Emily M. Keeler on the literature of overwork PAGE 13
$6.50 Vol. 25, No. 7 October 2017
M M M R H History Wars Memory, politics, and dark chapters in our past
PLUS A E The jihad economy
G F The mytho- constitutional Quebec universe
ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: + Dennis Duffy on a sociology of CanLit + Anne Kingston on doctors, patients, and cash Publications Mail Agreement #40032362 Return undeliverable Canadian addresses to + Donna Bailey Nurse on the vision of David Chariandy LRC, Circulation Dept. PO Box 8, Station K + Stephen Smith on P.K. Subban and hockey-dad memoirs Toronto, ON M4P 2G1 New from University of Toronto Press
The Constitution in a Hall of Mirrors Canada at 150 by David E. Smith Canada’s Odyssey In this book, David E. Smith analyzes A Country Based on Incomplete the interconnectedness of Canada’s Conquests parliamentary institutions and argues by Peter H. Russell that Parliament is a unity comprised of three parts and any reforms made to one In Canada’s Odyssey, renowned scholar branch will, whether intended or not, Peter H. Russell provides an expansive, affect the other branches. accessible account of Canadian history from the pre-Confederation period to the present day.
Something’s Got to Give Balancing Work, Childcare and Eldercare by Linda Duxbury and Christopher Making a Global City Higgins How One Toronto School Embraced Something’s Got to Give provides Diversity practical advice to managers and policy- by Robert Vipond makers about how to mitigate the effects of employee work-life con ict, Making a Global City celebrates one of retain talent, and improve employee the world’s most multicultural cities and engagement and productivity. shows how education plays a vital role in shaping and integrating immigrants in liberal democracies.
Homelands and Empires Indigenous Spaces, Imperial Fictions, and Competition for Territory in Northeastern An Exceptional Law North America, 1690–1763 Section 98 and the Emergency State, by Jeffers Lennox 1919-1936 This book highlights how Indigenous by Dennis G.Molinaro peoples, imperial forces, and settlers competed for space in northeastern This book highlights how the North America before the British emergency law used to repress labour conquest in 1763. activism during the First World War became normalized with the creation of Section 98 of the Criminal Code, following the Winnipeg General Strike.
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EDITOR IN CHIEF Sarmishta Subramanian [email protected] 3 Rites of Passage 15 Luminaire MANAGING EDITOR A letter from the editor A poem Michael Stevens S S J F T ASSISTANT EDITOR 4 History’s Ghosts 18 Institutionalized Bardia Sinaee M M M A sociology of CanLit ASSOCIATE EDITOR Beth Haddon R H D D POETRY EDITOR 6 In Shanghai 22 Lives of a Brother Moira MacDougall A poem Love, hope, and death in Scarberia COPY EDITOR M P D B N Patricia Treble CONTRIBUTING EDITORS 8 Undeclaring a language war 24 The Money Trap Mohamed Huque, Andy Lamey, Molly A Montreal academic confronts the ‘mytho- Big Pharma’s bid to woo doctors, patient groups, Peacock, Robin Roger, Judy Stoman constitutional Quebec universe’ journalists, and the rest of us ONLINE EDITORS G F A K Jack Mitchell, Donald Rickerd, C.M. PROOFREADER 10 Praise God—but First, the Market 28 Bigger Than the Team Tyler Willis Why some jihadist groups rise to power A dad’s-eye view of the NHL’s most polarizing RESEARCH A E gure Rob Tilley S S 11 Who Says April is the Cruelest? DESIGN A poem 32 Letters James Harbeck, for the last time A M A A , J B, C ADVERTISING/SALES D Michael Wile 13 Trompe Le Toil [email protected] Identity capitalism and the modern conundrum DIRECTOR, OPERATIONS of overwork Michael Booth E M. K ADMINISTRATOR Christian Sharpe PUBLISHER Mark Lovewell [email protected] BOARD OF DIRECTORS George Bass, Q.C., Don McCutchan, Trina McQueen, O.C., Jack Mintz, C.M., Jaime Watt ADVISORY COUNCIL Michael Adams, Alan Broadbent, C.M., Chris Ellis, Carol Hansell, Donald Macdonald, P.C., C.C., Grant Reuber, O.C., Don Rickerd, C.M., Rana Sarkar, Mark Sarner, Bernard Schi, Reed Scowen Poems in this issue are inspired by Sue Goyette’s poem “You Know This”: POETRY SUBMISSIONS For guidelines, please see reviewcanada.ca. is is how it begins, this part of winter. Its hands, clawed LRC design concept by Jackie Young/ and chapped, undo the safety net over your ears. Once that’s gone F P.A. D you hear things you shouldn’t. Whispers. e LRC is published 10 times a year by the Literary Review of Canada Charitable Organization.
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October 2017 reviewcanada.ca “MARVELLOUS AND
COMPELLING.”John Milloy, author of A National Crime
Mapmaker: Philip Turnor in Rupert’s Land in the Age of Enlightenment by Barbara Mitchell
“Fills a yawning gap in the history of the fur trade and northern exploration… a labour of love.” —Ken McGoogan, author of Dead Reckoning: The Untold Story of the Northwest Passage
Examining a family tree, Barbara Mitchell discovered that she was a descendant of the great northern surveyor, Philip Turnor, and his Cree wife. Together they had travelled 15,000 miles by canoe and foot, and his work became the foundation of northern geographic knowledge.
Participation made possible through Creative Saskatchewan’s Market and Export Development Grant Program.
2 LRC MAPMAKER ad U of R Press.indd 1 reviewcanada.ca Literary Review2017-09-15 of Canada 3:27 PM LETTER FROM THE EDITOR Rites of Passage
- tors is launching an ambitious strategic review of ial risks it takes in publishing a musical work about industry trivia may recall a story from 20 the magazine and its business operations, as well as a train derailment by the composer John Beckwith; Ryears ago, about an enterprising Canadian a serious fundraising campaign. It has also brought or Dennis Du y’s delightfully rangy essay on the author, Sandra Gulland. e author of a trilogy back an LRC stalwart, Mark Lovewell—interim myth of 1812; or Emily M. Keeler’s wonderful, of best-selling books about Josephine Bonaparte, editor, co-publisher, board member, writer, donor; century-spanning consideration of a literature of Gulland hit upon an ingenious scheme to ensure is there a hat Mark hasn’t worn here?—as publisher overwork in this issue; or the audacious yet clear- her sophomore novel disappointed as few of her to help see the magazine through this complex eyed critique of CanLit’s colonial predilections readers as possible: she focus-grouped the manu- transition. Other LRC veterans, including Bronwyn, forthcoming from Stephen Marche in the next. script with an audience committed to close read- have returned to do the same, and recent additions ese days—a small grace note—the LRC has ing (and book buying): book clubs. e technique to the community, such as associate editor Beth won some nods outside of the inner sanctum, too. worked so well she used it again for her third Haddon, have stepped up their involvement. All of ought-provoking articles published in the LRC book. It seemed both a creative way of di using us believe this work will pave the way for an ener- are nding their way into wider arenas, to the inter- writer’s block, and a curious signal in the business getic new phase. And about that missed September national audiences of Bookforum and Arts & Letters of making and selling books, a symptom of a new magazine—we will instead produce an extra edi- Daily and Architecture Daily. In the spring, two of cultural aversion to risk. Certainly it was prescient. tion in February, to replace the usual winter double our essays, by Lev Bratishenko, and by Ian Gold and Consumer analytics—a live, tickertape update on issue. (Annual subscriptions will be extended Suparna Choudhury, won honourable mentions at focus groups—now shapes much of the culture accordingly.) the National Magazine Awards. (Decent, consid- we consume. We prefer these days to leave risk to e LRC certainly has a respectable history of ering we nominated only three.) youthful, cortisol-addled nancial traders (who negotiating successfully for its life. e magazine e work being undertaken by the board, the can sink companies, and lives). e business of that was launched in 1991 as a kitchen table ven- sta , and friends of the LRC, will sustain that culture, we seem to think, should be risk-free. And ture by political scientist and historian Patrice Dutil momentum, and allow the magazine not only to so should its content. No surprises for the reader was handed over to Carleton University Press by its survive but ourish and grow. How far it goes, or viewer! Other than the ones she expects and founding editor when it outgrew that home, then though, depends on all of us—readers and writers demands. handed over again by the university, when the press and creators and supporters. In this prot-maximizing, focus-grouping age, shuttered, to a group of editors and co-publishers in e wonderful thing about a magazine like the gone is the promise of “the long tail” at the end of a Toronto. e 18 years since, too, have followed the LRC is that one does not have to be a mogul to sales graph—recall the book by that name, by Wired beeping course of a heart monitor: rise and fall and sustain it. (Although, one or two moguls would not editor Chris Anderson, which saw the future in a rise and fall. hurt, and if you happen to be one, do not restrain business model that, in essence, relies on selling In one sense, at age 26, the magazine is now yourself.) e simple act of buying the magazine 100 copies of a thousand books rather than 1,000 facing a natural stage of development—what two or making a donation goes a long way. No partner- copies of a hundred. It has given way to the era of American authors described in the early aughts, ships with luxury watchmakers here; aside from the mega blockbuster, in publishing, lm, music. long before the travails of millennials became the granting agencies that make our work pos- Which leaves those of us crunched into that tiny demographic catnip to marketers, as a “quarterlife sible, we depend on the simple economics of paid triangle of a tail-of-overstated-length in an interest- crisis.” It is easy to view the LRC’s predicament subscriptions, and renewals, and donations. (Gift ing place. We have the distinction, and satisfaction, against the projections of doom about newspapers subscriptions count, too, it is worth mentioning as of occupying a vital cultural space. We thrive in those and glossy consumer magazines, but life in your the holiday season prowls toward us.) ere are all narrow margins of risk taking; and yet arguably our mid-twenties can be full of both existential and sorts of ways the magazine’s community can help existence is more precarious than ever before. pragmatic questions. And this has always been a (see page 23). And those of you who support us In the obstacle-tted course that is available to di erent boat we are in: a little narrower, a little through your writing, your artwork, your poems, small, high-minded magazines, the Literary Review more tippy, a little rougher, if also more thrilling. already have our undying gratitude, of course. of Canada reached a milestone in 2016; it turned Magazines of this ilk seem to exist by sheer What we can promise in return is a magazine 25, to great fanfare: a gala in Toronto, coverage in force of their own will—the cyclostyled ones (our that will engage and provoke, enlighten and, above the papers, the release of a special literary supple- distant cousins) distributed by samizdat in the all, surprise its readers. Moments of crisis can be ment, e LRC 25. A year later, talking of risk, the U.S.S.R., fumbling their way from hand to hand in clarifying and we have used this one to rene our magazine has seen some more sobering passages. the Soviet night; the plucky North American ’zines goals, to aim even higher. We have a wonderful is summer and fall we found ourselves confront- of the 1990s, less important but no less urgent; the slate of stories in the coming months: pieces on the ing an organizational and funding challenge that highbrow book review papers that are more our energy economy, and unmade maps of Canada, forced us to suspend publication of the September immediate kin, some of which, across the pond, on laboratory dinosaurs and Canadian snacks. e issue. We said goodbye to Helen Walsh, our spirited manage (through fantastically imaginative writing brilliant essayist Michelle Orange joins us in a con- and dedicated publisher of 18 years, who, along and editing, underwritten by fantastically deep versation reecting on women and criticism; the with my much-admired predecessor, Bronwyn trust funds) to eclipse the circulation of news- philosopher Ramin Jahanbegloo explores forgive- Drainie, raised the LRC through its unruly teenage papers. ness through the prism of an unjust prison term years. And we bid a reluctant farewell to our copy at irrepressible will of magazines, of course, in Iran; and the novelist Pasha Malla introduces editor, Madeline Koch, and, soon, to our designer, is that of their readers and writers and editors and us to a 20th-century literary master. In an age of James Harbeck. For good measure, we also moved publishers, and it is little more, ultimately, than the shrinking patience and column inches, the LRC from our old oce space (which, in another of love of ideas, of words, of a lively interchange. is plans to give even more space to in-depth, lively, those signs of the times, is being turned into luxury magazine, like others of its class, has existed always and opinionated discussion of books and ideas. We rental units). for, and because of, its readers and writers. e loyal look forward to sharing this next chapter with you. It has been a tumultuous period, but it is also a support of this community has not only kept the S S hopeful and exciting one. e LRC’s board of direc- LRC alive but encouraged and indulged the editor- E C
October 2017 reviewcanada.ca 3 INTERVIEW History’s Ghosts Margaret MacMillan in conversation with Randall Hansen
the cobwebs lately and moving from Hbackdrop to foreground. Controversies roil over Confederate statues in the United States and memorials for Cecil Rhodes in the U.K., and Sir John A. Macdonald in Canada—not to mention celebrations of the sesquicentennial. Countries around the world are grappling with dark chapters in their pasts, and with dicult questions: How do we memorialize the past while interrogating and challenging it? How do we move forward from its fraught legacies? Historians seem uniquely poised to shed light on such challenges, and the LRC brought together two of the country’s preeminent history scholars last month for a lively discussion of the issues at stake. Margaret MacMillan is a profes- sor at Oxford University and former warden of St. Antony’s College, and the much-decorated author of Paris 1919: Six Months at Changed the World and History’s People: Personalities and the Past. She is also the chair of this year’s jury for the prestigious Cundill History Prize, administered by McGill University, which awards US$75,000 for the best history book of the year. Randall Hansen is the interim director of the Munk School of Global A airs and the director of Munk’s Centre for European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies. He is author of Disobeying Hitler: German Resistance After Operation Valkyrie and Fire and Fury: e Allied Bombing of Germany 1942–1945, which was nominated for the Governor General’s Literary Award for non-ction.
MM: We’ve heard so often that we live in an into these things called “peoples” or “nations.” You John A. Macdonald, for instance, didn’t matter. ahistorical age, that people don’t really care about had to nd some way of distinguishing one people MM: I think you’re right that there’s been a history, that they’re not learning history. Yet we’ve from another, and history was used. You got people move to bring in the histories of those, including been seeing all these stories about statues and like us creating often very false histories, very dubi- women’s histories, that haven’t been properly rec- memorials, and I think an interesting question is, ous histories, about how there had always been a ognized and acknowledged by history, but what why are people taking history so seriously? Why German race sitting in the middle of Europe, how worries me is we may lose any sense of a common has the past become such a matter of contention? there had always been an Anglo-Saxon race sitting history. You talked about political history; I think Here we have people—including the young—dem- on the British Isles… political history matters. Who governs you matters, onstrating about Cecil Rhodes’s statue in Oxford... RH: at’s right. What we also have now is sort how you govern yourselves matters. RH: But I’m not sure it’s new, is it? You wrote of a fundamental problem, and this might be rela- RH: As we’re noticing at the moment. about this in your book e Uses and Abuses of tively new. We can debate what history is, but cer- MM: Exactly. ese things go through violent History. Ten years ago, you and I were involved tainly history is about world-changing events—why swings, don’t they? So there’s been a swing away in the argument over the portrayal of Bomber they occurred, what their consequences were—and from what was seen as very boring political, con- Command in the Canadian War Museum; there until relatively recently, those decisions were made, stitutional history, the history of power. But we’re was the Enola Gay [exhibit at the Smithsonian] in in the main, by men. Which isn’t to say that we beginning to realize that that’s also part of history, the early 1990s. e question is, why do we get these don’t have social history and other histories—we just like the history of war is part of history—you moments when history moves from being history to certainly do. But one element of history is inevitably can’t ignore it. So I think we should always be try- being at the centre of contemporary politics? We’re going to be the memorialization of the men who ing to have a shared understanding of the past. at in one of those moments now. made the decisions, often horric decisions. Quite doesn’t mean we have to have a single narrative of MM: It is very interesting. I suppose history, rightly, women, minorities, and LGBT people feel the past, but at least we should understand the dif- at least since the 19th century, has been very tied excluded from the process. e question is how to ferent ways of looking at the past. up with identity, with the rise of nationalism, and bring those other voices and experiences into the RH: Let’s go back to the statues and renam- the idea that the human race could be divided up historical conversation without pretending that ing. There’s a proposal [from the Elementary
4 reviewcanada.ca Literary Review of Canada Teachers’ Federation of Ontario] to remove John A. assimilation, for example: they thought it was the RH: Which we encouraged, it must be said. e Macdonald’s name from schools. en there was only way forward for the Indigenous peoples of western Allies encouraged that narrative. the Confederate statues debate. What’s your view the Americas. We now think they’re wrong, but MM: Dear little Austria and wicked Germany. on all of that? we probably have equally silly views that people e Japanese have actually done a lot to teach their MM: I’m going to give a sort of weaselly a hundred years from now are going to say were past. ey have apologized to the Chinese, they answer: I think it’s complicated and it depends very absolutely ridiculous. I don’t think the assimilation have apologized to the Koreans. ose apologies much on the context. If you lived in Eastern Europe attempt was in itself evil. It was misguided and it may never be enough, but it seems to me Japan has under the Soviet Empire, you had no choice but to led to a great deal of cruelty, but I don’t think we’re gone at least some way to trying to deal with its past. have statues of Felix Dzerzhinsky, the founder of doing that much better in our relationships with RH: Yes though if I understand correctly, and the secret service, or of Stalin or of Lenin. When First Nations at the moment, so we should be care- I’m glad to be corrected, Japan hasn’t incorporated that regime ended, yes, you would want to take ful about condemning people in the past. it into the school system in the same thoroughgoing them down because they symbolized a dominance RH: We’re getting lots of things wrong. And way that the Germans have. which you didn’t particularly want. I would say the we’d have to parse that out a bit—what we memori- MM: It depends on which union is in charge. same for taking down statues of Hitler in Germany alize and what we study as historians and students I think there are a number of competing Japanese after the end of the Nazi era. of history are distinct spheres with overlap in the teachers’ unions and there’s a real competition It gets more complicated when you get things centre. We want to understand how it happened, over that. like the statues of Confederate generals in the what drove it forward and what the factors explain- RH: ere’s sort of two models out there. One south. I’m beginning to shift my view on that ing it were. If it’s just moral condemnation, at which is to de-memorialize, to strip away, to not memo- because I began to understand that a lot of them Canadians, incidentally, excel, that is quite poor rialize, to take down statues of anything that was were put up in the Jim Crow period to say to the history. unpleasant in our past, and then we would end blacks, “You may think the North won the Civil War, MM: Dean Acheson called Canada “the stern up with barren squares—not barren of religious but we won, and you still better watch your step daughter of the voice of God,” which is quite a symbols, as conservatives complain, but barren of because we’re still in charge.” And monuments to what is, at the end so those are more complicated. ‘History should always be a debate. We of the day, all our pasts. But I think my general preference ink of what the Germans do: is not to take statues down, but to should certainly explode false history they layer on an incredibly power- talk about them and explain them. ful and constant recognition of RH: at’s very interesting. My or misguided history, but to have some what they did, with the massive general view is that one should Holocaust memorial in Berlin. leave the statue up, and if the group decree that this must be our view And walk down any German street person represented in the statue and you’ll see the golden cobble- committed some egregious crime of the past, it makes me uneasy.’ stones with the names and dates of or there’s an element of the his- Jews who lived in the apartments tory that we’ve ignored, then add something to it: good phrase. I’m also a bit worried when particu- above and who were deported. Yet there’s also stat- add a plaque explaining that; provoke conversa- lar groups say that we have the right to dene the ues of Bismarck across Germany, and some people tion; contextualize the statues. Because the left, if past. I don’t think governments should dene the blame him for the Second World War. In Hamburg, I may, won’t necessarily get what it wants here. If past. I don’t think bodies of teachers should pass near one of the main stations, there is e ectively we remove all these statues, we simply stop talking a resolution saying this is the version of history we a fascist memorial to First World War dead that about them. must have. I think history is a debate and history the city of Hamburg decided not to take down and In my book on sterilization that I wrote with should always be a debate. We should certainly try instead contextualized with a little description of Desmond King, we talked about the renaming of a and explode false history or misguided history or when it was set up and what it’s valourizing. University of Alberta lecture series and room in the wrong history, but to have some group decree that MM: I heard about a war memorial in Crete psychology department because the academic in this must be our view of the past, it just makes me that the Nazis had put up to their dead soldiers, the question was a eugenicist who sat on the steriliza- uneasy. Nazis who were killed ghting there. And the local tion board and strongly supported forced eugenics RH: Doing so essentializes history. It says, Cretans left it up with an alteration or two because sterilization. Now that that’s all gone, no one’s going there’s one history, I understand it and I’m going to they said it reminds us of how many of them “we” to remember his name. Indeed it has slipped from tell it to you, and if you have a di erent view then killed. Now that may not be the most elevated my mind. that’s unacceptable. It’s fundamentally illiberal, motive, but I do think memorials can be interpreted Coming back to the specic issue of statues, isn’t it? in di erent ways. I think the idea of removing statues of John A. MM: Yes. I remember in Australia, there Just very close to where we’re talking is that Macdonald is ridiculous. But how do you distin- was this huge controversy about the teaching of giant equestrian statue of Edward VII in Queen’s guish between that and removing statues of Hitler Australian history and the government attempted Park, which was brought from India and was very or Goebbels? People press me, as a Germanist, on to impose a sort of pattern on it. As did the British much a product of the Raj. I don’t think people see this all the time. I think the answer is that the forced government. Michael Gove, when he was education it like that now, they see it as a piece of Victoriana or assimilation of First Nations populations was a his- secretary, said we must have the correct view of the Edwardiana and they see it as a memorial of a time torical sin, but that is not all that John A. Macdonald past. at makes me so uneasy because it’s usually that has long since vanished. was about. Hitler and Goebbels were about nothing very illiberal societies that do this. Look at what RH: I think that’s absolutely right. Our history other than a racial war of extermination and a dic- Vladimir Putin has been doing with Russian his- was imperial history; to pretend it was anything tatorship across Europe, whereas to say that all John tory: he has been very concerned with promoting a else—we were a settler nation, we were part of the A. Macdonald was about was the genocide, quote particular view of the Russian past. I don’t think we British Empire, we were a Dominion. ese are unquote, of First Nations is ahistorical in every pos- want to go down that road. basic facts that we can’t wish away. sible sense. RH: Absolutely. inking further about memo- MM: Could we do more, Randall? Some histo- MM: I hate—hate is too strong a word, but I very rialization, which country, if any, do you think gets rians would say there’s been too much of a trend much dislike—the loose use of the word “genocide.” it right? to look at the dark side of Canadian history, but I It was coined at the end of the Second World War MM: Well, some countries have been more don’t think we properly deal with the relationship to describe a very particular type of crime against honest about confronting their past than others, between the Aboriginal inhabitants of the Americas humanity and that was the systematic attempt to perhaps because they’ve had to. Germany was and the settlers as they arrived. exterminate whole people. To throw around words pushed by the Allies, but I think there were many RH: I think multiple things are going on. It’s like “cultural genocide” seems to me in a way to be Germans who also felt they needed to confront been only recently that we’ve recognized that the taking away some of the really important meaning their past. Germany has confronted its past; it’s creation of the country was the product of perhaps of that word. taken a while. I think Austria by contrast spent a not genocide but dispossession, expulsion. Many, I’m also uneasy about us sitting here in judg- very long time trying to ignore the past. ere’s that many deaths through disease and forced assimila- ment of people’s views a hundred years ago. I whole narrative that Austria was the rst victim of tion. mean if they were mass murderers…But there were Nazism, which doesn’t explain all those cheering MM: Broken treaties—we behaved disgrace- attitudes that a lot of people held at the time, about crowds when Hitler made the… fully.
October 2017 reviewcanada.ca 5 RH: Ugly, awful history. And what that past means. And we look to it relates to a broader issue. The the past. In so many western societ- Germans are really the only ones ies, religion or respect for authority who accepted that they were a racial In Shanghai no longer have the hold over people state. e Americans haven’t and I that they once had. It’s not true of all think that is part of the explanation of In a bed bunk, in a prayer, societies, but I think we look to the why we have the man we have in the in something we lower ourselves onto carefully. past for validation, for authority, to oce of the president. So in Canada say, yes you’re right and they were we haven’t got as far as the Germans. wrong. So we’re always going to be The eld has its grass, at’s part of the challenge facing this expecting a lot from history and we’re country. the leaves the tree always going to be disappointed On the other hand, my guess, and because history can’t deliver that sort I might be wrong, is that it’s going to but the city, with its lights bottled inside its stomach, of validation. be a while before we have the proper ickers like bent moths. They y with shredded mouths Let’s talk about what it means nuanced debate about those rela- for Canada to be 150. What are we tions and about Aboriginal societies and make no sound, no shaking free celebrating? I think 150 is not bad. themselves. I don’t claim to know like an old nightmare that looks different in the light. We get a lot of talk today about how much about them, but they would Iraq was a totally articial country, have been complex, they would have We all look different with the night drawn from our eyes. so many African countries are totally had their contradictions, liberalisms artificial, their boundaries were and illiberalisms, had their successes drawn elsewhere on maps—it’s also The dancers in the square quicken their step. and failures like any other society. I true of Canada. It’s a very interesting Their bodies drip like small leaves. suspect, since First Nations history is process that once you create a struc- just now coming to the centre, we’re ture, things begin to develop within going to have 20 years or so of cel- Everything was how I expected. that structure, things begin to grow ebratory history and we’re going to No uttering of birds within it. And Canada’s in some ways have to go through that process until the most improbable of countries. First Nations feel that they’re part of to dangle like scars from your shoulders, RH: I suppose all nations in the the common narrative, and then we no smooth falling into the mouth end are ultimately fairly articial con- can have a more complex historical structions. France for all the rhetoric debate. If you think of how we treated of night and held there. I wish there was a picture is a process of centralizing and crush- the First World War or Vimy Ridge, it to hang your silence on. A beautiful memory ing all sorts of regional identities. In was rather like that: our histories were Germany, they remain strong. Ditto celebratory and patriotic, and it took Italy. like a gunshot delivered into a stumbling bear a while before we had a much more e country has turned 150, it has when it recognizes death’s approach. critical history. many merits: it’s wealthy, it’s stable. MM: When I was at university, Canadians often are incredibly smug, there was a tendency, which then But it was nothing to you. Only tracks lled with snow essentially because they look south influenced the later teaching and or that small crack where the light falls through. of the border and feel superior. But research, to treat Canadian his- I wonder if we aren’t, in an odd sort tory as if it had started somewhere Melanie Pierluigi of way, a more provincial place than in the 16th century. It took out the we were 50 years ago. Because the Aboriginal history, which just wasn’t British Empire, while I will certainly considered, but it also failed to Melanie Pierluigi is from Toronto, but for six years has been never defend it—it was modelled on recognize that Canada was always teaching English in South Korea, China and Japan. Her poems racial superiority and subjugation— enmeshed in a wider society; it was have appeared in the journals Descant, CV2, Canadian Literature, but it did connect us to something a ected by what was going on in Room, Misunderstandings Magazine, Dalhousie Review, Other larger. Europe; many Canadians came here Voices, Rhubarb, Freefall, and others. MM: That’s very interesting from Europe. at pattern of immi- because we were born, as a country, gration has changed, but so many of as part of a much larger grouping, and our ideas and our institutions are still we took a great deal from that. We felt a ected by that past. Not to understand that, to see rather, in a funny way, call it Dominion Day. We’re that we were part of something more important Canada as something that suddenly sprang fully no longer a Dominion, but it reminds us of when than ourselves. We certainly pushed for a greater formed out of the ground, misses a very important we were. And I quite like Queen Victoria’s birthday; say within that bigger structure, but we wanted dimension of Canada in the world. she’s been dead a great many years, but it’s still part to remain part of it. As the British Empire faded, RH: I think there’s an even more pernicious of our past. we threw ourselves into supporting multilateral project, which has gone on since the 1960s, in RH: It’s part of what the country is and actually organizations like the UN and NATO. It was partly which the Liberal government starting under Pierre where I disagree with some of my liberal friends is the pressures of the Cold War, but perhaps we have Elliott Trudeau treated history as something that’s during the citizenship ceremonies, when migrants become less curious about the world. I don’t know optional, so the state can ip things whenever it who have come to this country and want to natural- how many people have told me that the Canadian wants. Dominion Day becomes Canada Day; we’ll ize say that they’re not prepared to swear allegiance immigration website crashed on the night of the take the prime ministers o our money, as if history to the Queen. My response is: then don’t naturalize American election. People tell me that with a sort of is something that state at determines. History did because Canadians owe allegiance to the Queen, glee. It seems to them to conrm everything about not begin in the 1960s and that’s why the claim you and there are republics all around the world that Canada. hear in this city, that multiculturalism was discov- one can travel to and migrate to. at is what we RH: We heard this all in 2004, but the immi- ered sometime around the Beatles in Toronto, is are. And why does that matter? Because it’s part of gration ows have not occurred. ere has not ludicrous. our history. been a mass exodus north. anks to our current MM: Yes, look at Montreal. Look at Winnipeg. I think there’s one more thing we need to talk prime minister—basically his looks, which are very RH: Look at Pittsburgh and New York. Or Izmir, about: the history wars. Do you think they’re over or impressive—we’re getting more attention than historically named Smyrna; Smyrna was a wonder- are they going to continue? Did turning 150 change we usually do, but relatively few people think of ful entrepôt of Muslims, Jews, Christians… anything? Canada as the centre of the globe or of Toronto as MM: Alexandria, Lvov, Istanbul, Baghdad: MM: I think there will always be history wars a truly global city. We tend to be a bit self-satised they were all multicultural cities. I think there is a because history is so much tied up with who we are, and a bit provincial, and, when we’re talking about tendency to assume that we invented things or dis- and as society changes we ask di erent questions of history, happy to let history happen somewhere covered them for the rst time. But I’m with you. I’d the past. ere will always be disagreements about else.
6 reviewcanada.ca Literary Review of Canada MM: And happy to go tut-tut to other people. between the naive [elementary school] teachers on humanity. It’s saying that we are really separate I remember in the last days of apartheid in South the one hand and the Conrad Blacks on the other— species and we can’t talk to each other. e other Africa, when the Canadians were, I think, playing MM: Who’s naive in a di erent way… thing is that societies are organic and they grow and an important role and leading the charge against RH: —is not a helpful space to be in. they change, as they should. at’s the thing I hate it, there was a very canny South African ambas- MM: It’s not helpful. Because history belongs about this history which says, “ ere’s always been sador here called Glenn Babb. e Canadians were to us all, I think it should always be a conversation. a nation of the French and it’s always been like this.” going on about the horrors of apartheid, which If I don’t understand the histories of others, then It hasn’t. It’s always changing, and what it means to were very real, and Glenn Babb took a group of I’m not going to really understand them. ere was be French has changed hugely over the centuries. South African journalists—all white, of course—to that whole thing in the 1970s I think—we’re getting RH: I think we can all agree founding moments a Native reserve in the north of do matter. In the case of Canada it was Manitoba and he showed these ‘I suspect we’re going to have 20 years the declaration in favour of something appalling conditions, which were that was actually quite unlikely, but in widely publicized, which were as or so of celebratory history, until First the end worked. But nations change bad as anything in the townships: all the time, evolve all the time, and no clean water, no sewage, dread- Nations feel that they’re part of the there’s nothing inevitable about ful schools, teenagers drinking their survival as, in our case, liberal too much or sning glue. And the common narrative, and then we can democracies. If you think of Germany Canadians were horrified, they in the 1920s, the Weimar Republic, said this is absolutely disgraceful have a more complex historical debate.’ it was a society that made incred- of the South Africans to do this. ible advances that we didn’t actually Babb actually put his nger on a sore point. We a little bit of this at the moment with the cultural make until the 1960s. Women were very engaged were being very smug about South Africa and how appropriation debate—that you should only study in politics, there was an active feminist movement, dreadful things were there; we weren’t looking at the history of your own people and you shouldn’t there was an environmental movement, and there what was happening in this country. study the histories of others because that was some- was a very public gay movement. So everything RH: I was working in Yellowknife during those how taking that history. Well, it would have left me that we think is kind of post-1960s, you found in summers in a town that was e ectively an apartheid studying the history of women of Scottish descent Germany and in Berlin in the 1920s, and within a city, with all the First Nations living in one part from southwestern Ontario. I thought, the world is decade we were looking at the jackboots. of the city su ering terrible problems. I was told, a bigger place than that. In the current context of, above all, Donald when I worked at a hotel there, that I was not to RH: You studied the women of the Raj and pro- Trump, but also some very nasty forces that are hire “Indians.” Now if that isn’t apartheid, I don’t duced a very good book. ere’s a distinction there: driving the United Kingdom out of the European know what is. saying that other voices should be brought in and Union, populism across Europe, I think we have at takes us back to the issue that we started people from those groups should be part of the con- to say that not only will the nation develop, but we with, which is how one incorporates those excluded versation, that’s quite right; saying that only those need to be vigilant and active in determining how it histories without rewriting history as it is. So how groups can have that conversation, that’s the end of develops. Because there are other visions out there do you bring in First Nations without knocking out the Enlightenment. Indeed, reasoned thought. and nothing’s inevitable about our triumph over John A. Macdonald? I fear a debate now polarized MM: It’s denying the common nature of theirs.
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October 2017 reviewcanada.ca 7 Undeclaring a language war A Montreal academic confronts the ‘mytho-constitutional Quebec universe’ GRAHAM FRASER
by little and day by day, new real- Charte canadienne et droits ities.” linguistiques: Pour en nir avec There were flags and trum- les mythes pets on April 17, 1982 all right— Frédéric Bérard but not in Quebec. e day the Les Presses de l’Université de Constitution was signed by the Montréal Queen in Ottawa, René Lévesque pages, soft cover led a protest march in the rain in Montreal. Quebec’s ags were lowered to half-mast. e agree- ment on the Constitution without Quebec was dubbed the Night of Canadian anniversar- the Long Knives; Raoul Hunter, Ties. But in the urry of an otherwise mild-mannered car- events surrounding Canada’s toonist for Le Soleil, drew Quebec 150th, Montreal’s 375th, the 40th as a woman being serially raped anniversary of the Charte de la by the premiers from the rest of langue française (Charter of the Canada; Lucien Bouchard almost French Language) in Quebec, won the 1995 referendum by reviv- and all the symbolic gestures of ing a story of betrayal, mockery reconciliation with Indigenous and humiliation. peoples, there has been relatively e nationalist trope of betrayal little mention—certainly in English—that 2017 is the headline of an analysis piece was “Quebec’s and oppression has also been reected in journalis- also the 35th anniversary of the patriation of the renaissance in the blind spot of the federation’s tic and academic writing—not simply about the way Constitution and the introduction of the Charter 150th.” In the same edition, Daniel Turp, a law in which the Constitution was patriated, but also in of Rights and Freedoms. e only discussion has professor and former Bloc MP, wrote about “La analyses of the way in which the Supreme Court been provoked by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s solitude constitutionnelle du Québec,” in which he has interpreted the Charter. Lévesque biographer spontaneous dismissal of Quebec Premier Philippe argued that the Charter, in promoting bilingual- Pierre Godin described Article 23 of the Charter, Couillard’s proposal to discuss Quebec’s role in ism and multiculturalism, was committing Canada which deals with minority language educational Confederation. And the consensus in English to the construction of a new national history that rights, as “the last attempt to anglicize Quebec.” Canada appeared to be relief that that other refused to recognize its own plurinational char- Law professor Eugénie Brouillet argued that the unmentionable “C” word would not return to pub- acter. Turp argued that Quebec needed to draft its Charter has “led to an erosion of the [Quebec] legis- lic debate. own constitution in order to reect how Quebecers lative competence in linguistic terms.” In a glowing editorial on the eve of Canada Day, see Canada. Legal scholar Henri Brun maintained that the the Globe and Mail recounted all the potential In Quebec, the approach to the constitution has Charter consisted of “perfectly symmetrical norms, wrong turns Canada could have taken over the past always been di erent. As Daniel Johnson Sr. told which completely ignores that Quebec is the only century and a half; it wrote that steps had been Peter C. Newman in the mid-1960s, when he was place in America where a French-speaking major- taken and a change of course made in the 1960s still leader of the opposition in Quebec, “When we, ity exists and that this majority at the same time and 1970s to correct the wrongs committed against with our Latin culture dream of a new constitution only represents a tiny linguistic minority on this Canada’s francophones outside Quebec to deprive for Canada, we see a monument of logic and clarity continent.” And academic and conservative colum- them of language and education rights. “Today, it with great principles from which ow the supreme nist Mathieu Bock-Côté claimed that “the regime is Indigenous Canadians who are owed apology, laws of the country. We conjure up the wonderful of 1982 is fundamentally hostile to the very idea of acknowledgment and redress,” the editorialist wrote. day when, in the name of a sovereign people, with Quebec nationalism (and even the Quebec nation) Language rights? Been there, done that—time a apping of ags, the proclamation of the new to the extent that it claimed to domesticate it. It has to move on. constitution and the scrapping of the old one will led, for example, to the programmed destruction of However, Le Devoir’s editorial on July 1 spoke be announced.” Bill 101 (Quebec’s language law).” of Canada as “an unachieved compromise”—and “All this is very marvellous from our point of view,” Johnson continued, “But this isn’t the way hen I saw the title of Frédéric Bérard’s book, Graham Fraser is a senior fellow at the Graduate constitutions are made and unmade in British WI thought it would be another contribu- School of Public and International A airs at the countries. ey don’t proceed with trumpet calls tion to this narrative of defeat and victimization. University of Ottawa. As a reporter, he covered but on the basis of precedents. Theoretically, On the contrary. In the book Charte canadienne et the language debates in Quebec in the 1970s, the they don’t abolish anything at all. ey carefully droits linguistiques, based on his doctoral thesis—it constitutional debates in the 1980s, the Quebec preserve all the facade, all the rites, and even the translates to “Canadian Charter and language referendum in 1995 and the Quebec reference to the whole vocabulary of the former state of a airs, rights”—Bérard summarizes and quotes from those Supreme Court in the1998. He was commissioner of and behind this facade, under the intangible veil who have established this approach, but turns the o cial languages from 2006 to 2016. of these rites and vocabulary they introduce little narrative on its head.
8 reviewcanada.ca Literary Review of Canada Citing authors and academics such as Michel signicant decisions in the area of language rights, Quebec City to accept the idea of restricting access Seymour, Frédéric Bastien, Turp, Brun, Brouillet, Justice Michel Bastarache specically reversed the to English school only to the children who had one and Bock-Côté, Bérard finds four themes in 1986 decision in R. v. Beaulac. “Language rights parent educated in English in Quebec. attacks on the Charter: that it signicantly reduces must in all cases be interpreted purposively, in So while Article 23 did, as the Charter’s crit- Quebec’s ability to protect the French fact; that it a manner consistent with the preservation and ics claim, take away the power of the National constitutes a frontal attack on Quebec’s language development of official language communities Assembly to decide who could go to English school policies; that it favours, or could be used to favour, in Canada,” Bastarache wrote. “To the extent that in Quebec, it did so by adopting an approach that the interests of the English-speaking minority Société des Acadiens stands for a restrictive inter- achieved the goal that Lévesque wanted: opening in Quebec over francophone minorities outside pretation of language rights, it is to be rejected.” Quebec’s English-language schools to the children Quebec; and that the Supreme Court, principally He then made it clear that the principle of of parents educated elsewhere in Canada. Bédard consisting of anglophones from outside Quebec, ocial bilingualism was not accommodation, but describes in detail what the Supreme Court has has undermined Quebec’s Charter of the French equality. e state should not respond as though done for French-speaking minorities outside Language and has applied, or could apply, lin- there were “one primary ocial language and a Quebec—and is withering about the reaction in guistic principles in a uniform manner across duty to accommodate with regard to the use of the Quebec. “What Quebec author has recognized the country, thus undermining Quebec’s unique other ocial language. e governing principle is the immense progress of francophone rights since character. that of the equality of both ocial languages.” the Charter? None,” he writes. e facts, he points He sets out to verify these claims—but instead Bastarache has played a huge role in the con- out, demonstrate that all of the gloomy predictions challenges or debunks them all. e result is a struction of the jurisprudence of language rights. about the anglicizing e ect of the Charter have book-length description of how the Supreme Court Before joining the Supreme Court he was counsel been wrong. “ e rights of francophones in the over 35 years has acknowledged Quebec’s dis- in a case that led to the court’s decision that the country, over the course of the last thirty years, have tinctiveness, recognized the validity of protecting minority education rights in the Charter meant not quite simply exploded.” the French language in Quebec, linked individual simply the right to have access to minority language But this has been ignored. Bédard argues that language rights to community vitality, and acted schools, but the right of the minority community to the French-speaking minorities outside Quebec to ensure that French-language minority schools control those schools. have been a “disagreeable reality” for Quebec enjoy substantive equality with English-language On the court he claried the obligation of prov- nationalists, and “an implicit enemy.” As a result, majority schools. It is a remarkable story: Over that incial governments to provide schools within a the Quebec government has often intervened in period, the Supreme Court has developed a sophis- reasonable distance of French-speaking parents, court against French-speaking minorities, feeling ticated jurisprudence of language rights that has regardless of school district boundaries. And he was that any gain they made could be used against the been nuanced but clear. a member of the court that unanimously concluded French-speaking majority in Quebec. On the con- In the 1985 reference Re Manitoba Language that respect for minorities was one of the unwritten trary, he argues, the English-speaking minority has Rights, Bérard notes the court described in sweep- principles underlying the Constitution. Now retired gained no benet from the Charter. ing terms the vital place of language rights in soci- from the court, Bastarache continues to be active As he proceeds, chapter by chapter, his indig- ety: “ e importance of language rights is grounded on minority language cases. nation increases as he criticizes what he calls the in the essential role that language plays in human Bérard approaches this narrative of language “mytho-constitutional Quebec universe” and the existence, development and dignity. It is through rights jurisprudence with a specic goal: challen- “quasi-hegemony of Quebec nationalist orthodoxy” language that we are able to form concepts; to ging the conventional wisdom in Quebec. It is gen- which leaves “little room for dissidents.” structure and order the world around us. Language erally taken for granted that the Charter of Rights “ e dominant Quebec doctrine has thus come, bridges the gap between isolation and community, and Freedoms has been detrimental to the protec- consciously or unconsciously, to ignore reality,” allowing humans to delineate the rights and duties tion of the French language in Quebec, insensitive he writes. “One can obviously explain the frustra- they hold in respect of one another, and thus to live to Quebec’s distinctiveness and biased in favour tion for those who hold this doctrine that anything in society.” of the English-speaking majority in Canada and which approaches Trudeauism can provoke, par- However, in 1986, in cases that originated in minority in Quebec. Bérard’s verdict: wrong on all ticularly after the patriation of 1982. at being New Brunswick, Quebec, and Manitoba, the court counts. said, this frustration cannot justify the creation of issued three decisions that appeared to back away His rst target is the argument that the Charter an imaginary politico-constitutional construction, from this sweeping view. Memorably, as Bérard punched holes in the language law, Bill 101, which particularly on the part of intellectuals who, while outlines in the book, the court ruled in one of them, established French as the only ocial language of having legitimate convictions, have nevertheless a Société des Acadiens, that where there was a right to the courts and the National Assembly in Quebec. duty of critical reection.” Ow! use an ocial language in court, there was no right Sorry, that legislation was declared ultra vires He goes on to observe that the principles of to be understood. Language rights, Judge Beetz in 1979 and 1981 in the two Blaikie cases. Bérard asymmetry, substantive equality and the need to wrote for the majority, “give the speaker or the points out that the overturning of the sweeping repair the damage done in the past, all dened writer the constitutionally protected power to speak aspects of Bill 101 had nothing to do with the by the Supreme Court, have been recognized—by or to write in the ocial language of his choice. And Charter. e Supreme Court found that erasing French-language academics and analysts outside there is no language guarantee, either under s. 133 the use of English in the National Assembly and Quebec including Michel Bastarache, Michel of the Constitution Act, 1867 or s.19 of the Charter… the courts in Quebec was unconstitutional on Doucet of the Université de Moncton, and Pierre that the speaker will be heard or understood, or that the basis of the language provisions in the British Foucher of the University of Ottawa. Yet all of that he has the right to be heard or understood in the North America Act of 1867—before the Charter was has been completely ignored by what Bérard calls language of his choice.” enacted. “the Quebec doctrine.” e reason, according to the majority, was that His next target is the argument that Article 23 So far, the book has yet to provoke reaction in “Language rights…remain nonetheless founded on of the Charter, which denes who gets access to the Quebec press. e academics and nationalist political compromise.” As a result, the court con- minority language schools and gives the right to commentators that Bérard has criticized so vigor- cluded, they should not be considered legal rights. minority language education to the child of at least ously have not taken to the pages of Le Devoir or Chief Justice Brian Dickson disagreed. “ is one parent educated in that language in Canada, is La Presse to mount a counterattack. is is perhaps right,” he wrote, “includes not only the right to a tool to anglicize Quebec. understandable: it is hard to see what the basis for make oral and written submissions in the language e Supreme Court’s clarications of that right, an e ective response could be. chosen by the individual but also, to make this right Bérard points out, have led to the doors to English But, as the departure of Chief Justice Beverley meaningful, the right to be understood by the judge school in Quebec opening a mere crack, certainly McLachlin approaches and the time comes to or judges hearing the case, whether directly or not enough to anglicize Quebec. name her successor and ll the vacant seat on the through other means.” And Justice Bertha Wilson Interestingly, what Berard fails to mention is that court, it is extremely useful to have a book-length was blunt in dissent. “Judges who sit on a case must the so-called “Canada clause”—as opposed to the analysis of the work of the Supreme Court in the be able to understand the proceedings, the evi- “Quebec clause” in the original version of Quebec’s eld of language jurisprudence. In addition to pro- dence and the arguments regardless of whether the language law, Bill 101—was then-premier René viding a refreshingly critical response to the nation- case was being heard in English or in French. is, Lévesque’s preference. He o ered reciprocity to alist narrative in Quebec, Bérard has delivered an indeed, is a requirement of due process.” his fellow premiers at a premiers’ conference in St. e ective anniversary tribute to the work of the court Dickson’s and Wilson’s views eventually pre- Andrews, N.B., in 1977—but no one was prepared in describing in detail this uniquely Canadian ver- vailed, even if it took 13 years. In one of the most to discuss it with him. Discouraged, he returned to sion of language rights.
October 2017 reviewcanada.ca 9 Praise God—but First, the Market Why some jihadist groups rise to power AMIRA ELGHAWABY
Jihad & Co.: Black Markets & Islamist Power Aisha Ahmad Oxford University Press pages, hardcover
“ e most beloved of places to God are the mosques, and the most hated places to God are the markets.” —Muhammad
the odious interpretation of Islam advanced Fby militants, the great dilemma has been how groups like ISIS or the Taliban were able to come to power at all. How is it possible that local populations in which both women and men had previously been free had come to support move- ments that would curtail their freedoms, dictate their spiritual practice, rob women of the rights of full personhood, and brutally punish those who don’t fall in line? What is the common thread to explain their ascendancy to power in otherwise failed states? In Somalia, in the absence of a functional state, It was a conundrum that Aisha Ahmad decided to investigate. An assistant professor of political Islam provided a critical source of social capital science at the University of Toronto, she spent more than ten years travelling through some of that allowed traders a measure of certainty, and the world’s ercest political terrain to unravel the complex networks that have helped bolster and access to pro table markets. eventually propel to power several key Islamist movements. She wanted to understand how these understand the historical context in which market- in the hearts of pretty much everyone were able groups were able to successfully wrest away power places had ourished and struggled even as gov- to do something others failed at doing: win over from others engaged in deadly power struggles. It ernments crumbled. e bulk of her book delves the business communities in their territories and was not as though Afghans, Pakistanis, Somalis, or into two case studies: Afghanistan and Somalia. regions. ey did this by providing order where Syrians had suddenly been persuaded to embrace Ahmad had extraordinary access, built through there previously was only chaos, by undercutting or even simply accept the religious doctrine as previous stints at local universities. rough her others who were trying to prot from the lawless- practised by groups like ISIS or the Islamic Courts meticulous research and a journalistic ability to ness, and by using Islamic identity to unite com- Union. It certainly was not, as far too many Western weave a compelling narrative, she presents a vivid munities that were otherwise sharply divided along authors have insisted, that the movements were and thorough on-the-ground story of the business ethnic and tribal lines. supported because their austere forms of Islam networks that keep extremist groups in power. Ahmad talks about two critical processes that resonated especially with the populations they is was dangerous work, no less so because of facilitate this rise. One is the ability of extremist targeted. the risk in speaking to opposing sides and factions, Islamist groups to build the trust that is the only way On the contrary, what Ahmad found was not and the added challenge of being a woman asking to function in a lawless space; the second is their a spiritual or intellectual reawakening. e rise of highly sensitive questions in often patriarchal, war- way of nding a cheaper cost of doing business. extremist Islamist groups was bound primarily to weary societies. But, as a Muslim, Ahmad was able Both strategies have played a vital role in the global one hard reality: money. Ahmad’s journey took her to pay close attention to the cultural sensitivities of rise of the modern Islamist proto-state, she writes. into arms bazaars, seaports, government oces, each environment in which she immersed herself, “ e need for trust drives the business class to the homes of warlords, and most importantly, black drawing out information that would likely have embrace Islam, and its desire for lower costs thrusts markets. She delved deep into these systems to been far more dicult for a complete foreigner to it into the arms of Islamists. Out of this nexus… elicit. emerges the Islamist proto-state, which threatens Amira Elghawaby is a journalist and human rights What she discovered was that the Islamist the very nature of the international state system.” advocate based in Ottawa. groups whose names now strike fear and loathing Anyone who is not a foreign-policy expert or
10 reviewcanada.ca Literary Review of Canada well-versed in Afghanistan’s recent, bloody his- set up by various warlords wanting a cut of the tory may sometimes get lost in Ahmad’s recount- prots. Somali businesspeople began to com- ing of the country’s pre-Taliban past. But it is pensate for this “trust decit,” Ahmad writes, a valuable recounting and provides necessary Who Says April by leaning “more heavily on Islamic identity context of how a brutal war with the Russians and institutions to facilitate economic activities decimated the local economy, and how the between groups.” In the absence of a functional business class had to nd ways to keep doing is the Cruelest? state, Islam provided a critical source of social business—often illegally. From there, we have capital that gave traders a measure of certainty, i don’t believe in ghosts the growth of the opium economy just as local allowing them to develop business partnerships usually except the fog businessmen begin to embrace an even more with other groups and gain access to protable fervent Islamic identity, very much in vogue frost from my mouth markets in Gulf States. “Religious piety,” Ahmad following the victory of the mujahedeen ght- on the boardwalk writes, “proved to be an e ective way to prot ers against their Russian foes. e hypocrisy of over the lake within the political anarchy.” selling opium with religiosity on full display is fumbling them Enter the Islamic Courts Union, a network of obvious, and Ahmad highlights one example of forward sometimes courts that blossomed into a full-edged organ- a drug lord who amassed a huge fortune sell- you have to believe ization that for a time controlled Mogadishu. ing heroin and yet managed to pass himself o in something like Much like the Taliban in Afghanistan, this move- as a generous benefactor to hospitals and poor when november ment grew out of a revulsion for the lawless- families, “for the sake of God alone.” Ahmad leeches across your ness that threatened everyone’s safety, and for the ongoing economic instability. e Islamic describes one closed-door meeting of powerful tongue and nds businessmen in which the dealer’s colleagues— Courts built trust with communities, as well as them there digging some of whom are not involved in the drug trade with the businessmen and smugglers, eventually oesophageal trenches themselves—lay out his charitable works and receiving nancial support from both groups. defend him against rumours that he is involved cracked roots rotting e unication of various Islamic Courts groups in illicit activities. His philanthropy successfully winter dead clinging into a singular union occurred in 2006 and “cleansed” his professional reputation. was initially seen as a positive development. Neighbouring Pakistan’s sympathies toward which part of this the exorcism Religiosity alone could not account for their suc- Islamist groups underscored the value of Islamist which part of this the haunting cess, writes Ahmad; it was the nancial backing credentials in this landscape. Islamabad was they were able to attract by lowering the cost of holding the purse strings on behalf of the CIA Amanda Merpaw doing business across clan lines. during the Russian-Afghan war and took the As Ahmad was undertaking the extensive view that those who exhibited religiosity could research of the business-Islamist alliances in be trusted (not immediately waking up for dawn Amanda Merpaw lives, writes, and teaches Afghanistan and Somalia, ISIS exploded onto prayers raised suspicions that one was a mole). in Toronto. She holds an MA in English the scene. She concludes her book by testing her is alliance of ghters, businessmen, and the from Ryerson University. Her poems have nding on the situations now unfolding in the Pakistani government (with American back- appeared in Room. She is currently read- Middle East (Syria and Iraq), North and West ing) successfully brought about the humiliating ing Mary Oliver’s Upstream and Leanne Africa (Maghreb and Sahel region), and South defeat of the Russian army. And as ghters died Betasamosake Simpson’s is Accident of Asia (Pakistan). For the most part, her thesis is on the battleeld and in the air, the Afghan busi- Being Lost. reinforced in all of these cases, though the dom- ness class made its own killing. inant al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) It was not only arms and drugs that fueled has not fooled most Algerians, who see through the booming black market. Everyday necessi- the thinly disguised pursuit of wealth over any ties including food, clothing, and construction by di erent factions would come to deeply regret sincere religious devotion. materials were obviously in demand. A highly their choice. e Taliban cracked down on the drug For those who shake their head in wonder at corrupt system provided all of this. But as history trade and mounted an anti-corruption campaign the grim political currents in far too many Muslim- has shown, often violently, there is no guarantee of that decimated the business community’s wealth. majority countries, the link between Islamist peace in the wake of a victory against an external e decline in the black-market economy did not movements and business interests is illuminat- enemy. Afghanistan, like other nations of diverse, lead to a growth in legitimate business. And bar- ing. It clearly lays out the interplay between failed multilingual tribes and communities, quickly des- ring women from leaving their homes—a reaction, states and the rise of groups who can create order cended into internecine ghting. In the 1990s, the in part, to the horric violence seen before the out of disorder, whether along religious or other country was further traumatized by the creation of Taliban’s ascent—led to further economic stagna- lines. It may also help to explain why other popu- bloody efdoms. e Taliban would soon unite a tion. lar Islamist movements have failed. Ahmad has divided nation whose people were su ering deeply Ahmad found that a parallel tragedy had been invested academic rigour in studying one of the from constant killings and rapes, what Ahmad calls playing out in Somalia. In a similarly in-depth most important security questions of our time. the “monstrous depravity of the civil war.” “As the study of the country’s past, she traces a trajectory For governments, policy makers, researchers, and ethnic violence spiraled out of control, the militias that led the business elite to build up their wealth anyone else tasked with nding solutions to these that once defended Afghanistan had now become and resources just as the entire country crumbled seemingly intractable questions, this book provides its predators,” she writes. beneath the weight of civil war. Much in the same critical direction. e Taliban movement promised safety, unity, way that their counterparts did in Afghanistan in An important and sadly obvious corollary is that and order. Ahmad details its growing popularity, the 1990s, Islamists in Somalia would enter the foreign intervention by Western states, no matter which takes on an almost mythical dimension, as scene as a potential unier of opposing tribes, pro- how humanitarian the objective, all too often leads tales—both true and apocryphal—of Taliban ght- viding a centralizing force where there was none. to failure. “What the policy community can do…” ers saving Afghan girls from rapists and protecting at business continued to grow was a testa- writes Ahmad. “is to learn the fundamental lesson vulnerable villagers spread throughout the country. ment to the fact that Somali bazaars became the from these failed engagements and stop repeating But as the world now knows, the movement would largest tracking operations in the Horn of Africa, them.” Rather than rely on the instruments of war, go on to establish a powerful Islamist state that notes Ahmad. While the civil war continued and Ahmad recommends an approach that relies on would impose a puritanical, deeply fundamentalist militias brutally terrorized vast populations, and political solutions—diplomacy over drones. version of the religion. And if business helped the hundreds of thousands of people ed Mogadishu “ e time horizon for these wars is indenite, Taliban achieve power, it did not ultimately benet to save themselves, businessmen and women and the costs in blood and treasure are astro- from Taliban rule because it failed to see what was knew there was money to be made. (Somali busi- nomical,” concludes Ahmad. “In our desperate coming once the group assumed power—a com- nesswomen were a force in the local economies, search for peace in the Muslim world, all parties mon storyline in other countries where Islamic an anomaly compared with other regions where must come to terms with their own helplessness. fundamentalist regimes take hold. e traders who Islamists operated.) Without this necessary drop of humility, the pros- initially nanced the Taliban as a way to circumvent As in Afghanistan, business interests were at pects of a future détente and peace are bleak; there the high tari s being charged across trade routes the time threatened by the numerous checkpoints will be no victors, only victims.”
October 2017 reviewcanada.ca 11 Coming Fall 2017
Tug of War Negotiating Security in Eurasia Edited by Fen Osler Hampson and Mikhail Troitskiy 978-1-928096-58-0 | paper 978-1-928096-60-3 | ebook
Revised and updated Now in paperback
Look Who’s Watching Surveillance, Treachery and Trust Online Fen Osler Hampson and Eric Jardine 978-1-928096-30-6 | paper 978-1-928096-20-7 | ebook
Advancing Policy Ideas and Debate
The Fabric of Peace in Africa Laid Low The Dragon’s Footprints Looking beyond the State Inside the Crisis That Overwhelmed China in the Global Economic Edited by Pamela Aall and Europe and the IMF Governance System under the Chester A. Crocker Paul Blustein G20 Framework Foreword by Kofi Annan October 2016 Alex He May 2017 978-1-928096-25-2 | paper September 2016 978-1-928096-26-9 | ebook 978-1-928096-35-1 | paper 978-1-928096-23-8 | paper 978-1-928096-41-2 | ebook 978-1-928096-24-5 | ebook CIGI PRESS CIGI Press books are distributed by McGill-Queen’s University Press (mqup.ca) and can be found in better bookstores and through online book retailers.
12 reviewcanada.ca Literary Review of Canada Trompe Le Toil Identity capitalism and the modern conundrum of overwork EMILY M. KEELER
The Weekend Effect: The Life-Changing Bene ts of Taking Time off and Challenging the Cult of Overwork Katrina Onstad HarperCollins pages, hardcover
The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline of Leisure Juliet B. Schor Basic Books pages, hardcover
Willing Slaves: How the Overwork Culture is Ruling Our Lives Madeleine Bunting Harper Perennial pages, softcover
if all you have is a hammer, everything Abegins to look rather like a nail. From my desk, where I use my laptop to tweet, make din- ner reservations, and do the labour that somehow amounts to making a living, everything looks like work. You may remember Maslow from your high school psychology text book. e “hierarchy of being much too broad—it is a matter of course that understanding that motivation, satisfaction, and needs” model has been at the root of contempor- famine is bad, homelessness is stressful, and having fulllment require a social rather than individual ary understandings of personal development friends is nice—but this hasn’t prevented a slew of structure. and motivation since it was rst published in the so-called happiness gurus from picking up where With the benet of hindsight, it seems almost scholarly Psychological Review in 1947. It outlines Maslow left o . Self-help manuals and productivity inevitable that Maslow, an American New Age a seemingly direct progression toward the vaunted guides constantly borrow from Maslow’s theory of pioneer and utopian dreamer looking to make the state of self-actualization based on a series of the hierarchy of needs, because it smacks of science world (and everyone in it) a bit better, would spend increasingly complex needs. At the bottom are and rings as true. some time applying the tools he had developed to physiological ones (air, food, water) and closer In 2011, the theory was a orded a brief bit the business sector. Maslow spent the summer of to the top are sociological functions (a sense of of academic reinvigoration, when Ed Diener, a 1962 at an electronics factory in Del Mar, California, belonging, or having the feeling of making a valid psychologist at the University of Illinois and senior where he founded a movement called enlightened and appreciated contribution to the community). scientist at the global polling company Gallup ran management. e rm, Non-Linear Systems Inc., Maslow’s model continues to provide the basis for a ve-year study in 123 countries on how people made voltmeters and such, and later created one of how we understand the complexities of human rated their level of happiness as well as which of the rst commercially available personal comput- desire and action. their needs on Maslow’s hierarchy were being met. ers. e psychology 101 pyramid we all memorized Shortly after the results were published, Diener In Willing Slaves, her expansively reported in junior year has staying power because it carries gave an interview in the Atlantic. It turns out that 2004 dive into the culture of overwork in Britain, a whi of the self-evident. Scientic psychologists Maslow was wrong to put these needs so neatly in a Madeleine Bunting, a columnist for the Guardian, typically ignore Maslow’s theory of motivation for hierarchal order—you can be happy to know you’re writes about this chapter in Maslow’s career. She well-liked by your friends even on an empty stom- quotes him at length, describing his “grand and Emily M. Keeler is the vice-president of PEN ach, for instance. “ ey’re like vitamins,” Diener glorious goal: ‘Proper management of the work Canada. Formerly the books editor of the National told the Atlantic. “We need them all.” Moreover, lives of human beings, of the way in which they Post, she founded Little Brother, an award-winning the prevalence of Maslow’s demonstrably awed earn their living, can improve them and improve literary magazine, in 2012. She is the editor of theory may have contributed a bit of socio-cultural the world and in this sense be a utopian or revolu- Exploded Views, a series of punchy non- ction damage: by positioning self-actualization at the top tionary technique.’ ” Maslow’s principles of man- books from Coach House Books. of the pyramid, the hierarchy provides few tools for agement presume that work is the primary, even
October 2017 reviewcanada.ca 13 sole, route to the ultimate, pyramid-topping state In 2008, the year of the crash, I was working six or Sisyphean. Whether you’re cleaning hospital of self-actualization; we understand who we are by days a week in a restaurant. e regular shift was toilets, washing dishes that diners will dirty again what we do, and what we do is, as you know, work. typically between six and ten hours, and I would tomorrow, or stringing together carefully con- Maslow was ahead of his time—Bunting do two or three double shifts a week, which would sidered sentences about the oft-mythologized state describes how his philosophy of the nature of the require putting in between 12 and, on wildly busy of achieving the perfect work-life balance, Maslow psychological contract between employee and nights, 16 hours. I checked my email once or maybe suggests that you will nd meaning if you are act- employer gained a foothold in the 1980s and 1990s. twice a week. Today, from the moment I woke up ively trying to optimize yourself for your labour. Be Moving beyond the basic presumption of work for until this minute—10:31 p.m.—I have checked the best toilet scrubber you can be, and you are well wages, Maslow envisioned dedicated employees my email approximately 147 times. Email is the on the journey to fulllment. entering into an agreement on the order of some- primary tool I use for work, and, it would seem, It’s all too easy to feel as though the rise of com- thing much more utopian. In 1954’s Motivation and for making my entire life seem like work. Hammer, municative technology has exacerbated all this. Personality, Maslow suggested that each human meet nail. Smartphones, equipped with the latest project- being is psychologically driven to fulll their indi- In her recently released book, e Weekend and life-management apps, are nearly always at vidual potential: “A musician must hand. e tiny machine you use make music, an artist must paint, The assumption is that every employee to photograph your children and a poet must write, if he is to be log your workouts is the same one ultimately at peace with himself. wants to self-actualize in the face of you use to get in touch with your What a man can be, he must be. boss real quick with a pressing is need we may call self-actual- responsibility, wants to rise to the question or to just check in on that ization.” one project that you suspect your His journal from his excursion challenge. And that these desires for colleague may have temporarily to the factory oor, originally titled back-burnered. It is clear that the Eupsychian Management and ful llment must be met through work. technology of our time seems to rebranded in contemporary print- have caused further erosion of a ings as Maslow on Management, is the foundational E ect—the latest in a long line of reports and work-life border that was already a bit soft. text of an astounding amount of taken-for-granted ruminations on the deleterious results of allowing In some European countries, this erosion is a management theory. is despite the fact that work to take over our lives—journalist Katrina matter t for ocial intervention: Since January, the whole book is comprised of mostly unedited Onstad describes how, for salaried employees in French companies with 50 employees or more have random thoughts Maslow would speak into a tape knowledge and service sectors, technological con- been legally required to negotiate with workers to recorder after each day in the factory. e psych- nectivity has helped to normalize the erosion of a identify hours of total unreachability—the times ologist himself also repeatedly reminds his reader boundary between time on and o the job: of the day and night where cubicle drones and that theories about this form of management would pixel-pushers will be expected to allow email to only really apply in a workplace that was already is is the new normal: smartphone-carrying pile up, Skype requests to go ignored, Slack chan- highly functioning and that had already built a sys- professionals report interacting with work nels to lie dormant. For the past few years, a hand- tem of psychological and material security for the 13.5 hours every workday. We can barely get ful of German automobile companies, including people who laboured there. through three waking hours without work- Volkswagen and Daimler, have been encouraging ough he generally wrote with a sense of possi- ing. e average smartphone user checks his employees to enable a software program that bility and yearning for a better way to live, Maslow’s or her device about 150 times per day, with automatically deletes all email sent to their work work has been easily co-opted by people who think younger people checking most often. Even addresses while they are on vacation. (Here in more about maximizing return on investments than if many of those swipes are just to check the Canada, the Liberal government is in the process humanist well-being. In giving corporate-friendly social feed, we are in constant, perpetual of addressing bills to amend the Labour Code, to language to his ideas regarding human nature and proximity to work. We carry our jobs in our reect the workforce’s growing desire for an ocial development, Maslow created a system for fram- purses and packs, on our bodies. ere’s policy of more exible working hours.) ing goals of individual development as a function no physical separation; we can always be And yet the line of non-ction books about the of capitalist enterprise; it is in part because of reached, and work can always reach us. never-ending grind long predates the arrival of the Maslow’s understanding of personal development smartphone. In what constitutes a seminal book that we as a culture assume that employees are Work, the kind that requires email, anyhow, in the genre, 1991’s e Overworked American, the somehow manifesting their destiny through labour. is a limitless uid; it will ow into and ll every economist Juliet B. Schor describes how capitalism, And management, he posits, can help with that container, every life, if given the chance. ( is, from the early days of industrialization through the by creating a working environment that emphasizes Onstad and others will tell you, follows econo- space-age convenience of the consumer era, has simultaneous self- and corporate actualization. mist C. Northcote Parkinson’s dismal dictum that persistently created conditions of vast inequality In his journal from Del Mar, Maslow posits that “work expands so as to ll the time available for its not only of income but also of time. enlightened management might even take the place completion.”) Onstad points out how technology Time itself has been shaped by the rise of cap- of more traditional forms of therapy (“Especially in has levelled the playing eld across classes: white- italism. Schor points out how the main unit used view of the fact that so many people are not suitable collar employees are only just now getting a taste of to measure time in Medieval Europe was the day, for individual psychotherapy,” he writes). Given the what shift workers, who have frequently had their and the concept of what constituted a day was right conditions, Maslow suggests that the point of hours determined with less than a week’s notice, tied to the movement of the sun through the sky. work is to become the job: “ ese highly evolved have known for decades. e culture of overwork For most people, time came in half-day-sized seg- individuals assimilate their work into the identity, both bubbles up and trickles down. “New technolo- ments. If you were to ask some hapless serf to meet into the self, i.e., work actually becomes part of the gies mean that blue-collar workers on the frontlines you somewhere at 2:30 p.m., they would look at self, part of the individual’s denition of himself.” of the patchwork economy are easier than ever to you as if you’d just asked to borrow their shadow. reach,” Onstad writes, “pulled in for extra hours Only during industrialization, and with the emer- t turns out, reviewing the contemporary land- with a text ‘request’ that feels compulsory.” gence of unending work arranged by shifts rather Iscape of work, that becoming the job does not is dynamic is, depending on your perspective, than by discreet tasks, did we come to experience always end so well. In 2015, for one dramatic the intrusion of work into time spent away from the time as something measured in minutes, hours, example, an intern with Bank of America Merrill oce (or the shop oor, or the utility truck), or else and seconds. “Modern time consciousness,” writes Lynch was found dead on the shower oor of his an intervention from management, whose role, fol- Schor, “which includes habituation to clocks, econ- London apartment. He had been working, with- lowing Maslow, is to make a worker feel integrated omy of time, and the ownership of time, became an out sleep, for 72 hours straight. After his death, and stimulated, en route to achieving their higher important weapon which employers used against Merrill Lynch competitor Goldman Sachs limited purpose. e underlying assumption is that every their employees.” During industrialization, time the hours it expected its 2,500 global interns to employee wants to self-actualize in the face of became money, and factory owners were deter- work to a mere 17 hours a day. Last year Goldman responsibility, has a tolerance for anxiety, wants to mined to get every nickel, dime, and penny’s worth Sachs admitted some culpability for its part in the improve, to rise to the challenge, to get better. And, of time out of their employees. 2008 nancial crisis and ensuing recession; it also of course, that these desires for fulllment must be Initially, industrial workers were paid by the reported a US$7.4 billion prot. met primarily through work, no matter how menial day, week, or month, in keeping with centuries of
14 reviewcanada.ca Literary Review of Canada labour laws t for a feudal or we wouldn’t have had that kind agricultural society. Because of exibility.” Perhaps not, Ed. employers were paying each Well beyond family firms worker by the day instead of by Luminaire in Britain, the neoliberal turn the hour, they would schedule against labour unions has had the shifts for brutally long per- Because I still taste the loss of you a disastrous e ect on the con- ditions of work—for workers iods, assuming there was more in cracks of hard lips chapped from the cold to squeeze out of workers if they who are not part of organized were on the job for 12 hours labour, too. Eric Liu, formerly Because I still hear in the lamplight the melliuous rather than six. Because the the Clinton White House dir- hour as a unit of measurement voice strung gently between us lamenting its Ophelia ector of legislative a airs for was still uncommon among the National Security Council, the masses, and the science of Because I still feel the nothing beating its tiny sts explains it simply in a 2013 col- measuring time was still seem- violently against my chest until it is heavy with the (non)sense of it umn for Time magazine: “First, ingly newfangled, employers the fact is that when unions were able to exploit workers Because perceiving the whispers of this nothing behind closed eyes are stronger the economy as a by gimmicking with the clocks is so absolute and overwhelming it is not even dark whole does better.” Unions, he that signalled when labour was argues, shape economic activ- scheduled to break or cease Because I do not yet know ity by raising wages for their members and therefore provide for the day. Schor quotes Karl all I do not know Marx’s writing on the factories more purchasing power, which of the late 19th century, and in turn enables more hiring. I will entomb the wine and the codeine and eshes out his observations of Unchecked by unions, corpora- the exploitative working con- consider it tomorrow tions have a tendency to hoard ditions with other historical prots, slow hiring, and deepen accounts, including this one Julia Florek Turcan a chasm of inequality. Strong from a factory worker who unions in the private sector, would advise his colleagues on in other words, put a check on Julia Florek Turcan is a poet and performance artist from Atikokan, Ontario, the oor to leave their watches what we’ve now learned to call currently residing in Winnipeg. She has performed on local and national at home: the 1 percent. “Second,” Liu stages, including fringe festivals, Canadian Festival of Spoken Word, and the argues, “unions lift wages for Winnipeg International Writers Festival. Her poetry has appeared in CV2 In reality there were no non-union members too by cre- and Understorey. Julia has just nished reading e Manticore, the second regular hours: masters and ating a higher prevailing wage.” book in the Deptford Trilogy by Robertson Davies, and is currently reading managers did with us as Bunting describes how the Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses. they liked. e clocks at “emasculation,” as she puts it, the factories were often put of Britain’s unions paved the forward in the morning and way for a decade of steady work back at night, and instead intensification: “Workers are of being instruments for the measurement gig economy.”) Schor is careful to describe how required to put in more e ort and to work faster. of time, they were used as cloaks for cheat- the general prosperity of capitalist, Western dem- is has been true throughout the economy, a ect- ery and oppression. ough this was known ocracies comes with a steep price: few workers are ing most sectors of the labour market.” amongst the hands, all were afraid to speak, able to freely choose the number of hours they sell In 1981, 38 percent of Canada’s workers and a workman then was afraid to carry to their employer, and employers are nancially belonged to a union; in 2012, that had dropped to a watch, as it was no uncommon event to incentivized to squeeze the most labour out of the 30 percent (and only 16 percent in the private sec- dismiss any one who presumed to know too fewest possible number of sta . Likewise, libertar- tor). e same year, a third of working Canadians much about the science of horology. ian rhetoric about the rights of individuals to freely reported that they felt they had more to do at work choose to pursue protability in selling their time than time could possibly permit. ( at neoliberal e clock was the rst technology merging the is, it turns out, a damaging lie. Especially since the campaigns against unions, which are now primarily spheres between life and labour, and in a sense it destabilization of strong unions throughout the the province of the public sector, were so successful still is; while our smartphones keep us connected 1970s and 1980s, the average Canadian, British, because they made each member of the public feel to work at all times, if there were no clock we’d or American worker has watched their bargaining personally inconvenienced rather than collectively never experience the anxiety of trying to balance power drop steadily year after year. empowered, is a matter I love to discuss idly over ourselves on and o of it. In Willing Slaves, Bunting depicts, through hun- the rare leisurely beer.) Schor’s gift to the ongoing argument for sus- dreds of interviews with ordinary British workers, Despite the longevity of this dour trend, work tained periods of rest and leisure lies in her meticu- how a culture of long hours and high employer intensication really does take on a whole new lous statistical analysis of historical labour norms. expectation is damaging to both the nation’s GDP meaning in the 2017 context, and not just because She is also the rst American economist to situate and its spirit. Her systematic look at work in call of the increased technological reachability of the overtime, long hours, and the general labour time centres, factories, nancial institutions, and hos- average worker. Onstad points out, for example, crunch as a general concern; her peers had often pitals reveals a culture-wide sense of time-starved that today half of all the jobs in Toronto, where both framed the growing expectation of long hours as desperation in Britain. A primary catalyst has been Onstad and I live, “are deemed ‘insecure’ or ‘pre- a concern primarily or solely a ecting the female increased pressure to intensify work. She visits an carious,’ meaning no benets and no job security.” aspect of the labour force—presuming, it would industrial packaging estate in a once-booming e growing gig economy means that not only are seem, that only bodies hypothetically able to bear coal mining town where the unemployment rate is people squeezing in more work at the oce or on children require time away from the rat race. higher than the national average. e rm has been the shipping oor, but everywhere else, too. Onstad “Despite the fact that worktime has been increasing family-owned and -operated for three generations. speaks with a young university professor who is an for twenty years,” Schor writes in somewhat pointed rough training employees for several, varied adjunct at three universities in the Toronto area. italics in her introduction, “this is the rst major tasks and organizing shifts to minimize or eliminate “She has no oce or library carrel,” Onstad writes, study to explore or even acknowledge this trend.” down time (i.e., bathroom breaks, a lunch hour), “and moves from campus to campus throughout In tracing the changes in the American labour the rm is able to achieve a high productivity level the week like a travelling band.” Companies like force over several decades, Schor is able to paint with a smaller workforce. Why hire two relaxed Airbnb, Uber, and Foodora promote the opportun- a clear picture of the shift from the golden era of a people when you can squeeze the same amount of ities they o er as a means of working just a little seemingly stable middle class bolstered by jobs for work out of one anxious labourer? is increased more than you already do—in most instances, after life to the more nebulous networks of precarious intensity is possible in part, a manager named Ed the company’s cut and the costs of providing these gigs and contracts that make up today’s job market. tells Bunting, because the rm has “avoided job “sharing economy” services, it’s not always clear (Onstad describes it as “patchwork,” others as “the descriptions; perhaps if we’d had unions involved, that an independent contractor working a 40-hour
October 2017 reviewcanada.ca 15 week would be able to clear minimum wage. to be found on the job than anywhere else. e in employees working 55 or more hours a week Not that people aren’t trying. In fact, for some, human animal is distinct from all the other crea- than in employees putting in 35 to 40). Overwork is a well-developed side hustle is as much a point of tures because of our need to create meaning in our bad for the individual; as a social condition, it does pride as a fancy job title. As Bunting points out, lives, and the corporate animal makes sure we’re more than raise rates of anxiety or lead to the shut- any fear of the 1990s turning all future generations mostly looking for it at work. tering of model train shops and a rise in projects into permanent slackers have been laid to rest by a But we’re also looking for it at the mall, on like TaskRabbit and Lyft. relentless form of identity capitalism: “A work ethic Amazon, and wherever goods are sold. e time Russell’s book was first published in 1935 has evolved that promotes a particular sense of self to shop is built right into our working lives. Onstad between the two de ning acts of irreparable vio- and identity which meshes neatly with the needs details how Henry Ford set a precedent for a ve- lence that shaped the 20th century. In the after- of market capitalism, through consumption and day workweek in his factories in part because he math of the rst industrialized war and with an eye through work. Put at its simplest, narcissism and realized that people needed a weekend so they toward the international debtors’ game of German capitalism are mutually reinforcing.” If the road to could be away from work, shopping for cars. And reparations, he praises idleness and advocates a self-ful llment lies in hard work, I can demonstrate not just cars, but endless commodities. Onstad four-hour workday. Russell’s concern is that the how meaningful my life is by telling you I’m just quotes Ford: “People who have more leisure must industrial-capitalist organization of work is bad for so busy, so in demand, I’ve been liberalism, for society. By making working so hard and my personal a virtue of engaging in paid enter- brand has never been stronger. And Only during industrialization, and prise, of contributing one’s labour of course, by becoming the job, with with the emergence of unending to the e ort to line the pockets of all the social capital that entails, the wealthy capitalists, a whole culture worker’s whole life also becomes the work arranged by shifts rather than is built to perpetuate vast wealth clock—it’s impossible to distinguish inequality. By de ating the myth time at work from personal time if by discreet tasks, did we come to of work as virtue, Russell is able to the person identi es themselves as point out the central hypocrisy in the ultimate product of their labour. experience time as something measured the pursuit of pro t. “If business men really wished to grow rich more n many ways, these observations in minutes, hours, and seconds. ardently than they wished to keep Iare essentially warmed-over Abe others poor,” he writes, “the world Maslow. e corporate incentive to use Maslow’s have more clothes,” Ford argues. “ ey eat a great would quickly become a paradise.” work to motivate people without addressing their variety of food. ey require more transportation in Russell’s point, ultimately, is that the rigorous, needs for belonging and even baser survival has vehicles.” e worker’s down time, in other words, technologically enabled management of labourers created a seemingly irreconcilable problem. In is the point at which she becomes the consumer, is a threat to the ability of the individual to think, to Willing Slaves, Bunting describes how various thus bolstering a heady capitalist economy with breathe, to bene t truly from the notional advance- companies exploit “this craving for control, self- both her labour and its fruit. “In 1990,” Schor writes, ment and achievements of the arts and sciences of assertion and self-a rmation, and design corpor- “the average American own[ed] and consum[ed] human history: “It seems not improbable that the ate cultures which meet the emotional needs of more than twice what he or she did in 1948, but also movement towards individual liberty which char- their employees.” Modernity is a peculiarly lonely [had] less free time.” acterized the whole period from the Renaissance condition, for various reasons, including the rise e philosopher Bertrand Russell—a noted fan to nineteenth-century liberalism may be brought to of secular society, the collapse of close commun- of leisure despite nding the time to author more a stop by the increased organization due to indus- ity ties, and the increased likelihood that workers than 60 books—described the troubling concep- trialism.” e pressure exerted on many individuals will be forced to commute or move in order to tion of labour as a virtue in itself as a slave mental- in the workforce, he suggests, is barbaric. What is nd paying work. Onstad and Bunting both point ity divorced of its context. ough Russell, having more barbaric is that we live in a period of extreme out that Europeans call a culture of overwork “the never been a Greco-Roman slave, is not speaking production and yet have been socially unable to American disease,” but the pulling of long hours with the authority of rst-hand knowledge, his assure a basic guaranteed income, housing, and is but one symptom. We presently live in a social book In Praise of Idleness persuasively positions the food for all. inking back on Maslow’s pyramid, it’s system where, as Bunting has it, the “ ve categories virtue of work-for-the-sake-of-it as both damag- time perhaps to forget about self-actualization and of experience” required for a person to have a sense ing and curiously persistent. In our own time it is think again how other needs must be met before of well-being—“time structure; social contact; col- damaging not just, per Onstad’s observation, to the making the demand that one ascend to the magical lective e ort or purpose, social identity or status health of the average time-crunched worker (she state of fully integrating one’s self with one’s work in and regular activity”—are signi cantly more likely mentions that the risk of stroke is 33 percent higher life.
16 reviewcanada.ca Literary Review of Canada Jane Austen’s Transatlantic Sister The Life and Letters of Fanny Palmer Austen sheila johnson kindred
October 2017 978-0-7735-5131-2 $34.95 cloth 6 x 9, 296pp, 24 color & 10 b&w photos
A revealing account of a naval officer’s young wife, her life during the Napoleonic Wars, and her influence on Jane Austen’s fiction.
Censored A Literary History of Subversion and Control matthew fellion and katherine inglis
October 2017 978-0-7735-5127-5 $34.95 cloth 416pp, 26 b&w illustrations
A provocative history of literary censorship uncovers the limits of free speech in the United States and United Kingdom.
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October 2017 reviewcanada.ca 17 Institutionalized A sociology of CanLit DENNIS DUFFY
Arrival: The Story of CanLit Nick Mount House of Anansi pages, hardcover
Revolutions: Essays on the Contemporary Canadian Novel Alex Good Biblioasis pages, softcover
I. THEN
When you look through a peephole into the past, you hope for a clear view, but more often than not what you get is a kaleidoscopic vision. Little pieces, multifaceted and multicolored, that t together to make a knowable pattern… —Elizabeth Brown Pryor, Six Encounters with Lincoln
- leading position in the Canadian Writers’ Union one would have quarrelled with that sort of study; it scopic bead when we consider the has established her as a spokesperson for the liter- would have lled a need. But it is Mount’s attention Wcareer of Alicia Cornbury. Her pre- ary community. to the growth of an institutional infrastructure, to cocity in Cascadia University’s creative writing You have already guessed that Alicia Cornbury what we might call the sociology of literature, that program generated the early appearance of her is one of my imaginary friends, a total invention, gives this study its value and distinctiveness. poetry chapbook Gatherings in 1948. A subsequent with a (very) few facts sprinkled over it. More What we can now see as the institutional- garnering of a Canada Council grant in 1950, then importantly for my argument, the individual and ization—largely with public funding—of a sup- her rst novel, Deadly Nightshade, a nalist in the institutional support, awards and appointments portive cultural infrastructure has resulted in three City of Vancouver literary competition, and a con- that she gathered (with the exception of the GG) are momentous consequences for CanLit: a renewed tender for Amazon.ca’s First Novel Award marked anachronistic. at is, they did not exist during the public, a socio-political prominence, and an abid- her as a comer. She won the Vancouver competition time frame I adopted. e kaleidoscope got shaken, ing presence in the nation’s cultural politics. is two years later with her second novel, Murderers’ and those props to literary success exist now. ose seems an important story. Row (whose publication was subsidized by federal changes, the appearance of that apparat, have Arrival’s method of treating these issues is and provincial arts councils), demonstrating her greatly changed the fact of writing in this country. deceptive, and therein lies its strength as a read. artistic maturity. e novel made the short list for e origins and e ects of that institutionalizing Rather than a theoretical approach, Mount adopts the Giller Prize. She began a writer-in-residence of the act of imaginative writing make up the story a narrative one. For example, consider what strikes tenure at Atlantis University, the rst of many such that Nick Mount’s Arrival: e Story of CanLit has me as a typical chapter, “ e Double Hook” (nam- stints. Her capture of the Governor General’s c- to tell, and an engrossing story he makes of it. ing the chapters after prominent works issued dur- tion award in 1955 saw her appointment as creative (Disclosure: I taught in the same department— ing the period adds a piquant touch to the study). writing chair at Cascadia, and her acquisition of the English at the University of Toronto—as Nick e chapter begins with some biographical/ Giller Prize for Fog and Filthy Air accompanied her Mount, from 1964 to 1999, and our careers slightly career anecdotage about the late Gwendolyn initial appearance as moderator of the CBC’s Books overlapped.) As Mount states, he is an academic MacEwen, but soon segues gracefully though Alive program, an association that continued for six who has not written an academic book here; its an account of the size of the audience at a 1972 years. e popularity of the Netix adaptation of Fog accessibility and informality of the style will garner reading of hers, into the diculty of ascertaining cemented her international reputation. Awarded it a wide readership. quantiable accounts of a writer’s audience. What the Order of Canada in 1969, she continues to serve e writer’s approach to his subject matter seems almost an aside then tells us one of the on the juries of many award programs, while her seems Arrival’s greatest strength. Consider: he major causes of the arrival that the book treats: the could have concentrated on an exposition and growth in boomer secondary and post-secondary Dennis Du y’s expositions of his city’s past intermit- critique of the ction, poetry, and drama of 1959 to school attendance that generated a new and thirsty tently appear in Torontoist.com. 1976, in the manner of a standard critical survey. No audience for literary engagements with the world
18 reviewcanada.ca Literary Review of Canada around that audience. e chapter then continues social prominence for it, and an abiding presence Cultural politics, especially literary ones, now make with its survey of serious bookstores and the eco- in the nation’s cultural politics. By “renewed pub- themselves felt in the news, and not always to the nomics of publishing, followed by some gossipy lic” I mean not just the appearance of CanLit in comfort of all the participants. (by “gossip,” I mean lived experience that has not school and post-secondary curricula, but CanLit’s Hats o to Arrival for its engaging coverage of a yet jelled into history) accounts of various book acquisition of a new audience activated by adver- pivotal period in Canadian letters. Still, one prom- emporia, the role played by little (often mimeo- tisements, reviews, and publicity about writers. inent aspect of it bothers me: the 106 “sidebars” that graphed) magazines in the di usion of Canadian Book ads—subsidized by public nding—appear dot its pages. Each sidebar o ers an encapsulated poetry, and a concluding anecdote or two about on the subway I ride daily. Sure, I recognize that 100-word or so comment on a single text, preceded the colourful career of Milton Acorn. Such is the some version of all this existed long before 1959, by a ve-star rating system. Do we really need a format of the rst 16 of 18 chapters, and through the earliest date in Arrival’s story. People did read check-it-or-wreck-it, yea-it-or-nay-it set of ratings, their accounts of individual events you learn of the Canadian books, textbooks and school readers as if the author were some kind of literary deejay? arrival and impact of the institutional underpin- included Canadian material, anthologies fostered Sometimes I agree with Mount’s ratings, some- nings of the present-day literary scene. ( e nal a self-consciousness bordering on self-righteous- times not. No matter. It is the practice itself that two deal with the careers of Alistair MacLeod and ness, nationalist manifestoes appeared, but they mars the book. According to Mount’s preface, Alice Munro, among others, and prove less inter- did so within a vacuum. e writer longing to join “several people” to whom he spoke asked that esting than the earlier, institutionally-oriented the choir invisible of national writers had to have as his book include evaluations of the writing of the ones.) e reader learns about the way in which her nal goal success in the Anglo-American liter- time. So he took this step “no doubt foolishly,” and cultural agencies and their agendas impact writers’ ary market. It was virtually the only way of earning in the hope that his audience would register its careers and aspirations, but in the manner of the a living from writing. A few, a very few did so: Sir disagreements “in the margin” of the book. at is biographer and chronicler rather than the scarcely an author’s ringing endorsement of objectifying analyst. Does the process covered in his methodology. It sounds like the classic Perhaps instead you are looking for a “this hurts me more than it does you” kind paradigmatic academic account, something Arrival seem like converting a of justication. Whoever called the shots on more analytical, even theoretical, of the this feature of the book called them wrong. matters covered here. My guess is that a raft into the Titanic just in time In a book bound to appear—legitimately or general reader will likely avoid an academic in a plagiarized form—in many a student output featuring such treatments as “ ‘Am for it to meet the iceberg? essay, the ratings need to include the notice, I not OK?’: Negotiating and Re-Dening “Do not try this in class.” Traumatic Experience in Emma Donoghue’s Gilbert Parker, Lucy Maud Montgomery and Mazo Room,” or “ ‘Liv[ing] Poetically upon the Earth’ de la Roche among them. Poets on the order of II. NOW 1: The Bioregional Child and Conservation in Sir Charles G.D. Roberts and Bliss Carman could Let’s imagine a reader interested in the polit- Monique Proulx’s Wildlives.” In fact, that same scratch out a living as men of letters, but the odd ical downfall of John Diefenbaker, our PM from reader probably picked up Arrival because increas- successful work followed by a blankness was too 1957–63. She reads two books on the subject. e ingly academic critical discourse about literature often the arc of a career. rst, Peter C. Newman’s Renegade in Power (1963), seems jammed with passages that, to paraphrase Broadcasting, creative writing posts, public leaves her impressed by its engaging style, its dra- Huck Finn, are interesting, but tough. A reader readings and appearances, writer-in-residencies, matically unfolding narrative and its evocation of charmed by Margaret Atwood’s recently published prizes: none of these activities today sustain living an era. e second, George Grant’s Lament for a lecture “ e Burgess Shale: e Canadian Writing large, but they do provide a sense that one’s work is Nation (1965) leaves her gasping. Like or dislike, Landscape of the 1960s,” and how clearly it illumin- supported and thrust in some way upon an audi- who cares? You have to engage with Grant’s argu- ates the early career of so prominent a writer, may ence that in the past would have encountered such ment that outlines a perspective on events that no also want to nd out more about the scene Atwood notices only tfully. other book is providing. captures. Arrival is a book for that reader. “Social prominence”: by this I don’t mean an Alex Good’s Revolutions. Essays on the e story Arrival has to tell provides a blend of appearance in a “society” photo op (though that Contemporary Canadian Novel is bookended by institutional and career histories o ering a vivid happens, too), but by the fact that a writer’s doings two essays setting the whole business of writing sense of the times. Arrival gathers material not get noticed. An appearance in a neighbourhood within the framework of the digital revolution, a merely from Toronto, but from the other centres public library seems no big deal. People show up, perspective that now engages any Canadian reader, of Canadian writing at the time, Vancouver and they ask questions, and they pass along to their writer, or publisher. What if the revolution which Montreal. I was around then, as a book reviewer friends an account of that encounter. Does this Good’s essays treat forces us to shift our placement (that is to say, I appeared in the triumphal march ensure everlasting fame? Make one a household of Arrival away from its sense of a beginning, and to from Aida, behind the elephants, and carrying a word? No. But a relevant public persona where the read it instead in twilight rather than at dawn? shovel and can). It was a time not merely of change writer doesn’t seem an animated reconstruction (what time isn’t?) but of a twitchy self-awareness of from Jurassic Park? Yes! e fundamental challenge facing literature change. Heady, even. Writers’ visible presence in our national cul- in the twenty-rst century is its need to nd— us a reader acquires a basic appreciation of tural discourse seems obvious these days. A somehow, somewhere—an audience. the onset of cultural change and innovation, not so controversy over the matter of “appropriation,” a much driven by starving artists, but by public insti- writer’s imaginative adoption of another ethnicity’s How’s that for an opening? Good’s introduction tutions responding to artistic production through experience, occupies space in national dailies. So to his collection cites a number of authorities claim- creating agencies fostering that production. e has, in the past year, the scandal of the ring of a ing that the audience for what we might call serious, strength of that public response in turn generated creative writing professor. Forces involving celeb- literary ction has shrunk and will continue to do further artistic e orts which in turn…And so the rity and institutional dysfunction inflate those so with no end in sight. His nal essay considers synergy goes. subjects beyond their purely literary boundaries, the negative fallout from the Internet, noting how e Massey Report, the rise of the Canada but the creation of a literary infrastructure gives the decreasing price (and quality) of ction gener- Council, the establishment of provincial arts those matters a heft beyond their origins. e very ated especially for that online medium threatens to bodies and the funding of regional theatres and notion of writing in this country now exerts a pres- sideline serious ction’s continued production. I companies, the role of the CBC/Radio-Canada, ence, a framework in which cultural apparatchiks am not prepared to dispute this, nor can I o er any the subsidization of publishing, the appearance of (a by-product of such institutionalization) make antidote to this image of literary devaluation. As literary journals and anthologies and collections, their presence felt. us, the tensions roiling such a consumer of printed ctional narrative running and much else are recounted here in passing. Yes, intentional communities and their discourse from Munro Leaf’s e Story of Ferdinand (1938) versions of these bodies and forces existed earlier, (augmented by the steroids of social media) create to Zadie Smith’s Swing Time (2017), I can say that I but sheer quantity of endeavour during this period another subject competing for media attention. understand what it was like in Weimar Germany or changed the conditions of production, in the same Wherever you stand on these issues, an audience Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe when you wheeled a way that a sucient quantity of cold molecules has been created for them and an outside public barrowful of near-worthless currency to the bakery turns water into ice. engaged (to the point of editorial cartoons on the in the afternoon for a loaf that cost you a shovelful Let me try to ll in those earlier abstractions of subject) on matters that in an earlier time would that morning. e situation is moving faster than we mine: a renewed public for Canadian literature, a have occupied only a few immediate participants. can grasp, and Good is trying to make us see that.
October 2017 reviewcanada.ca 19 e soundness of this cultural anxiety emerges I took my seat, the houselights were dimming for in (very) little magazines and keep in close touch when we consider what Good calls the habit of Mozart. When they came on again, I was listening with each other and each other’s work. e fate of aliteracy. It’s widespread, and cannot be dismissed. to Wagner, and Valhalla was all lit up in a ery fall. ction and its producers is another matter. People I know, people I love, bright and engaged Does this mean that the process covered in Arrival If fewer readers are reading fewer works of ser- people, no longer derive their imaginative nourish- seems like converting a raft into the Titanic just in ious ction, does that foretell a speedy end to the ment from printed ction. I have to admit that some time for it to meet the iceberg? whole enterprise? ink: for how many decades of my endless appetite for imaginary narrative is is ironic perspective is reinforced by the now have we been hearing that the symphony is now partially sated by episodic TV series. For bet- essays lying between the rst and the nal ones in dead, that opera is dead, that the frantic searching ter or worse, my imaginary BFFs now include Walt Revolutions. For these deal largely with the strains and drooling over that fabled demographic just White (Breaking Bad) and O cer Bunk Moreland of the institutional culture as we now know it: isn’t paying o . Yet there they are, symphony and ( e Wire), even though they have to share their the inconsistencies of jury verdicts, the hyping of opera. e same as they were ve decades ago, but space with Enobarbus, Quentin Compson, Holden prizes rather than the books themselves, the lapses there they still are. So Stratford puts more bums in Caul eld and Del Jordan. I doubt that many folks in judgement of the jurors, all concluding in the seats for resurrected classic musical comedies than much younger than I, even con rmed readers, familiar spectacle of yesterday’s prize-winning sen- for Shakespeare: has Shakespeare vanished? Were import their dream pals from books any longer. sation thumping down in stacks upon the remain- you in a public park last summer? e fact of aliteracy and the realization of its der table. Reputations Good considers overrated e implications of audience shrinkage and e ects goes beyond the cultural despair invoked in (Douglas Coupland, David Adams Richards) and competitive media platforms understandably Alexander Pope’s mock epic Dunciad (1743). at writers past their sell-by date (Margaret Atwood, bother Alex Good. He seems especially irked that lengthy, savage screech that I never tire of hearing, Michael Ondaatje) attract the author’s attention. our ction writers continue to make use of histor- merely re ects the downfall of a certain way of pro- He is lethal in his accounts of literary garlandings ical subjects and settings, and that this limits the ducing literature (aristocratic patronage) and the and gatherings like the Giller bash and the ction appeal of their work. Really? Historical ction has rise of another mode, that of a mercantile market- it canonizes. e fact remains, however, that his always been about the present-as-reflected-in- place with a far larger (and less cultivated, perhaps) critical judgement in those pieces seems often to the-past, about the search for origins as a way of supportive audience. Aliteracy compels the rec- be controlled by a search-and-destroy guidance predicting the future. e past that Faulkner under- ognition that imaginative narrative is increasingly system, which is why I prefer to remain with those stood was never even past o ers merely another divorced from print itself. No, serious ction won’t opening and closing sections. eir strategic place- kaleidoscopic shift in the ctional gaze, and that just vanish o the shelves one day. We’ve set our ment suggests that the author and publisher likely gaze continues to interest audiences. cultural oven’s thermostat well below Fahrenheit concurred in this judgement, and those beginning Good casts a cold eye on the revellers at CanLit’s 451. Yet over time, things change, and certain pre- and end pieces give the collection its air. prize-giving ceremonies. Perhaps they are rollick- revolutionary possibilities shrink and disappear. ing like the presumed dancers in Ravel’s La Valse, “No, but I saw the movie,” morphs into “You mean III. THEN AND NOW and closing their ears to the increasing disson- there was a book about this?” I assume that poets will continue at their trade for ance of the tune. Time will tell whether that period Now, I recognize that my readers know this, the foreseeable future. Poets are used to scratching celebrated by Arrival was a reveille or a last post. and are probably replying with a “Well…duh.” a living from elsewhere than their art. ey meet in Juxtaposing that study with Revolutions makes for Editorial and publication happenstance colluded conclaves and talk about their craft and sullen art. a more disturbing and for me interesting read than when Arrival and Revolutions came at me. When ey manifest, they read aloud, they publish mostly keeping the two at a distance.
NEW RELEASES
Language is the Key Therapeutic Touch Conversations with Trotsky Northrop Frye and Others The Canadian Language Research, Practice and Ethics Earle Birney and the Radical 1930s Volume II: The Order of Words Benchmarks Model Edited by Martin Rovers, Judith Edited by Bruce Nesbitt Robert D. Denham Edited by Monika Jezak Malette and Manal Guirguis-Younger This collection presents all of Earle In this second installment of a three- volume series, Northrop Frye expert Language is the Key offers an Inappropriate touch cases have sparked Birney’s known published and Robert D. Denham continues his examination of the widely recognized public outcry and made headlines, but unpublished writings on Trotsky invaluable examination of a number of system of o cial language training a discussion on the importance and and Trotskyism for the very rst time signi cant but understated in uences for adult immigrants to Canada—the ethics of positive, caring, appropriate and provides a unique insight into that informed the intellectual vision of Canadian Language Benchmarks touch in the helping professions such Canadian Trotskyism during the the renowned literary theorist and critic. (CLB) and their French equivalent, as teaching, nursing and counselling is Radical 1930s. Niveaux de compétence linguistique long overdue. canadiens (NCLC).
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October 2017 reviewcanada.ca 21 Lives of a Brother Love, hope, and death in Scarberia DONNA BAILEY NURSE
children with enormous opportunities. It did not her to rest when she comes home from her far- Brother occur to them that they were moving from a rock to ung cleaning jobs. Chariandy makes us feel Ruth’s David Chariandy a hard place; that they were part of a centuries-old exhaustion, the bone-weariness of the working McClelland & Stewart voyage that began with Africans forced across the poor: pages, hardcover Atlantic into slavery, and Indians who crossed the Kala Pani—the metaphorical dark waters beyond [She] had not only tough hours, but also the subcontinent—into lives of indentured servi- long journeys, complicated rides along bus tude; peoples travelling not only from one setting routes to faraway oce buildings and malls Brother, to another but through a cruel history. e costs and homes, long waits at odd hours at stops of David Chariandy’s new novel, is similar to were high then and they remain high now. How can and stations, sometimes in the rain or the Ithat of the memoir by Jamaica Kincaid. My Caribbean immigrants become rooted in this time thick heat of the afternoon, sometimes in the Brother is Kincaid’s account of her younger sibling’s and place? Chariandy wonders. How can they root cold and dark of winter. He understood that battle with AIDS. In the book she writes that she is their stories? there is a specic moment during the trip surprised to learn that despite her brother’s sexual This is Chariandy’s second novel. His first, back home from work when a mother’s body bravado in the company of women, he privately Soucouyant, published a decade ago, was short- threatens to give out. A specic site in the bus pursued intimate friendships with men. Kincaid’s listed for a Governor General’s award. It contained loop at Kennedy Station when exhaustion memoir unfolds in an Antigua of economic despair many similar ideas—the missing older brother, closes in and the limbs feel like meat, and where opportunities for young people are scarce. the absent father, the caretaking younger son, the it takes every last strength from a mother to It’s a story about loss, the waste of potential, and mentally ill black mother—which Chariandy works make the two additional bus transfers home. how those we love best can remain a mystery. and reworks like a Rubik’s Cube. He is a meticulous So, too, it is with Chariandy’s new novel, in which writer, his skill made manifest in the simple power e action occurs in pretty much the same area an air of mystery surrounds the narrator’s older of his prose, the way his words simultaneously where Chariandy was raised by his Trinidadian par- brother, Francis, especially the ents in the 1970s and ’80s. It was nature of his relationship with his Chariandy’s earlier novel, too, contained around that time that the media best friend. When the story opens, went from depicting Scarborough Francis has been dead 10 years. a missing older brother, an absent father, as a benign Toronto suburb to a e narrator, Michael, is Francis’s menacing urban jungle, a percep- 20-something brother. He cares a caretaking younger son, a mentally ill tion that grew in lockstep with its for their mother in the same darkening complexion. “Always,” gray, dilapidated Scarborough, black mother—ideas Chariandy works recalls Michael, “there were stor- Ontario, complex in which they ies on TV and in the papers of were raised. e boys’ parents are and reworks like a Rubik’s Cube. gangs, killings in bad neighbour- Trinidadian: their mother, Ruth is hoods, predators roaming close.” black; their absent father, South Asian. e Toronto convey plot, inspire reection and move us beyond One night when the boys cannot sleep, Ruth asks suburb is home to immigrants of colour, struggling empathy to physiological experience. In one regard, them what is wrong. Francis answers, “ e murder- to raise families on minimum wage jobs. Michael Brother is a quick, easy read. In another, it wrenches ers. In the news. e black men…” Excruciating is and Ruth keep to themselves, still traumatized by the soul. the word to describe this scene, in which Chariandy Francis’s violent death. But the reappearance of an e plot sweeps between a present in which illuminates a grotesque truth: Francis and Michael old girlfriend forces Michael to contemplate the Michael is caring for Ruth, supporting them both will soon learn they are the black men society has racism and police brutality that derailed his big on meagre earnings from shift work at the Easy Buy taught them to fear. brother’s life. grocer’s, and a past in which Francis and Michael Chariandy forces upon us many such agonizing In her memoir Kincaid painstakingly analyzes gradually come of age. e father abandons the moments, as when Francis tells his high school her relationship with her controlling mother. And family when Michael is two and Francis is three. teacher to fuck o , and the teacher threatens to in Chariandy’s book, Ruth’s ferocious determina- Mother and sons form a tight unit. When they are call police—clearly viewing Francis as a dangerous tion that her boys succeed contributes to Francis’s still small Ruth frequently leads them down the gure rather than a mouthy student. In this novel as growing alienation from his family. Ruth serves as path behind their complex into the lush Rouge well as his previous one, Chariandy severely indicts umbilical cord to the Caribbean and African past. Valley. It reminds her of Trinidad. Later the boys Ontario’s secondary school system, not only for Michael studies her for clues to who he is and head down on their own to build forts, play in the failing to provide black children with the tools to where he is from. leaves, race twigs in the creek. e valley conrms succeed, but for radically reducing black children’s Brother describes a cohort of Caribbean immi- the presence of beauty in their world, even if it is chances. Despite Francis’s intelligence, his curios- grants who settled in Toronto in the 1960s and ’70s. largely out of sight. ity, and his love of books, teachers stream him into ey believed they would be able to provide their Michael worships Francis, whom the girls dead-end courses. “His new-found disinterest in already adore and the bullies already fear. And school perfectly countered its apparent disinterest Donna Bailey Nurse is the editor of Revival: An Francis lovingly looks out for his nerdy sibling, in him.” Anthology of Black Canadian Writing (McClelland whom he teases in hilarious big brother fashion. Chariandy highlights the bleak ironies that and Stewart, 2006). He is protective of his mother as well, encouraging pervade our supposedly tolerant, classless soci-
22 reviewcanada.ca Literary Review of Canada ety. eir concrete neighbourhood, for instance, Comparisons can be drawn between Brother e episode is reminiscent of the passage in is called e Park, their drab building named and Cecil Foster’s Sleep On, Beloved, H. Nigel Alice Walker’s novel that describes the thrill of the e Waldorf. He is disgusted by wealthy business omas’s Behind the Face of Winter, and especially colour purple and the scene in Toni Morrison’s owners who underpay employees for their precar- Austin Clarke’s novel More, about a Bajan immi- Beloved when a despondent old woman clings to a ious, temporary jobs, and then lecture the poor grant who loses her son to the streets. is novel’s scrap of pink cloth. on their work ethic. He is outraged that black men success resides in Michael’s moving, pitch-perfect Chariandy shares Morrison’s preoccupation continue to be demonized by a police force that has voice. His perspective is inevitably that of the out- with the problem of keeping black culture alive in proven itself to be criminally violent. sider, partly because of his awkward personality a racist white society. One method of preservation Police are an ominous omnipresence, ran- and partly because he is mixed-race. Like biracial turns out to be cooking. In the novel, Ruth passes domly stopping black youth, demanding entrance characters in many black Canadian works, Michael her story down to her sons through her delicious into private establishments, breaking up parties, is always struggling to harmonize the African and Trinidadian meals. Another is the conventional threatening deadly violence to any black man who North American aspects of his existence. oral tradition: Jelly transmits black history through dares to question them. e harassment escalates Chariandy distinguishes himself most in his his music. Indeed, Jelly is a homophone for djeli, a after one of Francis’s friends is shot and killed. He depiction of Ruth whom he renders with gorgeous storyteller or praise singer in West African culture, and Michael are horried to come upon the body complexity: her ferocious love for her children, her tasked with safeguarding the people’s past. and police detain them at the scene. When Francis erce courage, her unbearable pride and violent instinctively reaches out to protect his little brother, frustration as well as her gentleness, her fragility [Jelly’s] genius was all about continuous ow, an ocer strikes him in the face. and love of beauty. When Michael nds Ruth lis- about ceaselessly mixing in one sound, one No one cares that these boys are traumatized by tening to Nina Simone, we understand Chariandy style, one era, with another. He worked magic what they have seen—not the police and certainly to be seeking a language for the essence of black with the cross-fader and the di erent equaliz- not their mother. On the contrary, Ruth is morti- women’s experience. It’s a portrait rarely found in ers, allowing us to recognize connections we’d ed that ocers have returned her boys to her the contemporary literature of black men. At the never otherwise imagine. Between ska and doorstep like common criminals for all to see. Her same time, Chariandy exhibits an anity for the blues. Between Port of Spain and Philadelphia. greatest fear has been that Francis would become a writing of black women. In one scene, Ruth, who Between the 1950s and the late 1980s. “Cri-min-al!” Ruth unwittingly reinforces society’s requires constant supervision, wanders down into racist image of her own son. Another excruciating the valley. Michael and his ex-girlfriend nd her Jelly would “isolate the break beat, that precious moment, then, when we realize Francis cannot standing by the creek. particle of meaning, that three-second glimpse of even escape racism in his own home. the bigger story of a song, extending now forever,” Francis transfers his a ection to his best friend, Mother has noticed us now. She turns and which is a good way of describing what Chariandy Jelly, the neighbourhood’s gifted disc jockey. e adjusts the collar of her winter coat. e bot- achieves with this novel. pair are close and spend most of their time together tom of her skirt is stained damp, and she tries When it comes to preserving black history, at the local barbershop where Jelly spins his rec- to hide from our sight her bare feet, her toes Chariandy believes most in the power of the written ords. ey share a dream of musical success. Sadly, blackened with mud. She has a small bunch word. Brother is a mesmerizing tale of a Caribbean for Francis, it is a dream forever deferred. And Ruth of the blue owers in her hand, a bright blue, family that su ers devastating loss in a harsh new never gets the chance to reconcile with her beloved an unnameable pretty colour. Singular. land. It is Chariandy’s bid to keep that history alive. son, which breaks her mind as well as her heart.
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October 2017 reviewcanada.ca 23 The Money Trap Big Pharma’s bid to woo doctors, patient groups, journalists, and the rest of us ANNE KINGSTON
the public health system; and that Doctors in Denial: Why Big government inaction puts citizens Pharma and the Canadian at risk. Medical Profession are Too Close Such willful blindness is one tar- for Comfort get of Lexchin’s new book, Doctors Joel Lexchin in Denial: Why Big Pharma and James Lorimer & Company Ltd. the Canadian Medical Profession pages, softcover are Too Close for Comfort. In it, he : identies a “comfort zone” in which physicians—individually and in Health Advocacy Inc.: How groups—believe taking money or Pharmaceutical Funding gifts from drug companies won’t Changed the Breast Cancer create bias or colour critical facul- Movement ties, despite bountiful evidence that Sharon Batt it does. It is precisely this kind of ego, UBC Press ironically, that is targeted by indus- pages, hardcover try when it solicits doctors to be “key : opinion leaders” (KOLs), paying them thousands of dollars to speak at conferences or dinners to inu- , ence their peers’ prescribing habits. physician Joel Lexchin has But doctors, like all humans, Fbeen a crusading Cassandra, are vulnerable to the “rule of warning Canadians of the com- reciprocity”—a sense of duty to mingling of interests between the repay a perceived act of kindness medical profession and the phar- Pharmaceutical excess of another era: Oil painting after Nicolas de Larmessin II. or a gift, Lexchin explains. is gift maceutical industry—and the dire (Image courtesy of Wellcome Library, London) need not be big: One study cited risks it poses to drug safety and shows that doctors wrote more pre- public health. His 1984 book, e Real Pushers: A Philpott calling for a Canadian equivalent of the scriptions for a drug after its manufacturer paid for Critical Analysis of the Canadian Drug Industry, U.S. Physician Payments Sunshine Act, which a $20 meal. foreshadowed by decades the rise of a booming requires drug companies to report publicly any Given just how enmeshed the drug industry has literary genre devoted to the pharmaceuticalization payment or gift of more than US$10 to an individ- become in health care—stealthily inuencing what of medicine—from Marcia Angell’s 2004 book, e ual doctor. (Philpott responded that health care is and how medical students learn, educating doctors Truth About Drug Companies: How they Deceive a provincial matter; in September, Ontario intro- about drugs, funding academic health centres and Us and What to Do About It, to Ben Goldacre’s Bad duced legislation that would reveal drug company professional bodies, advertising in medical jour- Pharma: How Drug Companies Mislead Doctors payments and gifts to doctors, dentists, and phar- nals—the feeling of reciprocity runs deep. Nearly and Harm Patients (2012). macists.) eir concern is warranted. Data gleaned half of Canadian doctors, according to a 2016 study, Lexchin, a professor at the University of from the 2010 U.S. legislation revealed rampant receive some sort of industry remuneration. eir Toronto’s department of family and community conicts of interest between opioid manufacturers “continuing education” includes being pitched new medicine (he is also a professor emeritus at York and U.S. doctors, with more than US$46 million drugs and devices over pepper-crusted ahi tuna in University’s school of health policy and manage- paid out between 2012 and 2015. Another study upscale restaurants or at luxe ski lodges. According ment), is a go-to source for journalists writing about showed links between payments received from to Lexchin, only one in ten of these newly approved drug safety, or the lack thereof. Many of these stor- statin manufacturers and doctors writing prescrip- therapeutic drugs o er a benet to patients, and ies have been inspired by Lexchin’s own tireless tions for their brand name drugs, as opposed to little is known of their safety before they come to research, including the headline that more than generics. market. Certainly doctors don’t get the complete 100,000 Canadians die annually from prescription Yet somehow Lexchin’s clarion call, one echoed story from pharmaceutical reps; Lexchin cites one drugs taken exactly as prescribed. by like-minded academics and physicians, has meta study that concluded that representatives pro- In August, Lexchin’s name also surfaced as a not ignited mass outrage or government action in vide minimally adequate safety information in just signatory on an urgent open letter sent by a group Canada, even amid the current opioid crisis. e 1.2 per cent of cases. e upshot, Lexchin argues of physicians to then-federal health minister Jane lack of traction could stem in part from the fact that in a book dense with statistics, research, and anec- Lexchin is not a showman; he writes policy papers dotal examples, pits two diametrically opposed Anne Kingston is a writer and columnist for with such titles as “Involuntary medication: e ideologies: medicine’s duty to public health and Maclean’s magazine. She is also the author of e possible e ects of the Trans-Pacic Partnership industry’s mandate to maximize shareholder prot. Edible Man: Dave Nichol, President’s Choice & the on the cost and regulation of medicine in Canada.” e losers, he believes, are public health and the Making of Popular Taste and e Meaning of Wife: Moreover, his message may not be one that citizen. A Provocative Look at Women and Marriage in the Canadians want to hear: that in drug safety, mon- Doctors in Denial charts a history of cozy Twenty-First Century. She is currently writing a itoring, and transparency, Canada lags far behind cooperation between the medical profession and book about medical politics. the U.S. and EU; that industry interests compromise industry dating from the 1950s. (Readers craving
24 reviewcanada.ca Literary Review of Canada a recap of 1987’s Bill C-22, which amended the another gap to be lled. Industry spent $107 million In the book’s foreword, Dr. Brian Goldman, host Patent Act, will nd it here.) Doctors bought into to fund research at Canadian universities and hos- of CBC Radio’s White Coat, Black Art, writes of act- industry talking points, Lexchin writes, including pitals in 2014, Lexchin writes; the book provides a ing as a KOL for Purdue Pharma Canada, the manu- the threat that allowing lower-priced generics to chart showing that the medical school at McMaster facturer of OxyContin, in the 1980s and ’90s, giving enter the market would drive out pharmaceutical University, in Hamilton, for one, receives more than paid speeches to fellow doctors about “safe and research and development in Canada. (In fact, even 35 percent of its total research income from corpor- responsible” prescription of drugs for chronic pain. with patent extensions, R&D spending declined as ate sources. He admits he was “swayed by imsy scienti c evi- a percentage of sales between 1988 and 2015.) One Such relationships have normalized a quid pro dence” that the drugs could bene t patients with- consequence: Canadians now pay $12.5 billion quo. Lexchin presents myriad examples, includ- out causing addiction. Lexchin’s book concludes annually for prescription drugs; drug prices in this ing this one: In 1999, Robert Prichard, then the with 40 pages of proposed remedies—among them country are among the highest in the world. But the president of the University of Toronto, wrote to a national pharmaceutical plan, a Canadian sun- true cost is even higher, Lexchin argues. It gives us the federal government to support generic drug shine act, and greater government research fund- a health care system that focuses on drug therapies, companies, Apotex in particular, regarding patent- ing —in hope his profession will “regain the trust before patient safety or care that does not involve protection regulations. is happened just as the society has placed in it.” pharmaceuticals. school was negotiating for a big grant from Apotex. Lexchin’s research permeates another recent Lexchin’s first exposure to industry-govern- Or there is the case of the British psychiatrist David Pharma Lit o ering: Sharon Batt’s Health Advocacy ment-medical profession triangulation dates to Healy, a pharma lit star thanks to his 2012 book Inc.: How Pharmaceutical Funding Changed the 1973, when he was a rst-year medical student at Pharmageddon, who had a job o er from Toronto’s Breast Cancer Movement. Batt, an adjunct profes- the University of Toronto. Drug industry educa- Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH) sor in the department of bioethics at Dalhousie tion in the curriculum was an hour split between abruptly rescinded in 2000 after he gave a lecture University, expands the conversation into new a pharma rep and a government rep talking about that linked Prozac to suicide risk. ere was no terrain, exploring how industry in ltrates patient Ontario’s public drug plan, and around 20 pages of indication that Eli Lilly, Prozac’s manufacturer and advocacy groups employing the same tools that reading that was “mildly critical” of the industry, a major CAMH donor, intervened, but that is irrel- have been so successful with doctors: building per- he writes. When Lexchin and a few other students evant, Lexchin writes; it doesn’t mean institutional sonal relationships, funding meetings, travel, and argued that the panel wasn’t “well-balanced,” self-censorship didn’t occur. gifts, and o ering “unrestricted educational grants” Lexchin was invited to join the panel. e pharma e recent restrictions on industry in uence, that invariably come with conditions. e KOL has rep, outraged by what Lexchin calls “unfriendly” such as eliminating some gifts to doctors, have been joined by the POL, or “patient opinion leader” comments made during the session, didn’t return mostly been window dressing, Lexchin contends. as drug companies groom articulate patients to get the following year. Con ict-of-interest policies are non-existent at their message out. e political embrace of neoliberalism a decade more than half of Canadian health centres, includ- e rising status of patients and patient groups later played out in the health care sector, Lexchin ing hospitals. Not that making such disclosures as front-line health policy in uencers since AIDS writes, where federal and provincial governments, solves the problem; it can in fact sanitize the activism makes them attractive targets for drug placing their faith in the power of the market, with- situation, while dismissing the stealth power of companies, Batt writes. A patient-activist group is drew from “direct intervention and responsibility.” bias. Authors who report con icts of interest, for “probably a more trusted source for patients than Into this breach, industry eagerly stepped, funding instance, tend to review products and clinical trials the company making the product.” professional societies and health centres. Slashes involving the companies that sponsored them more Federal cuts to health spending in the ’90s to federal funding of scienti c research created positively than those who do not. reduced funds to advocacy groups. e ability of
October 2017 reviewcanada.ca 25 NGOs with charitable status to advocate politic- groups that responded to a 2007 World Health marketing to reach the public directly via unlikely ally was also curtailed just as government-industry Organization call for input to draft global strategy allies such as soap opera plotlines. Earlier this year, bonds were tightening. Batt refers to a government on “neglected diseases,” eleven received industry the drug company Incyte Corp. partnered with scientist being red in the ’80s for saying publicly funding. ey also argued in favour of strong intel- ABC’s General Hospital over a story line in which that the Meme breast implant leaked potential lectual property protections for drug manufactur- a lead character is diagnosed with a deadly, rare carcinogens. ers, in briefs that occasionally employed identical blood cancer. Incyte’s sole product is the only FDA- Health Advocacy Inc. is both scholarly treatise phrasing. And we have seen the proliferation of faux approved drug targeting the genetic mutation that and memoir. Batt, diagnosed with breast cancer patient movements such as Even the Score, a cam- causes said cancer. ough never named, the drug in 1988, founded one of Canada’s rst patient-led paign created in part by Sprout Pharmaceuticals is a mere Google search away. advocacy groups and witnessed schisms in the to lobby for its third FDA application for Addyi, an e drug industry is also jumping to ll another movement during the 1990s over accepting indus- antidepressant billed as “female Viagra.” Even the funding void by sponsoring conferences attended try funding. Some saw doing so as a means to a Score cried sex discrimination, arguing that men by the very people supposed to write objectively righteous end: “All money is dirty money; about it. Undark.org, a non-prot digital why can’t we just put it to clean use?” is magazine that covers science, recently how one advocate put it. Others feared By 2000, most patient groups reported that the European Conference they would be co-opted. By 2000, Batt took money from PHANGOs, of Science Journalists, which met in writes, most groups took money from Copenhagen in June, received funding PHANGOs, her acronym for “pharma- Batt’s acronym for pharma-funded from Johnson & Johnson, a company funded NGOs.” e ones that don’t are currently facing lawsuits in multiple not as well-funded or vocal. e book NGOs. As one advocate put it, ‘All U.S. states for misrepresenting opioid comes alive in the nal chapters in which risks in its marketing. The magazine she recounts industry’s stealthy modus money is dirty money; why can’t also notes that Johnson & Johnson con- operandi and how it outmanoeuvered tributed at least $400,000 to this year’s grassroots breast-cancer patient groups. we just put it to clean use?’ World Conference of Science Journalists, The arrival of PHANGOs was, for convening in San Francisco in October; industry, Batt writes, a new path to government had access to similar drugs. e FDA approved the more than 20 percent of the event’s $2.5-million inuence, goodwill, and markets. e conversation drug in 2015, overruling its own clinical reviewers. budget was paid by industry. Again, corporate among patient groups turned to topics benet- Like Lexchin, Batt calls for a radical overhaul. sponsors and organizers insisted that program- ting pharma, such as the need for rapid access to Advocacy groups should not take money from the ming wouldn’t be inuenced, even as Johnson expensive new drugs and aggressive therapies. In pharmaceutical industry, she argues, pointing to & Johnson representatives called a meeting with this neoliberal-friendly arena, patients became the progressive model of Germany, where a small event organizers to discuss possible speakers and “stakeholders”—which earned them a seat at the tax on drug insurance coverage funds patient advo- topics, including “the importance of pharmaceut- policy table, Batt writes, but also conated patient cacy, and drug prices are much lower. ical research”; it also organized a eld trip to one of interests with industry goals. Lexchin and Batt are required reading. In the its labs. Anyone who reads Lexchin and Batt won’t e inuence of PHANGOs is pervasive, and meantime, pharma is already shifting its strategy require a crystal ball to predict how this story ends. often so subtle it’s undetectable. Of 14 patient to a eet of new tools, such as employing native
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26 reviewcanada.ca Literary Review of Canada October 2017 reviewcanada.ca 27 Bigger Than the Team A dad’s-eye view of the NHL’s most polarizing gure STEPHEN SMITH
How We Did It: The Subban Plan for Success in Hockey, School and Life Karl Subban and Scott Colby Random House Canada pages, hardcover
’ ’ hockey player, chances are that you have not Isubsequently gone out and written a book about it. Is this because your parental pride is more private than, say, a father’s, your fulllment so much the quieter? Or because you don’t feel the same urgent need to explain your son? Maybe. In Beloved and loathed: Nashville Predators’ P.K. Subban Mural—Montreal the teeming library devoted to our beloved winter (Image courtesy of Exile on Ontario St, via Flickr Commons) game, the books of hockey-parent lit may only ll a half-shelf, but this we know: almost all of them are interviewer soon after the book was published. “I all of them can dominate a game and electrify a written by fathers. ere is something charmingly wanted to defend the truth.” crowd. But is there a more consistently entertaining local about the fact that these books are published e exception to the rule of mothers not writing hockey player to watch, or one who seems to play at all: only in Canada could there be enough oxygen books is the memoir penned by the late Colleen with more joy, than Subban? “Like Roger Federer, to sustain such a sub-genre. Howe. Wife to Gordie, and mother to NHLers Mark or Kevin Durant, or Yasiel Puig,” Ben McGrath wrote If hockey fathers antedate the birth of the sport and Marty, she was a force in her own right, which in a persuasive 2014 New Yorker prole, “[Subban] itself, the dads of professional hockey players only you will already know if you’ve read My ree awes less because of the results he achieves than started writing books in the early 1970s. First to the Hockey Players (1975). To my mind, it remains because of the way he achieves them—kinetic char- font was Murray Dryden, who, if he were a primary the most interesting of the parental hockey books: isma, approaching genius.” character in George R.R. Martin’s Game of rones, lled with anecdote and incident, it’s candid and He was still a Montreal Canadien back then, might be dubbed Father of Goaltenders. Dave and bracingly caustic, knotty with grievance and criti- beloved to many, infuriatingly flamboyant to Ken’s dad was suitably satised when his sons both cism, holding nothing back. others—a polarizing gure, including (the rumours made the NHL, with Bu alo and Montreal, respect- e newest addition to the shelf, Karl Subban’s went) within his own dressing room; his own coach, ively—all the more so when they started against How We Did It: e Subban Plan for Success in Michel errien, was often critical of Subban’s one another in a regular-season game in 1971. Hockey, School and Life, ts in alongside Dryden defensive lapses. As a columnist from USA Today Dryden’s Playing the Shots at Both Ends (1972) is and Gretzky, down at what we might call the more wrote during last season’s playo s, “Subban has light and genial, a quick and agreeable excursion. generous end of the shelf. With his son P.K.—at? haters.” e adjectives that have crowded into men- At 156 pages, it set a standard of brevity that sub- nearing?—the peak of his game, Karl seems to be tions of Subban’s hockey exploits over his eight sequent exemplars from the genus Pater librorum enjoying the moment as much as seizing an oppor- years in the league include dynamic; freewheel- glaciem hockey have failed to follow. tunity while his son is at centre ice to tell his own ing; passionate; booming (his shot); dazzling (his e memoir Walter Gretzky published in 2001 story and shape it as a platform for his ideas on rushes); jaw-dropping (his creativity), but they also was called On Family, Hockey and Healing. After parenthood and mentoring young people. Writing run to the more hostile emotional; individualistic; a stroke threatened Gretzky Senior’s life in 1991, with an assist from Scott Colby, an editor with the cocky; arrogant; and bigger than the team. he faced a long and complicated recovery. As a Toronto Star, Karl is in a sharing mood. I suspect e debate hasn’t stopped roiling in Montreal spokesman for the Heart and Stroke Foundation that theirs might be the hockey-dad book that nds since he was traded in the summer of 2016 to of Canada, he was as focussed on advocacy and a wider audience than those that have gone before. Nashville, whose golden-garbed Predators he promoting awareness as he was on spinning hockey is has to do with P.K.’s compelling personality helped to attain a berth in this last spring’s Stanley tales about his son Wayne. and his philanthropy, both of which transcend Cup nals. e fact that they lost there to Sidney Published in both French and English editions, the game he plays. More than any other player of Crosby’s Pittsburgh Penguins didn’t do anything Michel Roy’s Patrick Roy: Winning, Nothing Else recent note he has also managed to unsettle hock- to change that: regret weighs heavily to this day (2007) ran to more than 500 pages. It was positively ey’s sense of itself, and there will be readers from with many Montreal fans who can’t—and don’t militant in its mission, which was to cast Patrick as beyond the rink who will come to the book curi- want to—forget the on-ice skill and exuberance a hero and correct the public’s faulty perceptions ous about questions of race and racism, the snubs that made him one of most exciting athletes any- of his character. People thought the younger Roy and the insults that Subban has su ered, and how where, in any sport, or his astonishing 2015 pledge was testy, aloof, selsh, and they were wrong. “I they’re coded, or not. to donate $10 million over seven years for the city’s wanted to present Patrick as he is,” Michel told an children’s hospital. quick recap, for those who might have been For all its ashing lights and bold embrace of Stephen Smith is the author of Puckstruck: Aexiled for a decade, on an atoll, far from wi: new markets (hello, Las Vegas), the NHL remains a Distracted, Delighted and Distressed by Canada’s Pernell Karl Subban is a vividly skilled 28-year-old bastion of staid and conservative attitudes. Because Hockey Obsession (2014). He steers a blog, defenceman who has been one of the NHL’s best he is anything but, Subban has been accused of Puckstruck.com, that keeps an eye on hockey his- since at least 2013, when he won the Norris Trophy. arrogance and disrespect, of excessive self-regard, tory and culture. Sidney Crosby, Alex Ovechkin, Connor McDavid: of not knowing his station. As a rookie with the
28 reviewcanada.ca Literary Review of Canada Montreal Canadiens, he was called out by the then- captain of the Philadelphia Flyers. “It’s just frus- trating to see a young guy like that come in here,” whinged Mike Richards, “and so much as think Coming up in the LRC that’s he’s better than a lot of people.” Never mind that Subban was better than a lot of people—as he always has been and will be. Hockey’s brassiest establishment voice, Don CanLit’s colonial habit Cherry, would soon be scolding him for daring to play with verve and personality; another, Mike S M Milbury, called him a clown during the spring’s playo s, berating him for courting too much atten- tion, and for the mortal sin of overt enthusiasm. ere is no good gauge of which of or how much, A history of snacking if at all, the reproaches directed Subban’s way C S have to do with the fact that he is a black man in a sport that has been so glaringly white for so long. ere are books about that, too, including Herb Carnegie’s instructive 1997 memoir A Fly in a Pail of Dada can x the social sciences Milk. A stand-out scorer in the 1930s and ’40s who J N couldn’t nd a way through hockey’s colour barrier, Carnegie never played an NHL game. He had no doubt that it was racism that kept him from crack- ing the New York Rangers’ line-up in 1948. Joni Mitchell’s prairie genius Readers who come to How We Did It in hopes of A M a broader discussion of race and racism in hockey may be left wanting. It’s not that Karl Subban seeks to avoid it, exactly, more that he addresses the issue as he sees t and moves on. Yes, his son has run into Rethinking Herbert Hoover his share of ignorant morons and their abhorrent D G slurs in his time playing hockey. No, Karl doesn’t think either—the slurs or the morons—is worth engaging; they’re nothing but distractions. “Racism is a fact of life,” he writes. Why give it permission to A story of statelessness get in the way of where you’re going? In the book’s A H nal pages, P.K. endorses his dad’s approach. And that’s as far as it goes.
ike the P.K. that fans see and hear, Karl is one to Lkeep both his outlook and message unrelent- ingly positive. “Hockey matters,” he declares at one point, “but people matter more.” He’s an a able, Subscribe! even friendly narrator, even if he does reveal him- self to have been intense and, occasionally, over- ( issues) *Rates including GST/HST by province the-line hotheaded as a parent of minor-league Individuals Libraries and Individuals Libraries hockey players. ( e guilty chapter describing the Institutions ( + tax) ( + tax) time he yanked a 10-year-old P.K. from an elite Canadian addresses* + + ON, NB, NL ( ) . . Toronto minor team runs to nearly 17 pages.) PE ( ) . . How We Did It is evenhanded: much as P.K. Outside Canada NS ( ) . . fans might wish for a narrative that emphasizes the Prices include shipping and postage. Rest of Canada () . . middle-born son who spends his winters wearing number 76, father Karl makes time for his elder daughters, Taz and Tasha, as well as to for P.K.’s Name Suite/Apt. younger brothers, Malcolm and Jordan, talented players both, both on the verge of NHL careers of Street City their own. (P.K. has said that Jordan is “going to be Province or State Country the best of us all.”) Karl has no trouble conceding that his sons’ Postal/Zip Code E-mail hockey careers are extensions of his frustrated aspirations. Born in Jamaica in 1958, he followed his Telephone Fax NH1710 parents to Canada in 1970, when he was twelve. He remembers feeling air-conditioning for the rst time, Please bill me! My cheque (payable to the Literary Review of Canada) is enclosed. and his introduction to the exotic Canadian cuisine Charge my Visa or MasterCard. known, outlandishly, as the hot dog. e family Card number Expiry made a home in Sudbury, Ontario, where Karl’s mother started as a seamstress and his father worked Signature as a diesel mechanic. An ardent cricketer, young Karl soon traded bats and wickets for a road hockey stick. Fax or mail completed form to Literary Review of Canada, PO Box , Station K He idolized Ken Dryden and dreamed of joining his Toronto • fax: 1-800-635-5255 • tel: 416-932-5081 Montreal Canadiens. Problem: he was in his mid- email: [email protected] teens before he started skating and never got into To subscribe online, visit www.reviewcanada.ca/sub2016. an organized league. “Raising a hockey player,” he If you do not wish to receive correspondence from the LRC or other organizations writes of his parents, “was not in their pocketbook.” unless it pertains directly to your subscription, please check here At university he was a talented basketball player and thought maybe that was a career he would
October 2017 reviewcanada.ca 29 court before turning to teaching. at eventually parent books really achieves is any kind of convin- Are there fathers out there who will seize on How took him to Toronto, where he embarked on a cing explanation of just what it is that makes their We Did It with the idea that it contains a foolproof 30-year career as an inuential teacher and highly sons so exceptional in their hockey talents. Walter formula for raising their own little NHL all-star? e successful administrator in the public system. It’s Gretzky condes that he was strict about proper title does pack more of a DIY imperative than most where he would also meet (and eventually marry) eating and early bedtimes before important games, of those of the other books on the hockey-father Maria Brand. en—well, “before you knew it,” and that when, as a toddler, Wayne watched older shelf. I’m advocating caution. As any parent (and is how Karl frames it, “we were blessed with ve kids play hockey, “there was a kind of intensity every hockey scout) knows, there is no recipe to any kids—our starting ve, as I like to call them.” there.” Gretzky Senior doesn’t really stretch himself of this, and if you do try it at home, you’re mostly For those waiting patiently for P.K. to make his beyond that: Wayne’s “life in hockey always seemed on your own. at’s not to say that advice from debut, that comes on page 85, or almost a third to be predestined.” someone like Karl Subban doesn’t have its place. of the way through the book. Pay atten- e Subban narrative is a positive one, tion, it happens fast. Where Michel Roy P.K. has unsettled hockey’s sense and even at times uplifting. Everyone has logs the minute of son Patrick’s birth, potential, Karl counsels, you just have the delivering doctor’s name, and his of itself, and there will be readers to nd your gift. Dreams are important, inaugural weight (seven pounds, one so nurture them and never let them wilt. ounce), Karl Subban lingers not at all in who will come to the book curious Occasionally the message veers o into the delivery room. ey grow up so fast: banality: be a good person is a key tenet turn the page and P.K. is two-and-a-half about the insults he has suffered, herein, because that’s the only kind that and already skating. succeeds in hockey. Readers hoping for the dish on P.K.’s and how they’re coded, or not. P.K. has ve years left on his Nashville early years may be disappointed. He was, contract. Beyond that, it’s impossible to as you’d imagine, an energetic kid who was good Karl Subban doesn’t really have any insight into say where his career will go from here. It will be at sports. ere were good times (when the family the alchemy of P.K.’s success. Or, no—I guess what worth watching, and maybe at some point, the man went skating together on freezing Friday nights he would say is that it’s all about family. at’s what will sit down and write his own book to help explain in Brampton) and mishaps (the time P.K. threw a shaped his boys into NHLers: the crucible of family himself. In the meantime, we have something of a beach ball and his sister was nearly blinded). Along love and presence and pressure. provisional statement in his 2015 announcement at with the rest of his sisters and brothers, P.K. pops Hockey reporters might hope to plumb How We the Montreal’s Children Hospital. “In life I believe in now and then with a paragraph of rst-person Did It for inside grist on the trade that so shockingly you are not dened by what you accomplish but by testimony. ended P.K.’s tenure with Montreal a year ago: What what you do for others,” he said there. “Sometimes For anyone not inclined to keep diaries or write happened? Why? What were P.K.’s true feelings? I try to think, ‘P.K., are you a hockey player or are extensive letters, reconstructing the past from Was the abandon with which he plays somehow an you just someone who plays hockey?’ I just play mere memories is hard work. You can do a certain a ront to the traditions of the sainted Canadiens? hockey. Because one day I won’t be a hockey player amount of scrapbooking with anecdotes and make ere is nothing much on any of that here. Karl takes anymore. I’ll just be someone who played hockey. that work, as most of the hockey-father books do, two paragraphs to say how little the trade surprised So what do I want people to remember me for other more or less. e absence of more revealing details him before handing over the page to Nashville’s VP than being a hockey player? Well, every time you is understandable, and not unique to Karl Subban’s and chief revenue ocer for the corporate view on walk into this hospital, you’ll know what I stand for.” contribution to the genre. What none of the hockey- how welcome P.K. is in his new NHL home.
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30 reviewcanada.ca Literary Review of Canada UOFMPRESS.CA
Tempting, Delicious, Something for Everyone... THIESSEN Food • History
“A compelling and unique study of not just snack food consumers The story of but also the farmers, factory workers, and business owners responsible for producing some of Canada’s most popular guilty pleasures.”—Ian Mosby, author of Food Will Win the War Canada’s favourite Snacks is a history of Canadian snack foods, the indep- endent producers and workers who make them, and the consumers who can’t put them down. Janis Thiessen profiles several iconic Canadian snack foods and snack food companies, including Old Dutch Potato Chips, Hawkins Cheezies, and choc- olatier Ganong. These companies have de- veloped in distinctive ways, reflecting the SNACKS unique stories of their founders and their intense connection to specific places. the people who
These stories of salty or sweet confections reveal a history that is at odds with popu- lar notions of “junk food.” Through exten- sive oral history and archival research, make them. Thiessen uncovers the roots of our deep loyalties to dierent snack foods, what it means to be an independent snack food producer, and the often-quirky ways $27.95 • 978-0-88755-799-6 snacks have been created and marketed.
Clearly written, extensively illustrated, and lavish with detail about some of Canadians’ favorite snacks, this is a lively and entertaining look at food and labour history.
Janis Thiessen is an associate professor of History and associate director of the Oral History Centre at the University of Winnipeg. Her favourite snack food is dill pickle potato chips.
ISBN 978-0-88755-799-6 90000 uofmpress.ca $ 27.95 CAD / $ 31.95 USD 9 780887 557996
October 2017 reviewcanada.ca 31 Letters
RE: “UNSETTLED,” BY JOSHUA NICHOLS (JULY- RE: “THE NEW DISSENT,” BY ANDREW we nd that acts of empathy—under the right AUGUST 2017) POTTER (JULY-AUGUST 2017) circumstances—are as powerful and as worthy of or those of us consciously wandering through o advance our understanding of dissent in celebration? Might we also reveal more things we Fand wondering about Canada, Peter Russell’s Tthese messy, challenging times, Andrew Potter sometimes miss? Canada’s Odyssey: A Country Based on Incomplete grapples with recent dicult examples of dissent, J B Conquests stands like a kind of literary inukshuk; cases avoided by William Kaplan in Why Dissent O , O the kind I learned to seek out after I moved here Matters: Because Some People See ings the Rest at 18 to attend university, having no idea what of Us Miss. Potter’s thoughtful and provocative RE: “THE NEW DISSENT,” BY ANDREW Canada was or meant. Like so many other immi- examination gets us to a more nuanced, even if still POTTER (JULY-AUGUST 2017) grants, I embarked on a haphazard journey to incomplete, understanding. Another way to under- nafraid to not pick a side, Andrew Potter nd that country. Mine was a romantic journey stand something is to look at what it is not. To that Uallows us to see the complexity of the jum- in many respects because there was so much in end, I would love to see Potter, Kaplan, and others bled mess we are in when we talk about the virtues Canada to feel romantic about. After all, this was examine dissent’s relationship to empathy. While of disagreeing with the supposed powers-that-be. the country that had just taken in thousands of many would view conformity as the opposite of dis- For me, the most important line was his histor- Vietnamese refugees. sent—Potter deftly analyzes the role of the critique ical assessment that “for going on 50 years now, Four decades later, I nd myself in a country of mass society in spurring on the fetishization rebellious nonconformity masquerading as dissent that does not know how to properly acknowledge, of dissent—in this era of dynamic and di used has been installed as the operating system of the let alone celebrate, its own sublimely creative authority, might empathy also be viewed as dis- West.” is fundamental fact of our recent history political achievement from 1867. Like many for sent’s opposite, and used as a comparator? is not pointed out frequently enough. Since at least whom Canada is an idea as much as physical fact, In those cases where the extent of the illegitim- the 1960s, the cultural common sense has told us I’ve been dismayed at many levels by the back- acy of the authoritative consensus is unclear, can to “be yourself,” to “do your own thing” and not lash to the Canada 150 celebrations. My dismay is we more agreeably distinguish between purpose- be told what to do by someone else—certainly not complicated because the backlash is understand- ful dissent and contrarianism by asking whether someone so retrograde as a representative of the able, necessary, and long overdue. But it remains empathy might have better advanced the interests state or a religion. ere are left- and right-wing ver- troubling because its fundamental premise posits of the cause? Or, even more provocatively, can so- sions of this common sense, but the impulse is the that Canada is illegitimate, if not immoral. I am called “dissent” in some circumstances be noth- same: beware the mainstream; be yourself. still grappling with the irony that we have created ing more than a reexive failure on the part of the What we now need to reckon with, and what one of the world’s most successful and inclusive dissenter to engage in empathy—to appreciate the Potter points to, is that there is almost no actual democracies, but have failed so miserably with perspectives and experiences of those who hold an mainstream left to disagree with. Or rather, there Indigenous peoples. opposing but not necessarily illegitimate view? are many “mainstreams,” but they are merely Professor Russell’s excellent book provides a Empathy isn’t a replacement for dissent in all imagined by particular groups, and their reality useful reminder that we are, yet again, in the midst instances. But what Potter demonstrates is that depends on the conrmation bias of those who of a vast paradigm shift, one that we will likely not all acts of dissent are so obviously deserving share a similar view of the world. When we’re all muddle through (as we tend to do), eventually let- of our praise and support, and may not even be dissenters, it’s so useful for each of us to have our ting go of assumptions and ways of seeing that no dissent as we have come to understand it as a tool own mainstream against which we can dene just longer serve us. for social change. Without question, there is an how authentically unique we really are. A A important role for dissent, but if we were to look C D T , O at the relative roles of dissent and empathy, might P , O
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32 reviewcanada.ca Literary Review of Canada PUSHING THE BOUNDARIES
Hunting the Northern Engagement Organizing No Home in a Homeland Character The Old Art and New Science of Indigenous Peoples and Homeless- Winning Campaigns ness in the Canadian North Tony Penikett Matt Price Julia Christensen This deeply personal account of recent developments in the Canadian North tells the At a time of heightened concern about Through personal accounts and analysis of story of a region that leaders in Oslo, Ottawa, what our future holds and how we can historical trends, No Home in the Homeland Moscow, and Washington often refuse to see shape it, this book shows how combining documents the spread of homelessness in and that only insiders fully know. old-school people power with new digital the North, what it reveals about colonialism tools and data can win campaigns for and its legacies, and the limitations of exist- November 2017 | 978-0-7748-8000-8 | hardcover change today. ing policies and programs.
July 2017 | 978-0-7748-9016-8 | paperback May 2017 | 978-0-7748-3395-0 | paperback
The Canadian Party A Queer Love Story Reluctant Warriors System The Letters of Jane Rule and Rick Canadian Conscripts and the Great War An Analytic History Bébout Patrick Dennis Edited by Marilyn Schuster Richard Johnston The first in-depth examination of Canadian These poignant, incisive letters between conscripts in the final battles of the Great In this long-awaited book, Richard Johnston Jane Rule, lesbian novelist and essayist, War, Reluctant Warriors provides fresh combines an arsenal of recently developed and Rick Bébout, gay journalist and evidence that conscripts were good soldiers analytic tools with a deep understanding activist, chronicle their reflections on and who fought valiantly and made a crucial of history to makes sense of the Canadian participation in the key issues and events contribution to the success of the Canadian party system. of LGBT communities in the ’80s and ’90s. Corps in 1918. September 2017 | 978-0-7748-3607-4 | hardcover May 2017 | 978-0-7748-3543-5 | hardcover September 2017 | 978-0-7748-3597-8 | hardcover
ubcpress.ca thought that counts Why Dissent Matters Because Some People See Things the Rest of Us Miss William Kaplan Jane Austen’s Censored Cloth, 360pp Transatlantic Sister A Literary History of Subversion A wide-ranging and provocative work The Life and Letters of and Control which tells a story of dissent and Fanny Palmer Austen Matthew Fellion and Katherine Inglis dissenters – people who have been Sheila Johnson Kindred Cloth, 416pp, 26 b&w illustrations attacked, bullied, ostracized, jailed, Cloth, 296pp, 24 colour & 10 b&w photos and, sometimes when it is all over, A provocative history of literary cen- celebrated. A revealing account of a naval officer’s sorship uncovers the limits of free young wife, her life during the speech in the English speaking world. “Passionate and forceful.” Napoleonic Wars, and her influence Margaret MacMillan, author of Paris 1919: on Jane Austen’s fiction. Six Months that Changed theWorld Why Reading Matters
Strangers with Memories The United States and Canada from Free Trade to Baghdad John Stewart Cloth, 248pp
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