Not all memoirs are written by people who make history, and not all memoir writers can compel the reader to experience emotions with them as they tell their story. On this, Laurenda Daniells is exemplary.
By exploring snapshots of her life throughout the pages of her memoir, Daniells does a magnificent job outlining 93 years of excitement, fear, travel, love and loss.
The book follows Daniells from growing up in Winnipeg to settling in Vancouver with her husband, where she became the first university archivist of UBC in 1970, as well as around the world as she traveled to Europe and Africa.
The short stories describing her childhood are beautifully written, frequently beginning with striking imagery describing these years through the eyes of her younger self. For example, when her mother was in the hospital recovering from fracturing her skull, young Laurenda focused more on the attention she received from her cousins than her limited understanding of her mother’s condition.
In another story, she describes sending a frightening note to a neighbour in order to maintain her friendship with another group of girls, a deed she has regretted ever since. The stories outline the universal struggle of growing up, creating a place for herself, and trying to find a way through complicated relationships.
While her writing is evocative and her personality shines through wonderfully, her relationship with her ancestry leaves much to be desired. Daniells firmly places herself within the context of her family. She chooses to outline the lives of her ancestors before she begins her own story, putting great importance on the fact that her great-great-grandmother, Salis, was a First Nations woman.
Over and over, she refers to this connection in her memoir, emphasizing its importance in her life. Perhaps she believes that her story is a continuation of those of her ancestors, and is attempting to link herself with the grandeur of the family’s past.
Even the title of her book, Royal Blood, comes from the connection to Salis, who was the daughter of the nation’s chief. At least to a point, she seems to identify with the story of having royal blood in her veins, which makes it even more disappointing that she does not talk about it in any great detail.
Daniells seems to like the idea of having exotic ancestry more than she understands the realities of the grandmother’s life. This exoticization of people of colour is not a unique event in her life. She never mentions any of the names of the nations she writes of, choosing to call people “Indian princess,” “Indian boy,” or “Indian girl” instead.
She also displays a startling amount of racism as she details her travels in Africa; in Ghana, she relates Creole dialects to a lack of intelligence: “English words but not English sense.”
Laurenda Daniells comes across as someone who was always wishing to be a grand adventurer as her great-great-grandfather Alexander Ross had been. In Ghana, she relates meeting a trader to being in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, at UBC she plays the detective as she tracks down a tape recorder stolen from the archives by a hippie, and in 1986 she chooses to continue on with her trip through the Iron Curtain into Russia in spite of the Chernobyl accident.
It seems that her connection to the glorious past of her family only serves the purpose of linking her to the grandeur of their lives. While the stories she has written captivate the reader, behind them hides the troubling need for her to be glorified by using her ancestors.
Royal Blood is available at Hager Books in Kerrisdale. It is published by Paper Trail Publishing and retails at $22.95. It is 416 pages long.
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