Category: Canada

“Foolish I may have been, but never silly.” The Stone Angel by Margaret Laurence

Now I am rampant with memory. I don’t often indulge this, or not so very often, anyway. Some people will tell you the old live in the past—that’s nonsense. Each day, so worthless really, has rarity for me lately. I could put it in a vase and admire it, like the first dandelions, and we would forget their weediness and marvel that they were there at all.

Meet Hagar Shipley. A woman nurtured and fueled by a stubborn pride and determination for ninety years, staring down death and, if refusing to live in the past, pulled to make some reluctant peace with it all the same. This singular, unforgettable character whose internal monologue—by turns funny, caustic, indomitable and confused—is the very soul (though she might dispute that designation) of Margaret Laurence’s classic 1964 novel, The Stone Angel. In person, it’s easy to imagine that Hagar would have been a difficult person to like, but as she chafes against the physical and familial restrictions of her current circumstances, and her thoughts drift back to revisit the lost relationships that continue to haunt her, it is impossible not to hope that she will find a way to go gentle into that good night. For once.

The daughter of a Scottish immigrant, Hagar was born in Manawaka, Manitoba, a town inspired by the author’s own hometown of Neepawa, sometime midway through the second half of the nineteenth century. Her mother does not survive her birth, so she and her two older brothers are raised by their father, a prominent local businessman, and Auntie Doll, the family’s housekeeper. Hagar is every bit her father’s daughter, hardworking, hard-headed and proud. But her gender limits the possibilities available to her. She is sent off to finishing school in Toronto and returns armed with skills of a proper lady, expected to accept one of the many suitable matches her father parades before her. But she is having none of them. In her typical spirit of defiance, she chooses Bram Shipley, a local farmer and widower fourteen years her senior who is uncouth, uneducated and unambitious. Her bed is made—a bed that will produce two sons over the next two decades before she finally gets it in her mind to leave.

Meanwhile, in the present day, Hagar is living in a city on the coast, with her eldest son Marvin, and his wife Doris. The house they live in is hers—or it was, she can’t remember if she really did sign over ownership somewhere along the way—and now that her grandchildren are grown and gone, it becomes clear to her that her son and daughter-in-law have plans to send her packing too. They have even selected a lovely nursing home: Silverthreads.

“If you make me go there, you’re only signing my death warrant, I hope it’s clear to you. I’d not last a month, not a week. I tell you—”

They stand transfixed by my thundering voice. And then, just when I’ve gained this ground, I falter. My whole hulk shakes, the blubber prancing up and down upon my rib cage, and I betray myself in shameful tears.

So far as she is concerned, there is no debate. She will not go, even if she has to take matters into her own hands. And Hagar, being Hagar, will attempt to do just that in the most unlikely, ill-advised, fashion.

Moving between the present and the memories that keep flooding back, Hagar’s monologue begins with a confident, frequently condescending tone that slowly grows less self-assured and more introspective over time. She clings to her desire to appear in control against the physical insults of an aging body, while questioning her life-long inability to speak from the heart when needed or silence the mind’s impulse when diplomacy is called for—“I can’t keep my mouth shut. I never could,” she says. As the distance of the past comes into better, if pained focus, especially as she seeks to come to terms with the loss of her beloved younger son John, her contemporary existence becomes slipperier, more difficult for her to hold on to. At times she returns from her reveries uncertain if she has simply been lost in her own thoughts or has been speaking them aloud. And then, of course, her indefatigable pride leads to shame. In Hagar Shipley we have a complicated, painfully human woman unpacking a life time of tightly packed baggage as the end nears.

Of course, her story is also one that spans ninety years of Western Canadian history, from the tough pioneer spirit of the early settlers, through wars, financial collapse, and rapid modernization. However, as this history unfolds through Hagar’s memories, shaped by the personal experiences most significant to her now, it never becomes forced or unwieldy. In fact, her story never stands still for a moment; her recollections instantly bring a forgotten time to life again and again. As in this description of her return to the Shipley place during the drought years of the 1930s:

The prairie had a hushed look. Rippled dust lay across the fields. The square frame houses squatted exposed, drabber than before, and some of the windows were boarded over like bandaged eyes. Barbed wire fences had tippled flimsily and had not been set to rights. The Russian thistle flourished, emblem of want, and farmers cut it and fed it to their lean cattle. The crows still cawed, and overhead the telephone wires still twanged all up and down the washboard roads. Yet nothing was the same at all.

At each turn, across every page, The Stone Angel is a brilliantly realized novel. Hagar is such a wonderful character that it is perhaps best to come to know her as she comes to know and understand herself, but as one reads it is impossible not to marvel at Margaret Laurence’s achievement. In the Afterword, her friend, the writer Adele Wiseman, shares excerpts from letters Laurence sent her during the agonizing process of writing this novel, fretting about its possible appeal, temporarily abandoning, briefly rewriting and finally returning to her original manuscript. Only in her thirties at the time, she wanted to give a meaningful voice to an old woman:

Old age is something which interests me more and more – the myriad ways people meet it, some pretending it doesn’t exist, some terrified by every physical deterioration because that final appointment is something they cannot face, some trying to balance the demands and routines of this life with an increasing need to gather together the threads of the spirit so that when the thing comes they will be ready – whether it turns out to be death or only another birth.

In the end, Laurence wisely allowed the voice of the character who had so captivated her to guide the story she would tell. The Stone Angel truly is Hagar’s story—fiction but somehow so true. For a book I have been meaning to read forever (my copy was purchased more than thirty years ago), I only wish I hadn’t waited so long.

The Stone Angel by Margaret Laurence, originally published by McClelland and Stewart, is currently  published by Penguin/Random House.

At the back of the west wind: Rosa’s Very Own Personal Revolution by Eric Dupont

“Hegel remarks somewhere that all facts and personages of great importance  in world history occur, as it were, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.”

These words of Marx occur twice in course of Eric Dupont’s Rosa’s Very Own Personal Revolution: early on, underlined in the book lying open on the lap of the protagonist’s recently deceased mother, and again as the story nears an end. But between the two occurrences it’s pure farce—even the tragic bits.

One has to wonder what goes on in the imagination of Dupont, the Quebec writer whose works have won awards and garnered impressive nominations in both the original French and in English translation. With his latest release from QC Fiction, he has defied the odds of conventional storytelling to pull folktale magic, Marxist idealism, sex work, the politics of language and culture, and a curse reaching back through the centuries into one oddly contemporary tale. From the outset it is probably best allow yourself plenty of rational wiggle room, accept the premise of the proposed wild goose chase or fool’s errand at the heart of Rosa’s grand adventure, assured that however unlikely, the novel’s internal logic will be disclosed before the last page is turned. And ten to one you won’t see it coming!

Our heroine here is Rosa, named after the famous revolutionary socialist, raised by her trade unionist mother, Terese Ost, and Aunt Zenaida, an anachronistic old woman, one hundred years behind the times, who literally emerged from a large block of ice Terese and her daughter found on the shore near their village and dragged back home to thaw before the stove. Home is Notre-Dame-de-Cachelot, a tiny hamlet “forgotten by God and all of humankind” out on the Gaspé Peninsula “where the wind can be a crutch to lean on.” Until it’s not. Little Rosa is raised on a healthy diet of Marxist ideology and regular rounds of Scrabble, but things are not good in Notre-Dame-de-Cachelot. The paper mill has closed down, and the local economy has been forced to rely on a mysterious gas called Boredom which is tapped and sold to foreign interests.

And then, one day, the wind suddenly stops just as a leak occurs in one of the pipes accessing the source of the precious, albeit poisonous, gaseous commodity. Soon, people start dying of Boredom, beginning with Rosa’s mother. Without the wind to disperse the fumes, the village is doomed. Rosa tries to find solace in her socialist texts but to no avail. Instead, the potential solution comes to her when she finds a giant winkle shell on the shore, places the massive mollusc to her ear, and hears her mother’s voice advise her that the wind comes from the west—from Montreal. Immediately Rosa, who is now twenty, knows what she must do.

So off she goes. Waiting for the bus to take her into the city she meets an international troop of strippers (as one does), and much to their collective surprise, a woman pulls up in a minivan and offers to give them all a lift. This savoir is Jeanne Joyal and it just so happens that she runs a boarding house for young women where Rosa is welcome to stay. All too perfect? All too perfectly weird, I’d say. Naive and trusting, Rosa arrives in Montreal dressed like someone from a distant era and immediately finds a job in a pay-by-the-hour motel, across from a club where her new friends perform Communist infused lurid acts for an audience containing more than a few national political figures . Of course, she has no idea what she has just walked into, but her simplicity and openly accepting character inspires the strippers and hookers in her work environment to look out for her and gently educate her about the less savoury aspects of the world.

What makes this most unlikely scenario work is the central character, the fabulously innocent Rosa Ost. She evolves and hardens as time goes on, but her trust and dedication to her seemingly impossible task is endearing. At her lodgings, she learns that her landlady is tough, set in her ways and determined to educate her young charges, Rosa and three others, in the intricacies of Quebec history whether they want it or not. Our protagonist is often the one to take a risk and stand up in defense of her roommates. Like a good socialist.

There is romance, there is betrayal and there is mystery against a backdrop of political realities true to the timing of the narrative—late 2000, following the death of Pierre Elliot Trudeau—and still valid today. Language and cultural tensions are growing, the climate is an increasing concern and attitudes toward women, especially those in the sex trade, are marked by double standards that still prevail. The weakest link in this wild tale is a running gag about dialects that doesn’t necessarily translate smoothly. For it to work one has to read the Gaspé and Acadian seasoned dialogue with the correct accent. In English it risks falling flat. But it’s not a huge element within the narrative overall. Playful and irreverent this improbable farce is a fun read with a strangely satisfying, if bizarre, ending that ties up the loose ends in the wildest of knots.

Rosa’s Very Own Personal Revolution by Eric Dupont in translated by Peter McCambridge and published by QC Fiction.

Bedtime stories for insomniacs: To See Out the Night by David Clerson

In 2016, a feisty new imprint, dedicated to introducing English speaking audiences to a new generation of young Quebecois writers, emerged with their first release. Over the past five years, this small Canadian publishing venture has maintained an annual three-title season, their books garnering nominations, awards and international attention along the way. QC Fiction has now introduced their 2021-2022 line-up with To See Out the Night, a short story collection by David Clerson, the same author whose novella Brothers closed their first season.

A work of haunting minimalism, Brothers is a stark fable about the adventures of two misshapen boys who live with their mother in a desolate world—a place that exists somewhere between epic childhood fantasy and post-apocalyptic despair. Together the siblings craft a ramshackle boat and set off in search of their father, a wild dog. The tale that unfolds is one of tragedy and resilience, played out on a stage that is spare, surreal, and yet strangely alive. With broad brush strokes Clerson creates a work of such visual energy that I cannot help but imagine it as an animated film or graphic novel.

His new work, first published in French in 2019, carries some of the same qualities or tendencies as Brothers. Although the characters and settings have greater density—they are fleshed out a little more—but there is still much left unsaid. A porous line separates the real and the unreal. The narratives, if grounded in a more recognizable world, explore the middle ground between primal and modern energies. In keeping with its title then, one could think of the dozen short fables of To See Out the Night as bedtime stories for insomniacs, those caught between waking and sleep. As it turns out, night—alternate dream realities, night shift workers, the exploration of strange nocturnal spaces—feature in many of the stories.

Clerson has a fondness for the socially awkward character, someone who tends to isolate or struggle with finding a balance between the disparate elements of their life. He typically places most of his protagonists in distinctly Quebec settings, both urban and rural, but in most cases a weirdness awaits, one that warps otherwise ordinary existences, perhaps mildly, perhaps stretched far beyond the norm. This may even involve, as with the boys’ animal/human parentage in Brothers, a crossing of boundaries between man and beast. In the opening piece, “The Ape Within,” an unemployed night watchman experiences a compelling sense of connection with an orangutan on a nature documentary and soon becomes convinced he is possessed, from inside, by the ape. On vacation, the protagonist of “Jellyfish” is entered by an aquatic creature that will completely transform his life. In “The Language of Hunters,” the narrator’s encounter with a bear carcass, killed by a hunter but abandoned to the birds and forest animals, leads into an account of the impact his father’s suicide has left on him:

I felt like I couldn’t leave, like I wanted to dig a grave for the bear or take it with me, gut it, cut through its flesh, remove its animal skin and put it on. The hunter hadn’t bothered to take the fur or the meat, and I wondered why we taxidermied animals but not humans, why we tried to preserve animals in some approximation of life but hid the bodies of our loved ones until we forgot about them, until there was nothing left.

In each tale, an oddness of motivation or intent colours the engagements between the characters and the worlds they find themselves in. Clerson’s gift lies in taking apparently ordinary actors, setting them in an environment, real or surreal or both, and twisting the circumstances to see not simply how, but if they will respond. The touch is light, the tone is matter-of-fact regardless of context, be it realistic or fabulist in nature and, beneath the surface, existential questions percolate. Quietly yet consistently off-centre, To See Out the Night offers a charismatic collection of apocryphal tales for our times.

To See Out the Night by David Clerson is translated by Katia Grubisic (who also translated Brothers) and published by QC Fiction.

God in the sky is not listening: No Pain Like This Body by Harold Sonny Ladoo

There is such a desperate energy propelling the narrative of Harold Sonny Ladoo’s No Pain Like This Body that one cannot possibly read it and emerge untouched. The prose is vibrant, vulgar and violent, seamlessly incorporating vernacular and explosive onomatopoeic passages into a stunning portrait of a dark world marked by poverty, grief and fear. The result is a classic of Caribbean-Canadian literature—a tragic epic stripped bare, economically reimagined in a little over one hundred pages.

The son of a peasant, Ladoo was born in Trinidad in 1945, or perhaps earlier it’s not certain. He worked a variety of manual labour jobs before immigrating to Canada in 1968 with his wife and children. There he entered Erindale College at the University of Toronto, studying by day, and supporting himself and his family by working in restaurants at night. His debut novel, No Pain Like This Body, was published in 1972, the year he graduated, and was met with enthusiastic critical response winning him a writing bursary from the Canada Council. The following year he returned to Trinidad to research further books, a trip that was tragically ended when he was attacked and killed. Harold Sonny Ladoo was only twenty-eight.

In her essential introduction to the 2003 edition, poet and writer Dionne Brand describes Ladoo as she remembers him from their years together at Erindale College. She never really engaged with him directly— as part of the African-Asian West Indian student Association her attentions were social and political, while he would be tucked away in a corner furiously pouring everything he had into the book he was writing. Focused as if his life depended on it. And perhaps it did.

Thinking back to her own childhood in Trinidad, Brand recalls seeing Hindu prayer flags fluttering above the fields as her family would travel down rural roadways. Signposts of the kind of world Ladoo and his ancestors knew well:

Secreted off this road there were traces and villages hacked out of the cane, places that African forced labour had despairingly abandoned and where Indian people had been brought two generations before as indentured labourers. An equally despairing endeavour. The feeling all along these traces, in these villages, was mournful, a patient brooding.

These were places suspended in time caught between a difficult past and hopes for some kind of a better future:

One could either make something of these places or be crushed by them. And for all the marvellous turns of imagination that allow people to survive history’s arbitrariness, one is not always able to rise to the task of reinvention, one is not always successful at it . One fails. Ladoo’s No Pain Like This Body tells of just such a failure. The novel is a Veda to the beginnings of Indian life in Trinidad. Life in the not so imaginary Tola Trace. A life of the barest subsistence and what must have seemed abandonment by the gods. Ladoo by this act, by the writing of a hymn to these origins, thought that he could reinvent himself. And he did, momentarily. His early death cutting his work short.

Set in 1905, this novel pulls the reader into the life of a poor rice-farming family in a small Eastern Caribbean village called Tola. The weather, illness, violence, tragedy and superstition define their world. Of all of these factors, weather is perhaps one of the most persistent and brutal features:

It was August, the middle of the rainy season. The rain was falling and falling and falling as if the sky was leaking or something.

The perspective, for much of the story, is that of a child—not one child, but collectively in a sense—of all four of the family’s children, alone it seems in a world of unpredictable adults, and the  constant threat of danger, real and imagined. At twelve, Balraj is the oldest, his sister Sunaree is ten. Their younger brothers, the twins Rama and Panday, are eight. All four of the children are given tasks and responsibilities far beyond their relative ages. There is no option. Their father is an alcoholic, either drunk and violent or absent. Their weary, self-sacrificing mother is left to tend to most of the farming and all of the other household work. Her only saving grace is the fact that her parents, the children’s Nanna and Nanny live across the river and half a mile down the road.

As the novel opens, the children are out in the rice-field collecting tadpoles—crappo fish—while Ma is washing clothes. But Pa has come home, quiet like a snake. When the two older children begin to quarrel, everything starts to fall apart, threats quickly escalate and violence erupts. Balraj and his mother receive the worst of it, eventually taking refuge in a sugarcane field while the others run off in fear. Meanwhile the heavens open up:

The wind didn’t care about Tola. The wind was beating the rain and the rain was pounding the earth. There were no lights in the sky; all that Ma and Balraj saw were layers and layers of blackness and rage. The choking sound of the thunder came from the sky zip zip zip crash doom doomm doomed! Then the lightening moved as a gold cutlass and swiped an immortelle tree beyond the river.

When the three younger children come running down the road, frightened by the storm’s intensity, their mother is shocked to see them. She had assumed they were home and safe. Not certain what to do, she decides to send Balraj and Sunaree on to fetch their grandparents while she takes Panday and Rama, both of whom are naked, into the sugarcane so they can wait and stay warm for a while. By the time they get back to the house, Pa is gone, but Rama is coughing and running a fever.

There is no relief. The rain continues to beat down, Rama grows sicker, and after the older children return with their Nanna and Nanny, Balraj accidentally disturbs scorpions in an effort to patch the leaking roof with leaves. Both he and Rama are stung. This is a critical situation, one more crisis in an afternoon and evening of relentless misfortune.

Ever resilient, the first line of attack is to look to the past, to turn to traditional prayer and folk cures. Nanna recites mantras from Hindu scriptures over the ailing boys to drive away evil spirits, roasts a scorpion and forces them to eat it, and makes them pee in his hands and rubs the urine over their hands, faces and mouths. Nothing he tries makes any difference, their conditions only worsen and when Rama begins to vomit green fluid Ma panics:

“O God me chile deadin!” Ma screamed.

Ma ran and held on to Rama; he was still vomiting; his eyes were closed, but he was seeing, just as a jumbie bird sees in daylight.

Nanna opened his eyes and said, “He not deadin. Have patience. God goin drive dat spirit away.”

And Nanny: “Stop prayin oldman! Go and get a horse cart and take these chirens to Tolaville Hospital.”

In the end he has no choice but to concede and take Balraj and Rama to the hospital. Only one boy will survive.

Midway through the narrative, when Rama’s body is brought back for the wake and funeral, there is a subtle shift in tone—as the community gathers an adult perspective takes over, reflected in the coarseness and vulgarity of the language and interactions. A variety of colourful characters converge at the house, rum and coffee flow freely, as do insults, insinuations, and tall tales. But within the immediate family an undercurrent of brutality continues unchecked. Nonetheless, Ladoo’s inventive and original prose is not without passing intimations of beauty amid the despair and darkness:

There was life in Tola. There was life in the wind as it left the corners of the sky and swept the face of the earth; there was life in the dawn that was coming with gold in its mouth; there was love in the night birds that made strange noises beyond the river; there was love in the people as their hearts reached up to the sky and their souls mixed with the void.

This is a story that speaks to the ongoing cycle of life, and no matter how demanding life was these Indian immigrants had to keep going, one day at a time. Amid the blend of transported cultural practices with existing Caribbean folk tales and spirits, the Ramayana was something from home that they held fast to. As Brand suggests:

That epic myth arrived in the diaspora with indentured workers. It was perhaps a source of sustenance throughout their own exile. A return garlanded in the lights of welcome awaited them after the bleak drudgery of a life tied to plantations of cane and rice.

This epic lies somewhere in the text of No Pain Like This Body. But no garland of lights precedes or follows Ladoo’s Rama. A fever burns in him, he is stung by scorpions and eventually carried even farther away from mythic Ayodhya… Ladoo renders a Ramayana steeped in hatred and violence. Plagued by incessant rain (“the rain fell like a shower of poison over Tola”) and a god terrible and indifferent (“God does only eat and drink in that sky”), Ladoo’s onomatopoeic insistencies make more horrifying the action in the novel. His characters’ trusting innocence, their supplication to fate are made more disastrous by his feats of verbal play.

Powerful, intense and emotionally devastating, No Pain Like This Body is an important testament to the determination of the early Indian residents in the Caribbean to hold on to the idea that a better life might await their children in this new land. Ma alludes to that a few times. All they have is hope for the next generation. Several generations down, Harold Sonny Ladoo was destined to not only move away, but to honour this otherwise under recognized heritage. A second novel, Yesterdays, which is apparently more upbeat, was published posthumously, but the trilogy he had envisioned would sadly be unrealized.

No Pain Like This Body by Harold Sonny Ladoo, with an introduction by Dionne Brand, is published by House of Anansi.

Just the right touch: A few thoughts about In Every Wave by Charles Quimper and a link to my review at The Temz Review

It is a distinct challenge to attempt to write about a novel that is so delicate and spare, almost gossamer-like, without crushing it beneath the tip of your pen. In Every Wave, the latest offering from Quebec-based publisher, QC Fiction is such a novel—or rather, at just 80 pages—novella. To write too much, to attempt to over read it in the analysis, would not only spoil the emotional experience of encountering the novel without any specific expectations and, most critically, risks colouring the hauntingly open-ended conclusion which I feel can be rightfully read a number of ways.

When I write a review of a piece of fiction, I try to offer a way into the text—enough I hope for someone else to know if it might be of interest to them—but I try to be careful not to explicitly state how I understood the book. That kind of discussion is fine for a book club, even for a friendly online debate, but not for a review. There are several reasons for this. One is that my own feelings toward a work might not fully gel until weeks or months after I’ve finished reading it. The other, more important, is that the books I am most inclined to want to review, especially for publication elsewhere, have a level of ambiguity, an openness to multiple interpretations. That is what makes me want to go to the extra work involved in reading a text, often several times, and attempting to bring to it to life—just a little—on the page.

The premise of Charles Quimper’s In Every Wave (translated by Guil Lefebvre) is simple. After his young daughter is tragically lost on a summer holiday outing, a father’s world starts to crumble. The narrative, presented as an internalized monologue directed at the protagonist’s missing daughter, is fragmented, nonlinear, painfully realistic and disturbingly surreal in turns. Nothing is entirely certain—nothing but the aching, overwhelming grief that consumes the bereaved parents and destroys their relationship, altering their lives forever.

This brief, but indelible story is best approached without too many preconceptions, so I felt that writing about it necessitated the lightest touch. I hope I achieved that. My review, for the latest issue of The Tℇmz Review, is now online here.

On being male and a link to my review of What Kind of Man Are You by Degan Davis

What does it mean to talk about masculinity today, in the twenty-first century, when serious questions of equality still remain unaddressed, gender identity is increasingly fluid, and there are new expectations of accountability and responsibility in our interactions with one another? It’s a matter I often feel ill-equipped to engage with even though I am well aware of what I appear to be when people see me. A white, middle-aged man.  My hidden past is not seen, a significant disability I live with is not visible, and yet, I am not without privilege. But much of that privilege is not afforded by my gender, in fact there are distinct situations in which my gender presentation has been a marked disadvantage—as a single parent, for instance.  But a recent experience here in my neighbourhood brought home to me a situation in which neither my gender, nor my colour, was an attribute in my favour.

I was walking home from the store when I was approached by a young black man. He was visibly distressed. “There’s a little girl on the street and she’s naked,” he told me. He went on to say he did not have a phone to call the cops, but I knew his reluctance ran deeper than that. The girl, when I reached her, was a child, about four years old, possibly of Indigenous heritage, whom I have often seen unattended on the street or sidewalk, sometimes riding a bicycle, but never with an adult in sight. On this day she was wearing a little shirt and nothing else. Not even underwear. Running up and down along what can be a relatively busy road. Yet at this moment, there was no one around at all. A taxi driver, also a black man, slowed down and called to me from his passenger side window. He was also upset. I told him I would try to do something. And then I’m thinking: a middle-aged white man is also in a precarious situation being seen walking down the street or talking with a half-naked child.

I asked the girl where she lived and told her she could not be on the street like that. She had to go home. She went up to a house but would not go in, instead stood alongside the house, playfully, like this was a game. I moved back several houses to ensure that she didn’t run back onto the road and called the police. I told the officer I did not feel comfortable intervening any further, but how concerned I and the two black men I’d encountered were to see this child, so vulnerable and unattended.

I realized that, but for a decision made in my late thirties, I would, as a middle-aged white woman, have been in a better position to directly ensure the child’s security until the police arrived.

I transitioned to male at forty to ease a longstanding gender disconnect, not because I grew up identifying as or wanting to be a boy or a man and not because I was naturally masculine in my interests or inclinations, but because I could never shake the deep seated feeling I was not female. This was eighteen years ago, long before transgender became a widely acknowledged phenomenon, especially for female-to-male.

When I finally decided to proceed, that second puberty was a shock. It radically upended everything I thought I understood about men. Testosterone is a game changer. Physically, emotionally and sexually. And so now, among a mixed group of friends, when gender debates arise, I am torn—I empathize with men, but I know what it is like to grow up and live as a female person in the world. And I have a son and a daughter. And yet my experience, my being in the world, has always been othered, cross-gendered, transgendered, and it always will be.All of this is a long and roundabout way of getting to What Kind of Man Are You (Brick Books), Toronto-based poet Degan Davis’ debut collection.  Manhood and masculinity—in all its shades of vanity, foolishness, joy and sorrow—are themes that recur throughout his poetry. Davis, a Gestalt therapist by day, draws on his own experiences as a son, a parent and a partner, but also his love of music and, one would imagine, many hours listening to others as they work through the challenges in their own lives. I happened upon this book when I attended a reading here, keen to see another author, local writer Marcello di Cintio who had recently released a book about Palestine, Pay No Heed to the Rockets. Davis, who happened to be out in Banff at the time, came into Calgary for a most unusual and fascinating double bill. But, masculinity dominated the lively discussion that followed. In the audience there was a psychologist concerned with the high suicide rate in middle-aged men, a woman who was writing a novel about war and wanted to understand the male attraction to conflict and violence, and a young transman early in transition. Possibly one of the best book reading events I’ve been to.

However, because it is so easy for poetry books to come and go with little attention, I decided to write a review of  What Kind of Man Are You for the latest edition of the relatively new and quite wonderful Canadian-based journal, The /tƐmz/ Review. You can find my review here (the layout is really nice and clean and suits poetic quotes beautifully, by the way). And while you’re there, have a look at the rest of the issue!

To have and to hold (or not): Passing Ceremony by Helen Weinzweig

I’ll admit it, I’d never heard of Canadian author Helen Weinzweig until I stumbled across her 1973 debut novel and, intrigued by its premise and its fragmentary form, decided that I had to bring it home. Before long, her name began to appear in my literary network with the American release of her second, and only other novel, Basic Black with Pearls from NYRB Classics last month, so I figured it was time to have a closer look at Passing Ceremony. The “Introduction and Memoir” by James Polk that opens the book had me wondering how her name had escaped me so long.

Polk, who was the editorial director at House of Anansi Press for many years, recalls how, in 1971, when the publishing house was still located in a less than glamourous part of Toronto, he received a large Birks jewelry box tied with a ribbon and addressed to “Editor.” Inside he found a stack of perfectly typed papers and a note instructing him to toss the pages in the air and arrange them as they fell. He could not quite imagine a market for such “chance” fiction in the current  Canadian literary marketplace, but as he scanned the fragments he soon found himself engrossed. It would become the first book he edited. (It was organized into and exists as a bound volume.) But if the initial packaging of the text surprised him, so did its author. Weinzweig, when she arrived to meet him, turned out to be a well-dressed woman, over fifty—“smart, wise, and funny” and well-read in everything from Beckett to Conrad, but harbouring a special affection for the French nouveau roman. She had, at this point, been publishing stories for several years, starting in 1967, when she was already fifty-two.

“One of the drawbacks of staring when you’re older is you know what good writing is, and you know you can’t do it,” she told the Globe in 1990. But she could do it. Everything she submitted to the magazines got published, in those mythic days when short stories had markets and commercial currency, though her age and gender bothered the critics. How could a nice Jewish housewife and mother seriously try writing, a man’s game, especially when she was so clearly over the hill?

Her style was startling and original, but sadly, after two novels and a collection of short stories, Weinzweig’s creative life would be cut short by either early onset dementia or a series of small strokes. Although she went on to live to the age of ninety-four, her short window of literary productivity makes her work that much more precious.

And so to Passing Ceremony.

What is played out through a series of fragments, is a most unusual wedding in the posh Rosedale neighbourhood of Toronto. The bride has a promiscuous past that no white dress will allow her to put behind her, and the groom is a closeted gay man abandoned by his lover. The estranged father of the bride arrives from Mexico with his young wife and baby, while his ex-wife is a sobbing puddle of shame throughout her daughter’s “big day.” The cast of assorted upper-class guests display an array of dysfunctional, often unpleasant, even suspect behaviours, thoughts, and obsessions. The reader swirls through the event, never quite catching enough to put all the pieces together, but gathering more than enough to know this is not a happy event.

The novel opens with a short monologue, the groom addressing his dead sister, admonishing her for missing, by her suicide, the act of sacrificial desperation that is about to unfold:

. . . if you could see me now: with this ring I thee wed and I will not fail you in sickness and in health as all the others did. Abandoned yet haunted by all of you, every night a nightmare of vanished faces. I take her, take thee, a small life, to have and to hold against my impossible longing.

Page after page, through a series of vignettes that range from  a short paragraph to a few pages in length, the reader eavesdrops on conversations, slips in and out of consciousnesses, and observes actions from a distance. Characters may or may not be identified. Perspective and style  shifts throughout. It is akin to being the proverbial fly-on-the-wall, and more. The assembled guests are generally an unpleasant, sometimes unsavoury, and occasionally tragic lot. If a wedding is, ideally, a celebration of love, this event—with a match as mutual means of escape at the centre—is more readily an evocation of the betrayal and failure of love. Yet there is also something so very human, and affecting, in the various confessions and mini-dramas being played out over the course of the evening:

How can I forgive you for what I will never know again. On your knees you promised. Those endless kisses. I was drugged like any addict. Enveloped in your languor. Aware of nothing but your whispers in the night. Now I’m thrust into the light and my eyes hurt from the glare. I do not wish your happiness. After all. It suits me to appear drunk.

The fragments that comprise this strangely engaging novel hint at the anger, humiliation, and false pride nursed by the assorted guests and family members present.

Helen Weinzweig, who was the wife of famed Canadian composer James Weinzweig, was no stranger to the well-heeled society she brings to life in her fiction. She captures the nuances of conversation—insinuations, veiled compliments and threats—in pitch-perfect tones:

—That’s the man, the doctor. His wife is supposed to die on the 30th.
—What’s today?
—The 18th.
—What if she doesn’t?
—Oh, but she will, he is a doctor.
—Suppose she rallies, they sometimes do, you know.
—Impossible—they say he treats his rats badly.
—Which one is his wife?
—The one with the sores.
—Did you know her when she was alive?
—Yes, she is a pretty little thing, rather pathetic, always begging you to like her.
—Beggars can’t be choosers.
—Doesn’t she know that?
—Apparently not, or she would have chosen life.

Much of what we hear or observe is deeply disturbing. Furtive confrontations suggest that more nefarious activities are at play. It is a dark satire in which the hapless couple at the centre—the fallen woman and her gay groom—are the most sympathetic, and unfortunate, of all the characters gathered for this unconventional and surreal passing ceremony. All that I know is that I am glad (and relieved) that I was able to attend vicariously.

Passing Ceremony by Helen Weinzweig is published by House of Anansi Press.

Seeking redemption underwater: Blue Field by Elise Levine—My Rusty Toque review

November is destined to go out as it came in, with a link to a review published elsewhere—in this case, my thoughts on Elise Levine’s Blue Field which appears in the latest issue of The Rusty Toque. This is a book that I heard about when it was released earlier this year, and I was immediately intrigued. However, when I finally sat down to read it, having already committed myself to a review, my first impression was that this was not going to be for me. The first few chapters put me off a little, that is, they led me to think I would find Blue Field difficult to assess fairly. I don’t believe that one should avoid negative reviews, but I feel that, if appropriate, they should be constructive, and if a book simply is not to your taste, it’s very difficult to make any judgement about it one way or another. As John Updike said, and I am paraphrasing, you should not accept for a review a book you are predisposed to dislike or obligated to like.

Then I turned to the promotional materials that came with my review copy. Biblioasis, bless them, frequently include an interview with the author or translator and, with an opportunity to learn more about  Levine, her writing process and interests, I was so impressed that I decided to give her book a second chance. Perhaps because it is somewhat different than the type of book I’ve read lately, I found myself caught off guard by this tale of a woman who takes up cave diving in an effort to find healing after her life has been upended. She is not particularly likable, increasingly reckless, and trapped in an vortex of loss and grief that could cost her everything she has. However, the prose—vivid, pulsating with energy, alternately harsh and shockingly poetic—is finely tuned and relentless in its intensity. Won me over.

Blue Field by Elise Levine is published by Biblioasis.

To find out more, I invite you to check out my review at The Rusty Toque. And while you’re there check out some of the other excellent features in this issue.

Lanterns buried: Injun by Jordan Abel

From the mid-60s through the mid-70s, I attended a small rural school west of Calgary, Alberta in western Canada. Treaty 7 land, though no one called it that. Children were bussed in from the Stoney Nakoda First Nation (though no one called it that either). The majority would not last beyond grade 5. This was the era of the Sixties Scoop when children were pulled from their homes and placed in foster care, and the wounds of the Residential School System (which was still in operation) ran deep. All we knew was that our friends disappeared one by one. And what did we know of the Indigenous populations of our region? Nothing. In school, when it came time to learn about “Indians,” we studied the Iroquois. The “people of the longhouse” are, let’s say for the sake of argument, about 3,000 kilometres off target.

I am also old enough to remember watching old Western movies and reruns of The Lone Ranger on TV on Saturday afternoons, and to have played “cowboys and Indians” without a second thought. Yet wise enough that, several decades later, when I took my own children to the library to see a screening of Walt Disney’s Peter Pan, I was absolutely ashamed and horrified by the depiction of the native characters in the film. I had a long talk with the kids afterward, insisting that it was not acceptable to entertain those offensive stereotypes under any circumstances. But it is only in recent years that the full force of the need to address the impact of colonialism at home and elsewhere has really started to settle into my consciousness in a profound way.

My most important role now is to listen.

One of the most exciting young Indigenous voices here in Canada today belongs to Jordan Abel, a Nisga’a writer from Vancouver. His book Injun, the winner of this year’s Griffin Poetry Prize is a vital examination of racism and the language of hate. However, for anyone anticipating conventional verse, that expectation is quickly undone in this inventive exercise to reclaim a dehumanizing and insulting slur and undermine the mythology of the West that still holds a romantic appeal. The decorations and themes of the annual Calgary Stampede in my hometown may have been toned down and “corrected,” but the subtext of the spectacle is still intact.

Abel’s work stands, as a reflection of his academic study, at the intersection of the Digital Humanities and Indigenous Literary Studies. He mines documents in the public domain to create what might be imagined as a “revisioned” literature. His third collection, Injun, is a powerful and necessary project of reclamation in the face of a long history of racism, an inventive exercise in decolonial poetics that takes as its initial source material 91 western novels. Using Control+F, he searched these texts for the word “injun” and came up with 509 results.  As he explains:

After separating out each of the sentences that contained the word, I ended up with 26 print pages. I then cut up each page into a section of a long poem. Sometimes I would cut up a page into three- to five- word clusters. Sometimes I would cut up a page without looking. Sometimes I would arrange a page until something sounded right. Sometimes I would just write down how the pieces fell together.

I am aware that many are apprehensive about poetry at its most conventional. They may be wondering what it is like to enter into the territory claimed by Injun. The 26-part title poem, “Injun” runs from strangely lyrical couplets, to the increasingly disjointed and abstracted, and back again to verses formed with fragmented, wounded words. Roughly two thirds of the way through, at its most dispersed, the text flips over and the final sections are read upside down. The format, in itself, speaks to the legacy of colonialism: peoples disrupted, dispersed, almost destroyed, slowly healing. It is not “easy” to read, nor should it be. But is not as difficult or inaccessible as it may sound. Part c), for example, reads:

Some fearful heap
some crooked swell

bent towards him
and produced a pair

of nickel-plated pullers
a bull winder of

dirty tenderness*
that stiffened into

that low-brow ice
that dead injun game

Later, section u) begins:

             th e  d ayki     cksup
lik         e a pa  ck of wo       lves
o              n the         c     ut

    bu   zza            rds
ar     efin              e b     irds
th       at a   refo           ol    ed
b      y m    y    re           dsk   in*
sc  ent

The poem is followed by “Notes.” In this part, faded fragments of sentences containing words marked by numbered notation in the preceding poem (asterisks here, i.e. tenderness, redskin) are aligned by the specific word in bold print, offering an interesting indication of context. As one might expect, a selection of passages containing words like warpath, squaw, or scalped, leave an ugly taste in the mouth.

The final part, “Appendix” is effectively an extended prose piece, created, I presume, by running through the stream of sentences harvested from the source material and digitally erasing every occurrence of i-n-j-u-n. Thus, the very texts that have arisen from and perpetuated a white mythology of the Wild West, are sifted and distilled to create a condensed narrative that is difficult to read without flinching. There is a delicious irony in the repurposing of this material in this way. But the blank spaces solve nothing. They only serve to render visible the ugliness of hatred and racism, and the resulting erasure and stereotyping of Indigenous peoples. The appropriation of language from this “canon” of Western pulp fiction, becomes a sharp commentary on appropriation and how it functions as an instrument of colonialism.

An important and experimentally powerful work, Injun is much more than an exercise in abstraction and recombination. It is a defiant act of reclamation, another step toward the recovery of identity. Nonetheless, it is also a commanding example of the ability of digital tools to assist in the creation of literature.

To that final note, the methodology employed here holds particular interest to me with respect to a project I’m working on to honour my father using material salvaged from his Russian literature collection, the translations of which are almost certainly in the public domain. I wish I had been paying more attention to the Canadian poetry scene before I met Jordan Abel a few weeks ago here at Wordfest. I knew he had won a major award and we talked about writing and poetry as I drove him from the hotel to the venue and back for a sound check, but had I been more familiar with his work beforehand I would have engaged in a serious discussion of technique! All the same, he is a great guy, and an exciting talent to watch.

Thirty-seven journeys from French to English: I Never Talk About It by Véronique Côté and Steve Gagnon

We all have our secrets; the habits, hopes, histories, and horrors that we keep to ourselves. We all hold something inside that we never talk about. It may be painful; it might be embarrassing. It can be major, it can be insignificant, but either way we all have a truth to guard.

This is the concept behind an inventive collaboration between Véronique Côté and Steve Gagnon, two Quebecois writers, actors and directors who created thirty-seven short confessional monologues to be performed live, and then gathered into a book titled Chaque automne j’ai envie de mourir. However, a unique and daring thing happened as this collection made its way from French into English. Thirty-seven different translators were invited along for the ride. The result, I Never Talk About It, is the latest release from QC Fiction, and further evidence of this ambitious young publisher’s determination to offer Canadian and international audiences original, exciting new work from Quebec.

The prose pieces that comprise this book demonstrate a wide range in structure and voice from unsophisticated and straightforward, to quirky stream of consciousness, to stylized and experimental. This variety creates the perfect environment in which to explore the considerations and decisions a translator faces in guiding a text from one language to another.

The translators invited into this intriguing exercise come from around the world and include seasoned professionals alongside first-timers without any specialized training or experience. Some are Francophones more accustomed to moving from English to French, while others have little or no familiarity with Quebecois usage and culture. There are teachers, students, and authors.  Each story is followed by a brief biography of the translator along with his or her comments about the challenges they faced and the approach they employed. Because, as editor and translator Peter McCambridge indicates in his introduction:

…there’s always an approach, always a slant, always a distortion or deviation from the original, however slight or well-intentioned. Often it makes for a smoother reading experience in English. But it’s nice to know it’s there, all the same…. Because there are few wrong answers. Because any translation is a question and then an answer.

And yes, there may be few wrong answers, but as a reader with a special fondness for translated and international literature, there are certainly approaches that, in the reading, seem to work better than others. However, unless we hear about the choices that are made we cannot know what we might be missing, or why some books leave us wondering: Is it the original or the translation that seems off?

 The greatest reward offered by a book like I Never Talk About It is a space to explore one’s own reaction to concise pieces, first on their own and then in the light of the translator’s reflections.

Because the original works are essentially performative, with variations in tone and flow, many translators mention the challenge of maintaining the energy of the French text. Often the chosen approach involves an intensive engagement with the text. Pablo Strauss describes translating as:

…a slow, unscientific process of writing and rewriting until you can’t look at the piece any more. Experience has taught me that translation has no rules; the translations I love are at once loose and careful.

Later on, Lori Saint-Martin admits that:

I read the piece about 786 times, a couple of times out loud, mentally thinking of avenues without writing anything down; then I did a really fast, intuitive draft as if writing it creatively myself…put it aside, and rewrote it three more times, pulling it closer to the original sometimes, sometimes a bit further away to boomerang it back closer.

It’s probably a coincidence but the stories they translated, “Nightmares” and “Constellation” were among my favourites.

One of my pet peeves when it comes to translated or even international literature originally written in English, is that decisions are sometimes made to make the work more palatable to an American or British audience. In this collection two translators chose to relocate the specifics and tone of their pieces—one to the US, the other to the UK—removing the Quebec (which were also essentially Canadian) references. To my ear, the results were out of place and disappointing. As a frequent reader of South African literature I have seen this tendency too, whether English originals or translations from Afrikaans, all the bakkies are turned into pick-up trucks and so on. For me it amounts to unfortunate accommodation and contributes to the homogenization of international literature lest any local flavour be off-putting.

In the end, I Never Talk About It is more than an enlightening glimpse into the myriad of ways that texts can be approached by a translator; it is an entertaining, and often deeply moving, look into the private anxieties, obsessions, confessions, and passions of a diverse cast of characters.