The Struggle of Memory against Forgetting

In Cloud of Bone, Bernice Morgan draws our attention to the smallest descriptive detail in order to achieve a deeply moral aim: to show the myriad things that connect us across oceans and centuries. Early on, for example, she places a character in a small dark hole under a church and then haunts him with the memory of a valley “no wider than a street, a green fold filled with golden light.” More haunting for the reader is what else the character remembers: the sudden ransacking of the valley by three boys “exhilarated by the power of destruction.” Other characters in this novel will be drawn to the same small sanctuary, but it is up to the reader to make the connections and remember how easily a delicate green world can be destroyed.

Three seemingly unconnected narratives follow the book’s epigram by Milan Kundera: “The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.” The first and the third, set in the 20th century, serve as a frame around the middle tale, which takes place in the 19th. The book opens with Kyle, a World War Two deserter from the Royal Navy, crawling under a church in St. John’s in an attempt to erase himself from the earth. The third is the tale of Judith, an anthropologist grieving for her husband who was shot as they inspected a mass grave in Rwanda. In the story in between, Morgan imagines the life of Shanawdithit, the young Beothuk woman whose death in 1829 marked the end of her people. Shanawdithit grows up into a culture that thins and finally vanishes before her eyes, as Europeans build their towns and roads over Baetha, the world that once contained all her people and their history.

Driven from their usual hunting and fishing places further and further inland by the Europeans, the Beothuk try to maintain the rituals and preserve the memories that sustain them. But in an oral culture, memory cannot be preserved independently of those who remember, and even when it can, those in power usually prefer a clean slate on which to write their own version of the past. As Shanawdithit’s story demonstrates, forgetting is often the act of erasing the people you wish to write over.

In the service of power, forgetting serves another purpose: it allows the perpetrators of harm to live with their actions. When his troubling memories become too much, Kyle simply shuts them off. Out on the icy North Atlantic, this repression was essential to his survival, but once underground he cannot so easily escape the memories of the young girl he once helped to abduct, or his friend Gup Gullage’s gleeful explosions of violence, or his own recent act of murder.

Evil flourishes in other ways as well. Revelling in havoc and violence, profoundly unable to feel remorse or see any other person as fully human, Gup Gullage is a terrifying presence in the novel. But this inability to see others as human is also a collective failing. It is apparent when the Europeans arrive in Baetha, shoulder their guns, unfurl their flags and claim the land. It is also evident in the Beothuk, who call themselves the People and refer to the Europeans as Dogmen. The Dogmen, they believe, are the descendants of a wolf spirit who raped a shaman’s daughter. She gave birth to misshapen white-skinned twins and sent them out over the water, where they washed up on a distant shore and became Euano, “murderers, rapists who have overrun the earth.”

In denying the essential humanity of the alien in their midst, each group produces the Other, who then becomes the Enemy, with whom no dialogue is possible. As their numbers become fewer, the Beothuk argue over how to survive. “If we are to live we must make peace with Dogmen. We must learn some of their ways and show them some of ours … This can only be done when we meet with Dogmen, talk to them, become friends,” one urges, but by then it is too late. Deep mistrust and anger prevent any such talk.

With their people facing starvation, Shanawdithit and the man she loves engage in a ceremony to draw out a caribou from the spirit world. It works, and their hunger is temporarily assuaged, but even a magical caribou cannot rewrite the coming end: “Our fences had fallen and were rotting into the ground. Near Great Spruce Lake they came upon a mamateek that had been burnt seasons before. Nowhere in all that vast country did they see any sign of the People.” It is a reminder that no matter how powerful our myths and rituals, they cannot save us if the material world that produced them is destroyed.

The novel’s three sections are connected by thin narrative threads: in his hole under the church, Kyle hears the murmurings of a ghost. They turn out to belong to Shanawdithit, who was buried outside the churchyard. Much later, Judith journeys to this churchyard to solve the mystery of a skull she has found in her childhood home. But in the final section, as we watch Judith grieve, and then go from library to library in search of an answer, the narrative tension is lost, and the ending, in which all three characters are brought together, is unconvincing.

Cloud of Bone works better as a novel of echoes than of compellingly linked narratives: young women are preyed upon while picking berries; acts of kindness to the enemy are foiled; people who know the luminous green valley long to return to it. Had the storylines been left unconnected, these echoes alone might have been sufficient to connect the characters.

The disappearance of an entire people always seems a conundrum to later generations (a whole culture? But didn’t anyone notice?). Morgan shows us exactly how it could happen, how it is produced by all the players and their parts, how the big events of history texts are actually the sum of countless untold individual steps and missteps.

She also shows us why, exactly, we should care. As Joseph Campbell spent his career pointing out, rituals and beliefs are built around the same deep structures, differing only in their surface details. This novel illuminates the tragic loss of those surface particularities, the things that allow a distinct culture to survive in a specific environment at a particular time. By making Shanawdithit the storyteller of her clan and the keeper of the Beothuk culture and history, Morgan allows us to feel the full impact of what has been lost. Cloud of Bone shows us that we are all repositories, and the loss of one Shanawdithit calls to mind John Donne: “Any man’s death diminishes me for I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.”