A Pilgrim in Narnia

It is chilly and pouring rain here in Prince Edward Island … normal weather for the week of Remembrance Day. Anne of Green Gables and I both love Island Octobers, but I struggle with the dying-dark and dreary days of November. I was hoping a change of atmosphere would bring an uplift this November. I have been planning to attend the C.S. Lewis conference at Alexandru Ioan Cuza University in Iași, Romania. Besides a different experience of light, I was hoping to meet good friends, colleagues, and students in this burgeoning intellectual centre of Eastern Europe.

Alas, I cannot make it Iași, and I am feeling a bit Eeyore-ish about missing out. There is an online registration for the hybrid conference–check it out here–and the folks there are kind enough to let me present digitally. Still, it isn’t the same thing … and I haven’t had the heart to look up the weather in Iași today.

Instead of moping, I spent part of the day working up the materials for the idea I am presenting. I am continuing with a theme that I have been focusing on all year, including my talk on Out of the Silent Planet at MonsterFest last month and my MythMoot discussion about “Being Hnau and Harry Potter” at Mythmoot in June. It goes back even further, actually, to an in-class lecture in 2022 and my Mythmoot paper in 2023 on ‘Nowhere to go, nowhere to hide, nowhere to be free’: A Settler’s Reflections on Indigenous Spaces and ‘Negotiated Symbiosis’ in Octavia Butler’s Literature.”

The unwieldy title of the Octavia Butler paper reveals how I’m struggling with a concept that is somewhat beyond myself. I keep talking about it from different angles and perspectives and finding new approaches, but not getting to the point of definitively saying the thing I need to say. Some people write to tell the world; some write to hear their own voices in a land of echoes. I write, at least initially, to discover what I know.

For my Romania talk, I am situating C.S. Lewis in a distinctly Indigenous studies space. In part, it is an echo of my Theology on Tap local talk back in the winter, which was not recorded, unfortunately. I gave that public lecture in this place I inhabit: Prince Edward Island, Epekwitk to the local Mi’kmaq folks, Abegweit in L.M. Montgomery‘s imagination, the Land of the Red Soil, the Cradle in the Waves, the Million Acre Garden of the Gulf. I am the descendant of settlers who, in their attempt to make life beautiful and make the world better, were part of a movement that caused great harm to the people who were already living here. In this way, I am a settler, but Epekwitk is my home. I am a native Prince Edward Islander, but not one of our Indigenous peoples. I belong nowhere else. It is deeply unsettling.

In Romania, I’m attempting to put all of this in a context that has a completely different kind of history from Canada and the United States, and then show some ways that C.S. Lewis speaks into this conversation–not as an expert, but with beauty, truth, and goodness. Romania has its own stories of conquest, displacement, and development, and I would love to learn more about them. However, in reading Narnia closely, I want to try to connect that audience to this Island space in which I endeavour to live well as it inhabits me.

If the talk is taped and I can share it, I will do so. Meanwhile, here is the title and a somewhat expanded description (though I already see that I am saying too much for a 15-minute talk!). I look forward to comments or seeing you online!

“At war with all wild things”: A Settler’s Reflections on C.S. Lewis and Indigenous Spaces

From the beginning of his fiction project in “Bleheris,” “Loki Bound,” and Dymer, to his mature and popular fantasy novels, C.S. Lewis is always writing about tyranny. When Lucy first finds her way into that magical world, the land is under the yoke of a century-long winter. We learn about this “always winter and never Christmas” reign through the stories and folklore of the Narnians as they live lives of resisting or giving in to the pretender’s cruel reign. Slaves are liberated in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, The Silver Chair, and The Horse and His Boy as Narnia negotiates its spaces between and among empires and colonies. In The Last Battle, these pressures finally collapse as colonial powers flood into Narnia through ways opened by conspirators.

But in Prince Caspian, we learn of the tyranny from various angles. In this “Return to Narnia,” a remnant of Old Narnia tells the successor to the tyrannical throne—the Telmarine Prince Caspian himself—about Narnia’s long history of loss and suffering under tyranny. We hear the stories of oppressors and the oppressed as old Narnia comes alive again in an alliance of settlers and indigenous peoples.

Prince Caspian’s peculiar position of colonial power in sympathy with the colonized invites us to reimagine Lewis’ fiction in a context where we are coming alive to the stories of lands and their peoples that where often destroyed or forced underground in what Lewis called the death-consumed “social sewerage system” of European colonial rule. Lewis gives space to the heart-breaking tales of the indigenous folk, like Dr. Cornelius, without pretending that colonial systems of government and social development can simply be uncreated.

In this paper, I walk beside Prince Caspian as he considers his role in the ancestral and ongoing (though illicit) land of the Narnians, while I live in the ancestral and ongoing territory of the Mi’kmaq people of Prince Edward Island. Europeans came and conquered, driving the Old Islanders, who once had the wealth of all of these lands and rivers and woods, into tiny hamlets, claiming to rule this place, re-educating the people, and, like the Telmarines, suppressing the old stories and wild ways of being in the world. Without ignoring the cultural distance of time and space between my kitchen table and C.S. Lewis’ writing desk, Lewis helps us reimagine a way beyond course binaries that dominate (especially American) social discourse—guilty and innocent, ignorance and knowledge, despair and naivete—and invites us to listen, live, and lead in transformational ways within the tensions of our ever-changing colonial spaces

Prince Caspian, hungry for magic, mystery, and meaning, thrills when he discovers that “All you have heard about Old Narnia is true. It is not the land of Men. It is the country of Aslan, the country of the Waking Trees and Visible Naiads, of Fauns and Satyrs, of Dwarfs and Giants, of the gods and the Centaurs, of Talking Beasts.” But then he discovers that “It is you Telmarines who silenced the beasts and the trees and the fountains, and who killed and drove away the Dwarfs and Fauns, and are now trying to cover up even the memory of them.”