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It Stops with Me: Memoir of a Canuck Girl, by Charleen Touchette
PDF Download It Stops with Me: Memoir of a Canuck Girl, by Charleen Touchette
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Artist'ss captivating and sober memoir of survival, renewal and healing among French Canadian, Jewish and Indian families across America. Follows the Author from Woonsocket, RI to Wellesley College, New York'ss Lower East Side and Soho to Indian Country and Santa Fe, New Mexico where she is debilitated by a toxic illness and must remember her childhood to heal. ART016000; BIO000000; OCC000000
- Sales Rank: #2576153 in Books
- Brand: Brand: TouchArt Books
- Published on: 2004-04-29
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.96" h x .81" w x 6.08" l, 1.06 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 320 pages
Features
- Used Book in Good Condition
Review
"...read it on vacation... terrific... could relate to much of it... especially enjoyed description of Touchette's life in N.Y." -- Ana Pacheco, Editor Publisher La Herencia, 2004 Governor's Award for Outstanding New Mexico Women Recipient, 2004 P.E.N. New Mexico Awardee
"Tough, evocative, border-crossing, honest, unflinching, and most of all very beautiful... large enough so it can embrace its readers." -- Margaret Randall, Author, photographer, activist, 2004 P.E.N. New Mexico Lifetime Achievement Awardee
"courageous story and writing give strength to all of us...survivors from generations of joy, sorrow, violence, and love." -- Winona LaDuke, Native American Environmental Activist, Co-Founder Indigenous Women's Network
…Touchette describes through…words and art, generations of oppression, the joys and sorrows of families and the choices they make." -- Deborah Davis, The New Mexican, Sunday April 18, 2004
…the conundrum of identity, wrapped up in a cycle of oppression and anger, unprovable ties and ties that bind." -- Jonanna Widner, The Santa Fe Reporter, April 21-27, 2004
From the Publisher
TouchArt Books debuts as an independent book publisher based in Santa Fe, New Mexico focusing on quality books of contemporary fine literature and art with its premier book, It Stops with Me: Memoir of a Canuck Girl by Author Artist Charleen Touchette. This unique book demonstrates TouchArt Books' commitment to publishing innovative books combining literature and art by original thinkers from diverse cultures in America.
From the Author
When I was growing up, I never knew any Canucks who were authors or artists. The libraries did not have books that told the stories of my memeres and ma tantes. It is important that women tell our stories that have been absent from the history of the world, especially for those of us who are mixed blood whose oral traditions have been obscured by oppression and genocide. We tell our stories and those of our grandmothers to honor them and inspire our children and future generations to celebrate all their cultural heritages.
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0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
From Teen Ink
By Critical Thinker
Banned Books: It Stops With Me
Custom User AvatarBy chipped_graphite, Camden, ME
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Banned Books: It Stops With Me
Image Credit: Jacque W., Columbus, NE
The author's comments:
Quotes
This piece was adapted from a speech I wrote for class.
Quotes
Imagine this:
It's 7:58 pm, 1954. You're born in a small hospital after eighteen hours of labor into the arms of a nineteen-year-old, unconscious but unconditionally loving mother. You're told many times in the years to follow that that day was one of the happiest of your parents' lives: the day their first daughter was born.
You grow up in Woonsocket, Rhode Island, a town American by geography but French Canadian by heart and soul. You speak English when you're at school, French when you answer your father's phone, and both at the dinner table. Your mother pushes relentlessly to rid you and your two sisters of the name Canuck, the derogatory term used to insult French Canadians. It won't be until much later that you work just as hard to reclaim that piece of your childhood culture.
For the most part, you are a happy kid. Happy but confused. You know, or at least you're fairly certain, that your parents love you, but sometimes you wonder if the things that go on inside your house--the incessant screaming, beating, crying, and fear--happen in every home in your neighborhood. At age eight, you write a letter to your future self, saying: "Never forget how it feels to be a little kid with a crazy mean daddy."
But you get through it. School is your escape, and the nuns at École Jesus Marie are kind. You feel guilty lying that you don't have shorts for gym, but you don't want them to see the bruises on your legs. You're permitted to skip first grade, and when the time comes for high school you convince your parents to send you to a more expensive academy forty-five minutes away. You graduate as a National Merit Semifinalist and choose Wellesley College from a long list of acceptance letters. There you find your passion for art and transfer to Bard College your sophomore year. No one knows you are battling severe depression.
You meet Barry, the love of your life, and between him and your painting you are happier than you've ever been. You go backpacking west through the Adirondacks, Canada, South Dakota, Wyoming, and Montana before returning to Manhattan and getting married. The experience gives you a husband, a baby, and inspiration for your art.
But four kids, a move to Santa Fe, countless exhibitions, and a decade later, you come down with a strange illness. No doctor can explain or remedy the piercing pain in your head or the horrible nightmares. You finally turn to spiritual healers, and eventually discover you are struggling to come to terms with the trauma you faced as a child. It won't be until your youngest, your daughter, is entering high school that you are able to fully face the abuse and to let go.
Your name is Charleen Touchette, and in 2004 at the age of fifty, you publish It Stops With Me: Memoir of a Canuck Girl. You have just released your personal and powerful story for all the world to read.
A year later, you receive a call. There has been a request to remove it from the Woonsocket Harris Public Library. What's worse, the challenger is your father.
He is quoted by both local and national newspapers as stating: "If members of a family wish to harm one another, those actions should be kept private and should not draw in others by involving matters of public policy."
To add insult to injury, Leon Botstein, the president of Bard College, where you, your husband, and your sister graduated, joins in and agrees with your father that domestic violence should remain a private matter. He is quoted as saying that your book "does not deserve First Amendment protection."
Thankfully, you are a member of various author and library associations and manage to launch a letter-writing campaign against the ban. After several months, your memoir is back on the shelves in your hometown. Your father refuses to comment for the press.
Child abuse isn't pretty, but it happens. On average, a report of child abuse is made every ten seconds. That means that in the time it's taken to read this, approximately thirty cases have been reported and countless others should have been but instead, someone kept silent. Is this really out of respect for the abuser's "privacy"?
There are so many horrible ironies in this situation, but the most blatant is the comment Leon Botstein made concerning the First Amendment, which, if you're unaware, is the one guaranteeing freedom of speech and press among other things. By complaining, he is essentially suggesting that Touchette had no right to write about her experiences. The most obvious contradiction to this is that by writing It Stops With Me, she not only completed her own process of healing but also gave voices to the millions of children and adults who were never able to speak out against their abuse.
Keeping violence a "private matter" is giving permission for it continue.
But there are other defenses as well, ones you can't find unless you read this powerful book. What I most admired about Touchette was how utterly forgiving she was towards her father and her situation. Looking back on old photographs, she would never fail to comment on the "deep sadness" in his eyes. The few times she did accuse him of being abusive were immediately followed by sentences explaining why it wasn't his fault. His parents likely abused him, and their parents and their parents and on and on. "...[I]t took generations to make a man like Archie," she said on one of the last pages. She was also very laid-back when she addressed the abuse itself. She let the descriptions of her nightmares and some of her included artwork speak for itself. Never once did she use the word rape, even though it would have been entirely appropriate. If anything, her father should have felt deep gratitude to have such an empathetic daughter.
The worst irony of all, however, did not become apparent to me until the very last paragraph, which reads as follows:
"How did it get to the point where men and women are at war, and their children are the swords they wield against each other? It is not just about my family and my ancestry. I don't know where it started, but I do know where it is ending. It is stopping right here with me. I choose a different legacy for my children to pass generation to generation. I was not the first girl to be abused in my family. But I will be the first to say, c'est fini. No more. It stops here with me."
If that doesn't make it clear that she was in no way promoting or encouraging child abuse but trying to prevent it, then nothing will. If simply reading an account of such horrible things makes someone want to go out and do them or support them or keep them private, then banning a little-known book like this is beyond pointless. I feel genuinely sorry for these people because they cannot appreciate banned books such as Charleen Touchette's It Stops With Me.
Stop the banning of books: read them!
6 of 8 people found the following review helpful.
New Review of It Stops with Me on Memoirs and More on May 18, 2009
By TouchArt, Ltd.
[...]
"The latest: It Stops with Me: Memoirs of a Canuck Girl, by Charleen Touchette. Finally, some solid writing. Touchette is also a gifted visual artist and includes black and white and colour prints of her paintings in the book. As well, she is a curator, an educator, an activist and freelance writer. She has numerous book titles to her name, many with feminist perspectives, others that explore issues of cultural, religious and historical identities.
I don't think Touchette and I would be best friends; this woman takes her politics very seriously and for all that she says she loves to laugh and enjoy life, her childhood was so bleak, violent and confusing, that it takes very bit of her sane self to keep the tortured self from imposing permanent depressions and mental and physical dysfunctions of all sorts.
That said, I have huge admiration for someone who has done as much as this woman has done, and succeeded in so many areas. I also admire someone who, as a young adult, chose a resoundingly sane and loving man with whom to share her life and make a family. If anyone could be forgiven for having chosen an unkind life partner, it would be Touchette. And yet she bypassed entirely the common pattern of abused children growing up to choose abusive partners. Now that's a person who somehow protected her absolute core of sanity - against all odds.
It was a lovely and at the same disturbing read. My only criticism is the odd coyness about revealing the extent of her father's sexual abuse. She builds up the tension in this regard again and again - in the art work and in the prose - but never flat-out says that she was raped, although this is intimated.
Likewise, she often repeats that the time was not right to tell her parents about the abuse (that would be tell her mother and confront her father) and the reader is left to guess that she never did tell them directly, but did show the art work around the country and beyond, and of course publish the memoir.
Again, you feel as the the entire book is building towards a showdown with the father - and yet this never occurs. Mind you, I don't blame her for avoiding/putting off a showdown. The father remains a right prick throughout her life, for all that his violent ways tone down with age. It's just that the story feels strangely climax-less - especially for a book that builds towards a climax almost from the first page.
All of which makes me sad. It seems that no matter how successful Touchette is, how brilliantly she has created and maintained a happy and healthy family life of her own, her fear of her father still dictates major decisions in her life. There are too many points I end up guessing about. Did she decide the pain of confrontation was not worth whatever good and liberating feelings she might receive back? Did the love she had for her mother get in the way of confronting the father? Was her mother's role in the abuse (pretending it didn't happen, looking the other way, blaming Touchette for the violence her father metes out to her) far too upsetting to explore in a meaningful way?
In the end consideration, I am not sure how I feel about the book." by Marjorie Simmins posted on May 18, 2009 on Memoirs and More.
15 of 20 people found the following review helpful.
Creative Franco-American Autobiography
By Juliana LHeureux
An autobiography of a spunky Franco-American woman from Woonsocket, Rhode Island gives cultural storytelling multi-generational appeal. Too many Franco-Americans (with ancestral roots in French-Canada) are quickly amalgamating into the mainstream of American culture without writing their special family stories. Fortunately, Charleen Touchette, a Woonsocket, Rhode Island writer and artist now living in New Mexico, puts both of her pleasingly creative talents together in "It Stops With Me: Memoir of a Cannuck Girl".
Touchette writes about her Franco-American roots by relating simple, often bittersweet and even brutal experiences growing up as a typical French Catholic girl in Woonsocket and later as an accomplished artist.
Moreover, Touchette energizes her autobiography's prose with a series of original black, and white and color print blocks. In other words, "It Stops With Me" expresses Touchette's Franco-American creativity using prose accentuated by her surprisingly cutting edge original art describing absorbing coming of age experiences. Her journey from a parochial Franco-American into her adult life is fraught with opportunities, along with unexpected harsh challenges. Her life is ordinary in some ways but hardly a nostalgic cake walk.
"It Stops With Me" is at its best when Touchette looks back and elevates normal Franco-American experiences to familiarities we can identify with. For example, she describes cooking with her "Ma Tantes" or getting ready to receive First Holy Communion at Woonsocket's Eglise Précieux-Sang (Church of Precious Blood).
Discord arises at a young age. Growing up as a French Roman Catholic girl is an underlying theme. Touchette's typical childhood is without the benefit of feeling safe at home, as she depicts in one of her portraits of a "Not a Picture Perfect Family".
Rather, Touchette's absorbing life story endures familial stress, social and personal conflicts, even leading to physical ailments, which haunt her into adult years.
Touchette's hard hitting narrative is set apart from others of the modern autobiographic genre by the intimate and complicated relationships she shares with her family. Delving even deeper into her private spiral are the intense personal investigations Touchette undertakes with regard to her sad relationship with her father.
Nevertheless, in spite of the particular circumstances, it's typical of Franco-Americans to harbor deep attachments for their relatives and parents regardless of obvious flaws, shortcomings or even family violence. Female family role models are especially strong in Touchette's life. "Although my Maman was a devout Catholic, she was a strong supporter of my right to freedom of expression," writes Touchette. In fact, her female relatives were outraged when Touchette even considered not going to college after high school. In her Woonsocket Franco-Americans world, Touchette writes about how curious it was to be singled out for college when no other woman in her family ever went beyond a high school education.
Throughout the autobiography, her French heritage is front and center, even when she embraces the peace of Judaism.
Many of the book's chapters are charmingly led by simple French titles.
Touchette's talent as a creative writer moves the reader beyond the dark side of her autobiography. Using the power of words, she inspires us to learn more about her as an individual woman with a spellbinding story to tell. Touchette does a good job explaining the pros and cons of the personal contrasts she inherited from her religious and ethnic roots. This is a well written autobiography, nominated for book awards, with a progressive social focus.
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