Conflicting Identities in Canadian Immigrant Prose

Abstract

The paper presents a portrait of immigrant identity on the example of two Polish Canadian writers. Aga Maksimowska’s novel, Giant introduces a protagonist who builds her national and personal identity over a dramatic experience of forced emigration, where Canadianness was at first a pragmatic construct, and not a conscious choice. As a result, the girl struggles with her concept of identity. In the case of Eva Stachniak’s Necessary Lies, one of the factors which leads to the protagonist’s internal conflict is guilt. When in 1981 the martial law was introduced in Poland, the narrator was already in Montreal, freshly in love with a man, who was not her husband. The motif of double guilt (marital betrayal, and that against her motherland) is a frame of Stachniak’s novel. The paper is an attempt to show young immigrant prose from the perspective of multicultural experience, which adds another formative background to the idea of identity understood as a choice or creation rather than an inherited legacy.