A Newfoundland girl

Ground to Stand On: A Canadian Literary Life
by Sandra Djwa  

Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2026
$34.95 /  9780228027706

Reviewed by Bill Paul

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In the mid-1950s Sandra Djwa (née Drodge) lives with her mother, Dora, and two younger sisters, Elizabeth and Dorothy, in the basement of her grandmother’s large house in St. John’s, Newfoundland. Sandra’s father, Walter, is having a hard time adjusting to civilian life after serving with the Merchant Marine during the Second World War. He’s often away working as a boat captain travelling as far as the West Indies. Besides raising her family, Dora runs a dressmaking business from home, mending dresses for extra cash. Eldest daughter Sandra is strong-willed and an avid reader drawn to the poems of the Newfoundland writer, E.J. Pratt. Reading all manner of books from the public library gives her great pleasure. Sandra’s plan is to attend university knowing that in Newfoundland the expectations for women are limited to getting married and having children.

Newfoundland joined Canada in March, 1949. During the post-war era the salt fishing industry was the cornerstone of the Newfoundland economy and employed men and women, yet women received lower pay for doing similar work as men. In the newer industries like forestry and mining the work was done by men. Year round work for fishermen and tradesmen was scarce. For women there was mostly low paid domestic, clerical, and household work. Women from Sandra’s generation yearned to “escape the implacable social order” that was entrenched in Newfoundland society. For Sandra, to get an education and enter a profession other than teaching meant that you needed to move off the island and onto the mainland (Ontario, Nova Scotia).

Sandra’s story about her family is one of many anecdotes she recounts in Ground to Stand On: A Canadian Literary Life. Growing up she finds that her young life is being shaped by social and economic forces beyond her control and the geography and landscape of Newfoundland. The book is part family memoir and part a recollection of her extraordinary career in academia. Attending Memorial University as a teenager was an unforgettable experience where she “revelled in this mix of books and people” and may have inspired her to dedicate her life to write about the poets, academics, and intellectuals who created a national Canadian literature. In 2020, the West Vancouver writer was appointed as Member of the Order of Canada for her contribution to Canadian and Quebecois literature.

An observation that she makes early in her life is “young men and their careers were taken seriously” and that women live in the “male world of power.” With this knowledge Sandra starts to notice the inequality that exists between men and women in the home and in the workforce. At home, her mother carries the family and is the main breadwinner due to her father’s inability to provide money “enough to feed us or pay rent.” In the academic workplace of the 1940s, Sandra knows that her grandfather’s cousin, Helen Lodge, pushed back against gender discrimination until she was appointed with the title of professor in the education department at Memorial University. Her death prompted Sandra to rethink her career dreams.

It made me think about the difficulties experienced by women as scholars and professors. It also led me to wonder if I could ever be an academic. I wanted a husband, family, a stable family life. But for female students at Memorial in the fifties the career choices are either teaching or family – very rarely both.

It was under these circumstances in 1956 that after working as a student reporter for the Evening Telegram, Sandra studies English literature at Memorial University and begins to attend meetings organised by the Student Christian Movement (SCM). At the end of the year, she travels to a SCM conference meeting at the University of New Brunswick and in June, 1957 she visits Toronto to volunteer at an international Christian summer work camp. At the Bathurst United Church, known as a left-leaning, progressive community church in Toronto, she’s befriended by Peter Djwa, a mechanical engineer from Indonesia and a Christian. The two become close companions and Sandra senses that he is supportive of her interest in having a family and a career in literature. Sandra writes:

Peter was unlike anyone else I had ever met. Of Chinese-Indonesian descent, he was seven years older than me and had beautiful features with a warm smile. Most importantly, he was impelled by a strong sense of inner direction….And when he produced photographs of his sister’s children, I realised he had a strong love of family.

In December, Peter sends Sandra an engagement ring and proposes to her. This is Sandra’s fork in the road. She accepts knowing she’s taking a “tremendous gamble.” In June, 1958, nineteen-year-old Sandra Drodge boards a plane for Vancouver “wearing a two-piece suit of pale-blue cotton sprigged with flowers – sewn by my mother and me. In my left hand, I carried a purse, and with my right I lugged a heavy, portable Singer sewing machine.” Peter has enrolled her in two education courses at the University of British Columbia (UBC) and he plans to start a master’s degree in business. The interracial couple face their share of discrimination but eventually find a place to rent. Both believe that their “shared values based on a Christian faith” will provide a strong foundation for their marriage.

At UBC in the fall of 1958 she registers in the Faculty of Education and the Faculty of Arts. Enrolled in an honours English program in 1962 at UBC, she takes a poetry class from Roy Daniels and learns the mechanics of how a poem is constructed. Daniels is a poet, teacher, and mentor who is mentioned several times in the book. During the 1930s he taught a course in Canadian literature at the University of Toronto. Djwa describes him as a man whose “religious concerns had been transferred to literature.” By 1964, she’s writing essays on E.J. Pratt and the Confederation poets. She writes: “I had acquired a general sense of English, American, and Canadian literature, but was most interested in Canadian.”

Her academic life flourishes during the rise of feminism and the push for women’s equality in the workplace. As a doctoral candidate from 1965 to 1967 she completes a study of Canadian poetry and lands a position as a sessional instructor in the English Department at UBC. In the spring of 1968, she finishes her PhD and at the age of 29, Sandra Djwa, pregnant with her son Jai, is hired as an English instructor at Simon Fraser University (SFU). Described as a person who knows the “difference between justice and injustice” she is involved in defending the rights of academic married women and is active in calling for the need to hire more Canadian instructors in an SFU English Department dominated by American professors.

In Canada for many years the classics of American and European literature were seen as superior to the literature produced in Canada. One reason was that text books such as Canadian Anthology featuring work by writers such as Archibald Lampman and Bliss Carman, known as the Confederation poets, and the works of poetry by Earle Birney, were probably out of print. In the late 1960s during the emergence of nationalism in Canada, Canadian literature starts to find a wider audience and gradually is taught in English departments at major universities across the country. In 1969, Djwa teaches a graduate course in Canadian poetry that includes the writings of Dorothy Livesay and P.K. Page. The positive response from students in her class convinces her that the writings and ideas of women poets are relevant to understanding contemporary women’s lives in Canada.

It’s through her close reading of poetry, studying the relationship between language and imagery, that she becomes a critic and an essayist. Always at the back of her mind are the poems of Newfoundland writer, E.J. Pratt. Born in 1882 in Western Bay, Pratt’s memories of growing up on the Grates Cove peninsula are similar to some of her own memories of “childhood summers.” Pratt writes about the Newfoundland landscape and lives of fisherman in the outport communities. He is also considered a nationalist poet. In 1974, Sandra publishes a study on his poetry called E.J. Pratt: The Evolutionary Vision. It’s not a traditional biography but it shows off her skills as a researcher and a narrator. These are skills she uses later when she sits down to write and research three biographies.

About her private life, Djwa is tactful and restrained. She writes about raising their son Jai and how during her early university teaching career, a fellowship grant helped finance a down payment on a house. She comments on her 28-year marriage with Peter which over time becomes strained. Sandra writes: “Peter continued to see himself as a patriarch and I felt the marriage was a partnership.” The marriage ends in 1986. She is exhausted, uncertain what to do with her life. Years later in 1989 she meets Lalit Srivastava, a biology professor at Simon Fraser University and two years later they marry. What they both share is a passion for work and love of their children. In 2007, Lalit is diagnosed with a fatal illness. In the last years of his life Djwa and Lalit travel and visit friends until his death in 2012.

During the time of her marriage with Peter she begins to interview the poet, political activist, and constitutional lawyer, F.R. Scott with plans to write a biography about him. The book, The Politics of the Imagination: A Life of F. R. Scott takes ten years to write and is published in 1987, a year after her divorce from Peter. In 2002, she publishes a biography on Roy Daniels who had retired from UBC in 1974. Her last biography is on the poet and friend P.K. Page, Journey with No Maps: A Life of P.K. Page. Djwa senses an affinity with Page. What impresses her is Page’s determination to become an artist, how she “connected with modernism and feminism, transcending many of the limitations facing women of her generation.” The biography won the Governor General’s Literary Award for Nonfiction.

As the book draws to a close, you feel like you’ve been a guest at a literary salon celebrating the history of Canadian-English poetry. Your host is Sandra Djwa; a thoughtful and articulate writer and teacher, academic activist and acclaimed biographer. You admire her breadth of literary knowledge and her generosity of spirit when she talks about Canadian culture. You meet her family and dear friends, fellow academics, and poets. You meet well known Canadians like Pierre Trudeau and Northrop Frye and also men and women not so well known, people like Professor Carl F. Klinck and Thea Gray, friend of P.K. Page. At times your host becomes nostalgic for Newfoundland. You feel fortunate that she has shared with you her philosophy on how to live with a strong sense of purpose.

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East Vancouverite Bill Paul enjoys photography and reading fiction and nonfiction. [Editor’s note: Bill has recently reviewed books by Richard Kelly Kemick, Dietrich Kalteis, Meg Todd, Clea Young, Iona Whishaw, and Stephen Osborne for The British Columbia Review.]

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The British Columbia Review

Interim Editors, 2023-26: Trevor Marc Hughes (non-fiction), Brett Josef Grubisic (fiction)
Publisher: Richard Mackie

Formerly The Ormsby Review, The British Columbia Review is an on-line book review and journal service for BC writers and readers. The Advisory Board now consists of Jean Barman, Wade Davis, Robin Fisher, Barry Gough, Hugh Johnston, Kathy Mezei, Patricia Roy, and Graeme Wynn. Provincial Government Patron (since September 2018): Creative BC. Honorary Patron: Yosef Wosk. Scholarly Patron: SFU Graduate Liberal Studies. The British Columbia Review was founded in 2016 by Richard Mackie and Alan Twigg.

“Only connect.” – E.M. Forster