George Ryga
George Ryga was a prominent Canadian playwright, poet, and novelist known for his powerful voice advocating for the marginalized and oppressed. Born to immigrant parents in a Ukrainian farming community in Alberta, he had a humble educational background that began in a one-room schoolhouse. His early work as a radio producer was cut short due to his controversial political views, which fueled his commitment to social justice. Ryga's first notable play, "Indian," aired on television in 1962 and addressed the dehumanization faced by Indigenous people, a theme he continued to explore in his acclaimed work "The Ecstasy of Rita Joe," which reflects on the tragic consequences of systemic discrimination.
Throughout his career, Ryga also published novels that dealt with themes of familial conflict, cultural preservation, and the human condition, including "Hungry Hills" and "Ballad of a Stone-Picker." His writing encapsulated the struggles of various underrepresented groups, and he often drew inspiration from historical events and personal experiences. Despite his significant contributions to Canadian literature, Ryga's career was cut short by a battle with inoperable stomach cancer. He spent his final years in Summerland, British Columbia, where he continued to write until his passing, leaving behind a legacy of poignant works that resonate with the struggles of the disenfranchised.
On this Page
Subject Terms
George Ryga
Canadian playwright and critic
- Born: July 27, 1932
- Birthplace: Deep Creek, Alberta, Canada
- Died: November 18, 1987
- Place of death: Summerland, British Columbia, Canada
Biography
George Ryga (REE-gah), the son of immigrants, grew up in a Ukrainian farm community in Alberta, Canada. His formal education began and ended in the one-room schoolhouse of Deep Creek. As an adolescent, he joined the laboring gangs that worked on roads and bridges, and he pursued a high-school education by correspondence. At eighteen, he landed a job as a radio producer, an opportunity that allowed his writing talent to blossom and his distinctive voice to develop. It was a voice that would mark his life with controversy, for it lashed out unsparingly against social and political structures that oppressed and exploited the weak and the downtrodden.
The radio station fired him for his political views, and Ryga traveled to Scotland to study another poet of dissent, Robert Burns. For a number of years, he worked at odd jobs while writing poetry, short stories, and novels.
In 1962, he wrote his first play, Indian, broadcast on television later that year and frequently anthologized since. It packed a powerful punch as it dramatized the dehumanization of the Indian by heartless employers and government officials. The Ecstasy of Rita Joe followed in 1967. Linked to Indian in subject matter and theme, The Ecstasy of Rita Joe was based on an actual murder of an Indian girl in Vancouver and staged as a trial, with the audience as jury. The sympathy for Rita builds to a powerful climax as she suffers indignities and finally destruction at the hands of whites. Widely acknowledged as Ryga’s best work, The Ecstasy of Rita Joe is performed frequently, both in Canada and abroad.
In the 1960’s, Ryga also began to publish novels. In his long fiction, as in his plays, short stories, poems, screenplays, and radio scripts, his mission is the same: to represent the voice of the underdog. In Hungry Hills, the vital quest for life and belonging in both old and young gets ground into dust during the drought of the 1930’s. Ballad of a Stone-Picker depicts the lonely condition of the human race and also presents one of Ryga’s recurrent themes: fathers who hurt, betray, and destroy.
The father in Sunrise on Sarah, for example, rejects his daughter because she was not the son he had wanted. Sarah’s futile search for a surrogate ends in tragedy. Though a father’s destructive impact on his daughter also informs Seven Hours to Sundown, the main conflict is between the destroyers and preservers of culture, centered in a power struggle over the preservation of an old building. Captives of the Faceless Drummer, based on the actual kidnapping and murder of a Québec cabinet minister by Québec separatists, indicts the spiritual vacuity of both sides.
Night Desk, Ryga’s third novel, is the monologue of a colorful fight promoter whose rambling anecdotes expose one of Ryga’s favorite targets: the squalor and spiritual poverty of city life. Ploughman of the Glacier is set in a mine in British Columbia. Based on two historical characters, the play takes a critical look at the exploitative spirit of humankind. In the Shadow of the Vulture, which reflects the influence of a stay in Mexico, presents the cause of Mexican farm laborers in the United States.
Ryga’s career as Canada’s most eloquent and disturbing stage voice was cut short when he was diagnosed with inoperable stomach cancer. After 1963, he made Summerland, British Columbia, his permanent home. There he wrote the letters, stories, speeches, and plays that gave a voice to the suffering masses, and there he wrote his last words, the poem “Resurrection,” when he felt the end approaching. In it, he expressed his anguish that his time was running out. Perhaps after death, he hoped, he would have freedom to “tend to the sick and wounded, give courage to the fallen.”
Bibliography
Boire, Gary. “Tribunalations: George Ryga’s Postcolonial Trial ‘Play.’” Ariel 22, no. 2 (April, 1991): 5-20. The Ecstasy of Rita Joe is compared with Margaret Atwood’s novel The Handmaid’s Tale (1986) and other anticolonial literature as a paradigm for examining the “encoding of class violence under the guise of social contract . . . [a] crucial feature of anti-colonial literatures.” Strong postmodern, semiotic deconstructionist look at “what postcolonial theorists call the reclamation of a world through irony.”
Burgess, Patricia, ed. Annual Obituary 1987. Chicago: St. James Press, 1990. A good recapitulation of Ryga’s themes, approaches to character, and patterns of composition during his career, along with an updated biography. “The lack of integration between land and people and between the individual and the group is the essential duality in Ryga’s work,” states the anonymous writer of this obituary.
Grace, Sherrill. “The Expressionist Legacy in the Canadian Theatre.” Canadian Literature, no. 118 (Autumn, 1988): 47-58. This study of Ryga and Robert Gurik examines the non-naturalistic aspects of both writers. Details The Ecstasy of Rita Joe, especially the characters identified by function, and the fragmented structure.
Hoffman, James. The Ecstasy of Resistance: A Biography of George Ryga. Toronto: ECW Press, 1995. Describes major events in Ryga’s life, especially those that relate to his writing. Includes bibliography and index.
Saddlemyer, Ann. “Crime in Literature: Canadian Drama.” In Rough Justice: Essays on Crime in Literature, edited by M. L. Friedland. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991. Ryga’s Indian is discussed as drama that “involves the process of judgment, assigning responsibility for action, distinguishing truth from fiction.”