Imperial Debris in Janet Frame's To the Is-Land (1982)

Abstract

This article explores Janet Frame's first autobiography To the Is-Land, reading Frame's relentless cataloguing of objects as indicative of her wider, post-imperial, life writing project. Frame insists that her ancestors (white Scottish settlers who arrived in New Zealand as part of a chain migration) ‘survive as a presence in objects [such] as a leather workbag, a pair of ribbed butter pats, a handful of salmon spoons’ (7). But the meaning of these objects is never stable: they are frequently lost, broken, or their significance is misinterpreted. Reading against the grain of this insistent cataloguing, I argue that these objects are detritus, rather than heirlooms and that Frame's life writing is filled with imperial debris which resists colonial taxonomies. Through this strategic confusion of objects and origin stories, Frame challenges an understanding of empire as a beginning point or determinant within her life writing.