a hybrid, searching for the nude in the landscape. Her many awards include The Saskatchewan Culture and Youth First Novel Award, SBA Best Fiction Award, and City of Regina Award,  YMCA Woman of the Year, CMHA National Distinguished Service Award, SWG Volunteer Award, Sask. Culture Award, and the Saskatchewan Order of Merit.  In 2010 she published her 9th book, The Forest Horses, which was nominated for Best Fiction for the Saskatchewan Book Awards.  Her poetic drama, The Room With Five Walls: The Trials of Victor Hoffman, an exploration of the Shell Lake Massacre, won the City of Regina Award.  She has been president of SWG twice, President of Sask. Book Awards, and Fiction Editor of GRAIN magazine.  A strong advocate for Mental Health as well as the arts, she served as President of CMHA, Saskatchewan, was the founding Chair of the Minister’s Advisory Council on Mental Health, and for twenty years was the Editor-in-chief of TRANSITION magazine.  Vice-chair of the Saskatchewan Arts Board from 1982-1989, she is currrently the Chair. Mother of actor Julianna Barclay, she lives in Regina.

  One Response to “Jungle Girl: Letter from Saskatchewan (Photo, Micromemoir & Fiction) — Byrna Barclay”

  1. Interesting picture, Byrna, but the stories are more intriguing. Good work.

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